When I first met Julian Assange more than ten years ago, I asked him why he had started WikiLeaks. He replied: “Transparency and accountability are moral issues that must be the essence of public life and journalism”.
I had never heard a publisher or an editor invoke morality in this way. Assange believes that journalists are the agents of people, not power: that we, the people, have a right to know about the darkest secrets of those who claim to act in our name.
If the powerful lie to us, we have the right to know. If they say one thing in private and the opposite in public, we have the right to know. If they conspire against us, as Bush and Blair did over Iraq, then pretend to be democrats, we have the right to know.
It is this morality of purpose that so threatens the collusion of powers that want to plunge much of the world into war and wants to bury Julian alive in Trumps fascist America.
In 2008, a top secret US State Department report described in detail how the United States would combat this new moral threat. A secretly directed personal smear campaign against Julian Assange would lead to “exposure [and] criminal prosecution”.
The aim was to silence and criminalise WikiLeaks and its founder. Page after page revealed a coming war on a single human being and on the very principle of freedom of speech and freedom of thought, and democracy.
The imperial shock troops would be those who called themselves journalists: the big hitters of the so-called mainstream, especially the “liberals” who mark and patrol the perimeters of dissent.
And that is what happened. I have been a reporter for more than 50 years and I have never known a smear campaign like it: the fabricated character assassination of a man who refused to join the club; who believed journalism was a service to the public, never to those above.
Assange shamed his persecutors. He produced scoop after scoop. He exposed the fraudulence of wars promoted by the media and the homicidal nature of America’s wars, the corruption of dictators, the evils of Guantánamo.
He forced us in the West to look in the mirror. He exposed the official truth-tellers in the media as collaborators: those I would call Vichy journalists. None of these imposters believed Assange when he warned that his life was in danger: that the “sex scandal” in Sweden was a set-up and an American hellhole was the ultimate destination. And he was right, and repeatedly right.
The extradition hearing in London this week is the final act of an Anglo-American campaign to bury Julian Assange. It is not due process. It is due revenge. The American indictment is clearly rigged, a demonstrable sham. So far, the hearings have been reminiscent of their Stalinist equivalents during the Cold War.
Today, the land that gave us Magna Carta, Great Britain, is distinguished by the abandonment of its own sovereignty in allowing a malign foreign power to manipulate justice and by the vicious psychological torture of Julian—a form of torture, as Nils Melzer, the UN expert, has pointed out, that was refined by the Nazis because it was most effective in breaking its victims. 
Every time I have visited Assange in Belmarsh prison, I have seen the effects of this torture. When I last saw him, he had lost more than 10 kilos in weight; his arms had no muscle. Incredibly, his wicked sense of humour was intact.
As for Assange’s homeland, Australia has displayed only a cringing cowardice as its government has secretly conspired against its own citizen who ought to be celebrated as a national hero. Not for nothing did George W. Bush anoint the Australian prime minister his “deputy sheriff”.
It is said that whatever happens to Julian Assange in the next three weeks will diminish if not destroy freedom of the press in the West. But which press? The Guardian? The BBC, the New York Times, the Jeff Bezos Washington Post?
No, the journalists in these organisations can breathe freely. The Judases on the Guardian who flirted with Julian, exploited his landmark work, made their pile then betrayed him, have nothing to fear. They are safe because they are needed.
Freedom of the press now rests with the honourable few: the exceptions, the dissidents on the internet who belong to no club, who are neither rich nor laden with Pulitzers, but produce fine, disobedient, moral journalism—those like Julian Assange.
Meanwhile, it is our responsibility to stand by a true journalist whose sheer courage ought to be inspiration to all of us who still believe that freedom is possible. I salute him.
First published at <a href="http://www.johnpilger.com/">johnpilger.com</a>.

John Pilger

The Stalinist trial of Julian Assange. Whose side are you on?

