In August 1945, war correspondent Wilfred Burchett entered Hiroshima, the first Western journalist to do so after the atomic bombing. His despatch on the front page of the London Daily Express was carried with the headline: “I write this as a warning to the world.” The journalist from Australia saw “devastation and desolation and nothing else”; at the hospital ward “stretched out on filthy mats on the floor... were a dozen or so more people in various stages of physical disintegration, from what I later knew to be atomic radiation,” with doctors completely at a loss how to treat them. Tell Me No Lies , edited by investigative journalist John Pilger (2005), is a selection of articles by some of the world’s best reporters.
It includes Seymour Hersh on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, Martha Gellhorn’s journal from Dachau, James Cameron and his accounts from North Vietnam talking to ordinary peasants and soldiers, Paul Foot on the Lockerbie trial travesty, Max Du Preez and Jacques Pauw and their exposé on apartheid’s death squads in South Africa, and the writing of Israeli journalist Amira Hass who lived and reported from the Gaza Strip for three years. To Hass, Gaza embodied the whole saga of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it represented the “central contradiction of the State of Israel — democracy for some, dispossession for others; it is our exposed nerve.”
Vital truths
Pilger — whose reportage from Cambodia (‘Year Zero’) is also in this collection — sets each piece in its context with an essay introducing the journalist and the work. Journalism’s paramount role, writes Pilger in the introduction, is not only to keep the record straight but also to hold those in power to account. To give one example, when war broke out in Chechnya in 1999, most Russian reporters wrote from the point of view of Moscow, says Pilger, barring the “honourable exception” of Anna Politkovskaya. Writing for the independent Novaya Gazeta , she sent despatches from Chechnya on the impact of the war on civilians. In October 2006, she was gunned down in Moscow. Her reports had repeatedly drawn the wrath of Russian authorities, and CPJ (Committee to Protect Journalists) research shows she was threatened, jailed, poisoned, and forced into exile.
Pilger says his favourite quotation belongs to the “great Irish muckraker Claud Cockburn who wrote, ‘Never believe anything until it is officially denied.’” He thus handpicked journalists and writers “whose disrespect for authoritarianism has allowed them to alert their readers to vital, hidden truths.”
The writer looks back at one classic each week.
