A point I have stressed in previous essays is how the distortions, delusions and downright lies of the media form a great obstacle to the regeneration of our people and country. This is true for the most modern sections of the media, too. A 20th Century history CD-ROM by Dorling Kindersley, commonly administered to the victims of the education system, devotes a full screen to the non-existent "Gulf of Tonkin" incident in Vietnam, and only ten words of tiny size to the infamous 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty.

Reading through John Pilger's Distant Voices, a collection of articles on a wide range of subjects, I was struck by how often his opinions mirrored mine. His denunciation of the controlled media could hardly be bettered: "Television news, from which most people learn about the world, is a moving belt of headlines, caricatures and buzzwords, with pretensions it is otherwise."

Pilger is at his best excoriating the misdeeds perpetrated on this country by odious politicians and their moneyed masters, "as the structures of civilisation, long taken for granted, have been and are being torn down":-

‘A new poverty has arisen in the space of less than twenty years, as British manufacturing has abandoned more than two-thirds of its workforce. Men with absolute skills have been marooned. Women and the unskilled are employed in "service industries" for wages that have no minimum. Working conditions, including safety provisions, have deteriorated, unions are routed and almost every net is taken away. For the working-class young, there is no longer the prospect of an apprenticeship and the pride that went with it; at best they must accept training schemes that are fraudulent. In the meantime, the social landscape has changed.’

However, one has to be careful and circumspect when opposing these infamies because:-

‘Many people may be unaware that, behind the supermarket facade, certain state controls are now reminiscent of those in the old Soviet Union. As you drive south across Vauxhall Bridge in London you pass the most striking new building in the capital; it houses the domestic secret intelligence service, Ml5, now expanding its role as a police and domestic surveillance force, its anonymity and unaccountability guaranteed by parliament. How ironic that is, now that the KGB is no more.’

Two million suspected subversives!

Reputedly almost two million people have had their names noted down by Stephen Lander's security service. Even something as inconsequential as writing a letter to a local paper denouncing government policies can get you onto this very long list. Incidentally, one of the bizarre features of BBC Television News is the way it insists that an annex to the Ministry of Defence is in fact the M15 building - a minor and pointless example of media misinformation.

The coverage of foreign affairs in Distant Voices is also not without interest. Referring to the US invasion of Panama and the propaganda build-up of Panamanian leader General Noriega as a demonised villain just like Saddam and Bin Laden, Pilger says that:

‘Noreiga, of course, had precious little to do with it. George Bush by John Pilger ran the CIA when Noriega was their man; drugs have long been a CIA currency.’

We have a very strong hint here of the real reason why the so-called "war on drugs" is bound to end in failure. Pilger's thesis received confirmation when Colonel James Hiett, head of the US anti-drug programme in Colombia, no less, was convicted of smuggling cocaine in diplomatic baggage. During the '80s and the traffic in drugs had increased dramatically, mirroring the decline in employment. The devastating impact of drugs will remain a negative factor in the lives of all Western countries as long as the would-be lords and masters of the New World Order remain in place.

Dummy Major

A few years ago John Major had a successful career as the best-known nonentity in Britain, a tailor's dummy of a PM, before returning to the obscurity from whence he had emerged. No doubt he had more personal decency and integrity than either his predecessor or his successor, but Pilger's verdict is quite rightly devastating: -

‘True, Major's career has been mostly as an apparatchik, although the keenness with which he engaged in the recolonisation of the Middle East and the slaughter of tens of thousands of Iraqi conscripts and civilians suggested he was made of stronger stuff. His journey to China for the purpose of offering alliance to those who ordered the massacre in Tiananmen Square and the crushing of the democracy movement, guarantees his prominent place above the mausoleum of the New World Order.’

