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John Pilger: "Power, Propaganda and Conscience"
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Jan 28, 2004, 1:57:32 AM1/28/04
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In article <bv73g1$15s5$1...@pencil.math.missouri.edu>, ric...@quaylargo.com
says...
>
>Friends,
>
>I am pleased to share with you this important and inspiring essay, sent to us
>by Betty Daly-King. An excerpt:
>
> For in spite of the propaganda campaign I have outlined, never in my
> lifetime have people all over the world demonstrated greater awareness
> of the political forces ranged against them and the possibilities of
> countering them.
>
>rkm
>
>--------------------------------------------------------
>Delivered-To: ric...@cyberjournal.org
>Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2004 01:11:46 +0800
>To: sea...@yahoogroups.com
>From: Betty Daly-King <dal...@iinet.net.au>
>Subject: John Pilger, UWA 12/01/04
>
>"Power, Propaganda and Conscience in The War On Terror"
>John Pilger: University of Western Australia
>12 January 2004
>http://multimedia.carlton.com/images/pilger/home/body/UWA_speech.doc
>
>I would like to thank the University of Western Australia for inviting
>me here today, and especially Nigel Dolan for his warm welcome and
>smooth organisation.
>
>I am a reporter, who values bearing witness. That is to say, I place
>paramount importance in the evidence of what I see, and hear, and sense
>to be the truth, or as close to the truth as possible. By comparing this
>evidence with the statements, and actions of those with power, I believe
>it's possible to assess fairly how our world is controlled and divided,
>and manipulated and how language and debate are distorted and a false
>consciousness developed.
>
>When we speak of this in regard to totalitarian societies and
>dictatorships, we call it brainwashing: the conquest of minds. It's a
>notion we almost never apply to our own societies. Let me give you an
>example. During the height of the cold war, a group of Soviet
>journalists were taken on an official tour of the United States. They
>watched TV; they read the newspapers; they listened to debates in
>Congress. To their astonishment, everything they heard was more or less
>the same. The news was the same. The opinions were the same, more or
>less. "How do you do it?" they asked their hosts. "In our country, to
>achieve this, we throw people in prison; we tear out their fingernails.
>Here, there's none of that? What's your secret?"
>
>The secret is that the question is almost never raised. Or if it is
>raised, it's more than likely dismissed as coming from the margins: from
>voices far outside the boundaries of what I would call our 'metropolitan
>conversation', whose terms of reference, and limits, are fixed by the
>media at one level, and by the discourse or silence of scholarship at
>another level. Behind both is a presiding corporate and political power.
>
>A dozen years ago, I reported from East Timor, which was then occupied
>by the Indonesian dictatorship of General Suharto. I had to go there
>under cover, as reporters were not welcome -- my informants were brave,
>ordinary people who confirmed, with their evidence and experience, that
>genocide had taken place in their country. I brought out meticulously
>hand-written documents, evidence that whole communities had been
>slaughtered -- all of which we now know to be true.
>
>We also know that vital, material backing for a crime proportionally
>greater than the killing in Cambodia under Pol Pot had come from the
>West: principally the United States, Britain and Australia. On my return
>to London, and then to this country, I encountered a very different
>version. The media version was that General Suharto was a benign leader,
>who ran a sound economy and was a close ally. Indeed, prime minister
>Keating was said to regard him as a father figure.
>
>He and Foreign Minister Gareth Evans made many laudatory speeches about
>Suharto, never mentioning not once -- that he had seized power as a
>result of what the CIA called "one of the worst massacres of the
>twentieth century." Nor did they mention that his special forces, known
>as Kopassus, were responsible for the terror and deaths of a quarter of
>the East Timorese population 200,000 people, a figure confirmed in a
>study commissioned by the Foreign Affairs Committee of [Australian]
>Federal Parliament. Nor did they mention that these killers were trained
>by the Australian SAS not far from this auditorium, and that the
>Australian military establishment was integrated into Suharto's violent
>campaign against the people of East Timor.
>
>The evidence of atrocities, which I reported in my film Death of a
>Nation was heard and accepted by the Human Rights Commission of the
>United Nations, but not by those with power in Australia. When I showed
>evidence of a second massacre near the Santa Cruz cemetery in November
>1991, the foreign editor of the only national newspaper in this country,
>The Australian, mocked the eyewitnesses. "The truth," wrote Greg
>Sheridan, "is that even genuine victims frequently concoct stories." The
>paper's Jakarata correspondent, Patrick Walters, wrote that "no one is
>arrested [by Suharto] without proper legal procedures". The
>editor-in-chief, Paul Kelly, declared Suharto a 'moderate' and that
>there was no alternative to his benign rule. Paul Kelly sat on the board
>of the Australia-Indonesia Institute, a body funded by the Australian
>government. Not long before Suharto was overthrown by his own people,
>Kelly was in Jakarta, standing at Suharto's side, introducing the mass
>murderer to a line of Australian editors. To his great credit, the then
>editor of the West Australian, Paul Murray, refused to join this
>obsequious group.
>
>Not long ago, Paul Kelly was given a special award in the annual Walkley
>Awards for journalism the kind they give to elder statesmen. And no one
>said anything about Indonesia and Suharto. Imagine a similar award going
>to Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the London Times in the 1930s. Like Kelly,
>he appeased a genocidal dictator, calling him a 'moderate'.
>
>This episode is a metaphor for what I'd like to touch upon tonight. For
>15 years, a silence was maintained by the Australian government, the
>Australian media and Australian academics on the great crime and tragedy
>of East Timor. Moreover, this was an extension of the silence about the
>true circumstances of Suharto's bloody ascent to power in the
>mid-sixties. It was not unlike the official silence in the Soviet Union
>on the bloody invasion of Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
>
>The media's silence I'll discuss in a while. Let's look now at the
>academic silence. One of the greatest acts of genocide in the second
>half of the twentieth century apparently did not warrant a single
>substantial academic case study, based on primary sources. Why? We have
>to go back to the years immediately after world war two when the study
>of post-war international politics, known as "liberal realism", was
>invented in the United States, largely with the sponsorship of those who
>designed American global economic power. They include the Ford, Carnegie
>and Rockeller Foundations, the OSS, the foreunner of the CIA, and the
>Council on Foreign Relations.
>
>Thus, in the great American universities, scholars generally served to
>justify the cold war which, we now know from declassified files, not
>only brought us closer to nuclear war than we thought, but was itself
>largely bogus. As the British files now make clear, there was no Soviet
>threat to the world. The threat was to Russia's satellites, just as the
>United States threatened, invaded and controlled its satellites in Latin
>America.
>
>"Liberal realism" in America, Britain, Australia meant taking the
>humanity out of the study of nations and viewing the world in terms of
>its usefulness to western power. This was presented in a self-serving
>jargon: a masonic-like language in thrall to the dominant power. Typical
>of the jargon were labels.
>
>Of all the labels applied to me, the most interesting is that I am
>'neo-idealist'. The 'neo' but has yet to be explained. I should add here
>that the most hilarious label is the creation of the foreign editor of
>The Australian who took a whole page in his newspaper to say that a
>subversive movement called Chomskyist-Pilgerism was inspiring would-be
>terrorists throughout the world.
>
>During the 1990s, whole societies were laid out for autopsy and
>identified as "failed states" and "rogue states", requiring
>"humanitarian intervention". Other euphemisms became fashionable "good
>governance" and "third way" were adopted by the liberal realist school,
>which handed out labels to its heroes. Bill Clinton, the president who
>destroyed the last of the Roosevelt reforms, was labelled "left of
>centre". Noble words like democracy, freedom, independence, reform were
>emptied of their meaning and taken into the service of the World Bank,
>the IMF and that amorphous thing called 'The West' in other words,
>imperialism.
>
>Of course, imperialism was the word the realists dared not write or
>speak, almost as if it had struck from the dictionary. And yet
>imperialism was the ideology behind their euphemisms. And need I remind
>you of the fate of people under imperialism. Throughout 20th century
>imperialism, the authorities of Britain, Belgium and France gassed,
>bombed and massacred indigenous populations from Sudan to Iraq, Nigeria
>to Palestine, India to Malaya, Algeria to the Congo. And yet imperialism
>only got its bad name when Hitler decided he, too, was an imperialist.
>
>So, after the war, new concepts had to be invented, indeed a whole
>lexicon and discourse created, as the new imperial superpower, the
>United States, didn't wish to be associated with the bad old days of
>European power. The American cult of anti-communism filled this void
>most effectively; however, when the Soviet Union suddenly collapsed and
>the cold war was over, a new threat had to be found.
>
>At first, there was the 'war on drugs' -- and the Bogeyman Theory of
>History is still popular. But neither can compare with the "war on
>terror" which arrived with September 11, 2001. Last year, I reported the
>"war on terror" from Afghanistan. Like East Timor, events I witnessed
>bore almost no relation to the way they were represented in free
>societies, especially Australia.
>
>The American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was reported as a liberation.
>But the evidence on the ground is that, for 95 per cent of the people,
>there is no liberation. The Taliban have been merely exchanged for a
>group of American funded warlords, rapists, murderers and war criminals
>terrorists by any measure: the very people whom President Carter
>secretly armed and the CIA trained for almost 20 years.
>
>One of the most powerful warlords is General Rashid Dostum. General
>Dostum was visited by Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, who
>came to express his gratitude. He called the general a "thoughtful" man
>and congratulated him on his part in the war on terror. This is the same
>General Dostum in whose custody 4,000 prisoners died terrible deaths
>just over two years ago the allegations are that wounded men were left
>to suffocate and bleed to death in containers. Mary Robinson, when she
>was the UN's senior humanitarian representative, called for an inquiry;
>but there was none for this kind of acceptable terrorism. The general is
>the face of the new Afghanistan you don't see in the media.
>
>What you see is the urbane Harmid Karzai, whose writ barely extends
>beyond his 42 American bodyguards. Only the Taliban seem to excite the
>indignation of our political leaders and media. Yet under the new,
>approved regime, women still wear the burqua, largely because they fear
>to walk down the street. Girls are routinely abducted, raped, murdered.
>
>Like the Suharto dictatorship, these warlords are our official friends,
>whereas the Taliban were our official enemies. The distinction is
>important, because the victims of our official friends are worthy of our
>care and concern, whereas the victims of our official enemies are not.
>That is the principle upon which totalitarian regimes run their domestic
>propaganda. And that , basically, is how western democracies, like
>Australia, run theirs.
>
>The difference is that in totalitarian societies, people take for
>granted that their governments lie to them: that their journalists are
>mere functionaries, that their academics are quiet and complicit. So
>people in these countries adjust accordingly. They learn to read between
>the lines. They rely on a flourishing underground. Their writers and
>playwrights write coded works, as in Poland and Czechoslovakia during
>the cold war.
>
>A Czech friend, a novelist, told me; "You in the West are disadvantaged.
>You have your myths about freedom of information, but you have yet to
>acquire the skill of deciphering: of reading between the lines. One day,
>you will need it."
>
>That day has come. The so-called war on terror is the greatest threat to
>all of us since the most dangerous years of the cold war. Rapacious,
>imperial America has found its new "red scare". Every day now,
>officially manipulated fear and paranoia are exported to our shores air
>marshals, finger printing, a directive on how many people can queue for
>the toilet on a Qantas jet flying to Los Angeles.
>
>The totalitarian impulses that have long existed in America are now in
>full cry. Go back to the 1950s, the McCarthy years, and the echoes today
>are all too familiar -- the hysteria; the assault on the Bill of Rights;
>a war based on lies and deception. Just as in the 1950s, the virus has
>spread to America's intellectual satellites, notably Australia.
>
>Last week, the Howard government announced it would implement US-style
>immigration procedures, fingerprinting people when they arrived. The
>Sydney Morning Herald reported this as government measures to "tighten
>its anti-terrorism net". No challenge there; no scepticism. News as
>propaganda.
>
>How convenient it all is. The White Australia Policy is back as
>"homeland security" yet another American term that institutionalises
>both paranoia and its bed-fellow, racism. Put simply, we are being
>brainwashed to believe that Al-Qaida, or any such group, is the real
>threat. And it isn't. By a simple mathematical comparison of American
>terror and Al-Qaida terror, the latter is a lethal flea. In my lifetime,
>the United States has supported and trained and directed terrorists in
>Latin America, Africa, Asia. The toll of their victims is in the
>millions.
>
>In the days before September 11, 2001, when America routinely attacked
>and terrorised weak states, and the victims were black and brown-skinned
>people in faraway places like Zaire and Guatemala, there were no
>headlines saying terrorism. But when the weak attacked the powerful,
>spectacularly on September 11, suddenly, there was terrorism.
>
>This is not to say that the threat from al-Qaida is not real It is very
>real now, thanks to American and British actions in Iraq, and the almost
>infantile support given by the Howard government. But the most
>pervasive, clear and present danger is that of which we are told
>nothing.
>
>It is the danger posed by "our" governments a danger suppressed by
>propaganda that casts "the West" as always benign: capable of
>misjudgment and blunder, yes, but never of high crime. The judgement at
>Nuremberg takes another view. This is what the judgement says; and
>remember, these words are the basis for almost 60 years of international
>law: "To initiate a war of aggression, it is not only an international
>crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other
>war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the
>whole"
>
>In other words, there is no difference, in the principle of the law,
>between the action of the German regime in the late 1930s and the
>Americans in 2003. Fuelled by religious fanaticism, a corrupt
>Americanism and corporate greed, the Bush cabal is pursuing what the
>military historian Anatol Lieven calls "the classic modern strategy of
>an endangered right-wing oligarchy, which is to divert discontent into
>nationalism". Bush's America, he warns, "has become a menace to itself
>and to mankind."
>
>Those are rare words. I know of no Australian historian or any other
>so-called expert to have uttered such a truth. I know of no Australian
>media organisation that would allow its journalists to speak or write
>such a truth. My friends in Australian journalism whisper it, always in
>private. They even encourage outsiders, like myself, to say it publicly,
>as I am doing now.
>
>Why? Well, a career, security even fame and fortune -- await those who
>propagate the crimes of official enemies. But a very different treatment
>awaits those who turn the mirror around. I've often wondered if George
>Orwell, in his great prophetic work 1984, about thought control in
>totalitarian state I've often wondered what the reaction would have
>been had he addressed the more interesting question of thought control
>in relatively free societies. Would he have been appreciated and
>celebrated? Or would he have faced silence, even hostility?
>
>Of all the western democracies, Australia is the most derivative and the
>most silent. Those who hold up a mirror are not welcome in the media. My
>work is syndicated and read widely around the world, but not in
>Australia, where I come from. However, I am mentioned in the Australian
>press quite frequently. The official commentators, who dominate the
>press, will refer critically to an article of mine they may have read in
>the Guardian or New Statesman in London. But Australian readers are not
>allowed to read the original, which must be filtered through the
>official commentators. But I do appear regularly in one Australian
>paper: the Hinterland Voice a tiny free sheet, whose address is Post
>Office Kin Kin in Queensland. It's a fine local paper. It has stories
>about garage sales and horses and the local scouts, and I'm proud to be
>part of it.
>
>It's the only paper in Australia in which I've been able to report the
>evidence of the disaster in Iraq --- for example, that the attack on
>Iraq was planned from September 11; that only a few months earlier,
>Colin Powell and Condaleeza Rice, had stated that Saddam Hussein was
>disarmed and no threat to anyone.
>
>Today, the United States is currently training a gestapo of 10,000
>agents, commanded by the most ruthless, senior elements of Saddam
>Hussein's secret police. The aim is to run the new puppet regime behind
>a pseudo-democratic fagade -- and to defeat the resistance. That
>information is vital to us, because the fate of the resistance in Iraq
>is vital to all our futures. For if the resistance fails, the Bush cabal
>will almost certainly attack another country possibly North Korea, which
>is nuclear armed.
>
>Just over a month ago, the United Nations General Assembly voted on a
>range of resolutions on disarmament of weapons of mass destruction.
>Remember the charade of Iraq's WMDs? Remember John Howard in Parliament
>last February, saying that Saddam Hussein, and I quote, "will emerge
>with his arsenal of chemical and biological weapons intact" unquote, and
>that it was "a massive programme".
