Breaking the Silence: The Films of John Pilger

For five decades, John Pilger's documentaries have been exposing injustices around the world and bringing to account those in power who make decisions that affect the lives of others, often in faraway countries. From his first film, The Quiet Mutiny, Pilger made waves, revealing the shocking truth about American troop rebellions in the Vietnam War. More recently, in the wake of September 11th, he has been a rare media voice in questioning the United States's foreign policy and its imperial ambitions.

Scenes of the starving in his landmark documentary Year Zero − The Silent Death of Cambodia, filmed in the aftermath of Pol Pot's genocide, helped to trigger $45 million in aid for that country. He has highlighted repression in Czechoslovakia, East Timor and Burma, the continuing Israeli occupation of Palestine and, with his first film for both television and the cinema, the attempts by small countries to carve out their own democracies, without interference from the United States. The British-based journalist has also subjected his own home country of Australia to affectionate but critical examinations over the years, culminating in his 2013 film Utopia.

His dedication to uncovering unpalatable truths and his disregard for traditional journalistic concepts of 'impartiality' and 'balance' have sometimes brought him into conflict with both the political and broadcasting establishments. In Breaking the Silence: The Films of John Pilger, Anthony Hayward traces Pilger's screen career, details the documentaries, their effects and controversies, and compares them with other factual output on TV and in the cinema.

Anthony Hayward is the author of Which Side Are You On? Ken Loach and His Films and the biographies Julie Christie and Phantom: Michael Crawford Unmasked. He has written many books about television and film, and contributed to The Independent since 1993 and The Guardian since 2009.

Breaking the Silence:

The Films of John Pilger

Anthony Hayward

Copyright Anthony Hayward/Profiles International Media 2013

Published 2013 by Profiles International Media at Smashwords

http://www.profilesinternationalmedia.co.uk/books.html

Photographs reproduced by kind permission of

John Pilger, ITV and Dartmouth Films

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

‘John Pilger’s field is the world and his subject humanity. His material is factual, but his expression of it powerfully emotional, and his contribution to present-day news reporting unsurpassed.’

Citation from the British Press Awards

judges, naming John Pilger the

1974 News Reporter of the Year

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. The ‘War on Terror’

2. Vietnam

3. Britain

4. Cambodia

5. Uncle Sam

6. Tyrannies

7. Truth Games

8. People’s Justice

9. Outsiders

10. Australia

Notes

General Bibliography

Appendix 1: Filmography

Appendix 2: Awards

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For their help in researching this book, I would like to thank Steve Anderson, David Bowman, Kate Connolly, Richard Creasey, Ana de Juan, Charles Denton, Paul Foot, Jim Goulding, Christopher Hird, Jim Howard, Phillip Knightley, Alan Lowery, Jonathan Morris, David Munro, Gerry Pinches, Jacky Stoller, Ivan Strasburg, David Swift, Louise Vidaud de Plaud and Jeremy Wallington.

In addition, I am grateful to Richard Jeffs, ITV, Dartmouth Films, the South West Film and Television Archive and Alex Rowley, as well as staff at the British Film Institute National Library in London, the British Library Newspaper Library in London, Westminster Library, Swiss Cottage Library and the central libraries in Leeds, Sheffield and York.

Thanks also to my wife, Deborah, but, most of all, I would like to thank John Pilger for his time and co-operation in giving many interviews to me over the years and providing access to archive material.

Anthony Hayward, October 2013

INTRODUCTION

FORTHRIGHT and fearless, John Pilger is a rare breed of journalist who has never shirked from saying the unsayable. For half a century, he has been an ever stronger voice for those without a voice and a thorn in the side of authority, the Establishment. His work, particularly his documentary films, has also made him rare in being a journalist who is universally known, a champion of those for whom he fights and the scourge of politicians and others whose actions he exposes.

In 2006, he joined three other eminent journalists at Columbia University, New York, for a discussion on ‘Breaking the Silence: War, Lies and Empire’. Alongside him were The Independent‘s Middle East correspondent, Robert Fisk – frequently the only other journalist in Britain’s national newspapers to put his head above the parapet and lay bare the truth behind British and American foreign policy – and American journalists Seymour Hersh and Charles Glass.

After Fisk had demonstrated that most of the Middle East news in that day’s New York Times was based on official statements, Pilger made the accusation that ‘journalists in the so-called mainstream bear much of the responsibility’ for the devastation and lives lost in Iraq by not challenging and exposing ‘the lies of Bush and Blair’. In then declaring that the BBC had ‘blood on its corporate hands’, he cited its minimal coverage of anti-war dissent during the build-up to the invasion and a study showing that 90 per cent of its references to weapons of mass destruction ‘suggested that Saddam Hussein actually possessed them and that, by clear implication, Bush and Blair were right’.¹

Before I became a journalist myself, I had witnessed the power of Pilger’s individual style of journalism. As a teenager in the mid-1970s, I saw in his television documentaries something that was ‘different’ from other factual and current affairs programmes: they presented serious issues, but there was a ‘human reality’ to them. Only later did I begin to understand that this was because of his dismissal of the fake notions of ‘impartiality’ and ‘balance’ that were the basis for mainstream television journalism, with their roots in the Reithian ‘values’ that served only to distance people from reality. ‘Official’ truths, rooted in the agendas of those who exercised power in government and broadcasting, were being challenged by a journalist whose starting point was with those who lived with the consequences of those institutions’ actions.

For being a maverick in the system, he faced the wrath of both institutions. Revealing American troop rebellions in Vietnam for his first documentary, The Quiet Mutiny, led to a rebuke from the Independent Television Authority, then the regulator for commercial television, after the American Ambassador to Britain complained.

Pilger’s uncompromising films have also highlighted Washington’s threat to democratically elected governments in Latin America, the injustice of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, the suffering of the ordinary people of Iraq as a result of the first Gulf War and the subsequent United Nations trade embargo, repression in Czechoslovakia, East Timor and Burma, discrimination against the Aborigines in his native Australia and social and political issues in his adopted country of Britain. Imperialism throughout the world, particularly that of the United States and Britain, is a constant theme – partly because he considers this an agenda unreported by the mainstream Western media. The September 11th attacks on the United States brought this to the forefront of Pilger’s work once more.

‘Imperialism is a word almost struck from the English and American lexicon,’ he explained. ‘It is the great unprintable, unsayable. For, once you attribute Western actions to imperialist intent, for reasons of economic or strategic advantage – it’s still imperialism – you shine a light on how the world is run by the powerful. It’s, of course, understandable that imperialism is a taboo – in contrast to when imperialists were proud of their exploits. Since fascism expounded its notions of racial superiority in the 1930s and 1940s, the imperial civilising mission has had a bad name.

‘Since the end of the Cold War, however, the economic and political crises in the developing world, precipitated by debt and the disarray of the liberation movements, have served as retrospective justification for imperialism. Although the word remains unspeakable, the old imperial project’s return journey to respectability has begun. What we are seeing now is the market testing of new brand names. Humanitarian war is the latest to satisfy the criterion of doing what you like where you like, as long as you are strong enough. This is why I try, from time to time, to break the silence on this important issue.’

Pilger’s most effective campaign, in 1979, was for justice in Cambodia, where two million people faced death from starvation and disease in the aftermath of the murderous Pol Pot’s overthrow by the Vietnamese. Cold War power politics meant that Western governments were unwilling to give substantial aid just four years after the United States’s defeat in the Vietnam War, but Year Zero – The Silent Death of Cambodia raised $45 million in relief. Alongside that humanitarian achievement was the spectacle of Western politicians and their supporters claiming that the aid was not getting through to the people, propaganda discredited by Pilger’s follow-up documentary in 1980, Cambodia – Year One.

The theme or ‘our’ (Western) propaganda was explored in The Truth Game, Pilger’s 1983 investigation into the language used to promote nuclear weapons. After the programme was given a peak-time place in the ITV schedules, it was withdrawn and delayed on the insistence of the Independent Broadcasting Authority until a ‘complementary’ documentary could be made. This was the first time that a specific ‘balancing’ programme has been ordered after completion of the original but before its transmission. Breaking the Silence – Truth and Lies in the War on Terror further explored the propaganda of the American and British governments in the wake of September 11th.

This questioning of authority had its roots in a childhood that began in Australia at the outbreak of the Second World War. John Richard Pilger was born in Sydney on 9 October 1939, the son of socialists who found little political comfort during the long years of conservative government by Robert Menzies and his successors in the 1950s and 1960s. The youngster enjoyed the surfing life and egalitarianism of Bondi beach. Taught to swim at the nearby ocean baths by Reg Clark, a notable member of the Bondi Icebergs’ Club, then by the Australian Olympic coach Sep Prosser, his powerful style won him swimming medals and gave him a love of the sport, and the challenge of surfing waves, that he has taken through his life. ‘I used to feel sorry for people who could not wake up and see or hear the ocean,’ said Pilger. ‘It is one of the quintessential joys of the Australian coast.’ Yet much about his homeland remained unknown to him and untold, such as the true history of its native population.

Having decided that a career as an illustrator was not for him, despite his love of art, Pilger completed almost four years’ training as a journalist with Australian Consolidated Press and worked on the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph newspapers in Sydney, owned by Sir Frank Packer, father of future media magnate Kerry. ‘The Telegraph was a tabloid paper, though very serious by London standards, and very right-wing,’ he recalled. ‘You were allowed no more than sixteen words to the paragraph. The politics of the paper didn’t bother me at the time, because I was more concerned about becoming a journalist. My own political thoughts had been influenced by my father and mother, who were anti-Establishment people.’

After ‘enjoying going broke’ during a year freelancing in Italy, Pilger moved to Britain in 1962. ‘I needed a job – any job,’ he said. ‘My father had borrowed £100 from his bookie for me and now that was gone.’ The following year, after short stints as a sub-editor at the news agencies British United Press and Reuter, Pilger became a subeditor on the Labour Party-supporting Daily Mirror, the biggest-selling newspaper in the Western world. Under editorial director Hugh Cudlipp, the Mirror was developing as a serious tabloid and presented Pilger with the opportunity to show his talent for investigative journalism and descriptive writing. He was soon beginning to realise his ambition of travelling the world.

The chance to move into television came in 1969, when actor and business executive David Swift, together with BBC documentary directors Charles Denton, Richard Marquand and Paul Watson, approached Pilger with the idea of forming an independent production company outside ITV and the BBC. They soon discovered the concept was ahead of its time – independents had to wait until Channel Four came along, more than ten years later.

‘I had an editing business through which I met Charles, Richard and Paul, who came from the BBC to put their films together,’ recalled Swift. ‘We talked about forming Tempest Films and it was Paul’s idea to approach John. We wanted a frontman with a mind of his own, rather like another James Cameron, with whom Richard had worked. Paul thought John was very charismatic, as well as marketing extremely original, refreshingly radical ideas. We recognised in him someone who had the voice and charisma to put over those ideas, which we shared. So we all teamed up as partners in this co-operative. Kenneth Griffith was also a partner, but there was no cross-fertilisation between him and the others at the time, although he later worked with Richard.

‘We then approached Robin Scott, who was in charge of BBC2, but he told us that there were no openings for independents. So we started packaging ideas. Jeremy Wallington, head of documentaries at Granada Television, was very keen and took on both John and Charles to make films for World in Action.’

Denton, who had previously worked with Alan Whicker and Malcolm Muggeridge, was keen to direct Pilger in ‘authored’ documentaries. ‘John knew what he felt about a whole range of subjects and in the Mirror had done some very forceful reporting,’ he explained. ‘So he had a reputation and decided views and, after meeting him, we felt that he could transfer what he had done purely in print to a visual medium.’

From his first documentary in 1970, which revealed the crumbling of morale among American troops in Vietnam, Pilger discovered that the rules of television journalism were different from those in newspapers. After making two programmes for the hard-hitting ITV current affairs series World in Action, Pilger left Granada as a result of clashes with Jeremy Wallington, who described him as ‘really a poet’. But the disagreement between the two had little to do with poetry and everything to do with the politics of television, and whether a maverick could be allowed to decode the consensual language of the medium.

On a one-year contract with the BBC between 1972 and 1973, Pilger made five reports for the current affairs programme Midweek, but only two were broadcast. They were uncontroversial interviews with George McGovern’s wife, Eleanor, during the American senator’s failed attempt to become the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, and with President Richard Nixon’s brother. ‘I don’t think Midweek wanted me as me – they wanted the anodyne in disguise,’ said Pilger.

The opportunity to return to television came in 1974, shortly after Charles Denton became deputy head of documentaries at ATV, the ITV contractor for the Midlands, and asked Pilger to present his own series. ‘Pilger was Charles’s idea,’ he explained. ‘It was he who encouraged me to stand up in front of the camera and say I. He said, Don’t beat about the bush. If that’s what you’re saying, say ‘I’. That was quite unusual, especially for one trained at the BBC. Charles commissioned a series of six films and directed half of them himself.’ Denton also produced the first series, before becoming ATV’s head of documentaries and, later, programme controller.

Pilger ran for five series – eighteen half-hour documentaries – and an hour-long special on Australia, between 1974 and 1977. It began on Sundays in a lunchtime slot, before winning a peak-time showcase on weekdays. When, in 1976, Pilger made a film about the American government withholding aid from ‘unfriendly’ countries, the IBA insisted that his programmes should be preceded by an on-screen announcement, and a caption, declaring, ‘In the programme which follows, reporter John Pilger expresses a personal view.’ A similar statement was tagged on to the end. The following year, in an attempt to emphasise this point, the Pilger series was broadcast under the banner ‘Personal Report’.

In 1976, to satisfy the IBA’s demands for balance, ATV also broadcast This Is Waugh, three documentaries presented by right-wing journalist Auberon Waugh and directed by Derek Hart, who had been a reporter on the BBC’s Tonight daily news magazine in the 1950s and 1960s. ‘We put Auberon Waugh’s films out just before John’s series because the IBA wouldn’t accept that we would balance his programmes,’ explained Richard Creasey, who produced Pilger at the time. ‘We argued to the IBA that we were balancing Auberon’s programmes – they were completely snookered! When you consider the budget for Auberon’s documentaries and the time and commitment spent on them, compared with the much greater budget and time spent on John’s, it was a sham. But, running time for running time, Auberon Waugh, right-of-centre, against John Pilger, perceived as left-of-centre, was balance.’ Years later, Pilger revealed that he had proposed Waugh as his ‘balance’, adding, ‘I knew the public would turn him off and they did.’

Film editor Jonathan Morris, who worked on both series, recalled that the Pilger documentaries ‘livened up our department’ because they received a lot of attention. ‘His great asset was the ability not to write for the Guardian brigade, but what was then the left-wing Mirror readership. He wrote in terrific phrases that communicated with ordinary people.’

Camera operator Gerry Pinches, who filmed Pilger’s historic documentary Year Zero – The Silent Death of Cambodia, observed during the making of it another of the disciplines that he believed set Pilger apart from many others. ‘In the evenings, he would not always join everyone else for a meal, but occasionally ate in his hotel room and did some serious reading and research for the next few days,’ recalled Pinches. ‘He is very assiduous in his research. When he is doing his camera pieces, he frequently has to speak in generalisations, so he has to be sure he is 100 per cent right. He is a man who works with his mind; it is that simple. He thinks things through according to no particular agenda. He’s often thought to be a left-winger, but he has been very critical of various governments, including the Russian one.’

