59 Facts About John Pilger

1.

John Richard Pilger is an Australian journalist, writer, scholar, and documentary filmmaker.

2.

John Pilger has mainly been based in Britain since 1962.

3.

John Pilger was once visiting professor at Cornell University in New York.

4.

John Pilger has criticised his native country's treatment of Indigenous Australians.

5.

John Pilger first drew international attention for his reports on the Cambodian genocide.

6.

John Pilger won Britain's Journalist of the Year Award in 1967 and 1979.

7.

John Pilger's documentaries have gained awards in Britain and worldwide, including multiple BAFTA honours.

8.

John Richard Pilger was born on 9 October 1939 in Bondi, New South Wales, the son of Claude and Elsie Pilger.

9.

John Pilger's older brother, Graham, was a disabled rights activist who later advised the government of Gough Whitlam.

10.

John Pilger is of German descent on his father's side, while his mother had English, German, and Irish ancestry; two of his maternal great-great-grandparents were Irish convicts transported to Australia.

11.

John Pilger later joined a four-year journalist trainee scheme with the Australian Consolidated Press.

12.

John Pilger freelanced and worked for the Sydney Sunday Telegraph, the daily paper's sister title.

13.

John Pilger was a war correspondent in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Biafra.

14.

John Pilger was a founder of the News on Sunday tabloid in 1984, and was hired as Editor-in-Chief in 1986.

15.

John Pilger resigned before the first issue and had come into conflict with those around him.

16.

John Pilger disagreed with the founders' decision to base the paper in Manchester and then clashed with the governing committees; the paper was intended to be a workers' co-operative.

17.

John Pilger, appointed with "overall editorial control", resigned at this point.

18.

In 2018, John Pilger said his "written journalism is no longer welcome" in the mainstream and that "probably its last home" was in The Guardian.

19.

John Pilger was successful in gaining a regular television outlet at ATV.

20.

Again and again John Pilger compared the Khmer Rouge to the Nazis.

21.

Ben Kiernan, in his review of Shawcross's book, notes that John Pilger did compare Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to Stalin's terror, as well as to Mao's Red Guards.

22.

John Pilger said the defence case collapsed because the government issued a gagging order, citing national security, which prevented three government ministers and two former heads of the SAS from appearing in court.

23.

John Pilger has long criticised aspects of Australian government policy, particularly what he regards as its inherent racism resulting in the poor treatment of Indigenous Australians.

24.

In 1969, John Pilger went with Australian activist Charlie Perkins on a tour to Jay Creek in Central Australia.

25.

John Pilger compared what he witnessed in Jay Creek to South African apartheid.

26.

John Pilger saw the appalling conditions that the Aboriginal people were living under, with children suffering from malnutrition and grieving mothers and grandmothers having had their lighter-skinned children and grandchildren removed by the police and welfare agencies.

27.

John Pilger has made several documentaries about Indigenous Australians, such as The Secret Country: The First Australians Fight Back and Welcome to Australia.

28.

John Pilger wrote in 2000 that the 1998 legislation that removed the common-law rights of Indigenous peoples:.

29.

John Pilger returned to this subject with Utopia, released in 2013.

30.

In East Timor John Pilger clandestinely shot Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy about the brutal Indonesian occupation of East Timor, which began in 1975.

31.

John Pilger said the film describes how an "historic injustice has been done to the Palestinian people, and until Israel's illegal and brutal occupation ends, there will be no peace for anyone, Israelis included".

32.

John Pilger's documentary Stealing a Nation recounts the experiences of the late 20th-century trials of the people of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean.

33.

John Pilger strongly criticised Tony Blair for failing to respond in a substantive way to the 2000 High Court ruling that the expulsion of the Chagossian people to Mauritius was illegal.

34.

John Pilger explores the US Army School of the Americas in the US state of Georgia.

35.

John Pilger said the film is about the struggle of people to free themselves from a modern form of slavery.

36.

John Pilger says that "in essence, very little" has changed since the first of his seven films about the Aboriginal people, A Secret Country: The First Australians.

37.

John Pilger makes the case that governments beginning with that of Margaret Thatcher have waged a secret war against the NHS with a view to privatising it slowly and surreptitiously.

38.

John Pilger predicted that moves toward privatisation would create more poverty and homelessness and that the resulting chaos would be used as an argument for further "reform".

39.

In 2004, John Pilger criticised British Prime Minister Tony Blair as equally responsible for the invasion and the bungled occupation of Iraq.

40.

On 25 July 2005, John Pilger ascribed blame for the 2005 London bombings that month to Blair.

41.

John Pilger wrote that Blair's decision to follow Bush helped to generate the rage that Pilger said precipitated the bombings.

42.

John Pilger said that Blair gave permission to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 to initiate what would ultimately become Operation Defensive Shield.

43.

John Pilger criticised Barack Obama during his presidential campaign of 2008, saying that he was "a glossy Uncle Tom who would bomb Pakistan" and his theme "was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully".

44.

John Pilger supported Julian Assange by pledging bail in December 2010.

45.

John Pilger said at the time: "There's no doubt that he is not going to abscond".

46.

John Pilger criticised the failure of the Australian government to object when it "repeatedly received confirmation that the US was conducting an "unprecedented" pursuit of Assange" and noted that one of the reasons Ecuador gave for granting asylum to Assange was his abandonment by Australia.

47.

John Pilger visited Assange in the embassy and has continued to support him.

48.

In March 2016, John Pilger commented in a speech delivered at the University of Sydney during the 2016 United States presidential election, that Donald Trump was a less dangerous potential President of the United States than Hillary Clinton.

49.

In November 2016, John Pilger said that "notorious terrorist jihadist group called ISIL or ISIS is created largely with money from [the government of Saudi and the government of Qatar] who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation".

50.

John Pilger quoted in the article a Jewish doctor who had tried to rescue people from the burning trade union building during the 2014 Odesa clashes, and was stopped by Ukrainian Nazis with the threat that this fate would soon befall him and other Jews and that what happened yesterday would not have happened even during the fascist occupation in World War II.

51.

John Pilger asserted in November 1998 that "many members are journalists, the essential foot soldiers in any network devoted to power and propaganda".

52.

John Pilger said David Aaronovitch exemplified the "mask-wearers" and noted that Aaronovitch had written that the attack on Iraq will be "the easy bit".

53.

In September 2014, John Pilger wrote critically of The Guardian and other western media, regarding their reporting on Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, writing "Without a single piece of evidence, the US and its NATO allies and their media machines blamed ethnic Russian 'separatists' in Ukraine and implied that Moscow was ultimately responsible".

54.

John Pilger asserted that "the newspaper has made no serious attempt to examine who shot the aeroplane down and why".

55.

John Pilger wrote in December 2002, of British broadcasting's requirement for "impartiality" as being "a euphemism for the consensual view of established authority".

56.

John Pilger wrote that "BBC television news faithfully echoed word for word" government "propaganda designed to soften up the public for Blair's attack on Iraq".

57.

John Pilger has additionally pointed to the 48 documentaries on Ireland made for the BBC and ITV between 1959 and the late-1980s which were delayed or altered before transmission, or totally suppressed.

58.

John Pilger has a daughter, Zoe John Pilger, born 1984, with journalist Yvonne Roberts.

59.

The John Pilger Archive is housed at the British Library.