Freemantle Prison

‘Since Rudd’s apology, Aboriginal poverty indicators have gone backwards. His “Closing the Gap” programme is a grim joke, having produced not a single new housing project.

An undeclared agenda comes straight from Australia’s colonial past: a land-grab combined with an almost prurient need to control, harass and blame a people who have refused to die off, whose genius is their understanding of an ancient land that still perplexes and threatens white authority. Whenever Canberra’s politicians want to look “tough”, they give the Aborigines a good kicking: it is a ritual as sacred as Don Bradman worship or Anzac Day.

The indigenous affairs minister, Jenny Macklin, has decreed that unless certain communities hand over their precious freehold leases, they will be denied basic services. The Northern Territory contains abundant mineral wealth, such as uranium, and has long been eyed by multinationals as a lucrative radioactive waste dump. The blacks are in the way, yet again: so it is time for the usual feigned innocence. Rudd has said his government “doesn’t have a clear idea of what’s happening on the ground” in Aboriginal Australia. What? The learned studies pour forth as if the sorcerer’s apprentice is loose.

One example: the rate of incarceration of black Australians is five times that of black South Africans during apartheid. Western Australia imprisons Aboriginal men at eight times the apartheid figure, an Aussie world record.

On 16 November, a 12-year-old Aboriginal boy appeared in court charged with receiving a Freddo Frog chocolate bar from a friend who had allegedly taken it from a supermarket. Only the international headlines forced the police to drop the case. Two-thirds of Aboriginal children who have contact with the police are jailed; two-thirds of white children are cautioned. A young Aboriginal man was jailed for a year for stealing £12 worth of biscuits and soft drink’.

- John Pilger, ‘Return to a secret country’. New Statesman 26 November 2009.

It seems that I can’t put away my sackcloth and ashes just yet …

 John Pilger’s inspirational Sydney Peace Prize Lecture

Thank you all for coming tonight, and my thanks to the City of Sydney and especially to the Sydney Peace Foundation for awarding me the Peace Prize. It’s an honour I cherish, because it comes from where I come from.

I am a seventh generation Australian. My great-great grandfather landed not far from here, on November 8th, 1821. He wore leg irons, each weighing four pounds. His name was Francis McCarty. He was an Irishman, convicted of the crime of insurrection and “uttering unlawful oaths”.  In October of the same year, an 18 year old girl called Mary Palmer stood in the dock at Middlesex Gaol and was sentenced to be transported to New South Wales for the term of her natural life. Her crime was stealing in order to live. Only the fact that she was pregnant saved her from the gallows. She was my great-great grandmother. She was sent from the ship to the Female Factory at Parramatta, a notorious prison where every third Monday, male convicts were brought for a “courting day” — a rather desperate measure of social engineering. Mary and Francis met that way and were married on October 21^st, 1823. 

Growing up in Sydney, I knew nothing about this. My mother’s eight siblings used the word “stock” a great deal. You either came from “good stock” or “bad stock”. It was unmentionable that we came from bad stock – that we had what was called “the stain”.

One Christmas Day, with all of her family assembled, my mother broached the subject of our criminal origins, and one of my aunts almost swallowed her teeth. “Leave them dead and buried, Elsie!” she said. And we did – until many years later and my own research in Dublin and London led to a television film that revealed the full horror of our “bad stock”.  There was outrage. “Your son,” my aunt Vera wrote to Elsie, “is no better than a damn communist”. She promised never to speak to us again.

The Australian silence has unique features. 

Growing up, I would make illicit trips to La Perouse and stand on the sandhills and look at people who were said to have died off.  I would gape at the children of my age, who were said to be dirty, and feckless.  At high school, I read a text book by the celebrated historian, Russel Ward, who wrote:  “We are civilized today and they are not.” “They”, of course, were the Aboriginal people.

My real Australian education began at the end of the 1960s when Charlie Perkins and his mother, Hetti, took me to the Aboriginal compound at Jay Creek in the Northern Territory. We had to smash down the gate to get in.

The shock at what I saw is unforgettable. The poverty. The sickness. The despair. The quiet anger. I began to recognise and understand the Australian silence.

Tonight, I would like to talk about this silence: about how it affects our national life, the way we see the world, and the way we are manipulated by great power which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war – against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else’s country. 

Last July, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said this, and I quote: “It’s important for us all to remember here in Australia that Afghanistan has been a training ground for terrorists worldwide, a training ground also for terrorists in South-East-Asia, reminding us of the reasons that we are in the field of combat and reaffirming our resolve to remain committed to that cause.”

There is no truth in this statement. It is the equivalent of his predecessor John Howard’s lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Shortly before Kevin Rudd made that statement, American planes bombed a wedding party in Afghanistan. At least sixty people were blown to bits, including the bride and groom and many children. That’s the fifth wedding party attacked, in our name.

The prime minister was standing outside a church on a Sunday morning when he made his statement. No reporter challenged him. No one said the war was a fraud: that it began as an American vendetta following 9/11, in which not a single Afghan was involved.  No one put it to Kevin Rudd that our perceived enemy in Afghanistan were introverted tribesmen who had no quarrel with Australia and didn’t give a damn about south-east Asia and just wanted the foreign soldiers out of their country. Above all, no one said: “Prime Minister, There is no war on terror. It’s a hoax. But there is a war of terror waged by governments, including the Australian government, in our name.” That wedding party, Prime Minister, was blown to bits by one the latest smart weapons, such as the Hellfire bomb that sucks the air out of the lungs. In our name.

During the first world war, the British prime minister David Lloyd George confided to the editor of the Manchester Guardian: “If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and they can’t know.”

What has changed? Quite a lot actually. As people have become more aware, propaganda has become more sophisticated.

