THE RECORD
May 24, 2000

Fiat Lux

by Ed Deak

My wife and I arrived in Montreal on the Greek Line ship Neptunia on April 28, 1955, after a ten day trip from Southampton, via Cherbourg and Cobh in Ireland. For years we had been planning our great adventure trip across Canada by motorcycle, before the Trans-Canada Highway was completed. The bike in question was a 1951 Douglas MkV, 350cc flat twin. We still have it, albeit it hasn't ran since we arrived in Vancouver four weeks after first arriving in Montreal. That trip was one of the greatest experiences of our lives, still vividly in our minds.

The first night we spent in a tourist accommodation in the outskirts of Montreal, then we went back into the city to look around for a couple of days. When we checked in at the Bell Motor Hotel on St. Catherine's the TV was on in the lobby and having never seen North American TV before, we stopped to watch it for a few minutes. The show was some situation comedy featuring the former child actor Jackie Cooper as a naval officer.

We hardly stopped when the show was cut and a series of commercials came on. I looked at my watch and it showed about seven minutes after the hour. We never saw, or heard TV or radio commercials before. That was the time when there was a big push by business to get private stations into Britain with the promise that commercials would only be shown at the hour and half hour and the programs would never be interfered with.

I asked the desk clerk why the commercials were shown so soon within the program and he laughed: "Just stick around for a while, there'll be another bunch of them in five minutes!"

And so they were. We were shocked by the sheer barbarism of the system. We talked about this after we went up to our room and decided there and then that we shall never buy anything on account of, or persuaded by TV and radio commercials. Now, 45 years later we can say that we never have. Of course, we can not avoid buying products advertised on TV, but when we buy them it is never because we saw them there. We still think that TV and radio commercials are the most disgusting forms of intrusion into privacy and brainwash, and that they should never be permitted.

We only get two TV channels in the area where we now live, CBC-TV and BCTV. Our daily TV time is 50 minutes of BCTV's 6 o'clock news, out of which at least 45 minutes are total waste of our time. The mute button is the shiniest on our remote control. There are commercials we must have seen dozens of times, without ever hearing a word they say. Most of the rest of the news is taken up by the minute examination of petty crimes and accidents, plus the inevitable and mandatory daily propaganda against the BC government and the selling of Gordon Campbell.

With the media under the iron control of a handful of billionaires most of our papers and electronic services have become pure and simple fascist propaganda machines against democracy and for the takeover of all levels of government by corporate dictatorships.

On account of this total blackout of real news very few people know what is actually going on in the world. Do you know, to put it simply, that the largest revolution the world has ever seen is brewing all over. The poverty caused by exploitation with the free movement of capital is beginning to backfire in a very big way with a groundswell of yet leaderless global outrage growing by the minute.

Although very few Canadians have ever heard about them, there were major upheavals in Ecuador, Costa Rica and Bolivia within the last 2-3 months. The US government just gave $1.7 billion in military aid to Colombia to keep their people down under the guise of fighting drug trafficking. The infamous School of the Americas located in Georgia is training thousands of South American troops in the art of torture and murder to be used against the enemies of tinhorn dictators to save American investments in these impoverished satellite countries.

Within the last couple of weeks there were general strikes in India, involving 200 million workers, about six times the population of Canada, also in Norway and South Africa. Has anybody heard of these events? Some of the papers may have mentioned something about "terrorists and anarchists" causing trouble for sovereign governments working on creation of wealth and prosperity, but this is the same stuff that we have already heard from Maggie Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney many years ago.

I am now in the third week of a forum organized by the World Bank on globalization, with about 4500 people involved from all corners of the world. The WB must have hoped for some support of their policies, but what they got is an unbroken string of condemnation, especially from Africa, Asia and even from Canada and the USA.

The only defence they are receiving is from their own employees and economists. Their feeble excuses are immediately countered by PhDs, professors and people from all walks of life who can see the terrible damage being done everywhere by these globalizing maniacs....or shall we call them by their right name of crooks?

How much more condemnation would the World Bank, the WTO and other tools of the corporate war against democracy receive if the the media were to give us more of the truth about what is happening in the world around us and less mindless advertising?

Copyright (c) 2000, West's International