Articles by John Pilger
We found 154 results.
Never Forget That Bradley Manning, Not Gay Marriage, Is the Issue
John Pilger – TRANSCEND Media Service,
21 May 2012
The award of the Nobel Prize to the first black president because he “offered hope” was both absurd and an authentic expression of the lifestyle liberalism that controls much of political debate in the west. Same-sex marriage is one such distraction. The truth is that what matters to those who aspire to control our lives is not skin pigment or gender, or whether or not we are gay, but the class we serve. Remember Bradley Manning.
→ read full articleYou Are All Suspects Now. What Are You Going To Do About It?
John Pilger – TRANSCEND Media Service,
30 Apr 2012
You are all potential terrorists. It matters not that you live in Britain, the United States, Australia or the Middle East. Citizenship is effectively abolished. Turn on your computer and the US Department of Homeland Security’s National Operations Center may monitor whether you are typing not merely “al-Qaeda”, but “exercise”, “drill”, “wave”, “initiative” and “organisation”: all proscribed words.
→ read full article(Portuguese) A Guerra Suja Contra a WikiLeaks
John Pilger – TRANSCEND Media Service,
26 Mar 2012
As difamações dos média sugerem a cumplicidade da Suécia com um esforço impulsionado por Washington para punir Julian Assange.
→ read full articleThe War on WikiLeaks Is Now Trial by Media in Sweden
John Pilger – TRANSCEND Media Service,
12 Mar 2012
War by media, says current military doctrine, is as important as the battlefield. This is because the real enemy is the public at home, whose manipulation and deception are essential for starting an unpopular colonial war. Like the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, attacks on Iran and Syria require a steady drip-effect on readers’ and viewers’ consciousness. This is the essence of a propaganda that rarely speaks its name.
→ read full articleThe Assange Case Means We Are All Suspects Now
John Pilger – TRANSCEND Media Service,
6 Feb 2012
This week’s Supreme Court hearing in the Julian Assange case has profound meaning for the preservation of basic freedoms in western democracies. This is Assange’s final appeal against his extradition to Sweden to face allegations of sexual misconduct that were originally dismissed by the chief prosecutor in Stockholm and constitute no crime in Britain. The consequences, if he loses, lie not in Sweden but in the shadows cast by America’s descent into totalitarianism.
→ read full articleOnce Again, War Is Prime Time and Journalism’s Role Is Taboo
John Pilger – TRANSCEND Media Service,
5 Dec 2011
The role of respectable journalism in western state crimes — from Iraq to Iran, Afghanistan to Libya – remains taboo. It is currently deflected by the media theatre of the Leveson enquiry into phone hacking, which Daily Telegraph’s Benedict Brogan describes as “a useful stress test”. Blame Rupert Murdoch and the tabloids for everything and business can continue as usual.
→ read full articleThe Son of Africa Claims a Continent’s Crown Jewels
John Pilger – TRANSCEND Media Service,
24 Oct 2011
On 14 October, President Barack Obama announced he was sending United States special forces troops to Uganda to join the civil war there. In the next few months, US combat troops will be sent to South Sudan, Congo and Central African Republic. They will only “engage” for “self-defence”, says Obama, satirically. With Libya secured, an American invasion of the African continent is under way.
→ read full articleThe ‘Getting’ of Assange and the Smearing of a Revolution
John Pilger – TRANSCEND Media Service,
10 Oct 2011
The High Court in London will soon to decide whether Julian Assange is to be extradited to Sweden to face allegations of sexual misconduct. However, it is not the Swedish judicial system that presents a “grave danger” to Assange, say his lawyers, but a legal device known as a Temporary Surrender, under which he can be sent on from Sweden to the United States secretly and quickly.
→ read full articleHail to the True Victors of Rupert’s Revolution
John Pilger – TRANSCEND Media Service,
12 Sep 2011
NATO is raining fragmentation bombs on civilian-populated Sirte and other “Gaddafi strongholds” where, says a Channel 4 News reporter, “until they cut off the head of the snake, Libyans will not feel safe”. I quote that not so much for its Orwellian quality but as a model of journalism’s role in justifying “our” bloodbaths in advance. This is Rupert’s Revolution, after all. Gone from the Murdoch press are pejorative “insurgents”. The action in Libya, says The Times, is “a revolution… as revolutions used to be”.
