SlowTV | The greening of politics. Bob Brown | The Monthly

SlowTV | The greening of politics. Bob Brown | The Monthly

Addressing the Green New Deal conference, political leader Bob Brown speaks about the rise of green politics over the past few decades. The major parties, he says, have ceased to govern in a manner that will deliver long-term prosperity, and only a radical shift in how we conceive of the relationship between business, economics and the broader society and environment will ensure a sustainable or viable future. Green New Deal conference, presented by the Green Institute, Melbourne, October 2009

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SlowTV | Climate change denialism and the challenges ahead. Kevin Rudd | The Monthly

SlowTV | Climate change denialism and the challenges ahead. Kevin Rudd | The Monthly

"It is time to remove any polite veneer from this debate... The overwhelming need for Australia to tackle the great challenge of our generation is being frustrated by the do-nothing climate change sceptics".

In his major speech to the Lowy Institute, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd takes aim at the goals and methods of climate change denialists and sceptics in Australia and around the world. He outlines a typography of the different schools opposing action on climate change then attacks the arguments that each employ to avoid taking substantial action; then he names those individuals and parties he believes are most responsible for preventing the actions necessitated by global scientific, economic and environmental realities. Lowy Institute, November 2009

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Breaking The Great Australian Silence

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.

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UN affirms Goldstone report

A 575-page blistering report by Justice Richard Goldstone detailing war crimes in Gaza last December is refusing to die despite an aggressive Israeli smear campaign to kill it.

The report, which was favorably voted by the 47-member Human Rights Council in Geneva last month, received overwhelming support Thursday in the 192-member General Assembly.

The vote was 114 in favor and 18 against, with 44 abstentions.

The 18 countries that voted against the resolution included the United States, Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Israel.

Ambassador Riyad Mansour, Permanent Observer of Palestine to the United Nations, singled out Ireland, one of the few Western nations to vote for the resolution, for “supporting” it.

He also noted that a “sizeable number of European nations” abstained on the resolution.

Among the abstentions were Britain, France, Norway, Sweden, Spain, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Denmark and Greece.

“The General Assembly sent a powerful message,” he told reporters, adding that if Israelis do not comply, “We will go after them.”

The Assembly requested Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to report within three months on the implementation of the resolution.

Among other things, the resolution calls upon both the Israelis and the Palestinians to undertake independent investigations of their own on the serious violations of international humanitarian and human rights laws during the 22-day conflict in Gaza in December.

Still, Mansour said he rejects any equation of the “occupying power's aggression and crimes with actions committed in response by the Palestinian side”.

“We wish to clearly reaffirm that there is absolutely no symmetry or proportionality between the occupier and the occupied,” he added.

U. S. Ambassador Alejandro Wolff rejected the Goldstone report as “deeply flawed” and “unbalanced”.

He said the United States was fully committed to a two-state solution - Israel and Palestine - and will do nothing to hinder it.

Last month, the 15-member Security Council debated the report but refused to take a vote primarily because of the opposition by the United States, a veto-wielding member of the Council.

In Geneva, the Human Rights Council endorsed the report last month by a vote of 25 in favour, six against, 11 abstentions and five no-shows.

The report was also the subject of a vote Tuesday by the U. S. House of Representatives, traditionally sympathetic towards Israel. That vote, condemning the report, was 344 in favour and 36 against.

Nadia Hijab, senior fellow at the Washington-based Institute for Palestine Studies, told IPS the importance of the Goldstone Report is evident given the amount of effort Israel, the United States and their allies are investing in trying to bury it.

She said irrespective of the strength or weakness of the General Assembly resolution, the report is important because of its very existence.

Not only does it provide an authoritative basis for Palestinians seeking reparations and accountability, but it also puts the world on notice that international law must be upheld and impunity must end, she said.

“It's simply not going to go away,” said Hijab.

The report, authored by a four-member international fact-finding mission headed by Justice Richard Goldstone, details war crimes charges against both Israel and the Palestinian resistance group Hamas.

The mission, and specifically Goldstone, has been politically crucified by pro-Israeli groups in the United States.

The UN mission recommended that the Security Council require Israel to report to it, within the next six months, on investigations and prosecutions it should carry out with regard to the violations cited in the report.

During the ruthless military operation, codenamed 'Operation Cast Lead,' the Israelis destroyed houses, factories, wells, schools, hospitals, police stations and other public buildings.

The number of Palestinian killed during the conflict is estimated at between 1,387 and 1,417, mostly civilians, compared with four Israeli fatal casualties in southern Israel and nine soldiers killed during fighting, four of whom died as a result of friendly fire.

The report also recommended that the Security Council set up its own body of independent experts to report to it on the progress of the Israeli investigations and prosecutions.

“If the expert's reports do not indicate within six months that good faith, independent proceedings are taking place, the Security Council should refer the situation in Gaza to the Prosecutor in the International Criminal Court (ICC),” the report recommended.

Hijab told IPS the Goldstone Report has already had an impact on the Israeli-Palestinian scene.

“It will ensure that henceforth the Israeli state as well as Palestinian armed groups are more careful about the use of force,” she said.

In addition, she said, the initial misguided attempt by the leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Palestinian Authority (PA) to “postpone” consideration has strengthened the hand of political parties and civil society in setting limits on how far the PA/PLO can go in their alliance with the U. S. and its erosion of Palestinian human rights.

In short, the Goldstone Report has had a significant before it even reached the General Assembly, and it continues to be discussed the world over, Hijab declared.

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Background Briefing - Internet piracy

Listen Now - 01112009 |Download Audio - 01112009

Copyright began 300 years ago, but now laws can't cope with the anarchy of new technologies. There's a battle between the law and the 'mashers', from the White House to the Australian Federal Court.

Anti-Piracy Advertisement: The pirates are out to get you. Don't let them brand you with their mark. Piracy funds organised crime.

Oscar McLaren: Messages like these have appeared at the start of DVDs, videos and cinema sessions for years.

Anti-Piracy Advertisement: Piracy costs jobs, and will destroy our music and publishing industry.

Piracy funds terrorism, and will destroy our development and your future enjoyment. Don't touch the hot stuff. Cool is copyright.

Oscar McLaren: The film and music studios argue that piracy is destroying the billion dollar entertainment industries. Here is an Australian version.

Anti-Piracy Advertisement: Burning, buying or downloading pirated films may seem harmless, but what you're really burning is the future of Australian films.

Oscar McLaren: The copyright industries say their enemies are everywhere, from multi-billion dollar internet companies to the millions of people around the world who pirate films and music on the net.

But also in the cross-hairs is a growing band of mash-up and remix artists and everyday computer users for whom the internet has sparked a wave of creativity.

Around the world, some say the copyright industry's war is already lost. At a conference in Canberra earlier this year, here's Harvard University's Professor Lawrence Lessig.

Lawrence Lessig: We have to recognise we can't kill this form of creativity, we're only going to criminalise it. There's no way we can stop our kids from engaging in this form of creativity, we can only drive their creativity underground. We can't make them passive, the way at least I was growing up, we can only make them pirates. And the question we have to ask is, Is that any good?

Oscar McLaren: Today, Background Briefing explores this question. Hello, I'm Oscar McLaren on ABC Radio National.

The battle is really about how copyright law should adapt in an age when everyone can be a pirate.

Should it crack down on every download of a film or song? Should it stop every unauthorised remix? Should it stand aside? Or should it find another way of regulating intellectual property.

There are enormous corporate interests involved on all sides, and the laws are complex. But at their most basic level they're meant to encourage creative people to produce work and release it to the public.

Here's how the ABC's children's news program Behind the News tried to explain copyright in 2006.

Presenter: Micky is making a video of herself miming to her favourite song. Now if she was to upload it to YouTube or other similar sites, she'd be committing an offence. Huh? She'd be breaking the copyright rules. What is copyright? As soon as music or a play is put down in a material form, such as on paper, recorded on tape, or stored on a computer disk, copyright rules automatically protect the creator. By using some copyrighted work without the owner's permission for your own use, you are committing piracy. It's got nothing to do with the high seas.

Oscar McLaren: The big fights so far have been over music, and film, though there are already tussles over electronic books as well.

There are two main ways that copyright is being breached. There's outright piracy, that is, people downloading full films and albums over the net; and there's also the trend of people at home remixing popular culture, making video clips using commercial music, or mixing other copyright material together.

We'll deal with this so-called remix culture first.

Music Sample: OK, are we all ready now? Good.

Oscar McLaren: In 2005 the British musician known as Strictly Kev teamed up with the music journalist Paul Morley to produce an hour-long history of the remix movement. And they told a story of how the internet has allowed people from around the world to fiddle with the media, from the comfort of their own home.

Paul Morley: It's from the home, which is nowhere in sight, unless it's your own, that the art of the bootleg mix appears, whereby anonymous raiders of the 20th century, or bastards, armed with a decent hard drive, a lust for life, a love of music that borders on the diseased, and a warped sense of humour, mash up tracks taken off the internet. Twist genres across themselves, and rewrite musical history in a way musicians would never think of. Access on the internet to a capella vocals and instrumental backing tracks, means that home bodies who are all in the mind, can ignore legalities and logic, and all manner of niceties, and splice together any music that takes their fancy. Destiny's Child's horny 'Bootilicious' is mashed in with Nirvana's holy 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' to create 'Smells Like Booty'.

Oscar McLaren: As Strictly Kev and Paul Morley pointed out, the idea of mixing other peoples' artworks together is nothing new. Visual artists have borrowed ideas for centuries, and in the words of the poet TS Eliot:

Reader: Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they they've taken and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

Oscar McLaren: In the internet age more and more people have become involved, using freely available film and music and basic computer programs.

There has been a host of films made about remix culture, including one we'll be quoting from today, called Good Copy Bad Copy. It was released for free on the net and has been translated into dozens of languages.

But amidst all the freewheeling cultural exchange, there are some pretty big legal problems. They came to a head in a celebrated case in 2004.

According to the US magazine Entertainment Weekly the Album of the Year in 2004 was The Grey Album.

MUSIC: Can I get an encore, do you want more ...

Oscar McLaren: It was the work of Brian Burton, who goes by the stage name of DJ Danger Mouse. He mixed sounds from The Beatles' White Album, with the vocal tracks from a more recent release, The Black Album by the Rapper Jay-Z. He gave it out for free, and it was wildly successful, spreading fast across the internet.

Brian Burton spoke about the album in the documentary about copyright law and culture called Good Copy Bad Copy. He said the idea was pretty simple.

Brian Burton: You know, you have a very white thing and a very black thing apparently, and then you know, they can make beautiful music together, it's very corny, very cheesy you know, and calling it the Grey Album, all that stuff you know, but that's what I'm trying to do is change people's perceptions about music and what you can do and things like that. So hopefully I'm getting there. It's a start.

Oscar McLaren: But there was one fairly big problem: Brian Burton didn't have permission to use the bits from The Beatles' White Album.

When its copyright owners, the record company , EMI, came across the new remix, they didn't like what they heard. They sent letters to Brian Burton, demanding that he stop distributing the album. He agreed, though he reminded them that he wasn't selling the Grey Album.

Brian Burton: I'm one of the few people I think that has a tonne of fans, that don't have any product of mine, you know what I mean, and that's great because it's not like it's dependent on that.

MUSIC: THE GREY ALBUM: 'Now look what you made me do, look what I made for you ...'

Oscar McLaren: But that wasn't the end of it. News of EMI's actions spread almost as quickly as the album had, and there were howls of protest.

A group called Downhill Battle who describe themselves as music activists, organised an online protest which they called Grey Tuesday.

Reader: Tuesday, February 24, will be a day of co-ordinated civil disobedience: websites will post Danger Mouse's Grey Album on their site for 24 hours in protest of EMI's attempts to censor this work.

Oscar McLaren: The idea was that people could register their protest by simply downloading the album, and according to the organisers, more than 100,000 people did on that one day.

Even today The Grey Album can be easily downloaded from peer-to-peer filesharing networks.

Background Briefing wasn't able to get comment on The Grey Album from EMI. There is no mention of their position on this issue on their website, but you can find a link to EMI's site on the Background Briefing web page.

The anarchy of the internet which allowed The Grey Album to spread so quickly and stay available for so long has really beaten the copyright industries so far.

It's not like they haven't tried, they've sued the operators of filesharing networks as well as some individual downloaders in the United States. They won many of those cases, but filesharing has continued unabated. Now the copyright industries are upping the ante.

Mark Colvin: The Federal Court has begun hearing a case which could determine how far internet companies have to go to stop their customers illegally downloading films and TV shows.

A group of 33 entertainment companies is suing the internet service provider, Iinet.

Oscar McLaren: The film industry now wants to see illegal filesharers kicked off the internet altogether.

The film and television industry's lobby group AFACT is in the Federal Court arguing that the internet service provider Iinet should be punished for not stopping piracy amongst its customers.

Iinet is defending the claim and says it can't be held responsible for its customers' actions.

Adrianne Pecotic has been the public voice of the studio's legal action. She's AFACT's Executive Director.

Adrianne Pecotic: We think this case is based on very clear legal principles. It's really about what an organisation like Iinet should do to prevent the infringement by its customers over its network of copyright material. The copyright law is very clear about authorisation principles, and also provides a safe harbour for ISPs who do act expeditiously to prevent copyright infringement on their networks.

Oscar McLaren: For many years, the copyright industries have argued that piracy is leading them to financial ruin.

Adrianne Pecotic: Well when last assessed in Australia, the industry was found to lose approximately $230-million, that's the Australian film industry. And broadband penetration has gone up about 70% since then, so we certainly fear that the losses have increased.

Oscar McLaren: That $230-million figure comes from a study that was commissioned by the US film industry in 2005. None of the raw data was released so it's hard to know how the dollar figure was reached.

There's no doubt that there's an enormous amount of illegal downloading going on. But the effect of this is less clear.

Amidst the talk about losses, you may be surprised to hear that last DVD sales were in fact at record levels. Combined revenue from VHS and DVD sales has grown steadily for the past decade.

So why all the talk about the industry facing ruin?

From AFACT, Adrianne Pecotic.

Adrianne Pecotic: The fact that there is a level of illegitimate consumption of film and television is something that detracts from the revenue that could go back into the industry and could go back into supporting local video stores, local cinemas and online distribution. Theft is not justified because someone is being successful, and that's a really important point in this debate.

Oscar McLaren: But it does seem strange that I mean, we're told in quite apocalyptic terms often that the video industry and the film industry is really starting to hurt. I don't imagine many people would actually be aware that the revenues are in fact going up quite steadily and have been for the past decade or so.

Adrianne Pecotic: I think the important thing about the losses that are being suffered by the film industry through piracy, is that individual investors in individual films rely on that investment in that particular film, for that film maker, or that investor as their entire revenue. If you're looking at the analysis across the board of the whole industry and whether it is going up or whether more people are consuming films or less people are consuming films, you're not asking the question of whether a particular film has had the opportunity to recoup its proper revenue.

Oscar McLaren: For the record, box office sales were also at all-time high levels last year, reaching nearly $1-billion.

The very nature of what copyright law is, why it is there and how it should be set, is the subject of heated debate.

The copyright industries say that downloading a film is the same as stealing a DVD from a shop, or stealing a car.

Adrianne Pecotic, from AFACT.

Adrianne Pecotic: I think we're certainly in a digital transition, and people who very clearly understand and respect that they would not go into a DVD store and steal a DVD, some of those people are yet to understand the distinction between being online and dealing with what is actually the valuable thing on that DVD, which is the film or the television program that the investors and the film maker have created. So if you think about the internet, there really is no property on the internet other than intellectual property, so it's incredibly important for the public to go through this digital transition and understand and respect copyright as property on the internet.

Oscar McLaren: But many lawyers in the debate argue that stealing a physical object is very different to breaching intellectual property laws.

On the phone from the University of Michigan Law School is the author of the book Digital Copyright, Professor Jessica Litman.

Jessica LitMan: The difference between a song and a cookie is if I eat a cookie, then you can't have it because I've eaten it, it's gone. But if I listen to a song, you can listen to a song, your friend can listen to a song, anyone can listen to a song, and because intellectual property is capable of being enjoyed by many people at the same time, it's subject to somewhat different rules than cookies. Or houses, or other kinds of property.

Oscar McLaren: Unlike other much older property laws, the idea of copyright has only been around for 300 years. To understand where it came from, we have to travel back to the City of London.

In 1709, a horse and cart was still the quickest way to get around London. The city was still almost 150 years away from getting a sewerage system, and 100 years away from banning the official slave trade. But it wasn't too early to be talking about copyright.

English novels were just starting to be established as a form of writing, and according to the Australian Copyright Council's Ian McDonald, all was not well in the world of publishing.

Ian McDonald: In particular, Daniel Defoe and other writers were finding that yes, they were creating works, they were publishing, or their publishers were putting material out, only immediately to find that the material was pirated by others. And so really it was that question; look, if they're putting the time and the effort and the resources into putting it out there into society to begin with, then they should have rights over that to the exclusion of others.

Oscar McLaren: And so in 1709 the world's first copyright law was enacted in England. It was called the Statute of Anne.

Reader: For the encouragement of learned men to compose and write useful books, may it please Your Majesty, that it may be enacted.

Oscar McLaren: The idea was pretty simple: if authors were granted a monopoly right to print their own books, they would get the full benefit of the books, and cheap copiers wouldn't be able to come in and undercut them with knock-off editions.

This was meant to give authors the support they needed to continue writing, and the confidence to release that writing to the public.

As with any political decision there was emotive language at play when the Statute of Anne was written. It clearly identified the plight of authors who were having their books pirated.

Reader: ... to their very great detriment, and too often to the ruin of them and their families.

Oscar McLaren: But Ben Atkinson from the Queensland University of Technology, and author of a history of copyright law in Australia says the law was more than just a policy to help starving authors.

There were other people who stood to make money out of original books; chief among them were the established booksellers who were having to compete against a growing pirate trade.

Ben Atkinson.

Ben Atkinson: Yes, there was a real, a big issue about piracy from pretty much the beginning of the 18th century, it was a real concern. But what these booksellers wanted to do essentially was to kind of corner a market, so any kind of threat to their trade was seen as very dangerous, and in a way it's rather similar to today. They wouldn't contemplate kind of ordinary profits, they wanted to optimise their returns, and it's around this period that we start to see the legend of the ruthless, crocodile-like publisher start to become apparent at large.

Oscar McLaren: Ben Atkinson argues that the idea of the struggling author was little more than a lobbying device.

Ben Atkinson: And what the publishers did was to persuade parliament to pass the Statute of Anne, the first copyright statute, and what they did very cleverly was to put forward a kind of ruse, which was the 'author', the concept of the author. Parliament conferred certain printing and publishing benefits on the author for a monopoly for a maximum term of 28 years, but it was in fact the publishers who stood behind the author, who benefited from this new legislation.

Oscar McLaren: I guess you do have to give full public relations marks to the booksellers of 1709 though - it's an idea that's been with us for a good 300 years.

Ben Atkinson: Yes, I give 20 out of 10 to the copyright industries for the way they have advanced their interest, and they have been very intelligent in the way they have done that, and they have extracted from the legislature exceptional privileges, and that is through the intelligence, through their planning and the intelligence of their lobbying.

Oscar McLaren: You can still see the idea of the struggling artist today.

The musician, actor and comedian, Jack Black, created an internet classic when he gave his take on the argument in an ad for his film Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny.

Jack Black: I don't know how they do it, but these pirates can bust into our entertainers' homes, make us walk the plank, steal our rocking tunes, and leave us broke. And you know what that means. No cash, no inspiration. No inspiration, no rocket sauce. No rocket sauce, no kick-ass rock and roll or movies. Is that what you want, Mr Long John Silver? What's your parrot going to listen to when you go toe-to-toe against the English Armada? Jazz? I don't think so. Don't be a douche. Stop piracy. This is Jack Black.

Oscar McLaren: And the archetype of the greedy industry is also still around. There has been a big backlash in the United States against music studios suing individual filesharers. And some artists are pleasing crowds by putting the boot into the industry.

This is how the lead singer of the band The Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor, put it during a concert in Sydney.

Trent Reznor: I remember last time I was here I was doing a lot of complaining about the ridiculous prices of CDs down here. (CHEERS) And that story got picked up and got carried all around the world, and now my record label all around the world hates me, because I yelled at them, and called them out for being greedy assholes. (CHEERS)

Oscar McLaren: There's no denying that the majority of musicians, film makers and other artists don't live like rock stars. Most struggle to make a living from their work.

The question today is whether copyright law properly deals with that problem.

It's a question that's been debated on and off ever since the Statute of Anne was enacted and the debates are usually sparked by technological change.

Jessica Litman from the University of Michigan Law School.

Jessica LitMan: It's always put in apocalyptic terms. When the piano roll was invented in the 19th century, John Phillip Souza for one talked about how it would mean the end of music. Similarly, the recording industry, radio, television, is always greeted by entrenched media as something that poses a threat to their very existence. A lot of that is just rhetoric.

Oscar McLaren: Jessica Litman says the result, after centuries of rhetoric, is a law which is complicated and doesn't do what it's supposed to.

Jessica LitMan: Right now, an ordinary person look at the copyright law in your country, in my country, would say gee whiz, this doesn't seem like a very sensible law to me. Many of them would say, well I'd be willing to pay for every time I listen to this song, if I were sure that the artists who made the song were getting the money, but I don't see any sign that that's true.

Oscar McLaren: There are some signs that new business models are emerging.

Legitimate online downloads nearly tripled last year, and some commercial sites are starting to allow free streaming of music. Some bands are giving away their music, and simply asking for donations. And there are still other musicians who say that illegal filesharing is really just advertising for live concerts.

Whatever business models do get used, there's the view amongst many in the copyright debate that the copyright system needs to make sense to the general public.

From the University of Queensland Law School, Kimberlee Weatherall.

Kimberlee Weatherall: The funny thing about copyright is that because it is so easy to copy, the whole functioning of the copyright system kind of depends on people believing in it and obeying it. You know, it depends on good faith on the part of users, to refrain from doing some of the things that they can easily do, particularly given current technologies. By making copyright look in some respects, evil at times, and perhaps dominated by certain corporate interests, I think some of the events of the last 10 years have chipped away at what goodwill there might have been.

Oscar McLaren: But Kimberlee Weatherall also points out it's not just a case of money-hungry copyright industries.

Kimberlee Weatherall: In the current round of copyright wars, there's probably greed on both sides. There's greed on the part of corporate owners wanting more expansive rights, ever longer rights, you know, give me another 20 years, give me another 20 years so that I can continue to exploit this creative work. And on the other hand, perhaps amongst those who are the most enthusiastic peer-to-peer filesharers, there's a bit of greed there too, it's like we don't want to pay. We want to get all of the music we could ever possibly want in the world and not pay for it, and not recognise that someone else invested in that creation.

MUSIC: KIDS ROCK BY LOO & PLACIDO

Oscar McLaren: You're listening to Background Briefing on ABC Radio National.

The role of children and young people in this debate is critical, as they'll be the ones observing or breaking copyright law in the future.

The American demi-god of the copyright reform movement, Lawrence Lessig was in Canberra earlier this year as a guest of Brisbane's ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation.

When he addressed a conference on the future of copyright law, children were on the agenda.

Lawrence Lessig: This war is a war of prohibition, and this war of prohibition, like most wars of prohibition, has not worked, if by worked you mean reduced the 'bad' behaviour. The one thing we recently learned is that kids who share files on peer-to-peer filesharing networks apparently don't read Supreme Court opinions, at least of the United States, I don't know about here in Australia.

Oscar McLaren: Lawrence Lessig displayed a graph showing the amount of illegal filesharing taking place online.

Lawrence Lessig: ... this line right here represents the moment where the Supreme Court clearly declared this behaviour illegal, but we see no drop off in the behaviour of peer-to-peer filesharing. Instead of reducing the bad behaviour, all this war has done, is render a generation criminal.

Oscar McLaren: At the conference, Background Briefing asked how the current copyright debate shapes up historically.

Lawrence Lessig.

Lawrence Lessig: I don't think we've ever seen the radical change in the reach of copyright law that we've seen in the last 10 years. What's happened with digital technologies is all of a sudden a whole class of people never imagined in the Copyright Act to be subject to the regulations in the Copyright Act have to become copyright experts, namely everybody who uses a computer, and obviously a law that was written as copyright law was written, for lawyers and publishing houses or major film studios, is not well suited to be applied to everybody who has access to a computer. So there's a fundamental need to update the law to make it make sense in a world where it purports to regulate everybody who turns on their machine.

Oscar McLaren: The Australian Copyright Council agree that the law is complex, but they argue, the complexity is hard to avoid.

Ian McDonald.

Ian McDonald: What contributes to that complexity is the fact that copyright is also trying to balance up the needs of society, not just to have material produced which is useful, but in certain circumstances to get access to that material, so you find in the copyright legislation both here and in other countries, quite complex provisions in many cases where they're balancing the needs of society to have creators and investors and the needs of society to get access to that material.

Oscar McLaren: And, Ian McDonald says, children do understand the basic ideas.

Ian McDonald: I think what's interesting is the number of basic principles which kids do get, that if they create something themselves, that they do feel a sense of possession towards that, and therefore certainly a number of the education programs which I've looked at, seem to enable the students to themselves see well, actually there's a sense to what is theirs, having some sort of control over it. What is somebody else's, having certain obligations towards it.

Oscar McLaren: But, as we heard earlier, the ABC's children's news program, Behind The News, had its work cut out for it when it tried to go through the details of copyright law for its audience of primary school students.

Presenter: You'll soon be allowed to tape your favourite TV program to watch at another time, but you're not allowed to give the recording to a friend. They can come over and watch the program with you, but they can't take it home. With MP3s, you can copy your music collection from CDs and other formats, to MP3 players. You can even make a compilation of all your favourite songs from CDs you own, as long as you put them on a different format like MP3. But you're not allowed to share your compilation with a friend, although they can listen to it with you. The laws are designed to crack down on people who make profit from piracy.

Oscar McLaren: The copyright industries run their own education campaigns. They recently sent two stars from the soap opera, Neighbours out into the streets to take copyright's pulse.

Child: It's not right, but we do do it.

Man: Do you think it matters if people pirate DVDs?

Child: It matters because a lot of people are losing money, but no, people just do it without even thinking about it. Things like cinemas, transport industries are also suffering because of DVD and video piracy, because they're not getting the amount of business that they usually would if this problem didn't occur.

Man: Is piracy of DVDs and CDs common among your mates?

Child: Oh yeah, lots of kids I know do it, they take it to school. It's not, yes, I don't do it myself, but many kids do, so ...

Man: Well there you go, the voice of youth speaks.

Oscar McLaren: The copyright industries also hold education days where classes of high school students are brought along to learn about copyright law.

There was recently one in Sydney, called the 'Nothing beats the real thing youth challenge'.

Man: ... and what's the day about? Nothing beats the real thing. What does that mean? No plagiarism, well done. Anybody else think of something? Nothing's better than the original. OK. Very good. I wonder what we're talking about. Of course, it's film piracy, but it's a civics and citizenship day here ...

Oscar McLaren: The industry website says on the day the students agreed the best way to deal with piracy is to quote 'Just say No.'

MUSIC: DOUBLE DEE & STEINSKI, 'IT'S UP TO YOU'.

Oscar McLaren: It's not just children who can get bemused by copyright law. Sites like YouTube with enormous legal teams say it's often impossible for them to judge whether video clips breach copyright or not.

There are two big areas of confusion.

First, it's often hard to know exactly who holds copyright. In pieces of recorded music, for instance, there are lots of copyright holders. The performers of the music, the people who wrote the music and the people who recorded it, all have some rights.

Some record labels don't even know exactly what they do and don't own.

The other confusion comes from so-called fair-dealing provisions. In Australia, you're allowed to reproduce copyright material if you're reviewing it or making a parody or satire. And there are a few other exceptions as well. In the US, there's a much broader exception called Fair Use.

But in both Australia and the US, the boundaries of what's allowed under exceptions are far from clear.

In the United States, the complexity reared its head during the 2008 presidential election campaign, especially for John McCain, who found himself caught up in a law he'd helped put in place 10 years earlier.

John McCain: The last eight years haven't worked very well have they? I'll make the next four better.

Oscar McLaren: Both John McCain and Barack Obama flooded the YouTube site with ads during the presidential campaigns. Some of the ads used news footage to illustrate their points.

John McCain: I'm John McCain and I approve this message.

Oscar McLaren: But news organisations said these ads breached copyright law because they used the news footage, and the broadcaster CBS, complained to YouTube.

Under a US law voted for by Senator McCain sites can be held liable for copyright infringement if they refuse to take down videos which are alleged to breach copyright.

