John Pilger Responses by William Shawcross and others
Did William Shawcross right any books?
Did William Shawcross write any books?
William Shawcross wrote in his book The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (1984) about Pilger's series of articles about Cambodia in the Daily Mirror during August 1979:  "A rather interesting quality of the articles was their concentration on Nazism and the holocaust. Pilger called Pol Pot 'an Asian Hitler' -- and said he was even worse than Hitler . . . Again and again Pilger compared the Khmer Rouge to the Nazis. Their Marxist-Leninist ideology was not even mentioned in the Mirror, except to say they were inspired by the Red Guards. Their intellectual origins were described as 'anarchist' rather than Communist".  Ben Kiernan, in his review of Shawcross's book, notes that Pilger did compare Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to Stalin's terror, as well as to Mao's Red Guards. Kiernan notes instances where other writers' comparisons of Pol Pot to Hitler or the Vietnamese to the Nazis are either accepted by Shawcross in his account, or not mentioned.  Shawcross wrote in The Quality of Mercy that "Pilger's reports underwrote almost everything that refugees along the Thai border had been saying about the cruelty of Khmer Rouge rule since 1975, and that had already appeared in the books by the Readers Digest and Francois Ponchaud. Nonetheless, the reaction to the stories in Britain was as if they were something quite new." Oliver Kamm asserted in 2006: "Pilger's documentaries are full of falsehoods. They operate by misdirection, simultaneously denouncing one form of injustice while ignoring or denying others". In Heroes, Pilger disputes Francois Ponchaud and Shawcross's account of Vietnamesse atrocities during the Vietnamese invasion and near famine as being "unsubstantiated". Ponchard had interviewed members of anti-communist groups living in the Thai refugee border camps. According to Pilger, "At the very least the effect of Shawcross's 'expose'" of Cambodian's treatment at the hands of the Vietnamese "was to blur the difference between Cambodia under Pol Pot and Cambodia liberated by the Vietnamese: in truth. a difference of night and day". In his book, Shawcross himself doubted that anyone had died of starvation. CANNOTANSWER
that had already appeared in the books by the Readers Digest and Francois Ponchaud.
John Richard Pilger (; born 9 October 1939) is an Australian journalist, writer, scholar, and documentary filmmaker. He has been mainly based in Britain since 1962. He is also currently Visiting Professor at Cornell University in New York.
 
Pilger is a strong critic of American, Australian, and British foreign policy, which he considers to be driven by an imperialist and colonialist agenda. Pilger has also criticised his native country's treatment of Indigenous Australians. He first drew international attention for his reports on the Cambodian genocide.

His career as a documentary film maker began with The Quiet Mutiny (1970), made during one of his visits to Vietnam, and has continued with over 50 documentaries since. Other works in this form include Year Zero (1979), about the aftermath of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, and Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy (1993). His many documentary films on indigenous Australians include The Secret Country (1985) and Utopia (2013). In the British print media, Pilger worked at the Daily Mirror from 1963 to 1986, and wrote a regular column for the New Statesman magazine from 1991 to 2014.

Pilger won Britain's Journalist of the Year Award in 1967 and 1979. His documentaries have gained awards in Britain and worldwide, including multiple BAFTA honours. The practices of the mainstream media are a regular subject in Pilger's writing.

Early life
John Richard Pilger was born on 9 October 1939 in Bondi, New South Wales, the son of Claude and Elsie Pilger. His older brother, Graham (1932–2017), was a disabled rights activist who later advised the government of Gough Whitlam. Pilger is of German descent on his father's side, while his mother had English, German, and Irish ancestry; two of his maternal great-great-grandparents were Irish convicts transported to Australia. His mother taught French in school. Pilger and his brother attended Sydney Boys High School, where he began a student newspaper, The Messenger. He later joined a four-year journalist trainee scheme with the Australian Consolidated Press.

Journalism and television career

Journalism 
Beginning his career in 1958 as a copy boy with the Sydney Sun, Pilger later moved to the city's Daily Telegraph, where he was a reporter, sports writer, and sub-editor. He also freelanced and worked for the Sydney Sunday Telegraph, the daily paper's sister title. After moving to Europe, he was a freelance correspondent in Italy for a year.

Settling in London in 1962, working as a sub-editor, Pilger joined British United Press and then Reuters on its Middle-East desk. In 1963 he was recruited by the English Daily Mirror, again as a sub-editor. Later, he advanced to become a reporter, a feature writer, and Chief Foreign Correspondent for the title. While living and working in the United States for the Daily Mirror, on 5 June 1968 he witnessed the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles during his presidential campaign. He was a war correspondent in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Biafra. Nearly eighteen months after Robert Maxwell bought the Mirror (on 12 July 1984), Pilger was sacked by Richard Stott, the newspaper's editor, on 31 December 1985. 

Pilger was a founder of the News on Sunday tabloid in 1984, and was hired as Editor-in-Chief in 1986. During the period of hiring staff, Pilger was away for several months filming The Secret Country in Australia. Prior to this, he had given editor Keith Sutton a list of people who he thought might be recruited for the paper, but found on his return to Britain that none of them had been hired.

Pilger resigned before the first issue and had come into conflict with those around him. He disagreed with the founders' decision to base the paper in Manchester and then clashed with the governing committees; the paper was intended to be a workers' co-operative. Sutton's appointment as editor was Pilger's suggestion, but he fell out with Sutton over his plan to produce a left wing Sun newspaper. The two men ended up producing their own dummies, but the founders and the various committees backed Sutton. Pilger, appointed with "overall editorial control", resigned at this point. The first issue appeared on 27 April 1987 and The News on Sunday soon closed.

Pilger returned to the Mirror in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks, while Piers Morgan was editor.

His most frequent outlet for many years was the New Statesman, where he had a fortnightly column from 1991 when Steve Platt was editor to 2014. In 2018, Pilger said his "written journalism is no longer welcome" in the mainstream and that "probably its last home" was in The Guardian. His last column for The Guardian was in April 2015.

Television 
With the actor David Swift, and the film makers Paul Watson and Charles Denton, Pilger formed Tempest Films in 1969. "We wanted a frontman with a mind of his own, rather like another James Cameron, with whom Richard [Marquand] had worked", Swift once said. "Paul thought John was very charismatic, as well as marketing extremely original, refreshingly radical ideas." The company was unable to gain commissions from either the BBC or ITV, but did manage to package potential projects.

Pilger's career on television began on World in Action (Granada Television) in 1969, directed by Denton, for whom he made two documentaries broadcast in 1970 and 1971, the earliest of more than fifty in his career. The Quiet Mutiny (1970) was filmed at Camp Snuffy, presenting a character study of the common US soldier during the Vietnam War. It revealed the shifting morale and open rebellion of American troops. Pilger later described the film as "something of a scoop" – it was the first documentary to show the problems with morale among the drafted ranks of the US military. In an interview with the New Statesman, Pilger said:

When I flew to New York and showed it to Mike Wallace, the star reporter of CBS' 60 Minutes, he agreed. "Real shame we can't show it here". 

He made other documentaries about the United States involvement in Vietnam, including Vietnam: Still America's War (1974), Do You Remember Vietnam? (1978), and Vietnam: The Last Battle (1995).

During his work with BBC's Midweek television series during 1972–73, Pilger completed five documentary reports, but only two were broadcast.

Pilger was successful in gaining a regular television outlet at ATV. The Pilger half-hour documentary series was commissioned by Charles Denton, then a producer with ATV, for screening on the British ITV network. The series ran for five seasons from 1974 until 1977, at first running in the UK on Sunday afternoons after Weekend World. The theme song for the series was composed by Lynsey de Paul. Later it was scheduled in a weekday peak-time evening slot. The last series included "A Faraway Country" (September 1977) about dissidents in Czechoslovakia, then still part of the Communist Soviet bloc. Pilger and his team interviewed members of Charter 77 and other groups, clandestinely using domestic film equipment. In the documentary Pilger praises the dissidents' courage and commitment to freedom, and describes the communist totalitarianism as "fascism disguised as socialism".

