Quotes by John Pilger

“Official truths are often powerful illusions”

“Nothing more vividly sums up the horrific situation in Iraq than what happened on Wednesday of this week when American helicopters attacked a wedding party in the west of Iraq killing 40 mostly women and children, a massacre. How long is the world going to stand for this? When I say the world Im talking about civilized humanity.”

“Vietnam was as much a laboratory experiment as a war”

“The attack on Iraq has been long planned. There just hasnt been an excuse for it. Since George H.W. Bush didnt unseat Saddam in 1991, theres been a longing among the extreme right in the United States to finish the job. The war on terrorism has given them that opportunity.”

“Its very clear that the Bush Administration is out of control. It contains some truly dangerous people.”

“Orwell is almost our litmus test. Some of his satirical writing looks like reality these days.”

“The censorship is such on television in the U.S. that films like mine dont stand a chance.”

“There are fundamentalists, Christian fundamentalists, who appear to be in charge of the White House at the moment, but they are very different from the Christian gentlemen who ran the British Empire and believed they were doing good works around the world. These days its about naked power.”

“Im absolutely convinced of that. Israel is the representative of the United States in that part of the world. Its policies are so integrated with American policies that they use the same language.”

“I grew up in Sydney in a very political household, where we were all for the underdog.”

The major western democracies are moving towards corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies — socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor — and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war. This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food.

It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and the myths that surround it.

Many journalists now are no more than channelers and echoers of what George Orwell called the official truth. They simply cipher and transmit lies. It really grieves me that so many of my fellow journalists can be so manipulated that they become really what the French describe as functionaires, functionaries, not journalists. Many journalists become very defensive when you suggest to them that they are anything but impartial and objective. The problem with those words impartiality and objectivity is that they have lost their dictionary meaning. Theyve been taken over... [they] now mean the establishment point of view... Journalists dont sit down and think, Im now going to speak for the establishment. Of course not. But they internalise a whole set of assumptions, and one of the most potent assumptions is that the world should be seen in terms of its usefulness to the West, not humanity.

We are beckoned to see the world through a one-way mirror, as if we are threatened and innocent and the rest of humanity is threatening, or wretched, or expendable. Our memory is struggling to rescue the truth that human rights were not handed down as privileges from a parliament, or a boardroom, or an institution, but that peace is only possible with justice and with information that gives us the power to act justly.

The U.S. is a cosmetic democracy.