Pilger: from inspiring truth-teller to genocide denier and apologist for dictators

Above: Pilger standing beside the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum in Vietnam in the late 1970s. Photo: Hulton Deutsch/Corbis/Getty Images

The death, on 30 December, of John Pilger brought very mixed feelings as far as I’m concerned. And, except in very extreme cases I am reluctant to speak ill of the dead – hence the delay in posting this piece.

Pilger was an early hero of mine and I can still remember being moved and inspired in the 1970’s by his exposures of racism, injustice, human rights abuses and war crimes. He was a war correspondent in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Biafra and probably (in Britain at least) did more than any other journalist to bring the horrors of those conflicts to public attention. He twice won the UK Journalist of the Year Award: in 1967 and 1979.  His eponymous TV series on ITV was required viewing as far as I was concerned. His 1979 Daily Mirror reports and the subsequent documentary Year Zero: the silent Death of Cambodia, exposing the genocide committed by Pol Pot’s monstrous regime in Cambodia following the Vietnam war, were examples of political journalism at its very finest.

But something happened to Pilger in the 1990’s and as far as I can tell it was triggered by events in Serbia and Bosnia (and a little later, Kosovo) following the breakup of Yugoslavia.

When Bosnia attempted to secede, Serbia – under Slobodan Miloševic’s leadership – set out to ethnically cleanse Bosnian territory by systematically removing all Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks). Serb forces surrounded Sarajevo, the capital city. Many Bosniaks were driven into concentration camps, where women and girls were systematically gang-raped and other civilians were tortured, starved and murdered.

In 1993, the UN Security Council declared that Sarajevo, Goradze, Srebrenica and other Muslim enclaves were to be safe areas, protected by a contingent of UN peacekeepers. But in July 1995, Serbs committed the largest massacre in Europe since World War II in Srebrenica. An estimated 23,000 women, children and elderly people were put on buses and driven to Muslim-controlled territory, while 8,000 “battle-age” men were detained and slaughtered. The so-called safe area of Srebrenica fell without a shot being fired by the UN forces.

In 1994, NATO initiated air strikes against Bosnian Serbs to stop the attacks. In December 1995, US-led negotiations in Dayton, Ohio ended the conflict in Bosnia, and a force was created to maintain the ceasefire. During the Dayton Peace talks, though Milošević’s anti-Albanian project was well underway, Kosova was not mentioned. Serb forces continued their atrocities, including the Raçak massacre, which resulted in an influx of journalists and human rights activists into Kosova, as well as the unarmed Kosovo Verification Mission lead by William Walker.

The increased media attention and first-hand accounts of crimes against humanity from international reporters, politicians, and Kosovar refugees increased pressure on the US and European allies to take action. But it was only when Serbia refused the international demands to remove its troops from Kosovo, grant autonomy to Kosovars, and allow 25,000 armed peacekeepers, in Rambouillet in 1999, that the US-NATO intervention (mainly bombing from the air) started.

Perhaps under the influence of his associate Noam Chomsky, Pilger (in the New Statesman) denounced NATO’s actions, calling the bombardment a “cowards’ war” and equivocating between Milosević’s attacks on Kosovar Albanians and the Luzane bus bombing, in which a NATO bomb struck a bus carrying civilians. In December 2004, he wrote a column calling Kosovo “a genocide that never was,” despite the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugsolavia charging Milosević with genocide (along with 65 other counts) in 2002.

Like Chomsky, Pilger endorsed Diana Johnstone’s book Fool’s Crusade, a revisionist history of the Yugoslav wars that denies the Srebrenica genocide and questions the authenticity of events like the 1999 Račak Massacre, in which 45 Kosovar Albanians were killed by Serbian guards. He also endorsed Herman & Peterson’s dreadful book The Politics of Genocide which cast doubt (in fact, more or less dismissed) both the Srebrenica massacre and the genocide of Tutsis by Hutu militias in Rwanda.

He was asked by Green Left Weekly (in an interview published in January 2004) whether he thought “the anti-war movement should be supporting Iraq’s anti-occupation resistance?”

Pilger replied unequivocally: “Yes, I do. We cannot afford to be choosy. While we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq, we have no choice now but to support the resistance, for if the resistance fails, the Bush gang will attack another country.” The fact that this so-called “resistance” was (literally) murderously opposed to Iraqi trade unionists, women, communists and democrats, was apparently of no consequence as far as Pilger was concerned. By now his political creed seemed to have amounted to no more than ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’: a philosophy that led him to give pretty much uncritical support to dictators, clerical fascists, misogynists and mass murderers – just so long as they were anti-‘the West’.

He excused Assad’s murderous regime in Syria and became a regular on the Kremlin’s TV channel RT (formerly Russia Today), promoting the idea that Putin wasn’t such a bad guy (“we cannot afford to be too choosey” again). He praised Assad/ Putin propagandists and war crimes deniers like Venessa Beeley, Eva Bartlett and Peter Ford.

Pilger joined in the Kremlin /Assad propaganda campaign denying Assad’s use of chemical weapons on Syrian civilians in Douma and elsewhere. He told viewers of RT: “There’s no real evidence of a chemical attack, so what we’re seeing is the most intense campaign of propaganda – at least since the build-up to the Iraq war in 2003.” 

