THEJOHN PILGER - ColdType · 2 AColdTypeSpecial |January2008 JohnPilgeris one of the world’s most renowned and distinguished investigative journalists and documentary film-makers

PILGERREADER

THE JOHN

The Collected Articles � June to December 2007

ColdType

2 A ColdType Special | January 2008

John Pilger is one of the world’s most renowned and distinguished investigativejournalists and documentary film-makers. Twice a winner of Britain’s highest honour,that of Journalist of the Year, he writes for newspapers around the world and for NewStatesman magazine.

His latest book is Freedom Next Time, published by Random House. Previous booksinclude: Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs; The NewRulers of The World; Heroes; Hidden Agendas; Reporting The World; A SecretCountry; Distant Voices; Last Day.

Pilger’s first cinema documentary, The War on Democracy, recently opened inLondon

Excerpts from some of these books, and previous columns, are available fordownloading in pdf format at http://www.coldtype.net/pilgerbooks.html

His web site is http://www.johnpilger.com

© John Pilger 2007

This is the second part of ColdType’s John Pilger Reader Collection for 2007.The first part – covering his essays from January to June 2007 – is athttp://www.coldtype.net/pilgerbooks.com

http://www.coldtype.net/pilgerbooks.html

http://www.johnpilger.com

http://www.coldtype.net/pilgerbooks.com

INTHE 1960S,when I first went toLatin America, I travelled up the coneof the continent from Chile across theAltiplano to Peru, mostly in rickety

buses and single-carriage trains. It was anexperience my memory stored for life, espe-cially the spectacle of the movement of peo-ple.They moved through the dust of a snow-

capped wilderness, along roads that wereribbons of red mud, and they lived inshanties that defied gravity. “We are invisi-ble,” said one man; another used the termabandonados; an indigenous woman in Bo-livia unforgettably described her poverty asa commodity for the rich.When I later saw Sebastiao Salgado’s

photographs of Latin America’s workingpeople, I recognised the people at the road-side, the gold miners and the coffee work-ers and the silhouettes framed in crosses inthe cemeteries. Perhaps the idea for a cin-ema film began then, or when I reportedRonald Reagan’s murderous assault on Cen-tral America; or when I first read the wordsof Victor Jara’s ballads and heard SamCooke’s anthem A Change Is Gonna Come.The War On Democracy is my first film

for cinema. It follows more than 55 docu-mentary films for television, which beganwith The Quiet Mutiny, set in Vietnam.Most of my films have told stories of peo-ple’s struggles against rapacious power and

of attempts to subvert and control our his-torical memory. It is this control, this organ-ised forgetting, that has always intriguedmeboth as a film-maker and a journalist. De-scribed by Harold Pinter as a great silenceunbroken by the incessant din of the mediaage, it assures the powerful in the west thatthe struggle of whole societies against theircrimes is merely “superficially recorded, letalone documented, let alone acknowl-edged... It never happened. Even while itwas happening it never happened. It didn’tmatter. It was of no interest”.This was true of Nicaragua in the early

1980s, when a popular revolution began toturn back poverty and bring literacy andhope to a country long dismissed as a ba-nana republic. In the United States, the San-dinista government was successfully por-trayed as communist and a threat, andcrushed.After all,Richard Nixon had said ofall of Latin America: “No one gives a shitabout the place.” The War On Democracyis meant as an antidote to this.Modern fictional cinema rarely seems to

break political silences.The very fineMotor-cycle Diaries was a generation too late. Inthis country,where Hollywood sets the lib-eral boundaries, the work of Ken Loach anda few others is an honourable exception.However, the cinema is changing as if by de-fault. The documentary has returned to thebig screen and is being embraced by the

A ColdType Special | January 2008 3

THE JOHN PILGER READER

13 JUNE 2007

Latin America: The genesisof ‘TheWar on Terrorism’



public, in the US and all over.Theywere stillclapping Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11two months after it opened in this country.Why? The answer is uncomplicated. It wasa powerful film that helped people makesense of news that no longer made sense. Itdid not present the usual phoney “balance”as a pretence for presenting an establish-ment consensus. It was not riddled with thecliches, platitudes and power assumptionsthat permeate “current affairs”. It was real-ist cinema, as important as The Grapes ofWrath was in the 1930s, and people de-voured it.The War On Democracy is not the same.

It comes out of a British commercial televi-sion tradition that is too often passed over:the pioneering of bold factual journalismthat treated other societies not as post-im-perial curios, as useful or expendable to“us”, but extraordinary and important intheir own terms.Granada’sWorld in Action,where I began, was a prime example. Itwould report and film in ways that the BBCwould not dare.These days,withmisnamed “reality” pro-

grammes consuming much of television likea plague of cane toads, cinema has beenhanded a timely opportunity. Such are thedangers imposed on us all today by a ram-pant, neo-fascist superpower, and so urgentis our need for uncontaminated informationthat people are prepared to buy a cinematicket to get it.The War On Democracy examines the

false democracy that comes with westerncorporations and financial institutions andawarwaged,materially and as propaganda,against popular democracy. It is the story ofthe people I first saw 40 years ago; but theyare no longer invisible; they are amighty po-litical movement, reclaiming noble conceptsdistorted by corporatism and they are de-

fending the most basic human rights in awar being waged against all of us.Cinema and television production are

closely related,of course,but the differences,I have learned, are critical. Cinema allows apanorama to unfold, giving a sense of placethat only the big screen captures. In TheWar On Democracy, the camera sweepsacross the Andes in Bolivia to the highestand poorest city on earth, El Alto, then fol-lows Juan Delfin, a priest and a taxi driver,into a cemetery where children are buried.That Bolivia has been asset-stripped bymultinational companies,aided by a corruptelite, is an epic story described by this oneman and this spectacle. That the people ofBolivia have stood up, expelled the foreignconsortium that took their water resources,even the water that fell from the sky, is un-derstood as the camera pans across a giantmural that Juan Delfin painted. This is cin-ema, a moving mural of ordinary lives andtriumphs.Chris Martin and I (we made the film as

a partnership) used two crews and two verydifferent cinematographers, Preston Cloth-ier and Rupert Binsley. They shot in high-definition stock,which then had to be con-verted to 35mm film – one of cinema’s won-derful anachronisms.The film was backed by the impresario

Michael Watt, a supporter of anti-povertyprojects all over the world, who had toldproducer Wayne Young that he wanted toput my TV work in the cinema. Granadaprovided additional support, and ITV willbroadcast the film later in the year. Theextra funding also allowed me to persuadethe late SamCooke’s NewYork agents to li-cense A Change Is Gonna Come, one of thefinest,most lyrical pieces of blackmusic everwritten and performed. I was in the south-ern United States when it was released. It



was the time of the civil-rights movement,and Cooke’s song spoke to and for all peoplestruggling to be free.The same is true of theballads of the Chilean Victor Jara, whosesongs celebrated the popular democracy ofSalvador Allende before Pinochet and theCIA extinguished it.We filmed in the National Stadium in

Santiago,Chile,where Jara was taken alongwith thousands of other political prisoners.By all accounts, he was a source of strengthfor his comrades, singing for them until sol-diers beat him to the ground and smashedhis hands.He wrote his last song there andit was smuggled out on scraps of paper.

These are the words:What horror the face of fascism createsThey carry out their plans with

knife-like precision ...For them, blood equals medals ...How hard it is to singWhen I must sing of horror ...In which silence and screamsAre the end of my song

After two days of torture, they killed him.The War On Democracy is about suchcourage and a warning to us all that “forthem” nothing has changed, that “bloodequals medals”.

ON 14 AUGUST, you are in-vited to “an audience” with BillClinton in London. You have achoice. You can attend the

“breakfast and speech” or the “brunch buf-fet and speech”.These will take place in thewhite elephantineMillenniumDome,wherea place in the “Kings’ Row” will cost you£799. Last year, Clinton made more than£5m granting “audiences”. Not only theusual corporate types attend. A few yearsago, I watched a conga line of writers, jour-nalists, publishers and others of liberal rep-utation shuffling towards his grotesquelypaid presence at the Guardian Hay Festival.The Clinton scam is symptomatic of the

death of liberalism – not its narcissistic,war-loving wing (“humanitarian intervention”),which is ascendant, but the liberalism thatspeaks against crimes committed in itsname, while extending rungs of the eco-nomic ladder to those below. It was Clin-ton’s promotion of the former and crushingof the latter that so inspired new Labour’s“project”. Clinton, not Bush, was Cool Bri-tannia’s true Mafia godfather. Keen ob-servers of Tony Blair will recall that duringone of his many farewell speeches, the so-ciopath did a weird impersonation of Clin-ton’s head wiggle.Clinton is able to make a shedload a

money because he is contrasted with thedespised Bush as the flawed good guy who

did his best for the world and brought eco-nomic boom to the US – the fabled Ameri-can dream no less. Both notions are finelyspun lies.What Clinton and Blair havemostin common is that they are the most violentleaders of their countries in the modern era;that includes Bush. Consider Clinton’s truerecord.In 1993, he pursued George H W Bush’s

invasion of Somalia. He invaded Haiti in1994. He bombed Bosnia in 1995 and Serbiain 1999. In 1998, he bombed Afghanistan;and, at the height of his Monica Lewinskytroubles,hemomentarily diverted the head-line writers to a major “terrorist target” inSudan that he ordered destroyed with anonslaught of missiles. It turned out to besub-Saharan Africa’s largest pharmaceuticalplant, the only source of chloroquine, thetreatment for malaria, and other drugs thatwere lifelines to hundreds of thousands. Asa result, wrote Jonathan Belke, then of theNear East Foundation, “tens of thousandsof people – many of them children – havesuffered and died from malaria, tuberculo-sis and other treatable diseases”.Long before Shock and Awe,Clinton was

destroying and killing in Iraq. Under thelawless pretence of a “no-fly zone”,he over-saw the longest allied aerial bombardmentsince the Second World War. This washardly reported. At the same time, he im-posed and tightened aWashington-led eco-

