[southnews] John Pilger: Breaking the Australian Silence
Dave Muller
human rights prize, the Sydney Peace Prize, John Pilger describes the
"unique features" of a political silence in Australia: how it affects
the national life of his homeland and the way Australians see the world
and 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".
Breaking the Australian Silence
By John Pilger
November 06, 2009 ""Information Clearing House" -- -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. Its 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.
Growing up in Sydney, I knew nothing about this. My mothers 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 elses country.
Last July, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said this, and I quote: Its
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 Howards 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. Thats 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 didnt 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. Its 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 dont know and they cant 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 Rudds 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 soldiers family. Serving in the military, says the prime
minister, is Australias 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 Australias 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 armys 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 Americas 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?
Its time we sang from the worlds 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 didnt 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 didnt happen. Even
while it was happening it didnt happen. It didnt 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. Theyre 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 thats 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 11th, 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 11th 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 doesnt matter who is president George Bush or Barack Obama.
Indeed, Obama has stepped up Bushs wars and started his own war in
Pakistan. Like Bush, he is threatening Iran, a country Hillary Clinton
said she was prepared to annihilate. Irans crime is its independence.
Having thrown out Americas favourite dictator, the Shah, Iran is the
only resource-rich Muslim country beyond American control. It doesnt
occupy anyone elses land and hasnt attacked any country -- unlike
Israel, which is nuclear-armed and dominates and divides the Middle East
on Americas behalf.
In Australia, we are not told this. Its 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
Obamas 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 Rudds 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 thats 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 isnt 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. Theres 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, Theres 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. Its set in an
apartment in a city like Sydney. A party is in progress. People are
drinking good wine and eating canapis. 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.
Theres 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, its tricky, isnt 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 ministers wife. And
nothing changes.
We certainly dont 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. Thats how the coroner
described it. Eddie was a rising rugby league star. But he was black and
had to be cut down to size. Eddies parents, Arthur and Leila Murray,
launched one of the most tenacious and courageous campaigns for justice
Ive 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. Hes in
his sixties. Hes 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,
doesnt have a clear idea of whats 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. Thats 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 worlds 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, Youre exhausted.
He replied, Look, I spend most of my life in meetings, fighting
lawyers, pleading for our birthright. Im 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 dont 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 dont 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 Australias 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
clichis 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 peoples 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. Its true some people dont 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, weve
progressed only because people have spoken out, only because the
suffragettes stood up, only because the miners of Broken Hill won the
worlds 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 is 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
------------------------------------
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