YouTube took the campaign videos down as soon as it received the complaints.

But John McCain's campaign insisted they should have stayed up, and that the use of news footage was 'fair use'.

YouTube replied:

Reader: Lawyers and judges constantly disagree about what does and does not constitute fair use.

Oscar McLaren: And YouTube continued:

Reader: We hope that as a content uploader, you have gained a sense of some of the challenges we face every day in operating YouTube.

Oscar McLaren: In this case, YouTube was simply managing its legal risk; there was nothing stopping John McCain from putting his videos up on other sites, or his own website.

But for many websites which host videos and music, the number of copyright complaints rolling in every day is so huge, and the task of checking them so complicated, that the vast bulk of videos which attract complaints are simply removed without any questions.

Paul Morley: In a room, much like the room you're in, using their heads and a sense of where music connects and disconnects, Pro Tooled-up laptop artists make their contribution to the way music is splitting up into a billion different available bits of sound and feeling. Fragmenting into the dust of eternity. Spiralling into infinity. Crazy swiftly tamed, and turned into a commercial promotional add-on. But for a while, the mating of one song with entirely another, for reasons of sound, seriousness and silliness, creates the true sound of the 21st century.

Oscar McLaren: If fair use exceptions are already complicated and fraught, they're being stretched to bursting point by a generation of young remix artists.

Paul Morley: Pop has been everything for 50 years.

Oscar McLaren: Look around the net, and you'll see literally millions of remix videos, music and other art on media-sharing sites. They're usually made by young people, and as far as the copyright industries are concerned, they're illegal.

Earlier we heard about DJ Danger Mouse. Today, a leading light of the genre goes by the name of Girl Talk, and he's become a symbol in the copyright wars.

MUSIC: GIRL TALK 'PLAY YOUR PART'

Oscar McLaren: His latest album, called Feed the Animals, crams more than 300 wildly different samples into 53 minutes of music.

He doesn't have permission for any of the samples, and the whole thing is really a legal fiasco. The New York Times has described it as a lawsuit waiting to happen but it's also highly acclaimed. It was named at Number 4 on Time magazine's top albums of last year.

Girl Talk, whose real name is Gregg Gillis, claims that his album falls under the fair use exception to copyright law.

When we appeared in a film about copyright law and culture, called Good Copy, Bad Copy, he made some interesting points.

Girl Talk: Everyone is bombarded with media now, that I think we've almost been forced to kind of take upon ourselves and use it as an artform. It's like anything, you know, if people were passing out paints on the street for free every day, I'm sure there'd be a lot more painters out there, right now, you know what I mean? That's exactly what's happening right now with kind of remix culture on the internet, and you know, I think the current laws are in a lot of ways just inhibiting the flow of culture and music.

Oscar McLaren: And Gregg Gillis told the makers of the film, Good Copy, Bad Copy that he uses so many samples, doing things by the book would be impossible.

Girl Talk: I don't know about anyone else, I'd be happy paying royalties for every sample on the record, but that's not what it'd be. You know, to actually licence a sample would cost millions of dollars which I can't afford. Sampling would be this form of music that you just can't make music off of, because you have to give all your money away. That would still be cool, it would still be this new way to make music. I think that would be wonderful. But in a theoretical world, if I could clear every sample on there and I had a millions to do it, it will take me probably you know, 50 years to go through the legal hassle of figuring all of that out, and that's just absurd.

Oscar McLaren: Girl Talk has an unlikely fan in his Republican Congressional representative, Mike Doyle, who took up the case at a house Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet in 2007.

Mike Doyle: Mr Chairman, I want to tell you a little story of a local guy done good. By day he's a biomedical engineer in Pittsburgh. At night, he DJs under the name Girl Talk. His schtick, as The Chicago Tribune wrote about him is 'based on the notion that some sampling of copyrighted material, especially when manipulated and recontextualised into a new art form, is legit and deserves to be heard.'

Oscar McLaren: But the support of a Congressional Republican hasn't helped Girl Talk's legal status. His albums are released on a record label called 'Illegal Art'.

For the moment, he hasn't faced a lawsuit, and hasn't been forced to stop. In fact, he's quite a star now. He regularly tours and has quit his biomedical engineering job.

But the Australian Copyright Council doesn't have much sympathy for his position.

Ian McDonald.

Ian McDonald: Let's for example, look at what record companies now do if they are putting out mash-ups and so on, in most cases they'll just clear the licensing. It's all just done as an administrative process.

Oscar McLaren: Artists like Girl Talk, who uses 400 samples in an album, many of which are probably orphan works, there's no way and he's explained on numerous occasions there's simply no way that he could go through the bureaucracy of doing that. I mean surely that's going to have a chilling effect on his expression at least?

Ian McDonald: Well I rather doubt it. I don't see why he can't just get permissions.

Oscar McLaren: Some artists have tried to get permission. The musician who goes by the name of Steinski wanted to make an audio montage about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

MUSIC: STEINSKI, 'THE MOTORCADE SPED ON'

Oscar McLaren: Steinski, aka Steven Stein, asked the broadcaster CBS for the rights to use parts of Walter Cronkite's broadcast of the events. He told the makers of a remix radio program called Some Assembly Required, how it went.

Steven Stein: I called up one or two people at CBS and I announced, you know I sort of delineated the project for them. And they out of hand, they just said good luck, buddy, you'll never get that kind of permission from us. And so I thought, oh, the hell with it, so I'll just do it.

Jon Nelson: So you approached them beforehand or in the middle of it?

Steven Stein: Yes, oh, sure, no, beforehand.

Jon Nelson: And they just laughed at you, it sounds like?

Steven Stein: Well, yes. Well I would too, if I was them.

Jon Nelson: Would you?

Steven Stein: Oh, of course. I mean the things, you know, of something of such national sanctity with one of CBS' biggest names?

Jon Nelson: Well yes, but isn't it arguable that given the media's involvement in making that occurrence such a public one, that we should be allowed to use the media to express our own personal experiences of the event?

Steven Stein: Nope.

Jon Nelson: You don't think so?

Steven Stein: I don't buy it. Hell, no, man. I mean if I owned the copyright to Walter Cronkite, that's mine, period, forget it.

Jon Nelson: You respect copyright?

Steven Stein: Well I respect it in theory, I obviously don't respect it in fact.

Jon Nelson: How do you justify that then?

Steven Stein: I don't.

Oscar McLaren: There may be more than a few problems of logic in the copyright debate. But as Steinski told the radio program, Some Assembly Required, the law is getting in the way of what he sees as an important art form.

Steven Stein: Basically almost all my stuff's horribly illegal which is why you can't buy it, not over the counter anyway, and you know, I mean that's it. My basic feeling about this is I'm sorry that it's illegal to do what I'm doing, but I would hate to see the art form wither and die simply because of a bunch of lawyers. Besides, I have too much fun doing it.

Oscar McLaren: Interestingly, some sections of the music industry are starting to agree that copyright holders need to give up some control, especially when amateur home users want to use material.

APRA/AMCOS looks after copyright for musicians in Australia, and it often sides with the industry on questions of piracy and rights. But now, there's an important shift under way in how APRA/AMCOS views the copyright debate.

The organisation's CEO is Brett Cottle.

Brett Cottle: There are a lot of artists who are keen on the remix culture, and that's fine. My view would be if that's done for purely non-commercial private purposes, then frankly, I think it ought to be allowed, because to do otherwise is to create a legal regime that is entirely artificial, and more honoured in the breach than in compliance. But I think that once that remixing crosses over into a commercial environment, I think permission ought to be obtained, and a licence ought to be obtained.

Oscar McLaren: The question of where to draw that line between what is commercial and what is non-commercial, is a difficult one.

APRA point out that there is often a lot of money involved even in apparently non-commercial use .

The broadband internet industry for instance has flourished in the age of film and video downloads. It's worth billions and is growing by the day.

APRA says it's only fair that artists get a share of some of these spoils.

Brett Cottle.

Brett Cottle: Look, I think that's really true. I think there's a huge amount of money behind users. A lot of it is transparent money, and a lot of it is hidden money, and that became clear in some of the earlier litigation about file-trading. The amount of money that was being generated behind the scenes in peer-to-peer networks is absolutely enormous. And I think the other thing is, that people are too ready to adopt this ideological stance of copyright equals big Hollywood studio, or big record label. In fact in most instances, copyright equals songwriter, or writer, or film maker or musician.

Oscar McLaren: Some internet service providers and online sites are already doing deals with content owners. With revenues increasing steadily, the music industry is now optimistic about the future.

But APRA says the days are gone when copyright owners can dictate when and how their material is used.

Brett Cottle.

Brett Cottle: It's not an issue of control or permission, it's an issue of fair payment for use. That's really where the debate is. And I think really, coming back to the starting point of this discussion, it would really help the debate if some sectors in the communications area would acknowledge the fact that they actually make profits based on the use of this material by other people. And the people who have profited most, frankly, have been the telcos and the ISPs from the internet, not copyright owners. And it is time to redress that balance a little bit, I think.

Oscar McLaren: Brett Cottle is one of the more liberal voices on the copyright side of this debate. Many sections of the copyright industries want to retain full control of their content in the digital age.

Professor Lawrence Lessig from Harvard University, fears that if this control continues, or even expands, it will hold back forms of expression which have been around for thousands of years.

Lawrence Lessig: Think about folk music, which no longer exists in any rich sense, because the very act of engaging in folk music authorship invokes copyright law today in a way that it never did in the 19th and 18th century. Well no classical musician today could afford to take the ballads of Bob Dylan and incorporate them into classical form because of the copyright issues that are involved. So the point is to recognise we have this tradition which has respected earlier authors and built upon them in creating new work, and somehow we got lost in the 20th century from recognising its significance, and as we come into this century, I'm trying to show how there's a link between the form of expression we think of in the modern sense of hip hop or remix today, and the form of expression that has been with us since the beginning of culture in human society.

MUSIC: CHRISTIAN MARCLAY; MORE ENCORES, JOHANN STRAUSS

Oscar McLaren: You may be one of the many people who like your music straight, and would be quite happy if the likes of Girl Talk, Steinski, DJ Danger Mouse, and their millions of fellow travellers didn't make their music.

Many fans of the original music which is mixed and cut up, believe that the originals should be left as they are. And if you don't like what remixers do to The Beatles and others, you'll absolutely loathe what Christian Marclay did to Johann Strauss.

MUSIC: CHRISTIAN MARCLAY; MORE ENCORES, JOHANN STRAUSS

Oscar McLaren: But to the Professor of Law at Harvard University, Lawrence Lessig, taking legal action simply isn't the right way to approach differences like these.

Lawrence Lessig: Well you know, in some sense I would say suck it up. I write books, and my books are misinterpreted and misapplied by people all over the world, and the idea that I would have the right to go into a court and get a court to punish somebody because of the way that they have not respected my work is to me crazy, even though at the very same time, I recognise that the people who misinterpret my work should be criticised for misinterpreting my work. And that's the distinction that I think we need to introduce into the moral rights debate. It's not that people should be free to insult without criticism, but we need to limit the place in which we try to regulate culture through legal action, by being able to sue or punish people in court for their misinterpretation. Let's leave that space of cultural negotiation to just the ordinary space of culture, and not involve lawyers in the mix.

Oscar McLaren: Background Briefing's Co-ordinating Producer is Linda McGinness. Research by Anna Whitfeld. Technical production by Phil McKellar, and the Executive Producer is Kirsten Garrett.

Musical thanks to Girl Talk, DJ Danger Mouse, Christian Marclay, Sweden, Some Assembly Required, DJ Food, Strictly Kev, Paul Morley, the crew of Good Copy Bad Copy, Loo & Placido, Cropstar, Steinski and of course their musical forebears too numerous to mention.

There'll be links to many of the artists and commentators in the story on the Background Briefing website.

I'm Oscar McLaren and you're listening to ABC Radio National.

Further Information

Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft

ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation

Australian Copyright Council

APRA/AMCOS

Steinski

Some Assembly Required

Girl Talk

Lawrence Lessig

Good Copy Bad Copy

Loo & Placido

EMI

DJ Food / Strictly Kev

Ben Atkinson's Book

Intellectual property law blog

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Israeli Activists Criticize US House for Considering Resolution Condemning Goldstone Report on Israeli War Crimes in Gaza

The House is expected to overwhelmingly vote today to condemn a UN inquiry that found Israel committed scores of war crimes in its three-week assault on the Gaza Strip. Headed by the South African jurist Richard Goldstone, the inquiry also accused Hamas of war crimes and said both sides should investigate the allegations or face international prosecution. Over 1,300 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli attack, a majority of them civilians. Nine Israelis were killed by Palestinians and another four by so-called friendly fire. The bipartisan, non-binding House measure calls the Goldstone inquiry “irredeemably biased and unworthy of further consideration or legitimacy.” The vote comes one day before the United Nations General Assembly is expected to take up the inquiry’s findings.

Guests:

Jeff Halper, Israeli peace activist and scholar. He is coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions

Micha Kurz, Co-founder of the group Breaking the Silence, an organization of veterans of the Israeli Defense Forces that collects testimonies from Israeli soldiers speaking out about their conduct in the occupied Palestinian territories. He is now a coordinator at Grassroots Jerusalem, an organization mapping grassroots activities in and around Jerusalem.

AMY GOODMAN: The House is expected to overwhelmingly vote today to condemn a UN inquiry that found Israel committed scores of war crimes in its three-week assault on the Gaza Strip. The report, headed by the South African jurist Richard Goldstone, also accused Hamas of war crimes and said both sides should investigate the allegations or face international prosecution. Over 1,300 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli attack, a majority of them civilians. Nine Israelis were killed, three by so-called friendly fire.

The bipartisan, non-binding House measure calls the Goldstone inquiry, quote, “irredeemably biased and unworthy of further consideration or legitimacy.” The vote comes one day before the United Nations General Assembly is expected to take up the inquiry’s findings.

The vote also comes as the Obama administration is under criticism for backing off its previous demands that Israel halt settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank. Israel is refusing to halt construction of about 3,000 West Bank houses or any construction in occupied East Jerusalem.

On Saturday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the reversal after meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

HILLARY CLINTON: What the Prime Minister is saying is historically accurate. There has never been a precondition. It’s always been an issue within the negotiations. What the Prime Minister has offered, in specifics of a restraint on the policy of settlements, which he has just described—no new starts, for example—is unprecedented, in the context of prior to negotiations.

AMY GOODMAN: Clinton’s comments drew criticism from Palestinian and other Arab leaders. Speaking in Morocco Monday, Clinton tried to address those concerns, now adding that Israeli pledges to “restrain” settlement growth are, quote, “not enough.”

HILLARY CLINTON: They will build no new settlements, expropriate no land, allow no new construction or approvals. And let me just say, this offer falls far short of what we would characterize as our position or what our preference would be, but if it is acted upon, it will be an unprecedented restriction on settlements and would have a significant and meaningful effect on restraining their growth.


And let me just take a step back, because I want to put this into the broader context. I will offer positive reinforcement to the parties when I believe they are taking steps that support the objective of reaching a two-state solution. I will also push them, as I have in public and in private, to do even more.

AMY GOODMAN: As Israel continues to build new homes for settlers, it’s also defying US demands to halt the destruction of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem. Around thirty Palestinians were displaced in home demolitions last week. According to the UN, as many as 60,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem are at risk of forced evictions, demolitions and displacement.

We’re joined right now by two guests. Here in the firehouse, Micha Kurz is the co-founder of the group Breaking the Silence, an organization of veterans of the Israeli Defense Forces that collects testimonies from Israeli soldiers speaking out about their conduct in the occupied Palestinian territories. Now he’s coordinator of Grassroots Jerusalem, an organization mapping grassroots activities in and around Jerusalem. And on the phone with us from Israel is Jeff Halper, an Israeli peace activist and scholar, coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.

I want to begin with you, Jeff, in Israel. Talk about this non-binding resolution that’s expected to pass in the House, condemning the Goldstone report. You just came from the United States.

JEFF HALPER: Yeah, I just came from the United States, and I just came from a week of meeting with members of Congress and the administration in Washington.

You know, it’s very—it’s very distressing, of course, because in the entire world, Israel relies on the United States as really its only—only firm supporter. The United States is the patron of Israel. But it’s not really the administration—it’s Congress—that’s Israel’s trump card. That is, Israel says it can circumvent the President; it can circumvent the administration by going directly to Congress. And Netanyahu works the phones all the time with Congress. So, in a sense, it’s a kind of divide and rule.

And when I was in Congress, I was telling members of Congress, “You have to understand that you’re being used by Israel as a kind of a—as a trump card against your own administration, preventing the American government from presenting a coherent policy speaking in one voice.” And I think that you really see that, that, in a way, it’s under—I would consider that a gross violation of the internal—you know, a gross, you know, intervention in the internal affairs of the United States, which would seem to me should get all members of Congress upset, no matter what their stand is.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m looking at a Human Rights Watch statement on this, saying, “Members of the [US] House of Representatives should oppose a resolution that calls for the Obama administration to reject scrutiny of Israel and Hamas,” this House Resolution 867, calling on the US President and Secretary of State to "oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration of the ‘Report of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict.‘”

Jeff Halper, how has it been received in Israel? I mean, Judge Goldstone, well-known jurist from South Africa, also a Zionist. His daughter was talking on Israeli radio and talking about his significance and his Zionism.

JEFF HALPER: Right. Well, I think it’s been—it’s been received here very hard, because it’s really the first time that Israel has—maybe except the International Court of Justice decision on the wall, that Israel has been held accountable for its actions.

And, of course, Israel always presents itself as being the victim, and Israel is defending itself against terrorism and all of that. So the fact that an important figure like Goldstone, through the UN, says no, that Israel is the attacker, Israel is the aggressor, Israel used a disproportionate amount of force, and that was the violation, that’s what made it a war crime, the attack on Gaza, is something that really is much more important than simply Israel going before the International Criminal Court. It means that Israel’s entire image as this little democratic Jewish victim of the conflict is being called into question, and Israel is being held accountable as the strong party for its actions. And that, I would say, is the greatest threat to Israel, because once it could be held accountable by Goldstone, then the dam has burst, and Israel will have trouble defending any of its policies anywhere.

AMY GOODMAN: And the significance of this resolution, if passed in the United States, for the rest of the world, for Israel and the rest of the world?

JEFF HALPER: Right. Well, what I say—you know, what I told members of Congress that I met, I don’t think they understand, that I don’t think the American people understand how much human rights means to the rest of the world. This is the hope of peoples all over the world to get out of oppression, to get some kind of parity, to be included in the world. Human rights really means something. And it’s something that’s meant to protect powerless people against governments, and corporations, as well, actually, so that it means a lot.

So when the United States stands against clear violations of human rights by Israel, I think this isolates the United States in a much broader sense from the world. It isn’t only Israel and the US alone in the UN voting against everybody else, but it really, I think, completely compromises any American credibility in the world as trying to foster democracy or trying even to be a part of the world. It really shows how disconnected the United States is from the concerns of people everywhere, including Europe.

So I think this—I don’t think the Americans understand what it means to go against human rights. I think they feel human rights are anti-American, they somehow trump American exceptionalism. But I think the United States really has to reevaluate its stand, in general, in terms of enforcement of human rights all over the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeff Halper, speaking to us from Israel, there an Israeli peace activist, coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.

Micha Kurz, you’re traveling here in this country. You’re a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces. You co-founded the group Breaking the Silence, Israeli soldiers talking about what they did in Gaza during this assault. Explain what you found.

MICHA KURZ: Breaking the Silence was founded close after the Second Intifada in 2004. We were talking about mostly what it means for soldiers, not as much what it means for Palestinians, but what it means to send eighteen-, nineteen-year-olds into occupied territories, controlling other human beings and making that a routine reality for us, for everyone who goes to the army. And in Israel, everyone goes to the army. Women go in for two years; men go in for three. And all of it’s when we’re eighteen.

What we were doing back then hasn’t—didn’t have anything to do with the Goldstone report. It was a self-check on what’s going on in Israeli mainstream morality: What’s the price we’re paying for these—for occupying these territories and controlling these people?

AMY GOODMAN: Share some of the testimony. Talk about your own experience. When did you serve?

MICHA KURZ: I served during the Second Intifada, a lot of time in Hebron. And a lot of what we were doing in Hebron, it turned out, was as protecting the settlers. We would hear, for example—

AMY GOODMAN: Explain the populations, the size of the settlers and the Palestinian community.

MICHA KURZ: Hebron is a settlement of around 600 to 700 settlers in the middle of a Palestinian town of about 160,000 Palestinians. It’s at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a holy spot for anyone—everyone involved.

And it was actually some of my first times in the Occupied Territories. I came to the army fairly patriotic and enthusiastic about serving my country. And what I ended up doing, it turned out, was protecting Palestinians from the settlers more than vice versa.

We would wake up in the middle of the night hearing banging from down in the settlement, and it turned out that there were settlers that were knocking down walls into Palestinian shops during curfew, and slowly doing this. We’d send a patrol to stop them, and we’d have to leave, and they’d keep working on this hole in the shop until it was wide enough to walk in, lock the doors from the inside, and take all the merchandise out and move a new—expand the settlements that way. This was slowly happening all the time in Hebron, especially back in 2004, when curfews would last forty days, and shopkeepers wouldn’t—weren’t able to go and fix it up.

And this is something we’re seeing today in Jerusalem, in East Jerusalem all the time. Silwan is slowly being taken over by settlements under the guise of archaeological NGOs slowly digging underneath other Palestinian homes and evicting family, one at a time. It’s a gradual process.

AMY GOODMAN: What about the process of your transformation? Do you remember the moment—was it a moment, or it was a period of time, where you felt maybe what we’re doing here is wrong?

MICHA KURZ: I don’t think there was one moment. I think over the course of the Intifada and watching what was going on with friends and the process that happens at a checkpoint. When you put a nineteen-year-old in a checkpoint to control a civilian population, what that looks like on the ground is that I get the power and the responsibility over everyone on the street.

And so, if 400 people come by that day through my checkpoint, and my order is that there is a curfew, then I have to tell 400 people that they have to go home right now. And the first hundred people, I tell them fairly politely, if I’m nice and I’m in a good mood in the morning. And the second hundred people, I’ll be a little more impatient. By the fourth hundred person that shows up at my checkpoint that day, I’m going to be pissed off, and I’m going to say, “What don’t you understand when there’s a curfew here?” And this is over a course of one shift in a day.

Over three years, this is what we watched our friends and myself go through. We would—if someone would break curfew at some point, we’d be—easily we’d handcuff and blindfold someone and sit them down as a punishment for six hours. So they learned, don’t—you don’t break curfew this way. And this became daily reality.

AMY GOODMAN: Would you say you were in the minority or in the majority of Israeli soldiers who were questioning what you were doing?

MICHA KURZ: I’d say right now it might be a minority still, but I think people are slowly waking up. This is what’s going on.

AMY GOODMAN: Micha Kurz, I want to play an excerpt from one of the video testimonies from the Breaking the Silence website. This is First Sergeant Amir, a reservist from the Armored Corps who served in Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, as they call that, the Israeli assault on Gaza earlier this year. He’s describing the briefings his unit received during the training for the assault.

FIRST SGT. AMIR: [translated] At any obstacle, any problem, we open fire and don’t ask questions, even if it’s firing in the dark, aimed at an unknown target. Fire when we don’t see, deterrent fire? No problem with that, etc. A vehicle that’s in the way? Crush it. A building in the way? Shell it. This was the spirit of things that was repeated throughout the training.


INTERVIEWER: Meaning that in briefings no one even mentions the issue of innocents?


FIRST SGT. AMIR: It is not mentioned. And if it is mentioned, it is only to say that there are no innocents, everyone there is enemy. That’s a phrase we kept hearing from that brigade commander, too, that wherever we would be, if there is anyone there, they must be the enemy.

INTERVIEWER: You had briefings before entering that included rules of engagement?


FIRST SGT. AMIR: Not that I recall. There were no rules of engagement. The rules of engagement were to shoot. Those were the rules of engagement. You see anything suspect? Shoot.

AMY GOODMAN: “The rules of engagement were [to] shoot.” So said Amir, the Israeli soldier in Gaza, collected on the Breaking the Silence website. The significance of these soldiers speaking out after this last assault? How many were there? And the effect in Israel?

MICHA KURZ: So far, there are over forty soldiers from different units around Jerusalem that have spoken up, and they’ve been in different parts of Gaza through those couple of weeks.

And I think the significance in Israel is the shift that we’ve seen, a very clear moral standard shift. Israel talks about being the most moral army in the world. The West Bank had some standard we would—no matter what was going on, what assignment we’d get, there was a briefing, a very clear briefing, whether it was Defensive Shield in Ramallah in 2004 or during the Intifada. There was a—the difference with Gaza this time was, after Israel sent out the fliers and the warnings to Gaza, we were—Israeli soldiers were allowed to do whatever they want. The briefings were not clear anymore. This is a—that was a first, as far as Israeli standards. It’s as if the IDF had shifted gears for the first time. And Gaza—Gaza is a—it was appalling. It’s shocking. But most of all, I think I’m mostly saddened by—

AMY GOODMAN: And the resolution that’s being introduced now, expected to pass in the House, that condemns the Goldstone report?

MICHA KURZ: Well, I can speak as Micha, not as Breaking the Silence, on that. And as far as I know, Goldstone, a self-proclaimed Zionst on the board of directors of Hebrew University and all the high school education program, a daughter living in Israel, well respected internationally, is well qualified. Israel had not let him into Israeli territories in [inaudible] to actually conduct a well-balanced report. And it seemed in Israeli media and through Israeli politicians that they actually hadn’t read the report—it was just a reaction. I’m saddened by it. I don’t understand it.

AMY GOODMAN: Micha Kurz, I want to thank you very much for being with us, a co-founder of the group Breaking the Silence, now coordinator of Grassroots Jerusalem, an organization mapping grassroots activities in and around Jerusalem. And on that point, the grassroots actions that are taking place in Jerusalem? Very quickly, you’ve got thirty seconds to lay out the groups and the actions.

MICHA KURZ: I’d like people to know that there are Israelis and Palestinians and internationals spread out all over Jerusalem and all over the West Bank finding innovative solutions, sustainable solutions, to the problems that the policymakers are—

AMY GOODMAN: And the groups that are doing this work?

MICHA KURZ: There is ICAHD, where Jeff is from. There’s Rabbis for Human Rights, the Holy Land Trust in Bethlehem, Bustan Qaraaqa and Beit Sahour. They take care of—this summer Beit Sahour has had their water shut off for forty days. They build water catchment systems and cisterns. This is an amazing thing. If anyone in the States needs to support something, wants to support something, support the grassroots organizations on the ground.

AMY GOODMAN: Thanks very much, Micha Kurz.

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Goldstone answers his critics

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MARK COLVIN: The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reacted to a UN report on the war in Gaza by telling his government to draw up proposals to change the international laws of war.

Mr Netanyahu's office said government bodies had been told to examine a worldwide campaign to get the laws changed, to adapt to the spread of global terrorism.

What's angered the Israeli Prime Minister appears to be the UN Human Rights Council decision to adopt the report of the Goldstone Commission.

The report accused both Israel and Hamas of war crimes in the conflict which erupted at the end of last year and continued into January.

Israel's closest allies, the United States, Britain and France have all urged it to investigate the war crime allegations.

On this program last week, the Israeli Government spokesman Mark Regev attacked Justice Richard Goldstone for agreeing to head a commission which was bound to be biased.

I put Mark Regev's accusations to Justice Goldstone today, but first I asked him about the new Israeli campaign to change the laws of war.

RICHARD GOLDSTONE: I don't agree at all. I think the interpretation of the rules may change from decade to decade, but the fundamental principles remain the same and that's to protect civilians from victimisation during war.

MARK COLVIN: On this program last week the Israeli Government spokesman Mark Regev said that you should never have taken on this commission and that Mary Robertson had refused it and you should have too.

RICHARD GOLDSTONE: Well you know that's not correct. Mary Robertson refused the mandate that I refused. I was offered a different mandate which I accepted and you know Mary Robertson wrote an op-ed which I think appeared in the Pakistan Times in which she explained this and leant her full support to what I've been doing.

MARK COLVIN: So what did you do to change the mandate?

RICHARD GOLDSTONE: Well I refused the original mandate because I thought it was biased against Israel and the president of the Human Rights Council asked me to write literally my own mandate, a mandate that I considered fair and even handed and I did that and he said well that's the mandate that I'm giving you.

He took it to the Human Rights Council, there was no objection and of course since then, very importantly, our whole report based on that mandate has been adopted by the Human Rights Council.

