Rebel Journalism: The Writings of Wilfred Burchett
Edited by George Burchett and Nick Shimmin
Cambridge University Press, 2007
314 pages,
$37.95 (* see special offer below)
Why should we still be interested in Wilfred Burchett? Rebel Journalism is a wide-ranging selection of the writings of the controversial Australian journalist and war correspondent, who also published more than 30 books before his death in 1983.
This volume includes extracts from most of these, taking the reader from Hiroshima through Eastern Europe, Korea, Russia, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, China and southern Africa.
Burchett has been often and loudly condemned as a communist, fellow-traveller and even traitor, especially in Australia. However he had an international reputation, launched by his courageous solo trip to Hiroshima shortly after the atomic bombing, where he was the first to report the horrendous crime that had occurred there. This book appropriately begins with Burchett's now famous "Warning to the World" about the "Atomic Plague". It still makes for outstanding reportage and chilling reading, especially now that so many regimes are nuclear-armed.
The editors call the book "a reader in Cold War journalism" and "a contribution to the study of journalism". Herein lies the anthology's enduring interest. In this age of "embedded" journalists, full spectrum dominance of the mass media by powerful corporations, and reporting that all too often seems to be mere channelling of government propaganda, it is inspiring to read the work of someone who dared to investigate for himself, often "from the other side" of conflicts, to see with his own eyes and judge accordingly. How much fearless journalism is there today?
Not that Burchett was always right. Along with other Western commentators, he initially welcomed the coming to power of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in 1975. But when he was finally able to get back into Cambodia and see for himself what the KR had done to their own people, he denounced the whole Angkar regime in a book written in 1981.
And no doubt charmed and flattered by the reception he was given by leaders like Ho Chi Minh and Sihanouk, he uncritically repeated official party propaganda about land reform in Vietnam or, in 1976, "the cleansing winds of the Cultural Revolution" in China. The editors, to their credit, make no bones about that.
"When he saw injustice and hardship, he criticised those he believed responsible for it", writes co-editor Nick Shimmin. In spite of the horrors he witnessed first-hand around the world, he never renounced his ideals.
In a recent radio interview, his son George Burchett said that Wilfred had "an incredibly optimistic belief in the goodness of man." This no doubt explains what attracted him initially to the Soviet bloc countries, which seemed to offer a real alternative to capitalism, imperialism and war-mongering.
When he later lost his illusions about the "People's Democracies", as he had titled a 1951 book, he blamed the failures on the Stalinist bureaucrats, his belief in the people's desire for socialism still unshaken.
If the US military had been offended by Burchett's reporting of the after-effects of the Hiroshima bomb, they were outraged in 1953 when he published This Monstrous War, where he investigated and confirmed claims by the North Korean government that the US had carried out germ warfare against its people. Burchett's observations as he travelled around North Korea seem to provide conclusive evidence of the claim that the US military had dropped plague-infected insects on the population.
From 1955 onwards, when he moved his base to Hanoi to observe the implementation of the Geneva accords, Burchett produced some of his best books, as he followed the criminal progression of US imperialism in South-East Asia.
Indochina, as it was then called, held a special fascination for him, sometimes bringing out a penchant for purple prose. On a trip to colonial Saigon he described it as "a seething cauldron in which hissed and bubbled a witches' brew of rival French and American imperialisms spiced with feudal warlordism and fascist despotism".
In November 1963, Burchett took on his greatest journalistic challenge since Hiroshima when he spent six months in southern Vietnam with Viet Cong guerrillas, staying in their fortified hamlets and even travelling underground in their network of narrow tunnels.
We find many striking turns of phrase in this series of books. Referring to US President Kennedy's massive increase in funding for the war in Vietnam, he writes: "No peasants anywhere in the world had so many dollars per capita lavished on their extermination."
Certainly, he was not immune from the temptation to propagandise on behalf of the Vietnamese patriots. In his interview with General Giap in 1964, published by Hanoi Foreign Languages Publishing House, Burchett simply poses Dorothy Dix questions to allow Giap to wage verbal war on the US enemy.
With Burchett's last book, Shadow of Hiroshima, published in 1983, his reporting life came full circle. "Hiroshima defined Wilfred", said his son and editor George in a recent radio interview. In the book he describes a Reagan White House "occupied by a regime which exults in its enthusiasm to make nuclear war 'winnable' and its willingness to 'go to the brink' over any threatened piece of imperial real estate".
Not because the people voted for it, he adds. "No one in a 'Western democracy' has, in fact, ever voted on the Bomb or its potential use." NATO, he added, was spending billions "to escalate the new cold war. The all-powerful 'Ministries of Truth' are synchronising the noise-making to drown out the voices from Greenham Common, Central Park and Hiroshima."
While the threat of all-out war increases, Burchett goes on, "we are tempted to give way to despair and helplessness. Yet at times like these — most of all — we must take courage and example from the hibakusha." These were the second and third-generation victims of atomic radiation who "fought back, becoming the most stalwart and militant of peaceniks. Through them and their ongoing struggle, the urgency of Hiroshima is transmitted to all of us."
Rebel Journalism is a readable and useful handbook of some of the best writing of Wilfred Burchett in the struggle for socialism and human dignity.
[*Cambridge University Press is offering a 40% online discount to 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly readers on Rebel Journalism. Go to . At checkout, input promotion code GREENLEFT to get the discount.]