good DICTATOR... bad DICTATOR...
- Independent Ink
- 3 days ago
- 8 min read
Unputdownable John Pilger: On the second anniversary of passing away of the great journalist and filmmaker on 30 December 2023, we celebrate his life and work, sharing gems from his reportage; gems that continue to inspire generations of journalists-filmamkers-writers-thinkers-activists-students with universal ideas of justice, equality and liberty.
By Raju Mansukhani
Old soldiers, it is said, never die, they simply fade away.
Veteran journalists-filmmakers like John Pilger too never die and they leave behind piles of books they have written, volumes of ground reports and analysis they filed as war correspondents, and shelf-full of documentary films they shot to capture the ruthlessness and brutality of humanity.
On the second anniversary of Pilger’s passing away on 30 December 2023, it is most appropriate to celebrate his life and work, ploughing through his well-maintained website and sharing gems from his reportage over the decades; gems that continue to inspire generations of writers-thinkers-activists-students-journalists-filmmakers with universal ideas of justice, equality and liberty.
In his address to the Trondheim World Festival in Norway in early September 2022, probably one of his last public addresses, Pilger charted the history of power propaganda and described how it appropriates journalism in a ‘profound imperialism’ -- and is likely to entrap us all, if we allow it.
He recounted, “in the 1970s, I met one of Hitler’s leading propagandists, Leni Riefenstahl, whose epic films glorified the Nazis. We happened to be staying at the same lodge in Kenya, where she was on a photography assignment, having escaped the fate of other friends of the Fuhrer. She told me that the ‘patriotic messages’ of her films were dependent not on ‘orders from above’ but on what she called the ‘submissive void’ of the German public. Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? I asked. ‘Yes, especially them,’ she said.” (https://johnpilger.com/2022/09/08/silencing-the-lambs-how-propaganda-works/)
“I think of this as I look around at the propaganda now consuming Western societies. Of course, we are very different from Germany in the 1930s. We live in information societies. We are globalists. We have never been more aware, more in touch, better connected. Are we? Or do we live in a Media Society where brainwashing is insidious and relentless, and perception is filtered according to the needs and lies of state and corporate power?” he questioned.
Media domination by US
“The United States dominates the Western world’s media. All but one of the top ten media companies are based in North America. The internet and social media – Google, Twitter, Facebook – are mostly American-owned and controlled. In my lifetime, the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, mostly democracies. It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries. It has dropped bombs on the people of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenceless. It has attempted to murder the leaders of 50 countries. It has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20 countries,”
Pilger’s words continue to resonate till date, with the fearlessness that was so characteristic of the man. As he said, “The extent and scale of this carnage is largely unreported, unrecognised; and those responsible continue to dominate Anglo-American political life.”
Pilger and great playwright Harold Pinter were good friends and both were equally forthright in speaking out against injustices. Said Pilger, “In the years before he died in 2008, the playwright Harold Pinter made two extraordinary speeches, which broke the silence. ‘US foreign policy,’ he said, is ‘best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it’s so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do….’”
“In accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, Pinter said: ‘The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis…’”
“Pinter was a friend of mine and possibly the last great political sage – that is, before dissenting politics were gentrified. I asked him if the ‘hypnosis’ he referred to was the ‘submissive void’ described by Leni Riefenstahl. ‘It’s the same,’ he replied. ‘It means the brainwashing is so thorough we are programmed to swallow a pack of lies. If we don’t recognise propaganda, we may accept it as normal and believe it. That’s the submissive void’,” said Pilger, making the reader pause to soak in the enormity of these thoughts and statements.
Speaking Up
Pilger had a vibrant sense of history; he could report on the present and keep his eyes on the historical past to create the context for better understanding of the subjects which tormented him and his generation. On 1 May 2023, he filed the report titled ‘There is a war coming shrouded in propaganda. It will involve us. Speak up’.
He began the essay-report going back to 1935 when the Congress of American Writers was held in New York City. “They called on ‘the hundreds of poets, novelists, dramatists, critics, short story writers and journalists’ to discuss the ‘rapid crumbling of capitalism’ and the beckoning of another war. They were electric events which, according to one account, were attended by 3,500 members of the public with more than a thousand turned away. (Well-known personalities like) Arthur Miller, Myra Page, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett warned that fascism was rising, often disguised, and the responsibility lay with writers and journalists to speak out…
“Telegrams of support from (great writers) Thomas Mann, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, C Day Lewis, Upton Sinclair and Albert Einstein were read out. The journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn spoke up for the homeless and unemployed, and ‘all of us under the shadow of violent great power,” he wrote.
