"was made before news broke of the upheavals in Xinjiang, along with reports that the Uygur minority was being persecuted. Typically, Pilger’s reaction was to avoid instantly pointing a finger at Beijing, and to look for an alternative narrative... The major broadcasters in China competed to acquire rights to show the film ... All I had to do, they said, was remove the Tiananmen Square sequence. Interestingly, the references to dissidents and other critical sections could stay. I said ‘no’ to any changes, and there were no deals. Within a week, appeared on the internet with Chinese subtitles – including the Tiananmen Square sequence. Then a friend called from Shanghai to say he had bought a DVD of the film in his local shop – unedited and openly on sale."

“The impact of the human tragedies I've reported on is that, more often than not, I'll be angry. I want to know why is this child dying? These are not acts of God; they're results of respectable politicians' decisions.”

“It’s difficult to separate the Uygurs from the barrage of anti-China denunciations coming from the US, most of which have a script familiar to those who follow America’s ‘soft’ campaigns against its strategic enemies... The leading US media are invariably the cipher. ‘In China, every day is Kristallnacht’, declared The Washington Post , likening China’s treatment of the Uygurs to that of the Nazi genocide of the Jews.... That’s not untypical; it reads as if it has been written by the US Agency for International Development or the National Endowment for Democracy, which fills in for the CIA. No one doubts the ruthless reaction of Beijing to separatists, but as a reporter, I would like to see for myself. I suggest in The Dirty War on the NHSwe look beyond this virus and ask how our current state of fear and its mass obedience will be exploit­ed in future. Will the workers ‘stood down’ ever see their jobs again? Will artificial intelligence consume freedoms that have been suspended? As Edward Snowden says, the disease of mass surveillance will outlast this pandemic. Will Julian Assange , persecuted for the crime of truthful journalism, survive?”

“I love irony in pictures. There's one photograph from Vietnam by Philip Jones Griffiths that shows a very large GI having his pocket picked by a tiny Vietnamese woman. It told the whole story of the clash of two cultures and how the invader could never win.”

“The major western democracies are moving towards corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies — socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor — and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war. This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food.”

“His trademark has always been to sidestep the accepted version of the facts, a modus operandi that served him well during the Vietnam war, in the apocalyptic post-Pol Pot Cambodia, the killing fields of East Timor and countless other hotspots... becoming an octogenari­an hasn’t mellowed him in the least.”

“It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and the myths that surround it.”