"Breaking the Great Australian Silence"

[I-mon]

http://pulsemedia.org/2009/11/10/breaking-the-great-australian-silence-john-pilger/

This is from last November, but a friend just sent it to me yesterday. It's a great speech by an Aussie journalist, with a lot to say about the current world system, media control, corporate control of politics, public apathy etc.



"Last week one of the world’s greatest living journalists, John Pilger, was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize. Never one to compromise his integrity or lower his voice in the face of intimidation or authority, Pilger focused much of his speech on urging Australians to cast a critical eye upon their own government, its policies (both domestic and foreign), as well as themselves. Unsurprisingly, Pilger’s words have been received with angry, defensive responses within Australia.

Pilger recently celebrated his 70th birthday, but he’s just as vibrant now as he was 40 years ago. Even after all this time, he’s still using his pen and voice to bring us the uncensored facts, while also managing to ruffle the feathers of those who prefer he be silent.

The following is Pilger’s award ceremony address.

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. It’s 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 mother’s 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 else’s country.

Last July, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said this, and I quote: “It’s 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 Howard’s 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. That’s 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 didn’t 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. It’s 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 don’t know and they can’t 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 Rudd’s 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 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. What matters is the illusion.

The aim is to ensure our silent complicity in a war of terror and in a massive increase in Australia’s 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 “army’s 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 America’s 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?

“It’s time we sang from the world’s 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 didn’t 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 didn’t happen. Even while it was happening it didn’t happen. It didn’t 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. They’re 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 – that’s 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 doesn’t matter who is president – George Bush or Barack Obama. Indeed, Obama has stepped up Bush’s wars and started his own war in Pakistan. Like Bush, he is threatening Iran, a country Hillary Clinton said she was prepared to “annihilate”. Iran’s crime is its independence. Having thrown out America’s favourite dictator, the Shah, Iran is the only resource-rich Muslim country beyond American control. It doesn’t occupy anyone else’s land and hasn’t attacked any country — unlike Israel, which is nuclear-armed and dominates and divides the Middle East on America’s behalf.

In Australia, we are not told this. It’s 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 Obama’s 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 Rudd’s 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 that’s 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 isn’t 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. There’s 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, “There’s 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. It’s set in an apartment in a city like Sydney. A party is in progress. People are drinking good wine and eating canapés. 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.

There’s 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, it’s tricky, isn’t 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 minister’s wife. And nothing changes.

We certainly don’t 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”. That’s how the coroner described it. Eddie was a rising rugby league star. But he was black and had to be cut down to size. Eddie’s parents, Arthur and Leila Murray, launched one of the most tenacious and courageous campaigns for justice I’ve 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. He’s in his sixties. He’s 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, “doesn’t have a clear idea of what’s 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. That’s 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 world’s 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, “You’re exhausted.”

He replied, “Look, I spend most of my life in meetings, fighting lawyers, pleading for our birthright. I’m 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 don’t 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 don’t 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 Australia’s 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 clichés 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 people’s 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. It’s true some people don’t 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, we’ve progressed only because people have spoken out, only because the suffragettes stood up, only because the miners of Broken Hill won the world’s 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."

[Steve James]

There are lots of silences. I'm not sure that speaking them will incur a change in human nature. In fact, I think it's the other way around; i.e., we'll see a change when people want to speak about these things. At that point, the change will have been made already. The particulars of the war or injustice are almost irrelevant. Any atrocity can be traced back --but that's because people need excuses to rationalize their behavior, especially when they're motivated by fear. So, the fault is never out there somewhere; it's us; we're the problem. It's not the English or the Irish; the Aussies or the "originals"; the Catholics, Protestants, Jews or Muslims; the Indians or the Africans; the Mexicans, the Colombians or the Canadians; it's not the Israelis or the Palestinians. If you ask any of them, they can produce a legitimate grievance. But, boy oh boy, they'll take that gripe and justify whatever they do or need to do. That's just the way we roll.

