
Hidden Agendas sets out to explain the nature of a rapacious power that never speaks its true name—that garlands itself with terms like "democracy" and regards itself as so exceptional that, unlike the rest of us, it is beyond the law. This defines a modern version of fascism, of which Guantánamo is a dark beacon.Amy McQuire on Hidden Agendas:
It's ironic that in an age of information it is now harder than ever to establish the truth. It's distorted and manipulated by governments and their collaborators in the mainstream media; buried in propaganda that is so sophisticated the public can barely distinguish the parameters of the lies.
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Pilger has often quoted the German propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, whose films glorified the Nazis; on the "submissive void" in the German population that allowed her messages to take hold. Modern propaganda is promoted by these silences.Pilger's work is the very antithesis to this propaganda. His power is in his truth-telling—from the shores of his own country, Australia, where Aboriginal people suffer third world conditions in a first world nation, to Pol Pot's murderous regime in Cambodia, to the horrors of the senseless Vietnam War. He's a campaigner for truth for the oppressed in places like Palestine and East Timor and a translator for the "unpeople"—the scores of lives stamped as invaluable, marked as collateral damage in war, dehumanized to an extent where they are deemed unworthy of justice.
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