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• Thursday, Jan 28, 2010
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  Pilger: Kidnapping of Haiti

  

  

  Commentary

  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 the arrival of 13,000 marines, special forces, spooks and mercenaries, none with humanitarian relief training.

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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• Sunday, Jan 17, 2010
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  Pilger: For Israel, A Reckoning

  

  

  Commentary

  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 as never before: an internationalism linking justice for the planet earth with universal human rights, and criminal justice for those who invade and dispossess with impunity. And the best news comes from Palestine.

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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• Thursday, Dec 31, 2009
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  Pilger: Welcome to Orwell's World

  

  

  Commentary

  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'."

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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• Friday, Dec 11, 2009
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  Pilger: Crime Of The Century

  

  

  Commentary

  I tried to contact Mark Higson the other day only to learn he had died nine years ago. He was just 40, an honorable man. We met soon after he had resigned from the Foreign Office in 1991 and I asked him if the government knew that Hawk fighter-bombers sold to Indonesia were being used against civilians in East Timor.

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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• Friday, Nov 27, 2009
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  Pilger: Returning to a Secret Country

  

  

  Commentary

  I remember the boys dressed in army surplus, the girls in hessian, their silhouettes framed in beach shanties, staring across an abyss. You were not meant to talk about them. They were not counted in the census, unlike the sheep, and anyway were dirty and feckless and dying off.

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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• Wednesday, Nov 18, 2009
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  Pilger: Bird Of Paradise

  

  

  Commentary

  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 South-east Asia".

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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• Saturday, Nov 07, 2009
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  Pilger: Great Australian Silence

  

  

  Commentary

  Thank you all for coming tonight, and my thanks to the City of Sydney and especially to the Sydney Peace Foundation for awarding me the Peace Prize. It's an honour I cherish, because it comes from where I come from.

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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• Friday, Oct 30, 2009
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  Pilger: Holocaust In Cambodia

  

  

  Commentary

  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 liberators came from the wrong side of the cold war and the Thatcher government send special forces to train the Khmer Rouge in exile.

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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• Thursday, Oct 22, 2009
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  Pilger: Postal Strike in Britain

  

  

  Commentary

  The postal workers' struggle is as vital for democracy as any national event in recent years. The campaign against them is part of a historic shift from the last vestiges of political democracy in Britain to a corporate world of insecurity and war. If the privateers running the Post Office are allowed to win, the regression that now touches all lives bar the wealthy will quicken its pace. A third of British children now live in low-income or impoverished families. One in five young people is denied hope of a decent job or education.

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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• Saturday, Oct 17, 2009
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  Pilger: War is Peace

  

  

  Commentary

  Barack Obama, winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, is planning another war to add to his impressive record. In Afghanistan, his agents routinely extinguish wedding parties, farmers and construction workers with weapons such as the innovative Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of your lungs. According to the UN, 338,000 Afghan infants are dying under the Obama-led alliance, which permits only $29 per head annually to be spent on medical care.

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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• Thursday, Oct 15, 2009
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  Pilger: The War Drive

  

  

  Commentary

  In 2001, the London Observer published a series of reports claiming 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 made as a weapon of mass destruction.

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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• Thursday, Oct 01, 2009
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  Pilger: The Lying Game

  

  

  Commentary

  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 exiles, planted stories in the British and US media helped George Bush and Tony Blair to launch an illegal invasion which caused, according to the most recent study, 1.3 million deaths.

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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• Friday, Sep 18, 2009
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  Pilger: Game Is Over

  

  

  Commentary

  On the day Prime Minister Gordon Brown made his "major policy speech" on Afghanistan, repeating his surreal claim that if the British army did not fight Pashtun tribesmen over there, they would be over here, the stench of burnt flesh hung over the banks of the Kunduz River. Nato fighter planes had blown the poorest of the poor to bits. They were Afghan villagers who had rushed to siphon off fuel from two stalled tankers. Many were children with water buckets and cooking pots. "At least" 90 were killed, although Nato prefers not to count its civilian enemy. "It was a scene from hell," said Mohammed Daud, a witness. "Hands, legs and body parts were scattered everywhere." No parade for them along a Wiltshire high street.

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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• Thursday, Sep 17, 2009
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  Pilger: Chile's 9/11

  

  

  Video

  An excerpt from John Pilger's documentary The War on Democracy, which recounts the involvement of the United States government in the brutal 1973 military coup that overthrew the democratic socialist government of President Salvador Allende -- paradoxically on September 11. It ushered in a regime of torture and tyranny.

