John Pilger

John Richard Pilger (9 October 1939 – 30 December 2023) was an Australian journalist and documentary maker based in London and Sydney.

1970s
And now as a result of that they are ruined economically and they are facing starvation.
 * And anyway, I am pro-Vietnamese, I regard their experience over 30 years as unique. They have had to turn back more intruders and vandals than any country in recent history.
 * "Ex-Aussie exposed the Khmer plight", The Sun-Herald (25 November 1979), p. 70

1980s

 * The consensus, often called "the tolerant society," began to sicken under the Labor Governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan; under Mrs. Thatcher, it is dying. One example: There are 7,000 officially recorded racist attacks each year. The true figure is probably many times that. Of immigrant families I have interviewed, none allow their children to play outside, none has escaped at least one firebombing, none bother to call the police for fear of being arrested themselves on a bogus charge.
 * "Britain's Poor Get Poorer; Rich Get Thatcher", The New York Times (7 June 1983), p. A23
 * Auberon Waugh cited Pilger's article (including most of the above quote) in the Sunday Telegraph commenting: "One wonders who are the better informed, readers of Pravda or readers of the New York Times." (19 June 1983, p. 18). Pravda was then the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

If he is as I found him last week, now that he's bereft of booze and smokes and on a Pritikin diet, I would quite frankly prefer he returned to the booze.
 * I have always had a great deal of admiration for Bob Hawke and the work he did as ACTU president; in fact it's a shame he's not still ACTU president.
 * I always say that the difference between the United States and Australia is that US settlers were on a mission from God whereas Australian settlers were God-forsaken.
 * "Pilger: freelance crusader for the downtrodden", Sydney Morning Herald (14 March 1987), p. 13
 * Pilger was in Australia making a three-part television series. The Last Dream was transmitted in 1988.

Robert Kennedy had seen his assassin leap on to a table and take aim; the flash of the little man's shiny yellow jacket remains indelible with me. "No!" Kennedy had screamed, half glancing for a space against the wall, anywhere, to escape. He lay mortally wounded beside a refrigerator, half smiling, tousled hair, eternal youth applied for; the face on the posters.
 * Twenty years ago today, in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, a gun was fired close to where I was standing. One bullet passed over my shoulder and struck a woman in the face; another lodged in the brain of a man who almost certainly would have become president of the United States.
 * "Bullet that Shattered a fragile tradition", The Independent (4 June 1988), p. 11

1990s

 * 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.
 * Hidden Agendas (1998).

Kraras is one of them. It is known as the "village of the widows", because the whole community of 287 people was slaughtered by the Indonesians. In a meticulous hand that carried on from a faded typewriter ribbon, a priest recorded the name, age, cause of death and date and place of the killing of every victim. In the last column, he identified the Indonesian battalion responsible for each murder. I have the document, which I always find difficult to put down, as if the blood of East Timor is fresh on its pages.
 * [An account of a visit to East Timor] I carried with me hand-drawn maps of other, unmarked graves where some of those murdered by Indonesian troops at the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre had been buried; I had no idea that so much of the country was a vast grave, marked by paths that ended abruptly, and fields inexplicably bulldozed, and earth inexplicably covered with tarmac, and villages that are not so much human entities as memorials.
 * "From the NS archive: We helped them descend into hell", New Statesman (13 September 1999, reprinted 1 January 2024)

2000s

 * Long before the Soviet Union broke up, a group of Russian writers touring the United States were astonished to find, after reading the newspapers and watching television, that almost all the opinions on all the vital issues were the same. "In our country," said one of them, "to get that result we have a dictatorship. We imprison people. We tear out their fingernails. Here you have none of that. How do you do it? What's the secret?"
 * In the freest press on earth, humanity is reported in terms of its usefulness to US power, New Statesman (19 February 2001)


 * [On the September 11 attacks] In these surreal days, there is one truth. Nothing justified the killing of innocent people in America last week and nothing justifies the killing of innocent people anywhere else.
 * "Blair has made Britain a target" The Guardian (21 September 2001).


