Island countries in the world

Countries without land borders

An island country is a state whose primary territory consists of one or more islands or parts of islands. As of 2011, 47 (approximately 25%^[1]) of the 193 UN member states are island countries.

Politics[link]

The percentage of island countries that are democratic is higher than that of continental countries, although historically they have been more prone to political instability.^[1]

War[link]

Island countries have often been the basis of maritime conquest and historical rivalry between other countries.^[2] Island countries are more susceptible to attack by large, continental countries due to their size and dependence on sea lines of communication and air lines of communication.^[3] Many island countries are also vulnerable to predation by mercenaries and other foreign invaders.^[4] However, their isolation also makes them a difficult target.

Natural resources[link]

Many island countries rely heavily on fish for their main supply of food.^[5] Some are turning to renewable energy—such as wind power, hydropower, geothermal power and biodiesel from copra oil—to combat the rise in oil prices.^[6]

Geography[link]

Some island countries are more affected by climate change than other countries. Some low-lying island countries are slowly being submerged by the rising water levels of the Pacific Ocean.^[7] Climate change also impacts island countries by causing natural disasters such as tropical cyclones, hurricanes, flash floods and drought.^[8]

Economics[link]

Many island countries rely heavily on imports and are greatly affected by changes in the global economy.^[9] The economies of island countries are usually smaller and more vulnerable to shipping costs, environmental damage to infrastructure, and isolation from other economies than those of larger, continental countries (excluding Japan, Australia and the U.K.) ^[10][11][12] The dominant industry for many island countries is tourism.^[13]

Composition[link]

Island countries are typically small with relatively low populations.^[14]

Some island countries are centred on one or two major islands, such as the United Kingdom, Trinidad and Tobago, New Zealand and Singapore. Others are spread out over hundreds or thousands of smaller islands, such as the Philippines, Indonesia, and the Maldives. Some island countries share their islands with other countries; these include the United Kingdom and Ireland, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and Indonesia, which shares islands with Papua New Guinea, Brunei, East Timor and Malaysia.

Geographically, the country of Australia is considered a continental landmass rather than an island, covering the largest landmass of the Australian continent. In the past, however, it was considered an island country for tourism purposes^[15] and is still often referred to as such.^[16]

Climate change[link]

Climate change poses a threat to island nations. Rising sea levels provide obstacles including reduced land use, water scarcity and sometimes even resettlement issues for island nations. In 2011, the Center for Climate Change Law (CCCL) held a conference attended by 272 registrants from 39 island nations titled Legal Issues for Threatened Island Nations.^[17]

See also[link]

References[link]

A nation may refer to a community of people who share a common language, culture, ethnicity, descent, or history.^[1] In this definition, a nation has no physical borders. However, it can also refer to people who share a common territory and government (for example the inhabitants of a sovereign state) irrespective of their ethnic make-up.^[2][3] In international relations, nation can refer to a country or sovereign state.^[1] The word nation can more specifically refer to people of North American Indians, such as the Cherokee Nation that prefer this term over the contested term tribe.^[1]

According to Joseph Stalin writing in 1913 in Marxism and the National Question: "a nation is not a racial or tribal, but a historically constituted community of people;" "a nation is not a casual or ephemeral conglomeration, but a stable community of people;" "a common language is one of the characteristic features of a nation;" "a nation is formed only as a result of lengthy and systematic intercourse, as a result of people living together generation after generation;" "a common territory is one of the characteristic features of a nation;" "a common economic life, economic cohesion, is one of the characteristic features of a nation;" "a common psychological make-up, which manifests itself in a common culture, is one of the characteristic features of a nation;" "A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture." According to Stalin, this would exclude Jews as they have no common territory.^[4]

An alternative view, expressed by Otto Bauer, author of Social Democracy and the Nationalities Question (1907), that "A nation is an aggregate of people bound into a community of character by a common destiny." would include Jews. R. Springer, author of The National Problem (1909), also cited by Stalin in his discussion of this matter, held similar views.^[4]

Etymology[link]

The word nation came to English from the Old French word nacion, which in turn originates from the Latin word natio (nātĭō) literally meaning "that which has been born".^[5]

As an example of how the word natio was employed in classical Latin, the following quote from Cicero's Philippics Against Mark Antony in 44 BC contrasts the external, inferior nationes ("races of people") with the Roman civitas ("community"):

"Omnes nationes servitutem ferre possunt: nostra civitas non potest."
("All races are able to bear enslavement, but our community cannot.")

