John Pilger RIP

[oh oooh]

[rayge]

Sad.
I used to love his articles in the Daily Mirror in the 1960s and Seventies.
RIP

[tory]

[harrylemon]

Captain Empathy to the rescue.

[oh oooh]

I don't even think Pilger was guilty of that kind of thing. Of course he chose what he wanted to present in his documentaries, but I never thought he whitewashed anyone he portrayed. He was a fine journalist, reporter, and presenter, shining a light into dark corners the 'establishment' media tended not to look at.

I might post some World In Action things he did, later. Some were exemplary. We were lucky to have him.

[Stacy Heydon]

He was massively important voice for me in shining a light on how international politics really worked. A brave and crusading journalist.
Toby's just made himself look a cunt posting that frankly. He should have more respect.

[tory]

Sorry but his reputation took a massive nosedive in the 90s and 00s.

He was important in uncovering the Thalidomolide scandal and Pol Pot.

[oh oooh]

Jan 1, 2024 9:58:19 GMT tory said:

Sorry but his reputation took a massive nosedive in the 90s and 00s.

among who?

[fonz]

I believe Pilger was some sort of apologist for Putin


I read some of his stuff from the last century.

Brave essential stuff. I had a lot of respect for his work

[tory]

Pilger was not an objective journalist. He had causes, which shaped his stories. To a certain extent, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that unless you are trying to report on a situation objectively.

So taking his word on many of his stories was difficult. He became an Assad apologist and his regular presence on Russia Today was a hallmark of just how far his reputation took a nosedive.

[tory]

Being called a "brave journalist" by the idiot Chris Williamson should raise a red flag immediately.

eaworldview.com/2018/05/fall-of-a-journalist-john-pilger-and-syrias-disinformation-activists/

[oh oooh]

Jan 1, 2024 10:15:45 GMT tory said:

He became an Assad apologist and his regular presence on Russia Today was a hallmark of just how far his reputation took a nosedive.

I didn't know he was a regular on that channel, but I don't see how that shows he's less reputable or whatever. RT was just another voice in its early days - bit like Al Jazeera, there was some excellent reporting, regardless of whether you agreed with their overall bias.

As usual you're just trying to disparage a leftie. It's a bit sad that you're doing that while the corpse is still warm.

[Stacy Heydon]

Jan 1, 2024 9:58:19 GMT tory said:

Sorry but his reputation took a massive nosedive in the 90s and 00s.

He was important in uncovering the Thalidomolide scandal and Pol Pot.

..which therefore means he deserves better than a dismissive tweet insinuating stuff about him that's not true.

[Stacy Heydon]

..and he was still doing vital work close to the end.

www.theguardian.com/film/2019/nov/28/the-dirty-war-on-the-national-health-service-review-john-pilger-documentary

[tory]

capx.co/john-pilger-was-a-charlatan-and-a-fraudster/

And then there is the case of Cambodia, the single best-known body of work Pilger did. His first film on the subject, Cambodia: Year Zero (1979) elicited a huge public reaction. (It made a big impression on me as a teenager.) It had two undeniable benefits, though one was more alloyed than the other. First, it raised a lot of money from the public to alleviate the desperate plight of Cambodians after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Second, it dramatically raised public awareness of the issue.

The problem was that public awareness was not necessarily equivalent to public understanding, and Pilger’s work didn’t serve the latter. Pilger’s message in this first film and still more so in its several successors was essentially propaganda on behalf of the Vietnamese puppet regime that had supplanted the Khmer Rouge and that was itself guilty of extensive human rights abuses. It was misleading and dishonest, and it involved defaming decent people trying to do their best for a ravaged nation.

Let me first give a bit of background. Pilger is often thought (and he did nothing to dissuade people from believing it) to have been responsible for exposing the sufferings of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979. He wasn’t. Journalists who broke this story, whose horrors were almost impossible to conceive of, as early as the summer of 1975 included Tony Paul of Reader’s Digest, Bruce Palling and Elizabeth Becker of the Washington Post, and Henry Kamm (no relation to this author) of the New York Times. They were the first writers to publicise refugee accounts, yet – for their pains – their reports were rubbished by some on the radical left as media distortions.

Noam Chomsky, the famed theoretical linguist, and his coauthor Edward Herman, a grotesque fabulist who went on to deny the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, wrote an infamous article in 1977 in which they complained that American newspapers were presenting a ‘seriously distorted version of the evidence available, emphasizing alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial US role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered’.

But the refugee accounts of Khmer Rouge atrocities, under which about 1.7 million out of a total Cambodian population of 8 million perished, were in all essentials accurate. Western journalists, in impossibly difficult conditions, had alerted the world to depravities that almost defied the imagination. Pilger was late to the story. This was due not to oversight on his part but to politics. He was a cheerleader for Vietnam, which had only just turned against the Khmer Rouge and invaded Cambodia.

Pilger’s consistent theme was that western governments and the United Nations were giving tacit support, including military aid, to the Khmer Rouge in order to undermine the Vietnamese-backed regime in Phnom Penh. And to muddy the truth that the Khmer Rouge had itself been supported by radical left-wing pundits in the west, and that its leaders were all former members of the French Communist Party, he slyly and repeatedly compared the movement to the Nazis.

In, especially, his second film in this series, Cambodia Year One (1980), and thereafter Pilger developed the theme that the west was denying development aid to Cambodia while providing assistance to the resurgent Khmer Rouge. These were shocking fabrications with direct and baneful humanitarian consequences. The truth was that Vietnam was deliberately preventing food aid from reaching the starving people of Cambodia: it was using international aid as a political tool, choosing who would be fed and who would not. UN agencies and NGOs told Pilger this, so he accused them of lying.

The aid agencies were correct and Pilger was the one telling untruths, which he never retracted. In fact the regime in Phnom Penh along with the occupying Vietnamese forces required every UN agency or NGO operating in Cambodia to pledge not to provide aid to starving Cambodians languishing at the border with Thailand. A real campaigning journalist would have exposed this scandal and inhumanity, but it was not Pilger’s cause. His documentary Cambodia: The Betrayal (1990), in which he alleged that SAS members had trained the Khmer Rouge, provoked a libel writ that Central Television settled at substantial cost.