8 AUGUST 2007

Good ol’ Bill,the liberal hero



nomic siege estimated to have killed a mil-lion civilians. “We think the price is worthit,” said his secretary of state,Madeleine Al-bright, in an exquisite moment of honesty.Clinton’s economic “legacy” – like Blair’s

– is the most unequal society Americanshave known. In his last presidential year,1999, I walked along the ocean front atSanta Monica in California and was struckby the number of middle-class homeless,“bag gents” who had lost executive jobs andfamilies thanks largely to Clinton’s NorthAmerican Free Trade treaty. As for workingAmericans, the boasted high employmentfigures concealed a reversion to real wagelevels of the 1970s. It was Clinton, not Bush,who wiped out the last of Roosevelt’s NewDeal. Back in Santa Monica the other day, Inoted the bag gents had multiplied.These days, you see Good Ol’ Bill, or the

Comeback Kid, as he is variously known,wiggling his head on the TV news, cam-

paigning for his wife, Hillary, among Amer-icans who, terminally naive, still believe theDemocratic Party is theirs and that “it’s timeto vote a woman into the White House”.Together, the Clintons are known as “Bil-lary” and rightly so. Like Good Ol’ Bill, hiswife has no plans to address the divisions ofa society that allows 130,000 Americans toclaim the wealth of millions of their fellowcitizens. Like GOB, she wants to continueIraq’s torment for perhaps a decade. Andshe has not “ruled out” attacking Iran.Those settling down in the Kings’ Row at

the Millennium Dome on 14 August forbreakfast or brunch with GOB, havingtransferred another swag to the Clintonbank account, are unlikely to reflect on theblood spilt and the epic suffering caused, oron the moral corruption of the liberal ideol-ogy that courted and acclaimed Clinton,along with the criminal Blair.But we should.



FROM A limestone hill risingabove Qalandia refugee campyou can see Jerusalem. I watcheda lone figure standing there in the

rain, his son holding the tail of his long tat-tered coat. He extended his hand and didnot let go. “I am AhmedHamzeh, street en-tertainer,” he said in measured English.“Over there, I played many musical instru-ments; I sang in Arabic, English and He-brew, and because I was rather poor, myvery small son would chew gum while themonkey did its tricks. When we lost ourcountry, we lost respect. One day a richKuwaiti stopped his car in front of us. Heshouted at my son, “Showme how a Pales-tinian picks up his food rations!” So I madethe monkey appear to scavenge on theground, in the gutter.Andmy son scavengedwith him. The Kuwaiti threw coins and myson crawled on his knees to pick them up.This was not right; I was an artist,not a beg-gar . . . I am not even a peasant now.”“How do you feel about all that?” I asked

him.“Do you expect me to feel hatred? What

is that to a Palestinian? I never hated theJews and their Israel . . . yes, I suppose I hatethem now, or maybe I pity them for theirstupidity.They can’t win.Because we Pales-tinians are the Jews now and, like the Jews,we will never allow them or the Arabs oryou to forget. The youth will guarantee us

that, and the youth after them . . .”.That was 40 years ago. On my last trip

back to the West Bank, I recognised little ofQalandia, now announced by a vast Israelicheckpoint, a zigzag of sandbags, oil drumsand breeze blocks, with conga lines of peo-ple, waiting, swatting flies with precious pa-pers. Inside the camp, the tents had been re-placed by sturdy hovels, although thequeues at single taps were as long, I was as-sured, and the dust still ran to caramel inthe rain. At the United Nations office Iasked about AhmedHamzeh, the street en-tertainer. Records were consulted, headsshaken. Someone thought he had been“taken away . . . very ill”. No one knewabout his son, whose trachoma was surelyblindness now.Outside,another generationkicked a punctured football in the dust.And yet,what NelsonMandela has called

“the greatest moral issue of the age” refusesto be buried in the dust.For every BBC voicethat strains to equate occupier with occu-pied, thief with victim, for every swarm ofemails from the fanatics of Zion to thosewho invert the lies and describe the Israelistate’s commitment to the destruction ofPalestine, the truth is more powerful nowthan ever.Documentation of the violent ex-pulsion of Palestinians in 1948 is volumi-nous. Re-examination of the historicalrecord has put paid to the fable of heroicDavid in the Six Day War, when Ahmed

24 AUGUST 2007

Israel: An importantmarkerhas been passed



Hamzeh and his family were driven fromtheir home.The alleged threat of Arab lead-ers to “throw the Jews into the sea”,used tojustify the 1967 Israeli onslaught and sincerepeated relentlessly, is highly questionable.In 2005, the spectacle of wailing Old Tes-

tament zealots leaving Gaza was a fraud.The building of their “settlements” has ac-celerated on the West Bank, along with theillegal Berlin-style wall dividing farmersfrom their crops, children from their schools,families from each other.We now know thatIsrael’s destruction of much of Lebanon lastyear was pre-planned. As the former CIAanalyst Kathleen Christison has written, therecent “civil war” in Gaza was actually acoup against the elected Hamas-led govern-ment, engineered by Elliott Abrams, theZionist who runs US policy on Israel and aconvicted felon from the Iran-Contra era.The ethnic cleansing of Palestine is as

much America’s crusade as Israel’s. On 16August, the Bush administration announcedan unprecedented $30bnmilitary “aid pack-age” for Israel, the world’s fourth biggestmilitary power, an air power greater thanBritain, a nuclear power greater thanFrance. No other country on earth enjoyssuch immunity, allowing it to act withoutsanction, as Israel. No other country hassuch a record of lawlessness: not one of theworld’s tyrannies comes close. Internationaltreaties, such as the Nuclear Non-Prolifera-tion Treaty, ratified by Iran, are ignored byIsrael. There is nothing like it in UN history.But something is changing. Perhaps last

summer’s panoramic horror beamed fromLebanon on to the world’s TV screens pro-vided the catalyst. Or perhaps cynicism ofBush and Blair and the incessant use of theinanity, “terror”, together with the day-by-day dissemination of a fabricated insecurityin all our lives,has finally brought the atten-

tion of the international community outsidethe rogue states,Britain and the US,back toone of its principal sources, Israel.I got a sense of this recently in the United

States. A full-page advertisement in theNew York Times had the distinct odour ofpanic. There have been many “friends of Is-rael” advertisements in the Times,demand-ing the usual favours, rationalising the usualoutrages. This one was different. “Boycott acure for cancer?” was its main headline, fol-lowed by “Stop drip irrigation in Africa? Pre-vent scientific co-operation between na-tions?”Whowouldwant to do such things?“Some British academics want to boycott Is-raelis,” was the self-serving answer. It re-ferred to the University and College Union’s(UCU) inaugural conference motion inMay,calling for discussion within its branches fora boycott of Israeli academic institutions.AsJohn Chalcraft of the London School of Eco-nomics pointed out, “the Israeli academyhas long provided intellectual, linguistic, lo-gistical, technical, scientific and human sup-port for an occupation in direct violation ofinternational law [against which] no Israeliacademic institution has ever taken a publicstand”.The swell of a boycott is growing inex-

orably, as if an important marker has beenpassed, reminiscent of the boycotts that ledto sanctions against apartheid South Africa.Both Mandela and Desmond Tutu havedrawn this parallel; so has South Africancabinet minister Ronnie Kasrils and other il-lustrious Jewish members of the liberationstruggle. In Britain, an often Jewish-led aca-demic campaign against Israel’s “methodi-cal destruction of [the Palestinian] educa-tion system” can be translated by those ofus who have reported from the occupiedterritories into the arbitrary closure of Pales-tinian universities, the harassment and hu-



miliation of students at checkpoints and theshooting and killing of Palestinian childrenon their way to school.These initiatives have been backed by a

British group, Independent Jewish Voices,whose 528 signatories include Stephen Fry,Harold Pinter, Mike Leigh and Eric Hobs-bawm. The country’s biggest union,Unison,has called for an “economic, cultural, aca-demic and sporting boycott” and the rightof return for Palestinian families expelled in1948. Remarkably, the Commons’ interna-tional development committee has made asimilar stand. In April, the membership ofthe National Union of Journalists (NUJ)voted for a boycott only to see it hastilyoverturned by the national executive coun-cil. In the Republic of Ireland, the Irish Con-gress of Trade Unions has called for divest-ment from Israeli companies: a campaignaimed at the European Union, which ac-counts for two-thirds of Israel’s exportsunder an EU-Israel Association Agreement.The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right toFood, Jean Ziegler, has said that humanrights conditions in the agreement shouldbe invoked and Israel’s trading preferencessuspended.This is unusual, for these were once dis-

tant voices. And that such grave discussionof a boycott has “gone global” was unfore-seen in official Israel, long comforted by itsseemingly untouchable myths and greatpower sponsorship, and confident that themere threat of anti-Semitism would ensuresilence.When the British lecturers’ decisionwas announced, the US Congress passed anabsurd resolution describing the UCU as“anti-Semitic”. (Eighty congressmen havegone on junkets to Israel this summer.)This intimidation has worked in the past.

