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JOHN PILGER
WORDS AGAINST WAR

Hard-hitting Writing from one of the
World's Top 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 newspapera around the world and for Britain's New Statesman magazine. His latest book is Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs (Random House UK)

Click here to read John Pilger's WORDS AGAINST WAR columns for 2004

Click here to read John Pilger's WORDS AGAINST WAR columns for 2003

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24. November 10, 2005
The rise of America's new enemy
I was dropped at Paradiso, the last middle-class area before barrio La Vega, which spills into a ravine as if by the force of gravity. Storms were forecast, and people were anxious, remembering the mudslides that took 20,000 lives. “Why are you here?” asked the man sitting opposite me in the packed jeep-bus that chugged up the hill. Like so many in Latin America, he appeared old, but wasn’t. Without waiting for my answer, he listed why he supported President Chavez: schools, clinics, affordable food, “our constitution, our democracy” and “for the first time, the oil money is going to us.” I asked him if he belonged to the MRV, Chavez’s party, “No, I’ve never been in a political party; I can only tell you how my life has been changed, as I never dreamt.”

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23. October 27, 2005
Epic crime that dare not speak its name
A Royal Air Force officer is about to be tried before a military court for refusing to return to Iraq because the war is illegal. Malcolm Kendall-Smith is the first British officer to face criminal charges for challenging the legality of the invasion and occupation. He is not a conscientious objector; he has completed two tours in Iraq. When he came home the last time, he studied the reasons given for attacking Iraq and concluded he was breaking the law. His position is supported by international lawyers all over the world, not least by Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, who said in September last year: “The US-led invasion of Iraq was an illegal act that contravened the UN Charter.”

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22. October 13, 2005
From Suharto to Iraq: Nothing has changed
The propagandist’s purpose,” wrote Aldous Huxley, “is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” The British, who invented modern war propaganda and inspired Joseph Goebbels, were specialists in the field. At the height of the slaughter known as the First World War, the prime minister, David Lloyd George, confided to C P Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian: “If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know, and can’t know.”
What has changed?

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21. October 13, 2005
The silence of writers
In 1988, the English literary critic and novelist, D.J. Taylor wrote a seminal piece entitled ‘When the Pen Sleeps’. He expanded this into a book ‘A Vain Conceit’, in which he wondered why the English novel so often denigrated into ‘drawing room twitter’ and why the great issues of the day were shunned by writers, unlike their counterparts in, say, Latin America, who felt a responsibility to take on politics: the great themes of justice and injustice, wealth and poverty, war and peace. The notion of the writer working in splendid isolation was absurd. Where, he asked, were the George Orwells, the Upton Sinclairs, the John Steinbecks of the modern age?

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20. September 27, 2005
Sinister events in a cynical war
Here are questions that are not being asked about the latesttwist of a cynical war. Were explosives and a remote-control detonator found in the car of the two SAS special forces men “rescued” from prison in Basra on 19 September? If true, what were they planning to do with them? Why did the British military authorities in Iraq put out an unbelievable version of the circumstances that led up to armoured vehicles smashing down the wall of a prison?

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19. September 13, 2005
News from behind the facade
When I lived in the United States in the late 1960s, my home was often New Orleans, in a friend’s rambling grey clapboard house that stood in a section of the city where civil rights campaigners had taken refuge from the violence of the Deep South. New Orleans was said to be cosmopolitan; it was also sinister and murderous. We were protected by the then District Attorney, Jim Garrison, a liberal maverick whose investigations into the assassination of John Kennedy were to make powerful enemies behind The Facade.

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18. August 21, 2005
The democratic police state
Thomas Friedman is a famous columnist on the New York Times. He has been described as “a guard dog of US foreign policy”. Whatever America’s warlords have in mind for the rest of humanity, Friedman will bark it. He boasts that “the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist”. He promotes bombing countries and says world war three has begun. Friedman’s latest bark is about free speech, which his country’s constitution is said to safeguard. He wants the State Department to draw up a blacklist of those who make “wrong” political statements. He is referring not only to those who advocate violence, but those who believe American actions are the root cause of the current terrorism. The latter group, which he describes as “just one notch less despicable than the terrorists”, includes most Americans and Britons, according to the latest polls.

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17. July 21, 2005
Truth struggling
In all the coverage of the bombing of London, a truth has struggled to be heard. With honourable exceptions, it has been said guardedly, apologetically. Occasionally, a member of the public has broken the silence, as an East Londoner did when he walked in front of a CNN camera crew and reporter in mid-platitude. “Iraq!” he said. “We invaded Iraq and what did we expect? Go on say it.”

