Salman Rushdie has it exactly right when he says that Pilger has a “gift for finding the image, the instant, that reveals all,” These are hammered down by documentation from little-read official sources and low-circulation radical sources that drives home the point he is making. It is a remarkable combination of vivid eyewitness accounts and interviews with top government and business leaders, who are often inadvertently revelatory, and with rebel leaders, who are often highly informative. The title of this book, “Hidden Agendas,” refers to the real concerns underneath the rationalizations and mystifications of society’s rulers. Noam Chomsky states, “The realities of our time that he has brought to light have been a revelation, over and over again.” Unlike many jacket blurbs, these statements are not at all exaggerated. Howard Zinn, in his jacket blurb for the book, states that “John Pilger’s startling revelations of Western perfidy and violence in the Third World” enable its readers to be “better able to see through the distortions and omissions of the mainstream media.” Using a concealed camera, he made a film, “Inside Burma: Land of Fear,” exposing the repressive government of Burma (also known as Myamar), which has employed slave labor, including children, on a large scale to build railroad construction sites for the service of big oil companies and other foreign investors. He reported on apartheid South Africa and then visited the country under President Mandela, where, despite some gains, there has been a perpetuation of social inequality as a result of the “historic compromises made with the corporate white elite and its Anglo-American backers.” Pilger witnessed the hurried American evacuation from Saigon as its client regime disintegrated in 1976, and he has returned to Vietnam since then to observe the increase in poverty wrought by World Bank-imposed “structural reforms.” He twice received the coveted British Journalist of the Year Award, and as a filmmaker he won an Emmy award. $18.95 (paperback).Īuthor John Pilger is a veteran radical British journalist and documentary film-maker who is much less known to Americans than he should be. John Pilger, “Hidden Agendas.” New Press, 1998.
0 kommentar(er)