One of the founders of modern propaganda was Edward Bernays, an American  who believed that people in free societies could be lied to and regimented without them realising. He invented a euphemism for propaganda — “public relations”, or PR. “What matters,” he said, “is the illusion.”  Like Kevin Rudd’s stage-managed press conferences outside his church, what matters is the illusion.  The symbols of Anzac are constantly manipulated in this way. Marches. Medals. Flags. The pain of a fallen soldier’s family.  Serving in the military, says the prime minister, is Australia’s highest calling.  The squalor of war, the killing of civilians has no reference. What matters is the illusion.

The aim is to ensure our silent complicity in a war of terror and in a massive increase in Australia’s military arsenal. Long range cruise missiles are to be targeted at our neighbours. The Rudd government and the Pentagon have launched a competition to build military robots which, it is said, will do the “army’s dirty work” in “urban combat zones”. What urban combat zones? What dirty work?

Silence.

 “I confess,” wrote Lord Curzon, viceroy of India, over a century ago, “that countries are pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world.”  We Australians have been in the service of the Great Game for a very long time. Do the young people who wrap themselves in the flag at Gallipoli every April understand that only the lies have changed – that sanctifying blood sacrifice in colonial invasions is meant to prepare us for the next one??

When Prime Minister Robert Menzies sent Australian soldiers to Vietnam in the 1960s, he described them as a ‘training team’, requested by a beleaguered government in Saigon. It was a lie. A senior official of the Department of External affairs wrote this secret truth: “Although we have stressed the fact publicly that our assistance was given in response to an invitation by the government of South Vietnam, our offer was in fact made following a request from the United States government.”

Two versions. One for us, one for them. 

Menzies spoke incessantly about “the downward thrust of Chinese communism”. What has changed? Outside the church, Kevin Rudd said we were in Afghanistan to stop  another downward thrust. Both were lies.

During the Vietnam war, the Department of Foreign Affairs made a rare complaint to Washington. They complained that the British knew more about America’s objectives than its committed Australian ally. An assistant secretary of state replied.  “We have to inform the British to keep them on side,” he said. “You are with us, come what may.”

How many more wars are we to be suckered into before we break our silence?

How many more distractions must we, as a people, endure before we begin the job of righting the wrongs in our own country?

 “It’s time we sang from the world’s rooftops,” said Kevin Rudd in opposition, “[that] despite Iraq, America is an overwhelming force for good in the world [and] I look forward to working with the great American democracy, the arsenal of freedom …”.

Since the second world war, the arsenal of freedom has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, and crushed some 30 liberation movements. Millions of people all over the world have been driven out of their homes and subjected to crippling embargos. Bombing is as American as apple pie.

In his acceptance of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter asked this question: “Why is the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought of Stalinist Russia well known in the West while American criminal actions never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it never happened. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”

In Australia, we are trained to respect this censorship by omission. An invasion is not an invasion if “we” do it. Terror is not terror if “we” do it.    A crime is not a crime if “we” commit it.  It didn’t happen. Even while it was happening it didn’t happen. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.

In the arsenal of freedom we have two categories of victims. The innocent people killed in the Twin Towers were worthy victims. The innocent people killed by Nato bombers in Afghanistan are unworthy victims. Israelis are worthy. Palestinians are unworthy.  It gets complicated. Kurds who rose against Saddam Hussein were worthy. But Kurds who rise against the Turkish regime are unworthy.  Turkey is a member of Nato. They’re in the arsenal of freedom.

The Rudd government justifies its proposals to spend billions on weapons by referring to what the Pentagon calls an “arc of instability” that stretches across the world. Our enemies are apparently everywhere — from China to the Horn of Africa.  In fact, an arc of instability does indeed stretch across the world and is maintained by the United States. The US Air Force calls this “full spectrum dominance”. More than 800 American bases are ready for war.

These bases protect a system that allows one per cent of humanity to control 40 per cent of wealth: a system that bails out just one bank with $180 billion – that’s enough to eliminate malnutrition in the world, and provide education for every child, and water and sanitation for all, and to reverse the spread of malaria. On September 11^th, 2001, the United Nations reported that on that day 36,615 children had died from poverty. But that was not news.

Journalists and politicians like to say the world changed as a result of the September 11^th attacks. In fact, for those countries under attack by the arsenal of freedom, nothing has changed. What has changed is not news.

According to the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a military coup has taken place in the United States, with the Pentagon now ascendant in every aspect of foreign policy.

It doesn’t matter who is president – George Bush or Barack Obama. Indeed, Obama has stepped up Bush’s wars and started his own war in Pakistan. Like Bush, he is threatening Iran, a country Hillary Clinton said she was prepared to “annihilate”.  Iran’s crime is its independence. Having thrown out America’s favourite dictator, the Shah, Iran is the only resource-rich Muslim country beyond American control. It doesn’t occupy anyone else’s land and hasn’t attacked any country — unlike Israel, which is nuclear-armed and dominates and divides the Middle East on America’s behalf.

In Australia, we are not told this. It’s taboo. Instead, we dutifully celebrate the illusion of Obama, the global celebrity, the marketing dream. Like Calvin Klein, brand Obama offers the thrill of a new image attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he bombs.

This is modern propaganda in action, using a kind of reverse racism – the same way it deploys gender and class as seductive tools. In Barack Obama’s case, what matters is not his race or his fine words, but the power he serves.

In an essay for The Monthly entitled Faith in Politics, Kevin Rudd wrote this about refugees: “The biblical injunction to care for the stranger in our midst is clear. The parable of the Good Samaritan is but one of many which deal with the matter of how we should respond to a vulnerable stranger in our midst …. We should never forget that the reason we have a UN convention on the protection of refugees is in large part because of the horror of the Holocaust when the West (including Australia) turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe who sought asylum.”

Compare that with Rudd’s words the other day. “I make absolutely no apology whatsoever,” he said, “for taking a hard line on illegal immigration to Australia … a tough line on asylum seekers.”

Are we not fed up with this kind of hypocrisy? The use of the term “illegal immigrants” is both false and cowardly. The few people struggling to reach our shores are not illegal. International law is clear – they are legal. And yet Rudd, like Howard, sends the navy against them and runs what is effectively a concentration camp on Christmas Island. How shaming. Imagine a shipload of white people fleeing a catastrophe being treated like this.

