John Pilger, dissident.

Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 06 June 2008 00:12.

“During the Cold War, a group of Russian journalists toured the United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by their hosts for their impressions. “I have to tell you,” said their spokesman, “that we were astonished to find, after reading all the newspapers and watching TV, that all the opinions on all the vital issues were, by and large, the same. To get that result in our country we imprison people. We tear out their fingernails. Here, you don’t have that. What’s the secret? How do you do it?”

... During the 1970s, I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a Stalinist dictatorship. I interviewed members of the dissident group, Charter 77. One of them, the novelist Zdener Urbanek, told me, “We are more fortunate than you in the West, in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and watch on television, nothing of the official truth. unlike you, we have learned to read between the lines of the media. unlike you, we know that that real truth is always subversive.” By subversive, he meant that truth comes from the ground up, almost never from the top down.

John Pilger explaining the power of journalism in the West to an audience at Columbia University in April 2006.

Pilger, now 68, has devoted his entire journalistic life to speaking for the (mostly Third World) exploited, degraded or slaughtered victims of the machinery of global power. The precise targets of his withering fire are the Western governments, the Western political system, his so often supine fellow journalists and, most of all, the rapine corporate and financial elites.

The [US presidential candidates] are as one in their support for America’s true deity, its corporate oligarchs. Despite claiming that his campaign wealth comes from small individual donors, Obama is backed by the biggest Wall Street firms: Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, J P Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, as well as the huge hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. “Seven of the Obama campaign’s top 14 donors,” wrote the investigator Pam Martens, “consisted of officers and employees of the same Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated in originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages.”

A report by United for a Fair Economy, a non-profit group, estimates the total loss to poor Americans of colour who took out sub-prime loans as being between $164bn and $213bn: the greatest loss of wealth ever recorded for people of colour in the United States. “Washington lobbyists haven t funded my campaign,” said Obama in January, They won’t run my White House and they will not drown out the voices of working Americans when I am president.” According to files held by the Centre for Responsive Politics, the top five contributors to the Obama campaign are registered corporate lobbyists.

What is Obama’s attraction to big business? Precisely the same as Robert Kennedy’s. By offering a new, young and apparently progressive face of the Democratic Party, with the bonus of being a member of the black elite, he can blunt and divert real opposition. That was Colin Powell’s role as Bush s secretary of state. An Obama victory will bring intense pressure on the US anti-war and social justice movements to accept a Democratic administration for all its faults. If that happens, domestic resistance to rapacious America will fall silent.

This is good stuff, from an essay published last week in the New Statesman.

Of course, Pilger cannot process the case for Western survivalism. He stands politically, I think, with the global justice movement, which is an outcrop of the post-communist left. But the older I get the more I realise that dissonance is not a good enough reason to accept the role allotted to us of endlessly quarrelling with the left. There is no left and right in the harsh light of day. There is plutocracy and there is victimhood everywhere that plutocrats reign. There is knowledge and there is ignorance. There is sleep and there is waking. There is the capacity to discriminate human values and there is the absence of it (it’s absent in the left).

In so far as the left leaves us alone to state and restate our own values and to pursue our own cause, we should not quarrel with it for desiring to tend to the poor in the Third World. Ultimately, both our concerns and theirs are just, and both flow from the same hearth of evil.

That’s the lesson I take from reading Pilger’s largely very good material.

Tags: Journalism

Comments:

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Fri, 06 Jun 2008 01:27 | #

“There is no left and right in the harsh light of day. There is plutocracy and there is victimhood everywhere that plutocrats reign. There is knowledge and there is ignorance. There is sleep and there is waking. There is the capacity to discriminate human values and there is the absence of it”

Exactly. There’s no right or left.

For me, there are only two things in politics, normalness and degenerateness: if you favor the ascendancy of normalness over degenerateness for society you’re a political “Normal” or de facto member of the “Normal Party,” and if you favor the ascendancy of degenerateness over normalness for society you’re a political “Degenerate,” or de facto member of the “Degenerate Party.” I use “left” and “right” when convention requires it for the purpose of communication.

Societal normalness is characterized by a predominance of racial/ethnocultural homogeneity (which, in turn, is what normal socialism flows from). That’s part of the good stuff. You generally don’t want your enemies to have the good stuff so (fill in the blank) ______ try to take that away from us and, because they’re strong and they blindside us, and we’re kinda dumb, they succeed. Are they acting alone? No, no more than Cortez was when he conquered the Aztecs — he had allies, however he got them, and so do they (... however they got them ...) — but that doesn’t mean someone else conquered Mexico.

Cortez did.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Fri, 06 Jun 2008 01:48 | #

In the log entry’s excerpt Pilger gives the Wall Street firms all those Obama string-pullers work for but not ... their ethnic identities ...

Is ethnic identity relevant in politics? Does two plus two equal four? Is water wet?

Does the Wall Street firm you work for (or part-own, as the case may be in this instance) somehow trump your acting politically in accord with your ethnic interests as you “feel” them? Why would it? And even if it somehow does for some, it doesn’t take many individuals acting in what they feel is their ethnic interest to have a huge effect swaying things. It took one (fill in the blank) _____ making one donation of a hundred million dollars to get the Sierra Club, previously for many decades the country’s chief conservation organization, to totally abandon conservation as a goal, as it pertained to open borders. One man. Making one single contribution. (Oh yes, and that man was (fill in the blank) ______ .)