Pilger was later given an hour slot at 9 pm, before News at Ten, which gave him a high profile in Britain. After ATV lost its franchise in 1981, he continued to make documentaries for screening on ITV, initially for Central, and later via Carlton Television.

Documentaries and career: 1978–2000

Cambodia

In 1979, Pilger and two colleagues with whom he collaborated for many years, documentary film-maker David Munro and photographer Eric Piper, entered Cambodia in the wake of the overthrow of the Pol Pot regime. They made photographs and reports that were world exclusives. The first was published as a special issue of the Daily Mirror, which sold out. They also produced an ITV documentary, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia, which brought to people's living rooms the suffering of the Khmer people. During the filming of Cambodia Year One, the team were warned that Pilger was on a Khmer Rouge 'death list.' In one incident, they narrowly escaped an ambush.

Following the showing of Year Zero, some $45 million was raised, unsolicited, in mostly small donations, including almost £4 million raised by schoolchildren in the UK. This funded the first substantial relief to Cambodia, including the shipment of life-saving drugs such as penicillin, and clothing to replace the black uniforms people had been forced to wear. According to Brian Walker, director of Oxfam, "a solidarity and compassion surged across our nation" from the broadcast of Year Zero.

William Shawcross wrote in his book The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (1984) about Pilger's series of articles about Cambodia in the Daily Mirror during August 1979:
A rather interesting quality of the articles was their concentration on Nazism and the holocaust. Pilger called Pol Pot 'an Asian Hitler' — and said he was even worse than Hitler . . . Again and again Pilger compared the Khmer Rouge to the Nazis. Their Marxist-Leninist ideology was not even mentioned in the Mirror, except to say they were inspired by the Red Guards. Their intellectual origins were described as 'anarchist' rather than Communist".
Ben Kiernan, in his review of Shawcross's book, notes that Pilger did compare Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to Stalin's terror, as well as to Mao's Red Guards. Kiernan notes instances where other writers' comparisons of Pol Pot to Hitler or the Vietnamese to the Nazis are either accepted by Shawcross in his account, or not mentioned.

Shawcross wrote in The Quality of Mercy that "Pilger's reports underwrote almost everything that refugees along the Thai border had been saying about the cruelty of Khmer Rouge rule since 1975, and that had already appeared in the books by the Readers Digest and François Ponchaud. In Heroes, Pilger disputes François Ponchaud and Shawcross's account of Vietnamese atrocities during the Vietnamese invasion and near famine as being "unsubstantiated". Ponchaud had interviewed members of anti-communist groups living in the Thai refugee border camps. According to Pilger, "At the very least the effect of Shawcross's 'exposé'" of Cambodians' treatment at the hands of the Vietnamese "was to blur the difference between Cambodia under Pol Pot and Cambodia liberated by the Vietnamese: in truth, a difference of night and day". In his book, Shawcross himself doubted that anyone had died of starvation.

Pilger and Munro made four later films about Cambodia. Pilger's documentary Cambodia – The Betrayal (1990), prompted a libel case against him, which was settled at the High Court with an award against Pilger and Central Television. The Times of 6 July 1991 reported:
Two men who claimed that a television documentary accused them of being SAS members who trained Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to lay mines, accepted "very substantial" libel damages in the High Court yesterday. Christopher Geidt and Anthony De Normann settled their action against the journalist John Pilger and Central Television on the third day of the hearing. Desmond Browne, QC, for Mr Pilger and Central Television, said his clients had not intended to allege the two men trained the Khmer Rouge to lay mines, but they accepted that was how the program had been understood.

Pilger said the defence case collapsed because the government issued a gagging order, citing national security, which prevented three government ministers and two former heads of the SAS from appearing in court. The film received a British Academy of Film and Television Award nomination in 1991.

Australia's Indigenous peoples
Pilger has long criticised aspects of Australian government policy, particularly what he regards as its inherent racism resulting in the poor treatment of Indigenous Australians. In 1969, Pilger went with Australian activist Charlie Perkins on a tour to Jay Creek in Central Australia. He compared what he witnessed in Jay Creek to South African apartheid. He saw the appalling conditions that the Aboriginal people were living under, with children suffering from malnutrition and grieving mothers and grandmothers having had their lighter-skinned children and grandchildren removed by the police and welfare agencies. Equally, he learned of Aboriginal boys being sent to work on white run farms, and Aboriginal girls working as servants in middle-class homes as undeclared slave labour.

Pilger has made several documentaries about Indigenous Australians, such as The Secret Country: The First Australians Fight Back (1985) and Welcome to Australia (1999). His book on the subject, A Secret Country, was first published in 1989. Pilger wrote in 2000 that the 1998 legislation that removed the common-law rights of Indigenous peoples:
is just one of the disgraces that has given Australia the distinction of being the only developed country whose government has been condemned as racist by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

Pilger returned to this subject with Utopia, released in 2013 (see below).

East Timor

Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy

In East Timor Pilger clandestinely shot Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy about the brutal Indonesian occupation of East Timor, which began in 1975.

Death of a Nation contributed to an international outcry which ultimately led to Indonesian withdrawal from East Timor and eventual independence in 2000. When Death of a Nation was screened in Britain it was the highest rating documentary in 15 years and 5,000 telephone calls per minute were made to the programme's action line. When Death of a Nation was screened in Australia in June 1994, Foreign Minister Gareth Evans declared that Pilger "had a track record of distorted sensationalism mixed with sanctimony."

Documentaries and career since 2000

Palestine Is Still the Issue

Pilger's documentary Palestine Is Still the Issue was released in 2002 and had Ilan Pappé as historical adviser. Pilger 
said the film describes how an "historic injustice has been done to the Palestinian people, and until Israel's illegal and brutal occupation ends, there will be no peace for anyone, Israelis included". He said the responses of his interviewees "put the lie to the standard Zionist cry that any criticism of Israel is anti-semitic, a claim that insults all those Jewish people who reject the likes of Ariel Sharon acting in their name". Its broadcast resulted in complaints by the Israeli embassy, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and the Conservative Friends of Israel that it was inaccurate and biased. Michael Green, chairman of Carlton Communications, the company that made the film, also objected to it in an interview with the Jewish Chronicle.

The UK television regulator, the Independent Television Commission (ITC), ordered an investigation. The ITC investigation rejected the complaints about the film, stating in its report:
The ITC raised with Carlton all the significant areas of inaccuracy critics of the programme alleged and the broadcaster answered them by reference to a range of historical texts. The ITC is not a tribunal of fact and is particularly aware of the difficulties of verifying 'historical fact' but the comprehensiveness and authority of Carlton's sources were persuasive, not least because many appeared to be of Israeli origin.

The ITC concluded that in Pilger's documentary "adequate opportunity was given to a pro-Israeli government perspective" and that the programme "was not in breach of the ITC Programme Code".

Stealing a Nation

Pilger's documentary Stealing a Nation (2004) recounts the experiences of the late 20th-century trials of the people of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean. The documentary primarily focuses on the expulsion of the Chagossians by Britain and the USA between 1967 and 1973 to Mauritius, and the poor economic situation faced by the islanders as a result of the deportation. Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos Islands, was given to the United States government which began the construction of a major military base for the region. In the 21st century, the US used the base for planes which were bombing targets in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a 2000 ruling on the events, the International Court of Justice described the wholesale removal of the Chagossian peoples from the Chagos Islands by Britain as "a crime against humanity". Pilger strongly criticised Tony Blair for failing to respond in a substantive way to the 2000 High Court ruling that the expulsion of the Chagossian people to Mauritius was illegal.

In March 2005, Stealing a Nation received the Royal Television Society Award.

