Tony Blair on his Money Run

Is this it?

Saturday February 9, 2008
The Guardian


Soul survivor ... John Pilger

Is there something I should know?
We're invited to be obedient and passive and to believe there is nothing we can do to influence the course of apparently invincible events - whether they're the criminal disasters in the Middle East, or the distortion of resources and wealth in our own societies. Then suddenly we glimpse the possible in the action of those with nothing, such as the heroism of the people of Gaza in breaking out of the prison of their homeland. They ought to inspire us to break down our own walls.

What difference does it make?

Information is power, words are weapons. In my own experience, letting people know about faraway places and their struggles helps to stir and - perhaps - galvanise popular action, to connect us.

Who wants to be a millionaire?

This is the song Tony Blair hums every morning when he rises and tots up his latest windfall - a million for telling business groups in China nothing they didn't know, three or four million for buying JP Morgan influence in whatever corridors of power he imagines still welcome him. That this criminal, awash in a nation's blood, is so enriched and deluded that he believes he should be president of Europe is a shame upon all of us in Britain who deny his prosecution.

What does your soul look like?

In the 1960s, when I was reporting the great civil rights revolution in the United States, I first heard Sam Cooke sing A Change is Gonna Come. Up until then, Cooke had recorded mostly dance and gospel numbers, then suddenly, here was perhaps the greatest single piece of black music, as stirring as Paul Robeson's anthems.

Why?

The cadence of Cooke's voice, the plaint, the restrained anger, the sheer power became a call-to-arms for African Americans and for millions all over the world, struggling to be free. The idea for my latest film, The War on Democracy, had its roots in the first time I heard Cooke. And in the film's final soundtrack Sam Cooke's voice speaks for those reclaiming hope in Latin America.

War (what is it good for)?

I believe in people fighting to defend themselves against invaders and plunderers. In 1975, in Vietnam, I stood where five all-women anti-aircraft gunners had brought down bombers that came day after day (of a kind flown by the current presidential pretender John McCain). They were 18 and 19 years old, and today their graves overlook what the American pilots used to call the "Street Of No Joy". There was honour for them, and none for the McCains who dropped their incendiaries on houses of straw, hospitals, churches. If turning back rapacious invaders makes war "good", its execution is bad. Having attended a number of wars, I have seen napalmed and cluster-bombed children and, worse, felt the grief of their protectors. That's why the likes of Blair, who bomb at a safe distance from their own children, are "paramount" war criminals, to quote the Nuremberg Tribunal.

Where the hood at?

My own "hood" has rested all over the world, but rests easily in London, the greatest multicultural city, and in Sydney, where I grew up in the salt spray off the South Pacific.

Do you like rock music?

I like it a lot. When Bill Haley and his Comets came to Australia in the 1950s I climbed the chicken wire that separated our teenage horde from our new hero.

· The War On Democracy is out now on DVD