[Sprint]

Pilger could just as easily have written American for Australian and as for complicity in genocide - well that includes all of Europe too. We do not live in democracies - democracy is dead. For Europe Australia and the US I would say that Feudalism is a more accurate term to describe the world we live in, with the Feudal Lords being the likes of Rupert Murdoch and the monarchy being a country you are not allowed to name or you will be accused of antisemitism.

[chimerical tortoise]

respect. the man speaks a universal truth through a very elegant framework of literature and histories, official and lived. that was a beautiful address.

[Rikimaru]

Awesome.

[Ron Panunto]

We do not live in democracies - democracy is dead.

Has a true democracy ever existed? Has anyone ever lived in a true democracy? I don't think so. A true democracy is simply an ideal that representative democracies use as a gauge.

[Darth Rock&Roll]

This kinda reads like yet one more white guilt story.

But is there a solution to all this white guilt?


shall we dissolve our cities,destroy ourselves and return to the land and live in neolithic conditions such as were the ways of the people who lived in teh lands we conquered hundreds of years ago and brought forward into the current age?

and what of those peoples from former aboriginal origin who have folded in with the rest of us moderns, white or not?

These tellings have relevancy of course, but it is not as wide or as urgent as some would want I think.

the horror of conquest was practiced by those who were eventually conquered as well.

Where are the lengthy articles from native peoples who regularly killed off neighbouring tribes in their time of power?
Where are their letters of guilt for destroying those people and for enslaving them in their tribal quests for power?

We need to move on from these guilty ramblings and empty platitudes that amount to nothing as far as apologies go.

apologies are useless, and payouts are not necessary.
Everyone must move forward together or fall by the wayside.

period.

I make no apologies for my views, I believe this sort of thing is an extension of what is wrong with us at the core and what impedes us from becoming better. We all recognize the inequities of colonialism, but we also live in the fruit of it. Everyone who chooses to do so.

[Steve James]

Well, imo, it's not about "guilt": it's about "shame." Nowadays, however, it's easier to describe it as guilt and then claim that there's nothing ("I" have done) to be guilty about. When it comes to the conquests of empires, there are very few individuals who are guilty, and fewer still who are alive. Of course, the argument that "they're better off now" is different, in the sense that the "white man's burden" was often used to justify things that people were and should have been guilty of. But, even so, there's something called "remorse" that goes along with guilt (it's the internal part, the part the guilty person feels in himself). Imo, there's nothing wrong with that, and there's a lot right with it. It has nothing to do with one's "Race" --and in that sense, it'd be better to talk about what the French, English, Belgians or Americans have done, not "white" people. Anyway, I just happened to be working on this subject for my African Lit class. We're doing the Congo. Quelle apropos.



Now, I wouldn't say that anyone should feel guilty about what happened there ... not even a Belgian, except in the royal family. And, I wouldn't ask any white person to feel ashamed for what a Belgian king did. But, imo, feeling remorse for the fact that it happened and that i might be benefiting from it --even though it happened before I was born-- would be admirable. That's not really important except as a way to point out that I'm no waiting for anyone to feel sorry. It's not going to be doing me any favors cause "I" feel fine. I feel guilty saying so, actually.

Anyway, #2. Edit: completely forgot to add that, if it had been an Aborigine who had written the same essay, there'd be those who'd say that he was playing the "race card." So, frankly, nobody gives much of a crap what the children of former colonizers think anyway. No matter what happens, either their hands are clean or there's nothing to be guilty about. They have been arguing about it among themselves for centuries.

[chud]

It doesn’t matter who is president – George Bush or Barack Obama. Indeed, Obama has stepped up Bush’s wars and started his own war in Pakistan. Like Bush, he is threatening Iran, a country Hillary Clinton said she was prepared to “annihilate”.

Very true, it doesn't matter who is president, the central-banking-warfare-model continues. The national security agenda continues. I don't know how we change it or stop it, but we need to.

[edededed]

This kinda reads like yet one more white guilt story.