MARK COLVIN: And you would know also that Israel objects very strongly just on the grounds that the Human Rights Council has been so dominated for so long by one side of the ledger if you like. That there have been so many anti-Israel resolutions coming out of it and comparatively very very few about countries like Saudi Arabia and Sudan.

RICHARD GOLDSTONE: Well I think Israel has good cause to complain. I think it has been dealt with over some years exceptionally by the United Nations and the Human Rights Council. They've given over-emphasis to Israel in the Middle East and given too little consideration to other countries, the most recent being Sri Lanka.

But I had hoped that this mandate, that an even-handed mandate was striking out in a new direction by the Human Rights council and it saddens me that Israel didn't grasp this as an opportunity to begin a new approach.

MARK COLVIN: Why did you accept the mandate given that it used the phrase "occupation of Gaza by Israel", or a phrase very similar to that?

RICHARD GOLDSTONE: No what...my mandate said nothing about occupation. My mandate instructed us to look into human rights and humanitarian law violations in relation to operation Cast Lead whether before during or after.

MARK COLVIN: When you're colleague on the Commission Hina Jilani was on this program, she defended very strongly the use of the word occupation.

RICHARD GOLDSTONE: Well after the event so do I but one of the issues that we looked into really, new and objectively was whether Gaza remains in occupation and we came to the view unanimously that it does.

MARK COLVIN: How does that work, given that there are no Israeli troops there?

RICHARD GOLDSTONE: Well because the, the test of occupation is effective control and we, we had regard to the fact that Israel absolutely controls what goes into Gaza, what comes out of Gaza, who can go in, who can come out. It controls the air space, it has drones constantly over Gaza and we held that was sufficient... we were convinced that that was sufficient evidence to, to constitute sufficient control to make it... to have it remain an occupied territory.

MARK COLVIN: I believe that you have said recently that your findings wouldn't necessarily stand up in a court of law; what do you mean by that?

RICHARD GOLDSTONE: Ours was a fact finding mission, it wasn't a criminal investigation, it wasn't a judicial or even a quasi-judicial investigation. We came to conclusions on the facts that we were able to gather. It there are to be prosecutions either in an international court, or I would hope in an domestic court, whether in Israel or in Gaza against people who are suspected of having committed any violations of international law, these facts that we found would have be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, which clearly wasn't a standard that we used.

MARK COLVIN: Now just going back to Mark Regev, to quote him, he said that "you came into the Gaza Strip, controlled by Hamas and having a public hearing in that sort of circumstance is like having a Stalinist show trial; that you heard exactly what you wanted to hear."

RICHARD GOLDSTONE: Well that's not correct. We heard independent witnesses from Israel certainly, we heard people who were very supportive of the Israel defence force, we heard the father of Gilad Shalit, the abducted Israeli soldier. I mean these weren't people who participated in a show trial. We heard from at least one victim of a rocket attack on Subeyrot (phonetic). It was neither a show, nor was it a trial.

MARK COLVIN: So what do you expect will happen now?

RICHARD GOLDSTONE: Well you know, I don't know. From today's news I see that there's still debate going on in Israel and pressure mounting on the Israeli government to have good faith domestic investigations and of course why shouldn't they?

If Israel has nothing to hide, if it committed no violations what's it got to fear from an independent domestic Israeli inquiry. And I certainly hope that Israel still goes that way. If it's got the political will I have no doubt that it has sufficient independent retired judges and legal practitioners and academics who would be more than capable and able of holding domestic investigations that are acceptable by the whole world

MARK COLVIN: Do you expect the same thing to happen on the other side? Do you think Hamas will be transparent?

RICHARD GOLDSTONE: Well I do and if it's unable ...

MARK COLVIN: I'm asking if you expect it or if you hope it?

RICHARD GOLDSTONE: Well certainly I think if Israel decides to have a domestic investigation there'll be huge pressure on Hamas to do that and if they can't, if they don't have the resources and the people available then I'm sure there's no shortage of independent judges and lawyers and academics not only in the international world but in the Arab world who could provide that assistance.

MARK COLVIN: Finally, there has been not just a political attack on you because of this but a pretty personal attack as a Jew and as a jurist, how do you react to that?

RICHARD GOLDSTONE: Well I find it very very objectionable obviously and hurtful, not only for me but also for my family and it saddens me that the response has been to make an ad hominem attack on me, rather than to deal with the substance of what's contained in our report.

MARK COLVIN: Richard Goldstone, the head of the Goldstone Commission speaking on the phone from New York.

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Background Briefing - Indefatigable Chomsky

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He's over 80 and has written or contributed to 95 books. At one time he was the most cited living academic, a Vietnam activist and a thorn in the side of Reagan. Today he is also critical of 'the left' with dire warnings. Noam Chomsky is as astute and interesting as ever. Producer, Kirsten Garrett. Recorded at the Commonwealth Club, San Francisco

Kirsten Garrett: Hello, this is Background Briefing and I'm Kirsten Garrett.

It may astonish some listeners in Australia that Noam Chomsky is still packing them in when he gives a public lecture in America. A few weeks ago all seats were sold out quickly when he addressed the Commonwealth Club of California. He is now more than 80 years old, and he has published or contributed to 95 books, and he is still regarded as one of America's foremost public intellectuals. In the 1980s he was the most often cited living academic.

Noam Chomsky calls himself a Libertarian Socialist, though he often challenges what used to be called the left, as much as the conservatives in Washington.

In this talk he was asked many questions, and the first related to whether he thought the internet would aid or deter good quality journalism. 'Both', he said. The internet can be good for journalism, but the other media need to research very deeply to do good work too.' He gave an example of recent news about policy on nuclear weapons.

Noam Chomsky: In Mexico they have an extremely good newspaper, La Jomada, maybe the only real independent newspaper in the hemisphere. They happen to run a wire service report which has not been reported here to my knowledge, namely that the International Atomic Energy Agency passed a resolution calling on Israel to join the non-proliferation treaty, and to open up its nuclear facilities to inspection.

Well the United States and the European Union tried to block it, and when they failed to block it, they voted against it, but it passed anyway. Well that's really important news.

Kirsten Garrett: Noam Chomsky went on to point out the hypocrisy of the Obama administration which had told Israel it could ignore the resolutions, and Chomsky went further.

Noam Chomsky: There are three countries that have never signed the non-proliferation treaty: India, Pakistan and Israel. In each case their nuclear weapons programs have been significantly aided by the United States. In the case of Pakistan, sometimes called the most dangerous country in the world, with some of its nuclear programs are a gift to the world by Ronald Reagan. So here we have three countries that have never signed the non-proliferation treaty. In each case they're nuclear powers, in each case they're pretty openly proceeding to defy international organisations, international monitoring organisations, announcing that their programs are moving along fast. In each case they're supported by the United States. Well, it takes work to discover these things. Theoretically you could find them through the internet, but with massive research, and that's true for every issue you look at.

Kirsten Garrett: The moderator of the lecture at the Commonwealth Club was academic and broadcast host Larry Bensky, and he moved the conversation on to the many denouncements of Barack Obama, about his reforms to the health system and other things, particularly by some radio commentators -- and the demonstrations in the streets by the people who have many grievances against the Democrats.

Noam Chomsky: I think the implications are dangerous, and it's easy to ridicule them. Look at the crazy things they say, 'You want to kill my grandmother' and so on. And there's a lot of nonsense, that's true. But what we really ought to be asking ourselves is why the peace movement, the left, the activist organisations aren't organising these people? And a lot of what they're protesting is pretty sensible. And a lot of the protests for example, are against the bail-out, the massive bail-out. They feel they were betrayed. They worked very hard to prevent it and two months later they got it and why should the bankers end up from the recession more powerful than they were before, which is what's happening. You can read it in the business press, they're exulting about it. They're more powerful than they were before. The big banks are even bigger than they were the government insurance policy, the 'Too Big to Fail' insurance policy, is guaranteeing them that they can continue doing exactly what they were doing, which tanked the economy; they can make risky loans and investments. Since it's risky they'll make a lot of profit: Money coming out of their ears. If it collapses, the taxpayer will come in and bail them out because they're Too Big to Fail. Bonuses and profits are going through the roof and meanwhile people are suffering. Well they have a reason to protest that, but the tragedy is that the protests are being organised by pretty much the same sectors that are creating the crisis and the corporate money that's behind them are the ones who are very happy that it's coming out like this. And it's a real failure of the activists' movements, the left, the peace movement and so on, I think that's the question we ought to ask.

And there are other things. These people have real grievances. I mean I have not seen a demographic analysis of those who call in on talk shows, but I listen to them a lot and they're interesting. If you sort of suspend disbelief, you forget about reality and the world and just listen, it's not a joke. If you listen the message that comes across has an internal logic to it. It's coherent, it gives answers to people who want answers and need them and deserve them. They're crazy answers, but they're not hearing any others. These are people who've worked hard, they've done everything right. You know, they're Christian, God-fearing, they take care of their families, and for 30 years they've been shafted. Somebody's got to give them an answer. Why?

Kirsten Garrett: The moderator, Larry Bensky, asked if there is any connection with the fact that in America the lines between journalism and entertainment have been blurred, that in its desperate race for audiences, readers and viewers, the media is aiming at infotainment -- or whatever will fire people up.

Noam Chomsky: That's happening, but I don't really think that's the main problem. I was not a great admirer of the media in the earlier period, it was really awful; in many ways I think they're better now than they were 30 or 40 years ago because the country is better. It's a more civilised country, the media reflect that. I'm not really thinking about the entertainment aspect of the media, though yes, it's significant, I'm thinking about the part that has substantive content. Crazy content, but it is substantive. It does give answers. I mean for the people who for the last 30 years, have seen their wages, incomes stagnated, benefits declined, services declined, nothing for the children, the world's out of control. These are the people who on polls maybe, 80% of them, say the country's going in the wrong direction, the government's run by the few in the special interests, not the people, and so on. You know, they're not wrong. This is all happening to them and the answers that they're getting from, say, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, the rest of them, well they have an answer. The rich liberals own everything, they own the corporations, they run the government, they run the media, and they don't care about people like you. They don't care about they fly over people between the East Coast and West Coast, they only care about giving everything you worked for away to illegal immigrants or gays or something. So we've got to protect ourselves from then. And furthermore, they run the government. And when they put up a health program, it's not to give you health, it's to kill your granny and that's an answer to something. It's a terrible answer, but it is an answer. And if you do suspend this belief, you forget about what's happening in the world really. It's a coherent answer. Neither nuttier or anything else, and the memory that comes to my mind - again, I won't press the analogy too hard but I think it's worth thinking about -- is late Weimar Germany. There were people with real grievances. The Nazis gave them an answer. 'It's the fault of the Jews and the Bolsheviks and we've got to protect ourselves from them, and that will take care of your grievances.' And we know what happened. Germany in the 1920s was one of the most civilised countries, the peak of western civilisation in the arts, in the sciences, highly functioning democratic institutions. And a decade later it was the pits of human history. And again, the analogy is not close, but it's frightening. And unless an answer can be given to these people, unless they can be led to understand what's really happening to them, we could be in for trouble.

Larry Bensky: Well let me ask you about the trouble that we may be in for as a race on this planet, not just as a civilisation in the United States. Your linguistic approach is sometimes summed up as emphasising an innate set of linguistic principles shared by all humans. Do we also have an innate sense, do you think, of principles, social principles? Are we inclined towards violence? Are we inclined towards fascism? Are we inclined towards democracy? Are we inclined towards anything, or are those social constructs that can be altered by governments and by media and by general social forces?

Noam Chomsky: Well just as background, we ought to bear in mind that not very much is understood about these topics. Studying human beings is a very complex object, and it's hard enough to figure out what the nature of insects is, and when you get to humans, much, much harder. And science has very little to say about this. There are some suggestions, but not a lot.

However, history tells us a lot, and history tells us that we have all those characteristics, and we've seen it. Again, take Germany. It was the same genes in the 1920s and the 1930s but they were very different societies, in fact almost opposite extremes of human possibility. And each one of us has those characteristics. I mean every one of us could be a saint, could be a sinner, usually something in between, and circumstances and conditions make a big difference. Now you mentioned before - let's take something concrete, you mentioned before correctly that the protesters, the right-wing protesters are denouncing government. Well where does that come from? Since the second world war, there has been a massive propaganda campaign, a huge propaganda campaign, run by the business world to try to make people hate government. But it's ambivalent because at the same time those same sectors want a strong government, a powerful state, one that works for them. When they're trying to get people to hate government, they want them to hate things like services that the government provides for the population, but they're not opposed to the powerful government that works for them. And what they say, Ronald Reagan again. He's called a conservative, but that's ridiculous. He was the most protectionist president in post-war American history, the government actually grew on his watch, he was an advocate of big government, but big government that serves the rich and the powerful. And he left the country with a huge deficit, a major crisis, the savings and loan crisis. Not quite as bad as this one, but pretty severe. He began deregulation, all in the interests of concentrated sectors of power. He also initiated, well he sort of pressed forward, the program of massive incarceration of poor and defenceless people, turns out mostly blacks, so the incarceration rate when he came in was approximately the same as Europe, maybe a little bit higher, and by the time he was gone it was out of sight. It increased further under, the same tendencies increased under Clinton, they're still going on. But Reagan drove it that way. You mentioned something about the internet before. Where did that come from? That didn't come from private enterprise, that came from state intervention in the economy. The same as computers, the same with lasers, containers that are the basis of trade, micro-electronics, biotechnology.

Larry Bensky: Are you saying technology is value neutral basically when it's invented, or created.

Noam Chomsky: In a sense, it's value neutral, in a society that had no structure, it would be value neutral. But in a society that has structure, it's not value neutral. I mean to a substantial extent it came from a powerful state intervening in the economy and pursuing a program which announced, and was pretty close to saying that the public pays the costs and takes the risks and the eventual profit is privatised. Well that's big government, and you can be sure that the corporate sponsors of the right-wing movements don't want to stop there, they want to keep it going.

Larry Bensky: You're listening to the Commonwealth Club of California. We're talking today with famed linguist, political activist and author, Dr Noam Chomsky.

Noam Chomsky, along the lines of what you were just saying, you wrote a number of years ago 'We cannot say much about human affairs with any confidence, but sometimes it's possible. We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there'll be a world without war, or there won't be a world, at least a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others.' You made allusion before to your age, your generation, do you think we've gotten any closer over the course of your lifetime to a world without war, or are we on the Doomsday clock ticking mostly towards midnight?

Noam Chomsky: Well I think there are tendencies in both directions and the future of the species depends on which of those prevail. So what I mentioned before about the escalation of nuclear weapons, well that's one of many aspects of a tendency towards destruction. On the other hand, we are a much more civilised society than we were, say, four years ago.

Larry Bensky: What do you mean by civilised?

Noam Chomsky: Well take some examples. Take the last election, 2008. I didn't happen to like any of the candidates, but 40 years ago or for that matter ten years ago, it would have been unimaginable, unthinkable that the Democratic party would have two candidates, a woman and an African-American. That's because of changes in the society. The civil rights movement, the women's movement, the environmental movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the opposition to aggression, which is much stronger than it was then, and has an inhibitory effect. All this comes out of the activism in the 60s, which is why it's so denounced and condemned. It was making the society more civilised and more democratic. Take, say, aggression. Compare the Vietnam war and the Iraq war. The Iraq war was bad enough, but it's I think the first war in history that was massively protested before it was officially launched. I say 'officially' because we later learned that Bush and Blair had already started the war, but we didn't know at the time. Anyway it was massively protested before it was officially launched, and that large-scale protest has had an effect. The US did not apply and could not apply the tactics it applied in Indo-China, this simply wouldn't have been tolerated by the population. So there's no saturation bombing, there's no chemical warfare, there's no sending half a million troops to the country, there's no driving people into concentration camps.

Larry Bensky: But there were 4 million people who left Iraq under duress. There were several hundred thousand who were killed and probably several million who will suffer psychological consequences for the rest of their lives.

Noam Chomsky: Yes. Bad enough, but it could have been worse. And Indo-China was much worse. In Iraq though it's not the way it's presented in the media, but if you think about it, the United States had to steadily back down from its war rooms. The US government fought tooth and nail to prevent elections but they were forced to permit them. They were forced to accept elections. They tried to prevent the elected government from moving in a nationalistic direction. They failed. As late as November, 2007, just two years ago, the Bush Administration effectively announced that the US would have to be permitted a permanent military presence of unspecified scale in Iraq, and that the country should be open to investment, privileging US investors. That's November, 2007. That's the Bush declaration which I think was reported in the press but you can find that on the internet. It was the proposal for the Status of Forces Agreement. Well, it had to back down at least formally. At least formally there is no permanent military presence. Formally they haven't rammed through the kind of investment law they wanted. And that's pretty significant. The government is not giving up, Obama wouldn't go into that, but before that, just compare it with the '60s.

I mean in the 1960s there was so little protest against the Vietnam War that most people don't even know when it was launched. It happens that in 1962 John F. Kennedy sent the US Air Force to start bombing South Vietnam, authorised chemical warfare to destroy crops and ground cover, and started authorising napalm, started programs which ultimately drove millions of people into what were called 'strategic hamlets' basically concentration camps, to try to separate them from the guerrillas who the government knew they were willingly supporting. Protest was virtually zero. I remember giving talks to four people in a church and the Minister, the organiser, a drunk who walked in off the street and somebody who wanted to kill me. And that went on for years.

Larry Bensky: But that's why you and I were involved in things called teach-ins, which is where I first met you.

Noam Chomsky: But they started in '65 or '66, that's after years of war. And in fact the large-scale protests were after about five years of war. By then South Vietnam had been destroyed, the war had expanded to the rest of Indo China, and they were effective but very late. And in the elite sectors, the articulate sectors like the media, commentary, there was really virtually never any protest of the war. It was protest on tactical grounds. It was very striking what happened by the say, the end of the war in 1975, formal end of the war. The population, about 70% of the population regarded the war as fundamentally wrong and immoral, not a mistake, as the polls from roughly then. If you look at the liberal commentary in the press, say at the extreme end, and maybe Anthony Lewis in The New York Times he summed up the war by '75 by saying the United States entered Vietnam with 'blundering efforts to do good'. Well that is a tautology. Our state did it, it did them good, blundering didn't quite work. So they entered with blundering efforts to do good but by 1969 it was clear that the war was a disaster, too costly to ourselves. Now that's what you could read in Pravda in 1985 when the Russians were in Afghanistan. But that was considered sharp critique of the war. Meanwhile the public was way off to the anti-war side.

Kirsten Garrett: This is Background Briefing on ABC Radio National.

Noam Chomsky's talking with academic and broadcast host, Larry Bensky. The discussion turned to the war in Afghanistan. Larry Bensky says America is again in some kind of perpetual militarised situation, with lives lost, cost to the economy, and no real chance of success. Yet the people in the street don't seem to be too worried about it, perhaps because there is no conscription in America now.

Noam Chomsky: Well, you're right. But we have to ask, why don't we have a draft now? Well we don't have the draft because the army, depending on the government, realised that in Vietnam they had made a tactical mistake. You cannot use a civilian army to carry out a brutal colonial war. Our predecessors didn't use citizen armies, so the French used the Foreign Legion, the British used the Gurkhas, in the Revolutionary War the Hessians. There was a sprinkling, the officer corps might be civilian but basically mercenary armies. By the late '60s the top leadership realised they had made a mistake. I don't really think it's because of the effect of the draft at home, I think that's vastly exaggerated. In fact the kind of leading edge of the anti-war movement like say the Resistance, was mostly led by kids who had never been drafted, like theology students, or students of the elite universities, they didn't want to get drafted, they didn't have to. They put themselves on the line, they faced serious dangers, many years in jail, of permanent exile, that's not an easy decision for an 18-year-old kid. They did it, it was very courageous, it spread, it had a big effect, but that can't be recognised in the mainstream doctrine, it's dangerous to recognise that people can take honourable, courageous actions on principled grounds. You're supposed to go as far as, say Anthony Lewis, a tactical error, it cost us too much, let's pull out. Actually that's like Obama. He's considered in the doctrinal system a principled opponent of the Iraq war. What was his opposition? He said, 'It's a strategic blunder.' Again, that's the same kind of thing you could have read in Pravda in 1985 and did read. A lot of people said the invasion of Afghanistan was a strategic blunder. And you don't call that principled opposition, you could have found that in the German General Staff after Stalingrad, two front war is a strategic blunder. What's significant is principled opposition, and that did exist in the '60s. It still exists. In fact, in the case of Afghanistan the protest is greater than it was in Vietnam at any comparable stage of the war. You go back to when there were 60,000 troops in Vietnam, conscripts; protest was almost zero and it wasn't even talked about.

Larry Bensky: What do you mean protest? I don't see any protest these days very much at all, unless you count my emails.

Noam Chomsky: Yes, there's a national day of protest coming up.

Larry Bensky: That's the first one in about two years. And what I'm saying is that...

Noam Chomsky: But in the '60s there was nothing. That's a big difference.

Larry Bensky: What do you make of the fact the debate in officialdom over Afghanistan now seems to be either 'Let's turn it into another Vietnam' or 'Let's keep pouring troops in for one strategic goal or another', or 'Let's pull back to the Joe Biden solution, which is basically airborne death squads. Send in the predators, we'll find out where they are, maybe we'll know or maybe we won't. There'll be a lot of collateral damage but at least our boys and girls won't be in danger.;' And those seem to be the permissible contours in Washington of the debate. Massive military intervention with consequent great loss of life or surgical, as they say, military intervention with less loss of life on the side of the interveners, but probably equal or greater loss of life on the part of the subject population.

Noam Chomsky: Again, that's correct. But I'm not suggesting that there has been a shift in elite attitudes. There's been a shift in popular attitudes. When they talk about massive intervention, they couldn't even begin to compare with Vietnam. I mean they're talking about maybe 100,000 people. By 1965 when protests started, they were talking about hundreds of thousands, plus 50,000, 70,000 mercenaries and so on. So yes, those are the parameters of debate and it's the fault of the peace movement that those are the parameters. For example, we ought to be pointing out that there's a fundamental problem in the debate in Washington. The relevant voices aren't even being heard. I mean these decisions should be made by Afghans. We don't have any right to make a decision, that's left between Biden and McChrystal.

Larry Bensky: Interesting that Sunday's New York Times had a full page of 'What should we do about Afghanistan'. Ten different opinions, not a single one of which was by an Afghani person.

Noam Chomsky: Yes, and they have voices. And for example there's an Afghan peace movement, a very significant one. They can find out about it but they're not going to read about it here. They have spokespersons, quite eloquent ones. And some of them are pretty impressive. The most impressive that I know is a woman named Malalai Joya who's a remarkable woman. She's survived somehow miraculously, struggling against the Russians, against the Reagan's favourite, the murderous warlords who took over and were so outrageous that the population welcomed the Taliban. A few struggled against them, struggling against the return of the warlords, which is essentially the current government. They elected parliament with a lot of support that was quickly thrown out because she denounced the warlords who dominate the government, she was living underground, protected. But she speaks, she's written a book and it's interesting, she gives talks, and her proposal which is that of the Afghan peace movement, and maybe that of for all we know, the large majority of Afghans, you know, nobody looks,. It's kind of supported more or less by the polls that are taken. But her position is Afghanistan needs an invasion, an invasion of schools, hospitals, roads, not an invasion of guns and tanks where Afghans will, if given a chance, will work out their problems: We're subject to an assault from the Taliban, from the warlords, and from the occupying army, and we want to get out of that attack and we'd have to work it out ourselves. So help us, they say, but not this way. But that voice is not part of the debate.

Larry Bensky: We'll take some of our questions from the audience here at the Commonwealth Club, a questioner asks can movements like the Green alternative energy movement make a true difference in the world if population continues to grow and how can we globally ever come to an agreement to stop population growth if that's deemed necessary?

Noam Chomsky: There's a lot understood, I mentioned before, not too much is known about human affairs, but something is understood about population growth. There are basically two ways to retard it. One way is the Chinese way, by force, and it's causing them plenty of problems quite apart from the brutality of it. The other way to solve it is to educate women. There's very good evidence that as education of women increases, the population declines. There are some remarkable examples. So take, say, India. One of the poorer provinces in India, Kerala in the south, happens to have a very enlightened government since independence. We're not allowed to say it here but it was a communist-led government, so forget that.

Larry Bensky: You're allowed here, it's the Commonwealth Club.

Noam Chomsky: But it was a pretty enlightened government, in fact when Congress came in they had to follow pretty much the same policies. Literacy is extremely high, there's education of women, and fertility has levelled and declined, unlike the rest of India. And it's happening in Europe, it's happening in Japan, it's happening everywhere. If women have options and choices which they don't have in most of the world. Then yes, population levels. In fact in Europe and Japan it's even declining. So there are two methods to deal with excessive population groups, and I think it's pretty obvious which one we should pursue. So I don't see that as the major problem. The ecological and environmental problems are enormous; grotesque in fact. If the species succeeds in destroying itself as it may, it will be either from nuclear weapons or from destruction of the environment, and in both cases, in the case of the environmental threats, again there are two tendencies in opposite directions. So compare it again with the '60s. Virtually no concern. The environmental movement was almost nothing. Now it's a very substantial movement, it's a substantial popular movement pressing pretty hard on green alternatives, cutting down energy waste and so on, but this counter-tendency as there always is, the business world. So just recently, within the last few weeks, the American Petroleum Institute and the Chamber of Commerce, the biggest business lobby, others, announced, (you can read it in the press), that they're inspired by the example of the health insurers who months ago knew that they had won, but the front page cover of Business Week in August -- health insurers have won. We've got it. They had a terrific technique which essentially killed the possibility of desperately-needed health reform. They know it's going to tank the economy, but that's somewhere in the future. The personal consequences they don't care about. Again, not that they're bad people, it's the way the institutions work. Well the Petroleum Institute and Chamber of Commerce say 'We're going to follow that model and try to make sure that no serious energy environmental bills are passed by Congress.'

Now there was an interesting split in the Chamber of Commerce. Some energy corporations pulled out, and said, 'We're not going to cooperate with this.' You look at who they were, they're the ones who produce nuclear energy. So they would like to have tax on fossil fuel use then they can make more money. They'll kill us some other way.

And again, it's important to stress that these are not bad people, they're perfectly good people, just like anyone else. But they're working within an institutional framework which requires certain choices. If you don't make those choices, you're out. So the institutions require, in fact even the law requires it, you have to be committed to maximising profit and growth in the short term. That's amplified by perverse incentives, like the 'Too Big to Fail' government insurance policy, which is now even bigger than it was before, thanks to the bank bailout and the way the money was distributed, and other perversions like incentives like tying CEO pay to short-term gain, and other structures like that.

Kirsten Garrett: Noam Chomsky is speaking at the Commonwealth Club of California a few weeks ago.

And the next issue raised was what does he think will happen when the world starts to run out of oil, and prices get high. Peak oil, will it fatally endanger democracy?

Noam Chomsky: Peak oil will come in sooner or later of course, it's a finite resource, but it's a complex notion. I mean the real question is not how much oil is underground, but how much can be extracted at an economically feasible price. Now it's pushing the limits now. Oil extraction is more and more costly, and more and more environmentally dangerous because they're going after sources that are harder to use. At some point, it'll become impossible to continue, but nobody knows how far that point is. However, from another point of view, we're probably better off if peak oil comes sooner, because that will reduce the use of fossil fuels and help preserve the environment for our grandchildren to live in. And business knows this. I mean take, say, The Wall Street Journal. They've been the leading deniers of global warming. Read the editorial pages, it makes Rush Limbaugh look like a moderate, but a couple of weeks ago they ran a supplement on the environment which took a very strong stand on the need for radical measures to try to sustain the environment, in fact they even called for a geo-engineering. They said that the measures being considered in Washington aren't enough. Well, there's a reason for that. I mean these are after all the people who own the world, they don't want their possession destroyed, so they have mixed motives too. But it's the population that's going to have to drive this, and in that respect there has been pretty substantial progress in the last 30, 40 years.

Larry Bensky: Speaking of something the population is going to have to drive, I'm going to change topics with another question from the audience here. This question from the audience, Noam Chomsky, is do you think that taking money out of politics, fair election, clean money campaigns, is first of all possible in this country, and second of all, would it be effective in solving many of our political problems in the United States?