The people in those leaking boats demonstrate the kind of guts Australians are said to admire.  But that’s not enough for the Good Samaritan in Canberra, as he plays to the same bigotry which, as he wrote in his essay, “turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe”. .

Why isn’t this spelt out? Why have weasel words like “border protection” become the currency of a media crusade against fellow human beings we are told to fear, mostly Muslim people?  Why have journalists, whose job is to keep the record straight, become complicit in this campaign?

After all, Australia has had some of the most outspoken and courageous newspapers in the world. Their editors were agents of people, not power. The Sydney Monitor under Edward Smith Hall exposed the dictatorial rule of Governor Darling and helped bring freedom of speech to the colony. Today, most of the Australian media speaks for power, not people.  Turn the pages of the major newspapers; look at the news on TV.  Like border protection, we have mind protection. There’s a consensus on what we read, see and hear: on how we should define our politics and view the rest of the world. Invisible boundaries keep out facts and opinion that are unacceptable.

This is actually a brilliant system, requiring no instructions, no self-censorship. Journalists know not what to do. Of course, now and then the censorship is direct and crude.  SBS has banned its journalists from using the phrase “Palestinian land” to describe illegally occupied Palestine. They must describe these territories as “the subject of negotiation”. That is the equivalent of somebody taking over your home at the point of a gun and the SBS newsreader describing it as “the subject of negotiation”.

In no other democratic country is public discussion of the brutal occupation of Palestine as limited as in Australia.  Are we aware of the sheer scale of the crime against humanity in Gaza? Twenty-nine members of one family — babies, grannies – are gunned down, blown up, buried alive, their home bulldozed. Read the United Nations report, written by an eminent Jewish judge, Richard Goldstone. 

Those who speak for the arsenal of freedom are working hard to bury the UN report. For only one nation, Israel, has a “right to exist” in the Middle East: only one nation has a right to attack others. Only one nation has the impunity to run a racist apartheid regime with the approval of the western world, and with the prime minister and the deputy prime minister ofb Australia fawning over its leaders.

In Australia, any diversion from this unspoken impunity attracts a campaign of craven personal abuse and intimidation usually associated with dictatorships. But we are not a dictatorship. We are a democracy.

Are we? Or are we a murdochracy.

Rupert Murdoch set the media war agenda shortly before the invasion of Iraq when he said, “There’s going to be collateral damage. And if you really want to be brutal about it, better get it done now.”

More than a million people have been killed in Iraq as a result of that invasion — “an episode”, according to one study, “more deadly than the Rwandan genocide”. In our name. Are we aware of this in Australia?

I once walked along Mutanabi Street in Baghdad. The atmosphere was wonderful. People sat in cafes, reading. Musicians played. Poets recited. Painters painted. This was the cultural heart of Mesopotania, the great civilisation to which we in the West owe a great deal, including the written word. The people I spoke to were both Sunni and Shia, but they called themselves Iraqis. They were cultured and proud.

Today, they are fled or dead. Mutanabi Street has been blown to bits. In Baghdad, the great museums and libraries are looted. The universities are sacked. And people who once took coffee with each other, and married each other, have been turned into enemies. “Building democracy”, said Howard and Bush and Blair.

One of my favourite Harold Pinter plays is Party Time. It’s set in an apartment in a city like Sydney. A party is in progress. People are drinking good wine and eating canapés. They seem happy. They are chatting and  affirming and smiling. They are stylish and very self aware.

But something is happening outside in the street, something terrible and oppressive and unjust, for which the people at the party share responsibility.

There’s a fleeting sense of discomfort, a silence, before the chatting and laughing resumes.

How many of us live in that apartment?

Let me put it another way. I know a very fine Israeli journalist called Amira Hass. She went to live in and report from Gaza.  I asked her why she did that. She explained how her mother, Hannah, was being marched from a cattle train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen when she saw a group of German women looking at the prisoners, just looking, saying nothing, silent. Her mother never forgot what she called this despicable “looking from the side”.

I believe that if we apply justice and courage to human affairs, we begin to make sense of our world. Then, and only then, can we make progress. 

However, if we apply justice in Australia, it’s tricky, isn’t it?  — because we are then obliged to break our greatest silence – to no longer “look from the side” in our own country.

In the 1960s, when I first went to South Africa to report apartheid, I was welcomed by decent, liberal people whose complicit silence was the underpinning of that tyranny. They told me that Australians and white South Africans had much in common, and they were right. The good people of Johannesburg could live within a few kilometres of a community called Alexandra, which lacked the most basic services, the children stricken with disease. But they looked from the side and did nothing. 

In Australia, our indifference is different. We have become highly competent at divide and rule: at promoting those black Australians who tell us what we want to hear. At professional conferences their keynote speeches are applauded, especially when they blame their own people and provide the excuses we need.  We create boards and commissions on which sit nice, decent liberal people like the prime minister’s wife. And nothing changes.

We certainly don’t like comparisons with apartheid South Africa. That breaks the Australian silence.

Near the end of apartheid, black South Africans were being jailed at the rate of 851 per 100,000 of population.  Today, black Australians are being jailed at a national rate that is more than  five times higher.  Western Australia jails Aboriginal men at eight times the apartheid figure.

In 1983, Eddie Murray was killed in a police cell in Wee Waa in New South Wales by “a person or persons unknown”. That’s how the coroner described it.  Eddie was a rising rugby league star. But he was black and had to be cut down to size. Eddie’s parents, Arthur and Leila Murray, launched one of the most tenacious and courageous campaigns for justice I’ve known anywhere. They  stood up to authority. They showed grace and patience and knowledge. And they never gave in. 

When Leila died in 2003, I wrote a tribute for her funeral. I described her as an Australian hero. Arthur is still fighting for justice. He’s in his sixties. He’s a respected elder, a hero. A few months ago, the police in Narrabri offered Arthur a lift home and instead took him for a violent ride in their bullwagon. He ended up in hospital, bruised and battered. That is how Australian heroes are treated.

