Politics & Power Quote by John Pilger

Pilger’s line is doing what his best polemics always do: collapsing diplomatic euphemism into a blunt, accusatory shorthand. By calling Israel “the representative of the United States,” he’s not just alleging influence; he’s reframing the relationship as a hierarchy, where sovereignty becomes branding and policy becomes franchise. The “absolutely convinced” opener matters: it preempts the usual hedging around alliances and “shared values,” daring the reader to treat this as a structural truth, not a debatable interpretation.

The key move is linguistic. “They use the same language” isn’t a trivial observation about talking points; it’s a claim about how power reproduces itself through vocabulary. Security, terrorism, deterrence, stability, self-defense: these aren’t neutral descriptors in Pilger’s world, they’re pre-written permissions. If two governments narrate the region with the same script, he implies, it’s because one script is being authored (or at least enforced) by the same strategic imagination. The subtext is that discourse is policy’s advance team: once you accept the lexicon, you’ve already accepted the boundaries of the possible.

Contextually, Pilger is speaking from a long anti-imperial tradition in Anglo-American journalism, one sharpened by the post-9/11 era and the Iraq War’s public-relations machinery. His target isn’t merely Israel’s actions, but the Western habit of outsourcing messy regional realities into a tidy “ally” story. The provocation is designed to make readers hear familiar phrases as instruments, not explanations.