True to form – the Guardian’s Obituary Fails to Mention Pilger’s Searing Criticisms of their Treachery Over Julian Assange
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John Pilger In His Own Words: The
Late Great Journalist In A Never Before Released Interview
I’m
not sure if he was trying to send a message, asking me to pick up the baton,
but John Pilger died on my birthday! I can’t think of anyone today who even
approaches Pilger’s record of campaigning journalism.
I
had a premonition that John Pilger was not long for this world when someone
mentioned that during the genocide in Gaza his voice had not been heard. It’s
not hard to imagine what Pilger would have made of the ongoing genocide in Gaza
and the pretence that it is all about destroying Hamas.
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Pilger
would have instantly seen through the lies of the war criminals who rule us, Blinken,
Biden, Sunak and Starmer, and his invective would have been all the sharper for
that. We live in a world of lies where there is a pretence that Israeli
genocide and its attacks on ambulances, hospitals, homes and children, are all
about Hamas rather than the ethnic
cleansing that Israeli politicians openly proclaim.
Pilger
was a staunch supporter of the Palestinians. Not for him the vile and
fabricated accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ against anyone who criticises this
wretched apartheid state.
The
Zionist lobby reacted with their usual cries of ‘anti-Semitism’ when he
produced Palestine
is Still the Issue for ITV in 2002.
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Palestine is
Still the Issue (2002) - John Pilger
In
Why
my film is under fire Pilger described how
The pro-Israel lobby intimidates
journalists to ensure that most coverage remains biased in its favour.
Does
anyone imagine that Pilger’s article would get past its Zionist gatekeeper, Jonathan Freedland,
today? Freedland and Guardian Editor
Kath Viner would argue that accusing the ‘victims’ of ‘anti-Semitism’ of making
false allegations was itself anti-Semitic, even if those ‘victims’ were rich and
powerful supporters of genocide. To Freedland Palestinians are never victims.
Only Jews merit that title.
Pilger described
how Michael Green, Chairman of Carlton TV, attacked his 2002 film Palestine is Still
the Issuein the Jewish Chronicle. Green was rebuked for that by
Carlton’s Factual Department.
John
Pilger's Legendary Career Praised by Fellow Journalists
Pilger was
recruited by the Mirror in 1963 and became chief foreign correspondent before
he was sacked at the behest of the Zionist spy and thief who owned the Mirror, Robert Maxwell, at the end of 1985.
He briefly returned when Piers Morgan was editor. None of this was mentioned in
the Mirror’s obituary.
He was also their war correspondent in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Biafra
Pilger
also wrote for the New Statesman, where he had a column from 1991 to 2014, and
the Independent. His last piece for the Statesman was in 2014. As it moved to
the right his message became uncomfortable to its Blairite Editor, Jason Cowley.
The Mirror was not the only paper which was
selective in what it said. The Guardian
ran the most dishonest
obituary. It described Pilger’s journalistic history thus:
He left the
Mirror in 1985 and wrote for other papers, including the Guardian. He was a
supporter of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
And
that was it. No explanation as to why he hadn’t had an article published in The Guardian since 2019. For that we have to turn to his interview with KPFA in 2018
where he described how his
last
appearance was in the Guardian which 3 years ago got rid of people like me in
what was pretty much a purge of those who were really saying things the
Guardian no longer says anymore. That has happened right across the liberal
media.
The War on Democracy – Latin America
Pilger
was an anti-imperialist and his obituary writers found that hard to deal with.
That meant he opposed US foreign policy and the devastation that it has
wrought. Not a subject for The Guardian!
In The War on Democracy- Latin America
Pilger described
how serial US intervention, overt and covert, had toppled a series of governments
in the Latin American region since the 1950s. The democratically elected
Chilean government of Salvador Allende, for example, was ousted by a US backed
coup in 1973 and replaced by the military dictatorship of General Pinochet.
