John Pilger facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
John Pilger
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Pilger in August 2011
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| Born | 9 October 1939 Bondi, New South Wales, Australia
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| Died | 30 December 2023 (aged 84) London, England
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| Nationality |
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| Education | Sydney Boys High School |
| Occupation |
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| Spouse(s) |
Scarth Flett
(divorced) |
| Partner(s) | Yvonne Roberts |
| Children | 2, including Zoe |
| Awards | Full list |
John Richard Pilger ( 9 October 1939 – 30 December 2023) was an Australian journalist, writer, scholar, and documentary filmmaker. He had mainly been based in Britain since 1962. He had also been a visiting professor at Cornell University in New York.
Pilger was a strong critic of American, Australian, and British foreign policy, which he considered to be driven by an imperialist and colonialist agenda. Pilger had also criticised his native country's treatment of Indigenous Australians. He first drew international attention for his reports on the Cambodian genocide.
His career as a documentary film maker began with The Quiet Mutiny (1970), made during one of his visits to Vietnam, and has continued with over 50 documentaries since. Other works in this form include Year Zero (1979), about the aftermath of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, and Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy (1993). His many documentary films on indigenous Australians include The Secret Country (1985) and Utopia (2013). In the British print media, Pilger worked at the Daily Mirror from 1963 to 1986, and wrote a regular column for the New Statesman magazine from 1991 to 2014.
Pilger won Britain's Journalist of the Year Award in 1967 and 1979. His documentaries have gained awards in Britain and worldwide, including multiple BAFTA honours. What he saw as the deceitful practices of the mainstream media are a regular subject in Pilger's writing.
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Early life and education
John Richard Pilger was born on 9 October 1939 in Bondi, New South Wales, the son of Claude and Elsie Pilger. His older brother, Graham (1932–2017), was a disabled rights activist who later advised the government of Gough Whitlam. Pilger was of German descent on his father's side, while his mother had English, German, and Irish ancestry; two of his maternal great-great-grandparents were Irish convicts transported to Australia. His mother taught French in school.
Pilger and his brother attended Sydney Boys High School, where he began a student newspaper, The Messenger. He later joined a four-year journalist trainee scheme with the Australian Consolidated Press.
Newspaper and television career
Newspaper
Beginning his career in 1958 as a copy boy with the Sydney Sun, Pilger later moved to the city's Daily Telegraph, where he was a reporter, sports writer, and sub-editor. He also freelanced and worked for the Sydney Sunday Telegraph, the daily paper's sister title. After moving to Europe, he was a freelance correspondent in Italy for a year.
Settling in London in 1962, working as a sub-editor, Pilger joined British United Press and then Reuters on its Middle-East desk. In 1963 he was recruited by the English Daily Mirror, again as a sub-editor. Later, he advanced to become a reporter, a feature writer, and Chief Foreign Correspondent for the title. While living and working in the United States for the Daily Mirror, on 5 June 1968 he witnessed the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles during his presidential campaign. He was a war correspondent in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Biafra. Nearly eighteen months after Robert Maxwell bought the Mirror (on 12 July 1984), Pilger was sacked by Richard Stott, the newspaper's editor, on 31 December 1985.
Pilger was a founder of the News on Sunday tabloid in 1984, and was hired as Editor-in-Chief in 1986. During the period of hiring staff, Pilger was away for several months filming The Secret Country in Australia. Prior to this, he had given editor Keith Sutton a list of people who he thought might be recruited for the paper, but found on his return to Britain that none of them had been hired.
Pilger resigned before the first issue and had come into conflict with those around him. He disagreed with the founders' decision to base the paper in Manchester and then clashed with the governing committees; the paper was intended to be a workers' co-operative. Sutton's appointment as editor was Pilger's suggestion, but he fell out with Sutton over his plan to produce a left wing Sun newspaper. The two men ended up producing their own dummies, but the founders and the various committees backed Sutton. Pilger, appointed with "overall editorial control", resigned at this point. The first issue appeared on 27 April 1987 and The News on Sunday soon closed.
Pilger returned to the Mirror in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks, while Piers Morgan was editor.