Like all colonial societies, Australia has secrets. The way we treat Indigenous people is still mostly a secret. For a long time, the fact that many Australians came from what was called “bad stock” was a secret.
“Bad stock” meant convict forebears: those like my great-great grandmother, Mary Palmer, who was incarcerated here, at the Female Factory in Parramatta in 1823.
According to nonsense spun by numerous aunts – who had irresistible bourgeois ambitions – Mary Palmer and the man she married, Francis McCarthy, were a lady and a gentleman of Victorian property and propriety.
In fact, Mary was the youngest member of a gang of wild young women, mostly Irish, who operated in the East End of London. Known as “The Ruffians”, they kept poverty at bay with the proceeds of prostitution and petty theft.
The Ruffians were eventually arrested and tried, and hanged – except Mary, who was spared because she was pregnant.
She was just 16 years old when she was manacled in the hold of a ship under sail, the Lord Sidmouth, bound for New South Wales “for the term of her natural life”, said the judge.
The voyage took five months, a purgatory of sickness and despair. I know what she looked like because, some years ago, I discovered an extraordinary ritual in St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney.
Every Thursday, in a vestry, a nun would turn the pages of a register of Irish Catholic convicts – and there was Mary, described as “not more than 4ft in height, emaciated and pitted with the ravages of small pox”.
When Mary’s ship docked at Sydney Cove, no one claimed her as a servant or a skivvy. She was a “third class” convict and one of “the inflammable matter of Ireland”. Did her newly born survive the voyage? I don’t know.
They sent her up the Parramatta River to the Female Factory, which had distinguished itself as one of the places where Victorian penal experts were testing their exciting new theories. The treadwheel was introduced in the year Mary arrived, 1823. It was an implement of punishment and torture.
The Cumberland Pilgrim described the Female Factory as “appallingly hideous … the recreation ground reminds one of the Valley of the Shadow of Death”.
Arriving at night, Mary had nothing to sleep on, only boards and stone and straw, and filthy wool full of ticks and spiders. All the women underwent solitary confinement. Their heads were shaved and they were locked in total darkness with the whine of mosquitoes.
There was no division by age or crime. Mary and the other women were called “the intractables”. With a mixture of horror and admiration, the attorney general at the time, Roger Terry, described how the women had “driven back with a volley of stones and staves” soldiers sent to put down their rebellion. More than once, they breached the sandstone walls and stormed the community of Parramatta.
Missionaries sent from England to repair the souls of the women were given similar short shrift.
I am so proud of her.
Then there was “courting day”. Once a week, “bereft gentlemen” (whomever they might be) were given first pick, followed by soldiers, then male convicts.
Some of the women found “finery” and primped urgently, as if an inspecting male might provide a way out of their predicament. Others turned their backs should an aspiring mate be an “old stringybark fella” down from the bush.
During all this, the matron would shout out what she called “the good points” of each woman, which was a revelation to all.
In this way, my great-great grandparents met each other. I believe they were well matched.
Francis McCarthy had been transported from Ireland for the crime of “uttering unlawful oaths” against his English landlord. That was the charge levelled at the Tolpuddle Martyrs.
I am so proud of him.
Mary and Francis were married at St Mary’s Church, later St Mary’s Cathedral, on 9 November 1823 with four other convict couples. Eight years later, they were granted their “ticket of leave” and Mary her “conditional pardon” by one colonel Snodgrass, the captain general of New South Wales – the condition being she could never leave the colony.
Mary bore 10 children and they lived out hard lives, loved and respected by all accounts, to their 90th year.
My mother knew the secret about Mary and Francis. On her wedding day in 1922, and in defiance of her own family, she and my father came to these walls to pay tribute to Mary and the intractables. She was proud of her “bad stock”.
I sometimes wonder: where is this spirit today? Where is the spirit of the intractables among those who claim to represent us and those of us who accept, in supine silence, the corporate conformity that is characteristic of much of the modern era in so-called developed countries?
Where are those of us prepared to “utter unlawful oaths” and stand up to the authoritarians and charlatans in government, who glorify war and invent foreign enemies and criminalise dissent and who abuse and mistreat vulnerable refugees to these shores and disgracefully call them “illegals”.
Mary Palmer was “illegal”. Francis McCarthy was “illegal”. All the women who survived the Female Factory and fought off authority were “illegal”.
The memory of their courage and resilience and resistance should be honoured, not traduced, in the way we are today. For only when we recognise the uniqueness of our past – our Indigenous past and our proud convict past – will this nation achieve true independence.

