The recent announcement of plans to extend the power of police to tap phones raises once again the question of how really our democratic rights are. On these pages we present a slightly abridged version of a paper JOAN COXSEDGE, Victorian MLC, delivered to the Socialist Scholars Conference in July.
When people think of civil rights — if they think of them at all — they tend to think in terms of our legal system and how they can be enforced. I believe this ignores the basic purpose of the law and the way it operates.
In every society, the law is a means of enforcing the status quo. No system makes laws which encourage anything vaguely resembling its own destruction. Those who want to change society, even in minor ways, usually have to break the law.
This was recognised in the US Declaration of Independence, which says that people must ultimately use illegal means to change the existing rule once it becomes oppressive. Of course, Jefferson wasn't making a general statement in support of revolution; he was offering an argument to justify throwing off British rule. These days, ironically, to get into the United States, you must swear that you don't believe in that part of the famous document.
Civil liberties, like other facets of our lives, are governed by economic circumstances and the society in which we live, a reminder that it is class-based. For the concerned middle class in so-called liberal democracies like our own, ideas of civil liberties generally focus on freedom of speech, freedom from physical harassment and equality before the law. Today these liberties are steadily being eroded and are at the mercy of the growing economic and environmental crisis of capitalism, which is now the only economic system left in the world.
'Free' speech
If you open your mouth and participate in some serious stirring, you may not end up in jail, but today's high-tech surveillance society guarantees that you will wind up on someone's data bank — whether state, such as ASIO and a plethora of other snooping outfits, or private (and they're growing apace) — as a troublemaker who should not be employed and should be watched.
Very few people realise the huge scale of these computerised snooping systems that keep tabs on you from the cradle to the grave. Dossiers can be upgraded instantly and swapped around amongst the various agencies, crossing national borders. The growth of secret agencies and these data banks have made freedom to open your mouth an increasingly high-risk proposition.
A recent example involved the bitter pilots' dispute of 1989, when they were stood down and blacklisted in their own country, forcing many to leave and seek work with foreign carriers. One group of 15 went to Swiss Air under contract, and it was recently suggested they become full-time staff. To do that, they had to take out Swiss citizenship. A rather large snag appeared when Swiss authorities were he pilots were listed by ASIO as "political dissidents".
(Many people are under the impression that Interpol is a high-powered international police force regulated by government. Nothing could be further from the truth. This immensely influential worldwide police body is a shady private outfit operating completely outside government control. Interpol functions as a giant repository and disseminator of information which it keeps on a multiplicity of individuals and groups around the globe. People harmed by Interpol's activities have no protection or legal redress whatsoever.
(There are other serious worries about Interpol, not the least of which is its known track record in support of fascism, which dates back to World War II, when the Nazis took over the running of the organisation. When I wrote about Interpol in the October 1989 issue of my newsletter "Hard Facts for Hard Times", I pointed out that in Australia, Interpol had its national central bureau office inside Canberra's Federal Police HQ, staffed by about six Federal Police personnel. Our Federal Police commissioner, Peter McAulay, was Interpol's national representative in this country. Of course, our secret agency network not only curbs our freedom of speech and threatens our civil liberties but determines our foreign policy and trade.)
Media control
Synonymous with free speech is a free media. Our media ownership is the most concentrated in the Western world. The advent of satellites, the stranglehold of Murdoch, growing interference in the ABC, plus the widespread use of syndicated and networked material add up to a very disturbing anti-democratic picture.
In addition to the lack of diversity, the paucity of information given to Australians has had a disastrous effect on our political understanding, our culture and even our national psyche. The media now control political life in a most frightening way and are able to create and destroy parties and people. The range of political debate is so limited that genuine left-wing opinions seem almost to have vanished.
This has helped create a feeling of apathy of alarming proportions. It is rather meaningless to talk about people making up their own minds when the media have left them either ignorant or with a totally distorted picture of what is going on in society.
The methods used are both blatant and subtle. Our media barons need not interfere (although Murdoch always does), because others will do their dirty work for them. Most journalists know that their job prospects are tied to what they write, and this pervasive atmosphere encourages self-censorship and ensures that certain viewpoints are simply avoided altogether.
The situation is getting even worse with the likelihood that the Packer/Conrad Black extreme right-wing consortium will be the successful bidder in the takeover of the Fairfax media empire, but don't hold your breath waiting for the Hawke government to step in and take a strong stand against this further curtailment of our right to information. Remember the way the law was changed to accommodate a och.
The struggles of British print workers outside Murdoch's plant at Wapping a few years ago revealed other disturbing aspects. British MP Tony Benn told the House of Commons that violent police attacks on TV camera crews were not being reported by their own stations and that 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ of film footage were transposed by the BBC news department in order to present an account that was more favourable to the police and, of course, to Murdoch.
