En Passant

It is good to see Cut & Paste publishing intelligent letters to the editor from The Age. (Cut & Paste Wednesday 8 May). It makes a good counterbalance to the festival of reaction that is normally the letters page of The Australian and the paper more generally.

I call bullshit on The Australian and its reporting of climate change and its denial of humanity’s role in it.

Just to let you know how The Australian itself values free speech, here are 3 letters I have sent recently to them. None have been published. To whet your appetite, here is an entree. ‘I love The Australian as the representative of the fruitcake faction of capital. But the number of nutters you are publishing in your letters and opinion pages is getting somewhat tiresome.’

We all know Rupert Murdoch’s Australian newspaper is big on free speech. (Its own, if no-one else’s.) And investigative journalism. And making sure our leaders are people of integrity. So I thought I’d post the letters I sent to The Australian in the last few days that it hasn’t published.

I suspect Mick Armstrong would be surprised to learn he is now in Socialist Alliance (‘As for Bob Brown, Laurie Oakes and the Socialist Alliance, the differences are wafer thin’ Cut & Paste, The Australian Monday April 16).  So in the interests of accuracy - a topic my good friend at Cut and Paste pillories the Fairfax Press about when they [...]

If all this setting upon and intimidation and violence at the Invasion Day demonstration are true, why have there been no arrests? Maybe because the police on the ground – not liars sitting hundreds of miles away – know the truth. There was no violence by protesters. If all this setting upon and intimidation and violence at the Invasion Day demonstration are true, why have there been no arrests? Maybe because the police on the ground – not liars sitting hundreds of miles away – know the truth. There was no violence by protesters.

But don’t let racist stories as part of a racist agenda of continued dispossession and genocide of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders stand in the way of the truth.

These two disgraceful articles are just a further indication to me that racism is systemic and entrenched in Australian society and its institutions, including the media.

A good first step is telling the truth. As George Orwell put it, that is a revolutionary act.

But in the end only a mass struggle of Aboriginal people and their millions of supporters can challenge the systemic racism of Australian capitalism.

The news organisation that bought you phone hacking in the UK brings you untruths in Australia.

The Australian – by its untrue stories shall you know it. The Murdoch press – where untruths abound.

Read The Australian to see what the bosses’ future might hold. Read Socialist Alternative to understand how their system works and why we should fight for a better world now. Read Socialist Alternative to see what our future could be.

Apartheid is the word Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela have used to describe conditions for Palestinians under Israeli rule. No doubt they too in Sheridan’s view are prejudiced and politically sectarian. No doubt they too in Sheridan’s view are ignorant extremists.

Here is a letter I sent to The Australian for its attack on me in Cut and Paste.  (Old Marxists never die; they write opinion articles for the Australian Financial Review). John My thanks to Cut and Paste for the free advertising about my blog site En Passant and my rent tax analysis in Wednesday’s Australian Financial [...]