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Democracy Now - 03.07.09 - Noam Chomsky Riverside Church - GCJM

Category: Chomsky
Description:
Noam Chomsky on “Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours” Noam Chomsky, the MIT professor, author and dissident intellectual, just turned eighty years old this past December. He has written over 100 books, but despite being called “the most important intellectual alive” by the New York Times, he is rarely heard in the corporate media. We spend the hour with Noam Chomsky. He spoke recently here in New York at an event sponsored by the Brecht Forum. More than 2,000 people packed into Riverside Church in Harlem to hear his address, titled “Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours.” In his talk, Chomsky discussed the global economic crisis, the environment, wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, resistance to American empire and much more.
Seeders: 11
Leeches: 1

Alternative Radio mega pack, 151 episodes. Radical History and current affairs.

Category: Talks, Debates, Interviews
Description:
Here are 151 Episodes of Alternative Radio. Alternative Radio is an internationally syndicated, one hour, weekly radio program, featuring interviews with progressive thinkers and activists. Begun in 1986, it evolved from a program that journalist David Barsamian hosted on community radio station KGNU-FM, in Boulder, Colorado. AR is currently heard on more than 125 radio stations around the world. It is entirely self-funded through donations and sales of recordings of individual programs.
Seeders: 2
Leeches: 0

New Edition of Alternative Radio with David Barsamian

Category: Talks, Debates, Interviews
Description:
David Barsamian's Alternative Radio Feat. Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, Arundhati Roy, George Galloway, Amy Goodman, Edward Said, Bill Moyers, Eric Schlosser, Greg Palest, Gore Vidal, Norman Solomon, Robert Jay Lifton, Scott Ritter, Tariq Ali, and Much Much more...Voice you'll Never Hear on our so called "Free Press" New Topics: Angela Davis - The Meaning of Freedom Arundhati Roy - Brave New India Benjamin Barber - Runaway Capitalism George Lakoff - The Political Mind Gore Vidal - The Fall of the United States Howard Zinn - War & Civil Disobedience John Pilger - Imperialism, War & Journalism Juan Cole - Invading the Middle East Napoleon to Bush Michael Parenti - The Arrogance of Empire Naomi Kline - Economic Warfare Newbar Hovsepian - The War on Lebanon Noam Chomsky - War Bailouts & Elections Richard Grossman - Rolling Back Corporate Power Sut Jhally - How TV Exploits It's Audience Tariq Ali - War and the Media Tom Hayden - Movements and Machiavellians Vandana Shiva - India States of Resistance and Much Much More...EnJoy!
Seeders: 1
Leeches: 0

(2009.01.02) - Howard Zinn on Democracy Now - Godcanjudgeme

Category: News & Current Affairs
Description:
Heads Up!!! Democracy Now! is available as Torrent!!! Simply visit: http://ewheel.democracynow.org/ to pick up the last weeks broadcasts for your torrent client.. Now higher quality than ever! ---------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------- For your viewing pleasure, 02.01.2009's broadcast, an hour long talk on the current (ish) state of affairs; Howard Zinn on "War and Social Justice" Recorded at Binghamton University, Upstate New York, a few days after the 2008 presidential election. ---------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.democracynow.org/ Not my work but theirs. Format : MP4 Codec : H.264 Sample Rate : 48000 Hz Audio Bitrate : 97kbs stereo Resolution : 640x480 Frame Rate : 29.971 Length : 00:59:18 Size : 447MB ----------------------------- ----------------------------- Happy New Year ..Godcanjudgeme..
Seeders: 0
Leeches: 1

Noam Chomsky Audio+Text Pack (incomplete) FIXED

Category: Chomsky
Description:
i had some trouble with thepiratebay, but now it's all fixed, ok? if you had the old torrent, stop it, download this one and point it to the same directory as the old one, it will work. ** this is a pre-release and includes a few duplicates, broken files, and is generally incomplete, but there is so much stuff here, that you probably don't care anyway! the text files are in text.rar so you NEED WINRAR OR 7zip to extract the text. 7zip is free: http://www.7-zip.org/ video is not included (it's fucking huge!) and will be released in a separate release called "Noam Chomsky Video Pack" more noam can be found on planetchomsky.com and chomsky.info
Seeders: 4
Leeches: 1

The Road to Guantanamo (2006)

