#Harper’s #DumpsterFire: #Despotism vs #Democracy (Explained in 1946) #cdnpoli #elxn42

Since it is early morning on the 42nd Election, 2015 Edition, we felt it may be in our best interest as a Nation to review an “Old Stock” educational film that explains the differences between Despotism and Democracy to encourage everyone to think really hard before traveling to the polls. We would like to especially deliver this to the “undecided” potential conservative voters that may, or may not, grasp the importance of placing their Country above the Harper Regime’s ideology. In other words, it may be worth considering the option of falling on your swords with dignity today with honour as opposed to casting your kids and grand-kids futures under the ReformaCon bus while falling under another’s sword in disgrace. Below you will find the video that we have uploaded via our ytube channel followed by the transcripts for those that may like to read along or have trouble viewing as it has been rumoured that this is being blocked in Canada. As always, we encourage sharing and commenting…

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#Harper’s #DumpsterFire: #Despotism vs #Democracy (Explained in 1946) #cdnpoli #elxn42

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YxkyF3CgY4

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Despotism

by Encyclopaedia Britannica Films
Published: 1946
Usage: Public Domain
Topics: Political science

Measures how a society ranks on a spectrum stretching from democracy to despotism. Explains how societies and nations can be measured by the degree that power is concentrated and respect for the individual is restricted. Where does your community, state and nation stand on these scales?

The companion Encyclopedia Britannica Film “Democracy” can be found here.
Run time: 11:00
Producer: Encyclopaedia Britannica Films
Audio/Visual:sound, B&W

Shotlist

Illustrates the thesis that all communities can be ranged on a scale running from democracy to despotism. The two chief characteristics of despotism — restricted respect and concentrated power — are defined and illustrated. Two of the conditions which have historically promoted the growth of despotism are explained and exemplified. These are a slanted economic distribution and a strict control of the agencies of communication.

The end of World War II gave impetus to the “one-worlder movement.” Sparked by the sense that nationalism engendered conflict, this movement for world government viewed nationhood as a relic made obsolete in an age of economic interdependence and rapid air transportation. The movement was marked by the release of films calling for world government, such as Man: One Family; We, the Peoples; Brotherhood of Man; and Our Shrinking World, and exposing the nature of fascist and authoritarian rule.

Despotism treats the idea of nationhood differently than most other educational films. It sees nations not as static entities but dynamically, moving towards democracy or despotism as conditions change. This outlook doesn’t mesh well with old cliches about patriotism and democracy, because it doesn’t necessarily see the American system as democracy’s highest achievement.

Despotism offers a number of indicators by which the degree of democracy or despotism in a society can be measured, using a sliding, thermometer-like animated scale. According to an article in The New York Times (March 16, 1946), an advisory board of educators debated for eighteen months (at seventy-five conferences) over the definition of the terms “democracy” and “despotism,” the titles of the two films released at the same time. Finally, a compromise was reached, resulting in the “respect scale” and the “power scale” that we see in Despotism.

So how does our own system measure up? The film becomes a little frightening as we consider where we stand with regard to indicators like economic distribution, concentration of land ownership, regressive taxation and centralized control of information. Draw your own conclusions.

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[Despotism. An Erpi Classroom Film. Produced by Encyclopaedia Britannica Films, Inc. in collaboration with Harold D. Lasswell, Ph.D., Yale University. Copyright MCMXLV by Encyclopaedia Britannica Films Inc. All rights reserved. main titles graphic design art cards]

You can roughly locate any community in the world somewhere along a scale running all the way from democracy to despotism. One at the democracy end, another somewhere in the middle, and a third (inaudible). [rotating globes rulers animation graphs charts measurement quantification scales measures points pointers]

Let’s find out about despotism. This man makes it his job to study these things. “Well for one thing, avoid the comfortable idea that the mere form of government can of itself safeguard a nation against despotism. [maps charts wallcharts professors academics commentators authorities]

Germany under President Hindenburg was a republic. And yet in this republic an aggressive despotism took root and flourished under Adolf Hitler. [maps flags art cards swastikas animation James Brill narrators]

When a competent observer looks for signs of despotism in a community, he looks beyond fine words and noble phrases.” “. . . for which it stands, one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.” [saluting flag pledge of allegiance flags hands over hearts lynchings hangings gallows capital punishment condemnation death murder ropes nooses]