The hidden history of the women who rose up

On my wall in London is my favourite photograph from South Africa. Always thrilling to behold, it is Paul Weinberg’s image of a lone woman standing between two armoured vehicles, the infamous “hippos”, as they rolled into Soweto. Her arms are raised, fists clenched, her thin body both beckoning and defiant of the enemy. 
It was May Day 1985; the last great uprising against apartheid had begun. Twelve years later, with my thirty-year banning from South Africa lifted, there was a pinch-me moment as I flew into Jan Smuts and handed my passport to a black immigration officer. “Welcome to our country,” she said.
I quickly discovered that much of the spirit of resistance embodied in the courageous woman in Soweto had survived, together with a vibrant ubuntu that drew together African humanity, generosity and political ingenuity – for example, in the dignified resolve of those I watched form a human wall around the house of a widow threatened with disconnection of her electricity; in people’s rejection of demeaning “RDP houses” they called “kennels”; and in the pulsating mass demonstrations of social movements that are among the most sophisticated and dynamic in the world.
On the 20th anniversary of the first democratic vote on 27 April 1994, it is this resistance, this force for justice and real democratic progress, that should be celebrated, while its betrayal and squandering should be understood and acted upon.
On 11 February, 1990, Nelson Mandela stepped out on the balcony of Cape Town City Hall with the miners’ leader Cyril Ramaphosa supporting him. Free at last, he spoke to millions in South Africa and around the world. This was the moment, an historic split-second as rare and potent as any in the universal struggle for freedom. Moral power and the power for justice could triumph over anything, any orthodoxy, it seemed. “Now is the time to intensify the struggle,” said Mandela in a proud and angry speech, perhaps his best, or the last of his best. 
The next day he appeared to correct himself. Majority rule would not make blacks “dominant”. The retreat quickened. There would be no public ownership of the mines, banks and rapacious monopoly industries, no economic democracy, as he had pledged with the words: “a change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable”. Reassuring the white establishment and its foreign business allies – the very orthodoxy and cronyism that had built, maintained and reinforced fascist apartheid – became the political agenda of the “new” South Africa.
Secret deals facilitated this. In 1985, apartheid had suffered two disasters: the Johannesburg stock market crashed and the regime defaulted on its mounting foreign debt. In September that year, a group led by Gavin Relly, chairman of the Anglo-American Corporation, met Oliver Tambo, the ANC president, and other liberation officials in Mfuwe, Zambia. 
The Relly message was that a “transition” from apartheid to a black-governed electoral democracy was possible only if “order” and “stability” were guaranteed. These were liberal code for a capitalist state in which social and economic democracy would never be a priority. The aim was to split the ANC between the “moderates” they could “do business with” (Tambo, Mandela and Thabo Mbeki) and the majority who made up the United Democratic Front and were fighting in the streets. 
The betrayal of the UDF and its most effective components, such as the National Civic Organisation, is today poignant, secret history.
In 1987 and 1990, ANC officials led by Mbeki met twenty prominent members of the Afrikaner elite at a stately home near Bath, in England. Around the fireplace at Mells Park House, they drank vintage wine and malt whisky. They joked about eating “illegal” South African grapes, then subject to a worldwide boycott, “It’s a civilised world there,” recalled Mof Terreblanche, a stockbroker and pal of F.W. De Klerk. “If you have a drink with somebody ... and have another drink, it brings understanding. Really, we became friends.”
So secret were these convivial meetings that none but a select few in the ANC knew about them. The prime movers were those who had profited from apartheid, such as the British mining giant Consolidated Goldfields, which picked up the tab at Mells Park House. The most important item around the fireplace was who would control the economic system behind the facade of “democracy”.
At the same time, Mandela was conducting his own secret negotiations in Pollsmoor Prison. His principal contact was Neil Barnard, an apartheid true believer who headed the National Intelligence Service. Confidences were exchanged; reassurances were sought. Mandela phoned P.W. Botha on his birthday; the Groot Krokodil invited him to tea and, as Mandela noted, even poured the tea for his prisoner. “I came out feeling,” said Mandela, “that I had met a creative, warm head of state who treated me with all the respect and dignity I could expect.”
This was the man who, like Verwoerd and Vorster before him, had sent a whole African nation to a vicious gulag that was hidden from the rest of the world. Most of the victims were denied justice and restitution for this epic crime of apartheid. Almost all the verkramptes – extremists like the “creative, warm” Botha – escaped justice.
How ironic that it was Botha in the 1980s – well ahead of the ANC a decade later – who dismantled the scaffolding of racial apartheid and, crucially, promoted a rich black class that would play the role of which Frantz Fanon had warned: a “transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged”. 
In the 1980s, magazines like Ebony, Tribute and Enterprise celebrated the “aspirations” of a black bourgeoisie whose two-garage Soweto homes were included on tours for foreigners the regime sought to impress. “This is our black middle class,” the guides would say; but there was no middle: merely a buffer class being prepared, as Fanon wrote, for “its historic mission”. This is unchanged today. 
The Botha regime even offered black businessmen generous loans from the Industrial Development Corporation. This allowed them to set up companies outside the “bantustans”. In this way, a black company such as New Africa Investments could buy part of Metropolitan Life. Within a decade, Cyril Ramaphosa was deputy chairman of what was effectively a creation of apartheid. He is today one of the richest men in the world. 
The transition was, in a sense, seamless. “You can put any label on it you like,” President Mandela told me at Groote Schur. “You can call it Thatcherite, but for this country, privatisation is the fundamental policy.” 
“That’s the opposite of what you said before the first elections, in 1994,” I said.
“There is a process,” was his uncertain reply, “and every process incorporates change.”
Mandela was merely reflecting the ANC’s mantra – which seemed to take on the obsessions of a supercult. There were all those ANC pilgrimages to the World Bank and the IMF in Washington, all those “presentations” at Davos, all those ingratiations at the G-8, all those foreign advisers and consultants coming and going, all those pseudo-academic reports with their “neo-liberal” jargon and acronyms. To borrow from the comic writer Larry David, “a babbling brook of bullshit” engulfed the first ANC governments, especially its finance ministries. 
Putting aside for a moment the well-documented self-enrichment of ANC notables and suckering of arms deals, the Africa analyst Peter Robbins had an interesting view on this. “I think the ANC leadership [was] ashamed that most of their people live in the third world,” he wrote. “They don’t like to think of themselves as being mostly an African-style economy. So economic apartheid has replaced legal apartheid with the same consequences for the same people, yet it is greeted as one of the greatest achievements in world history.”
Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission brushed this reality, ever so briefly, when business corporations were called to the confessional. These “institutional” hearings were among the most important, yet were all but dismissed. Representing the most voracious, ruthless, profitable and lethal industry in the world, the South African Chamber of Mines summed up a century of exploitation in six and a half derisory pages.
There was no apology for the swathes of South Africa turned into the equivalent of Chernobyl. There was no pledge of compensation for the countless men and their families stricken with occupational diseases such as silicosis and mesothelioma. Many could not afford an oxygen tank; many families could not afford a funeral.
In an accent from the era of pith helmets, Julian Ogilvie-Thompson, the former chairman of Anglo-American, told the TRC: “Surely, no one wants to penalise success.” Listening to him were ex-miners who could barely breathe. 
Liberation governments can point to real and enduring achievements since 1994. But the most basic freedom, to survive and to survive decently, has been withheld from the majority of South Africans, who are aware that had the ANC invested in them and in their “informal economy”, it could have actually transformed the lives of millions. Land could have been purchased and reclaimed for small-scale farming by the dispossessed, run in the co-operative spirit of African agriculture. Millions of houses could have been built; better health and education would have been possible. A small-scale credit system could have opened the way for affordable goods and services for the majority.
None of this would have required the import of equipment or raw materials, and the investment would have created millions of jobs. As they grew more prosperous, communities would have developed their own industries and an independent national economy. 
A pipe dream? The violent inequality that now stalks South Africa is no dream. It was Mandela, after all, who said, “If the ANC does not deliver the goods, the people must do what they have done to the apartheid regime.”
	[This article appeared at <a href="http://johnpilger.com/">JohnPilger.com</a>. Follow John Pilger on twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/johnpilger">@johnpilger</a>.]