Category: Documentary
Description:
Information The Road to Guantanamo is a 2006 docudrama directed by Michael Winterbottom about the incarceration of three British detainees at a detainment camp in Guant�namo Bay Naval Base, Cuba. The film tells the story of Ruhal Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul (the 'Tipton Three'); three young British men from Tipton in the West Midlands of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origins who traveled to Pakistan in September 2001 just days after the September 11 terrorist attacks in the USA for supposedly a wedding for a friend of theirs. While staying at a mosque in Karachi, the three decided to take a rash and dangerous trip to Afghanistan to see first-hand the encounters of the region. Mixed with interviews with the three men themselves, and archive news footage from the period, the film contains an account of the three men's experiences from their travels into Afghanistan and to their capture and imprisonment. Reduced: 94% of original size [ 680 x 555 ] - Click to view full image Technical Specs Video Codec: XviD Video Bitrate: 1501 kbps Video Resolution: 688x368 Video Aspect Ratio: 1.870:1 Audio Codec: AC3 Audio Bitrate: 192kb/s CBR 48000 Hz Audio Languages: English RunTime Per Part: 1hr32 Number Of Parts: 1 Part Size: 1120MB Subtitles: English/Portuguese Ripped by: Dentje
Seeders: 0
Leeches: 1

2006 - Bill Moyers - The Net at Risk

Category: News & Current Affairs
Description:
The future of the Internet is up for grabs. Last year, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) effectively eliminated net neutrality rules, which ensured that every content creator on the Internet-from big-time media concerns to backroom bloggers-had equal opportunity to make their voice heard. Now, large and powerful corporations are lobbying Washington to turn the World Wide Web into what critics call a "toll road," threatening the equitability that has come to define global democracy's newest forum. Yet the public knows little about what's happening behind closed doors on Capitol Hill. Some activists describe the ongoing debate this way: A small number of mega-media giants owns much of the content and controls the delivery of content on radio and television and in the press; if we let them take control of the Internet as well, immune from government regulation, who will pay the price? Their opponents say that the best way to encourage Internet innovation and technological advances is to let the market-not the federal government-determine the shape of the system. "The genius of the Internet was that it made the First Amendment a living document again for millions of Americans," says Robert McChesney, a media scholar and activist and co-author of OUR MEDIA, NOT THEIRS. "The decisions that we're going be making ... are probably going to set our entire communication system, and, really, our entire society, on a course that it won't be able to change for generations."
Seeders: 0
Leeches: 0

Still, the Children Are Here (2003)

