The matter of Julian Assange and Australian msm journalism just got more and more interesting for me today when I stumbled across a change.org petition update, headed 150,000 signatories then Twitter suspends our petitioner's account on Twitter.
The update, of 19/6/19, was written by... a Phillip Adams, Brisbane, Australia. Of course, the author of the update, is emphatically NOT the well-known Radio National broadcaster despite the identical spelling of their names.
The update set me wondering whether or not any of the 150,000 signatories to the original petition signed it thinking the Brisbane Adams was actually the ABC broadcaster. (You can access the former's update at change.org where he gives his suspended twitter account as @PhillipAdams64.)
Now I may be wrong, but my hunch is that few of them referred to in the update even knew who the broadcaster was.
But then a friend dropped in, assuring me that he'd heard the ABC broadcaster discussing Julian Assange, he seemed to think, positively. This, I thought was most unlike our PEP (Progressive Except Palestine) broadcaster, but felt compelled to check it out anyway.
Adams the broadcaster, of course, runs ABC Radio National's Late Night Live (LNL) program, so I headed to the LNL archives, specifically to the entry labelled 'Journalism', and trawled back in time until I found the only discussion in all of the entries listed there on Julian Assange.
It was dated 2/3/11, and headed Robert Manne: The untold story of Julian Assange. (If Robert Manne is unknown to you, just click on the relevant MERC label below.) Note that Adams and Manne are discussing only that period, in the mid-1990s, well before WikiLeaks, when Assange and others like him were collectively known as cypherpunks.
To cut to the chase, here is Adams' guest, Robert Manne, responding to his request to say where Assange stood in relation to the other 1990s cypherpunks. Note that, while a grudging, highly qualified admiration for Assange is the most we get from Manne, we don't even get that from Phillip Adams. Here's Manne's assessment of Assange, the cypherpunk, vis-a-vis other cypherpunks of the time:
"[Assange] is a real extremist on the hardline, electronic libertarian [model/spectrum?] who just would not put up with any state interference to individual liberties. On the other hand, he was from the point of view of left/right economics, more a left-wing libertarian or a left-wing anarchist in that he just didn't believe in the neoliberal philosophy of dual market and capitalism. So he had quite a complicated position which comes from his postings - which are all available if anyone took the trouble to to read them. So he is very hardline on the question of the struggle against the state trying to suborn individuals who want to communicate privately on the one hand. On the other hand, he's not an Ayn Rand type, whereas a lot of [the cypherpunks] were."
Typically, Phillip Adams asked Manne if Assange was "simply anti-American." Manne disagreed, saying:
"He understands the evils of Communism. One of his great heroes is Alexander Solzhenitsyn... One of the ironies is that people like John Pilger are now his great supporters, but in fact - or Michael Moore, the film maker - Assange doesn't respect people like that in reality... He's not a journalist at all, but even if he was to some extent a journalist... He is a revolutionary, not a non-violent revolutionary... He is the first person who has gotten away with threatening the extremely powerful."
Note that line, "He's not a journalist, but even if he were..."! Not to mention Manne's flabbergasting characterisation of Assange as a "violent" revolutionary because he "got away with threatening the extremely powerful."
Finally, I repeat, this was the only LNL program which touched on the subject of Julian Assange in the LNL archive, and was emphatically NOT any kind of endorsement of him. Consider this for the record.
Showing posts with label John Pilger. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Pilger. Show all posts
Thursday, June 20, 2019
Sunday, November 13, 2016
Clinton Emailed
From John Pilger's interview with Julian Assange, Emails show Clinton Foundation funders also bankroll ISIS: the explosive interview with John Pilger, newmatilda.com, 5/11/16:
Pilger: The emails that give evidence of access for money and how Hillary Clinton herself benefited from this and how she's benefiting politically are quite extraordinary. I'm thinking of when the Qatari representative was given 5 minutes with Bill Clinton for a million dollar cheque.
Assange: And 12m from Morocco... For Hillary Clinton to attend [a party]
Pilger: In terms of US foreign policy, that's where the emails are most revealing, where they show the direct connection between Hillary Clinton and the foundation of jihadism, of ISIS, in the Middle East. Can you talk about how the emails demonstrate [that] those who are meant to be fighting the ISIS jihadists are actually those who have helped create it?
