John Pilger - Remembering The Legendary Writer, Journalist And Documentary Maker

Gareth Murray

January 6, 2024

News

John Pilger - Remembering The Legendary Writer, Journalist And Documentary Maker

People of a certain age will have been sorry to hear about the recent death, at the age of 84, of John Pilger on the 30th of December last. PIlger was a legendary writer, journalist and film maker whose works often shone light into those dark corners of this world that the powerful and the rich would have preferred to have remained hidden.

Pilger was born in Sydney, Australia in 1939 but developed the majority of his career while living in Britain, first beginning his work as a freelance journalist in the early 1960s.

Pilger made many documentaries over the years on many subjects in many places including Vietnam, South Africa, Cambodia, Latin America, Afghanistan, Iraq - anywhere he saw injustice and corruption, he exposed it!

The killings fields of Cambodia. The Cambodian Genocide, perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge death cult, led to the deaths of an estimated 2 million people. The genocide was only ended after invasion by the armed forces of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam who went on to overthrow the Khmer Rouge regime.

This pursuit included the recent making of the documentary 'The Dirty War on the NHS' (2019), an exposé of the creeping privatisation and destruction of Britain's National Health Service. This was Pilger’s last project before his death.

'Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy' (1993) lifted the veil on the complicity of the British, United States and Australian governments in the genocide perpetrated by the Indonesian government against the Timorese people.

The US and British governments were regular targets of John Pilger's ire, as was the government of his home country of Australia where he regularly exposed the systemic neglect and discrimination against the indigenous peoples of that country.

'The War on Democracy' (2007) was Pilger’s first film to get a cinema release. An exposé of US foreign policy, the film explored the history of US intervention, overt and covert, in toppling a series of governments in Latin America, along with ensuring their replacement with a succession of US puppet dictatorships.

US soldiers detain Iraqi civilians during the invasion of that country.

A documentary that is especially pertinent today is Pilger’s 2002 feature 'Palestine is Still the Issue', a piece which exposed Apartheid Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people.

'Palestine is Still the Issue' described how an historic injustice has been done to the Palestinian people, and correctly warns that until Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine ends, there will be no peace for anyone.

When speaking of the making of the documentary Pilger said that the responses of the interviewees "put the lie to the standard Zionist cry that any criticism of Israel is anti-semitic, a claim that insults all those Jewish people who reject the likes of Ariel Sharon acting in their name". Today, two decades later, Pilger’s analysis still holds true.

Israeli soldiers prevent a native Palestinian woman from accessing her land.

One of Pilger’s most remarkable documentaries, bringing the story of a little known tragedy to an international audience, was 'Stealing a Nation' (2004), an exposé of how the British government heartlessly expelled the indigenous population of the Chagos Islands, a tiny British colony in the Indian Ocean, in the late 1960s and early 70s to make way for an US military base. Pilger first heard of the plight of the Chagossians in 1982 during the Malvinas War.

“Britain sent a fleet to the aid of 2,000 Falkland Islanders at the other end of the world, while another 2,000 British citizens from islands in the Indian Ocean had been expelled by British governments and hardly anyone knew. The difference was that one lot were white and the others were black, and the United States wanted the Chagos Islands – especially Diego Garcia – as a major military base.” - John Pilger

Coming from an unashamedly left perspective, Pilger always used painstaking research and analysis to tell the real stories that people needed to hear and learn about, in contrast to the safe, sanitised and self-censored versions presented by the mainstream media and corporate broadcasting companies.

In recent years, Pilger supported both Julian Assange and David McBride, two ‘whistle-blowers’ who currently face the possibility of lengthy prison sentences for the ‘crime’ of attempting to let the wider public know about the secrets multiple governments around the world do not want released into public domain, including their many, many war crimes.

Take some time over the coming weeks to watch a few of his documentaries, many of which are available online.

Below is a link to John Pilger's website in which many of his documentaries can be accessed. These documentaries can be a useful resoruce around which to base political discussions and provide an alternative perspective to many pertinent issues.

John Pilger Filmography -

1970

Vietnam: The Quiet Mutiny

1971

Conversations With a Working Man

1974

Vietnam: Still America's War

*Palestine Is Still The Issue (Part 1)

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Thalidomide: The Ninety-Eight We Forgot

The Most Powerful Politician in America

One British Family