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Mandela is gone, but apartheid is alive and well in Australia

12/31/2013

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http://johnpilger.com/articles/mandela-is-gone-but-apartheid-is-alive-and-well-in-australia
 
19 December 2013
by John Pilger


In the late 1960s, I was given an usual assignment by the London Daily Mirror's editor in chief, Hugh Cudlipp. I was to return to my homeland, Australia, and "discover what lies behind the sunny face". The Mirror had been an indefatigable campaigner against apartheid in South Africa, where I had reported from behind the "sunny face". As an
Australian, I had been welcomed into this bastion of white supremacy. "We admire
you Aussies," people would say. "You know how to deal with your blacks."
 
I was offended, of course, but I also knew that only the Indian Ocean separated the racial attitudes of the two colonial nations. What I was not aware of was how the similarity caused such suffering among the original people of my own country. Growing up, my school books had made clear, to quote one historian: "We are civilised, and they are not". I remember how a few talented Aboriginal Rugby League players were allowed their glory as long as they never mentioned their people. Eddie Gilbert, the great Aboriginal cricketer, the man who bowled Don Bradman for a duck, was to be prevented from playing again. That was not untypical.
 
In 1969, I flew to Alice Springs in the red heart of Australia and met Charlie Perkins. At a time when Aboriginal people were not even counted in the census - unlike the sheep - Charlie was only the second Aborigine to get a university degree. He had made good use of this distinction by leading "freedom rides" into racially segregated towns in the
outback of New South Wales. He got the idea from the freedom riders who went
into the Deep South of the United States.

We hired an old Ford, picked up Charlie's mother Hetti, an elder of the Aranda people, and headed for what Charlie described as "hell". This was Jay Creek, a "native reserve", where hundreds of Aboriginal people were corralled in conditions I had seen in Africa and India. One outside tap trickled brown; there was no sanitation; the food, or "rations", was starch and sugar. The children had stick-thin legs and the
distended bellies of malnutrition.
 
What struck me was the number of grieving mothers and grandmothers - bereft at the theft of children by the police and "welfare" authorities who, for years, had taken away those infants with lighter skin. The policy was "assimilation". Today, this has changed only in name and rationale.
 
The boys would end up working on white-run farms, the girls as servants in middle-class homes. This was undeclared slave labour. They were known as the Stolen Generation. Hetti Perkins told me that when Charlie was an infant she had kept him tied to her back, and would hide whenever she heard the hoofs of the police horses. "They didn't get him," she said, with pride.
 
In 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised for this crime against humanity. Older Aboriginal people were grateful; they believed that Australia's first people - the most enduring human presence on earth - might finally receive the justice and recognition they had been denied for 220 years.
 
What few of them heard was the postscript to Rudd's apology. "I want to be blunt about this," he said. "There will be no compensation." That 100,000 people deeply wronged and scarred by vicious racism - the product of a form of the eugenics movement with its links to fascism - would be given no opportunity to materially restore their lives was shocking, though not surprising. Most governments in Canberra, conservative or Labor, have insinuated that the First Australians are to blame for their suffering and poverty.
 
When the Labor government in the 1980s promised "full restitution" and land rights, the powerful mining lobby went on the attack, spending millions campaigning on the theme that "the blacks" would "take over your beaches and barbies". The government capitulated, even though the lie was farcical; Aboriginal people comprise barely three per cent of the Australian population.
 
Today, Aboriginal children are again being stolen from their families. The bureaucratic words are "removed" for "child protection". By July 2012, there were 13,299 Aboriginal children in institutions or handed over to white families. Today, the theft of these
children is now higher than at any time during the last century. I have interviewed numerous specialists in child care who regard this as a second stolen generation. "Many of the kids never see their mothers and communities again," Olga Havnen, the author of a report for the Northern Territory government, told me. "In the Northern Territory, $80 million was spent on surveillance and removing kids, and less than $500,000 on supporting these impoverished families. Families are often given no warning and have no idea where their children are being taken. The reason given is neglect - which means poverty. This is destroying Aboriginal culture and is racist. If apartheid South Africa had done this, there would have been an uproar."
 
In the town of Wilcannia, New South Wales, the life expectancy of Aborigines is 37 - lower than the Central African Republic, perhaps the poorest country on earth, currently racked by civil war. Wilcannia's other distinction is that the Cuban government runs a literacy programme there, teaching young Aboriginal children to read and write. This is what the Cubans are famous for - in the world's poorest countries. Australia is one of the world's richest countries.
 
