John Pilger has been in the rare position of having witnessed many of the major world upheavals of the past twenty years. More important, he has demonstrated his skill at conveying the atmosphere, and analyzing the nature, of both the great upheavals and domestic tragedies he has encountered as a journalist and film-maker. In Heroes, a book as compelling as it is revealing and uncompromising, he brings together the episodes for which his journalism is renowned. It is a vivid, engrossing and sometimes blackly amusing personal story and also a tribute to the many ordinary people he has witnessed coping with their lives in difficult and often brutal conditions. These are the 'heroes' of John Pilger's narrative. They are the Irish laboring generation f his great-great-great grandfather, who was transported in irons to Australia for 'uttering unlawful oaths', and the London scullery servant he met in a 'female factory' in Sydney where she hd been sent for life. They are the modern poor of Great Britain, whose hopes of a better life have been fostered, for political expediency, and then betrayed.
They are the victims of conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia, Africa, India, the Middle East and Central America; and those denied basic civil liberties in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. By turns moving, ironic and angry, John Pilger's always compassionate book maintains a tight grip on the political significance of the events he describes. He identifies some of the silences of imperial history - the largely untold story of the Aborigines, for example. He shows how great powers declare small nations 'expendable' and also how the supposedly impartial language of the media, especial television, often reflects the propaganda of the dominant power. In Cambodia, whose suffering he brought to the attention of the world in 1979, he describes how external forces are today working to restore Pol Pot to power in another guise. John Pilger's research uncovers secrets kept, lies told and unpalatable facts suppressed. His four-year campaign on behalf of a forgotten group of the thalidomide children tells much about established power when it is rabged against the helpless victims of such a disaster.
Above all, in Heroes he celebrates the human strengths of those who, far from succumbing to bitterness and despair, have still found room for generosity and humour. By recounting their triumphs, John Pilger demonstrates his conviction that fighting back against the injustices of war or tyranny or poverty is indeed possible.
- ISBN10 0330297570
- ISBN13 9780330297578
- Publish Date 12 June 1987 (first published 29 May 1986)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 8 April 1992
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Pan Macmillan
- Imprint Pan Books
- Edition New edition
- Format Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
- Pages 608
- Language English