The smearing of American academics hasdenied them promotion, even tenure. Thelate Edward Said kept an emergency buttonin his NewYork apartment connected to thelocal police station; his offices at ColumbiaUniversity were once burned down.Follow-ing my 2002 film, Palestine is Still the Issue,I received death threats and slanderousabuse,most of it coming from the USwherethe film was never shown.When the BBC’s Independent Panel re-

cently examined the corporation’s coverageof the Middle East, it was inundated withemails, “many from abroad, mostly fromNorth America”, said its report. Some indi-viduals “sent multiple missives, some wereduplicates and there was clear evidence ofpressure group mobilisation”. The panel’sconclusion was that BBC reporting of thePalestinian struggle was not “full and fair”and “in important respects, presents an in-complete and in that sense misleading pic-ture”. This was neutralised in BBC press re-leases.The courageous Israeli historian, Ilan

Pappé, believes a single democratic state, towhich the Palestinian refugees are given theright of return, is the only feasible and justsolution, and that a sanctions and boycottcampaign is critical in achieving this.Wouldthe Israeli population bemoved by aworld-wide boycott? Although they would rarelyadmit it, South Africa’s whites were movedenough to support an historic change. Aboycott of Israeli institutions, goods andservices, says Pappé, “will not change the[Israeli] position in a day, but it will send aclear message that [the premises of Zion-ism] are racist and unacceptable in the 21stcentury . . . They would have to choose.”And so would the rest of us.



ASTATE of parallel worlds de-termines almost everything wedo and how we do it, every-thing we know and how we

know it. The word that once described it,class, is unmentionable, just as imperialismused to be. Thanks to George W Bush, thelatter is back in the lexicon in Britain, if notat the BBC.Class is different. It runs too deep; it al-

lows us to connect the present with the pastand to understand the malignancies of amodern economic system based on inequityand fear. So it is seldom spoken about pub-licly, lest a Goldman Sachs chief executiveonmultimillions in pay or bonuses,or what-ever they call their legalised heists, be askedhow it feels to walk past office cleanersstruggling on the minimum wage.Just as elite power seeks to order other

countries according to the demands of itsprivilege, so class remains at the root of ourown society’s mutations and sorrows. In re-cent weeks, the killing of an 11-year-old Liv-erpool boy and other tragedies involvingchildren have been thoroughly tabloided.Interviewing Keith Vaz, chairman of theHouse of Commons home affairs selectcommittee,one journalist wondered if “we”should go out and deal personally with ourvile, mugging, stabbing, shooting youth. Tothis, the nodding Vaz replied that the prob-lem was “values”.

The main “value” is ruthless exclusion,such as the exile of millions of young peopleon vast human landfills (rubbish dumps)called housing estates,where they are fore-armed with the knowledge that they aredifferent and schools are not for them. Arigid curriculum, a system devoted to test-ing child-ren beyond all reason, ensurestheir alienation. “From the age of seven,”says Shirley Franklin of the Institute of Ed-ucation, “20 per cent of the nation’s childrenare seen, and see themselves, as failures . . .Violence is an expression of hatred towardsoneself and others.” With the all-digitalworld of promise and rewards denied them,let alone a sense of belonging and esteem,theymove logically to the streets and crime.And yet, since 1995, actual crime in Eng-

land andWales has fallen by 42 per cent andviolent crime by 41 per cent.No matter. The“violence of youth” is the accredited hyste-ria. A government led for a decade by amanwhose lawless deceit helped cause the vio-lent deaths of perhaps a million people inIraq invented an acronym – Asbo – for acampaign against British youth, whoseprospects and energy and hope were re-placed by the “values” expressed by KeithVaz and exemplified byGoldman Sachs andthe current imperial adventures in Iraq andAfghanistan.Take Afghanistan,where the irony is sear-

ing. In less than seven years, the Anglo-

15 FEBRUARY 2007

Class is still the issue



American slaughter of countless “Taliban”(people) has succeeded in spectacularly re-viving an almost extinct poppy trade, sothat it now supplies the demand for heroinon Britain’s poorest streets, where enlight-ened drug rehabilitation is not considered agovernment “value”.Parallel worlds require other elite forms

of exclusion. At the Edinburgh TelevisionFestival on 24 August, the famous BBC pre-senter Jeremy Paxmanmade amuch-hypedspeech “attacking” television for “be-tray[ing] the people we ought to be serv-ing”. What was revealing about the speechwas the attitude towards ordinary viewers itbetrayed. According to Paxman, “while themedia and politicians feel free to criticiseeach other, neither has the guts to criticisethe public, who are presumed never to bewrong”.In fact, ordinary people are treated in

much of the media as invisible or with con-tempt, or they are patronised. Two hon-

ourable exceptions were the GMTV presen-ters cited and mocked by Paxman for theirhumanity in standing up for an ex-soldierdenied proper treatment by the NationalHealth Service.Paxman called for a more “sophisticated”

and “honest” approach that accepted thepublic’s approval of low taxes— taxes thatare not rationed when it comes to proppingup hugely profitable private finance initia-tives in the Health Service or squandered onwaging war, regardless of the public’s objec-tions.Not once in his speech did Paxman refer

to Iraq, nor did he tell us why Blair wasnever seriously challenged on that blood-bath in a broadcast interview.That the BBChad played a critical role in amplifying andechoing Blair’s and Bush’s lies was appar-ently unmentionable.The coming attack onIran, led again by propaganda filteredthrough broadcasting, is from the same par-allel world, also unmentionable.



AS THE people of Burma riseup again, we have had a raresighting of Aung San Suu Kyi.There she stood, at the back

gate of her lakeside home in Rangoon,where she is under house arrest.She lookedvery thin.For years,people would brave theroadblocks just to pass by her house and bereassured by the sound of her playing thepiano. She told me she would lie awake lis-tening for voices outside and to the thump-ing of her heart. “I found it difficult tobreathe lying on my back after I became ill,she said.”That was a decade ago. Stealing into her

house,as I did then, required all the ingenu-ity of the Burmese underground. My film-making partner David Munro and I weregreated by her assistant, Win Htein, whohad spent six years in prison, five of them insolitary confinement. Yet his face was openand his handshakewarm.He led us into thehouse, a stately pile fallen on hard times.The gardenwith its ragged palms falls downto Inya Lake and to a trip wire, a reminderthat this was the prison of a woman electedby a landslide in 1990, a democratic act ex-tinguished by generals in ludicrous uni-forms.Aung San Suu Kyi wore silk and had or-

chids in her hair.She is a striking,glamorousfigure whose face in repose shows the re-solve that has seen her along her heroic

journey.We sat in a room dominated by a wall-

length portrait of Aung San, independentBurma’s assassinated liberation fighter, thefather she never knew.“What do I call you?” I asked. “Well, if

you can’t manage the whole thing, friendscall me Suu.”“The regime is always saying you are fin-

ished, but here you are, hardly finished.How is that?”“It’s because democracy is not finished in

Burma . . . Look at the courage of the people[on the streets],of those who go onworkingfor democracy, those who have already beento prison. They know that any day they arelikely to be put back there and yet they donot give up.”“But how do you reclaim the power you

won at the ballot boxwith brute power con-fronting you?” I asked.“In Buddhism we are taught there are

four basic ingredients for success. The firstis thewill to want it, then youmust have theright kind of attitude, then perseverance,then wisdom . . .”“But the other side has all the guns?”“Yes, but it’s becoming more and more

difficult to resolve problems by militarymeans. It’s no longer acceptable.”We talked about the willingness of for-

eign business to come to Burma, especiallytour companies, and of the hypocrisy of


3 OCTOBER 2007

My last conversationwith Aung San Kyi





“friends” in the West. I read her a BritishForeignOffice press release: “Through com-mercial contacts with democratic nationssuch as Britain, the Burmese people willgain experience of democratic principles.”“Not in the least bit,” she responded,“be-

cause new investments only help a smallelite to get richer and richer. Forced labourgoes on all over the country, and a lot of theprojects are aimed at the tourist trade andare worked by children.”“People I’ve spoken to regard you as

something of a saint, a miracle worker.”“I’m not a saint and you’d better tell the

world that!”“Where are your sinful qualities, then?”“Er, I’ve got a short temper.”“What happened to your piano?”“Youmeanwhen the string broke? In this

climate pianos do deteriorate and some ofthe keys were getting stuck, so I broke astring because I was pumping the pedal toohard.”“You lost it ... you exploded?”“I did.”“It’s a very moving scene. Here you are,

all alone, and you get so angry you breakthe piano.”“I told you, I have a hot temper.”“Weren’t there times when, surrounded

by a hostile force, cut off from your familyand friends you were actually terrified?”“No, because I didn’t feel hostile towards

the guards surrounding me.Fear comes outof hostility and I felt none towards them.”“But didn’t that produce a terrible alone-

ness ...?”“Oh, I havemymeditation,and I did have

a radio . . . And loneliness comes from in-side, you know. People who are free andwho live in big cities suffer from it, becauseit comes from inside.”

