The Guardian 24 May, 2006
TV programs worth watching
Sun 28 May — Sat 3 June
Hart Cohen’s documentary Cantata Journey (ABC 4.00pm Sunday) tracks the story of the unique interaction of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and the Hermannsburg women of the Ntaria Ladies Choir from Central Australia.
They are involved in bringing to life the Horseshoe Bend Cantata — from conception to realisation, from rehearsals at their home in Central Australia to their triumph on stage at the Sydney Opera House.
The film contrasts the physical qualities of Central Australian landscapes with Sydney’s unique urban harbour and beaches and reveals this cantata’s significance to Australian, as well as specifically Aboriginal, heritage and culture.
In this week’s episode of Peking To Paris (ABC 7.30pm Sundays), the bumbling "adventurers" reach the halfway point in their expedition. So far, for me, the highlight has been when the cavalcade of vintage cars rolled into a small Russian town in eastern Siberia and the crews found a small, abandoned church to express regrets about.
Through a window, they could see icons and decoration and they waxed lyrical about what a waste it was and how it should be restored (the Communists might be gone but they were obviously still in "Godless Russia").
Startlingly, one of the expedition speaks up to remind the others that the construction and upkeep of that church would have consumed an enormous slice of the "Gross Domestic Product" of the entire village. Moreover, the villagers would have had no say in the matter: the Church would have decided to build a church there and the local peasants would have had to build it and pay for its upkeep.
His pointing out of the facts of Russian history leaves the others very quiet.
However, things improve for the anti-Soviet members of the expedition as the ABC’s publicity notes so smugly put it, they arrive in Yekaterinburg "on the day Russians mark the end of Communism".
Putin may make the odd pro-Soviet statement, but his regime maintains a trenuous stream of anti-Soviet propaganda: here the overthrow of socialism is the occasion for an official holiday and "celebration", in an effort to convince people that in some unspecified way they are now "better off".
Everyone knows by now that nicotine is an addictive drug that causes severe, frequently fatal, health problems. For a few years after the revelations of the link between tobacco and lung cancer (not to mention the other diseases), the consumption of tobacco fell dramatically.
Smoking became uncommon. Today, however, young people in particular seem to be smoking more than ever.
The Tobacco Conspiracy (SBS 8.30pm Tuesday) in the Cutting Edge slot, examines how the tobacco industry has maintained its power and markets in the face of the growing knowledge about its devastating impact on public health. The program is the result of three years of investigations in North America, Europe and Africa by filmmaker Nadia Collot.
Knowing that their product was deadly and anti-social, the tobacco giants could have responded by trying to make tobacco non-addictive and less dangerous but no doubt less profitable.
But instead of improving tobacco, they chose to instead polish up its image. In 1953 a group of senior executives from the tobacco industry met in New York with PR company, Hill and Knowlton. The decision taken at the meeting, which is recreated in the program, was to take drastic, and expensive, action to "win back consumers".
The leading tobacco companies worked together to recruit scientists and academics, who then published deceitful articles about the "harmlessness" of tobacco and second-hand smoke. Dr William Farone, Director of Research for Philip Morris (1976-84), says that a supposedly independent academic researcher who produced data on passive smoking signed off on documents actually written by the tobacco industry.
Dr Farone also says that he spent years researching ways to try to make cigarettes safer to smoke but none of his ideas were ever pursued by the company. The program says that in 1983 Philip Morris successfully applied pressure to prevent Nicorette products being introduced for another ten years.
And how do they get people to smoke in the first place? Sylvester Stallone was paid US$500,000 by Brown and Williamson to smoke cigarettes in five feature films. Philip Morris paid to put Marlboros in Superman II. This form of marketing is especially directed at young smokers.
Lawyer Francis Caballero, who for more than a decade has been fighting the tobacco industry in French courts, says that the industry has admitted that smokers die younger but it also says that the extra cost to the French health plan is balanced out by reduced pension payments because smokers do not live as long!
In Africa, where the industry is hoping for a 16 percent increase in smokers, activist Inoussa Saouna, comments: "There is no industry behind AIDS pushing people to contract AIDS, there is no ad campaign promoting AIDS so awareness campaigns are useful with AIDS.
"But with tobacco dramatic action is called for: we must demonise the tobacco industry which is not a responsible organisation. It is a criminal consortium."
The regime of sanctions and economic boycott imposed by imperialism on Zimbabwe for leading African opposition to the manoeuvres of imperialist agencies like the World Bank have had a devastating impact on this third world country.
But while Zimbabwe struggles to survive the poverty imperialism has forced on it, imperialism’s propagandists are busy blaming Zimbabwe for that same poverty. One of those propaganda outlets is the US Public Broadcasting Service, which I have had cause to mention before.
A PBS program Border Jumpers (SBS 8.30pm Thursday) purports to show how thousands of suffering Zimbabwean "refugees" are illegally crossing the border into neighbouring Botswana in search of work.
The blurb for the program tells us that Botswana "has established itself as the ‘gem of Africa’, with the fastest growing economy in the world, based on diamond mining, cattle farming and tourism". In contrast Mugabe’s "tyrannical rule" in Zimbabwe has brought that country to "economic collapse".
Further on, however, the program blurb lets the cat out of the bag: "with 23 percent unemployment and over a third of its 1.7 million people infected with HIV, Botswana cannot support the influx of refugees".
The "gem of Africa" has 23 percent unemployment? And a 33 percent HIV infection rate?
Imperialism, not Robert Mugabe, is responsible for the problems confronting southern Africa.