How John Pilger challenged the narratives set by Western powers

Pilger was a prominent and vocal critic of what he saw as the neo-imperialist foreign policies of successive governments in the US and the UK, not to mention his own birthland, Australia. He also took pains to highlight the mainstream media’s role in parroting the narratives and propaganda of those in power. In doing so, he set the stage for the breaking of the ‘information monopoly’ set by the West since World War II.

From the conflict zones

Towards the beginning of his career, Pilger was war correspondent for a bunch of British publications (and international ones like Reuters) starting from the 1960s. He reported from war-torn regions like Cambodia, Vietnam, Biafra, Bangladesh and so on. In a lot of these stories, Pilger went above and beyond his establishment-approved brief, uncovering the direct and indirect ways through which the US and UK governments aided and abetted global conflicts.

He made a series of Vietnam documentaries in the 1970s, including Vietnam: Still America’s War (1974) and Do You Remember Vietnam? (1978) — the latter, in particular, became a widely-cited source of information about the war, especially outside of America. Pilger first became controversial in the mainstream media for these efforts, especially since his films depicted the fading morale of American troops in Vietnam; many soldiers suggested to Pilger that they were not in favour of the way American foreign policy was unfolding.

In 1994, Pilger wrote and presented the documentary Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy. This film documented Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor since the early 90s, and the role played by the US, UK and Australian governments in the large-scale killings that followed in the region. The film was crucial in whipping up international criticism of the occupation and eventually, Indonesia withdrew from East Timor which gained independence in 2000. It’s unusual for standalone documentaries to have this kind of an impact, but for Pilger it wouldn’t be the last time. His 2002 documentary, Palestine Is Still The Issue, became a flashpoint for British audiences. (I encourage you to watch the film here, on YouTube).

This is the film, after all, where a mainstream British journalist was giving ordinary Palestinians the chance to tell their story before a global audience. It punctured decades of carefully-managed propaganda. In this film, we saw ex-Israeli soldiers talking about the cruelty they inflicted on the residents of Gaza and the Western Bank. We saw Palestinian writers taking us to the now-ruined Ministry of Culture — Israeli soldiers had deliberately defecated all over the premises, despite having functional bathrooms within. Literal bags of shit defiled paintings, sculptures, posters drawn by children.

A brief history of the many injustices in Palestine

Pilger also delivered a mini-history of the many injustices the so-called ‘rules-based world order’ had unleashed upon Palestine since the 1940s. “In 1987, the Palestinians rose up in what they call intifada,” Pilger said in the film. “History will surely call it a war of national liberation. They fought mostly with slingshots against tanks and planes. (…) Two years ago, the Palestinians rose up a second time. This was hardly surprising. During curfews, people live under a form of house arrest. Without notice they can be locked inside their homes. Their ordinary lives are a maze of controls, roadblocks, checkpoints. This is how I remembered apartheid South Africa. The hidden effect is the same humiliation and anger and death.”

Pilger’s comparison of Israel with apartheid South Africa, of course, struck a nerve with pro-Israel audiences, who forced the UK’s media watchdog Independent Television Commission (ITC) to investigate the film’s alleged bias. The ITC found that the film had breached no rules and that it had given adequate opportunity for pro-Israel voices to have their say. It’s pertinent to note here that Pilger openly scoffed at the idea of investigating journalists for ‘bias’. In his masterful book Hidden Agendas (1998), he wrote about the absurdity of a journalist claiming to be one hundred per cent objective:

“Having spent much of my life as a reporter in places of upheaval, including many of the wars of the second half of the century, I have become convinced that it is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers, without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and the myths that surround it. High on the list is the myth that we now live in an ‘information age’ when, in fact, we live in a media age, in which the available information is repetitive, ‘safe’ and limited by invisible boundaries.”

An indictment of the West’s post-WWII foreign policies

Of course, like everybody else, Pilger had his blind spots, too. There was a recurring line of criticism hurled at his work, specifically regarding his softball interviews of people like Hugo Chavez, the former President of Venezuela. There was a feeling that Pilger went soft on subjects whose presence was politically convenient for his films. In The War on Democracy (1997), available on YouTube here, you can see Pilger’s Chavez interview for yourself, especially in the first 30 minutes or so. The questions lobbed at the former President are really more like laudatory statements with a dash of the rhetorical. Moreover, Chavez is allowed to respond almost entirely in campaign-speak homilies.

That doesn’t mean, however, that the rest of Pilger’s work isn’t extremely valuable. In fact, I would urge readers to pick up Hidden Agendas in particular — one of the most direct, unvarnished and unapologetic indictments of the West’s disastrous post-WWII foreign policies. These lines in particular feel prophetic today and sum up the frustration and the powerlessness that so many of us feel:

“These are surreal times, as if ‘mainstream’ politics has come to the end of the road. In Britain, the United States, much of Europe and Australia, the policies of the principal parties have converged into single-ideology states with rival factions, which are little more than brotherhoods of power and privilege. Their rhetoric is tendentious. Democratic accountability and vision are replaced by a specious gloss, the work of fixers known as ‘spin-doctors’, and assorted marketing and public relations experts and their fellow travellers, notably journalists.”

Fare thee well, Mr Pilger.