Award-winning journalist and documentary-maker John Pilger is perhaps best known for his work covering the suffering of the Khmer people under Pol Pot, a brutal dictator who had been “accidentally” aided by America (he believes that ISIS was formed under similar conditions). His documentary raised 45 million dollars for survivors.
He has shot a number of other documentaries, which covered topics like the brutality of the Western-backed Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor (causing an international outcry which led to the withdrawal of Indonesian forces), the Israeli- Palestine conflict (for which he received complaints from the Israeli embassy) and the British government’s expulsion of the entire population from the Chagos Archipelago (for which he received Britain’s most prestigious documentary prize).
Pilger knows a thing or two about genocide and the complicity of Western governments, and is well worth listening to; in this interview on Going Underground, he started off by describing who he believed was to blame for the rise of ISIS.
“They are not only the progeny, they are the fully grown up, manic creature belonging to Paris, London and the United States. Without the funding of these countries, without the arms that have been given to ISIS… the French, the British, the Americans and the Turks have all supplied those who have kept ISIS going”.
He notes that propaganda plays a powerful role in today’s media landscape; it was propaganda which allowed Blair and Bush to go to war in Iraq over non-existent nuclear WMDs after all.
He also notes that the mainstream media coverage of the Paris attacks have been carefully “orchestrated” to ensure maximum hysteria, and so that the actions of Western governments would not be blamed for it.
“Just now, the Guardian has admitted that it suppressed comment that might suggest that Western policies had something to do with ISIS and the attacks on Paris.”
He points out that Cameron had failed to heed the mistakes of his predecessor, Tony Blair, who had ignored all the advice by the intelligence community on the repercussions of invading Iraq.
“And we know that Cameron has ignored everything; Blair was told by MI6… that if he attacked Iraq, that it would come back, there would be blow-back… Cameron knows all that, is this man serious… or is he just this verbose sociopath with his ludicrous policies”.
When asked about his quoting of a French foreign minister who had stated that the British had planned covert action in Syria since 2009, two years before the Syrian civil war, (the former French FM had said, “I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria. This was in Britain not in America. Britain was preparing gunmen to invade Syria.“) Pilger replied that Dumas had been invited to take part in a coordinated attack on Syria. In fact, the US has been plotting regime change since the 1950s.
Pilger points out that regardless of the heinous actions of the Assad regime, it has the widespread support of the Syrian people- because the Western-backed alternative is far worse; from the Mujaheddin (who would later form Al Qaeda) in Afghanistan to the invasion of Iraq and the invasion of Libya, to the admitted arming of Al Qaeda affiliate Al Nusra and accidental arming of ISIS with rocket launchers by France, the Western powers have largely created the creature that bombed Paris.
“Ludicrous” is how Pilger describes the argument that despite “accidentally” creating ISIS, Western governments have to bomb it.
“This strutting, plastic Napoleon that Hollande has presented himself as… “were at war..” yes, we’re at war, but we’re supplying the arms for that war to the very enemy that he denounces”.
Indeed, he notes that the West has ignored the enormous supply lines of oil trucks up until recently.
Regarding the mainstream media’s whitewashing of the West’s involvement with the formation of ISIS, he states that “pretension [of seriousness], that’s very important to certain newspapers… the propaganda is even more lethal when it comes from sources of news with credibility“.
Ridding itself of its current incumbent would not solve Britain’s problems. It would still be faced with a “war-like” Labor party ruling it, which has members who are just “eager to bomb”.
Journalists play an important role in preventing war; the Iraq war was avoidable if “journalists had done their job and questioned the propaganda, challenged the propaganda… almost a million people died from that invasion”.
Instead of turning Britain into a “fortress” he believes that addressing the cause, the Western leadership which continuously arms and destroys people in the Middle East, would be a better protection against suicide bombers. “Those bombs [that went off] on the 7th of July 2005 were Blair’s bombs that went off in London.”
“We’ve seen this support for… Islamic fanaticism by Western governments right back to the Muslim Brotherhood which was given a place to organize in the offices of the Suez Canal Company then controlled by Britain,” he said, recommending a book by Mark Curtis which revealed that “violent Islamist groups were allowed to settle in Britain, using the country as a base to carry out attacks abroad”.
“Mosque after mosque was taken over through intimidation by the fundamentalists. Police and others in authority refused pleas from moderate Muslims with the excuse that they did not want to interfere” .
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Very often we are told of the past ‘mistakes’ that are responsible for the increasing problems we face today. Our movers and shakers may be guilty of many things, but stupidity is not one of them. It can be argued that it is we, the rank and file who make the mistakes, for example, not recognizing deliberate trouble making even when we see it practiced over and over again. Like it or not, if stupidity is involved it is definitely ours and not theirs.