Pilger himself explained, ‘You have to legitimise before the viewer’s eyes the opinion you are expressing. The Independent Broadcasting Authority, during its time as regulator for commercial television, always saw to it that I never included anything that could not be sourced and often double- or triple-sourced. I put paramount importance on making sure that the material I use has reliable sources.’

In 1978, Pilger began making one-hour documentaries when he teamed up with actor-turned-director David Munro to film Do You Remember Vietnam, charting his return to the country he had known through its long years of war and struggle. This allowed him to film for the first time the devastation wrought on the North, which he had previously reported only for the Mirror, shortly after the end of the war. ‘In an hour-long documentary you can begin to make sense of a complex subject,’ explained Pilger. ‘You can introduce a historical context, let interviews run and employ valuable texture, such as music.’

The switch to one-hour films was also part of a strategy by Richard Creasey, who became ATV’s executive producer of documentaries in 1977, to persuade the IBA that there was a distinction between that type of programme and current affairs. Through many ‘negotiations’ with the Authority, and with Pilger as his primary weapon, Creasey established the right to make ‘personal view’ documentaries for ITV, an idea whose subjectivity was apparently at variance with the IBA’s regulations about objectivity and impartiality. After ATV became Central Independent Television, these programmes were broadcast under the ‘Viewpoint’ banner. Creasey’s impressive line-up of film-makers included Antony Thomas, Adrian Cowell, Michael Grigsby, Brian Moser and, later, Ken Loach.

‘I was aware that there were two, diametrically opposing views,’ explained Creasey. ‘One was what the IBA thought and the other was what people like John and Antony Thomas thought. Somewhere in the middle was the ATV board of directors and me. The cornerstone of the programme that would change the IBA’s mind was John. He was never meant to be aware of that because, as he said to me terribly eloquently early on as I was trying to persuade him to listen to the IBA’s point of view, he didn’t want to hear their point of view. He said: You sort out the IBA; that’s your problem.

‘John had to believe that what he was saying was true and objective. The IBA believed his films were totally subjective, completely unbalanced and personal view. I was caught in the middle, because John’s greatest strength was that his programmes were justifiably selective – everything the IBA accused John of was exactly what we wanted. I had enormous respect for his views, but my greatest respect was that he was everything the IBA didn’t want. The IBA's regulations concerning factual programmes were all about objectivity and impartiality, and didn't have any space set aside for subjectivity; it was the publisher. ATV, and then Central, could never be sued, provided the IBA had said OK. My job was to negotiate us to a position where they said just that; that was a challenge. Unlike other documentary controllers within ITV, who argued their case to the IBA and either got their programmes through or didn’t, I acted as a go-between – between the IBA and John Pilger. It was a question of what I could get away with from the IBA’s point of view.

‘I never went in as an adversary of the IBA. Most of the programmes I took to them were un-transmittable, according to the regulations. The chief escape clause was the one that John hated most – the one called personal view. It wasn’t meant to be balanced. My argument, which I eventually lost, was that other ITV companies were balancing John Pilger.

‘However, the IBA recognised the need for subjective programmes, because television was in competition with newspapers, which could say what they liked. Once John had done his Personal Report series and established that as something that was present, I was able to argue that every documentary is, by definition, subjective and there is a huge difference between that and a current affairs programme, which must be balanced.

‘I think David Glencross [the IBA’s deputy director of television and, from 1983, director of television] really believed there was a difference between documentaries and current affairs, and the IBA couldn’t ignore the fact that these big names making documentaries were winning awards. David had a stack of regulations, which there was no way he could keep. From John’s point of view, he was a block. My job was to persuade David that this was an opportunity to sail even closer to the wind – and he did. He actually changed more than anyone I’ve ever known.’

From 1978, Pilger made one-hour films, on average, once a year, most of them shown worldwide, in at least thirty countries, and he has never been one to report a story and leave it, not to return. His Vietnam and Cambodia documentaries are the best examples of this. ‘I’ve always continued a relationship with subjects and people and countries,’ he explained. ‘All my films, and most of my published reporting, have sought to understand more about a subject. I keep a watching brief on all these places I have known over the years, such as Vietnam. For me, the unending job is to look behind the stereotypes, the façades, the authorised versions. That’s actually my definition of journalism; it’s really very simple.’

Pilger’s films continued to make ripples and, as the ‘docu-soap’ era dawned in the 1990s, with programmes showing little pretence of taking on serious issues, he remained almost the only heavyweight to survive on ITV and to continue returning most years with a new documentary. The programmes have won dozens of international awards. His most prestigious broadcasting honour has been the British Academy of Film and Television Arts’ 1990 Richard Dimbleby Award, appropriately conferred on him with leading members of the Establishment up in arms.

