Times accuses Pilger of stealing firewood from a Tuscan farmer
Posted by Ian M on January 1, 2024, 6:30 pm
Unclear who authored this hatchet job, maybe Murdoch himself? Predictable collection of smears, 'campaigning', 'controversial', 'crusading', 'hard left', 'bollinger bolshevik', 'anti-American' etc. along with some more serious allegations and a picture of him receiving a journalism award from Thatcher, presumably to indicate his lack of principles or something. God knows where they pulled out the firewood story from (bolded) but it's got to be up there with absurd attempts to discredit anti-establishment figures.
OBITUARY John Pilger, campaigning Australian journalist, dies aged 84
Controversial, left-wing documentary maker whose name inspired an unflattering verb
Sunday December 31 2023, 3.30pm, The Times Australia
In 1982 the crusading journalist John Pilger wrote in the Daily Mirror about how in Bangkok he had purchased Sunee, an eight-year-old illiterate village girl, for £85. Over three pages, Pilger declared that this “slave” was merely one of an estimated 200,000 children “forced into hard labour in sweatshop factories or as domestics and prostitutes”.
It was a story that grabbed international attention, especially because it possessed the perfect ending. After heading back to what was described as her village in northeast Thailand, Pilger and his photographer miraculously discovered Sunee’s mother and photographed the tearful reunion, while a visibly moved Pilger looked on and pledged money for Sunee’s education.
Unfortunately for Pilger, a follow-up by a more sceptical journalist discovered that Sunee was actually attending primary school in Bangkok and that the entire story was fabricated by an enterprising taxi driver who had been hired by Pilger to find a genuine slave girl but had failed to do so. Instead, the driver bribed a mother and daughter living in Bangkok to play the part.
When Auberon Waugh commented on this in an article in The Spectator, Pilger sued them for questioning his story and, as a result, no London newspapers immediately followed up on the hoax. This prompted Waugh to pursue Pilger for the bias of his reporting and ultimately invent a new verb: to Pilger, Pilgerise, or be Pilgered. It was defined as: “To present information in a sensationalist manner to reach a foregone conclusion; using emotive language to make a false political point; treating a subject emotionally with generous disregard for inconvenient detail; or making a pompous judgment on wrong premises.” It was later withdrawn from The Oxford English Dictionary of New Words, after legal action by Pilger.
Only three years earlier, in 1979, Pilger was at the height of his fame with the broadcast of his ITV documentary Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia. It portrayed harrowing scenes in the aftermath of the genocide by the Khmer Rouge, the communist rulers, who were ousted earlier in the year by the Vietnamese army. The screenings throughout the world were said to have helped raise nearly $50 million in aid for the devastated country.
Such was the power of the documentary that schoolchildren donated their pocket money while some manual labourers handed over their entire weekly pay packets. Later, critics pointed out that Pilger had ignored the communist credentials of the Khmer Rouge, preferring to call Pol Pot, their leader, an “Asian Hitler”, and when a colleague spoke of communist Vietnam having invaded Cambodia, Pilger shouted in reply: “No mate, it wasn’t an invasion, it was liberation — they liberated Cambodia!”
Pilger also declared that the American bombing of Cambodia was the main catalyst for the growth of the Khmer Rouge, rather than their reign of terror or military aid from their communist allies. Already, an extreme left-wing and anti-American bias consistently underscored much of his reporting.
From the mid-Sixties until the early Eighties, Pilger won numerous awards for his international reporting in the Daily Mirror and elsewhere, but his real impact came from more than 60 emotionally charged, hard-hitting ITV documentaries, as the handsome sun-tanned presenter with a shock of long hair intoned about the perfidies of the West in Biafra, Vietnam and Diego Garcia, or the plight of Australian Aborigines, along with poverty in the UK.