“Many observers have found that two workable yardsticks help in discovering how near a community is to despotism. The respect scale and the power scale. [goal variables charts graphs posters pointing fingers]

A careful observer can use a respect scale to find how many citizens get an even break. As a community moves towards despotism, respect is restricted to fewer people. [shared fairness equality]

A community is low on a respect scale if common courtesy is withheld from large groups of people on account of their political attitudes; if people are rude to others because they think their wealth and position gives them that right, or because they don’t like a man’s race or his religion. [drugstores soda Palmer Pharmacy pharmacies prescriptions candy cosmetics Scarlet Stores pedestrians people walking sidewalks storm troopers goons fascists military uniforms SA men SS men brownshirts brown shirts Nazis Sam Browne belts leather boots spectators Good Germans Jewish people Jews anti-Semitism antisemitism racism prejudice bigotry private doors offices bosses employers management class chauvinism classism For a quiet, restful vacation. Camp Gentilhomme on the Lake. Reservation Blank.

Gentlemen: Enclosed please find $ — deposit for my party of: name, address, date of arrival, religion. We solicit Gentile patronage only. Are there any Hebrews in your party? Yes or no. I hereby swear that the above statements are true. Signed application blanks pencils pointing]

Equal opportunity for all citizens to develop useful skills is one basis for rating a community on a respect scale. The opportunity to develop useful skills is important but not enough. [schools colleges universities lawns trees graduates steps stairs mothers cap and gown mortarboards parental pride pictures snapshots photography parents diplomas]

The equally important opportunity to put skills to use is a further test on a respect scale. [newspapers jobs applications employment offices unemployment work lines employment agencies]

A power scale is another important yardstick of despotism. It gauges the citizen’s share in making the community’s decisions. Communities which concentrate decision making in a few hands rate low on a power scale and are moving towards despotism. Like France under the Bourbon kings, one of whom said, “The state – I am the state.” [shared concentrated political power democracy equestrian statues horses statuary public art]

Today democracy can ebb away in communities whose citizens allow power to become concentrated in the hands of bosses. “What I say goes. See, I’m the law around here. Ha ha ha.” [government buildings smoke fires political power Tammany Hall machines laughs laughing newspaper reporters press]

The test of despotic power is that it can disregard the will of the people. It rules without the consent of the governed. [Declaration of Independence July 4, 1776 booklets opening inserts printed pieces In Congress, the unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.]

Look beyond the legal formalities of an election in measuring a community on the power scale to see if the ballot is really free. [fascists Nazis elections voting booths rigged storm troopers soldiers terrorism voters crosses hats uniforms Sam Browne belts hats control]

If the citizens can vote only the way they are told, a community approaches despotism.

When legislatures become ceremonial assemblies only, and have no real control over lawmaking, their community rates low on a power scale. “Sieg Heil. Sieg Heil.” [Germany Third Reich Nazis Adolf Hitler swastikas ceremonies applause clapping newsreels salutes fascists fascism]

In a downright despotism, opposition is dangerous whether the despotism is official or whether it is unofficial. [signs fences concentration camps Camp 33 for Political Offenders political prisoners prisons prison camps hoods hanging nooses ropes executions deaths capital punishment condemned people murder flames fires burning crosses Ku Klux Klan terrorism hoods racism]

“The spread of respect and power in a community is influenced by certain conditions which many observers measure by means of the economic distribution and information scales.” [instrumental variables]

If a community’s economic distribution becomes slanted, its middle income groups grow smaller and despotism stands a better chance to gain a foothold. [balanced distribution of wealth money affluence poverty]

Where land is privately owned, one sign of a poorly balanced economy is the concentration of land ownership in the hands of a very small number of people.

When farmers lose their farms they lose their independence. This one can stay on, but not as his own boss any more. To the extent that this condition exists throughout a nation, the likelihood of despotism is increased. [couples men women John J. Shea v. Walter Leeds.