 * More terrorists are given training  and sanctuary in the United States than anywhere on earth. They include mass murderers, torturers, former and future tyrants and assorted international criminals. This is virtually unknown to the American public, thanks to the freest media on earth.
 * During my lifetime, America has been constantly waging war against much of humanity: impoverished people mostly, in stricken places.
 * "Blair has made Britain a target" The Guardian (21 September 2001).


 * There is no War on Terrorism; it is the speeded up. The difference is the rampant nature of the, ensuring infinite dangers for us all.
 * "The great charade" The Guardian (14 July 2002).


 * The censorship is such on television in the US that films like mine don't stand a chance.
 * From interview on November 2002, cited by David Barsamian in Louder Than Bombs: Interviews from the Progressive Magazine (2004) p. 34.


 * Many journalists now are no more than channelers and echoers of what Orwell called the official truth..."Impartiality" and "objectivity" now mean the establishment point of view...This is internalized. Journalists don't sit down and think, "I'm now going to speak for the establishment." Of course not. But they internalize a whole set of assumptions, and one of the most potent assumptions is that the world should be seen in terms of its usefulness to the West, not humanity.
 * From interview on November 2002, in Louder Than Bombs: Interviews from the Progressive Magazine (2004), pp. 38-39.

Pilger: Are you saying that? Hill: I am asking you whether that is what you are implying? Pilger: That's a leading question, I wouldn't ... Hill: How would you describe the activities of the United Nations up until this point? Pilger: Which area of the United Nations? It's a very big organisation. Hill: What preparation would you have cared for, Mr Pilger? Pilger: To read. Read. It takes time. Hill: It's a pity you wasted a lot of your time tonight, Mr Pilger. I was looking forward to ... Pilger: No, I haven't. I'm quite pleased with my answers. I hope you broadcast them as I've given them. Hill: We broadcast you exactly as you are. It's been interesting to speak with you.
 * Kim Hill: All this time, then, the United Nations and weapons inspectors have been some kind of puppets of the US.
 * Pilger: You waste my time because you have not prepared for this interview, as any journalist does, and I've done many interviews. The one thing is to prepare for them and this interview, frankly, is a disgrace.
 * Extracts from Face to Face with Kim Hill (TVNZ, 20 March 2003), as cited in "Pilger salvo leaves Kim Hill reeling", New Zealand Herald (22 March 2003)


 * If those who support aggressive war had seen a fraction of what I've seen, if they'd watched children fry to death from Napalm and bleed to death from a cluster bomb, they might not utter the claptrap they do.
 * "This Much I know" The Observer (13 November 2005).


 * The impact of the human tragedies I've reported on is that, more often than not, I'll be angry. I want to know why is this child dying? These are not acts of God; they're results of respectable politicians' decisions.
 * "This Much I know" The Observer (13 November 2005).


 * When governments and other vested interests attack me personally I usually regard it as a vindication, otherwise they would use facts. That's why I believe in the wonderful Claud Cockburn dictum, 'Never believe anything until it is officially denied.' It has certainly been my experience.
 * "This Much I know" The Observer (13 November 2005).


 * I love irony in pictures. There's one photograph from Vietnam by Philip Jones Griffiths that shows a very large GI having his pocket picked by a tiny Vietnamese woman. It told the whole story of the clash of two cultures and how the invader could never win.
 * "This Much I Know" The Observer (13 November 2005).


 * I've never seen myself as a campaigning journalist. A maverick, yes. But I'm a reporter and I'll always be a reporter, forever curious. And, I suppose, if anything drives me it's curiosity
 * I stand by every word I've ever written. I can back everything up with facts. I have never made the facts fit an agenda, unlike the corporate media. But, if I didn't annoy all the right people all the time, I would be very upset.
 * "John Pilger: writer of wrongs", The Scotsman (1 July 2006)


 * Barack Obama is a glossy Uncle Tom who would bomb Pakistan. Hillary Clinton, another bomber, is anti-feminist. John McCain's one distinction is that he has personally bombed a country.
 * "The danse macabre of US-style democracy", JohnPilger.com (24 January 2008)


 * In fact, Hamas's real threat is its example as the Arab world's only democratically elected government, drawing its popularity from its resistance to the Palestinians' oppressor and tormentor.
 * "John Pilger on the Dagan Plan and Gaza under fire", New Statesman (8 January 2009)


 * [On Barack Obama:] No one knew what the new brand actually stood for. So accomplished was the advertising (a record $75m was spent on television commercials alone) that many Americans actually believed Obama shared their opposition to Bush’s wars. In fact, he had repeatedly backed Bush’s warmongering and its congressional funding. Many Americans also believed he was the heir to Martin Luther King’s legacy of anti-colonialism. Yet if Obama had a theme at all, apart from the vacuous 'Change you can believe in,' it was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully. 'We will be the most powerful,' he often declared.
 * "The Madmen Did Well" New Statesman (30 April 2009).