In the same week the police did this — as they do to black Australians, almost every day – Kevin Rudd said that his government, and I quote,  “doesn’t have a clear idea of what’s happening on the ground” in Aboriginal Australia.

How much information does the prime minister need? How many ideas? How many reports? How many royal commissions? How many inquests?  How many funerals? Is he not aware that Australia appears on an international “shame list” for having failed to eradicate trachoma, a preventable disease of poverty that blinds Aboriginal children?

In August this year, the United Nations once again distinguished Australia with the kind of shaming once associated with South Africa. We discriminate on the basis of race. That’s it in a nutshell.  This time the UN blew a whistle on the so-called “intervention”, which began with the Howard government smearing Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory with allegations of sex slavery and paedophile rings in “unthinkable numbers”, according to the minister for indigenous affairs.

In May last year, official figures were released and barely reported.

Out of 7433 Aboriginal children examined by doctors, 39 had been referred to the authorities for suspected abuse. Of those, a maximum of four possible cases were identified. So much for the “unthinkable numbers”. Of course, child abuse does exist, in black Australia and white Australia. The difference is that no soldiers invaded the North Shore; no white parents were swept aside; no white welfare has been “quarantined”. What the doctors found they already knew: that Aboriginal children are at risk — from the effects of extreme poverty and the denial of resources in one of the world’s richest countries.

Billions of dollars have been spent – not on paving roads and building houses, but on a war of legal attrition waged against black communities. I interviewed an Aboriginal leader called Puggy Hunter. He carried a bulging brief case and he sat in the West Australian heat with his head in his hands.

I said, “You’re exhausted.”

He replied, “Look, I spend most of my life in meetings, fighting lawyers, pleading for our birthright. I’m just tired to death, mate.”     He died soon afterwards, in his forties.

Kevin Rudd has made a formal apology to the First Australians. He spoke fine words. For many Aboriginal people, who value healing, the apology was very important. However, the Sydney Morning Herald published a remarkably honest editorial. It described the apology as “a piece of political wreckage” that “the Rudd government has moved quickly to clear away … in a way that responds to some of its supporters’ emotional needs”.

Since the apology, Aboriginal poverty has got worse. The promised housing programme is a grim joke. No gap has even begun to be bridged. Instead, the federal government has threatened communities in the Northern Territory that if they don’t hand over their precious freehold leases, they will be denied the basic services that we, in white Australia, take for granted.

In the 1970s, Aboriginal communities were granted comprehensive land rights in the Northern Territory, and John Howard set about clawing back these rights with bribery and bullying. The Labour government is doing the same.  You see, there are deals to be done. The Territory contains extraordinary mineral wealth, especially uranium. And Aboriginal land is wanted as a radioactive waste dump. This is very big business, and foreign companies want a piece of the action.

It is a continuation of the darkest side of our colonial history: a land grab

Where are the influential voices raised against this?  Where are the peak legal bodies?  Where are those in the media who tell us endlessly how fair-minded we are?       Silence.

But let us not listen to their silence. Let us pay tribute to those Australians who are not silent, who don’t look from the side – those like Barbara Shaw and Larissa Behrendt, and the Mutitjulu community leaders and their tenacious lawyer George Newhouse, and Chris Graham, the fearless editor of the National Indigenous Times. And Michael Mansell, Lyle Munro, Gary Foley, Vince Forrester and Pat Dodson, and Arthur Murray.

And let us celebrate Australia’s historian of courage and truth, Henry Reynolds, who stood against white supremacists posing as academics and journalists. And the young people who closed down Woomera detention camp, then stood up to the political thugs who took over Sydney during Apec two years ago. And good for Ian Thorpe, the great swimmer, whose voice raised against the intervention has yet to find an echo among the pampered sporting heroes in a country where the gap between white and black sporting facilities and opportunity has closed hardly at all.

Silences can be broken, if we will it.   In one of the greatest poems of the English language, Percy Shelley wrote this:

Rise like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number.

Shake your chains to earth like dew.

Which in sleep has fallen on you.

Ye are many – they are few.

But we need to make haste. An historic shift is taking place. The major western democracies are moving towards a 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.

How do we change this? We start by looking beyond the stereotypes and clichés that are fed to us as news.  Tom Paine warned long ago that if we were denied critical knowledge, we should storm what he called the Bastille of words. Tom Paine did not have the internet, but the internet on its own is not enough.

We need an Australian glasnost, the Russian word from the Gorbachev era, which broadly means awakening, transparency, diversity, justice, disobedience. It was Edmund Burke who spoke of the press as a Fourth Estate. I propose a people’s Fifth Estate that monitors, deconstructs and counters the official news. In every news room, in every media college, teachers of journalism and journalists themselves need to be challenged about the part they play in the bloodshed, inequity and silence that is so often presented as normal.

The public are not the problem. It’s true some people don’t give a damn – but millions do, as I know from the responses to my own films. What people want is to be engaged – a sense that things matter, that nothing is immutable, that unemployment among the young and poverty among the old are both uncivilised and wrong. What terrifies the agents of power is the awakening of people: of public consciousness.

This is already happening in countries in Latin America where ordinary people have discovered a confidence in themselves they did not know existed. We should join them before our own freedom of speech is quietly withdrawn and real dissent is outlawed as the powers of the police are expanded. 

 “The struggle of people against power, “wrote Milan Kundera, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

In Australia, we have much to be proud of – if only we knew about it and celebrated it. Since Francis McCarty and Mary Palmer landed here, we’ve progressed only because people have spoken out, only because the suffragettes stood up, only because the miners of Broken Hill won the world’s first 35-hour week, only because pensions and a basic wage and child endowment were pioneered in New South Wales.

In my lifetime, we have become one of the most culturally diverse places on earth, and it has happened peacefully, by and large. That is a remarkable achievement – until we look for those whose Australian civilisation has seldom been acknowledged, whose genius for survival and generosity and forgiving have rarely been a source of pride. And yet, they remain, as Henry Reynolds wrote, the whispering in our hearts. For they are what is unique about us.

