With sadness Consortium News reports that John Pilger, whose books, films and articles informed generations of people eager to cut through official narratives and propaganda on the Palestinian question; U.S. wars executed in Vietnam, Iraq and elsewhere; the one it plans for China; the state of public medicine in Britain; the treatment of aborigines in his native Australia and a host of other critical public issues, has died in London at 84.
Pilger, a recipient of numerous awards, including winning British journalist of the year twice, was a member of Consortium News‘ board of directors and in October was awarded with CN‘s Gary Webb Freedom of the Press Award. Tributes have been pouring in….
RIP to one of the world’s most intrepid, independent and stalwart journalists and documentarians, John Pilger.
His long-time anti-imperialism placed him on the international left, but he was refused to be enslaved to them: arguing Hillary was more dangerous than Trump. https://t.co/iXj7XnvfT0
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 31, 2023
John Pilger. I miss you my friend, what a great man you were. We will carry you in our hearts forever, you will always be there to give us strength. Love R.
— Roger Waters ✊ (@rogerwaters) December 31, 2023
An Interview with the late, great John Pilger [2022]
Link: https://t.co/m5D46fAHw8 pic.twitter.com/3doq0iqvqI— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) December 31, 2023
John Pilger’s documentaries are historically significant exposés of the cruelty and connivances of US empire, in which he gave voice to resistance movements still struggling for their sovereignty.
Films like his 1983 “Nicaragua, a nation’s right to survive” inspired my own work,… pic.twitter.com/xWUiF5RVH2
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) December 31, 2023
Below is John Pilger’s Biography via johnpilger.com…
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John Pilger was born and grew up in Bondi, Sydney, Australia. He launched his first newspaper at Sydney High School and later completed a four year cadetship with Australian Consolidated Press. “It was one of the strictest language courses I know,” he says. “Devised by a celebrated, literate editor, Brian Penton, the aim was economy of language and accuracy. It certainly taught me to admire writing that was spare, precise and free of cliches, that didn’t retreat into the passive voice and used adjectives only when absolutely necessary. I have long since slipped that leash, but those early disciplines helped shape my journalism and writing and my understanding of moving and still pictures”.
Like many of his Australian generation, Pilger and two colleagues left for Europe in the early 1960s. They set up an ill-fated freelance ‘agency’ in Italy (with the grand title of ‘Interep’) and quickly went broke. Arriving in London, Pilger freelanced, then joined Reuters, moving to the London Daily Mirror, Britain’s biggest selling newspaper, which was then changing to a serious tabloid.
He became chief foreign correspondent and reported from all over the world, covering numerous wars, notably Vietnam. Still in his twenties, he became the youngest journalist to receive Britain’s highest award for journalism, Journalist of the Year and was the first to win it twice. Moving to the United States, he reported the upheavals there in the late 1960s and 1970s. He marched with America’s poor from Alabama to Washington, following the assassination of Martin Luther King. He was in the same room when Robert Kennedy, the presidential candidate, was assassinated in June 1968.
His work in South East Asia produced an iconic issue of the London Mirror, devoted almost entirely to his world exclusive dispatches from Cambodia in the aftermath of Pol Pot’s reign. The combined impact of his Mirror reports and his subsequent documentary, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia, raised almost $50 million for the people of that stricken country. Similarly, his 1994 documentary and dispatches report from East Timor, where he travelled under cover, helped galvanise support for the East Timorese, then occupied by Indonesia.
In Britain, his four-year investigation on behalf of a group of children damaged at birth by the drug Thalidomide, and left out of the settlement with the drugs company, resulted in a special settlement.
His numerous documentaries on Australia, notably The Secret Country (1983), the bicentary trilogy The Last Dream (1988), Welcome to Australia (1999) and Utopia (2013) all celebrated and revealed much of his own country’s ‘forgotten past’, especially its indigenous past and present.
He has won an American TV Academy Award, an Emmy, and a British Academy Award, a BAFTA for his documentaries, which have also won numerous US and European awards, such as as the Royal Television Society’s Best Documentary. The British Film Institute includes his 1979 film, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia among the ten most important documentaries of the twentieth century.
His articles appear worldwide. In 2001, he curated a major exhibition at the London Barbican, Reporting the World: John Pilger’s Eyewitness Photographers, a tribute to the great black-and-white photographers he has worked alongside. In 2003, he was awarded the prestigious Sophie Prize for ’30 years of exposing injustice and promoting human rights.’ In 2009, he was awarded Australia’s human rights prize, the Sydney Peace Prize. He has received honorary doctorates from universities in the UK and abroad. In 2017, the British Library announced a John Pilger Archive of all his written and filmed work.
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