A transcription of John Pilger’s address to Socialism 2009 in San Francisco
Murdoch: a cultural Chernobyl
John Pilger describes “an iceberg of relentless inhumanity” beneath the Guardian’s revelations about illegal phone tapping at Murdoch’s Sunday tabloid and the impact of his empire in Britain and all over the world.
Mourn on the fourth of July
John Pilger argues that while liberals now celebrate America’s return to its “moral ideals”, they are silent on a venerable taboo. This is the true role of Americanism: an ideology distinguished by its myths and the denial that it exists. President Obama is its embodiment.
Books that counter our “training” to make war
John Pilger asks his readers to set aside the usual summer holiday reading lists and reach for books that help us make sense of extraordinary times and to resist our “training” to make war.
Lockerbie: Megrahi was framed
John Pilger describes the suppression of facts behind the furore over the “compassionate” release of the so-called Lockerbie bomber, Libyan Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi. He writes that Megrahi was “in effect blackmailed by the governments of Scotland and England” so that it would not be revealed in his appeal that he had been framed for a crime he did not commit.
For many Britons, the party game is over
John Pilger analyses the impact of ‘Blair’s wars’ on the Labour Party and its historic convergence with the Tories into a single ideology state.
The lying game: how we are prepared for another war of aggression
John Pilger compares the current drum-beating for war against Iran, based on a fake “nuclear threat”, with the manufacture of a sense of false crisis that led to invasion of Iraq and the deaths of 1.3 million people.
War is peace. Ignorance is strength
John Pilger draws on George Orwell’s inspiration to describe the Call of Obama: “attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he kills”.
A postal strike in Britain is the war at home
John Pilger argues that the strike by British postal workers for the right to work with dignity, consultation and security has wider significance for all touched by the political regression that imposes high rates of poverty and gross wealth for an opulent minorty represented by “rescued banks” now celebrating record bonuses.
Thirty years on, the holocaust in Cambodia and its aftermath is remembered
In a report for the London Daily Mirror, John Pilger recalls the stricken society he found in Cambodia in 1979 which he described in his documentary, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia. He reminds us that the Pol Pot horror emerged from the bombing ordered by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, and that Cambodia was again “punished” when its liberators came from the wrong side of the Cold War and the Thatcher government sent special forces to train the Khmer Rouge in exile.
