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True Story Documentary Channel
The Coming War on China, from award winning journalist John Pilger, reveals what the news doesn’t – that the world’s greatest military power, the United States, and the world’s second economic power, China, both nuclear-armed, may well be on the road to war. Nuclear war is not only imaginable, but planned. The greatest build-up of NATO military forces since the Second World War is under way on the western borders of Russia. On the other side of the world, the rise of China is viewed in Washington as a threat to American dominance. To counter this, President Obama announced a ‘pivot to Asia’, which meant that almost two-thirds of all US naval forces would be transferred to Asia and the Pacific, their weapons aimed at China. A policy which has been taken up by his successor Donald Trump, who during his election campaign said “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country and that’s what they’re doing”. Filmed on five possible front-lines across Asia and the Pacific over two years, the story is told in chapters that connect a secret and ‘forgotten’ past to the rapacious actions of great power today and to a resistance, of which little is known in the West.
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Excerpts:
THE DIPLOMAT
The Coming War on China does not engage in lies but it evades the truth so much that it is rendered invisible. (One doesn’t know whether Pilger appreciates his thoughts are often verbatim to what regularly appears in Chinese state television, though he fails to include one single clip from this media instead relying on a montage of American news shows to indicate a warmongering United States.) If, according to Joseph Goebbels, by telling a lie enough times it becomes the truth, then the reverse is also true: by evading the truth enough times it becomes a lie.
The Trouble With John Pilger’s The Coming War on China
A closer look at a new documentary.
By David Hutt
December 23, 2016
I was left feeling an odd mixture of sympathy and exasperation after enduring John Pilger’s latest documentary, The Coming War on China.
Despite the journalist’s long career of opposing tyranny, oppression, and dictatorship wherever he may find it, Pilger’s loathing of the United States has led him to produce a film that acts as an apology for Chinese totalitarianism, distorts the truth about Asian politics, and presents China as a passive victim in a potential new superpower war. Actually, my sympathy for his intellectual descent is less sincere than my anger; what I watched was an incendiary spectacle that manages to circle the triumvirate of narcissism, ignorance, and propaganda.
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Now, with personal reasons in light and with personal reasons aside, let me come to The Coming War on China, which was released at selected cinemas in Britain this month. First, the title had me concerned. “With” might have given the sense of shared responsibility for the possible war, but only an aggressor commits a war “on” another country. Pilger’s intellect cannot be doubted, so his semantic choice must have been intentional.
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The Coming War on China does not engage in lies but it evades the truth so much that it is rendered invisible. (One doesn’t know whether Pilger appreciates his thoughts are often verbatim to what regularly appears in Chinese state television, though he fails to include one single clip from this media instead relying on a montage of American news shows to indicate a warmongering United States.) If, according to Joseph Goebbels, by telling a lie enough times it becomes the truth, then the reverse is also true: by evading the truth enough times it becomes a lie.
This is what Pilger does throughout. For example, at the same time as the United States was tricking the people of the Marshall Islands back onto into highly contaminated and radiated homes, leaving many to die, the Communist Party of China was launching a nationwide campaign to suppress counter-revolutionaries. The official number of deaths when it came to an end was as high as 700,000, though some historians put it around the two million mark.
The latter is not mentioned by Pilger. In fact, even the casual viewer would probably notice that he fails to mention any of the crimes committed by the CPC – even a visit to the party’s museum warrants no reference to these. For example, he mentions the Cultural Revolution in passing but doesn’t provide the unwitting viewer with the fact that as many as 30 million people died during these eleven years. He only says it gave way to “silence,” a most cruel euphemism. Indeed, Pilger is at his worst when he speaks with euphemisms, with the figurative raising of the eyebrow.
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Pilger begins the documentary by saying it is “a film about the human spirit, and about the rise of an extraordinary resistance.” But where is the extraordinary resistance mounted against China’s foreign endeavors? Why does he not mention the resistance of the Burmese against the Myitsone Dam? Or the Lao people to stop much of the country’s north being sold for cheap to Chinese businessmen? Or, for that matter, the Lao who demonstrated against their government after China decided to build dozens of dams in the country that will destroy most of the Mekong River? Or, even give one sentence over to the anti-Chinese protests in Vietnam? It is a shame Pilger does not even mention these, or that Myanmar is now a democratic country while China was happy to allow its murderous military junta to try to create a nation of slaves.
Pilger consistently glosses over China’s past crimes while dwelling on America’s. He doesn’t mention that it was China that kept the Khmer Rouge in AK-47s, preventing Cambodia for returning to peace until almost two decades after the genocidal regime was overthrown in 1979. Neither does he ever mention Tibet or the Chinese role in the Vietnam War, and its continuing propping up of North Korea. Neither does he consider China’s actions in the South China Sea in more than a passing reference. Neither, for one moment, does he consider China’s economic actions abroad in the negative. Quite the opposite, in fact. In his New Internationalist article, he lauds China’s “New Silk Road,” saying that it “has the approval of much of humanity,” adding, with a sense of anti-West triumphalism, that “along the way, [it] is uniting China and Russia; and they are doing it entirely without ‘us’ in the West.” (This goes against the noble forms of resistance against Chinese capital abroad I mentioned above).
