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Hard-hitting
writing from John Pilger, one
of the world's most respected journalists
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR –
John Pilger is one of the world's most renowned and
distinguished investigative journalists and documentary film-makers.
Twice a winner of Britain's highest honour, that of Journalist of the
Year, he writes for The Mirror newspaper and New Statesman magazine.
ColdType
is republishing his most recent anti-war articles from these journals
as pdf downloads, ready for printing as inserts into an 8.5" by
11" binder. The cover (above) and biography may also be downloaded
for printing. Pilger's latest book, The New
Rulers Of The World, is published by Verso (www.versobooks.com)
Click
here to download Cover (280kb)
NEW
- Click here to download Year
Zero (360k), our 80-page excerpt
from Tell
Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism And Its Triumphs
Click
here to download Paying The Price
(530k), our 26-page excerpt from The
New Rulers Of The World
Click
here to download John Pilger's
ColdType essay, The Betrayal of Afghanistan
DOWNLOAD
THE 2004 ARTICLES HERE:
NEW
- December 8
How
silent are the invaders of Kosovo?
Muted
by the evidence of the Anglo-American catastrophe in Iraq, the international
"humanitarian" war party ought to be called to account for
its largely forgotten crusade in Kosovo, the model for Tony Blair's
"onward march of liberation". Just as Iraq is being torn apart
by the forces of empire, so was Yugoslavia, the multi-ethnic state that
uniquely rejected both sides in the cold war. Lies as great as those
of Bush and Blair were deployed by Clinton and Blair in their grooming
of public opinion for an illegal, unprovoked attack on a European country.
Like the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, the media coverage in the
spring of 1999 was a series of fraudulent justifications, beginning
with US Defence Secretary William Cohen's claim that "we've now
seen about 100,000 military-aged [Albanian] men missing... they may
have been murdered."
Click
here to download (36kb)
November 11
Normalising
the unthinkable
Edward
S Herman’s landmark essay, “The Banality of Evil”, has
never seemed more apposite. “Doing terrible things in an organised
and systematic way rests on ‘normalisation’,” wrote Herman.
“There is usually a division of labour in doing and rationalising
the unthinkable, with the direct brutalising and killing done by one
set of individuals... others working on improving technology (a better
crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive Napalm, bomb fragments
that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function
of the experts, and the mainstream media, to normalise the unthinkable
for the general public.”
Click
here to download (36kb)
October
13
When
truth is replaced by silence …
In
October 1999, I stood in a ward of dying children in Baghdad with Denis
Halliday, who the previous year had resigned as assistant secretary
general of the United Nations. He said: “We are waging a war through
the United Nations on the people of Iraq. We’re targeting civilians.
Worse, we’re targeting children... What is this all about?”
Halliday had been 34 years with the UN. As an international civil servant
much respected in the field of “helping people, not harming them”,
as he put it, he had been sent to Iraq to implement the oil-for-food
programme, which he subsequently denounced as a sham. “I am resigning,”
he wrote, “because the policy of economic sanctions is... destroying
an entire society. Five thousand children are dying every month. I don’t
want to administer a programme that satisfies the definition of genocide.”
Halliday’s successor, Hans von Sponeck, another assistant secretary
general with more than 30 years’ service, also resigned in protest.
Jutta Burghardt, the head of the World Food Programme in Iraq, followed
them, saying she could no longer tolerate what was being done to the
Iraqi people.
Click
here to download (36kb)
October
11
How
Britain and the US expelled a nation
There
are times when one tragedy, one crime tells us how a whole system works
behind its democratic facade and helps us to understand how much of
the world is run for the benefit of the powerful and how governments
lie. To understand the catastrophe of Iraq, and all the other Iraqs
along imperial history’s trail of blood and tears, one need look
no further than Diego Garcia. The story of Diego Garcia is shocking,
almost incredible. A British colony lying midway between Africa and
Asia in the Indian Ocean, the island is one of 64 unique coral islands
that form the Chagos Archipelago, a phenomenon of natural beauty, and
once of peace. Newsreaders refer to it in passing: “American B-52
and Stealth bombers last night took off from the uninhabited British
island of Diego Garcia to bomb Iraq (or Afghanistan).” It is the
word “uninhabited” that turns the key on the horror of what
was done there. In the 1970s, the Ministry of Defence in London produced
this epic lie: “There is nothing in our files about a population
and an evacuation.”
Click
here to download (36kb)
September
16
The
most important terrorism is ‘ours’
The
world is dividing into two hostile camps: Islam and “us”.
That is the unerring message from western governments, press, radio
and television. For Islam, read terrorists. It is reminiscent of the
cold war, when the world was divided between “Reds” and us,
and even a strategy of annihilation was permissible in our defence.
