By Rei Tanotsuka, 7 October 2019
“Genuinely objective journalism not only gets the facts right, it gets the meaning of events right.” T.D Allman
As an Australian, I am very proud to share the country that cast indelible prints of blue skies, school days and weekly Coles’ shopping trips with people who believe that liberty begets truth. Edward Smith Hall, an Australian journalist, dedicated his life to ensuring Australia adhered to the triad of freedom of press, representative government and trial by jury. What a grave disappointment the Australian press is now, nothing but a nursery rhyme of big oil, big banks and bigger lies.
Forthright reporters around the world, who prize the art of journalism over all the accoutrements which can accrue to those who wield the pen, hold the value of society. It is through these rare heroic truth seekers and speakers, that the sorrows borne by those who have no voice, can finally be heard.
The rare few, who are willing to relinquish the penultimate and ultimate twin gifts of liberty and the sacredness of their life for the world, to unveil the propaganda and confront the pusillanimous wizard behind the green curtain.
Today, I want to take you for a walk on the yellow brick road, to witness the Western hurricane in devouring its own children of the rights and liberties pertinent to everyone who shares our world. How it pardons itself, through ipsisimosity and prevarication to appear as the Saint, and not as the rightful Sinner.
If you already know these incidents, then this will be stroll down memory lane. If it’s your first reading, then welcome to the road less travelled, for the GPS of most, will never guide you here.
Stop one: Is the Miner’s hurricane coming?
Tories Vs Miners:
1990. March. Daily Mirror, then owned by Robert Maxwell, yes the father of Ghislaine Maxwell, as in ‘Epstein scandal, Ghislaine’, launched a campaign against Arthur Scargill. Who is Scargill? The president of Britain’s National Union of Mineworkers.
This was not a scandal that Scargill could hide away from. There’s no basement reprieve, no Aunt Em to protect him from the attributions of corruption, Soviet bribes and the misappropriation of Lybia’s Gaddafi donations for his personal mortgage repayments. In short, a complete character assassination, in broad day light, sanctioned from the very top.
Not a word of it was true. Scargill was ruler straight, morally incorrigible with a titanium will to ensure that the power of the Union in Britain, will not be diluted by government. This was the problem.
A 10,000 worker strike in 1972 saw the closure of the Saltley coke depot at Birmingham and secured a victory for the Union, but caused outrage in the British establishment. In 1974, the Heath government was defeated by the powers of the Union, which meant that when the Tories returned to power in 1979, they were out for blood. The union had to be decapitated, and its body, dismembered. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2002/may/27/mondaymediasection.politicsandthemedia
This whole affair involved the British government, British Intelligence, (the term parapolitics was coined in honour of this conspiracy), the CIA, and a motley group of other B grade actors from journalists, to the courts, to break down the Miners Union, an institution the British government saw as an inimical threat.
How did the press collude? Here’s a sobering thought, David Cornwell a former intelligence officer said “the British secret service controlled large sections of the press, just as they may do today.”
This should not come as a surprise, look at the latest Twitter 77th Brigade British Intelligence officer https://www.newsweek.com/twitter-executive-revealed-psyops-soldier-spreading-disinformation-across-social-media-1462406
Are the British the standard bearers of democracy and liberty? Still a mild yes? Ok, bring on the hurricane!
Stop 2: The Thalidomide Whirl
We haven’t left Britain yet! What about the CHILDREN??? Yeah, what about em?
Thalidomide was marketed as a fool proof, no side effect sedative for pregnant women in 1954. By 1961, Australian obstetrician William McBride was already raising alarm bells on the foetal abnormalities caused by the drug. Who cared? No one in a position to put a kibosh on the drug that could penetrate the placental barrier, and attack the limbs of the foetus, that’s for sure!
Some 8000 children needed to be assigned the tortuous fate of living life with partial or no limbs, before this drug was taken off the shelves. Here is the Canadian version of Thalidomide victims being mocked by the Canadian Disabilities Minister!!!
The great Phillip Knightley, an Australian journalist, who chased this story from 1968, documented all his findings, only to be able to release the cache of information in 1977!
We have a classic case of big pharma – Distillers, and the media, colluding to quelch the voices of the victims of a harrowing life sentence, which was not through any other reason than negligence and unscrupulous practices of big pharma and government.
Journalists were the media spin doctors, who turned personal tragedies of these innocent families, into a sensationalised windfall gain akin to a lottery win, with headlines like ‘WHAT PRICE A POUND OF FLESH?’ in the Sunday Times. The stone cold hearts of the journalists not only lacked the warmth of human decency, but through the continuous reiteration of the victims being ‘lucky’ people who got a handout, led to bullying in school of the victims by other children who were not afflicted by Thalidomide.