Noam Chomsky: I think it wouldn't be easy because there are a lot of ways to get around any regulations. But it would be possible. And it would certainly have a good effect. I mean if campaign funding is a remarkably good predictor of election, and also of policy. You can pretty well predict policies by looking at where the campaign funding comes from. There's good political science worked on this, Thomas Ferguson, a very fine political economist, has done extremely good work on this, and it's convincing. In fact we see it right in front of us all the time. So the rate of election of incumbents is overwhelming. It's like 98%, 99%. This is happening at the same time that public attitudes towards approval of Congresses in the low teens. But they are out-spending their opponents. So OK, they get elected, even if people don't like them. But just take the last election, 2008, the core of Obama's funding was financial institutions. They preferred him to McCain, they thought he'd serve them better, and it's turning out it's probably true. You can also read off the policies of the administration from looking at the concentrated campaign funding. Financial institutions are doing marvellously. So yes, taking money out of politics would be a good idea, very good. It's not going to solve all the problems, they're much deeper than that, but it would be substantial. It would be hard because they're all kind of wasting it around, but it's an important topic and here tendencies are going in the wrong direction. Right now the Supreme Court is considering a suit which if they change the law, which they probably will, means that corporations can buy elections directly instead of indirectly. They don't put it that way, but you think through it, that's what it amounts to. So that's what the Supreme Court is doing, and there's something kind of surreal going on, because at the very same time, the logic of this for the Supreme Court is that corporations are persons, they have personal rights, so therefore they have the right of free speech. That was in fact a gift to the corporate world by the courts about a century ago. So because they have rights of persons, they have the right of free speech, so therefore they can buy elections directly. At the same time, Congress, there's a competition going on in Congress between the Democrats and the Republicans, to see who can be more brutal in denying health care to undocumented aliens, and there's a legal argument behind that, too. They're not persons under the law. The courts have shaped American law so that if you're an undocumented alien, you're not a person. You don't have personal rights. So on the one hand, the corporate entities have rights of persons and have to be allowed to buy elections directly; on the other hand, undocumented aliens on whose backs a lot of the economy rides, they're not persons, and therefore we, the Democrats and the Republicans, have to show that we're more savage than the Opposition in denying them health care. We shouldn't be allowing this to happen before our eyes. I mean the facts are there, but they're not being discussed, they're not being addressed, and that's another serious lack of people who care about living in a civilised community.

Larry Bensky: Well we've reached the point in our program where we have time for only one last question from our audience, and we'll kind of come back to where we were at the beginning of this discussion with Noam Chomsky. What answer would you give to the frustrated, hard-working people as you describe them, attracted by the narrative of the right that you listen to, brave you, on AM talk radio?

Noam Chomsky: Well, take the fact that their incomes have stagnated for 30 years, their benefits declined, work hours are going up and so on.

Larry Bensky: Well suppose we say that's because the government's giving all its...

Noam Chomsky: That's why we should be giving them the right answer. The right answer is that has to do with the reconstruction of the economy that took place in the 1970s, which shifted us from a high growth, relatively egalitarian economy of the '50s and '60s, to what's called the neo-liberal economy, with a vast growth of financial institutions, evisceration of productive capacity, shifting it abroad where it's more profitable, and yes, this has lots of predictable effects. One of them is the financial crises that happen periodically. The growth of the financial institutions is phenomenal, and that doesn't help people. Say in 1970 they were maybe 3% of gross domestic product, but now it's well over 30%. Well you know, that's great for Goldman Sachs and so on, it's not great for these people who are concerned that their lives are falling apart. We should tell them that, we should tell them that the heroes, that there is a massive business-run, corporate program. Its scale is astonishing, it's been pretty well studied. It goes back to the 1950s. It was designed, as I said before, to make people hate and fear government. But then there's a little secret behind it, the people who are running the campaign love government, and they want it to be powerful and interventionist, but in their interest. But what people are told is you're supposed to hate government. So take, for example, April 15th. OK, when April 15th comes along, in it the comparable date, in a functioning democracy, people would be applauding. They say, OK, this is the day in which we get together and provide the resources for the programs that we have decided on. What could be better than that? In the United States, thanks to massive propaganda, you're supposed to hate April 15th, because that's the day when some alien force you know, like from Mars, is coming down here and stealing your hard-earned money. Well that's a real triumph in undermining and destroying the fundamental basis of democracy. And for elite opinion, or for business, yes, it makes sense. They don't like democracy, elites never do. Well that's our failure to have permitted this to happen.

Larry Bensky: Well let me also put in a word for media literacy here, because along with the developments you're talking about came deregulation of ownership of radio and television stations; abolition of the fairness doctrine, so that radio and television no longer had it, so that any balance in a discussion of public issues, and the rise of the talk radio fanatics that have distorted public debate in this country. And television of course, an entire network.

Noam Chomsky: You're right, and I think it's very important, but again, I think we should be asking questions of ourselves. Why don't we exploit this situation, make use of it, reach these people with a sensible message that can lead them and us to better lives, and a more democratic society? Well, got to do that. There's a tremendous amount of activism in the country. I suspect that if you count noses more than in the '60s, where it's a very atomised isolated society. People in one corner of town don't know what's happening in the other corner of town. There are separate agendas, there's sectarianism, you know, We've got to have our way, you can't have your way. The success in atomising the society has been enormous.

Larry Bensky: And has the internet played into that?

Noam Chomsky: The internet I think has a complicated effect. I mean it does separate people. One thing about human beings is face-to-face communication means something. Communicating through a text message doesn't have that meaning. So it does separate people, and in fact it contributes to the ideal of the business world, which is a society in which the elementary, the atoms are a dyad, you and the two, but no communication other than that, and that's tremendous technique of control. So it has that effect.

On the other hand it is the tool for all the organising and activist efforts that go on, and also for education. So the internet really is like a lot of technology, it's fundamentally neutral, depends on who's using it and for what purpose.

Larry Bensky: And how class-stratified do you think it will continue to be? Do you see any tendencies towards greater participation? People having more access to that technology?

Noam Chomsky: There's more access but more access alone doesn't help you. If the access that you have leads to a huge range of choices where you have no framework or structure to decide what makes sense, then it's negative. If there's more access that's guided and directed by the kind of understanding and comprehension that can really only come out of co-operative efforts -

Larry Bensky: And education.

Noam Chomsky: ...which is a cooperative effort, if it's serious. Yes, that kind of access makes sense.

Larry Bensky: But if all you are trained to care about is your belief system, uninstructed by anything other than tradition, you're in a different framework.

Noam Chomsky: That's very bad, and if what you're trained for from childhood is to pass the next test, it's worse, it destroys your thinking. There's a name for that, it's called 'No Child Left Behind'. Which really means 'Every Child Left Behind.'

Larry Bensky: Our thanks very much to Dr Noam Chomsky.

[Applause]

Kirsten Garrett: Noam Chomsky was talking with academic Larry Bensky at the Commonwealth Club of California. You can listen to this again on audio streaming or the podcast, and there will be a transcript on the Background Briefing website.

I'm Kirsten Garrett, you're with ABC Radio National.

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Can we cross the valley of death to commercialise our best IP?

Australian R&D providers are good at value creation but poor at value capture. The biggest challenge facing innovators and entrepreneurs, who have “market ready” Intellectual Property (IP) to commercialise, is crossing the so called “valley of death”. Put simply, most Australian innovators and entrepreneurial firms do not have access to affordable capital especially when they need $2 million to $10 million to invest in building prototype products or a manufacturing plant. This is where so many of our brilliant innovations and IP fall into the valley of death or move offshore.

There is no clear consensus as to why so little of Australia’s world class IP has been successfully commercialised in this country. However, venture capital in Australia is often very conservative and institutional investors are more comfortable in investing in tangible assets. They fail to recognise the value that IP contributes to a business. Others will claim that in the current innovation system and business culture, research and IP is undervalued in Australia. Simply, the big money is made offshore.

And that’s Australia’s trouble spot. As a nation, we are investing billions of dollars in pure and applied research to generate IP. Trouble is we are not making returns by exploiting it.

This is a business model that does not make economic sense. It is unsustainable. We cannot afford to let our best innovations to be exploited offshore with little or no return of benefits to Australia. Surely there are better ways to capture the value of IP in Australia?

One of the most glaring problem areas is the gap between publicly funded research bodies and industry. Different worlds, different cultures and different mindsets. The result is destruction of shareholder and national building value. Experts tell us that successful commercialisation requires an alignment of different stakeholders.

Speaking recently at a seminar on Value Exchange between R&D providers and industry, Mr Ken King, CEO of nanotechnology niche firm Micronisers said the priorities of industry were totally different from those of research organisations, especially universities where the “publish or perish” culture makes it unattractive for academic experts and scientists to spend time on short term and highly demanding industry projects. There is often a massive disconnect between expectations of academics conducting long term research and industry wanting fast results as measured by sales, market share and environmental impact. Success for researchers is typically through showcasing their work at overseas conferences and publishing articles in top tier journals.

Organisations like Advanced Manufacturing CRC based out at Swinburne University of Technology are working to bridge this gap by co-investing federal funds with industry cash and in kind from R&D providers in high impact projects. A cornerstone of its efforts is to facilitate a clear and transparent agreement between industry and R&D providers on key project and commercialisation issues. In a nutshell, this provides high quality R&D for businesses with their clear path for commercialisation.

Project agreements are the mechanism for ensuring industry and R&D providers agree upfront on how they will share and commercialise the IP. The project selection criteria involves examination of the business model and capacity of the technology to transform an industry. It also looks at the management capacity and track record of the industry and R&D providers in the area of commercialisation. Successful project participants from industry and R&D institutions are then in a strong position to focus on making an economic, social and environmental impact for Australia and to come out in better competitive shape at the end of the project. The old paradigm of producing technological successes and commercial failures is being replaced with a new paradigm. This new paradigm looks at how the IP can be commercialised by asking where is the order book, who is the customer and the customer’s customer for the innovation?

New entrepreneurial firms and SME’s who sometimes lack the experience and skills to commercialise IP have access to various programs such as the Enterprise Connect (e.g. “Researchers in Business”) and COMET schemes. However, it is at later stages where large investments are also required where government, industry and institutional investors need to collaborate in setting up suitably large funds to facilitate and accelerate the commercialisation of our best IP.

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Public Health Before Wall Street Wealth

Wonderful. The 13 Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee get one faintly rational Republican to join them in a meaningless stab at health care reform and it throws the media into a titillated frenzy about what it all means. It means very little.

The main thrust of the proposal is to forcibly submit even more customers to the tender mercies of the insurance industry while doing nothing significant to cut costs. Insurers will now pretend that the burdens on them are onerous and will demand concessions to make this an even bigger boondoggle for the medical profiteers than George W. Bush’s prescription drug coverage initiative.

The insurers’ leverage with the few moderate Republicans and with conservative Democrats will prevent the merging of the Baucus bill with the more serious attempts at reform in other Senate and House proposals. While President Barack Obama was celebrating Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, for being “extraordinarily diligent” in working with the Democrats, she was already proclaiming the exit strategy she will use if the bill becomes worthwhile. “My vote today is my vote today,” Snowe said Tuesday. “It doesn’t forecast what my vote will be tomorrow.”

The health care debate has become a convenient distraction, for both political parties, from the far more pressing issues surrounding the banking meltdown. As important as health insurance is as an issue, representing 16 percent of the economy, and with so many uninsured, no sane person can deny that the current system is a sorry mess that needs to be changed. But why now and not after a growth economy has returned?

The answer is that politicians from both parties just love the health care game because it allows them to assume reflexive but irrelevant postures in that tired old debate about “socialized medicine” versus “free-market choice” although it has nothing to do with either ideological fantasy. Consumers do not have meaningful choices as it is—many have no coverage and others are frozen into some company-sponsored plan—and it is insulting to the social democracies of Western Europe to suggest that anything comparable is even under consideration in the U.S. Congress.

The health care issue should never even have been brought up at a time when the economy is reeling and we are running such immense deficits to shore up the banks. Instead of fixing the economy by saving Americans’ homes and jobs, we are preoccupied with pie-in-the-sky rhetoric on a hot issue that should have been addressed in calmer times. It came up now because, despite all the hoary partisan posturing, it is a safer subject than the more pressing issue of what to do with Citigroup, AIG and General Motors, which the taxpayers happen to own but do not control. While Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner plots in secret with the top bankers who got us into this mess, we are focused on the perennial circus of so-called health care reform.

There is an odd disconnect between the furious public debate over health care reform, with its emphasis on the cost of an increased government role, and the nonexistent discussion about the far more expensive and largely secretive government program to bail out Wall Street. Why the agitation over the government spending $83 billion a year on health care when at least 20 times that amount has been thrown at the creators of the ongoing financial crisis without any serious public accountability? On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that employees of the financial industry that we taxpayers saved are slated to be paid a record $140 billion this year.

If you want to know who actually runs this country, just look at the phone logs, released by court order last week, revealing Geithner’s nearly constant calls to solicit the advice of the fat cats who caused the banking implosion. It’s the same as when he was chair of the Federal Reserve in New York, before Obama appointed him to his current job. Only back then, as he blithely ignored the impending financial meltdown, it was easier to have lunch with the bankers as well as to chat by phone.

In an earlier Freedom of Information exposé, The New York Times reported in April: “An examination of Mr. Geithner’s five years as president of the New York Fed, an era of unbridled and ultimately disastrous risk-taking by the financial industry, shows that he forged unusually close relationships with executives of Wall Street’s giant financial institutions. His actions, as a regulator and later a bailout king, often aligned with the industry’s interests and desires, according to interviews with financiers, regulators and analysts and a review of Federal Reserve records.”

Nothing has changed since then. Meanwhile, we all get in a tizzy about fake efforts at health reform as immense decisions are being made to ensure the health of financial institutions that should have been left to die.

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SlowTV | Steve Keen on debt and the economy: How do we pay for all this? | The Monthly

SlowTV | Steve Keen on debt and the economy: How do we pay for all this? | The Monthly

Speaking at the Per Capita annual conference Policy Exchange 09, economist Steve Keen looks at the rising national debts in Australia and the United States, paying particular attention to their historical relationship with recessions, growth and unemployment. He suggests that the levels of debt in both countries have reached a point which virtually guarantees a very difficult economic road ahead in the long term.
Canberra, October 2009

Source:

Per Capita

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SlowTV | The Fall of Rome: Media after Empire. Mark Scott | The Monthly

SlowTV | The Fall of Rome: Media after Empire. Mark Scott | The Monthly

Part 2

As Managing Director of the ABC, Mark Scott has presided over the national broadcaster at a time of extraordinary change in the media landscape. In the A.N. Smith Lecture in Journalism, he looks at where media might be headed after the fall of the great media empires. Newspapers and commercial television are under ever-growing commercial pressures, mostly precipitated by the internet and the diffusion of audiences. Scott examines these tectonic shifts and discusses what changes to the media we may see in coming years.University of Melbourne, October 2009

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The War on Language

There is a scene in “Othello” when the Moor is so consumed by jealousy and rage that he loses the eloquence and poetry that make him the most articulate man in Venice. He turns to the audience, shortly before he murders Desdemona, and sputters, “Goats and monkeys!” Othello fell prey to wild self-delusion and unchecked rage, and his words became captive to hollow clichés. The debasement of language, which Shakespeare understood was a prelude to violence, is the curse of modernity. We have stopped communicating, even with ourselves. And the consequences will be as extreme as in the Shakespearean tragedy.

Those who seek to dominate our behavior first seek to dominate our speech. They seek to obscure meaning. They make war on language. And the English- and Arabic-speaking worlds are each beset with a similar assault on language. The graffiti on the mud walls of Gaza that calls for holy war or the crude rants of Islamic militants are expressed in a simplified, impoverished form of Arabic. This is not the classical language of 1,500 years of science, poetry and philosophy. It is an argot of clichés, distorted Quranic verses and slogans. This Arabic is no more comprehensible to the literate in the Arab world than the carnival barking that pollutes our airwaves is comprehensible to our literate classes. The reduction of popular discourse to banalities, exacerbated by the elite’s retreat into obscure, specialized jargon, creates internal walls that thwart real communication. This breakdown in language makes reflection and debate impossible. It transforms foreign cultures, which we lack the capacity to investigate, into reversed images of ourselves. If we represent virtue, progress and justice, as our clichés constantly assure us, then the Arabs, or the Iranians, or anyone else we deem hostile, represent evil, backwardness and injustice. An impoverished language solidifies a binary world and renders us children with weapons.

How do you respond to “Islam is the solution” or “Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior”? How do you converse with someone who justifies the war in Iraq—as Christopher Hitchens does—with the tautology that we have to “kill them over there so they do not kill us over here”? Those who speak in these thought-terminating clichés banish rational discussion. Their minds are shut. They sputter and rant like a demented Othello. The paucity of public discourse in our culture, even among those deemed to be public intellectuals, is matched by the paucity of public discourse in the Arab world.

This emptiness of language is a gift to demagogues and the corporations that saturate the landscape with manipulated images and the idiom of mass culture. Manufactured phrases inflame passions and distort reality. The collective chants, jargon and epithets permit people to surrender their moral autonomy to the heady excitement of the crowd. “The crowd doesn’t have to know,” Mussolini often said. “It must believe. ... If only we can give them faith that mountains can be moved, they will accept the illusion that mountains are moveable, and thus an illusion may become reality.” Always, he said, be “electric and explosive.” Belief can triumph over knowledge. Emotion can vanquish thought. Our demagogues distort the Bible and the Constitution, while their demagogues distort the Quran, or any other foundational document deemed to be sacred, fueling self-exaltation and hatred at the expense of understanding. The more illiterate a society becomes, the more power those who speak in this corrupted form of speech amass, the more music and images replace words and thought. We are cursed not by a cultural divide but by mutual cultural self-destruction.

The educated elites in the Arab world are now as alienated as the educated elites in the United States. To speak with a vocabulary that the illiterate or semiliterate do not immediately grasp is to be ostracized, distrusted and often ridiculed. It is to impart knowledge, which fosters doubt. And doubt in calcified societies, which prefer to speak in the absolute metaphors of war and science, is a form of heresy. It was not accidental that the founding biblical myth saw the deliverer of knowledge as evil and the loss of innocence as a catastrophe. “This probably had less to do with religion than with the standard desire of those in authority to control those who are not,” John Ralston Saul wrote. “And control of the Western species of the human race seems to turn upon language.”

The infantile slogans that are used to make sense of the world express, whether in tea party rallies or in Gaza street demonstrations, a very real alienation, yearning and rage. These clichés, hollow to the literate, are electric with power to those for whom these words are the only currency in which they can express anguish and despair. And as the economy worsens, as war in the Middle East and elsewhere continues, as our corporate state strips us of power and reduces us to serfs, expect this rage, and the demented language used to give it voice, to grow.

The Arabic of the Quran is as poetic as the intricate theology of Islam. It is nuanced and difficult to master. But the language of the Quran has been debased in the slums and poor villages across the Middle East by the words and phrases of political Islam. This process is no different from what has taken place with Christianity in the United States. Our mainstream churches have been as complacent in fighting heretics as have the mainstream mosques and religious scholars in the Middle East. Demented forms of Christianity and Islam have largely supplanted genuine and more open forms of religious expression. And they have done so because liberal elites were cowed into silence.

Corruptions of Islamic terms and passages are as numerous in the militants’ ideology as in the ideology of the Christian right. The word jihad for the militants means the impunity to kill, kidnap, hijack and bomb anyone they see as an infidel, including children and other Muslims. Jihad, however, does not always mean holy war, or even war, in the Quran. According to Islamic tradition, the “great jihad” is the battle within one’s self to live in accord with God’s will. A jihad, for the prophet Muhammad, is often the struggle to achieve inner-worldly asceticism, in accord with his call “to command the good and forbid evil with the heart, the tongue and the hand.” And the Quran condemns the use of violence to propagate the faith. “There is no compulsion in religion,” it states. The Quran also denounces forced piety and conversion as insincere. Calls to martyrdom, presented by militants as a direct path toward eternal life, conveniently eschew the Quran’s rigid ban on suicide. But theological nuance is beside the point for zealots. The fantasies peddled by the Christian right, from the Rapture, which is not in the Bible, to the belief that Jesus, who was a pacifist, would bless wars in the Middle East, injects our own version of sanctified slogans into the vernacular.

Our crisis is a crisis of language. Victor Klemperer in his book “Lingua Tertii Imperii” noted that the distortion of language by the Nazis was vital in creating fascist culture. He was repeatedly perplexed by how the masses, even those who opposed the Nazis, willingly ingested the linguistic poison the Nazis used to perpetuate collective self-delusion. “Words may be little doses of arsenic,” he wrote. “They are consumed without being noticed; they seem at first to have no effect, but after a while, indeed, the effect is there.”

Chris Hedges is the author of “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.”

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Background Briefing - Who owns the news?

Download Audio - 04102009

It's a question no one has really been able to answer, though many try. A new fight for the answer is breaking out all over the place because readers are getting what they want on the internet, and copying stuff is really easy. Reporter Stan Correy.

Download Extra Audio - Sir Keith Murdoch, 4 January 1937

Download MP3 Sir Keith Murdoch is giving a speech at the opening of radio station 3LK in Melbourne. Prime Minister Lyons was in attendance at the opening. This may be the only audio recording of Sir Keith Murdoch in existence. Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive. [dur:2:35 size 1.5MB]

No matter where you go in your life, at some point you're going to need somebody to stand by you.

Stan Correy: Something must be wrong when one of the most powerful industries in the world is crying out for help, using really good popular music to market a message.

'Stand By Me' was the theme music that began a newspaper conference in Sydney in early September. As the music played, an evocative montage of striking images appeared on the screen showing recent news stories in Australia and overseas. The images were all celebrating the power of the newspaper, informing, entertaining and emotionally powerful.

But you could also take another message: Stand by newspapers. They're dying. Please help.

Hello, I'm Stan Correy and welcome to Background Briefing on ABC Radio National.

David Simon is the creator of the award-winning television series 'The Wire'. He's also a former investigative reporter. Appearing in May before the US Senate Committee on the Future of Journalism, David Simon.

David Simon: From the captains of the newspaper industry you may hear a certain martyrology, a claim that they were heroically serving democracy only to be undone by a cataclysmic shift in technology. From those speaking on behalf of new media, weblogs and that which goes Twitter, you'll be treated to assurances that American journalism has a perfectly fine future online and that a great democratisation is taking place. Well, a plague on both their houses. High-end journalism is dying in America and unless a new economic model is achieved, it will not be re-born on the web or anywhere else.

Stan Correy: The real story of the endless committees and conferences over the past year has been 'Who's going to pay for the media?'

On Fox Business television, Rupert Murdoch was asked by the presenter this question:

Presenter: Theoretically, if I'm in Tahiti, it's hard to get delivery but in Tahiti I can access the web, so that the circulation market, if you will, on the web for any newspaper has expanded to the globe.

Rupert Murdoch: You're going to have to pay for your favourite newspaper on the web.

Presenter: I was going to say, doesn't that mean more money, not less money?

Rupert Murdoch: Well it may be less somewhere else, but yes, more eyeballs certainly. People are reading news today, they're reading it on the web, they're reading on Google, they're reading on whatever.

Presenter: They're reading it for free.

Rupert Murdoch: Exactly, and that's going to stop.

Stan Correy: Rupert Murdoch says very soon you will have to pay to get your news online. But of course even Rupert Murdoch knows that's easy to say, less easy to make happen.

From the University of Chicago, Douglas Baird:

Douglas Baird: The reality is, if the great newspapers disappear, we're all going to be worse off. On the other hand if we don't allow new technologies to flourish that allows information to be much more available now than it's ever been before, we're also going to be worse off. So the question is, how can we balance both against each other, that's the perennial challenge in intellectual property.

Stan Correy: That tension has been going on for hundreds of years.

The language of the new world of pay for content, or pay walls, is cram-packed with jargon.

Reader: Transformational technology
Link economy,
News as property,
Protect, point and pay,
Google check-out.

Stan Correy: The words are new, but the fight is age-old. In reality, similar debates were going on in Australia in the 1930s, as you'll hear about later, when Rupert Murdoch's father, Sir Keith Murdoch was at the centre of disputes about the economics of the media in Australia.

But it goes back even further to the 1840s and the invention of the telegraph. And the formation of the first news agency run by newspapers, the Associated Press or the AP.

Zachary Seward from the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University.

Zachary Seward: The AP goes all the way back to 1846 with the Mexican-American war, and it was born out of the birth of the telegraph. It was the telegraph that was really changing how that war was being covered and bunch of New York-based newspapers got together and agreed to form what became the Associated Press, and I think that's an important story because this is an organisation that was born of a technology that totally changed the way news was delivered, and that was the telegraph. And now we've come upon another technology that is again totally changing the way news is delivered, the internet. And the AP is attempting at least to reinvent itself once again. I mean the jury's still out on whether is successful.

Stan Correy: One of the great film classics is Citizen Kane by Orson Welles.

[Excerpt from Citizen Kane]: Charles Foster Kane: I sympathise with you. Charles Foster Kane is a scoundrel, his paper should be run out of town; a committee should be formed to boycott him. You may, if you can form such a committee, put me down for a contribution of $1,000. I'm the publisher of The Inquirer, as such it's my duty, and I'll let you in on a little secret: it's also my pleasure to see to it that decent, hard-working people in this community aren't robbed blind by a pack of money-mad pirates just because they haven't anybody to look after their interests.

Stan Correy: Citizen Kane was based on the life of William Randolph Hearst, the Rupert Murdoch of his time. And it was Hearst who was involved in a court case in 1918 called Associated Press versus International News Service.

It's one of the strange twists in the current story of who owns and who pays for news that a court case from 1918, AP versus INS is resurrected to fight a battle in the digital age. In 1918, the talk was all about news being stolen, of unfair competition and loss of revenue.

It's a clich�, but in the business of media the more things change, the more they remain the same. In Sydney a few weeks ago, all this was the talk of a newspaper conference.

Chairman: Please welcome Timothy Balding.

Stan Correy: Timothy Balding is chief executive of the global industry body for newspaper publishers, the World Association of Newspapers.

Timothy Balding: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It's a great pleasure to be here to talk about some of the important issues facing our industry globally. I don't think anyone, however, can contest that we're not only living in a world of change but that change is accelerating really dramatically.

Stan Correy: Timothy Balding began his talk with a series of slides, illustrating the perilous financial state of the newspaper industry as it competed in the digital world.

The punchline to the slide presentation gave an insight into what newspapers see as the threat to their existence. It was a slide which stated that in the past minute or so, 94,000 songs had been downloaded across the world illegally.

After his speech Background Briefing spoke to Timothy Balding.

Timothy Balding: There's been a tremendous change of heart and mind in the world's newspaper publishers and editors, as much as the gamble up till now has been that all traffic to the online sites of newspapers was welcomed because newspapers could take a big slice of the advertising revenue that would accompany that traffic, and of course the big search engines are responsible for pushing a lot of audience towards these sites. But with the downturn in advertising revenues globally, including digital advertising revenues, the paradise has taken a step backwards you know. The newspapers are not in a position to see any longer that they're going to make any substantial revenues from the advertising. So the thought has now become how do we make money from the content?

Stan Correy: And if that content is to be quality journalism, then publishers will need to invest more.

Timothy Balding: Clearly, journalistic teams working for online sites are not going to be funded by the advertising model. So the question has been, how do we get money for the content on online sites? Now inasmuch as the search engines are creaming off the stories from newspapers, making them freely available to the public, there is an issue arising of intellectual property. How do you protect your content from that exploitation by the search engines?

Stan Correy: There's growing anger in the global newspaper industry about infringement of copyright.

Timothy Balding: There's a mythology that copyright doesn't apply in the online world. But there's actually no reason to suppose that at all, so there will be more and more I think court cases taking the search engines to task over the copyright issue.

Stan Correy: The lawsuits have begun already. In Italy, in August, a very complex one was launched, involving an anti-trust investigation of allegations that Google is distorting the market for online advertising by the way it interacts with news publishers and their material. For a report on this case, there will be a link on the Background Briefing website.

The search engines have responded to the attacks. For example, Google Flip is a new web application that allows internet users to easily access newspapers and magazines. But both Google and the newspapers share the ad revenue.

In Europe and America, newspapers have been hit hard by the double whammy of recession and the internet.

In Australia, revenues are down but not as much as overseas. But our publishers still feel the pain of what they call misappropriation. The news is their property and the internet burglars are getting away with it.

At the Sydney newspaper conference, chief executive of publisher APN, Brendan Hopkins.

Brendan Hopkins: No single business model has done more to promote the notion that journalism should be free, despite its multimillion dollar cost, than search engines. For newspapers to prosper in print and online, we must create a new dynamic in our relationship with the likes of Yahoo and Google. To use an analogy, I see search engines as breaking into our homes every day, itemising our content, walking out, listing everything for everyone to see and making money out of that process. The only problem is I don't see any revenue being paid directly from Google, Yahoo or Microsoft in our company profit and loss accounts. This must come in the future. I broker no argument with the right of search engines to make money, but when their business model requires our contribution I feel it is only right the publishers have an equitable position.