“Martha, who became a close friend, told me later over her customary glass of Famous Grouse and soda: ‘The responsibility I felt as a journalist was immense. I had witnessed the injustices and suffering delivered by the Depression, and I knew, we all knew, what was coming if silences were not broken.’ Her words echo across the silences today: they are silences filled with a consensus of propaganda that contaminates almost everything we read, see and hear…
“Let me give you one example: On 7 March, the two oldest newspapers in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, published several pages on ‘the looming threat’ of China. They coloured the Pacific Ocean red. Chinese eyes were martial, on the march and menacing. The Yellow Peril was about to fall down as if by the weight of gravity. No logical reason was given for an attack on Australia by China. A ‘panel of experts’ presented no credible evidence: one of them is a former director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a front for the Defence Department in Canberra, the Pentagon in Washington, the governments of Britain, Japan and Taiwan and the West’s war industry. ‘Beijing could strike within three years,’ they warned. ‘We are not ready.’ Billions of dollars are to be spent on American nuclear submarines, but that, it seems, is not enough. ‘Australia’s holiday from history is over’: whatever that might mean,” Pilger commented, not mincing his words, ready to call a spade a spade.
“There is no threat to Australia, none. The faraway ‘lucky’ country has no enemies, least of all China, its largest trading partner. Yet, China-bashing that draws on Australia’s long history of racism towards Asia has become something of a sport for the self-ordained ‘experts’. What do Chinese-Australians make of this? Many are confused and fearful. The authors of this grotesque piece of dog-whistling and obsequiousness to American power are Peter Hartcher and Matthew Knott, ‘national security reporters’ I think they are called. I remember Hartcher from his Israeli government-paid jaunts. The other one, Knott, is a mouthpiece for the suits in Canberra. Neither has ever seen a war zone and its extremes of human degradation and suffering…
“‘How did it come to this?’ Martha Gellhorn would say if she were here. ‘Where on earth are the voices saying no? Where is the comradeship?’,” wrote Pilger, giving pointers to media-persons across Asia who are unable to go beyond the surface when it comes to defence deals and country-bashing.
Manufactured consent
Going back to Pilger’s reporting in January 2014, he questions “Is media just another word for control?”
Covering the wars was his passion, his focus, and he remained an independent war correspondent, writing and making films as only he could.
He wrote: “A recent poll asked people in Britain how many Iraqis had been killed as a result of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The answers they gave were shocking. A majority said that fewer than 10,000 had been killed. Scientific studies report that up to a million Iraqi men, women and children died in an inferno lit by the British government and its ally in Washington. That’s the equivalent of the genocide in Rwanda. And the carnage goes on. Relentlessly.”
“What this reveals is how we in Britain have been misled by those whose job is to keep the record straight,” he wrote, adding, “The American writer and academic Edward Herman calls this ‘normalising the unthinkable’. He describes two types of victims in the world of news: ‘worthy victims’ and ‘unworthy victims’. ‘Worthy victims’ are those who suffer at the hands of our enemies: the likes of Assad, Qadaffi, Saddam Hussein. ‘Worthy victims’ qualify for what we call ‘humanitarian intervention’. ‘Unworthy victims’ are those who get in the way of our punitive might and that of the ‘good dictators’ we employ. Saddam Hussein was once a ‘good dictator’ but he got uppity and disobedient and was relegated to ‘bad dictator’.”
Pilger continued travelling across Asia and Africa and his reportage on countries and continents is razor-sharp. “In Indonesia, General Suharto was a ‘good dictator’, regardless of his slaughter of perhaps a million people, aided by the governments of Britain and America. He also wiped out a third of the population of East Timor with the help of British fighter aircraft and British machine guns. Suharto was even welcomed to London by the Queen and when he died peacefully in his bed, he was lauded as enlightened, a moderniser, one of us.
Unlike Saddam Hussein, he never got uppity,” he wrote.
“When I travelled in Iraq in the 1990s, the two principal Moslem groups, the Shia and Sunni, had their differences but they lived side by side, even intermarried and regarded themselves with pride as Iraqis. There was no Al Qaida, there were no jihadists. We blew all that to bits in 2003 with ‘shock and awe’. And today Sunni and Shia are fighting each other right across the Middle East. This mass murder is being funded by the regime in Saudi Arabia which beheads people and discriminates against women. Most of the 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia.
“…In 2010, Wikileaks released a cable sent to US embassies by the Secretary of State Hilary Clinton. She wrote this: “Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support for Al Qaeda, the Taliban, al Nusra and other terrorist groups… worldwide”. And yet, the Saudis are our valued allies. They’re good dictators. The British royals visit them often. We sell them all the weapons they want,” Pilger could see through the charade of foreign policy in the democracies whose domination he found completely unacceptable.
“I use the first person ‘we’ and ‘our’ in line with newsreaders and commentators who often say ‘we’, preferring not to distinguish between the criminal power of our governments and us, the public. We are all assumed to be part of a consensus: Tory and Labour, Obama’s White House too. When Nelson Mandela died, the BBC went straight to David Cameron, then to Obama. Cameron who went to South Africa during Mandela’s 25th year of imprisonment on a trip that was tantamount to support for the apartheid regime, and Obama who recently shed a tear in Mandela’s cell on Robben Island – he who presides over the cages of Guantanamo,” he stated, providing an epitaph for President Obama and the Democrats.
Photos 1, and last 3 below, courtesy: https://johnpilger.com/
Raju Mansukhani is a researcher-writer on history and heritage
issues; contributing columns and features in leading Indian and foreign newspapers, portals.