Pilger addresses 200 in Katoomba

Journalist and documentary filmmaker spoke at a public forum on March 7. Attended by 200 people, the forum was hosted by Pilger's high-school friend, actor Jack Thompson, at his pub in the Blue Mountains town of Katoomba

Pilger described the election of the Rudd Labor government as both an opportunity and a difficulty. The danger, Pilger said, is that while there has never been such widespread awareness that things are rotten in the world, people will not go onto the streets in large numbers and resist neoliberalism and warmongering led by an ALP government, like they resisted, and eventually removed, the Howard Coalition government.

Pilger spoke passionately on a wide variety of topics, ranging from how to deal with the mainstream media (assume everything they present as facts are lies) to why Washington and its right-wing Latin American allies desperately want to get rid of Venezuelan socialist President Hugo Chavez. The meeting ended with a call from Thompson for people to remember the 1960s, especially the movement that stopped the war on Vietnam, and "go back onto the streets".

From GLW issue 743