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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• Saturday, Sep 05, 2009
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  Pilger: Lockerbie

  

  

  Commentary

  The hysteria over the release of the so-called Lockerbie bomber reveals much about the political and media class on both sides of the Atlantic, especially Britain. From Gordon Brown's "repulsion" to Barack Obama's "outrage", the theatre of lies and hypocrisy is dutifully attended by those who call themselves journalists. "But what if Megrahi lives longer than three months?" whined a BBC reporter to the Scottish First Minister, Alex Salmond. "What will you say to your constituents, then?"

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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• Wednesday, Sep 02, 2009
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  Pilger: Obama & Empire

  

  

  Video

  Author, journalist, film maker John Pilger speaks at Socialism 2009 www.socialistworker.org; wwwhaymarketbooks.org Filmed by Paul Hubbard at the Womens Building in San Francisco 7-4-09.

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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• Saturday, Aug 22, 2009
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  Pilger: Film's Travesty

  

  

  Commentary

  On 30 August it will be a decade since the people of East Timor defied the genocidal occupiers of their country to take part in a United Nations referendum, voting for their freedom and independence. A "scorched earth" campaign by the Indonesian dictatorship followed, adding to a toll of carnage that had begun 24 years earlier when Indonesia invaded tiny East Timor with the secret support of Australia, Britain and the United States. According to a committee of the Australian parliament, "at least 200,000" died under the occupation, a third of the population.

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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• Tuesday, Aug 18, 2009
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  Pilger: Summer reading for activists

  

  

  ZNet Article

  A summer reading list for those who aren't interested in listening to lies about the war or media PR.

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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• Friday, Aug 07, 2009
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  Pilger: Anti-War Books

  

  

  Commentary

  These are extraordinary times. Flag-wrapped coffins of 18-year-old soldiers killed in a failed, illegal and vengeful invasion are paraded along a Wiltshire high street. Victory in Afghanistan is at hand, says the satirical Gordon Brown. On the BBC's Newsnight, the heroic Afghan MP Malalai Joya, tries, in her limited English, to tell the British public that her people are being blown to bits in their name: 140 villagers, mostly children, in her own Farah Province. No parade for them. No names and faces for them. The suppression of the suffering of Britain's and America's colonial victims is an article of media faith, a tradition so ingrained that it requires no instructions.These are extraordinary times. Flag-wrapped coffins of 18-year-old soldiers killed in a failed, illegal and vengeful invasion are paraded along a Wiltshire high street. Victory in Afghanistan is at hand, says the satirical Gordon Brown. On the BBC's Newsnight, the heroic Afghan MP Malalai Joya, tries, in her limited English, to tell the British public that her people are being blown to bits in their name: 140 villagers, mostly children, in her own Farah Province. No parade for them. No names and faces for them. The suppression of the suffering of Britain's and America's colonial victims is an article of media faith, a tradition so ingrained that it requires no instructions.These are extraordinary times. Flag-wrapped coffins of 18-year-old soldiers killed in a failed, illegal and vengeful invasion are paraded along a Wiltshire high street. Victory in Afghanistan is at hand, says the satirical Gordon Brown. On the BBC's Newsnight, the heroic Afghan MP Malalai Joya, tries, in her limited English, to tell the British public that her people are being blown to bits in their name: 140 villagers, mostly children, in her own Farah Province. No parade for them. No names and faces for them. The suppression of the suffering of Britain's and America's colonial victims is an article of media faith, a tradition so ingrained that it requires no instructions.These are extraordinary times. Flag-wrapped coffins of 18-year-old soldiers killed in a failed, illegal and vengeful invasion are paraded along a Wiltshire high street. Victory in Afghanistan is at hand, says the satirical Gordon Brown. On the BBC's Newsnight, the heroic Afghan MP Malalai Joya, tries, in her limited English, to tell the British public that her people are being blown to bits in their name: 140 villagers, mostly children, in her own Farah Province. No parade for them. No names and faces for them. The suppression of the suffering of Britain's and America's colonial victims is an article of media faith, a tradition so ingrained that it requires no instructions.

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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• Saturday, Jul 25, 2009
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  Pilger: Cultural Chernobyl

  

  

  Commentary

  I met Eddie Spearritt in the Philharmonic pub, overlooking Liverpool. It was a few years after 96 Liverpool football fans had been crushed to death at Hillsborough Stadium, Sheffield, on 15 April 1989. Eddie's son, Adam, aged 14, died in his arms. The "main reason for the disaster", Lord Justice Taylor subsequently reported, was the "failure" of the police, who had herded fans into a lethal pen.