Stan Correy: the newspaper publishers are constantly complaining about free riders in the online world. In other words, companies and individuals who don't invest in news production, taking what doesn't belong to them.

Brendan Hopkins: As an industry we must therefore strive to protect our content from those who contribute nothing to its creation but are happy to ride on its coat tails. Our value is diminished by other media outlets both online and off with limited news sources who feed off our newspapers, by those who take the ideas of newspapers, rewrite our journalists' words to be miraculously their own words, and then put it on a blog or on a broadcast piece and call that journalism.

Stan Correy: Brendan Hopkins.

At the Edinburgh Festival in late August, James Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, Europe and Asia, delivered the McTaggart lecture.

Sky News Reporter: Twenty years ago, his father had addressed the movers and shakers of Britain's broadcast media. Rupert Murdoch duly went on to shake up the industry.

Stan Correy: The theme was that in the digital age, the only reliable, durable and perpetual guarantor of independence for journalism, is profit. But there's an evil empire that threatens the golden age of the all-media marketplace, free content, state-sponsored journalism, public broadcasting.

James Murdoch: There is a land-grab, pure and simple, going on, and in the interests of a free society it should be sternly resisted.

The land-grab is spearheaded by the BBC. The scale and scope of its current activities and future ambitions is chilling.

Being funded by a universal hypothecated tax, the BBC feels empowered and obliged to try and offer something for everyone, even in areas well served by the market.

Now this whole approach is based on a mistaken view of the rationale behind State intervention and it produces perverse outcomes. Rather than concentrating on areas where the market is not delivering, the BBC seeks to compete head-on for audiences with commercial providers to try and shore up support, or more accurately to dampen opposition, to a compulsory licence fee.

Stan Correy: James Murdoch is seen as the heir apparent in the News Corporation empire. Young, hip and well plugged into the all media marketplace, a marketplace that would thrive and would provide endless choice if only the BBC got out of the way.

James Murdoch: Most importantly in this all-media marketplace, the expansion of state-sponsored journalism is a threat to the plurality and independence of news provision, which are so important to our democracy.

Dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market makes it incredibly difficult for journalism to flourish on the internet.

Yet it is essential for the future of independent digital journalism that a fair price can be charged for news to people who value it.

We seem to have decided as a society to let independence and plurality wither. To let the BBC throttle the news market and then get bigger to compensate.

Stan Correy: James Murdoch.

Immediately after his speech, members of the audience who were largely media industry peopled were asked for their reaction.

Voice One: Every media company, traditionally become digitally challenged. No company knows what it's model's going to be in 10 years times. It's a time of extraordinary flux, it's very, very exciting. Everybody's having to reinvent the regular business, the regular funder, their content, and that speech is a raw capitalist polemic challenging the basic tenets of the British system, the BBC, the paternalism, the wrath, Ofcom as regulator, and that's healthy. But what we now have to talk about is if you were to abolish those organisations, what would you put in their place? What's the policy? So we have a lot of reinventing to do in the British media world in the next year or two, a lot of reinventing.

Voice Two: Well I think it was exactly what you want people to not feel neutral about it, and everyone's going to have a view on that, and it feels like he's absolutely set a very clear agenda, and actually the onus now, in Edinburgh, is on all sorts of people, but particularly on the public service broadcasters to now make a response to that, because I think he's absolutely laid down the gauntlet to them, and so can they come back with him? What's going to be interesting in the next couple of days is what they come back with, how they justify and answer some of those arguments.

Stan Correy: Well the public broadcasters have been doing just that. For one, just a few weeks later, the managing director of the ABC gave a talk called 'Why Public Broadcasting Matters More than Ever' in London.

On his return Background Briefing asked Mark Scott about his response to what James Murdoch had been saying.

Mark Scott: I just think it's far more complex than was outlined by James Murdoch. If you look at the history of news, the market has never really purely provided news, there have been a number of different factors that have been in play. You've had proprietors who've been willing to in a sense, sub-optimise their earnings in order to deliver news and be proprietors of news organisations to make a medium and long term investment, even though it may not have been in their short term interest. You've had quite a philanthropic approach to delivery of news. Some of the great newspapers of the world like The Guardian came out of a trust mechanism, and you have public broadcasters who've been funded in order to deliver news, but not return a profit.

So if you're simply trying to say 'Clear out, unless you're trying to make a profit out of news', and that the profit mechanism will deliver quality news, investigative journalism, great newspapers, great broadcasting, I think that's very narrow. And the interpretation that I took from James Murdoch's speech and that many took from the speech was a sense that if the BBC was going to be providing quality news online, free of charge, in a way that hurts newspapers' ability to charge, then the BBC should back away. Well my answer to that in an Australian context, and certainly the BBC 's response to that is that the public has paid for our news, the public through their taxes in Australia have paid for the ABC news service, and we'll provide that to them free of charge in the format that they want on the device that they want, so that if they want to see it on television, free of charge, they can; on radio, free of charge, they can; if they want to see it online, and we have a suite of online services, then the public has paid for that content, and they should be able to see it free of charge.

Stan Correy: So you're saying that James Murdoch's view didn't really reflect the history of news any way in a mixed economy?

Mark Scott: No. I mean news has always been massively cross-subsidised really, even if you look at newspapers. In my experience back at Fairfax I remember hearing that the Saturday Sydney Morning Heral may get $10 worth of revenue, but of that the audience, the paying customer, was only paying $2 and really $4 was coming from classified ads and $4 was coming from display ads. So whereas the customer thought it may have represented $2 worth of value it really was generating $10 worth of revenue. So there was a cross subsidy that was coming from the advertising to fund the news. And so in a sense, a pure market economics in a sense, has never really been applied to news, but there has been a period of time that's existed for a long period of time now I suppose, that a business model held together that allowed proprietors to make good money but customers or audiences to get good news services, and now that business model is clearly under pressure.

Stan Correy: The managing director of the ABC, Mark Scott.

Mark Scott: And I think you would argue the audiences would be dramatically worse off, even though the proprietors, the media barons, might be more wealthy. Now I think that's a pretty straightforward decision. I think there is money to be made in media, but the way it's operated well now for decades, the way it's operated well in Australia, is in a mixed model where you have public broadcasters and private sector broadcasters operating together to meet the audience needs.

Stan Correy: Were you surprised to see in the ABC's history that Keith Murdoch and the ABC had that kind of acrimonious relationship?

Mark Scott: Look I think I'd simply say that if you look at the tradition of the Murdoch papers, often there's been a tension that has existed between the Murdoch press and public broadcasters. And it was interesting to discover that that went back two generations, the similar argument right back to the heart of the 1930s. So it's interesting to see, at least there's consistency in the message. But the reason it hasn't happened is that basically the system works well and the audience needs are delivered in this way, and that we have a richer, more vibrant, more competitive media environment with this mix of public and private sector. And just because private sector media is under some financial pressure now, that those business models are being tested by the internet, we've had an economic downturn, is no reason to try and quarantine public broadcasters into a small corner so that more money can be made elsewhere.

Stan Correy: There'll be a link to the full speech by James Murdoch and the one by Mark Scott on the Background Briefing website.

Back in the 1930s, Sir Keith Murdoch was the most powerful media baron in Australia, running newspapers and radio stations.

Even before the ABC began in 1932, Sir Keith Murdoch had pressured the federal government to change the legislation that created the ABC. In effect, restricting the public broadcaster from collecting its own news.

The tension continued throughout the decade. If the ABC got its own news service it would compete with his newspapers and his radio stations.

This would be unfair competition because the ABC at that time survived on a listening or licence fee extracted from everyone who owned a radio.

On a smaller scale, the battle between Sir Keith Murdoch and the ABC in the 1930s, mirrored a much larger conflict between print and radio in the United States.

In 1937, Sir Keith Murdoch opened a new radio station in Victoria. At the opening was the Australian Prime Minister who owed his job to the political lobbying of Murdoch.

Keith Murdoch [archival]: I want to thank Mr Lyons, the prime minister, and Mr Dunstan, the premier, on behalf of the directors of The Herald and Weekly Times Limited. This evening marks an important development in our company's work. The Melbourne Herald was one of the first newspapers in the world to develop the theory that newspaper work and broadcasting could be joined to the advantage of all concerned. In particular, we wanted the newspapers to get into closer touch with their public. We exist only to provide the public with services. The policy has cost us a lot of money and worry, but thanks to the fine staff we have built up, and to your own splendid support, it seems now to be fully successful.

Stan Correy: This is the only known recording of Sir Keith Murdoch, and it's heard for the first time since 1937. And in it, just like his grandson 80 years later, he was critical of government support for public broadcasting. In Sir Keith Murdoch's case, it was the then five-year-old Australian Broadcasting Commission. Murdoch reminded prime minister Joe Lyons that commercial operations were expensive to run, and that he doesn't get a listening or licence fee from the government.

Keith Murdoch [archival]: 3DB was taken over seven years ago. In those days we had a staff of five. Now we have 50. And the money which would have kept 3DB going for one week then, now would last for only half a day. The cost of course is in the programs, and they all go to you free over the air, for we get none of the listening fees you pay. Success of course cannot be reckoned by cost, but only by the extent to which you listen to us, and in this we believe we have been successful.

Stan Correy: Sir Keith Murdoch speaking in 1937.

In the ABC archives are some remarkable documents that trace the heated conflicts between Australian newspaper publishers and the ABC. The documents describe the ups and downs of the relationship. Similar debates raged in England and the United States. Although there was less fuss about public broadcasting in Europe.

One of the big issues in Australia was the time the ABC presented its news bulletins, so they didn't compete with newspaper editions.

In 1936, Sir Keith Murdoch and the general manager of the ABC, Charles Moses, had a brief exchange on that subject. Keith Murdoch speaks first, in this reconstruction.

Keith Murdoch [archival]: Is 7 o'clock the best hour for the evening?

Charles Moses [archival]: Yes, that is the best time.

Keith Murdoch [archival]: You have taken the best time for yourselves. There must be room for bargaining. You would expect free facilities for the very best hour. It amounts to this: If you can't alter the hour, the question that concerns us is how much you should pay us. The damages to us are very considerable.

Stan Correy: Sir Keith Murdoch didn't fear the new technology of broadcasting, in fact he embraced it. But like his son and his grandson now, he knew that public broadcasting along the lines of the BBC and the ABC posed a significant threat to his own control of the media market of his day.

Today, Rupert Murdoch describes himself as 'platform agnostic'. He doesn't care how the news is delivered, as long as News Corporation gets paid.

Rupert Murdoch: The web as it is today, our websites will be vastly improved, much more in them, and you'll pay for them. But there'll be other platforms; you'll be able to get the guts and the main headlines and alerts and everything on your Blackberry, on your Palm, or whatever, all day long. People need news, communities live on news about their communities to be able to live and enjoy the world.

Stan Correy: Rupert Murdoch, a media baron who understands you have to adapt to new conditions or die. But in the process you fight hard. There are three stages to media war: one, establish whether the new technology is friend or foe; two, industry bodies get together to fight the enemy; and three, If all else fails, bring in the lawyers and lobby the politicians to change the laws regulating media and competitive behaviour. Today, bloggers and citizen journalists are derided as not real journalists.

Back in the 1930s, emotions also ran high. Broadcast journalists were regarded the same way by newspaper journalists; the broadcasters were just announcers, or entertainers.

Just like newspapers in 2009 complain about online news aggregators stealing their online content, in the 1930s it was the radio stations stealing newspaper articles and wire services.

On the phone from New York, Gwyneth Jackaway.

Gwyneth Jackaway: They used to call it rip-and-read. They got hold of the AP wire service, sometimes they were purchasing the AP wire services, so technically like, they weren't stealing the wires , but of course they could get it on the air before the newspapers could print it. And so the AP wire members, the newspapers who were members of the wire services were angry because they were paying for the gathering of the news by the AP wire services and then the broadcasters were putting on air before they could go to print. And back then, there were several newspaper editions a day. There was the morning and an evening edition usually, but no-one can compete with live, and no-one could compete with the instantaneity of broadcasters.

Stan Correy: Gwyneth Jackaway is from Fordham University in New York, and has written a history of the press–radio war of the 1930s, a war that the newspapers lost.

The same issues that dogged newspapers in the 1930s are still around today. An economic fear, loss of profits, loss of advertising and the loss of audience. But the most interesting connection with the 1930s is the fear of loss of power in society.

Gwyneth Jackaway: When a new communication technology comes along, it disrupts the established power of the previously dominant media industry, and so obviously newspapers and then eventually newspapers plus the telegraph, had dominated news transmission for hundreds of years, and so the newspapers and the magazines were really caught off guard because they thought of themselves as, they had a monopoly, that was the only way you could get news was through print. And I don't think that they even really expected at first that radio would do news, because at first it seemed like oh, you know, this is going to be entertainment, it's going to be Amos and Andy and The Lone Ranger, and music.

Stan Correy: Broadcast journalists in Australia and the US constantly irritated their newspaper colleagues by getting news on air before it appeared in the morning or evening editions.

Gwyneth Jackaway: They were really taken aback when broadcasters started trying to do the news. They saw it as their domain. And if you look at the different moments when a new communication technology comes along, and threatens an old one, and television posed a similar threat to cinema when it came in the '50s, first there is this sense of shock that Oh, we may might actually not be the only game in town.

Stan Correy: Gwyneth Jackaway. On the Background Briefing website, there's a link to her article about the press radio wars of the 1930s.

In the United States one of the early compromises between radio and newspapers was the Press Radio Bureau. The Bureau's radio news bulletins effectively told listeners If you want the full or real story, read about it in the newspapers. It's a tradition that still exists in a more truncated form on radio and television news and current affairs in What the Papers Say. Here's an early example from the late 1930s.

Newsreader [archival]: Here is a special bulletin from the Press Radio Bureau. Berlin: The dispute over Czechoslovakia seems to be moving closer to a head. A newspaper which speaks for the German Foreign Office has published a statement advising Great Britain to warn Czechoslovakia that the demands of the Sudeten Germans must be satisfied if an acute situation is to be avoided. The paper urges action right away. This bulletin is from the Press Radio Bureau. Further details will be found in your newspapers.

Stan Correy: In today's media we're in the third and final stage of the conflict, where legal strategies and the technology itself are used to defeat the opposition.

Digital technology just makes it so easy to find, copy and transmit information. And one option for old media providers is to use some form of spoiling technology to sabotage their competitors. 'Spoiling technology' is the phrase used for any form of technology that is used to block, or track, how people use information.

From the Queensland University of Technology, economist, Professor Paul Frijters.

Paul Frijters: There are very interesting ways in which newspapers and other media providers can in principle, try to play this game themselves. They can try to set up an alternative to Google news, or they could even try to as it were, directly sabotage Google news and sabotage other intermediaries whilst allowing their own intermediaries to emerge. I'm almost expecting, as it were, a technical war here, so that the linking which consumers do, would to some degree be facilitated and be allowed to go on without any additional fuss, whilst the linking from automated search engines would be made more difficult. That's where the nuts and bolts of the debate will be, how much fuss can they create technically. And if they can't it's very hard to see that they can get Google news to pay for anything.

Stan Correy: And the technical wars he described are about to begin. Doing exactly what Paul Frijters suggested: stopping Google and other search engines from stealing news articles from traditional media providers. It involves one of the oldest and most powerful media organisations in the world, the AP, the Associated Press.

Zachary Seward from the Nieman Journalism Lab was recently leaked a document from Associated Press that discussed a new strategy for preventing other websites from stealing its material and re-using without payment on their websites. It's called 'Protect, Point and Pay'.

Zachary Seward: The three-point system, 'Protect, Point and Pay' involves a whole host of things, some of which they've figured out and some of which they're still trying to figure out. Part of it is protecting their copyright and so that could be in part, a legal strategy in suing or sending cease and desist letters to websites that are re-using AP content without authorisation. Now they've also got a plan to track use of the content so that they can tell when that's happening, and they're also working on various different systems that might be able to consolidate AP content. Because you know, the Associated Press was built on this notion that its content should be distributed as far as possible to all of its members, and that made a lot of sense in print, but online there are some disadvantages, so they're sort of rethinking how they might exist on the web and try to keep all their content in one place to the extent that that's possible. So that's the 'Point' element of it.

Stan Correy: The Associated Press says it's lost control of all its content, its news stories, once they're published on the internet. So if you see an Associated Press story on The New York Times website, when you click on it, under the new system, you'll be taken to the Associated Press's own website, and there'll be no cutting and pasting. So that's the Point. And what about Pay? Zachary Seward says that the Pay issue is not AP's priority at the moment.

How Associated Press hopes to track where its content goes is by use of a digital tracking beacon embedded in their news copy. On Background Briefing's website, there's a link to the document explaining how it's meant to be done. This is a classic example of a spoiling technology.

Zachary Seward: The tracking beacon is in part a metaphor and part new technology that the AP is attempting to roll out. And that would be any AP content that they distribute to members and customers would come with it attached to this beacon, and at least theoretically the beacon would allow them to track where that content goes. So you know The New York Times is a member of the AP and they run AP content on their website. Well the beacon would alert the AP that their content is on the Times website, and of course that's OK, so there's no problem there. But if someone then took it off the Time website and put it on their own, and they're not a paying member of the AP, well the tracking beacon would alert the AP of this misuse and then of course their legal department would get involved if they so chose.

Stan Correy: How far has that gone? Is that just in its early stages, or is that just a plan?

Zachary Seward: The rollout for the beacon is supposed to be this Fall. It's still in development; they're going to first do it with the AP's own content, but I do think it's important to know with the tracking beacon and with several of these plans, the real hope for the AP is that they'll be able to it with their members' content as well; that the real power, if this were a successful plan, would be to have lots of newspapers on board also using the beacon to track their own content. But that's still quite some time off, the first step will be testing this out and that's scheduled for the Fall.

Stan Correy: And since the 19th century, it's been Associated Press that has been involved in every battle. It's all about the concept of news as property, and if you're involved in the media industry today, you need to know about it.

In the legal cases to come over online news, one case involving Associated Press in 1918 will definitely be quoted. It's called Associated Press versus International News Service. From the University of Chicago Law School, Professor Douglas Baird.

Douglas Baird: We had the Associated Press and it was the largest news gathering organisation at the time. It had reporters throughout the world, in addition to that it had agreements with governments and news services in Europe and elsewhere, and its reporters would transmit over the telegraph, news from World War I, communiqu�s from various capitals in Europe, it would have reporters and this information would all go through the AP wires, and newspapers that were members of the AP would have access to this news. Now if you were a newspaper that was not a member of the AP, then of course you could only find out about the news by reading the newspaper. What happened, at least this is what the Associated Press alleged, was that a rival news service would go out and buy AP papers when they were released, copy the news in the AP papers and distribute it to its own newspapers. So the AP said, 'This is crazy, we have toiled and we have laboured and we have gathered all this information and we use it in our newspapers, and let's say we use it in a newspaper on the East Coast, it's possible that the rival news service INS, can buy the newspaper for a penny, copy that news, telegraph it to the West Coast and have its newspapers on the West Coast publish the news before our West Coast newspaper comes out. They shouldn't be able to reap where they have not sown.' And that was the argument that the AP made.

Stan Correy: And again this year, the same argument was made in a case against an online news service that AP claimed had stolen its material. They quoted the 1918 case AP versus INS and the New York judge agreed.

In the current debates about paying for online content, the following words are continually repeated. Too many people, say the newspaper publishers, are reaping in cyberspace where they haven't sown. That's what the majority of judges in AP versus INS decided when they found in favour of Associated Press in 1918. But should that apply today?

From the University of Chicago, Douglas Baird.

Douglas Baird: Well you asked me today what the weather was and I told you what the newspaper said. And I didn't do the weather forecasting myself, I didn't go to school and get a degree in meteorology, I am reaping where I have not sown, but you think that's unobjectionable. Why do you think that's unobjectionable? What's the difference between that and this general idea that I shouldn't be able to create my own weather.com blog in which I appropriate the information from the newspaper.

Stan Correy: Associated Press versus International News Service has also cast its shadow on Australian discussions about who owns news and information. And the reason? It was used by Australia's High Court judges in their deliberations on an Australian court case from the 1930s. A court decision that is also getting a new lease of life in the digital age.

To find out why, let's go to the races.

Announcer [archival] They're off! The start for the Melbourne Cup of 1937 has begun.

Stan Correy: From the ABC Archives, a call of the Melbourne Cup from 1937.

Announcer [archival]: ... is very prominent. The Trump began very fast, and is at the top of the field. When they've settled down into stride...

Stan Correy: So it was in the 1930s that a commercial race caller called Cyril Angles made legal and media history. He climbed up a ladder outside the Victoria Park racecourse in Sydney and using a telephone with a very long cord, rang the radio station and called the race by looking over the fence.

The racecourse owners complained the radio broadcast was stopping people attending the races, and Cyril Angles, with his binoculars, was also stealing the race statistics posted up around the bookies' yard.

The case went to the High Court and the Victoria Park racecourse owners' complaint was dismissed, but the echoes of Victoria Park still reverberate in today's intellectual property battles over who owns and pays for the news.

The owners of the Victoria Park racecourse built high fences to keep out non-paying punters, but a ladder, a telephone line and radio defeated them.

Today the media is facing the same problem as Victoria Park racecourse: new communication technology is undermining their control. And control of information that they believe the punters will pay big money to use: sports news and statistics.

After his speech at the future of newspapers conference, News Corporation's digital boss in Australia, Richard Freudenstein, was asked if they were thinking about charging readers for sports content.

Richard Freudenstein: Yes I do. I'm not being specific about what we will end up charging for, but I think there absolutely is an opportunity around sport, yes. No firm plans about what we're going to do, but as a general proposition, sport is an absolute passion of people and I think there is a real opportunity, and what you probably need to do is combine in NewsCorp's case, a bunch of our assets, not just the newspaper content, but video's going to be very important in that as well, and how do you pull it all together in a way that again, is compelling and interesting and different, but absolutely I think sport is a big opportunity.

Stan Correy: Richard Freudenstein.

As a former head of BSkyB in Britain, he knows the economic value of sport. It was Rupert Murdoch's purchase of the broadcast rights of the English premier league that drove the success of Murdoch's pay satellite venture. But today, if you're really desperate to watch an English football game or a rugby league game in Australia, you don't really need to subscribe to Sky or Foxtel. You can watch it on your computer, via several live, but illegal streaming channels that capture the television feed.

And it's not only the control of live action that is undermined, but the very profitable area of news and information. Editor of the Journal of Media Business, Robert Picard.

Robert Picard: Newspapers had a particular problem in their history. If you go back basically 125 years ago, newspapers had very small audiences. They were lucky if they could get about 15% of the public to reads a newspaper. They were very serious, relatively small, and they concentrated on relatively hard news. Now as the 20th century came along, they wanted to attract the larger audience, and you now had wage-earning and higher education, you had the major of people in developed nations who were getting secondary school education along the way, so you had good literacy rates; they had money to spend to buy the newspapers. So throughout the 20th century we expanded newspapers, and most newspapers today are three to five times larger than they were at the turn of the 20th century. And what we added was large amounts of sports, large amounts of entertainment news, large amounts of lifestyle, food, cooking, automobile news, things that were designed to attract people who didn't really care about news. They wanted other kinds of information. And so we're taking away a lot of these functions that the newspaper had to get the mass audience. And so the mass audience is disappearing from the newspaper and the advertisers are saying, 'Well we don't want to be there', many of the advertisers, 'at the prices we've paid if the mass audience isn't there.'

Stan Correy: In the coming months, you'll be hearing numerous announcements from newspaper publishers and other media organisations that they've found a new and workable business model for charging for news online. In the United States newspaper publishers even went to Congress last month — not to ask for a bailout, they claimed, but to lobby for changes to tax and anti-trust laws to make it easier for them to survive. A popular option in the US at the moment is for non-profit organisations to fund quality journalism.

Richard Freudenstein of Murdoch's News Digital is part of News Corporation's committee working out how to make charging for news work. And he's confident that it can be done.

Richard Freudenstein: Why do people pay Apple billions of dollars a year to download songs, when with a little bit of effort they could do it for free, not legally, but they could. The main reason is because Apple have made it so easy and they've made it cool as well. Easy to pay, and it works very well for the record labels, it's easy for Apple to pass the money on to them, it all works well. I think we need to look at things like that as well. We have to make their lives easy to navigate, give them what they want, when they want. And I think this again is where we at News Corp feel pretty good about where the world is going and how we are going to be positioned in this new world.

Stan Correy: At the beginning of Background Briefing we asked 'who's going to pay for the media?'

The media players who talk about pay walls forcefully state that people already pay for music, for games, for information on their mobiles, for pay television. They even pay for specialist information from The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Time or Crikey. So what's all the fuss about paying for news?

From the Journal of Media Business, Robert Picard.

Robert Picard: The biggest problem isn't technical and it really isn't the cost per se, the problem is you have no way of knowing beforehand the quality of the news article. You don't know whether it's an important article, you don't know whether it's well written, you don't know whether it's worth paying 5 cents for or 10 cents or 25 or a dollar. And this is the particular problem, and this is where a lot of people I think the newspaper industry overestimate their ability to make a micropayment system very successful for them. Because newspapers are a collection of materials and what you're doing, if you're going into a micropayment system is unbundling that collection and trying to sell the pieces individually. And that's a particular problem because most of the material in newspapers is not original material, OK?

So to begin with, you are not able to in many cases even have the newspaper sell it online, or they'll have to get the rights to sell it online, which will boost the cost for doing it. And this occurs because newspapers use so much material from news agencies, from syndicated sources and other such things. The problem with that is a lot of that material is available elsewhere, because the broadcasters are using the same news services, because Google and MSN and Yahoo are buying the rights to put that news on their sites and providing it free to their consumers as part of the internet service fee. So you're having to say to the public, 'We want you to pay for what you can get elsewhere'. That's not a very good formula.

Further Information

US Senate Committee: The Future of Journalism

US Joint Economic Hearing: The Future of Newspapers: The Impact on the Economy and Democracy

Article by Zachary M Seward, What The Associated Press' tracking beacon is - and what it isn't

Other articles by Zachary M Seward in Niemanlab Jounralism Lab

Associated Press

Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers Association

America's press-radio war of the 1930s: a case study in battles between old and new media' by Gwenyth Jackaway

Is the Internet Bad News? The Online News Era and the Market for High-Quality News' by Paul Frijters and Malathi Velamuri

Italian Antitrust Authority Press Release

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What Have We Done to Democracy?

Arundhati Roy / TomDispatch.com

This article was published previously on TomDispatch.

While we’re still arguing about whether there’s life after death, can we add another question to the cart: Is there life after democracy? What sort of life will it be? By “democracy” I don’t mean democracy as an ideal or an aspiration. I mean the working model: Western liberal democracy, and its variants, such as they are.

So, is there life after democracy?

Attempts to answer this question often turn into a comparison of different systems of governance, and end with a somewhat prickly, combative defense of democracy. It’s flawed, we say. It isn’t perfect, but it’s better than everything else that’s on offer. Inevitably, someone in the room will say: “Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia ... is that what you would prefer?”

Whether democracy should be the utopia that all “developing” societies aspire to is a separate question altogether. (I think it should. The early, idealistic phase can be quite heady.) The question about life after democracy is addressed to those of us who already live in democracies, or in countries that pretend to be democracies. It isn’t meant to suggest that we lapse into older, discredited models of totalitarian or authoritarian governance. It’s meant to suggest that the system of representative democracy—too much representation, too little democracy—needs some structural adjustment.

The question here, really, is what have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions has metastasized into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximizing profit?

Is it possible to reverse this process? Can something that has mutated go back to being what it used to be? What we need today, for the sake of the survival of this planet, is long-term vision. Can governments whose very survival depends on immediate, extractive, short-term gain provide this? Could it be that democracy, the sacred answer to our short-term hopes and prayers, the protector of our individual freedoms and nurturer of our avaricious dreams, will turn out to be the endgame for the human race? Could it be that democracy is such a hit with modern humans precisely because it mirrors our greatest folly—our nearsightedness?

Our inability to live entirely in the present (like most animals do), combined with our inability to see very far into the future, makes us strange in-between creatures, neither beast nor prophet. Our amazing intelligence seems to have outstripped our instinct for survival. We plunder the earth hoping that accumulating material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable thing that we have lost. It would be conceit to pretend I have the answers to any of these questions. But it does look as if the beacon could be failing and democracy can perhaps no longer be relied upon to deliver the justice and stability we once dreamed it would.

A Clerk of Resistance

As a writer, a fiction writer, I have often wondered whether the attempt to always be precise, to try and get it all factually right somehow reduces the epic scale of what is really going on. Does it eventually mask a larger truth? I worry that I am allowing myself to be railroaded into offering prosaic, factual precision when maybe what we need is a feral howl, or the transformative power and real precision of poetry.

