JOURNALISM AND PERCEPTION or REMEMBERING JOHN PILGER

Thinking about journalism and public perception, I was reminded today that in 1979 Australian journalist John Pilger entered Cambodia. The Vietnamese had just ousted despot Pol Pot and his fanatical Khmer Rouge. Pilger’s reporting filled the Daily Mirror, sharing with the world evidence of the destruction of the nation's cities and maybe one in three civilians. On the 30th anniversary of that publication, in October of 2009, Pilger reflected:

I walked along Monivong Avenue to the National Library which had been converted to pigsty, as a symbol, all its books burned. It was dream-like. There was a wasteland where the Gothic cathedral had stood — it had been dismantled stone by stone. When the afternoon monsoon rains broke, the deserted streets were suddenly awash with money. With every downpour a worthless fortune of new and unused banknotes sluiced out of the Bank of Cambodia, which the Khmer Rouge had blown up as they fled.

Inside, a cheque book lay open on the counter. A pair of glasses rested on an open ledger. I slipped and I fell on a floor brittle with coins. For the first few hours I had no sense of even the remains of a population. The few human shapes I glimpsed seemed incoherent, and on catching sight of me, would flit into a doorway.

In a crumbling Esso filling station an old woman and three emaciated infants squatted around a pot containing a mixture of roots and leaves, which bubbled over a fire fuelled with paper money. Such grotesque irony: people in need of everything had money to burn. At a primary school called Tuol Sleng, I walked through what had become the "interrogation unit" and the "torture and massacre unit". Beneath iron beds I found blood and tufts of hair still on the floor. "Speaking is absolutely forbidden," said a sign.

And as Pilger had become famous for, he was not shy to point out, just one more time, that it was Henry Kissinger who ordered the covert bombing of Cambodia, killing hundreds of thousands of peasants and opening the door for Pol Pot to seize control. Pilger was also keen to remind the world that Cambodia’s liberation by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam assured that country was on the wrong side of the Cold War, meaning the US and UK enforced a blockade on Cambodia, worsening the tragedy. He reminded us that London lied about the Vietnamese obstructing aid and how Oxfam defied the Foreign Office by flying a jet full of milk, penicillin, and vitamins funded by his readers and those stirred by the images taken by the photographer who joined him, Eric Piper…

Well, Pilger died at age 84 on December 30th of 2023. If he’d lived another few months I feel like today he would be reflecting once again on the anniversary of another significant piece of work. Ten years ago this week Pilger offered what now looks like a prophetic set of observations and warnings to the world. Back in 2014, he wrote in The Guardian an opinion piece titled “In Ukraine, the US is dragging us towards war with Russia.” There he offered that “Washington’s role in Ukraine, and its backing for the regime’s neo-Nazis, has huge implications for the rest of the world.” Though I disagree with Pilger on plenty of things and am no fan of Putin (as must be reiterated again and again in the current milieu), this seasoned journalist’s offering seems so very clear-eyed now a decade on:

Having masterminded the coup in February against the democratically elected government in Kiev, Washington's planned seizure of Russia's historic, legitimate warm-water naval base in Crimea failed. The Russians defended themselves, as they have done against every threat and invasion from the west for almost a century.

But NATO's military encirclement has accelerated, along with US-orchestrated attacks on ethnic Russians in Ukraine. If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained "pariah" role will justify a NATO-run guerrilla war that is likely to spill into Russia itself.

Instead, Putin has confounded the war party by seeking an accommodation with Washington and the EU, by withdrawing Russian troops from the Ukrainian border and urging ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine to abandon the weekend's provocative referendum. These Russian-speaking and bilingual people — a third of Ukraine's population — have long sought a democratic federation that reflects the country's ethnic diversity and is both autonomous of Kiev and independent of Moscow. Most are neither "separatists" nor "rebels", as the western media calls them, but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland.

Like the ruins of Iraq and Afghanistan, Ukraine has been turned into a CIA theme park — run personally by CIA director John Brennan in Kiev, with dozens of "special units" from the CIA and FBI setting up a "security structure" that oversees savage attacks on those who opposed the February coup. Watch the videos, read the eye-witness reports from the massacre in Odessa this month. Bussed fascist thugs burned the trade union headquarters, killing 41 people trapped inside. Watch the police standing by.

A doctor described trying to rescue people, "but I was stopped by pro-Ukrainian Nazi radicals. One of them pushed me away rudely, promising that soon me and other Jews of Odessa are going to meet the same fate. What occurred yesterday didn't even take place during the fascist occupation in my town in world war two. I wonder, why the whole world is keeping silent."

Russian-speaking Ukrainians are fighting for survival. When Putin announced the withdrawal of Russian troops from the border, the Kiev junta's defence secretary, Andriy Parubiy — a founding member of the fascist Svoboda party — boasted that attacks on "insurgents" would continue. In Orwellian style, propaganda in the west has inverted this to Moscow "trying to orchestrate conflict and provocation", according to William Hague. His cynicism is matched by Obama's grotesque congratulations to the coup junta on its "remarkable restraint" after the Odessa massacre. The junta, says Obama, is "duly elected". As Henry Kissinger once said: "It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but what is perceived to be true."

Of course, Pilger was writing at a time, back in the dreamy 2010s, when publications were not seemingly forbidden from reporting about the fascist, white-supremacist takeover of Ukraine. This was back when journalists could offer editorials and video essays from inside Ukraine documenting the ultranationalist, neo-Nazi youth training camps springing up all over the country, or the marauding gangs attacking ethnic and sexual minorities, or the fact that Western countries were having to amend their long-established laws prohibiting financial and materiel backing of avowed neo-Nazi regimes. Since then, what is true has lost out to propaganda and a far more popular perception.

Still, just a couple of years into the formal conflict, it looks like Pilger was proven right. As Western nations have now pledged $380 billion in aid and another $118 billion in direct military aid, with NATO and EU countries reversing policies against sending lethal arms into a conflict zone, Pilger appears to have known what he was talking about. We are all, it seems, at war with Russia — even as we pretend that's not happening.

With a population the same size as Ukraine and a limited military, Canada alone has so far put up more than $4 billion in aid in just two years. For scale, Canada’s fourteen-year-long mission in Afghanistan is said to have cost $18 billion, which included $2.2 billion in development aid (making Afghanistan the largest recipient of Canadian aid during that period.) With our own boots on the ground, Canada sent 20 of its 60 main battle tanks and eight armoured recovery and engineering vehicles to Afghanistan over a decade (and only did so after sacrificing our men in lighter-skinned vehicles.) By contrast, so far, with none of our troops (officially) in the field, Canada has sent eight newer model tanks (with skins ten times as thick) and more than 300 armoured vehicles of various sorts. So, except for publicly announcing sending in 20,000 troops, it’s hard to imagine how things would look much different if we officially declared war on Russia. And yet, weirdly, just as the public perception appears to be that Ukraine and it's forces don't have a Nazi problem, most folks seem to feel we are not at war with Russia. I think Pilger might disagree.