Australian-born, award-winning, Liberal, anti-Imperialist journalist and filmmaker, John Pilger is interviewed here about the US Election on RT: Going Underground by Afsin Rattansi.
The legendary Pilger has made several films, including ‘Stealing a Nation’, ‘The War on Democracy’ and ‘The War You Don’t See’, in which he champions the causes of the oppressed peoples around the world.
Therefore, I thought that this would be a worthwhile interview to share with those who are distraught by the election of Donald Trump as President of the US and I’ve made a partial transcript, here.
Pilger says he not surprised by the election’s outcome, unlike the shocked Liberals of the US but he doesn’t seem to realize how many Trump supporters are as shocked (and scared) by the outcome as Hillary’s supporters – but for different reasons.
The latter thought they had it locked up and that the other camp was so “deplorable” that they could never possibly win, whereas many Trump supporters didn’t believe that he could win, due to the power of Hillary’s machine to tamper the votes, which is known to have occurred during the Primary Election, per WikiLeaks and from the testimony of poll workers.
Pilger states, “The corrupt candidate; the embodiment of the status quo, that has declared the whole world a battlefield, was the candidate of ‘sanity’, the candidate for ‘women’. This grotesque campaigning for…a person who represented great, rapacious power has been probably the most eye-opening side to this…
Of Hillary, Pilger continues, “She is the embodiment of a very dangerous, warmongering system that has declared the world a place where it can go to war wherever it likes, where it can bomb agricultural communities in Yemen, where half the children are malnourished, where it can do what it likes in Syria, do what it likes in Iraq…
“Most of humanity regards that kind of behavior from allegedly the most powerful country in the world as abhorrent…
“Now, whether Trump will be [abhorrent] is an open question. He says he’s anti-establishment – but of course, he will come with his own establishment. He’s anti- their establishment. I don’t believe for a moment that he’ anti- the wider establishment of the United States. Indeed, he’s a product of it…
“That shock-surprise is the same as the Brexit vote; a kind of, ‘How dare these people vent their frustrations at the ballot box?’ The truth is, there was no one to vote for in the United States…
“The system threw up those who could afford it – Trump had his own money. Clinton was backed by the Democratic Party. Clinton was backed by the arms companies…her financial backers included all but one of the ten leading arms manufacturers in the world.
“People, for all kinds of reasons don’t like this…The main reason is what has happened to their lives; the way a corrupt banking system has destroyed their lives, has destroyed jobs, destroyed whole cities and towns – the towns that the Democratic Party once claimed to represent. That’s what they don’t like and that’s why they voted for Trump…
As for the Mainstream Media, Pilger has this to say: “They’re not journalists, they’re anti-journalists. One of the most revealing aspects of this has been the exposure of journalism.
“The exposure of journalism as an extension of that same corrupt, established power that I’ve been speaking about. They’re not independent. They are echo chambers; they amplify and echo that which is handed down to them. And the worst, of course the greatest echoes other so-called ‘enlightened’, ‘respectable’ Liberal press. The New York Times has become a kind of Cold War propaganda sheet, with all the nonsense about Russia interfering in this campaign.
“The Guardian has given up. Yesterday, we had in The Guardian an article called the ‘Hall of Shame’ by Jonathan Friedland, in which he pointed the finger at a truth-teller like Julian Assange, as if he would be to blame if Hillary Clinton, this ‘paragon a liberal virtue’ were to be defeated. It was grotesque. That’s not journalism…
“There was a monstrous situation applied in the United States and journalists enabled it. They created Trump. The media, along with the Pentagon, the CIA the State Department and all the rest, including the Republican Party – were Trump’s opponents but they were the shouters… the BBC, CNN as I mentioned, The Guardian, The New York Times and you know, you name it – they were all there because Hillary Clinton represented them.”
Rattansi asks, “Millions of people have watched your film that you made, that was broadcast on Saturday. You mentioned Julian Assange. In that film, Assange said ‘they’ wouldn’t allow Donald Trump to win. But if Hillary was President-Elect would we expect what pressure on the Ecuadorian Government? Would he just be extradited or is there more hope for him?”
Pilger replies, “I don’t the answer to that. I’m not a futurist. I can’t predict. Trump could turn out pretty much the same! No one really listened to Trump’s narratives. They saw only this salacious side of Trump, of ‘getting’ Trump, demonizing – he certainly demonized himself – of course but now, they have to go back through all that news footage and find out ‘what did what did that man actually say?’ you know. It’s extraordinary and shameful.”