Judgment of Foreclosure and Sale. mortgages fingers pointing United States maps animation]

In communities which depend almost entirely on a single industry, such as a factory or mine, maintaining economic balance is a challenging problem. [company towns monopolies smokestacks factories animation]

If this condition exists over the nation as a whole, so that the control of jobs and business opportunities is in a few hands, despotism stands a good chance. Another sign of a poorly balanced economy is a taxation system that presses heaviest on those least able to pay. [animation money graphs wealth national revenue large incomes small incomes regressive taxation]

A larger part of a small income is spent on necessities such as food. Sales taxes on such necessities hit the small income harder. [pie charts pie graphs large income small income]

In the days of the salt tax, feudal despotisms were partly sustained by this and other (inaudible). [historical recreations Colonial North America taxation without representation]

A community rates low on an information scale when the press, radio, and other channels of communication are controlled by only a few people and when citizens have to accept what they are told. In communities of this kind, despotism stands a good chance. [uncontrolled media monopolies monopolization oligopolies Time Warner Disney ABC Capital Cities Westinghouse CBS NBC General Electric Fox News Corporation Turner CNN critical evaluation automatic acceptance]

See how a community trains its teachers. “Bear this in mind. Young people cannot be trusted to form their own opinions. This business about open-mindedness is nonsense. It’s a waste of time trying to teach students to think for themselves. It’s our job to tell ’em.” [lecturers mental discipline drill classrooms agreement nodding heads manufacturing consent consensus]

And when teachers put such training into practice, despotism stands a good chance. These children are being taught to accept uncritically whatever they are told. Questions are not encouraged. [students conformity conditioning brainwashing writing learning education]

“How can you ask such a question? Have you got a textbook?” “Yes Ma’am.” “Does it say here that our law courts are always just?” “Yes Ma’am.” “Then how dare you question the fact? Sit down.”

And so we aren’t surprised when – “But it must be true. I saw it in this book right here.”

And if books and newspapers and the radio are efficiently controlled, the people will read and accept exactly what the few in control want them to. Government censorship is one form of control. [Ministry of Propaganda plaques signs doors windows Internal Censorship censors rubber stamps passed by censor deletions blue pencils manuscripts]
A newspaper which breaks a government censorship rule can be suspended. It is also possible for newspapers and other forms of communication to be controlled by private interests. [The Daily Citizen press control proclamations This Newspaper is Suspended editors journalists newspaper offices Advertising Manager Mgr.]

“I thought I told you to kill that story. It’ll cost us a lot of advertising.” “If that story goes out, I quit.” “All right.” [firings]

What sort of community do you live in? Where would you place it on a democracy/despotism scale? To find out, you can rate it on a respect scale and a power scale. And to find out what way it is likely to go in the future, you can rate it on economic distribution and information scales. [cities wipes]

The lower your community rates on economic distribution and information scales, the lower it is likely to rate on respect and power scales and thus to approach despotism.

What happens in a single community is the problem of its own citizens, but it is also the problem of us all because as communities go, so goes the nation. [animation United States]

[Encyclopaedia Britannica Films Inc. Bring the World to the Classroom. end titles]

Politics, Political science, Democracy, Despotism, Dictatorship, Censorship, Newspapers, Rubber stamps, Freedom of the press, Communism, Germany (Nazi) Third Reich, Students, Teachers, Political Indoctrination, Propaganda, Mass communications, Animation Graphic design Cartoons, Animation Scales (sliding), Information (visual), Surrealism, Capitalism, Economics

 

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continue reading source: https://archive.org/details/Despotis1946

 

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Power, Propaganda and Conscience in The War On Terror

by John Pilger
UWA Extension Summer School Lecture
Winthrop Hall, The University of Western Australia, 12 January 2004

In the days before September 11, 2001, when America routinely attacked and terrorised weak states, and the victims were black and brown-skinned people in faraway places like Zaire and Guatemala, there were no headlines saying terrorism. But when the weak attacked the powerful, spectacularly on September 11, suddenly, there was terrorism.

I am a reporter, who values bearing witness. That is to say, I place paramount importance in the evidence of what I see, and hear, and sense to be the truth, or as close to the truth as possible. By comparing this evidence with the statements, and actions of those with power, I believe it’s possible to assess fairly how our world is controlled and divided, and manipulated – and how language and debate are distorted and a false consciousness developed.

When we speak of this in regard to totalitarian societies and dictatorships, we call it brainwashing: the conquest of minds. It’s a notion we almost never apply to our own societies. Let me give you an example. During the height of the cold war, a group of Soviet journalists were taken on an official tour of the United States. They watched TV; they read the newspapers; they listened to debates in Congress. To their astonishment, everything they heard was more or less the same. The news was the same. The opinions were the same, more or less. “How do you do it?” they asked their hosts. “In our country, to achieve this, we throw people in prison; we tear out their fingernails. Here, there’s none of that? What’s your secret?”