I believe the key to our self respect — and our legacy to the next generation — is the inclusion and reparation of the First Australians. In other words, justice. There’s no mystery about what has to be done. The first step is a treaty that guarantees universal land rights and a proper share of the resources of this country.

Only then can we solve, together, issues of health, poverty, housing, education, employment. Only then can we feel a pride that comes not from flags and war. Only then can we become a truly independent nation able to speak out for sanity and justice in the world, and be heard.

By John Pilger, ZNet, Nov 18, 2009
John Pilger’s ZSpace Page

When General Suharto, the west’s man, seized power in Indonesia in the mid-1960s, he offered “a gleam of light in Asia”, rejoiced Time magazine. That he had killed up to a million “communists” was of no account in the acquisition of what Richard Nixon called “the richest hoard of natural resources, the greatest prize in South-east Asia”.

In November 1967, the booty was handed out at an extraordinary conference in a lakeside hotel in Geneva. The participants included the most powerful capitalists in the world, the likes of David Rockefeller, and senior executives of the major oil companies and banks, General Motors, British American Tobacco, Imperial Chemical Industries, American Express, Siemens, Goodyear, US Steel. The president of Time Incorporated, James Linen, opened the proceedings with this prophetic description of globalisation: “We are trying to create a new climate in which private enterprise and developing countries work together for the greater profit of the free world. The world of international enterprise is more than governments . . . It is a seamless web, which has been shaping the global environment at revolutionary speed.”

Continues >>

INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST REVIEW – ISSUE 68

International Socialist Review, Issue 68 is now out

http://www.isreview.org/

ISSUE 68:
November-December 2009 TOO MANY PEOPLE?
Population, hunger, and the environment

EDITORIAL

The business of health care reform

ANALYSIS IN BRIEF

Elizabeth Schulte: Why won’t they call it racism?

Eric Ruder interviews Gareth Porter: Obama’s Afghan Disaster

COLUMN

Phil Gasper • Critical Thinking: What ever happened to “Change we can believe in?”

Shaun Joseph: The coup in Honduras: Perspectives and prospects

INTERVIEWS

Cleve Jones: Getting back to our roots

Walden Bello: The G20 after the crash

FEATURES

John Pilger: Power, illusion, and American’s last taboo

Chris Williams: Are there too many people?

Rick Kuhn: Economic crisis and the responsibility of socialists

HISTORY

Rebekah Ward: Darwin: the reluctant revolutionary

John Riddell: Clara Zetkin’s strugggle for the united front

Sharon Smith: 1934: The strikes that led the way

REVIEWS

Chrisopher Phelps: The sexual revolution, A review of Sherry Wolf’s Sexuality and Socialism

Ian Angus: Two accounts of Engels’ revolutionary life

Phil Aliff on soldier’s resistance; David Florey on racism after Katrina; Sara Knopp and Mais Jasser on a teenager’s diary under occupation; Marlene Martin on Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Jailhouse Lawyers; Chris Williams on Monthly Review’s special issue on food

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

I refer to the Sydney Peace Prize awarded to John Pilger. When what seems like a month or two ago I heard he had won it, I was very extremely happy. Not just because he, unlike others or late, thoroughly deserve it, but because it meant he would have to give another speech and I LOVE the words and revelations of Mr. John Pilger. His denouncement of wars, the people and power behind them and the global misery it causes, are an oasis of journalism in an utterly corrupted world of filthy journalistic pretenders.

I wasn’t disappointed.

Take it away John…   http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=555

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Some things are not to be discussed in Australia according to John Pilger awarded journalist and one of my heroes.

I put it to you that the same goes for New Zealand.

I am a seventh generation Australian. My great-great grandfather landed not far from here, on November 8th, 1821. He wore leg irons, each weighing four pounds. His name was Francis McCarty. He was an Irishman, convicted of the crime of insurrection and “uttering unlawful oaths”. In October of the same year, an 18 year old girl called Mary Palmer stood in the dock at Middlesex Gaol and was sentenced to be transported to New South Wales for the term of her natural life. Her crime was stealing in order to live. Only the fact that she was pregnant saved her from the gallows. She was my great-great grandmother. She was sent from the ship to the Female Factory at Parramatta, a notorious prison where every third Monday, male convicts were brought for a “courting day” — a rather desperate measure of social engineering. Mary and Francis met that way and were married on October 21st, 1823.
Growing up in Sydney, I knew nothing about this. My mother’s eight siblings used the word “stock” a great deal. You either came from “good stock” or “bad stock”. It was unmentionable that we came from bad stock – that we had what was called “the stain”.

One Christmas Day, with all of her family assembled, my mother broached the subject of our criminal origins, and one of my aunts almost swallowed her teeth. “Leave them dead and buried, Elsie!” she said. And we did – until many years later and my own research in Dublin and London led to a television film that revealed the full horror of our “bad stock”. There was outrage. “Your son,” my aunt Vera wrote to Elsie, “is no better than a damn communist”. She promised never to speak to us again.

The Australian silence has unique features.

Read more

• The Fabulous Craig Murray, “Uzbek Terror and the UK/USA” (interview on The Real News; watch Craig’s recent talk on the same grim topic here and here)

• John Pilger, “Breaking the Australian Silence” (Sydney Peace Prize acceptance speech):

Last July, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said this, and I quote: “It’s important for us all to remember here in Australia that Afghanistan has been a training ground for terrorists worldwide, a training ground also for terrorists in South-East-Asia, reminding us of the reasons that we are in the field of combat and reaffirming our resolve to remain committed to that cause.”

There is no truth in this statement. It is the equivalent of his predecessor John Howard’s lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Shortly before Kevin Rudd made that statement, American planes bombed a wedding party in Afghanistan. At least sixty people were blown to bits, including the bride and groom and many children. That’s the fifth wedding party attacked, in our name.

