A Palestinian youngster sifts through refuse in a ‘refugee’ camp in the occupied territories in this image based on an Associated Press photo.

Freedom Next Time
By John Pilger
Published by Black Swan, 2007

Interventions
By Noam Chomsky
Published by City Lights, 2007

The staggering extent to which popular opinion has been moulded by government misinformation begins to emerge in these books. That WMD business was only the tiniest tip of the iceberg. My review for The Nation, published on January 6.

Anyone who believes that 3,000 young Americans have died in Iraq for a worthy cause, or that it’s the Palestinians who are trying to drive the Israelis into the sea and not the other way around, ought to avoid these books. Or – far better – they should force themselves to read them and see if there’s something that might finally change their minds.

Here is the “liberal” motherlode, the wrought-iron manifesto of pacifists and Bush-bashers, the defiance of authority in the defence of the underdog, the harping insistence that human rights always trump corporate rights. It’s the self-righteousness of those on the “left” who know they are right.

Unfortunately, of course, people on the “right” – those who support “conservative” governments for reasons that usually have something to do with their own expectations of financial security – won’t go near these books, and Chomsky and Pilger will continue preaching to their own adoring choirs.

This is another maddening facet of the modern world, politically polarised between people raised to see concentric circles of borders everywhere – myself, my family, my neighbourhood, my country – and those who recognise humanity, life itself even, as interdependent. The latter know that every pebble dropped in the ocean by a greedily meddling politician, or a well-intentioned one, sends ripples across every boundary on the map, and sometimes destructive tsunamis too.

Governments wishing to lay claim to foreign territory can always count on persuading the border-watchers to let them reach beyond their permitted frontiers and dabble in other countries’ business if they convince them that it’s in the interest of “helping” the less fortunate by ending some atrocity or installing the virtues of freedom and democracy.

These are the “interventions” that Noam Chomsky (pictured left) addresses in 44 op-ed articles written between September 2002 and March 2007 and distributed by the New York Times Syndicate. These articles never appeared in the New York Times. That newspaper and most others found unpalatable his depictions of the president as a power-crazed, land-grabbing, constitution-abusing brute, a lying servant of Big Business and a manipulative God-on-my-side missionary for America First and Only.

In his essays on the news media, 9/11 and Iraq, intelligent design, China, South America, Palestine, US social security and Hurricane Katrina, Chomsky is unremitting as he blames a slew of presidents and British leaders all the way back to Churchill for the ever-blackening mess we’re in today.

George W Bush took a tremendous risk in Iraq, Chomsky states plainly, to ensure control of Middle Eastern oil in a tri-polar world (US-Europe-China). “It is a rational calculation on the assumption that human survival is not particularly significant in comparison with short-term power and wealth. And that is nothing new. These themes resonate through history. The difference today in this age of nuclear weapons is only that the stakes are enormously higher.”

Reviling Chomsky is a cottage industry. Though he’s highly respected overseas, including in Britain, millions of Americans loathe him, most for the simplistic reason that he denigrates American foreign policy. There are those like Paul Bogdanor who go to great lengths to systematically debunk his claims – dubiously, it must be said. Chomsky is frequently misquoted and taken out of context, which is why he is so careful about citing sources that his prose, for a professional linguist, tends to dryness.

But Chomsky lives in the ivory tower of academia, so that’s to be expected. John Pilger gets sweaty in the field, in the dusty realities of South Africa and Palestine, and his writing bleeds with empirical truth. The journalist’s reports in “Freedom Next Time” are lengthy to the point of badgering, but brimming with revelations and invariably moving.

Easily the finest chapter is on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which puts flesh to the mechanical diagrams sketched by Chomsky of the spurious Oslo accord and Israel’s “courageous withdrawal” from the occupied territories, which in fact represents those territories’ piecemeal annexation and dismemberment.

Pilger’s report is based on a documentary he made for ITV that, despite being “cautiously” aired at 11pm, raised an international furore. The morsel that proved hardest to swallow was the discovery – by living Israeli historians – that in April 1948, several months before Israel became a sovereign state, its army forcibly uprooted the populations of 369 Palestinian towns and villages, sometimes massacring the inhabitants.

The current wisdom is that the Palestinians abandoned these towns, more or less peacefully, at the urging of their own leaders, who recognised that the land would have to be ceded in accordance with British intervention on the Jews’ behalf. Now, instead, revealed in Israeli government archives, here were David Ben Gurion and his general, Yitzhak Rabin, murderously conducting a form of ethnic cleansing.

Public reaction to the television broadcast was equally divided, but the hostile half was enough to prompt a formal investigation of its claims – and Pilger was found to have been spot-on throughout.

From South Africa, India and, perhaps most appallingly of all, the little island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean – gang-raped by Washington and London – Pilger dispenses horrendous facts as hard as diamonds and cold as ice. The closing chapter on what has really taken place in Afghanistan is flooring.

Readers who find the daily news in this newspaper or on the BBC amply chilling are in for a rough ride with “Freedom Next Time”, yet I cannot recommend the book highly enough. This is real journalism, as good as it gets in an era when the truth is so overtly compromised and, in fact, better than we have lately been allowed to expect.

“What about solutions?” people always want to know. “What can we do about all this?” Pilger offers no solutions, only the din of truth. Chomsky repeatedly suggests the “obvious” solution: vote for change. And yet he also repeatedly points out that politicians rarely heed the opinion polls, and that the majority of Americans have long wanted their troops out of Iraq. Of all the candidates for president, only Barack Obama and Ron Paul have said they would bring the troops home, and neither one is likely to win the White House.

Gordon Brown appears to be finally weaning Britain from America’s teat, and the Australians and Japanese may have had enough too. There are plenty of good people who trust that change for the better will eventually come along. Unfortunately, in the interim, they’re the ones who are saying to the downtrodden and the dispossessed, “Freedom next time.”