Still, apart from objections by those such as David Dimbleby and Sir Robin Day, Pilger eventually found himself not only honoured, but almost accepted, by the television establishment. ‘I had a struggle to keep going right from my first documentary, in 1970, through to the mid-1980s,’ he recalled. ‘During that time, censorship was in the form of a bureaucracy acting on behalf of a political establishment. The ITA, which became the IBA, was only interested in ensuring that the political slant of a film, as they saw it, was towards the Establishment. This is what they called impartiality, a word now almost Orwellian in the perversity of its opposite meaning.’

The powerful response to Pilger’s documentaries during the 1990s was all the more remarkable for coming at a time when people had an unprecedented number of channels from which to choose and considering that he no longer had the Daily Mirror to use alongside his films (although he complemented his television work with reporting in The Guardian and the New Statesman). ‘In the 1970s and 1980s, the combination of ITV and the Mirror was very effective,’ he recalled. ‘The two added up to an event on television – such as Cambodia – and this had a political impact. That is rare these days, which is a pity.’

The dominance of ‘infotainment’ erected more obstacles for serious documentaries. ‘In the 1970s, getting documentaries on television meant getting them past the regulator,’ said Pilger at the time. ‘Today, it’s about fighting for slots. There is no regulator like the old ITA and IBA – Ofcom, like its predecessor, the ITC [Independent Television Commission], doesn’t have the same powers. These have transferred to the ITV Network Centre, which both commissions and transmits programmes, leaving the television companies as facilitators. Political censorship has disappeared – along with many serious documentaries. Censorship by a nannying regulator has been replaced by censorship by omission.’

One fine irony of these changes was the transformation in the television bureaucracy’s views on Pilger’s films. In 1994, David Glencross, the ITC’s chief executive, who in his days at the IBA was described by Pilger as ‘commercial television’s chief censor’,² warned of ‘the triumph of infotainment over both information and entertainment’. In commending three documentaries that had set high standards, he included Pilger’s programme about Indonesian repression in East Timor. The man who, year upon year, had once demanded changes to Pilger’s films, was now praising the journalist and citing him as an example of factual television at its best.³ If nothing else, this illuminated, in retrospect, the political nature of a censorship that had dared not speak its name.

For Pilger, the irony persisted. In its review of ITV’s performance during 1999, the ITC expressed its concern about lightweight factual programmes and cited Pilger’s updated East Timor documentary as one of the few examples of the channel’s current affairs output providing high-quality international coverage. It also singled out Welcome to Australia, on the continuing plight of the Aborigines, as ‘one of a small number of outstanding films… documentaries in the best traditions of ITV’, with the ‘potential to expose, move and disturb’.⁴

Pilger was given another platform to do the same when, in the wake of the September 11th attacks on the United States, he was invited to write again for the Daily Mirror, the paper he had served for twenty-two years until his sacking by Robert Maxwell in 1985. It was part of a strategy by the Mirror’s editor, Piers Morgan, to move the paper mid-market and give more coverage to serious news at such a cataclysmic moment, trying to reclaim at least some of its former glory. Later, Morgan was also serious about making his paper one of only two national dailies in Britain, alongside The Independent, to oppose the war in Iraq – recalling memories of the Mirror’s anti-Vietnam War stance four decades earlier.

‘A few days after the invasion of Afghanistan,’ Pilger recalled, ‘my telephone rang at home and at the end of the line was a voice that said: Hello, John, it’s Piers. I paused and said: I’m sorry, but I don’t know anyone called Piers. I had actually met him briefly in a lift in the Mirror building and we laughed about this later. It was an abortive attempt to persuade him to be interviewed for a programme I was doing about the influence of Rupert Murdoch on the Mirror [Breaking the Mirror – The Murdoch Effect].

‘He said, to my great surprise: "We would like you to come back to the Mirror and write for us. This came as almost a shock, so I said to him: Give me five minutes and I’ll call you back. I phoned him back and I said: Fine. That sounds very intriguing. Here are my terms: that my stories appear on pages of the paper without being complemented by anything salacious; that I either write the headlines or I’m consulted about the headlines and, equally, consulted about the editing; and that I’m given complete editorial freedom." He said yes without hesitation and it was agreed. What astonished him was that among my conditions there was no demand for real payment. He decided to pay me a pound a word. I was writing, almost weekly or fortnightly, major pieces. It was the journalism I relished. It was a golden time.’

Some articles had dramatic, uncompromising front pages. One was headlined ‘Mourn on the Fourth of July’, with a photograph of George Bush flanked by the Stars and Stripes and Pilger analysing what was being done around the world in the name of this patriotism. Another, shortly before the invasion of Iraq, showed Tony Blair with his hands held out, covered in blood, and the headline ‘Blood on His Hands’, illustrating a piece in which Pilger reported that the British Prime Minister was about to commit two crimes against humanity, according to the criteria set out by the judges at the Nuremberg Trials – the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign state that presented no threat to one’s homeland and the murder of civilians. Pilger wrote the headline and sent a sketch of a front-page design to Morgan, who was delighted. ‘That presentation caused particular anger in Downing Street and gave me a certain satisfaction,’ reflected Pilger.

