Power, Propaganda and Conscience in The War On Terror
UWA Extension Summer School Lecture by John Pilger
Winthrop Hall, The University of Western Australia, 12
January 2004
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 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 been 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 façade - 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, "will emerge with his
arsenal of chemical and biological weapons intact", 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 were, "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 involved with an 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. In
Washington, he was editor of an extreme right wing journal called The National
Interest.
No one would deny Owen Harries his voice in any
democracy. But we should know who his former sponsors were. Moreover, it is his
extreme view that 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, "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, "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 thew 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 were not indifferent.
The tragedy for many Australians seeking 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 beating 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."
uarante-huit heures après le départ pour le sud-est de l'Irak d'un
premier contingent de 90 militaires japonais armés (un millier sont attendus
d'ici mars), la polémique autour du bien-fondé de la participation du Japon à la
coalition de pays engagés en Irak a repris. «L'impensable est devenu
réalité», jugeaient, hier, dépités, les opposants à l'envoi des forces
d'autodéfense en Irak.
eorge Bush promised to bring honor and integrity back to the
White House. Instead, he got rid of accountability. 
t is generally
agreed that September 11, 2001, changed the course of history. But we must ask
ourselves why that should be so. How could a single event, even one involving
3,000 civilian casualties, have such a far-reaching effect? The answer lies not
so much in the event itself as in the way the United States, under the
leadership of President George W. Bush, responded to it. 
he
supremacist ideology of the Bush Administration stands in opposition to the
principles of an open society, which recognize that people have different views
and that nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth. The supremacist ideology
postulates that just because we are stronger than others, we know better and
have right on our side. The very first sentence of the September 2002 National
Security Strategy (the President's annual laying out to Congress of the
country's security objectives) reads, "The great struggles of the twentieth
century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for
the forces of freedom-and a single sustainable model for national success:
freedom, democracy, and free enterprise."
eptember
11 introduced a discontinuity into American foreign policy. Violations of
American standards of behavior that would have been considered objectionable in
ordinary times became accepted as appropriate to the circumstances. The
abnormal, the radical, and the extreme have been redefined as normal. The
advocates of continuity have been pursuing a rearguard action ever since.
eanwhile,
largely as a result of our preoccupation with supremacy, something has gone
fundamentally wrong with the war on terrorism. Indeed, war is a false metaphor
in this context. Terrorists do pose a threat to our national and personal
security, and we must protect ourselves. Many of the measures we have taken are
necessary and proper. It can even be argued that not enough has been done to
prevent future attacks. But the war being waged has little to do with ending
terrorism or enhancing homeland security; on the contrary, it endangers our
security by engendering a vicious circle of escalating violence. 
recent Council on Foreign Relations publication sketches
out three alternative national-security strategies. The first calls for the
pursuit of American supremacy through the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive military
action. It is advocated by neoconservatives. The second seeks the continuation
of our earlier policy of deterrence and containment. It is advocated by Colin
Powell and other moderates, who may be associated with either political party.
The third would have the United States lead a cooperative effort to improve the
world by engaging in preventive actions of a constructive character. It is not
advocated by any group of significance, although President Bush pays lip service
to it. That is the policy I stand for.