— Cicero, Orationes: Pro Milone, Pro Marcello, Pro Ligario, Pro rege Deiotaro, Philippicae I-XIV^[6]

An early example of the use of the word "nation" (in conjunction with language and territory) was provided in 968 by Liutprand (the bishop of Cremona) who, while confronting the Byzantine emperor, Nicephorus II, on behalf of his patron Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor, declared:

"The land...which you say belongs to your empire belongs, as the nationality and language of the people proves, to the kingdom of Italy.'"

— Liutprand, Relatio de legatione Constantinopolitana ad Nicephorum Phocam ^[7]

[edit] Medieval nationes

A significant early use of the term nation, as natio, occurred at mediaeval universities^[8] to describe the colleagues in a college or students, above all at the University of Paris, who were all born within a pays, spoke the same language and expected to be ruled by their own familiar law. In 1383 and 1384, while studying theology at Paris, Jean Gerson was elected twice as a procurator for the French natio. The University of Prague adopted the division of students into nationes: from its opening in 1349 the studium generale which consisted of Bohemian, Bavarian, Saxon and Polish nations.

In a similar way, the nationes were segregated by the Knights Hospitaller of Jerusalem, who maintained at Rhodes the hostels from which they took their name "where foreigners eat and have their places of meeting, each nation apart from the others, and a Knight has charge of each one of these hostels, and provides for the necessities of the inmates according to their religion", as the Spanish traveller Pedro Tafur noted in 1436.^[9]

See also[link]

References[link]

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Cesária Évora
Cesária Évora in 2008
Background information
Born	(1941-08-27)27 August 1941 Mindelo, Portuguese Cape Verde
Died	17 December 2011(2011-12-17) (aged 70) São Vicente, Cape Verde
Genres	Morna Coladeira
Occupations	Singer
Years active	1957–2011

Cesária Évora (Portuguese pronunciation: [sɨˈzaɾiɐ ˈɛvuɾɐ]; 27 August 1941 – 17 December 2011) was a Cape Verdean popular singer. Nicknamed the "Barefoot Diva" for performing without shoes,^[1] she was also the "Queen of Morna".^[2]

Life and career[link]

Cise (as her friends used to call her) was born on August 27, 1941 in Mindelo, São Vicente, Cape Verde. When she was seven years old her father (who was a part-time musician ^[3]) died, and at age ten she was placed in an orphanage, as her mother could not raise all six children. At the age of 16, she was persuaded by a friend to sing in a sailors' tavern.^[2]

In the 1960s, she started singing on Portuguese cruise ships stopping at Mindelo as well as on the local radio. It was only in 1985 when at the invitation of Cape Verdean singer Bana she went to perform in Portugal. In Lisbon she was discovered by the musician José da Silva and invited to record in Paris.^[4]

Évora's international success came only in 1988 with the release of her first album La Diva Aux Pieds Nus recorded in France.^[2] Her 1992 album Miss Perfumado sold over 300,000 copies worldwide, and included one of her most celebrated songs, "Sodade"^[5], composed by Bonga Kuenda (Angola 74).

Her 1995 album Cesária brought her broader international success and the first Grammy Award nomination.^[2] In 1997, she won KORA All African Music Awards in three categories: "Best Artist of West Africa", "Best Album" and "Merit of the Jury".^[6] In 2003, her album Voz d'Amor was awarded a Grammy in the World music category.^[2]

In 2010, Évora performed a series of concerts, the last of which was in Lisbon on May 8th. Two days later, after a heart attack, she was operated on at a hospital in Paris. On the morning of May 11, 2010 she was taken off artificial pulmonary ventilation, and on May 16, she was discharged from the intensive care unit and transported to a clinic for further treatment. In late September 2011, Évora's agent announced she was ending her career due to poor health.^[7]

On December 17, 2011, aged 70, Évora died in São Vicente, Cape Verde, from respiratory failure and hypertension.^[8] A Spanish newspaper reported that 48 hours before her death she was still receiving people -and smoking- in her home in Mindelo, popular for always having its doors open. ^[9]

Discography[link]

The house of Cesária Évora.

