That's really an amazing POV.
This exchange was interesting:
TONY JONES: So Australian troops you would regard in Iraq as legitimate targets?
JOHN PILGER: Excuse me but, really, that's an unbecoming question. I've just said that any foreign occupier of a country, military occupier, be they Germans in France, Americans in Vietnam, the French in Algeria, wherever, the Americans in Latin America, I would have thought, from the point of view of the local people - and as I mentioned, be they Australians in Australia - if Australia had been invaded and occupied by the Japanese, then the occupying forces, from the point of view of the people of that country, are legitimate targets.
I think Pilger answered the question by saying "yes", didn't he? Only he didn't want Australians to think he said yes so he bobbed and weaved a bit.
As for this exchange:
TONY JONES: Do you acknowledge that huge human rights abuses, not perhaps on the same scale as Pol Pot, but quite close to it, happened under Saddam Hussein's regime ...
JOHN PILGER: Absolutely.
TONY JONES: But just let me finish that question. Can there not be a moral case made for deposing the dictator who was killing hundreds and thousands of his opponents?
JOHN PILGER: Absolutely. By the Iraqi people
I guess the message to would be Pol Pots is, once you start the killing be really quick and really ruthless and really effective about it, because the only legitimate response to mass murder is for the people of one's own country to rise up and suppress it.
Why wasn't the next question about Hitler, I wonder. If he had stayed to himself and not invaded anybody and started rounding up the Jews and gassing and shooting them, would that have been ok too? |