Indeed, he never considers this to be a Chinese form of globalization and, dare I say, economic imperialism – one of the world’s last Marxist-Leninist countries must have purged Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism from its reading list. “The initiative is a timely reminder that China under the Communist Party is building a new empire,” Friedrich Wu, a professor at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, told the Financial Times last year. How can Pilger sit back and applaud the so-called “Beijing Consensus,” which exports the worse of globalization to the world – the rise of predatory capitalism without the expectation for countries to develop democratically?
https://thediplomat.com/2016/12/the-trouble-with-john-pilgers-the-coming-war-on-china/
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THE DIPLOMAT
David Hutt has been Southeast Asia columnist at The Diplomat since 2016, writing weekly about Southeast Asian politics. He was formerly based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He also writes for Foreign Policy, Asia Times, Nikkei Asian Review, South China Morning Post, and other international publications. He was previously a reporter at Southeast Asia Globe magazine and the editor of Focus Asean magazine. He was president of the Overseas Press Club of Cambodia between 2018 and 2019, and is a visiting fellow at Future Forum, a Phnom Penh-based think tank. He can be followed on Twitter @davidhuttjourno
https://thediplomat.com/authors/david-hutt/
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The Diplomat Magazine
LEAST BIASED
These sources have minimal bias and use very few loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes). The reporting is factual and usually sourced. These are the most credible media sources. See all Least Biased sources.
- Overall, we rate Diplomat Magazine Least Biased based on low biased straightforward news reporting and minimal left-right bias editorially. We also rate them High for factual reporting due to excellent sourcing of information and a clean fact check record.
Detailed Report
Factual Reporting: HIGH
Country: Japan
World Press Freedom Rank: Japan 67/180
History
Founded in 2001, The Diplomat is an online international news magazine covering politics, society, and culture in the Asia-Pacific region. It is based in Tokyo, Japan. According to their about page “Since its launch in 2002, The Diplomat has been dedicated to quality analysis and commentary on events occurring in Asia and around the world.”
In 2009, The Diplomat ceased print publication and became a strictly online entity. The current editor is Shannon Tiezzi.
Funded by / Ownership
The Diplomat is owned by Trans-Asia Inc. an international translation service. The website is funded through advertising and subscription fees.
Analysis / Bias
In review, Diplomat Magazine publishes news related to politics, society and culture within the Asia-Pacific Region. Many stories are related to foreign relations and most often are low in bias such as this Saudi-Pakistani Relations Enter Tough Times as Both Riyadh and Islamabad Face Challenges. The Diplomat thoroughly sources all information through hyperlinks. For example, the previous story links to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Reuters, as well as many other credible sources.
The website does not have a dedicated area for opinion pieces, but they do cover politics with minimal bias such as this South Koreans Flock to Study Japan Amid Ongoing Tensions. When it comes to USA politics they tend to report negatively on the Trump administration, but only as it relates to Asian-Pacific affairs such as this: Assessing Trump’s Indo-Pacific Strategy, 2 Years In. This story does use loaded words as exemplified by this quote: “However, by some measures, the United States has become increasingly unhinged from its Asian partners of late.” In general, news reporting is factual and low biased, while occasionally the authors use loaded emotional language that is opposed to the Trump administration. This is rare.
A factual search reveals they have not failed a fact check.
Overall, we rate Diplomat Magazine Least Biased based on low biased straightforward news reporting and minimal left-right bias editorially. We also rate them High for factual reporting due to excellent sourcing of information and a clean fact check record. (8/16/2016) Updated (D. Van Zandt 10/12/2019)
Source: https://thediplomat.com
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-diplomat-magazine/
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John Richard Pilger (/ˈpɪldʒər/; born 9 October 1939) is an Australian journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker.[1] He has been mainly based in Britain since 1962.[2][3][4]
Pilger is a strong critic of American, Australian, and British foreign policy, which he considers to be driven by an imperialist and colonialist agenda. Pilger has also criticised his native country’s treatment of Indigenous Australians. He first drew international attention for his reports on the Cambodian genocide.[5]
His career as a documentary film maker began with The Quiet Mutiny (1970), made during one of his visits to Vietnam, and has continued with over 50 documentaries since. Other works in this form include Year Zero (1979), about the aftermath of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, and Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy (1993). His many documentary films on indigenous Australians include The Secret Country (1985) and Utopia (2013). In the British print media, Pilger worked at the Daily Mirror from 1963 to 1986,[6] and wrote a regular column for the New Statesman magazine from 1991 to 2014.
Pilger won Britain’s Journalist of the Year Award in 1967 and 1979.[7] His documentaries have gained awards in Britain and worldwide,[6][8] including multiple BAFTA honors.[9] The practices of the mainstream media are a regular subject in Pilger’s writing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Pilger
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