Studio albums[link]

• La Diva Aux Pieds Nus (1988)
• Distino di Belita (1990)
• Mar Azul (1991)
• Miss Perfumado (1992)
• Cesária (1995)
• Cabo Verde (1997)
• Café Atlantico (1999)
• São Vicente di Longe (2001)
• Voz d'Amor (2003)
• Rogamar (2006)
• Nha Sentimento (2009)

Compilations & live albums[link]

• Sodade - Les Plus Belles Mornas de Cesária (Best of compilation, 1994)
• Club Sodade (Remix album, 1996)
• Live à l'Olympia (Live album, recorded at the Paris Olympia, 1996)
• Colors of the World (Allegro Music, 1997)
• Live Lugano July 1997 (Live album, recorded at Lugano, 1997)
• Best Of' (Best of compilation, 1998) CAN: Gold^[10]
• Anthology (Best of compilation, 2002)
• Anthologie - Mornas & Coladeras (Double CD edition of Anthology, 2004)
• Live d'Amor (Live DVD, recorded in 2004 at Le Grand Rex, Paris, 2004)
• Un Geste Pour Haiti"

Singles[link]

• Nutridinha (2001)

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Cesária Évora

• Life and Work of Cesária Évora, in Portuguese
• Blog by the fans of Cesária Évora, the 1st page entirely in portuguese about her, 2008
• Official Website
• extensive bio by Radio France Internationale

Greg Stone (born 23 June 1961 in Perth, Australia) is an Australian actor who has appeared in films, television and on stage.

Biography[link]

Stone graduated from the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney in 1983^[1] and won a Helpmann Award and Green Room Award^[2] for Best Actor^[3] for his role of George W. Bush in David Hare’s Stuff Happens directed by Neil Armfield in 2006.^[4] Other notable film roles are in The Bank with David Wenham and Anthony LaPaglia, Van Diemen's Land, Oranges and Sunshine and Boytown.

Television[link]

He has appeared in many Australian television shows including:

• A Country Practice
• Neighbours
• Blue Heelers
• Good Guys Bad Guys
• City Homicide
• Bed of Roses
• The Librarians
• Blue Heelers
• Marshall Law
• Underbelly Files: Tell Them Lucifer was Here
• Winners and Losers

Theatre[link]

Considered one of Australia’s finest stage actors he has appeared in over 60 productions for many companies including Melbourne Theatre Company, Sydney Theatre Company, State Theatre Company of South Australia, Company B, Malthouse Theatre, Playbox Theatre, Black Swan Theatre, Bell Shakespeare, Griffin Theatre Company and Q Theatre.^[5] He was nominated for Green Room Awards for his performances in Angels In America, Good Works, A Little Night Music,^[6] Beauty Queen of Leenane, Beneath Heaven, Night a Wall 2 Men, and most recently Blackbird in 2008 (also a Helpmann nomination).^[7] He was a founding member of the acclaimed Keene/Taylor Theatre Project and Artistic Associate at Playbox Theatre in 2004.^[8]

Music career[link]

He is the lead singer of the glam rock band Melody Lords.

Personal life[link]

He lives in Melbourne with his wife Rebekah Stone, also an actor, and their two children.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Greg Stone at the Internet Movie Database

This article about an Australian actor or actress is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July 2011)

John Pilger
Born	9 October 1939[1] Sydney, Australia
Residence	United Kingdom
Nationality	Australian
Occupation	Journalist, writer, documentary filmmaker
Website
johnpilger.com

John Richard Pilger (born 9 October 1939)^[1] is an Australian journalist and documentary maker, based in London.

Since his early years as a war correspondent in Vietnam, Pilger has been a strong critic of American and British foreign policy, which he considers to be driven by an imperialist agenda. Pilger has also criticised his native country's treatment of Indigenous Australians and the practices of the mainstream media. In the UK print media, he has had a long association with the Daily Mirror, and writes a fortnightly columnn for the New Statesman magazine.