Again on RT, he described the heroic White Helmets in Syria as “a complete propaganda construct”, a phrase seized on and repeated gleefully by every Putin/Assad apologist (over 300 White Helmets have been killed rescuing Syrians, most deliberately targeted). He knowingly endangered the only hope those under the ruins in Syria have – the #WhiteHelmets, who risk their lives to rescue others, knowing the bombers will circle back and strike again, to kill the rescuers (the same ‘double tap’ technique is now used in Gaza: strike, wait for rescuers, strike again. Tragically Gazans do not have rescuers like the White Helmets to spend days digging them out of the rubble regardless of the danger).

Above: Pilger on Putin’s propaganda channel

On Ukraine, with a horrible inevitability, Pilger more or less parroted the Kremlin/Ministry of Foreign Affairs narrative: “The invasion clearly was provoked. Indeed, if it was a breach of international law, so too was the provocation” (the “provocation” presumably being the existence of NATO, despite Ukraine not being a member). He endorsed the Kremlin narrative of Ukraine as “a regime infested with Nazis” and factually wrong to the point of deliberate disinformation when he said “NATO now completely surrounds Russia in the west”.

As long ago as 2009 ‘Airforce Amazons’ put together the following dossier. It pre-dates his Assad/Putin apologism, but still makes shocking reading and should be drawn to the attention of anyone (eg readers of the Morning Star) who still have illusions and/or think his degeneration has only occurred recently:

Pilger links

Reading this, I felt it necessary to gather together links on a few John Pilger stories that had stuck in the mind over the years:

Martin Shaw, Research Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex, on Pilger’s downplaying of Saddam Hussein’s responsibility in the suffering of the Iraqi people.

BBC special correspondent John Sweeney on the same topic.

Historian Marko Attila Hoare on Pilger’s denial of genocide in Kosovo.

Martin Shaw on the same topic. (Also here.)

Ian Black, diplomatic editor of The Guardian, writing on Pilger’s conspiracy theories about NATO action in Kosovo in 1999. The column by Pilger that he was responding to is here.

Pilger’s support for those deliberately targeting civilians in Iraq.

Pilger’s defence of the deliberate targeting of civilians in Israel.

Added, Pilger misrepresents the views of Independent Jewish Voices. (Thanks to Flesh is Grass.)

Added, 1 March 2010, Oliver Kamm on John Pilger’s approval of Gilad Atzmon:

“I’d like to know – and I invite him to comment on it – why Pilger is citing this bigot as a voice of conscience and an advocate of justice.”

More on Pilger and Atzmon at Engage and the CST blog.

Added, 10 June 2010, Michael Ezra takes on just one paragraph from  Pilger’s latest cornucopia of conspiracy theory. This is on the Vietnam War, though the Pilger New Statesman piece it comes from, The way to lie about another war, also raves on about Israel, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Japan, and Oxbridge, all sites of “master illusions” and “black propaganda”. Oh yes, the quotation marks come thick and heavy in this piece of “journalism”. See also Mick Harley’s comments.

Another collection of Pilger links can be found on David Thompson’s blog, including one to a post by Tim Blair in 2004 reproducing Pilger’s declarations that American, British and Australian soldiers in Iraq were “legitimate targets”, and that:

“I think the situation in Iraq is so dire that unless the United States is defeated there that we’re likely to see an attack on Iran, we’re likely to see an attack on North Korea and all the way down the road it could be even an attack on China within a decade.”

Oliver Kamm collected criticisms of Pilger’s documentaries on Cambodia and on nuclear weapons in his 2006 post, Celebrating John Pilger.

Added, 19 December 2010, lawyer David Allen Green provides a legal commentary on Pilger on Assange. (Via Shiraz Socialist.)

Added, 5 June 2011, Denying Rwanda: An Open Letter to John Pilger, by Adam Jones PhD, author of Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, Routledge/Taylor & Francis Publishers 2010. (Via Max Dunbar.)

Added, 16 September 2011, Decline and Fall, Peter Ryley on Pilger and Libya.

Added, 30 October 2011, “Most egregious” competition, Gene of Harry’s Place compares comments by right wing radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, Republican congresswoman Michele Bachmann, and John Pilger, on the Obama administration’s intervention against the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda.

A commenter responding to that post helpfully links to a 2008 article by Sunny Hundal, The racist flip side of anti-imperialism, which begins:

What do Ralph Nader, John Pilger and Ayman al-Zawahiri have in common?

Before Barack Obama has even taken office or signed a single bill, all three have dismissed him as a sellout by using racial slurs. One might be tempted to say, “at least give the guy a chance,” but that would be a futile exercise.

The activist Ralph Nader and documentary filmmaker John Pilger both referred to him as an “Uncle Tom”, while, more recently, al-Qaida No 2 al-Zawahiri said Obama was “the direct opposite of honorable black Americans” like Malcolm X, and lumped Obama together with Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell as “house slaves”.

The Pilger column referred to is here.

• JD would like to acknowledge his use of tweets from Grannies4Equality in the course of preparing this post.