The left-wing journalist, documentary-maker and crusading commentator John Pilger has died at the age of 84, eliciting a wave of mostly flattering obituaries. Among the many eulogies and effusive praise for his campaigning reporting style, fewer tributes have critiqued Pilger’s reflexive anti-American worldview and embrace of conspiracy theories – a visceral embrace that escalated over his lifetime. Nor has Pilger’s posthumous reputation been much diminished by his repeated denials or contextualization of the atrocities of dictators, mass murderers and terrorists, from Mao and Pol Pot to Slobodan Milosevic, Bashar al-Assad, Osama bin Laden, Vladimir Putin and more. As a young reporter in the early 1960s, Pilger moved from his […]
Last week, I wrote that the widely-linked article positing that the CIA was behind a Swedish woman's accusation of rape against Julian Assange was authored by a Russian-born, Swedish-domiciled, multi-aliased anti-Semite and Holocaust denier currently writing under the name "Israel Shamir," a.k.a. Adam Ermash or Jöran Jermas. The broader point had little to do with […]