>
>In a speech lasting 30 minutes, Howard referred more than 30 times to
>the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. And it
>was all a deception, wasn't it, a lie, a terrible joke on the public,
>and it was channelled and amplified by an obedient media. And who in the
>universities, our power-houses of knowledge and criticism and debate who
>stood up and objected? I can think of just two.
>
>Nor can I find any report in the media of the United Nations General
>Assembly resolutions on 8th December. The outcome was remarkable, if not
>surprising. The United States opposed all the most important
>resolutions, including those dealing with nuclear weapons. In its secret
>Nuclear Posture Review for 2002, the Bush administration outlines
>contingency plans to use nuclear weapons against North Korea, and Syria,
>and Iran and China.
>
>Following suit, a British government has announced for the first time
>that Britain will attack non-nuclear states with nuclear weapons "if
>necessary". Who among you is aware of these ambitions, and yet American
>and British intelligence facilities in this country are crucial to their
>implementation.
>
>Why is there no public discussion about this? The answer is that
>Australia has become a microcosm of the self-censored society. In its
>current index of press freedom, the international monitoring
>organisation Reporters Without Borders lists Australian press freedom in
>50th place, ahead only of autocracies and dictatorships. How did this
>come about?
>
>In the nineteenth century, Australia had a press more fiercely
>independent than most countries. In 1880, in New South Wales alone,
>there were 143 independent titles, many of them with a campaigning style
>and editors who believed it was their duty to be the voice of the
>people. Today, of twelve principal newspapers in the capital cities, one
>man, Rupert Murdoch, controls seven. Of the ten Sunday newspapers,
>Murdoch has seven. In Adelaide and Brisbane, he has effectively a
>complete monopoly. He controls almost 70 per cent of capital city
>circulation. Perth has only one newspaper.
>
>Sydney, the largest city, is dominated by Murdoch and by the Sydney
>Morning Herald, whose current editor in chief Mark Scott told a
>marketing conference in 2002 that journalism no longer needed smart and
>clever people. "They are not the answer," he said. The answer is people
>who can execute corporate strategy. In other words, mediocre minds,
>obedient minds.
>
>The great American journalist Martha Gellhorn once stood up at a press
>conference and said: "Listen, we're only real journalists when we're not
>doing as we're told. How else can we ever keep the record straight?" The
>late Alex Carey, the great Australian social scientist who pioneered the
>study of corporatism and propaganda, wrote that the three most
>significant political developments of the twentieth century was, and I
>quote, "the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power and the
>growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power
>against democracy".
>
>Carey was describing the propaganda of 20th century imperialism, which
>is the propaganda of the corporate state. And contrary to myth, the
>state has not withered away; indeed, it has never been stronger. General
>Suharto was a corporate man -- good for business. So his crimes were
>irrelevant, and the massacres of his own people and of the East Timorese
>were consigned to an Orwellian black hole. So effective is this
>historical censorship by omission that Suharto is currently being
>rehabilitated. In The Australian last October, Owen Harries described
>the Suharto period as a "golden era" and urged Australia to once again
>embrace the genocidal military of Indonesia.
>
>Recently, Owen Harries gave the Boyer Lectures on the ABC. This is an
>extraordinary platform: in six episodes broadcast on Radio National,
>Harries asked whether the United States was benign or imperial. After
>some minor criticisms of American power, he described the foreign policy
>of the most dangerous administration in modern times as "utopian".
>
>Who is Owen Harries? He was an adviser to the government of Malcolm
>Fraser. But in none of the publicity about his lectures have I read that
>Harries was also an important figure in a CIA-front propaganda
>organisation, the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its Australian
>offshoot. For years, Harries was an apologist for the cold war and the
>initial CIA-run attack on Vietnam, which he visited, courtesy of the
>CIA. Later, in Washington, he was editor of an extreme right wing
>journal called The National Interest.
>
>No would deny Owen Harries his voice in any democracy. But we should
>know who his former sponsors were. Moreover, it is his extreme view is
>the one that dominates. That the ABC should provide him with such a
>platform tells us a great deal about the effects of the long-running
>political intimidation of our national broadcaster.
>
>Consider, on the other hand, the ABC's treatment of Richard Flanagan,
>one of our finest novelists. Last year, Flanagan was asked to read a
>favourite piece of fiction on a Radio National programme and explain his
>reasons for the choice. He decided on one of his favourite writers of
>fiction: John Howard. He listed Howard's most famous fictions that
>desperate refugees had wilfully thrown their children overboard, and
>that Australia was endangered by Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass
>destruction.
>
>He followed this with Molly Bloom's soliloquy from Joyce's Ulysses,
>because, he explained, and I quote, "in our time of lies and hate it
>seems appropriate to be reminded of the beauty of saying yes to the
>chaos of truth." Well, all of this was duly recorded. But when the
>programme was broadcast, all references to the prime minister had been
>cut out. Flanagan accused the ABC of rank censorship. No, was the
>response. They just didn't want "anything political". And this is the
>same ABC that has just given Owen Harries, the voice of George W Bush's
>utopia, six one hour broadcasts.
>
>As for Richard Flanagan, that wasn't the end of it. The ABC producer who
>had censored him asked if he would be interested in coming on a
>programme to discuss, and I quote, " disillusionment in contemporary
>Australia." In a society that once prided itself on its laconic sense of
>irony, there was not even a hint of irony, just an obedient, managerial
>silence. "All around me," wrote Flanagan, "I see avenues for expression
>closing, and odd collusion of an ever-more cowed media and the way in
>which the powerful seek to dictate what is and what is not read and
>heard."
>
>I believe those words speak for many Australians. Half a million of them
>converged on the centre of Sydney on February 16 th, and this was
>repeated proportionally across the country. Ten Million marched across
>the world. People who had never protested before protested the fiction
>of Howard and of Bush and Blair.
>
>If Australia is the microcosm, consider the destruction of free speech
>in the United States, which constitutionally has the freest press in the
>world. In 1983, the principal media in America was owned by fifty
>corporations. In 2002, this had fallen to just nine companies. Today,
>Murdoch's Fox Television and four other conglomerates are on the verge
>of controlling 90 per cent of the terrestrial and cable audience. Even
>on the internet, the leading twenty websites are now owned by Fox,
>Disney, AOL, Time Warner, Viacom and other giants. Just fourteen
>companies attract 60 per cent of all the time Americans spend online.
>And these companies control, or influence most of the world's visual
>media, the principal source of information for most people.
>
>"We are beginning to learn," wrote Edward Said in his book Culture and
>Imperialism, "that de-colonisation was not the termination of imperial
>relationships but merely the extending of a geo-political web that has
>been spinning since the Renaissance. The new media have the media to
>penetrate more deeply into a receiving culture than any previous
>manifestation of Western technology." Compared with a century ago, when
>"European culture was associated with a white man's presence, we now
>have in addition an international media presence that insinuates itself
>over a fantastically wide range."
>
>He was referring not only to news. Right across the media, children are
>remorsely targeted by big business propaganda, commonly known as
>advertising. In the United States, some 30,000 commercial messages are
>targeted at children every year. The chief executive of one leading
>advertising company explained: "They aren't children so much as evolving
>consumers." Public relations is the twin of advertising. In the last
>twenty years, the whole concept of PR has changed dramatically and is
>now an enormous propaganda industry. In the United Kingdom, it's
>estimated that pre-packaged PR now accounts for half of the content of
>some major newspapers. The idea of "embedding" journalists with the US
>military during the invasion of Iraq came from public relations experts
>in the Pentagon, whose current strategic-planning literature describes
>journalism as part of psychological operations, or "psyops". Journalism
>as psyops.
>
>The aim, says the Pentagon, is to achieve "information dominance" which,
>in turn, is part of "full spectrum dominance" -- the stated policy of
>the United States to control land, sea, space and information. They make
>no secret of it. It's in the public domain.
>
>Those journalists who go their own way, those like Martha Gellhorn and
>Robert Fisk, beware. The independent Arab TV organisation, Al-Jazeera,
>was bombed by the Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the invasion of
>Iraq, more journalists were killed than ever before -- by the Americans.
>The message could not be clearer. The aim, eventually, is that there'll
>be no distinction between information control and media. That's to say:
>you won't know the difference.