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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• Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
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  Pilger: 4th Of July Mourning

  

  

  Commentary

  The monsoon had woven thick skeins of mist over the central highlands of Vietnam. I was a young war correspondent, bivouacked in the village of Tuylon with a unit of US marines whose orders were to win hearts and minds. "We are here not to kill," said the sergeant, "we are here to impart the American Way of Liberty as stated in the Pacification Handbook. This is designed to win the hearts and minds of folks, as stated on page 86."

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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• Thursday, Jun 25, 2009
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  Pilger: Point Of Departure

  

  

  Commentary

  T S 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 had sailed. The Bretagne was my ship; it was white with blue stripes along the side and had a graceful bow, having been built in Saint-Nazaire as a modest version of the mighty Normandie. Alas, long veins of rust showed, and the crew looked morose. A Greek company now owned it, and the previous day had decanted 600 Greek brides.

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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• Thursday, Jun 11, 2009
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  Pilger: Face Of The Tiger

  

  

  Commentary

  At 7.30 in the morning on 3 June, a seven-month-old baby died in the intensive care unit of the European Gaza Hospital in the Gaza Strip. His name was Zein Ad-Din Mohammed Zu'rob, and he was suffering from a lung infection which was treatable.

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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• Friday, May 29, 2009
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  Pilger: Corruption

  

  

  Commentary

  The theft of public money by members of parliament, including government ministers, has given Britons a rare glimpse inside the tent of power and privilege. It is rare because not one political reporter or commentator, those who fill tombstones of column inches and dominate broadcast journalism, revealed a shred of this scandal. It was left to a public relations man to sell the "leak". Why?

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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• Thursday, May 14, 2009
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  Pilger: Sri Lanka

  

  

  Commentary

  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 described terrible state crimes that the news ignored, and they implored us reporters to "let the world know". Palestinians speaking above the din of crowded rooms in Bethlehem and Beirut asked no more. For me, the most tenacious distant voices have been the Tamils of Sri Lanka, to whom we ought to have listened a very long time ago.

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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• Wednesday, Apr 29, 2009
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  Pilger: Obama's 100 Days

  

  

  Commentary

  The BBC's American television soap Mad Men offers a rare glimpse of the power of corporate advertising. The promotion of smoking half a century ago by the "smart" people of Madison Avenue, who knew the truth, led to countless deaths. Advertising and its twin, public relations, became a way of deceiving dreamt up by those who had read Freud and applied mass psychology to anything from cigarettes to politics. Just as Marlboro Man was virility itself, so politicians could be branded, packaged and sold.

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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• Thursday, Apr 16, 2009
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  Pilger: Wine

  

  

  Commentary

  My parents grew up in the mining town of Kurri Kurri in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales. The main street had hitching posts and was as wide as a paddock, and the general store was shaded by a vast awning of corrugated iron and offered liquorice and slippers side by side. The mines were among the most dangerous in the world, with almost vertical shafts, and were worked according to nationality: a pit for the Scots, one for the Welsh, another for Australian-born. There was a brass band and a pipe band, a WEA (Workers'Educational Association), a School of Arts and an annual eisteddfod run by my grandfather, a German seafarer. And there was wine.

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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• Thursday, Apr 02, 2009
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  Pilger: Epic Crimes

  

  

  Commentary

  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 other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole". International law would be mere farce, said the chief US chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson, "if, in future, we do not apply its principles to ourselves".

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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• Friday, Mar 06, 2009
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  Pilger: War Comes Home

  

  

  Commentary

  Freedom is being lost in Britain. The land of Magna Carta is now the land of secret gagging orders, secret trials and imprisonment. The government will soon know about every phone call, every email, every text message. Police can willfully shoot to death an innocent man, lie and expect to get away with it. Whole communities now fear the state. The foreign secretary routinely covers up allegations of torture; the justice secretary routinely prevents the release of critical cabinet minutes taken when Iraq was illegally invaded. The litany is cursory; there is much more.

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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• Tuesday, Feb 24, 2009
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  Pilger: Cambodia's Accused

  

  

  Commentary

  At my hotel in Phnom Penh, the women and children sat on one side of the room, palais-style, the men on the other. It was a disco night and a lot of fun; then suddenly people walked to the windows and wept. The DJ had played a song by the much-loved Khmer singer, Sin Sisamouth, who had been forced to dig his own grave and to sing the Khmer Rouge anthem before he was beaten to death. I experienced many such reminders in the years following Pol Pot's fall.

  John Pilger ZSpace page
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