John Richard Pilger (born 9 October 1939) is a renowned expatriate Australian journalist and documentary maker who is based in London. He has twice won Britain's Journalist of the Year Award, and his documentaries have received academy awards in Britain and the US. John Pilger in the opinion of the UK News Statesman: “John Pilger, renowned investigative journalist and documentary film-maker, is one of only two to have twice won British journalism's top award; his documentaries have won academy awards in both the UK and the US. In a New Statesman survey of the 50 heroes of our time, Pilger came fourth behind Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela. "John Pilger," wrote Harold Pinter, "unearths, with steely attention facts, the filthy truth. I salute him.” (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Pilger and http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2010/03/pilger-australia-murdoch-media ).
John Pilger on “holocausts” inflicted on Muslims and others by the Western US Alliance (2012): Longer and bloodier than any war since 1945, waged with demonic weapons and a gangsterism dressed as economic policy and sometimes known as globalisation, the war on democracy is unmentionable in Western elite circles. As Pinter wrote: “It never happened even while it was happening.” Last July, American historian William Blum published his “updated summary of the record of US foreign policy”. Since World War II, the US has:
• Tried to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of them democratically-elected.
• Tried to suppress a populist or national movement in 20 countries.
• Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
• Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.
• Tried to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.
In total, the United States has carried out one or more of these actions in 69 countries. In almost all cases, Britain has been a collaborator. The “enemy” changes in name — from communism to Islamism — but mostly it is the rise of democracy independent of Western power or a society occupying strategically useful territory, deemed expendable, like the Chagos Islands. The sheer scale of suffering, let alone criminality, is little known in the West, despite the presence of the world’s most advanced communications, nominally freest journalism and most admired academy. That the most numerous victims of terrorism — western terrorism — are Muslims is unsayable, if it is known. That half a million Iraqi infants died in the 1990s as a result of the embargo imposed by Britain and the US is of no interest. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured as a weapon of Western policy (“Operation Cyclone”) is known to specialists but otherwise suppressed. While popular culture in Britain and the US immerses World War II in an ethical bath for the victors, the holocausts arising from Anglo-American dominance of resource-rich regions are consigned to oblivion.” [1].
[1]. John Pilger, “The World war on democracy”, Green Left Weekly, 1 February 2012: http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/49856 .