In the course of his career, John Pilger made 61 documentaries, all questioning the ‘establishment narrative’ on big, international news stories. Topics he’s covered include Palestine, the Thalidomide scandal, Julian Assange and Wikileaks, and the ‘Coke v Pepsi’ battles.
Bottom up journalism
People often talk about ‘bottom-up v top-down’ politics, but Pilger believed in bottom-up journalism. Rather than fielding debates between politicians, he would begin by finding how people on the ground were experiencing those big issues and conflicts — but his documentaries never lacked analysis. The key was that if you make real life your starting point, you can see the questions that need asking, and you end up with a far better informed version of what’s going on, and why.
Chomsky called him a ‘beam of light’ and, commenting on his death, said what so many of us were feeling – that we’ve lost an essential, critical voice in journalism, just when the establishment narrative has hit an all-time low. That’s probably why the event I attended in Hastings this week to commemorate Pilger’s work centred around his documentary ‘Palestine is still the issue’. This was a re-visit when Pilger made the programme in 2002. He was going back over the ground of a situation he’d investigated 25 years before, asking what’s been happening? Why has no solution been found?
As always with Pilger documentaries, the ‘sticking points’ in the Palestine issue were investigated from plenty of angles. We heard from a man whose daughter was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber, from Israeli IDF vets and politicians, and from the brother of a woman who became a suicide bomber.
Wafa Idris was an ambulance volunteer in Palestine. Her brother talked about some of the things she’d seen, about the kinds of experiences that could turn a compassionate volunteer into a suicidal killer.
At our memorial event, Mayer Wakefield, an officer from Stop the War spoke about Pilger, saying that he was unusual in that he was both an investigative journalist and a campaigner, often speaking about his experiences at big anti-war rallies. Wakefield remembers Pilger’s journalism informing his own political education as he grew up, with Pilger’s column often being the only bit worth reading in the New Statesman, for example.
Wafa Idris’ story is a perfect example of Pilger’s work: this is the kind of thing that happens, this is how it feels like for these people who are involved, this is what leads to that… and then we see Pilger presenting the problem to an Israeli politician who, quite simply, refuses to believe that any action by Israeli forces could either be, or be the cause of, terrorism.
A situation experienced, investigated and analysed, so the viewer can deduce what the problem is, and precisely where it lies, in a way that you’d never be able to work out from mainstream media coverage.
Ironically, in the conversations after the documentary, we forgot to talk about Pilger. We were full of thoughts and questions about what the documentary was about, and, finding we had a lawyer in the room, we got busy questioning her about the Geneva Convention, and what might or might not happen as a result of the ICJ ruling on Israel.
Because that was the kind of journalist Pilger was. He got viewers thinking about the things that needed thinking about. We will indeed miss him.
UNWRA and genocide complicity
By the by – two things I learned during that conversation – UMWRA, the United Nations Agency several countries have just defunded on Israel’s say-so, is responsible for overseeing the right of return of Palestinian refugees. Well, suddenly a roomful of us knew exactly why Israel wants UNWRA discredited.
The other thing was about a very interesting law suit that could hit the news soon, regarding Rishi Sunak and complicity in genocide.
Keep talking
Please keep talking about Palestine – the two new things I learned last night were a reminder to me how much we all need to keep learning and questioning but also, there are still people out there who’ve never been lucky enough to come upon a good piece of independent journalism about Palestine and they are the ones who don’t yet realize we need to get our war-crazy politicians under control.
And let us keep a place in our hearts for those journalists attempting to follow in the foot steps of journalists like Pilger – Assange for example, currently in Belmarsh Prison waiting to see if, after all this time, we can fend off the USA operators who are doing their best to kill real journalism — and those wonderful people managing, against all the odds, to bring us real, bottom-up journalism from Gaza.
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Dear Reader,
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Cheers,
Kay
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Kay Green 