From John Pilger's film Zero Year'
On the 60th anniversary of the founding of ITV, Britain's and Europe's biggest commercial broadcaster, John Pilger's groundbreaking film, 'Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia', has been named as one of the network's 60 top programmes.
'Cambodia Year Zero', as it became known, was credited with alerting the world to the suffering of the people of Cambodia under the fanatical regime of Pol Pot. It raised tens of millions of pounds for Cambodia's children - mostly unsolicited - and became the most watched documentary throughout the world.
Watch the film and
read John Pilger's account in his anthology 'Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs'.
The 'Madman Theory of War' was a phrase coined by former US president Richard Nixon. The New rulers of Cambodia called 1975 'Year Zero', the dawn of an age in which there would be
No families, no sentiment, no expressions of love or grief, no medicines, no hospitals, no schools, no books, no learning, no holidays, no music, no song, no post, no money - only work and death.
Comment: In his article '
From Cambodia's Pol Pot to Iraq's ISIS', Pilger wrote:
"Anything that flies on everything that moves,"
and like in Cambodia, later in Iraq, Libya and Syria, from out of the smoke of the Western bombs came a new plague unleashed upon those struggling peoples. As a witness to the human consequences of aerial savagery - including the beheading of victims, their parts festooning trees and fields - I am not surprised by the disregard of memory and history, yet again. A telling example is the rise to power of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, who had much in common with today's Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). They, too, were ruthless medievalists who began as a small sect. They, too,
were the product of an American-made apocalypse, this time in Asia.
ISIS is the progeny of those in Washington and London who, in destroying Iraq as both a state and a society, conspired to commit an epic crime against humanity. Like Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge,
ISIS are the mutations of a western state terror dispensed by a venal imperial elite undeterred by the consequences of actions taken at great remove in distance and culture. Their culpability is unmentionable in "our" societies.
Also, he mentions how children can be bought in neighbouring Thailand, which I thought was quite remarkable.
And again it was all about the Soviet Union that sent humanitarian aid to a starving Cambodia when no-one else did, while the west was sitting on its hands, again, supporting the Khmer Rouge, allowing the suffering to continue. Maddening.
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I think John Pilger did a wonderful job here.