His most frequent outlet for many years was the New Statesman, where he had a fortnightly column from 1991 when Steve Platt was editor to 2014. In 2018, Pilger said his "written journalism is no longer welcome" in the mainstream and that "probably its last home" was in The Guardian. His last column for The Guardian was in November 2019.
Television
With the actor David Swift, and the film makers Paul Watson and Charles Denton, Pilger formed Tempest Films in 1969. "We wanted a frontman with a mind of his own, rather like another James Cameron, with whom Richard [Marquand] had worked", Swift once said. "Paul thought John was very charismatic, as well as marketing extremely original, refreshingly radical ideas." The company was unable to gain commissions from either the BBC or ITV, but did manage to package potential projects.
Pilger's career on television began on World in Action (Granada Television) in 1969, directed by Denton, for whom he made two documentaries broadcast in 1970 and 1971, the earliest of more than fifty in his career. The Quiet Mutiny (1970) was filmed at Camp Snuffy, presenting a character study of the common US soldier during the Vietnam War. It revealed the shifting morale and open rebellion of American troops. Pilger later described the film as "something of a scoop" – it was the first documentary to show the problems with morale among the drafted ranks of the US military. In an interview with the New Statesman, Pilger said:
When I flew to New York and showed it to Mike Wallace, the star reporter of CBS' 60 Minutes, he agreed. "Real shame we can't show it here".
He made other documentaries about the United States involvement in Vietnam, including Vietnam: Still America's War (1974), Do You Remember Vietnam? (1978), and Vietnam: The Last Battle (1995).
During his work with BBC's Midweek television series during 1972–73, Pilger completed five documentary reports, but only two were broadcast.
Pilger was successful in gaining a regular television outlet at ATV. The Pilger half-hour documentary series was commissioned by Charles Denton, then a producer with ATV, for screening on the British ITV network. The series ran for five seasons from 1974 until 1977, at first running in the UK on Sunday afternoons after Weekend World. The theme song for the series was composed by Lynsey de Paul. Later the program was scheduled in a weekday peak-time evening slot. The last series included "A Faraway Country" (September 1977) about dissidents in Czechoslovakia, then still part of the Communist Soviet bloc. Pilger and his team interviewed members of Charter 77 and other groups, clandestinely using domestic film equipment. In the documentary Pilger praises the dissidents' courage and commitment to freedom and describes the communist totalitarianism as "fascism disguised as socialism".
Pilger was later given an hour slot at 9 pm, before News at Ten, which gave him a high profile in Britain. After ATV lost its franchise in 1981, he continued to make documentaries for screening on ITV, initially for Central, and later via Carlton Television.
Documentaries and career: 1978–2000
Cambodia
In 1979, Pilger and two colleagues with whom he collaborated for many years, documentary filmmaker David Munro and photographer Eric Piper, entered Cambodia in the wake of the overthrow of the Pol Pot regime. They made photographs and reports that were world exclusives. The first was published as a special issue of the Daily Mirror, which sold out. They also produced an ITV documentary, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia.
Following the showing of Year Zero, some $45 million was raised, unsolicited, in mostly small donations, including almost £4 million raised by schoolchildren in the UK. This funded the first substantial relief to Cambodia, including the shipment of life-saving drugs such as penicillin, and clothing to replace the black uniforms people had been forced to wear. According to Brian Walker, director of Oxfam, "a solidarity and compassion surged across our nation" from the broadcast of Year Zero.
William Shawcross wrote in his book The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (1984) about Pilger's series of articles about Cambodia in the Daily Mirror during August 1979:
A rather interesting quality of the articles was their concentration on Nazism and the holocaust. Pilger called Pol Pot 'an Asian Hitler' — and said he was even worse than Hitler . . . Again and again Pilger compared the Khmer Rouge to the Nazis. Their Marxist-Leninist ideology was not even mentioned in the Mirror, except to say they were inspired by the Red Guards. Their intellectual origins were described as 'anarchist' rather than Communist".
Ben Kiernan, in his review of Shawcross's book, notes that Pilger did compare Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to Stalin's terror, as well as to Mao's Red Guards. Kiernan notes instances where other writers' comparisons of Pol Pot to Hitler or the Vietnamese to the Nazis are either accepted by Shawcross in his account, or not mentioned.