“What were the small pleasures you’dlook forward to?”“I’d look forward to a good book being

read on ‘Off the Shelf’ on the BBC and ofcourse to my meditation .... I didn’t enjoymy exercises so much; I’d never been a veryathletic type.”“Was there a point when you had to con-

quer fear?”“Yes. When I was small in this house. I

wandered around in the darkness until Iknew where all the demons might be . . .and they weren’t there.”For several years after that encounter

with Aung San Suu Kyi I tried to phone thenumber she gave me. The phone wouldring, then go dead.One day I got through.“Thank you so much for the books,” she

said. “It has been a joy to read widelyagain.” (I had sent her a collection of T SEliot, her favourite, and Jonathan Coe’s po-litical rompWhat a Carve Up!.) I asked herwhat was happening outside her house.“Oh, the road is blocked and they [the mil-itary] are all over the street . . .”“Do you worry that you might be

trapped in a terrible stalemate?”“I am really not fond of that expression,”

she replied rather sternly. “People have beenon the streets.That’s not a stalemate.Ethnicpeople, like the Karen, are fighting back.That’s not a stalemate.The defiance is therein people’s lives, day after day. You know,even when things seem still on the surface,there’s always movement underneath. It’slike a frozen lake; and beneath our lake,weare progressing, bit by bit.”“What do you mean exactly?”“What I am saying is that, no matter the

regime’s physical power, in the end theycan’t stop the people; they can’t stop free-dom. We shall have our time.”



IN SICKO,MichaelMoore’s new film,a young Ronald Reagan is shown ap-pealing to working-class Americans toreject “socialisedmedicine” as commie

subversion. In the 1940s and 1950s, Reaganwas employed by the AmericanMedical As-sociation and big business as the amiablemouthpiece of a neo-fascism bent on per-suading ordinary Americans that their trueinterests, such as universal health care,were“anti-American”.Watching this, I foundmyself recalling the

effusive farewells to Reagan when he diedthree years ago. “Many people believe,” saidGavin Esler on the BBC’s Newsnight, “thathe restored faith in Americanmilitary action[and] was loved even by his political oppo-nents.”In the Daily Mail, Esler wrote that Rea-

gan “embodied the best of the Americanspirit – the optimistic belief that problemscan be solved, that tomorrow will be betterthan today, and that our children will bewealthier and happier than we are”.Such drivel about a man who, as presi-

dent, was responsible for the 1980s blood-bath in central America, and the rise of thevery terrorism that produced al-Qaeda, be-came the received spin. Reagan’s walk-onpart in Sicko is a rare glimpse of the truth ofhis betrayal of the blue-collar nation heclaimed to represent. The treacheries of an-other president, Richard Nixon, and a

would-be president, Hillary Clinton, aresimilarly exposed by Moore.Just when there seemed little else to say

about the greatWatergate crook,Moore ex-tracts from the 1971 White House tapes aconversation between Nixon and John Er-lichman, his aide who ended up in prison.Awealthy Republican Party backer, EdgarKaiser, head of one of America’s biggesthealth insurance companies, is at theWhiteHouse with a plan for “a national health-care industry”. Erlichman pitches it toNixon,who is bored until the word “profit”is mentioned.“All the incentives,” says Erlichman, “run

the right way: the less [medical] care theygive them, the more money they make.” Towhich Nixon replies without hesitation:“Fine!” The next cut shows the presidentannouncing to the nation a task force thatwill deliver a system of “the finest healthcare”. In truth, it is one of the worst andmost corrupt in the world, as Sicko shows,denying common humanity to some 50mil-lion Americans and, for many of them, theright to life.The most haunting sequence is captured

by a security camera in a Los Angeles street.A woman, still in her hospital gown, stag-gers through the traffic,where she has beendumped by the company (the one foundedby Nixon’s backer) that runs the hospital towhich she was admitted. She is ill and ter-

147OCTOBER 2007

Why they’re afraidofMichaelMoore

rified and has no health insurance. She stillwears her admission bracelet, though thename of the hospital has been thoughtfullyerased.Later on,we meet that glamorous liberal

couple,Bill andHillary Clinton. It is 1993 andthe new president is announcing the ap-pointment of the first lady as the one whowill fulfil his promise to give America a uni-versal health-care. And here is “charmingandwitty” Hillary herself, as a senator callsher, pitching her “vision” to Congress.Moore’s portrayal of the loquacious, flirting,sinister Hillary is reminiscent of Tim Rob-bins’s superb political satire Bob Roberts.You know her cynicism is already in herthroat. “Hillary,” says Moore in voice-over,“was rewarded for her silence [in 2007] asthe second-largest recipient in the Senate ofhealth-care industry contributions”.Moore has said that Harvey Weinstein,

whose company produced Sicko andwho isa friend of the Clintons,wanted this cut,buthe refused. The assault on the DemocraticParty candidate likely to be the next presi-dent is a departure for Moore, who, in hispersonal campaign against George Bush in2004, endorsed General Wesley Clark, thebomber of Serbia, for president and de-fended Bill Clinton himself, claiming that“no one ever died from a blow job”. (Maybenot,but half a million Iraqi infants died fromClinton’s medieval siege of their country,along with thousands of Haitians,Serbians,Sudanese and other victims of his unsunginvasions.)With this new independence apparent,

Moore’s deftness and dark humour in Sicko,which is a brilliant work of journalism andsatire and film-making, explains – perhapseven better than the films that made hisname, Roger and Me, Bowling forColumbine and Fahrenheit 9/11 – his popu-

larity and influence and enemies. Sicko is sogood that you forgive its flaws, notablyMoore’s romanticising of Britain’s NationalHealth Service, ignoring a two-tier systemthat neglects the elderly and the mentallyill.The film opens with a wry carpenter de-

scribing how he had to make a choice aftertwo fingers were shorn off by an electricsaw. The choice was $60,000 to restore aforefinger or $12,000 to restore a middle fin-ger. He could not afford both, and had noinsurance. “Being a hopeless romantic,” saysMoore, “he chose the ring finger” on whichhewore his wedding ring.Moore’s wit leadsus to scenes that are searing, yet unsenti-mental, such as the eloquent anger of awoman whose small daughter was deniedhospital care and died of a seizure. Withindays of Sicko opening in the United States,more than 25,000 people overwhelmedMoore’s website with similar stories.The California Nurses Association and

the National Nurses Organising Committeedespatched volunteers to go on the roadwith the film. “From my sense,” says JanRodolfo, an oncology nurse, “it demon-strates the potential for a true nationalmovement because it’s obviously inspiringso many people in so many places.”Moore’s “threat” is his unerring view

from the ground. He abrogates the con-tempt in which elite America and themediahold ordinary people.This is a taboo subjectamong many journalists, especially thoseclaiming to have risen to the nirvana of “im-partiality” and others who profess to teachjournalism.If Moore simply presented victims in the

time-honoured, ambulance-chasing way,leaving the audience tearful but paralysed,he would have few enemies. He would notbe looked down upon as a polemicist and



self-promoter and all the other pejorativetags that await those who step beyond theinvisible boundaries in societies wherewealth is said to equal freedom. The fewwho dig deep into the nature of a liberal ide-ology that regards itself as superior,yet is re-sponsible for crimes epic in proportion andgenerally unrecognised, risk being eased outof the “mainstream”, especially if they areyoung – a process that a former editor oncedescribed tome as “a sort of gentle defenes-tration”.None has broken through like Moore,

and his detractors are perverse to say he isnot a “professional journalist” when the roleof the professional journalist is so often thatof zealously, if surreptitiously, serving thestatus quo.Without the loyalty of these pro-fessionals on the NewYork Times and otheraugust (mostly liberal) media institutions“of record”, the criminal invasion of Iraqmight not have happened and amillion peo-ple would be alive today. Deployed in Hol-lywood’s sanctum – the cinema – Moore’sFahrenheit 9/11 shone a light in their eyes,reached into the memory hole, and told thetruth. That is why audiences all over theworld stood and cheered.What struck me when I first saw Roger

and Me, Moore’s first major film, was thatyouwere invited to like ordinary Americansfor their struggle and resilience and politicsthat reached beyond the din and fakery ofthe American democracy industry. More-over, it is clear they “get it” about him: thatdespite being rich and famous he is,at heart,one of them.A foreigner doing something similar risks

being attacked as “anti-American”, a termMoore often uses as irony in order todemonstrate its dishonesty. At a stroke, hesees off the kind of guff exemplified by a re-cent BBC Radio 4 series that presented hu-

manity as pro- or anti-American while thereporter oozed about America, “the city onthe hill”.Just as tendentious is a documentary

called Manufacturing Dissent, which ap-pears to have been timed to discredit, if notSicko, then Moore himself. Made by theCanadians Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine,it says more about liberals who love to facebothways and thewhiny jealousies arousedby tall poppies.Melnyk tells us ad nauseamhow much she admires Moore’s films andpolitics and is inspired by him, then pro-ceeds to attempt character assassinationwith a blunderbuss of assertions andhearsay about his “methods”, along withpersonal abuse, such as that of the criticwho objected to Moore’s “waddle” andsomeone else who said he reckoned Mooreactually hated America – was anti-Ameri-can, no less!Melnyk pursues Moore to ask him why,

in his own pursuit of an interview withRoger Smith of General Motors, he failed tomention that he had already spoken to him.Moore has said he interviewed Smith longbefore he began filming.When she twice in-terceptsMoore on tour, she is rightly embar-rassed by his gracious response. If there is arenaissance of documentaries, it is notserved by films such as this.This is not to suggest Moore should not

be pursued and challenged about whetheror not he “cuts corners”, just as the work ofthe revered father of British documentary,John Grierson, has been re-examined andquestioned. But feckless parody is not theway. Turning the camera around, as Moorehas done, and revealing great power’s “in-visible government” of manipulation andoften subtle propaganda is certainly oneway. In doing so, the documentary-makerbreaches a silence and complicity described



by Günter Grass in his confessional autobi-ography, Peeling the Onion, as maintainedby those “feigning their own ignorance andvouching for another’s... divert[ing] atten-tion from something intended to be forgot-ten, something that nevertheless refuses togo away”.For me, an earlier Michael Moore was

that other great “anti-American” whistle-blower, Tom Paine,who incurred the wrathof corrupt power when he warned that ifthe majority of the people were being de-nied “the ideas of truth”, it was time tostormwhat he called the “Bastille of words”and we call “the media”.That time is overdue.





