For all his charismatic eloquence -- and he is very persuasive -- Pilger's is a Marxist analysis of the world, presented in a popular and accessible form. It may have its strengths, but it isn't the only way of seeing things.
So -- read this book by all means. Digest the details of the terrible things he lists about the horrors of the anti-Communist murders when Suharto took over Indonesia (including the slaughter of huge numbers of Indonesian Chinese), the long-term involvement of the West with Iraq, or the unending sufferings of the Australian Aborigines. But don't automatically or unthinkingly assume it's the last word on all matters political and economic.
The world is an old place. Empires rise and fall, and they don't do so without bloodshed and exploitation. But power is power. For men to exist without taking the opportunities to exert power when they present themselves would, sadly, be for human beings to be made differently than they are.
Some of John Pilger's fellow journalists have written about the process of "Pilgerization," the processing and simplifying of any given situation until it fits in with his intransigent view of the world.
This is unfair, but it suggests how global politics can be made to fit into Pilger's crusading pattern only after a degree of
simplification.
Taiwan is a good example. Here is an island where the political divide is not, as in most other places, between right and left, rich and poor, but between pro-independence and pan-China camps. Nor is Taiwan the only place that fails to fit into Pilger's shining, ideologically crystal-clear pattern.
Nevertheless, despite his dark material, Pilger ends on a hopeful note. The anti-globalization (read anti-US) movement, he claims, represents youth's growing awareness of the realities of the situation. Protest marches in the US may not be as big as they were in the anti-Vietnam War days, but in Europe they're bigger. The young, he believes, are seeing the truth at last.
Pilger is these days based in London, like so many Australians ambitious to reach wider horizons than their native country affords them. And at least he's allowed to express such inflammatory opinions from there. Things were not always so easy for radical opponents of the state.
When the Roman philosopher Cicero wouldn't stop criticizing the emperor, he was killed on a lonely coast road, and his head delivered to the imperial palace where the empress entertained herself by poking pins through his once-hostile tongue.
It's when John Pilger's body is found one rainy night on a British lay-by, the victim of a hit-and-run driver, that we'll really have cause to worry.
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