The prime minister was standing outside a church on a Sunday morning when he made his statement. No reporter challenged him. No one said the war was a fraud: that it began as an American vendetta following 9/11, in which not a single Afghan was involved. No one put it to Kevin Rudd that our perceived enemy in Afghanistan were introverted tribesmen who had no quarrel with Australia and didn’t give a damn about south-east Asia and just wanted the foreign soldiers out of their country. Above all, no one said: “Prime Minister, There is no war on terror. It’s a hoax. But there is a war of terror waged by governments, including the Australian government, in our name.” That wedding party, Prime Minister, was blown to bits by one of the latest smart weapons, such as the Hellfire bomb that sucks the air out of the lungs. In our name.

By Pilger, John | ZNet, Nov. 7, 2009
John Pilger’s ZSpace Page

Thank you all for coming tonight, and my thanks to the City of Sydney and especially to the Sydney Peace Foundation for awarding me the Peace Prize. It’s an honour I cherish, because it comes from where I come from.

I am a seventh generation Australian. My great-great grandfather landed not far from here, on November 8th, 1821. He wore leg irons, each weighing four pounds. His name was Francis McCarty. He was an Irishman, convicted of the crime of insurrection and “uttering unlawful oaths”. In October of the same year, an 18 year old girl called Mary Palmer stood in the dock at Middlesex Gaol and was sentenced to be transported to New South Wales for the term of her natural life. Her crime was stealing in order to live. Only the fact that she was pregnant saved her from the gallows. She was my great-great grandmother. She was sent from the ship to the Female Factory at Parramatta, a notorious prison where every third Monday, male convicts were brought for a “courting day” – a rather desperate measure of social engineering. Mary and Francis met that way and were married on October 21st, 1823.

Continues >>

 

http://www.nctsdg.navy.mil/island.html

Stealing A Nation reveals the extraordinary story of the secret expulsion of the entire population of the Chagos islands in the Indian Ocean by successive British governments, so that the principal island, Diego Garcia, could be handed to the United States.

http://www.dmzhawaii.org/?p=4614

Stealing A Nation wins Britain’s most prestigious documentary honor, also top American award

Stealing A Nation reveals the extraordinary story of the secret expulsion of the entire population of the Chagos islands in the Indian Ocean by successive British governments, so that the principal island, Diego Garcia, could be handed to the United States as a major military base. It is from this base that American aircraft have attacked Iraq and Afghanistan.

“This is a shocking, almost incredible story. A government calling itself civilised tricked and expelled its most vulnerable citizens so that it could give their homeland to a foreign power…ministers and their officials then mounted a campaign of deception all the way up to the prime minister.” John Pilger

10/06/04: “ITV” — John Pilger’s documentary is an extraordinary film about the plight of people of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean – secretly and brutally expelled from their homeland by British governments in the late 1960s and early 1970s, to make way for an American military base. The base, on the main island of Diego Garcia, was a launch pad for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

A remarkable dossier of evidence has been put together by Pilger and producer Chris Martin, all from official files, charting one of the most shocking conspiracies of modern times, which continues today.

Diego Garcia is America’s biggest military base in the world, outside the US. There are more than 4,000 troops, two bomber runways, thirty warships and a satellite spy station. The Pentagon calls it an “indispensable platform” for policing the world.

Before the Americans came, more than 2,000 people lived on the islands, many with roots back to the late 18th century. There were thriving villages, a school, a hospital, a church, a railway and an undisturbed way of life. The islands were, and still are, a British crown colony.

In the 1960s, the government of Harold Wilson struck a secret deal with the United States to hand over Diego Garcia. The Americans demanded that the islands be “swept” and “sanitised”. Unknown to Parliament and to the US Congress, the British government plotted with Washington to expel the entire population – in secrecy and in breach of the United Nations Charter.

At first, they starved them of essential supplies; then rumours spread that the islands would be bombed; then the people watched their pets gassed to death before they were herded on to boats and dumped in the slums of Mauritius.
Rita, now in her 70s, lost her husband and three of her children following their deportation: “I am a British citizen and they threw us out of our homeland in the name of the Queen.”

Lizette, in her 70s, says: “My children died from sadness. When we were forced out, she died, the youngest fell ill and the doctor said to me, ‘I can’t treat sadness’. What they did to us was no different from the treatment of the slaves.”

Charlesia says: “What hurts most is that we were never told what they were doing with our islands. If it had been built for poor people to work, fine. But it’s a base for bombers – and the bombs that fell on Iraq came from our paradise.”

John Pilger and producer Christopher Martin have acquired hundreds of astonishing official documents which, in the words of officials and ministers, reveal how the conspiracy was hatched, then covered up.

“The documents show clearly that the conspiracy to expel the population rested on a big lie,” says John Pilger. “This claimed that the population were itinerant workers, when the government knew this was a population that went back generations. Most had never left the islands.

“One Foreign Office document is headed, ‘Maintaining the fiction’. Another says, ‘We propose to certify these people, more or less fraudulently, as belonging somewhere else.’ We have secret memos that propose how the government should lie to the world. I have never read anything like them.”

Pilger also reveals how the scandal continues today.

The director, writer and presenter John Pilger, has made more than 50 documentaries for ITV, including his famous exposes of Pol Pot’s killing fields in Cambodia and the genocide in East Timor. He has twice won Britain’s highest award for journalism, Journalist of the Year. He has been International Reporter of the year and holds the United Nations Media Peace Prize, the Richard Dimbleby Award given by Bafta and an American television academy award, an Emmy.

Related:

This is a link to a great speech given by Austalian Sydney Peace Prize winner John Pilger entitled Breaking The Australian Silence.  In it he discusses how propaganda and illusion has taken control of Australian government and society and the governments and societies of the world as well.  It is long but very eloquent and truthful.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23912.htm

We're not happy

H/T to the Black Informant for finding this bit of information…

As readers may or may not know, I was in my youth, much closer in ideology to being a full on socialist (though with reservations) than a right winger.  Though I’ve since wised up, I retain a healthy degree of socialist skepticism of monied interests (as do all true conservatives) and believe that the two party system is much more of a scam than anyone cares to openly admit.  The real divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, but between the ones who dominate government through monetary means and those of us, the vast majority, who do not, but who are often the ones paying the bills.

These lines in particular caught my attention as the Black Informant talks about socialist John Pilger:

If you do not hear anything else I say, just follow the money. While we peons are out here in cyberspace arguing and debating over the latest comment made by Rush Limbaugh, the name given to fried chicken joints, who compared Michelle Obama to a monkey, money is constantly exchanging hands in Washington. It (money) is probably one of the only things in Washington that does not discriminate. Party affiliation does not matter, neither does the color of one’s skin.

This is profoundly and deeply true.  Barack Obama in particular (and the Democratic Party in general) benefited from hundreds of millions in corporate dollars in the financing of his campaign.  The same monies that poured in to support Bush are the same ones that back Obama, and you can be sure that in politics, as in all things, money buys influence.

Much noise has been made about tea-party protests, the slide in Obama’s popularity, the socialist policies of the new administration, but by and large, many things, indeed most things remain the same.  People on both ends of the political spectrum are frustrated with Obama’s governance, for what they believe are very different reasons.  I believe however that their anger has more in common than they realize.  Pilger is very far to the left, but these words easily resonate on the right as well:

My own guess is that a populism is growing once again in America, evoking a powerful force beneath the surface which has a proud history. From such authentic grassroots Americanism came women’s suffrage, the eight-hour day, graduated income tax, public ownership of railways and communications, the breaking of the power of corporate lobbyists, and much more. In other words, real democracy.

The American populists were far from perfect, but they often spoke for ordinary people and they were betrayed by leaders who urged them to compromise and merge with the Democratic Party. That was long ago, but how familiar it sounds.

Now of course Pilger sees this populism being put to the use of long standing socialist/leftist ideas which as a conservative I reject as being both impractical and inimical to liberty. However, he does touch a very clear nerve and describes well what I believe to be a bipartisan, grass roots frustration with being ignored by a ruling class that sees itself not as our servants, but as our rulers.

In this kind of system, the voter is nothing more than a group to be manipulated by this or that politician or party. Evangelical Christians discovered this (belatedly) during the Bush administration as his embrace of evangelical faith did little to advance their concerns about homosexual rights and abortion.  Liberal feminists are likewise waking up to the cynical way their concerns about “reproductive rights” (i.e. abortion) are used to keep them voting for Democrats no matter how much they disappoint.  Black Americans it seems are the slowest to begin to wake to see that the race politics of the Democratic Party aren’t really serving their interests.  Again the Black Informant:

For the Black voter, Obama quickly became an easy sell once Obama won Iowa ( a state made up of mostly Whites). We became willing to ditch all those concerns about the war, the economy, politicians who profited from the same “evil” corporations they blasted on the campaign stump in order to take part in history.  Whites loved him–that is all that mattered. We even took it a step further by suggesting that a vote against Obama was a vote against your own race. So despite all the questions a person may have like “Why did Obama and his party continue to court lobbyists even after he repeatedly dissed them publicly”, your loyalty to your race was now on the line. Shut up and vote. Talk about a vote guarantee!

When the economy continued to go south after Obama’s promise that his efforts with his stimulus bill would hold unemployment @8%, criticism has been very light to say the least. In fact, when you do hear criticism, it is directed towards the all-encompassing “government” (even though the listener really know that they are really talking about Obama). When criticisms do make it out of the fold, they are usually confronted with the huge hand of denial that says “It’s way too early to judge Obama.” In the meantime, when a small committee in Oslo decided to JUDGE Obama and give him a Nobel Peace Prize, it was paraded as another “First” that Blacks everywhere should celebrate. Blacks, just like other ethnic minorities, women, members of the GLBT community, the anti-war crowd, the anti/pro-abortion crowd, the disabled, the poor, the uneducated–you name the group–are nothing more than cards in a deck that are played in the game of politics. It’s never about the card itself. Instead, it is all about how the card can be played to achieve a certain goal. Pilger nails it with this quote:

“Real activism has little time for identity politics, which, like exceptionalism, can be fake. These are distractions that confuse and sucker good people.”

The anti-war crowd is only realizing this now.

This is why I always find it interesting to hear how Republicans feel that by engaging in identity politics based on race like Democrats that somehow they will become more liked. Democrats engage in identity politics based on race all the time, yet they cannot point to one city that has improved as a result of their policies under their authority. They had decades of practice and all they can do is blame the other guy.

Right on brother. What he’s saying is very true. Ultimately I believe that the protesters of the tea party movement and the rank and file liberals who were tossed under the bus in the Democratic primary (who mostly dutifully voted for Obama in fear of what McCain / Palin represented) have much in common.  They are equally annoyed that their votes, their concerns, their fears, their agenda, their well being don’t matter at all to the powers that be in Washington.

Liberals are hopping mad that universal health care isn’t being passed.  Conservatives are mad that years of supposedly conservative governance has led to massive deficits.  Both are mad about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, though for different reasons.   Obama rode to power on this wave of discontent, but is proving to be more of the same, but worse.  God help us all.

L’altre dia parlàvem de The Yes Men en l’article que enunciava la nova edició de Cine Ambigú, cicle que estrenarà la seva darrera proposta: The Yes Men Fix The World. Els presentàvem com un grup activista que utilitza els mitjans audiovisuals per dir les veritats que ningú s’atreveix a dir en veu alta; són una associació d’impostors, com ells mateixos diuen, que vol desemmascar els abusos de les empreses que fan diners amb una praxis totalment criticable i censurable.

Indagant en la seva biografia, observem com aquest grup va néixer amb la única intenció d’expressar la indignació que sentien amb l’actitud dèspota i inhumana de l’anomenada corporació. Un bon exemple és quan van aconseguir que les accions de la química Dow Chemichal baixessin 2 milions d’euros, després de que un tal Jude Finisterra, un yes man que es va fer passar per un executiu de Dow, reconegués la seva culpa en el cas Bophal. En aquest vídeo s’explica el cas:

The Yes Men, que dóna un cop de mà a qui creu necessari canviar el sistema i de pas, intenta despertar les ments anestesiades. Les dues pel·lícules que han fet fins el moment, The Yes Men i The Yes Men Fix The World, són dos clars exemples de crítica cap a les empreses que no coneixen cap límit alhora d’obtenir beneficis i de lucrar-se a qualsevol preu.

The Yes Men, Oliver Stone, Noam Chomsky, Serge Latouche, Enric Duran, The Black Angels, Michael Moore, John Pilger, Colin Beavan, Leonardo Di Caprio, Eco-Site, Concern Worldwide, Peter Joseph, Eerie Investigations i d’altres, cadascú a la seva manera, però tots amb una mateix missatge, ofereixen un altre punt de vista, totalment diferent a l’establert.

The Yes Men intenta despertar consciències, crear dubtes, i donar a conèixer qui domina el sistema i com el domina. És més senzill no pensar en res i viure amb el pilot automàtic encès, aliens a preocupacions que creiem que no ens afecten directament. Però si sou dels que considera que s’ha de canviar d’estil de vida, dijous 27 al Verdi Park podreu veure The Yes Men Fix The World.

Per acabar, un exemple de com empenyen a la gent a pensar per sí mateixos:

John Pilger, New Statesman, Oct 15, 2009

Obama, the man of peace, is planning another war to add to his impressive record

Barack Obama, winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, is planning another war to add to his impressive record. In Afghanistan, his agents routinely extinguish wedding parties, farmers and construction workers with weapons such as the innovative Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of your lungs. According to the UN, 338,000 Afghan infants are dying under the Obama-led alliance, which permits only $29 per head annually to be spent on medical care.

Within weeks of his inauguration, Obama started a new war in Pakistan, causing more than a million people to flee their homes. In threatening Iran – which his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said she was prepared to “obliterate” – Obama lied that the Iranians were covering up a “secret nuclear facility”, knowing that it had already been reported to the International Atomic Energy Authority. In colluding with the only nuclear-armed power in the Middle East, he bribed the Palestinian Authority to suppress a UN judgment that Israel had committed crimes against humanity in its assault on Gaza – crimes made possible with US weapons whose shipment Obama secretly approved before his inauguration.

The old dog whistle test

At home, the man of peace has approved a military budget exceeding that of any year since the end of the Second World War while presiding over a new kind of domestic repression. During the recent G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, hosted by Obama, militarised police attacked peaceful protesters with something called the Long-Range Acoustic Device, not seen before on US streets. Mounted in the turret of a small tank, it blasted a piercing noise as tear gas and pepper gas were fired indiscriminately. It is part of a new arsenal of “crowd-control munitions” supplied by military contractors such as Raytheon. In Obama’s Pentagon-controlled “national security state”, the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, which he promised to close, remains open, and “rendition”, secret assassinations and torture continue.

The Nobel Peace Prize-winner’s latest war is largely secret. On 15 July, Washington finalised a deal with Colombia that gives the US seven giant military bases. “The idea,” reported the Associated Press, “is to make Colombia a regional hub for Pentagon operations . . . nearly half the continent can be covered by a C-17 [military transport] without refuelling”, which “helps achieve the regional engagement strategy”.

Translated, this means Obama is planning a “rollback” of the independence and democracy that the people of Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador andParaguay have achieved against the odds, along with a historic regional co-operation that rejects the notion of a US “sphere of influence”. The Colombian regime, which backs death squads and has the continent’s worst human rights record, has received US military support second in scale only to Israel. Britain provides military training. Guided by US military satellites, Colombian paramilitaries now infiltrate Venezuela with the goal of overthrowing the democratic government of Hugo Chávez, which George W Bush failed to do in 2002.

Obama’s war on peace and democracy in Latin America follows a style he has demonstrated since the coup against the democratic president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, in June. Zelaya had increased the minimum wage, granted subsidies to small farmers, cut back interest rates and reduced poverty. He planned to break a US pharmaceutical monopoly and manufacture cheap generic drugs. Although Obama has called for Zelaya’s reinstatement, he refuses to condemn the coup-makers and to recall the US ambassador or the US troops who train the Honduran forces determined to crush a popular resistance. Zelaya has been repeatedly refused a meeting with Obama, who has approved an IMF loan of $164m to the illegal regime. The message is clear and familiar: thugs can act with impunity on behalf of the US.

Obama, the smooth operator from Chicago via Harvard, was enlisted to restore what he calls “leadership” throughout the world. The Nobel Prize committee’s decision is the kind of cloying reverse racism that has beatified the man for no reason other than he is a member of a minority and attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he kills. This is the Call of Obama. It is not unlike a dog whistle: inaudible to most, irresistible to the besotted and boneheaded. “When Obama walks into a room,” gushed George Clooney, “you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere.”

Extreme and dangerous

The great voice of black liberation Frantz Fanon understood this. In The Wretched of the Earth, he described the “intermediary [whose] mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation: it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged”. Because political debate has become so debased in our media monoculture – Blair or Brown; Brown or Cameron – race, gender and class can be used as seductive tools of propaganda and diversion. In Obama’s case, what matters, as Fanon pointed out in an earlier era, is not the intermediary’s “historic” elevation, but the class he serves. After all, Bush’s inner circle was probably the most multiracial in presidential history. There was Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas, all dutifully serving an extreme and dangerous power.

Britain has seen its own Obama-like mysticism. The day after Blair was elected in 1997, the Observer predicted that he would create “new worldwide rules on human rights” while the Guardian rejoiced at the “breathless pace [as] the floodgates of change burst open”. When Obama was elected last November, Denis MacShane MP, a devotee of Blair’s bloodbaths, unwittingly warned us: “I shut my eyes when I listen to this guy and it could be Tony. He is doing the same thing that we did in 1997.”