Distant Voices Read online

  CONTENTS

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by John Pilger

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Preface by Martha Gellhorn

  Introduction

  I: INVISIBLE BRITAIN

  The man with no name

  Absolutely no excuse

  Race and pinstripes

  Casualty ward

  The miners

  Waiting for Armageddon

  II: DISTANT VOICES OF DISSENT

  Organised forgetting

  Information is power

  A betrayal of purpose

  A code for charlatans

  The correct ideas

  III: THE QUIET DEATH OF THE LABOUR PARTY

  A paler shade of blue

  The witchhunters

  Laughing nine times

  The coup

  The Italian factor

  IV: MYTHMAKERS OF THE GULF WAR

  Sins of omission

  Video nasties

  Salesman Hurd

  Turkey shoots

  New Age imperialism

  A bloodfest

  Liberal triumphalism

  Normality is resumed

  Who killed the Kurds?

  Another reality

  How the world was won over

  What is Parliament for?

  V: WAR BY OTHER MEANS

  The new propaganda

  The war against democracy

  The silent war

  Bangkok lament

  The betrayal of Bosnia

  Operation Restore Hope

  VI: EAST TIMOR

  Born in tears

  Cleaning the field

  A land of crosses

  Arms for the generals

  VII: TRIBUTES

  Elsie and Claude

  Curt Gunther

  Noam Chomsky

  Oliver Stone

  Farzad Bazoft

  John Merritt

  Baby Hermes

  VIII: ON THE ROAD

  Two Russias

  Terminator in bifocals

  The magic of Disney

  Have a nice war

  The secret valley

  IX: CAMBODIA

  Return to Year Zero

  Through the looking glass

  A Faustian pact

  King Sihanouk’s democracy

  X: UNDER THE VOLCANO

  A land of broken promises

  Nicaragua

  Children of Palestine

  The fire next time

  Lions of Judah

  XI: AUSTRALIA

  Down at Bondi

  Wild colonial boys

  In the heart of the country

  Notes

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Throughout his distinguished career as a journalist and film-maker, John Pilger has looked behind the ‘official’ versions of events to report the real stories of our time.

  The centrepiece of this new, expanded edition of his bestselling Distant Voices is Pilger’s reporting from East Timor, which he entered secretly in 1993 and where a third of the population has died as a result of Indonesia’s genocidal policies. This edition also contains more new material as well as all the original essays – from the myth-making of the Gulf War to the surreal pleasures of Disneyland. Breaking through the consensual silence, Pilger pays tribute to those dissenting voices we are seldom permitted to hear.

  About the Author

  John Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been a war correspondent, film-maker and playwright. Based in London, he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s highest award, that of Journalist of the Year, for his work in Vietnam and Cambodia. Among a number of other awards, he has been International Reporter of the Year and winner of the United Nations Association Media Peace Prize. For his broadcasting, he has won an American television Academy Award, an ‘Emmy’, and the Richard Dimbleby Award, given by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

  ALSO BY JOHN PILGER

  The Last Day

  Aftermath: The Struggle of Cambodia

  and Vietnam (with Anthony Barnett)

  The Outsiders

  (with Michael Coren)

  Heroes

  A Secret Country

  Hidden Agendas

  FOR JANE AND DAVID

  Distant Voices

  John Pilger

  PREFACE

  by Martha Gellhorn

  Punching through TV channels, I found myself watching a strange scene. A gang of literary lights was attacking a tall lanky sunburned young man with curare-tipped words. It was a very high-class panel book review programme. The young man looked bewildered but dignified. I had never heard of him, by name John Pilger, nor of his book, The Last Day. It was apparently his first book, the record of an historic event, the Retreat from the Embassy Roof, the suitably shameful end of a vilely shameful war. The literary lights, none of whom had attended that war (or probably any other), were really attacking John Pilger’s viewpoint, not his facts or his prose. They seemed to think the Vietnam War had been a good thing.

  The next day, I bought and read the book and wrote to the author, telling him how fine it was and that he should not pay the slightest attention to his critics. That was in 1975. They’ve been attacking him ever since. Which proves John’s continuous success. (‘Yeah,’ John might say, a unique drawled two-syllable sound that suggests he has been thinking it over calmly and almost agrees with you.)

  After my fan letter, John came to see me. He said that Hugh Cudlipp, then editor-in-chief of the Mirror (ah, the golden past), read my 1966 Vietnam articles in the Guardian, called him in, gave him the articles and said, that’s the story, go and get it. So began John’s long devotion to the people of Indo-China. I am always convinced that my writing is useless but it had done something very good if it got John to Vietnam. My 1966 articles appeared two years too early. I was repeatedly refused a visa to return to Vietnam. I had the painful honour of being the only journalist blacklisted out of that country and that war. Probably John did my work for me – though I must say I’d rather have been able to do it myself.

  John is a compulsive worker, compulsive but not frenzied. He has plenty of material; he will never come to the end of it. Basically, it seems to me, he has taken on the great theme of justice and injustice. The misuse of power against the powerless. The myopic, stupid cruelty of governments. The bullying and lies that shroud realpolitik, a mad game played at the top, which is a curse to real people.