>
>That alone is worthy of reflection by journalists: those who still
>believe, like Martha Gellhorn, that their duty is to keep the record
>straight. The choice is actually quite simple: they are truth-tellers,
>or, in the words of Edward Herman, they merely "normalise the
>unthinkable."
>
>In Australia, so much of the unthinkable has already been normalised.
>Almost twelve years after Mabo, the basic rights of the first
>Australians, known as native title, have become ensnared in legal
>structures. The Aboriginal people now fight not just to survive. They
>face a constant war of legal attrition, fought by lawyers. The legal
>bill and associated costs in native title administration alone now runs
>into hundreds of million of dollars. Puggy Hunter, a West Australian
>Aboriginal leader, told me: "Fighting the lawyers for our birthright,
>fighting them every inch of the way, will kill me." He died soon
>afterwards, in his forties.
>
>The High Court of Australia, once regarded as the last hope for the
>First Australians, now refers to native title as having a "bundle of
>rights" as if Aboriginal rights can be sorted and graded -- and
>downgraded.
>
>The unthinkable is the way we allow the government to treat refugees,
>against whom our brave military is dispatched. In camps so bad that the
>United Nations inspector said he had never seen anything like them, we
>allow what amounts to child abuse.
>
>On October 19th 2001, a boat carrying 397 people sank on its way to
>Australia. 353 drowned, many of them children. Were it not for a single
>individual, Tony Kevin, a retired Australian diplomat, this tragedy
>would have been consigned to oblivion. Thanks to him, we now know the
>Australian and military intelligence knew the boat was in grave danger
>of sinking, and did nothing. Is that surprising when the prime minister
>of Australia and the responsible minister have created such an
>atmosphere of hostility towards these defenceless people a hostility
>designed, I believe, to tap the seam of racism that runs right through
>our history.
>
>Consider the culpable loss of those lives against the pompous statements
>of Australian defence experts about our "sphere of influence" in Asia
>and the Pacific that allows the Australian military to invade the
>Solomon's, but not to save 353 lives.
>
>Threats? Let's talk about threats from asylum-seekers in leaking boats,
>from al-Qaida. In its annual report for 1990, the Australian Security
>and Intelligence Organisation, ASIO, stated: "The only discernible
>threat of politically motivated violence comes from the racist right." I
>believe, regardless of subsequent events, nothing has changed.
>
>All these matters are connected. They represent, at the very least, an
>assault on our intellect and our morality, yet even in our cultural
>life, we seem to turn away, as if frightened. Last week, I attended the
>opening of a new play in Sydney called "Harbour". It's about the great
>struggle on the waterfront in 1998 which attracted extraordinary public
>support. The play is an act of neutering, its stereotypes and
>sentimentality make history acceptable. Those who can afford the $60-odd
>for a ticket will not be disappointed. The sponsors, Jaguar and Fairfax
>and a huge law firm, will not be disappointed.
>
>We must reclaim our history from corporatism; for our history is rich
>and painful and, yes, proud. We should reclaim it from the John Howards
>and the Keith Windshuttles, who deny it, and from the polite people and
>their sponsors who neuter it. You will hear them say that Joe Blow
>doesn't care that as a people, we are apathetic and indifferent.
>
>It was the thousands of Australians who went into the streets in 1999,
>in city after city, town after town, who decisively helped the people of
>East Timor not John Howard, not General Cosgrove. And those Australians
>were not indifferent. It was the thousands of Australians and New
>Zealanders who stopped the French exploding their nuclear bombs in the
>Pacific. And they were not indifferent. It was the young people who
>travelled to Woomera and forced the closure of that disgraceful camp.
>And they awere not indifferent.
>
>The tragedy for many Australians seekivng pride in the achievements of
>our nation is the suppression or the neutering, in popular culture, of a
>politically distinctive past, of which we there is much to be proud. In
>the lead and silver mines of Broken Hill, the miners won the world's
>first 35-hour a week, half a century ahead of Europe and America. Long
>before most of the world, Australia had a minimum wage, child benefits,
>pensions and the vote for women. By the 1960s, Australia could boast the
>most equitable spread of income in the western world. In spite of Howard
>and Ruddock, in my lifetime, Australia has been transformed from a
>second-hand Anglo-Irish society to one of the most culturally diverse
>and attractive on earth, and almost all of it has happened peacefully.
>Indifference had nothing to do with it.
>
>I can almost hear a few of you saying, "OK, then what should we do?" As
>Noam Chomsky recently pointed out, you almost never hear that question
>in the so-called developing world, where most of humanity struggles to
>live day by day. There, they'll tell you what they are doing.
>
>We have none of the life-and-death problems faced by, say, intellectuals
>in Turkey or campesinos in Brazil or Aboriginal people in our own third
>world. Perhaps too many of us believe that if we take action, then the
>solution will happen almost overnight. It will be easy and fast. Alas,
>it doesn't work that way.
>
>If you want to take direct action and I believe we don't have a choice
>now: such is the danger facing all of us then it means hard work,
>dedication, commitment, just like those people in countries on the front
>line, who ought to be our inspiration. The people of Bolivia recently
>reclaimed their country from water and gas multinationals, and threw out
>the president who abused their trust. The people of Venezuela have, time
>and again, defended their democratically elected president against a
>ferocious campaign by an American-backed elite and the media it
>controls. In Brazil and Argentina, popular movements have made
>extraordinary progress -so much so that Latin America is no longer the
>vassal continent of Washington.
>
>Even in Colombia, into which the United States has poured a fortune in
>order to shore up a vicious oligarchy, ordinary people trade unionists,
>peasants, young people have fought back.
>
>These are epic struggles you don't read much about here. Then there's
>what we call the anti-globalisation movement. Oh, I detest that word,
>because it's much more than that. It's is a remarkable response to
>poverty and injustice and war. It's more diverse, more enterprising,
>more internationalist and more tolerant of difference than anything in
>the past, and it's growing faster than ever.
>
>In fact, it is now the democratic opposition in many countries. That is
>the very good news. For in spite of the propaganda campaign I have
>outlined, never in my lifetime have people all over the world
>demonstrated greater awareness of the political forces ranged against
>them and the possibilities of countering them. The notion of a
>representative democracy controlled from below where the representatives
>are not only elected but can be called truly to account, is as relevant
>today as it was when first put into practice in the Paris Commune 133
>years ago. As for voting, yes, that's a hard won gain. But the
>Chartists, who probably invented voting as we know it today, made clear
>that it was gain only when there was a clear, democratic choice. And
>there's no clear, democratic choice now. We live in a single-ideology
>state in which two almost identical factions compete for our attention
>while promoting the fiction of their difference.
>
>The writer Arundhati Roy described the outpouring of anti-war anger last
>year as "the most spectacular display of public morality the world has
>ever seen" That was just a beginning and a cause for optimism.
>
>Why? Because I think a great many people are beginning to listen to that
>quality of humanity that is the antidote to rampant power and its
>bedfellow: racism. It's called conscience. We all have it, and some are
>always moved to act upon it. Franz Kafka wrote: "You can hold back from
>the suffering of the world, you have free permission to do so and it is
>in accordance with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is
>the one suffering that you could have avoided."
>
>No doubt there are those who believe they can remain aloof acclaimed
>writers who write only style, successful academics who remain quiet,
>respected jurists who retreat into arcane law and famous journalists who
>protest: "No one has ever told me what to say." George Orwell wrote:
>"Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks the whip. But the really
>well-trained dog is the one that turns somersaults when there is no
>whip."
>
>For those members of our small, privileged and powerful elite, I
>recommend the words of Flaubert. "I have always tried to live in an
>ivory tower," he said, "but a tide of shit is beatings its walls,
>threatening to undermine it." For the rest of us, I offer these words of
>Mahatma Gandhi: "First, they ignore," he said. "Then they laugh at you.
>Then they fight you. Then you win."
>--
>
>============================================================
>
> "...the Patriot Act followed 9-11 as smoothly as the
> suspension of the Weimar constitution followed the
> Reichstag fire."
> - Srdja Trifkovic
>
> There is not a problem with the system.
> The system is the problem.