South Africa: 20 years of apartheid by another name

The tape is searing. There is the voice of an infant screaming as he is wrenched from his mother, who pleads, “There is nothing wrong with my baby. Why are you doing this to us? I would’ve been hung years ago, wouldn’t I? Because [as an Australian Aborigine] you’re guilty before you’re found innocent.”
The child’s grandmother demands to know why “the stealing of our kids is happening all over again”. A welfare official says, “I’m gunna take him, mate.”
This happened to an Aboriginal family in outback New South Wales. It is happening across Australia in a scandalous and largely unrecognised abuse of human rights that evokes the infamous Stolen Generation of the last century.
Up to the 1970s, thousands of “mixed race” children were stolen from their mothers by welfare officials. The children were given to institutions as cheap or slave labour; many were abused.
Described by a Chief Protector of Aborigines as “breeding out the colour”, the policy was known as assimilation. It was influenced by the same eugenics movement that inspired the Nazis.
In 1997, a landmark report, Bringing Them Home, disclosed that as many 50,000 children and their mothers had endured “the humiliation, the degradation and sheer brutality of the act of forced separation ... the product of the deliberate, calculated policies of the state”. The report called this genocide.
Assimilation remains Australian government policy in all but name. Euphemisms such as “reconciliation” and “Stronger Futures” cover similar social engineering and an enduring, insidious racism in the political elite, the bureaucracy and wider Australian society.
When in 2008 Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised for the Stolen Generation, he added: “I want to be blunt about this. There will be no compensation.” The Sydney Morning Herald congratulated Rudd on a “shrewd manoeuvre” that “cleared away a piece of political wreckage that responds to some of its supporters’ emotional needs, but changes nothing”.
Today, the theft of Aboriginal children – including babies taken from the birth table – is now more widespread than at any time during the last century. As of June last year, almost 14,000 Aboriginal children had been “removed”.
This is five times the number when Bringing Them Home was written. More than a third of all removed children are Aboriginal – from 3 percent of the population. At the present rate, this mass removal of Aboriginal children will result in a stolen generation of more than 3,300 children in the Northern Territory alone.
Pat (not her real name) is the mother whose anguish was secretly recorded on a phone as four Department of Child Services officials, and six police, descended on her home. On the tape an official claims they have come only for an “assessment”. But two of the police officers, who knew Pat, told her they saw no risk to her child and warned her to “get out of here quick”.
Pat fled, cradling her infant, but the one-year-old was eventually seized without her knowing why. The next morning a police officer returned to apologise to her and said her baby should never have been taken away. Pat has no idea where her son is.
Once, she was “invited” by officials to bring her children to “neutral” offices to discuss a “care plan”. The doors were locked and officials seized the children, with one of the youngest dragging on a police officer’s gun belt. Many Indigenous mothers are unaware of their legal rights. A secretive Children’s Court has become notorious for rubber-stamping removals.
Most Aboriginal families live on the edge. Their life expectancy in towns a short flight from Sydney is as low as 37. Dickensian diseases are rife; Australia is the only developed country not to have eradicated trachoma, which blinds Aboriginal children.
Pat has both complied with and struggled bravely against a punitive bureaucracy that can remove children on hearsay. She has twice been acquitted of false charges, including “kidnapping” her own children. A psychologist has described her as a capable and good mother.
Josie Crawshaw, the former director of a respected families’ support organisation in Darwin, told me, “In remote areas, officials will go in with a plane in the early hours and fly the child thousands of kilometres from their community. There’ll be no explanation, no support, and the child may be gone forever.” 
In 2012, the co-ordinator-general of remote services for the Northern Territory, Olga Havnen, was sacked when she revealed that almost $80 million was spent on the surveillance and removal of Aboriginal children compared with only $500,000 on supporting the same impoverished families.
She told me, “The primary reasons for removing children are welfare issues directly related to poverty and inequality. The impact on families is just horrendous because if they are not reunited within six months, it’s likely they won’t see each other again. If South Africa was doing this, there’d be an international outcry.”
She and others with long experience I have interviewed have echoed the Bringing them Home report, which described an official “attitude” in Australia that regarded all Aboriginal people as “morally deficient”.
A Department of Families and Community Services spokesman said that the majority of removed Indigenous children in New South Wales were placed with Indigenous carers. According to Indigenous support networks, this is a smokescreen; it does not mean families and is control by divisiveness that is the bureaucracy’s real achievement.
I met a group of Aboriginal grandmothers, all survivors of the first stolen generation, all now with stolen grandchildren. “We live in a state of fear, again,” they said. David Shoebridge, a State Greens MP, told me, “The truth is, there is a market among whites for these kids, especially babies.”
The New South Wales parliament is soon to debate legislation that introduces forced adoption and “guardianship”. Children under two will be liable – without the mother’s consent – if “removed” for more than six months. For many Aboriginal mothers like Pat, it can take six months merely to make contact with their children. “It’s setting up Aboriginal families to fail,” said Shoebridge.
I asked Josie Crawshaw why. “The wilful ignorance in Australia about its first people has now become the kind of intolerance that gets to the point where you can smash an entire group of humanity and there is no fuss.”
[First published at <a href="http://johnpilger.com/articles/once-again-australia-is-stealing-its-indigenous-children">JohnPilger.com</a>.]

