Distant Voices [Paperback]

Pilger is an investigative journalist whose life's work has been dedicated to finding and exposing injustice. This excellent collection of essays forced me to revise my opinions on a whole raft of subjects, in particular on the nature of British and American foreign policy in the Far East and the gulf between rhetoric and reality. Pilger painstakingly catalogues his sources and, if his writing becomes didactic at times, it is only because of the passion he brings to his work. His investigation of Indonesian crimes in East Timor, evidently conducted at great personal cost, deserves to be much more widely known.

An excellent book. Well written and covering many aspects of events. Pilger has exposed a lot of truths, especially the sanctions on Iraq. He is one of the few good western journalists, a bargin at the price!

It's almost this book's 20th anniversary. Let's check it out. These are reprinted journalistic articles, typically four or five pages long. They're grouped in 9 chapters: roughly, UK, Gulf, Cambodia, Russia, small countries (Nicaragua, Israel), Australia, and tributes to, among others, Chomsky and Oliver Stone. They're published by Vintage, at a time when they'd started publishing Chomsky as mainstream. I'll try to summarise his stance and also, in my opinion, the vital material omitted.

[1] This is all PC material, at least as regards USA/Canada, Europe, ANZ. It's worth recalling the Stephen Lawrence enquiry, virtually a show trial of the British police, was a little later than these pieces. It would be ten years before Labour in UK would secretly decide to flood immigrants into Britain. The European Union still appears in the index as 'EC', European Community - the secret Soviet-style arrangements were unknown outside a few alarmist circles.

[2] John Pilger had a standard quasi-left stance on, I think, every single issue which was permitted to be aired. For example: he states the 'rich countries' received enormous sums from the poor countries. In fact, of course, it was bankers; it was hardly democratic in any sense. He describes Filipino poverty - Indian slum style poverty of labourers, while Imelda Marcos and her mates lived in enclaves with golf courses. What he doesn't say is what could be done - a handful of houses wouldn't go far divided among millions of people. There's an analogous passage about a coal mine in Britain: a long way underground, and with a small coal seam - but what else could they do? That was where the coal was. He mentions south Africa hardly at all but when he does he disapproves.

[3] His material has endnotes listing sources; mostly these are newspapers, and these are mostly British, though there also books, and journalistic sources such as summary of BBC shortwave transmissions. He also quotes organisations like the 'Runnymede Trust' - part of the huge mass of quangoes and think-tanks with their own agenda. One of the odd aspects of John Pilger's work is that, although he's perfectly aware of censorship and institutional lies, he treats such sources as though they are largely above reproach. As examples, Whittam-Smith who founded the Independent, worked for the Guardian, which in its entire history published nothing honest about the Vietnam War. And yet both these 'newspapers' are quoted with apparent approval by Pilger. One of the noteworthy things about British journalists is their general ignorance - they know nothing of any technical subject. I don't know of a single issue (AIDS? OPs? Lead in petrol? Weapons that don't work? International law? Kennedy murder? EU? Lawyers directing money to each other? War crimes? etc etc) in which journalists and broadcasters have any sort of creditable record.

[4] Pilger misunderstands the entire period since 1914. Under Stalin, tens of millions were murdered; and he was an ally! The systematic bombing of towns in Germany and Japan was deliberate policy; in point of fact, carpet bombing in Korea and Vietnam was the same policy. The most powerful parts of Pilger's writing are to do with genocide in Vietnam, which he partly witnessed; he seems to have little idea about the Second World War. He continues in a similar vein on Iraq and Kuwait and Saddam Hussein, which war was in full swing at the time he wrote these essays. Incidentally he mentions Ramsey Clark's War Crimes Commission, which I think must have been based on Bertrand Russell's. Pilger has no idea about 'Zionists' in the US government; he claims to regard Israel as an apartheid-type state, so this may be a genuine stance. He realises there are at least two types of Muslims, but his tribalist knowledge seems almost non-existent - for instance in Indonesia. I think this helps explain the problematical quality of his writing. Cambodia for instance was bombed by Americans and subsequently largely wiped out, but the underlying uncaring tribal racism of the US controllers is simply not part of Pilger's worldview.

Stylistic note: he seems to have learnt (from some journalism school?) to put in impressionist exaggerations. A coal miner reaches with a 'claw' - the impression given is many miners had lost fingers. There's an account - and I remember a speech by him on this - of a house with Asians in it being attacked by whites. I believe this account is a lie, or at least misleading.

Conclusion: Pilger is an almost perfect example of the house radical, tolerated provided of course the unspoken limits are accepted. He would certainly never have been published or broadcast otherwise. Unfortunately, I don't think his work is any help whatever in deciding what ought to be done.