Posted by Beardie-Weirdie on Fri, 06 Jun 2008 13:15 | #

I cannot agree.
Basically Pilger is just another Marxist, blinkered, old lefty.
Yes, what he says about Obama and the coroprate interests is all true, but at the fundamental level (ie the need to establish White etno-states predicated on ethnic genetic interest - if you excuse me for controversy, the flawed analogue is with the National Socialist movement of Germany post 1918), you will find Pilger to be the bitterest, hardest most uncomprimising enemy - a man who would willingly slaughter Nationalist Whites by the million without turning a hair, and a man who would KILL and die for mollycoddling the ‘poor ethnics’ - that’s the caliber of cunt we are dealing with here - he’s np friend of ours.

Just watch some of his tear jerking lefty bollocks broadcast on ITV (when they actually showed good programmes) about Apartheid South Africa) 20-30 years ago.

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:36 | #

I take your point. I don’t want to be Pilger’s pal. But I don’t want to waste my time obediently fighting him, and missing the confluence of interests which definitely exists.

Posted by Bill on Fri, 06 Jun 2008 23:13 | #

Thanks GW

Hat tip to Fred for triggering something I have been thinking about for a long time.

It is always feels good to me, to have half understandings, (which loom into focus only to recede into hazy hue) to be presented and distilled in a manner in which my mind can grasp.

At the beginning of the millennium, en route to my awakening, I could not help but notice certain recurring words running through the RR narrative. These oft-recurring words soon formed a constant theme, which over time became a akin to a jungle drumbeat; this theme can be encapsulated into three words, Holocaust, Hitler and Sex. I found this not only intriguing but also quite disturbing, for what was this strange coded message trying to tell me?

Holocaust, Hitler, why? That was over 60 years ago, history in fact, what have these things got to do with anything? - It’s over and done with.

And what about this obsession with all things sexual, on television, in school education, Hollywood films and widespread pornography everywhere, being beamed in from G-d knows where – what the heck is going on here?

I had no answers so I started my quest on the Internet, (Why immigration?) there was no mistaking that the big three (Holocaust, Hitler and sex) ran through the conversation like a stick of Blackpool Rock – I became curiouser and curiouser?

As time went on, (the Google search meter registering in its thousands,) a picture was beginning to emerge, I soon deduced the Holocaust, Hitler and Sex were code and being used as a tool to inculcate guilt into the mind of the white British nation, not only were they a tool, but also a stick with which to beat us over the head.

The Holocaust and Hitler bit I could follow - in a perverse sort of way, but the Sex part took some figuring out, in fact I’m still not 100% sure – so let me try and explain.

Sex take 1. (Shorthand) Our opponents reckon European whites are hung up on sex and need liberating from this unnatural state, and in doing so, (liberating) dismantles the ties of group cohesion, thus making conditions ripe for the deconstruction of British (Western) culture.

Sex take II. Throughout my awakening journey, if asked, what was one of the most notable recurring themes (meme?) running throughout the RR narrative? With little hesitation, my reply would be sex!

Using old labels, it comes across to me that sex registers far higher on the Richter scale of sex as important in life of the Left than it does the Right, to the extent that, (to me) the Left are all consuming paranoid about sex. The Left’s emphasise placed upon degenerateness (Fred’s term) is self evident, again, to me, it is relentless and constitutes a greater part in their meaning of life, of course, degenerateness is reviled by normalness (Fred) in large measure - and never the twain shall meet.

I am poised now to enter unknown territory – so please bear with me. IMO, The state of difference between normalness and degenerateness is irreconcilable, and always has been, for it is this huge divide that defines Left and Right per se, for all else stems from these sexual definitions. For the Right, normalness is not a matter of opinion or choice but the true path of nature, however, for the Left, it is not a matter of truth (for there are no moral absolutes) but is matter of opinion. (or choice) Postmodernism is so convenient for these people.

In other words, I’m saying it is genetic hard wiring at birth that defines or decides what we are, normalness or otherwise, it must be, for what else could it be? How do we account for this unbridgeable divide between normalness and degenerateness? Is it determined by genetics etc? Is it acquired? Is it a life style choice?

This divide will not go away for it is bound up in human nature. The Left’s solution is to force feed degenerateness upon the normal, which in turn, causes untold misery to millions. Another disturbing feature I have noticed (more recently) is reportage of sexual engineering, this is so scary to me it almost defies discussion, I’ve just posted something I found today in the category ‘Liberalism’s slippery slope.’

In another recent post, I asked if there had been any studies in this sphere of political orientation and sexuality – but there was no response so I guess the answer is no.

Posted by Frank McGuckin on Sat, 07 Jun 2008 13:04 | #

I expect American Negros to rally around the half-breed Obama. Serious criticism of his foriegn policy will be met with charges of racism.

Posted by Lurker (Mk II) on Sat, 07 Jun 2008 14:45 | #

Justin Raimondo recants his earlier queerish passion for Barack. He concludes that the Magic Negro is on board for the Bush/Cheney parting shot against Iran, after seeing Obama’s supine performance at AIPAC:

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12944

Posted by Bill on Tue, 10 Jun 2008 11:24 | #

The personal becomes political

“So it is not political polarisation but disputes about different ‘ways of life’ that fuel the blue/red divide. Some even believe that the identities of the blues and the reds are frozen and unchangeable. A report titled The Separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Supporters, produced by a group of researchers at the University of Maryland, argued that Bush supporters live in a make-believe world while their opponents inhabit the real world (1). Increasingly, people’s political attitudes are reduced to the level of personality. An individual’s upbringing, psychology and character are discussed as key factors in forming their political worldview. Politics becomes psychologised.”

Frank Furedi

Barack Obama and the politicisation of lifestyle - Spiked Magazine Mon. 9th. June 2008

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5301/

Posted by Paul Urbanek on Fri, 14 May 2010 04:02 | #

Pilger is such a terrific journalist that he couldn’t even manage to get the name of my Uncle, ZDENEK Urbanek, right.