Category: Documentary
Description:
Still, The Children Are Here Category: Documentaries Regions: South Asia Topics: Indigenous Peoples, Political Institutions / Systems, Economic Development / Poverty Still, The Children Are Here is an exquisitely photographed portrait of an indigenous society that has maintained its culture in isolation from a rapidly urbanizing and westernizing India. But this intimate film not only describes an indigenous people and culture, it also speaks to the essential nature of man. For many of the Garos of Meghalaya in North East India, cultivating rice is a way of life and worship. In the West Garo Hills, villagers still grow a diversity of ancient strains of hill rice in the same manner as humanity first did 6,000 years ago. These strains are now highly valued by scientists studying sustainable agriculture and botanical genetics. Of Tibetan-Burmese origin, the Garos' homes and just about all of their household goods have their origins in the lush bamboo forests that surround them. Their worries are both basic (having enough food and a roof over their heads) and universal (the women worry about whether their men are faithful and a couple mourns the loss of their child). Theirs is a society based on the natural order of things, but as the world changes around them, they begin to find this is no longer enough. Shot over the course of an entire growing cycle, from the preparation of the fields to the harvest, Still, The Children Are Here is an elegant meditation on a way of life that to outsiders seems simple and peaceful, but is fraught with the same existential questions that plague us all. ----------------------------------------------------------------- A muddled documentary about a small, isolated society in northeastern India, "Still, the Children Are Here" has one admirable quality that is missing from almost every other film with an ethnographic focus. Individual residents of Sadolpara, a village inhabited by the Garos, rice farmers of Tibetan-Burmese origin, emerge as complicated careworn people with the same psychological stresses as everybody else. As it wanders around Sadolpara it finds people, who live much the same way they did 6,000 years ago. But the older inhabitants are also painfully aware of the outside world encroaching. The once self-sufficient Garos are no longer entirely self-sustaining. But the movie's haphazard way of rambling from one topic to the next is confusing, and the film is too light on the kind of history and statistics that might ground its portrait of the Gora. — Stephen Holden, The New York Times ----------------------------------------------------------------- Produced by Mira Nair (Vanity Fair, Salaam Bombay) in association with the International Fund for Agricultural Development, STILL, THE CHILDREN ARE HERE is an exquisitely photographed portrait of an indigenous society that has maintained its culture in isolation from a rapidly urbanizing and westernizing India. But this intimate film not only describes an indigenous people and culture, but also speaks to the essential nature of man. For many of the Garos of Meghalaya in North East India, cultivating rice is a way of life and worship. In the West Garo Hills, villagers still grow a diversity of ancient strains of hill rice in the same manner as humanity first did 6000 years ago. These strains are now highly valued by scientists studying sustainable agriculture and botanical genetics. Of Tibetan-Burmese origin, the Garos' homes and just about all of their household goods have their origins in the lush bamboo forests that surround them. Their worries are both basic (having enough food and a roof over their heads) and universal (the women worry about whether their men are faithful and a couple mourns the loss of their child). Theirs is a society based on the natural order of things, but as the world changes around them, they begin to find this is no longer enough. Shot over the course of an entire growing cycle, from the preparation of the fields to the harvest, STILL, THE CHILDREN ARE HERE is an elegant meditation on a way of life that to outsiders seems simple and peaceful, but is fraught with the same existential questions that plague us all. "Highly Recommended! This exceptionally well-produced documentary provides an engrossing portrait of a... culture in transition. Produced in association with the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), this is a beautifully photographed and edited field study. Excellent!" - Educational Media Reviews Online " A beautiful film." - Newsday "*** (3 Stars!)." - New York Post "Intimate scenes create a clearer, deeper understanding of the difficulties of tradition and change." - FilmForward.com "Beautfully shot... Remarkably cohesive... Portrays a rich way of life and how it's now threatened by agricultural development and outside market forces." - TV Guide.com "[Lends] an elegant air to a classic documentary subject." - The New Yorker "Invaluable and gorgeous." - New York Magazine ** 2005 Society for Visual Anthropology Film Festival ** 2005 Annual Conference on South Asia (University of Wisconsin) ** 2005 Association for Asian Studies Film Festival ** 2005 South Asian Human Rights Film Festival ** 2005 Newport Beach Film Festival ** 2004 Silver Award WInner, Broadcast Design Association ** 2004 Locarno International Film Festival ** 2004 Planet in Focus Environmental Film Festival ** 2004 Woodstock Film Festival LinkTV sdtv divx rip 90min English sub Not a DVD rip www.progressivetorrents.com To learn more or to purchase dvd of this film, visit First Run Icarus Films.
Seeders: 1
Leeches: 1