We now know, or we ought to know, that so much of that was a charade;
released official files make clear the Soviet threat was for public
consumption only. . . Tony Blair’s “idealism” and “decency”
are promoted by his accredited mainstream detractors, as the concocted
Greek tragedy of his political demise opens on the media stage. Having
taken part in the killing of as many as 37,000 Iraqi civilians, Blair’s
distractions, not his victims, are news: from his arcane rivalry with
treasurer Gordon Brown, his Tweedledee, to his damascene conversion
to the perils of global warming. On the atrocity at Beslan, Blair is
allowed to say, without irony or challenge, that “this international
terrorism will not prevail”. These are the same words spoken by
Mussolini soon after he had bombed civilians in Abyssinia.
Click
here to download (36kb)
September
2
The
betrayal of India
The
crows beat their wings against the bay windows, waiting to ascend and
dive. Their cries are incessant; it is their apocalyptic swarm that
is different in India. They dance in the rain and wait in the yellow
heat of unyielding farmland turned to dust and hover above corridors
of refugees fleeing flood and war. Now, in the late monsoon in Mumbai,
they perch on a billboard image of young businessmen, who are white-skinned
and joyful and celebrating their ownership of a mobile phone that combines
a TV screen. The young businessmen and the fat crows overlook a pyramid
of rubbish, which is inhabited by a scabrous dog and darting rats (with
an eye to the crows) and a tiny sari-clad figure, digging methodically
with her hands. Mumbai is India’s richest city. It handles 40 per
cent of the country’s maritime trade; it has most of the merchant
banks and two stock exchanges and Asia’s biggest slum.
Click
here to download (36kb)
August
27
Bush
v. Kerry: The fake debate
On
6 May last, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution which,
in effect, authorised a “pre-emptive” attack on Iran. The
vote was 376/3. Undeterred by the accelerating disaster in Iraq, Republicans
and Democrats, wrote one commentator, “once again joined hands
to assert the responsibilities of American power.” The joining
of hands across America’s illusory political divide has along history.
The native Americans were slaughtered, the Philippines laid to waste
and Cuba and much of Latin America brought to heel with “bi-partisan”
backing. Wading through the blood, a new breed of popular historian,
the journalist in the pay of rich newspaper owners, spun the heroic
myths of a super sect called Americanism, which advertising and public
relations in the 20th century formalised as an ideology, embracing both
conservatism and liberalism.
Click
here to download (36kb)
July
31
Journalism
that cared - a tribute to Paul Foot
For
Paul Foot, who died on 18 July, principle was not negotiable, nor was
it clubbable, regardless of his wide circle of friends; and those who,
since his death, have suggested that Paul was a brilliant journalist
in spite of his socialism, show his memory little respect.
In their references to his “Bollinger Bolshevism” and his
“socialist hair shirt”, the liberal bombers and assorted Blairites
who prefer this “in spite of” version have exploited Paul’s
ironic, often black, jokes about his high-born background. In truth,
Paul was the supreme journalist he was largely because of his socialism.
His work exemplified the natural partnership between a world-view that
saw the betterment of humanity and the fight against injustice as paramount,
and a journalism that respected and cared for its readers, especially
those with no one to speak for them.
Click
here to download (36kb)
July
15
The
endangered documentary
Britain
remains one of the few countries where documentaries are still shown
on mainstream television in the hours when most people are awake. But
documentaries that go against the received wisdom and inform are becoming
an endangered species, at the very time we need them most. That will
be a tragedy; for viewers in this country are not only used to but support
an eclectic range of programmes, unlike the United States where people
expect television to be little more than a shopping mall with buskers.
Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Channel, a parody of journalism, fits this
perfectly; and he wants us to have the same. In survey after survey,
when people are asked what they would like more of on television; they
say documentaries. I don’t believe they mean cod-documentaries
about airports and estate agents.
Click
here to download (36kb)
July
8
Dark
secrets behind the picture postcards
BBC
television recently showed an outstanding documentary called The Boy
from the Block. It is about Australia and opens with a picture postcard
view of the Australian beach and its board riders and bikinis, and progresses
to the popping of corks at a smart Sydney art gallery. Here is the Australian
bourgeoisie at its most relaxed: drinking good wine, partaking of culture
and making money. A young woman is asked what she likes most about Aboriginal
art, which the gallery is featuring. “Oh, it’s a great investment,”
she says. “For me, it’s like superannuation.” The camera
pulls back to show the Aboriginal artist, the guest of honour, surrounded
by white art lovers. Everyone is smiling. If you are Aboriginal and
like the artist, says the voiceover, everyone wants to be your friend.
