[BretLudwig]

(("So far as the left leaves us alone...." Bret))


John Pilger, dissident.

€œDuring the Cold War, a group of Russian journalists toured the
United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by their
hosts for their impressions. €œI have to tell you,€� said their
spokesman, €œthat we were astonished to find, after reading all the
newspapers and watching TV, that all the opinions on all the vital issues
were, by and large, the same. To get that result in our country we
imprison people. We tear out their fingernails. Here, you dont have
that. Whats the secret? How do you do it?€�

... During the 1970s, I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a
Stalinist dictatorship. I interviewed members of the dissident group,
Charter 77. One of them, the novelist Zdener Urbanek, told me, €œWe are
more fortunate than you in the West, in one respect. We believe nothing of
what we read in the newspapers and watch on television, nothing of the
official truth. unlike you, we have learned to read between the lines of
the media. unlike you, we know that that real truth is always
subversive.€� By subversive, he meant that truth comes from the ground
up, almost never from the top down.

John Pilger explaining the power of journalism in the West to an audience
at Columbia University in April 2006.

Pilger, now 68, has devoted his entire journalistic life to speaking for
the (mostly Third World) exploited, degraded or slaughtered victims of the
machinery of global power. The precise targets of his withering fire are
the Western governments, the Western political system, his so often supine
fellow journalists and, most of all, the rapine corporate and financial
elites.

The [US presidential candidates] are as one in their support for
Americas true deity, its corporate oligarchs. Despite claiming that his
campaign wealth comes from small individual donors, Obama is backed by the
biggest Wall Street firms: Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, J P
Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, as well as the
huge hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. €œSeven of the Obama
campaigns top 14 donors,€� wrote the investigator Pam Martens,
€œconsisted of officers and employees of the same Wall Street firms
charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated in
originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages.€�

A report by United for a Fair Economy, a non-profit group, estimates
the total loss to poor Americans of colour who took out sub-prime loans as
being between $164bn and $213bn: the greatest loss of wealth ever recorded
for people of colour in the United States. €œWashington lobbyists haven t
funded my campaign,€� said Obama in January, They wont run my White
House and they will not drown out the voices of working Americans when I
am president.€� According to files held by the Centre for Responsive
Politics, the top five contributors to the Obama campaign are registered
corporate lobbyists.

What is Obamas attraction to big business? Precisely the same as
Robert Kennedys. By offering a new, young and apparently progressive
face of the Democratic Party, with the bonus of being a member of the
black elite, he can blunt and divert real opposition. That was Colin
Powells role as Bush s secretary of state. An Obama victory will bring
intense pressure on the US anti-war and social justice movements to accept
a Democratic administration for all its faults. If that happens, domestic
resistance to rapacious America will fall silent.

This is good stuff, from an essay published last week in the New
Statesman.

Of course, Pilger cannot process the case for Western survivalism. He
stands politically, I think, with the global justice movement, which is an
outcrop of the post-communist left. But the older I get the more I realise
that dissonance is not a good enough reason to accept the role allotted to
us of endlessly quarrelling with the left. There is no left and right in
the harsh light of day. There is plutocracy and there is victimhood
everywhere that plutocrats reign. There is knowledge and there is
ignorance. There is sleep and there is waking. There is the capacity to
discriminate human values and there is the absence of it (its absent in
the left).

In so far as the left leaves us alone to state and restate our own values
and to pursue our own cause, we should not quarrel with it for desiring to
tend to the poor in the Third World. Ultimately, both our concerns and
theirs are just, and both flow from the same hearth of evil.

Thats the lesson I take from reading Pilgers largely very good
material. "

Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, June 5, 2008 at 11:12 PM in
Journalism
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