The Real First Casualty of War
Interesting article by John Pilger, especially the first paragraph or two.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/pilger/pilger40.html
During the 1970s, I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a Stalinist dictatorship. The dissident novelist Zdenek Urbánek told me, "In one respect, we are more fortunate than you in the west. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and watch on television, nothing of the official truth. Unlike you, we have learned to read between the lines, because real truth is always subversive."
I think however that Pilger is as guilty of the things he accuses others of. If he hadn't been driving his own political agenda rather than sticking to journalism, the good he could have done may well have happened.
For example, I want to know about things like:
It was during this time that I made a series of documentaries about Cambodia. The first, in 1979, Year Zero: the silent death of Cambodia, described the American bombing that had provided a catalyst for the rise of Pol Pot,...
whether because I care that my government's (or its allies') actions are evil or only that they are counterproductive.
But when he says things like:
The target was another impoverished nation without resources: Nicaragua, whose "threat," like Vietnam's, was in trying to establish a model of development different from that of the colonial dictatorships backed by Washington.
he loses credibility. I would counter that it was perfectly plausible (even if untrue) to argue that Nicaragua was not "merely" trying to develop using a different model (after all, what was Japan, or Western Europe?), but was the pawn of an evil empire bent on world domination (oddly enough the same "Stalinist dictatorship" he seems to be trying to distances himself from).
He should take a line from Fox News: We report, you decide, (to which they are more famously but equally unfaithful).
The tragedy then is that, at least in a pragmatic sense if not an ideal sense, he "deserves" to be censored - and we are all the poorer for it because he tries to use these important stories to make great logical leaps to support his assertions about the biggest issues in the world.
In fact it is Pilger's unfaithfulness to the ideals of his profession that deprives us of an important alternate source of information.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/pilger/pilger40.html
During the 1970s, I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a Stalinist dictatorship. The dissident novelist Zdenek Urbánek told me, "In one respect, we are more fortunate than you in the west. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and watch on television, nothing of the official truth. Unlike you, we have learned to read between the lines, because real truth is always subversive."
I think however that Pilger is as guilty of the things he accuses others of. If he hadn't been driving his own political agenda rather than sticking to journalism, the good he could have done may well have happened.
For example, I want to know about things like:
It was during this time that I made a series of documentaries about Cambodia. The first, in 1979, Year Zero: the silent death of Cambodia, described the American bombing that had provided a catalyst for the rise of Pol Pot,...
whether because I care that my government's (or its allies') actions are evil or only that they are counterproductive.
But when he says things like:
The target was another impoverished nation without resources: Nicaragua, whose "threat," like Vietnam's, was in trying to establish a model of development different from that of the colonial dictatorships backed by Washington.
he loses credibility. I would counter that it was perfectly plausible (even if untrue) to argue that Nicaragua was not "merely" trying to develop using a different model (after all, what was Japan, or Western Europe?), but was the pawn of an evil empire bent on world domination (oddly enough the same "Stalinist dictatorship" he seems to be trying to distances himself from).
He should take a line from Fox News: We report, you decide, (to which they are more famously but equally unfaithful).
The tragedy then is that, at least in a pragmatic sense if not an ideal sense, he "deserves" to be censored - and we are all the poorer for it because he tries to use these important stories to make great logical leaps to support his assertions about the biggest issues in the world.
In fact it is Pilger's unfaithfulness to the ideals of his profession that deprives us of an important alternate source of information.
posted by Patrick Henry at 14:47
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