Something about the cunning, Brahmanical, intricate, bureaucratic, file-bound, “apply-through-proper-channels” nature of governance and subjugation in India seems to have made a clerk out of me. My only excuse is to say that it takes odd tools to uncover the maze of subterfuge and hypocrisy that cloaks the callousness and the cold, calculated violence of the world’s favorite new superpower. Repression “through proper channels” sometimes engenders resistance “through proper channels.” As resistance goes this isn’t enough, I know. But for now, it’s all I have. Perhaps someday it will become the underpinning for poetry and for the feral howl.

Today, words like “progress” and “development” have become interchangeable with economic “reforms,” “deregulation,” and “privatization.” Freedom has come to mean choice. It has less to do with the human spirit than with different brands of deodorant. Market no longer means a place where you buy provisions. The “market” is a de-territorialized space where faceless corporations do business, including buying and selling “futures.” Justice has come to mean human rights (and of those, as they say, “a few will do”).

This theft of language, this technique of usurping words and deploying them like weapons, of using them to mask intent and to mean exactly the opposite of what they have traditionally meant, has been one of the most brilliant strategic victories of the tsars of the new dispensation. It has allowed them to marginalize their detractors, deprive them of a language to voice their critique and dismiss them as being “anti-progress,” “anti-development,” “anti-reform,” and of course “anti-national”—negativists of the worst sort.

Talk about saving a river or protecting a forest and they say, “Don’t you believe in progress?” To people whose land is being submerged by dam reservoirs, and whose homes are being bulldozed, they say, “Do you have an alternative development model?” To those who believe that a government is duty bound to provide people with basic education, health care, and social security, they say, “You’re against the market.” And who except a cretin could be against markets?

To reclaim these stolen words requires explanations that are too tedious for a world with a short attention span, and too expensive in an era when Free Speech has become unaffordable for the poor. This language heist may prove to be the keystone of our undoing.

Two decades of “Progress” in India has created a vast middle class punch-drunk on sudden wealth and the sudden respect that comes with it—and a much, much vaster, desperate underclass. Tens of millions of people have been dispossessed and displaced from their land by floods, droughts, and desertification caused by indiscriminate environmental engineering and massive infrastructural projects, dams, mines, and Special Economic Zones. All developed in the name of the poor, but really meant to service the rising demands of the new aristocracy.

The hoary institutions of Indian democracy—the judiciary, the police, the “free” press, and, of course, elections—far from working as a system of checks and balances, quite often do the opposite. They provide each other cover to promote the larger interests of Union and Progress. In the process, they generate such confusion, such a cacophony, that voices raised in warning just become part of the noise. And that only helps to enhance the image of the tolerant, lumbering, colorful, somewhat chaotic democracy. The chaos is real. But so is the consensus.

A New Cold War in Kashmir

Speaking of consensus, there’s the small and ever-present matter of Kashmir. When it comes to Kashmir the consensus in India is hard core. It cuts across every section of the establishment—including the media, the bureaucracy, the intelligentsia, and even Bollywood.

The war in the Kashmir valley is almost 20 years old now, and has claimed about 70,000 lives. Tens of thousands have been tortured, several thousand have “disappeared,” women have been raped, tens of thousands widowed. Half a million Indian troops patrol the Kashmir valley, making it the most militarized zone in the world. (The United States had about 165,000 active-duty troops in Iraq at the height of its occupation.) The Indian Army now claims that it has, for the most part, crushed militancy in Kashmir. Perhaps that’s true. But does military domination mean victory?

How does a government that claims to be a democracy justify a military occupation? By holding regular elections, of course. Elections in Kashmir have had a long and fascinating past. The blatantly rigged state election of 1987 was the immediate provocation for the armed uprising that began in 1990. Since then elections have become a finely honed instrument of the military occupation, a sinister playground for India’s deep state. Intelligence agencies have created political parties and decoy politicians, they have constructed and destroyed political careers at will. It is they more than anyone else who decide what the outcome of each election will be. After every election, the Indian establishment declares that India has won a popular mandate from the people of Kashmir.

In the summer of 2008, a dispute over land being allotted to the Amarnath Shrine Board coalesced into a massive, nonviolent uprising. Day after day, hundreds of thousands of people defied soldiers and policemen—who fired straight into the crowds, killing scores of people—and thronged the streets. From early morning to late in the night, the city reverberated to chants of “Azadi! Azadi!” (Freedom! Freedom!). Fruit sellers weighed fruit chanting “Azadi! Azadi!” Shopkeepers, doctors, houseboat owners, guides, weavers, carpet sellers—everybody was out with placards, everybody shouted “Azadi! Azadi!” The protests went on for several days.

The protests were massive. They were democratic, and they were nonviolent. For the first time in decades fissures appeared in mainstream public opinion in India. The Indian state panicked. Unsure of how to deal with this mass civil disobedience, it ordered a crackdown. It enforced the harshest curfew in recent memory with shoot-on-sight orders. In effect, for days on end, it virtually caged millions of people. The major pro-freedom leaders were placed under house arrest, several others were jailed. House-to-house searches culminated in the arrests of hundreds of people.

Once the rebellion was brought under control, the government did something extraordinary—it announced elections in the state. Pro-independence leaders called for a boycott. They were rearrested. Almost everybody believed the elections would become a huge embarrassment for the Indian government. The security establishment was convulsed with paranoia. Its elaborate network of spies, renegades, and embedded journalists began to buzz with renewed energy. No chances were taken. (Even I, who had nothing to do with any of what was going on, was put under house arrest in Srinagar for two days.)

Calling for elections was a huge risk. But the gamble paid off. People turned out to vote in droves. It was the biggest voter turnout since the armed struggle began. It helped that the polls were scheduled so that the first districts to vote were the most militarized districts even within the Kashmir valley.

None of India’s analysts, journalists, and psephologists cared to ask why people who had only weeks ago risked everything, including bullets and shoot-on-sight orders, should have suddenly changed their minds. None of the high-profile scholars of the great festival of democracy—who practically live in TV studios when there are elections in mainland India, picking apart every forecast and exit poll and every minor percentile swing in the vote count—talked about what elections mean in the presence of such a massive, year-round troop deployment (an armed soldier for every 20 civilians).

No one speculated about the mystery of hundreds of unknown candidates who materialized out of nowhere to represent political parties that had no previous presence in the Kashmir valley. Where had they come from? Who was financing them? No one was curious. No one spoke about the curfew, the mass arrests, the lockdown of constituencies that were going to the polls.

Not many talked about the fact that campaigning politicians went out of their way to de-link Azadi and the Kashmir dispute from elections, which they insisted were only about municipal issues—roads, water, electricity. No one talked about why people who have lived under a military occupation for decades—where soldiers could barge into homes and whisk away people at any time of the day or night—might need someone to listen to them, to take up their cases, to represent them.

The minute elections were over, the establishment and the mainstream press declared victory (for India) once again. The most worrying fallout was that in Kashmir, people began to parrot their colonizers’ view of themselves as a somewhat pathetic people who deserved what they got. “Never trust a Kashmiri,” several Kashmiris said to me. “We’re fickle and unreliable.” Psychological warfare, technically known as psy-ops, has been an instrument of official policy in Kashmir. Its depredations over decades—its attempt to destroy people’s self-esteem—are arguably the worst aspect of the occupation. It’s enough to make you wonder whether there is any connection at all between elections and democracy.

The trouble is that Kashmir sits on the fault lines of a region that is awash in weapons and sliding into chaos. The Kashmiri freedom struggle, with its crystal clear sentiment but fuzzy outlines, is caught in the vortex of several dangerous and conflicting ideologies—Indian nationalism (corporate as well as “Hindu,” shading into imperialism), Pakistani nationalism (breaking down under the burden of its own contradictions), U.S. imperialism (made impatient by a tanking economy), and a resurgent medieval-Islamist Taliban (fast gaining legitimacy, despite its insane brutality, because it is seen to be resisting an occupation). Each of these ideologies is capable of a ruthlessness that can range from genocide to nuclear war. Add Chinese imperial ambitions, an aggressive, reincarnated Russia, and the huge reserves of natural gas in the Caspian region and persistent whispers about natural gas, oil, and uranium reserves in Kashmir and Ladakh, and you have the recipe for a new Cold War (which, like the last one, is cold for some and hot for others).

In the midst of all this, Kashmir is set to become the conduit through which the mayhem unfolding in Afghanistan and Pakistan spills into India, where it will find purchase in the anger of the young among India’s 150 million Muslims who have been brutalized, humiliated, and marginalized. Notice has been given by the series of terrorist strikes that culminated in the Mumbai attacks of 2008.

There is no doubt that the Kashmir dispute ranks right up there, along with Palestine, as one of the oldest, most intractable disputes in the world. That does not mean that it cannot be resolved. Only that the solution will not be completely to the satisfaction of any one party, one country, or one ideology. Negotiators will have to be prepared to deviate from the “party line.”

Of course, we haven’t yet reached the stage where the government of India is even prepared to admit that there’s a problem, let alone negotiate a solution. Right now it has no reason to. Internationally, its stocks are soaring. And while its neighbors deal with bloodshed, civil war, concentration camps, refugees, and army mutinies, India has just concluded a beautiful election. However, “demon-crazy” can’t fool all the people all the time. India’s temporary, shotgun solutions to the unrest in Kashmir (pardon the pun), have magnified the problem and driven it deep into a place where it is poisoning the aquifers.

Is Democracy Melting?

Perhaps the story of the Siachen Glacier, the highest battlefield in the world, is the most appropriate metaphor for the insanity of our times. Thousands of Indian and Pakistani soldiers have been deployed there, enduring chill winds and temperatures that dip to minus 40 degrees Celsius. Of the hundreds who have died there, many have died just from the elements.

The glacier has become a garbage dump now, littered with the detritus of war—thousands of empty artillery shells, empty fuel drums, ice axes, old boots, tents, and every other kind of waste that thousands of warring human beings generate. The garbage remains intact, perfectly preserved at those icy temperatures, a pristine monument to human folly.

While the Indian and Pakistani governments spend billions of dollars on weapons and the logistics of high-altitude warfare, the battlefield has begun to melt. Right now, it has shrunk to about half its size. The melting has less to do with the military standoff than with people far away, on the other side of the world, living the good life. They’re good people who believe in peace, free speech, and in human rights. They live in thriving democracies whose governments sit on the U.N. Security Council and whose economies depend heavily on the export of war and the sale of weapons to countries like India and Pakistan. (And Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia, the Republic of Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan … it’s a long list.)

The glacial melt will cause severe floods on the subcontinent, and eventually severe drought that will affect the lives of millions of people. That will give us even more reasons to fight. We’ll need more weapons. Who knows? That sort of consumer confidence may be just what the world needs to get over the current recession. Then everyone in the thriving democracies will have an even better life—and the glaciers will melt even faster.

Arundhati Roy was born in 1959 in Shillong, India. She studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives. She has worked as a film designer and screenplay writer in India. Roy is the author of the novel “The God of Small Things,” for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize. Her new book, just published by Haymarket Books, is “Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers.” This post is adapted from the introduction to that book.

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Our Evanescent Culture And the Awesome Duty of Librarians

How secure is our civilization’s accumulated knowledge?

It is a question that, in a fundamental sense, transcends many life-and-death concerns (threats of sickness, natural disaster, or military invasion) that prompt us collectively to spend fortunes on insurance, health care, and weaponry. We know that we each individually will die, though we are willing to go to great lengths to delay the event as long as possible. But we have an overarching shared interest that the world of ideas will go on without us: that our descendants will continue to compose music, invent tools, refine scientific knowledge, and write histories, extending into the indefinite future the cumulative, constantly evolving universe of signs, symbols, and skills that have enriched our lives. Cultural death—the passing of the wisdom, artistic creations, and practical knowledge of an entire people, painstakingly built up over many generations—is a loss almost too wrenching to contemplate.

Yet cultural death happens. The examples from history are legion. Anthropologists and archaeologists have identified well over 10,000 distinct human cultures, of which most have perished, many by absorption into one multi-ethnic civilization or another. Linguists have catalogued over 6,000 human languages; again, most are extinct or endangered, often for a similar reason—absorption of indigenous populations into multi-ethnic urban civilizations. But civilizations are also mortal: about 24 are known to have existed over the past 5,000 years, and again most are now dust.

Here is perhaps the most salient fact: when past civilizations were in the process of decline and collapse, they seem to have given insufficient thought to preserving the best of their achievements; indeed, the reverse often happened—libraries were burned, statues defaced, tombs looted. Archaeologists make heroic efforts to piece together the histories of these vanished empires, but they face enormous hurdles. Even the monumental and long-lasting civilization of ancient Egypt left behind more questions about itself than answers: we’re not even sure how much arithmetic and geography the average educated Egyptian knew.

It might seem that our own civilization’s achievements are less vulnerable. After all, the sheer weight, volume, and variety of contemporary cultural materials is unprecedented, including hundreds of millions of books, and more hundreds of millions of newspapers, magazines, paintings, sculptures, photographs, motion picture films, phonograph records, CDs, DVDs, websites, and on and on.

But all this volume and diversity may be deceiving. In some respects our culture is arguably more ephemeral than most others, and a surprisingly large proportion of our cultural materials is in danger of being swept away with astonishing speed, leaving virtually no trace—like a candle flame vanishing in a puff of wind.

If we want future generations to have the benefit of our achievements, we should start thinking more seriously about what to preserve, and how to preserve it.

The Ascendancy of Electronic Media

The survival struggle of America’s remaining newspapers is symptomatic of a trend that began in the 1970s, when computers began finding their way into businesses, schools, and homes. Today many of us get our news from the screen, not from the local print daily—and the proportion is growing. Major newspapers like the New York Times now have robust websites to accompany their print editions; but many industry forecasters say the print editions may not survive. Even before the beginning of the current recession, newspaper advertising revenues were declining steeply, and this year daily average circulation for 395 newspapers has fallen 7.1 percent to 34.4 million (from 37.1 million last year). In recent months the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have ceased print news operations, and both the Chicago Sun Times and the Tribune have filed for bankruptcy.

The magazine and book trades are likewise evolving quickly under pressure from the Internet. Something like 50,000 new book titles still appear each year, and the book industry remains profitable in most years; however, according to Book Industry TRENDS 2009, many insiders think advances in digital publishing will force an unprecedented transformation of the industry, as ever fewer books are released in print versions and more in online or e-book formats—a trend already sweeping the textbook sector.

As with newspapers, most magazines now publish their content online, and some (like The Ecologist) have already gone all-electronic, jettisoning their print versions. Perhaps the most economically secure of print publications are also the most ephemeral in their content—People magazine and other fixtures of the supermarket checkout line.

The production processes for books, magazines, and newspapers—from writing to typesetting, printing, and distribution—are already thoroughly computerized.

Digitization has nearly completed its takeover of the motion picture, photography, and music industries. Just try to buy a package of Kodachrome film for your 35mm camera, or an analog recording of your favorite band’s latest songs. And with the explosive growth of I-tunes, YouTube (and other sources of streaming video), and online photo galleries, the Internet is gradually becoming the primary delivery medium for all these media.

Libraries are being forced to adapt, as they face enormous pressure to expand digital media at the expense of traditional media. For archivists, the emerging trend can be summarized in one word: digitization. Whether the original exists on paper, vinyl, or celluloid, its future lies in endless strings of ones and zeroes encoded on magnetic or laser-etched media, which will presumably preserve the original content while making it accessible to millions or billions of people today and in future generations.

At the same time, the very function of libraries is up for grabs: a presentation at the 2008 American Library Association conference reported in Library Journal suggested that libraries should be “more and more a place to do stuff, not just to find stuff. We need to stop being a grocery store and start being a kitchen.” As libraries become multi-purpose cultural centers (in many occasions serving as informal daytime homeless shelters), one of their primary practical functions is the provision of free public Internet access, with computer included. Yet these new demands and functions arrive at a time when funding for libraries is shrinking, as city and state budgets are downsized to fit evaporating tax revenues.

Preservation of digitized knowledge can become a problem simply because of obsolescence. Think of the billions of floppy disks manufactured and encoded during the years between 1980 and 2000: few of us still have working computers capable of retrieving the data on those disks. But this is hardly the worldwide information system’s point of greatest vulnerability.

Ultimately the entire project of digitized cultural preservation depends on one thing: electricity. As soon as the power goes off, access to the Internet goes down. CDs and DVDs become meaningless plastic disks; e-books become inscrutable and useless; digital archives become as illegible as cuneiform tablets—or more so. Altogether, digitization represents a huge bet on society’s ability to keep the lights on forever.

Without precious kilowatts, what would survive? Sculpture and architecture would persist. Previous generations of sound and visual media might be decipherable: old phonograph records could still be made to emit music, given a hand crank, needle, and megaphone, and silent films would be relatively easy to show. Books and collections of physical newspapers and magazines would fare reasonably well for a few decades, but deteriorating acid-laden paper threatens the survival of about 85 percent of books and nearly 100 percent of newspapers and magazines (ancient books written on parchment and acid-free paper could last many more centuries).

It’s ironic to think that the cave paintings of Lascaux may be far more durable than the photos from the Hubble space telescope.

Altogether, if the lights were to go out now, in just a century or two the vast majority of our recently recorded knowledge would be gone or inaccessible.

How Likely Is Blackout?

If we could be fully confident that a more-or-less permanent blackout is unthinkable, then this discussion would be a purely academic exercise. Where might such confidence come from?

Two questions could help us assess the magnitude of risk: What has to go wrong for the lights to go out?, and, What has to go right for them to stay on?

Here’s a short list of what would have to go wrong:

• Failure to replace aging infrastructure. All knowledgeable observers agree that North America’s electricity grid system is overdue for a massive upgrade. According to electrical industry consultant Jason Makansi in his 2007 book Lights Out: The Electricity Crisis, the Global Economy, What it Means to You, “You almost can’t read a report on the U.S. electricity industry that doesn’t decry the state of the nation’s transmission grid.” The consequences of failure to invest tens of billions in new infrastructure will be more frequent and ever-longer blackouts and brownouts, leading perhaps to electricity rationing and a host of fairly dire economic impacts.
• Unavailability of sufficient investment capital. Replacing infrastructure will require capital and political will. The current grid was built when energy was cheap, demand for electricity was lower, and the economy was growing at a rapid pace. Today investment capital is scarce, so the Federal government will have to pay for most of the grid upgrade. But the U.S. budget is already overextended in paying for bailout and stimulus packages, not to mention a couple of lingering wars. Until an unavoidable crisis arises, grid investment is likely to continue being moved back in the line of projects needing money.
• Inability of the industry to maintain sufficient supplies of fossil fuels for electricity generation. In my new book Blackout, I discuss credible reports suggesting that U.S. coal production could peak in the years between 2020 and 2030 and decline afterward, with prices for the resource inevitably escalating. Natural gas seems plentiful for the time being, but continued exploration and production from new shale gas plays require high gas prices; further, problems with well productivity and low energy return on energy invested may render the new gas plays a mere flash in the pan.
• Inability of alternatives to make up for fossil fuels. If higher-priced and soon-to-be scarce coal and gas could be easily, quickly, and cheaply replaced with other energy sources, fossil fuel supply limits would pose no problem. However, all of the available alternatives are problematic in one way or another. Yes, we could have more wind, solar, geothermal, and tidal power—but it will take time and enormous amounts of investment capital (see above), and most of these alternatives are intermittent energy sources. (Post Carbon Institute and International Forum on Globalization have prepared a lengthy, soon-to-be published report, Searching for a Miracle: “Net Energy” and the Fate of Industrial Societies, that examines 18 energy sources across 10 criteria, concluding that no combination of alternatives is likely to be able to replace fossil fuels within a reasonable time frame, and that therefore the world must rely on energy conservation as its primary strategy to deal with climate change as well as oil, coal, and gas depletion.)
• Nuclear war. The electromagnetic pulse generated by the explosion of hydrogen bombs has the capacity to fry the grid, and hundreds of millions of electrical devices plugged into it, nearly instantaneously. For war planners, this possibility is not only real and credible, it is one of the greatest causes of worry with regard to national survival following any nuclear exchange.
• Systemic vulnerabilities. We live in a world that is increasingly interconnected, and in which the pursuit of economic efficiency has reduced overall resilience. In such a system, problems in one area have a way of spilling over to create more problems elsewhere. For example, difficulties with oil supply will also eventually impact the electricity system, since spare parts and fuel (coal) for that system are made and/or transported with oil; similarly, problems with the electric grid will impact oil supply, since pumps and refineries require alternating current. Similarly, natural disasters, sabotage, social breakdown, and economic collapse could have knock-on effects (some too circuitous to predict) that would imperil continued, reliable delivery of electrical power.

What has to go right in order to avert grid breakdown? In many respects, this list could be a mirror image of the previous one:

• Successful massive investments in grid upgrades. As discussed above, these are far from being assured.
• A rapid, successful conversion to alternative energy sources. Again, as mentioned above, this is a long shot at best.
• Averting of international conflicts that might go nuclear. So far, so good….
• Averting of grid breakdowns due to natural disasters, etc., or rapid recovery from such problems. Society has been able to do this for decades: even in the cases of hurricanes, earthquakes, and wars, recovery was usually rapid. But increasingly crises are becoming synergetic.

The breakdown of electricity supply systems is not just a matter of theory. In about 100 nations around the globe, supplies of power are already problematic. Consider just one example: the nuclear-armed nation of Pakistan. Here is a quote from an article posted earlier this year on the website All Things Pakistan:

While rolling blackouts or load shedding as its locally known has always been a staple of daily life in Pakistan, the problem has become acute in the last couple of years. In the second half of December, the situation got so bad that WAPDA & KESC (power generation entities in Pakistan) resorted to draconian levels of load shedding. The power cuts during this time amounted to 20-22 hours a day in most small cities and even cities like Karachi were seeing 18+ hours of load shedding.

Pakistan is a poor, politically unstable country; surely nothing like this could ever happen in a wealthy industrial nation! Yet consider the situation in Britain: a recent article in the Telegraph was headlined, “Britain Heading Back to the Dark Ages: The UK is facing a tipping point over the next few years in its ability to generate enough power to satisfy an ever-increasing demand.” The article notes: “Over the next 10 years, one third of Britain’s power-generating capacity needs to be replaced with cleaner fuels, as a result of European laws on pollution. By 2025 the situation is expected to worsen….” Another article, this one from the BBC, is titled, “Britain Could Face Blackouts by 2016”; it quotes David MacKay, a researcher at Cambridge University and soon-to-be government energy advisor, as saying, “The scale of building required [to avert blackouts] is absolutely enormous.”

Generating electricity is not all that difficult in principle; people have been doing it since the 19th century. But generating power in large amounts, reliably, without both cheap energy inputs and secure availability of spare parts and investment capital for maintenance, poses an increasing challenge.

To be sure, here in the U.S. the lights are unlikely to go out all at once, and permanently, any time soon. The most likely scenario would see a gradual increase in rolling blackouts and other forms of power rationing, beginning in a few years, with some regions better off than others. After a while, unless governments and utilities could muster the needed effort, electricity might increasingly be seen as a luxury, even a curiosity. Reliable, ubiquitous, 24/7 power would become just a dim memory. If the challenges noted above are not addressed, many nations, including the U.S., could be in such straits by the third decade of the century. In the best instance, nations would transition as much as possible to renewable power, maintaining a functioning national grid or network of local distribution systems, but supplying rationed power in smaller amounts than is the currently the case. Digitized data would still be retrievable part of the time, by some people.

In the worst instance, economic and social crises, wars, fuel shortages, and engineering problems would rebound upon one another, creating a snowballing pattern of systemic failures leading to permanent, total blackout.

It may seem inconceivable that it would ever come to that. After all, electrical power means so much to us that we assume that officials in charge will do whatever is necessary to keep the electrons flowing. But, as Jared Diamond documents in his book Collapse, elites don’t always do the sensible thing even when the alternative to rational action is universal calamity.

Altogether, the assumption that long-term loss of power is unthinkable just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. A permanent blackout scenario should exist as a contingency in our collective planning process.

Remember Websites?

Over the short term, if the power were to go out, loss of cultural knowledge would not be at the top of most people’s lists of concerns. They would worry about more mundane necessities like refrigeration, light, heat, and banking. It takes only a few moments of reflection (or an experience of living through a natural disaster) to appreciate how many of life’s daily necessities and niceties would be suddenly absent.

Of course, everyone did live without power until only a few generations ago, and hundreds of millions of people worldwide still manage in its absence. So it is certainly possible to carry on the essential aspects of human life sans functioning wall outlets. One could argue that, post-blackout, there would be a period of adaptation, during which people would reformulate society and simply get on with their business—living perhaps in a manner similar to their 19th century ancestors or the contemporary Amish.

The problem with that reassuring picture is that we have come to rely on electricity for so many things—and have so completely let go of knowledge, skills, and machinery that could enable us to live without electrical power—that the adaptive process might not go well. For the survivors, a 19th century way of life might not be attainable without decades or centuries spent re-acquiring knowledge and skills, and re-inventing machinery.

Imagine the scene, perhaps two decades from now. After years of gradually lengthening brownouts and blackouts, your town’s power has been down for days, and no one knows if or when it can be restored. No one is even sure if the blackout is statewide or nation-wide, because radio broadcasts have become more sporadic. The able members of your community band together to solve the mounting practical problems threatening your collective existence. You hold a meeting.

Someone brings up the problems of water delivery and wastewater treatment: the municipal facilities require power to supply these essential services. A woman in the back of the room speaks: “I once read about how you can purify water with a ceramic pot, some sand, and charcoal. It’s on a website….” Her voice trails off. There are no more websites.

The conversation turns to food. Now that the supermarkets are closed (no functioning lights or cash registers) and emptied by looters, it’s obviously a good idea to encourage backyard and community gardening. But where should townspeople get their seeds? A middle-aged gentleman pipes up: “There’s this great mail-order seed company—just go online….” He suddenly looks confused and sits down. “Online” is a world that no longer exists.

Is There Something We Should Be Doing?

There is a message here for leaders at all levels of government and business—obviously so for emergency response organizations. But I’ve singled out librarians in this essay because they may bear the gravest responsibility of all in preparing for the possible end of electric civilization.

Without widely available practical information, recovery from a final blackout would be difficult in the extreme. Therefore it is important that the kinds of information that people would need are identified, and that the information is preserved in such a way that it will be accessible under extreme circumstances, and to folks in widely scattered places.

Of course, librarians can never bear sole responsibility for cultural preservation; it takes a village, as Hillary Clinton once proclaimed in another context. Books are clearly essential to cultural survival, but they are just inert objects in the absence of people who can read them; we also need skills-based education to keep alive both the practical and the performing arts. What good is a set of parts to the late Beethoven string quartets—arguably the greatest music our species has ever produced—if there’s no one around who can play the violin, viola, or cello well enough to make sense of them? And what good would a written description of horse-plowing do to a post-industrial farmer without the opportunity to learn hands-on from someone with experience?

Nevertheless, for librarians the message could not be clearer: Don’t let books die. It’s understandable that librarians spend much effort trying to keep up with the digital revolution in information storage and retrieval: their main duty is to serve their community as it is, not a community that existed decades ago or one that may exist decades hence. Yet the thought that they may be making the materials they are trying to preserve ever more vulnerable to loss should be cause for pause.

There is a task that needs doing: the conservation of essential cultural knowledge in non-digital form. This task will require the sorting and evaluation of information for its usefulness to cultural survival—triage, if you will—as well as its preservation. It may be unrealistic to expect librarians to take on this responsibility, given their existing mandate and lack of resources—but who else will do it? Librarians catalog, preserve, and make available accumulated cultural materials, especially those in written form. That’s their job. What profession is better suited to accept this charge?

* * *

The contemplation of electric civilization’s collapse can’t help but provoke philosophical musings. Perhaps cultural death is a necessary component of evolution—as is the death of individual organisms. In any case, no one can prevent culture from changing, and many aspects of our present culture arguably deserve to disappear (we each probably carry our own list around in our head of what kinds of music, advertising messages, and television shows we think the world could do without). Assuming that humans survive the current century—by no means a sure thing—another culture will arise sooner or later to replace our current electric civilization. Its co-creators will inevitably use whatever skills and notions are at hand to cobble it together (just as the inhabitants of Europe in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance drew upon cultural flotsam from the Roman Empire as well as influences from the Arab world), and it will gradually assume a life of its own. Still, we must ask: What cultural ingredients might we want to pass along to our descendants? What cultural achievements would we want to be remembered by?