I filmed similar conditions 28 years ago when I made my first film about indigenous Australia, The Secret Country. Vince Forrester, an Aboriginal elder I interviewed then, appears in my new film, Utopia. He guided me through a house in Mutitjulu where 32 people lived, mostly children, many of them suffering from otitis media, an infectious,
entirely preventable disease that impairs hearing and speech. "Seventy per cent
of the children in this house are partially deaf," he said. Turning straight to my camera, he said, "Australians, this is what we call an abuse of human rights."
 
The majority of Australians are rarely confronted with their nation's dirtiest secret. In 2009, the respected United Nations Special Rapporteur, Professor James Anaya, witnessed similar conditions and described government "intervention" policies as racist. The then Minister for Indigenous Health, Tony Abbott, told him to "get a life" and stop listening to "the victim brigade". Abbott is now the prime minister of Australia.

In Western Australia, minerals are being dug up from Aboriginal land and shipped to China for a profit of a billion dollars a week. In this, the richest, "booming" state, the prisons bulge with stricken Aboriginal people, including juveniles whose mothers stand at the prison gates, pleading for their release. The incarceration of black Australians
here is eight times that of black South Africans during the last decade of apartheid.
 
When Nelson Mandela was buried this week, his struggle against apartheid was duly celebrated in Australia, though the irony was missing. Apartheid was defeated largely by a global campaign from which the South African regime never recovered. Similar opprobrium has seldom found its mark in Australia, principally because the Aboriginal population is so small and Australian governments have been successful in dividing and co-opting a disparate leadership with gestures and vacuous promises. That may  well be changing. A resistance is growing, yet again, in the Aboriginal heartland, especially among the young. Unlike the US, Canada and New Zealand, which have made treaties with their first people, Australia has offered gestures often wrapped in the law. However, in the 21st century the outside world is starting to pay attention. The specter of Mandela's South Africa is a warning.
 
This article first appeared in the London Daily Mirror. John Pilger's documentary, Utopia, is broadcast on ITV in Britain on 19 December at 10.35pm, and will be launched in Australia in January. 
 
Follow John Pilger on
twitter@johnpilger


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A moral de desobedecer

12/31/2013

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http://www.dn.pt/Common/print.aspx?content_id=3567765

Baptista Bastos
  
Salazar afastou-nos da política. Alegava que percebíamos pouco ou nada dos enredos que determinavam o processo histórico. Para cumprir o projecto serviu-se do sarrafo e do cantochão: da violência e do servilismo cúmplice da Igreja católica. Calafetou-nos com a censura, a polícia, uma escola com esquadrias implacáveis, o temor religioso que nos imbecilizava, a criação de uma clique paralisante e ignara; e a colocação, nos postos de comando e de poder, de serventuários inescrupulosos. Leitor de Maurras, de Sorel e de Gobineau, cujo Les Plêiades absorvera, entusiasmadíssimo, na juventude, conhecia muito bem o que desejava. "Sei o que quero e para aonde vou", dissera, num tom ameaçador que passou despercebido, mesmo aos homens da Seara Nova.

A arteirice do seu comportamento possuía qualquer coisa de irónico. Quando Alfredo
da Silva, o grande industrial, fundador da CUF, se lhe foi queixar da mediocridade do ministro da Economia, Salazar respondeu: "Olhe que o outro será pior." Promovia a ascensão dos ambiciosos, sobretudo dos que abjuravam dos ideais, e a história dos seus governos está repleta dessa gente. Alguns, mantinham uma relativa ética republicana, de onde procediam, e do ideário maçónico, do qual se não tinham completamente dissociado.

Esta caracterização tem semelhanças, nada abusivas, com o político actualmente no  poder. É apenas uma verificação histórica. Acontece um porém: Salazar era culto e bom manejador da língua. Frequentador, com mão diurna e mão nocturna, dos padres António Vieira e Manuel Bernardes, consumia pelo menos 36 horas a redigir os discursos mais importantes. O que nos calhou agora é aquilo que tem provado à exaustão. Mas a consciência antidemocrática é comum aos dois. Por muito que este encha a boca com a palavra "democracia", ele e sua prática são quase um sacrilégio, enquanto o outro só a proferia raramente e, claro!, para a escarmentar.