Guatemala, Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador have all been invaded by
the US. Pilger said of the film that it was “about
the struggle of people to free themselves from a modern form of slavery".
These people
describe a
world not as American presidents like to see it as useful or expendable, they
describe the power of courage and humanity among people with next to nothing.
They reclaim noble words like democracy, freedom, liberation, justice, and in
doing so they are defending the most basic human rights of all of us in a war
being waged against all of us.
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The Quiet Mutiny - World in Action (1970)
The
Vietnam War was instrumental in disillusioning many of us who had grown up on
American rhetoric of freedom and democracy. His first film The Quiet Mutiny,
was made by Granada TV’s World in Action (1970).
The film broke
the story of insurrection by drafted troops in Vietnam. In The First Casualty, Phillip Knightley described Pilger's
revelations as among the most important reporting from Vietnam. The soldiers'
revolt – including the killing of US in Indo-China.
Vietnam: The Last Battle - John Pilger (1995) - Vietnam War
Documentary
In Vietnam: The Last Battle Pilger returned to Vietnam 20 years after
the US had left only to find ilosing
many of the gains it had fought for as it was drawn into the globalised market economy
while imperialist control exerted itself through the World Bank, the IMF and
other global institutions. It is called ‘market socialism’.
John Pilger: Paying the Price
Killing the Children of Iraq 2000
Pilger campaigned
against the Iraq War and what led up to it in his film Paying the Price Killing
the Children of Iraq 2000. Pilger described
the bombing of Iraq and sanctions as ‘a
war against the children of Iraq’. The US sanctions killed half a million
children but when asked about it US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
replied: "This is a very hard
choice, but we think the price is worth it." When Pilger questioned
her spokesman James Rubin about this, he claimed Albright's words were taken
out of context.
Year
Zero: The Silent Death Of Cambodia
Year Zero: The Silent Death of
Cambodiaalerted
the world to the horrors wrought by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The film was
originally broadcast on commercial TV in Britain and Australia without
advertising, which was unprecedented. The British Film Institute listed it as
one of the 10 most important documentaries of the 20th century.
Pilger
revealed that as many as 2m people out of a population of 7m were killed or
starved by the Khmer Rouge. ‘The genocide
of Pol Pot was begun by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.’ US bombing of
Cambodia from 1969 to 1973 caused such turmoil that the rise of the Khmer Rouge
to power in 1975 was made inevitable. Pilger says
‘The new
rulers of Cambodia called 1975 Year Zero, the dawn of an age in which there
would be no families, no sentiment, no expressions of love or grief, no
medicines, no hospitals, no schools, no books, no learning, no holidays, no
music, no song, no post, no money; only work and death... For me, coming here
has been like stumbling into something I could never imagine and what follows
is the first complete film report by Westerners from the ashes of a gentle
land.’
‘Nothing had prepared us,’ he said.
There was no
power, no drinking water, no shops, no services of any kind. At the railway
station, trains stood empty at various stages of interrupted departure.
Personal belongings and pieces of clothing fluttered on the platforms, as they
fluttered on the mass graves beyond.
At Tuol
Sleng extermination centre, where men, women and children were tortured and
killed, black-and-white photographs of the victims stare out of the screen.
Outside, deserted streets are interrupted by the lone figure of an infant – his
parents almost certainly dead or missing – weaving his way down the middle of
the road.
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Pilger's
spontaneous, vivid reporting of the power politics that caused such suffering
is a model of anger suppressed. He described how, as a means of punishing the
Vietnamese, whose army had liberated Cambodia the US and its allies declared a
blockade on stricken Cambodia. Unicef’s representative, Jacques Beaumont, said,
‘In one of
the very poor barracks with practically nothing, there was already 54 children
dying. One of them was sitting in the corner of the room with swollen legs
because he was starving. He did not have the strength to look at me or to
anybody. He was just waiting to die. Ten days later, four of these children
were dead and I will always remember that, saying: “I did not do anything for
these children, because we had nothing.”’