Assange: There's an early 2014 email from Hillary Clinton... to her campaign manager John Podesta that states ISIS is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. This is the most significant email in the whole collection, and... because Saudi and Qatari money is spread all over the Clinton Foundation. Even the US government agrees that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIS. But the dodge has always been that it's just some rogue princes, using their cut of the oil money to do whatever they like, but that, actually, the government disapproves. But that email says that no, it is the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar that have been funding ISIS.
Pilger: The Saudis, Qataris, Moroccans, Bahrainis... were giving all this money to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, and the State Department was approving massive arms sales, particularly to Saudi Arabia.
Assange: Under Hillary Clinton the world's largest ever arms deal was made with Saudi Arabia, [worth] more than $80 billion. In fact, during her tenure as secretary of state, total arms exports from the United States, in terms of dollar value, have doubled.
Pilger: Of course, the consequence of that is that ISIS has been created largely with money from the very people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation.
Assange: Yes.
(Assange goes on to reveal that Clinton is the public face of Wall Street and that "half the Obama cabinet was basically nominated by a representative from City Bank.")
Pilger: Why was she so enthusiastic about the destruction of Libya? What have the emails told us about what happened there, because Libya is such a source for so much of the mayhem now in Syria... and it was almost Hillary Clinton's invasion?
Assange: Libya... was Hillary Clinton's war. Obama initially opposed it, Hillary Clinton championed it. That's documented throughout her emails. She'd put her favorite agent, Sidney Blumenthal onto it. More than 1,700 out of the 33,000 of the emails we've published are just about Libya. It wasn't about cheap oil. She saw the removal of Gaddafi... as something she could use in her run-up to election as president. In late 2011, an internal document called the Libya Tick Tock was produced for her. It's a chronology of how she was the central figure in the destruction of the Libyan state, which resulted in around 40,000 deaths in Libya. Jihadists, ISIS moved in, leading to the European refugee crisis... As Gaddafi said at the time: 'What do these Europeans think they're doing, trying to bomb and destroy Libya? There's going to be a flood of migrants and jihadists out of Africa and into Europe,' and that's exactly what happened.
Pilger: The emails that give evidence of access for money and how Hillary Clinton herself benefited from this and how she's benefiting politically are quite extraordinary. I'm thinking of when the Qatari representative was given 5 minutes with Bill Clinton for a million dollar cheque.
Assange: And 12m from Morocco... For Hillary Clinton to attend [a party]
Pilger: In terms of US foreign policy, that's where the emails are most revealing, where they show the direct connection between Hillary Clinton and the foundation of jihadism, of ISIS, in the Middle East. Can you talk about how the emails demonstrate [that] those who are meant to be fighting the ISIS jihadists are actually those who have helped create it?
Assange: There's an early 2014 email from Hillary Clinton... to her campaign manager John Podesta that states ISIS is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. This is the most significant email in the whole collection, and... because Saudi and Qatari money is spread all over the Clinton Foundation. Even the US government agrees that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIS. But the dodge has always been that it's just some rogue princes, using their cut of the oil money to do whatever they like, but that, actually, the government disapproves. But that email says that no, it is the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar that have been funding ISIS.
Pilger: The Saudis, Qataris, Moroccans, Bahrainis... were giving all this money to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, and the State Department was approving massive arms sales, particularly to Saudi Arabia.
Assange: Under Hillary Clinton the world's largest ever arms deal was made with Saudi Arabia, [worth] more than $80 billion. In fact, during her tenure as secretary of state, total arms exports from the United States, in terms of dollar value, have doubled.
Pilger: Of course, the consequence of that is that ISIS has been created largely with money from the very people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation.
Assange: Yes.
(Assange goes on to reveal that Clinton is the public face of Wall Street and that "half the Obama cabinet was basically nominated by a representative from City Bank.")
Pilger: Why was she so enthusiastic about the destruction of Libya? What have the emails told us about what happened there, because Libya is such a source for so much of the mayhem now in Syria... and it was almost Hillary Clinton's invasion?
Assange: Libya... was Hillary Clinton's war. Obama initially opposed it, Hillary Clinton championed it. That's documented throughout her emails. She'd put her favorite agent, Sidney Blumenthal onto it. More than 1,700 out of the 33,000 of the emails we've published are just about Libya. It wasn't about cheap oil. She saw the removal of Gaddafi... as something she could use in her run-up to election as president. In late 2011, an internal document called the Libya Tick Tock was produced for her. It's a chronology of how she was the central figure in the destruction of the Libyan state, which resulted in around 40,000 deaths in Libya. Jihadists, ISIS moved in, leading to the European refugee crisis... As Gaddafi said at the time: 'What do these Europeans think they're doing, trying to bomb and destroy Libya? There's going to be a flood of migrants and jihadists out of Africa and into Europe,' and that's exactly what happened.