LYING BACK in a hospitalward, the procedure done andsuccessful, a cup of tea goingdown nicely with the last of the

morphine, you are a spectator to the best.By the best, I mean a glimpse of society withnone of the dogmatic histrionics of a mediaand political class determined to change thewaywe think.That is the worst.By the bestI mean, unforgettably, the spectacle of theminers of Murton,County Durham, emerg-ing from the mist of a cold March morning,with the women marching first, going backto the pit.Nomatter their defeat by superiorforces, they were the best.In a hospital ward, the best is more likely

mundane, with people working routinely,listening, responding, reassuring. Their vo-cabulary is not corporate-speak.Their “pro-ductivity” is not a device of profit. Theircommitment has no bottom line, and theircamaraderie is like a presence; and you be-come part of it. The common thread is hu-manity and caring.How exotic that sounds.Turn on the ward’s television and there is aweird other-world of “news”, with famousdullards spinning the latest destruction ofsociety.There is the mad Blair calling for an at-

tack on Iran and the education secretary EdBalls peddling his dodgy diplomas, andprime minister Gordon Brown, fresh fromentertaining Rupert Murdoch and Alan

Greenspan, announcing his “return of lib-erty” alongwith his latest “reforms” that aremalignancies on the one institution thatembodies liberty in Britain: the NationalHealth Service.None of them has the slight-est connection with the people running myward. The divide in modern Britain is be-tween a society represented by those whokeep the Health Service going, and its mu-tation epitomised by Blair’s and Brown’sLabour government.In Michael Moore’s Sicko, the socialist

Tony Benn predicts a revolution in Britain ifthe NHS is abolished. But Britain’s HealthService is being destroyed by attrition,and ifthe latest “reforms” are not stopped, it willbe too late to erect barricades. On 5 Octo-ber, the Health Secretary,Alan Johnson,ap-proved a list of fourteen companies that willadvise on and take over the “commission-ing” of NHS services. They will be given in-fluence, if not eventually control,over whichtreatments patients receive and who pro-vides them. They are assured multimillionsin profits.They include the US companies United-

Health, Aetna and Humana. These totali-tarian organisations have been repeatedlyfined for their notorious role in the Ameri-can health-care system. Last year, United-Health’s chief executive, William McGuire,whowas paid $125m a year, resigned follow-ing a share-option scandal. In September,

1 NOVEMBER 2007

The destruction ofBritain’s health service



the company agreed to pay out $20m infines “for failures in processing claims andresponding to patient complaints”. Aetnahas had to pay $120m in damages after aCalifornia jury found it guilty of “malice,op-pression and fraud”. In Sicko, a medical re-viewer for Humana is shown testifying toCongress that she caused the death of aman by denying him care in order to savethe company money. Every year, some18,000 Americans die because they are de-nied health care or they cannot afford it.These companies are the Labour govern-

ment’s friends.Simon Stevens,Blair’s formerhealth policy adviser, is now a CEO at Unit-edHealth. Julian Le Grand, writing in theGuardian as a distinguished professor, giveshis learned approval to the “reforms” – he,too,was Blair’s adviser.In Manchester, other “reforms” are well

on the way to destroying NHS services forthe mentally ill. William Scott committedsuicide after losing the support of an NHSworker who had cared for him for eightyears.What all this means is that the NHSis being softened up for privatisation bystealth. This is the undeclared policy of theBrown government, whose rapacious ac-tions abroad are mirrored at home. It wasBrown as treasuer who promoted the dis-astrous “private finance initiative” as a de-vice to build new hospitals, while handinghuge profits to favoured companies.As a re-sult, the NHS is being bled by £700m a year.This has caused a wholly unnecessary “fi-nancial crisis” that is the catch-22 rationalefor allowing more profiteers to take overwhat was a former Labour government’sgreatest achievement. Will we allow themto get away with it?



ON REMEMBRANCE Day2007, the great and the goodbowed their heads at the Ceno-taph. Generals, politicians,

newsreaders, football managers and stock-market traders wore their poppies.Hypocrisy was a presence. No one men-tioned Iraq.No one uttered the slightest re-morse for the fallen of that country.No oneread the forbidden list.The forbidden list documents, without

favour, the part the British state and itscourt have played in the destruction of Iraq.Here it is:

1. Holocaust denialOn 25 October, Dai Davies MP asked Gor-don Brown about civilian deaths in Iraq.Brown passed the question to the ForeignSecretary,David Miliband,who passed it tohis junior minister, Kim Howells, whoreplied: “We continue to believe that thereare no comprehensive or reliable figures fordeaths since March 2003.” This was a de-ception. In October 2006, the Lancet pub-lished research by Johns Hopkins Universityin the US and al-Mustansiriya University inBaghdad which calculated that 655,000Iraqis had died as a result of the Anglo-American invasion. A Freedom of Informa-tion search revealed that the government,while publicly dismissing the study, secretlybacked it as comprehensive and reliable.

The chief scientific adviser to theMinistry ofDefence, Sir Roy Anderson, called its meth-ods “robust” and “close to best practice”.Other senior governments officials secretlyacknowledged the survey’s “tried and testedway of measuring mortality in conflictzones”. Since then, the British researchpolling agency, Opinion Research Business,has extrapolated a figure of 1.2 milliondeaths in Iraq. Thus, the scale of deathcaused by the British and US governmentsmay well have surpassed that of theRwanda genocide,making it the biggest sin-gle act of mass murder of the late 20th cen-tury and the 21st century.

2. LootingThe undeclared reason for the invasion ofIraq was the convergent ambitions of theneocons,or neo-fascists, inWashington andthe far-right regimes of Israel. Both groupshad longwanted Iraq crushed and theMid-dle East colonised to US and Israeli designs.The initial blueprint for this was the 1992“Defence Planning Guidance”, which out-lined America’s post-Cold War plans todominate the Middle East and beyond. Itsauthors included Dick Cheney, Paul Wol-fowitz and Colin Powell, architects of the2003 invasion. Following the invasion, PaulBremer, a neocon fanatic, was given ab-solute civil authority in Baghdad and in aseries of decrees turned the entire future

14 NOVEMBERL 2007

No tears, no remorsefor the fallen of Iraq

Iraqi economy over to US corporations. Asthis was lawless, the corporate plundererswere given immunity from all forms of pros-ecution. The Blair government was fullycomplicit and even objected when it lookedas if UK companies might be excluded fromthe most profitable looting. British officialswere awarded functionary colonial posts. Apetroleum “law” will allow, in effect, foreignoil companies to approve their own con-tracts over Iraq’s vast energy resources.Thiswill complete the greatest theft since Hitlerstripped his European conquests.

3. Destroying a nation’s healthIn 1999, I interviewedDr JawadAl-Ali, a can-cer specialist at Basra city hospital. “Beforethe Gulf War,” he said, “we had only threeor four deaths in a month from cancer.Nowit’s 30 to 35 patients dying every month.Ourstudies indicate that 40 to 48 per cent of thepopulation in this area will get cancer.” Iraqwas then in the grip of an economic and hu-manitarian siege, initiated and driven by theUS and Britain. The result,wrote Hans vonSponeck, the then chief UN humanitarianofficial in Baghdad,was “genocidal... practi-cally an entire nation was subjected topoverty, death and destruction of its physi-cal andmental foundations”.Most of south-ern Iraq remains polluted with the toxic de-bris of British and American explosives, in-cluding uranium- 238 shells. Iraqi doctorspleaded in vain for help, citing the levels ofleukaemia among children as the highestseen since Hiroshima. Professor KarolSikora, chief of the World Health Organisa-tion’s cancer programme,wrote in the BMJ:“Requested radiotherapy equipment,chemo-therapy drugs and analgesics areconsistently blocked by United States andBritish advisers [to the Sanctions Commit-tee].” In 1999,KimHowells, then trademin-

ister, effectively banned the export to Iraq ofvaccines that would protect mostly childrenfrom diphtheria, tetanus and yellow fever,which,he said, “are capable of being used inweapons of mass destruction”.Since 2003,apart from PR exercises for the

embeddedmedia, the British occupiers havemade no attempt to re-equip and resupplyhospitals that, prior to 1991, were regardedas the best in the Middle East. In July,Oxfam reported that 43 per cent of Iraqiswere living in “absolute poverty”.Under theoccupation, malnutrition rates among chil-dren have spiralled to 28 per cent. A secretDefence Intelligence Agency document,“Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities”, re-veals that the civilian water supply was de-liberately targeted.As a result, the great ma-jority of the population has neither accessto running water nor sanitation – in a coun-try where such basic services were once asuniversal as in Britain. “The mortality ofchildren in Basra has increased by nearly 30per cent compared to the Saddam Husseinera,” said Dr Haydar Salah, a paediatricianat Basra children’s hospital. “Children aredying daily and no one is doing anything tohelp them.” In January this year, nearly 100leading British doctors wrote to HilaryBenn, then international development sec-retary, describing how children were dyingbecause Britain had not fulfilled its obliga-tions as an occupying power under UN Se-curity Council Resolution 1483.Benn refusedto see them.

