Tell Me No Lies : Investigative Journalism That Changed the World

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

A new book edited by John Pilger, reviewed in today's Guardian:

A columnist in this very newspaper recently suggested that Margaret Thatcher deserves our pity, because she is old and mad and alone. This speaks well for his sense of compassion but not, some may say, for his sense of history or justice. Let him read, or perhaps re-read, pp284-331 of Tell Me No Lies, which is from Seumas Milne's 1994 book, The Enemy Within. Remember that she used that disgusting phrase to describe those who sought to defend their livelihoods from the most aggressive, not to mention legally dubious, use of state force outside wartime. And, when detailing the smear campaign against Arthur Scargill, Milne reminds us for the sake of comparison that "the four Conservative election victories between 1979 and 1992 were underwritten with millions of pounds donated by five foreign businessmen implicated in criminal tax evasion, insider dealing and fraud". (Not to mention rather sticky allegations of collaboration with Nazis, as in the case of the late John Latsis.)

It is important to be reminded of these things, of how ill the world is governed, both specifically and in general. John Pilger has been informing us of this for more than a third of a century now, and he knows all too well the dangers journalists face when they investigate too deeply. The best news, after all, is the kind that someone somewhere doesn't want you to hear. But there is another danger, which this collection aims to redress. That is "censorship by omission, the most virulent form". There is also willing collusion. Pilger tears into Roy Greenslade for enthusiastically running the anti-Scargill smears when editor of the Daily Mirror. "He is now," says Pilger in his introduction to Milne's piece, "remarkably, the Guardian's commentator on the tabloid press and a professor of journalism at City University." (This swipe at Greenslade did not stop the latter from calling this book "first-rate" in these pages last year, or from adding another mea culpa about the Scargill business.) Greenslade has now left the Guardian.

This is, though, a very international collection. It begins with Martha Gellhorn's dispatch from Dachau, and contains stunning, disturbing and unimpeachably authoritative reports on, among other subjects, Hiroshima (where the official line was that radiation poisoning was Japanese sympathy-promoting propaganda), My Lai, East Timor, Gaza, Rwanda and Florida (Greg Palast's "How to Steal the Presidency and Get Away with It"), as well as a roundup of Paul Foot's devastating analysis of the Lockerbie cover-up (the book is dedicated to his memory). Pilger includes his own work on Cambodia, and with complete justification. It is an exemplary piece of journalism, which helped to change the way people looked at that corner of the world.

And that is the point of every selection here. There are plenty of famous names - Robert Fisk, Ed Murrow, Jessica Mitford, and others - but there is also work that you may not know of, but which is still essential for our understanding of the world and what is going wrong with it. You might not be familiar with Günter Wallraff, but he became celebrated in West Germany by disguising himself as a Turkish Gastarbeiter and exposing the kind of revolting conditions endured in the heart of a supposedly squeaky-clean European democracy. Anna Politkovskaya's "Chechnya: A Dirty War" is a revelation (one is brought up short by the phrasing when we learn that, because of the anti-personnel mines littering the streets there, going to the toilet in Grozny "is like playing Russian roulette"). There is also an astonishing coda where she reports on going into the Moscow theatre seized by Chechen nationalists and attempting to negotiate with the hostage-takers. The extract from Eduardo Galeano's Upside Down offers as concise and accurate a critique of the contemporary situation as you are likely to find anywhere: "The upside-down world rewards in reverse: it scorns honesty, punishes work, prizes lack of scruples and feeds cannibalism."

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1596994,00.html

Amazon US:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1560257865/

Amazon UK:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1560257865/

[glitch]

1. Maybe it's not too late to send to Judy Miller for her next bout in prison

The craft of journalism is noble, the people who corrupt it should not be called journalists.

Thank you for posting, the book looks like a must-read.