Thursday, October 24, 2013
The Unpalatable Truth About Martha Gellhorn 1
I've been meaning for a while now to tackle the subject of The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, an award which, in the words of its creator, the great Australian journalist John Pilger, "is in honour of one of the 20th century's greatest reporters. It's awarded to a journalist whose work has penetrated the established version of events and told an unpalatable truth. It's validated by powerful facts that expose establishment propaganda, or 'official drivel', as Martha Gellhorn called it." (An unpalatable truth: The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, John Pilger, Information Clearing House, 3/6/11)
So having just learned that the worthy Nazareth-based journalist Jonathan Cook was awarded the Gellhorn Prize in 2011 is probably as good a prompt as any to raise what at first blush may appear to be a rather odd - even highly inappropriate - question: Isn't it perhaps time to rename this award?
Before returning to that question in my next post, a brief introduction to the career of Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) and her connection with John Pilger is in order.
The following sketch, by Shane Maloney, John Pilger & Martha Gellhorn, comes from the Australian magazine The Monthly (5/3/08), and flags the concern I have about Gellhorn as a model of genuine, 'truth-to-power' journalism:
"Martha Gellhorn wrote many things during her remarkable 60-year career. Reports on living conditions in the mine and mill towns of Depression-era America. Newspaper despatches from battlefronts as far-flung as Spain, Finland, Java and El Salvador. Trenchant and prophetic observations on the rise of fascism. Eyewitness accounts of wars, insurrections, revolutions and invasions. Novels, collections of short stories, travelogues and autobiography.
"In 1975, she wrote a 'fan letter' to a stranger she saw on television. He was a 35-year-old Australian journalist named John Pilger. Gellhorn had chanced upon an interview in which Pilger was copping a mauling for his first book, The Last Day, an eyewitness account of the hasty American retreat from Saigon. Personally acquainted with the reception often given to the bearers of unpalatable news, she promptly went out and bought the book. Judging it fine, she wrote to Pilger to tell him so.
"Pilger, it transpired, owed his introduction to Indochina to Gellhorn. Eight years earlier, her articles on the horrors being unleashed on Vietnam's civilians had prompted Pilger's editor at the Daily Mirror to send him to cover the war. Pilger found Gellhorn's fan mail 'moving', but it was another 3 years before the two inveterate travellers were to meet. In 1978, following the screening of Pilger's documentary Do You Remember Vietnam?, they finally sat down together.
"Gellhorn kept a flat, a court of sorts, in London's Cadogan Square. As a young Midwesterner in Paris, she'd modelled for Chanel and Schiaparelli, and she retained a slim, striking elegance that must have contrasted to the lanky Aussie with fiercely independent hair. Over a bottle of Famous Grouse, they talked about 'the struggle of memory against forgetting', agreeing furiously on almost everything. The exception was Palestine. Gellhorn was one of the first journalists to enter Dachau and her adherence to Israel was unqualified. Pilger steered around the subject and the two became good friends.
"Strongly averse to 'the kitchen of life', the former Mrs Ernest Hemingway was a terrible cook. On subsequent visits, Pilger took food. Sometimes they would stroll in the park, talking surfing and snorkelling between denouncing the vileness of Kissinger. An incorrigible smoker, Gellhorn once got thrown out of Selfridges for lighting up.
"Martha Gellhorn was still reporting in her eighties, travelling to Panama in the wake of the American invasion and interviewing street kids in the favelas of Brazil. She died of cancer* in 1998. John Pilger continues to annoy the buggery out of his critics."
To be continued...
[*Although Gellhorn had cancer, it was a pre-emptive pill that actually did the trick.]
So having just learned that the worthy Nazareth-based journalist Jonathan Cook was awarded the Gellhorn Prize in 2011 is probably as good a prompt as any to raise what at first blush may appear to be a rather odd - even highly inappropriate - question: Isn't it perhaps time to rename this award?
Before returning to that question in my next post, a brief introduction to the career of Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) and her connection with John Pilger is in order.