 * We are beckoned to see the world through a one-way mirror, as if we are threatened and innocent and the rest of humanity is threatening, or wretched, or expendable. Our memory is struggling to rescue the truth that human rights were not handed down as privileges from a parliament, or a boardroom, or an institution, but that peace is only possible with justice and with information that gives us the power to act justly.
 * Sydney Peace Prize acceptance speech, University of Sydney (4 November 2009).


 * The major western democracies are moving towards corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies — socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor — and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war. This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food.
 * Sydney Peace Prize address, Sydney Opera House (5 November 2009).

2010s

 * We journalists... have to be brave enough to defy those who seek our collusion in selling their latest bloody adventure in someone else's country... That means always challenging the official story, however patriotic that story may appear, however seductive and insidious it is. For propaganda relies on us in the media to aim its deceptions not at a far away country but at you at home... In this age of endless imperial war, the lives of countless men, women and children depend on the truth or their blood is on us... Those whose job it is to keep the record straight ought to be the voice of people, not power.
 * The War You Don't See ITV (UK) (14 December 2010).


 * The problem with media-run "conversations" on gender is not merely the almost total absence of male participants, but the suppression of class.
 * "There is a war on ordinary people and feminists are needed at the front", New Statesman (6 June 2013)


 * Putin is the only leader to condemn the rise of fascism in 21st-century Europe.
 * "In Ukraine, the US is dragging us towards war with Russia", The Guardian (13 May 2014)

Trump's views on migration are grotesque, but no more grotesque than those of David Cameron. It is not Trump who is the Great Deporter from the United States, but the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama. According to one prodigious liberal commentator, Trump is "unleashing the dark forces of violence" in the United States. Unleashing them? As presidential election day draws near, Clinton will be hailed as the first female president, regardless of her crimes and lies - just as Barack Obama was lauded as the first black president and liberals swallowed his nonsense about "hope". And the drool goes on.
 * In the circus known as the American presidential campaign, Donald Trump is being presented as a lunatic, a fascist. He is certainly odious; but he is also a media hate figure. That alone should arouse our scepticism.
 * Donald Trump is a symptom of this, but he is also a maverick. He says the invasion of Iraq was a crime; he doesn't want to go to war with Russia and China. The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton. She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and violence of a system whose vaunted "exceptionalism" is totalitarian with an occasional liberal face.
 * "A world war has begun. Break the silence." JohnPilger.com (20 March 2016).
 * From an edited version of a speech ("A World War Has Begun") delivered at the University of Sydney.


 * WikiLeaks has achieved far more than what The New York Times and The Washington Post in their celebrated incarnations did. No newspaper has come close to matching the secrets and lies of power that Assange and Snowden have disclosed. That both men are fugitives is indicative of the retreat of liberal democracies from principles of freedom and justice. Why is WikiLeaks a landmark in journalism? Because its revelations have told us, with 100 per cent accuracy, how and why much of the world is divided and run.
 * Quoted in "New Cold War & looming threats" Frontline: The Hindu (India) (21 December 2018).


 * Obama was one of the most violent U.S. Presidents. He launched or sustained seven wars and left office with none resolved: a record. In his last year as President, 2016, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, he dropped 26,171 bombs. It’s an interesting statistic; it’s three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day, on mostly civilians.
 * Quoted in "New Cold War & looming threats," Frontline: The Hindu (India) (21 December 2018)


 * Journalists can help people by telling the truth, or by as much truth as they can find, and acting not as agents of governments, of power, but of people. That is real journalism. The rest is specious and false.
 * When I began as a journalist, especially as a foreign correspondent, the press in the UK was conservative and owned by powerful establishment forces, as it is now. But the difference compared to today is that there were spaces for independent journalism that dissented from the received 'wisdom' of authority. That space has now all but closed and independent journalists have gone to the internet, or to a metaphoric underground.
 * The single biggest challenge is rescuing journalism from its deferential role as the stenographer of great power. The United States has constitutionally the freest press on earth, yet in practice it has a media obsequious to the formulas and deceptions of power. That is why the US was effectively given media approval to invade Iraq, and Libya, and Syria and dozens of other countries.
 * "Real journalists act as agents of people, not power" Daily Star (Bangladesh) (16 January 2019).


 * WikiLeaks is possibly the most exciting development in journalism in my lifetime... The truth about the Vietnam War was told when Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers. The truth about Iraq and Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia and many other flashpoints was told when WikiLeaks published the revelations of whistle-blowers.
 * When you consider that 100 percent of WikiLeaks leaks are authentic and accurate, you can understand the impact, as well as the fury generated among secretive powerful forces. Julian Assange is a political refugee in London for one reason only: WikiLeaks told the truth about the greatest crimes of the 21st century. He is not forgiven for that, and he should be supported by journalists and by people everywhere.
 * "Real journalists act as agents of people, not power" Daily Star (Bangladesh) (16 January 2019)


 * Since Chavez’s death in 2013, his successor Nicolas Maduro has shed his derisory label in the Western press as a 'former bus driver' and become Saddam Hussein incarnate.... As the journalist and film-maker Pablo Navarrete reported this week, Venezuela is not the catastrophe it has been painted. 'There is food everywhere,' he wrote. 'I have filmed lots of videos of food in markets [all over Caracas] … it’s Friday night and the restaurants are full.'
 * In the pages of liberal newspapers in the West, race and class are two words almost never uttered in the mendacious “coverage” of Washington’s latest, most naked attempt to grab the world’s greatest source of oil and reclaim its “backyard”. For all the chavistas’ faults — such as allowing the Venezuelan economy to become hostage to the fortunes of oil and never seriously challenging big capital and corruption — they brought social justice and pride to millions of people and they did it with unprecedented democracy.
 * "The War on Venezuela is Built on Lies"  (22 February 2019)


 * Should the CIA stooge Guaido and his white supremacists grab power, it will be the 68th overthrow of a sovereign government by the United States, most of them democracies. A fire sale of Venezuela’s utilities and mineral wealth will surely follow, along with the theft of the country’s oil, as outlined by John Bolton. Under the last Washington-controlled government in Caracas, poverty reached historic proportions. There was no healthcare for those could not pay. There was no universal education; Mavis Mendez, and millions like her, could not read or write.
 * "The War on Venezuela is Built on Lies" CounterPunch (22 February 2019)


 * Julian [Assange] is a distinguished Australian, who has changed the way many people think about duplicitous governments. For this, he is a political refugee subjected to what the United Nations calls 'arbitrary detention'. The UN says he has the right of free passage to freedom, but this is denied. He has the right to medical treatment without fear of arrest, but this is denied. He has the right to compensation, but this is denied. As founder and editor of WikiLeaks, his crime has been to make sense of dark times. WikiLeaks has an impeccable record of accuracy and authenticity which no newspaper, no TV channel, no radio station, no BBC, no New York Times, no Washington Post, no Guardian can equal.
 * "The Prisoner Says No to Big Brother" CounterPunch (4 March 2019)


 * The persecution of Julian Assange is the conquest of us all: of our independence, our self respect, our intellect, our compassion, our politics, our culture. So stop scrolling. Organise. Occupy. Insist. Persist. Make a noise. Take direct action. Be brave and stay brave. Defy the thought police. War is not peace, freedom is not slavery, ignorance is not strength. If Julian can stand up, so can you: so can all of us.
 * "The Prisoner Says No to Big Brother" CounterPunch (4 March 2019)

2020s

 * On 28 January China said it would welcome international help as it struggled to contain coronavirus. No substantial help has come. Instead of solidarity and defying WHO, the US, Australia, Britain seek to isolate China, returning it to a state of siege and the dangers of the past.
 * Twitter (5 February 2020)


 * A pandemic has been declared, but not for the 24,600 who die every day from unnecessary starvation, and not for 3,000 children who die every day from preventable malaria, and not for the 10,000 people who die every day because they are denied publicly-funded healthcare, and not for the hundreds of Venezuelans and Iranians who die every day because America's blockade denies them life-saving medicines, and not for the hundreds of mostly children bombed or starved to death every day in Yemen, in a war supplied and kept going, profitably, by America and Britain. Before you panic, consider them.
 * Quoted in Here is what legendary journalist John Pilger said about coronavirus outbreak "Pilger decries inattention to hunger, malaria and American wars and blockades" The Week, (12 March 2020).


