John Pilger is renowned Australian-born British investigative journalist and documentary film-maker, and 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. According to the UK New Statesman: “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://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2009/12/pilger-iraq-media-crime and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Pilger ).
John Pilger re Iraqi Genocide, Iraqi Holocaust and UK holocaust denial (2007): “Remembrance Day was marred by the unacknowledged deaths in Iraq - a genocide that threatens to outstrip the horrors of Rwanda in the numbers killed and displaced. On Remembrance Day 2007, the great and the good bowed their heads at the Cenotaph. Generals, politicians, newsreaders, football managers and stock-market traders wore their poppies. Hypocrisy was a presence. No one mentioned Iraq. No one uttered the slightest remorse for the fallen of that country. No one read the forbidden list. The forbidden list documents, without favour, the part the British state and its court have played in the destruction of Iraq. Here it is: 1 Holocaust denial. On 25 October, Dai Davies MP asked Gordon Brown about civilian deaths in Iraq. Brown passed the question to the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, who passed it to his junior minister, Kim Howells, who replied: "We continue to believe that there are no comprehensive or reliable figures for deaths since March 2003." This was a deception. In October 2006, the Lancet published research by Johns Hopkins University in the US and al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad which calculated that 655,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the Anglo-American invasion. A Freedom of Information search revealed that the government, while publicly dismissing the study, secretly backed it as comprehensive and reliable. The chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence, Sir Roy Anderson, called its methods "robust" and "close to best practice". Other senior governments officials secretly acknowledged the survey's "tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones". [1].
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.” [2].
[1]. John Pilger, “The forgotten fallen”, New Statesman, 15 November 2007: http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2007/11/iraq-genocide-pilger-british .
[2]. John Pilger, “The World war on democracy”, Green Left Weekly, 1 February 2012: http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/49856 .