Gideon Polya, “Lies & Slies by Orwellian Mainstream Media. Scheherazade, Murdochracy Paczmen & Climate Criminals ”, MWC News, 27 June 2008.
Lies & Slies by Orwellian Mainstream Media. Scheherazade, Murdochracy Paczmen & Climate Criminals.
We are all familiar from childhood with the fabulous stories of The Arabian Nights, the One Thousand and One stories told by the courageous princess Scheherazade to stop the deadly mass murder of innocent princesses by the vengeful Sultan and indeed to change his heart to a course of humanity.
This story is illustrated by my huge painting “Scheherazade” that was created in the interests of Peace and Humanity and to honour the Scheherazades of this world such as 2007 Literature Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing (Iran-born UK novelist), Booker Prize- and Sydney Peace Prize-winner Arundhati Roy (Indian writer) and the courageous poet, physician and activist Taslima Nasrin (free-thinking refugee from Bangladesh) (for a detailed discussion of this huge painting see “War on Women & Women’s Rights” on MWC News: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/16294/42/ ).
What is the world that these wonderful women want to change for the better in their own unique ways? Imagine that some visitors from a far-off galaxy land in my garden and – because they are busy inter-galactic tourists writing a Lonely Galaxy Guide – they want a very quick run-down on the situation on the Earth (aka Terra) and allow me only a few minutes to “tell it like it is” before they transport themselves to the next planet with intelligent life forms in this part of the Galaxy.
I say “Honored visitors - Terra has a population of 6.5 billion human beings and is acutely threatened by nuclear, greenhouse and poverty threats. Nuclear arsenals currently threaten virtual total destruction of humanity from blast, radiation and nuclear winter. Run-away global warming due to profligate greenhouse gas pollution from fossil fuel burning threatens to kill over 6 billion people this century. Poverty due to violence-backed First World hegemony over global resources already causes the avoidable deaths of about 16 million people each year from deprivation and deprivation-exacerbated disease. But the technical solutions to this nightmare are already available and some of us still plead that truth, science, system change and, above all, LOVE can yet save Terra ...”
My appalled intergalactic visitors (who have unfortunately encountered this scenario of life-forms being “too smart for their own good” on so many other devastated Planets) rapidly depart before my allotted time is up, to prevent any damage to their highly refined spiritual sensibility networks.
Great writers (and artists in general) tell stories – like Scheherazade – so that we can better understand ourselves, others and our interactions. Scientists largely confine themselves to quantitative data, scientific assessment (this involving the critical testing of potentially falsifiable hypotheses) and proposals for sensible system change for the betterment of man and other unique life forms on Earth. Scientists and artists have at their moral core a common commitment to truth and beauty. As John Keats put it in his poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Unfortunately blind capitalist expansionism and Western imperialist violence and propaganda have perverted human sensibilities. The nightmare world of George Orwell’s “1984” has already arrived. Pick up any major newspaper and you will quickly discover - either explicitly stated by commission or implicitly stated by omission – Big Brother’s injunctions that “war is peace”, “ignorance is strength”, “slavery is freedom” and “2 plus 2 does not equal 4” .
Westerners live in Murdochracies in which the democratic process is subverted by Mainstream media (of which the Murdoch Empire is the most powerful and notorious) and an unaccountable and secret political Establishment. I have referred to the Anglo-American political Establishment as run by PACMEN (Prosperous Anglo-Celtic men) but the horrors of the Bush Oil Wars aka Zionist colonization of the Middle East and the War on Terror (associated with an estimated 11 million avoidable Indigenous Asian deaths, 1990-2008) calls for some revision. The Western Murdochracies can be seen as dominated by PACZMEN (pronounced, after the Hungarian fashion, “Patchmen”) i.e. Prosperous Anglo-Celtic and Zionist Men.
We live in a world of lies of commission and omission that after 8 years of George Bush is now heavily dominated by “spin”. Whereas “Science” is about critically testing potentially falsifiable hypotheses, anti-science “Spin” is about selectively using “asserted facts” to support a partisan position.
My country is Australia, aka the Land of Oz, and famous as a “sunburnt country” (see “My Country” on MWC News: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/21449/42/ ) in which the “Australian salute” refers to Aussies endlessly waving away FLIES. The lying and spin in Murdochracy Australia (the birth place of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, now an American citizen) is such that I refer to Australia as the Land of Flies, Lies and Slies (spin-based untruths). There is a huge list of examples of INCORRECT REPORTAGE in Murdochracy Australia but several recent, illustrative examples are given below.
1. Iraqi Genocide – I recently had occasion to publicly ask the evidently Zionist former editor of a top Australian newspaper why Australian media don’t report the expertly-documented Iraqi Genocide. He dismissed my detailed concerns as “nonsense” and a vigorous public exchange ensued. A major Australian newspaper “The Sydney Morning Herald” (from the same media conglomerate) recently reported that “91,000” Iraqis had died post-invasion – however the appalling REALITY is that post-invasion violent plus non-violent excess deaths in Occupied Iraq totalled 1.7 - 2.2 million as of March 2008. In addition one can estimate 1.7 million Sanctions excess deaths (1990-2003), 1.2 million under-5 infant deaths under Sanctions, 0.2 million Iraqi Gulf War deaths, 0.6 million post-invasion infant deaths (UNICEF) and 4.5 million Iraqi refugees (UNHCR). This is an Iraqi Holocaust and an Iraqi Genocide as defined by the UN Genocide Convention (see: http://www.brusselstribunal.org/Messages190308.htm#polya ) .
2. Global warming – I belong to a Melbourne-based Climate Action Group (CAG) which in turn is associated with a national-based Climate Emergency Network (CEN). CEN attempts to make Australia and the world aware of the current Climate Emergency and the urgent need – most cogently expressed by top US climate scientist Dr James Hansen – to return atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) to a safe 350 ppm (parts per million) from the present 385 ppm at which all Arctic sea ice may disappear within 5 years (e.g. see: http://climatefactsheets.blogspot.com/ ). However the following shocking story illustrates what we are up against.
The leading Australian and Murdoch Empire newspaper “The Australian” (23 April 2008; see: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23583376-7583,00.html ) INCORRECTLY reported under a false and alarmist headline that, QUOTE: “All four agencies that track Earth's temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007.”
In ACTUALITY the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York (report updated 28 January, 2008; see: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2007/ ) provides sobering graphs of increasing global temperature since 1880 and states a TOTALLY DIFFERENT current reality, QUOTE: “The year 2007 tied for second warmest in the period of instrumental data, behind the record warmth of 2005, in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) analysis. 2007 tied 1998, which had leapt a remarkable 0.2°C above the prior record with the help of the "El Niño of the century". The unusual warmth in 2007 is noteworthy because it occurs at a time when solar irradiance is at a minimum and the equatorial Pacific Ocean is in the cool phase of its natural El Niño-La Niña cycle.”
What can decent people do? We must INFORM others following the examples of outstanding scientists like NASA’s Dr James Hansen (recently awarded the 2007 AAAS Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility from the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science) and outstanding humanitarian writers - and latter day Scheherazades - such as Doris Lessing, Arundhati Roy and Taslima Nasrin. We can also APPLY Sanctions and Boycotts against the goods and services of corporations of the Paczmen (Prosperous Anglo-Celtic and Zionist Men, “Patchmen”) whose greed, racism, lies and slies (spin-based untruths) are devastating the Planet and threatening the biosphere with Terracide.