Latin America: The War on Democracy (2007)

The documentary The War on Democracy (2007) was Pilger's first film to be released in the cinema. In "an unremitting assault on American foreign policy since 1945", according to Andrew Billen in The Times, the film explores the role of US interventions, overt and covert, in toppling a series of governments in the region, and placing "a succession of favourably disposed bullies in control of its Latino backyard". It discusses the US role in the overthrow in 1973 of the democratically elected Chilean leader Salvador Allende, who was replaced by the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Pilger interviews several ex-CIA agents who purportedly took part in secret campaigns against democratic governments in South America. It also contains what Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian described as "a dewy-eyed interview" with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, which has moments of "almost Hello!-magazine deference".

Pilger explores the US Army School of the Americas in the US state of Georgia. Generations of South American military were trained there, with a curriculum including counter-insurgency techniques. Attendees reportedly included members of Pinochet's security services, along with men from Haiti, El Salvador, Argentina and Brazil who have been implicated in human rights abuses.

The film also details the attempted overthrow of Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez in 2002. The people of Caracas rose up to force his return to power. It looks at the wider rise of populist governments across South America, led by figures calling for loosening ties with the United States and attempting a more equitable redistribution of the continent's natural wealth. Of "Chávez's decision to bypass the National Assembly for 18 months, and rule by decree", Peter Bradshaw writes "Pilger passes over it very lightly".

Pilger said the film is about the struggle of people to free themselves from a modern form of slavery. These people, he says,describe a world not as American presidents like to see it as useful or expendable, they describe the power of courage and humanity among people with next to nothing. They reclaim noble words like democracy, freedom, liberation, justice, and in doing so they are defending the most basic human rights of all of us in a war being waged against all of us.

The War on Democracy won the Best Documentary category at the One World Media Awards in 2008.

The War You Don't See (2010)
The subject of The War You Don’t See is the role of the media in making war. It concentrates on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories. It begins with the Collateral Murder video leaked by Chelsea Manning and released by WikiLeaks. In an interview, Julian Assange describes WikiLeaks as an organisation that gives power to ‘conscientious objectors’ within ‘power systems’. The documentary contends that the CIA uses intelligence to manipulate public opinion and that the media collude by following the official line. During the documentary Pilger states that "propaganda relies on us in the media to aim its deceptions not at a far away country but at you at home".

John Lloyd in the Financial Times said The War You Don't See was a "one-sided" documentary which "had no thought of explaining, even hinting, that the wars fought by the US and the UK had a scrap of just cause, nor of examining the nature of what Pilger simply stated were "lies" – especially those that took the two countries to the invasion of Iraq".

Support for Julian Assange

Pilger supported Julian Assange by pledging bail in December 2010. Pilger said at the time: "There's no doubt that he is not going to abscond". Assange sought asylum in the Embassy of Ecuador in London in 2012 and Pilger's bail money was lost when a judge ordered it to be forfeited.

Pilger has been critical of the media's treatment of Assange saying: "The same brave newspapers and broadcasters that have supported Britain’s part in epic bloody crimes, from the genocide in Indonesia to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, now attack the “human rights record” of Ecuador, whose real crime is to stand up to the bullies in London and Washington".

He criticised the failure of the Australian government to object when it "repeatedly received confirmation that the US was conducting an “unprecedented” pursuit of Assange" and noted that one of the reasons Ecuador gave for granting asylum to Assange was his abandonment by Australia.

Pilger visited Assange in the embassy and has continued to support him.

Utopia (2013)

With Utopia, Pilger returned to the experiences of Indigenous Australians and what he termed "the denigrating of their humanity". A documentary feature film, it takes its title from Utopia, an Aboriginal homeland (also known as an outstation) in the Northern Territory. Pilger says that "in essence, very little" has changed since the first of his seven films about the Aboriginal people, A Secret Country: The First Australians (1985). In an interview with the UK based Australian Times he commented: "the catastrophe imposed on Indigenous Australians is the equivalent of apartheid, and the system has to change".

Reviewing the film, Peter Bradshaw wrote: "The awful truth is that Indigenous communities are on mineral-rich lands that cause mouths to water in mining corporation boardrooms". "When the subject and subjects are allowed to speak for themselves – when Pilger doesn't stand and preach – the injustices glow like throbbing wounds", wrote Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times, but the documentary maker "goes on too long. 110 minutes is a hefty time in screen politics, especially when we know the makers' message from scene one".

Geoffrey Macnab described it as an "angry, impassioned documentary" while for Mark Kermode it is a "searing indictment of the ongoing mistreatment" of the first Australians.

The Coming War on China (2016)
The Coming War on China was Pilger's 60th film for ITV.

The film premiered in the UK on Thursday 1 December 2016, and was shown on ITV at 10.40 pm on Tuesday 6 December and on the Australian public broadcaster SBS on 16 April 2017. In the documentary, according to Pilger, "the evidence and witnesses warn that nuclear war is no longer a shadow, but a contingency. The greatest build-up of American-led military forces since the Second World War is well under way. They are on the western borders of Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, confronting China. Like the renewal of post-Soviet Russia, the rise of China as an economic power is declared an 'existential threat' to the divine right of the United States to rule and dominate human affairs".

"The first third told, and told well, the unforgivable, unconscionable tale of what has overtaken the Marshall Islanders since 1946, when the US first nuked the test site on Bikini Atoll" beginning an extended series of tests, wrote Euan Ferguson in The Observer. "Over the next 12 years they would unleash a total of 42.2 megatons. The islanders, as forensically proved by Pilger, were effectively guinea pigs for [the] effects of radiation". Ferguson wrote that the rest of the film "was a sane, sober, necessary, deeply troubling bucketful of worries". Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian wrote that the film "lays bare the historical horrors of the US military in the Pacific, exposing the paranoia and pre-emptive aggression of its semi-secret bases," adding: "This is a gripping film, which though it comes close to excusing China ... does point out China's insecurities and political cruelties". Neil Young of The Hollywood Reporter called the film an "authoritative indictment of American nefariousness in the western Pacific".

Kevin Maher wrote in The Times that he admired the early sequences on the Marshall Islands, but that he believed the film lacked nuance or subtlety. Maher wrote that, for Pilger, China is "a brilliant place with just some 'issues with human rights', but let's not go into that now". Diplomat columnist David Hutt said "Pilger consistently glosses over China's past crimes while dwelling on America's". Caitlin Johnstone of Scoop called the film "powerful" and praised it for showing "the USA's generations-long history of provocation and hostility toward [China's] government. It also addresses the silly projection so many westerners harbor that if the US wasn't bullying and slaughtering the world into compliance, China would take over doing the same."

The Dirty War on the National Health Service (2019)

Pilger's The Dirty War on the National Health Service was released in the UK on 29 November 2019 and examined the changes that the NHS has undergone since its founding in 1948. Pilger makes the case that governments beginning with that of Margaret Thatcher have waged a secret war against the NHS with a view to privatising it slowly and surreptitiously. Pilger predicted that moves toward privatisation would create more poverty and homelessness and that the resulting chaos would be used as an argument for further "reform". Peter Bradshaw described the documentary as a "fierce, necessary film".

Views (1999–present)

Bush, Blair, Howard and wars
In 2003 and 2004, Pilger criticised United States President George W. Bush, saying that he had used the 9/11 terrorist attacks as an excuse to invade Iraq as part of a strategy to increase US control of the world's oil supplies. In 2004, Pilger criticised British Prime Minister Tony Blair as equally responsible for the invasion and the bungled occupation of Iraq. In 2004, as the Iraq insurgency increased, Pilger wrote that the anti-war movement should support "Iraq's anti-occupation resistance:
We cannot afford to be choosy. While we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq, we have no choice now but to support the resistance, for if the resistance fails, the "Bush gang" will attack another country".

