Farewell, John Pilger, Lunatic of One Idea

John Pilger, Australian journalism’s most embarrassing export, has died at the age of 84 in London. His mourners, I’m sorry to report, are not confined to the tinpot dictators and terrorists he drooled over and excused during his long and shabby career. Instead, most obituarists, in a Pilger-like series of omissions and prevarications, have chosen to honour the Australian for his”truth-telling” dissents, or his bravery for “saying the unsayable”. Even in unfriendly quarters like The Times, one finds mere teasing of Pilger for his haughty demands for expensive shirts and first-class flights, as he pretended to be the lone voice of the poor and downtrodden. This is annoying, too, but only for the impression it might give that Pilger’s worst or only vice was his hypocrisy.

No obituary writer bothered to note that Pilger, in the company of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, viewed al-Qaeda’s 9/11 terrorist atrocity with unmistakable giddiness. “Their distant voices of rage are now heard,” he ventriloquised. “The daily horrors in faraway brutalised places have at last come home.” America, in other words, deserved precisely what it got.

As if this wasn’t contemptible enough, Pilger soon strengthened his solidarity with these comrades in the aftermath of the Iraq War. When former Ba’ath loyalists and Islamist psychopaths allied in the cause of mutilating Iraqi innocents and erasing civil society, Pilger knew exactly who his new friends were. “We cannot afford to be choosy,” he declared, when asked whether the international Left should back the anti-occupation forces. “We have no choice but to support the resistance.” And yes, he added for clarity, this made Australian and other coalition troops perfectly legitimate targets for murder.

Pilger’s resistors, it’s also been forgotten, would later go on to found Islamic State. This explains why, even as its militants attempted genocide, conducted eschatological warfare, and reintroduced both the Islamic slave trade and methods of execution such as crucifixion, Pilger could never quite find a stern word to say about them, let alone suggest any acceptable means by which Western or Iraqi or Kurdish forces might destroy them.

The warm-up act for all this, the obituaries also failed to mention, was Pilger’s propaganda work for Slobodan Milosevic and his fascistic dreaming of a Greater Serbia in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. In certain corners of the radical Left, NATO intervention, no matter what, could never be justified. And so, Pilger, along with genocide deniers and moral cretins like Diana Johnstone and Edward S. Herman, argued that the real victims were not the Bosnians, but the beleaguered Serbs, and the mass graves of Srebrenica were a Western fabrication. Pilger stuck with Milosevic to the very end, and was one of the very few who lamented his lonely death in prison. As ever, in his default mode of mendacity, he continued to invent stories for his readers about the war criminal’s innocence and acquittal.

In fact, it’s hard to think of a modern dictator or authoritarian who missed out on Pilger’s encomia.

Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin, for example, could always rely on Pilger to cover up or excuse their respective barrel bombings or annexations. Perhaps the most risible was Pilger’s swooning over Hugo Chavez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, the leaders who brought nothing but economic and social ruination to Venezuela. Pilger, as usual, blamed everything on Tío Sam and never lost his faith, even as Venezuelans resorted to stealing zoo animals to relieve their chronic hunger.

With this odious record, John Pilger, more than anyone else in the rogue’s gallery of the anti-imperialist Left, embodied Wallace Stevens’ image of “the lunatic of one idea”. This could be easily summarised as whatever happens in the world, it is the West’s fault. The West’s enemies, then, became Pilger’s friends and allies, alleged to be misunderstood victims of a campaign of propaganda. This was the conclusion he reached before undertaking any actual investigative work, which is why he never really bothered to do any.

What’s “unsayable”, then, about Pilger’s journalism may only be at the ironic expense of his sooky obituarists. Intelligent and well-adjusted readers would never repeat what Pilger said all his life because it was always so morally reprehensible, not because he was bravely speaking truth to power. And he said it all while living and working in places he loathed, like Australia, the UK and America. Of course, these are the only countries in the world where someone like Pilger could prosper and be rewarded for his loathing. Just about every article on his death mentioned his receipt of the Sydney Peace Prize in 2009, which was based on the obviously erroneous assumption that Pilger was some kind of anti-war advocate, or that his journalistic interventions were aimed at creating the conditions for peace in our time. This misses the point that Pilger was always an enthusiast for war; he simply wanted the West’s opponents to achieve a decisive and bloody victory.

Pilger’s one idea unhinged him and disfigured and corrupted his journalism, making his documentaries unwatchable and his dispatches unreliable, to put it as charitably as possible. Unfortunately, he still has his groupies and imitators in much of the media and the academy, so his legacy isn’t likely to diminish anytime soon.

An alternative and cheerier scenario here is still one that includes a proper consideration of his work. It could be part of the curriculum or training that serves as a model of what not to do for those entering a career in reporting or filmmaking. This leads me to what is perhaps the most salient oversight in all the obituaries, one that I’ll try not to repeat going forward. With his eschewal of complexity and nuance, and his unthinking cheerleading for despots and thugs, it’s worth wondering whether John Pilger should be thought of as a journalist at all.