Hidden Agendas
By John Pilger
Vintage, 1998. 680 pp., $19.95 (pb)
Review by Saffron Howden
In an age of escalating social problems, few are even properly acknowledged. Hidden Agendas is a tribute to some of the strugglers against oppression, violence, greed and imperialism.
John Pilger has dedicated his life's work to these strugglers, and his latest book continues in the powerful tradition of books like A Secret Country, reporting and analysing events and battles that are still being fought out.
Hidden Agendas takes the reader behind the political facades of Myanmar, Indonesia and East Timor, England's "New Labour" and Thatcher's Britain, Australia's perceived identity, Cambodia, the arms trade, the world media, the "globalised" economy and the "new" South Africa under Nelson Mandela.
Pilger not only conveys the political and social predicaments of the exploited and censored, but also places these people and their struggles in the context of the agendas of the powerful and profit-hungry that impact upon millions of unseen and little-considered lives of ordinary people. For this reason, Hidden Agendas belongs to what Pilger sees as the dying or dead arena of investigative journalism.
A large section of the book is dedicated to "The Rise and Fall of Popular Journalism". Here, Pilger draws on his own experience as a young journalist working in London on the Daily Mirror and uses it to explain why news and information in this "information age" are so limited and censored — why books like Hidden Agendas might come as a shock to many who consider themselves well versed in world current affairs.
The reason for this, Pilger argues, can ultimately be found in the profits that the likes of Rupert Murdoch reap from building and maintaining public ignorance of affairs in which they have a vested interest.
Related to this is Pilger's important dispelling of the myth that the public has been "desensitised" to the violence and hardship confronting communities such as those in Myanmar and Cambodia and even the indigenous Australians. The myth creates a self-perpetuating and debilitating cycle of severely limited news coverage: the readers do not want to know, therefore the journalists will not report, and consequently the readers are not only ignorant but believe that that is what they want to be.
Hidden Agendas mocks this myth. It is dedicated to what Pilger calls the "slow news" of journalism. "Slow news" is maritime workers around the world striking in solidarity with the Liverpool dockers fighting against the sacking of union members and their replacement by casual non-union labour. This section of the book has particular relevance for Australians as the battle escalates between the Maritime Union of Australia and Patricks, in remarkably similar circumstances.
"Slow news" is old men, women and children forced at gunpoint by "military officials" into virtual slave labour in Myanmar, building a railway line to transport French- and British-owned oil. It is East Timorese being shot en masse, beaten to death, tortured for information regarding their political affiliations and exiled from their own country for "subversive" conduct by the Indonesian military and the dictator Suharto.
Even slower news is the fact that the Australian government, for its own financial gain, turned its back on the East Timorese when the Indonesian military invaded and began a series of killings that amount to genocide; or the Margaret Thatcher government's complicity in the sale of weapons, with the potential to kill millions of people, to Saddam Hussein.
Hidden Agendas provides a voice for the ordinary people who suffer daily from repressive regimes, poverty, lack of education and denial of those "inalienable" rights we are all supposedly entitled to. It also hails the people who, often unacknowledged, fight for the lives of their fellow human beings and for a better way of life for all.
While necessarily highlighting struggling and downtrodden people and the terrible events which shape their lives, Hidden Agendas is also an inspiration. The power, passion and wit of Pilger's writing are empowering.
[John Pilger is touring Australia from May 12 to 19 to promote his new book. See Meetings ... Parties ... Anything for details.]