The Red
Cross representative, François Bugnion, took Pilger aside and asked him if he
could contact ‘someone in the Australian
government who can arrange for an aircraft to fly in a truck, food and drugs to
save thousands of lives while the politics are being ironed out’. The
Australian ambassador in Bangkok didn’t respond.
Near the
end of the film, he refers to a starving boy whose screams can be heard rising
and falling in agony. ‘Of course,’ he
says directly to the camera, ‘if you're
in Geneva or New York or London, you can’t hear the screams of [this] little
boy.’
Year
Zero’s broadcast in Britain had a phenomenal public response. 40 sacks of post
arrived at the ATV studios in Birmingham, with £1m in the first few days. ‘This is for Cambodia,’ wrote an
anonymous Bristol bus driver, enclosing his week’s wage. An elderly woman sent
her pension for two months. A single parent sent her savings of £50.
Frontline
News described
how Pilger won an International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences award
for his 1979 film Year Zero: The Silent Death Of Cambodia, which
revealed the extent of the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities.
Screened
in 50 countries and seen by 150 million viewers, Year Zero was credited with raising more than $45 million in
unsolicited aid for Cambodia, which helped rescue normal life: it restored a
clean water supply in Phnom Penh, stocked hospitals and schools, supported
orphanages and reopened a desperately needed clothing factory, allowing people
to discard the black uniforms the Khmer Rouge had forced them to wear.
Year Zero
won many awards. Pilger himself won the 1980 United Nations Media Peace Prize
for ‘having done so much to ease the
suffering of the Cambodian people’.
Pilger
made a total of five documentaries on Cambodia. Their later films reported on
the American and British governments' back-door support for the exiled Khmer
Rouge. In 2008, the former SAS soldier Chris Ryan, then a bestselling author,
lamented in a newspaper interview that
when John Pilger, the foreign correspondent,
discovered we were training the Khmer Rouge in the Far East [we] were sent home. [Year
Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia]
John Pilger - Stealing A Nation - Diego Garcia (Chago´s
Island) [HD]
Pilger
opposed the hypocrisy and deceit of US and British imperialism. No more obvious
a case was there than the islanders of Diego Garcia. In Stealing A Nation -
Diego Garcia (Chago´s Island) in 2000 Pilger described how
‘there are
times when one tragedy one crime tells us how a whole system works behind its
democratic facade and helps us understand how much of the world is run for the
benefit of the powerful and how governments often justify their actions with
lies.’
Pilger
described
how a government that called itself civilised
‘tricked
and expelled its most vulnerable citizens so that it could give their homeland
to a foreign power for a military base.’
Pilger
was referring to how Chagos Island was handed over the United States behind the
backs of the islanders.
‘In Death of a Nation: The East Timor Conspiracy’
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One of Pilger’s most important films in terms of the
impact it had was his 1994 film ‘In Death of a Nation: The East
Timor Conspiracy’. Portugal decolonised in 1974. Independence was declared by Fretilin on 28
November 1975 and the Indonesian military invaded East Timor on 7 December 1975
and did not leave till 1999.
The
Indonesian government subjected the people of East Timor to routine and
systematic torture, sexual slavery, extrajudicial executions, massacres, and
deliberate starvation
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In
1996 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to two men from East Timor, Carlos Filipe
Ximenes Belo and José Ramos-Horta,
for their ongoing efforts to end the occupation. In 1999 a referendum resulted
in an overwhelming majority in favour of independence.
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Indonesia’s
invasion had been supported by the US and Australia. Once again the US, whilst
preaching freedom support dictatorship. Australia has as is clear with the Aukus
Pact, been the US’s main ally in the Pacific and a local imperialist power
in its own right.
The First Australians Fight Back - John Pilger - The Secret
Country – 1985
It
isn’t surprising, given that Pilger was Australian, that he was particularly
concerned with the question of the Aboriginal people.