Pilger described Australian Prime Minister John Howard as "the mouse that roars for America, whipping his country into war fever and paranoia about terrorism within". He thought Howard's willingness to "join the Bush/Blair assault on Iraq ... evok[ed] a melancholy history of obsequious service to great power: from the Boxer Rebellion to the Boer war, to the disaster at Gallipoli, and Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf".

On 25 July 2005, Pilger ascribed blame for the 2005 London bombings that month to Blair. He wrote that Blair's decision to follow Bush helped to generate the rage that Pilger said precipitated the bombings.

In his column a year later, Pilger described Blair as a war criminal for supporting Israel's actions during the 2006 Israel–Lebanon conflict. He said that Blair gave permission to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 to initiate what would ultimately become Operation Defensive Shield.

In 2014, Pilger wrote that "The truth about the criminal bloodbath in Iraq cannot be "countered" indefinitely. Neither can the truth about our support for the medievalists in Saudi Arabia, the nuclear-armed predators in Israel, the new military fascists in Egypt and the jihadist "liberators" of Syria, whose propaganda is now BBC news".

Barack Obama
Pilger criticised Barack Obama during his presidential campaign of 2008, saying that he was "a glossy Uncle Tom who would bomb Pakistan" and his theme "was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully". After Obama was elected and took office in 2009, Pilger wrote, "In his first 100 days, Obama has excused torture, opposed habeas corpus and demanded more secret government".

Sunny Hundal wrote in The Guardian during November 2008 that the "Uncle Tom" slur used against Obama "highlights a patronising attitude towards ethnic minorities. Pilger expects all black and brown people to be revolutionary brothers and sisters, and if they veer away from that stereotype, it can only be because they are pawns of a wider conspiracy".

Comments about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton
In a February 2016 webchat on the website of The Guardian newspaper, Pilger said "Trump is speaking straight to ordinary Americans". Although his opinions about immigration were "gross", Pilger wrote that they are "no more gross in essence than, say, David Cameron's – he is not planning to invade anywhere, he doesn't hate the Russians or the Chinese, he is not beholden to Israel. People like this lack of cant, and when the so-called liberal media deride him, they like him even more". In March 2016, Pilger commented in a speech delivered at the University of Sydney during the 2016 United States presidential election, that Donald Trump was a less dangerous potential President of the United States than Hillary Clinton.

In November 2016, Pilger said that "notorious terrorist jihadist group called ISIL or ISIS is created largely with money from [the government of Saudi and the government of Qatar] who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation".

In August 2017, in an article published on his website, Pilger wrote that a "coup against the man in the White House is under way. This is not because he is an odious human being, but because he has consistently made clear he does not want war with Russia. This glimpse of sanity, or simple pragmatism, is anathema to the 'national security' managers who guard a system based on war, surveillance, armaments, threats and extreme capitalism".  According to Pilger, The Guardian has published "drivel" in covering the claims "that the Russians conspired with Trump". Such assertions, he writes, are "reminiscent of the far-right smearing of John Kennedy as a 'Soviet agent'".

Russia
On the Poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, Wiltshire on 4 March 2018, Pilger said in an interview on RT: "This is a carefully constructed drama as part of the propaganda campaign that has been building now for several years in order to justify the actions of NATO, Britain and the United States, towards Russia. That’s a fact". Such events as the Iraq War, "at the very least should make us sceptical of Theresa May’s theatrics in Parliament". He hinted that the UK government may have been involved in the attack, saying it had motive and that the nearby Porton Down laboratory has a "long and sinister record with nerve gas and chemical weapons".

China
According to Pilger, "American bases form a giant noose encircling China with missiles, bombers, warships - all the way from Australia through the Pacific to Asia and beyond. ... There are no Chinese naval ships and no Chinese bases off California".

Brexit 
On voting to leave the European Union, Pilger wrote in 2016 "The majority vote by Britons to leave the European Union was an act of raw democracy. Millions of ordinary people refused to be bullied, intimidated and dismissed with open contempt by their presumed betters in the major parties, the leaders of the business and banking oligarchy and the media.This was, in great part, a vote by those angered and demoralised by the sheer arrogance of the apologists for the "remain" campaign and the dismemberment of a socially just civil life in Britain. The last bastion of the historic reforms of 1945, the National Health Service, has been so subverted by Tory and Labour-supported privateers it is fighting for its life."

Criticism of the mainstream media
Pilger has criticised many journalists of the mainstream media. During the administration of President Bill Clinton in the US, Pilger attacked the British-American Project as an example of "Atlanticist freemasonry". He asserted in November 1998 that "many members are journalists, the essential foot soldiers in any network devoted to power and propaganda". In 2002, he said that "many journalists now are no more than channellers and echoers of what Orwell called the official truth".

In 2003, he criticised what he called the "liberal lobby" which "promote killing" from "behind a humanitarian mask". He said David Aaronovitch exemplified the "mask-wearers" and noted that Aaronovitch had written that the attack on Iraq will be "the easy bit". Aaronovitch responded to an article by Pilger about the mainstream media in 2003 as one of his "typical pieces about the corruption of most journalists (ie people like me [Aaronovitch]) versus the bravery of a few (ie people like him)".

On another occasion, while speaking to journalism students at the University of Lincoln, Pilger said that mainstream journalism means corporate journalism. As such, he believes it represents vested corporate interests more than those of the public.

In September 2014, Pilger wrote critically of The Guardian and other western media, regarding their reporting on Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, writing "Without a single piece of evidence, the US and its NATO allies and their media machines blamed ethnic Russian 'separatists' in Ukraine and implied that Moscow was ultimately responsible". He asserted that "the newspaper has made no serious attempt to examine who shot the aeroplane down and why".

In January 2020, Pilger tweeted scepticism of contemporary mainstream narratives about the downing of MH17, and the downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 over Iran, saying "Lie upon lie. Hiroshima necessary to defeat Japan. Vietnam attacked US ships in Gulf of Tonkin. Saddam Hussein had WMD. Libya invaded to prevent massacre. Russia shot down MH17/put Trump in the White House. The US, not Russia, defeated Isis. Add Iran shot down Ukrainian airliner".

BBC
Pilger wrote in December 2002, of British broadcasting's requirement for "impartiality" as being "a euphemism for the consensual view of established authority". He wrote that "BBC television news faithfully echoed word for word" government "propaganda designed to soften up the public for Blair's attack on Iraq". In his documentary The War You Don't See (2010), Pilger returned to this theme and accused the BBC of failing to cover the viewpoint of the victims, civilians caught up in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has additionally pointed to the 48 documentaries on Ireland made for the BBC and ITV between 1959 and the late-1980s which were delayed or altered before transmission, or totally suppressed.

Personal life
Pilger was married to journalist Scarth Flett, granddaughter of the physician and geologist Sir John Smith Flett. Their son Sam was born in 1973 and is a sports writer. Pilger also has a daughter, Zoe Pilger, born 1984, with journalist Yvonne Roberts. Zoe is an author and art critic.

