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John grew up in Sydney, Australia. He has been a war correspondent, author and film-maker. He has twice won British Journalism’s highest award, that of Journalist of the Year, for his work all over the world, notably in Vietnam and Cambodia.

Why am I reviewing a book from 26 years ago? Because John’s work, with 40 pages of references, has opened my eyes, especially through his 1990s lenses. I wish I had had his perspective then, but I was completely blind then.

This is a big book, at 687 pages.

British selling arms to Indonesia’s military dictatorship

East Timor, 400 nautical miles north of Western Australia, is the focus of this section. The Timorese were an invaluable support to Australian troops in World War II. And Australia pledged to never let them down in gratitude for their sacrificial service.

But we did. We did not sell arms to their invaders, Indonesia, but we did nothing until it was too late to stop the British from doing so.

Douglas Hurd, when Torry Foreign Secretary (of Britain), alluded to higher motives. ‘Under the United Nations Charter’, he said ‘all Sovereign States have the right to their own self defence. So, there is nothing wrong with selling arms to friendly countries to allow them to defend themselves.’ (p. 119)

This is ironic when we consider that huge Indonesia had invaded tiny, defenceless East Timor. But let me share a wonderful story John tells:

Jo, Andrea, Lotta and Angie belong to ‘Seeds of hope – East Timor Ploughshares’, a direct-action group inspired by the biblical injunction to ‘beat swords into ploughshares’ (p 314).

These four ladies, in England, broke into an airbase where Hawk helicopters were being readied for export to the Indonesian military for use against East Timorese civilians. The girls filmed themselves hitting the aircraft with hammers and left a video of these aircraft being used against the East Timorese on the pilot’s seat.

Naturally, they were arrested, but their trial took a remarkable twist. They were acquainted, as their crime was seen as justified to prevent a greater crime. But the mainstream media could not accept the verdict; they were so set on this attack being likened to terrorism against the state.

The Liverpool Dockers’ Strike (1995 – 1998)

Liverpool was arguably the leading seaport in the world at its peak at the turn of the nineteenth century. Then, on 25 October 1995, the entire workforce of a private contracting company, Torside, was sacked for not agreeing to work overtime. 80 men lost their jobs. Three days later, 329 men from the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company mounted a picket line.

Jim Donovan, the Australian Maritime Union leader, told me from Sydney: ‘In a lifetime as union official I have never seen anything like the Liverpool campaign… They’ve gone to every corner of the earth to seek support… with no backing from their union… I took $A 60,000 for them last time.’ (p. 351)

The dispute went global, largely at the hands of desperate wives and their children:

On January 20, 1997, they did it. From a room in Transport House, Liverpool, with one phone, one fax line and a tea urn, they triggered a show of international labour solidarity believed to be without precedent this century. ‘It was as if the planet skipped a heartbeat’, wrote Chris Knight. Workers in 105 ports across the world took action in support of the Liverpool dockers. (p. 352)

This dockers’ dispute was primarily about the country’s politicians, through the dockers’ management, breaking a proud productive culture with its replacement by a culture that would be totally submissive to management’s demands.

In addition, you can argue that this dispute broke the heart of the union movement everywhere. Many would contend that Margaret Thatcher’s outstanding achievement of her 1979–1990 reign as Britain’s Prime Minister was her crushing of the unions.

‘Rebuilding’ Vietnam after the war

Perhaps Pilger will be remembered most for his work in ending the Vietnam War (1 November 1955 to 30 April 1975).

His first documentary, “The Quiet Mutiny” (1970), focused interest on the US war effort in Vietnam. The sand was duly marked by interviews with soldiers ordered to ‘shoot everything that moves… including the chicken, because it might be a Vietcong chicken’.

The film ends with wounded soldiers being taken to a flight home, the background music by The Beatles: ‘Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away…’ Binoy Kampmark (2024)

I imagined that with the withdrawal of the Americans, the Vietnamese would have been left to pick up the pieces with the support of the West, who would want to do all they could in reparations for their carnage of a culture. But:

Revenge was the policy. Washington’s allies joined in. In 1979, the new British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, persuaded the European Commission to halt its regular shipments of milk to Vietnamese children. As a consequence, the price of a kilo of milk powder in Vietnam rose to ten times the price of a kilo of meat…

According to the World Health Organization’s measurements, a third of all infants under five so deteriorated following the milk ban that the majority of them were stunted or likely to be and a disproportionate number of the very young were reportedly going blind due to lack of Vitamin A. (p. 567)

What was the agenda here? Before the war, Vietnam had very credible, community-based education and health systems. After the war, all these initiatives were cut, as centralisation was the mantra of the day.

