John Pilger, the author, war correspondent and film maker, today launched an excoriating attack on defeated US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

In an interview on RT UK’s Going Underground the veteran of sixty films from conflicts around the world gave an extremely frank assessment of the reasons behind Donald Trump’s “shock victory” in Tuesday’s ballot.

Zoning in on the USA’s record of military intervention, continued by Clinton under the Obama administration, as a reason for Trump’s victory, Pilger said:

“[Hillary] is clearly the embodiment of a corrupt system: the embodiment of a very dangerous, warmongering system that has declared the world a place where it can go to war wherever it likes; that it can bomb agricultural communities in Yemen where half the children are malnourished…”

He continued: “Most of humanity regards that kind of behaviour, from the allegedly most powerful country in the world, as abhorrent. And she has been the embodiment of that.”

However, he stopped short of speculating that Trump’s foreign policy record would be any different, questioning the billionaire businessman’s stance as the ‘anti-establishment’ candidate:

“Now, whether Trump will be is an open question; he says he’s anti-establishment, but of course he’ll come with his own ‘establishment’: he’s anti their establishment, I don’t believe for a moment that he’s anti the wider establishment of the United States – indeed he’s a product of it.”

Pilger also criticised America’s role in the Middle East, Russia and China, and the intrinsic challenges to democracy posed by the country’s close ties which Saudi Arabia.

Pilger was talking ahead of the release of his 60th film The Coming War on China, which also explores US arms-building and war planning, this time in the Pacific, and hits cinemas next month.