UFPPC (www.ufppc.org) Digging Deeper XL: January 28, 2008, 7:00 p.m.
John Pilger, Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire (New York: Nation Books, 2007).
Acknowledgments. List of 33 people.
Introduction. “This book is about empire, its
façades and the enduring struggle of people for their
freedom” (1). “[C]olonial assumptions” (1) and
“servility to the state” (2) dictate news coverage,
which distinguishes between “worthy victims” and
“unworthy victims” (3). “A crime is only a crime if
the perpetrators are ‘them,’ not ‘us’” (4).
Imperialist ideology is being rehabilitated, after it
was “airbrushed out” in the post-WWII period (5-
7). Liberals twist words in Orwellian fashion (7-8).
This book “pushes back this one-way moral screen
to demonstrate that imperialism, in whatever guise,
is the antithesis of ‘benevolent and moralistic’” (8).
Review of book’s contents (8-13). Is America
fascist or pre-fascist? (13-16). Britain not that
different (16). “I have written Freedom Next Time
to warn against these dangers” (17). Hopefulness
(18-19). There is “a worldwide movement against
poverty and war and misinformation that has arisen
in less than a decade . . . just as the conquest of Iraq
is unravelling, so a whole system of domination and
impoverishment can unravel, too” (19).
Ch. 1: Stealing a Nation. The eviction of the
2,000 people who lived on the Chagos archipelago,
principally on Diego Garcia, after the secret
decision made in 1961-1964 by the U.S. & the U.K.
to establish an Indian Ocean base; there the U.S.
now maintains “four thousand service personnel and
contractors, two bomber runways, each two and a
half miles long, anchorages for a fleet of ships,
living conditions the US Navy describes as
‘indispensable,’ ‘outstanding’ and ‘unbelievable,’”
though habitability was one of the ruses used to
justify the eviction of the Chagossians (56, see also
45; 20-61). [There is an excellent timeline at
www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=diego_garcia ]
Ch. 2: The Last Taboo. Account of, in Edward
Said’s words, the “oppression and maltreatment” of
the Palestinians, and of the distortion of reporting
about it (62-162). “The ‘peace process’ was never
about peace, but principally about greater Israeli
control of the Occupied Territories” (149).
Ch. 3: Shining India. A portrait of poverty and
starvation in India, despite official images to the
contrary: “India is home to more people living in
poverty than any other country in the world” (167;
163-76).
Ch. 4: Apartheid Did Not Die. Economic
apartheid is alive and well in South Africa (177-
263). Features interview with Nelson Mandela
(258-62).
Ch. 5: Liberating Afghanistan. The surreal
mirage of the liberation of Afghanistan, right out of
Catch-22 (264-313). Features interviews with
Douglas Feith (297-301), John Bolton (301-05),
William Kristol (misspelled ‘Kristal’) (305-07), Ray
McGovern (307-11)..
Notes. 30 pp.
Picture Acknowledgments. 1 page.
Index. 19 pp.
[About the Author. John Pilger was born in
Sydney, Australia, on Oct. 9, 1939. He has
published twelve books and made more than two
dozen documentary films. Critique of Western
foreign policy runs through all his work. Harold
Pinter has called him “fearless. He unearths, with
steely attention to facts, the filthy truth, and tells it
as it is.” Salman Rushdie has called him “a
photographer using words instead of a camera.” He
began his career in 1958 as a journalist for the
Sydney Daily Telegraph, then moved to Italy in
1962. He worked for Reuters in the Middle East,
then for the Daily Mirror (1963-1986). His
reporting from Vietnam and Cambodia earned him
an international reputation. Beginning in 1970, he
has been a TV reporter for various networks, and
founded News on Sunday in 1987. He has received
many journalistic prizes, honorary degrees, and the
UNESCO Peace Prize. In 1983, he wrote a play on
Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. He has a son
(b. 1973) and a daughter (b. 1984). He often quotes
Milan Kundera: “The struggle of people against
power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”
(20).]