The
First
Australians Fight Back Pilger described
how
As children, we were given to understand that we
were merely innocent bystanders to the slow and natural death of an ancient
people, the First Australians, rather than the inheritors of a history every
bit as rapacious as that of the United States, Latin America, Africa.
John Pilger - The Last Dream - Secrets 1988
In
the Last Dream Pilger returned to Australia to make a special, three-part
documentary, The Last Dream, screened at the time of the country’s bicentenary
in 1988. Reflecting on 200 years of White Australia, it is an antidote to the
celebrations that followed.
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Gough Whitlam - Australian Prime Minister Overthrown in a CIA/British Coup
Secrets
was the second of the trilogy and Pilger focused
on the treatment of the Aborigines. Pilger remarks that:
This film is
about another Australia, an Australia behind the beer-can images and well-worn
stereotypes, a place of secrets. The story of my country has been, and remains,
an epic cover-up.
Highlighting
Aboriginal deaths in police custody, he noted that Australia has the highest
rate of imprisonment for black people in the world and likens film of the
funeral of a black who died from head injuries while being held by police to
scenes in the South African township of Soweto.
Breaking the Silence : Truth and Lies in the War on Terror
(2003) - John Pilger
In
his 2003 film Breaking
the Silence : Truth and Lies in the War on Terror Pilger describes
the lies and falsehoods that preceded the invasion of Afghanistan. Tony Blair
promised that:
To the Afghan
people, we make this commitment. We will not walk away... If the Taliban regime
changes, we will work with you to make sure its successor is one that is
broadbased, that unites all ethnic groups and offers some way out of the
poverty that is your miserable existence.
George Bush had said a few days earlier:
The oppressed
people of Afghanistan
will know the generosity of America and its allies. As we strike military
targets, we will also drop food, medicine and supplies to the starving and
suffering men and women and children of Afghanistan. The US is a friend of the
Afghan people.
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Almost every word they spoke was a lie as we can see with Biden’s scuttle
from Afghanistan but they prepared the way for the conquest of both Afghanistan
and Iraq. It was also the start of the ‘War
on Terror’ which was a war against Muslims at home and state sponsored
terrorism abroad. Pilger described Kabul as
a
glimpse of Dresden post-1945, with contours of rubble rather than streets,
where people live in collapsed buildings, like earthquake victims waiting for
rescue. They have no light and heat; their apocalyptic fires burn through the
night. Hardly a wall stands that does not bear the pock-marks of almost every
calibre of weapon. Cars lie upended at roundabouts. Power poles built for a modern
fleet of trolley buses are twisted like paperclips. The buses are stacked on
top of each other, reminiscent of the pyramids of machines erected by the Khmer
Rouge to mark Year Zero.
It could be Gaza today that Pilger was describing.
John Pilger Documentary - The Coming War on China
The
Coming
War on China was completed in the month Trump
was elected President. The film investigated
the manufacture of a ‘threat’ and the beckoning of a nuclear confrontation and
tells how when the US decided that China was a threat to its
imperial dominance, two-thirds of US naval forces were transferred to Asia and
the Pacific. This was the ‘pivot to Asia', announced by Obama in 2011.
Seldom
referred to in the Western media, 400 American bases surround China with ships,
missiles and troops, in an arc that extends from Australia north through the
Pacific to Japan, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India.
Chapter 1
is set in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, which the US took over as a UN
‘trust territory’ in 1945 with an obligation to ‘protect the population’s health and wellbeing’. From 1946 to 1958,
the US exploded the equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb every day in the islands,
contaminating its people and environment.
Filmed on
irradiated Bikini Atoll, which cannot be safely inhabited today, perhaps ever,
Pilger described the testing in 1954 of the world's first hydrogen bomb,
codenamed Bravo, which vaporised an entire island. The inhabitants had been
moved to a nearby atoll, Rongelap, where the ‘unexpected’ fallout endowed them
with multiple cancers.
The film
is a portrayal of US imperialism in all its ugliness. An ugliness that the BBC
is dedicated to hiding.
Julian Assange in conversation with John Pilger
When
Julian Assange and WikiLeaks could win readers and prizes for the Guardian, the NYT and other 'papers of record', he was celebrated.
When the
dark state objected and demanded the destruction of hard drives and the
assassination of Julian's character, he was made a public enemy. Vice President
Biden called him a 'hi-tech terrorist'.
Hillary Clinton asked, 'Can't we just
drone this guy?'
The
ensuing campaign of abuse and vilification against Assange - the UN Rapporteur
on Torture called it 'mobbing' --
brought the liberal press to its lowest ebb. Pilger called them Vichy journalists.
This
was a 68-minute interview with Julian Assange, recorded during the filming of
John Pilger’s THE WAR YOU
DON’T SEE. We owe it to Pilger to ensure that Assange is freed from
Belmarsh prison.
Governments and Media roles in War Propaganda | THE WAR YOU
DON'T SEE |
In The War You Don't See, Pilger
returned to the subject of war reporting and its role in the making
of wars. This ‘drum beat’ was the theme of Pilger's 1983 documentary, a history
of war journalism from the Crimea in the 19th century (‘the last British war
without censorship’) to Margaret Thatcher's Falklands War in 1982.
The War You Don’t See
analyses propaganda as a weapon in Iraq and Afghanistan. The title refers to
censorship by omission – ‘the most
virulent form of censorship,’ and the collusion of journalists in nominally
free societies such as Britain and the United States.
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The film
begins with shocking footage from Iraq in 2007. A US Apache gunship opens fire
on a Baghdad street, killing in cold blood two Reuter journalists, along with civilians.
There is no provocation – the victims are unarmed. One of the Apache crew
comments ‘Nice’ as he murders people
at a safe distance. Titled ‘Collateral Murder’, the video was
leaked to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning.
‘Selling’
the 2003 invasion of Iraq is the centrepiece of Pilger's film. The news media
is exposed as a source of illusions, such as a non-existent link between Saddam
Hussein and the attacks of 9/11. A CIA witness says the primary aim of
intelligence supplied by the Pentagon is to manipulate public opinion.
The New Rulers of
the World (2001)
In The
New Rulers of the Worldin July 2001 Pilger explained
that
“A small
group of powerful individuals are now richer than most of the population of
Africa. Just 200 giant corporations dominate a quarter of the world’s economic
activity... The famous brands of almost everything from running shoes to baby
clothes are now made in very poor countries with cheap labour, at times
bordering on a form of slave labour.”
Globalisation
had become a topical subject by the time The New Rulers of the World was
screened. More than a million people opposed to the increasing gap between rich
and poor had staged a series of anti-capitalist demonstrations.
John
Pilger’s documentary brought together several themes that run throughout his
work – the way in which superpowers use small countries as pawns in their
global strategies, the courting of dictators by the West to open the doors to
valuable resources and the exploitation of workers to provide riches in which
they do not share.
The film
puts the story of multinationals’ global domination into a political context
and demonstrates how the West has increased its stranglehold on poor countries
by using the might of the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organisation to
control their economies.
Utopia
Utopia
was Pilger’s fourth film about the Aborigines. Released in 2013 Utopia broke
what amounted to a national silence about the brutalising of Indigenous people.
New
footage is juxtaposed with that of his earlier films. The point was made that
little has changed for many of those excluded from white Australia's wealth,
regardless of an official apology for 'wrongs
past and present'.
The material
comfort of Whites contrasted with the First Australians who died from
Dickensian diseases in their 40s and were imprisoned at a rate six times that
of blacks in apartheid South Africa. Western Australia, the richest state had
the highest incarceration rate of juveniles, mainly Indigenous, in the world.
Pilger
takes a journey from million-dollar properties in Sydney and Canberra to the
ironically named Northern Territory region of Utopia, where communities are
without basic services, such as fresh running water. In Darwin, he shows
shocking footage of police routinely mistreating a seriously ill Aboriginal man
who is left to die in a cell, his cries for help unheeded.