However, the constant criticism of Bush and Blair’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq became too much for the major American shareholders in Trinity Mirror, which owned the newspaper. When, in May 2004, Morgan made the disastrous decision to run photographs of Iraqi prisoners being abused by British troops that allegedly proved to be fake, the company’s bosses had the excuse to sack him. He later admitted that the Mirror had been hoaxed.

Pilger found himself out in the cold, too – after a return to the paper that had lasted two-and-a-half years. ‘When Baghdad fell to the Americans, I think my role in the Mirror also fell,’ he explained. ‘Piers told me unofficially that I had upset the very powerful American shareholders at Trinity. Some of those Mirrors had been among the best ever produced. Piers led a very talented editorial team.’

Changes were also afoot in Pilger’s television work. Following his long-running professional partnerships with David Munro and Alan Lowery, he became joint director of his own films, starting with Breaking the Silence – Truth and Lies in the War on Terror in 2003. Chris Martin, who established himself as Pilger’s producer with that documentary after several years as associate producer, then became his co-director for Stealing a Nation, which told the remarkable story of how British governments expelled the population of the Chagos Islands so that the United States could set up a military base on Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean. ‘I had always partly directed my films anyway,’ explained Pilger. ‘The relationship with David was a totally overlapping one – producing, directing, editing, journalism.’ Pilger continued as co-director when he resumed his film-making partnership with Alan Lowery for The War You Don’t See and Utopia.

Although his days of battles with the Independent Television Authority and the Independent Broadcasting Authority, its successor as the regulator of commercial television in Britain, were long over, each ITV company still had to adhere to the Broadcasting Act. This meant that compliance lawyers employed by the production company – who always had to pass Pilger’s films as fit for broadcast, even under the old system – had become a more important part of the process. Another metamorphosis was the merging of Central Independent Television into Carlton Television, then Granada Television and, finally, ITV Productions, as the commercial channel rebranded itself and streamlined its production operations.

‘My films are still patrolled and examined with a forensic toothcomb,’ explained Pilger. ‘Whereas the IBA’s officious examination of work has gone, the work of compliance lawyers has actually increased. Every company has to have a lawyer to sign off the film. They interpret the Broadcasting Act and come to me with a lot of questions, some of them very constructive. It’s a process in the film-making and I don’t mind. I’ve never minded the intervention of an editor, as long as it is pertinent and in good faith. It can only improve work.’

Pilger charted new territory when he made his first film for screening in the cinema before its showing on television. The War on Democracy told the story of how some Latin American countries were resisting the United States’s influence and establishing their own independent democracies. It joined a renaissance for documentaries on the big screen that had begun in the first decade of the new millennium, most notably with the work of Michael Moore and films such as Fahrenheit 9/11. These productions revived a tradition of political documentaries that had begun in the 1930s with film-makers such as John Grierson and Robert Flaherty, who brought the concerns of ordinary people to a wide audience and whose work was more incisive and revealing than the propaganda films that followed during and after the Second World War.

The War on Democracy, produced by Youngheart Entertainment, established Pilger as a film-maker for both the cinema and television. The War You Don't See and Utopia, made by Dartmouth Films, followed in the same vein, blurring the lines between the two mediums. Not only were the documentaries feature-length, but their funding came from more than one source, giving Pilger bigger budgets and more resources. ITV was no longer the producer, but its partial funding and guarantee of a British television screening were crucial to getting the balance of the films’ financing from other companies and individuals.

Since the mid-1990s, Pilger had been the token regular maker of ‘serious’ documentaries on ITV as it acclimatised to a multi-channel age with lower advertising revenue and made fewer of these programmes. In recent times, however, the commercial channel has shown a new commitment to serious documentaries and given less air time to the dreaded docu-soaps. The challenge for all documentary-makers has become to get sufficient funding.

‘It is very difficult for documentaries to make money in the conventional way,’ said Christopher Hird, founder of Dartmouth Films. ‘These sort of films were perfect in the regulated broadcasting structure in which there was essentially a degree of monopoly profit, which was used to help pay for them. In a much more competitive structure, where people are fighting for viewers and, in the case of ITV, fighting for profit, there’s much less scope for making films that deliver a million rather than five million viewers, as once was the case. It’s hard to make the sums add up without there being at least part of the funding that comes without the expectation of financial gain. So we generally have some grant funding in our documentaries.’

Hird also reflected that the trade-off for the disappearance of regulatory censorship was the difficulty in making documentaries at all. ‘The editorial constraint that there was when they were 100 per cent-funded and within the ITV system has been replaced by a financial constraint,’ he said. ‘The limitation on John’s future work will be the constant quest to find ways of funding it. If you have a film on television, it definitely has more impact than if it exists only as an independent feature documentary. You can have a film that is only in the cinema and has an impact but not, I think, in the United Kingdom. If you look at the documentary films that have had any sort of impact on public policy or cultural behaviour in the UK, television has been part of that – and, in some cases, only television.’

Pilger himself had made an impact in print journalism, television and the cinema, and won dozens of awards, including Britain’s Journalist of the Year title – he is one of only two journalists to hold it twice. More unusually, as a journalist, his work has been recognised by the academic world, with honorary doctorates bestowed on him by eight universities.⁵ The citations referred to Pilger’s success in continuing to analyse world events and bring understanding to readers and viewers of issues in countries such as Cambodia and East Timor. In presenting Pilger with an honorary Doctor of Law degree at St Andrews in 1999, professor of philosophy John Haldane announced, ‘One may wonder whether, had he not taken an interest in them, the places and people that now concern us would even have entered our consciousness – let alone our consciences.’