Pilger has twice won Britain's Journalist of the Year Award, and his documentaries, screened internationally, have gained awards in Britain and worldwide, and the journalist has received several honorary doctorates.^[2][3]

Early life and career[link]

This biographical section of an article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (January 2010)

Pilger was born and raised in Bondi, a suburb of Sydney.^[2] He attended Sydney Boys High School,^[2] where he started a student newspaper, The Messenger, and later joined a four-year journalist trainee scheme with the Australian Consolidated Press.^[2] Beginning his career in 1958 as a copy boy with the Sydney Sun, he later moved to the city's Daily Telegraph where he was a reporter, sports writer and sub-editor.^[2] He also freelanced and worked for the Sydney Sunday Telegraph, the daily paper's sister title. After moving to Europe, he was for a year a freelance correspondent in Italy.^[4]

Settling in the UK in 1962, working as a sub-editor, Pilger joined British United Press and then Reuters in London on their middle-east desk,^[4] and was recruited by the English Daily Mirror in 1963, again as a sub-editor at first.^[4] Later, he was a reporter, a feature writer and Chief Foreign Correspondent for the title. Working in the United States, on 5 June 1968 he witnessed the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.^[5][6] During the next twenty years, Pilger became the Daily Mirror's star reporter, particularly on social issues. He was a war correspondent in Vietnam, Cambodia, Egypt, India, Bangladesh and Biafra. Nearly eighteen months after Robert Maxwell bought the Mirror (on 12 July 1984), Pilger was sacked by Richard Stott, the newspaper's editor, on 31 December 1985.^[7]

Early television work[link]

His career on television began on World in Action (Granada Television) in 1969, for whom he made two documentaries broadcast in 1970 and 1971, the earliest of more than fifty involving Pilger. The Quiet Mutiny in 1970 was the first of these. Filmed at Camp Snuffy, the film presented a character study of the common US soldier during the Vietnam War, revealing the shifting morale and open rebellion of Western troops. Pilger described the film as "something of a scoop" - it was the first documentary to show the open rebellion within the drafted ranks of the US military that led to the withdrawal of the land army in 1973.^{[citation needed]} "When I flew to New York and showed it to Mike Wallace, the star reporter of CBS' 60 Minutes, he agreed. "Real shame we can't show it here"", Pilger said in an interview with the New Statesman.^[8] Later films about Vietnam followed The Quiet Mutiny, Vietnam: Still America's War (1974), Do You Remember Vietnam? (1978) and Vietnam: The Last Battle (1995).

Following a brief unhappy period on the BBC's Midweek television series during 1972-73,^[9] five reports were completed, but only two were broadcast, the journalist was given a regular television outlet at ATV. The Pilger half-hour documentary series was commissioned by Charles Denton, then a producer with ATV, for screening on the British ITV network. The series ran for five series from 1974 until 1977,^[9] at first runnng in the UK on Sunday afternoons after Weekend World; later it was scheduled in a weekday peak-time evening slot. The last series included "A Faraway Country" (broadcast in September 1977) about dissidents in Czechoslavakia, then part of the Communist Soviet bloc. Pilger and his team interviewed members of Charter 77, and others, secretly using domestic film equipment. In the documentary Pilger praises the courage and commitment to freedom of Charter 77 and describes the communist totalitarianism as "fascism disguised as socialism".^[10]

Pilger's programmes were then extended to fill an hour, placed in the 9pm slot before News at Ten, and gained the journalist a high profile in Britain. After ATV lost its franchise in 1981, he has continued to make documentaries for screening on ITV, initially for Central, and later via Carlton Television.

