Our West was never really won and the great cities like Sydney, hanging on the very edge of a largely un-pioneered country, are confessions of that failure. No Thomas Jefferson ever lived here. Australian heroes have always been measured by how many Olympic gold medals they can win or how many Pommy wickets they can smash.
Do you remember Vietnam? Do you remember all those television pictures of far-away suffering, of reporters shouting over the noise of meaningless battles. Vietnam ran longer than Z Cars and at times had popularity ratings even higher than Kojak... Some nostalgia may creep into this film but, if it does, it will be nostalgia purely and simply for the endurance of the Vietnamese people, whom I admire.
Pilger reveals that as many as two million people out of a population of seven million were killed or starved by Pol Pot's medievalists. ‘The genocide of Pol Pot,’ he says, ‘was begun by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.’ The film is replete with evidence that the US bombing of Cambodia from 1969 to 1973 caused such turmoil that the rise of the Khmer Rouge to power in 1975 was made inevitable.
The 10 per cent growth rate that the economists say that the oil will bring is meaningless while children work at the age of six, while their parents have no work at all, while millions live beside open sewers, while people are kidnapped for seeking their rights under the law.
The film you are about to see will show what your compassion and generosity have achieved. It will also show, in the first report both from here in Cambodia and the camps in Thailand, why this suffering nation is being kept in shadow, isolated by power politics.
On patrol... a hand would reach back, followed by a reassuring voice, ‘C’mon, man, let’s go!’ The voice would come from a street corner in the Bronx, a rural town in the Confederacy, a steel mill in Pennsylvania – little people’s America.
By using reassuring, even soothing, language, language which allowed both the politicians and us to distance ourselves from the horror or nuclear war, this new kind of propaganda created acceptable images of war and the illusion that we could live securely with nuclear weapons.
What is the role of the media in wartime? Is it simply to record or is it to explain, and from whose point of view – the military, the politicians or the victims?
This film is about the people of Nicaragua and their unique struggle to end a cycle of poverty and humiliation. It is also about a threat which, according to President Reagan, this tiny country presents to the most powerful and richest nation on Earth.
This is a funny, almost satirical film. Inspired by Jill Chen Louis’s book The Cola Wars, John Pilger’s Burp! Pepsi v Coke in the Ice Cold War tells the story of the struggle between ‘those giants of carbonation and regurgitation, Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola’ – and how the two multinationals have influenced American politics.
As children, we were given to understand that we were merely innocent bystanders to the slow and natural death of an ancient people, the First Australians, rather than the inheritors of a history every bit as rapacious as that of the United States, Latin America, Africa.
You are more than likely to be watching this on a Japanese television set. If you’re out, you may have recorded it on video – Japanese, of course. And you may have checked the programmes by your Japanese watch. Perhaps at the weekend you drove to the park in your Japanese car and took snaps with your Japanese camera.
This film is about extraordinary events which have allowed Asia’s Hitler to rise again and the prospect of the previously unthinkable happening again... The memories of 10 years ago are indelible and, now that the Vietnamese have left, almost everybody I know is in fear of their lives again.
Three weeks after Cambodia: Year Ten was screened, John Pilger made a studio-based follow-up to address the issues in the film that had caused a massive public and political response.
Unfortunately, this film is not a celebration of a Cambodia now freed from the threat of another holocaust. It’s about betrayal – a betrayal of those who asked for help for Cambodia, regardless of whether that help meant offending the United States and China, which give direct and indirect support to the Khmer Rouge.
Remember Live Aid in 1985, that symbol of concern and generosity? Did you know that during that year the hungriest countries in Africa gave twice as much money to us in the developed world as we gave to them?
What will happen when the United Nations leaves? Why has Pol Pot’s organisation grown stronger and more menacing since the arrival of the UN? Indeed, has a Trojan horse been built for the return of Asia’s Hitler?
Documentary of the events that occurred in the East Timor genocide during 1990-91. (From the ITV series "Network First").
One of the biggest manufacturing industries in Britain at the close of the 20th century is arms... Its future is uncertain and depends to a large degree on secret deals with some of the most corrupt and brutal regimes on Earth.
This film is not just about an anniversary, but will try to rescue something of Vietnam’s past and present, from Hollywood images that have pitied the invader while overshadowing one of the epic national struggles of the 20th century.
On the surface, everything appears serene... But Burma is also a secret country, isolated for the past 34 years since a brutal dictatorship seized power, the assault on its people all but forgotten. To tell their story, we had to go undercover. What we found was a land of fear. (Updated repeat aired 8th July 1998, adding a minute to the original runtime).
Apartheid based on race is outlawed now, but the system always went far deeper than that. The cruelty and injustice were underwritten by an economic apartheid which regarded people as no more than cheap, expendable labour... Today, the same system is called, without a trace of irony, the free market.
On the surface, everything appears serene... But Burma is also a secret country, isolated for the past 34 years since a brutal dictatorship seized power, the assault on its people all but forgotten. To tell their story, we had to go undercover. What we found was a land of fear. (Updated repeat adding a minute to the original runtime)
We are showing this updated version because the people of East Timor are in the news at last, once again fighting for their lives, and because their murderers continue to receive arms from this British government, contrary to its boast about an ethical foreign policy. This documentary was edited and updated version of the 1994 film "Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy".
It was fitting that Sydney, a sporting paradise, should be given the Olympic Games in the millennium year, 2000... When it came to the vote, no one mentioned those Australians excluded from Paradise and who were until recently its invisible people. This film is about that other Australia.
Almost 10 years of extraordinary isolation imposed by the UN and enforced by America and Britain have killed more people than the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan.
A small group of powerful individuals are now richer than most of the population of Africa. Just 200 giant corporations dominate a quarter of the world’s economic activity... The famous brands of almost everything from running shoes to baby clothes are now made in very poor countries with cheap labour, at times bordering on a form of slave labour.
Almost 30 years apart, John Pilger's two documentaries about Palestine carried the same title, Palestine is Still the Issue. His point was that, in the course of a generation, a great injustice remained unchanged and urgent.
Six months after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and two years after the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, John Pilger’s documentary Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror highlighted the hypocrisy and double standards of the American and British adventures of 2001-3, which led to the deaths of more than a million people.
Stealing a Nation, about how British governments ruthlessly expelled the population of the Chagos Islands, a crown colony in the Indian Ocean, in the late 1960s and early 70s to make way for an American military base on Diego Garcia, the largest island.
Venezuela, Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, Salvador, Bolivia: people's struggle for democracy versus US imperialism in Latin America since the 1950s, backing coups and supporting dictatorships.
Thought-provoking documentary on war propaganda: how governments manipulate the facts and how most media let them get away with it.
Exploring offenses practiced by popular media, big business, police forces and Governments helping the Australian 225 year campaign of genocide continue against Aboriginal Australians.
When the United States, the world’s biggest military power, decided that China, the second largest economic power, was a threat to its imperial dominance, two-thirds of US naval forces were transferred to Asia and the Pacific. This was the ‘pivot to Asia', announced by President Barack Obama in 2011. China, which in the space of a generation had risen from the chaos of Mao Zedong's ‘Cultural Revolution’ to an economic prosperity that has seen more than 500 million people lifted out of poverty, was suddenly the United States's new enemy.
Veteran filmmaker John Pilger takes us through a history of threats to Britain's National Health Service ,from its 1948 founding by Labor through a privatizing push by Margaret Thatcher's bureaucrats, to challenges by new Conservatives.