If you are not like her, almost no one wants to be your friend.
Click
here to download (36kb)
June
24
There
is an alternative
First
it was Reagan, now it is Clinton. The homage continues. When Reagan
died, Gavin Esler, one of the BBC’s star reporters, described the
American president responsible for a secret, lawless campaign of terror
in central America and for the deaths of untold thousands elsewhere
as “a man who was loved even by his political opponents”.
In the Daily Mail, Esler wrote that Reagan “embodied the best of
the American spirit”. In the Guardian on 21 June, Bill Clinton
was given page after page to promote his self-serving book and relish
his mea culpa. He “revealed” that Nelson Mandela had helped
him through the Monica Lewinsky affair. How touching. In an “exclusive
interview” he was asked nothing about his execution of a subnormal
man in order to appease the capital punishment lobby. There was nothing
about his violent presidency: the attack on Sudan at the time of Monicagate;
the longest aerial bombing of a country (Iraq) since the Second World
War and the sanctions that saw off half a million Iraqi infants.
Click
here to download (36kb)
June
11
So
much for the ‘liberal’ media
The
D-Day anniversary and the election campaign have been a rich time for
the kind of propaganda that marks the limits of mainstream liberal debate
in Britain. On 5 June, the Guardian gave a whole news page to its discredited
warmonger, David Aaronovitch, whose support for the bloody invasion
of Iraq in 2003 was in keeping with his defence of the bloody Soviet
invasion of Hungary in 1956. Aaronovitch’s assignment clearly was
to demolish Respect, the anti-war party contesting seats in the European
Parliament. The result was a show of contempt not so much for George
Galloway and the activists who organised the greatest demonstration
in British history, but for the moral intelligence of people who wish
somehow to express their outrage at Blair’s epic crime committed
in their name.
Click
here to download (36kb)
May
27
How
to silence an awkward newspaper
The
editor of the Daily Mirror, Britain’s most famous mass-circulation
newspaper, was sacked because he ran the only English-language popular
paper to expose the “war on terror” as a fraud and the invasion
of Iraq as a crime. He was marked long before the Mirror published the
notorious, apparently faked pictures of British troops torturing Iraqi
prisoners. On 4 July 2002, American Independence Day, the Mirror published
a report of mine, displayed on the front page under the headline “Mourn
on the Fourth of July” and showing Bush flanked by the Stars and
Stripes. Above him were the words: “George W Bush’s policy
of bomb first and find out later has killed double the number of civilians
who died on 11 September. The USA is now the world’s leading rogue
state”. It was the Mirror at its most potent; not since it distinguished
itself as the first mass-circulation paper in the western world to oppose
the US invasion of Vietnam and, before that, the British invasion of
Suez, had it confronted the rapacious policies of a British government
and its principal ally.
Click
here to download (36kb)
May
13
Generations
apart: A tribute
Since
I left Australia, one journey has remained a small dream unfulfilled.
It involves going north in New South Wales, to an old frontier town
called Ballina, which is an Irish corruption of an Aboriginal word meaning
“abundance”. My mother Elsie arrived in Ballina in 1920, alone,
aged 19. It was the middle of the night. She had travelled the 500 miles
from Sydney, having sold her books to pay the fare, which the department
of education said was “the responsibility of those privileged to
teach”. This was her first teaching job; in those days, you taught
where you were sent.
Click
here to download (36kb)
May
7
Torture
is news, but it’s not new
When
I first went to report the American war against Vietnam, in the 1960s,
I visited the Saigon offices of the great American newspapers and TV
companies, and the international news agencies. I was struck by the
similarity of displays on many of their office pinboards. “That’s
where we hang our conscience,” said an agency photographer. There
were photographs of dismembered bodies, of soldiers holding up severed
ears and testicles and of the actual moments of torture. There were
men and women being beaten to death, and drowned, and humiliated in
stomach-turning ways. On one photograph was a stick-on balloon above
the torturer’s head, which said: “That’ll teach you to
talk to the press.” The question came up whenever visitors caught
sight of these pictures: why had they not been published?
Click
here to download (36kb)
April 29
Power,
propaganda and ‘our’ terrorism
On
20 March, the first anniversary of the Anglo-American attack on Iraq,
John Pilger addressed a rally in Sydney, Australia – part of a
‘day of action’ in cities and towns around the world –
in which he described the carnage in Iraq: up to 55,000 dead, including
10,000 civilians; more than 1000 children killed or injured every month
from exploding cluster bombs; and the contamination of uranium-tipped
weapons. This is the text of the speech . . .
