John Pilger and the deafening silence about class warfare

In  a recent article Discovering the power of people's history  and why it is feared today Australia's finest journalist John Pilger reminds us of the deafening silence about class in the UK and about the harm and devastation caused by the class warfare unleashed by the political (and corporate) classes under the guise of policies of austerity, privatization and marketization.

Pilger points out that the experience of everyday people under policies of austerity (or what he calls enforced poverty) are not just deliberately hidden and suppressed. In the world of the political, corporate and media class, the experience and history of ordinary people under austerity simply does not matter, or even exist.

When I read recently that 600,000 Greater Manchester residents were "experiencing the effects of extreme poverty" and that 1.6 million were slipping into penury, I was reminded how the political consensus was unchanged. Now led by the southern squirearchy of David Cameron, George Osborne and their fellow Etonians, the only change is the rise of Labour's corporate management class, exemplified by Ed Miliband's support for "austerity" - the new jargon for imposed poverty.

In Clara Street in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in the wintry dark of early morning, I walked down the hill with people who worked more than sixty hours a week for a pittance. They described their "gains" as the Health Service. They had seen only one politician in the street, a Liberal who came and put up posters and said something inaudible from his Land Rover and sped away. The Westminster mantra then was "paying our way as a nation" and "productivity". Today, their places of work, and their trade union protection, always tenuous, have gone. "What's wrong," a Clara Street man told me, "is the thing the politicians don't want to talk about any more. It's governments not caring how we live, because we're not part of their country."

John Pilger on the use of ideas of democracy and human rights as a cover for conquest

In his latest piece in New Statesman John Pilger writes about the ways that democracy and human rights serve as rhetorical cover for conquest.

What is the world's most powerful and violent "ism"? The question will summon the usual demons such as Islamism, now that communism has left the stage. The answer, wrote Harold Pinter, is only "superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged", because only one ideology claims to be non-ideological, neither left nor right, the supreme way. This is liberalism.

"It's a nice and convenient myth that liberals are the peacemakers and conservatives the  warmongers," wrote the historian Hywel Williams in 2001, "but the imperialism of the liberal way may be more dangerous because of its openended nature - its conviction that it represents a superior form of life [while denying its] selfrighteous fanaticism." He had in mind a speech by Tony Blair in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks, in which Blair promised to "reorder this world around us" according to his "moral values". At least a million dead later - in Iraq alone - this tribune of liberalism is today employed by the tyranny in Kazakhstan for a fee of $13m.

Blair's crimes are not unusual. Since 1945, more than a third of the membership of the United Nations - 69 countries - have suffered some or all of the following. They have been invaded, their governments overthrown, their popular movements suppressed, their elections subverted and their people bombed. The historian Mark Curtis estimates the death toll in the millions. This has been principally the project of the liberal flame carrier, the United States, whose celebrated "progressive" president John F Kennedy, according to new research, authorised the bombing of Moscow during the Cuban crisis in 1962. "If we have to use force," said Madeleine Albright, US secretary of state in the liberal administration of Bill Clinton, "it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future." How succinctly she defines modern, violent liberalism.

John Pilger and the political extremism that masquerades as democracy

John Pilger's latest article in New Statesman exposes the political and corporate extremism that masquerades as democracy:

Arriving in a village in southern Vietnam, I caught sight of two children who bore witness to the longest war of the 20th century. Their terrible deformities were familiar. All along the Mekong river, where the forests were petrified and silent, small human mutations lived as best they could.

Today, at the Tu Du paediatrics hospital in Saigon, a former operating theatre is known as the "collection room" and, unofficially, as the "room of horrors". It has shelves of large bottles containing grotesque foetuses. During its invasion of Vietnam, the United States sprayed a defoliant herbicide on vegetation and villages to deny "cover to the enemy". This was Agent Orange, which contained dioxin, poisons of such power that they cause foetal death, miscarriage, chromosomal damage and cancer.

In 1970, a US Senate report revealed that "the US has dumped [on South Vietnam] a quantity of toxic chemical amounting to six pounds per head of population, including woman and children". The code-name for this weapon of mass destruction, Operation Hades, was changed to the friendlier Operation Ranch Hand.  Today, an estimated 4.8 million victims of Agent Orange are children.

Len Aldis, secretary of the Britain-Vietnam Friendship Society, recently returned from Vietnam with a letter for the International Olympic Committee from the Vietnam Women's Union. The union's president, Nguyen Thi  Thanh  Hoa, described "the severe congenital deformities [caused by Agent Orange] from generation to generation". She asked the IOC to reconsider its decision to accept sponsorship of the London Olympics from the Dow Chemical Corporation, which was one of the companies that manufactured the poison and has refused to compensate its victims. 

Aldis hand-delivered the letter to the office of Lord Coe, chairman of the London Organising Committee. He has had no reply. When Amnesty International pointed out that in 2001 Dow Chemical acquired "the company responsible for the Bhopal gas leak [in India in 1984] which killed 7,000 to 10,000 people immediately and 15,000 in the following twenty years", David Cameron described Dow as a "reputable company". Cheers, then, as the TV cameras pan across the £7 million decorative wrap that sheathes the Olympic stadium: the product of a 10-year "deal" between the IOC and such a reputable destroyer.

History is buried with the dead and deformed of Vietnam and Bhopal. And history is the new enemy. On 28 May, President Obama launched a campaign to falsify the history of the war in Vietnam. To Obama, there was no Agent Orange, no free fire zones, no turkey shoots, no cover-ups of massacres, no rampant racism, no suicides (as many Americans took their own lives as died in the war), no defeat by a resistance army drawn from an impoverished society. It was, said Mr. Hopey Changey, "one of the most extraordinary stories of bravery and integrity in the annals of [US] military history". 

The following day, the New York Times published a long article documenting how Obama personally selects the victims of his drone attacks across the world. He does this on "terror Tuesdays" when he browses through mug shots on a "kill list", some of them teenagers, including "a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years". Many are unknown or simply of military age. Guided by "pilots" sitting in front of computer screens in Las Vegas, the drones fire Hellfire missiles that suck the air out of lungs and blow people to bits. Last September, Obama killed a US citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, purely on the basis of hearsay that he was inciting terrorism. "This one is easy," he is quoted by aides as saying as he signed the man's death warrant. On 6 June, a drone killed 18 people in a village in Afghanistan, including women, children and the elderly who were celebrating a wedding. 

The New York Times article was not a leak or an expose. It was a piece of PR designed by the Obama administration to show what a tough guy the 'commander-in-chief' can be in an election year. If re-elected, Brand Obama will continue serving the wealthy, pursuing truth-tellers, threatening countries, spreading computer viruses and murdering people every Tuesday. 

The threats against Syria, co-ordinated in Washington and London, scale new peaks of hypocrisy. Contrary to the raw propaganda presented as news, the investigative journalism of the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung identifies those responsible for the massacre in Houla as the 'rebels' backed by Obama and Cameron. The paper's sources include the rebels themselves. This has not been completely ignored in Britain. Writing in his personal blog, ever so quietly, Jon Williams, the BBC world news editor, effectively dishes his own 'coverage', citing western officials who describe the 'psy-ops' operation against Syria as 'brilliant'. As brilliant as the destruction of Libya, and Iraq, and Afghanistan.

And as brilliant as the psy-ops of the Guardian's latest promotion of Alastair Campbell, the chief collaborator of Tony Blair in the criminal invasion of Iraq. In his "diaries", Campbell tries to splash Iraqi blood on the demon Murdoch. There is plenty to drench them all. But recognition that the respectable, liberal, Blair-fawning media was a vital accessory to such an epic crime is omitted and remains a singular test of intellectual and moral honesty in Britain. 

How much longer must we subject ourselves to such an "invisible government"?  This term for insidious propaganda, first used by Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud and inventor of modern public relations, has never been more apt.  "False reality" requires historical amnesia, lying by omission and the transfer of significance to the insignificant. In this way, political systems promising security and social justice have been replaced by piracy, "austerity" and "perpetual war": an extremism dedicated to the overthrow of democracy. Applied to an individual, this would identify a psychopath. Why do we accept it?

Shirley Shackelton, John Pilger and the ugly truth of Australia's imperial exploitation of East Timor

"Shirley Shackleton is one of a remarkable group of people who never gave up in the struggle for East Timor's freedom. She is quite simply a hero."
John Pilger

Shirley Shackleton's life has largely been defined by the shocking record of Australian complicity in the tragic history of East Timor.

On October 16th 1975 in the East Timor town of Balibo her journalist husband Greg Shackleton was murdered by Indonesian forces along with 4 other Australia journalists- Tony Stewart, Brian Peters, Gary Cunningham and Malcolm Rennie.

The Australian journalists were murdered because they  stumbled upon and filmed the illegal and covert Indonesian invasion of East Timor.  Seven weeks later on December 7th 1975 Indonesian forces invaded and occupied Dili and instigated a bloody campaign of occupation, murder and genocide against the East Timorese people that lasted until 1999. All of this occurred with the support and collusion of the the then Whitlam Government and its diplomatic mandarins in Indonesia and Canberra.

It was those events and the subsequent cover up by successive Australian and Indonesian Governments of the circumstances of the journalists' death  and that of another Australian journalist Roger East that launched Shirley Shackleton on a 40 year struggle to find out and expose the truth of what happened in Balibo that day.

Her  2010 Walkley award winning memoir The Circle of Silence tells of her activism and campaign for justice for all those who died in East Timor. The book describes the impact of the murder of the Balibo Five on her and her family and documents the denial and cover ups perpetrated by all levels of the Australia Government. The book goes into great detail about the appalling treatment she (and other families) received from the Australian Government and the television station who employed her husband.

Shackleton also documents successive Australian government complicity in the Indonesian genocide in East Timor from 1975 to 1999.

It was largely the efforts of Shirley Shackleton and the families of the other murdered journalists that led to the 2007 NSW Coroners Court judicial inquiry into the Balibo murders.

The Inquiry found that the five journalists had been murdered by Indonesian special forces while trying to surrender. Evidence of war crimes was referred to the Australian Federal Police to see if charges could be laid against former  Indonesian soldiers. The AFP are still conducting inquiries.

The 2010 film Balibo by Director Robert Connolly recreates the circumstances surrounding the death of the Balibo Five and Roger East.

The Australian journalist John Pilger has spent over 25 years  exposing the Indonesian Government's illegal occupation and its genocide and brutality in East Timor as well as the collusion of Australia Governments. In her book Shirley Shackleton acknowledges the pioneering journalism of John Pilger.

As John Pilger points out in a recent article Australia's colonial exploitation of East Timor did not end with East Timorese independence. Pilger writes that with elections underway on the tenth anniversary of independence, Australia's exploitation of East Timor continues,  albeit under a different guise:

"Celebrating the tenth anniversary of an independence Evans once denied, East Timor is in the throes of electing a new president; the second round of voting is on 21 April, followed by parliamentary elections.

For many Timorese, their children malnourished and stunted, the democracy is notional. Years of bloody occupation, backed by Australia, Britain and the US, were followed by a relentless campaign of bullying by the Australian government to manoeuvre the tiny new nation out of its proper share of the seabed's oil and gas revenue. Having refused to recognise the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and the Law of the Sea, Australia unilaterally changed the maritime boundary.

In 2006, a deal was finally signed, largely on Australia's terms. Soon afterwards, Prime Minister Mari Alkitiri, a nationalist who had stood up to Canberra and opposed foreign interference and indebtedness to the World Bank, was effectively deposed in what he called an "attempted coup" by "outsiders". Australia has "peace-keeping" troops based in East Timor and had trained his opponents. According to a leaked Australian Defence Department document, Australia's "first objective" in East Timor is for its military to "seek access" so that it can exercise "influence over East Timor's decision-making". Of the two current presidential candidates is Taur Matan Rauk, a general and Canberra's man who helped see off the troublesome Alkitiri.

One independent little country astride lucrative natural resources and strategic sea lanes is of serious concern to the United States and its  "deputy sheriff" in Canberra. (President George W. Bush actually promoted Australia to full sheriff). That largely explains why the Suharto regime required such devotion from its western sponsors. Washington's enduring obsession in Asia is China, which today offers developing countries investment, skills and infrastructure in return for resources.

Visiting Australia last November, President Barack Obama issued another of his veiled threats to China and announced the establishment of a US Marines' base in Darwin, just across the water from East Timor. He understands that small, impoverished countries can often present the greatest threat to predatory power, because if they cannot be intimidated and controlled, who can?"

John Pilger from the streets of Mexico

Diego Rivera's Mural, "A Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park." (Photo: asmythie / flickr)

Australia's finest journalist and documentary film maker is vilified and ignored by the mainstream media in this country. 

In his latest piece  John Pilger writes from the streets of Mexico about the the evils of contemporary capitalism and the legacy of those who resist:

"The beneficiaries of the new, privatized Mexico are those like Carlos Slim, now ahead of Bill Gates as the world's richest man, whose fingers are lodged in every imaginable pie: from food and construction to the national telephone company. A US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks says, "The net worth of the 10 richest people of Mexico - a country where more than 40 per cent of the population lives in poverty - represents roughly 10 per cent of the gross domestic product.

For most of this year, thousands of los indignados have taken over the massive parade ground known as the Zocalo facing the National Palace. The occupations in Wall Street and around the world have their genesis in Latin America. The difference here is there is none of the angst about the protesters' "focus." As in all places where people live on the edge and the state and its cronyism cast lawless shadows, they know exactly what they want. Ask some of the 44,000 employees of the national power company, who prevented the fire sale of the national grid until Calderon sacked them all; and the striking copper miners of Cananea, whose owners funded Calderon's campaign; and the former pilots and stewards of the national airline, Mexicana, dissolved in a sham bankruptcy that was a gift to the private airline industry.

These angry, eloquent and often courageous people have long known something many in Europe and the United States are only beginning to realize: there is no choice but to fight the economic extremism unleashed in Washington and London a generation ago. Employment, trade unionism, public health, education, "life itself," says Manuel Lopez Obrador, the former mayor of Mexico City who ran against Calderon, "has since been struck by a political and economic earthquake."

John Pilger on what lies behind the Arab revolt

 As always John Pilger, Australia's finest journalists, speaks a fundamental truth:

"The revolt in the Arab world is not merely against a resident dictator, but against a worldwide economic tyranny designed by the US Treasury and imposed by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which have ensured that rich countries like Egypt are reduced to vast sweatshops, with half the population earning less than $2 a day" 

Queensland floods: Australia's "Katrina moment?"

 "Since the 1980s, Australia has become the model of a social democracy where the cult of the “market” has diminished public services and infrastructure budgets and divided by wealth a society that once boasted the most equitable spread of personal income in the world".
John Pilger

As always, John Pilger, Australia's finest journalist offers a contrarian view on the Queensland floods in in this recent piece (here).

Pilger describes the floods as "Australia Katrina moment", in recognition that the devastation and destruction that resulted was compounded by policy decisions (and inaction) by successive Federal, State and local governments and Australia's corporate elite.

Pilger describes a political culture and political system subservient to business and corporate interests which stood by and allowed excessive land clearing on flood prone areas and environmental degradation, failed to invest in public infrastructure to protect flood prone communities and benefited from property speculation and property development which sold property and houses on flood prone land.

Pilger also describes how  pro-market and pro-business regulatory institutions allowed insurance companies to avoid an agreed definition of what constituted a flood, thereby allowing them to more easily refuse to honor claims of flood damage.

Sunday's random thoughts*

"The major western democracies are moving towards 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."
John Pilger

" Most of the real work on this planet is not done for profit: it’s done at home, for each other, for affection, out of idealism, and it starts with the heroic effort to sustain each helpless human being for all those years before fending for yourself becomes feasible."
Rebecca Solnit

*Random thoughts is a regular attempt to use the words and thoughts of others to illuminate aspects of contemporary life here in Australia and Western Australia.

Inconvenient truths: The Chilean story we did not hear in the media

John Pilger in the New Statesmen, Antonio Castillio in New Matilda  and Malcolm Coad and Patricio Navia in Open Democracy write about some of the inconvenient truths about Chile that were not heard during media coverage of the rescue of the trapped Chilean miners.

The writers acknowledge that the extraordinary rescue of the miners was filled with pathos and heroism , but told only partial truths about contemporary Chile.

Navia writes that Chile has achieved much since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship in 1990. The credit for these achievements lies with four consecutive centre- left governments which governed Chile from 1990-2010. However, Navia writes that Chile faces major challenges, particularly its high levels of social and economic inequality, poor quality of public education, poor safety and labour market standards and poor working conditions experienced by the great masses of Chileans. Navia, like Pilger and Castillio argues that Chile's treatment of Indigenous people (Mapuche) continues to be a blight on the country.

Pilger, Coad and Castillio write that the mining disaster was a consequence of a private industry with an appalling safety record and an economic system that has changed little since the dictatorship of General Auguste Pinochet. In 2009 there were 191,000 recorded workplace accidents and 443 fatalities . Miners die because because safety is ignored and the mining companies put production and earnings above all else.

The mine in which the Chilean miners were entombed had previously been closed due to safety concerns and in the months before the disaster concerns were expressed about serious safety deficiencies, however no action was taken. The day after the rescue another miner lost his life in a nearby accident.

As John Pilger (and others such as Naomi Klein) remind us, the current Chilean economic system that contributed to the mining disaster was largely the consequence of the free market experiment imposed on Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship, with the support and advice of free market economists associated with Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago.  The consequence is that Chile has one of the most unequal distribution of wealth in the world.

Castillio writes that the current Chilean President Sebastien Pinera was a major beneficiary of the policies of the Pinochet dictatorship. Pinera is a billionaire financial speculator who made his fortune during and after the Pinochet military dictatorship from privatized industries such as energy, mining and retail. His brother was a senior Minister in the Pinochet dictatorship with responsibility for privatization of state owned assets. His right wing coalition includes political parties that supported the Pinochet dictatorship, although Pinera opposed it.

Castillio tells us that  a number of the rescued miners were themselves victims of the Pinochet dictatorship's terror campaign. The miners had lost parents, grandparents and family members who were executed by roaming death squads during Pinochet reign's of terror.

While the mine rescue has fostered a strong sense of national unity, none of the writers are optimistic about the likelihood of significant renewal and reform to address the long standing and entrenched social, economic and political inequalities in Chile.

The corporate enclosure of sport

John Pilger on the corporate enclosure of sport:

"The pursuit of profit in sport seems unrelenting............................Corporate sport has enriched Rupert Murdoch, corrupted cricket and much of football, subverted numerous other play and appropriated the Olympics and similar spectacles. Its language is that of business schools, PR companies, consultancies and banks. Its “philosophy” is that everything is for sale and monopoly rules"

John Pilger defends WikiLeaks

In a New Statesman column John Pilger applauds WikiLeaks for exposing the dirty secrets of the war in Afghanistan.

Pilger describes the attempts by the US, British and Australian Governments to "fatally marginalize" WikiLeaks and its founder Australian citizen Julian Assange. Both the the current Australian Labor Government and the Coalition Opposition have indicated they may act again Assange if he returns to Australia.

John Pilger writes:

"In a nation that claims its constitution protects truth-tellers, the Obama administration is pursuing and prosecuting more whistleblowers than any of its modern predecessors. A Pentagon document states bluntly that US intelligence intends to "fatally marginalise" WikiLeaks. The preferred tactic is smear, with corporate journalists ever ready to play their part".......................

"The WikiLeaks revelations shame the dominant section of journalism, devoted merely to taking down what cynical and malign power tells it. This is state stenography, not journalism. Look on the WikiLeaks site and read a Ministry of Defence document that describes the "threat" of real journalism."

John Pilger on the rise of Julie Gillard

Australian filmmaker and journalist John Pilger is at his incendiary best in his latest piece on the rise of Julie Gillard.

In a piece titled The New Order of Oz John Pilger writes of the unity between the agendas of Bob Hawke and Jullie Gillard.

Writing about the launch of Bob Hawke's new biography (written by his wife) Pilger has this to say

" The Order of Mates celebrated beside Sydney Harbour the other day. This is a venerable masonry in Australian political life that unites the Labor Party with the rich elite known as the big end of town........

A highlight of the occasion was the arrival of the brand new prime minister, Julia Gillard, who proclaimed Hawke her “role model” and the “gold standard” for running Australia."

On Julie Gillard he writes:

" This may help explain the extraordinary and brutal rise of Gillard. In 48 hours in June, she and Mates in Labor’s parliamnetary caucus got rid of the elected prime minister, Kevin Rudd. Her weapons were Rudd’s slide in the opinion polls and the power and prize of Australia’s vast trove of minerals. To pay off the national debt, Rudd had decreed a modest special tax on the profits of giants like BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto. The response was a vicious advertising campaign against the government and a threat to shut down mines.

Within days of her coup, Gillard, who was Rudd’s deputy, had reduced the new tax; and the companies’ campaign was called off. It was a repeat of Hawke’s capitulation to the mining companies in the 1980s when they threatened to bring down a state Labor government in Western Australia. Like her predecessors, Gillard is pursuing a landgrab of the one region of Australia, the Northern Territory, where Aboriginal Australians have land and mineral rights. The deceit is spectacular and historical. The government claims it is “protecting” black Australian children from “abuse” and “neglect” within their communities. Official statistics show that the incidence of child abuse is no different from that of white Australia and the true cause of Aboriginal suffering is a systemic colonial racism that denies housing, water, roads, adequate health care and schools to indigenous people and harasses and imprisons them at a rate greater than in South Africa under apartheid.

Since her coup, Gillard has reaffirmed this racism at the heart of policy-making. Australia takes fewer refugees than almost any country, yet Gillard is using their “threat” to outdo the hysterics of an especially primitive parliamentary opposition led by Tony Abbot, known as the “mad monk”.

John Pilger: Australia's finest journalist

Thank god for journalists like John Pilger. In my mind he is Australia's finest journalist. His recent interview with Phillip Adams on Late Night Live was intelligent, thoughtful and erudite.

And in a recent piece in New Statesman he writes about Australia's obsession with Anzac day and the militarization and glorification of war that is celebrated.

The day before I flew out of Australia, 25 April, I sat in a bar beneath the great sails of the Sydney Opera House. It was Anzac Day, the 95th anniversary of the invasion of Ottoman Turkey by Australian and New Zealand troops at the behest of British imperialism. The landing was an incompetent stunt of blood sacrifice conjured by Winston Churchill; yet, it is celebrated in Australia as an unofficial national day. The ABC evening news always comes live from the sacred shore at Gallipoli, in Turkey, where this year some 8,000 flag-wrapped Antipodeans listened, dewy-eyed, to the Australian Governor-General Quentin Bryce, who is the Queen's viceroy, describe the point of pointless mass killing. It was, she said, all about a "love of nation, of service, of family, the love we give and the love we receive and the love we allow ourselves to receive. [It is a love that] rejoices in the truth, it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. And it never fails."

Of all the attempts at justifying state murder I can recall, this drivel of DIY therapy, clearly aimed at the young, takes the blue riband. Not once did Bryce honor the fallen with the two words that the survivors of 1915 brought home with them: "Never again." Not once did she refer to a truly heroic anti-conscription campaign, led by women, that stemmed the flow of Australian blood in the First World War, the product not of a gormlessness that "believes all things," but of anger in defense of life.

Israeli and Palestinian families stand together against the Occupation

John Pilger has written a moving piece in the New Statesman on Israelis Rami and Nurit Elhanan, the founders of Parents Circle- Families Forum a forum that brings together Israeli and Palestinian parents who have lost children during the conflict.

Pilger's piece tells how the Elhanan's lost their 14 year old daughter in a suicide bomb attack in Jerusalem and how they are assisting a Palestinian family whose 10 year old daughter was killed by a rubber bullet fired by an Israeli soldier at point blank range.

Rani Elhanan has written a long piece on his personal story and how he came to be involved in the Forum. In it are these quotes:

"As the son of a holocaust survivor, I believe the world had a responsibility for what happened 60 years ago when my grandparents were sent to the gas chambers. The world also has a responsibility today as well, and the world’s behavior is a shame! Today, while these two crazy peoples are massacring each other without any mercy, the free and civilized world led by the US is not only stand aside but rather supporting one side unconditionally at the expense of both sides, prolonging the suffering of both sides. More pressure needs to be put on both sides and especially on the stronger side to return back to the negotiating table and sit down and talk instead of killing each other"