Global control
Murdoch is not simply another media mogul — although that is bad enough, with his paper's obsessions with warmongering, racism, sexism and violence — but a new species altogether.
His tentacles reach into every facet of mass communications. Apart from owning hundreds of newspapers, film and video companies, satellite TV and other TV stations throughout the world (he recently moved into eastern Europe), his interests include natural gas, uranium, agribusiness and the computer industry.
He was invited onto the board of the US military/industrial giant, United Technologies, when he was still an Australian citizen, a most unusual occurrence. One of its subsidiaries is Sikorsky Aircraft, which makes helicopters. In 1989 Sikorsky narrowly won the contract to supply Australia with 16 Seahawks at a cost of $620 million.
World media watchers are predicting that we could be moving into a new dark age of global mind control, no doubt as part of Bush's New World Order. This prediction is not so far-fetched when you realise that control of all information and entertainment resources — including books, magazines, TV, radio, and more recent forms of high-tech communication systems — will soon be in the hands of a mere five or six corporate giants.
Each of these planetary corporations will gather under its control every step of the information process, from creation of the "product" — news, information, ideas, entertainment and popular culture — to its release to the public. The public is the entire world.
The men at the helm of these giant corporations are appropriately called "Lords of the Global Village". They have their own political agenda and are as ready as any dictator to suppress, distort, and de-emphasise news and information, because theirs is a strategy of total control. If successful, they would impose an extraordinary uniformity and blandness on ideas, culture and commerce, affecting populations larger than any in history. One of these modern-day controllers of the Ministry of Truth is US citizen Murdoch.
Routine bugging and telephone tapping have made privacy a thing of the past. And there's really no effective law to stop prospective employers from discriminating against you as long as there's nothing in writing. I know that much of ASIO's bagging of individuals to personnel people was done over the phone, so there was no written evidence of its activities. In any case, there is no law against running data banks on individuals, and even if there were, how on it?
With the astronomical costs of legal actions, equality before the law is a mockery and openly treated as such by large corporations and their ilk, who have the financial and political clout to get away with literal murder. The Bhopal chemical catastrophe was a good example: tens of thousands of its victims — those who haven't died — are still waiting for compensation. The same thing happens with asbestosis cases and workers injured on the job — usually as a result of the bosses' negligence — and women affected by using the Dalkon Shield.
There is now no point patenting any sort of invention in the United States. Large corporations will deliberately infringe the patent and openly invite you to sue them if you reckon you can beat them. In the land of the free, all billionaires are indeed equal before the law.
Legal repression
In 1982, I co-authored a book called Rooted in Secrecy, which went into some detail about the way the state had switched from using the anticommunist bogy as a means of controlling dissent and creating political conformity in capitalist countries, to the bogy of terrorism, used as a smokescreen to hide serious abuses of people.
We looked at the way Britain has used Northern Ireland as a testing ground for repressive methods of population control. Significantly, it is the first major counter-insurgency campaign in a developed urbanised society which is technically part of a liberal democracy.
We also dealt with the dreadful frame-up in our own country of Tim Anderson and the other two members of the Ananda Marga, Ross Dunn and Paul Alister, sentenced to 16 years' jail for conspiracy to murder NSW Nazi leader Robert Cameron. The crown's case was based on the concoctions of a mentally unstable police pimp, Richard Seary, hired by NSW Special Branch to infiltrate the Ananda Marga.
Since then, regardless of the fact that a great proportion of political violence is committed by the forces of law and order — more appropriately referred to as lawlessness and disorder — the anti-terrorist excuse has been used for further quite monstrous official injustices.
We had the second attempt to frame Tim Anderson, which was thwarted mainly because of a powerful public campaign. On July 4, anti-apartheid activist Kerry Browning was acquitted by a Canberra jury on all charges related to an alleged fire-bombing in 1988 of cars belonging to the South African and US embassies. Browning, under virtual house arrest for two years, was convicted of writing a "threatening" letter to the US ambassador and was put on a good behaviour bond. In both cases evidence presented by the police was fabricated, reflecting their political bias.
In Britain, after serving long prison sentences, the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven have been released.
Manufactured evidence
One of the most disturbing elements in many of these cases has been the increasing use of tame scientists to manufacture evidence, as well as the propensity of allegedly impartial judges to go along with every twist and turn of the crown's evidence, invented as the case went along. This was particularly noticeable in the Tim Anderson witch-hunt and the British cases, with juries being manipulated into bizarre verdicts.Our judicial system seems to have largely abandoned the concept of discovering the truth, if we ever had it. It has been turned into a machine for the manufacture of convictions, backed up by a range of technological trappings which allow it almost to bypass the jury system by baffling jurors with science.
Cynics might say that at least we go through some form of judicial procedure, perhaps best illustrated by the old US southern vigilante saying, "We always hang the niggers we catch, but we give them a fair trial first".
