. New Rulers of the World | John Pilger Verso Press 2002

Australian journalist John Pilger is often criticised for being a campaigning journalist or for being one-sided. He would probably say he must campaign (and ask why others don’t) when that side has a fair case and yet is so often misrepresented or ignored in the mainstream media.

Of course, Pilger is not as alone as he likes to make out and, as even he records, it is often the mainstream – politicians, bureaucrats, academics and corporate executives – that (eventually) verifies his contentions. Nevertheless, the likes of Pilger’s uncomfortable descriptions of how America, in particular, goes about “ruling the world” don’t get a great hearing.

A recent exception, though, was Paul Kennedy, a history professor at Yale University, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald on May 11 how he’d heard an angry environmentalist demanding, “By what right do Americans place such a heavy footprint upon God’s Earth?”

“That was a tough one,” said Kennedy, “because, alas, it’s largely true.” And he went on to list how the US comprises slightly less than five per cent of the world’s population but imbibes 27 per cent of the world’s annual oil production, creates and consumes nearly 30 per cent of its Gross World Product and spends 40 per cent of all the world’s defence expenditures.

His travel experiences to the Arabian Gulf, Europe, Korea and Mexico plus correspondence from across the globe all suggested “that this American democracy of ours is not as admired and appreciated as we often suppose.”

Unilateralist US policies on landmines, the international criminal court and Kyoto environmental protocols fell well below expectations of those people – not lovers or haters – genuinely concerned about America, he said.

Real American leadership, he said, would turn openly to the American people and explain why their deepest national interest lay in taking the fate of the planet seriously and in investing heavily in its future.

It is perhaps characteristic of John Pilger – and some support for his critique of other commentators – that he’s been alone in noting how the “war on terrorism” evokes the twisted language and pseudo-information of Airstrip One in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Says Pilger, “We are to live with the threat and illusion of endless war, it seems, in order to justify increased social control and state repression, while great power pursues its goal of global supremacy.” America’s post September 11 thrust for “world order” joins globalisation and Indonesia, the Western embargo of Iraq, and Australia’s subjugation of its indigenous peoples in the new material and reworking of Pilger’s television research that make up The New Rulers of the World.

Owen Harries, a senior associate with the conservative Centre for Strategic and International Studies, in the Australian on May 15 was one of the few to join Pilger outside the “consensual boundaries” and say the world didn’t change on September 11. For Pilger the attacks that day “accelerated the continuity of events, providing an extraordinary pretext for destroying social democracy.”

At the end of his introduction he says, “the real terror is poverty, from which some 24,000 people die every day.” And later he asks, “Who will put aside the chessboard and explain that only when great grievance, injustice and insecurity are lifted from nations will terrorism recede?”

Pilger continues a pursuit of his previous books: comparing the actions of politicians in Western democracies with those of criminal tyrants. He is hard on Bush and Blair whose “crimes” in Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan are, he says, given a “moral whitewash”, justified by their so-called “ethical dimension”. Supporters of Alex Mills’ campaign against cluster bombs (July Insights)

will appreciate how Pilger traces the lineage of the bombs and their testing in Vietnam and Laos (where they continue to kill 30 years later) to their use in Afghanistan, already the most landmined country in the world.

Pilger sweeps from the global and historical to the local and anecdotal; speaking to leaders of governments and security agencies as well as farmers and doctors. Apart from referring to his own work, Pilger quotes official documents and interviews with or statements by key players such as Cyrus Vance and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski, Washington guru and adviser to several US presidents, has written, says Pilger, of stirring up Muslims, of local wars being the beginning of a final conflict leading to domination by the US, and of nation states being incorporated in the new order controlled by economic interests as dictated by international banks, corporations and ruling elites.

John Negroponte, America’s man in the in the UN, recently voiced US objections to its troops being subject to the International Criminal Court (“We cannot accept a structure that may transform the political criticism of America’s world role into the basis for criminal trials of Americans who have put their lives on the line for freedom”). This is the man who was, says Pilger, “the mastermind of American terror in Central America”, overseeing the Honduran regime’s funding of death squads, administering the CIA’s contra war against Nicaragua, and who wrote, post-September 11, that “America’s self-defence . requires further actions with regard to other states.”

That, says Pilger, was a warning to the world.

Though his book’s comments regarding current events may date, the chapter on Iraq demands reading given Australia’s apparent support for America’s impending escalation of war on that front.

Stephen Webb

http://insights.uca.org.au/reviews/books/august02-books-reviews.htm#one

See also http://pilger.carlton.com/print/101656; Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Basic Books; and Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich, Broadway Books.