Civilization has come at a price. Since the age of Sumer cities have been terrible for the environment, leading to deforestation, loss of topsoil, and reduced biodiversity. There have been human costs as well, in the forms of economic inequality (which hardly existed in pre-state societies) and loss of personal autonomy. These costs have grown to unprecedented levels with the advent of industrialism—civilization on crack—and have been borne not by civilization’s beneficiaries, but primarily by other species and people in poor nations and cultures. But nearly all of us who are aware of these costs like to think of this bargain-with-the-devil as having some purpose greater than a temporary increase in creature comforts, safety, and security for a minority within society. The full-time division of labor that is the hallmark of civilization has made possible science—with its enlightening revelations about everything from human origins to the composition of the cosmos. The arts and philosophy have developed to degrees of sophistication and sublimity that escape the descriptive capacity of words.

Yet so much of what we have accomplished, especially in the last few decades, currently requires for its survival the perpetuation and growth of energy production and consumption infrastructure—which exact a continued, escalating environmental and human toll. At some point, this all has to stop, or at least wind down to some more sustainable scale of pillage.

But if it does, and in the process we lose the best of what we have achieved, will it all have been for nothing?

MuseLetter 209 / October 2009 by Richard Heinberg
Download printable PDF version here (PDF, 123 KB)

richardheinberg.com

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What "Capitalism" Is Not

If I were to summarize message Michael Moore's new movie, Capitalism: A Love Story in one sentence, it would be this: Capitalism is not a form of government. That's the answer to the question posed at the beginning of the movie, via 1950s educational/propaganda films.

Capitalism is not a form of government. It is a tool we've allowed to be used as a weapon. We threw out the instructions and rules for its usage, and it became a weapon — much like a hammer can be used to build a house or smash a skull, depending on whether it's wielded by a carpenter or a psychopath.

Moore spends the rest of the movie showing us how we not only tossed out the rules, but junked every other tool in our collective toolbox, and left ourselves with the hammer. But everything is not a nail, and the hammer isn't suited to every aspect of the task in front of us. Moore gives us until the end of the movie to figure out what that seemingly abandoned task might be.

Capitalism is populated by people whose names we know and people whose names we don't — all characters in what Michael Moore has subtitled "a love story." We know the speeches of the former, and the stories of the latter, because we've watched those same stories unfold in our own communities in the last couple of years. The speeches were intended to arouse our passions, by retelling part the most recent chapter in the story of how we got here — the part that happened on Wall Street and in Washington.

The stories were intended to touch our hearts, by retelling another part of the most recent chapter in the story of how we got here — the part that happened on "Main Street," on our streets, and in our communities; the part that happened to friends, neighbors and family members whose financial decisions weren't any worse that the residents of Wall Street. But one carries bonus checks in their hands, while the other carries boxes and furniture to a truck, dumpster, or fire-pit outside of their homes — or sometimes just to the curb.

For some of the audience, Moore is largely telling us a story that we mostly already know. And for others, Moore's film pulls back the curtain to reveal the reality only seen as faint shadows before, from the other side. Almost anyone who isn't a student of economics, history, business or government will come away with some bit of new bit of knowledge, or a better understanding of what we already know

We know because in a sense we're all in this movie; like players in a soap opera that's run so long nobody remembers the original players or plot. That's part of the paradoxical challenge Moore took on with this film. He must must tell us a story that's at once familiar and unfamiliar.

He reacquaints us with the players we already know: the homeowners facing foreclosure, the "condo vulture" profiting off others' misfortune, and Countrywide VIP loan officer who didn't see anything wrong with what he was doing — though at one point he notes that "the bad loans" were being processed in the office next door, even as he process more desirable loans (waiving fees and paperwork) for special "Friends of Angelo." In the process he humanizes them, rather than lionizing or demonizing them. He neither excuses their decisions or forgives their choices

He goes into archives and digs up old scripts to storyboard the plot-line leading up to this moment — our moment in the ongoing saga. He coaxes the old actors — the staring players and anonymous extras — to have them tell us about their role in the drama.

But then he hands us an incomplete script, with inevitable holes in the story, and no apparent ending. The holes in the story are inevitable. Moore's subject is so broad, with a timeline reaching impossibly far back into our shared history. Working inside the finite timeline of a movie, it's inevitable that Moore had to leave some parts of the story untold. Other parts he must paint with broad strokes, if wants to get in the rest of the story. (If Moore is looking for material for the DVD "extras," the debacles around mortgage reconciliation and credit card reform might be good places to start. Toss in the recent Senate Finance Committee vote on a public option in health care reform, and Moore would have the makings of another movie: on the influence of money in politics.)

Capitalism is not a form of government, nor is it a religion. As Moore points out, despite how often we've been told that it is at completely compatible with religion, it ain't (as the song goes) necessarily so. The prosperity gospel notwithstanding, Moore rather humorously points out what he turns to his own priest and other ministers to address more seriously. They say pretty the same thing that Rev. Howard Bess has written about the health care reform debate.

As a follower of Jesus from Nazareth, I ask all who have taken the name Christian to remember that 1) Jesus was committed to giving people healthy bodies, 2) that Jesus had a priority commitment to the poorest of the poor, and 3) that his warnings to the wealthy and the selfish were relentless.

This is called Bible 101.

I suspect many will balk at the repeated uttering of the words "capitalism" and "evil" at some points in the movie. In America that's bordering on blasphemy and has been for some time. I suspect, however, that at least some of the ministers will concede — as did the bishop who was interviewed — that at the very least capitalism is a tool which has been used for evil purposes, which I'll define as willfully and knowingly engaging in actions that will bring harm to others. The added twist is that using capitalism in such a way usually means doing so for one's own material gain.

While Phil Gramm may consider Wall Street a "holy place" it can hardly be disputed that many powerful people on Wall Street knowingly and willingly engaged in actions that would bring harm to many, and profited from it. They profited from it, and are still profiting from it even as the consequences reach into the live of people far less well off. As the opponents of health care reform have recently taken up the chant "What's wrong with profit?", my guess is that Moore and the ministers he interviews for his movie would agree that the love of profit, and the pursuit of profit above all other considerations is the real problem.

There is a simple answer to the far right's new favorite chant against health care reform - "What's Wrong With Profit?". Nothing. There is nothing inherently wrong with making a profit. But their question misses a point that I recall from my Baptist upbringing and my days as a Sunday school teacher.

It's not money that's "the root of all evil," as the most common misquoting of particular bit of scripture would suggest. It's the love of money that's the "root of all evil." Money itself is neither bad nor good. Money, or profit, is not the problem. It's what we do with it, and what we do for it, that makes the difference. If it becomes our only reason for doing anything we are, as a country, lost.

Capitalism is not a form of government, nor is it a religion. It's a tool, turned into a weapon by our abandoning rules and guidelines for it's use. But it's not the only tool at our disposal. The others actually have been lost so much as neglected, and towards the middle of his film onwards, Moore seeks out those who have picked up those tools and are re-learning how to use them.

Moore probably shows us this because the tool we've clung to, for which we've forsaken the others, is not suited to every aspect of the task in front of us, so long forgotten that we have to be reminded what it is. Here, Moore turns to a man whose name has been invoked over and over again during the current economic crisis — for he defined the task more than a generation ago.

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens.

As Moore relates, Roosevelt did not live to see his second bill of rights become reality. He didn't live to see — as Moore explains — the country roll back the safeguards put in place during his time in office, to prevent another financial disaster, and the consequences visited upon Americans during the Great Depression.

Watch Crash The Next Great Depression (factors that led to the 2008 meltdown -- after the 1929 market crash in Politics | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

TERRANCE HEATH: In his column about the 79th anniversary of the 1929 Wall Street Crash, Professor Maury Klein asked, "Is it 1929 all over again?" Is it?

ROBERT KUTTNER: Yes, this is 1929 all over again. For the same reasons. The crash of 1929 was caused by too much speculation, with too much borrowed money, with too many conflicts of interest and too little transparency. And in the 1930's the New Deal mostly repaired that by much tighter regulation of banks, much stricter supervision of conflict of interest, much greater controls on leverage and much grater disclosure for investors.

But it fixed the problem for the known universe of financial institutions, and after the '70s all kinds of new exotic financial instruments were invented. And because deregulation came back into fashion, and the right wing really took over the conversation as well as government regulators did not keep up with the new instruments that Wall Street invented. And so all the same kinds of uses crept back in, and it took about 20 years until the house of cards was so high and so rickety that you then had the same kind of crash.

TH: When did the rolling back of those New Deal measures start?

RK: Well, it's interesting; it happened in fits and starts. Some of it was deliberate and some of it was simply people taking advantage of other things that had happened. For instance, in the period between 1971 and 1973 the Nixon administration dismantled dismantled one of the main pillars of Bretton Woods from 1944, which had created a regime of fixed exchange rates and along the way prevented a great deal of international speculation in currencies

So, after the 1970s little by little you had a whole category of speculation that had been prohibited by the ground rules obtained in the '50s and '60s, namely a lot of currently speculation. You had the so-called eurodollar market of dollars that existed in Europe that are not really regulated by anybody.

Then in the '70s also you had Wall Street taking something that had been the monopoly of Fannie Mae back when Fannie Mae was a public institution and part of the government, namely the securitization of mortgage, and privatizing it, and having lower standards than Fannie Mae did.

Again this was OK from the first decade or so but then when securitized mortgages rendezvoused with subprime and subprime rendezvoused with contracts written against the risk of bonds going bad, the whole house of cards just goes higher and higher and because in the '80s and the '90s Democrats fingerprints were on this, too. Regulators were not really interested in keeping up with these new risk products that Wall Street invented.

So, then in 1999, the capstone of this is the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. One other aspect of this was Greenspan's failure to enforce the Home Ownership Equity Protection Act of 1994, which, had Greenspan enforced it, subprime never would have happened, because that legislation required anybody who made mortgage loans to use sound underwriting standards. And you had Democrats and Republicans preventing the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from regulating many categories of derivatives.

So it was in the air, the idea that whatever Wall Street invents is by definition efficient, by definition virtuous, by definition self-regulating, and little by little a whole parallel banking system gets created that is beyond the scope of what the regulators can monitor.

Nor did Roosevelt live to see Americans come very close to rejecting the task he defined.

President Obama traveled to Wall Street on the anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers that triggered the worst financial debacle since the Great Depression. His purpose was to challenge Wall Street's barons...

The president invoked country and the common good. "Instead of learning the lessons...of the crisis, [some in the financial industry] are choosing to ignore them. They do so not just at their own peril, but our nation's." Obama called on Wall Street to act on its own, to overhaul pay systems, to level with consumers, to join with him in defining reform, but his tone was almost wistful. As he knows all too well, for much of Wall Street, patriotism is for suckers. And in Washington, private interests are rolling over the common good.

...We are witnessing a harrowing test of our democracy. America is a big, bustling and entrepreneurial country. We pursue our own passions and pursuits, are jealous of our freedoms, and begrudge governmental intrusions. But in a crisis—faced with depression or war, our history tells us many become one. We join together for the common good.

Well, it is hard to imagine a greater crisis than the one this country has faced over the last years. A middle class that has suffered a lost decade. Two wars. The Great Recession. Gilded Age inequality. Catastrophic climate change accelerating faster than most predictions.

Yet, we haven't come together. Wall Street lobbies against reform. Derivative traders will ante up hundreds of millions to block regulation of credit default swaps. Goldman Sachs is back to computerized gambling and billions in bonuses. The insurance companies are spending over a million-and-a-half dollars a day against comprehensive health-care reform.

Close to the end of his movie, after having traveled across the country and revisited various points in history, Moore's journey brings him to the National Archives, for a personal visit with the Constitution. Almost as if in answer to modern day teabaggers who wave "the U.S.S. Constitution" and declare it says nothing about "the government taking over health care," Moore studies it and finds terms like "capitalism" and "free market" strangely absent.

Instead he notes that it repeatedly references the notion of "general welfare."

So I sort of have to wonder why we can be having this health care debate without the whole thing being constantly framed in terms of our general welfare. You know, like it says in the Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America....

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States;

So, where are liberal values in this debate, anyway? Where are America's founding values?

Moore's is in many ways a jeremiad against capitalism, the worship of profit, the sanctification of selfishness, and the suffering it has wrought, but at its a warning that all of the above has brought us perilously to the point of becoming a nation that has abandoned the very idea of the common good.

It's also a reminder that we must not be governed by capitalism, nor should we worship it, but that we should use it — where appropriate — to accomplish the task before us; and where it isn't appropriate to the task, set it aside and pick up another tool.

Having reminded us of that, and shown us the other tools we've abandoned for so long, by the end Moore tells us that the task before us is the same as it was after the crash of 1929, during the Great Depression and the Roosevelt era.

We must restore the common good, and having done so we must maintain it. This time.

Finally — politely, if also wearily — he asks us to "Get to work."

While there is still time.

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The Westminster conspiracy

Former BBC Director General, Greg Dyke, On The Media-Political Opposition To Radical Change

Last month, Greg Dyke, who was the BBC's director general from 2000-2004, described the BBC as part of a "conspiracy" preventing the "radical changes" needed to UK democracy. Speaking at the Liberal Democrat party's conference, Dyke said:

"The evidence that our democracy is failing is overwhelming and yet those with the biggest interest in sustaining the current system - the Westminster village, the media and particularly the political parties, including this one - are the groups most in denial about what is really happening to our democracy." (Brian Wheeler, 'Dyke in BBC "conspiracy" claim,' BBC website, September 20, 2009; http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8265628.stm)

Dyke argued there had never been a greater separation between the "political class" and the public:

"I tried and failed to get the problem properly discussed when I was at the BBC and I was stopped, interestingly, by a combination of the politicos on the board of governors, one of whom [Baroness Sarah Hogg] was married to the man who claimed for cleaning his moat, the cabinet interestingly - the Labour cabinet - who decided to have a meeting, only about what we were trying to discuss, and the political journalists at the BBC.

"Why? Because, collectively, they are all part of the problem. They are part of one Westminster conspiracy. They don't want anything to change. It's not in their interests."

Dyke said the MPs' expenses scandal had been "British democracy's Berlin Wall moment" but the opportunity to change the system was fading. He added:

"It's time to be radical. Our current model was designed for the 18th Century. It doesn't fit 21st Century Britain."

Dyke was also candid about political interference with the BBC. He discussed an internal review of the BBC's political coverage carried out at the beginning of the decade, to which all political parties were asked to contribute. He said: "there was a lot of pressure from the government of the day not to change anything... A lot of the governors were what I call semi-politicians and they liked the present system and.... maybe they were right - it's not the job of the BBC to change the political system and to start questioning the political system. I happen to not agree with that but, you know, we didn't get anywhere."

If these comments were extraordinary, the media response to them was predictable - close to zero coverage in the national UK press. Dyke's speech was covered in three sentences in the Belfast Telegraph on September 21. A longer piece appeared in the Herald (Glasgow) on the same day. In response to our prompting, the website Journalism.co.uk covered the story on September 22. They then contacted Roy Greenslade, who covered the story on his Guardian website blog a day later - the sole national mainstream mention. Greenslade wrote of the story:

"... the national press appears to have ignored it, or missed it altogether. Yet the claim should have generated widespread interest. If true, it requires more probing. If false, it should severely dent Dyke's credibility". (Greenslade, 'Dyke's BBC conspiracy theory,' Greenslade Blog, September 23, 2009;
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2009/sep/23/bbc-greg-dyke)

On September 28, one week after the speech was reported by the BBC, Media Guardian published an article by Maggie Brown titled: 'When trust breaks down: The BBC Trust is under siege from politicians of all parties, rival broadcasters, corporation staff and the viewing public. But is it fulfilling its remit - and, if not, what is the alternative?' Greg Dyke was mentioned, but there was no reference to his whistleblowing comments.

Dyke's comments were important, providing a rare moment of honesty from such a senior insider. They were of clear public interest and doubtless chimed with the concerns of many people outraged by the scandal of MPs' expenses. As discussed, the story was broken on the BBC's own website - a high-profile source familiar to mainstream journalists. So what could explain the lack of interest from all mainstream national newspapers?

The answer is found in the story itself: the national media are indeed part of an elite system which is not interested in discussing, much less effecting, radical political change. Dissident outsiders attempting to challenge the status quo are dismissed as marginal figures. But even high-profile insiders - celebrity managers, journalists, writers, dramatists and diplomats - are ignored.

On September 23, we wrote to the BBC's Brian Wheeler, the journalist who broke the story.

Dear Brian

Hope you're well. I was impressed and amazed by your story, 'Dyke in BBC "conspiracy" claim.'

I would have thought it was important news of great interest to the public that a former BBC director general had described the BBC as part of a "conspiracy" preventing the "radical changes" needed to UK democracy. Isn't it extraordinary that not a single UK national newspaper has reported your story? What do you make of it?

Best wishes

David Edwards

Wheeler replied the same day:

Hi David

Thanks for your comments. I'm afraid I have no idea why the story wasn't picked up by the nationals, although I think Media Guardian may have done something on it. It's sometimes hard to predict which stories will get followed up.

Brian

Wheeler was of course reluctant to speculate (and to reply to our second email) because BBC journalists are not allowed to express their personal opinions - or so we are to believe.

Last month, Milton Coleman, senior editor at The Washington Post, sent a memo to staff on the issue of use of "individual accounts on online social networks, when used for reporting and for personal use". The memo warned staff to "remember that Washington Post journalists are always Washington Post journalists". It added:

"All Washington Post journalists relinquish some of the personal privileges of private citizens... Post journalists must refrain from writing, tweeting or posting anything-including photographs or video-that could be perceived as reflecting political, racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism that could be used to tarnish our journalistic credibility. This same caution should be used when joining, following or friending any person or organization online." (http://paidcontent.org/article/419-wapos-social-media-guidelines-paint-staff-into-virtual-corner/)

These rules echo BBC editorial guidelines. In 2005, we asked the BBC's World Affairs correspondent, Paul Reynolds, if he thought George Bush hoped to create a genuine democracy in Iraq. Reynolds replied:

"I cannot get into a direct argument about his policies myself! Sorry." (Email to Media Lens, September 5, 2005)

Reynolds explained to one of our readers:

"You are asking for my opinion about the war in Iraq yet BBC correspondents are not allowed to have opinions!" (Forwarded to Media Lens, October 22, 2005)

As these comments suggest, media guidelines require that journalists relinquish, not just "personal privileges", but also moral responsibility. Journalists are not free to declare their "bias" even in abhorring mass murder, war crimes and climate chaos, if doing so "could be used to tarnish" their employers' "journalistic credibility". The problem is that the people with the power to do the tarnishing are overwhelmingly of the right - big business and political centres of power dominated by big business.

In reality, the demand for 'balance' means that journalists can say pretty much what they like in favouring powerful interests, but they will be severely castigated for losing 'balance' when they criticise the wrong people. Thus we find that it is not 'biased' to suggest that Britain and America are committed to spreading democracy around the world, but it +is+ 'biased' to suggest that they are responsible for crimes in the Third World. In short, the demand for 'balance' is a weapon of thought control - it is a way of policing and enforcing bias in media performance.

As Greg Dyke made clear, the truth hidden behind the sham of 'balance' is that political journalism works hard to protect an elite system of which it is very much a part.

SUGGESTED ACTION

The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.

Write to the BBC's director general, Mark Thompson. Ask him to respond to Greg Dyke's claim that the BBC is part of a "Westminster conspiracy" to obstruct radical change to the political system:

Email: mark.thompson@bbc.co.uk

Please send a copy of your emails to us
Email: editor@medialens.org

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Democracy Now Transcript - Arundhati Roy

Author Arundhati Roy on the Human Costs of India’s Economic Growth, the View of Obama from New Delhi, and Escalating US Attacks in Af-Pak

Guest:

Arundhati Roy, world-renowned Indian author and global justice activist. Her first novel, The God of Small Things, won the Booker Prize in 1997. Since then she has written numerous essays on war, climate change and the dangers of free market development in India. Her new book, published today by Haymarket Books, is called Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. An adapted introduction to the book is also posted on Tomdispatch.com._

AMY GOODMAN: We turn to a woman the New York Times calls India’s most impassioned critic of globalization and American influence, Arundhati Roy, world-renowned Indian author and global justice activist. Her first novel, The God of Small Things, won the Booker Prize in 1997. She has a new book; it’s called Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. An adapted introduction to the book is posted at tomdispatch.com, called “What Have We Done to Democracy?” Arundhati Roy joins us now from New Delhi, India, on the country’s biggest national holiday of the year.

Arundhati, we welcome you to Democracy Now! And as you listen to this report from the streets of G-20 by our producer Steve Martinez, talk about globalization and what has happened to democracy.

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, that’s a huge subject, Amy. And I think my book—in my book, I discuss it in some detail in terms of what’s happening to India. But as we know now, because of the way the global economy is linked, countries are not—you know, the political systems in countries are also linked, so democracies are linked to dictatorships and military occupations and so on. We know that. We now that some of the main military occupations in the world today are actually administered by democracies: Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir.

But what I think is beginning to be very clear now is that we see now that democracy is sort of fused to the free market, or to the idea of the free market. And so, its imagination has been limited to the idea of profit. And democracy, a few years ago, maybe, you know, even twenty-five years ago, was something that, let’s say, a country like America feared, which was why democracies were being toppled all over the place, like in Chile and so on. But now wars are being waged to restore—to place democracy, because democracy serves the free market, and each of the institutions in democracy, like you look at India, you know, whether it’s the Supreme—whether it’s the courts or whether it’s the media or whether it’s all the other institutions of democracy, they’ve been sort of hollowed out, and just their shells have been replaced, and we play out this charade. And it’s much more complicated for people to understand what’s going on, because there’s so much shadow play.

But really we are facing a crisis. And that’s what I ask. You know, is there life after democracy? And what kind of life will it be? Because democracy has been hollowed out and made meaningless. And when I say “democracy,” I’m not talking about the ideal. You know, I’m not saying that countries that live in dictatorships and under military occupation should not fight for democracy, because the early years of democracy are important and heady. And then we see a strange metastasis taking over.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Arundhati Roy. She’s joining us from New Delhi, India, the world-renowned author, global justice activist. Her book The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize, well known all over the world. Now she has written a new book. Today we will talk about it for the first time in the United States in a national broadcast, Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. We’ll be back with her for the rest of the hour in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We continue with Arundhati Roy, speaking to us from New Delhi, India, talking about India, war and globalization. I’m here with co-host Anjali Kamat. Anjali?

ANJALI KAMAT: The Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers met in New York Sunday on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meeting but failed to agree on a timetable for negotiations. Talks continue to be stalled by the fallout of the November 2008 attack on Mumbai that killed 163 people. India blames Pakistani militants for the attack and has emphasized the need for Pakistan to prosecute those responsible. The Indian Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna told reporters he raised these concerns with his Pakistani counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi.

S.M. KRISHNA: As you are aware, we do have serious and continuing concerns about terrorist and extremist groups in Pakistan, which are—which are a national security risk for us and for our people. Foreign Minister Qureshi conveyed to me the seriousness of his government in bringing to book, through their legal process, those responsible for the terrorist outrage in Mumbai ten months ago.

ANJALI KAMAT: Meanwhile, inside India, the focus has shifted to a different adversary. The stage is set for a major domestic military offensive against an armed group that the Indian prime minister has repeatedly called the country’s, quote, “gravest internal security threat.”

Operation Green Hunt will reportedly send between 75,000 and 100,000 troops to areas seen as Maoist strongholds in central and eastern India. In June, India labeled the Naxalite group, the Communist Party of India—Maoist—a terrorist organization, and earlier this month India’s home minister came to the United States to share counterterror strategies.

The Indian government blames the deaths of nearly 600 people this year on Maoist violence and claims that Maoist rebels are active in twenty out of the twenty-eight states in the country. The Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh outlined the threat to a conference of state police chiefs earlier this month.

PRIME MINISTER MANMOHAN SINGH: In many ways, the left-wing extremism poses perhaps the gravest internal security threat our country faces. We have discussed this in the last five years. And I would like to state, frankly, that we have not achieved as much success as we would have liked in containing this menace.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, to help make sense of what’s unfolding inside the world’s largest democracy, we continue with the Booker Prize award-winning novelist, political essayist, global justice activist Arundhati Roy. She won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize in 2002. She’s the author of a number of collection of essays and the novel The God of Small Things. Her latest book is called Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers.

Can you make sense, Arundhati, of what is happening inside India for an audience around the world?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, let me just pick up on what Anjali was talking about just now, about the assault that’s planned on the so-called Maoists in central India. You know, when September 11th happened, I think some of us had already said that a time would come when poverty would be sort of collapsed and converge into terrorism. And this is exactly what’s happened. The poorest people in this country today are being called terrorists.

And what you have is a huge swath of forest in eastern and central India, spreading from West Bengal through the states of Jharkhand, Orissa and Chhattisgarh. And in these forests live indigenous people. And also in these forests are the biggest deposits of bauxite and iron ore and so on, which huge multinational companies now want to get their hands on. So there’s an MoU [Memorandum of Understanding] on every mountain, on every forest and river in this area.

And about in 2005, let’s say, in central India, the day after the MoU was signed with the biggest sort of corporation in India, Tatas, the government also announced the formation of the Salwa Judum, which is a sort of people’s militia, which is armed and is meant to fight the Maoists in the forest. But the thing is, all this, the Salwa Judum as well as the Maoists, they’re all indigenous people. And in, let’s say, Chhattisgarh, something like the Salwa Judum has been a very cruel militia, you know, burning villages, raping women, burning food crops. I was there recently. Something like 640 villages have been burned. Out of the 350,000, first about 50,000 people moved into roadside police camps, from where this militia was raised by the government. And the rest are simply missing. You know, some are living in cities, you know, eking out a living. Others are just hiding in the forest, coming out, trying to sow their crops, and yet getting, you know, those crops burnt down, their villages burnt down. So there is a sort of civil war raging.

And now, I remember traveling in Orissa a few years ago, when there were not any Maoists, but there were huge sort of mining companies coming in to mine the bauxite. And yet, they kept—all the newspapers kept saying the Maoists are here, the Maoists are here, because it was a way of allowing the government to do a kind of military-style repression. Of course, now they’re openly saying that they want to call out the paramilitary.

And if you look at—for example, if you look at the trajectory of somebody like Chidambaram, who’s India’s home minister, he—you know, he’s a lawyer from Harvard. He was the lawyer for Enron, which pulled off the biggest scam in the history of—corporate scam in the history of India. We’re still suffering from that deal. After that, he was on the board of governors of what is today the biggest mining corporation in the world, called Vedanta, which is mining in Orissa. The day he became finance minister, he resigned from Vedanta. When he was the finance minister, in an interview he said that he would like 85 percent of India to live in cities, which means moving something like 500 million people. That’s the kind of vision that he has.

And now he’s the home minister, calling out the paramilitary, calling out the police, and really forcibly trying to move people out of their lands and homes. And anyone who resisted, whether they’re a Maoist or not a Maoist, are being labeled Maoist. People are being picked up, tortured. There are some laws that have been passed which should not exist in any democracy, laws which make somebody like me saying what I’m saying now to you a criminal offense, for which I could just be jailed. Even sort of thinking an anti-government thought has become illegal. And we’re talking about, you know, as you said, 75,000 to 100,000 security personnel going to war against people who, since independence, which was more than sixty years ago, have no schools, no hospitals, no running water, nothing. And now, now they’re being—now they’re being killed or imprisoned or just criminalized. You know, it’s like if you’re not in the Salwa Judum camp, then you’re a Maoist, and we can kill you. And they are openly celebrating the Sri Lanka solution to terrorism, to terrorism.

ANJALI KAMAT: Arundhati Roy, can you explain a little bit more about how India has so successfully hidden this side of it, this underbelly of democracy that you bring out in your book—murder, disappearances, torture, rapes, thousands—millions of people displaced, whether it’s for development projects or in the process of fighting wars, tens of thousands disappeared in Kashmir, the insurgency that’s being fought, the military that’s fighting the insurgency in the northeast? How is India, on a global stage, continues to be seen as this successful democracy, a place where investors are flooding to?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, precisely because it is a democracy for some of its citizens, you know? And so, in a way, it has—this whole system has somehow created an elite that is now suddenly enriched in the last, you know, twenty years since the advent of the corporate free market. We have a huge middle class that is hugely invested in this sort of a police—or, you know, a police state that isn’t acknowledged as one. So you have—it’s not just a small sort of coterie of generals, like in Burma, or a kind of military dictatorship that’s supported by the US in America. You have a huge constituency in this country that completely supports this whole enterprise, and you have a free media where 90 percent of the turnover of those media houses comes from corporate advertisements and so on. So they’re also free, but free to also embrace this particular model, in which, you know, a small section of people—well, not a small section; there are millions and millions of people, but they are not the majority of the people of this country. The light shines upon this rising middle class, which is, as I said, such a huge number that it’s a very, very attractive market for the whole world.