A former
prisons minister describes 'racking and stacking' Aboriginal prisoners. A shadow
Labor Party minister becomes abusive when Pilger asks him why, after 30 years
in Parliament, he has not alleviated the poverty of his black constituents.
Utopia also revealed a new ‘stolen generation’ of children taken from their
mothers.
Thalidomide 1974; The 98 We Forgot
Thalidomide:
The Ninety-Eight We Forgot, his 1974 programme for ITV,
helped win compensation for children who suffered birth defects when expectant
mothers took the drug. He went on to have his own half-hour documentary series
on ITV from 1974 until 1977.
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‘This is a war of propaganda’: John Pilger on Ukraine and
Assange |
In Silencing
the Lambs — How Propaganda Works Pilger told how in the 1970s he met Leni Riefenstahl, whose films glorified
the Nazis. She told him that the “patriotic
messages” of her films were dependent not on “orders from above” but on what she called the “submissive void” of the German public.
Did that include the liberal, educated
bourgeoisie? he asked. “Yes, especially them,” she said. Pilger
noted that ‘I think of this as I look
around at the propaganda now consuming Western societies.’
Pilger
described how in
his lifetime, the USA has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50
governments. It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries. It has
dropped bombs on the people of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenceless.
It has attempted to murder the leaders of 50 countries. It has fought to suppress liberation
movements in 20 countries.
The extent and scale of this carnage is largely
unreported and those responsible continue to dominate Anglo-American political
life.
Pilger described how his friend, Harold Pinter, a
Jewish anti-Zionist, in the years before he died in 2008, made two extraordinary
speeches, which broke a silence. “U.S.
foreign policy,” he said, is “best
defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in.’
In accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature,
Pinter said:
“The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant,
vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You
have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of
power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a
brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
Pilger described how he asked Pinter if the
“hypnosis” he referred to was the “submissive void” described by Leni
Riefenstahl.
It’s the same.It
means the brainwashing is so thorough we are programmed to swallow a pack of
lies. If we don’t recognise propaganda, we may accept it as normal and believe
it. That’s the submissive void.”
Pilger described
the news from the war in Ukraine as not news, but a one-sided litany of
jingoism, distortion, omission. Pilger described how he had never known such
blanket propaganda.
In February 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine as a
response to almost eight years of killing and destruction in the
Russian-speaking region of Donbass on their border.
In 2014, the United States had sponsored a coup
in Kiev that got rid of Ukraine’s democratically elected, Russian-friendly
president and installed a successor whom the Americans made clear was their
man.
In recent years US “defender” missiles have been installed in
eastern Europe, Poland, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, accompanied by false
assurances by James Baker’s to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in February 1990
that NATO would never expand beyond Germany.
NATO on Hitler’s Borderline
Ukraine is the frontline. NATO has reached the borderland
through which Hitler’s army stormed in 1941, leaving more than 23m dead in the
Soviet Union. Last December, Russia proposed a far-reaching security plan for
Europe. This was dismissed, derided or suppressed in the Western media. Who
read its step-by-step proposals?
The history, the lies, the peace proposals, the solemn
agreements on Donbass at Minsk counted for nothing.
ITV
Report on Hostility of Mariupul’s population to the Ukrainian Army
Pilger
asked when will writers stand up, as they did against the rise of fascism in
the 1930s? When will film-makers stand up, as they did against the Cold War in
the 1940s? When will satirists stand up, as they did a generation ago? (This
is taken from an edited version of an address to the Trondheim World
Festival, Norway, 6.9.22.)
The Guardian and Julian Assange
It is no surprise that the Guardian
passed over its relationship with Assange in one sentence. Pilger had been a
bitter critic of the paper. Pilger wrote
about how it had been open season on Assange for more than a decade.
‘In
2011, The Guardian exploited Julian's work as if it was its own, collected
journalism prizes and Hollywood deals, then turned on its source.