  Conscience has made John a brave and invaluable witness to his time. In many circles, conscience is regarded as oafish; in periods of crisis, it is considered treasonable. During the Vietnam War, contempt for conscience produced the term ‘bleeding hearts’. (Mrs Thatcher’s ‘wet’ was of the same order of contempt.) It is tiring to own a conscience, and it does not endear the owner to our rulers. Not surprisingly, John opposed the use of force in the Gulf War, urging continued use of sanctions. Considering the miserable end of that war, with Saddam Hussein still firmly in place in Iraq, uncounted thousands of innocents dead, and millions uprooted, it looks as if his conscience was a first-rate guide.

  I have not followed all of John’s work; there is too much of it. More than 30 documentary films, five books, hundreds of thousands of words of reporting. But I do not forget the documentaries I have seen and probably no one who saw it will ever forget the great film Year Zero, made with David Munro, that showed the world what Pol Pot had done to the Cambodian people. Like John, I think that Nixon and Kissinger were father and mother to Pol Pot and that successive US governments, tirelessly punishing Vietnam for having w
on that war, have extended their vengeance to the Cambodians. John never hesitates to blame the powerful in the clearest language; they never fail to react with fury.

  John’s range is wide. He has done noble service to the Aborigines of Australia, and condemned his own government in the process. He made a film, dangerously and secretly, on the Charter 77 members in Czechoslovakia. He went to Japan and discovered the poor.

  Whoever thought of Japanese as being poor? (To me, those black-clad hordes pouring out of bullet trains in Tokyo always looked like African soldier ants, which move in packed narrow streams and eat their way through everything, dead or alive.) Suddenly, like a revelation, the Japanese became human: a gently smiling giant, John bent to listen to tiny, wrinkled old people, and it turns out that Japanese can be poor, neglected and out of it, in rich Japan, as anywhere else. Steadily, John documents and proclaims the official lies that we are told and that most people accept or don’t bother to think about. He is a terrible nuisance to Authority.

  We agree on every political subject except Israel and the Palestinians. Thinking it over, I believe this has to do with age. John was born in October 1939, an infant in Australia during the Second World War. He was eight years old when the Jews of Palestine, who had accepted the UN Partition Plan, were forced to fight practically with their hands to survive the first combined Arab onslaught and declared their state. Perhaps nobody can understand Israel who does not remember the Second World War and how and why the nation came into being. Since we cannot change each other’s views, John and I declare a truce, for I fear the Arab-Israel problem will not be solved in my lifetime.

  It is lovely and comforting to have a friend who is as angry about the state of the world as you are yourself. It means you can give it a rest, have some drinks, go to the movies, talk about surfing and snorkelling – our different favourite occupations – make each other laugh. All the fame and fuss about John have not affected him. Off screen and off print, he is a modest, easy, somewhat shy man. He takes his work very seriously, but not himself. And that is, in itself, a remarkable quality.

  Some years ago, John made an unnoted documentary series called The Outsiders. He interviewed six or seven people, among them myself, dragooned by friendship into what I least like doing. I never saw the finished product and remember the names of only two of my fellow participants. I had never thought of myself as an outsider or an insider: the question did not arise. I wonder if Helen Suzman, at home in her own country saying ‘No’, thought of herself as an outsider. Or did Wilfred Burchett, an Australian, who said ‘No’ so much that the Australian Government peevishly took away his passport, think of himself that way?

  It seems to me that John was simply interviewing people who had their own opinions and did their own work, whatever it was, as they saw fit. At most they could be called dissenters, but even that is rather grand, since we are used to dissenters paying with their life or liberty for their unpopular ideas. It occurred to me that this odd label had to do with the peculiar Aussie–Brit relationship and the way they regard each other. And, as a result, John saw himself as an outsider.

  Of course he is not. He belongs to an old and unending worldwide company, the men and women of conscience. Some are as famous as Tom Paine and Wilberforce, some as unknown as a tiny group calling itself Grandmothers Against the Bomb, in an obscure small western American town, who have gone cheerfully to jail for their protests. There have always been such people and always will be. If they win, it is slowly; but they never entirely lose. To my mind, they are the blessed proof of the dignity of man. John has an assured place among them. I’d say he is a charter member for his generation.

  July 12, 1991

  INTRODUCTION

  THIS BOOK SETS out to offer a different way of seeing events of our day. I have tried to rescue from media oblivion uncomfortable facts which may serve as antidotes to the official truth; and in so doing, I hope to have given support to those ‘distant voices’ who understand how vital, yet fragile is the link between the right of people to know and to be heard, and the exercise of liberty and political democracy. This book is a tribute to them.

  Written originally as essays for the New Statesman and Society, and the Guardian and the Independent, the collection draws on my previous books, notably Heroes,1 Indeed, in some respects it is an extension of Heroes. I have rewritten and combined many of the pieces, adding new material as the dates at the end of each chapter indicate. This is especially true of the four long Cambodia chapters, which grew out of work published over a dozen years. Indeed, in this completely revised edition there is a great deal that is new, notably the chapters on East Timor, which formed the basis for my documentary film, Death of a Nation, broadcast in 1994.