Somos responsáveis por um e por outro. Muito respeitadores por quem nos desrespeita, nos violenta e nos agride com mentiras e omissões, os nossos protestos quedam-se na obediência à estrutura "orgânica", por natureza cumpridora e legalista. Cito Cornelius Castoriadis (ao qual voltarei, em breve, porque estou a relê-lo): "...a honestidade, o serviço de Estado, a transmissão do saber, a obra feita (...) vivemos em sociedades nas quais estes valores se tornaram, com pública notoriedade, irrisórios e em que apenas importa a quantidade de dinheiro que se mete no bolso, de qualquer maneira, ou o número de vezes que se aparece na televisão."

Os episódios ocorridos na escadaria do Parlamento, e na "invasão" de quatro  ministérios, representam veementes censuras ao recalcamento que este Governo  nos aplica. O direito à desobediência impõe-se, quando o poder cria formas e  estimula métodos contrários aos princípios das próprias noções de convivência  social.

Por decisão pessoal, o autor do texto não escreve segundo o novo acordo ortográfico
 
BAPTISTA-BASTOS

publicado a 2013-12-04 às 01:20

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Our Invisible Revolution

12/14/2013

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 http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/our_invisible_revolution_20131028/

 Posted on Oct 28, 2013

 By Chris Hedges



Shutterstock

 “Did you ever ask yourself how it happens that government and capitalism continue to exist in spite of all the evil and trouble they are causing in the world?” the anarchist Alexander Berkman wrote in his essay “The Idea Is the Thing.” “If you did, then your answer must have been that it is because the people support those institutions, and that they support them because they believe in them.”

Berkman was right. As long as most citizens believe in the ideas that justify global
capitalism, the private and state institutions that serve our corporate masters
are unassailable. When these ideas are shattered, the institutions that buttress the ruling class deflate and collapse. The battle of ideas is percolating below the surface. It is a battle the corporate state is steadily losing. An increasing number of Americans are getting it. They know that we have been stripped of political power. They recognize that we have been shorn of our most basic and cherished civil liberties, and live under the gaze of the most intrusive security and surveillance apparatus in human history. Half the country lives in poverty. Many of the rest of us, if the corporate state is not  overthrown, will join them. These truths are no longer hidden.

It appears that political ferment is dormant in the United States. This is incorrect. The ideas that sustain the corporate state are swiftly losing their efficacy across the  political spectrum. The ideas that are rising to take their place, however, are inchoate. The right has retreated into Christian fascism and a celebration of the gun culture. The left, knocked off balance by decades of fierce state repression in the name of anti-communism, is struggling to rebuild and define itself. Popular revulsion for the ruling elite, however, is nearly universal. It is a question of which ideas will capture the public’s imagination. 

Revolution usually erupts over events that would, in normal circumstances, be considered meaningless or minor acts of injustice by the state. But once the tinder of
revolt has piled up, as it has in the United States, an insignificant spark easily ignites popular rebellion. No person or movement can ignite this tinder. 
No one knows where or when the eruption will take place. No one knows the form
it will take. But it is certain now that a popular revolt is coming. The refusal by the corporate state to address even the minimal grievances of the citizenry, along with the abject failure to remedy the mounting state repression, the chronic unemployment and underemployment, the massive debt peonage that is crippling more than half of Americans, and the loss of hope and widespread despair, means that blowback is inevitable. 
 
“Because revolution is evolution at its boiling point you cannot ‘make’ a real revolution any more than you can hasten the boiling of a tea kettle,” Berkman wrote. “It is the fire underneath that makes it boil: how quickly it will come to the boiling point will depend on how strong the fire is.”

Revolutions, when they erupt, appear to the elites and the establishment to be sudden and unexpected. This is because the real work of revolutionary ferment and  consciousness is unseen by the mainstream society, noticed only after it has  largely been completed. Throughout history, those who have sought radical change have always had to first discredit the ideas used to prop up ruling elites and construct alternative ideas for society, ideas often embodied in a utopian revolutionary myth. The articulation of a viable socialism as an alternative to corporate tyranny—as attempted by the book “Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA” and the website Popular Resistance—is, for me, paramount. Once ideas shift for a large portion of a population, once the vision of a new society grips the popular imagination, the old regime is finished. 
 
