John Pilger at the Ferens (5/5) By Martin J Deane

(1/5), (2/5), (3/5), (4/5), (5/5).

The Internet This is extremely important. Before looking at the papers, John Pilger trawls various media websites. Now the newspaper is a supplement rather than the starting point. The BBC and The Guardian are the top two most popular. E.g. on Iraq the Internet is so far ahead. The BBC should come clean on Iraq. So much has been kept from us. It was a blogger who found out chemical weapons had been used by the Americans in Fallujah. Al Jazeera is getting conservative now, but it has shamed our broadcast media for a long while.

Vietnam True, the Vietnam War took place without censorship. But it so illuminated self censorship! Pilger, visiting the Agencies for work, saw photos which were horrific of American atrocities. The US did awful things. Torture. The sign above the pictures said: That will teach you to talk to the press. There were My Lai's (famous massacre of a whole village) every day. A whole province was a free fire zone. They talked in terms of the bodycount.

There were 600 correspondents there, but no one got the word out. Finally it was reported by Seymour Hersh who still does good work today. That was self censorship in all its inaction.

Participatory democracy Pilger told the audience the Chartists defined 3 types of democracy. They said you had to have all three. The Vote, economic democracy and social democracy. Now, for example, neo-liberalism makes democracy a fraud. We have no-one to vote for. The miners fight was a just fight, allegedly apathetic. People need political imagination. Politics is not about being dead or cynical or top-down. There is an extreme situation here! Pensions, the war ... In Caracas there is a sophisticated debate with the government over what the people want from them next.

Here our Northern cities have become theme parks. The coal industry should never have been closed down. We could have access to all that energy now and it could have been clean coal with new burning methods. Now we have call centres, etc. It's a democracy gone wrong. Thatcher and her cronies saw the NUM as the roots of revolution and closed an industry down.

East Timor This country had years of brutal occupation. Finally it became independent through blood. It has oil off shore. Australia is now bullying it to get a greater share of this natural wealth. 2000 Australian troops are there now - it's a quiet coup. Poverty is the greatest killer now. Meanwhile the Australian Prime Minister John Howard describes himself as George W Bush's deputy sheriff ... Investigative journalism Has to go another way. The media is an extension of mainstream power. So mainstream media has to have a voice challenging it. I don't believe the Labour Party can be reformed. Like with the media - Know what it is if you want to be independent.

On Iraq Get out now! No debate. It's someone else's country. It's the practical thing to do and it's the right thing to do. Palestine British Lecturers - even the recent watered down resolutions are making an important point: that pressure from the outside will make the difference (In the 1950s the British Empire would always complain that these people aren't ready for independence! It's an Empire's defence!) In Israel academia is built into the state. For example, Pappe's position there is very tenuous as a dissenting intellectual.

Is it worth going on? We could go back to Cromwell, the Chartists, the union struggles, the Levellers. These are the great struggles for the freedoms we enjoy today. It was only in 1928, remember, that women got the vote in Britain! Chavez in Venezuela quotes Orwell and the Chartists! These should be our inspiration too! I'm not a fan of the word hope! You can sit around and hope all you like. Better you should DO something! Organising a debate. Tony Benn, doing the research, says there are more public meetings today than ever before!!

Falklands War The media was embedded. The last British war without censorship was the Crimean! Then Russell exposed the Charge of the Light Brigade for what it was: Imperial war. The meeting concluded with an invitation to buy John Pilger's new book, Freedom Next Time and to have it signed by the author.

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