Sir, – John Pilger did great work in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in Vietnam (”Campaigning Australian journalist John Pilger dies aged 84″, World, December 31st). After that he let his spiteful, knee-jerk anti-westernism define his work and world view, lending his credibility and name to the defence of monsters like Milosevic, Assad and Putin.
Far from defending “the underprivileged, the victims of unbearable suffering in times of war and against those countries and individuals that perpetrated and inflicted such egregious crimes against humanity”, as Tom Partridge would have it (Letters, January 3rd), Pilger routinely and repeatedly denied genocides committed by leaders who postured as “anti-imperialist”.
His standards for evidence slipped to the point that, in 2014, he was quoting an obviously bogus Facebook account to denounce crimes by fictitious “Ukrainian Nazis” in Odessa.
Pilger did much good in his career, but by the end he allowed his juvenile morality, in which any enemy of the West must be the “good guys”, to make him into a willing conduit for disinformation. – Yours, etc,
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DARAGH McDOWELL,
London.