John Pilger is a moralist. Though he is a tad touchy about the labels others give him, he could hardly disown this one. He has spent the last 30 years preaching, inveighing, chastising, poking around the byways and hedgerows of international business and politics to flush out evildoers like an old-fashioned Redemptorist in search of sinners. Bill McSweeney reviews The New Rulers of the World, by John Pilger
It is a worthy vocation. The Moralist in international affairs - the observer who detects human choice and responsibility where others claim raison d'état or market forces - is making a comeback after half a century of the Scientist. Pilger and others have helped expose the realist myth of impersonal laws governing the actions of states. They rake the muck on which the power and wealth of states and corporations are founded, and the stench is awesome. (It is also, it must be admitted, a little intoxicating.) The effect is to breed a virus of outrage in public opinion about the duplicity of politicians and the corruption of politics.
Nowhere has Pilger contributed more deliciously to this revelation than in his acclaimed television documentaries and fly-on-the-wall exposures of arms-dealers and torturers who moved the pawns that settled the game in Indonesia, Iraq, Bosnia. Outrage is Pilger's staple mood. Ironically, in this book as in his earlier Hidden Agendas, he deploys it in a manner which undermines his case.
The book assembles material previously published in diverse media on four major issues. Beginning with the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia and Western complicity in its brutal exercise of power, the author paints his picture of political corruption through stories of personal greed and intrigue. He gives a graphic account of the 1967 conference in Geneva, sponsored by Time-Life Corporation, at which the world's largest banks, oil and tobacco companies divided up the spoils of Indonesia after the military coup, like Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill settling the fate of Eastern Europe at Yalta.
The second chapter moves to familiar territory in Iraq, and again a series of stories depicting state crime and individual suffering. Stories well-chosen and well-told - as they are here - can focus attention and expand understanding of complex events. The reader's emotions can be tweaked to authorial purpose.
But they need to be tweaked, not yanked; used judiciously to illustrate argument, to support objective analysis. Too many stories with too little analysis clog the brain. The heart bleeds but the head swims. It matters whether it was depleted uranium from the West or chemical weapons from Saddam which caused cancer in Iraq in 1991. A five-year-old boy dying of Hodgkin's Disease is moving witness to the cruelty of war - but whose war? The boy's suffering just after the Gulf War does not speak for itself, as Pilger prompts us to assume.
In the next piece, entitled 'The Great Game', the author stands back to view the wider phenomenon of globalisation as an exercise in great-power greed. He cites a line from New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman which poetically makes the connection between military force and the market economy: "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15".
But Friedman is a radical conservative who interprets this link to conservative purpose. By the end of Pilger's chapter we are unaware of this alternative viewpoint and no better equipped to challenge it.
His final chapter is probably the most coherent and interesting of the book. From his native Australia, Pilger tells the stories of the Aborigines - exploited, abused, and incarcerated by a succession of governments, and then manicured for the media in the sham display of multiculturalism which was the Sydney Olympics. For those who recall white Australia's emotion at Aboriginal Cathy Freeman's win in the 400 metres, Pilger's account of the shame behind the cheers makes sober reading.
The author has two aims in this book as in all his publications: to uncover the wickedness of states and corporations and to provoke a reaction which will promote alternative and more just structures and institutions. The first he achieves with some aplomb. But that is the easier bit, and the wickedness is no big secret, even if the details require the skills of the competent investigator. Pilger muckrakes to such effect that he leaves the outraged reader prey to the very realist view of politics which he claims to oppose - that states, of their nature, are incapable of ethical behaviour.
The end of this train of thought is cynicism. If the world is so corrupt, what is the point of resisting? If the only alternative to the anarchy of politics is the anarchism of the individual then Pilger has played into the hands of his conservative enemies. Thankfully, the world is more complex than he depicts it.
Bill McSweeney teaches International Politics at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin
The New Rulers of the World. By John Pilger. Verso, 246 pp.
£10 sterling