But is there a solution to all this white guilt?


shall we dissolve our cities,destroy ourselves and return to the land and live in neolithic conditions such as were the ways of the people who lived in teh lands we conquered hundreds of years ago and brought forward into the current age?

and what of those peoples from former aboriginal origin who have folded in with the rest of us moderns, white or not?

These tellings have relevancy of course, but it is not as wide or as urgent as some would want I think.

the horror of conquest was practiced by those who were eventually conquered as well.

Where are the lengthy articles from native peoples who regularly killed off neighbouring tribes in their time of power?
Where are their letters of guilt for destroying those people and for enslaving them in their tribal quests for power?

We need to move on from these guilty ramblings and empty platitudes that amount to nothing as far as apologies go.

apologies are useless, and payouts are not necessary.
Everyone must move forward together or fall by the wayside.

period.

I make no apologies for my views, I believe this sort of thing is an extension of what is wrong with us at the core and what impedes us from becoming better. We all recognize the inequities of colonialism, but we also live in the fruit of it. Everyone who chooses to do so.

Funny... I hear very similar opinions a lot by (mostly male) Japanese folks in Japan, too...

[chimerical tortoise]

shall we dissolve our cities,destroy ourselves and return to the land and live in neolithic conditions such as were the ways of the people who lived in teh lands we conquered hundreds of years ago and brought forward into the current age?

nobody's asking for that.

UBC, like many Canadian unis, is built on 'endowment land', which means it's technically leased from the Musqueam. They've been ceded the land for educational purposes, but there's a questionable history as to who is allowed to develop what on the land and as it stands the administration is fucking things up with all the new high-price condos that are sprouting up like flies on crap all over campus to target a non-student, family demographic. The UBC farm, last urban farm and only one on a university in N.America, was nearly shut down for that reason last year, but that caused enough upcry that it was kept. When the protests were happening, it was mainly the poli sci/commerce students that spun this line of crap; funny enough since we're all parrotting what we study, right? I wonder where the agriculture students were.

The golf course that everyone sees on their way into ubc was returned recently to the Musqueam band, iirc they haven't torn it down, instead they've managed it responsibly since.

apologies are useless, and payouts are not necessary.
Everyone must move forward together or fall by the wayside.

there's a certain national anthem that sounds very similar to that...

But seriously now, the idea of a social progression is such bullshit; most often it's conflated with a technological/industrial progression. We are just as barbaric as we were before, but now we pretend otherwise.

The developed world can only do what it does based on its percieved moral authority by its constituents. Apologies and payouts are the price to pay for that moral ethnocentrism.

We all recognize the inequities of colonialism, but we also live in the fruit of it. Everyone who chooses to do so.

I call bullshit on this, DRR.

The fruits are not equally distributed. They are raped from some and given to others. There is not a lot of choice.

[Ian]

shall we dissolve our cities,destroy ourselves and return to the land and live in neolithic conditions such as were the ways of the people who lived in teh lands we conquered hundreds of years ago and brought forward into the current age?

where the hell are you getting that from?

the author's talking about solving problems of health, poverty, housing, education, employment and inequality. not 'returning to neolithic conditions'.

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 don’t hand over their precious freehold leases, they will be denied the basic services that we, in white Australia, take for granted.

[Darth Rock&Roll]

The author is talking about solving problems, I agree. My viewpoint is that he is talking about it from an angle which I don't agree with.

As for the fruits of Colonialism, what are you talking about Tortoise?
YOu don't like clean fresh water supplies? You don't like infrastructure for trade, social constructs such as services of police, fire brigades, hospitals etc?

No one is getting raped. That is a tired ass line dragged out from what happened 100 years ago or more.
It's 2010, how is my country raping someone else's?

It's not black or white issue, but it is certainly not incumbent upon one society to make such great exceptions for another to remain in a state whereby they become an unnecessary difficulty.

Look at canada and our stupid indian act and reserve system. It is a tremendously expensive pain in the ass that allows some to languish in old ways while others struggle like everyone else.

and yes, moving forward together is important. why leave anyone behind?

I don't agree with the intention of the article is all I'm saying. I do agree that a solution needs to be found.

