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This is a hard-hitting, thought provoking read from journalist John Pilger, much in the vein of his other books, ‘Heroes’, ‘Distant Voices’ and ‘Hidden Agendas’. Governments, the United States in particular, are called into question and dirty political secrets exposed within its 300+ pages. There are five distinct chapters covering a part of the world each, plus an in-depth introduction to the topic.
The subject matter can be difficult to digest, but Pilger manages to get his message across in a way that hits home – by turning the statistics into real people. When he discusses the deaths of hundreds, thousands, millions, in South Africa, Afghanistan, Israel, we meet those who watched their loved ones perish under a hail of bombs or through starvation and disease. Pilger paints the scene of each of the five countries with vivid pictures of wastelands, oppression, sickly children and complete and utter poverty. But even more importantly, through in-depth research and hundreds of interviews, he exposes those responsible for these terrible things, and more often than not, all fingers point in some way or other to the United States government.
There’s the forgotten inhabitants of the island of Deigo Garcia, part of the Chagos Islands, who had their island sold right from under them to the USA for the purposes of creating a military base. They were shipped off to live (if it can be called that) in the slums of Mauritius whilst their children ‘died of sadness’ and the history of the island was rewritten in the press as if they never even existed.
There’s Israel and the Gaza Strip - ‘a breeding ground for terror’ where millions of Palestinians are forced to live. Pilger reveals Britain’s involvement in providing millions of pounds worth of military equipment for Israel to attack the West Bank, and the terrible division between Jews and Palestinians.
There’s the mobile phone advertisements starring happy, healthy, pale skinned, models with straight white teeth plastered all over the over-populated, cholera-ridden slums of poverty stricken sections of India, taunting the starving dehydrated inhabitants with their perfect smiles.
There’s South Africa, the World Bank, western governments, big business and other interesting players’ involvement in the horrors of apartheid. Stories from both pre and post the removal of legal apartheid are presented to us - only the irony is there’s not too much difference between the two. Their inter-changeability is truly frightening.
And then there’s Afghanistan. Poor, reduced to rubble Afghanistan, with its ghost-like children playing next to the fresh blood stains of their friends who died only days before in buildings bombed by US planes. There’s the bustling opium trade, oppression of women, CIA trained and funded jihadi, the US involvement with the Taliban and 9/11, and strategic chessboard moves that see hundreds die, the Soviet Union fall, and oil interests kept at heart.
All these stories, parts of which are often celebrated as ‘liberation’ in other contexts, are examined properly under Pilger’s journalistic microscope, and the construction of this supposed ‘freedom’ in mainstream media and collective consciousness is exposed for its half-truths, part-truths and down-right lies.
After reading this book, you’re likely to question whether you can ever trust the ‘official story’ again. If that sounds good to you then this book is the one for you, but if you’d rather keep the wool over your eyes then stay as far away as you possibly can from ‘Freedom Next Time’.
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