→ read full articleIn Cuba, the Revolution Continues, Softly, as Times Change
John Pilger – TRANSCEND Media Service,
8 Aug 2011
Radios that crackle, a new airport terminal with birds nesting, the early morning snores of an official at passport control and the palpable ambivalence of pride and frustration belong to a revolution that sends tens of thousands of doctors across the world for the sole purpose of helping other human beings: an epic internationalism.
→ read full articleThe Invasion of Australia – Official, At Last
John Pilger – TRANSCEND Media Service,
4 Jul 2011
The City of Sydney has voted to replace the words “European arrival” in the official record with “invasion”. The deputy lord mayor, Marcelle Hoff, says it is intellectually dishonest to use any other word in describing how Aboriginal Australia was dispossessed by the British. “We were invaded,” said Paul Morris, an Aboriginal adviser to the council. “It is the truth and it shouldn’t be watered down. We wouldn’t expect Jewish people to accept a watered-down version of the Holocaust, so why should we?”
→ read full articleAn Unpalatable Truth: The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism
John Pilger – Information Clearing House,
6 Jun 2011
This prize is in honour of one of the 20th century’s greatest reporters. Julian Assange is an editor, publisher and journalist in the oldest and finest tradition of our craft. He is brave. He is a true agent of people; and I should say that those who dismiss him a hacker merely betray themselves as hacks.
→ read full articleWelcome To the Violent World of Mr. Hopey Changey
John Pilger – TRANSCEND Media Service,
30 May 2011
And as “Mr. Hopey Changey” (the name that Ted Rall, the great American cartoonist, gives Barack Obama), is fawned upon by the British elite and launches another insufferable presidential campaign, the Anglo-American reign of terror proceeds in Afghanistan and elsewhere. In Libya there is a tribal civil war; and the armed uprising against Gaddafi has long been appropriated by the Americans, French and British, a repeat of the “shock and awe” in Iraq that left thousands of civilians dead and maimed. As in Iraq, the victims, which include countless incinerated Libyan army conscripts, are media unpeople.
→ read full articleHow the Murdoch Press Keeps Australia’s Dirty Secret
John Pilger – TRANSCEND Media Service,
16 May 2011
The Australian publishes long articles that present Aboriginal people not unsympathetically, but as perennial victims of each other, “an entire culture committing suicide,” or as noble primitives requiring firm direction: the eugenicist’s view. It promotes Aboriginal “leaders” who, by blaming their own people for their poverty, tell the white elite what it wants to hear. The writer Michael Brull parodied this: “Oh White man, please save us. Take away our rights because we are so backward.”
→ read full articleBreaking Australia’s Silence: WikiLeaks and Freedom
John Pilger - TRANSCEND Media Service,
21 Mar 2011
Public forum held on 16 March 2011 at the Sydney Town Hall. The event was staged by the Sydney Peace Foundation, Amnesty International, Stop the War Coalition, and supported by the City of Sydney.
→ read full articleHow the So-Called Guardians of Free Speech Are Silencing the Messenger
John Pilger – TRANSCEND Media Service,
14 Mar 2011
As the United States and Britain look for an excuse to invade another oil-rich Arab country, the hypocrisy is familiar. Colonel Gaddafi is “delusional” and “blood-drenched” while the authors of an invasion that killed a million Iraqis, who have kidnapped and tortured in our name, are entirely sane, never blood-drenched and once again the arbiters of “stability”.
→ read full articleBehind the Arab Revolt is a Word We Dare Not Speak
John Pilger – TRANSCEND Media Service,
28 Feb 2011
The revolt in the Arab world is not merely against a resident dictator but a worldwide economic tyranny designed by the US Treasury and imposed by the US Agency for International Development, the IMF and World Bank, which have ensured that rich countries like Egypt are reduced to vast sweatshops, with half the population earning less than $2 a day. The people’s triumph in Cairo was the first blow against what Benito Mussolini called corporatism, a word that appears in his definition of fascism.
→ read full articleJohn Pilger in Conversation with Julian Assange
John Pilger – TRANSCEND Media Service,
7 Feb 2011
Watch a 70-minute interview with Julian Assange recorded during filming of John Pilger’s latest film ‘The War You Don’t See’.
→ read full articleThe War on WikiLeaks: A John Pilger Investigation and Interview with Julian Assange
John Pilger – TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 Jan 2011
The attacks on WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, are a response to an information revolution that threatens old power orders, in politics and journalism. The incitement to murder trumpeted by public figures in the United States, together with attempts by the Obama administration to corrupt the law and send Assange to a hell hole prison for the rest of his life, are the reactions of a rapacious system exposed as never before.
→ read full articleWhy Are Wars Not Being Reported Honestly?
John Pilger – TRANSCEND Media Service,
20 Dec 2010
In the US Army manual on counterinsurgency, the American commander General David Petraeus describes Afghanistan as a “war of perception… conducted continuously using the news media”. What really matters is not so much the day-to-day battles against the Taliban as the way the adventure is sold in America where “the media directly influence the attitude of key audiences”. Reading this, I was reminded of the Venezuelan general who led a coup against the democratic government in 2002. “We had a secret weapon,” he boasted. “We had the media, especially TV. You got to have the media.”
→ read full articleHow Journalists Help to Promote War – And What Can Be Done To Stop It
Daniel Trilling interviewing John Pilger – New Statesman,
13 Dec 2010
The War You Don’t See is about the media’s role in promoting and sanitising contemporary wars. Why make this film at this particular moment?
→ read full articleThe Party Game Is Over. Stand and Fight
John Pilger – TRANSCEND Media Service,
8 Nov 2010
There is no other way now. Direct action. Civil disobedience. Unerring. Read Shelley and do it.
→ read full articleChile’s Ghosts Are Not Being Rescued
John Pilger – TRANSCEND Media Service,
18 Oct 2010
In his latest column for the New Statesman, written as the 33 Chilean miners are brought to the surface after ther epic rescue, John Pilger describes the unspoken life in Chile behind the media facade that the government of President Sebastion Pinera has skilfully exploited.
→ read full articleThe BBC Is on Murdoch’s Side
John Pilger – TRANSCEND Media Service,
4 Oct 2010
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger says that while the dangers of Rupert Murdoch’s dominance are understood, the role played by the respectable media, such as the New York Times and the BBC, notably in the promotion of colonial wars, is at least as important.
→ read full articleC’mon, Time to Rebrand Your Life!
John Pilger – TRANSCEND Media Service,
20 Sep 2010
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger continues his examination of the effect of ‘extreme corporatism’ – money – on sport. He contrasts the last of the great sporting stars who were not celebrities in the modern sense with the enrichment of Rupert Murdoch and the corruption of sports like cricket.
→ read full articleFlying the Flag, Faking the News
John Pilger – TRANSCEND Media Service,
6 Sep 2010
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger traces the history of propaganda to Edward Bernays, the American nephew of Sigmund Freud, who invented the term “public relations”. Bernays believed in “engineering public consent” and creating “false realties” as news. Here are examples of how this works today.
→ read full articleWhy WikiLeaks Must Be Protected
John Pilger – TRANSCEND Media Service,
23 Aug 2010
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the importance of Wikileaks as a new and fearless form of investigative journalism that threatens both the war-makers and their apologists, notably journalists who are state stenographers.
→ read full articleThe Charge of the Media Brigade
John Pilger – TRANSCEND Media Service,
19 Jul 2010
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes how an all-pervasive corporate media culture in the United States prepares the way for a permanent state of war. And yet for all the column inches and broadcast hours filled, the brainwashing is not succeeding. And this, he suggests, is ‘America’s greatest virtue’.
→ read full articleThe Heresy of the Greeks Offers Hope
John Pilger – TRANSCEND Media Service,
24 May 2010
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger inverts the perception of Greece as a “junk country” and sees hope in the uprising of ordinary Greeks protesting against the “bailout” of an economy plunged into debt by the tax-evading rich. Greece, he writes, is a microcosm for the developed world, where class war are the words seldom used because they are the truth.
→ read full articleVoting for War. Take Your Pick
John Pilger – TRANSCEND Media Service,
10 May 2010
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes how Edwardian notions of war are again being promoted in western democracies, along with the militarising of history, journalism and parliamentary politics. In Britain, the three main candidiates for prime minister are declared warmakers; and yet popular feeling is very different.
