Naomi Klein spoke at a meeting organized by the arts community in Toronto last week. The meeting was quite successful, bringing forth some ideas an initiatives to unseat conservatives.
Visit www.departmentofculture.ca for more information.
Here's the transcript of what Klein had to say in a packed room on Queen Street.
Naomi Klein: A turn out like this means something, you know what, when your first meeting is packed up and its sold out to put it in theatre terms it means you have a hit on your hands. To put it in activist terms it means you are a movement moment, it means if you organize it they will come. It means you have good timing. That’s the moment we’re in right now. [applause]
And I want to thank the Department of Culture for existing and for opening the doors and letting all of us flood in. I also really wanted to be here tonight because my husband Avi Lewis was used as a expedient excuse to kill a very important program called PromArts which is what we’ve been hearing about tonight which sends writers and documentary film makers and feature film makers around the world to promote their work. And Avi’s name was invoked, he was described as a ‘general radical’ [alughter and applause]. Avi couldn’t be here tonight because he is covering the Republican National Convention [laughter] I think right now he’s listening to a speech by a woman who doesn’t believe in a woman’s right to chose even in the case of rape and believes that gas prices could lowered by next weekend if we drilled in Arctic National wildlife preserve. In other words, it’s the spiritual homeland of Stephen Harper. [applause] He sends his regrets, he says that he his sorry that he helped to kill a wonderful government program, [laughter] and he also said that he’d like to apologize to general radicals everywhere [laughter] because it’s really not fair to you that he be put in your league.
As you know, there was something really amazing about the way Avi’s name was used, about the way Gwynne Dyer’s name was used, about the way many artists names were used. It was overtly political. You know, what they said is, ‘we do not like your politics, so we’re cutting this program’. They didn’t even say ‘we don’t like the film you made about occupying factories in Argentina’ which is what he promoting, you know, fair enough, it was a communist film but … [laughter] … they didn’t even go that far it was just, you know, his politics. And then they made this really dishonest association with Al Jazeera, right ’scary Arab network’ where Avi is working now, even though the grant was issued in 2004 and Avi’s only been at Al Jazeera for six months. So this is the kind of dirty tactics that are being used, they really won’t stop at anything. Our argument is not with them, it is with the Canadian public. We need to expose these tactics and we need to talk directly to the people and make our case. [applause]
I just want to reiterate something that Susan Swann said, about this not being her country, this not being her Canada. I don’t think we want to engage in any unnecessary idealization of our perfect nation that never existed, because we know that that isn’t true. But there is something very real going on in this country, something very real that is at stake here, and if I could just talk a little bit personally; my family came to Canada in 1967 because my father didn’t want to fight in the Vietnam war. They came here as war resisters, they came here as draft dodgers, but they stayed because my mother liked the National Film Board and my father didn’t want to work for the American health care system. And this was explained to me as a kid, that we were staying in Canada, we left America because of the war but we were staying because here mommy could make films about feminism and the peace movement with Studio D at the National Film Board and in Canada you don’t have to… you don’t have to be rich to get sick, to get decent health care. Now all of this is under siege. The principle of universal health care, funding for the arts, and war resisters are being sent home by this government while embracing the tedious war on terror rhetoric in Afghanistan [applause] This isn’t the country that my family chose to come to, that my family came to by choice, and it’s starting to look a lot more that country on display in St. Paul during the Republican National Convention. This administration, the Harper government, they don’t actually want an economy that’s built on culture and innovation. what they want is a culture and economy that is built on taking the Alberta tar sands, boiling them, and turning it into a substance that will further boil our planet, that is their vision, it is that ugly. So when we think about the coalition that we want to build, we also have to be making powerful collations with environmental groups who are also determined to find ways to beat the Tories in this election. [applause]
To me what’s really exciting, is, when you build a coalition, it isn’t just about this group here, or that group there coming together with their agenda, it’s about what everyone brings to the table and I think it’s really exciting to the labour movement, to the environmental movement to think about what the arts community can bring to the table, to think about your skills, in film, in theatre, in design, in a way that can make politics truly transformative, truly exciting, because you guys know how to put on a hit. So let’s do it. [applause]
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment