Gorilla Radio for Monday, November 5, 2007

GR 04-27 101.9 FM 104.3 Cable 'cfuv.uvic.ca'
Monday Nov. 5, 2007

5:00:00 3:00 Welcome to GR, etc; "It's elementary," Sherlock Holmes famously deduced, informing Watson, the solution to any mystery presides within the constituent elements of the situation. Today, the mystery is: How can our society come to terms with the damaging effects we have on the elements required to sustain life?

You need not be a genius on the order of Conan Doyle's detective to see: The air, earth, and water are threatened. Everywhere you look, the elements we, and all the natural world need to survive are being destroyed. And, the culprit is we, and our "way of life."

But what's to be done?

On the southern tip of Vancouver Island, the unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples, the Greater Victoria Water Watch Coalition are gathering to address the issues vital to our, and the greater environment's, collective preservation. Rodger Oakley and Janet Gray are two Vancouver Islanders involved with the campaign; Rodger from the Nanaimo-based, Island Water Watch, and Janet down here with the Greater Victoria Water Watch.

Rodger Oakley and Janet Gray and Water, Ours to Protect in the first segment.

And; in a time of decay, when all the institutions of western enlightenment are perverted, resembling gnarled fruits, hanging grotesquely below democracy's dying tree; in a world where massive crimes of unprecedented magnitude are allowed to continue unremarked upon, and go unpunished; in a climate of fear, when men and women abrogate their natural duty to decency, serving personal comfort and career, as the vital needs of humanity go unserved, there remains a few dedicated and undaunted media professionals chronicling the debasement of the age, and speaking truth to power.

John Pilger has, for more than four decades, served the highest ethos of journalism: Truth. He's produced more than 55 documentary films, written thousands of articles, and received the highest honours his profession affords: Twice named Journalist of the Year in Britain, and International Journalist of the Year, John Pilger was also granted the United Nations Association Media Peace Prize. Among the many awards his documentary films garnered are an Emmy in the United States, and Britain's "Oscar," the BAFTA award. His latest film, the first to be released theatrically, is 'The War on Democracy,' a timely examination of the drastic decline of that institution in the early years of the 21st Century.

John Pilger and the global war on democracy in the second half.

And; Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with all that's good to do in and around Victoria in the coming week. But first, Rodger Oakley and Janet Gray, keeping watch over Vancouver Island's water.

5:00:03 22:00 Discussion w/ Rodger and Janet

"Welcome to the program Rodger Oakley and Janet Gray. Janet, first what can we expect from the Ours to Protect conference?"

5:25:00 1:00 Cart(s)
5:26:00 8:00 Janine Bandcroft
5:34:00 3:00 Music (Memory War)
5:36:00 22:00 Discussion w/ John Pilger (tape)

"Welcome back to GR, etc. (Reit. JP intro)

John Pilger has, for more than four decades, served the highest ethos of journalism: Truth. He's produced more than 55 documentary films, written thousands of articles, and received the highest honours his profession affords: Twice named Journalist of the Year in Britain, and International Journalist of the Year, John Pilger was also granted the United Nations Association Media Peace Prize. Among the many awards his documentary films garnered are an Emmy in the United States, and Britain's "Oscar," the BAFTA award. His latest film, the first to be released theatrically, is 'The War on Democracy,' a timely examination of the drastic decline of that institution in the early years of the 21st Century.

"Welcome to the program, John. In a review of your film, 'The War on Democracy,' John Saniford writes of your early television broadcasts from London's ITV television in the 1970's as inspiring youth to action to right the ills you documented, but then laments the fact that this film is "unlikely to have the same effect on today's youth." How do we, if we do, differ today from that inspired generation you urged to action three decades ago?"

5:59:00 1:00 Thanks to Rodger Oakley, Janet Gray, John Pilger, J9; upcoming.
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“WATER OURS TO PROTECT” St. Aidans Church, 3703 St. Aidans St. Victoria Nov. 17, 2007 9am 4pm
Workshops will be held concurrently on November 17th, 2007 from 1:00pm 2:30pm
website: greatervictoriawaterwatchcoalition.ca

Workshops: 1. Sacred nature of water an aboriginal perspective. 2. Community action and governance how people can make a difference. 3. Water for people and nature; not for profit the truth about bottled water. 4. Groundwater, aquifers and watersheds: The dynamic of groundwater in the subsurface and aquifer sustainability. 5. Preservation,/Restoration/ & Recovery of Watersheds 6. Modern Alchemy: Turning Waste into Gold


Rodger Oakley has been a Union and Community activist for the past twenty-seven years with the Canadian Union of Public Employees. Rodger is the past President of CUPE Local 401. He has been involved in various associations as an activist including member and chair of the CUPE BC Municipal Committee, Member of the Vancouver Island Distinct Council, and was a founding member of the Mid Island Coalition for Strong Communities.

Currently Rodger’s attention is on water. He was instrumental in establishing the Island Water Watch Campaign with CUPE BC and CUPE National, and is the chair of that committee. Rodger has worked with, Greater Victoria Water Watch Coalition, Ocean Side Coalition, KIROS, Council of Canadians, Campbell River Water Watch Coalition, Comox Valley Water Watch Coalition. Water is invaluable. Rodger’s goal is to help form a broad Coalition of Activists in every segment of our society to protect what is most valuable to our communities. WATER!

Janet Gray has been active in the community all her adult life, as a nurse, mother, homeschooling educator and organic gardener; she believes in the strength of the grassroots community in the making changes we need to create a healthy future for all. Active in Kairos and Social Justice Organizations within the United Church of Canada, she has been working on water issues for the past two years with the Greater Victoria Water Watch Coalition. Janet is passionate about Water.
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'The War On Democracy'
JP

The rising of Latin America - the genesis of 'The War On Democracy' 13 Jun 2007 In the 1960s, when I first went to Latin America, I travelled up the cone of the continent from Chile across the Altiplano to Peru, mostly in rickety buses and single-carriage trains. It was an experience my memory stored for life, especially the spectacle of the movement of people.

They moved through the dust of a snow-capped wilderness, along roads that were ribbons of red mud, and they lived in shanties that defied gravity. "We are invisible," said one man; another used the term abandonados; an indigenous woman in Bolivia unforgettably described her poverty as a commodity for the rich.

When I later saw Sebastiao Salgado's photographs of Latin America's working people, I recognised the people at the roadside, the gold miners and the coffee workers and the silhouettes framed in crosses in the cemeteries. Perhaps the idea for a cinema film began then, or when I reported Ronald Reagan's murderous assault on Central America; or when I first read the words of Victor Jara's ballads and heard Sam Cooke's anthem A Change Is Gonna Come.

The War On Democracy is my first film for cinema. It follows more than 55 documentary films for television, which began with The Quiet Mutiny, set in Vietnam. Most of my films have told stories of people's struggles against rapacious power and of attempts to subvert and control our historical memory. It is this control, this organised forgetting, that has always intrigued me both as a film-maker and a journalist. Described by Harold Pinter as a great silence unbroken by the incessant din of the media age, it assures the powerful in the west that the struggle of whole societies against their crimes is merely "superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged... It never happened. Even while it was happening it never happened. It didn't matter. It was of no interest".

This was true of Nicaragua in the early 1980s, when a popular revolution began to turn back poverty and bring literacy and hope to a country long dismissed as a banana republic. In the United States, the Sandinista government was successfully portrayed as communist and a threat, and crushed. After all, Richard Nixon had said of all of Latin America: "No one gives a shit about the place." The War On Democracy is meant as an antidote to this.

Modern fictional cinema rarely seems to break political silences. The very fine Motorcycle Diaries was a generation too late. In this country, where Hollywood sets the liberal boundaries, the work of Ken Loach and a few others is an honourable exception. However, the cinema is changing as if by default. The documentary has returned to the big screen and is being embraced by the public, in the US and all over. They were still clapping Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 two months after it opened in this country. Why? The answer is uncomplicated. It was a powerful film that helped people make sense of news that no longer made sense. It did not present the usual phoney "balance" as a pretence for presenting an establishment consensus. It was not riddled with the cliches, platitudes and power assumptions that permeate "current affairs". It was realist cinema, as important as The Grapes of Wrath was in the 1930s, and people devoured it.

The War On Democracy is not the same. It comes out of a British commercial television tradition that is too often passed over: the pioneering of bold factual journalism that treated other societies not as post-imperial curios, as useful or expendable to "us", but extraordinary and important in their own terms. Granada's World in Action, where I began, was a prime example. It would report and film in ways that the BBC would not dare. These days, with misnamed "reality" programmes consuming much of television like a plague of cane toads, cinema has been handed a timely opportunity. Such are the dangers imposed on us all today by a rampant, neo-fascist superpower, and so urgent is our need for uncontaminated information that people are prepared to buy a cinema ticket to get it.

The War On Democracy examines the false democracy that comes with western corporations and financial institutions and a war waged, materially and as propaganda, against popular democracy. It is the story of the people I first saw 40 years ago; but they are no longer invisible; they are a mighty political movement, reclaiming noble concepts distorted by corporatism and they are defending the most basic human rights in a war being waged against all of us.

Cinema and television production are closely related, of course, but the differences, I have learned, are critical. Cinema allows a panorama to unfold, giving a sense of place that only the big screen captures. In The War On Democracy, the camera sweeps across the Andes in Bolivia to the highest and poorest city on earth, El Alto, then follows Juan Delfin, a priest and a taxi driver, into a cemetery where children are buried. That Bolivia has been asset-stripped by multinational companies, aided by a corrupt elite, is an epic story described by this one man and this spectacle. That the people of Bolivia have stood up, expelled the foreign consortium that took their water resources, even the water that fell from the sky, is understood as the camera pans across a giant mural that Juan Delfin painted. This is cinema, a moving mural of ordinary lives and triumphs.

Chris Martin and I (we made the film as a partnership) used two crews and two very different cinematographers, Preston Clothier and Rupert Binsley. They shot in high-definition stock, which then had to be converted to 35mm film - one of cinema's wonderful anachronisms.

The film was backed by the impresario Michael Watt, a supporter of anti-poverty projects all over the world, who had told producer Wayne Young that he wanted to put my TV work in the cinema. Granada provided additional support, and ITV will broadcast the film later in the year. The extra funding also allowed me to persuade the late Sam Cooke's New York agents to license A Change Is Gonna Come, one of the finest, most lyrical pieces of black music ever written and performed. I was in the southern United States when it was released. It was the time of the civil-rights movement, and Cooke's song spoke to and for all people struggling to be free. The same is true of the ballads of the Chilean Victor Jara, whose songs celebrated the popular democracy of Salvador Allende before Pinochet and the CIA extinguished it.

We filmed in the National Stadium in Santiago, Chile, where Jara was taken along with thousands of other political prisoners. By all accounts, he was a source of strength for his comrades, singing for them until soldiers beat him to the ground and smashed his hands. He wrote his last song there and it was smuggled out on scraps of paper. These are the words:

What horror the face of fascism
creates
They carry out their plans with
knife-like precision ...
For them, blood equals medals ...
How hard it is to sing
When I must sing of horror ...
In which silence and screams
Are the end of my song.

After two days of torture, they killed him. The War On Democracy is about such courage and a warning to us all that "for them" nothing has changed, that "blood equals medals".