Films By John Pilger
Media and War — Challenging The Consensus
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John Pilger talks about the various mainstream media commonalities of today--censorship by omission, information management, Public Relations and the 'massaging of information', as well as the clever distractions such as the election of Obama as a war monger in the land of slavery, alongside powerfigures such as Hillary Clinton and Julia Gillard as a false win for so-called 'feminist ideals'. Amongst the ongoing wars played by the United States, Britain and Australia, Media And War -- Challenging The Consensus is a renewed call to unravel complex propaganda and cut through distractions...
Breaking Australia’s Silence — WikiLeaks and Freedom
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John Pilger talks at a public forum in Sydney about the recent revelations of WikiLeaks and the importance of leaked information in exposing the lies and machinations of Public Relations in mainstream media and political rhetoric. Pilger demonstrates the parallels with the plight of Julian Assange and the treatment of David Hicks through the United States legal system, and also explains using recent leaked documents why state power sees investigative journalists and others as a major threat to the established order...
The War You Don’t See
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The War You Don't See traces the history of 'embedded' and independent reporting from the carnage of World War One to the destruction of Hiroshima, and from the invasion of Vietnam to the current war in Afghanistan and disaster in Iraq. As weapons and propaganda become even more sophisticated, the nature of war is developing into an 'electronic battlefield' in which journalists play a key role, and civilians are the victims. But who is the real enemy?
War By Other Means
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John Pilger examines the policy of western banks making loans with third world countries, which are then unable to meet the crippling interest charges -- debt is a weapon. It also analyses 'Structural Adjustment Programs', which are proclaimed to enable countries to compete in the global economy, but have the opposite effect of lowering wages which in turn further transfers the wealth from the poor to the rich...
Stealing A Nation
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In the 1960s and 70s, British governments conspiring with American officials, secretly tricked into leaving and then expelled, the entire population of the Chagos islands in the Indian Ocean as to make way for a major American military base. Indeed from Diego Garcia, American military planes have since bombed Afghanistan and Iraq. Stealing A Nation documents the story of the islanders who were dumped in the slums of Mauritius and in the words of the British officials who left a 'paper trail' of what the International Criminal Court now describes as 'a crime against humanity'...
War On Democracy
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Set in Latin America and the US, War on Democracy explores the historic and current relationship of Washington with countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile. John Pilger examines the role of Washington in America's manipulation of Latin America during the last 50 years leading up to the struggle by ordinary people to free themselves from poverty and racism...
Death of A Nation — The Timor Conspiracy
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On December 7, 1975 with the complicity of many Western governments including the US, the UK, and Australia, Indonesia secretly invaded the small nation of East Timor. In the intervening 18 years, an estimated 200,000 East Timorese or one third of the population, had been slaughtered by the Indonesian military -- using US and British planes to bombard the island, while Western defence ministers proclaimed ignorance. As John Pilger tapes an Australian diplomat admitting that East Timor was considered "expendable", no one watching the massacre can excuse the geopolitical machinations that led to this genocide...
Palestine Is Still The Issue
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John Pilger returns to the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza where, in 1974, he filmed a documentary with the same title -- Palestine Is Still The Issue -- a film about the same issues, a nation of people, the Palestinians, forced off their land and subjected to military occupation by Israel. Pilger hears extraordinary stories from Palestinians, though most of his interviews are with Israelis whose voices are seldom heard, including the remarkable witness of a man who lost his daughter in a suicide bombing. But for Palestinians, the overriding, routine terror, day after day, has been the ruthless control of almost every aspect of their lives, as if they live in an open prison. This film is about the Palestinians and a group of courageous Israelis united in the fight to be free...
The Last Dream
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In these three films, John Pilger and Alan Lowery return to Australia to celebrate the country’s bicentenary, interviewing an extraordinary range of Australians from diverse backgrounds, each of whose views are a long way from those of the treasured Aussie stereotypes...
Obama and Empire
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Since 1945, by deed and by example, the US has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, crushed some 30 liberation movements and supported tyrannies from Egypt to Guatemala. Bombing and war is as American as apple pie. Obama, having stacked his government with warmongers, Wall Street cronies and polluters from the Bush and Clinton eras, the 45th president is merely upholding tradition...
Power, Propaganda and the Silence of Writers
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"These days, a one-dimensional political 'culture' ensures that few writers write, or speak out, as they did in the last century. They are talented, yet safe. In the media, the more people watch, the less people know. Beneath the smokescreen of objectivity and impartiality, media establishments too often ventriloquise the official line, falling silent at the sight of unpleasant truths." Renowned independent journalist John Pilger speaks about complicity and compliance, censorship and citizen journalism as well as issues such as the holocaust in Iraq and Rudd's shrewd political apology to the Indigenous peoples of Australia...
Freedom Next Time
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Australian journalist, author and film maker John Pilger speaks about global media consolidation, war by journalism, the US military and its quest for domination/hegemony in the post 9-11 era and the false history that is presented in the guise of 'objective' journalism...
The New Rulers of The World
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The myths of globalisation have been incorporated into much of our everyday language. "Thinking globally" and "the global economy" are part of a jargon that assumes we are all part of one big global village, where national borders and national identities no longer matter. But what is globalisation? And where is this global village? In some respects you are already living in it. The clothes in your local store were probably stitched together in the factories of Asia. Much of the food in your local supermarket will have been grown in Africa...
Apartheid Did Not Die
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"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. It was backed by great business corporations in South Africa, Britain, the rest of Europe, and the United States and it was this apartheid based on money and profit that allowed a small minority to control most of the land, most of the industrial wealth, and most of the economic power. Today, the same system is called -- without a trace of irony -- the free market."
Pepsi vs. Coke In The Ice Cold War
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Pepsi vs. Coke in The Ice Cold War traces the history of the worldwide struggle for soft drink supremacy by the Coca Cola Company, against the backdrop of World War II. The war was the perfect vehicle for Coca-Cola distribution, including to the Nazis. Bottling plants on front lines were paid for by the US war department. Nixon got Kremlin supremo, Khrushchev, to pose drinking Pepsi, which became the first US product made in the Soviet Union. In 1949, Mao kicked Coca-Cola out of China. President Carter got it back in 1978. In Chile, Pepsi Cola's boss ran a daily paper which was used by the CIA to help Pinochet's bloody coup...
Flying The Flag, Arming The World
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John Pilger and David Munro look behind political rhetoric to discover the hidden world of international arms dealing...
Breaking The Silence
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The discrepancies between the "war on terror" and the facts on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq are many. In 2001, as the bombs began to drop, George W. Bush promised Afghanistan "the generosity of America and its allies". Now, the familiar old warlords are retaining their power, religious fundamentalism is expanding its grip and military "skirmishes" continue routinely. In "liberated" Afghanistan, America has its military base and pipeline access, while the people have the warlords who are, as one woman says in the film, "in many ways worse than the Taliban" -- which, after all, is funded by the United States, remember?
Paying The Price, Killing The Children of Iraq
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After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the United Nations (backed strongly by the US and UK) imposed harsh sanctions on Iraq that lasted for 10 years (1991-2001); the harsh restrictions on imports of everything, including access to key medicines, resulted in over a million deaths, more than half a million of which were women and children. That's more deaths than the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan and the events of September 11 combined. The purpose was regime change, but it never came. The overwhelming majority of those killed were the poor, elderly, women and children. Empirically, sanctions overwhelmingly punish the poor, the destitute. While the sanctions were in place, the richest people in control of the resources (Saddam Hussein et al.) still had everything they wanted: food, cars, mansions, free access to medicines, etc...
Year Zero — The Silent Death of Cambodia
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As the first complete report of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge and the devastating affects of US bombing in Cambodia during the Vietnam War, Year Zero -- The Silent Death Of Cambodia is an important and historic document of the grim reign of Pol Pot and the world's response of indifference and inaction...
The Truth Game
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When the United States devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons in 1945, the bombs dropped were code-named 'Fat Man' and 'Little Boy' -- as part of the new propaganda campaign to create acceptable images of war, propagating the illusion that the world should live securely with nuclear weapons, and that it is the only way to 'enable peace'. By using reassuring and even soothing language, this new kind of propaganda spread all over the world...
Secret Country, The First Australians Fight Back
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The secret history of Australia is a historical conspiracy of silence. Written history has long applied selectivity to what it records, largely ignoring the shameful way that the Indigenous people were, and continue to be, treated...
Welcome to Australia
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The 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney were universally recognised as an overwhelming success. The Australian heroine from start, when she carried the Olympic torch into the stadium, to finish, as she crossed the line to take 400m gold, was the indigenous athlete Cathy Freeman. Against the will of many of her still oppressed people, she came to represent the symbol, albeit shallow, of reconciliation between White Australia and Indigenous Australia...
Breaking The Mirror — The Murdoch Effect
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The Daily Mirror used to be a peoples' paper that respected its readers and earned trust and affection. But that changed out of all recognition when the British public were told that the new information technology, heralded by The Sun's move to Wapping, would bring a greater variety of newspapers and a more diverse media. Instead, what happened was rapid moves toward contracted press controlled by ever fewer proprietors. John Pilger describes the downfall of his old paper and the all-pervasive influence of Rupert Murdoch...
Inside Burma — The Land of Fear
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Inside Burma -- The Land Of Fear exposes the history and brutality of one of the world's most repressive regimes. Nearly the size of Texas, with a population of more than 40 million, Burma has rich natural resources. Yet Burma is also a secret country. Isolated for the past 40 years, since a brutal military dictatorship seized power in Rangoon, Burma has been relegated to one of the world's poorest countries, with the assault on its people all but forgotten by the rest of the world. Award winning film-makers John Pilger and David Munro go undercover to expose how the former British colony is ruled by a harsh, bloody and uncompromising military regime...
Vietnam — The Last Battle
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In 1975, John Pilger reported the end of the Vietnam War from the American Embassy in Saigon, where the last American troops fled from the roof-top helicopter pad. Twenty years later, he returns to Vietnam to revive the Vietnamese past and present from the plethora of fake Hollywood images which pity the invader, and overshadow one of the most epic struggles of the 20th century.
Cambodia — Return to Year Zero
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John Pilger travels to Cambodia to investigate how the United Nations has allowed the Khmer Rouge regime to grow stronger. Why has Pol Pot's organisation grown stronger and more menacing since the arrival of the UN? Cambodia -- Return To Year Zero looks behind the façade of the so-called 'peace process' and asks: Has the unthinkable for Cambodia at last been made acceptable for the rest of the world?
Cambodia — The Betrayal
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Cambodia -- The Betrayal is the fourth follow-up to John Pilger and David Munro's series on Cambodia, the film Year Ten from 1989, which examined the hypocrisy of western 'geopolitics' by looking at the way in which the United Nations pressured Cambodia to accept the Khmer Rouge regime as part of the United Nations peace plan.
Cambodia — Year Ten Update
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Cambodia -- Year Ten Update examines the reactions of the British government and the United Nations to the international outcry over the situation in Cambodia.