As War Criminals meet in Sydney, protest and dissent is stifled

[Middle finga]

HALL GREENLAND reports that the big end of town in Sydney is like a ghost town for the APEC meeting. Protest and dissent is being stifled so war criminals can chat safely behind the Great Wall of Sydney.


It's as if the militarised shutdown of the northern Central Business District by federal and state governments – with its fences and barricades and ubiquitious squads of police reminiscent of East Germany in the bad old days - is supposed to banish the ghosts of hundreds of thousands of killed, maimed and jailed Iraqis, Chechens, Tibetans, Papuans and Chinese and Indian workers.

Certainly the great leaders responsible for these deaths, and now assembling in Sydney, are not to be reminded of the victims of their misrule and tyrannies. The local millionaire businessman who booked billboards along the leaders' route from the airport to the CBD for a series of human rights advertisements has had them rejected – and the leading television network has also refused his ads.

As for protesters, who might remind the leaders of their crimes and shortcomings, they are to be kept out of sight and earshot – banished to at least 12 blocks from where the presidents, prime ministers and their entourages are meeting.

As David Marr suggested in his column in the Sydney Morning Herald on Tuesday, protests are now as much about free speech and civil liberties as a show of moral repugnance. On that last point, somebody has to say it: there has rarely been such a cabal of war criminals assembled in any one place anywhere on the planet as in Sydney this week.

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http://www.homepagedaily.com/Pages/article-the-great-wall-of-sydney.aspx

When peaceful revolution becomes impossible, violent revolution becomes inevitable. -- John F. Kennedy

MF