John Pilger
Vintage Books, London,1998, £8.99 pb
As one of the few serious radicals in this country to whom the mass media pay any attention, Pilger is important. This is a collection of essays, a few already published but most written for this book. We are back in what is recognisably Pilgerland: the corruptions of the mass media; the ideologists of and apologists for Anglo-American imperialism – and its victims; memories of the old, pre-Murdoch Fleet Street; examples of popular resistance to imperialism and globalisation. Pilger is Noam Chomsky via the Daily Mirror of 25 years ago. Which is mostly good news. He hates the right people and his nose wrinkles at the right bullshit. This is writing with passion, there is little of that these days, and much of what there is is not very good.
To most of this I simply say, ‘bravo’. I have only one serious disagreement, and that is about writing style. The book is somewhere between journalism and academic writing: that is, it is documented with footnotes but intermittently so. Here’s a paragraph from page 25.
‘When post-colonial regimes took the wrong political turn they generally did not last long. Official records from 1953 show that in British Guiana, the elected socialist government was overthrown by British and CIA terrorism in order to secure the flow of cheap sugar and bauxite. That was a busy year. The elected nationalist government in Iran met the same fate; claiming ownership of the nation’s oil resources was beyond the pale.(24) British governments supported repression and killing in Uganda, Chile and South Africa. In Vietnam in the 1960s, unknown to Parliament and the public, British SAS troops fought alongside American “special forces”.’
Pilger’s footnote refers the reader to a section of William Blum’s The CIA: a Forgotten History, on the Iran coup. But what are the ‘official records’ which tell us about ‘British and CIA terrorism’ in British Guiana in 1953? My initial reaction to this was, I thought all this happened in 1963/4; didn’t Philip Agee say something about this? I checked, and yes, he did. Then I looked at Mark Curtis’s The Ambiguities of Power, and there is the section on the 1953 events; and since Pilger cites Curtis elsewhere in the book (and, like Pilger, Curtis spells ‘Guyana’ Guiana), and since Curtis cites official Foreign Office documentation on the events, I think Curtis is Pilger’s source. But Curtis does not refer to the CIA, nor to ‘British and CIA terrorism’ in 1953. The CIA are referred to in the 1963/4 events, but in the context of a destabilisation campaign, climaxing in a long strike (rather similar to the events leading up to the 1973 coup in Chile, probably using the same manual). To accuse the British state of ‘terrorism’ in British Guiana surely requires some kind of documentation.
In the last sentence Pilger refers to the SAS fighting in Vietnam ‘with US special forces’. Again, I checked in Curtis and he cites one sentence from Bloch and Fitzgerald’s British Intelligence and Covert Action. which describes SAS personnel being attached to New Zealand and Australian SAS units. Well, I have no reason to doubt them; and no reason to doubt that the SAS dipped their toes in Vietnam. But the way Pilger states it suggests (a) that the British government knew the SAS were in Vietnam, for which there is no evidence; and (b) that the government supported the US war in Vietnam; and on this the evidence is still ambiguous. It is true that British components of the Anglo-American intelligence and surveillance system, notably some GCHQ bases in the Far East, provided intelligence to the US. But despite a great deal of arm-twisting from LBJ, and despite Wilson’s utter dependence on the US at this point for financial assistance to defend the value of the pound, Harold Wilson refused to send even a token force to Vietnam. (Apologists for Maurice Oldfield hint that he was instrumental in keeping the British state out of Vietnam.)
The paragraph of Pilger’s I have quoted illustrates two things Pilger does which I think are a mistake. He overworks the available evidence in support of his theses when there is no need to – the bad guys are bad enough; and he does not include the full documentation. Pilger dreams of a literate, curious, self-educating public who won’t be fooled again. Presumably he must hope that someone, reading his book, will be inspired to take up the struggle or encouraged to carry on. But if so, why not provide the sources for such a reader to go off to the library and do more reading? Assertion without documentation leaves the reader at a dead-end: believe it or don’t. Assertion plus documentation opens doors, empowers.
For example, in a really splendid and splenetic assault on Our Great Leader (T. Blair) he quotes extensively from the material on the British American Project for the Future Generation and TUCETU in Lobster 33. But the source is not given. (This will be corrected in the second edition, I am assured.) Granted, Lobster 33 would be hard to find if a new reader tried; but eventually, if asked, the British library system would produce a photocopy from one of the copyright copies it holds of Lobster.
There is a widespread prejudice against foot- or end-notes in the publishing business. Publishers think they put people off, are too academic-looking. This is just a prejudice. It is difficult to imagine anyone picking Pilger’s book up, being interested in the subject matter, and then putting it down because it had lots of end-note numbers in the text. Documentation creates popular access. The fact that few readers will ever bother to follow the notes does not make any difference.