In South Africa, the Mbeki government has been suckered by British arms companies into buying 24 Hawk fighter jets at £17-million each.
Had he not been assassinated 40 years ago this week, Robert Kennedy would have been elected president of the United States. Kennedy’s campaign is a model for Barack Obama.
When the outside world thinks about Australia, it generally turns to venerable clichés of innocence — cricket, leaping marsupials, endless sunshine, no worries.
Australian governments actively encourage this. Witness the recent "G’Day USA" campaign, in which Kylie Minogue and Nicole Kidman sought to persuade Americans that, unlike the empire’s problematic outposts, a gormless greeting awaited them Down Under.
”’Democracy’ is now the free market — a concept itself bereft of freedom. ‘Reform’ is now the denial of reform. ‘Economics’ is the relegation of most human endeavour to material value, a bottom line.” We publish an edited version of an address by John Pilger to graduating students at Rhodes University.
The highest and oldest wall is that which separates ”us” from ”them”. This is described today as a great divide of religions or ”a clash of civilisations”, which are false concepts, propagated to provide ”the other” — a target for fear and hatred that justifies invasion and plunder, writes John Pilger.
I walked with Roberto Navarrete into the national stadium in Santiago, Chile. With the southern winter’s wind skating down from the Andes, it was empty and ghostly. Little had changed, he said: the chicken wire, the broken seats, the tunnel to the changing rooms from which the screams echoed. We stopped at a large number 28. ”This is where I was, facing the scoreboard. This is where I was called to be tortured.”
I walked with Roberto Navarrete into the national stadium in Santiago, Chile. With the southern winter’s wind skating down from the Andes, it was empty and ghostly. Little had changed, he said: the chicken wire, the broken seats, the tunnel to the changing rooms from which the screams echoed. We stopped at a large number 28. ”This is where I was, facing the scoreboard. This is where I was called to be tortured.”
Just as the London bombs in the summer of 2005 were Blair’s bombs, the inevitable consequence of his government’s lawless attack on Iraq, so the potential bombs in the summer of 2007 are Brown’s bombs. Gordon Brown, Blair’s successor as prime minister, has been an unerring supporter of the unprovoked bloodbath whose victims now equal those of the Rwandan genocide.
Israel is destroying any notion of a state of Palestine and is imprisoning an entire nation. That is clear from the latest attacks on Gaza. The attacks, reported on Britain’s Channel 4 News, were ”targeting key militants of Hamas” and the ”Hamas infrastructure”. The BBC described a ”clash” between the same militants and Israeli F-16 aircraft.
The Israeli journalist Amira Hass describes the moment her mother, Hannah, was marched from a cattle train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. ”They were sick and some were dying,” she says. ”Then my mother saw these German women looking at the prisoners, just looking. This image became very formative in my upbringing, this despicable ‘looking from the side’.”