The secret is that the question is almost never raised. Or if it is raised, it’s more than likely dismissed as coming from the margins: from voices far outside the boundaries of what I would call our ‘metropolitan conversation’, whose terms of reference, and limits, are fixed by the media at one level, and by the discourse or silence of scholarship at another level. Behind both is a presiding corporate and political power.

A dozen years ago, I reported from East Timor, which was then occupied by the Indonesian dictatorship of General Suharto. I had to go there under cover, as reporters were not welcome – my informants were brave, ordinary people who confirmed, with their evidence and experience, that genocide had taken place in their country. I brought out meticulously hand-written documents, evidence that whole communities had been slaughtered – all of which we now know to be true.

We also know that vital material backing for a crime proportionally greater than the killing in Cambodia under Pol Pot had come from the West: principally the United States, Britain and Australia. On my return to London, and then to this country, I encountered a very different version. The media version was that General Suharto was a benign leader, who ran a sound economy and was a close ally. Indeed, prime minister Keating was said to regard him as a father figure.

…This episode is a metaphor for what I’d like to touch upon tonight.

For 15 years, a silence was maintained by the Australian government, the Australian media and Australian academics on the great crime and tragedy of East Timor. Moreover, this was an extension of the silence about the true circumstances of Suharto’s bloody ascent to power in the mid-sixties. It was not unlike the official silence in the Soviet Union on the bloody invasion of Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

…During the 1990s, whole societies were laid out for autopsy and identified as “failed states” and “rogue states,” requiring “humanitarian intervention.” Other euphemisms became fashionable – “good governance” and “third way” were adopted by the liberal realist school, which handed out labels to its heroes. Bill Clinton, the president who destroyed the last of the Roosevelt reforms, was labelled “left of centre.”

Noble words like democracy, freedom, independence, reform were emptied of their meaning and taken into the service of the World Bank, the IMF and that amorphous thing called “The West” – in other words, imperialism.

Of course, imperialism was the word the realists dared not write or speak, almost as if it had been struck from the dictionary. And yet imperialism was the ideology behind their euphemisms. And need I remind you of the fate of people under imperialism. Throughout 20th century imperialism, the authorities of Britain, Belgium and France gassed, bombed and massacred indigenous populations from Sudan to Iraq, Nigeria to Palestine, India to Malaya, Algeria to the Congo. And yet imperialism only got its bad name when Hitler decided he, too, was an imperialist.

So, after the war, new concepts had to be invented, indeed a whole lexicon and discourse created, as the new imperial superpower, the United States, didn’t wish to be associated with the bad old days of European power. The American cult of anti-communism filled this void most effectively; however, when the Soviet Union suddenly collapsed and the cold war was over, a new threat had to be found.

At first, there was the “war on drugs” – and the Bogeyman Theory of History is still popular. But neither can compare with the “war on terror” which arrived with September 11, 2001. Last year, I reported the “war on terror” from Afghanistan. Like East Timor, events I witnessed bore almost no relation to the way they were represented in free societies, especially Australia.

The American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was reported as a liberation. But the evidence on the ground is that, for 95 per cent of the people, there is no liberation. The Taliban have been merely exchanged for a group of American funded warlords, rapists, murderers and war criminals – terrorists by any measure: the very people whom President Carter secretly armed and the CIA trained for almost 20 years.

One of the most powerful warlords is General Rashid Dostum. General Dostum was visited by Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, who came to express his gratitude. He called the general a “thoughtful” man and congratulated him on his part in the war on terror. This is the same General Dostum in whose custody 4,000 prisoners died terrible deaths just over two years ago – the allegations are that wounded men were left to suffocate and bleed to death in containers. Mary Robinson, when she was the UN’s senior humanitarian representative, called for an inquiry; but there was none for this kind of acceptable terrorism. The general is the face of the new Afghanistan you don’t see in the media.

…Like the Suharto dictatorship, these warlords are our official friends, whereas the Taliban were our official enemies. The distinction is important, because the victims of our official friends are worthy of our care and concern, whereas the victims of our official enemies are not. That is the principle upon which totalitarian regimes run their domestic propaganda. And that, basically, is how western democracies, like Australia, run theirs.