Honours and awards

The Press Awards, formerly the British Press Awards
 1966: Descriptive Writer of the Year
 1967: Journalist of the Year
 1970: International Reporter of the Year
 1974: News Reporter of the Year
 1978: Campaigning Journalist of the Year
 1979: Journalist of the Year

Other awards
 1991: Television Richard Dimbleby Award, BAFTA
 1991: At 19th International Emmy Awards Emmy for documentary 'Cambodia, the Betrayal'
 2009: Sydney Peace Prize
 2011: Grierson Trust Award, UK
 2017: Order of Timor-Leste

Reception

 Martha Gellhorn, the American novelist, journalist and war correspondent, said that "[John Pilger] has taken on the great theme of justice and injustice... He documents and proclaims the official lies that we are told and that most people accept or don't bother to think about. [He] belongs to an old and unending worldwide company, the men and women of conscience. Some are as famous as Tom Paine and William Wilberforce, some as unknown as a tiny group calling itself Grandmothers Against The Bomb.... If they win, it is slowly; but they never entirely lose. To my mind, they are the blessed proof of the dignity of man. John has an assured place among them. I'd say he is a charter member for his generation".
 Noam Chomsky said of Pilger: "John Pilger's work has been a beacon of light in often dark times. The realities he has brought to light have been a revelation, over and over again, and his courage and insight a constant inspiration".
 According to Harold Pinter, Nobel Laureate and member of the Stop the War Coalition, "John Pilger is fearless. He unearths, with steely attention to facts, the filthy truth, and tells it as it is... I salute him".
 John Simpson, the BBC's world affairs editor, has said, "A country that does not have a John Pilger in its journalism is a very feeble place indeed".
 The Anglo-American writer Christopher Hitchens said of Pilger: "I remember thinking that his work from Vietnam was very good at the time. I dare say if I went back and read it again I'd probably still admire quite a lot of it. But there is a word that gets overused and can be misused – namely, anti-American – and it has to be used about him. So that for me sort of spoils it... even when I'm inclined to agree".
 Shortly after Pilger won the Sydney Peace Prize in 2009, the Australian commentator Gerard Henderson accused Pilger of "engaging in hyperbole against western democracies".
 The Economist Lexington columnist criticised Pilger's account of the Arab uprising, writing that he "thinks the Arab revolts show that the West in general and the United States in particular are 'fascist'", adding, "what most of the Arab protesters say they want are the very freedoms that they know full well, even if Pilger doesn't, to be available in the West".
 In Breaking the Silence: The Films of John Pilger, Anthony Hayward wrote, "For half a century, he has been an ever stronger voice for those without a voice and a thorn in the side of authority, the Establishment. His work, particularly his documentary films, has also made him rare in being a journalist who is universally known, a champion of those for whom he fights and the scourge of politicians and others whose actions he exposes".
 The New York magazine columnist Jonathan Chait responded to Pilger's 13 May 2014 column in The Guardian about Ukraine. Chait wrote that Pilger was "defending Vladimir Putin on the grounds that he stands opposed to the United States, which is the font of all evil" and that his "attempt to cast land-grabbing, ultranationalist dictator Vladimir Putin as an enemy of fascism is comical". US Government funded Radio Free Europe claimed that Pilger's column contained a bogus quote regarding the Odessa massacre of May 2014.

Legacy 
The John Pilger Archive is housed at the British Library. The papers can be accessed through the British Library catalogue.

Bibliography
Books

 The Last Day (1975)
 Aftermath: The Struggles of Cambodia and Vietnam (1981)
 The Outsiders (with Michael Coren, 1984)
 Heroes (1986),  (2001)
 A Secret Country (1989)
 Distant Voices (1992 and 1994)

 Hidden Agendas (1998)
 Reporting the World: John Pilger's Great Eyewitness Photographers (2001)
 The New Rulers of the World (2002; 4th ed. 2016)
 Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs (ed.) Cape (2004)
 Freedom Next Time (2006)

Plays
 The Last Day (1983)

Documentaries

 World in Action
 "The Quiet Mutiny" (1970)
Conversations With a Working Man (1971)
Palestine Is Still The Issue (Part 1) (1974)
Vietnam: Still America's War (1974)
Guilty Until Proven Innocent (John Pilger) (1974)
Thalidomide: The Ninety-Eight We Forgot (1974)
The Most Powerful Politician in America (1974)
One British Family (1974)
 Pilger
 "An Unfashionable Tragedy" (1975)
 "Nobody's Children" (1975)
 "Zap-The Weapon is Food" (1976)
 "Pyramid Lake is Dying" (1976)
 "Street of Joy" (1976)
 "A Faraway Country" (1977)
Mr Nixon's Secret Legacy (1975)
Smashing Kids] (1975)
To Know Us Is To Love Us (1975)
A Nod & A Wink (1975)
Pilger in Australia (1976)
Dismantling A Dream (1977)
An Unjustifiable Risk (1977)
The Selling of the Sea (1978)
 Do You Remember Vietnam (1978)
 Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia (1979)
 The Mexicans (1980)
Cambodia: Year One (1980)
 Heroes (1980)
Island of Dreams (John Pilger)(1981)
 In Search of Truth in Wartime (1983)

 Nicaragua. A Nations Right to Survive (1983)
 The Outsiders (series, 1983)
 The Truth Game (1983)
 Burp! Pepsi V Coke in the Ice Cold War (1984)
 The Secret Country: The First Australians Fight Back (1985)
 Japan Behind the Mask (1987)
 The Last Dream (1988)
 "Heroes unsung"
 "Secrets"
 "Other People's Wars"
Cambodia: Year Ten (1989)
 Cambodia, the Betrayal (1990)
 War By Other Means (1992)
 Cambodia: Return to Year Zero (1993)
 Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy (1994)
 Flying the Flag, Arming the World (1994)
 Vietnam: The Last Battle (1995)
 Inside Burma: Land of Fear (1996)
 Breaking the Mirror – The Murdoch Effect (1997)
 Apartheid Did Not Die (1998)
 Welcome to Australia (1999)
 Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq (2000)
 The New Rulers of the World (2001)
 Palestine Is Still the Issue (2002)
 Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror (2003)
 Stealing a Nation (2004)
 The War on Democracy (2007)
 The War You Don't See (2010)
 Utopia (2013)
 The Coming War on China (2016)
 The Dirty War on the NHS (2019)

References

External links 

 
 
 Freedom Next Time: Filmmaker & Journalist John Pilger on Propaganda, the Press, Censorship and Resisting the American Empire, Democracy Now!, 7 August 2007
 John Pilger at Random House Australia

1939 births
Living people
Anti-Americanism
Australian documentary filmmakers
Australian expatriates in the United Kingdom
Australian freelance journalists
Australian investigative journalists
Australian people of English descent
Australian people of German descent
Australian people of Irish descent
Australian war correspondents
People educated at Sydney Boys High School
People from Sydney
War correspondents of the Nigerian Civil War
War correspondents of the Vietnam War
20th-century Australian journalists
21st-century Australian journalists
Daily Mirror people
Shawcross  is an English surname. Notable people with this surname include the following:

 Arthur Shawcross (1945–2008), American serial killer
 Christopher Nyholm Shawcross (1905–1973), English lawyer and politician; brother of Hartley Shawcross
 Conrad Shawcross (born 1977), English artist; son of William Shawcross
 David Shawcross (born 1941), former English footballer
 Hartley Shawcross, Baron Shawcross (1902–2003), English lawyer and politician
 Henry Douglas Shawcross (?–1913), English newspaper journalist and writer
 Neil Shawcross (born 1940), English artist
 Ryan Shawcross (born 1987), English footballer
 Val Shawcross, English Labour Party politician
 William Shawcross (born 1946), English writer, journalist and commentator, and charity administrator; son of Hartley Shawcross

English-language surnames William Hartley Hume Shawcross,  (born 28 May 1946, in Sussex, England) is a British writer and commentator, and a former Chairman of the Charity Commission for England and Wales.

Career
Shawcross was educated at St Aubyns Preparatory School, Rottingdean, Eton College and University College, Oxford. He attended Saint Martin's School of Art to study sculpture after leaving Oxford, and worked as a journalist for The Sunday Times. In 1973, as a Congressional Fellow of the American Political Science Association, Shawcross worked in Washington, D.C. on the staffs of Senator Edward M. Kennedy and Representative Les Aspin.

Shawcross writes and lectures on issues of international policy, geopolitics, Southeast Asia and refugees, as well as the British royal family.  He has written for a number of publications, including Time, Newsweek, International Herald Tribune, The Spectator, The Washington Post and Rolling Stone, in addition to writing numerous books.

His books include studies of recent international topics: the Prague Spring, the Vietnam War, the Iranian Revolution, the Iraq War, foreign assistance, humanitarian intervention, and the United Nations. Two of them, Sideshow and The Quality of Mercy, were included on The New York Times Book Reviews annual lists of the roughly 15 top books of the year for 1979 and 1984, respectively.