Harold Pinter - Nobel Prize Speech

Category: Talks, Debates, Interviews
Description:
Harold Pinter – Nobel Lecture Art, Truth & Politics In 1958 I wrote the following: 'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.' I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false? Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost. I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did. Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me. The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The Homecoming is 'What have you done with the scissors?' The first line of Old Times is 'Dark.' In each case I had no further information. In the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn't give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either, for that matter. 'Dark' I took to be a description of someone's hair, the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question. In each case I found myself compelled to pursue the matter. This happened visually, a very slow fade, through shadow into light. I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C. In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark room and ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed a short time later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), 'Dad, do you mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it? Why don't you buy a dog? You're a dog cook. Honest. You think you're cooking for a lot of dogs.' So since B calls A 'Dad' it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean that there was no mother? I didn't know. But, as I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends. 'Dark.' A large window. Evening sky. A man, A (later to become Deeley), and a woman, B (later to become Kate), sitting with drinks. 'Fat or thin?' the man asks. Who are they talking about? But I then see, standing at the window, a woman, C (later to become Anna), in another condition of light, her back to them, her hair dark. It's a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author's position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can't dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man's buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort. So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time. But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot. Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice. He must be prepared to approach them from a variety of angles, from a full and uninhibited range of perspectives, take them by surprise, perhaps, occasionally, but nevertheless give them the freedom to go which way they will. This does not always work. And political satire, of course, adheres to none of these precepts, in fact does precisely the opposite, which is its proper function. In my play The Birthday Party I think I allow a whole range of options to operate in a dense forest of possibility before finally focussing on an act of subjugation. Mountain Language pretends to no such range of operation. It remains brutal, short and ugly. But the soldiers in the play do get some fun out of it. One sometimes forgets that torturers become easily bored. They need a bit of a laugh to keep their spirits up. This has been confirmed of course by the events at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad. Mountain Language lasts only 20 minutes, but it could go on for hour after hour, on and on and on, the same pattern repeated over and over again, on and on, hour after hour. Ashes to Ashes, on the other hand, seems to me to be taking place under water. A drowning woman, her hand reaching up through the waves, dropping down out of sight, reaching for others, but finding nobody there, either above or under the water, finding only shadows, reflections, floating; the woman a lost figure in a drowning landscape, a woman unable to escape the doom that seemed to belong only to others. But as they died, she must die too. Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed. As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true. The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it. But before I come back to the present I would like to look at the recent past, by which I mean United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this period to at least some kind of even limited scrutiny, which is all that time will allow here. Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified. But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States' actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked. Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America's favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as 'low intensity conflict'. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued – or beaten to death – the same thing – and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer. The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of America's view of its role in the world, both then and now. I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s. The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: 'Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.' Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. 'Father,' he said, 'let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.' There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch. Innocent people, indeed, always suffer. Finally somebody said: 'But in this case “innocent people” were the victims of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of a sovereign state?' Seitz was imperturbable. 'I don't agree that the facts as presented support your assertions,' he said. As we were leaving the Embassy a US aide told me that he enjoyed my plays. I did not reply. I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: 'The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.' The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution. The Sandinistas weren't perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated. The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador. I spoke earlier about 'a tapestry of lies' which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a 'totalitarian dungeon'. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships. Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright. The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. 'Democracy' had prevailed. But this 'policy' was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened. The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven. Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it. It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis. I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.' It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US. The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn't give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain. What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days – conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what's called the 'international community'. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be 'the leader of the free world'. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally – a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man's land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anaesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You're either with us or against us. So Blair shuts up. The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading – as a last resort – all other justifications having failed to justify themselves – as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people. We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'. How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they're interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London. Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don't exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. 'We don't do body counts,' said the American general Tommy Franks. Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. 'A grateful child,' said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. 'When do I get my arms back?' he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn't holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you're making a sincere speech on television. The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm's way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves. Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda, 'I'm Explaining a Few Things': And one morning all that was burning, one morning the bonfires leapt out of the earth devouring human beings and from then on fire, gunpowder from then on, and from then on blood. Bandits with planes and Moors, bandits with finger-rings and duchesses, bandits with black friars spattering blessings came through the sky to kill children and the blood of children ran through the streets without fuss, like children's blood. Jackals that the jackals would despise stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out, vipers that the vipers would abominate. Face to face with you I have seen the blood of Spain tower like a tide to drown you in one wave of pride and knives. Treacherous generals: see my dead house, look at broken Spain: from every house burning metal flows instead of flowers from every socket of Spain Spain emerges and from every dead child a rifle with eyes and from every crime bullets are born which will one day find the bull's eye of your hearts. And you will ask: why doesn't his poetry speak of dreams and leaves and the great volcanoes of his native land. Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see the blood in the streets!* Let me make it quite clear that in quoting from Neruda's poem I am in no way comparing Republican Spain to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. I quote Neruda because nowhere in contemporary poetry have I read such a powerful visceral description of the bombing of civilians. I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as 'full spectrum dominance'. That is not my term, it is theirs. 'Full spectrum dominance' means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources. The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course. We don't quite know how they got there but they are there all right. The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity – the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons – is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it. Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government's actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force – yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish. I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man's man. 'God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad, except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don't chop people's heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don't you forget it.' A writer's life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don't have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection – unless you lie – in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician. I have referred to death quite a few times this evening. I shall now quote a poem of my own called 'Death'. Where was the dead body found? Who found the dead body? Was the dead body dead when found? How was the dead body found? Who was the dead body? Who was the father or daughter or brother Or uncle or sister or mother or son Of the dead and abandoned body? Was the body dead when abandoned? Was the body abandoned? By whom had it been abandoned? Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey? What made you declare the dead body dead? Did you declare the dead body dead? How well did you know the dead body? How did you know the dead body was dead? Did you wash the dead body Did you close both its eyes Did you bury the body Did you leave it abandoned Did you kiss the dead body When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us. I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory. If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us – the dignity of man.
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Bob McChesney - Media Matters - Interviews Vol. 2