Seven years after the ‘restructuring’, according to the World Bank’s own estimates, poverty has increased, with up to 70% of the population in ‘absolute poverty’, half the adult population consuming considerably fewer than 2,100 calories a day and half the children severely malnourished. (p. 574)

Japanese capital controls 80% of the loans for investment projects and infrastructure, while the dollar has taken over from the Vietnamese dong, giving the US Reserve Bank effective control of the flow of currency. Singapore dominates the property market, and Taiwan and Korea the ‘tax-holiday’ sweatshops. The French and the Australians are doing nicely, too with the British not far behind. (p. 575)

Why was the exodus of the Vietnamese boat people after the war? Surely, refugees are the ones fleeing a war zone. However, more than 80,000 Vietnamese people moved to Australia in the decade following the War, many as refugees. What sort of rebuilding was that?

Rupert Murdoch and the death of journalism

Running like a thread through Hidden Agendas is the disappearance of the independent journalist, motivated by seeking after truth, and the inauguration of a handful of global media moguls founded on the creation of wealth for the few.

The first great battle for the freedom of the press was fought by dissenters, dreamers and visionaries who begged to differ from the established guardians of society. They suffered terrible penalties. Thomas Hytton was executed for selling books by William Tyndale, who translated the Bible into English. (p. 542)

Parallel with this has been the marriage of the media with the globalist elites. Together, they began to sing in unison without fear of dissent.

Pilger began his journalism career in January 1963 with The Daily Mail. He witnessed the demise of the labour-intensive method called the letterpress system, and the union-crushing introduction of desktop publishing.

Ironically, London’s docklands were rejuvenated by the rise of the new media monopolies:

Canary Wharf, the glass obelisk rising out of London’s former docklands where five national newspapers are produced, is known by journalists as ‘the ministry of truth’. Journalism has turned inward here. Having penetrated the layers of ‘security’, you notice the silence: footsteps are unheard and voices distant. Eye-contact is with the banks of VDU screens. There are no smells, not of ink or wood panelling or carbolic on the stairs. (p. 535)

Hidden Agendas never claims to reveal the agendas, but it allows you to see them through Pilger’s eyes.

Journalists ought not to stand outside the closed doors of the powerful waiting to be lied to… They ought to be sceptical about the assumed and the acceptable, especially the legitimate and respectable. (‘Never believe anything’ said Claud Cockburn, until it’s officially denied.’)

Their job is to speak for the ‘true witnesses, those in possession of the terrible truth’ as Primo Levi described the victims of Nazism. At least they ought to be the natural enemies of the authoritarianism that Rupert Murdoch says ‘can work’. (pp. 544-5)

Here in Australia nearly fifty years ago, Murdoch’s alliance with the conservatives led by Malcolm Fraser illustrates how the media have manipulated politics.

In 1975, Murdoch’s Australian conducted a campaign resembling a vendetta against the reformist Prime Minister of Australia, Gough Whitlam… Journalists’ copy was slanted and rewritten as the county’s only national newspaper clearly assisted in the despatch of the elected government.

The journalists rebelled… they told Murdoch they could not be loyal to a ‘propaganda sheet’… The journalists went to the streets and burned copies of their newspaper in the centre of Sydney. They were joined by hundreds of passers-by. Nothing like this had ever happened before in Australia. (pp. 481-2)

Then again, this second quote about the British media landscape illustrates how media bias in a Western nation is even more dangerous than in a self-declared dictatorship.

Since the birth of the BBC, the bias of the British state has operated through a ‘consensus’ created and fostered by a paternalistic order. The public has been groomed, rather than brainwashed. George Orwell, in his unpublished introduction to Animal Farm, described how censorship in free societies was infinitely more sophisticated and thorough than in dictatorships because ‘unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark without the need for an official ban.’ (p. 486)

First they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out –
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the communists
And I did not speak out –
Because I was not a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out –
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me –
And there was no one left
To speak for me (p. 526)
— Pastor Martin Niemӧller (1892 – 1984)

Whose Agendas?

I am not going to attempt to answer this, but simply raise the question. Considering Hidden Agendas as opposed to random unrelated narratives, I find it easier to believe in the agendas.

Why would Britain persist in selling arms to a ruthless dictator? Why would Australia turn its back on East Timor?

I accept that change is often painful, but wouldn’t diplomacy with dockworkers have been a better approach? But here, the rubber hits the road. Was the real motive the destruction of democracy and the people’s exercise of personal responsibility? The recreation of subservience.

58,148 Americans were reportedly killed in the Vietnam War, along with two million civilians, one million North Vietnamese fighters and up to 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers. Why? What was the point? As far as I can see, the only winners were the arms manufacturers who had a twenty-year war and the bankers who ‘financed’ the ‘rebuilding’.

Cloaking all of this, we have the demise of journalism. Pilger was one of the very few who fought back against the silence. For me, this was arguably the biggest tragedy in the book. We now have media that, at best, we know to be biased; at worst, they are purely purveyors of globalist propaganda.

Are the agendas hidden today? Perhaps it all depends on whether we have our eyes open.

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