Sunday, June 13, 2010

If a Peasant Dies in a Forest, And TV Doesn't Cover It,Does It Make a Sound?

Yesterday I finished a book called "Xamon Song", by Adam Stone. It's about a teenaged American boy who joins the military and is sent off to "defend his country", and how he learns that he's really there to protect a logging company, and the paramilitaries they have hired to kill the indigenous people who live in the forest.

By coincidence, later on I watched Arundhati Roy speak about the indigenous tribal people of India, being wiped out for the profits of multi-national corporations. The interviewer scolded her for supporting the armed resistors, pointing out that India is the country of Ghandi.

She replied that Ghandian resistance requires an audience, but tribal people are being massacred without an audience.

That is an incredible insight.

While world-wide attention is being paid to the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, NO attention is being paid to the wiping out of the last hunter-gatherers on our planet, unless someone famous calls attention to it, as when James Cameron, the producer of Avatar, got involved with a Brazilian tribe trying to stop a dam from wiping out their homelands.

What about the people of the Congo? The people of Indonesia?

Avatar was a great movie, and at the time, I connected it to the American genocide of the Indians of our continent.

But the genocide continues to this day! Capitalism, having looted the riches of its own countries, is moving on to the last unspoiled forests and oceans of the rest of the world.

And tribes are being wiped out, without the rest of us even knowing that it is happening.




5 comments:

Anonymous said...

If ten people show up for a tea party rally, it is all over the news. 250,000 Mexican Americans marched on Washington and no one covered it, but they have time to report that Chevrolet objects to being called Chevy.

wagelaborer said...

It's the same with peace marches. I went to Washington, DC in 2003 and 2005 to march against the invasion of Iraq.

There were hundreds of thousands of people there both times.

But the media didn't report it, so it didn't happen.

David G. said...

Capitalism and greed are destroying our world. The weakest are destroyed first, then it moves up the hierarchy.

At the top of the food chain are the billionaires, the Masters of the Universe. They have set up a system which guarantees they have it all, that they live in opulence.

It's much like the period prior to the French Revolution.

Anonymous said...

They don't realize that the opulence they live in is provided by us, the peons!

If they kill us off, who will be their servants?

ryk said...

Arundhati Roy is indeed insightful. She's a brilliant writer.