To: Detroit/Seattle
Workers' Voice mailing list
January 9, 2024
by Joseph Green, Detroit Workers’ Voice
The well-known activist, journalist, and writer John Pilger died on 30 December 2023. He was known for his many books, articles, and documentary films denouncing imperialism, among which are those on Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor, Australia, Palestine, and elsewhere. This won’t be forgotten.
He is also known for backing the blood-stained Ssyrian dictator
Assad, for denying the Serbian massacres of the Kosovars, for defending
Putin and denouncing Ukrainians as neo-Nazis, and for being silent
about the crimes of the Chinese regime. This shouldn’t be
forgotten either.
How could this happen? It wasn’t simply a matter that as he grew
older Pilger became sloppy in his reporting, or lazy and credulous
about bad sources, although one can understand why some activists
nostalgic about his best work might think so.
The truth is that Pilger was remarkably consistent throughout his life in his approach to journalism and his view of what was going on in the world. His descent into apology for massacres and tyranny was a result of his beliefs about what the world was like, and his views of what journalism was.
He would tell the world about the crimes of imperialism, but he had a narrow view of what imperialism was, and didn’t recognize the existence of new imperialisms such as those of Russia and China, nor of revisionist state-capitalism. True, he could denounce the Khmer Rouge, but only because Vietnam itself was doing so. He could later see problems with post-liberation Vietnam, but only as continuing crimes of outside forces. He could denounce the continuing oppression of the masses under the ANC regime, and its betrayal of the Freedom Charter, but all he could see was white or Western capitalist pressure — as far as I know, he never even hinted at the connection of ANC’s betrayal to the nature of the revisionist political trend it followed for decades.
This selective nature of Pilger’s struggle against oppression took its toll, and would eventually lead to his betrayal of many working people’s struggles around the world.
He wrote a book Breaking the silence,
but throughout his career he was silent about whatever went against his
view of the world. He did not see the nature of state-capitalism or
revisionism and had no idea of what the mass struggle would be other
than against the traditional capitalists and Western corporate
interests and governments. He was a lively and effective writer, and
many of his targets were important, but he was also a propagandist who
sought to cover up things that didn’t accord with his views.
And so he did accomplish a number of things, and many people read
his work. But things don’t stay the same. Sooner or later the radical
left has to deal with the fact that so many who speak in its name deny
the existence of new imperialisms. Otherwise, the masses will see the
radical left as apologists for one type of reaction against another.
The tragedy of Pilger’s life is that he couldn’t see the need to move
forward, and so he went from silence about certain crimes against the
working masses to active cover-up. And with regard to sources, he only
considered what agreed with his preconceived views. This reached the
point that he avowed on one occasion in 2017 that he would get his news
every morning from various websites that he liked, and would only read
the general press in order to refute it, not to see if it described
anything about what was going on in the world. (1) This
presumably would be what he would recommend to others. And it was not
likely, when choosing which websites to look at, that he read or took
seriously the part of the left press that brought up facts that he
found inconvenient.
Among Pilger’s best work was his bringing out that, after the fall of apartheid, the majority of the black masses in South Africa faced continuing harsh economic and social conditions with shocking inequality and deep privation. His catchword was that “apartheid didn’t die”, which is inaccurate and shows an inability to understand how the struggle should continue, but reflected his fierce denunciation of what was going on. He criticized Mandela’s deal with the white supremacist National Party, which had enforced apartheid with a bloody whip, about what South Africa would look like after the surrender of power by the National Party in 1993. And he made a point of doing so in his comments after Mandela’s death in 2013. However, he was silent on what long-standing political views in the ANC and the tightly-related South African Communist Party had prepared the way for Mandela’s deal.
We in the Communist Voice Organization also wrote about Mandela’s
“divided legacy” at that time. Let’s look back at that, because some
aspects of what happened to Mandela bear on what happened to Pilger, as
the deal by the ANC and the SACP with the National Party was connected
to their similar blindness to the same features of the world politics
as Pilger was blind to. At a meeting of the Detroit Workers’ Voice
Discussion Group in 2013 we noted that Mandela was a key figure in the
struggle against apartheid, but Mandela also
“had been one of the key figures who had led the ANC, as it came to power, to discard the promises of its famous ‘Freedom Charter’, which had envisioned radical economic change. Instead, the ANC government has acted as one of the foremost adherents in the world of free-market fanaticism. If the bourgeois governments fawn on the memory of Mandela today, it's the Mandela who became a defender of the privileges of the rich and an advocate of policies like those of the World Bank.
“This shows the importance of the fight against revisionism, the political trend that talks in the name of Marxism and communism but has betrayed ... their real meaning. It is revisionism, not communism, that rules in China and Cuba today, and Russia and Eastern Europe in the old days. This has had its effect in South African politics. Although many members and supporters of the South African Communist Party fought courageously and at great personal cost against apartheid, the party also came to follow closely the sold-out politics of the revisionist movement centered in the Soviet Union. And the ANC regime showed in practice how a new bourgeoisie can arise after a revolution; in the case of South Africa, the new ANC millionaires emerged hand-in-hand with the traditional white bourgeoisie.
“Let us be inspired by the historic victory of the South African masses in overthrowing apartheid, but let us also be committed to continuing the class struggle until the liberation of the masses from poverty, inequality, and all oppression. Let us learn from the momentous struggle of the South African people, and from both the pluses and minuses of Mandela's legacy.” (2)
In a way, something similar can be said about John Pilger’s legacy. He was an active fighter against what he saw as imperialism, but he only saw so much, and throughout his life he closed his eyes to anything else but that, and this eventually led to his sordid betrayals of the mass struggle in various countries. We should continue the fight against capitalism and imperialism, but more consistently then he did, and with recognition of the need to distinguish what is truly socialist or progressive and what isn’t. The only way to truly commemorate the best in Pilger’s life and work is to take seriously the need for the radical left to overcome the viewpoints that led him to abandon the cause he had seemed to dedicate his life to.
(1) See the question and answer period after his presentation at the 2017 forum in South Africa, where he delivered the Abdulhay Ahmed Saloojee Trust Memorial Lecture, 2017. https://johnpilger.com/videos/john-pilger-delivers-the-abdulhay-ahmed-saloojee-trust-memorial-lecture.
(2) “The divided legacy of Nelson Mandela”, Dec. 11, 2013, https:/www.communistvoice.org/DWV-131215.html. <>
Picture: John Pilger with Nelson Mandela, 1995.
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