The following sketch, by Shane Maloney, John Pilger & Martha Gellhorn, comes from the Australian magazine The Monthly (5/3/08), and flags the concern I have about Gellhorn as a model of genuine, 'truth-to-power' journalism:
"Martha Gellhorn wrote many things during her remarkable 60-year career. Reports on living conditions in the mine and mill towns of Depression-era America. Newspaper despatches from battlefronts as far-flung as Spain, Finland, Java and El Salvador. Trenchant and prophetic observations on the rise of fascism. Eyewitness accounts of wars, insurrections, revolutions and invasions. Novels, collections of short stories, travelogues and autobiography.
"In 1975, she wrote a 'fan letter' to a stranger she saw on television. He was a 35-year-old Australian journalist named John Pilger. Gellhorn had chanced upon an interview in which Pilger was copping a mauling for his first book, The Last Day, an eyewitness account of the hasty American retreat from Saigon. Personally acquainted with the reception often given to the bearers of unpalatable news, she promptly went out and bought the book. Judging it fine, she wrote to Pilger to tell him so.
"Pilger, it transpired, owed his introduction to Indochina to Gellhorn. Eight years earlier, her articles on the horrors being unleashed on Vietnam's civilians had prompted Pilger's editor at the Daily Mirror to send him to cover the war. Pilger found Gellhorn's fan mail 'moving', but it was another 3 years before the two inveterate travellers were to meet. In 1978, following the screening of Pilger's documentary Do You Remember Vietnam?, they finally sat down together.
"Gellhorn kept a flat, a court of sorts, in London's Cadogan Square. As a young Midwesterner in Paris, she'd modelled for Chanel and Schiaparelli, and she retained a slim, striking elegance that must have contrasted to the lanky Aussie with fiercely independent hair. Over a bottle of Famous Grouse, they talked about 'the struggle of memory against forgetting', agreeing furiously on almost everything. The exception was Palestine. Gellhorn was one of the first journalists to enter Dachau and her adherence to Israel was unqualified. Pilger steered around the subject and the two became good friends.
"Strongly averse to 'the kitchen of life', the former Mrs Ernest Hemingway was a terrible cook. On subsequent visits, Pilger took food. Sometimes they would stroll in the park, talking surfing and snorkelling between denouncing the vileness of Kissinger. An incorrigible smoker, Gellhorn once got thrown out of Selfridges for lighting up.
"Martha Gellhorn was still reporting in her eighties, travelling to Panama in the wake of the American invasion and interviewing street kids in the favelas of Brazil. She died of cancer* in 1998. John Pilger continues to annoy the buggery out of his critics."
To be continued...
[*Although Gellhorn had cancer, it was a pre-emptive pill that actually did the trick.]
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Exporting Zionism
"So we can understand what Israel is doing in various remote corners of the world when we contemplate the Middle East itself and consider what Israel is doing there. Given the past and the present of Zionism in the Middle East, what else could one expect? What Israel is doing in the Third World is simply to export the Middle East experience of Zionism. This product doesn't need much adaptation to suit the export market, because the Middle East is part of the Third World, and what Israel does in such remote corners of the world as Chile and the Philippines is a direct outgrowth of what it has done at home. What Israel has been exporting to the Third World is not just a technology of domination, but a worldview that undergirds that technology. In every situation of oppression and domination, the logic of the oppressed is pitted against the logic of the oppressor. What Israel has been exporting is the logic of the oppressor, the way of seeing the world that is tied to successful domination. What is exported is not just technology, armaments, and experience, not just expertise, but a certain frame of mind, a feeling that the Third World can be controlled and dominated, that radical movements in the Third World can be stopped, that modern Crusaders still have a future." (The Israeli Connection: Whom Israel Arms & Why, Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, 1987, p 248)
"It is only a matter of time before the last redoubt of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) will fall. Armed resistance in the conventional sense of positional warfare will soon come to an end. But for all the triumphalism of the Sri Lankan army, it would be instructive to remember that since the fall of Killinochchi in October 2008, a small band of 2000+ LTTE cadres held out against 3 divisions of the Sri Lankan army for over 8 months. An army armed by China, Pakistan, helped by radars from India, manned by Indian personnel... Trained by the Indians, Pakistanis, Israelis and the Chinese... In the post-conflict situation, the Sri Lankans will keep conditions in the [Internally Displaced Persons] camps barely livable... They will... actively encourage the displaced to leave Sri Lanka for India or join the Tamil diaspora elsewhere and in a sense depopulate part of the north of that island. They will then... seek to implant Sinhalese settlers in that