 * I suggest in The Dirty War on the NHS we look beyond this virus and ask how our current state of fear and its mass obedience will be exploit­ed in future. Will the workers 'stood down' ever see their jobs again? Will artificial intelligence consume freedoms that have been suspended? As Edward Snowden says, the disease of mass surveillance will outlast this pandemic. Will Julian Assange [the Australian founder of WikiLeaks], persecuted for the crime of truthful journalism, survive?
 * Quoted in Ed Peters John Pilger on 50 years spent shining a light into humanity’s darkest corners" South China Morning Post  ] (9 May 2020).

Quotes about Pilger

 * Mr Pilger certainly looked the part of the crusading journalist – the open-necked shirt, the unobtrusive make-up, the earnest gaze straight at the autocue. But The Truth Game was not an investigation, it was a piece of special pleading – part polemic, part "drama documentary", the journalistic equivalent of soap opera in which the heroes and villains are readily identifiable.
 * Peter Ackroyd "But what is 'officiual truth'", The Times (1 March 1983), p. 15


 * John Pilger was once a notable reporter on this newspaper, even if he was the first to say so. [...] Pilger is an Australian descended from German and Irish immigrants. He has never understood Britain. His world is populated by simple Aborigines and sinister capitalists. He espouses the cause of one and enjoys the fruits of the other.
 * Joe Haines in a review of Pilger's book Heroes in the Daily Mirror, as cited in "A Tabloid Hero in Black and White", The Guardian (16 October 1989), p. 19


 * John Pilger's excoriation of the American performance in Vietnam was likewise unmatched by any similarly sceptical treatment of the North Vietnamese and their frequent resorts to torture and murder.
 * Max Hastings "The battle for our hearts and minds", Evening Standard (24 November 1997), p. 47
 * From a review of War and the Media by Miles Hudson and John Stanier (Sutton (UK)/New York University Press (US))


 * The ferocity of rightwing criticism of his views indicated the effectiveness of his journalism.
 * Anthony Hayward "John Pilger obituary" The Guardian (1 January 2024)


 * Oh, Pilger. The thing is, if Pilger wasn't an egomaniac, he wouldn't have done the work he's done. I was keen to talk to him, but he turns out to be a prick. So it goes.
 * Kim Hill (interviewed by Diana Wichtel) as cited in "Interview: Kim Hill", New Zealand Listener, issue 3772 (10 November 2012)


 * Pilger gained prominence in Indochina in the 1970s. ... He saw what he wished to see and ignored the rest. Pilger's documentaries about Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge inspired humanitarian fundraising, yet failed to disclose that Communist Vietnam, having invaded Cambodia and installed a puppet regime, was trying to control which starving people were fed and which were not.
 * Oliver Kamm "Big voice, too many false notes", The Times (20 September 2006)


 * [A] kind of cult has developed around Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, which cannot believe they could ever be wrong, and produces ever more elaborate conspiracy theories to justify their mistakes.
 * George Monbiot, Tweet (22 November 2017), as quoted in "The West's Leftist 'Intellectuals' Who Traffic in Genocide Denial, From Srebrenica to Syria" (24 November 2017), by Oz Katerji, Haaretz


 * His trademark has always been to sidestep the accepted version of the facts, a modus operandi that served him well during the Vietnam war, in the apocalyptic post-Pol Pot Cambodia, the killing fields of East Timor and countless other hotspots... becoming an octogenari­an hasn’t mellowed him in the least.
 * John Pilger on 50 years spent shining a light into humanity’s darkest corners, Ed Peters, South China Morning Post, (9 May 2020)