JOHN PILGER :Rage against injustice (The Guardian )

Rage against injustice

John Pilger’s Freedom Next Time confronts some uncomfortable truths, says Nicholas Lezard

Saturday June 9, 2007
The Guardian

Buy Freedom Next Time at the Guardian bookshop

Freedom Next Time
by John Pilger
(Black Swan, £8.99)

A recent profile of the politically active comedian Mark Thomas described him as "John Pilger with a sense of humour". This is a bit hard on Pilger. It might be easy to think of him as the grim chronicler of the world’s many injustices, which is the kind of occupation that would wipe the smile off most faces; but I did spot a couple of jokes here, or at least the odd occasion when one could fancy the lip curling with a sardonic twist. The best comes when he is examining the case of the Chagossians exiled from Diego Garcia. (I presume that readers of this newspaper need no reminding of the details; but in case you do, 2,000 islanders were kicked out between 1967 and 1971 to make room for a US military base. They have just won, unbelievably, a ruling from the court of appeal in London.)

Article continues

Pilger ties Bill Rammell, the FO minister responsible for the Chagos, in knots regarding the inhabitability of the islands. Rammell said an official feasibility study had said the islands were no longer safe; they were sinking, had no fresh water and so on, so the islanders couldn’t go back even if they wanted to. Pilger points out that there are 4,000 US personnel there, in living conditions described by the US Navy as "outstanding" and "unbelievable". Rammell replies that OK, the islands are inhabitable, but "at a cost ... based on specific financial recommendations in the experts’ report". Pilger has a copy of the report, and reads from it a bit saying "this report has not been tasked with investigating the financial costs of resettlement". In other words, says Pilger, you’ve made it up. Well, what if there’s an earthquake or a volcano or a tidal wave, says Rammell. Unlikely, says Pilger, as the islands have a completely benign climate. And so on. The dialogue is uncannily like a Monty Python sketch.

Still, fingers crossed, that story at least has a happy ending; the others here do not, or not yet. In chapters dealing with the continuing sufferings of Palestine, the increasing poverty gap in India, the continuing economic apartheid of South Africa and the hell-hole of Afghanistan, Pilger examines the legacy of western action and inaction on both the large and the intimate scale. He takes those news items that tiptoe round the effects of American and British foreign policy - chiefly those that cause death and destruction to innocent civilians - and makes us see them in their savage actuality.

It makes, as you will have come to expect from Pilger’s past form, for the kind of reportage that makes your blood boil with indignation. People may dismiss him as a polemicist (or, when he catalogues the injustices perpetrated against the Palestinians, as a rabid anti-semite, that automatic smear), but you can’t gainsay the meticulousness with which he marshals his facts and interviews key witnesses - both influential and powerless - to make his case. He glosses over the Russians’ not-always-benign behaviour in Afghanistan, but seeing what’s happened later, you can understand why.

The chapter on South Africa is particularly uncomfortable, but, apart from the lacuna mentioned above, Pilger is not in general afraid to face the uncomfortable. (It is his job, after all.) You would have thought it hard to engineer circumstances that could make the gap between rich and poor in South Africa wider than it had been before the end of apartheid; but, somehow, the ANC has done that - and not without some help from Nelson Mandela, whose feet, in this book, are revealed to be rather more clay-related than one might have previously thought. The culprits, in a theme that runs throughout the book, are a mixture of implacable economic force - often tied to staggeringly expensive arms deals and unfulfilled promises of aid and development - and a rather resigned realpolitik.

The extraordinary thing about Pilger is that while he paints a picture that is potentially conducive to despair, he does not despair himself. However hopeless the situation looks, he finds people who have hope, and act on it. That quite a few of these people seem to come to sticky ends doesn’t kill the message of freedom. But you can see why it is that Pilger doesn’t smile all that often.