area... as they did successfully in the east where there is now a sizeable Sinhalese population in what was once a predominantly Tamil area... Any exodus of the Tamils from the north of Sri Lanka to India... would be inimical to the long-term interests of both the Sri Lankan Tamils as a historical community, as deeply rooted in the island nation as the Sinhalese. The Rajapakse brothers are devious but also farsighted... [They] are not merely looking at the military defeat of the Tigers; they want to write a new and final chapter of the Mahavamsa, which will conclude that the Sinhalese finally settled the 2000-year struggle with the Tamils under the Rajapakse brothers by sending the Tamils back in boats to where they originally came from." (Summer winds auger ill for the Sri Lankan Tamil, Ravi Nair, countercurrents.org, 11/5/09)
"The Sri Lankan government has learned an old lesson from, I suspect, a modern master: Israel. In order to conduct a slaughter, you ensure the pornography is unseen, illicit at best. You ban foreigners and their cameras from Tamil towns like Mulliavaikal, which was bombarded recently by the Sri Lankan army, and you lie that the 75 people killed in the hospital were blown up quite wilfully by a Tamil suicide bomber. You then give reporters a ride into the jungle, providing what in the news business is called a dateline, which suggests an eyewitness account, and you encourage the gullible to disseminate only your version and its lies. Gaza is the model. From the same masterclass you learn to manipulate the definition of terrorism as a universal menace, thus ingratiating yourself with the 'international community' (Washington) as a noble sovereign state blighted by an 'insurgency' of mindless fanaticism. The truth and lessons of the past are irrelevant. And having succeeded in persuading the United States and Britain to proscribe your insurgents as terrorists, you affirm you are on the right side of history, regardless of the fact that your government has one of the world's worst human rights records and practises terrorism by another name. Such is Sri Lanka." (Distant voices, desperate lives, John Pilger, johnpilger.com, 14/5/09)
"It is only a matter of time before the last redoubt of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) will fall. Armed resistance in the conventional sense of positional warfare will soon come to an end. But for all the triumphalism of the Sri Lankan army, it would be instructive to remember that since the fall of Killinochchi in October 2008, a small band of 2000+ LTTE cadres held out against 3 divisions of the Sri Lankan army for over 8 months. An army armed by China, Pakistan, helped by radars from India, manned by Indian personnel... Trained by the Indians, Pakistanis, Israelis and the Chinese... In the post-conflict situation, the Sri Lankans will keep conditions in the [Internally Displaced Persons] camps barely livable... They will... actively encourage the displaced to leave Sri Lanka for India or join the Tamil diaspora elsewhere and in a sense depopulate part of the north of that island. They will then... seek to implant Sinhalese settlers in that area... as they did successfully in the east where there is now a sizeable Sinhalese population in what was once a predominantly Tamil area... Any exodus of the Tamils from the north of Sri Lanka to India... would be inimical to the long-term interests of both the Sri Lankan Tamils as a historical community, as deeply rooted in the island nation as the Sinhalese. The Rajapakse brothers are devious but also farsighted... [They] are not merely looking at the military defeat of the Tigers; they want to write a new and final chapter of the Mahavamsa, which will conclude that the Sinhalese finally settled the 2000-year struggle with the Tamils under the Rajapakse brothers by sending the Tamils back in boats to where they originally came from." (Summer winds auger ill for the Sri Lankan Tamil, Ravi Nair, countercurrents.org, 11/5/09)
"The Sri Lankan government has learned an old lesson from, I suspect, a modern master: Israel. In order to conduct a slaughter, you ensure the pornography is unseen, illicit at best. You ban foreigners and their cameras from Tamil towns like Mulliavaikal, which was bombarded recently by the Sri Lankan army, and you lie that the 75 people killed in the hospital were blown up quite wilfully by a Tamil suicide bomber. You then give reporters a ride into the jungle, providing what in the news business is called a dateline, which suggests an eyewitness account, and you encourage the gullible to disseminate only your version and its lies. Gaza is the model. From the same masterclass you learn to manipulate the definition of terrorism as a universal menace, thus ingratiating yourself with the 'international community' (Washington) as a noble sovereign state blighted by an 'insurgency' of mindless fanaticism. The truth and lessons of the past are irrelevant. And having succeeded in persuading the United States and Britain to proscribe your insurgents as terrorists, you affirm you are on the right side of history, regardless of the fact that your government has one of the world's worst human rights records and practises terrorism by another name. Such is Sri Lanka." (Distant voices, desperate lives, John Pilger, johnpilger.com, 14/5/09)
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