Once again, Australia is stealing Indigenous children

It's celebrity time again. The Golden Globes have been, and the Oscars are coming. This is a “vintage year”, say Hollywood's hagiographers on cue. It isn't. Most movies are made to a formula for the highest return, money-fuelled by marketing and something called celebrity. This is different from fame, which can come with talent. True celebrities are spared that burden.
Occasionally, this column treads the red carpet, awarding its own Oscars to those whose ubiquitous promotion demands recognition. Some have been celebrities a long time, drawing the devoted to kiss their knees (more on that later). Others are mere flashes in the pan, so to speak.
In no particular order, the nominees for the Celebrity Oscars are:
Benedict Cumberbatch. This celebrity was heading hell-bent for an Oscar, but alas, his ultra-hyped movie, The Fifth Estate, produced the lowest box office return for years, making it one of Hollywood's biggest ever turkeys. This does not diminish Cumberbatch's impressive efforts to promote himself as Julian Assange – assisted by film critics, massive advertising, the US government and, not least, the former PR huckster, David Cameron, who declared, “Benedict Cumberbatch - brilliant, fantastic piece of acting. The twitchiness and everything of Julian Assange is brilliantly portrayed.” Neither Cameron nor Cumberatch has ever met Assange. The “twitchiness and everything” was an invention.
Assange had written Cumberbatch a personal letter, pointing out that the “true story” on which the film claimed to be based was from two books discredited as hatchet jobs. “Most of the events depicted never happened, or the people shown were not involved in them”, WikiLeaks posted. In his letter, Assange asked Cumberbatch to note that actors had moral responsibilities, too. “Consider the consequences of your cooperation with a project that vilifies and marginalises a living political refugee...”
Cumberbatch's response was to reveal selected parts of Assange's letter and so elicit further hype from the “agonising decision” he faced - which, as it turned out, was never in doubt. That the movie was a turkey was a rare salute to the public.
Robert De Niro is the celebrity's celebrity. I was in India recently at a conference with De Niro, who was asked a good question about the malign influence of Hollywood on living history. The 1978 multi-Oscar winning movie The Deer Hunter was cited, especially its celebrated Russian roulette scene; De Niro was the star.
“The Russian roulette scene might not have happened,” said De Niro, “but it must have happened somewhere. It was a metaphor.” He refused to say more; the celebrity star doesn't like giving interviews.
When The Deer Hunter was released, the Daily Mail described it as “the story they never dared to tell before... the film that could purge a nation's guilt!” A purgative indeed – that was almost entirely untrue.
Following America's expulsion from its criminal invasion of Vietnam, The Deer Hunter was Hollywood's post-war attempt to reincarnate the triumphant Batman-jawed white warrior and present a stoic, suffering and often heroic people as sub-human Oriental idiots and barbarians. The film's dramatic pitch was reached during recurring orgiastic scenes in which De Niro and his fellow stars, imprisoned in rat-infested bamboo cages, were forced to play Russian roulette by resistance fighters of the National Liberation Front, whom the Americans called “Vietcong”.
The director, Michael Cimino, insisted this scene was authentic. It was fake. Cimino himself had claimed he had served in Vietnam as a Green Beret. He hadn't. He told Linda Christmas of the Guardian he had “this insane feeling that I was there... somehow the fine wires have got really crossed and the line between reality and fiction has become blurred”. His brilliantly acted fakery has since become a YouTube “classic”: for many people, their only reference to that “forgotten” war.
While he was in India, De Niro visited Bollywood, where his celebrity is god-like. Fawning actors sat at his feet and kissed his knees. Bollywood's asinine depiction of modern India is not dissimilar to The Deer Hunter's distortion of America and Asia.
Nelson Mandela was a great human being who became a celebrity. “Sainthood”, he told me drily, “is not the job I applied for”. The western media appropriated Mandela and made him into a one-dimensional cartoon celebrity tailored for bourgeois applause: a kind of political Santa Claus. That his dignity served as a facade behind which his beloved ANC oversaw the further impoverishment and division of his people was unmentionable. And in death, his celebrity-sainthood was assured.
For those outside Britain, the name Keith Vaz is not associated with celebrity. And yet this Labour Party politician has had a long and distinguished career of self-promotion, while slipping serenely away from scandals and near-scandals, a parliamentary inquiry and a suspension, having acquired the soubriquet Keith Vaseline. In 2009, he was revealed to have claimed 75,500 pounds in expenses for an apartment in Westminster despite having a family home just 12 miles from parliament.
Last year, Vaz's parliamentary home affairs committee summoned Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger to Parliament to discuss the leaks of Edward Snowden. Vaz's opening question to Rusbridger was: “Do you love this country?”
Once again, Vaz was an instant celebrity, though, once again, not the one he longed to be. He was compared with the infamous Senator Joe McCarthy. Still, the sheer stamina of his endeavours proves that Keith Vaseline is no flash in the pan; and is the Oscar Celebrity of the Year! Congratulations Keith, and commiserations, Benedict; you were only just behind.
	[Previously published at <a href="http://www.johnpilger.com/">JohnPilger.com</a>.]
Follow John Pilger on twitter @johnpilger

It’s the other Oscars, and yet again the winner slips away

On 17 January, John Pilger’s latest film, Utopia, premiered in front of 4,000 people at the Block in Redfern. The film, named after the central Australian Aboriginal community, both exposes the racism and deplorable conditions that Indigenous people continue to endure and documents their inspiring resistance, so often ignored. The following is an edited transcript of John Pilger’s speech at the event.
This film is about heroes. This film is not about victims. It’s about struggle and resistance. It brings together some of the most admirable human beings I have met. You’ve already heard from several of them.
Over the last two years, this has been the most remarkable journey for me. I knew there was in Australia – a long time ago, when I discovered it; when I discovered my own country, in the late 1960s – I knew there was an extraordinary resistance movement. All it lacked was the acknowledgment, just the acknowledgment and recognition, by the majority people of this country.
I suppose Utopia is made for them. It’s not telling you anything you don’t know. It’s not perhaps telling many of the non-Indigenous people who are here things they don’t know. But it will tell, if it can get to them, the majority in this country, many things they don’t know.
The whole notion, as I often get from non-Indigenous audiences, particularly in the media, is: “Well, look, we know all that.” Well, they don’t know all that; and if they did know all that, why haven’t they fixed it?
Why haven’t they listened to the likes of Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, who in this film says: “We never ceded anything of our land to the invaders of this country. There was no deal that we would give up our country for a lot of welfare. Where was this deal?! No deal was made! Nothing was ceded!”
No Western country has been more repeatedly condemned for the way it has treated its Indigenous people and for its racism than Australia. This is its distinction, along with a number of other distinctions. One more is that it’s the only First World country on a United Nations shame list in which an entirely preventable disease, called trachoma, has not been beaten. It’s been beaten in Sri Lanka, in Vietnam, in Morocco, relatively poor countries, but not in rich Australia.
The world is watching, the world is noticing or beginning to notice. Thinking back to 2009, when the United Nations special rapporteur, a distinguished Native American, Professor James Anaya, came to Australia, [he] went to Utopia and said, “Why is this going on? This is racist.” The reaction of the then shadow minister for Indigenous health, Tony Abbott, was, “Get a life. Don’t listen to the Victim Brigade.” Those were his words. This man is now the prime minister of Australia.
When I say to people overseas, “There is a struggle for freedom in Australia”, they look at me nonplussed. Until they see a film like this, and then they understand.
This is the issue in Australia that matters more than anything. We’re coming into a period when there will be a great deal of military propaganda. We must combat that with the fact that something like 20-30,000 Aboriginal people died fighting the invaders of their country. Set that against the 40,000 Australian soldiers who died in the Second World War, and we’re talking about the suppression of a history on an extraordinary scale.
We must stand up, not just for recognition of Indigenous soldiers in these world wars and in these colonial wars; that’s very important. We must stand up for the beginning, for those who fought so heroically on many frontiers against the invaders of this country.
More people died fighting defending Australia from its invaders than Native Americans died fighting the US cavalry at famous places like Wounded Knee and Little Big Horn. More people died in Queensland, where there was open carnage.
I hope that this film … does its job. It could only do its job as part of an extraordinary resistance, which I would like to see renewed in the way that we’ve seen it in the past. And I feel it will be.
[To find out more about the film, and for screening times, visit <a href="http://utopiajohnpilger.co.uk/">utopiajohnpilger.co.uk</a>.]

