John Pilger didn’t like war or fascism, which makes him AOK in our book. He did some great work. From Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., at lewrockwell.com:
The world suffered a great loss when the Australian journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger died December 30 at the age of 84. One fact stands out foremost in his decades-long career as a writer and intellectual: He opposed war and fascism. He thought that the United States and Britain all too often supported war and fascism, and he often had occasion to criticize other intellectuals as lackeys of the state, in a way that will remind readers of LRC of Murray Rothbard’s similar attacks on “court historians.”
To be against fascism, we have to be able to identify the fascists properly. Pilger argues that in the war between Russia and the Ukraine, those who condemn Putin as a “fascist” have matters backwards. It is the Ukrainian leadership who are the real fascists:
“The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or ‘neo-Nazism’ or ‘extreme nationalism’, as you prefer. Ukraine as modern Europe’s fascist beehive has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who lauded Hitler’s ‘Jewish policy’, which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. ‘We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,’ a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews.