The bravest writer, John Pilger.
John Pilger today accepted the Sydney Peace Prize 2009 at Sydney Opera House. He had some things today that has distinct relevance to this blog.
Early in his oration Pilger attacked Australian policy with regards to the “boat people”, those unfortunates who flee to the shores of the great continent only to end up in what Pilger calls concentration camps like the one at Woomera. He asked how they would all feel if the boats were filled with white people. He remarked on the hypocrisy of Rudd who declared undying sympathy for the refugees early in his office and only recently declared that ” a hard line” must be taken against them. Pilger went on to castigate the rule of silence among journalists everywhere who “seem to know what not to say” without being told. He cited his own experience as a film maker, broadcaster and journalist in support of the assertion, which indeed requires no support. He pointed to mind control on the part of the media in service to political ideology. (The silence surrounding Travels with Li Po is owed in large measure to just that.)
“One of my favourite plays is Harold Pinter’s “Party Time”. He tells of the plot … a bunch of people are at a party in an apartment like any other middle-class soiree in Sydney or elsehwere. “But something is happening outside in the street, something terrible and oppressive for which the people at the party share responsibility.” There is a moment’s uneasiness as the chatter stops for a second and then the laughter resumes.”
Pilger uses this as a methaphor for society at large. “How many of us live in that apartment?”
“I believe that if we begin to apply justice and courage to human affairs we begin to make sense of our world.”
Silence he went on to say, recalling his experience of South African Apartheid, is the effect of tyranny. The citizens of Johannesburg lived a few kilometres from a shanty town where people wasted in poverty and their children died of disease but these repectable citizens “looked from the side and did nothing.”
Australians, he went on, have become adepts at divide -and-rule where blacks who blame their own people for their misfortunes are welcomed and applauded. Western Australia jails indigenous people at eight times the rate of the South African Apartheid figure. Australia is internationally shamed for its treatment of blacks.
“We discriminate on the basis of race. That’s it in a nutshell.”
Rights to land that were granted to the indigenous population of the Northern Territory in 1970 were clawed back by John Howerd by means of bribery and bullying. The Rudd government is doing the same. Leases are bought in with threats of basic amenities and services being witheld.
“You see, there are deals to be made… Foreign companies want a piece of the action”. ( For uranium and other minerals).
“Silences can be broken if we will it.”
“Tom Paine warned long ago that if we were denied critical knowledge we should storm, what he called, The Bastille of words. We need an Autralian Glasnost, … which broadly means, awakening, transparency, diversity, justice, disobedience…”
“In every newsroom, 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.”
“What terrifies the agents of power is an awakening of people, of public consciousness. This is already happening in countries in Latin America where people have discovered a confidence in themselves they didn’t 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 is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
Pilger then called for a treaty guaranteeing universal land rights and a proper sharing of the resources of Australia. The path to self-respect he warned for Australians as for any other nation lies in demanding justice.
We agree with every word of the above with the proviso that justice is not to be “attained” as such but is only possible with the removal of injustice. You do not create ‘justice’. You make it possible. We take leave to point out that Travels with Li Po was inherenty an indictment of society that was purposefully transformed by the status quo into a fantasy …. to make money. The war is waged in the sphere of mind as it is in the hills of Iraq. AThat is what St. Paul meant by “principalities and powers” and that too, albeit in a different way, is what John Pilger is saying and why we quote him at length.