Documentaries and career: 1978-2000[link]

Cambodia[link]

In 1979, Pilger and two colleagues with whom he collaborated for many years, documentary film-maker David Munro and photographer Eric Piper, entered Cambodia in the wake of the overthrow of the Pol Pot regime. The result was a series of world exclusives, the first of which occupied almost an entire Daily Mirror, which sold out. This was followed by an ITV documentary, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia, which brought to people's living rooms the suffering of the Khmer people. Some $45 million was raised, unsolicited, in mostly small donations following the showing of Year Zero, including almost £4 million raised by schoolchildren in the UK. This funded the first substantial relief to Cambodia, including life saving drugs like penicillin and the manufacture of clothes to replace the black uniforms people had been forced to wear. According to Brian Walker, director of Oxfam, "a solidarity and compassion surged across our nation" from the broadcast of Year Zero.^[11] Pilger and Munro made four later films about Cambodia. During the filming of Cambodia Year One, they were warned that Pilger was on a Khmer Rouge 'death list' and, in one incident, they narrowly escaped an ambush. The British Film Institute (BFI) has described Year Zero as one of the ten most influential documentary films of the 20th century.^{[citation needed]}

Pilger himself described the British reaction to Year Zero in 2006:

The documentary as a television "event" can send ripples far and wide... Year Zero not only revealed the horror of the Pol Pot years, it showed how Richard Nixon's and Henry Kissinger's 'secret' bombing of that country had provided a critical catalyst for the rise of the Khmer Rouge. It also exposed how the west, led by the United States and Britain, was imposing an embargo, like a medieval siege, on the most stricken country on earth. This was a reaction to the fact that Cambodia's liberator was Vietnam - a country that had come from the wrong side of the Cold War and that had recently defeated the US. Cambodia's suffering was a wilful revenge. Britain and the US even backed Pol Pot's demand that his man continue to occupy Cambodia's seat at the UN, while Margaret Thatcher stopped children's milk going to the survivors of his nightmare regime. Little of this was reported. Had Year Zero simply described the monster that Pol Pot was, it would have been quickly forgotten. By reporting the collusion of "our" governments, it told a wider truth about how the world was run... Within two days of Year Zero going to air, 40 sacks of post arrived at ATV ... in Birmingham - 26,000 first-class letters in the first post alone. The station quickly amassed £1m, almost all of it in small amounts. "This is for Cambodia," wrote a Bristol bus driver, enclosing his week's wage. Entire pensions were sent, along with entire savings. Petitions arrived at Downing Street, one after the other, for weeks. MPs received hundreds of thousands of letters, demanding that British policy change (which it did, eventually). And none of it was asked for. For me, the public response to Year Zero gave the lie to clichés about "compassion fatigue", an excuse that some broadcasters and television executives use to justify the current descent into the cynicism and passivity of Big Brotherland. Above all, I learned that a documentary could reclaim shared historical and political memories, and present their hidden truths. The reward then was a compassionate and an informed public; and it still is."^[12]

In a 2007 speech, "Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire", Pilger described his experience with executives of the American Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) who refused to screen Year Zero, which, according to Pilger, has never been broadcast in the USA.^[13]

A claim in one of those later Pilger documentaries, Cambodia - The Betrayal (1990), led to a libel case. The Times of 6 July 1991 reported:

Two men who claimed that a television documentary accused them of being SAS members who trained Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to lay mines, accepted "very substantial" libel damages in the High Court yesterday. Christopher Geidt and Anthony De Normann settled their action against the journalist John Pilger and Central Television on the third day of the hearing. Desmond Browne, QC, for Mr Pilger and Central Television, said his clients had not intended to allege the two men trained the Khmer Rouge to lay mines, but they accepted that was how the program had been understood.^[14]

Australia's indigenous population[link]

Pilger has long been a critic of Australian government policy, particularly of what he regards as its inherent racism and the poor treatment of its indigenous population. He has made several documentaroes on this subject, such as The Secret Country-The First Australians Fight Back (1985), and has wriiten the book A Secret Country published in 1989.