Pilger understands full how liberal democracy as kown and practised in the Western World is a transparent fraud and racket. The parties which label themselves "Labour", "Conservative", "Democrat" or "Republican" are no more than threadbare fronts for the same concealed vested interests:-

‘... Los Angeles and London become extensions of the Third World. Britain now has a quarter of Europe's poor; one British child in four now lives in poverty. The political prescriptions agreed by elites in the developed countries offer no solutions. In Britain there said to be "convergence" between the policies of the main political parties, policies that declare people expendable and the notion of common obligation heresy, eroding the premises upon which a modest civilisation rested. The national political "debate" is directed almost exclusively by a small group of "experts" and observers who enjoy the institutional games of democracy, know the personalities and protect them.’

Such a system deserves to dissolve into its own corruption, increasingly happening today. Of course, Pilger disagrees with contention that multi-culturalism forms a major part of the drive towards a New World Order. He fails to note that those he most despises, like Murdoch and other global capitalists, are fully behind the moves toward the "Asianisation" of Australia and the consequent contraction of the old Australia. But how many dissenters like Pilger will be left if Anglo-Celtic Australia dwindles towards extinction, and the country slowly merges into the great one world sweatshop?

However, Mr Pilger does lay into the new Australian Labour Party in a most satisfying manner, in terms which would not be out of place in this very magazine. Of course, Australian "Labour" is now totally beholden to big money, a noxious Thatcherite grouping of the type with which we are so nauseatingly familiar in this country: -

‘Paul Keating's political hero is Jack Lang, the "Big Fella", who was premier of New South Wales during the Great Depression. In 1930, the British banks, to which Australia was deeply in debt, sent an imperial bailiff, Sir Otto Niemeyer, to all but foreclose on the state's economy. Sir Otto demanded interest payments of £110 million a year. With a third of the workforce unemployed, he said Australians were "living luxuriously" and that wages and the dole would have to be cut. Lang promised: "No cuts in wages, no cuts in public services" and, if necessary, the debt would be repudiated ... it is ironic that Keating looks back to Lang; for no Treasurer surrendered as much of Australia's economic independence and security as Keating. Throughout the 1980s, Keating and his "economic nationalists" paid court to the New York financial world, which could withhold credit ratings and turn its collective thumbs down on the Australian economy as effectively as Sir Otto Niemeyer had done half a century before.’

Attack on Iraq Holocaust

Pilger deserves praise for his work in publicising the silent and ignored Iraqi Holocaust, caused by the shameful sanctions imposed against a country which is no threat to Britain and which by rights should be a friendly nation. If our foreign policy had not been perverted by "special interests" then Britain could have kept its traditional friendship with the Arab world.

Watching Pilger's angry exchanges on television with a smirking James "Baby Killer" Rubin, I found it difficult to believe that occasional heretical thoughts haven't flitted through his mind over the merciless sanctions that Rubin supervises. Pilger does briefly comment in Distant Voices that Zionism is one of the last great taboo subjects. After describing the slaughter of Palestinian children by the Israeli Army he comments that: "Apart from rubber the Israelis also have a stone-throwing machine that hurls 600 stones a minute. "It's our own intifada on wheels," said an officer."

If any poor Virginian "white trash" farmer happens to be reading this and wonders who pays for all this nifty modern military technology, the answer is - you do, sucker! The U.S. taxpayer has provided over $77 billion towards the occupation of former Arab territories since 1967. No mainstream U.S. politician dares to comment on this state of affairs. Nor are the realities of power much different in the rival former superpower.

Pilger wrote the following remarkable and prophetic statement, included in Distant Voices, when he visited Russia, about the time of the break-up of the U.S.S.R., just before Yeltsin became the front-man for a dozen or so oligarchs:-

‘Money power, never before known in the Soviet Union, is the other side of perestroika. Western propaganda, that money power equals democracy, has become Soviet propaganda, The new economic order has made the rouble the currency of the poor and people will do almost anything for hard currency .... As we set out for Moscow airport the impression I have is of a society taking remarkable risks, and vulnerable.

‘Of course, the vulnerability here derives from within, and from those who cannot wait to get their hands on this resource-rich giant. There was always a synthesis between both sides in the Cold War. Nixon and many of America's leading capitalists recognised this. Both sides knew that "communism" was a myth in the Soviet empire and that state capitalism was a not so distant relative of monopoly capitalism.’