>
> Faith in humanity, not gods, ideologies, or programs.
> _____________________________
>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>============================================================
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------------
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>For additional commands, e-mail: cj-...@cyberjournal.org
says...
>
>Friends,
>
>I am pleased to share with you this important and inspiring essay, sent to us
>by Betty Daly-King. An excerpt:
>
> For in spite of the propaganda campaign I have outlined, never in my
> lifetime have people all over the world demonstrated greater awareness
> of the political forces ranged against them and the possibilities of
> countering them.
>
>rkm
>
>--------------------------------------------------------
>Delivered-To: ric...@cyberjournal.org
>Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2004 01:11:46 +0800
>To: sea...@yahoogroups.com
>From: Betty Daly-King <dal...@iinet.net.au>
>Subject: John Pilger, UWA 12/01/04
>
>"Power, Propaganda and Conscience in The War On Terror"
>John Pilger: University of Western Australia
>12 January 2004
>http://multimedia.carlton.com/images/pilger/home/body/UWA_speech.doc
>
>I would like to thank the University of Western Australia for inviting
>me here today, and especially Nigel Dolan for his warm welcome and
>smooth organisation.
>
>I am a reporter, who values bearing witness. That is to say, I place
>paramount importance in the evidence of what I see, and hear, and sense
>to be the truth, or as close to the truth as possible. By comparing this
>evidence with the statements, and actions of those with power, I believe
>it's possible to assess fairly how our world is controlled and divided,
>and manipulated and how language and debate are distorted and a false
>consciousness developed.
>
>When we speak of this in regard to totalitarian societies and
>dictatorships, we call it brainwashing: the conquest of minds. It's a
>notion we almost never apply to our own societies. Let me give you an
>example. During the height of the cold war, a group of Soviet
>journalists were taken on an official tour of the United States. They
>watched TV; they read the newspapers; they listened to debates in
>Congress. To their astonishment, everything they heard was more or less
>the same. The news was the same. The opinions were the same, more or
>less. "How do you do it?" they asked their hosts. "In our country, to
>achieve this, we throw people in prison; we tear out their fingernails.
>Here, there's none of that? What's your secret?"
>
>The secret is that the question is almost never raised. Or if it is
>raised, it's more than likely dismissed as coming from the margins: from
>voices far outside the boundaries of what I would call our 'metropolitan
>conversation', whose terms of reference, and limits, are fixed by the
>media at one level, and by the discourse or silence of scholarship at
>another level. Behind both is a presiding corporate and political power.
>
>A dozen years ago, I reported from East Timor, which was then occupied
>by the Indonesian dictatorship of General Suharto. I had to go there
>under cover, as reporters were not welcome -- my informants were brave,
>ordinary people who confirmed, with their evidence and experience, that
>genocide had taken place in their country. I brought out meticulously
>hand-written documents, evidence that whole communities had been
>slaughtered -- all of which we now know to be true.
>
>We also know that vital, material backing for a crime proportionally
>greater than the killing in Cambodia under Pol Pot had come from the
>West: principally the United States, Britain and Australia. On my return
>to London, and then to this country, I encountered a very different
>version. The media version was that General Suharto was a benign leader,
>who ran a sound economy and was a close ally. Indeed, prime minister
>Keating was said to regard him as a father figure.
>
>He and Foreign Minister Gareth Evans made many laudatory speeches about
>Suharto, never mentioning not once -- that he had seized power as a
>result of what the CIA called "one of the worst massacres of the
>twentieth century." Nor did they mention that his special forces, known
>as Kopassus, were responsible for the terror and deaths of a quarter of
>the East Timorese population 200,000 people, a figure confirmed in a
>study commissioned by the Foreign Affairs Committee of [Australian]
>Federal Parliament. Nor did they mention that these killers were trained
>by the Australian SAS not far from this auditorium, and that the
>Australian military establishment was integrated into Suharto's violent
>campaign against the people of East Timor.
>
>The evidence of atrocities, which I reported in my film Death of a
>Nation was heard and accepted by the Human Rights Commission of the
>United Nations, but not by those with power in Australia. When I showed
>evidence of a second massacre near the Santa Cruz cemetery in November
>1991, the foreign editor of the only national newspaper in this country,
>The Australian, mocked the eyewitnesses. "The truth," wrote Greg
>Sheridan, "is that even genuine victims frequently concoct stories." The
>paper's Jakarata correspondent, Patrick Walters, wrote that "no one is
>arrested [by Suharto] without proper legal procedures". The
>editor-in-chief, Paul Kelly, declared Suharto a 'moderate' and that
>there was no alternative to his benign rule. Paul Kelly sat on the board
>of the Australia-Indonesia Institute, a body funded by the Australian
>government. Not long before Suharto was overthrown by his own people,
>Kelly was in Jakarta, standing at Suharto's side, introducing the mass
>murderer to a line of Australian editors. To his great credit, the then
>editor of the West Australian, Paul Murray, refused to join this
>obsequious group.
>
>Not long ago, Paul Kelly was given a special award in the annual Walkley
>Awards for journalism the kind they give to elder statesmen. And no one
>said anything about Indonesia and Suharto. Imagine a similar award going
>to Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the London Times in the 1930s. Like Kelly,
>he appeased a genocidal dictator, calling him a 'moderate'.
>
>This episode is a metaphor for what I'd like to touch upon tonight. For
>15 years, a silence was maintained by the Australian government, the
>Australian media and Australian academics on the great crime and tragedy
>of East Timor. Moreover, this was an extension of the silence about the
>true circumstances of Suharto's bloody ascent to power in the
>mid-sixties. It was not unlike the official silence in the Soviet Union
>on the bloody invasion of Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
>
>The media's silence I'll discuss in a while. Let's look now at the
>academic silence. One of the greatest acts of genocide in the second
>half of the twentieth century apparently did not warrant a single
>substantial academic case study, based on primary sources. Why? We have
>to go back to the years immediately after world war two when the study
>of post-war international politics, known as "liberal realism", was
>invented in the United States, largely with the sponsorship of those who
>designed American global economic power. They include the Ford, Carnegie
>and Rockeller Foundations, the OSS, the foreunner of the CIA, and the
>Council on Foreign Relations.
>
>Thus, in the great American universities, scholars generally served to
>justify the cold war which, we now know from declassified files, not
>only brought us closer to nuclear war than we thought, but was itself
>largely bogus. As the British files now make clear, there was no Soviet
>threat to the world. The threat was to Russia's satellites, just as the
>United States threatened, invaded and controlled its satellites in Latin
>America.
>
>"Liberal realism" in America, Britain, Australia meant taking the
>humanity out of the study of nations and viewing the world in terms of
>its usefulness to western power. This was presented in a self-serving
>jargon: a masonic-like language in thrall to the dominant power. Typical
>of the jargon were labels.
>
>Of all the labels applied to me, the most interesting is that I am
>'neo-idealist'. The 'neo' but has yet to be explained. I should add here
>that the most hilarious label is the creation of the foreign editor of
>The Australian who took a whole page in his newspaper to say that a
>subversive movement called Chomskyist-Pilgerism was inspiring would-be
>terrorists throughout the world.
>
>During the 1990s, whole societies were laid out for autopsy and
>identified as "failed states" and "rogue states", requiring
>"humanitarian intervention". Other euphemisms became fashionable "good
>governance" and "third way" were adopted by the liberal realist school,
>which handed out labels to its heroes. Bill Clinton, the president who
>destroyed the last of the Roosevelt reforms, was labelled "left of
>centre". Noble words like democracy, freedom, independence, reform were
>emptied of their meaning and taken into the service of the World Bank,
>the IMF and that amorphous thing called 'The West' in other words,
>imperialism.
>
>Of course, imperialism was the word the realists dared not write or
>speak, almost as if it had struck from the dictionary. And yet
>imperialism was the ideology behind their euphemisms. And need I remind
>you of the fate of people under imperialism. Throughout 20th century
>imperialism, the authorities of Britain, Belgium and France gassed,
>bombed and massacred indigenous populations from Sudan to Iraq, Nigeria
>to Palestine, India to Malaya, Algeria to the Congo. And yet imperialism
>only got its bad name when Hitler decided he, too, was an imperialist.