This story is excruciating to read, especially the ad hoc assignment of the kids who received compensation, labelled as ‘X’ vs those who didn’t qualify being assigned as the ‘Y’ people. How did they make this allocation? By employing Professor Richard Smithells of Leeds University to LOOK AT PICTURES of the children!!! Those who are interested, please read Phillip Knightley’s book, Suffer the Children.
Stop 3: Yellow Brick Road
Now we have reached the land of the free and the home of the brave…….maybe the second bit has justification, but not the first part! This is especially so, if you are a physician who can find cures to thwart the earning potential of BIG PHARMA!
Stanislaw Burzynski is a Doctor in biochemistry and discovered a cure for cancer known as antineoplaston therapy.
Antineoplastons are a group of peptides, and peptide derivatives Burzynski combines, as an alternative cure for cancer. He has been using this treatment since 1984 and it is STILL not approved by the FDA despite numerous patients willing to testify the treatments efficacy. Here’s a typical story https://www.statnews.com/2016/06/01/brain-cancer-fda-fight/
I am not a cancer specialist, so I won’t argue on the grounds of the actual treatment. For those who are interested in alternative therapies, here is another one, the Budwig Protocol https://www.mossreports.com/budwig-diet-for-cancer-flax-or-fiction/
I will argue on the moral grounds for not pursuing these alternative treatments because both Burzynski and Budwig (6 time Nobel Prize nominee) are not quacks who moonlight as ‘Wholistic healers’. Both of these physicians are scientists and are well acquainted with rules pertaining to what constitutes real science vs Bro science. There is definitely room to question the ethics of governments that refuse to take these discoveries seriously, and turn them into legitimate case studies when records are kept by both Burzynski, and Bugwig showing the efficacy of their therapies.
How can any institution claim to have the best interest of their citizens at heart, when upon every discovery that doesn’t involve a pyramid profit scheme, gets burned up like a bad highschool chemistry experiment, without benefit of the doubt? On the other hand, Thalidomide gets approved WITHOUT animal trials! Go figure.
Stop 4: Exposing the Wizard – Modern day slavery in the West
We delight in exposing second and third world nation’s exploitation of human labour, chuckling at their barbarism despite sharing the 21st Century with the sophisticated West. These dastardly backward nations still divorce their citizens from the crudest form of human rights…….riiiiiight.
Cue in Germany. One journalist from the nation that claims it has learned from its history is Gunter Wallraff. He did an expose on the working conditions of foreign labour in Germany, titled Ganz unten (Lowest of the low).
Wallraff disguised himself as a Turk and applied to work in the Jurid factory, which was involved in asbestos processing. What he discovered was that in Germany 1985, 4 decades after THAT war, Germans still had not lost the Hitler touch!
Turks and Polish migrants were still seen to be less human than Germans. Normal forms of clothing protection such as helmets and masks against asbestos were given to German workers in the factory, but optional for the migrants. Germans still regarded the life of a non Aryan to be essentially devoid of meaning – dispensable and replaceable. https://www.dw.com/en/the-lowest-of-the-low-no-more/a-1746801
Think it’s only the Germans? Nope
Final Destination: There’s no place like home
……….we finally reach my home, Australia. What are Asians good for?
(all hands in the room go up, voices in unison) “Labour Exploitation!”. Correct!
I have been persistent and consistent in my tirade against the most diabolical group of all, the collusion of Asian siblings with Western powers to abuse another Asian. It seems that internalised racists, are fans of stripping off the underwear of their kin, to engage them in the ice bucket challenge in Siberia, all the while asking ” Is it cold?”.
I do not know which part of this story is more gut wrenching, the onslaught of a nightmare that began with a dream of going to a more ‘liberated’ country for the Asian student, or the deceit and malice that flows through the criminal colonial veins of Australia’s adopted sons and daughters. I mean both the adopted White and Asian Australians involved in the joint venture of exploitation.
This Al Jeezera documentary, follows the disillusionment of foreign Asian students who end up working in the most horrendous and wretched conditions for wages which do not even meet the minimum.
The most disappointing aspect, is the bond which traditionally forges between those who share a similar background, are forsaken for a few pieces of coloured plastic paper.
There is no place like home. Home is a place where the heart is at peace, where conscience can rest, not due to battle weary exhaustion, but because there remains an unacknowledged, unbreakable affinity, which holds one person accountable to another. If aid can not be dispensed, cruelty should not stand in its place instead.
Why do we chose to cheat others, when we can not benefit from them? Is this the twin choice of human nature?