John Pilger’s ‘The War You Don’t See’ an indictment on journalists

Rady Ananda, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

In The War You Don’t See (2010, 95 mins), investigative journalist and filmmaker John Pilger chronicles the massive lies that keep the Western world in war on the Middle East and elsewhere. Pilger interviews key journalists involved in propagandizing the wars, along with others, like Dahr Jamail and Mark Manning, who reported independent of the military, as well as Julian Assange, whose whistleblower organization WikiLeaks has released hundreds of thousands of documents evidencing the wholesale, indiscriminate killing of entire populations.

That is one key point, beyond the obvious lies of Bush and Blair: that military strategy has been replaced by large scale, indiscriminate and massive destruction of nations whose resources are sought. The film skewers the Golden Calf, and media’s whitewash of Israel’s criminal occupation of Palestine, including the murderous attack on an aid ship in international waters earlier this year.

The global assault on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange prompts Pilger to accuse President Obama of leading the charge against truth. “More than any other case, Obama has prosecuted truth tellers known as whistle blowers.” In the film, Assange says:

“This sprawling industrialist state is growing, becoming more and more secretive, becoming more and more uncontrolled. This is not a sophisticated conspiracy controlled at the top. This is a vast movement of self-interest by thousands and thousands of players who are all working together and against each other to produce an end result, which is Iraq and Afghanistan and Colombia, and keeping that going.”

One of the leaked documents from the Pentagon reveals that US intelligence intends to destroy trust in WikiLeaks. And so it has in corporate media, gaining a large following in alternative media.
But Pilger fires back, showing a rare interview of one of the soldiers, Ethan McCord, who pulled wounded children from a van attacked by US forces in 2007, made infamous by the WikiLeaks’ film, Collateral Murder.

The film stands in stark contrast to today’s news shows propagandizing the public about North Korea, recently attacked by South Korea, while the United Nations Security Council scheduled an emergency meeting today.

The public needs to see The War You Don’t See, but the film’s target audience is professional journalists, whose complicity in spreading misinformation is most responsible for ongoing wars. Without media complicity, peace would break out.

Rady Ananda’s work has appeared in several online and print publications. She holds a B.S. in Natural Resources from The Ohio State University’s School of Agriculture. Using years of editorial experience and web publishing, Rady now promotes the ideas and work of a select group of quality writers and artists at Food Freedom and COTO Report.