Pilger’s ‘truth’ was as a propagandist for terrorists, dictators
John Pilger, who died in London on December 30, loved to be described as a “courageous journalist,” and as someone “who spoke truth to power”. It was an image that was carefully cultivated by him, and by legions of people who believed what he wrote, while he vilified the governments of the US, the UK (where he resided for most of his life)and Australia, the country where he was born.
Yet in contrast with this mythical image, Pilger was in fact a man who spent most of his life telling lies for dictators in power. Even after his death few journalists were willing to admit this.
John Simpson, the BBC’s world affairs editor, said that although he disagreed with Pilger over the years, “I admired the force of his writing, even when I often didn’t support what he wrote, and he was always warm when we met”.
The Guardian assigned a film and television critic to write Pilger’s obituary. Instead of dealing with the extensive list of charges brought forward by reasonable critics of Pilger, Anthony Hayward ignored their details. Hayward’s only comment on the many charges was a non-sequitur: “The ferocity of right-wing criticism of his views indicated the effectiveness of his journalism.”
The Sydney Morning Herald’s Amy Ripley introduced her obituary with: “The crusading Australian journalist John Pilger, who died on December 30 aged 84, made it his lifetime’s work to speak truth to power and stand up for the vulnerable, marginalised and dispossessed, often in hidden, unfashionable corners of the world such as East Timor, Vietnam and Palestine.” Ripley’s words could have been ghostwritten by Pilger himself, were he not deceased. Later, in mentioning dissent during the David Dimbleby award ceremony for Pilger in 1991, Ripley never mentioned the substance of the criticism of his work.
Former ABC journalist Quentin Dempster wrote on X: “Pilger exposed atrocity, war crimes, abuse of power, dispossession, hypocrisy and dirty tricks around the world in a life of fearless truth telling. May he rest in peace.”
Broadcaster and ABC Late Night Live host Phillip Adams wrote: “Vale John Pilger. Friend of mine, of Julian Assange and of the truth. A sad end to a bad year.” Pilger? Friend of the truth?
Pilger was throughout his life, a devoted servant of the Vietnamese Communist Party. The main victims of this commitment were the people of Cambodia. During the terrible years of Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia, Pilger was not bothered to denounce the radical hyper-Maoist regime led by Pol Pot, because the Vietnamese communists did not do so.
It was only after the falling out between the two neighbouring regimes in December 1977, resulting in Vietnam invading Cambodia at the end of 1978, that Pilger became suddenly concerned about the mass killings and general tyranny of the regime led by Pol Pot. This resulted in Pilger producing a television documentary, Cambodia Year Zero, in 1979. The documentary was very successful, though most viewers could not discern its reflection of the Hanoi regime’s perspective.
Pilger’s task during the war from 1979 to 1989 was to spin the war as one between a liberating Vietnamese army and its Cambodian proxies on one side, and a rump Khmer Rouge backed by China and the West on the other.
In fact, the Chinese and the Western nations led by the US were only interested in creating a political solution that did not include Vietnamese control of Cambodia. The Western democracies wanted to see only a non-communist government in power, and dutifully began arming and training the non-communist resistance.
In order to subvert the plans of the West, Pilger was willing to lie in support of Hanoi. On different occasions he accused the US and the British SAS of arming and training the Khmer Rouge, when in fact they were arming and training non-communist forces. As a result, Pilger and Central Television were sued for libel – a case they lost and for which they were forced to pay considerable damages to the SAS agents whom Pilger defamed. Yet Pilger’s lies won him journalistic awards. For the next 30 years Pilger was an active supporter of the Hanoi-installed dictator, and unrepentant former Khmer Rouge, Hun Sen.
This was the pattern of Pilger’s journalismall over the world. Wherever there was a serious conflict between the Western democracies and foreign dictators, Pilger was spinning his narrative in support of the foreign dictators, and lying about the facts.
During the George W. Bush administration, Pilger stated in a column that he was saddened by the collapse of the Soviet Union. He saw Russian tyrant and mass murder Vladimir Putin as the honourable successor to the Soviet leaders. In a 2014 article for The Guardian, Pilger wrote that Putin was “the only leader to condemn the rise of fascism in 21st-century Europe”.
In 2018, when former Russian KGB operative Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were poisoned in Salisbury, England, by Russian military intelligence agents, Pilger claimed the allegations were bogus. He told the Putin-controlled Russia Today channel: “This is a carefully constructed drama as part of the propaganda campaign that has been building now for several years in order to justify the actions of NATO, Britain and the United States towards Russia. That’s a fact.”
In February 2022, Russia, unprovoked,launched an all-out invasion of Ukraine. Pilger rushed to support the aggressor and denigrate the victim. Yet this time there was some pushback from some of his followers. Pilger pulled back a little, given the intensity of criticism from people he thought were in his pocket. But he continued to spread Russian lies about Ukraine being controlled by neo-Nazis.
Over the years Pilger has also been an apologist for Islamist terrorism – first by al-Qa’ida in the US and London – and later a supporter of Iranian-sponsored terrorists in the Middle East. On October 8, 24 hours after Hamas invaded Israel and began a horrific massacre, Pilger tweeted: “The Palestinians are again fighting for their lives, refusing to live in the prison known as Gaza, controlled and policed by Israel with Palestinians killed and maimed, unreported, day after day. Now their resistance, to which they have a right, is called ‘unprovoked’.”
So Hamas according to Pilger had a right to massacre 1200 unarmed Jewish civilians – men, women and children. Hamas had a right to gang-rape Jewish women and teenage girls, before shooting them in the back of the head.
John Pilger was not a journalist in any meaningful sense of the word. Like his mentor, Wilfred Burchett, Pilger was a political hack and propagandist for some of the world’s most odious regimes. He brought the profession that he pretended to be a part of into disrepute.
Dr Stephen J. Morris is the author of Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia (Stanford University Press). He was a fellow of Harvard University’s Centre for International Affairs, Russian Research Centre and department of government. For 16 years he was a fellow at Johns Hopkins University school of advanced international studies. He has taught at the University of NSW, Boston University and the US Naval War College.
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