So, when India opens its markets, you know, because it has opened its markets, and because it’s—you know, international finance is flooding in, and all of that is so attractive, it is allowed to commit genocide in Gujarat; it’s allowed to commit civil war in the center; it’s allowed to have a military occupation in Kashmir, where you have 700,000 soldiers, you know, patrolling that little valley; it’s allowed to have laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act in the northeast, which allows the army to just kill on suspicion. And yet, it’s celebrated. It’s allowed to displace millions of people, but yet it’s celebrated as this real success story, because it has all these institutions in place, even though they’ve been hollowed out.

So you have, for example, a Supreme Court in which there are very erudite judges, and there are some very erudite judgments, but if you look at how it’s actually functioning, it has hollowed out. To criticize the court is a criminal offense. And yet, you have judgments where a judge openly says something like—you know, that—I’ve forgotten the exact words, but how corporate—you know, a corporate company cannot basically commit anything illegal, cannot commit an illegal act, you know? Or you have a judge in court openly talking about, let’s say, Vedanta, which is mining in Orissa for bauxite. And the Norwegian government had pulled out of that project because of the human rights violations and so on; and, you know, for a whole lot of ethical reasons, they pulled out. And in India, you know, the company was taken to court, and a judge openly, in an open court, says that, “OK, we won’t give this contract to Vedanta. We’ll give it to Sterlite, because Sterlite is a very good company. I have shares in it,” omitting to mention that Sterlite is a subsidiary of Vedanta.

You know, but there’s so much fancy footwork. If it was a military dictator, they have would have just said, “Shut up” and “Vedanta will get the project.” But here, there are affidavits and counter-affidavits and a little bit of delay and everything; everyone thinks it’s democracy. You know, you have the Supreme Court hearing on, let’s say, the Parliament attack, where openly the Supreme Court of the world’s greatest democracy says, you know, on the one hand, “We don’t have evidence to prove that the person who was charged is—belongs to a terrorist group,” and a few paras later says, “but the collective conscience of society will only be satisfied if we sentence him to death.” And it’s just said so, blatantly, out there, you know? And you can’t criticize it, because it’s a criminal offense.

AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati Roy, talk about Kashmir. I think it’s something, certainly here in the United States, a conflict people understand very little.

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, Kashmir—Kashmir was an independent sort of kingdom in 1947 at the time of independence and partition. And when—I mean, just to cut a very complicated story short, when partition happened, both India and Pakistan fought over it and hived off parts of it, and both now have military presence in this divided Kashmir. But to give you some idea of the military presence, it’s—you know, let’s say the US has 165,000 troops in Iraq. India has 700,000 troops in Kashmir.

Kashmir used to have a Hindu king and a largely Muslim population, which was very, very backward and so on at the time, because at the time, you know, Muslims were discriminated against by that princely—in that princely state.

But now, for—I mean, in 1990, after a whole series of events, which culminated in a sort of fake election, a rigged election in 1987, there was an armed uprising in Kashmir. And really, since then, it’s been convulsed by militancy and military occupation, encounters, disappearances and so on. Last year, there was a—you know, last year, they began to say everything is normal, you know, tourists are going back to the valley. But, of course, that was just wishful thinking, because there was a huge nonviolent uprising in which hundreds of thousands of people, you know, flocked the streets, day and night, demanding independence. It was put down with military force.

And now, once again, you have a situation where you can hardly walk from, you know, twenty meters without someone with an AK-47 in your face. Sometimes in places like Srinagar, which is the capital, it’s well hidden. But it’s a place where every action, every breath that people, you know, breathe in and breathe out, is kind of controlled by military force. And this is how—you know, people are just being asphyxiated; they cannot breathe.

And, of course, there’s a huge publicity machine. You know, I mean, I’d say that the only difference between what’s happening in Palestine and Kashmir is that, so far, India has not used air power on the people of Kashmir, as they are threatening to do, by the way, in Chhattisgarh, you know, to its own poorest. It has not—you know, the people, technically, they are able to move around, unlike the people of Gaza and the West Bank. Kashmiris are able to move around in the rest of India, though it isn’t really safe, because their young get picked up and disappeared and tortured and so on. So, you know, it’s not something that they easily will do. And there has not been this kind of system of settlements, you know, where you’re trying to sort of take over by pushing in people from the mainland. So, other than those three, I think we’re talking about an outright occupation.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re speaking with the great writer Arundhati Roy, social justice activist. She’s speaking to us from New Delhi, India. When we come back, we’ll talk about India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the view of President Obama from India. This is Democracy Now! Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We continue with our exclusive global broadcast with Arundhati Roy in New Delhi, India, the world-renowned author, social justice activist. Her first book, The God of Small Things, translated all over the world, won the Booker Prize in 1997. Her new book, just out: Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers.

I’m Amy Goodman with Anjali Kamat. Anjali?

ANJALI KAMAT: Arundhati, years ago, under the Bush administration, you called yourself a “subject of empire.” Today, can you talk about what Obama’s America looks like from India, from New Delhi, as the Obama administration expands the war from Afghanistan into Pakistan?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, I think, you know, when people would ask me what I thought of Obama, I said I hope that he would land the American empire gently, like the pilot who landed the—who crash-landed the plane in the Hudson.

Yes, he’s expanding the war in Afghanistan. I think, basically, people, including Obama, just don’t know what to do in Afghanistan, and expanding the war is certainly not going to end that war or create any kind of just peace in that region. It’s, in fact, going to exacerbate the situation, draw Pakistan into it, and when Pakistan is drawn into it, so will India, and so on. So it goes.

I think, you know, the real change that has taken place in the last, you know, ten years is also the rise of India and China as kind of imperial powers, you know, playing out their games in Africa and also in parts of Latin America. So it’s a very—and, of course, the rise of Russia.

So, I think the situation in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir is very volatile. And, of course, let’s not forget that these are nuclear powers, even though a scientist recently has announced that India’s nuclear tests were a damp squib and that they were not successful, but I don’t know what that’s about and why he’s coming out with it now.

But I think we are headed for a lot of chaos. And in India, you know, as I said, while the situation in Kashmir—even now, as I speak in the studio, there’s news coming in of what they call “encounter killings,” you know, almost a few every day. So, obviously, given that nonviolent protest has been put down violently, things are going to go back to a previous era of some kind of militant violence there. And, you know, the heart of India being sort of hollowed out by this civil war and this assault on its poor.

I really don’t know what to say or what to expect, except to say that this kind of pressure can never result in an orderly submission, even if people wanted to submit. What’s going to happen and what is happening is that unpredictable kinds of battles and chaos is erupting all over the place, and, you know, the government is constantly firefighting and trying to douse those flames.

But out of this chaos, something new has to come, and will come, because it cannot go on like this. And I don’t know whether that thing will be worse or will be better, but it can’t go on like this. You know, the kind of polythene bag over our heads has to burst open at some point. You know, we have to be allowed to breathe. And this kind of surveillance and drone attacks and all this that’s being planned is not going to be able to hold down millions of people who are just getting impoverished and hungry and homeless.

ANJALI KAMAT: Arundhati, can you talk about the state of the media in India? You talk about the different institutions of democracy. How would you assess the Indian media, and what is its role in this landscape?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, if I had to talk about the—you know, I mean, the mainstream sort of corporate media, and if I were to have to make a kind of crude statement, I’d say that the mainstream media right now here is not a little to the right of Fox News. You know, that’s what’s going on here. There’s a kind of nationalist howl that I find pretty terrifying. Having said that, I think that, you know, now all we’re left with is to try and find some sane sort of bubbles within that. And there are those.

And, of course, the fact that India is a country where—I mean, forget the media; people don’t—you know, people don’t have access to water and food and basic healthcare. The kind of reach and that mesmeric spell that the media casts in, you know, developed countries, the media can’t in India. In fact, I was actually—you know, when I was in this place, Chhattisgarh, Dantewada, where the war is unfolding, a senior policeman told me, “You know, Arundhati, as a policeman, I can tell you that the police are not going to be able to solve the problem of these indigenous, you know, these Adivasi people”—“Adivasi” is the word for tribal people—“and I have told the government that the problem with these people is that they don’t have any greed. So, the way to solve the problem is to put a TV in every house. Then we’ll be able to win this war.”

So, you know, you have a situation where more and more people are just outside the barcode. You know, they are what you would call “illegible.” And we have a very, very serious situation here, where now they are planning, you know, once again, to make a—what do you call it—a electronic ID card. Of course, once again, to people who don’t have water, who don’t have electricity, who don’t have schools, but they will have ID cards, and people who don’t have ID cards are not going to exist.

But, sorry, I moved away from your question, which was a question about the media. I fear the media greatly here. You know, sometimes, like you see after the attacks in Mumbai, the government was more mature than the media. The media was spoiling for war. It was really—you know, the media and the elite and the urban middle class were spoiling for war. They were just pushing for a war with Pakistan. And so, I’d say highly irresponsible, with very little basis in fact. And a lot of my book is really a response to how the media has behaved over the last few years on very, very crucial issues. And it’s very troubling to live in a place where the media has actually no accountability.

ANJALI KAMAT: Arundhati, can you talk a little bit about encounter deaths? You mentioned this a little earlier in the program. What are police encounters, fake encounters? This is something that’s quite common in India. But can you explain to our audience what you mean by “encounter deaths”?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, what happens now is that, you know, one of the ways in which people—the police and the security establishment deals with, you know, dissent, resistance and terrorism, or what they call terrorism, is to just deliver summary justice: kill people and say, oh, they were killed in an encounter, in cross-firing, or so on, and so on. So, in places like Kashmir and in the northeast, in Manipur and Nagaland, it’s an old tradition. In places like Andhra Pradesh, they had, you know, many, many hundreds of encounter deaths.

And, in fact, recently, there was a photo essay of an encounter death in Manipur, where the, you know, security grid just—security forces just surrounded this young boy. And it was a photo essay, you know. He was unarmed. He was a former militant, I think, who had laid down his arms, and he was in the market. And you just saw a policeman pulling out his gun, shooting him, and then they said, oh, he was killed in crossfire, you know.

So, it’s a very—you have people—we have cops here who are given medals for being encounter specialists. You know, so the more people they’ve killed, the more medals they’ll get. And in places like Kashmir, they actually get promotions. So, in fact, it’s something to be proud of, an encounter killing, for, you know, both the army as well as the police and the counterinsurgency forces.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Arundhati Roy. She’s speaking to us from New Delhi, India. She has just published a new book called Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. Arundhati, why “listening to grasshoppers”?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Oh, it was the name of a lecture that I did in Turkey last year on the anniversary after the death of Hrant Dink, the Armenian journalist who was shot outside his office for daring to talk about the Armenian genocide of 1915, which you’re not supposed to talk about in Turkey. And my lecture was really about the historical links between progress and genocide.

And “listening to grasshoppers” was—referred to the testimony an old lady called Araxie Barsamian, who’s the friend—mother of my friend David Barsamian, who is Armenian and who talked about how, you know, the wheat had ripened in her village in 1915, and suddenly there was this huge swarm of grasshoppers that arrived. And the village elders were very worried about this and said it was a bad omen. And they were right, because a few months later, when the wheat had ripened, the Turks came, and that was the beginning of the Armenian genocide for her.

And so, I talk about—the whole lecture was really about how societies are prepared for genocide and how genocide is, you know, it’s like part of free trade, and how, you know, genocides that are acknowledged, and denied, and prosecuted, all have to—all depend on world trade, and always have done, and about how I worry that a country like India, that is poised on the threshold of progress, could also be poised on the threshold of genocide.

And that essay was written in January of last year. And now, as you see, the troops are closing in on the forest areas where the poorest people live. And they will be sacrificed at the altar of progress, unless we manage to show the world that we have to find a different way of seeing and a different way of going about things.

But here in India, there’s the smell of fascism in the air. Earlier, it was a kind of an anti-Muslim, religious fascism. Now we have a secular government, and it’s a kind of right-wing ruthlessness, where people openly say, you know, every country that has progressed and is developed, whether you look at Europe or America or China or Russia, they have a quote-unquote “past,” you know, they have a cruel past, and it’s time that India stepped up to the plate and realized that there are some people that are holding back this kind of progress and that we need to be ruthless and move in, as Israel did recently in Gaza, as Sri Lanka has recently done with its hundreds of thousands of Tamils in concentration camps. So why not India? You know? Why not just do away with the poor so that we can be a proper superpower, instead of a super-poor superpower?

AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati Roy, we just have less than a minute. What gives you hope?

ARUNDHATI ROY: What gives me hope is the fact that this way of thinking is being resisted in a myriad ways in India, you know, from the poorest person in a loincloth in the forest saying, “We’re going to fight,” right up to me, who’s at the other end, you know. And all of us are joined together by the determination that, even if we lose, we’re going to fight, you know? And we’re not going to just let this happen without doing everything we can to stop it. And that gives me a tremendous amount of hope.

AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati Roy, we thank you very much for being with us from, well, not far from your home, in New Delhi, India, in this international global exclusive broadcast on the publication of your book, Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers, published by Haymarket Books.

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Iran - The War Dance

On September 19, the Irish Times reported:

"Israel has rejected the call by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and open up its atomic sites to international inspection." (Mark Weiss, 'Israel spurns nuclear watchdog's call to open atomic sites to inspection,' Irish Times, September 19, 2009; http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ world/2009/0919/1224254860406.html)

The IAEA, which met in Vienna on September 18, adopted a resolution expressing concern about "Israeli nuclear capabilities" and called on agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei to work on the issue. The motion was adopted by 49 votes to 45, with 16 abstentions. Russia and China, both permanent members of the UN security council, voted in favour. The United States and the European Union initially tried to block the vote, and then voted against it. David Danieli, deputy director of Israel's atomic energy commission, said: "Israel will not co-operate in any matter with this resolution." (http://english.aljazeera.net/news/ middleeast/2009/09/2009918173136830771.html)

Despite this defiance, despite Israel's appalling record of violating international law, despite its record of waging and threatening war in the region, and despite possessing as many as 400 nuclear warheads, no Western journalist suggested that Israel should be bombed or blockaded as a result. Indeed, apart from the tiny left-wing Morning Star newspaper and a couple of wire agencies, it appears the Irish Times was the only English-language media outlet to cover this story.

Israel is one of three countries, along with India and Pakistan, which is not a signatory to the NPT. The treaty is intended to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, but Article VI constitutes a specific obligation on nuclear-weapon states like Britain and the United States to disarm themselves of nuclear weapons, an obligation they have conspicuously failed to meet.

On September 27, the Financial Times was also a lonely voice in reporting that India "can now build nuclear weapons with the same destructive power as those in the arsenals of the world's major nuclear powers". According to New Delhi's senior atomic officials, India has built weapons with yields of up to 200 kilotons. It is estimated to have manufactured weapons-grade plutonium for at least 100 warheads. (James Lamont and James Blitz, 'India raises nuclear stakes,' Financial Times, September 27, 2009; http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d63f3a70-ab90-11de -9be4-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1)

India has no problem delivering these weapons. Britain supplied the Hawk ground-attack aircraft used to train Indian pilots to fly Jaguar nuclear-capable bombers, also built by BAE Systems. In 2003, the Independent reported:

"The deal comes after intense lobbying by the British Government, with Prime Minister Tony Blair, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw taking it in turns to persuade the Indians to buy the jets." (Clayton Hirst and George Fernandes, 'BAE to enjoy Indian summer with £1bn order for Hawk jets,' The Independent, August 3, 2003)

Propaganda Stunts

Meanwhile, news that Iran has a "secret underground uranium enrichment plant south of Tehran" at Qom, (http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/ 2009/sep/25/iran-nuclear-plant-qanda) generated a fevered war dance right across the liberal media. Simon Tisdall wrote in the Guardian:

"Today's disclosure, and the concomitant conclusion that Iran's leaders are congenital double-dealers, will further spur the debate among regional neighbours, in particular Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt, about acquiring nuclear capabilities of their own. Thus does the feared, fabled Middle East nuclear arms race inch closer." (Tisdall, 'Iran has been caught red-handed,' The Guardian, September 25, 2009; http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/ 2009/sep/25/iran-secret-nuclear-plant)

Tisdall made no mention of the September 18, IAEA resolution that was a clear reminder that "the feared, fabled Middle East nuclear arms race" has long since been started by Israel. Tisdall added:

"For its part Israel will be gratified that Iran, long its 'existential' security issue, is now being treated with equal seriousness by western countries and Russia."

Israel will also be gratified that its own capacity to pose "existential" threats to its enemies is being treated with the standard seriousness - zero - by its allies.

Intriguingly, the Guardian's former Middle East editor (2000-2007) Brian Whitaker, who is now an editor on the Guardian's Comment is Free website, posted the following message in the comments' section under Tisdall's article:

"This smells of a propaganda stunt by western intelligence agencies. It's not clear that Iran has actually broken any ruies [sic] on disclosure, since the plant is said to be non-operational." (Whitaker comment, September 25, 2009, 4:44pm; http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/25/iran-secret-nuclear-plant)

Tisdall has form on propaganda stunts. His May 22, 2007 front-page Guardian story described 'Iran's secret plan for summer offensive to force US out of Iraq.' You can see the front page here: www.medialens.org/alerts/07/ screenshots/guardian_070522_cover.jpg

Iran, it seemed, was "forging ties with al-Qaida elements and Sunni Arab militias in Iraq in preparation for a summer showdown with coalition forces intended to tip a wavering US Congress into voting for full military withdrawal". (www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,2085195,00.html)

To use the term favoured by the late, great playwright Harold Pinter, this was "bollocks".

A rare voice of sanity in the Guardian, Scott Ritter, former chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq, put the latest revelations in context, noting that: "when Obama announced that 'Iran is breaking rules that all nations must follow', he is technically and legally wrong". Ritter explained:

"The Qom plant, if current descriptions are accurate, cannot manufacture the basic feed-stock (uranium hexaflouride, or UF6) used in the centrifuge-based enrichment process. It is simply another plant in which the UF6 can be enriched.

"Why is this distinction important? Because the IAEA has underscored, again and again, that it has a full accounting of Iran's nuclear material stockpile. There has been no diversion of nuclear material to the Qom plant (since it is under construction). The existence of the alleged enrichment plant at Qom in no way changes the nuclear material balance inside Iran today.

"Simply put, Iran is no closer to producing a hypothetical nuclear weapon today than it was prior to Obama's announcement concerning the Qom facility." (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/ cifamerica/2009/sep/25/iran-secret- nuclear-plant-inspections)

Even if the claims of Iranian military intent are true, Ritter added, "this interpretation would still require the diversion of significant nuclear material away from the oversight of IAEA inspectors, something that would be almost immediately evident. Any meaningful diversion of nuclear material would be an immediate cause for alarm, and would trigger robust international reaction, most probably inclusive of military action against the totality of Iran's known nuclear infrastructure".

Instead, it is "more likely, an attempt on the part of Iran to provide for strategic depth and survivability of its nuclear programme in the face of repeated threats on the part of the US and Israel to bomb its nuclear infrastructure".

The Guardian editors were unimpressed. The following day, a leader, 'Iran: Time to come clean,' described: "the US president stressing that a negotiated solution still existed, while Mr Brown talked of serial deception and drawing lines in the sand. The truth is that neither man has the luxury of waiting to find out what Iran's true intentions are". (Leading article, 'Iran: Time to come clean,' The Guardian, September 26, 2009)

Again, no mention of Israel's refusal to come clean. The previous day, a Guardian leader had warned feverishly of how "the whirring centrifuges spin Iran ever closer to the threshold of being able to manufacture a nuclear bomb". (Leading article, 'Iran: Spinning out of control,' The Guardian, September 25, 2009)

As ever, thoughts of military action came naturally to the Guardian editors:

"Iranian negotiators should realise that their centrifuges are reaching their highest trade-in value. Push it any further, and Iran will not have an internationally monitored production line of enriched uranium to feed its nuclear reactors. Instead of international finance and trade, it will attract blockades and bombs."

Iranian policy, then, would "attract" blockades and bombs - Iran would be responsible for +our+ criminal actions. The Guardian is like a habitual wife-beater blaming the victim for his violence. Not a word in this Guardian editorial of how the blockades and bombs attracted to Iran's neighbour, Iraq, were based on a torrential outpouring of British and American lies. As the World Socialist Web Site observed on September 30:

"In an editorial published Sunday, the Financial Times of London joined the media onslaught against Iran, calling its rulers 'cheats and deceivers' who 'cannot be remotely trusted' in relation to the country's nuclear program.

"If the newspaper is committed to exposing 'cheats and deceivers,' why has it waited so long? It could have provided its readers with this valuable service nearly seven years ago during the buildup to the war against Iraq. After all, this epithet perfectly fits the role played by the US and British governments." (http://www.wsws.org/articles/ 2009/sep2009/pers-s30.shtml)

Just four weeks before the Guardian wrote of "whirring centrifuges" spinning the Middle East to destruction, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei told the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, published by a group of prominent scientists:

"We have not seen concrete evidence that Tehran has an ongoing nuclear weapons program... But somehow, many people are talking about how Iran's nuclear program is the greatest threat to the world... In many ways, I think the threat has been hyped. Yes, there's concern about Iran's future intentions and Iran needs to be more transparent with the IAEA and the international community... But the idea that we'll wake up tomorrow and Iran will have a nuclear weapon is an idea that isn't supported by the facts as we have seen them so far."
(http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe /articles/2009/09/02/un_nuclear_watchdog_say s_iran_threat_hyped/)

On September 30, the Guardian itself reported:

"The UN's chief weapons inspector, Mohamed ElBaradei, said today he had seen 'no credible evidence' that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, rejecting British intelligence allegations that a weapons programme has been going on for at least four years." (Julian Borger and Richard Norton-Taylor, '"No credible evidence" of Iranian nuclear weapons, says UN inspector,' The Guardian, September 30, 2009)

On September 16, Newsweek revealed that US intelligence agencies had reported that Iran had "not restarted its nuclear-weapons development program" since the National Intelligence Estimate of November 2007, which stated with "high confidence" that Iran had "halted its nuclear weapons program" in 2003. (Mark Hosenball, 'Intelligence Agencies Say No New Nukes in Iran,' Newsweek, September 16, 2009; http://www.newsweek.com/id/215529)

On the Guardian's letter's page, John Heawood delivered a powerful counterblast to the Guardian's earlier warmongering:

"Your editorial (Time to come clean, 26 September) states 'Iran's cat-and-mouse game with nuclear inspectors hands a propaganda victory on a plate to Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli premier who has made little secret of his air force's preparations for a long-range strike'.

"This 'propaganda victory' is easily demolished by relevant facts which you fail to mention. Fact: Israel has not signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Fact: Israel has had nuclear weapons for at least 30 years. Fact: Israel has done and still does its best to conceal the existence of these weapons. Fact: as recently as 18 September Israel refused a request from the IAEA to open its nuclear plants to inspection. Fact: an unprovoked Israeli attack on Iran would be a violation of the UN charter and a war crime. And please don't claim that Iran's as-yet ambiguous nuclear activities are a provocation. What Israel most fears from Iran is not a nuclear threat to its territory, but a nuclear threat to its own nuclear domination.

"That western powers dangerously demonise Iran is one tragedy. That newspapers uncritically imitate them is a worse one." (Heawood, Letters, 'Nuclear nightmare in the Middle East,' The Guardian, September 29, 2009)

Nearing The End Game (Again)

Like an endlessly nagging child, the Telegraph continued its push for war with Iran:

"We are nearing the endgame of diplomacy towards Iran... If the Kremlin vetoes or dilutes a sanctions resolution, this will make a peaceful resolution of the confrontation with Iran far less likely, and shorten the odds on a war in the Middle East next year." (Leading article, 'Obama is gambling with Europe's security,' The Daily Telegraph, September 19, 2009)

Nothing new here. On the February 12, 2007 edition of the BBC's Newsnight programme, the Telegraph's Con Coughlin declared that military action with Iran was looming now that "diplomacy is almost at an end". A year earlier, in 2006, Gerard Baker wrote in the Times:

"The unimaginable but ultimately inescapable truth is that we are going to have to get ready for war with Iran." (Baker, 'Prepare yourself for the unthinkable: war against Iran may be a necessity,' The Times, January 27, 2006)

The Telegraph added this week:

"Sanctions are already hurting a country whose Achilles' heel is its economy but they have not curbed its nuclear ambitions. That is why the military option, the destruction of vital links in the production chain, must remain on the table. The risks of a strike are considerable, but so is the shattering of the non-proliferation regime through Iranian defiance." (Leading article, 'Iran ups the ante,' The Daily Telegraph, September 28, 2009)

Again, not a word about Israel's "shattering of the non-proliferation regime," or about its "defiance" 10 days earlier in flatly refusing to cooperate with the IAEA resolution. On the same day that the Telegraph discussed the "risks of a strike" - it meant risks to 'us' - a BBC news report reminded of the risks to 'them'.

"At least 13 people have been killed in a series of bomb attacks across Iraq, local officials say. A lorry with explosives blew up at a police station near the central city of Ramadi, killing seven policemen. In southern Iraq, a bomb planted on a bus killed three people in the province of Qadisiya. In Baghdad, a series of bombs killed at least three people." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/- /2/hi/middle_east/8279056.stm)

It is indeed with a sense of wonder, verging on awe, that we witness the same media performing the near-identical war dance on Iran that they performed on Iraq just seven years ago. To us it seems like yesterday - the sense of madness is fresh in our minds. When Obama acts the stern father in demanding: "Iran must comply with United Nations resolutions," he is repeating, with the alteration of but a single letter, the same sentence in the same tone used by George Bush and Tony Blair on Iraq.

In 2007, Paul Krugman wrote of Iran in the New York Times:

"But let's have some perspective, please: we're talking about a country with roughly the G.D.P. of Connecticut, and a government whose military budget is roughly the same as Sweden's." (Krugman, 'Fearing Fear Itself,' New York Times, October 29, 2007)

The lunacy of the current propaganda campaign against Iran is bad enough. The fact that it comes so soon after the lies on Iraq - every last one of them now exposed for all to see - makes it far worse. But it is taken to an altogether different level by the fact that the last set of concocted threats has resulted in the devastation of an entire country, with over one million killed and four million made refugees (they are still out there, although not for the mainstream media). The icing on this malevolent cake is that there is next to no reference to these horrors in the latest media propaganda campaign. There is no sense that journalists recognise the consequences of what they helped make happen in Iraq. There is no sense that they feel even a tiny tug of horror at the prospect of repeating the same catastrophe in Iran.

As Noam Chomsky has observed, it is not that they want to cause harm; they simply step on Third World people the way they might step on ants. It is perhaps best described as a kind of speciesism, rather than racism.

Journalists who rightly dismiss out of hand the idea that some cosmic father figure is guiding the universe, or that some saviour (unaccountably delayed for 2,000 years) is on his way, are reduced to childish gullibility by the presence of a black man with a gift for public speaking in the White House. What level of social insanity is it that persuades people to imagine that a single individual has the power to undo what centuries of entrenched, organised and determined vested interests (that have not gone away) have put in place? A rare and admirable note of realism was sounded by a group of academics on the Guardian's letter's page:

"Though Obama's leadership has enhanced America's image, as yet there has been no major change from the policies and outcomes of the Bush years. Yet the Obama presidency is still reported in the mainstream media as a happy departure from the 'disastrous Dubya'...

"Obama presents himself as the 'un-Bush'. But when you look at substance, rather than style and rhetoric, and the structural constraints on presidential power, you can legitimately question the extent of his ability to change US policies. We call for a richer and better informed debate on US policy abroad. We need to end this unhealthy obsession with personalities and look properly at the issues - an admittedly difficult task given the supremely gifted and charismatic president now in office.

"Journalists must be more forthright about the multibillion-dollar Pentagon budget, the massive numbers of US military bases around the world, the sheer scale of the US national security state." (Professor Inderjeet Parmar University of Manchester, Dr Mark Ledwidge University of Manchester, Professor Rob Singh Birkbeck College, Dr Tim Lynch Institute for the Study of the Americas, Letters, The Guardian, September 18, 2009;
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/ 18/us-foreign-policy-obama-afghanistan)

Grow up, in other words, and wake up! But the media cannot do either because it is closer to a corporate machine than a human being. It is a product of power and reflects the needs of power. Because the needs of power remain essentially the same over long periods of time, media performance follows the same themes with eerie consistency. A key focus, unchanging for the past 60 years, is that there must be a threatening enemy to fear, hate, and if necessary destroy.

SUGGESTED ACTION

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