  I have used a range of styles, which I hope readers will regard as a strength. There are pieces written in response to unfolding events, as in the Gulf War, which have a contemporary feel rather than a linear narrative, and more reflective chapters such as those on East Timor, Cambodia and Australia. And there are pieces simply about people, which I enjoy writing, as in the opening chapters of ‘Invisible Britain’ and later, in ‘Terminator in Bifocals’. There is also a shamelessly sentimental tribute to my typewriter, ‘Baby Hermes’, still going after 30 years and numerous close calls.

  The title Distant Voices is taken from an essay I wrote in the wake of the disintegration of communist power in Eastern Europe and which argued that Western triumphalism and the ‘new world order’ had brought a renewed threat to many freedoms, such as diversity of expression.2 The media, the arena in which I work, has been both a major victim of and a collaborator in the narrowing of information and ideas, although it is misrepresented as the very opposite. That’s why the majority of these essays are about or touch upon the role of the media in controlling the way we see and in confining and isolating us in the present. This new power is perhaps best demonstrated in the section ‘Mythmakers of the Gulf War’.

  Long after the Gulf War, I remember vividly two surreal moments from television. The first was on the BBC’s arts programme The Late Show, which devoted an edition to foreign correspondents talking about their adventures in the Gulf.3 As each one spoke, the background filled with images from the war itself, mostly tanks and artillery and missiles flashing in the night. Then suddenly the scene changed to bulldozers at work; and the reporter’s monologue was overwhelmed by shocking pictures behind him. Driven by Allied soldiers, the bulldozers were pushing thousands of bodies into mass graves. Many of the bodies were crushed, as if they had been run over. The memory reached back to similar scenes at Belsen, Dachau and Auschwitz where newsreel cameras recorded bulldozers pushing thousands of bodies into open pits.

  To my knowledge the BBC’s subversive blink was the only time the British public was allowed to see the extent of the slaughter in the Gulf. Certainly there were news reports of the ‘turkey shoot’ on the Basra road; and the famous Observer photograph of a man burnt to a skeletal monster, upright in the cabin of his truck.4 But the dead generally were represented as looters, and the pathetic objects they had taken from Kuwait – toys, electric fans – were highlighted as evidence of their guilt. The crime of slaughtering people who were fleeing was passed off as an ‘unfortunate’ and ‘tragic’ postscript to a necessary war – a war in which precious few Allied lives were lost and Western technology had entertained the viewers at home. It had been both a good war and a clean war. That was the official truth.

  The second memorable moment was Clive James reviewing 1991, again on BBC Television. In awarding Saddam Hussein the ‘BBC’s Gardener’s World Award’ as ‘the person who’s done most to transform the appearance of our planet in 1991’, James made the war the joke of the year.5 No bulldozers were shown, no bodies piled in open pits.

  When these events next entered public consciousness, the process was complete: the unthinkable had been normalised. In May 1992 a coroner in Oxford handed down an ‘unlawful killing’ verdict on the deaths of nine British soldiers killed
by American ‘friendly fire’. Newspapers which had supported sending the troops to the Gulf and had colluded with the Ministry of Defence in obscuring the true nature of the war now attacked the government for ‘covering up the truth’ about the soldiers’ deaths.

  No irony was noted. Not a single reference was made to what the American writer Michael Albert has called ‘one of the more wanton, cowardly massacres in modern military history’, and which resulted in the deaths of as many as 200,000 men, women and children, none of them the subject of a British inquest or an international enquiry convened by the United Nations in whose name the slaughter was initiated. Most were almost certainly killed unlawfully: either by ‘anti-personnel’ weapons and ‘weapons of mass destruction’, whose legality has yet to be tested under the Geneva Convention; or by attacks on civilian centres, such as the RAF attack on the town of al-Nasiriyah; or while retreating and surrendering. Countless defenceless men were buried alive in the night beneath advancing American bulldozers, the same machines which were later used unlawfully to dump the dead in pits without respect for human identity and for the rights of their families to know the truth and to mourn.

  The fact that the war continues today against the children of Iraq is of no interest to the Western media. Iraq is no longer ‘a story’. There are more dramatic, more ‘relevant’ pictures to be had elsewhere. Thanks to a few – the voluntary aid agencies, the Harvard medical teams, Dr Eric Hoskins of the Gulf Peace Team, Victoria Brittain of the Guardian – careful readers will know that, as a direct result of American and British-led sanctions against Iraq, more than a million Iraqi children are seriously malnourished and more than 100,000 are seriously ill, and many of those are likely to die.6 Iraqi doctors are struggling with a disease not seen for many years, pica, which babies contract by eating dirt.7 In its latest study, the Harvard team describes Iraqi infants as ‘the most traumatised children of war ever described’.8 Like the slaughter that preceded it, the ‘unthinkable has been normalised’, as Edward S. Herman wrote in his fine essay, ‘The Banality of Evil’.