Since 2002, he has also written several books about the British royal family, including the official biography of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, published in 2009. He writes glowingly about the royal family, for example in an April 2020 piece about Queen Elizabeth II captioned "Thank God for the Queen": "One happy result of the horrible virus is that it has prompted the Queen to give us not one but two statements of her faith in this country and in God. Together they demonstrate vividly the exquisite, strong but light touch of our almost timeless monarch."

Shawcross was Chairman of ARTICLE 19, the international centre on censorship, from 1986 to 1996. He was a Member of the Council of the Disasters Emergency Committee from 1997 to 2002, and a board member of the International Crisis Group from 1995 to 2005.

Shawcross was a member of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees's Informal Advisory Group from 1995 to 2000. From 1997 to 2003, he was a member of the BBC World Service Advisory Council. In 2008, he became a Patron of the Wiener Library, and in 2011 he joined the board of the Anglo-Israel Association and was appointed to the board of the Henry Jackson Society.

Shawcross took up the Chairmanship of the Charity Commission for England and Wales on 1 October 2012, and was chairman until February 2018. His appointment to a second three-year term in 2015 was called "controversial" at the time, with some Labour Party members raising concerns about how it was handled. A January 2018 assessment of his tenure concluded that he "won praise from government but heavy criticism from within the charity sector."

In March 2019, he was named by the UK Foreign Secretary as Special Representative on UK victims of Qadhafi-sponsored IRA terrorism.  In March 2020, he delivered his report to the Foreign Secretary but, controversially, it was not made public.

In January 2021, the British government appointed Shawcross to head the review of Prevent, its anti-radicalisation programme. Amnesty International and 16 other human rights and “community” organisations announced they would boycott the review in protest at the appointment of William Shawcross as its chairman as they feared a “whitewash” because of his perceived anti-Muslim political positions.

He was appointed a Commissioner for Public Appointments in September 2021

Political views
Shawcross's politics have been described as having moved to the right over the course of his life.  His 1979 book on Cambodia, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia, resulted in Shawcross's being "lauded by liberal intellectuals and America's East Coast elite."  The U.S. left continues to praise Shawcross's earlier work; for example, in September 2019, Sideshow was cited at length in an opinion piece in The Intercept defending Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

As an initial indicator of how his views were shifting, in his 1990 introduction to the revised edition of his 1970 biography of Alexander Dubček, Shawcross wrote, "My own principal criticism [of his own 1970 book] is that I did not realize adequately that the experiment of humane Communism, or Socialism with a Human Face, was impossible, perhaps even a contradiction in terms.  . . .  The last twenty years have shown nothing so much as the catastrophic nature of Communism everywhere.  Wherever Communism has triumphed—I think particularly of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos—its consequences have been utterly disastrous."  In 1992, he wrote an "admiring" biography of Rupert Murdoch.  In 1994, about his 1970s journalism from Vietnam, in light of subsequent abuses by the governments of Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos, Shawcross wrote, "I think I concentrated too easily on the corruption and incompetence of the South Vietnamese and their American allies, was too ignorant of the inhuman Hanoi regime, and far too willing to believe that a victory by the Communists would provide a better future."  Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, he supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq.  His 2003 selection by Buckingham Palace to write the authorised biography of the Queen Mother was described as drawing "Shawcross into the bosom of the monarchy in a way rarely enjoyed by any layman", and the resulting book led to him being described as a "royalist writer."  In November 2018 he appeared to walk back his 1979 criticism of Henry Kissinger in Sideshow; in an argument that Kissinger should be allowed to speak at New York University, Shawcross noted "regret" for the "tone" of his prior criticism of Kissinger, which he minimised as "a policy disagreement over Cambodia", as opposed to "a moral crusade", and he concluded that Kissinger "is an extraordinary man who deserves respect."

Shawcross justified torture such as waterboarding at Guantánamo Bay.

In 2006, Shawcross warned of “a vast fifth column” of Muslims in Europe who “wish to destroy us”; we should not shy away from labelling the problem “Islamic fascism”.

In 2010, Shawcross described “Britain’s humiliation” by “mass immigration” and multiculturalism.

In November 2019 he took a position in support of Britain's exit from the European Union, on the basis of the E.U.'s problematic nature and approach, summarizing his position as "There are risks in proceeding with Brexit. But there are far greater risks in abandoning it."

The change over time in Shawcross's politics has been compared to the political shifts of his father Sir Hartley Shawcross, Paul Johnson, and Christopher Hitchens.  While noting speculation about other reasons for the shift, American journalist James Traub speculated that "it's more instructive to consider the possibility that Shawcross has remained true to his principles, but that a morally driven foreign policy looks very different after 9/11 than it did before."

Selected Books

Dubcek (1970, revised 1990)
Shawcross's first published book was a biography of Alexander Dubček, the leader of Czechoslovakia during the 1968 Prague Spring whose "socialism with a human face" briefly brought freedom into the Soviet Bloc.  According to the introduction to the 1990 edition, the book's genesis was in Shawcross's travels to Czechoslovakia as a 22-year-old recent college graduate in 1968–69, when he witnessed the Prague Spring and its aftermath.  In April 1969, as his first assignment, The Times sent Shawcross to Prague to report on Dubcek's deposition from power, which led him to decide "I would like to write a book about Dubcek", and to spend several months in Czechoslovakia researching it.  The book concluded (grandiosely) that Dubcek "was quite convinced that he had discovered in 1968 that for which philosophers and philanthropists have for centuries searched—the just society.  He may have been right."

The New York Times Book Review, in December 1971, named Dubcek among the year's "noteworthy titles", describing it in a June 1971 capsule review as: "Written less than a year after Alexander Dubcek's resignation, this biography of the Czech leader by a London journalist is an authoritative, first‐rate job."

Shawcross revised and reissued Dubcek in 1990 upon its subject's return to prominence and power during the Velvet Revolution, following two decades of rustication.

Crime and Compromise: Janos Kadar and the Politics of Hungary Since Revolution (1974)
Shawcross next wrote "a political study of Hungarian politician Janos Kadar" who, like Dubcek, "tried to negotiate with Communist dogmas to create more humane regimes." 
In it, Shawcross argued that, following Kadar's 1956 betrayal of Hungarian President Imre Nagy, "Kadar worked to reunite Hungary and succeeded in making it one of the most advanced countries in the Warsaw Pact in both economic and democratic terms."

In his mostly-favorable review in The Washington Post, Robert Dean, a CIA analyst, wrote that "Shawcross has succeeded admirably in conveying a sense of the atmosphere which has come to prevail in the wake of the reform, and how a cautious reformist ethos and economic success have in turn shaped cultural life, social policies, and the attitudes of youth." Dean thought that the book portrayed Kadar less well than it did Hungary: "One senses that Shawcross would have liked to have produced a biography of Kadar but was stymied by the incompleteness of information."

Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia (1979)
Sideshow is, at least in the United States, Shawcross's best known and most controversial book. To write it, Shawcross interviewed over 300 people and reviewed thousands of U.S Government documents, some classified Top Secret, obtained using the Freedom of Information Act.  Sideshow  exposed the secret bombing of Cambodia conducted by U.S. President Richard Nixon and his advisor Henry Kissinger, and argued that Nixon's and Kissinger's policy "led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the subsequent massacre of a third of Cambodia's population,"  According to one summary, Sideshow "denounces the systematic destruction of Cambodia by the Nixon Administration as a consequence of the Vietnam War and for the sake of a mere strategic design. The study stresses how the decision to attack a neutral country was a patent violation of the American Constitution. As in his previous two books, Shawcross combines an interest in international policies with a private focus on the personal relationship between Nixon and Kissinger. The study argues that the President and his Secretary of State reproduced in their international relations the same pattern of falsehood that characterized their own personal association."  The book's penultimate, conclusory sentence—"Cambodia was not a mistake; it was a crime"—is frequently quoted; whenever Shawcross's lifetime of writing is reduced to one sentence, that's it.