Pilger wrote in 2000 that the 1998 legislation that removed the common law rights of Indigenous Australians "is just one of the disgraces that has given Australia the distinction of being the only developed country whose government has been condemned as racist by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination."^[15]

East Timor[link]

In 1993 Pilger slipped into East Timor and shot Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy. The revelations of this film alerted the British public to the horror of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, which began in 1975. Death of a Nation prompted an international outcry which ultimately led to Indonesian withdrawal from East Timor and eventual independence in 2000. When Death of a Nation was screened in Britain it was the highest rating documentary in 15 years and 5,000 telephone calls per minute were made to the programme's action line.^[16] When Death of a Nation was screened in Australia in June 1994, Foreign Minister Gareth Evans declared that Pilger "had a track record of distorted sensationalism mixed with sanctimony."^[17]

Documentaries and career since 2000[link]

Later newspaper career[link]

In 1987 Pilger was a founder of News on Sunday in London, and titular Editor-in-Chief, but resigned before publication. Pilger has a fortnightly column in New Statesman, his most frequent outlet, which began in 1991 while Steve Platt was editor of the magazine.^[18] Reportedly, Pilger has described his role at the Statesman as a "fig leaf".^[19] In 2001, while Piers Morgan was editor of the Mirror, he returned to his old paper in 2001, after the 9/11 attacks.^[20]

[edit] Palestine Is Still the Issue

Following broadcast on ITV in the UK, Pilger's documentary Palestine Is Still the Issue (2002) was alleged by the UK press to be inaccurate and biased. The UK television regulator, the Independent Television Commission (ITC), ordered an investigation. Based on the results of the investigation, the ITC rejected the complaints made about the film, stating:

The ITC raised with Carlton all the significant areas of inaccuracy critics of the programme alleged and the broadcaster answered them by reference to a range of historical texts. The ITC is not a tribunal of fact and is particularly aware of the difficulties of verifying 'historical fact' but the comprehensiveness and authority of Carlton's sources were persuasive, not least because many appeared to be of Israeli origin.

Pilger's documentary, the ITC added, "was not in breach of the ITC Programme Code... Adequate opportunity was given to a pro-Israeli government perspective."^[21]

In 2010, Pilger endorsed the Canadian Boat to Gaza ^[22], part of the Freedom Flotilla 2 ^[23] which aims to end the Israeli blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip.

Diego Garcia[link]

Pilger's 2004 film Stealing a Nation told the story of the people of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean. In the 1960s and 70s, British governments expelled the entire population of the Chagos Archipelago, dumping them in the slums of Mauritius. The aim was to give the principal island of this Crown Colony, Diego Garcia, to the Americans who wanted it as a major military base, from where US planes have since bombed Afghanistan and Iraq. The International Criminal Court later described this act as "a crime against humanity". Pilger strongly criticised Tony Blair for not making any real response to the 2000 High Court ruling that the British expulsion of the island's natives to Mauritius in order to make way for a United States Air Force base had been illegal.^[24]

In March 2005, Stealing a Nation was awarded Britain's most prestigious documentary prize, the Royal Television Society Award.

In May 2006, the UK High Court ruled in favour of the Chagossians in their battle to prove they were illegally removed by the UK government during the depopulation of Diego Garcia, paving the way for a return to their homeland. The leader of the Chagos Refugee Group, Olivier Bancoult, described it as a "special day, a day to remember". In May 2007, the UK Government's appeal against the 2006 High Court ruling was dismissed and they took the matter to the House of Lords. In October 2008, the House of Lords ruled in favour of the Government, overturning the original High Court ruling.

Latin America[link]

His 2007 film The War on Democracy was Pilger's first cinema release and was named Best Documentary at the 2008 One World Media Awards.^[25] The film explores the historic and current relationship of Washington with Latin American countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile. Using, among other sources, archive footage sourced by Michael Moore's archivist Carl Deal, the film explores the role of US intervention, overt and covert, in toppling a series of governments in the region since the 1950s. This includes, for example, discussing reports of US involvement in the overthrow of the democratically elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende in 1973 and its replacement by the military dictatorship of General Pinochet. Pilger interviews several ex-CIA agents who purportedly took part in secret campaigns against democratic countries. He investigates the School of the Americas in the US state of Georgia, where Pinochet’s torture squads were reportedly trained along with tyrants and death squad leaders in Haiti, El Salvador, Brazil and Argentina.