Click
here to download (36kb)
April
15
Iraq
is a war of national liberation
Four
years ago, I travelled the length of Iraq, from the hills where St Matthew
is buried in the Kurdish north to the heartland of Mesopotamia, and
Baghdad, and the Shia south. I have seldom felt as safe in any country.
Once, in the Edwardian colonnade of Baghdad’s book market, a young
man shouted something at me about the hardship his family had been forced
to endure under the embargo imposed by America and Britain. What happened
next was typical of Iraqis; a passer-by calmed the man, putting his
arm around his shoulder, while another was quickly at my side. “Forgive
him,” he said reassuringly. “We do not connect the people
of the west with the actions of their governments. You are welcome.”
Click
here to download (36kb)
April
1
Once
again, East Timor is betrayed
Ten
years ago, I filmed secretly in East Timor, a small country in south-east
Asia whose
brutal occupation was largely unknown to the outside world. The title
of the film, Death of a
Nation, was hardly an exaggeration. The Suharto military dictatorship
in Indonesia, having
invaded the Portuguese colony in 1975, caused the death of "at
least" 200,000 East
Timorese, according to a study by the foreign affairs committee of the
Australian parliament.
This represented a third of the population; proportionally, it was an
act of genocide greater
than the Jewish Holocaust. The governments of the United States, Britain
and Australia were
not only forewarned, but supported and equipped the invaders. Henry
Kissinger personally
gave General Suharto the go-ahead.
Click
here to download (36kb)
New
– March 22
Universal
justice is not a dream
The invasion of Iraq, now in its second year, was “organised with
lies”, says the new Spanish prime minister. Does anyone doubt this
any more? And yet these proven lies are still dominant in Australia.
Day after day, their perpetrators seek to obfuscate and justify an unprovoked,
illegal attack that killed up to 55,000 people, including at least 10,000
civilians: that every month causes the death and injury of 1,000 children
from exploding cluster bombs: that has so saturated Iraqi towns and
cities with uranium that American and British soldiers are warned not
to go where Iraqi children play, for fear of contamination. Set that
carnage against the Madrid atrocity. Terrible though that act of terrorism
was, it was small compared with the terrorism of the American-led “coalition”.
Yes, terrorism. How strange it reads when it describes the actions of
“our” governments. So saturated are we in the west in the
devilry of third world tyrants (most of them the products of Western
imperialism) that we have lost all sense of the enormous crime committed
in our name.
Click
here to download (36kb)
New
– March 10
Pilger
on the US and terrorism
An
interview with Tony Jones, Australian Broadcasting Corporation
TONY
JONES: Now to the issue which has divided the political left and the
Iraq anti-war movement. Now that the die has been cast, the regime deposed
and the coalition forces are occupying the country, how should they
regard those who are still attacking the occupiers and targeting anyone
they consider to be assisting the United States? The veteran journalist
John Pilger has no doubts. He claims that, what he calls “the resistance”
is “incredibly important” and that the world now “depends”
on it to win. “I think,” he says, “if the US military
machine” and the Bush administration can suffer something like
a defeat “in Iraq, they can be stopped.” By which he means
stopped from invading other countries . . .
Click
here to download (36kb)
March
19
The
unmentionable source of terrorism
The
current threat of attacks in countries whose governments have close
alliances with Washington is the latest stage in a long struggle against
the empires of the west, their rapacious crusades and domination. The
motivation of those who plant bombs in railway carriages derives directly
from this truth. What is different today is that the weak have learned
how to attack the strong, and the western crusaders' most recent colonial
terrorism (as many as 55,000 Iraqis killed) exposes "us" to
retaliation. The source of much of this danger is Israel. A creation,
then guardian of the west's empire in the Middle East, the Zionist state
remains the cause of more regional grievance and sheer terror than all
the Muslim states combined.
Click
here to download (36kb)
March
4
Bush
or Kerry: the danger is the same
A
myth
equal to the fable of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction is gaining
strength on both sides of the Atlantic. It is that John Kerry offers
a world-view different from that of George W Bush. Watch this big lie
grow as Kerry is crowned the Democratic candidate and the “anyone
but Bush” movement becomes a liberal cause celebre. While the rise
to power of the Bush gang, the neoconservatives, belatedly preoccupied
the American media, the message of their equivalents in the Democratic
Party has been of little interest. Yet the similarities are compelling.
Click
here to download (36kb)
February
20
Australia's
enduring shame
Once
again, the neat, placid surface of white Australia is disturbed by those
who owned and cared for this country and remain its internal exiles.
