http://www.johnpilger.com/articles/the-w...ing-us-ban
On 7 June 2011, the Lannan Foundation in the United States banned the film and cancelled a US visit by John Pilger without explanation but the film is available to watch online......
'The War You Don't See' was nominated for the 'Documentary Award' at the 2011 One World Media Awards.
The film is a powerful and timely investigation into the media's role in war, tracing the history of 'embedded' and independent reporting from the carnage of World War One to the destruction of Hiroshima, and from the invasion of Vietnam to the current war in Afghanistan and disaster in Iraq. As weapons and propaganda become even more sophisticated, the nature of war is developing into an 'electronic battlefield' in which journalists play a key role, and civilians are the victims. But who is the real enemy?
John Pilger says in the film:
"We journalists... have to be brave enough to defy those who seek our collusion in selling their latest bloody adventure in someone else's country... That means always challenging the official story, however patriotic that story may appear, however seductive and insidious it is. For propaganda relies on us in the media to aim its deceptions not at a far away country but at you at home... In this age of endless imperial war, the lives of countless men, women and children depend on the truth or their blood is on us... Those whose job it is to keep the record straight ought to be the voice of people, not power." :mexican:
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Lannan Foundation cancels on controversial speaker
Outspoken investigative journalist 'perplexed' by vague last-minute email
Paul Weideman | The New Mexican
Thursday, June 09, 2011 - 6/10/11
Patrick Lannan, president of the nonprofit Lannan Foundation, on Wednesday night suddenly canceled a speaking engagement for the veteran U.K.-based investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger scheduled for June 15.
In an email Thursday morning, Pilger said Lannan had given no reason for his decision. "Just like that. A short e-mail no explanation whatsoever."
Later in the morning, Pilger wrote, "All I have is an e-mail from Barbara Ventrello (the foundation's Cultural Freedom Special Projects director) saying Patrick Lannan called from California saying cancel all my events. I know Patrick all very friendly, Lannan has flown me over before. I regarded them as friends. Now they won't even answer their phones ... Am completely perplexed.
After repeated requests for an explanation, Ventrello emailed this statement from Patrick Lannan: "Lannan Foundation regrets the cancellation of Mr. John Pilger's events next week and any inconvenience this may have caused the Santa Fe community members who support our public programs."
The Lannan Foundation had the Pilger event on its schedule for months. Part of its Readings and Conversations series, it was to be a conversation between Pilger and David Barsamian, director of Boulder, Colo.-based Alternative Radio.
Barsamian did not return phone calls Thursday.
While in Santa Fe, Pilger also was expected to attend the U.S. premiere of his new film, The War You Don't See, on June 16 at The Screen. Lannan paid the rental fee in advance, but canceled that event as well. Peter Grendle, manager of theater on the Santa Fe University of Art & Design campus, said he was informed about the decision in an email from Ventrello. He said Pilger planned to introduce the film and do a question-and-answer session afterward.
It is not known if the Pilger event was dropped because of topics he might address in his talk, but Lannan is not known for exercising any kind of censorship in the past.
Pilger, the author of eight books and nearly 60 documentary films, has been a fierce and prolific critic of government and the media for more than 40 years.
The War You Don't See opens with upsetting footage of an "unreported Apache gunship attack" on people walking on a Baghdad street in 2007. As the pavement erupts in bullet-sprayed dust and the people fall and scramble, the voice of the commander directs, "Keep shootin'. Keep shootin'. Keep shootin'."
When director Pilger questions Bryan Whitman, the United States' deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, about the attack, Whitman is relatively noncommittal. "These incidences are unfortunate. Every one in which there is a civilian casualty is unfortunate," he says. "But again, it is the enemy who is deliberately trying to inflict civilian casualties and put civilians in harm. It is the NATO forces, it is the U.S. forces that are taking every precaution they can to prosecute the war and prevent civilian casualties."
On the dearth of probing investigations into the truths behind the Iraq war, Pilger grills journalists including David Mannion, editor in chief of ITV News. He asks Mannion about his decision to report uncritically a warning by then-Vice President Dick Cheney that Iraq would soon have nuclear weapons. Mannion says the network "allowed our viewers to make up their minds as to whether this was a man telling the truth or not."
"But that's not fair on viewers, is it?" Pilger says. "Because they may not know what we as journalists know or ought to know: that this was an extremely dodgy politician who was making extraordinary claims."
He gets former CBS correspondent Dan Rather to admit in the film that, "If we had done our job, I do think a strong argument can be made that perhaps we would not have gone to war."
In an email exchange June 1 for a Pasatiempo story now also canceled about the Lannan event, Pilger said, "The point is journalism. Real journalism, not the kind that takes authority at face value, that is bored with the notion of truth-telling and is besotted by 'celebrities,' famous or not. If those of us paid to keep the record straight don't do our job, who will?"
The War You Don't See was made before the killing of Osama bin Laden. But in an interview with Pasatiempo, Pilger said, "The impression I get is that much of the U.S. media rejoiced at the killing of Osama bin Laden. For the victims of 9/11 that would be understandable. But for Maureen Dowd, liberal columnist of The New York Times, to say words to the effect that it was suddenly great to be American again is absurd.