→ read full articleHAVE A NICE WORLD WAR, FOLKS
John Pilger - Truthout,
26 Mar 2010
Here is news of the Third World War. The United States has invaded Africa. US troops have entered Somalia, extending their war front from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and, now, the Horn of Africa. In preparation for an attack on Iran, American missiles have been placed in four Persian Gulf states, and “bunker-buster” bombs […]
→ read full articleTHE KIDNAPPING OF HAITI
John Pilger – Information Clearing House,
31 Jan 2010
The theft of Haiti has been swift and crude. On 22 January, the United States secured “formal approval” from the United Nations to take over all air and sea ports in Haiti, and to “secure” roads. No Haitian signed the agreement, which has no basis in law. Power rules in an American naval blockade and […]
→ read full articleFOR ISRAEL, A RECKONING
John Pilger,
16 Jan 2010
In the United States and Europe, trade unions, academic associations and mainstream churches have brought back the strategies and tactics that were used against apartheid South Africa. The farce of the climate change summit in Copenhagen affirmed a world war waged by the rich against most of humanity. It also illuminated a resistance growing perhaps […]
→ read full articleWELCOME TO ORWELL’S WORLD
John Pilger – The New Statesman,
11 Jan 2010
Barack Obama’s deceptions over the Afghanistan war should remind people of the lessons of George Orwell’s 1984.IN 1984, George Orwell described a superstate, Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that "passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’" […]
→ read full articleWELCOME TO ORWELL’S WORLD 2010
John Pilger,
31 Dec 2009
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate called Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that “passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’, ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’.” Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the […]
→ read full articleRETURNING TO A SECRET COUNTRY
John Pilger - Information Clearing House,
29 Nov 2009
Since Rudd’s apology, Aboriginal poverty indicators have gone backwards… a land grab combined with an almost prurient need to control, harass and blame a people who have refused to die off, whose genius is their understanding of an ancient land that still perplexes and threatens white authority. I remember the boys dressed in army surplus, […]
→ read full articleFREE THE FORGOTTEN BIRD OF PARADISE
John Pilger – Information Clearing House,
18 Nov 2009
When General Suharto, the west’s man, seized power in Indonesia in the mid-1960s, he offered “a gleam of light in Asia”, rejoiced Time magazine. That he had killed up to a million “communists” was of no account in the acquisition of what Richard Nixon called “the richest hoard of natural resources, the greatest prize in […]
→ read full articleNO SHIPLOAD OF WHITES FLEEING DISASTER WOULD BE TREATED LIKE THIS
John Pilger,
6 Nov 2009
An edited extract from ‘Breaking the Australian Silence, the City of Sydney Peace Prize Lecture’, given by this year’s winner, the journalist and film-maker, John Pilger, in the Sydney Opera House on Thursday, Nov 5 2009.The Australian silence has unique features. It affects our national life, the way we see the world, and the way […]
→ read full articleTHE HOLOCAUST IN CAMBODIA AND ITS AFTERMATH IS REMEMBERED
John Pilger,
30 Oct 2009
John Pilger recalls the stricken society he found in Cambodia in 1979 which he described in his epic dispatches and documentary, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia He reminds us that the Pol Pot horror emerged from the bombing ordered by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, and that Cambodia was again "punished" when its […]
→ read full articleTHE LYING GAME
John Pilger,
3 Oct 2009
In 2001, the Observer in London published a series of reports that claimed an “Iraqi connection” to al-Qaeda, even describing the base in Iraq where the training of terrorists took place and a facility where anthrax was being manufactured as a weapon of mass destruction. It was all false. Supplied by US intelligence and Iraqi […]
→ read full articleBACK TO THE POINT OF DEPARTURE
John Pilger,
27 Jun 2009
TS Eliot wrote that the point of any journey was to find out where you came from. As I bore my bulging canvas bag to the wharf at Circular Quay, not far from where my Irish great-great-grandparents had landed in leg irons, I hoped the point of my journey would become clearer once my ship […]
→ read full articleSMILE ON THE FACE OF THE TIGER
John Pilger,
13 Jun 2009
Obama offered only a “tired, morally bankrupt American mantra [which] essentially argues that only the rich, the strong, the oppressors and the enforcers of injustice (notably the Americans and Israelis) have the right to use violence, while the poor, the weak, the oppressed and the victims of oppression must . . . submit to their […]
→ read full articleTHE TAMILS OF SRI LANKA
John Pilger,
