The Australian journalist and documentarian died last week at the age of 83. He was tireless in his efforts to expose the crimes of the powerful against the powerless.

I first became aware of him in 1979 when I was in graduate school in the US. The film The Deer Hunter that dealt with the story of three friends form rural Pennsylvania who get sent to Vietnam during that brutal invasion of that country by the US that saw millions of Vietnamese killed and their country ruined by massive bombardment and the deliberate destruction of villages and the countryside. The film came out to great acclaim and went on to win five Academy Awards including best picture, best director (Michael Cimino) and best supporting actor (Christopher Walken) with further nominations for best actor (Robert De Niro) and best actress (Meryl Streep).

I went to see it and was appalled at the utterly racist way that the Vietnamese were portrayed, like bloodthirsty savages who delighted in torturing and killing. It was clear to me that the film was trying to make Americans feel good about the war that they had humiliatingly lost just four years earlier despite throwing their sophisticated weaponry (short of nuclear weapons) at a much poorer country.

So when I came across an op-ed by Pilger titled The Gook Hunter that exposed the film for what it was, as a piece of American imperial propaganda, I cut it out of the newspaper and stuck it on the bulletin board of the coffee room of the physics department, hoping that it would disabuse others about the film

Here is part of what he wrote:

America came out of Vietnam without a squeak from on high that what was done was wrong, that the war was a war of rampant technology against human beings. Perhaps that was understandable. The impression lingered and gained strength that it was all some unfortunate mistake, a mammoth bungle and no more.

For three years there was virtual silence: Hollywood sensed that a lot of money could be made with a movie that appealed directly to those racist instincts that cause wars and that allowed the Vietnam war to endure for so long — a movie that reincarnated the triumphant Batman-jawed Caucasian warrior, that presented the. Vietnamese as. Oriental brutes and dolts, that served up a new form of gratuitous violence in the orgiastic Russian‐roulette scenes that never, to my knowledge, happened, and with John Wayne‐like heroics and heavenly violins thrown in.
…

Nothing changes, it seems. This is how Hollywood created the myth of the Wild West, which was harmless enough unless you happened to be an American Indian, and how World War 11 and Korea were absorbed into box-office folklore, which was harmless enough unless you happened to be. a “dumb Kraut” or an “unspeakable Nip” or a “Commie Chink,” or one of malleable generation and likely to be conditioned by simplistic images of war, a conditioning that caused many young Americans actually to embrace the war against the “gooks.” That the same cynical myth‐making is now being applied to the most documented war in history, and that a cheap money‐spinning travesty of a movie is being earnestly debated, induces more melancholy than anger in those like myself who saw whole Vietnamese communities used as guinea pigs for the testing of a range of “anti‐personnel” military technology, and who saw demoralized, brutalized and often mutinous American teen‐agers lying in their own blood and excrement, for the purpose of some pointless, sacrificial siege staged in the cause of nothing, except the gratification of inept brass in their air‐conditioned offices.
…

I went back to Vietnam last year. Much of the North, which few Americans ever saw, is a moonscape. All visible signs of life — houses, factories, schools, hospitals, pagodas, churches — have been obliterated. Forty‐four percent of the forests have heed destroyed; in many of those still standing there are no lodger birds and animals.

There are thousands of children in Hanoi and Haiphong alone who are permanently deaf as ‘a result of the bombing at Christmas 1972. More tons of bombs were dropped on Vietnam than were dropped during all of World War II. There are the deformed infants, damaged in the womb as a direct result of the poisoning of the landscape. There are the permanently dislocated and the insane, who ran from Gen. William C. Westmoreland’s genocidal “free‐fire zones.” And there are the thousands of children fathered by Americans.

After that, I kept my eye out for other reporting by Pilger, who was based in the UK.

Pilger wrote how a key scene in The Deer Hunter had a major impact in the way it dehumanized the Vietnamese.

Following America’s expulsion from its criminal invasion of Vietnam, The Deer Hunter was Hollywood’s post-war attempt to reincarnate the triumphant Batman-jawed white warrior and present a stoic, suffering and often heroic people as sub-human Oriental idiots and barbarians. The film’s dramatic pitch was reached during recurring orgiastic scenes in which De Niro and his fellow stars, imprisoned in rat-infested bamboo cages, were forced to play Russian roulette by resistance fighters of the National Liberation Front, whom the Americans called ‘Vietcong’.

The director, Michael Cimino, insisted this scene was authentic. It was fake. Cimino himself had claimed he had served in Vietnam as a Green Beret. He hadn’t. He told Linda Christmas of the Guardian he had “this insane feeling that I was there… somehow the fine wires have got really crossed and the line between reality and fiction has become blurred”. His brilliantly acted fakery has since become a YouTube “classic”: for many people, their only reference to that “forgotten” war.

(Another longer and more detailed review of the film as racist propaganda can be read here.)

Here is a clip from a documentary made by Pilger about how Hollywood has distorted what happened in Vietnam, leaving entire generations with a false impression of what that war was like and was really about.

In another piece, he took apart another highly acclaimed film The Hurt Locker, set in the Iraq war, that was released in 2010 and also went on to win six Academy Awards including best picture and best director (Kathryn Bigelow).

I grew up on the movie myth of the Wild West, which was harmless enough unless you happened to be a native American. The formula is unchanged. Self-regarding distortions present the nobility of the American colonial aggressor as a cover for massacre, from the Philippines to Iraq. I only fully understood the power of the con when I was sent to Vietnam as a war reporter. The Vietnamese were “gooks” and “Indians” whose industrial murder was preordained in John Wayne movies and sent back to Hollywood to glamourise or redeem.

I use the word murder advisedly, because what Hollywood does brilliantly is suppress the truth about America’s assaults. These are not wars, but the export of a gun-addicted, homicidal “culture”. And when the notion of psychopaths as heroes wears thin, the bloodbath becomes an “American tragedy” with a soundtrack of pure angst.

Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker is in this tradition. A favourite for multiple Oscars, her film is “better than any documentary I’ve seen on the Iraq war. It’s so real it’s scary” (Paul Chambers CNN). Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian reckons it has “unpretentious clarity” and is “about the long and painful endgame in Iraq” that “says more about the agony and wrong and tragedy of war than all those earnest well-meaning movies”.

What nonsense. Her film offers a vicarious thrill via yet another standard-issue psychopath high on violence in somebody else’s country where the deaths of a million people are consigned to cinematic oblivion. The hype around Bigelow is that she may be the first female director to win an Oscar. How insulting that a woman is celebrated for a typically violent all-male war movie.

One of the things that Pilger did was to describe in graphic detail what he saw as a war correspondent, so that readers would have no illusions about how ghastly war was and how ordinary people’s lives were destroyed by it. Not for him the euphemisms used by the mainstream press and the apologists for war who try to shield the public from the horrors that their leaders inflict on defenseless people. Here he is raking UK prime minister Tony Blair over the coals for his complicity in the decision to join the US in the horror that was about to take place with the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

As a reporter of many wars I am constantly aware that words on the page like these can seem almost abstract, part of a great chess game unconnected to people’s lives.

The most vivid images I carry make that connection. They are the end result of orders given far away by the likes of Bush and Blair, who never see, or would have the courage to see, the effect of their actions on ordinary lives: The blood on their hands.

Let me give a couple of examples. Waves of B52 bombers will be used in the attack on Iraq. In Vietnam, where more than a million people were killed in the American invasion of the 1960s, I once watched three ladders of bombs curve in the sky, falling from B52s flying in formation, unseen above the clouds.

They dropped about 70 tons of explosives that day in what was known as the “long box” pattern, the military term for carpet bombing. Everything inside a “box” was presumed destroyed.
When I reached a village within the “box”, the street had been replaced by a crater.

I slipped on the severed shank of a buffalo and fell hard into a ditch filled with pieces of limbs and the intact bodies of children thrown into the air by the blast.

The children’s skin had folded back, like parchment, revealing veins and burned flesh that seeped blood, while the eyes, intact, stared straight ahead. A small leg had been so contorted by the blast that the foot seemed to be growing from a shoulder. I vomited.

I am being purposely graphic. This is what I saw, and often; yet even in that “media war” I never saw images of these grotesque sights on television or in the pages of a newspaper.

I saw them only pinned on the wall of news agency offices in Saigon as a kind of freaks’ gallery.
Some years later I often came upon terribly deformed Vietnamese children in villages where American aircraft had sprayed a herbicide called Agent Orange.

It was banned in the United States, not surprisingly for it contained Dioxin, the deadliest known poison.

This terrible chemical weapon, which the cliché-mongers would now call a weapon of mass destruction, was dumped on almost half of South Vietnam.

Today, as the poison continues to move through water and soil and food, children continue to be born without palates and chins and scrotums or are stillborn. Many have leukemia.

You never saw these children on the TV news then; they were too hideous for their pictures, the evidence of a great crime, even to be pinned up on a wall and they are old news now.

That is the true face of war. Will you be shown it by satellite when Iraq is attacked? I doubt it.

Pilger was a powerful journalistic voice, willing to say what many other journalists shied away from.