1. THE ‘WAR ON TERROR’

September 11th 2001 dominates almost everything we watch, read and hear. We’re fighting a war on terror, say George Bush and Tony Blair, a noble war against evil itself. But what are the real aims of this war and who are the most threatening terrorists? Indeed, who is responsible for far greater acts of violence than those committed by the fanatics of Al Qaeda, crimes that have claimed many more lives than September 11th and always in poor, devastated, faraway places, from Latin America to South-east Asia? The answer to these questions is to be found here in the United States, where those now in power speak openly of their conquests and of endless war – Afghanistan, Iraq. These, they say, are just the beginning. Look out, North Korea, Iran, even China. This film is about the rise and rise of rapacious imperial power and a terrorism that never speaks its name because it is our terrorism.

WITH these uncompromising words, John Pilger introduced viewers to an insight into the causes of the September 11th attacks on the United States very different from that presented by most of the Western world’s mainstream media. Breaking the Silence – Truth and Lies in the War on Terror was dominated by a theme that had become increasingly prevalent in his journalism over the decades: the rise and rise of American power. Screened in Britain in September 2003, six months after the invasion of Iraq and two years after 9/11, the film raised questions about the United States’s right to intervene in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

However, the roots of this new Cold War, centred on the Middle East, were in Israel, where Pilger had previously charted stormy waters with his accounts, in print and on television, of how the United States and Britain had given their support to the dispossession of an entire people, the Palestinians, in the name of creating a state based on Zionism, the political movement dedicated to achieving the Jews’ biblical claims to the Holy Land. Indeed, almost thirty years apart, he made two documentaries with the title Palestine Is Still the Issue, to emphasise the lack of progress on the most urgent issue in the Middle East – and, perhaps, the world.

The British had ruled Palestine under mandate from the League of Nations since 1919 and after the Second World War, under pressure from Arabs concerned about Jewish immigration, asked the United Nations to make a decision on the country’s future. In 1947, the UN declared that it would be divided into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, with Jerusalem as an international city. The Arabs would not agree to this and, although the Jews gave their public acceptance to the plan, they secretly plotted the annexation of the Arab land.

Violence followed and in 1948, when the British surrendered their mandate, the Jews declared the state of Israel. Thousands of Palestinians fled to refugee camps on both banks of the Jordan, and to Syria and Lebanon. From 1950, Israel aligned itself with the United States and other Western powers, such as Britain and France. Israel was spurred into attacking Egypt six years later when President Abdul Gamal Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, and received British and French military support. However, the United Nations ordered a ceasefire and sent an international peace force to the Middle East.

The flames were reignited by the Six Day War of 1967, which followed a series of border incidents between Israel, Syria and Jordan, and brought Israel and its Arab neighbours back into the world spotlight. Egypt became involved after demanding the removal of a UN patrol on its frontier with Israel and blocked the Israeli port of Elat. Israel struck first and, once a truce was arranged after six days, had added to its lands Jordanian territory on the West Bank of the River Jordan, the rest of Jerusalem, the Gaza strip on the west coast and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. Refugees fled in their thousands to camps in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, and the seeds of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation were sown. Soon, they were conducting raids across Israel’s border. The Yom Kippur War of October 1973 saw territory won and lost by both sides when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on the Jewish holy fast-day. Ultimately, the Arabs emerged stronger.

Pilger had visited Israel for the Daily Mirror since 1966, seen refugee camps in Jordan and met children in a kibbutz who were raised to fight. In 1973, he wrote about taking a Palestinian refugee back to see his former home in Israel and he reported the Yom Kippur War, becoming the first British correspondent to reach Cairo after a journey across the desert from Tripoli, in Libya. The following year, he made the documentary Palestine Is Still the Issue for his Pilger series of half-hour programmes.

Since the fourth war between the Arabs and the Jews, the word ‘earthquake’ had become part of everyday language in Israel, said Pilger, in the ruined capital of the Golan Heights. ‘For what happened here and on the Suez Canal was indeed an earthquake that shook Israel as never before, causing illusion after illusion to crumble,’ he explained. ‘The illusion that wars could always be won, and quickly, the illusion that the Western world, and especially America, would always bear Israel’s burden, regardless of oil, what it costs or what was right or wrong. The earthquake, neither victory nor defeat, has left Israel in almost a manic state of confusion and self-doubt. The old unity which once drew strength from war after war, and from a permanent feeling of siege, is in question now. People are hurt and bitter. They no longer see generals as heroes or politicians as leaders and, because of this, there is now among some of them the faint beginnings of a new realism, almost a revolutionary thinking that may, just may, bring peace.’