The film also explores the attempted overthrow of Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez in 2002 and how the people of Caracas rose up to force his return to power. It looks at the wider rise of populist governments across South America led by figures calling for loosening ties with Washington and a fairer redistribution of the continent's natural wealth. "[The film]" says Pilger, "is about the struggle of people to free themselves from a modern form of slavery". These people, he says, "describe a world not as American presidents like to see it as useful or expendable, they describe the power of courage and humanity among people with next to nothing. They reclaim noble words like democracy, freedom, liberation, justice, and in doing so they are defending the most basic human rights of all of us in a war being waged against all of us".^[26]

In May 2007, Pilger co-signed and put forward a letter supporting the refusal of the government of Venezuela under Hugo Chavez to renew the broadcasting licence of Venezuela's largest television network Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV), as they openly supported a 2002 coup attempt against the democratically elected government. Pilger and other signatories suggest that if the BBC or ITV used their news broadcasts to publicly support a coup against the British government, they would suffer similar consequences.^[27] Human rights groups including Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists have described the RCTV decision as an effort to stifle freedom of expression.^[28]

Western leaders[link]

In addition to criticizing the policies of former United States President George W. Bush, Pilger has also taken aim at former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whom he believes to be just as culpable as President Bush for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

On 25 July 2005, Pilger ascribed blame for the 2005 London bombings that took place the same month to Blair, whose decision to follow Bush helped to generate the rage that he maintains precipitated those bombings.^[29]

In the same column a year later, Pilger described Blair as a war criminal for supporting Israel's actions during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict. He also asserted that Blair gave permission to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 to initiate what would ultimately become Operation Defensive Shield.^[30]

Pilger has also criticised United States President Barack Obama, describing him as "a glossy Uncle Tom who would bomb Pakistan."^[31] and whose theme "was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully." Pilger asserts, "In his first 100 days, Obama has excused torture, opposed habeas corpus and demanded more secret government." ^[32]

He is a member of the International Organization for a Participatory Society, other leading members include Noam Chomsky and David Graeber,^[33] launched in 2012.^[34]

Other issues[link]

Critic of mainstream media[link]

He is a strong critic of the institutions and economic forces that structure 'mainstream' journalism. In an address at Columbia University on 14 April 2006, he said:

During the Cold War, a group of Russian journalists toured the United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by their hosts for their impressions. 'I have to tell you,' said their spokesman, 'that we were astonished to find after reading all the newspapers and watching TV, that all the opinions on all the vital issues were by and large, the same. To get that result in our country, we imprison people, we tear out their fingernails. Here, you don't have that. What's the secret? How do you do it?'

Pilger said, while speaking to journalism students at the University of Lincoln, that mainstream journalism means corporate journalism, and as such represents vested corporate interests over those of the public.^[35]

He is particularly scornful of pro-Iraq war commentators on the liberal left, or 'liberal interventionists', such as Nick Cohen and David Aaronovitch.

In 2003 he was interviewed by the New Zealand journalist Kim Hill on her television show Face to Face With Kim Hill. The interview became infamous in New Zealand. Pilger, being interviewed via a live-cross, complained that Hill had not researched him before the interview, saying "You waste my time because you have not prepared for this interview, as any journalist does, and I've done many interviews. The one thing is to prepare for them and this interview, frankly, is a disgrace." Hill, who had commenced the interview by proposing that the Iraq war was "a just war", eventually threw Pilger's book at his image on the screen.

Honours and awards[link]

Pilger has received human rights and journalism awards, including the Richard Dimbleby Award for factual reporting at the 1990 BAFTA Awards, as well as many honorary doctorates.^[2] The jury’s citation reads as follows: "For work as an author, film-maker and journalist as well as for courage as a foreign and war correspondent in enabling the voices of the powerless to be heard. For commitment to peace with justice by exposing and holding governments to account for human rights abuses and for fearless challenges to censorship in any form."^[36]

Other awards include:

• One World Media Awards - TV Documentary Award for his ITV1 film The War on Democracy, on the role of Washington in Latin American politics. (2008)^[37]
• The Grierson Trust Award, UK (2011)^[38]

Praise and criticism[link]

Praise[link]

