|
Refusing To Fly The Flag
By John Pilger
02/24/06 "ICH'
-- -- The other day, one of my favourite cinemas
closed down. The boards went up on the art-deco Valhalla in
Sydney, one of the world's best at putting out powerful,
political documentaries. The lack of fuss might have seemed
surprising in a city whose iconic Opera House is said to embody
modern Australia's pride in the arts. On the contrary, the
closure reflected a more general shutting down.
The Valhalla was certainly an anomaly in an Australia so
entrapped by the cult of "marketing" that an executive of the
Sydney Morning Herald can declare "the answer" is "not smart and
clever people" but "people who can execute your strategy". On 9
February, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development in Paris proclaimed Australia the least regulated
and most privately owned economy in the western world. This is a
country owned and run by businessmen.
The most vivid example is the press. Rupert Murdoch controls
almost 70 per cent of principal newspaper circulation. With the
exception of the multi-ethnic Special Broadcasting Service and
the radio network of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation,
the rest of the media reflect Murdochism and a market ideology
imported wholesale from the United States. The remarkable
culture wars of the neoconservative prime minister, John Howard,
exemplify this.
Howard believes that "business and sport" are society's prime
movers. The country's once-respected scientific research
laboratories, the CSIRO, have been instructed to take on
business sponsors. Almost alone among nations, Australia last
year abstained rather than vote for a modest United Nations
proposal that members should defend "diversity" in their own
cultures - against rapacious great power. When Australia's
leading playwright, David Williamson, likened Howard's
privatised "aspirational" Australia to a cruise ship sailing to
the "sobering destiny" of an environmental disaster, his speech
was "called for" by the prime minister's office and a vicious
campaign was orchestrated in the Murdoch press.
With no political opposition to speak of, Howard's conquests?
have been in cultural life, with historiography thrown in.
Siding with an unchanging clique of far-right commentators, he
has effectively stifled debate about Australia's bloody colonial
past while deriding the "black armband theory of history": that
is, the truth of a genocidal racism that continues to devastate
the Aboriginal people. His patriotic, or "put out more flags",
campaign is pure George W Bush. Schools have been ordered to
erect flagpoles, and on "Australia Day", 26 January, which
"celebrates" the "settlement" of another people's country, flags
are distributed and often displayed with gormless aggression.
This was never part of Australian life; Americans wrapped
themselves in their flag, but not we Australians. We saw it as a
respectful reminder of those who had gone to fight and die in
Australia's mostly catastrophic imperial wars, who "did their
best". The Howard regime has changed all this. The little leader
wears a plastic flag in his lapel, just like Bush, and puts his
hand on his heart, just like Bush, and reinforces a race-based
society, just like Bush. While the neglect of New Orleans is
Bush's symbol, the contempt shown the first Australians is
Howard's.
On "Australia Day", I made my way through the flags to Redfern,
an Aboriginal area in the inner city, and celebrated what black
Australians call Survival Day. Their first "Day of Mourning and
Protest" was held in 1938 on the 150th anniversary of the white
invasion. Over a thousand Aboriginal men and women attended that
first civil rights gathering, after having been refused use of
Sydney Town Hall. A long and painful campaign for freedom and
justice had begun, and endures, like an invisible presence.
In Redfern Park on Survival Day, the flags were black, red and
gold: colours of indigenous skin, the earth and the sun. The
only report I could find of Redfern the next day was of a minor
fight, which was no doubt fed to the papers by the police.
Should the word "Aboriginal" enter the public arena it must be
associated, where possible, with "no-hopers".
In Howard's Australia, the ultimate "no-hoper" is a sick,
terrified, deeply troubled and abused young man called David
Hicks. Hicks was a drifter, which was once an Australian type
known as a "swagman" and a "larrikin" and lauded by our bush
poets and balladeers. In the 1990s, Hicks became a Muslim and
drifted through Kosovo, then on to Afghanistan, where he was
kidnapped by the Americans and sent to their concentration camp
at Guantanamo Bay. Not a shred of evidence exists that Hicks
fought for al-Qaeda, or is a terrorist. He is a drifter. Yet he
is to face one of Bush's "military commissions", for which
torture is used to extract confessions, and there is no right to
cross-examine witnesses, no presumption of innocence and no
standard of proof "beyond a reasonable doubt". Even three of the
hand-picked US military prosecutors have withdrawn, arguing that
the commission is rigged to secure convictions. Many of
Australia's leading jurists agree.
The Howard government has said, in so many words, that David
Hicks can rot. He is a no-hoper, un-American, unaspirational.
Put out more flags.
This article first appeared in the New Statesman
Translate
this page
(In accordance with Title 17
U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to
those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational purposes.
Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the
originator of this article nor is Information Clearing House
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.) |
