It is an honor to be here with the great filmmaker, journalist and author John Pilger. Great to welcome him back to the United States. I want to thank The New School, the Center for Economic Research and Social Change and Nation Books for sponsoring tonight's event. Also the Wallace Global Fund for their generous support. If you could turn off your cell phones and after John speaks and we have a discussion there will be a book signing right here on the stage and you can get your books at the back and we would encourage you to write your questions on index cards and they will be passed to the front and we can put some of your comments and questions to John Pilger. John is a world renowned correspondent, author and filmmaker. Twice won British journalism's highest award Journalist of the Year for his work all over the world, particularly known for his work around Cambodia, East Timor, Iraq, Afghanistan, Diego Garcia and we could go on. John is remarkably prolific and profound. He has done 57 documentaries. His latest documentary is called War on Democracy, it's being released by Lions Gate in Britain and well - while it takes on the issue of Empire from Latin America to the United States it will be up to you whether it is theatrically released in the United States. It is truly up to people in this country to break the sound barrier. When you have such a distinguished journalist who is known around the world perhaps one of the most well known filmmakers and authors, journalists and yet in this country where we have to break the sound barrier together which is why it's so important to support independent media and challenge the corporate media to bring out the voices of people like John and most importantly the voices that he brings out in his documentaries. John has won the United Nations Association Peace Prize and Gold Medal for his broadcasting he has won France's Reporter Sans Frontieres, an American television Academy Award which was based on the one time that his documentary Year Zero about Cambodia made it to PBS albeit it was after midnight, just that one showing. So could you imagine what would happen if his film was seen, his films were seen, around this country, actually more than once! Most of his films have been shown on ITV network television in the Britain and around the world. In 2003 he received the prestigious Sophie Prize for 30 years of exposing deception and furthering human rights. That didn't stop him though and he just kept at it. His most recent book is "Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire" taking on issues, looking at Empire from South Africa to Diego Garcia, from Palestine on which he has done two films. Palestine is Still the Issue and Palestine is Still the Issue. I guess, there will probably be a third in the series soon, the great filmmaker, journalist, correspondent, author John Pilger. Thank you, thank you Amy for that generous welcome. It's very good to be here and especially to be back in the United States. I think a lot of my world education political education has taken place in this country. One of my oldest colleagues is here Ken Reagan. Ken and I, on many a assignment, together in this country going back many years. So its it's very good to be back and to have one of my books published by Nation Books. As Amy said getting films on US television is more problematic. She is right. Out went the Cambodia film at 1 o' clock in the morning on WNET and someone was watching, not many people watching but some one was watching and they gave it an Emmy which there was something truly absurd about this that pointed up. It pointed up that you can win a prize but not an audience and so but enough of that. I am here to talk about the book. Bolzac said there are two histories there is the official history which is tortuous and as he put it very succinctly that's full of lies and there is then the secret history which is very often shameful, which is very often not tortuous. And I suppose that's been the theme of my work both in film and journalism is to look behind the façade of the official view. One of my favorite quotations which I am only saying it tonight because I haven't spoken here before but it's very much associated with me. It's by the famous Irish muckraker Claud Cockburn, father of Alexander Cockburn who said, "Never believe anything until it's officially denied." That that is should be engraved on the bathroom mirror of every journalist, the first thing he or she sees in the morning apart from his or her own face and reads that and understands it because it should be the gold standard of Journalism and I've tried sometimes as much as I can to follow that and that's what this book is about. It takes five countries, five situations where people have struggled against power for their freedom. It shows how they have been treated, it shows how power has treated them but it also shows how the media has represented them or ignored them and willfully ignored them, in such a way that you wonder, if we, do we really live in an information age, a media age at all. The first chapter is about, as Amy mentioned Diego Garcia. Now that, those words would be familiar to a lot of people because they may turn on their television and they will hear that B52 bombers yesterday took off from the uninhabited island of Diego Garcia. In fact, of course, it is the main island of the Chagos Archipelago a group of island halfway between Africa and India in the middle of the India Ocean which were populated during the 18th century until the 1960s when the British government conspired with the US administration to expel them. This was a British colony, everybody on it was a British citizen and over a period of ten years the population was coerced and tricked and finally expelled into leaving so that the British government could give the US administration the main island of Diego Garcia to the Americans as a as a military base and today Diego Garcia is indeed the third biggest US overseas base with one of the longest runways in the world and from there Afghanistan and Iraq have been bombed. There is a metaphor about this story, it's terrific in its own terms but it says so much about the imposition of power on people, their homelands and resources and the ruthlessness of power. I think that ruthlessness is what the story tells us and certainly it that's a constant threat running through all these stories, that power one power will take unless unless people stand up to it. These the islanders of the Chagos were thrown into the slums of Mauritius, a 1000 miles away and after and a horrific transformation of their lives, like all indigenous people have been dispossessed, many of them died, many of them suffered in other ways, they started to stand up. And finally so quite finally, with the help of some very tenacious lawyers and with the discovery of a remarkable treasure trove of official documents in the public record office in London and I have read most of them, they would fill I suppose from there right across to where Amy is sitting back to there, and they are the documents of power and how its regards people and basically they describe how they were going to expel a population, lie about it, cover it up. As one British Foreign Office official said, "we are going to get these rocks and they are going to be ours regardless of whether there a few thousands on them. The disregard for people, the American documents are very similar which I got under the Freedom of Information Act here. A lot of them blacked out but they tell enough and they they talk about the US Administration which would have been the which would have been the Nixon Administration, wanting the islands swept and cleansed of people. So they what happened in the Chagos really tells us a great deal about what happens all over the world. I won't go into similar details about the others but the rest of the book then moves into the the center page really I suppose is is Palestine. I first went to Palestine, to Israel and Palestine, as a young reporter in the 1960s and I have been going ever since. I made a film in the 70s called "Palestine is Still the Issue". I made a film 20 odd years later called "Palestine is still the issue and it's still the issue". And it's still the issue. The chapter is called The Last Taboo which is crediting from a very angry essay by Edward Syed, in which he accused the foreign media of ignoring the history of Palestine and never contextualizing the struggle of the Palestinians in reporting the Israeli Palestinian conflict. The idea of freedom next time is that these are people who glimpsed there freedom but haven't yet achieved it. I realize that I left off a bit of good news about the Chagos islanders. They finally won their way; they finally made their way to the High Court in London after many years. The judges of the High Court were, I think I can say, quite literally horrified by their story. They invoked the Magna Carta which is the basis for all our laws and says you cannot throw people out of their home land. They described the decisions by governments to do it as outrageous and said they could go back. The British government, Tony Blair decided this wasn't what they wanted. So they invoked an ancient royal decree power which allows the Prime Minister, such as Blair when he joined in the attack on Iraq, to do it by royal decree, in other words it's a way of getting around Parliament, its deeply undemocratic. So what they did by decree was to say you can't go back regardless of what the High Court said. Anyway two weeks ago the High Court having reviewed this through out the government's decree, describing the government decision as repugnant and the islanders can go back but not to where most of them come from and that's Diego Garcia because Washington says no. So that struggle goes on, so their freedom has been glimpsed. The rest of the book is other places where I have had long associations such as South Africa, I was I reported apartheid in South Africa, again in the 60s and was banned from South Africa for about 30 years for that. I went back about 10 years ago and made a film and wrote about the apartheid that had not been that had not ended with the democratic elections and that was economic apartheid, which exist in South Africa today. Also there is Afghanistan, a country that seemed to glimpse its freedom with the expulsion of the Taliban but of course all that was not as it seemed. Instead the Taliban's very close brethren, that is the war lords who were supported by the Americans and the British were reinstalled in in Kabul. Women's rights are really not much different than they were under the Taliban. So that struggle goes on. It I think all these situations tell us really, I hope help to inform us about just about the great confusion that people often feel about what is going on in the world. At the moment my own view is and it's a view that has been I suppose honed with experience and that is it's impossible to understand the world until you understand power and especially imperial power. If you don't see the world in by understanding power and seeing how great imperial power operates, then it becomes a series of sort of outbreaks, bushfires, personalities, demons, dictators. But the world isn't like that really. There are connections between most of what we call crisis. And I think, thanks to the actions of George W Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, that gang and the gang across the Atlantic, Blair and people, I think, people's awareness has risen a great deal about how the world is ordered. So that's really all I think I should say at that moment and do ask me questions and Amy and I will talk till then. Thank You.
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