In countries like El Salvador, Guatemala, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, any niceties have long since been abandoned. Political torture and murder have become institutionalised, frequently under the tutelage of the CIA, which supplies both the know-how and the technology. Training takes place at a little-known establishment called the US Army School of the Americas, moved to Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, in 1984 from Panama as a condition of the Panama Canal Treaty.
War against the poor
To regard these methods as qualitatively different in philosophy from that prevailing in countries like Australia would be a mistake. What is at stake is preservation of the status quo. And today, we are looking at only one worldwide political-economic system, the capitalist system, in a variety of manifestations and at various stages of development or decay. The methods it employs to keep itself in power differ from time to time and from country to country, but the philosophy is identical.
As resources are getting scarcer, this philosophy can be universally characterised as a war of the rich and powerful against the poor. The weapons used range from the gun and the rocket to unemployment and homelessness.
Middle-class thinking defines freedom as freedom of speech and freedom from physical violence. Yet all around us, people are driven insane, into suicide or physical collapse, without the overt use of force or severe abrogation of freedom of speech. The question we ought to be asking is — how free are those who have no roof over their heads or who don't know where their next meal is coming from? How free is a journalist — even in a situation where there is no overt secret police intimidation or editorial censorship — who knows that she or he has only two possible bosses as a choice, both right wing, in the whole of Australia?
As Bertolt Brecht said, "first comes your belly, then your ethics". The bulk of people deprived of civil liberties suffer in different ways from what might be thought of as a more traditional definition.
So persuasive are our media and the organs of the state that the t even recognise their oppression. They believe their situation is due to some law of nature, variously called "the state of the economy", "difficult times" or "world trade". Not only are they powerless, but they are powerless against forces which are beyond their understanding or knowledge. We seem to be degenerating into a society based on mythology. Whereas past societies at least managed to fit their ignorance into a reasonably coherent framework of religion, no-one can grasp the fetishes of resource exploitation, privatisation and deregulation, which are today's myths.
Environment
In this way, the power brokers are able to make war on the disadvantaged, the unemployed, the sick and those unable or unwilling to play the alienated games of capitalism. And while each rich nation makes war on its own poor, collectively they make war on the poor nations and on the environment. The destruction of our environmental heritage is yet another very serious encroachment of our civil liberties which is often left out of the debate.
Environmental destruction, which we can fight against in this country — even if it is a rearguard action — is being institutionalised, together with economic exploitation.
I decline to use the term "developing" countries because most poor countries are developing in reverse. Certainly, Australia, which is being turned into a neo-colonial entity by the policies of the Hawke/Keating clique, could scarcely be said to be developing. Indeed, the entire thrust of economic pressure on such nations is to stop them from developing, unless development is defined as digging huge holes in the ground, chopping down trees, destroying secondary industries and local identity and culture.
Running alongside this, we have increasing militarisation, with desperately poor nations now spending more than half their national income on arms to keep their corrupt leaders in power under the interventionist eye of Uncle Sam, ever ready to take swift action if US interests are perceived to be threatened.
There are lots of mechanisms to achieve world domination by multinational corporations, whose budgets often exceed those of small countries, or even large ones. One has just been demonstrated in the Middle East, where more than 200,000 people were brutally and scientifically slaughtered and the lives of countless millions more put at risk, in order to prove who is the boss.
Evidently, the boss man of the world's rent-a-cops, Iran/Contragate crook George Bush, still isn't satisfied, along with the French, who seem keen to drop even more bombs on a country that is still out of favour. It sums up international morality to listen to Mitterrand talk in tones of moral outrage when his country is polluting the Pacific with nuclear weapons testing and the secret service major involved in bombing the Rainbow Warrior, killing a man in the process, has just been awarded a medal.
Trade
The other weapon is trade. GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, set up at the end of World War II along with the is quite openly expropriating the resources of poor countries and handing them over to the rich nations which dominate GATT.
In economic and social terms, Third World countries and their peoples are on the point of being rolled back to the colonial era, in a less obvious way than the old-style gunboat diplomacy. Countries that refuse to bow down to their provisions will be punished with trade retaliation, not only confined to the issue under dispute, but right across the board.
Every time a farmer is decapitated by death squads in the Philippines or a Koori dies in a prison cell, an unemployed worker is driven to the wall in Australia, a woman is raped, a young person dies of a drug overdose or a Tim Anderson gets locked up unjustly, ultimately the driving force in these crimes against humanity is the same. It is the system of power structures forming part of the pyramid of greed and corruption which is the make-up of our social system.
And while we must fight each encroachment on our lives and our liberties, these rearguard actions, even if successful, can at best slow the disastrous path we're taking. At some stage, we will have to confront the system itself. Before too much longer, we will have to put into practice that very important clause in the US Declaration of Independence and seriously take on our oppressors.