The New Rulers of The World - John Pilger (Book Review)

The book I read for this last quarter of the school year was one that I found lying about the house. “The New Rulers of the World” by John Pilger is a collection of four essays, with a new introduction, revisits and expands on earlier Pilger material – on Indonesia, Iraq, the ‘great game’ of imperial and economic conquest, and the politics behind the treatment of the Aborigines in Australia. But this description is deceptive, because the book covers the full spectrum of human life in the issues it raises. And what holds it together is a depth of perspective which, crucially, places these subjects and countries in their politico-historical contexts, and a passionate indignation at the suffering and death caused by the ‘exploitation of man by man.’

This book is one that really does punch you right in your emotional solar plexus. Catchy, thrilling, all the while serious, there is no better investigative journalist in my mind than John Pilger. This is not the first book I have read by him or movie I have watched and every time I have been captivated by his mind-blowing work. If you have any humane concern for the suffering of others, you will need to sit down quietly for a time to recover slowly from reading it, it is so heart-rending in its portrayal of injustice, indifference and cruelty.

The facts of the violence, the poverty and the suffering Pilger describes are not really in dispute, so it is the way they are dealt with – more often than not they are explained away, denied, or contested, or else labeled as being "distorted for political ends," rather than openly confronted – which leads the reader to a reflection on the real and the ideal world, on the frustration of ‘what is to be done?,’ and finally to a line of self-questioning which runs something like this: is there anything you or I can do, when the new rulers of the world, who are indeed all-powerful and increasingly have the means and disposition to invade every area of your private life and mine, do not want to see the things Pilger describes, and what is more, do not want you – the people – to see them either.

Pilger introduces the term "unpeople" to denote the different value that is put on distant lives from what is considered the Third World as compared to lives (or deaths) of the Westerners: "that Afghan peasants have the same right to life as New Yorkers is unmentionable, a profanity". Or perhaps I should be using term 'Northerners' really as the divisions in the modern world are defined more and more by the North-South rather than the East-West axis.

The case against the ones "in the know" (the academics and the media) is made very strongly in the book: "Those with the power to understand suppress their knowledge". Overall, the omission and censorship are internal to the press as much as forced from above.