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16. July 18, 2005
Fighting fascism, then and now
It was the International Brigades’ Memorial Day in Jubilee Park beside the Thames in London. It was a hot day with no breeze, “a Spanish day”, one of the Brigaders said. Like the others, all in their eighties and older, he took shelter in the shade and rested on his walking stick. He wore his red beret. Twenty yards away, tourists waiting to board the London Eye, the great ferris wheel built for the Milennium, looked bemused at the elderly men in their berets, and the rest of us, without knowing who we were, what the men had done and why we were celebrating them.

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15. July 8, 2005
The bombs belong to Blair and Bush
No one doubts the atrocious inhumanity of those who planted the bombs that killed and caused mayhem in London yesterday. No one should also doubt that this outrage has been coming since the day Tony Blair joined George Bush in their bloody invasion and occupation of Iraq.They are “Blair’s bombs,” and he ought not be allowed to evade culpability with yet another unctuous speech about other people’s violence.

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14. July 7, 2005
The polite crushing of dissent and truth
Over the past two weeks, the contrast between two related “global” events has been salutary. The first was the World Tribunal on Iraq held in Istanbul; the second the G8 meeting in Scotland and the Make Poverty History campaign. Reading the papers and watching television in Britain, you would know nothing about the Istanbul meetings, which produced the most searing evidence to date of the greatest political scandal of modern times: the attack on a defenceless Iraq by America and Britain.

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13. June 22, 2005
The G8 Summit: A fraud and a circus
The front page of the London Observer on 12 June announced, “55 billion Africa debt deal ‘a victory for millions’.” The “victory for millions” is a quotation of Bob Geldof, who said, “Tomorrow 280 million Africans will wake up for the first time in their lives without owing you or me a penny...”. The nonsense of this would be breathtaking if the reader’s breath had not already been extracted by the unrelenting sophistry of Geldof, Bono, Blair, the Observer et al.

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12. June 10, 2005
Sleeping with the enemy
The National Union of Journalists and the Blair government are planning a “launch” ceremony, at which they will announce their “partnership”. According to John Fray, the NUJ’s deputy general secretary, this collaboration will “promote awareness among journalists of the issues that surround the struggle against poverty on a world scale... We want to help the media to tell it like it is.” In a glossy letter to NUJ members, Fray says that joining hands with the government is “enhancing the understanding of the need for a positive approach to international development amongst those who report and comment on the issues...”. For this “positive approach”, the government is paying the journalists’ union 80,000 pounds. What a bargain price for the principle of independence from power.

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11. May 26, 2005
Cambodia: A victim of hate
From the air, there appeared to be nobody, no movement, not even an animal, as if the great population of Asia had stopped at the Mekong river. Even the patchwork of rice paddies and fields was barely discernible; nothing seemed to have been planted or growing, except the forest and lines of tall wild grass. On the edge of deserted villages, often following a pattern of bomb craters, the grass would follow straight lines; fertilised by human compost, by the remains of thousands upon thousands of men, women and children, it marked common graves in a nation in which as many as two million people, or between a third and a quarter of the population, were “missing”.

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10. May 12, 2005
The state has lost its mind
In 1987, the sociologist Alex Carey, a second Orwell in his prophesies, wrote “Managing Public Opinion: the corporate offensive”. He described how in the United States “great progress [had been] made towards the ideal of a propaganda-managed democracy”, whose principal aim was to identify a rapacious business state “with every cherished human value”. The power and meaning of true democracy, of the franchise itself, would be “transferred” to the propaganda of advertising, public relations and corporate-run news. This “model of ideological control”, he predicted, would be adopted by other countries, such as Britain.To many who work conscientiously in the media, this will sound alarmist; it is not like that in Britain, they will say.

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09. April 21, 2005
Tony Blair's forgotten victims
A familiar, if desperate media push is under way to convince the British people that the main political parties offer them a democratic choice in the general election on 5 May. This demonstrable absurdity became hilarious when Tony Blair, leader of one of the nastiest, most violent right-wing regimes in memory, announced the existence of “a very nasty right-wing campaign” to defeat him. If only it was that funny. If only it was possible to read the “ah, but” tributes to a “successful” Labour government without cracking a rib. If only it was possible to read warmongers bemoaning the “apathy” of the British electorate without one’s laughter being overtaken by the urge to throw up.

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08. April 6, 2005
Reject the law of silence
Can you imagine the BBC apologising to a rogue regime that practises racism and ethnic cleansing; that has “effectively legalised the use of torture” (Amnesty); that holds international law in contempt, having defied hundreds of UN resolutions and built an apartheid wall in defiance of the International Court of Justice; that has demolished thousands of people’s homes and given its soldiers the right to assassinate; and whose leader was judged “personally responsible” for the massacre of more than 2,000 people?

