Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Pilger's "insurrection of subjugated knowledge"

by John Pilger  |  Socialist Resistance no44  |  page 22

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

Freedom next time Bantam Books, €17.99 Reviewed by Andy Gibbons In the last issue of Socialist Resistance, Piers Mostyn compared John Le Carre to George Orwell.

I appreciated Le Carre's Absolute Friends but a better follow-on would be Patrick Neute's City of Tiny Lights. To my mind, John Pilger is more comparable to Orwell - except that he hasn't been co-opted by the state.

Freedom next time is his latest contribution to what Vandana Shiva calls "an insurrection of subjugated knowledge."

In the introduction he talks about America as a "prefascist" state, primarily because of media control removing that vital precondition of democracy i.e. freedom of information. This applies to Britain (and Israel) too and could be a useful term for us to use.

Anti-war activists will have heard of the US base in the Indian Ocean: "BBC newsreaders still refer to US aircraft flying out to bomb Afghanistan and Iraq from the 'uninhabited' island of Diego Garcia."

Pilger's first chapter is about 2,000 black British citizens secretly transported from Diego Garcia/Chagos Islands. How different their treatment was to the 1200 white citizens of the Falklands/ Malvinas, when they faced a takeover by another government.

When Tony Blair is tried for war crimes, spare a thought for Harold Wilson.

Yes, 2004's tsunami was predicated and it did miss the Chagos archipelago. Not surprisingly the "best kept secret in the US Navy" was deliberately suppressed.

Along with recent "cry wolf" warnings of American climatologists it neatly sums up the imperialist approach to climate change. Diego Garcia is technically British territory.

In a very short chapter on "Shining India" Pilger explores how that country has transformed "food from a basic need which everyone has a right to into a globally traded commodity" (Vandana Shiva

In the final chapter Liberating Afghanistan he discusses the "Camp Justice" allegations and points out that the Taliban had suppressed the opium trade which has again become the major export.

Like Orwell, Pilger loves words and uses them precisely. As Chomsky (a linguist by trade) so eloquently points out in Hegemony or Survival, Pilger's work highlights the "struggle of people against power and memory against forgetting." (Milan Kundera)