‘There is a struggle for justice in Australia’

The corridors of the Australian parliament are so white you squint. The sound is hushed; the smell is floor polish. The wooden floors shine so virtuously they reflect the cartoon portraits of prime ministers and rows of Aboriginal paintings, suspended on white walls, their blood and tears invisible.
The parliament stands in Barton, a suburb of Canberra named after the first prime minister of Australia, Edmund Barton, who drew up the White Australia Policy in 1901. “The doctrine of the equality of man,” said Barton, “was never intended to apply” to those not British and white-skinned.
Barton’s concern was the Chinese, known as the Yellow Peril; he made no mention of the oldest, most enduring human presence on earth: the first Australians. They did not exist. Their sophisticated care of a harsh land was of no interest. Their epic resistance did not happen. Of those who fought the British invaders of Australia, the Sydney Monitor reported in 1838: “It was resolved to exterminate the whole race of blacks in that quarter.” Today, the survivors are a shaming national secret.
The town of Wilcannia, in New South Wales, is twice distinguished. It is a winner of a national Tidy Town award and its Indigenous people have one of the lowest recorded life expectancies. They are usually dead by the age of 35. The Cuban government runs a literacy programme for them, as they do among the poorest of Africa. According to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth report, Australia is the richest place on earth. 
Politicians in Canberra are among the wealthiest citizens. Their self-endowment is legendary. Last year, the then minister for indigenous affairs, Jenny Macklin, refurbished her office at a cost to the taxpayer of $331,144. 
Macklin recently claimed that, in government, she had made a “huge difference”. This is true. During her tenure, the number of Aboriginal people living in slums increased by almost a third, and more than half the money spent on Indigenous housing was pocketed by white contractors and a bureaucracy for which she was largely responsible. A typical, dilapidated house in an outback Indigenous community must accommodate as many as 25 people. Families, the elderly and the disabled wait years for sanitation that works. 
In 2009, Professor James Anaya, the respected UN Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous people, described as racist a “state of emergency” that stripped Indigenous communities of their tenuous rights and services on the pretext that paedophile gangs were present in “unthinkable” numbers – a claim dismissed as false by police and the Australian Crime Commission. 
The then opposition spokesman on indigenous affairs, Tony Abbott, told Anaya to “get a life” and not “just listen to the old victim brigade”. Abbott is now the prime minister.
I drove into the red heart of central Australia and asked Dr. Janelle Trees about the “old victim brigade”. A GP whose Indigenous patients live within a few miles of $1,000-a-night resorts serving Uluru (Ayers Rock), she said, “There is asbestos in Aboriginal homes, and when somebody gets a fibre of asbestos in their lungs and develops mesothelioma, [the government] doesn’t care.
“When the kids have chronic infections and end up adding to these incredible statistics of Indigenous people dying of renal disease, and vulnerable to world record rates of rheumatic heart disease, nothing is done. I ask myself: why not?
“Malnutrition is common. I wanted to give a patient an anti-inflammatory for an infection that would have been preventable if living conditions were better, but I couldn’t treat her because she didn’t have enough food to eat and couldn’t ingest the tablets. I feel sometimes as if I’m dealing with similar conditions as the English working class at the beginning of the industrial revolution.”
In Canberra, in ministerial offices displaying yet more first-nation art, I was told repeatedly how “proud” politicians were of what “we have done for Indigenous Australians”. When I asked Warren Snowdon – the minister for indigenous health in the Labor government recently replaced by Abbott’s conservative coalition – why after almost a quarter of a century representing the poorest, sickest Australians, he had not come up with a solution, he said, “What a stupid question. What a puerile question.” 
At the end of Anzac Parade in Canberra rises the Australian National War Memorial, which historian Henry Reynolds calls “the sacred centre of white nationalism”. I was refused permission to film in this great public place. I had made the mistake of expressing an interest in the frontier wars in which black Australians fought the British invasion without guns but with ingenuity and courage – the epitome of the “Anzac tradition”.
Yet, in a country littered with cenotaphs not one officially commemorates those who fell resisting “one of the greatest appropriations of land in world history”, wrote Reynolds in his landmark book Forgotten War. More first Australians were killed than Native Americans on the American frontier and Maoris in New Zealand. The state of Queensland was a slaughterhouse. An entire people became prisoners of war in their own country, with settlers calling for their extinction. The cattle industry prospered using Indigenous men virtually as slave labour. The mining industry today makes profits of a billion dollars a week on Indigenous land.
Suppressing these truths, while venerating Australia’s servile role in the colonial wars of Britain and the US, has almost cult status in Canberra today. Reynolds and the few who question it have been smeared with abuse. Australia’s unique first people are its Intermenschen. As you enter the National War Memorial, Indigenous faces are depicted as stone gargoyles alongside kangaroos, reptiles, birds and other “native wildlife”. 
When I began filming this secret Australia 30 years ago, a global campaign was under way to end apartheid in South Africa. Having reported from South Africa, I was struck by the similarity of white supremacy and the compliance and defensiveness of liberals. Yet no international opprobrium, no boycotts, disturbed the surface of “lucky” Australia.
Watch security guards expel Aboriginal people from shopping malls in Alice Springs; drive the short distance from the suburban barbies of Cromwell Terrace to Whitegate camp, where the tin shacks have no reliable power and water. This is apartheid, or what Reynolds calls, “the whispering in our hearts”.
[John Pilger’s latest film, Utopia, will be released in Australia in January. This article was previously published at <a href="http://www.JohnPilger.com">JohnPilger.com</a>.]

