Veteran British Journalist Pilger Blasts Media’s Complicity in Drive for Nuclear War Against Russia
EIRNS—Distinguished veteran British journalist John Pilger delivered a powerful blast at the controlled media, on Friday, in an address to the Logan Investigative Reporting Symposium in London on Dec. 5, accurately characterizing the major news media as leading the world closer to World War III.
"The world is facing the prospect of major war, perhaps nuclear war — with the United States determined to isolate and provoke Russia and eventually China. This truth is being turned inside out by journalists, including those who promoted the lies that led to the bloodbath in Iraq in 2003," he said.
"The times we live in are so dangerous and so distorted in public perception that propaganda is no longer, as Edward Bernays called it, an ’invisible government’. It is the government. It rules directly without fear of contradiction and its principal aim is the conquest of us: our sense of the world, our ability to separate truth from lies."
While most people might think of Fox News or other right-wing media outlets as the worst culprits, Pilger goes after the so-called "liberal" media as most responsible.
"The most effective propaganda is found not in the Sun or on Fox News — but beneath a liberal halo. When the New York Times published claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, its fake evidence was believed, because it wasn’t Fox News; it was the New York Times," he said. "The same is true of the Washington Post and the Guardian, both of which have played a critical role in conditioning their readers to accept a new and dangerous cold war. All three liberal newspapers have misrepresented events in Ukraine as a malign act by Russia — when, in fact, the fascist-led coup in Ukraine was the work of the United States, aided by Germany and NATO. This inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington’s military encirclement and intimidation of Russia is not contentious. It’s not even news, but suppressed behind a smear and scare campaign of the kind I grew up with during the first cold war."
Further on Russia, he says:
"The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news black-outs I can remember. The biggest Western military build-up in the Caucasus and eastern Europe since WWII is blacked out. Washington’s secret aid to Kiev and its neo-Nazi brigades responsible for war crimes against the population of eastern Ukraine is blacked out. Evidence that contradicts propaganda that Russia was responsible for the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner is blacked out.
"And again, supposedly liberal media are the censors. Citing no facts, no evidence, one journalist identified a pro-Russian leader in Ukraine as the man who shot down the airliner. This man, he wrote, was known as The Demon. He was a scary man who frightened the journalist. That was the evidence.
"Many in the western media have worked hard to present the ethnic Russian population of Ukraine as outsiders in their own country, almost never as Ukrainians seeking a federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a foreign-orchestrated coup against their elected government.
"What the Russian president has to say is of no consequence; he is a pantomime villain who can be abused with impunity. An American general who heads NATO and is straight out of Dr. Strangelove — one General Breedlove routinely claims Russian invasions without a shred of visual evidence. His impersonation of Stanley Kubrick’s General Jack D. Ripper is pitch perfect."
Pilger doesn’t limit himself to the danger of nuclear world War III, either. The economic crisis, he notes, is as fake as the supposed threat emanating from Russia. He castigates those in the media who also, especially in the liberal media, went after Edward Snowden and Julian Assange of Wikileaks fame. The truth is often just written out of history. "’When the truth is replaced by silence,’ said the Soviet dissident Yevtushenko, ’the silence is a lie,’" Pilger said.
"It’s this kind of silence we journalists need to break. We need to look in the mirror. We need to call to account an unaccountable media that services power and a psychosis that threatens world war."
Aside from Sputnik News, the Guardian, and a few alternative media outlets, there seems to be very little coverage of Pilger’s remarks.
