Consortium News this month pays tribute to the life and work of John Pilger, an all-time great journalist who died Dec. 30. Today we republish his essay from April 2019 just after Julian Assange’s arrest.
Leni Riefenstahl said her epic films glorifying the Nazis depended on a “submissive void” in the German public. This is how propaganda is done.
From Jeremy Corbyn, WikiLeaks, Afshin Rattansi, Max Blumenthal, Jonathan Cook, Scott Ritter, Vijay Prashad, Glenn Greenwald, Tariq Ali, Matt Kennard, Roger Waters and more.
Citing examples of Richard Nixon’s leadership, historian Joan Hoff-Wilson refers to Henry Kissinger as “a glorified messenger boy,” writes Robert Scheer.
The United States’ most notorious diplomat was behind key nuclear arms control treaties with the USSR that kept a lid on the possibility of catastrophic nuclear exchange.
With the stated aim of providing “context,” The Guardian instead has destroyed the historical context that puts Western foreign policy towards the Middle East in a very grim light, writes Joe Lauria.
There is just one scenario in which Israel would relinquish its nuclear weapons and it seems further from reality than ever, wrote Joe Lauria on May 4, 2015.
A hunger for genocide and ethnic cleansing colours senior Israeli officials’ statements and has influenced their conduct in this war. Talk of civilian casualties is brushed off, and so are calls for a ceasefire, writes Vijay Prashad.
There can’t be democracy and colonial war; one aspires to decency, the other to fascism. Meanwhile, once welcomed mavericks are heretics now in an underground of journalism amid a landscape of mendacious conformity.
What’s happening today and for the last 100 years in Palestine is consistent with the history of the West for the last 500 years, a reader writes.