Excerpts from the end of John Pilger's speech:
http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=555
5 Nov 2009
In a speech at the Sydney Opera House to mark his award of Australia's human rights prize, the Sydney Peace Prize, John Pilger describes the "unique features" of a political silence in Australia: how it affects the national life of his homeland and the way Australians see the world and 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".
You can watch the full speech below with an introduction by Professor Emeritus Stuart Rees. Stuart Rees. Director, Sydney Peace Foundation.
http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=555
...
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 ... 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 didn’t have the internet, but the internet on its own is not enough.
We need an ... [global] ... glasnost, the Russian word from the Gorbachev era, which broadly means awakening, transparency, diversity, justice: to which I would add 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 uncivilized and wrong. What terrifies the agents of power is the awakening of people: of public consciousness; the revelation of a seed beneath the snow.
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.”
... 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.
...
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 ... speak out for sanity and justice in the world, and be heard.
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