4. Destroying a societyThe UN estimates that 100,000 Iraqis arefleeing the country every month. Therefugee crisis has now overtaken that ofDarfur as the most catastrophic on earth.Half of Iraq’s doctors have gone, along withengineers and teachers.Themost literate so-



ciety in theMiddle East is being dismantled,piece by piece. Out of more than four mil-lion displaced people, Britain last year re-fused the majority of more than 1,000 Iraqiswho applied to come here, while removingmore “illegal” Iraqi refugees than any otherEuropean country. Thanks to tabloid-in-spired legislation, Iraqis in Britain are oftendestitute,with no right to work and no sup-port. They sleep and scavenge in parks.Thegovernment, says Amnesty, “is trying tostarve them out of the country”.

5. Propaganda“See in my line of work,” said George WBush,“you got to keep repeating things overand over again for the truth to sink in, tokind of catapult the propaganda.” Standingoutside 10 Downing Street on 9 April 2003,the BBC’s then political editor, AndrewMarr, reported the fall of Baghdad as a vic-tory speech. Tony Blair, he told viewers,“said they would be able to take Baghdadwithout a bloodbath, and that in the endthe Iraqis would be celebrating. And onboth of those points he has been provedconclusively right. And it would be entirelyungracious, even for his critics, not to ac-knowledge that tonight he stands as a largerman and a stronger prime minister as a re-sult.” In the United States, similar travestiespassed as journalism. The difference wasthat leading American journalists began toconsider the consequences of the role theyhad played in the build-up to the invasion.Several told me they believed that had themedia challenged and investigated Bush’sand Blair’s lies, instead of echoing and am-plifying them, the invasion might not havehappened.A European study found that, ofthe major western television networks, theBBC permitted less coverage of dissent thanall of them. A second study found that the

BBC consistently gave credence to govern-ment propaganda that weapons of mass de-struction existed. Unlike the Sun, the BBChas credibility – as does, or did, the Ob-server.On 14 October 2001, the London Ob-

server’s front page said: “US hawks accuseIraq over anthrax”. This was entirely false.Supplied by US intelligence, it was part ofthe Observer’s staunchly pro-war coverage,which included claiming a link between Iraqand al-Qaeda, for which there was no cred-ible evidence and which betrayed thepaper’s honourable past. One report overtwo pages was headlined: “The Iraqi con-nection”. It, too, came from “intelligencesources” and was rubbish. The reporter,David Rose, concluded his barren inquirywith a heartfelt plea for an invasion. “Thereare occasions in history,” he wrote, “whenthe use of force is both right and sensible.”Rose has since written his mea culpa, in-cluding in these pages, confessing how hewas used. Other journalists have still toadmit how they were manipulated by theirown credulous relationshipwith establishedpower.These days, Iraq is reported as if it is ex-

clusively a civil war, with a US military“surge” aimed at bringing peace to thescrapping natives. The perversity of this isbreathtaking. That sectarian violence is theproduct of a vicious divide-and-conquerpolicy is beyond doubt. As for the largelymedia myth of al-Qaeda, “most of the[American] pros will tell you”, wrote Sey-mour Hersh, “that the foreign fighters are acouple per cent, and then they’re sort ofleaderless”.That a poorly armed,audaciousresistance has not only pinned down theworld’s most powerful army but has agreedan anti-sectarian, anti al-Qaeda agenda,which opposes attacks on civilians and calls



for free elections, is not news.

6. The next blood lettingIn the 1960s and 1970s, British governmentssecretly expelled the population of DiegoGarcia,an island in the IndianOceanwhosepeople have British nationality.Women andchildren were loaded on to vessels resem-bling slave ships and dumped in the slumsofMauritius,after their homelandwas givento the Americans for a military base. Threetimes, the High Court has found this atroc-ity illegal, calling it a defiance of the MagnaCarta and the Blair government’s refusal toallow the people to go home “outrageous”and “repugnant”. The government contin-ues to use endless recourse to appeal, at thetaxpayers’ expense, to prevent upsettingBush. The cruelty of this matches the factthat not only has the US repeatedlybombed Iraq from Diego Garcia, but at“Camp Justice”, on the island, “al-Qaedasuspects” are “rendered” and “tortured”,ac-

cording to the Washington Post. Now theUS Air Force is rushing to upgrade hangarfacilities on the island so that stealthbombers can carry 14-tonne “bunker bust-ing” bombs in an attack on Iran. Orches-trated propaganda in the media is critical tothe success of this act of international piracy.

On 22 May, the front page of the LondonGuardian carried the banner headline:“Iran’s secret plan for summer offensive toforce US out of Iraq”.This was a tract of un-alloyed propaganda based entirely onanonymous US official sources. Through-out the media, other drums have taken upthe beat. “Iran’s nuclear ambitions” slips ef-fortlessly from newsreaders’ lips, no matterthat the International Atomic EnergyAgency refuted Washington’s lies, no mat-ter the echo of “Saddam’s weapons of massdestruction”,nomatter that another blood-bath beckons.Lest we forget.



WHAT HAS changed inthewaywe see theworld?For as long as I can re-member, the relationship

of journalists with power has been hiddenbehind a bogus objectivity and notions of an“apathetic public” that justify a mantra of“giving the public what they want”. Whathas changed is the public’s perception andknowledge. No longer trusting what theyread and see and hear, people in westerndemocracies are questioning as never be-fore, particularly via the internet.Why, theyask, is the great majority of news sourced toauthority and its vested interests? Why aremany journalists the agents of power, notpeople?Much of this bracing new thinking can be

traced to a remarkable UK website,www.medialens.org. The creators of MediaLens, David Edwards and David Cromwell,assisted by their webmaster,OllyMaw,havehad such an extraordinary influence sincethey set up the site in 2001 that, withouttheir meticulous and humane analysis, thefull gravity of the debacles of Iraq andAfghanistan might have been consigned tobad journalism’s first draft of bad history.Peter Wilby put it well in his review ofGuardians of Power: theMyth of the LiberalMedia, a drawing-together of Media Lensessays published by Pluto Press, which hedescribed as “mercifully free of academic or

political jargon and awesomely well re-searched. All journalists should read it, be-cause the Davids make a case that demandsto be answered.”That appeared in the New Statesman.

Not a single major newspaper reviewed themost important book about journalism Ican remember. Take the latest Media Lensessay, “Invasion – a Comparison of Sovietand Western Media Performance”. Writtenwith Nikolai Lanine, who served in the So-viet army during its 1979-89 occupation ofAfghanistan, it draws on Soviet-era news-paper archives, comparing the propagandaof that time with current western mediaperformance. They are revealed as almostidentical.Like the reported “success” of the US

“surge” in Iraq, the Soviet equivalent al-lowed “poor peasants [to work] the landpeacefully”. Like the Americans and Britishin Iraq and Afghanistan, Soviet troops wereliberators who became peacekeepers and al-ways acted in “self-defence”. The BBC’sMark Urban’s revelation of the “first real ev-idence that President Bush’s grand design oftoppling a dictator and forcing a democracyinto the heart of the Middle East couldwork” (Newsnight, 12 April 2005) is almostword for word that of Soviet commentatorsclaiming benign and noble intent behindMoscow’s actions in Afghanistan.The BBC’sPaul Wood, in thrall to the 101st Airborne,

29 NOVEMBER 2007

Exposing theguardians of power



http://www.medialens.org

reported that the Americans “must win hereif they are to leave Iraq . . . There is muchstill to do.” That precisely was the Sovietline.The tone of Media Lens’s questions to

journalists is so respectful that personalhonesty is never questioned. Perhaps thatexplains a reaction that can be both out-raged and comic. The BBC presenter GavinEsler, champion of Princess Diana andRonald Reagan, ranted atMedia Lens email-ers as “fascistic” and “beyond redemption”.Roger Alton, editor of the London Observerand champion of the invasion of Iraq, repliedto one ultra-polite member of the public:“Have you been told to write in by thosecunts at Media Lens?” When questionedabout her environmental reporting, FionaHarvey, of the Financial Times, replied:“You’re pathetic . . .Who are you?”