The difference is that in totalitarian societies, people take for granted that their governments lie to them: that their journalists are mere functionaries, that their academics are quiet and complicit. So people in these countries adjust accordingly. They learn to read between the lines. They rely on a flourishing underground. Their writers and playwrights write coded works, as in Poland and Czechoslovakia during the cold war.

A Czech friend, a novelist, told me; “You in the West are disadvantaged. You have your myths about freedom of information, but you have yet to acquire the skill of deciphering: of reading between the lines. One day, you will need it.”

That day has come. The so-called war on terror is the greatest threat to all of us since the most dangerous years of the cold war. Rapacious, imperial America has found its new “red scare.” Every day now, officially manipulated fear and paranoia are exported to our shores – air marshals, finger printing, a directive on how many people can queue for the toilet on a Qantas jet flying to Los Angeles.

The totalitarian impulses that have long existed in America are now in full cry. Go back to the 1950s, the McCarthy years, and the echoes today are all too familiar – the hysteria; the assault on the Bill of Rights; a war based on lies and deception. Just as in the 1950s, the virus has spread to America’s intellectual satellites, notably Australia.

Last week, the Howard government announced it would implement US-style immigration procedures, fingerprinting people when they arrived. The Sydney Morning Herald reported this as government measures to “tighten its anti-terrorism net.” No challenge there; no scepticism. News as propaganda.

How convenient it all is. The White Australia Policy is back as “homeland security” – yet another American term that institutionalises both paranoia and its bed-fellow, racism. Put simply, we are being brainwashed to believe that Al-Qaida, or any such group, is the real threat. And it isn’t. By a simple mathematical comparison of American terror and Al-Qaida terror, the latter is a lethal flea. In my lifetime, the United States has supported and trained and directed terrorists in Latin America, Africa, Asia. The toll of their victims is in the millions.

In the days before September 11, 2001, when America routinely attacked and terrorised weak states, and the victims were black and brown-skinned people in faraway places like Zaire and Guatemala, there were no headlines saying terrorism. But when the weak attacked the powerful, spectacularly on September 11, suddenly, there was terrorism.

This is not to say that the threat from al-Qaida is not real – It is very real now, thanks to American and British actions in Iraq, and the almost infantile support given by the Howard government. But the most pervasive, clear and present danger is that of which we are told nothing.

It is the danger posed by “our” governments – a danger suppressed by propaganda that casts “the West” as always benign: capable of misjudgment and blunder, yes, but never of high crime. The judgement at Nuremberg takes another view. This is what the judgement says; and remember, these words are the basis for almost 60 years of international law: “To initiate a war of aggression, it is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”

In other words, there is no difference, in the principle of the law, between the action of the German regime in the late 1930s and the Americans in 2003. Fuelled by religious fanaticism, a corrupt Americanism and corporate greed, the Bush cabal is pursuing what the military historian Anatol Lieven calls “the classic modern strategy of an endangered right-wing oligarchy, which is to divert discontent into nationalism.” Bush’s America, he warns, “has become a menace to itself and to mankind.”

…Today, the United States is currently training a gestapo of 10,000 agents, commanded by the most ruthless, senior elements of Saddam Hussein’s secret police. The aim is to run the new puppet regime behind a pseudo-democratic façade – and to defeat the resistance. That information is vital to us, because the fate of the resistance in Iraq is vital to all our futures. For if the resistance fails, the Bush cabal will almost certainly attack another country – possibly North Korea, which is nuclear armed.

…In the nineteenth century, Australia had a press more fiercely independent than most countries. In 1880, in New South Wales alone, there were 143 independent titles, many of them with a campaigning style and editors who believed it was their duty to be the voice of the people. Today, of twelve principal newspapers in the capital cities, one man, Rupert Murdoch, controls seven. Of the ten Sunday newspapers, Murdoch has seven. In Adelaide and Brisbane, he has effectively a complete monopoly. He controls almost 70 per cent of capital city circulation. Perth has only one newspaper.

Sydney, the largest city, is dominated by Murdoch and by the Sydney Morning Herald, whose current editor in chief Mark Scott told a marketing conference in 2002 that journalism no longer needed smart and clever people. “They are not the answer,” he said. The answer is people who can execute corporate strategy. In other words, mediocre minds, obedient minds.