Shawcross wrote in The Quality of Mercy that "Pilger's reports underwrote almost everything that refugees along the Thai border had been saying about the cruelty of Khmer Rouge rule since 1975, and that had already appeared in the books by the Reader's Digest and François Ponchaud. In Heroes, Pilger disputes François Ponchaud and Shawcross's account of Vietnamese atrocities during the Vietnamese invasion and near famine as being "unsubstantiated". Ponchaud had interviewed members of anti-communist groups living in the Thai refugee border camps. According to Pilger, "At the very least the effect of Shawcross's 'exposé'" of Cambodians' treatment at the hands of the Vietnamese "was to blur the difference between Cambodia under Pol Pot and Cambodia liberated by the Vietnamese: in truth, a difference of night and day". In his book, Shawcross himself doubted that anyone had died of starvation.
Pilger and Munro made four later films about Cambodia. Pilger's documentary Cambodia – The Betrayal (1990), prompted a libel case against him, which was settled at the High Court with an award against Pilger and Central Television. The Times of 6 July 1991 reported:
Two men who claimed that a television documentary accused them of being SAS members who trained Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to lay mines, accepted "very substantial" libel damages in the High Court yesterday. Christopher Geidt and Anthony De Normann settled their action against the journalist John Pilger and Central Television on the third day of the hearing. Desmond Browne, QC, for Mr Pilger and Central Television, said his clients had not intended to allege the two men trained the Khmer Rouge to lay mines, but they accepted that was how the program had been understood.
Pilger said the defence case collapsed because the government issued a gagging order, citing national security, which prevented three government ministers and two former heads of the SAS from appearing in court. The film received a British Academy of Film and Television Award nomination in 1991.
Australia's Indigenous peoples
Pilger has long criticised aspects of Australian government policy, particularly the poor treatment of Indigenous Australians. In 1969, Pilger went with Australian activist Charlie Perkins on a tour to Jay Creek in Central Australia. He compared what he witnessed in Jay Creek to South African apartheid. He saw the appalling conditions that the Aboriginal people were living under, with children suffering from malnutrition and grieving mothers and grandmothers having had their lighter-skinned children and grandchildren removed by the police and welfare agencies. Equally, he learned of Aboriginal boys being sent to work on white run farms, and Aboriginal girls working as servants in middle-class homes as undeclared slave labour.
Pilger has made several documentaries about Indigenous Australians, such as The Secret Country: The First Australians Fight Back (1985) and Welcome to Australia (1999). His book on the subject, A Secret Country, was first published in 1989.
Pilger returned to this subject with Utopia, released in 2013.
East Timor
Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy
In East Timor Pilger clandestinely shot Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy about the brutal Indonesian occupation of East Timor, which began in 1975.
Death of a Nation contributed to an international outcry which ultimately led to Indonesian withdrawal from East Timor and eventual independence in 2000. When Death of a Nation was screened in Britain it was the highest rating documentary in 15 years and 5,000 telephone calls per minute were made to the programme's action line. When Death of a Nation was screened in Australia in June 1994, Foreign Minister Gareth Evans declared that Pilger "had a track record of distorted sensationalism mixed with sanctimony."
Documentaries and career since 2000
Palestine Is Still the Issue
Pilger's documentary Palestine Is Still the Issue was released in 2002 and had Ilan Pappé as historical adviser. Pilger said the film describes how an "historic injustice has been done to the Palestinian people, and until Israel's illegal and brutal occupation ends, there will be no peace for anyone, Israelis included". He said the responses of his interviewees "put the lie to the standard Zionist cry that any criticism of Israel is anti-semitic, a claim that insults all those Jewish people who reject the likes of Ariel Sharon acting in their name". Its broadcast resulted in complaints by the Israeli embassy, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and the Conservative Friends of Israel that it was inaccurate and biased. Michael Green, chairman of Carlton Communications, the company that made the film, also objected to it in an interview with the Jewish Chronicle.
The UK television regulator, the Independent Television Commission (ITC), ordered an investigation. The ITC investigation rejected the complaints about the film, stating in its report:
The ITC raised with Carlton all the significant areas of inaccuracy critics of the programme alleged and the broadcaster answered them by reference to a range of historical texts. The ITC is not a tribunal of fact and is particularly aware of the difficulties of verifying 'historical fact' but the comprehensiveness and authority of Carlton's sources were persuasive, not least because many appeared to be of Israeli origin.