The message is: how dare you challengeus in such away thatmight expose us? Howdare you do the job of true journalism andkeep the record straight? Peter Barron, theeditor of the BBC’s Newsnight, took a dif-ferent approach. “I rather like them. DavidEdwards and David Cromwell are unfail-ingly polite, their points are well argued andsometimes they’re plain right.”David Edwards believes that “reason and

honesty are enhanced by compassion andcompromised by greed and hatred. A jour-nalist who is sincerely motivated by concernfor the suffering of others is more likely toreport honestly . . .” Somemight call this anexotic view. I don’t. Neither does theGandhi Foundation, which on 2 Decemberwill presentMedia Lens with the prestigiousGandhi International Peace Award. I salutethem.



THE BOOK of which I ammostproud is Tell Me No Lies: Inves-tigative Journalism and its Tri-umphs. It was a long-held ambi-

tion of mine to bring together the work ofthose I considered the greatest journalists ofmy lifetime: the “honourable exceptions” ofmy craft. In paying tribute to them, I wantedto demonstrate to young journalists a cali-bre of truth-telling to which they might as-pire. There is the reporting of Martha Gell-horn, Edward R Murrow, James Cameron,Seymour Hersh,Paul Foot,Robert Fisk, Jes-sica Mitford and the Guardian’s SeumasMilne and Richard Norton-Taylor amongothers.In celebrating those who kept and con-

tinue to keep the record straight – the basisof all good journalism – I also recognise theneed to identify the example of those at theother end of the spectrum, whose work ishardly journalism at all, but who possessthe power of exposure in the so-calledmainstream media.On March 28 2006 I described here a re-

port broadcast on Channel 4 News the pre-vious night by its Washington correspon-dent, Jonathan Rugman. Rugman is prettytypical of television’s Washington corre-spondents; he reports as if embedded,when, in fact, his work is voluntary. Whatdistinguishes him is his reporting fromVenezuela. Rugman’s brief visit last year to

Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, producedwhat I described here as “one of the worst,most distorted pieces of journalism I haveever seen qualifying as crude propaganda”.This was a piece, I wrote, “which might aswell have been written by the US state de-partment”. For example,he describedMariaCorina Machado as a “human rights ac-tivist”.In fact, shewas a leader of Sumate,an ex-

treme rightwing organisation, who hadbeen welcomed to the White House byGeorge Bush himself. He caricatured HugoChávez as a buffoon dictator. In fact, he isan authentic product of a popular politicalmovement that began in 1989 who has wonmore democratic elections than any leaderon earth. Rugman reported that Chávezwas helping Iran develop a nuclear weapon.This is laughable – see the US National

Intelligence Estimate report published onDecember 3 2007.At the end of his perform-ance, Rugman complained dramatically tothe camera that he had been “held for 30hours” by police in Caracas. In fact, he hadwalked into a military base and, surprise,surprise,was apprehended – as hewould beon anyMinistry of Defence establishment inBritain – and Venezuela is a country whosepresident two years earlier had been tem-porarily overthrown in a military coup. Infact, Chávez himself arranged for Rugman’sspeedy release. Rugman’s “report” was so

4 DECEMBER 2007

Keep the record straight



absurd that Channel 4 News, which main-tains a reputation, was inundated withcomplaints and, as I was told, “embar-rassed” – though not embarrassed enoughto desist from sending Rugman back toVenezuela for yesterday’s important consti-tutional referendum.Chávez narrowly lost the referendum.His

government wanted to change a number ofarticles in the Venezuelan constitution thatwould define what he has called “socialismfor the 21st century”, including allowing thepresident to stand in unlimited elections(which leaders in Britain,Canada,Australiaand many other countries can do). Butmany of his own supporters were uncon-vinced and probably confused as to whythey were being called upon to vote yetagain, and 3 million of them abstained.Ironically, the result actually reaffirmed

the health of democracy in Venezuela andserved to ridicule the incessant media prop-aganda that Chávez was a “dictator” and a“tyrant”. In a gracious speech conceding de-feat, Chávez congratulated the oppositionand invited them to celebrate.His tone wasthe antithesis of the media-led campaign.On the eve of the referendum,closeted withVenezuela’s richminority, Jonathan Rugmanallowed them to call Chávez a communist,which he isn’t. “It’s as bad that?” he con-tributed.Presenting these people as victims, he

said nothing about their history of rapaciousprivilege or that their wealth was actuallyincreasing under Chávez. He allowed, un-substantiated, histrionics such as, “Thereare Chávez supporters [who] will kill me.”His clever cameraperson filmed soldiersfrom the boots up at polling stations – sol-diers who, according to Rugman, instead ofsaluting cry out “for the fatherland and so-cialism”. That they were guarding an elec-

tion process internationally recognised andcommended was not mentioned, neitherwas the fact that opposition monitors hadannounced theywere pleasedwith the con-duct of the election.For a spot of “balance”,he toured what he called the “slums” andfound “rubbish in the streets” and milkmissing from otherwise abundantly stockedsupermarkets.His script was crudely juxta-posed with images showing a screamingchild being given an injection over whichRugman commented that “this is howChávez is injecting his vast oil wealth justwhere it’s neededmost”. “Chávez loyalists,”said Rugman, “will control parliament.”Imagine Channel 4 News describingLabour’s electoral majority in the Commonsas “Labour’s loyalists control parliament.”He diminished or ignored the majority of

the proposed constitutional changes includ-ing those that would reduce the workingweek from 44 hours to 36 hours; extend so-cial security benefits to 5 million Venezue-lans whowork in the “informal economy” –street vendors and the like; end discrimina-tion on the basis of gender – unprecedentedin Latin America; lower theminimum votingage from 18 to 16, also unprecedented; andrecognise Venezuela’s African-Venezuelanheritage and multiculturalism as a step to-wards ending the rampant racism practisedby a wealthy elite reminiscent of whiteSouth Africa under apartheid.With the referendum results announced,

Rugman rejoiced with a crowd of the well-off in Caracas. He declared that “the air isseeping out of the socialist revolution”.Dis-gracefully, he reported that “[the opposi-tion] feared that [Chávez] would rig the bal-lots against them” –when the opposite wasboth true and confirmed.Propaganda such as this is an accurate re-

flection of the Venezuela media, which is



overwhelmingly anti-Chávez and pro-Washington and was complicit in the law-less 2002 coup. As one of the coup plotterssaid, “Our secret weapon was the media.”Dressed as journalism, it seeks not to in-form, but to discredit – in this case,demon-strably one of the most original and imagi-native and hopeful democratic experimentsin the world. In doing so, it blocks real de-bate on issues such as those that led Chávezsupporters to abstain and a definition ofVenezuela’s proclaimed “socialism” as wellas the natural tension between the state

and the grass roots. It is the same propa-ganda that has closed down debate else-where and helped to see off Allende inChile, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua andAstride in Haiti, not to mention a long listof those on other continents who have triedto raise their people out of poverty and de-spair.This is journalism as the agency of power,

not people,unrelated in all ways to the craftof a Gellhorn, a Cameron, a Murrow, aHersh.



WHEN GORDON Brownspoke recently about hisgovernment’s devotion tothe United States, “foun-

ded on the values we share”, he was echo-ing his Foreign Office minister KimHowells,who was preparing to welcome the Saudidictator to Britain with effusions of “sharedvalues”.The meaning was the same in bothcases. The values shared are those of rapa-cious power and wealth, with democracyand human rights irrelevant, as the blood-bath in Iraq and the suffering of the Pales-tinians attest, to name only two examples.The “values we share” are celebrated by

an organisation that has just held its annualconference. This is the British-AmericanProject for the Successor Generation (BAP),set up in 1985 with money from a Philadel-phia trust with a long history of supportingright-wing causes. Although the BAP doesnot publicly acknowledge this origin, thesource of its inspiration was a call by Presi-dent Reagan in 1983 for “successor genera-tions” on both sides of the Atlantic to “worktogether in the future on defence and secu-rity matters”.Hemade numerous referencesto “shared values”.Attending this ceremonyin the White House Situation Room werethe ideologues RupertMurdoch and the lateJames Goldsmith.As Reagan made clear, the need for the

BAP arose fromWashington’s anxiety about

the growing opposition in Britain to nuclearweapons, especially the stationing of cruisemissiles in Europe. “A special concern,” hesaid, “will be the successor generations, asthese younger people are the ones who willhave to work together in the future on de-fence and security issues.” A new,preferablyyoung elite – journalists, academics, econo-mists, “civil society” and liberal communityleaders of one sort or another – would off-set the growing “anti-Americanism”.The aims of this latter-day network, ac-

cording to David Willetts, the former direc-tor of studies at the right-wing Centre forPolicy Studies, now a member of the Toryshadow cabinet, are simply to “help rein-force Anglo-American links, especially ifsome members already do or will occupypositions of influence”.A former British am-bassador to Washington, Sir John Kerr, wasmore direct. In a speech to BAP members,he said the organisation’s “powerful combi-nation of eminent Fellows and close Atlanticlinks threatened to put the embassy out of ajob”. An American BAP organiser describesthe BAP network as committed to “groom-ing leaders” while promoting “the leadingglobal role that [the US and Britain] con-tinue to play”.The BAP’s British “alumni” are drawn

largely from new Labour and its court. Nofewer than four BAP “fellows” and one ad-visory board member became ministers in