Australia’s apartheid

The critical moment in the political trial of the century was on 28 February when Bradley Manning stood and explained why he had risked his life to leak tens of thousands of official files. It was a statement of morality, conscience and truth: the very qualities that distinguish human beings.
This was not deemed mainstream news in America; and were it not for Alexa O’Brien, an independent freelance journalist, Manning’s voice would have been silenced. Working through the night, she transcribed and released his every word. It is a rare, revealing document.
Describing the attack by an Apache helicopter crew who filmed civilians as they murdered and wounded them in Baghdad in 2007, Manning said: “The most alarming aspect of the video to me was the seemingly delightful bloodlust they appeared to have. They seemed not to value human life by referring to them as ‘dead bastards’ and congratulating each other on the ability to kill in large numbers.
At one point in the video there is an individual on the ground attempting to crawl to safety [who] is seriously wounded... For me, this seems similar to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass.” He hoped “the public would be as alarmed as me” about a crime which, as his subsequent leaks revealed, was not an aberration. 
Bradley Manning is a principled whistleblower and truth teller who has been vilified and tortured – and Amnesty International needs to explain to the world why it has not adopted him as a prisoner of conscience; or is Amnesty, unlike Manning, intimidated by criminal power?
“It is a funeral here at Fort Meade,” Alexa O’Brien told me. “The US government wants to bury Manning alive. He is a genuinely earnest young man with not an ounce of mendacity. The mainstream media finally came on the day of the verdict. They showed up for a gladiator match – to watch the gauntlet go down, thumbs pointed down.”
The criminal nature of the American military is beyond dispute. The decades of lawless bombing, the use of poisonous weapons on civilian populations, the renditions and the torture at Abu Graib, Guantanamo and elsewhere, are all documented. As a young war reporter in Indochina, it dawned on me that America exported its homicidal neuroses and called it war, even a noble cause.
Like the Apache attack, the infamous 1968 massacre at My Lai was not untypical. In the same province, Quang Ngai, I gathered evidence of widespread slaughter: thousands of men, women and children, murdered arbitrarily and anonymously in “free fire zones”. 
In Iraq, I filmed a shepherd whose brother and his entire family had been cut down by an American plane, in the open. This was sport. In Afghanistan, I filmed to a woman whose dirt-walled home, and family, had been obliterated by a 500lb bomb. There was no “enemy”. My film cans burst with such evidence.
In 2010, Private Manning did his duty to the rest of humanity and supplied proof from within the murder machine. This is his triumph; and his show trial merely expresses corrupt power’s abiding fear of people learning the truth. It also illuminates the parasitic industry around truth tellers. Manning’s character has been dissected and abused by those who never knew him yet claim to support him. 
The hyped film We Steal Secrets: the Story of WikiLeaks mutates a heroic young soldier into an “alienated... lonely... very needy” psychiatric case with an “identity crisis” because “he was in the wrong body and wanted to become a woman”. So spoke Alex Gibney, the director, whose prurient psycho-babble found willing ears across a media too compliant or lazy or stupid to challenge the hype and comprehend that the shadows falling across whistleblowers may reach even them.
From its dishonest title, Gibney’s film performed a dutiful hatchet job on Manning, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. The message was familiar – serious dissenters are freaks. Alexa O’Brien’s meticulous record of Manning’s moral and political courage demolishes this smear.
In the Gibney film, US politicians and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are lined up to repeat, unchallenged, that, in publishing Manning’s leaks, WikiLeaks and Assange placed the lives informants at risk and had “blood on his hands”.
On 1 August, The Guardian reported: “No record of deaths caused by WikiLeaks revelations, court told.” The Pentagon general who led a 10-month investigation into the worldwide impact of the leaks reported that not a single death could be attributed to the disclosures.
Yet, in the film, the journalist Nick Davies describes a heartless Assange who had no “harm minimisation plan”. I asked the film maker Mark Davis about this. A respected broadcaster for SBS Australia, Davis was an eyewitness, accompanying Assange during much of the preparation of the leaked files for publication in The Guardian and The New York Times.
His footage appears in the Gibney film. He told me, “Assange was the only one who worked day and night extracting 10,000 names of people who could be targeted by the revelations in the logs.” 
While Manning faces life in prison, Gibney is said to be planning a Hollywood movie. A “biopic” of Assange is on the way, along with a Hollywood version of David Leigh’s and Luke Harding’s book of scuttlebutt on the “fall” of WikiLeaks.
Profiting from the boldness, cleverness and suffering of those who refuse to be co-opted and tamed, they all will end up in history’s waste bin. For the inspiration of future truth tellers belongs to Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and the remarkable young people of WikiLeaks, whose achievements are unparalleled.
Snowden’s rescue is largely a WikiLeaks triumph: a thriller too good for Hollywood because its heroes are real.
[For more of John’s writings visit JohnPilger.com]