>
>So, after the war, new concepts had to be invented, indeed a whole
>lexicon and discourse created, as the new imperial superpower, the
>United States, didn't wish to be associated with the bad old days of
>European power. The American cult of anti-communism filled this void
>most effectively; however, when the Soviet Union suddenly collapsed and
>the cold war was over, a new threat had to be found.
>
>At first, there was the 'war on drugs' -- and the Bogeyman Theory of
>History is still popular. But neither can compare with the "war on
>terror" which arrived with September 11, 2001. Last year, I reported the
>"war on terror" from Afghanistan. Like East Timor, events I witnessed
>bore almost no relation to the way they were represented in free
>societies, especially Australia.
>
>The American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was reported as a liberation.
>But the evidence on the ground is that, for 95 per cent of the people,
>there is no liberation. The Taliban have been merely exchanged for a
>group of American funded warlords, rapists, murderers and war criminals
>terrorists by any measure: the very people whom President Carter
>secretly armed and the CIA trained for almost 20 years.
>
>One of the most powerful warlords is General Rashid Dostum. General
>Dostum was visited by Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, who
>came to express his gratitude. He called the general a "thoughtful" man
>and congratulated him on his part in the war on terror. This is the same
>General Dostum in whose custody 4,000 prisoners died terrible deaths
>just over two years ago the allegations are that wounded men were left
>to suffocate and bleed to death in containers. Mary Robinson, when she
>was the UN's senior humanitarian representative, called for an inquiry;
>but there was none for this kind of acceptable terrorism. The general is
>the face of the new Afghanistan you don't see in the media.
>
>What you see is the urbane Harmid Karzai, whose writ barely extends
>beyond his 42 American bodyguards. Only the Taliban seem to excite the
>indignation of our political leaders and media. Yet under the new,
>approved regime, women still wear the burqua, largely because they fear
>to walk down the street. Girls are routinely abducted, raped, murdered.
>
>Like the Suharto dictatorship, these warlords are our official friends,
>whereas the Taliban were our official enemies. The distinction is
>important, because the victims of our official friends are worthy of our
>care and concern, whereas the victims of our official enemies are not.
>That is the principle upon which totalitarian regimes run their domestic
>propaganda. And that , basically, is how western democracies, like
>Australia, run theirs.
>
>The difference is that in totalitarian societies, people take for
>granted that their governments lie to them: that their journalists are
>mere functionaries, that their academics are quiet and complicit. So
>people in these countries adjust accordingly. They learn to read between
>the lines. They rely on a flourishing underground. Their writers and
>playwrights write coded works, as in Poland and Czechoslovakia during
>the cold war.
>
>A Czech friend, a novelist, told me; "You in the West are disadvantaged.
>You have your myths about freedom of information, but you have yet to
>acquire the skill of deciphering: of reading between the lines. One day,
>you will need it."
>
>That day has come. The so-called war on terror is the greatest threat to
>all of us since the most dangerous years of the cold war. Rapacious,
>imperial America has found its new "red scare". Every day now,
>officially manipulated fear and paranoia are exported to our shores air
>marshals, finger printing, a directive on how many people can queue for
>the toilet on a Qantas jet flying to Los Angeles.
>
>The totalitarian impulses that have long existed in America are now in
>full cry. Go back to the 1950s, the McCarthy years, and the echoes today
>are all too familiar -- the hysteria; the assault on the Bill of Rights;
>a war based on lies and deception. Just as in the 1950s, the virus has
>spread to America's intellectual satellites, notably Australia.
>
>Last week, the Howard government announced it would implement US-style
>immigration procedures, fingerprinting people when they arrived. The
>Sydney Morning Herald reported this as government measures to "tighten
>its anti-terrorism net". No challenge there; no scepticism. News as
>propaganda.
>
>How convenient it all is. The White Australia Policy is back as
>"homeland security" yet another American term that institutionalises
>both paranoia and its bed-fellow, racism. Put simply, we are being
>brainwashed to believe that Al-Qaida, or any such group, is the real
>threat. And it isn't. By a simple mathematical comparison of American
>terror and Al-Qaida terror, the latter is a lethal flea. In my lifetime,
>the United States has supported and trained and directed terrorists in
>Latin America, Africa, Asia. The toll of their victims is in the
>millions.
>
>In the days before September 11, 2001, when America routinely attacked
>and terrorised weak states, and the victims were black and brown-skinned
>people in faraway places like Zaire and Guatemala, there were no
>headlines saying terrorism. But when the weak attacked the powerful,
>spectacularly on September 11, suddenly, there was terrorism.
>
>This is not to say that the threat from al-Qaida is not real It is very
>real now, thanks to American and British actions in Iraq, and the almost
>infantile support given by the Howard government. But the most
>pervasive, clear and present danger is that of which we are told
>nothing.
>
>It is the danger posed by "our" governments a danger suppressed by
>propaganda that casts "the West" as always benign: capable of
>misjudgment and blunder, yes, but never of high crime. The judgement at
>Nuremberg takes another view. This is what the judgement says; and
>remember, these words are the basis for almost 60 years of international
>law: "To initiate a war of aggression, it is not only an international
>crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other
>war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the
>whole"
>
>In other words, there is no difference, in the principle of the law,
>between the action of the German regime in the late 1930s and the
>Americans in 2003. Fuelled by religious fanaticism, a corrupt
>Americanism and corporate greed, the Bush cabal is pursuing what the
>military historian Anatol Lieven calls "the classic modern strategy of
>an endangered right-wing oligarchy, which is to divert discontent into
>nationalism". Bush's America, he warns, "has become a menace to itself
>and to mankind."
>
>Those are rare words. I know of no Australian historian or any other
>so-called expert to have uttered such a truth. I know of no Australian
>media organisation that would allow its journalists to speak or write
>such a truth. My friends in Australian journalism whisper it, always in
>private. They even encourage outsiders, like myself, to say it publicly,
>as I am doing now.
>
>Why? Well, a career, security even fame and fortune -- await those who
>propagate the crimes of official enemies. But a very different treatment
>awaits those who turn the mirror around. I've often wondered if George
>Orwell, in his great prophetic work 1984, about thought control in
>totalitarian state I've often wondered what the reaction would have
>been had he addressed the more interesting question of thought control
>in relatively free societies. Would he have been appreciated and
>celebrated? Or would he have faced silence, even hostility?
>
>Of all the western democracies, Australia is the most derivative and the
>most silent. Those who hold up a mirror are not welcome in the media. My
>work is syndicated and read widely around the world, but not in
>Australia, where I come from. However, I am mentioned in the Australian
>press quite frequently. The official commentators, who dominate the
>press, will refer critically to an article of mine they may have read in
>the Guardian or New Statesman in London. But Australian readers are not
>allowed to read the original, which must be filtered through the
>official commentators. But I do appear regularly in one Australian
>paper: the Hinterland Voice a tiny free sheet, whose address is Post
>Office Kin Kin in Queensland. It's a fine local paper. It has stories
>about garage sales and horses and the local scouts, and I'm proud to be
>part of it.
>
>It's the only paper in Australia in which I've been able to report the
>evidence of the disaster in Iraq --- for example, that the attack on
>Iraq was planned from September 11; that only a few months earlier,
>Colin Powell and Condaleeza Rice, had stated that Saddam Hussein was
>disarmed and no threat to anyone.
>
>Today, the United States is currently training a gestapo of 10,000
>agents, commanded by the most ruthless, senior elements of Saddam
>Hussein's secret police. The aim is to run the new puppet regime behind
>a pseudo-democratic fagade -- and to defeat the resistance. That
>information is vital to us, because the fate of the resistance in Iraq
>is vital to all our futures. For if the resistance fails, the Bush cabal
>will almost certainly attack another country possibly North Korea, which
>is nuclear armed.
>
>Just over a month ago, the United Nations General Assembly voted on a
>range of resolutions on disarmament of weapons of mass destruction.
>Remember the charade of Iraq's WMDs? Remember John Howard in Parliament
>last February, saying that Saddam Hussein, and I quote, "will emerge
>with his arsenal of chemical and biological weapons intact" unquote, and
>that it was "a massive programme".