13 December 2007

Tainted handsacross thewater



the first Blair government. The new Labournames include Peter Mandelson, GeorgeRobertson, Baroness Symons, JonathanPowell (Blair’s chief of staff), Baroness Scot-land, Douglas Alexander, Geoff Mulgan,Matthew Taylor and David Miliband. Someare Fabian Society members and describethemselves as being “on the left”. TrevorPhillips, chair of the Equality and HumanRights Commission, is another member.They object to whispers of “a conspiracy”.The mutuality of class or aspiration ismerely assured, unspoken, and the warmembrace of power flattering and often pro-ductive.BAP conferences are held alternately in

the US and Britain.This year’s was in New-castle, with the theme “Faith and Justice”.On the US board is Diana Negroponte, thewife of John Negroponte, Bush’s former na-tional security chief notorious for his associ-ations with death-squad politics in centralAmerica. He follows another leading neo-con, Paul Wolfowitz, architect of the inva-sion of Iraq and discredited head of theWorld Bank. Since 1985, BAP “alumni” and“fellows” have been brought together cour-tesy of Coca-Cola, Monsanto, Saatchi &

Saatchi, Philip Morris and British Airways,among other multinationals. Nick Butler,formerly a top dog at BP,has been a leadinglight.For many, the conferences have the re-

vivalist pleasures honed by American PRtechniques, with management games, per-sonal presen tations, and a closing jollyrevue to lighten the serious business. The2002 conference report noted: “Many BAPalumni are directly involved with US andUK military and defence establishments.”The BAP rarely gets publicity,which may

have something to dowith the high propor-tion of journalists who are alumni. Promi-nent BAP journalists are David Lipsey, Yas-min Alibhai-Brown and assorted Murdo-chites. The BBC is well represented.On theToday programme, James Naughtie, whosebroadcasting has long reflected his owntransatlantic interests,has been an alumnussince 1989. Today’s newest voice, EvanDavis, formerly the BBC’s zealous econom-ics editor, is a member.And at the top of theBAP website home page is a photograph ofJeremy Paxman and his endorsement. “Amarvellous way of meeting a varied cross-section of transatlantic friends,” says he.



THE FORMERMurdoch retai-ner Andrew Neil has describedJames Murdoch, the heir appar-ent, as a “social liberal”. What

strikes me is his casual use of “liberal” forthe new ruler of an empire devoted to thepromotion of war, conquest and human di-vision. Neil’s view is not unusual. In themurdochracy that Britain has largely be-come, once noble terms such as democracy,reform, even freedom itself, have long beenemptied of their meaning.In the years leading to Tony Blair’s elec-

tion, liberal commentators vied in theirTonier-than-thou obeisance to such aparagon of “reborn liberalism”. Writing inthe New Statesman in1995, Henry Portercelebrated an almost mystical politicianwho “presents himself as a harmoniser forall the opposing interests in British life, aconciliator of class differences and tribal an-tipathies, a synthesiser of opposing beliefs”.Blair was, of course, the diametric opposite.As events have demonstrated, Blair and

the cult of New Labour have destroyed thevery liberalism millions of Britons thoughtthey were voting for. This truth is like ataboo andwasmissing almost entirely fromlast week’s Guardian debate about civil lib-erties. Gone is the bourgeoisie that in goodtimes would extend a few rungs of the lad-der to those below.From Blair’s pseudo-moralising assault

on single parents a decade ago to PeterHain’s recent attacks on the disabled, the“project” has completed the work ofThatcher and all but abolished the premisesof tolerance and decency, however amor-phous, on which much of British public lifewas based.The trade-off has been mostly superficial

“social liberalism” and the highest personalindebtedness on earth. In 2007, reported theJoseph Rowntree Foundation, the UnitedKingdom faced the highest levels of inequal-ity for 40 years, with the rich getting richerand the poor poorer and more and moresegregated from society. The InternationalMonetary Fund has designated Britain a taxhaven, and corruption and fraud in Britishbusiness are almost twice the global aver-age, while Unicef reports that British chil-dren are the most neglected and unhappi-est in the “rich” world.Abroad, behind a facade of liberal con-

cern for the world’s “disadvantaged”, suchas waffle about millennium goals and anti-poverty stunts with the likes of Google andVodafone, the Brown government, togetherwith its EU partners, is demanding viciousand punitive free-trade agreements that willdevastate the economies of scores of impov-erished African, Caribbean and Pacific na-tions.In Iraq, the blood-letting of a “liberal in-

tervention”maywell have surpassed that of



19 December 2007

Liberalism toMurdochracy

the Rwanda genocide, while the British oc-cupiers have made no real attempt to helpthe victims of their lawlessness.And puttingout more flags will not cover the shame.“The mortality of children in Basra has in-creased by nearly 30% compared to the Sad-dam Hussein era,” says Dr Haydar Salah, apaediatrician at Basra children’s hospital.In January nearly 100 leading British doc-

tors wrote to Hilary Benn, then interna-tional development secretary, describinghow children were dying because Britainhad not fulfilled its obligations under UN se-curity resolution 1483. He refused to seethem.Even if a contortion of intellect and

morality allows the interventionists to jus-tify these actions, the same cannot be saidfor liberties eroded at home. These are toomuch part of the myth that individual free-dom was handed down by eminent liberalgentlemen instead of being fought for at thebottom. Yet rights of habeas corpus, of freespeech and assembly,and dissent and toler-ance, are slipping away,undefended.WholeBritish communities now live in fear of thepolice. The British are distinguished as oneof the most spied upon people in the world.A grey surveillance van with satellite track-ing sits outside my local Sainsbury’s.On the pop radio station Kiss 100, the se-

curity service MI5 advertises for ordinarypeople to spy on each other. These are nor-mal now, along with the tracking of our in-timate lives and a system of secretive justicethat imposes 18-hour curfews on peoplewho have not been charged with any crimeand are denied the “evidence”.Hundreds of terrified Iraqi refugees are

sent back to the infinite dangers of the coun-try “we” have destroyed.Meanwhile, the cause of any real civil

threat to Britons has been identified and

confirmed repeatedly by the intelligenceservices. It is “our” continuingmilitary pres-ence in other people’s countries and collu-sion with a Washington cabal described bythe late Norman Mailer as “pre-fascist”.When famous liberal columnists wring theirhands about the domestic consequences, letthem look to their own early support forsuch epic faraway crimes.In broadcasting, a prime source of liber-

alism and most of our information, the un-thinkable has been normalised. The mur-derous chaos in Iraq is merely internecine.Indeed, Bush’s “surge” is “working”. Theholocaust there has nothing to dowith “us”.There are honourable exceptions, of course,as there are in those great liberal store-houses of knowledge, Britain’s universities;but they, too,are normalised and left to nat-ter about “failed states” and “crisis manage-ment” – when the cause of the crisis is ontheir doorstep.As Terry Eagleton has pointed out, for the

first time in two centuries almost no emi-nent British poet, playwright or novelist isprepared to question the foundations ofwestern actions, let alone interrupt, as DJTaylor once put it, all those “demure ironiesand mannered perceptions, their focus onthe gyrations of a bunch of emotionalposeurs ... to the reader infinitely reassuring... and infinitely useless”.Harold Pinter andRonan Bennett are exceptions.Britain is now a centralised single-ideol-

ogy state, as secure in the grip of a super-power as any former eastern bloc country.The Whitehall executive has prerogativepowers as effective as politburo decrees.Unlike Venezuela, critical issues such as

the EU constitution or treaty are denied areferendum, regardless of Blair’s “solemnpledge”. Thanks largely to a parliament inwhich a majority of the members cannot



bring themselves to denounce the crime inIraq or even vote for an inquiry,New Labourhas added to the statutes a record 3,000criminal offences: an apparatus of controlthat undermines the Human Rights Act. In1977, at the height of the cold war, I inter-viewed the Charter 77 dissidents in Czecho-slovakia.They warned that complacency and si-

lence could destroy liberty and democracyas effectively as tanks. “We’re actually betteroff than you in the west,” said a writer,measuring his irony. “Unlike you, we haveno illusions.”For those people who still celebrate the

virtues and triumphs of liberalism – anti-slavery,women’s suffrage, the defence of in-

dividual conscience and the right to expressit and act upon it – the time for direct ac-tion is now.It is time to support those of couragewho

defy rotten laws to read out in ParliamentSquare the names of the current,mounting,war dead,and those who identify their gov-ernment’s complicity in “rendition” and itstorture, and those who have followed thepaper and blood trail of Britain’s piraticalarms companies.It is time to support the NHS workers

who up and down the country are trying toalert us to the destruction of a Labour gov-ernment’s greatest achievement. The list ofpeople stirring is reassuring.The awakeningof the rest of us is urgent.



ColdType

Download John Pilger’s columns essays, plusbook excerpts and essays – all in pdf format– all free of charge, athttp://www.coldtype.net/pilger.html andhttp://www.coldtype.net/pilgerbooks.html(Click on links to enter web site)

Read moreessays andbook excerptsby John Pilgerat Coldtype.net

WRITING WORTH READING FROM AROUND THE WORLD

http://www.coldtype.net/pilger.html

http://www.coldtype.net/pilgerbooks.html

Documents

THEJOHN PILGER - ColdType · 2 AColdTypeSpecial |January2008 JohnPilgeris one of the world’s most renowned and distinguished investigative journalists and documentary film-makers