All Governments Lie.
Title of a movie, ostensibly about the life, times and legacy of pioneering American independent investigative journalist I.F. Stone, a man who sat outside the mainstream and dug through the documents governments put out to reveal the truth of their lies - Vietnam, McCarthy, Nixon.
He ran a subscription based weekly paper, banged out with two fingers on a typewriter, survived and thrived. It's a model now being taken up with varying degrees of success by the new breed of independent journalists who have pulled back the ugly blackness surrounding our Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Palestine, Yemen, our dirty and corrupt politicians parties and the shameless corporations who profit from it all.
I watched these ventures, support them when I can, but what I see is the slow and deadly hand of our government and their corporate partners in criminal conspiracy use the courts to assault and batter, the security and police service to harass, disrupt and dissipate, and worse. An Australian citizen has been incarcerated for simply revealing the truth on matters that should be of critical and central concern to US ALL, for giving whistleblowers a means to publish the information on all the lies, deception and sheer bloody never ending carnage.
These matters seem remote, it feels like we're powerless, perhaps we are. Even here, Broome, a sunny tropical paradise of clean living and bright futures, there are lies, ones so many of us choose to ignore because the effect, the cost, is not ours to bear.
I try in my clumsy and amateur way to reveal some of the shonky work behind the glittering facade and wonder is it possible to move to more secure and persistent footings given the lack of any real critical investigative reporting in most of our mainstream press?
How does that work in a town of this size?
I hope that what we're developing with the Pollee Co-operative and Broome Voice will deliver a model that offers hope in answering this question.
There's information about it all but it would seem everyone is so damn busy these days. Let me know if you're interested, if you too want to ask the hard questions, do some work and find the answers to all the lies our governments utter?
https://allgovernmentslie.com/