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07. March 20, 2005
Be proud of what you’ve achieved
While apologists for Bush’s and Blair’s murderous adventure in Iraq see a “silver lining” in pseudo-events in the Middle East, real events in Colombia illuminate the universal nature of their “mission”. The latest tells a horrific story that, had it qualified as news, probably would have been reported as a tragedy whose victims “paid the price of cocaine paid with blood”. That was how the London Observer on 13 February represented the suffering of Colombia, which is typical of most of the American and European press, with a Foreign Office minister assuring us that Colombia’s woes all could be blamed on drugs; and that the “Oxford-educated” president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe, was “trying to rein rogue elements of the army”; moreover, the British government was helping him in his noble cause. As for America’s colossal military involvement in Colombia, known as “Plan Colombia”, whose expenditure rates just behind the billions spent in Iraq and Israel, this was merely “controversial” and “aimed at eradicating the [drugs] trade...”. As for Bill Rammell, the junior Foreign Office minister responsible, it seems, for most of the planet, the Observer reported that he had identified a moral issue in Colombia. For the English caring classes, said Busy Bill, snorting cocaine “should be as socially taboo as was drinking a bottle of South African wine during apartheid”.

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05. March 3, 2005
A regime with blood on its hands

Almost eight years ago, the choir of British liberalism celebrated a new age. Tony Blair, wrote the liberal thinker Hugo Young, “wants to create a world none of us have known”, a world which “ideology has surrendered entirely to ‘values’ [and where] there are no sacred cows . . . no fossilised limits to the ground over which the mind might range in search of a better Britain”. Besotted minds ranged far. In a Tonier-than-thou piece for the Guardian, Martin Kettle hilariously declared Blair an honorary Australian. “He is not in awe of the past,” he wrote. “He is not intimidated by class. He is a meritocrat, a doer . . . He is simply happy making his own history . . . It would be nice to think that one day these would be thought of as British characteristics, too.”

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04. February 17, 2005
Our children are learning lies

How does thought control work in societies that call themselves free? Why are famous journalists so eager, almost as a reflex, to minimise the culpability of a prime minister who shares responsibility for the unprovoked attack on a defenceless people, for laying waste to their land and for killing at least 100,000 people, most of them civilians, having sought to justify this epic crime with demonstrable lies? What made the BBC’s Mark Mardell describe the invasion of Iraq as “a vindication for him”? Why have broadcasters never associated the British or American state with terrorism? Why have such privileged communicators, with unlimited access to the facts, lined up to describe an unobserved, unverified, illegitimate, cynically manipulated election, held under a brutal occupation, as “democratic”, with the pristine aim of being “free and fair”? That quotation belongs to Helen Boaden, the director of BBC News.

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03. February 3, 2005
Fear and silence in Australia

National myths are usually partly true. In Australia, the myth of an egalitarian society, or “fair go”, has an extraordinary history. Long before most of the world, Australia had a minimum wage, a 35-hour working week, child benefits and the vote for women. The secret ballot was invented in Australia. By the 1960s, Australians could boast the most equitable spread of personal income in the world. Today, these are forgotten, subversive truths. As schools are ordered to fly the flag (its Union Jack still mocking from on high), the maudlin story of Australian soldiers dying pointlessly for an imperial master at Gallipoli is elevated, along with barely veiled colonialism and racism. Self-promoted as a bastion of human rights, Australia has become a sideshow of their denial and degradation.”

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02. January 20, 2005
We should never forget Burma

I tried to phone her the other day. I still have a number she gave me, which I could call infrequently and exchange a few words. It was fruitless to try this time; the hurried click at the other end was an echo of her Kafkaesque oppression. The isolation of Aung San Suu Kyi is now complete, in the tenth year of her detention. The last time I got through, I asked her what was happening outside her house. “Oh, the road is blocked and there are soldiers all over the street... for my own security, of course!”

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01. January 6, 2005
The other tsunami

The west’s crusaders, the United States and Britain, are giving less to help the tsunami victims than the cost of a Stealth bomber or a week’s bloody occupation of Iraq. The bill for George Bush’s coming inauguration party would rebuild much of the coastline of Sri Lanka. Bush and Blair increased their first driblets of “aid” only when it became clear that people all over the world were spontaneously giving millions and that a public relations problem beckoned. The Blair government’s current “generous” contribution is one-sixteenth of the £800m it spent on bombing Iraq before the invasion and barely one-twentieth of a £1bn gift, known as a soft loan, to the Indonesian military so that it could acquire Hawk fighter-bombers.

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MORE from John Pilger at coldtype.net

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

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