{"id":1421600,"date":"2024-01-01T09:12:42","date_gmt":"2024-01-01T09:12:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newmatilda.com\/?p=134017"},"modified":"2024-01-01T09:12:42","modified_gmt":"2024-01-01T09:12:42","slug":"a-champion-for-justice-my-tribute-to-john-pilger-stuart-rees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2024\/01\/01\/a-champion-for-justice-my-tribute-to-john-pilger-stuart-rees\/","title":{"rendered":"A Champion for Justice \u2013 My Tribute to John Pilger: Stuart Rees"},"content":{"rendered":"
People of the world who cherish human rights have lost a champion. The courageous, skilled, inimitable John Pilger, prolific author, film maker, foreign and war correspondent\u00a0died in London on December 30 2023. He was 84 years old.<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n His books and films, his advocacy for the powerless were struggles for justice which he conducted by holding governments and powerful institutions accountable for abuses of power. He taught that keeping people in a state of ignorance about the real objectives of policies should be challenged by speaking out, by disobedience, by hearing the voices of the vulnerable, asylum seekers, people in poverty, prisoners and, the most persecuted of all – \u00a0Indigenous citizens.<\/p>\n John invited us to break the silence of abuse, to realise, in Edward Bernay\u2019s terms, that in democracies and dictatorships, people were regimented, controlled and conned.<\/p>\n John identified Australia\u2019s culture of conservatism, cowardly journalism and \u00a0politicians\u2018 illiteracy about non-violence as reasons why inequalities were slow to be addressed, why corporate interests could stifle human rights, why privatisation of public resources was taken for granted.<\/p>\n He exposed Australia\u2019s illusion that it was egalitarian, promoted mateship and inclusiveness; and took particular aim at the violence central to US foreign policies. When accepting the 2009 Sydney Peace Prize, he reminded his audience that \u00a0since the end of the Second World War, US administrations had overthrown 50 governments, crushed\u00a030 liberation movements, but still pretended to be the land of the free.<\/p>\n John\u2019s decades-long defence of the publisher, journalist, whistleblower Julian Assange derived from his opposition to the brutality of US foreign policy. John described as a sickening injustice the possibility that Julian would be extradited to face a potential 175 years in a US jail for revealing the murder and mayhem practised by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan. He showed that such cruelty had been nurtured by the US desire for revenge, by a privileged and indifferent English court system and by cowardly silence from Australia.<\/p>\n