There was never a single example of Pilger praising a pro-western leader or government. Instead, it was dictators such as Fidel Castro of Cuba, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Vladimir Putin of Russia or the communist rulers of Vietnam that were sympathetically portrayed. Later, Pilger was one of the main supporters of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, despite losing tens of thousands of pounds in bail sureties when Assange absconded.
When questioned about his left-wing bias, Pilger responded: “I stand by every word I’ve ever written. I can back everything up with facts. I have never made the facts fit an agenda, unlike the corporate media … My questions do not have a tone of voice. I simply call people to account with facts.”
In 2002 Pilger dismissed the notion of the principles of impartiality in British broadcasting, saying it was merely “a euphemism for the consensual view of established authority”. In responding to claims of his anti-American prejudice, Pilger countered: “More terrorists are given training and sanctuary in the United States than anywhere on earth. They include mass murderers, torturers, former and future tyrants and assorted international criminals … During my lifetime, America has been constantly waging war against much of humanity: impoverished people mostly, in stricken places.”
Rather than blame Osama bin Laden for perpetrating the 9/11 attacks, Pilger instead claimed American foreign policy was responsible for the growth of Islamic fundamentalism: “Their distant voices of rage are now heard; the daily horrors in faraway brutalised places have at last come home.” The Islamist terrorist attacks in London in 2005 were also laid directly at the feet of the foreign policies of the prime minister Tony Blair.
It was no surprise that, in due course, Pilger endorsed the Russian invasion and illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 and later was sceptical of Russian involvement in the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. This polemical approach to looking at all international conflicts through an anti-American prism won him widespread support throughout the world, though others denounced him as a dupe of the eastern bloc and, later, the Putin regime.
John Richard Pilger was born in Bondi, Sydney, in 1939. His carpenter father, Claude, the son of German immigrants, was an active trade unionist, and his mother, Elsie, was a schoolteacher. Pilger was especially proud of his Irish convict ancestry, one of whom was convicted of insurrection in 1821 and sentenced to 14 years’ imprisonment. From an early age, Pilger was a competitive swimmer and later became a successful rower. He attended Sydney Boys High School, the leading secondary state school, where at the age of 12 he co-founded The Messenger, a student newspaper. In 1958 he began his journalism as a copy boy on the Sydney Sun before joining the Packer-owned Consolidated Press, where he stayed until 1962, working as a sub-editor, reporter and sports writer. He then left for Italy, where he founded a news agency that quickly failed, so he tried his luck in London.
In 1963, after a brief spell at Reuters, he was eventually recruited by the Daily Mirror, then the largest English language circulation newspaper in the world. The appointment was made by Michael Christiansen, the assistant editor. He was concerned about an upcoming match against the Daily Express and asked the tall Australian if he was any good at cricket. Pilger never played the game, but claimed to be a decent spin bowler and was promptly offered a job as a sub-editor.
After spending two years in the Manchester office as a reporter, he returned to London as the youngest feature writer on the paper and then had a lucky break. Hugh Cudlipp was chairman of the Mirror Group of newspapers and the presiding force for the success of the Daily Mirror, with its campaigns, gimmicks and stunts. After the bad publicity concerning fights between mods and rockers, a politician had lobbied him to write something positive about Britain’s youth involvement with the voluntary services, along the lines of “Motorbike thugs decorating grannies’ kitchen”. Pilger had already complained to Cudlipp about needing more challenging assignments, so he asked Pilger to come up with a series extolling the virtues of Britain’s younger generation especially in deprived regions of Britain.
Pilger instantly thought this would be a brilliant opportunity to highlight the work of young British volunteers around the globe with the Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO). Cudlipp quickly approved this venture, so for the next year Pilger travelled around the world, writing about British volunteers helping to conserve endangered species, creating potable water supplies in Tanzania as well as teaching English in Laos and nursing in Palestinian refugee camps. It won him his first newspaper award which soon led to his appointment as chief foreign correspondent of the Daily Mirror.