The courage of Bradley Manning

Recently, I stood outside the strangely silent building where I began life as a journalist. It is no longer the human warren that was Consolidated Press in Sydney, though ghosts still drink at the King’s Head pub nearby.
As a cadet reporter, I might have walked on to the set of Lewis Milestone’s The Front Page. Men in red braces did shout, “Hold the front page”, and tilt back their felt hats and talk rapidly with a roll-your-own attached indefinitely to their lower lip. You could feel the presses rumbling beneath and smell the ink. 
This was the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, where I learned to report crime, courts, sport, killer bees, Rotary meetings and the arrival of almost famous people from that mysterious land, “overseas”. The proprietor was a former boxer, Frank Packer, immortalised in Cyril Pearl’s Wild Men of Sydney, and knighted for his vendettas against anyone to the political left of Pontius Pilate. 
“Sir Frank” was seen on the editorial floor on Saturday nights after the races. If his horse had lost, fear and loathing were a presence. Once, he cancelled all the late editions and exiled the production staff to the King’s Head, where their necessary return was negotiated from a phone on the public bar.
My only encounter with Sir Frank was when I foolishly boarded a geriatric lift precariously filled with the corpulent proprietor and his two gargantuan sons, Clyde and Kerry. “Who the fuck are you?” said Kerry, later to find distinction as the money bags behind World Series cricket.
The training was superb. A style developed by a highly literate editor, Brian Penton, who had published poetry in the Telegraph, instilled a respect for English grammar and the value of informed simplicity. Words like “during” were banned; “in” was quite enough. The passive voice was considered lazy and banned, along with most clichés and adjectives – except those in the splenetic editorials demanding all Reds went to hell. When I boarded a rust-streaked Greek ship for Europe, I was sorry to leave; I had begun to learn about the craft of journalism and about those who controlled it and used it and why.
A lesson that endures is that when the rich and powerful own the means of popular enlightenment and dress it up as a “free press”, bestowing a false respectability called the “mainstream”, the opposite is usually true. Sir Frank turned out to be a minnow compared with Rupert Murdoch.
Murdoch bought the Packer newspapers in 1972 and today controls 70 percent of Australia’s capital city press, along with dozens of local and regional newspapers. In Adelaide and Brisbane he owns almost everything. Two conglomerates dedicated to a doctrinaire, often extreme world view – Murdoch’s News Limited and Fairfax Media – control 86 percent of the Australian press. 
This absence of choice and real dissent, let alone “balance”, extends to the national broadcaster, the ABC, a progeny of the BBC run as a corporate hierarchy. There are honourable exceptions, of course, among them Philip Dorling, Kate McClymont and Quentin Dempster. Unlike the US and Britain, independent online journalism is rare. The result is a sameness that seems remarkable and demeaning in a first world, educated society.
Murdoch’s augmented obsessions rule. The Labor government is loathed by his newspapers. This is inexplicable as Labor’s policies are more or less those of the conservative coalition of Tony “Mad Monk” Abbott. When former Communications Minister Stephen Conroy proposed timid post-Leveson regulation, he was depicted as Stalin in the fashion of the Sun in London. When Kevin Rudd in 2010 announced a modest tax on the mega-profits of the mining companies, he was deposed by his own party following a propaganda campaign across the media, largely funded by the mining lobby. 
Public perception of non-conformist minorities, especially Australia’s Indigenous people, is often taken from the media. These unique first people are seen as “bludgers” – spongers. This inverts a truth that is never news: a parasitical, lucrative white industry is effectively licensed by federal and state governments to exploit Indigenous hardship.
Like America, Australia in its early colonial days had a vibrant press, a “medley of competing voices”, wrote Edward Smith Hall, editor of the crusading Sydney Monitor. Journalists were “the voice of the people” and not of the “trade of authority”. In the late 19th century, there were 143 independent newspapers in New South Wales alone. By 1988, the empires of Murdoch, Fairfax, Packer and Alan Bond, later imprisoned for the country’s biggest corporate fraud, dominated the “mainstream” as an exclusive Order of Mates.
This is true across much of the democratic world. The medley of voices on the internet has dented monopoly media power, though the same monopolies are now consuming the web. “Social media” are largely introverted, a look-at-me peep show for the digitally besotted. As the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta approaches, hard-won rights such as the presumption of innocence are buried beneath the tentacular might of corporate systems. 
Ironically, in the “information age”, censorship by omission is a weapon of this power – the silencing of whistleblowers without whom journalism can never be free, and of a compliant, privileged “left”. Militarised policing, displayed recently in Boston, consumes an America waging “perpetual war” and now threatening China. In Europe, a savage class war rages from Greece to Spain and Britain. It is no surprise that newspapers in thrall to this corrupt power are ailing. 
Edmund Burke mythologised the press as a Fourth Estate. Today, we need a “fifth estate” right across the media and in journalism training and on the streets. We need those like Edward Smith Hall, who see themselves as agents of people not power.
[For more of John’s writing visit JohnPilger.com]

The Stalinist trial of Julian Assange. Whose side are you on?

The hidden history of the women who rose up

South Africa: 20 years of apartheid by another name

Once again, Australia is stealing Indigenous children

It’s the other Oscars, and yet again the winner slips away

‘There is a struggle for justice in Australia’

Australia’s apartheid

The courage of Bradley Manning

We need a genuinely free media

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