[continued from previous message] 
  
 the world's poor while lauding "compassionate" Bush's "war on terror" 
 as one of his generation's greatest achievements; and there again was 
 Brown, the enforcer of unfair rules of trade, saying incredibly that 
 "unfair rules of trade shackle poor people"; and Paul Wolfowitz, 
 beaming next to the Archbishop of Canterbury: this is the man who, 
 before he was handed control of the World Bank, devised much of Bush's 
 so-called neoconservative putsch, the mendacious justification for the 
 bloodfest in Iraq and the notion of "endless war". And if you missed 
 all that, there is a downloadable PDF kit from a "ONE Campaign" e-mail 
 to "help you organise your very own ongoing Live 8 party". The 
 suppression of African singers and bands, parked where Geldof decreed, 
 in an environmental theme park in Cornwall far from the vaunted global 
 audience, was described correctly by Andy Kershaw as "musical 
 apartheid". 
  
 Has there ever been a censorship as complete and insidious and 
 ingenious as this? Even when Stalin airbrushed his purged comrades 
 from the annual photograph on top of Lenin's mausoleum, the Russian 
 people could fill in the gaps. Media and cultural hype provide 
 infinitely more powerful propaganda weapons in the age of Blair. 
 With Diana, there was grief by media. With Iraq, there was war by 
 media. Now there is mass distraction by media, a normalising of the 
 unmentionable that "the state has lost its mind and is punishing so 
 many innocent people", as Arthur Miller wrote, "and so the evidence 
 has to be internally denied". Deploying the unction of Bono, Madonna, 
 Paul McCartney, a pop-up Andrew Marr and of course Geldof, whose Live 
 Aid 20 years ago achieved nothing for the people of Africa, the 
 contemporary plunderers and pawnbrokers of that continent have pulled 
 off an unprecedented scam: the antithesis of 15 February 2003, when 
 two million people brought both hearts and brains to the streets of 
 London. 
  
 "[Ours] is not a march in the sense of a demonstration, but more of a 
 walk, " said Bruce Whitehead of Make Poverty History. "The emphasis is 
 on fun in the sun. The intention is to welcome the G8 leaders to 
 Scotland and ask them to deliver trade justice, debt cancellation and 
 increased aid to developing countries." 
  
 Really? 
  
 In Lewis Carroll's classic, Alice asked the Cheshire Cat and the Mad 
 Hatter to show her the way out of wonderland. They did, over and 
 again, this way, that way, until she lost her temper and brought down 
 her dream-world, waking her up. The people killed and maimed in Iraq 
 and the people wilfully impoverished in Africa by our governments and 
 our institutions, in our name, demand that we wake up. 
  
  
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