Sideshow received high praise and awards.  The Pulitzer Prize jury recommended a special citation for it in the 1980 awards based on its  "extraordinary qualities", although it was ineligible for the prize because its author was not American; the Pulitzer board declined that recommendation, however. The New York Times Book Review selected Sideshow among its top 17 "Editor's Choice" books of 1979, describing it as an "indictment" of Kissinger and Nixon.  It won the George Polk Award in Journalism's Book Award for 1979.  Columnist Anthony Lewis wrote in The New York Times, "I think it is the most interesting and the most important book on American foreign policy in many years. On more than foreign policy, really: on the American constitutional system. For it is a textbook — a gripping, factual textbook — on what can happen when the system is violated."  John Leonard of The New York Times wrote that in addition to being "meticulous[ly]" documented, "it has the sweep and the shadow of a spy novel as it portrays the surreal world of power, severed from morality, paranoid, feeding on itself."

Kissinger, who declined Shawcross's interview requests when the book was being written, vociferously denounced Sideshow, as did American conservatives.  In an angry letter to The Economist, Kissinger described the book as "obscene" and "absurd." Observing that both Sideshow and Kissinger's memoir, White House Years, were included among The New York Times Book Reviews best books of 1979, Herbert Mitgang asked each author about the other's volume.  Kissinger called Sideshow "a shoddy, outrageous work that is filled with inaccuracies," adding, "And you can quote me." Following the publication of Sideshow, Peter Rodman, an aide to  Kissinger, concluded that Shawcross's work was "a fraud" and "a compendium of errors, sleight of hand, and egregious selectivity", according to R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., who published Rodman's criticism in his conservative magazine, The American Spectator. Shawcross, in turn, described Rodman's critique as "a rotten piece of work" and wrote a response ("demonstrating the fallacies, if not the fraud, of almost all of Mr. Rodman's points"), which The American Spectator published, with Rodman's further reply.
 Shawcross included the entire exchange in later editions of Sideshow.  Tyrrell proclaimed Sideshow the "worst book of the year" in the Washington Post, as did his magazine. Shawcross later became friends with Tyrrell and Rodman.  In 2007, Shawcross and Rodman co-wrote a New York Times op-ed, referring to their past differences over Cambodia but jointly arguing against U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. When Rodman died in 2008, Shawcross was "much saddened", as he later wrote, and sent Tyrrell a note expressing his grief.  And in 2011, The American Spectator ceremonially revoked its 1979 "worst book of the year" award, on grounds that subsequently "Shawcross has become increasingly sound" in his views, at a London lunch among Shawcross and Tyrrell.

The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (1984)
The Quality of Mercy again addresses Cambodia, but as a critical assessment of the aid and relief efforts of governments, UN bodies, and international relief agencies following the suffering inflicted on that country by its Khmer Rouge government and by its neighbour, Vietnam.  Shawcross's book portrays, in the words of Colin Campbell's New York Times review, "a humanitarian outpouring that was shot through with misrepresentations, incompetence, callousness and shirking of principle."  The book finds positives and negatives of each player, but overall, the United States, in particular the U.S. Embassy in Thailand and its Ambassador, Morton Abramowitz, "comes out looking pretty good. Vietnam appears to have been the main obstacle to the Cambodians' relief."

The Quality of Mercy has received less attention than some of Shawcross's other books, but is highly regarded by some critics, while also receiving negative criticism from others. The historian and Cambodia expert Ben Kiernan, who was "Shawcross's interpreter for several weeks" when he was researching the book, wrote a long critical essay. The Australian journalist John Pilger—who is criticised in The Quality of Mercy, and the two men have a continuing history of public disagreements—reportedly attacked Shawcross in a New Statesman review as a "born-again cold warrior." But Ed Vulliamy, in The Guardian, called it "Shawcross's bravest, most complicated and astute work", commenting that "the little-known Quality of Mercy examined and challenged deficiencies in the international aid programme to Cambodia, which lavished assistance on the remnants of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, perpetuating the violence." The editors of The New York Times Book Review included it among their fifteen "Editor's Choice" books, as the best books of 1984.  Colin Campbell, in The New York Times, concluded, "This is a startling book and most of it is very persuasive."  He stated that on most counts, "Mr. Shawcross's subtlety and lack of sanctimony are remarkable."  He also considers it "noteworthy that a journalist who in the past attacked American policy so fiercely has, in this book, portrayed at least the United States Embassy in Bangkok as one of the best informed and most decently efficient actors in the refugee drama."  Human rights activist Aryeh Neier, reviewing The Quality of Mercy in The New York Times Book Review, similarly stated that "a reader cannot help but be impressed by his apparent fairness" and called it "a splendid book that will have a profound impact."  He concluded that The Quality of Mercy "may well be the best account we have of the politics of international charity."

The Quality of Mercy was republished in 1985 with an additional final chapter, "Report from Ethiopia—May 1985", describing the then-ongoing relief effort in response to the Ethiopian famine in light of the Cambodian experience.  Shawcross drew a number of lamentable parallels, for example that "in Ethiopia as well as Cambodia, humanitarian aid was being used by a Communist regime to underwrite war." The essay concluded, "In neither Cambodia nor Ethiopia did the ordinary people for whom the aid was delivered benefit from it to the extent which had been intended and which they deserved.  Instead aid was being used to prolong rather than to end the disaster."

The Shah's Last Ride (1988)
This book's US subtitle was "The Fate of an Ally;" its 1989 UK subtitle was "The Story of the Exile, Misadventures and Death of the Emperor."  The Shah's Last Ride is, in the words of its prologue, "the story of a journey, the Shah's forlorn journey into exile and death, and of various elements of his rule—his relations with the British and Americans, his secret police, SAVAK, the CIA, oil, the arms trade. The tale of the fall and exile of the Shah is one which illustrates the nature of relationship between states and leaders.  It is a story of loyalty and convenience."  It retraces the odyssey of the last Shah of Iran after being driven into exile by the Iranian Revolution, first to Egypt, and then in succession to Morocco, the Bahamas, Mexico, the United States, Panama, and finally back to Egypt, where he died.  Shawcross traces his own interest in Iran to the 1960s: "Ardeshir Zahedi, the Shah's Ambassador to London, became a firm friend of my family then, and has remained so since."  As a further family connection, Shawcross's father "was once President of the Iran Society in Britain."

Many reviewers praised The Shah's Last Ride for the high quality of its narrative and storytelling, with praise such as "a compelling, evenhanded, artful book, more like a novel than a history;"  Much of what criticism the book received arose from its narrow focus.  One Middle East expert, Daniel Pipes, wrote that Shawcross "has done his best to eke out the details of this sad, small tale. But this reader concludes that he has pretty much wasted his time, and Shawcross himself seems to know it."  Another, Zalmay Khalilzad (later Republican-appointed U.S. Ambassador to, successively, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United Nations), criticised the book for not highlighting the Carter administration's failures in its dealings with the Shah.  A third Middle East expert, Fouad Ajami, criticised Shawcross for telling the Shah's story as a sympathetic (or at least pathetic) tale of "the woes of an ailing, old man, dying of cancer" rather than one of an oppressive dictator and his long, brutal reign. Ajami further criticised Shawcross's choice of sources from the Shah's circle, and his credulous attitude toward them. In a critique that may have foreshadowed Shawcross's later writing about another royal family, Ajami posited that Shawcross's sources, including the Shah's twin sister, Princess Ashraf, were able to work their royal charms to disarm his reportorial skepticism.

