Interview with John Pilger

By Anna Hustler 28/11/02

Q: What obstacles have you run into in your career with actually getting the truth out to the public in terms of censorship and bureaucracy?

JP: I guess an obstacle for journalists is trying to find an outlet for stories which aren’t generally welcomed in the mainstream. Once you find that outlet, then the next obstacle is staying in the mainstream. The mainstream of journalism is so dominated by one consensual view that any digression from that is not welcomed. Not only that, those who digress are given pejorative labels, ‘committed advocacy journalists’, that kind of thing. I’ve always worked in the mainstream and so I’m aware of the obstacles and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking how I can navigate around them. For me, that is just getting work printed in mainstream newspapers, getting documentaries on mainstream television and so on and so forth: it’s been more of a challenge than an obstacle but sometimes there are obstacles.

Q: I remember reading in the Sydney Morning Herald about military-type training camps in the US for war reporters. In what ways has the media’s role in war changed, if at all?

JP: The media’s role in war hasn’t changed since modern war began. The last war that Britain fought without censorship was the Crimea. I’m quite serious. One of my journalistic heroes is William Howard Russell, who was the Times correspondent, the man who exposed the Charge of the Light Brigade, the totally useless bloody blunder that it was. He and his editor, John Delane, were accused of treason. I mean that kind of reporting is very unusual today. They [journalists] don’t need [training], they’re already disciplined, they’re already trained. They’re trained by the fact that journalists, once they enter an institution, a mainstream institution, find themselves under great pressure to internalise all the dogma, all the prejudices, all the assumptions and all the vocabulary that makes mainstream journalism such a powerful propaganda instrument.

Q: I remember reading in Heroes about the Hong Kong asylum seeker policy after the Vietnam War and being surprised at the similarities to what we’re seeing now in Australia. In what ways do you see history repeating itself within Australia’s refugee policies?

JP: All these issues go together: war, what I would call xeno-racism – a kind of xenophobia and racism – they are all reactionary. They are part of a very profound conservative agenda. The Howard Government is no different from other western governments. Today there was a suggestion that he [Howard] might see sense. I don’t agree with that. He is only representative of the system, and that system is basically racist. It expresses itself very vividly in a country whose history is very largely racist. And you can see that now in the attempts to discredit historians like Henry Reynolds: a small but influential political group are always trying to revise history or to suppress the true history of what happened to the Aboriginal people. The connection between that and the suppression of the truths of asylum seekers is very important. The truth is that [there] are only 4000 people that have come to this country illegally and almost all of those seem to be ideal immigrants to Australia – courageous, they want to live here, many have relatives here and so on. And they have been turned into enemies of the state. On one level that is absurd, but on another level it makes sense because it is part of a racist system we haven’t got rid of from the body politic.

Q: The way I see the situation in Australia now is that our government is creating a generation of immigrants who have no respect for our country or its citizens. Is that something that has occurred in the past or is it a relatively new thing?

JP: It is a fairly new thing because one of the incidental positive products of the Australian immigration program … was basically a kind of moderate and economic reserve army. So we went around the world and got it, but there were very positive by-products to that. And that is that official propaganda said that these were people that we welcomed. I found the contrast with Britain in the 80s quite striking, where Thatcher made the equivalent immigrants in Britain into a form of disease to be shunned, who were contaminating society. In Australia the propaganda was very positive because these people were needed and you would go along to naturalisation ceremonies and they were quite moving ceremonies of people pleased to be in Australia. The bureaucracy of Australia welcomed them. It was all very positive and that has changed. Howard’s only unusual contribution has been to change that, to elevate xenophobia. To restore a xenophobia that was always there that the official propaganda had temporarily pushed aside. He’s restored it and that is right through his political career, going back to the 80s when he virtually had Hanson-like policies. That has been consistent in his career. So, yes, I think it has changed and that’s a great tragedy, because whether it was for the right or wrong reasons, the old official propaganda that immigrants were good had such a positive effect on the community. It shows that when governments are saying positive things to people about other people the effects can be quite extraordinary. But now they are saying the opposite: the disgraceful statement about muslim women the other day, that they might be carrying bombs and so on, and Howard refusing to disassociate himself from Fred Nile’s latest absurdity, that’s an indication of a change.

For more information got to http://www.johnpilger.com/