On 15 February, a crowd of Aboriginal youths set fire to a railway station
and fought riot police in a run-down area known as The Block, in the
Redfern district of Sydney. It is the last redoubt of Australia’s
original inhabitants in the centre of a city built on land from which
their forebears were first evicted 216 years ago.
Click
here to download (36kb)
February
9
Attack
on BBC: The official truth is a lie
During
the war against Iraq, the BBC's Today programme sent Andrew Gilligan
to Baghdad. Gilligan's reports were unlike anything the BBC had broadcast.
They contradicted the official Anglo-American line about "liberation"
and made clear that, for a great many Iraqis, the invasion and occupation
were at least as bad as life under Saddam Hussein.
This was heresy, prompting Alastair Campbell to move Gilligan to the
top of his list of "rants", as Greg Dyke has described them.
"Gullible Gilligan" was Campbell's term of abuse, which meant
that the reporter was on to something. Like his subsequent report that
the government had "sexed up" its Iraq dossier, Gilligan's
conclusion was right, and has since been repeatedly proven right. There
is no liberation in Iraq. There is a vicious colonial occupation. The
government "sexed up" not one, but two dossiers.
Click
here to download (36kb)
NEW
- February 5
Blair’s
new weapon of mass deception
"In
the wake of the Hutton fiasco, one truth remains unassailed: Tony Blair
ordered an unprovoked invasion of another country on a totally false
pretext, and that lies and deceptions manufactured in London and Washington
caused the deaths of up to 55,000 Iraqis, including 9,600 civilians.
Consider for a moment those who have paid the price for Blair’s
and Bush’s actions, who are rarely mentioned in the current media
coverage. Deaths and injury of young children from unexploded British
and American cluster bombs are put at 1,000 a month. The effect of uranium
weapons used by Anglo-American forces – a weapon of mass destruction
– is such that readings taken from Iraqi tanks destroyed by the
British are so high that a British Army survey team wore white, full-body
radiationsuits, face masks and gloves. Iraqi children play on and around
these tanks. British troops, says the Ministry of Defence, “will
have access to biological monitoring”
Click
here to download (36kb)
NEW
- January 30
Pol
Pot: His terror and his backers
"It
is my duty,” wrote the correspondent of the Times at the liberation
of Belsen, “to describe something beyond the imagination of mankind.”
That was how I felt in the summer of 1979, arriving in Cambodia in the
wake of Pol Pot’s genocidal regime.In the silent, grey humidity,
Phnom Penh, the size of Manchester, was like a city that had sustained
a nuclear cataclysm which had spared only the buildings. Houses, flats,
offices, schools, hotels stood empty and open, as if vacated that day.
Personal possessions lay trampled on a path; traffic lights were jammed
on red. There was almost no power, and no water to drink. At the railway
station, trains stood empty at various stages of interrupted departure.
Several carriages had been set on fire and contained bodies on top of
each other.
Click
here to download (36kb)
NEW
- January 12
Power, propaganda and conscience
I
am
a reporter, who values bearing witness. That is to say, I place paramount
importance in the evidence of what I see, and hear, and sense to be
the truth, or as close to the truth as possible. By comparing this evidence
with the statements, and actions of those with power, I believe it’s
possible to assess fairly how our world is controlled and divided, and
manipulated – and how language and debate are distorted and a false
consciousness developed.
When we speak of this in regard to totalitarian societies and dictatorships,
we call it brainwashing: the conquest of minds. It’s a notion we
almost never apply to our own societies.
Click
here to download (36kb)
January
9
What they don’t want you to know
The
disaster in Iraq is rotting the Blairite establishment. Blair himself
appears ever more removed from reality; his latest tomfoolery about
the “discovery” of “a huge system of clandestine weapons
laboratories”, which even the American viceroy in Baghdad mocked,
would be astonishing, were it not merely another of his vapid attempts
to justify his crime against humanity. (His crime, and George Bush’s,
is clearly defined as “supreme” in the Nuremberg judgment.)
This is not what the guardians of the faith want you to know. Lord Hutton,
who is due to report on the Kelly affair, will provide the most effective
distraction, just as Lord Justice Scott did with his arms-to-Iraq report
almost ten years ago, ensuring that the top echelon of the political
class escaped criminal charges. Of course, it was not Hutton’s
“brief” to deal with the criminal slaughter in Iraq; he will
spread the blame for one man’s torment and death, having pointedly
and scandalously chosen not to recall and cross-examine Blair, even
though Blair revealed during his appearance before Hutton that he had
lied in “emphatically” denying he had had anything to do with
“outing” Dr David Kelly.”
Click
here to download (36kb)
Click
here to read John Pilger's columns for 2005
Click
here to read John Pilger's columns for 2003
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