Kindle Notes & Highlights
In 2009, the University of the West of England published the results of a ten-year study of the BBC’s coverage of Venezuela. Of 304 broadcast reports, only three mentioned any of the positive policies introduced by the government of Hugo Chavez.
Today, the promotion of bourgeois privilege is often disguised as feminism.
‘Globalisation does not mean the impotence of the state, but the rejection by the state of its social functions, in favour of repressive ones, and the ending of democratic freedoms.’6
In 1999, the United States faced a ‘genuine dilemma’ in Iraq, reported the Wall Street Journal. ‘After eight years of enforcing a no fly zone in northern [and southern] Iraq, few military targets remain. “We’re down to the last outhouse,” one US official protested. “There are still some things left, but not many.”’79 There are still children left. Around the time that statement was made, six children died when an American missile hit Al Jumohria, a community in Basra’s poorest residential area. Sixty-three people were injured, a number of them badly burned.
On my last night in Iraq, I went to the Rabat Hall in the centre of Baghdad to watch the Iraqi National Orchestra rehearse. I had wanted to meet Mohammed Amin Ezzat, the conductor, whose personal tragedy epitomises the punishment of his people. Because the power supply is so intermittent, Iraqis have been forced to use cheap kerosene lamps for lighting, heating and cooking; and these frequently explode. This is what happened to Mohammed Amin Ezzat’s wife, Jenan, who was engulfed in flames. ‘It was devastating,’ he said, ‘because I saw my wife burn completely before my eyes. I threw myself on
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‘The hidden hand of the market,’ wrote Thomas Friedman, the guardian of American foreign policy in the New York Times, ‘will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.’31
Twelve years later, virtually every commitment made at Paris has been broken. The poorest countries are worse off than in 1990; the assertion that ‘liberalisation’ and ‘trickle down economics’ ‘create wealth’ is a mockery. The number of poor countries has actually increased, with almost half their people subsisting on less than a dollar a day. Their life expectancy has deteriorated to twenty-five years shorter than that of people in developed countries; in Afghanistan, few survive beyond their forties.
Two illustrations tell the story. One of Clare Short’s enterprises is in Ghana where, according to internal documents, British officials have made clear that aid money for a clean water project is conditional on the privatisation of the country’s water supply. This would reap profits for at least one British multinational company, while ensuring the doubling of water bills for the poorest.45
It was followed, at the end of 1992, by the invasion of Somalia. Code-named ‘Operation Restore Hope’, this road-tested a strategy called ‘humanitarian intervention’, which was designed to replace the ‘war on drugs’. When US Marines came ashore in Somalia ‘to feed the starving’, Time published a two-page colour photograph showing Somali children reaching out to a US Marine for ‘the gift of hope’.48 This was fake; the famine was by then well over.
Shortly before Christmas 1991, the Medical Educational Trust in London published a comprehensive study of casualties. Up to a quarter of a million men, women and children were killed or died as a direct result of the American-led attack on Iraq.60 This confirmed American and French intelligence estimates of ‘in excess of 200,000 deaths’.61 The sheer scale of this killing never entered public consciousness in the West. The famous American TV anchorman Dan Rather told his national audience: ‘There’s one thing we can all agree on. It’s the heroism of the 148 Americans who gave their lives so that
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On September 11, 2001, as America was being attacked, the Blair Government was hosting an ‘arms fair’ in London’s Docklands attended by various human rights abusers, including Saudi Arabia, spiritual home of al-Qa’ida and birthplace of Osama bin Laden. Out of respect for the victims of the Twin Towers atrocity, the annual conference of the Trades Union Congress was curtailed, along with sporting fixtures and other public events. The arms fair went ahead. Shortly afterwards, in an interview with David Frost, Blair declared that the way to defeat terrorists was to stop ‘the people who gave them
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‘According to the official version of history,’ he said, ‘CIA aid to the mujaheddin began during 1980, that is, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan … But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise.’103
Those in charge of humanities teaching whisper complaints that universities have become vocational training colleges, obsessed with sponsorship. By keeping silent, they have allowed governments to diminish a wealth of knowledge of how the world works, declaring it ‘irrelevant’ and withholding funding. This is not surprising when the humanities departments – the engine rooms of ideas and criticism – are close to moribund. When academics suppress the voice of their knowledge, who can the public turn to?
Like Britain and the US, Australia is a single-ideology state with two competing factions, discernible largely by the personalities of their politicians. The difference between Howard’s conservative coalition and the opposition Labor Party is that Howard’s policies are not veiled. The Labor governments of the 1980s and early 1990s oversaw the greatest redistribution of wealth in the country’s history: from bottom to top. They were Thatcherite and Reaganite in all but name. Indeed, Tony Blair described then Prime Minister Paul Keating as his ‘inspiration’.
When John Howard came to office in 1996, his first act was to cut $A400 million from the Aboriginal affairs budget – which he referred to contemptuously as the ‘Aboriginal industry’.
With the opening ceremony three weeks away, the Howard Government responded to yet another damning United Nations report on Aboriginal health by banning visits by UN human rights inspectors and declaring it would no longer appear before UN human rights committees.
In the silver and zinc mines of Broken Hill, New South Wales, the miners won the world’s first thirty-five-hour week, half a century ahead of Europe and America.
