John Pilger RIP

I have to confess, to my shame, that I had mixed feelings about John Pilger, the great investigative journalist who died at the age of 84 due undoubtedly to the influence of the media aș demonstrated so brilliantly by the likes not only of Noam Chomsky (in ”Manufacturing Consent” 1988) but in Edwards and Cromwell’s Guardians of Power – the myth of the liberal media which actually contains a foreward by John Pilger. Let Pilger’s words (written in 2006) speak for themselve -

The latest ‘bad things’, such as America’s and Britain’s bombing of civilian targets with cluster bombs, and use of napalm and depleted uranium, in Iraq and Afghanistan, are not reported as acts of rapacious conquest but as imperfect liberation, justified by the myths of the ‘good war’ and the Cold War. The principal conveyer of these myths is that amorphous extension of the established order known as ‘the media’. While occasionally begging to differ on tactics and political personalities, journalists know, almost instinctively or by training, or both, the true nature of their tasks, especially when the established order appears to be threatened or goes to war. Societies are to be reported in terms of their threat or usefulness to ‘us’. Offi cial enemies are to be identifi ed and pursued. Parallels are to be drawn with the ‘good war’ and the Cold War, while official friends are to be treated as one views one’s own government: benign, regardless of compelling evidence to the contrary.

What has changed is the public’s perception and knowledge. No longer trusting what they read and see and hear, people are questioning as never before. A critical public intelligence is often denied by journalists, who prefer notions of an ‘apathetic public’ that justify their mantra of ‘giving the people what they want’. These days, however, the public is well ahead of the media, refusing to accept the limits of what academics called ‘the public discourse’. For example, according to the polls, a majority of the British people regard their prime minister as a liar: not one who has ‘misled parliament’ or ‘spun the facts’, but a liar. That is unprecedented. (remember this was 2006)

The last article Pilger wrote was a few months ago and warned of how we are being prepared for war -

In literature, the likes of John Steinbeck, Carson McCullers, George Orwell are 

obsolete. Post-modernism is in charge now. Liberalism has pulled up its political ladder.

A once somnolent social democracy, Australia, has enacted a web of new laws protecting 

secretive, authoritarian power and preventing the right to know. Whistleblowers are 

outlaws, to be tried in secret. An especially sinister law bans ‘foreign interference’ 

by those who work for foreign companies. What does this mean?
Democracy is notional now; there is the all-powerful elite of the corporation 

merged with the state and the demands of ‘identity’. American admirals are paid 

thousands of dollars a day by the Australian tax payer for ‘advice’. Right across the 

West, our political imagination has been pacified by PR and distracted by the intrigues 

of corrupt, ultra low-rent politicians: a Johnson or a Trump or a Sleepy Joe or a Zelensky.

No writers’ congress in 2023 worries about ‘crumbling capitalism’ and the lethal 

provocations of ‘our’ leaders. The most infamous of these, Blair, a prima facie criminal 

under the Nuremberg Standard, is free and rich. Julian Assange, who dared journalists 

to prove their readers had a right to know, is in his second decade of incarceration…..

The article then discusses the hypocrisy evident in the media’s portrayal of 

the Ukraine war 

In Britain, the silence of the liberal intelligensia is the silence of intimidation. 

State-sponsored issues like Ukraine and Israel are to be avoided if you want to 

keep a campus job or a teaching tenure. What happened to Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 

is repeated on campuses where opponents of apartheid Israel are casually smeared 

as anti-Semitic. Professor David Miller, ironically the country’s leading authority 

on modern propaganda, was sacked by Bristol University for suggesting publicly 

that Israel’s ‘assets’ in Britain and its political lobbying exerted a disproportionate 

influence worldwide — a fact for which the evidence is voluminous. The university 

hired a leading QC to investigate the case independently. His report exonerated 

Miller on the ‘important issue of academic freedom of expression’ and found 

‘Professor Miller’s comments did not constitute unlawful speech’. 

Yet Bristol sacked him. The message is clear: no matter what outrage it perpetrates, 

Israel has immunity and its critics are to be punished.

A PILGER RESOURCE 
https://johnpilger.com/ His website
Hidden Agendas John Pilger (1998) A superb collection of the causes he took on

The New Rulers of the World John Pilger (2002) His expose of the conditions in which modern corporations expect their global workers to sweat.

Tell me No Lies – investigative journalism and its triumphs John Pilger 2004
The New Rulers of the World John Pilger – the video verion of the book 

https://highprofiles.info/interview/john-pilger/