[Steve James]

YOu don't like clean fresh water supplies? You don't like infrastructure for trade, social constructs such as services of police, fire brigades, hospitals etc?

Hmm, are you arguing that the water is cleaner and fresher in 'civilization'? or even in places where there has been colonization or continued neo-colonialism? I dunno. As for trade and social constructs, I think that all pre-colonial societies had those. The Iroquois Confederacy is considered one basis for the U.S. Constitution. And, in terms of hospitals, etc., I wouldn't say that makes us any healthier.

I don't know about Canada, but I do know that, in Africa, the water and health conditions are worst around the most industrialized areas ... where only Africans live. In the States, it's the same, btw, with the added dimension of 'color' if not race. For ex., ... shoot, I hate to make a statement like this without looking for the backup first. I received an NEH grant a while back to study pollution/contamination in Brooklyn near the waterfront. You can probably look up the grant, it was called "Water and Work." Anyway, looking at national documents, it was found that the Best way to locate a toxic site was to do a demographic survey. Yes, it was literally the surest way. It's like finding out where nuclear tests have been done worldwide or where nuclear waste is dumped. But, I digress.)

My main point is that, though you disagree with the perspective of the article's author, your perspective on the issue is precisely the one he argues against. Fact is, his point is that the descendants of the former colonizers enjoy the benefits of the earlier colonization at the continued expense of the original inhabitants. To the survivors or victims of the colonization (and usually physical and economic disenfranchisement), the arguments that "now you have soap and water and even television" is meaningless. It's the old joke, "the white man got the oil and the Indians got the shaft." (Sorry, you know I don't believe in white people). Of course, nowadays, because native peoples have been given some control over land that was given (back) to them, we have casinos ... where the white people can share.

I agree that it's not purely a black/red-white issue. In terms of oppression, color is just an accident. If you're not (considered) Japanese (real Nihonjin), you'll find it more difficult in Japan. Is it true in Canada, that if you're Canadian, conditions are about the same? Or, do some Canadians have greater access to the services you mentioned than others? Who are they? In the US, the conditions of life for most native peoples is not as good as they are for the later-comers.

[Darth Rock&Roll]

Yep, my points may be argued against.
But then, so can any.

And yes, people were in more miserable conditions before advanced civilization took root.
It took a century or two, but there is clean water, power supply, infant mortality rate is down down down, life expectancy is up up up.

There are people who still live off the land as well.

The argument he presents, is from my point of view wrong and filled with unnecessary emotional content which diminishes the real achievements of modern man.

Hold up any ancient way of life if you like, I can pretty much give you a laundry list of why that lifestyle is inferior to what is available now.
I can give you a further list as to why colonialism improved the lot of those who were colonized and living primitively before those events.

All advanced civilizations absorb primitive ones and lift them up.

are there corruptions? yes, humans can be greedy and self centered.
In the long run, it is better for everyone.

we can pont at industrialization and colonialism and say "that is bad"
but ultimately, when weighed against the actual outcome benefits, that position is clearly wrong.

Would you rather do the subsistence living? Or would you rather have what we have now?
Because you do have a choice to put all that stuff down, stop driving that car, put away that phone, get off the grid and go do that.
You, or anyone else is fully entitled to do that.

We are also entitled to strive as diligently as we can to fashion better circumstances and that will never be an easy go and there will always be an obstacle and sometimes those obstacles are people.

I can tell you this, slavery isn't just a white mans game and never was. Everyone practiced slavery from Africans enslaving other africans, to native americans enslaving other native americans.

tribal warfare and conquering is everyones game, not just whites.

injustices, pollution and misuse of natural resources is definitely not just a whites game either.

Asians pollute and kill the earth every day.
Africans pollute and kill the earth every day.
North American and South American Aborigines pollute and kill the earth every day.
Europeans pollute and kill the earth every day.

All humans before, now and to come suffer at the hands of each other and treat each other poorly.

The argument made in the article is flawed on these points because of these points.

Colonialism didn't wreck the world. It put it in the path we are going now.