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.
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).
“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…”
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.
our flag
A sound question. Addressed to home-grown pseudo-revolutionaries in particular, especially those who take sledgehammers to crack peanuts. Never mind the multi-conglomerates, the state protected polluters of oceans and rivers, the high-rollers of Monaco or Vegas who think nothing of tossing away a million or two on the flip of a card, the billionaires who lust for ever greater and greater power, the war-mongers and political spin doctors who haunt the corridors of Washington and London planning the ,merciless subjugation of small struggling nations like Nicaragua or Afghanistan. No, the real enemy are three Derry men from the slums of the Bogside, spawned from the lowest level of the working class, socialists to a man please note, who are trying to scratch a living from their art – the murals they painted for the people of Derry and which attract many thousands of visitors per year. Socialist murals indeed which we intended from the start even if the pseudo’s have neither the sensibilities or the intelligence to recognise that simple fact.
Targeted by the jealous, the petty-minded, the misinformed, the greedy and self-deluded fantasists masquerading as “revolutionaries’ who seemingly can sleep through all of their astonishing contradictions like babes in straw, snug in their self-appointed roles as liberators of mankind and blessed, would you believe ?, with an all-embracing love for the oppressed everywhere except those of course, like us, they are determined to add to the pile. We three, it seems, The Bogside Artists, provide these idiots with a mighty cause to serve – What mighty cause? Why preventing us, in homage to the class we represent, from earning an honest living from our labours by denigrating our work and our names. How proud they must be of themselves and how humbled by their mighty achievement. What achievement? Well…. you would need to ask them, unless you count working in the employ of even bigger idiots than even they, an ‘achievement’. We are still here is what this blog is here to state. That is our flag flying in the breeze by the way, just outside our studio. Our flag of independence. The price we have paid? Contact us and we will be happy to tell you. It is not over until The Fat Tyrant learns to sing and the fanatic understands that the system is his real target and not the ordinary folk who are trying to earn a living against the oppression of these – its most ruthless practitioners.
Like Noah it is best to build your boat BEFORE the rains fall and let the beguiled drown in their own stupidity calling you ‘paranoid’ than to take risks with the worst possible scenario and the precariousness of a fragile future. Smart dudes buy insurance and leave the psychiatric game to the professionals. We, The Bogside Artists, speak, not from delusional fantasy but from direct experience, as over the years we have been victims of shameless, character defamation, identity theft, social marginalization, calculated denigration of our selves and our work, wholesale, organized targeting of our lives and our achievement and accordingly labelled pro-active capitalists on a par with Richard Branson and Rupert Murdoch, supporters of American imperialism, and ideologically to the right of Genghis Khan. All of it lies and damned lies at that, conjured up by jealous minds and hate-driven hearts hiding behind masks of social acceptance and ‘revolutionary’ zeal.
This has been our ‘reward’ for having given our town, and the world indeed, one of the most profoundly socialist art displays in existence – one that world-renowned playwright Brian Friel declared, quite rightly “Diego Rivera would be proud of.” Victimized and targeted we have been and still are, let it be said, by people who live in fine houses, have salaried jobs, lucrative careers, positions of influence in government and the media and who feel free to sell their articles to a gullible world and their books on the net while we have to forego any sort of an income in order to survive as a group. We shoulder our wheel daily not to plan holidays or extend our private interests in the name of business masquerading as ‘social concern’ but in order to survive as a group. Simple as that, facts that visitors we speak to find incredible and disgusting, just as we do. We are a registered charity to boot, a salient fact that our adversaries choose to ignore as it kinda gets in the way of the big, fat, labels of denigration they have pinned to our backs.
Yet, like Noah, we have built our boat regardless. It is called The Bogside Artists’ Studio and it serves the community and the sacred aspirations towards individual freedom and artistic expression that The People’s Gallery , that we three created, makes manifest to all who come to see it. Capitalism be damned! say we. Our enemies and transgressors are a hundred times more ruthless in that regard than we could ever be .. or want to be. We, at least, get to sleep at night, soundly as we adhere relgiously to a simple philosophy – Live and Let Live, something these people seem to be cogenitally incapable of doing.
We take leave here to state our position once and for all and to let you the reader know that if you believe anything else to the contrary of what is here stated by us, you have been lied to, pure and simple, and most likely, lied to by people holding positions of trust and authority who have no right to be there.
Our studio is our refuge and all are welcome. It floats. We sail on. And neither the dark clouds above our heads or the hounds snapping at our heels will ever deter us from hoisting our bright, clean flag of independence and claiming the right to be who we are and always have been – THE BOGSIDE ARTISTS
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