The great American journalist Martha Gellhorn once stood up at a press conference and said: “Listen, we’re only real journalists when we’re not doing as we’re told. How else can we ever keep the record straight?” The late Alex Carey, the great Australian social scientist who pioneered the study of corporatism and propaganda, wrote that the three most significant political developments of the twentieth century were, “the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.”

Carey was describing the propaganda of 20th century imperialism, which is the propaganda of the corporate state. And contrary to myth, the state has not withered away; indeed, it has never been stronger. General Suharto was a corporate man – good for business. So his crimes were irrelevant, and the massacres of his own people and of the East Timorese were consigned to an Orwellian black hole. So effective is this historical censorship by omission that Suharto is currently being rehabilitated. In The Australian last October, Owen Harries described the Suharto period as a “golden era” and urged Australia to once again embrace the genocidal military of Indonesia.

…If Australia is the microcosm, consider the destruction of free speech in the United States, which constitutionally has the freest press in the world. In 1983, the principal media in America was owned by fifty corporations. In 2002, this had fallen to just nine companies. Today, Murdoch’s Fox Television and four other conglomerates are on the verge of controlling 90 per cent of the terrestrial and cable audience. Even on the Internet, the leading twenty websites are now owned by Fox, Disney, AOL, Time Warner, Viacom and other giants. Just fourteen companies attract 60 per cent of all the time Americans spend online. And these companies control, or influence most of the world’s visual media, the principal source of information for most people.

“We are beginning to learn,” wrote Edward Said in his book Culture and Imperialism, “that de-colonisation was not the termination of imperial relationships but merely the extending of a geo-political web that has been spinning since the Renaissance. The new media have the media to penetrate more deeply into a receiving culture than any previous manifestation of Western technology.” Compared with a century ago, when “European culture was associated with a white man’s presence, we now have in addition an international media presence that insinuates itself over a fantastically wide range.”

He was referring not only to news. Right across the media, children are remorsely targeted by big business propaganda, commonly known as advertising. In the United States, some 30,000 commercial messages are targeted at children every year. The chief executive of one leading advertising company explained: “They aren’t children so much as evolving consumers.” Public relations is the twin of advertising. In the last twenty years, the whole concept of PR has changed dramatically and is now an enormous propaganda industry. In the United Kingdom, it’s estimated that pre-packaged PR now accounts for half of the content of some major newspapers. The idea of “embedding” journalists with the US military during the invasion of Iraq came from public relations experts in the Pentagon, whose current strategic-planning literature describes journalism as part of psychological operations, or “psyops.” Journalism as psyops.

The aim, says the Pentagon, is to achieve “information dominance” – which, in turn, is part of “full spectrum dominance” – the stated policy of the United States to control land, sea, space and information. They make no secret of it. It’s in the public domain.

Those journalists who go their own way, those like Martha Gellhorn and Robert Fisk, beware. The independent Arab TV organisation, Al-Jazeera, was bombed by the Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the invasion of Iraq, more journalists were killed than ever before – by the Americans. The message could not be clearer. The aim, eventually, is that there’ll be no distinction between information control and media. That’s to say: you won’t know the difference.

That alone is worthy of reflection by journalists: those who still believe, like Martha Gellhorn, that their duty is to keep the record straight. The choice is actually quite simple: they are truth-tellers, or, in the words of Edward Herman, they merely “normalise the unthinkable.”

….I can almost hear a few of you saying, “OK, then what should we do?”

As Noam Chomsky recently pointed out, you almost never hear that question in the so-called developing world, where most of humanity struggles to live day by day. There, they’ll tell you what they are doing.

We have none of the life-and-death problems faced by, say, intellectuals in Turkey or campesinos in Brazil or Aboriginal people in our own third world. Perhaps too many of us believe that if we take action, then the solution will happen almost overnight. It will be easy and fast. Alas, it doesn’t work that way.

If you want to take direct action – and I believe we don’t have a choice now: such is the danger facing all of us – then it means hard work, dedication, commitment, just like those people in countries on the front line, who ought to be our inspiration. The people of Bolivia recently reclaimed their country from water and gas multinationals, and threw out the president who abused their trust. The people of Venezuela have, time and again, defended their democratically elected president against a ferocious campaign by an American-backed elite and the media it controls. In Brazil and Argentina, popular movements have made extraordinary progress – so much so that Latin America is no longer the vassal continent of Washington.