The ITC concluded that in Pilger's documentary "adequate opportunity was given to a pro-Israeli government perspective" and that the programme "was not in breach of the ITC Programme Code".
Stealing a Nation
Pilger's documentary Stealing a Nation (2004) recounts the experiences of the late 20th-century trials of the people of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean. The documentary primarily focuses on the expulsion of the Chagossians by Britain and the USA between 1967 and 1973 to Mauritius, and the poor economic situation faced by the islanders as a result of the deportation. Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos Islands, was given to the United States government which began the construction of a major military base for the region. In the 21st century, the US used the base for planes which were bombing targets in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In a 2000 ruling on the events, the International Court of Justice described the wholesale removal of the Chagossian peoples from the Chagos Islands by Britain as "a crime against humanity". Pilger strongly criticised Tony Blair for failing to respond in a substantive way to the 2000 High Court ruling that the expulsion of the Chagossian people to Mauritius was illegal.
In March 2005, Stealing a Nation received the Royal Television Society Award.
Latin America: The War on Democracy (2007)
The documentary The War on Democracy (2007) was Pilger's first film to be released in the cinema. In "an unremitting assault on American foreign policy since 1945", according to Andrew Billen in The Times, the film explores the role of US interventions, overt and covert, in toppling a series of governments in the region, and placing "a succession of favourably disposed bullies in control of its Latino backyard". It discusses the US role in the overthrow in 1973 of the democratically elected Chilean leader Salvador Allende, who was replaced by the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Pilger interviews several ex-CIA agents who purportedly took part in secret campaigns against democratic governments in South America. It also contains what Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian described as "a dewy-eyed interview" with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, which has moments of "almost Hello!-magazine deference".
Pilger explores the US Army School of the Americas in the US state of Georgia. Generations of South American military were trained there, with a curriculum including counter-insurgency techniques. Attendees reportedly included members of Pinochet's security services, along with men from Haiti, El Salvador, Argentina and Brazil who have been implicated in human rights abuses.
The film also details the attempted overthrow of Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez in 2002, and the response of the people of Caracas. It looks at the wider rise of populist governments across South America, led by figures calling for loosening ties with the United States and attempting a more equitable redistribution of the continent's natural wealth. Of "Chávez's decision to bypass the National Assembly for 18 months, and rule by decree", Peter Bradshaw writes "Pilger passes over it very lightly".
Pilger said the film is about the struggle of people to free themselves from a modern form of slavery. These people, he says,
describe a world not as American presidents like to see it as useful or expendable, they describe the power of courage and humanity among people with next to nothing. They reclaim noble words like democracy, freedom, liberation, justice, and in doing so they are defending the most basic human rights of all of us in a war being waged against all of us.
The War on Democracy won the Best Documentary category at the One World Media Awards in 2008.
The War You Don't See (2010)
The subject of The War You Don't See is the role of the media in making war. It concentrates on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories. It begins with the Collateral Murder video leaked by Chelsea Manning and released by WikiLeaks. In an interview, Julian Assange describes WikiLeaks as an organisation that gives power to 'conscientious objectors' within 'power systems'. The documentary contends that the CIA uses intelligence to manipulate public opinion and that the media collude by following the official line. During the documentary Pilger states that "propaganda relies on us in the media to aim its deceptions not at a far away country but at you at home".
John Lloyd in the Financial Times said The War You Don't See was a "one-sided" documentary which "had no thought of explaining, even hinting, that the wars fought by the US and the UK had a scrap of just cause, nor of examining the nature of what Pilger simply stated were "lies" – especially those that took the two countries to the invasion of Iraq".
Utopia (2013)
With Utopia, Pilger returned to the experiences of Indigenous Australians and what he termed "the denigrating of their humanity". A documentary feature film, it takes its title from Utopia, an Aboriginal homeland (also known as an outstation) in the Northern Territory. Pilger says that "in essence, very little" has changed since the first of his seven films about the Aboriginal people, A Secret Country: The First Australians (1985). In an interview with the UK based Australian Times he commented: "the catastrophe imposed on Indigenous Australians is the equivalent of apartheid, and the system has to change".
Reviewing the film, Peter Bradshaw wrote: "The awful truth is that Indigenous communities are on mineral-rich lands that cause mouths to water in mining corporation boardrooms". "When the subject and subjects are allowed to speak for themselves – when Pilger doesn't stand and preach – the injustices glow like throbbing wounds", wrote Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times, but the documentary maker "goes on too long. 110 minutes is a hefty time in screen politics, especially when we know the makers' message from scene one".
Geoffrey Macnab described it as an "angry, impassioned documentary" while for Mark Kermode it is a "searing indictment of the ongoing mistreatment" of the first Australians.
The Coming War on China (2016)
The Coming War on China was Pilger's 60th film for ITV.
The film premiered in the UK on Thursday 1 December 2016, and was shown on ITV at 10.40 pm on Tuesday 6 December and on the Australian public broadcaster SBS on 16 April 2017. In the documentary, according to Pilger, "the evidence and witnesses warn that nuclear war is no longer a shadow, but a contingency. The greatest build-up of American-led military forces since the Second World War is well under way. They are on the western borders of Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, confronting China. Like the renewal of post-Soviet Russia, the rise of China as an economic power is declared an 'existential threat' to the divine right of the United States to rule and dominate human affairs".
"The first third told, and told well, the unforgivable, unconscionable tale of what has overtaken the Marshall Islanders since 1946, when the US first nuked the test site on Bikini Atoll" beginning an extended series of tests, wrote Euan Ferguson in The Observer. "Over the next 12 years they would unleash a total of 42.2 megatons. The islanders, as forensically proved by Pilger, were effectively guinea pigs for [the] effects of radiation". Ferguson wrote that the rest of the film "was a sane, sober, necessary, deeply troubling bucketful of worries". Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian wrote that the film "lays bare the historical horrors of the US military in the Pacific, exposing the paranoia and pre-emptive aggression of its semi-secret bases," adding: "This is a gripping film, which though it comes close to excusing China ... does point out China's insecurities and political cruelties". Neil Young of The Hollywood Reporter called the film an "authoritative indictment of American nefariousness in the western Pacific".
Kevin Maher wrote in The Times that he admired the early sequences on the Marshall Islands, but that he believed the film lacked nuance or subtlety. Maher wrote that, for Pilger, China is "a brilliant place with just some 'issues with human rights', but let's not go into that now". Diplomat columnist David Hutt said "Pilger consistently glosses over China's past crimes while dwelling on America's".
The Dirty War on the National Health Service (2019)
Pilger's The Dirty War on the National Health Service was released in the UK on 29 November 2019 and examined the changes that the NHS has undergone since its founding in 1948. Pilger makes the case that governments beginning with that of Margaret Thatcher have waged a secret war against the NHS with a view to privatising it slowly and surreptitiously. Pilger predicted that moves toward privatisation would create more poverty and homelessness and that the resulting chaos would be used as an argument for further "reform". Peter Bradshaw described the documentary as a "fierce, necessary film".
Personal life
Pilger was married to journalist Scarth Flett, granddaughter of the physician and geologist Sir John Smith Flett. Their son Sam was born in 1973 and is a sports writer. Pilger also has a daughter, Zoe Pilger, born 1984, with journalist Yvonne Roberts. Zoe is an author and art critic.
Pilger died in London on 30 December 2023, at the age of 84.
Honours and awards
The Press Awards, formerly the British Press Awards
- 1966: Descriptive Writer of the Year
- 1967: Journalist of the Year
- 1970: International Reporter of the Year
- 1974: News Reporter of the Year
- 1978: Campaigning Journalist of the Year
- 1979: Journalist of the Year
Other awards
- 1991: Television Richard Dimbleby Award, BAFTA
- 1991: At 19th International Emmy Awards Emmy for documentary 'Cambodia, the Betrayal'
- 2009: Sydney Peace Prize
- 2011: Grierson Trust Award, UK
- 2017: Order of Timor-Leste
Legacy
The John Pilger Archive is housed at the British Library. The papers can be accessed through the British Library catalogue.
See also
In Spanish: John Pilger para niños