Category: Talks, Debates, Interviews
Description:
Bob McChesney - Media Matters - Audio Interviews Vol. 2 "Media Matters" is an hour-long listener call-in radio program hosted by Bob McChesney that often but not always focuses on media policy issues. In this package, I've included shows from 2004-2007 in which Bob interviews well-known guests such as Barbara Ehrenreich, Gore Vidal, John Nichols, John Pilger, Michael Albert, Molly Ivins, Naomi Klein, Norman Solomon, Paul Krugman, Sy Hersh, and Thomas Frank. For details visit http://www.will.uiuc.edu/AM/mediamatters/default.htm An earlier upload (call it "Media Matters Vol. 1") featured interviews with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Alexander Cockburn, Norman Finkelstein, Robert Fisk, Amy Goodman, Charles Lewis, David Sirota, and Norman Solomon. Files: BarbaraEhrenreichMediaMatters070603.mp3 DonohueKleinHershMediaMatters050626.mp3 GoreVidalMediaMatters050529.mp3 JohnNicholsMediaMatters060212.mp3 JohnNicholsMediaMatters061008.mp3 JohnPilgerMediaMatters070610.mp3 MichaelAlbertMediaMatters070408.mp3 MollyIvinsMediaMatters040229.mp3 NaomiKleinMediaMatters050424.mp3 NormanSolomonMediaMatters070715.mp3 PaulKrugmanMediaMatters041212.mp3 SeymourHershMediaMatters050508.mp3 ThomasFrankMediaMatters041205.mp3 Robert "Bob" W. McChesney is a professor of media studies and one of the foremost critics of American mass media. His work concentrates on the history and political economy of communication, emphasizing the role media plays in democratic and capitalist societies. Since 2002, McChesney has been the host of Media Matters, a call-in talk radio program broadcast on WILL-AM and over the internet ( http://www.will.uiuc.edu/AM/mediamatters/default.htm ). Barbara Ehrenreich is a prominent liberal American writer, columnist, feminist, socialist and political activist. Gore Vidal is an American author of novels, stage plays, screenplays, and essays. The scion of a prominent political family, Gore is an outspoken critic of the American political establishment and a noted wit and social critic. John Nichols, Washington correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. He is the author of "Jews for Buchanan: Did You Hear the One About the Theft of the American Presidency." With Robert McChesney, he co-authored "Our Media Not Theirs: the Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media." John Pilger is an Australian journalist and documentary filmmaker from Sydney, primarily based in London, England. Pilger's career in journalism began in 1958, and he has developed his reputation through both his reporting and the various books and documentary films that he has written or produced. He is best known in Britain for his investigative documentaries, particularly those on Cambodia and East Timor. He has acted as a war correspondent during conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia, Egypt, India, Bangladesh and Biafra. In all of his work, Pilger has been a prominent and fervent critic of Western foreign policy. He is particularly opposed to many aspects of American foreign policy, which he regards as being driven by a largely imperialist agenda. Michael Albert is a longtime activist, speaker, and writer, is co-editor of ZNet, and co-editor and co-founder of Z Magazine. He also co-founded South End Press and has written numerous books and articles. He developed along with Robin Hahnel the economic vision called participatory economics, or parecon for short. Albert identifies himself as a market abolitionist and favors democratic participatory planning as an alternative. Mary Tyler "Molly" Ivins (died 2007) was a liberal American newspaper columnist, political commentator, and best-selling author from Austin, Texas. Naomi Klein is a Canadian journalist, author and activist well known for her political analyses of corporate globalization. In 2000, Klein published the book "No Logo", which for many became a manifesto of the anti-globalization movement. This movement had shut down the WTO Meeting of 1999 one month before the release of "No Logo." The book lambasts brand-oriented consumer culture by describing the operations of large corporations. These corporations are also often guilty of exploiting workers in the world's poorest countries in pursuit of ever-greater profits, she writes. Norman Solomon is an American journalist, media critic and antiwar activist. A longtime associate of the media watch group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), Solomon is also the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, a national consortium of policy researchers and analysts which works pro-actively to provide alternative sources for journalists. His weekly column, "Media Beat", has been in national syndication since 1992. Paul Krugman is an American economist. Krugman, a liberal, is currently a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University. He is also an author and a columnist for The New York Times, writing a twice-weekly op-ed for the newspaper since 2000. Krugman is an outspoken critic of the George W. Bush administration and its foreign and domestic policy. Unlike many economic pundits, he is also regarded as an important scholarly contributor by his peers. He has written over 200 scholarly papers and 20 books—some academic, and some written for the layperson. Seymour (Sy) Hersh is an American Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist and author based in Washington, DC. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters. Thomas Frank is an American author who writes about what he calls "cultural politics". He is the founder and editor of The Baffler and the author of several books, most recently "What's the Matter with Kansas?". Other writings include essays for Harper's Magazine, Le Monde diplomatique, and the Financial Times.
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