Gideon Polya, “Silence Kills and Silence is Complicity but Truth Saves Lives, MWC News 4th Anniversary”, MWC News, 15 May 2008.
Silence Kills and Silence is Complicity but Truth Saves Lives. MWC News 4th Anniversary.
Congratulations MWC News on 4 years of courageous, ethical and humanitarian reportage!
Decent anti-racist, humanitarian folk around the world understand the crucial need for media to REPORT THE TRUTH – especially when that truth relates to gross human rights abuses and avoidable mass morbidity and mortality. However this powerful plea of Humanity in general can be re-stated from a scientific perspective as follows.
Rational risk management (that has made aviation very safe and is crucially important in heavy industry, defence, nuclear power plants etc - all areas where errors can be catastrophic) has a general applicability and successively involves (a) getting accurate data, (b) scientific analysis (involving the critical testing potentially falsifiable hypotheses) and (c) systemic change (to minimize risk of morbidity, mortality or other loss when - inevitably - there is human error, mechanical malfunction or other adverse circumstances) (see my detailed and extensive course lecture notes on the subject: http://rationalriskmanagement.blogspot.com/ ).
Unfortunately the Mainstream media and political Establishments of the Western Murdochracies (and others e.g. the Burma, Sudan, Congo etc etc régimes) routinely IGNORE and PERVERT this rational risk management protocol by replacing it with (a) lies, censorship, intimidation and obfuscation, (b) anti-science spin (involving selection of asserted facts to support a partisan position) and (c) blame and shame (thereby cutting off mandatory reportage) and with war, famine and pestilence the most appalling outcomes.
Thus major aid agency warnings indicate that scores of thousands will die because of tardy aid delivery by the military regime in Burma which is keen on spin and propaganda but is appalling the world by its lack of urgency in the Cyclone Nargis aftermath – deadly perversion of rational risk management.
However the SAME evil is seen in relation to US Alliance-occupied Occupied Afghanistan where "total annual per capita medical expenditure" is $19 (NINETEEN DOLLARS) as compared to about $7,000 in the main Occupier country, the United States (WHO data) and as a consequence 327,000 under-5 year old Occupied Afghan infants die each year, mainly from deprivation and deprivation-exacerbated disease (see UNICEF Occupied Afghanistan statistics: http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/afghanistan_statistics.html ). This carnage in US-occupied Afghanistan translates to about 470,000 (about 0.5 MILLION) avoidable deaths annually, an horrendous US Alliance war crime that is UTTERLY IGNORED by Mainstream media.
In contrast, reports related to the shocking infant deaths and avoidable deaths in Occupied Afghanistan have been reported by MWC News for 4 years (FOUR YEARS) - for the earliest and latest reports by me on MWC News about this, see “: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/724/26/ (July 17, 2005) and http://mwcnews.net/content/view/22356/42/ (May 9, 2008).
Such shocking information about Occupied Afghanistan was recently reported by several mass circulation Asian papers, namely the Milli Gazette (the biggest paper for 200 million Indian Muslims) and the very important newspaper the Shanghai Daily (serving a country of 1.3 billion; see Shanghai Daily on US Alliance war crimes in Asia: http://www.shanghaidaily.com/sp/article/2008/200804/20080417/article_356139.htm ) but IGNORED by Western media, QUOTE: the ''annual under-five-year-old infant death rate" is about the same (about 0.6 percent) in Tibet and China as a whole as compared to 6.2 percent for US- and Australia-occupied Afghanistan, 0.12 percent for occupier Australia and 0.16 percent for occupier United States.
The annual infant death rate in occupied Afghanistan (6.2 percent) is 51 times that in occupier Australia, 38 times that in occupier US and similar to the ''annual death rate" of 10.2 percent for Australian prisoners of war of the Japanese in World War II - a war crime for which key Japanese leaders were tried and hanged." END QUOTE
Indeed many other examples can be given of the callous indifference, holocaust-complicity, holocaust-ignoring and holocaust-denying of the Mainstream media and politicians of the Western Murdochracies (for a cogent summary of the appalling statistics and the core moral arguments see “Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghan, Biofuel and Climate Genocides – Silence Kills and Silence is Complicity”: http://www.liberalati.com/?q=node/261 ).
Congratulations, again to editor Shahram Vahdany and MWC News – one can only wish that the rest of the World media would follow Shahram’s outstanding, ethical, pro-Peace, humanitarian example. Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity. Truth saves lives.