>
>In a speech lasting 30 minutes, Howard referred more than 30 times to
>the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. And it
>was all a deception, wasn't it, a lie, a terrible joke on the public,
>and it was channelled and amplified by an obedient media. And who in the
>universities, our power-houses of knowledge and criticism and debate who
>stood up and objected? I can think of just two.
>
>Nor can I find any report in the media of the United Nations General
>Assembly resolutions on 8th December. The outcome was remarkable, if not
>surprising. The United States opposed all the most important
>resolutions, including those dealing with nuclear weapons. In its secret
>Nuclear Posture Review for 2002, the Bush administration outlines
>contingency plans to use nuclear weapons against North Korea, and Syria,
>and Iran and China.
>
>Following suit, a British government has announced for the first time
>that Britain will attack non-nuclear states with nuclear weapons "if
>necessary". Who among you is aware of these ambitions, and yet American
>and British intelligence facilities in this country are crucial to their
>implementation.
>
>Why is there no public discussion about this? The answer is that
>Australia has become a microcosm of the self-censored society. In its
>current index of press freedom, the international monitoring
>organisation Reporters Without Borders lists Australian press freedom in
>50th place, ahead only of autocracies and dictatorships. How did this
>come about?
>
>In the nineteenth century, Australia had a press more fiercely
>independent than most countries. In 1880, in New South Wales alone,
>there were 143 independent titles, many of them with a campaigning style
>and editors who believed it was their duty to be the voice of the
>people. Today, of twelve principal newspapers in the capital cities, one
>man, Rupert Murdoch, controls seven. Of the ten Sunday newspapers,
>Murdoch has seven. In Adelaide and Brisbane, he has effectively a
>complete monopoly. He controls almost 70 per cent of capital city
>circulation. Perth has only one newspaper.
>
>Sydney, the largest city, is dominated by Murdoch and by the Sydney
>Morning Herald, whose current editor in chief Mark Scott told a
>marketing conference in 2002 that journalism no longer needed smart and
>clever people. "They are not the answer," he said. The answer is people
>who can execute corporate strategy. In other words, mediocre minds,
>obedient minds.
>
>The great American journalist Martha Gellhorn once stood up at a press
>conference and said: "Listen, we're only real journalists when we're not
>doing as we're told. How else can we ever keep the record straight?" The
>late Alex Carey, the great Australian social scientist who pioneered the
>study of corporatism and propaganda, wrote that the three most
>significant political developments of the twentieth century was, and I
>quote, "the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power and the
>growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power
>against democracy".
>
>Carey was describing the propaganda of 20th century imperialism, which
>is the propaganda of the corporate state. And contrary to myth, the
>state has not withered away; indeed, it has never been stronger. General
>Suharto was a corporate man -- good for business. So his crimes were
>irrelevant, and the massacres of his own people and of the East Timorese
>were consigned to an Orwellian black hole. So effective is this
>historical censorship by omission that Suharto is currently being
>rehabilitated. In The Australian last October, Owen Harries described
>the Suharto period as a "golden era" and urged Australia to once again
>embrace the genocidal military of Indonesia.
>
>Recently, Owen Harries gave the Boyer Lectures on the ABC. This is an
>extraordinary platform: in six episodes broadcast on Radio National,
>Harries asked whether the United States was benign or imperial. After
>some minor criticisms of American power, he described the foreign policy
>of the most dangerous administration in modern times as "utopian".
>
>Who is Owen Harries? He was an adviser to the government of Malcolm
>Fraser. But in none of the publicity about his lectures have I read that
>Harries was also an important figure in a CIA-front propaganda
>organisation, the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its Australian
>offshoot. For years, Harries was an apologist for the cold war and the
>initial CIA-run attack on Vietnam, which he visited, courtesy of the
>CIA. Later, in Washington, he was editor of an extreme right wing
>journal called The National Interest.
>
>No would deny Owen Harries his voice in any democracy. But we should
>know who his former sponsors were. Moreover, it is his extreme view is
>the one that dominates. That the ABC should provide him with such a
>platform tells us a great deal about the effects of the long-running
>political intimidation of our national broadcaster.
>
>Consider, on the other hand, the ABC's treatment of Richard Flanagan,
>one of our finest novelists. Last year, Flanagan was asked to read a
>favourite piece of fiction on a Radio National programme and explain his
>reasons for the choice. He decided on one of his favourite writers of
>fiction: John Howard. He listed Howard's most famous fictions that
>desperate refugees had wilfully thrown their children overboard, and
>that Australia was endangered by Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass
>destruction.
>
>He followed this with Molly Bloom's soliloquy from Joyce's Ulysses,
>because, he explained, and I quote, "in our time of lies and hate it
>seems appropriate to be reminded of the beauty of saying yes to the
>chaos of truth." Well, all of this was duly recorded. But when the
>programme was broadcast, all references to the prime minister had been
>cut out. Flanagan accused the ABC of rank censorship. No, was the
>response. They just didn't want "anything political". And this is the
>same ABC that has just given Owen Harries, the voice of George W Bush's
>utopia, six one hour broadcasts.
>
>As for Richard Flanagan, that wasn't the end of it. The ABC producer who
>had censored him asked if he would be interested in coming on a
>programme to discuss, and I quote, " disillusionment in contemporary
>Australia." In a society that once prided itself on its laconic sense of
>irony, there was not even a hint of irony, just an obedient, managerial
>silence. "All around me," wrote Flanagan, "I see avenues for expression
>closing, and odd collusion of an ever-more cowed media and the way in
>which the powerful seek to dictate what is and what is not read and
>heard."
>
>I believe those words speak for many Australians. Half a million of them
>converged on the centre of Sydney on February 16 th, and this was
>repeated proportionally across the country. Ten Million marched across
>the world. People who had never protested before protested the fiction
>of Howard and of Bush and Blair.
>
>If Australia is the microcosm, consider the destruction of free speech
>in the United States, which constitutionally has the freest press in the
>world. In 1983, the principal media in America was owned by fifty
>corporations. In 2002, this had fallen to just nine companies. Today,
>Murdoch's Fox Television and four other conglomerates are on the verge
>of controlling 90 per cent of the terrestrial and cable audience. Even
>on the internet, the leading twenty websites are now owned by Fox,
>Disney, AOL, Time Warner, Viacom and other giants. Just fourteen
>companies attract 60 per cent of all the time Americans spend online.
>And these companies control, or influence most of the world's visual
>media, the principal source of information for most people.
>
>"We are beginning to learn," wrote Edward Said in his book Culture and
>Imperialism, "that de-colonisation was not the termination of imperial
>relationships but merely the extending of a geo-political web that has
>been spinning since the Renaissance. The new media have the media to
>penetrate more deeply into a receiving culture than any previous
>manifestation of Western technology." Compared with a century ago, when
>"European culture was associated with a white man's presence, we now
>have in addition an international media presence that insinuates itself
>over a fantastically wide range."
>
>He was referring not only to news. Right across the media, children are
>remorsely targeted by big business propaganda, commonly known as
>advertising. In the United States, some 30,000 commercial messages are
>targeted at children every year. The chief executive of one leading
>advertising company explained: "They aren't children so much as evolving
>consumers." Public relations is the twin of advertising. In the last
>twenty years, the whole concept of PR has changed dramatically and is
>now an enormous propaganda industry. In the United Kingdom, it's
>estimated that pre-packaged PR now accounts for half of the content of
>some major newspapers. The idea of "embedding" journalists with the US
>military during the invasion of Iraq came from public relations experts
>in the Pentagon, whose current strategic-planning literature describes
>journalism as part of psychological operations, or "psyops". Journalism
>as psyops.
>
>The aim, says the Pentagon, is to achieve "information dominance" which,
>in turn, is part of "full spectrum dominance" -- the stated policy of
>the United States to control land, sea, space and information. They make
>no secret of it. It's in the public domain.
>
>Those journalists who go their own way, those like Martha Gellhorn and
>Robert Fisk, beware. The independent Arab TV organisation, Al-Jazeera,
>was bombed by the Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the invasion of
>Iraq, more journalists were killed than ever before -- by the Americans.
>The message could not be clearer. The aim, eventually, is that there'll
>be no distinction between information control and media. That's to say:
>you won't know the difference.