Even in Colombia, into which the United States has poured a fortune in order to shore up a vicious oligarchy, ordinary people – trade unionists, peasants, young people have fought back.

These are epic struggles you don’t read much about here. Then there’s what we call the anti-globalisation movement. Oh, I detest that word, because it’s much more than that. It’s is a remarkable response to poverty and injustice and war. It’s more diverse, more enterprising, more internationalist and more tolerant of difference than anything in the past, and it’s growing faster than ever.

In fact, it is now the democratic opposition in many countries. That is the very good news. For in spite of the propaganda campaign I have outlined, never in my lifetime have people all over the world demonstrated greater awareness of the political forces ranged against them and the possibilities of countering them. The notion of a representative democracy controlled from below where the representatives are not only elected but can be called truly to account, is as relevant today as it was when first put into practice in the Paris Commune 133 years ago. As for voting, yes, that’s a hard won gain. But the Chartists, who probably invented voting as we know it today, made clear that it was gain only when there was a clear, democratic choice. And there’s no clear, democratic choice now. We live in a single-ideology state in which two almost identical factions compete for our attention while promoting the fiction of their difference.

The writer Arundhati Roy described the outpouring of anti-war anger last year as “the most spectacular display of public morality the world has ever seen.” That was just a beginning and a cause for optimism.

Why? Because I think a great many people are beginning to listen to that quality of humanity that is the antidote to rampant power and its bedfellow: racism. It’s called conscience. We all have it, and some are always moved to act upon it. Franz Kafka wrote: “You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have free permission to do so and it is in accordance with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering that you could have avoided.”

No doubt there are those who believe they can remain aloof – acclaimed writers who write only style, successful academics who remain quiet, respected jurists who retreat into arcane law and famous journalists who protest: “No one has ever told me what to say.” George Orwell wrote: “Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks the whip. But the really well-trained dog is the one that turns somersaults when there is no whip.”

For those members of our small, privileged and powerful elite, I recommend the words of Flaubert. “I have always tried to live in an ivory tower,” he said, “but a tide of shit is beating its walls, threatening to undermine it.” For the rest of us, I offer these words of Mahatma Gandhi: “First, they ignore,” he said. “Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.”

Quotable quotes…

“…The so-called war on terror is the greatest threat to all of us since the most dangerous years of the cold war. Rapacious, imperial America has found its new “red scare.” Every day now, officially manipulated fear and paranoia are exported to our shores – air marshals, finger printing, a directive on how many people can queue for the toilet on a Qantas jet flying to Los Angeles. The totalitarian impulses that have long existed in America are now in full cry. Go back to the 1950s, the McCarthy years, and the echoes today are all too familiar – the hysteria; the assault on the Bill of Rights; a war based on lies and deception. Just as in the 1950s, the virus has spread to America’s intellectual satellites, notably Australia…”

“…we are being brainwashed to believe that Al-Qaida, or any such group, is the real threat. And it isn’t. By a simple mathematical comparison of American terror and Al-Qaida terror, the latter is a lethal flea. In my lifetime, the United States has supported and trained and directed terrorists in Latin America, Africa, Asia. The toll of their victims is in the millions…”

“…In the days before September 11, 2001, when America routinely attacked and terrorised weak states, and the victims were black and brown-skinned people in faraway places like Zaire and Guatemala, there were no headlines saying terrorism. But when the weak attacked the powerful, spectacularly on September 11, suddenly, there was terrorism…”

“…The judgement at Nuremberg…says… “To initiate a war of aggression, it is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” In other words, there is no difference, in the principle of the law, between the action of the German regime in the late 1930s and the Americans in 2003. Fuelled by religious fanaticism, a corrupt Americanism and corporate greed, the Bush cabal is pursuing what the military historian Anatol Lieven calls “the classic modern strategy of an endangered right-wing oligarchy, which is to divert discontent into nationalism.” Bush’s America, he warns, “has become a menace to itself and to mankind’…”

John Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been a war correspondent, film-maker and playwright. Based in London, he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s highest award, that of “Journalist of the Year,” for his work in Vietnam and Cambodia.

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