Daily Inspiration Quote by John Pilger

Pilger is doing something sly here: he grants the old imperialists their favorite alibi, then yanks it away from their heirs. By calling nineteenth-century European empire-builders people who "believed they were literally on a mission", he’s not praising them so much as diagnosing the mechanism that made conquest socially sustainable. The "mission" wasn’t just propaganda; it was a moral technology. It let extraction dress up as duty, violence as administration, plunder as "civilization". Pilger knows that self-myth matters: an empire that thinks it’s benevolent can recruit clerks, soldiers, and voters with cleaner hands.

Then comes the pivot: today’s imperialists, he argues, can’t even pretend. "Public service" is the missing mask. In Pilger’s telling, contemporary power projects are less about national destiny or civilizing rhetoric and more about naked economic predation: deregulated, outsourced, plausibly deniable. Calling them "pirates" is calibrated insult. Pirates don’t build institutions; they raid. They don’t claim a future; they take the present and disappear. It’s also a way of collapsing respectability: boardrooms and policy think tanks get rhetorically shoved onto the same moral plane as armed robbery.

The context is Pilger’s lifelong critique of Anglo-American interventionism and corporate-state entanglement, especially in the post-Cold War era: wars sold as humanitarianism, markets opened at gunpoint, media narratives laundering coercion into "security". His point isn’t that empire used to be kinder. It’s that it used to be better at lying - and the lie itself once performed important political work.