"As far as I’m concerned, the basic and most important thing about The Forum of Bereaved Families for Peace is that it is a joint venture of the two sides. It is a venture of people who paid the highest price possible yet are still able to put aside the anger and the natural will to retaliate by talking. They see this path as the only means of getting anywhere and breaking the endless and meaningless cycle of violence. And this is really the message, if we who lost our loved ones and paid the highest price possible… if we can talk to one another then anyone can. We are proud that this is not a political organization. We won’t tell the politicians where to draw the lines or how to phrase the articles of the peace treaty because this gives us enormous power to talk to anyone despite the very deep political divide in Israel"

John Pilger: Why the Oscars are a Con

(Image:Jared Rodriguez/truthout; adapted: NMCIL ortiz domney, rubyblossom)

"John Pilger unearths, with steely attention, the facts, the filthy truth, and tells it as it is."
Harold Pinter

Thank goodness for John Pilger*. He is a journalist and writer like no other, able to cut through the cant, the lies and deceit of the powerful in a couple of hundred words.

His latest piece Why the Oscars are a Con starts with this:

"Why are so many films so bad?. This years Oscar's nominations are a parade of propaganda, stereotypes and outright dishonesty. The dominant themes is as old as Hollywood: America's divine right to invade other societies, steal their history and occupy their memory. When will directors and writers behave like artists and not pimps for a world view devoted to control and destruction".

Pilger writes of the social and political deceit at the core of these movies and contrasts them with the fate of other movies that tell the truth about America's imperial empire. Here are some extracts from Pilger's piece on a couple of the nominations

The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow) "Her film offers a vicarious thrill via yet another standard issue psychopath high on violence in somebody's else's country where the deaths of a million people are consigned to cinematic oblivion".

Avatar (James Cameron) "Non American humanity is not deemed to have box appeal, dead or alive. They are "the other" who are allowed, at best to be saved by us.. 3d noble savages known as the Na'vi need a good guy American soldier to save them".

Invictus (Clint Eastwood)"In promoting the racist, thuggish rugby culture as a panacea of "the rainbow nation", Eastwood gives barely a hint that many black South Africans were deeply embarrassed and hurt by Mandela's embrace of the hated Springbok symbol of their suffering. He airbrushes white violence- but not black violence-which is ever present as a threat. As for Boer racists they have hearts of gold, because "we didn't really know".

Up in the Air (Jason Reitman) "Before the triteness dissolves into sentimentality, every stereotype is summoned, particularly of women"

* John Pilger is a world renowned Australian journalist, author and documentary film maker. His website and blog are here

John Pilger: The Great Australian silence

"The Australian silence has unique features. It affects our national life, the way we see the world, and the way we are manipulated by great power which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war - against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else's country". John Pilger

Here's the full text of John Pilger's speech in Sydney to mark his award of the Sydney Peace Prize.

Here's Pilger on the illusions and lies used to justify Australia's apparent love of fighting in other people's wars.

"Do the young people who wrap themselves in the flag at Gallipoli every April understand that only the lies have changed? Like Kevin Rudd's stage-managed press conferences outside his church, the symbols of Anzac are constantly manipulated in this way. Marches. Medals. Flags. The pain of a fallen soldier's family. Serving in the military, says the Prime Minister, is Australia's highest calling. The squalor of war, the killing of civilians, has no reference in this higher calling. What matters is the illusion. The aim is to ensure our silent complicity in a war of terror"

John Pilger: pioneering Australian journalist recognised

Great news that Australian journalist John Pilger has been awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in recognition of his pioneering work as an author, journalist, film maker and war correspondent.
I reckon Pilger is Australia finest journalist, but he appears nowhere in any of the mainstream Australian press. The reason is obvious really. Pilger has spent nearly 5 decades exposing human rights abuses and trying to hold governments, politicians and corporations to account. And Pilger has been long standing and ardent critic of the Australian corporate media and public broadcaster the ABC.

You won't get to read John Pilger anywhere in the mainstream Australia press. He is vilified here by the corporate media and his work ignored. Let's be frank. His work is "censored" in Australia. If you want to read Pilger you have go to his own website http://www.johnpilger.com/ read his articles which appear in the UK New Statesman and in various alternative media websites (such as Z Net, Media Lens and Information Clearing House). You might be able to pick up some of his outstanding documentaries in the documentary section of your local video shop or local library.