An uprising that is devoid of ideas and vision is never a threat to ruling elites. Social  upheaval without clear definition and direction, without ideas behind it, descends into nihilism, random violence and chaos. It consumes itself. This, at  its core, is why I disagree with some elements of the Black Bloc anarchists. I believe in strategy. And so did many anarchists, including Berkman, Emma Goldman, Pyotr Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin. 
 
By the time ruling elites are openly defied, there has already been a nearly total loss of
faith in the ideas—in our case free market capitalism and globalization—that sustain the structures of the ruling elites. And once enough people get it, a process that can take years, “the slow, quiet, and peaceful social evolution becomes quick, militant, and violent,” as Berkman wrote. “Evolution becomes  revolution.”

This is where we are headed. I do not say this because I am a supporter of revolution. I am not. I prefer the piecemeal and incremental reforms of a functioning democracy. I  prefer a system in which our social institutions permit the citizenry to nonviolently dismiss those in authority. I prefer a system in which institutions are independent and not captive to corporate power. But we do not live in such a system. Revolt is the only option left. Ruling elites, once the ideas that justify their existence are dead, resort to force. It is their final clutch at power. If a nonviolent popular movement is able to ideologically disarm the bureaucrats, civil servants and police—to get them, in essence, to defect—nonviolent revolution is possible. But if the state can organize  effective and prolonged violence against dissent, it spawns reactive revolutionary violence, or what the state calls terrorism. Violent revolutions usually give rise to revolutionaries as ruthless as their adversaries. “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster,”Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. “And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” 

Violent revolutions are always tragic. I, and many other activists, seek to keep our  uprising nonviolent. We seek to spare the country the savagery of domestic violence by both the state and its opponents. There is no guarantee that we will succeed, especially with the corporate state controlling a vast internal security apparatus and militarized police forces. But we must try. 
 
Corporations, freed from all laws, government regulations and internal constraints, are
stealing as much as they can, as fast as they can, on the way down. The managers
of corporations no longer care about the effects of their pillage. Many expect the systems they are looting to fall apart. They are blinded by personal greed and hubris. They believe their obscene wealth can buy them security and protection. They should have spent a little less time studying management in business school and a little more time studying human nature and human history. They are digging their own graves. 

Our shift to corporate totalitarianism, like the shift to all forms of totalitarianism, is  incremental. Totalitarian systems ebb and flow, sometimes taking one step back  before taking two steps forward, as they erode democratic liberalism. This process is now complete. The “consent of the governed” is a cruel joke. Barack Obama cannot defy corporate power any more than George W. Bush or Bill Clinton could. Unlike his two immediate predecessors, Bush, who is intellectually and probably emotionally impaired, did not understand the totalitarian process abetted by the presidency. Because Clinton and Obama, and their Democratic Party, understand the destructive roles they played and are playing, they must be seen as far more cynical and far more complicit in the ruination of the country. Democratic politicians speak in the familiar “I-feel-your-pain” language of the liberal class while allowing corporations to strip us of  personal wealth and power. They are effective masks for corporate power.

The corporate state seeks to maintain the fiction of our personal agency in the political and economic process. As long as we believe we are participants, a lie sustained  through massive propaganda campaigns, endless and absurd election cycles and the pageantry of empty political theater, our corporate oligarchs rest easy in their private jets, boardrooms, penthouses and mansions. As the bankruptcy of corporate capitalism and globalization is exposed, the ruling elite are increasingly nervous. They know that if the ideas that justify their power die, they are finished. This is why voices of dissent—as well as spontaneous uprisings such as the Occupy movement—are ruthlessly crushed by the corporate state. 

“... [M]any ideas, once held to be true, have come to be regarded as wrong and evil,”
Berkman wrote in his essay. “Thus the ideas of the divine right of kings, of slavery and serfdom. There was a time when the whole world believed those institutions to be right, just, and unchangeable. In the measure that those superstitions and false beliefs were fought by advanced thinkers, they became discredited and lost their hold upon the people, and finally the institutions that incorporated those ideas were abolished. Highbrows will tell you that they had ‘outlived’their ‘usefulness’ and therefore they ‘died.’ But how did they ‘outlive’ their‘usefulness’? To whom were they useful, and how did they ‘die’? We know already that they were useful only to the master class, and they were done away with by popular uprisings and revolutions.” 
 




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Quando a Europa salva os bancos, quem paga?

12/14/2013

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