Murdoch (1992)
In a change from international affairs, Shawcross next wrote a biography of Rupert Murdoch.  Its 1992 UK title was Rupert Murdoch: Ringmaster of the Information Circus; it was published in the US in 1993 as Murdoch: The Making of a Media Empire. New York Times reviewer Herbert Mitgang commented there was a "red flag" present: Shawcross had let Murdoch read a draft before publication, violating "an unwritten rule for the most esteemed American biographers." The pundit Andrew Sullivan, in The New York Times Book Review, described Murdoch as "what a Murdoch paper would surely call a suck-up."

Despite the issues raised, Mitgang's review was generally positive, while Sullivan wrote that Shawcross, albeit "unwittingly", "achieved something very valuable", in "expos[ing] the banality of a highly sophisticated and successful businessman", and "plac[ing] the real issue behind the story of Mr. Murdoch's career—the nature of a democratic culture—away from the petty demonization of an entrepreneur and on the larger forces that have determined his fate." The Economist made a similar point in a more straightforward way: "Although this is a fine, superbly-researched and vivid book on the Murdoch enigma, the enigma remains."

The 1992 publication of Murdoch raised a brief flurry in the literary world. The New Yorker, then edited by Tina Brown, published a short Talk of the Town piece by Francis Wheen, wondering how "could Willie Shawcross, who made his name in the seventies with Sideshow, an indignant expose of Henry Kissinger's destruction of Cambodia, become Murdoch's hagiographer?" David Cornwall, better known by his nom de plume John le Carré, wrote a responsive letter in defense of Shawcross, calling Wheen's essay "one of the ugliest pieces of partisan journalism that I have witnessed in a long life of writing." Brown said she would only publish Cornwall's letter if he cut it to one paragraph, he released it to the press instead, and the contretemps drew much media attention.

Deliver Us From Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords, and a World of Endless Conflict (2000)
Deliver Us From Evil overviews the work of the United Nations during the 1990s to ameliorate situations in many of the world's trouble spots of that decade, largely as seen through the eyes of Kofi Annan, whom Shawcross accompanied on his travels.

Reviews were mixed to negative.  Some meted out limited praise: "highly readable, if at times repetitive and scattershot," "admirably fair in his judgments," and "thoughtful but inconclusive" as well as "a useful reality check for all those well-meaning people who clamor for the United Nations to do something."

At the most negative end of the spectrum, a capsule review in The New Yorker concluded: "Shawcross's reporting here is often secondhand; his prose is dreary; and his thinking (which frequently takes refuge in anti-Americanism) is lazy. The result is an insult to the gravity of the issues he purports to address, and—worse—to the anguish of the world's politically endangered peoples."  Shawcross's optimistic attitude "as a booster for the UN" was criticised as unwarranted by reviewers from left and right, with all arguing the UN has a long record of failures. His identifying Cambodia as a UN success story drew particular quibbles, while several found fault with the book's analytical conclusions (or, more precisely, its lack thereof).

Robert Kagan, reviewing it for Commentary, labelled Deliver Us From Evil "little more than an exercise in liberal handwringing."

The more balanced reviewers, witness New Zealand diplomat Terence O'Brien who was on the ground at UN Headquarters for large parts of Shawcross' tale during the ascendancy of Bill Clinton, paint it as excellent first-hand history and feel that it "is unlikely soon to be bettered", terming his book sharp and comprehensive. "Shawcross enjoys a reputation as a chronicler of the blemishes in modern international behaviour... The response of the so-called international community to the continuing rash of internal conflict is subjected to clinical appraisal" might have triggered some reviewers' esprit de corps so readers are well-advised to read and judge for themselves.

Allies (2003)
Like other Shawcross books, Allies was published under two different subtitles, in a 2003 hardback as "The U.S., Britain, and Europe in the Aftermath of the Iraq War", and in a 2005 paperback as "Why the West Had to Remove Saddam."  The book has been described as a polemic, rather than a work of journalism, with some commentators observing that, unlike other books by Shawcross, it has no footnotes. One critic wrote of Shawcross as "a vocal supporter of President George W. Bush's War on Terror and praises Tony Blair's interventionist policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, writing off criticism of the two leaders as hysterical."

Regarding Shawcross's position in Allies compared to his prior positions, especially in Sideshow, the reviewer in The New York Times asked "What's going on here?" while the conservative U.S. journals The National Review and The American Spectator were surprised and laudatory.  The National Review wrote, "Shawcross has written an outstanding justification of the Anglo-American effort to drive Saddam Hussein from power. It is an exemplary piece of moral clarity and fine writing."

Justice and the Enemy: Nuremberg, 9/11, and the Trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (2011)
Justice and the Enemy considered the George W. Bush administration's post-9/11 military commissions in light of the Nuremberg trials.  In it, according to  the law professor and former U.S. Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith, Shawcross "provides a deeply sympathetic account of how" the Bush administration resolved "difficult choices and trade-offs in deciding how to bring justice to the perpetrators of 9/11."

The Economists review of Justice and the Enemy found the book lacked "original research on al-Qaeda", its Nuremberg comparisons unhelpful, and its author "keener to score points against all those who roundly condemn President George Bush's strategy" than to draw useful conclusions. The Independent described it as a "shameless justification of the policies of the Bush administration" in which "justice is a surreal concept totally subordinate to the "security" of the US".

Private life and honours
Shawcross's father was the politician, lawyer, Chief British Prosecutor at Nuremberg and life peer Hartley Shawcross. His mother was Joan Winifred Mather, who died in a riding accident on the Sussex Downs in 1974.

In 1970, he married the writer and art critic Marina Warner, and their son, Conrad, is an artist. The marriage ended in divorce in 1980.

Shawcross married Michal Levin in 1981. Their daughter, Eleanor, was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers to George Osborne from 2008. She had previously worked on Boris Johnson's mayoral campaign. Eleanor is married to Simon Wolfson, Baron Wolfson, who is the son of David Wolfson, Baron Wolfson of Sunningdale, Conservative life peers and the current and former Next chairman.

Shawcross married his third wife, Olga Polizzi, in 1993.  His stepdaughter is the hotelier and television presenter Alex Polizzi.

He has lifelong ties to Cornwall where he is a keen campaigner in the preservation and protection of local Conservation Areas. His campaign succeeded in obtaining Grade II listing for St Mawes's historic and endangered sea wall.

He was appointed Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (CVO) in the 2011 New Year Honours.

Publications
Dubcek: Dubcek and Czechoslovakia 1918–1968 (1970, revised ed. 1990)
Watergate: The Full Inside Story (co-author, 1973)
Crime and Compromise: Janos Kadar and the Politics of Hungary since Revolution (1974)
Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia (1979), New York Times Editor's Choice Book of the Year, awarded a George Polk Award
The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (1984), New York Times Editor's Choice Book of the Year, awarded the Freedom From Hunger Media Award
The Shah's Last Ride (1988)
Kowtow!: A Plea on Behalf of Hong Kong (1989)
Murdoch: The Making of a Media Empire (also published as Rupert Murdoch: Ringmaster of the Information Circus) (1992)
Cambodia's New Deal (1994)
Deliver us from Evil: Warlords, Peacekeepers and a World of Endless Conflict (2000)
Queen and Country: The Fifty-Year Reign of Elizabeth II (2002)
Allies (2003)
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother: The Official Biography (2009)
Justice and the Enemy: Nuremberg, 9/11, and the Trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (2011)
Counting One's Blessings: The Selected Letters of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (2012) (editor) 
The Servant Queen and the King She Serves (2016)

References

External links
William Shawcross on GOV.UK
William Shawcross on The Guardian

1946 births
Living people
British people of English descent
People educated at St. Aubyns School
People educated at Eton College
Alumni of University College, Oxford
Commanders of the Royal Victorian Order
English biographers
British biographers
20th-century biographers
21st-century biographers
British male journalists
Campaign Against Psychiatric Abuse
William Shawcross
Male biographers
Forte family
Sons of life peers