>
>That alone is worthy of reflection by journalists: those who still
>believe, like Martha Gellhorn, that their duty is to keep the record
>straight. The choice is actually quite simple: they are truth-tellers,
>or, in the words of Edward Herman, they merely "normalise the
>unthinkable."
>
>In Australia, so much of the unthinkable has already been normalised.
>Almost twelve years after Mabo, the basic rights of the first
>Australians, known as native title, have become ensnared in legal
>structures. The Aboriginal people now fight not just to survive. They
>face a constant war of legal attrition, fought by lawyers. The legal
>bill and associated costs in native title administration alone now runs
>into hundreds of million of dollars. Puggy Hunter, a West Australian
>Aboriginal leader, told me: "Fighting the lawyers for our birthright,
>fighting them every inch of the way, will kill me." He died soon
>afterwards, in his forties.
>
>The High Court of Australia, once regarded as the last hope for the
>First Australians, now refers to native title as having a "bundle of
>rights" as if Aboriginal rights can be sorted and graded -- and
>downgraded.
>
>The unthinkable is the way we allow the government to treat refugees,
>against whom our brave military is dispatched. In camps so bad that the
>United Nations inspector said he had never seen anything like them, we
>allow what amounts to child abuse.
>
>On October 19th 2001, a boat carrying 397 people sank on its way to
>Australia. 353 drowned, many of them children. Were it not for a single
>individual, Tony Kevin, a retired Australian diplomat, this tragedy
>would have been consigned to oblivion. Thanks to him, we now know the
>Australian and military intelligence knew the boat was in grave danger
>of sinking, and did nothing. Is that surprising when the prime minister
>of Australia and the responsible minister have created such an
>atmosphere of hostility towards these defenceless people a hostility
>designed, I believe, to tap the seam of racism that runs right through
>our history.
>
>Consider the culpable loss of those lives against the pompous statements
>of Australian defence experts about our "sphere of influence" in Asia
>and the Pacific that allows the Australian military to invade the
>Solomon's, but not to save 353 lives.
>
>Threats? Let's talk about threats from asylum-seekers in leaking boats,
>from al-Qaida. In its annual report for 1990, the Australian Security
>and Intelligence Organisation, ASIO, stated: "The only discernible
>threat of politically motivated violence comes from the racist right." I
>believe, regardless of subsequent events, nothing has changed.
>
>All these matters are connected. They represent, at the very least, an
>assault on our intellect and our morality, yet even in our cultural
>life, we seem to turn away, as if frightened. Last week, I attended the
>opening of a new play in Sydney called "Harbour". It's about the great
>struggle on the waterfront in 1998 which attracted extraordinary public
>support. The play is an act of neutering, its stereotypes and
>sentimentality make history acceptable. Those who can afford the $60-odd
>for a ticket will not be disappointed. The sponsors, Jaguar and Fairfax
>and a huge law firm, will not be disappointed.
>
>We must reclaim our history from corporatism; for our history is rich
>and painful and, yes, proud. We should reclaim it from the John Howards
>and the Keith Windshuttles, who deny it, and from the polite people and
>their sponsors who neuter it. You will hear them say that Joe Blow
>doesn't care that as a people, we are apathetic and indifferent.
>
>It was the thousands of Australians who went into the streets in 1999,
>in city after city, town after town, who decisively helped the people of
>East Timor not John Howard, not General Cosgrove. And those Australians
>were not indifferent. It was the thousands of Australians and New
>Zealanders who stopped the French exploding their nuclear bombs in the
>Pacific. And they were not indifferent. It was the young people who
>travelled to Woomera and forced the closure of that disgraceful camp.
>And they awere not indifferent.
>
>The tragedy for many Australians seekivng pride in the achievements of
>our nation is the suppression or the neutering, in popular culture, of a
>politically distinctive past, of which we there is much to be proud. In
>the lead and silver mines of Broken Hill, the miners won the world's
>first 35-hour a week, half a century ahead of Europe and America. Long
>before most of the world, Australia had a minimum wage, child benefits,
>pensions and the vote for women. By the 1960s, Australia could boast the
>most equitable spread of income in the western world. In spite of Howard
>and Ruddock, in my lifetime, Australia has been transformed from a
>second-hand Anglo-Irish society to one of the most culturally diverse
>and attractive on earth, and almost all of it has happened peacefully.
>Indifference had nothing to do with it.
>
>I can almost hear a few of you saying, "OK, then what should we do?" As
>Noam Chomsky recently pointed out, you almost never hear that question
>in the so-called developing world, where most of humanity struggles to
>live day by day. There, they'll tell you what they are doing.
>
>We have none of the life-and-death problems faced by, say, intellectuals
>in Turkey or campesinos in Brazil or Aboriginal people in our own third
>world. Perhaps too many of us believe that if we take action, then the
>solution will happen almost overnight. It will be easy and fast. Alas,
>it doesn't work that way.
>
>If you want to take direct action and I believe we don't have a choice
>now: such is the danger facing all of us then it means hard work,
>dedication, commitment, just like those people in countries on the front
>line, who ought to be our inspiration. The people of Bolivia recently
>reclaimed their country from water and gas multinationals, and threw out
>the president who abused their trust. The people of Venezuela have, time
>and again, defended their democratically elected president against a
>ferocious campaign by an American-backed elite and the media it
>controls. In Brazil and Argentina, popular movements have made
>extraordinary progress -so much so that Latin America is no longer the
>vassal continent of Washington.
>
>Even in Colombia, into which the United States has poured a fortune in
>order to shore up a vicious oligarchy, ordinary people trade unionists,
>peasants, young people have fought back.
>
>These are epic struggles you don't read much about here. Then there's
>what we call the anti-globalisation movement. Oh, I detest that word,
>because it's much more than that. It's is a remarkable response to
>poverty and injustice and war. It's more diverse, more enterprising,
>more internationalist and more tolerant of difference than anything in
>the past, and it's growing faster than ever.
>
>In fact, it is now the democratic opposition in many countries. That is
>the very good news. For in spite of the propaganda campaign I have
>outlined, never in my lifetime have people all over the world
>demonstrated greater awareness of the political forces ranged against
>them and the possibilities of countering them. The notion of a
>representative democracy controlled from below where the representatives
>are not only elected but can be called truly to account, is as relevant
>today as it was when first put into practice in the Paris Commune 133
>years ago. As for voting, yes, that's a hard won gain. But the
>Chartists, who probably invented voting as we know it today, made clear
>that it was gain only when there was a clear, democratic choice. And
>there's no clear, democratic choice now. We live in a single-ideology
>state in which two almost identical factions compete for our attention
>while promoting the fiction of their difference.
>
>The writer Arundhati Roy described the outpouring of anti-war anger last
>year as "the most spectacular display of public morality the world has
>ever seen" That was just a beginning and a cause for optimism.
>
>Why? Because I think a great many people are beginning to listen to that
>quality of humanity that is the antidote to rampant power and its
>bedfellow: racism. It's called conscience. We all have it, and some are
>always moved to act upon it. Franz Kafka wrote: "You can hold back from
>the suffering of the world, you have free permission to do so and it is
>in accordance with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is
>the one suffering that you could have avoided."
>
>No doubt there are those who believe they can remain aloof acclaimed
>writers who write only style, successful academics who remain quiet,
>respected jurists who retreat into arcane law and famous journalists who
>protest: "No one has ever told me what to say." George Orwell wrote:
>"Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks the whip. But the really
>well-trained dog is the one that turns somersaults when there is no
>whip."
>
>For those members of our small, privileged and powerful elite, I
>recommend the words of Flaubert. "I have always tried to live in an
>ivory tower," he said, "but a tide of shit is beatings its walls,
>threatening to undermine it." For the rest of us, I offer these words of
>Mahatma Gandhi: "First, they ignore," he said. "Then they laugh at you.
>Then they fight you. Then you win."
>--
>
>============================================================
>
> "...the Patriot Act followed 9-11 as smoothly as the
> suspension of the Weimar constitution followed the
> Reichstag fire."
> - Srdja Trifkovic
>
> There is not a problem with the system.
> The system is the problem.
>
> Faith in humanity, not gods, ideologies, or programs.
> _____________________________
>
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