The film showed a kibbutz where seven people were killed during the Yom Kippur War. Dr Israel Shahak, a Holocaust survivor who founded the Israeli Civil Rights League, told Pilger about the fears of his people. ‘You have to look around and be careful all the time,’ he said. ‘Somebody might stab you from behind.’ Pilger noted that Dr Shahak and other Israelis had begun to talk about ‘Palestinians’, ‘to say the unthinkable’. Palestinian Arabs living within the expanded Israeli borders would one day outnumber the Israelis. ‘In other words,’ said Pilger, ‘the Jewish nation will have a clear Arab majority unless the occupied lands are given up and form part of a new neighbour called Palestine. Until this happens, Israel is liable to go on suffering atrocities.’

At a United Nations refugee camp near Jerusalem, where children were seen collecting meagre food supplies, Pilger explained that many of them were the second generation born in the twenty-six years since the first Palestinians became refugees in their own land. They still regarded Palestine as their homeland and talked about going home. ‘If there’s really to be a chance of peace, it won’t be Egypt or Syria with whom the Israelis will do their final deal,’ he said. ‘It will be these people.’

However, one Israeli told him, ‘Non-Jews, who happen in the majority to be Palestinians here or Arabs, are not regarded in this country as human beings.’ Dr Ben Meir, a member of the Israeli Parliament, said, ‘We have no doubt that we can maintain, as long as we can see in the future, a Jewish majority in Israel.’ Against this, Pilger quoted a recent poll in one of the country’s newspapers revealing that 320,000 Israelis were considering leaving the country.

Likening the segregation resulting from Palestinian refugee camps to apartheid in South Africa, Pilger pointed out that an increasing number of Israelis relied on Arabs to do menial jobs. ‘I’ve been coming here on and off for eight years,’ he said direct to the camera, ‘and nothing ever changes, only the mud for dust, the dust for mud. The children still get their 1,500 calories of supplementary food every day in summer, 1,600 calories in winter, which is almost exactly what they need to survive and no more. And, of course, that’s all the world community and the world’s conscience can afford.

‘No, nothing ever changes here, certainly not the irony that the position of the Palestinians now is so remarkably like that of the Jews before the birth of Israel. Both people were Semites, of course. Both were dispossessed and dispersed, and most became someone’s problem. How ironic that the Palestinians, the Jews of the Arab world, have become Israel’s problem. From the aftermath of the October war, while Israel does her deals with Egypt and even with Syria, her greatest and most neglected problem, as well as her greatest and most neglected chance of peace, still resides here in a wretched camp like this.’

A group of young Israelis told Pilger that they craved an end to conflict, one pointing out that Egypt had signalled the same desire. ‘I must tell you how much we want peace,’ said one young man. Shulamit Aloni, a member of the Israeli Parliament, said, ‘If President Sadat is ready to hear us, as I believe he is, maybe we will have peace in not too many years.’

Pilger explained that the Jews, who had come to Israel from places as far apart as Damascus and Miami, had justified their nation and settlement of Arab lands taken during the Six Day War by citing the Old Testament. Over film of a rabbi from Boston taking his flock on a tour of Israel, Pilger said that the American government was giving annual grants and loans equivalent to £400 for every Israeli, but this would not cover the cost of the last war.

He asked Nathan Yalin-Mor, former leader of the Stern Gang, a terrorist organisation operating in Palestine before the founding of the state of Israel, whether he could see a similarity between his group’s murders and those carried out recently by the Palestinian Black September group. ‘We didn’t murder people,’ said Yalin-Mor. ‘The difference is that we killed people only in the conflict between the Hebrew nation and the British occupation power.’ He insisted that his organisation did not attack those out of uniform, although some inevitably died. ‘Liberation for people can’t come without using armed force,’ Yalin-Mor added. ‘I justify the right of every people to fight for its own independence with arms.’

Dr Israel Shahak, of the Israeli Civil Rights League, said he sought security for both Jews and Arabs. ‘Security must be mutual,’ he told Pilger. ‘There is no security for a single community. Jews will never have a security if they insist only for their own security, and the same goes for Palestinians.’

Abdul Amin, a Palestinian who had become a grocer in a refugee camp near Jerusalem since being expelled from his home, was taken by Pilger back through the Jordan valley to the farm he had not seen since the Six Day War. ‘This sad old man, wandering through his land, to which he can never return, is not just a pawn in a confused political situation,’ said Pilger. ‘He and thousands of Palestinians like him are the problem.’ Through an interpreter, Amin told him that, if both Arabs and Jews, Palestinians and Israelis, had equal human rights, there would be a lasting peace. ‘He said that the Arabs forgive easily and they forget easily,’ explained Pilger.

‘It seems to me,’ summed up Pilger, ‘that Israel now, and perhaps for the first time in her history, has been handed a clear choice. She can choose to cling to the old fears and to an uncertain mortgage in Washington or she can face a new reality, and that new reality is the recognition of a Middle East where Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs, are equals and partners, perhaps even part of a rich, developed, flourishing, undreamed-of Middle East, perhaps even a peaceful one. And that’s not as forlorn a hope as it may sound, for in the end there’s no other way.’

Palestine Is Still the Issue became one of the most viewed Pilger documentaries. ‘Time and again, I’ve run into people in the Middle East and elsewhere who’ve seen it,’ he said a quarter of a century later. ‘It told a very simple story