• In Breaking the Silence: The Television Reporting of John Pilger, his appraisal of the journalist's documentaries, Anthony Hayward wrote, "For more than a generation, he has been an ever stronger voice for those without a voice and a thorn in the side of authority, the Establishment. His work, particularly his television documentaries, has also made him rare in being a journalist who is universally known, a champion of those for whom he fights and the scourge of politicians and others whose actions he exposes."^[39]
• Noam Chomsky said of Pilger: "John Pilger's work has been a beacon of light in often dark times. The realities he has brought to light have been a revelation, over and over again, and his courage and insight a constant inspiration."^[40]
• According to Harold Pinter, Nobel Laureate and member of the Stop the War Coalition, "John Pilger is fearless. He unearths, with steely attention to facts, the filthy truth, and tells it as it is... I salute him."^[3]
• Martha Gellhorn, the American novelist, journalist and war correspondent, said that "[John Pilger] has taken on the great theme of justice and injustice... He documents and proclaims the official lies that we are told and that most people accept or don't bother to think about. [He] belongs to an old and unending worldwide company, the men and women of conscience. Some are as famous as Tom Paine and William Wilberforce, some as unknown as a tiny group calling itself Grandmothers Against The Bomb.... If they win, it is slowly; but they never entirely lose. To my mind, they are the blessed proof of the dignity of man. John has an assured place among them. I'd say he is a charter member for his generation."^[41]
• John Simpson, the BBC's world affairs editor, has said, "A country that does not have a John Pilger in its journalism is a very feeble place indeed."^[42]

Criticism[link]

• The English writer Auberon Waugh, writing in The Spectator in the 1970s in response to an article Pilger had written alleging Thai complicity in child trafficking (whose research was challenged), coined the verb "to pilger", defined as: to present information in a sensationalist manner to reach a foregone conclusion.^[43] The word was included in the Oxford Dictionary of New Words in 1991, but removed from the subsequent edition after Pilger complained^[44] and, according to some sources, threatened legal action.^[45] Noam Chomsky responded to Waugh's neologism by stating that "pilgerize" was "invented by journalists furious about his incisive and courageous reporting, and knowing that the only response they are capable of is ridicule."^[46]
• The writer William Shawcross, considers him "one of the worst journalists writing in the English language".^[47]
• The Anglo-American writer Christopher Hitchens said of Pilger: "I remember thinking that his work from Vietnam was very good at the time. I dare say if I went back and read it again I’d probably still admire quite a lot of it. But there is a word that gets overused and can be misused – namely, anti-American – and it has to be used about him. So that for me sort of spoils it... even when I’m inclined to agree."^[48]
• Gerard Henderson, a Conservative Australian newspaper columnist, has accused him of "engaging in hyperbole against western democracies."^[49]
• The Economist's Lexington columnist commented on Pilger's account of the Arab uprising:

Next up is the egregious John Pilger, who thinks the Arab revolts show that the West in general and the United States in particular are "fascist":

The revolt in the Arab world is against not merely a resident dictator, but a worldwide economic tyranny, designed by the US Treasury and imposed by the US Agency for International Development, the IMF and the World Bank, which have ensured that rich countries such as Egypt are reduced to vast sweatshops, with 40 per cent of the population earning less than $2 a day. The people's triumph in Cairo was the first blow against what Benito Mussolini called corporatism, a word that appears in his definition of fascism.

... Maybe he hasn't noticed, but what most of the Arab protesters say they want are the very freedoms that they know full well, even if Pilger doesn't, to be available in the West. No doubt he believes they are labouring under some massive mind-control delusion engineered by the CIA.^[50]

Bibliography[link]

Books[link]

Plays[link]

• The Last Day (1983)

Selected documentaries[link]

References[link]

See also[link]

• Media Lens

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: John Pilger

• John Pilger - official website
• John Pilger Videos - documentaries online, official website
• John Pilger at IMDb
• Freedom Next Time: Filmmaker & Journalist John Pilger on Propaganda, the Press, Censorship and Resisting the American Empire, Democracy Now!, 7 August 2007.
  Listen and Watch.
• John Pilger at Random House Australia
• John Pilger: There Is a War on Journalism - video interview by Democracy Now!
• John Pilger: Global Support for WikiLeaks is "Rebellion" Against U.S. Militarism - video report by Democracy Now!
• Desert Island Discs - John Pilger, BBC Radio 4, 18 February 1990 - Download page