14 May 2009
Distant Voices, Desperate Lives In the early 1960s, it was the Irish of Derry who would phone late at night, speaking in a single breath, spilling out stories of discrimination and injustice. Who listened to their truth until the violence began? Bengalis from what was then East Pakistan did much the same. Their urgent whispers […]
→ read full articleFAKE FAITH AND EPIC CRIMES
John Pilger,
3 Apr 2009
These are extraordinary times. With the United States and Britain on the verge of bankruptcy and committing to an endless colonial war, pressure is building for their crimes to be prosecuted at a tribunal similar to that which tried the Nazis at Nuremberg. This defined rapacious invasion as "the supreme international crime differing only from […]
→ read full articleTHE POLITICS OF BOLLOCKS
John Pilger,
7 Feb 2009
Growing up in an Antipodean society proud of its rich variety of expletives, I never heard the word bollocks. It was only on arrival in England that I understood its majesterial power. All classes used it. Judges grunted it; an editor of the Daily Mirror used it as noun, adjective and verb. Certainly, the resonance […]
→ read full articleCOME ON DOWN FOR YOUR FREEDOM MEDALS
John Pilger,
25 Jan 2009
On 13 January, George W. Bush presented “presidential freedom medals”, said to be America’s highest recognition of devotion to freedom and peace. Among the recipients were Tony Blair, who, with Bush, bears responsibility for the physical, social and cultural destruction of an entire nation; John Howard, the former prime minister of Australia and minor American […]
→ read full article“PALESTINE IS STILL THE ISSUE”
John Pilger,
10 Jan 2009
Why Has This Documentary Never Been Broadcast On U.S. Media ? Twenty-five years ago, I made a film called Palestine Is Still The Issue. It was about a nation of people – the Palestinians – forced off their land and later subjected to a military occupation by Israel. An occupation condemned by the United Nations and […]
→ read full articleHOLOCAUST DENIED
John Pilger,
9 Jan 2009
The Lying Silence of Those Who Know When the truth is replaced by silence," the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, "the silence is a lie." It may appear the silence is broken on Gaza. The cocoons of murdered children, wrapped in green, together with boxes containing their dismembered parents and the cries of grief and […]
→ read full articleIN THE GREAT TRADITION: OBAMA IS A HAWK
John Pilger,
25 Dec 2008
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger reaches back into the history of the Democratic Party and describes the tradition of war-making and expansionism that Barack Obama has now left little doubt he will honour. In 1941, the editor Edward Dowling wrote: "The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States […]
→ read full articleTHE CORRUPTION THAT MAKES UNPEOPLE OF AN ENTIRE NATION
John Pilger,
27 Nov 2008
I went to the Houses of Parliament on 22 October to join a disconsolate group of shivering people who had arrived from a faraway tropical place and were being prevented from entering the Public Gallery to hear their fate. This was not headline news; the BBC reporter seemed almost embarrassed. Crimes of such magnitude are […]
→ read full articleLATIN AMERICA: THE WAR ON DEMOCRACY
John Pilger,
14 Nov 2008
Toward Freedom – Documentary Online The War on Democracy is John Pilger’s first major film for the cinema – in a career that has produced more than 55 television documentaries. Set in Latin America and the US, it explores the historic and current relationship of Washington with countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile. "The […]
→ read full articleUNDER THE COVER OF RACIST MYTH, A NEW LAND GRAB IN AUSTRALIA
John Pilger,
29 Oct 2008
With its banks secured in the warmth of the southern spring, Australia is not news. It ought to be. An epic scandal of racism, injustice and brutality is being covered up in the manner of apartheid South Africa. Many Australians conspire in this silence, wishing never to reflect upon the truth about their society’s untermenschen, […]
→ read full articleThreat to Democracy in Latin America
Harold Pinter, John Pilger, Tony Benn,
30 Sep 2008
On September 10 President Evo Morales of Bolivia declared the US ambassador persona non grata. On September 11 (the 35th anniversary of the military overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile) the president of Venezuela asked the US ambassador there to leave the country. President Hugo Chávez believed he was facing the possibility of an imminent […]
→ read full articleThe New World War:
John Pilger,
30 Sep 2008
The Silence Is a Lie In an article for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the ‘great silence’ over the annual British party conferences as politicians and their club of commentators say nothing about a war provoked and waged across the world the responsibility for which lies close at hand. Britain’s political conference season of […]
→ read full article