In a Guardian book by David Leigh and Luke Harding, Assange is quoted as
saying during a dinner in a London restaurant that he didn't care if informants
named in the leaks were harmed.
Neither Harding nor Leigh were at the dinner. John Goetz, an
investigations reporter with Der Spiegel,
actually was at the dinner and testified that Assange said nothing of the kind.
Lecturing a group of City University students, David Leigh mocked the
very idea that "Julian Assange will
end up in an orange jumpsuit". His fears were an exaggeration, it was
paranoia he sneered. Edward Snowden later revealed that Assange was on a "manhunt timeline".
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Another despicable Guardian journalist was James Ball who wrote
‘The
only barrier to Julian Assange leaving Ecuador’s embassy is pride. The
WikiLeaks founder is unlikely to face prosecution in the US...’
Luke Harding was outside the Ecuadorean embassy on the
evening Julian sought asylum. Standing with a police line he gloated "Scotland Yard may well have the last
laugh."
The
campaign was relentless. Guardian columnists scraped the barrel. "He really is the most massive
turd," wrote Suzanne Moore of a man she had never met. Suzanne Moore, a
right-wing feminist commented
in the New Statesman after the arrest:
‘O frabjous
day! We are all bored out of our minds with Brexit when a demented looking
gnome is pulled out of the Ecuadorian embassy by the secret police of the deep
state. Or “the met” as normal people call them.’
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The Guardian’s Smear Article Attacking Assange – It was Totally Without Foundation
Pilger wrote
that Julian Assange’s only crime was revealing government crimes and lies and
so performed one of the great public services of his lifetime. Pilger wrote
in 2020 how a decade previously
the
Guardian exploited Assange's work, claimed its profit and prizes as well as a
lucrative Hollywood deal, then turned on him with venom. Throughout the Old
Bailey trial, two names have been cited by the prosecution, the Guardian's
David Leigh, now retired as 'investigations editor' and Luke Harding, the
Russiaphobe and author of a fictional Guardian 'scoop' that claimed Trump
adviser Paul Manafort and a group of Russians visited Assange in the Ecuadorean
embassy. This never happened, and the Guardian has yet to apologise.
Pilger spoke
of
‘the Judases on the Guardian who flirted with Julian, exploited his landmark
work, made their pile then betrayed him, have nothing to fear. They are safe
because they are needed. (my emphasis)
Pilger, in JULIAN
ASSANGE MUST BE FREED, NOT BETRAYED
told how in 2011, David Leigh told journalism students at City University that
Assange was "quite deranged".
When a student asked why, Leigh replied, "Because
he doesn't understand the parameters of conventional journalism".
Pilger commented that it was
precisely
because he did understand that the "parameters" of the media often
shielded vested and political interests and had nothing to do with transparency
that the idea of WikiLeaks was so appealing to many people, especially the
young, rightly cynical about the so-called "mainstream".
A Guardian
editorial
on Assange’s extradition said
It is not a question of how wise
Mr. Assange is, still less how likable. It's not about his character, nor his
judgement. It's a matter of press freedom and the public's right to know.
Pilger
commented in THE
LIES ABOUT ASSANGE MUST STOP NOW that
what the
Guardian is trying to do is separate Assange from his landmark achievements,
which have both profited the Guardian and exposed its own vulnerability, along
with its propensity to suck up to rapacious power and smear those who reveal
its double standards.
Kevin
Lygo, managing director of media and entertainment at ITV described
Pilger as “a giant of campaigning
journalism” who offered viewers a level of analysis and opinion that was
rare in mainstream television.
He had a clear, distinctive
editorial voice which he used to great effect throughout his distinguished
filmmaking career. His documentaries were engaging, challenging, and always
very watchable.
He eschewed comfortable
consensus and instead offered a radical, alternative approach on current
affairs and a platform for dissenting voices over 50 years,” he added.
Tony Greenstein
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