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Date Posted: 11:08:43 10/31/02 Thu
Author: bobgeldof.info
Subject: Bob Geldof Speech - The Aegis Institute

You will see in the Bob Geldof Collectibles section of www.bobgeldof.info that there is a limited edition of 25 posters framed and signed by Bob, with all profits going to the Aegis Institute. Please see below Bob's speech about the Institute.

The day is dark, which is probably appropriate. The world is pretty dark right now. We face a time of utter moral confusion, I think. It isn't perhaps the right place to say it, but Israel squanders its moral capital daily. We may be about to do the same thing.

Man is a very odd and baleful creature. Almost like we're born with twin seeds of good and evil, and were it not for our values, which come from our society, down through our families, one side may outgrow the other. Luckily for us, it came down on the flower of good.

For a lot of the people here, I feel daunted always in your presence, having lived through an alternative universe to the rest of us. And I'm always glad when I see my friend Roman, because he can put these events into normal conversation and make then sound like the everyday, what happened to him and his family. And of course, all those years ago, that in fact was the everyday. And the train ride took us an hour, an hour and a half out of Kings Cross. And I was telling my pathetic, average travel tales with Luke Holland, who's a film maker here with us. And Roman and his wife Susie laughingly were telling us theirs. And they were of a completely different order, of a completely different moral universe to anything we could possibly conceive.

And the Smith family have just shown us the everyday occurrence that we are aware of, and all the other everyday occurrences that we're made aware of, daily, on television. And Marcus talked eloquently, and indeed did everyone, about between these two seeds of good and evil, which I think exist in us, and we know they do because you can feel that little worm, that little niggle inside you, when the fear of the stranger approaches from within. That little niggle of racism or suspicion, or a belief that something is ugly because you don't understand it.

Luckily we're exalted by our endeavours and art and the poetry that people read at events like this. And they read poetry, because the language that we try and make speeches in is inadequate for the unsayable. The things that Susie and Roman and so many of you have lived through are literally unsayable. You tell your stories but what was lived through is not only unspeakable but more profoundly unsayable, and so you reach for the higher and heightened language of poetry. Or anything; film. Because we can't comprehend it, and that's what allows us to do it again. And it is the normal, it's the average person that can do this. Again, in an imaginary other universe, maybe we'd have done it. That's the terrible truth that lies at the heart of each of us; that imponderable, 'were I not Jewish, in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Germany, would I have gone down on the other side?'

Would I have been a Raoul Wallenberg or indeed a Per Anger, who wasn't mentioned today but who died last week, who was his partner in this great endeavour; a superbly brave man who Marcus just briefly told me he knew, and quickly told me about him. And he's forgotten already, even in his lifetime, almost. So it wasn't a unique Wallenberg effort, though he was the leading man. There was this sort of Laurel and Hardy of humanity in this almost joke, that was perpetrated on us all and in particular on the Jewish people, this madness.

So we reach for other forms of communication, and aside from the poetry, what everyone talked about today was the indifference. Indifference grows from the commonplace. And the great fear, and what I hope that this centre can articulate not just to young people but us and everyone else, that the language of the Holocaust, the piety from the Holocaust, the images of the Holocaust, never ever become worn down with overuse and that we too become indifferent to it.

Because the daily banalities of the news can't counter the horror that we should be alert to. And in my time, of course, I've experienced some of them. The different sorts of ethnocides or genocides that occur, not just the mad, systematic, state apparatus of the Holocaust, but the other ones, whether it's in Rwanda, or whether it's what Luke was telling me on the train about where he comes from in South America, the wilful genocide of the peoples of the Amazon in the great name of the god Development.

Or was it, reaching back into my own country's past, the indifference that led to the great famine in Ireland, where a minimum of a million people died, in plain view of their English overlords, and another million and a half were sent on the ships, akin to the slave ships, to the United States. It was indifference, it wasn't famine.

Or in my time, and in my experience, and now, going back to Africa, and seeing what happened then, luckily the indifference was put on hold for that particular crisis. But right now, can you not say that it's a type of genocide, the AIDS pandemic? We see it, everyday; we are told the figures; Zambia, 25% of the society have AIDS, so you see societal collapse. Teachers cannot be replaced. You cannot absorb enough into the teacher training schools so they die, so society implodes. Africa the hidden figures are 20%, South Africa for AIDS, yet we have the means, we have the drugs. The drugs companies are being taken to court for making generic cures for these people who cannot, obviously, afford our fees.

It goes on. We know about it. We really know about it, I'm telling you now; millions upon millions of children now will be dying in ten years. 10% of all children in the affected countries are dying now. And that growth is exponential. Is that not genocide? They live in a far away country of which we know little; and that reminds me. And so we go on, and we get platitudinous, and in the platitudes is our excuse to get out. It's the articulation of our indifference.

And I remember being in northern Mali, with the governor of the province there, and he was showing me around this blasted and devastated landscape, and the people were kind of getting on with it, the worst had passed. And he wandered round and he did his African official thing, and they are a hierarchical people and he was proud of his position. And gradually as he got to know me and the fact I am not very hierarchical or have much to do with that stuff he sort of loosened up, and finally at about three in the afternoon, we had been together a day and a night, we sat on the only wood, actually, it just strikes me now, the only wood anywhere that I had seen in the day and a half. And he sat down and he just put his head in his hands, both hands, and he just said, "Three hundred and fifty" – mark you – "three hundred and fifty languages have been wiped out in the last year." Three hundred and fifty languages that we have no knowledge of, that we will never know again; that are not recorded, written, nothing, and all that culture, all that humanity, you know, all those lives, all that poetry, all that …

And that's why this place is so profound. We can go on about killing, we know we do this stuff, all of us, we know we do it, and we know we are going to keep doing it, but that's why it's so important, because unless we're confronted in the most brutal way, in the most shameless language, just confronting it – just saying what it is – unless we do that, then we become northern Mali, and all those lights of human genius just wink out.

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[> Re: Bob Geldof Speech - The Aegis Institute -- saskia, 14:50:19 11/02/02 Sat

that isan inspiritional speech :)


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