"Why wasn't bin Laden brought back to the U.S. and put on trial? Isn't that the way true democracies behave? Perhaps the reason was that he might have thrown light on his earlier employment by the CIA and Britain's MI6. The victims of 9/11 surely had a right to see him tried. His killing will undoubtedly bring reprisals against innocents, media 'unpeople' in those faraway places whose names we never know, whose faces we never see. That's already happened."
At a little after 9 p.m. London-time Thursday, Pilger sent an email to The New Mexican regarding the cancellation of his Santa Fe appearances that said, "I'm e-mailing Patrick Lannan to ask why. How can he not answer? What's going on? Is the U.S. an open or closed society?"
hock:
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The Strange Silencing of Liberal America
Monday 11 July 2011
by: John Pilger, Truthout | Op-Ed
How does political censorship work in liberal societies? When my film, "Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia," was banned in the United States in 1980, the broadcaster PBS cut all contact. Negotiations were ended abruptly; phone calls were not returned. Something had happened. But what? "Year Zero" had already alerted much of the world to the horrors of Pol Pot, but it also investigated the critical role of the Nixon administration in the tyrant's rise to power and the devastation of Cambodia.
Six months later, a PBS official told me, "This wasn't censorship. We're into difficult political days in Washington. Your film would have given us problems with the Reagan administration. Sorry."
In Britain, the long war in Northern Ireland spawned a similar, deniable censorship. The journalist Liz Curtis compiled a list of more than 50 television films in Britain that were never shown or indefinitely delayed. The word "ban" was rarely used and those responsible would invariably insist they believed in free speech.
The Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico, believes in free speech. The foundation's web site says it is "dedicated to cultural freedom, diversity and creativity." Authors, filmmakers, poets make their way to a sanctum of liberalism bankrolled by the billionaire Patrick Lannan in the tradition of Rockefeller and Ford.
Lannan also awards "grants" to America's liberal media, such as Free Speech TV, the Foundation for National Progress (publisher of the magazine Mother Jones), the Nation Institute and the TV and radio program Democracy Now! In Britain, Lannan has been a supporter of the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, of which I am one of the judges. In 2008, Lannan personally supported the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. According to the Santa Fe New Mexican, he is "devoted" to Obama.
On 15 June, I was due in Santa Fe, having been invited to share a platform with the distinguished American journalist David Barsamian. The foundation was also to host the US premiere of my new film, "The War You Don't See," which investigates the false image making of war makers, especially Obama.
I was about to leave for Santa Fe when I received an email from the Lannan official organizing my visit. The tone was incredulous. "Something has come up," she wrote. Lannan had called her and ordered all my events to be canceled. "I have no idea what this is all about," she wrote.
Baffled, I asked that the premiere of my film be allowed to go ahead as the US distribution largely depended on it. She repeated that "all" my events were canceled, "and this includes the screening of your film." On the Lannan website "canceled" appeared across a picture of me. There was no explanation. None of my phone calls were returned, nor subsequent emails answered. A Kafkaesque world of not knowing descended.
The silence lasted a week until, under pressure from local media, the foundation put out a brief statement that too few tickets had been sold to make my visit "viable" and that "the Foundation regrets that the reason for the cancellation was not explained to Mr. Pilger or to the public at the time the decision was made." Doubts were cast by a robust editorial in the Santa Fe New Mexican, The paper, which has long played a prominent role in promoting Lannan events, disclosed that my visit had been canceled before the main advertizing and previews were published. A full-page interview with me had to be hurriedly pulled. "Pilger and Barsamian could have expected closer to a packed 820-seat Lensic [arts center]."
The manager of The Screen, the Santa Fe cinema that had been rented for the premiere, was called late at night and told to kill all his online promotion for my film, but took it upon himself to reschedule the film for 23 June. It was a sell-out, with many people turned away. The idea that there was no public interest was demonstrably not true.
Theories? There are many, but nothing is proven. For me, it is all reminiscent of the long shadows cast during the cold war. "Something is going to surface," said Barsamian. "They can't keep the lid on this."
My talk on 15 June was to have been about the collusion of American liberalism in a permanent state of war and the demise of cherished freedoms, such as the right to call government to account. In the United States, as in Britain, serious dissent - free speech - has been substantially criminalized. Obama, the black liberal, the politically correct exemplar, the marketing dream, is as much a warmonger as George W. Bush. His score is six wars. Never in US history has a president prosecuted as many whistleblowers; yet. this truth telling, this exercise of true citizenship, is at the heart of America's constitutional First Amendment. Obama's greatest achievement is having seduced, co-opted and silenced much of liberal opinion in the United States, including the anti-war movement.
The reaction to the Lannan ban has been illuminating. The brave, like the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, were appalled and said so. Similarly, many ordinary Americans called into radio stations and have written to me, recognizing a symptom of far greater suppression. But some exalted liberal voices have been affronted that I dared whisper the word, censorship, about such a beacon of "cultural freedom." The embarrassment of those who wish to point both ways is palpable. Others have pulled down the shutters and said nothing. Given their patron's ruthless show of power, it is understandable. For them, the Russian dissident poet
Yevgeny Yevtushenko once wrote, "When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie."
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