A solitary, slightly aloof figure in the newsroom, Pilger managed to strike a deal with management that his copy could never be touched or cut, which led to a certain resentment among his colleagues. He quickly gained a reputation for hard-hitting emotional accounts of the oppressed and underdogs. His assignment to Vietnam in 1966 led to more awards and later a number of TV documentaries for ATV and Granada. Pilger was present at the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968. Among his many gongs, Pilger won journalist of the year at the British Press Awards in 1967 and 1979.
By the early Seventies, he had acquired a taste for never travelling less than club class and sporting expensive designer shirts that were laundered at Jeeves of Belgravia. Whenever he was reporting on the iniquities of the Thai military and western capitalism in Thailand, he invariably stayed at the Mandarin Oriental, one of the grandest and most expensive hotels in Asia.
To further add to his “Bollinger Bolshevik” credentials, he also acquired a farmhouse in Tuscany, where an architect created a conversation pit, which he decorated with photographs of himself in the company of assorted freedom fighters, anti-imperialists and left-wing dictators.
His sense of righteousness and humourlessness meant there were rarely apologies for questionable personal behaviour. On one occasion in the early Eighties, Pilger stopped his car next to the adjoining Tuscan farmer’s woodpile and helped himself to a number of freshly cut logs without any permission or compensation. The farmer’s wife complained to a neighbour, prompting Pilger to ask a friend to write a letter in Italian asserting he was not a thief, though he made no effort to pay for the logs and from that day onwards the farmer and Pilger never spoke to each other again.
Any questioning of his accuracy or probity was frequently countered with a libel writ. Even his journalistic mentor, Wilfred Burchett, the doyen of pro-communist apologists, once remarked to a colleague: “I always tell John not to tilt at so many windmills.”
By the mid-Eighties, the Mirror Group was under the ownership of Robert Maxwell and Pilger was let go, after working for the Daily Mirror for more than two decades. He later found a berth as a columnist on the New Statesman alongside numerous TV assignments.
Always eager to find a conspiracy to bolster his point of view, Pilger presented a documentary about Cambodia in 1990 that accused Christopher Geidt — now Lord Geidt, the former principal private secretary of Queen Elizabeth II — of secretly training the Khmer Rouge to lay landmines. Geidt, who was visiting Cambodia for a research project, sued and won substantial damages plus unconditional apologies from Pilger and Central TV in the High Court.
Pilger’s commitment to a hard-left view meant that after Nelson Mandela took power in South Africa, he attacked him for selling off bloated and inefficient state industries to the private sector. In 2000, on a trip to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Pilger claimed that, “I have seldom felt as safe in any country”. A decade later Pilger described President Obama as an “Uncle Tom” who surrounded himself with Zionists. Donald Trump, meanwhile, was said to be less dangerous than his rival presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton: “Trump is speaking straight to ordinary Americans,” Pilger declared.
Pilger was married to Scarth Flett and they had a son, Sam, who is a sports journalist. The marriage was dissolved. He also had a daughter, Zoe, an art critic, from a relationship with the journalist Yvonne Roberts.
On the Russian poisoning in 2018 of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, Pilger asserted: “This is a carefully constructed drama as part of the propaganda campaign that has been building now for several years in order to justify the actions of Nato, Britain and the United States, towards Russia.” As usual he added: “That’s a fact.”
Even a week before the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Pilger — a regular guest on the propaganda TV channel Russia Today — dismissed such a possibility as western propaganda to assist the “Neo-Nazi Ukrainian government”. Instead, “Nato itself is the real threat to European security”.
John Pilger, crusading journalist, was born on October 9, 1939. He died after a long illness on December 30, 2023, aged 84 Tell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/
Re: Times accuses Pilger of stealing firewood from a Tuscan farmer
There's not much in this, is there? Christ, his antics make me sound like a... pious monk. Nice hotels come with the territory. I remember one in Frankfurt, where polite Turkish guys handed one a warm cotton towel to dry one's hands after taking a piss.
Re: Times accuses Pilger of stealing firewood from a Tuscan farmer
Fundamentally, I don't give fuck about the foibles of a public figures personal life. Let him who is without... and all that.
What matters, at the end of the day is the journalism he produced, which, on balance, was, outstanding. So what if he interviewed 'dictators', it's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it!
Re: Pilger said he was proud to be called a traitor by Murdoch
A hatchet job by a Murdoch employee, who'd have thought it. Did Pilger get some things wrong. Of course, the Skripal poisoning, we really don't know what happened here, and he'd have been wiser to keep an open mind as we all should. And he was successfully sued in regard to claims about Christopher Geidt. A horrible black mark again Pilger's work, apparently. The obituary writer doesn't seem to realise he/she is equally revealing that only this once, in his whole career of crusading journalism, did Pilger make a claim that was seriously challengeable by anyone else.
So is the remark that when commentators challenged his accuracy or probity, they'd get a libel threat? Isn't that what people do when others are saying to the wider world that Pilger is guilty of lying.? And they all kept quiet? So much for their charges. And we have, in all those years of his work, just that one successful case against him?
To the writer, it matters not whether what Pilger said was right or wrong, but merely if it offended his/her own personal opinion or the opinion of his employer. Privatisation of S Africa's state assets, the Uncle Tom charge against Obama - Pilger's allowed to say these things and many many people would agree with him. It is not a useful or relevant charge against Pilger's journalism.
So at times he stayed at expensive hotels and had some personal vanities. Goodness me, how damning. This is one long miserable ad hominem from a worthless hack Murdoch puppet - the writer should be put out to grass like his boss.
Re: Times accuses Pilger of stealing firewood from a Tuscan farmer
"In his 1994 book Distant Voices, Pilger described how the Treasury solicitor warned that it was "prepared to intervene in the proceedings at any stage … in respect to evidence from any witness".
Pilger said the authority for a public interest immunity certificate – a gagging order – signed by the then defence secretary, Tom King, was presented to the judge.
"Evidence regarding the SAS and the security services, such as MI6, which might have been produced as evidence … would be challenged," wrote Pilger. A long-standing friend of Geidt, the journalist William Shawcross, wrote in the Guardian on 15 May 2013 that Pilger's account of the suppressed evidence in the trial was "bluster" and that it was "nonsense" for anyone to suggest that government "gagging" had prevented him from defending his case. "
-Whatever Geidt's involvement or not any reasonably well informed person at the time knew of the rumours that the SAS were training the Khmer: of course this would always be subject to official state censorship.
Interestingly from the horses mouth Kit Klarenburg recently dug this up from an interview with "Former SAS member Chris Ryan, 47... best-selling author and TV presenter." in "thisismoney.co.uk":
.. you have to be so squeaky clean that if so motivated you could potentially make a lucrative career as, say, a barrister.
Instead of consistently and voluntarily putting your life on the line for substantially less impressive material reward or personal gain.
Funny how that works, isn’t it?
George W Bush and Dick Cheney each had three arrests on their respective records: Apparently it did not prevent them being wafted unconditionally into high office by the Murdoch press, from wherein they unleashed an elaborate and unprovoked genocide of depravity unmatched since the fiasco of Vietnam.
One law for thee …
- Shyaku
Re: Times accuses Pilger of stealing firewood from a Tuscan farmer
Jesus, Mary and Joseph that was an utterly shameful piece of garbage. Whichever bought and paid for Murdoch hack that spat that on to the page should be ashamed but that would presuppose a conscience.
Stealing firewood from his neighbours pile in Tuscany does seem like the sort of thing the fraudian would mention They can't even do their hit pieces right these days.
This is truly disgraceful though. I don't usually even look at the Times/Telegraph/Mail/Expess as it always seems pointless but I'd forgotten how spiteful they are....no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party...So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.