That is not by any means Atos’ only public relations trick, associating itself with positive and beautiful things to hide their negative, ugly activities.
In Atos’ logo, one sees a beautiful coral reef fish. Which has nothing to do with Atos, but never mind
BHOPAL: A SILENT PICTURE is a photo installation by Samar S. Jodha. During its showing at the week-long Mumbai’s Kala Godha Arts Festival 2011, it received record 82,172 visitors.
Between 7,000 and 10,000 people perished instantly because of a toxic gas leak from a pesticide factory in the Indian city. Over the next 20 years a further 15,000 people died and the site is still contaminated, affecting over 100,000 people.
Dow Chemical has never addressed the continuing human rights impact of the catastrophe, says Amnesty International.
In order to bring the issue to wider attention an exhibition which runs to the end of the month has just opened outside Amnesty’s headquarters in Shoreditch, east London, close to the Olympics park.
It highlights the Olympics link to Dow Chemical in a multi-sensory art installation on Bhopal by renowned Indian artist Samar Jodha.
Jodha’s temperature-controlled metal container recreates the wintry night of December 2 1984 in Bhopal with 3D images, blowtorched mannequins and a soundscape.
The latter starts silently and there are notably no alarms or sirens throughout.
As on that fateful December night, there’s just the noise of crickets and the hum of the factory.
The sound of gas escaping from the plant can be heard as the viewer moves through the container and, towards the end of the journey, the sound of the first Bhopal victim struggling to breathe.
Born in Jodhpur, India, Jodha has relatives in Bhopal including an uncle who worked at the chemical plant and another who was a doctor.
The installation will help prevent “the constant struggle of memory against forgetting,” he says.
Renowned London street artist Pure Evil has also painted a sign on the Amnesty building, which reads: “Don’t Poison Our Olympics – Tell Lord Coe To Stop Defending Dow.”
That slogan is what this exhibition’s all about and Amnesty is asking the public to contact Lord Coe, the head of the committee organising the London Olympic Games, to ask him to retract Locog’s defence of Dow Chemical and to apologise to Bhopal’s survivors.
Bhopal: A Silent Picture is at The Human Rights Action Centre, 17-25 New Inn Yard, Shoreditch, London EC2, until July 31.
Furious workers at South West Trains will take industrial action throughout the Olympics after miserly bosses refused to pay them a Games bonus payment: here.
The hysteria over Olympic security has been a wonder to behold: here.
USA: WikiLeaks Exposes Department of Homeland Security Spying on Occupy Movement. Allison Kilkenny, In These Times: “[Department of Homeland Security] document appears to be more concerned with protecting the mechanisms of the financial sector than in ensuring the safety of citizens who are exercising their First Amendment rights. They talk about threats to ‘critical infrastructure’ and this fear that these protests are going to … make commerce difficult and people are going to start losing money. There is a kind of bottom line in analysis to what they’re talking about”: here.
Occupy Wall Street Rallies Monitored by Dow Chemical. Lee Fang, Republic Report: “Wikileaks revealed a massive trove of e-mails from the firm Stratfor. The e-mails show that the company, working on behalf of chemical giant Dow Chemical, closely monitored news coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Stratfor relayed the activities of people seeking redress for the 1984 Dow Chemical/Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal, India, which resulted in the death of thousands and lasting environmental damage”: here. And here.
It was hailed as a breakthrough in the democratisation of knowledge. But the online encyclopedia has since been hijacked by forces who decided that certain things were best left unknown.
By Robert Verkaik
Published: 18 August 2007
The secret of Wikipedia’s phenomenal success is that anyone can edit the millions of comments, facts and statistics published on the pages of the world’s most popular online encyclopaedia. But that of course is also its greatest weakness.
The chance to rewrite history in flattering and uncritical terms has proved too much of a temptation for scores of multinational companies, political parties and well-known organisations across the world. …
An IP address that belongs to ExxonMobil, the oil giant, is linked to sweeping changes to an entry on the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989. An allegation that the company “has not yet paid the $5 billion in spill damages it owes to the 32,000 Alaskan fishermen” was replaced with references to the funds the company has paid out.
The [United States] Republican Party and Iraq
The Republican Party edited Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party entry so it made it clear that the US-led invasion was not a “US-led occupation” but a “US-led liberation.”
The CIA and casualties of war
A computer with a CIA IP address was used to change a graphic on casualties of the Iraq war by adding the warning that many of the figures were estimated and not broken down by class. Another entry on former CIA chief William Colby was edited to expand his cv. …
A computer registered to the Dow Chemical Company is recorded as deleting a passage on the Bhopal chemical disaster of 1984, which occurred at a plant operated by Union Carbide, now a wholly owned Dow subsidiary. The incident cost up to 20,000 lives. …
News International and the hypocritical anti-paedophile campaign
Someone at News International [owned by Rupert Murdoch] saw fit to remove criticism of the News of the World‘s anti-paedophile campaign by deleting the suggestion that this amounted to editorial hypocrisy [see also a Dutch nazi child porn case of that]. The original entry reminded readers that the paper continued to “publish semi-nude photographs of page three models as young as 16 and salacious stories about female celebrities younger than that.”
Tom Hodgkinson on the [US conservative] politics of Facebook: here.
