Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, broad/webcasting since 1999. The show is archived at: www.gorilla-radio.com. The GR blog is at: gorillaradioblog.blogspot.com, and you can find and support the program at GRadio.Substack.com. Financial support is also possible through the Patreon site: https://www.patreon.com/PacificFreePress. He's too the past contributing editor to the web news site, www.pacificfreepress.com, (now defunct) and tweets at @paciffreepress. G-Radio is dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media. Some past guests include: M. Shahid Alam, Joel Bakan, Maude Barlow, Ramzy Baroud, David Barsamian, William Blum, Luciana Bohne, Helen Caldicott, Noam Chomsky, Paul Cienfuegos, Yves Engler, Laura Flanders, Denis Halliday, Julia Butterfly Hill, Sam Husseini, Robert Jensen, Dahr Jamail, Chalmers Johnson, Malalai Joya, Kathy Kelly, Ingmar Lee, Dave Lindorff, Andrew Gavin Marshall, Stefania Maurizi, Greg Palast, Michael Parenti, John Pilger, Kevin Pina, Ted Rall, Paul Craig Roberts, John Ross, David Rovics, Joan Russow, Danny Schechter, Vandana Shiva, Norman Solomon, David Swanson, Andy Worthington, Mickey Z., Howard Zinn and many others.
Welcome to Gorilla Radio, recorded January 14th, 2023.
It’s been three years now since the great global unraveling wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic began. In Canada, part of that meant changes to the laws of the land – changes Canadians are yet to resolve properly in Parliament and the courts, or among a polity divided in unprecedented ways.
Kim Goldberg is a Nanaimo-based poet, journalist, and author. She’s written 8 books of poetry and nonfiction, including her most recent collection ‘DEVOLUTION: poems and fables of eco-pocalypse‘.
Kim’s also covered BC current affairs for Canadian Dimension Magazine for many years, most recently on the Fairy Creek blockade, and now her writing is featured at Substack. @KimPigSquash can too be found again, after some rude interruption, on Twitter.
Welcome to Gorilla Radio, recorded November 5th, 2022.
Gorilla Radio is heard around the World, and as such I’d like to think it’s universal. But whether acknowledged or not, everyone is sourced in space and in time; rooted physically, intellectually, and spiritually. I am Canadian; born in that place in the middle of the last century. My educational indoctrination taught me many things about my home country, its history, place in the World, and guiding principles. Most of these I discovered later to be false.
After completing an advanced degree in Canada’s post-secondary education system, Pitasanna Shanmugathas felt the cognitive dissonance too. His reaction was to set out across our famously vast country on an epic three year journey of discovery – the result of which is his six part documentary film series, ‘Truth to the Powerless: An Investigation into Canada’s Foreign Policy‘.
Pitasanna Shanmugathas in the first half.
And; it’s not just Canada’s federal political infrastructure claiming allegiance first and last to democratic values and fair play. Here in British Columbia, the provincial NDP party recently held a leadership contest bearing less resemblance to those principles than to what passes as “democracy” in Banana Republic client states of the Empire.
Ingmar Lee is a long-time BC-based environment defender who describes himself as a “rotten, belligerent, iconoclastic, ungrateful, unrepentant, and unpleasant treehugger.”
Besides these sterling qualities, Lee has spent a life-time investigating truth, questioning accepted wisdom, and making enemies of “greedhead political fraudsters, money-grubbing business leaders, spinmeisters and journalistic hacks” of the state/corporate media and yellow press. He has in turn been called by those same an “environmental zealot”, “eco-terrorist”, and one committing the deeds of “a raving nutcase”. Just the sort for GR!
Ingmar Lee and the NDP’s uninvited in the second half.
But first, Pitasanna Shanmugathas and documenting a Canadian political odyssey.
