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John Pilger, Nick Cave, Palestine, Gaza, 11-11-1975 Gough Whitlam, US Base Pine Gap & America’s Servitors by John Togs Tognolini
I'd like to make a plug for the Alexei Sayle Podcast that he does with Talal Karkouti. I was listening to the recent episode and they were talking about Nick Cave and his support for Israel. The whole question about art and politics. I was also thinking about it being nearly a year since John Pilger died, and that is why I wrote following to them. On Whitlam’s Sacking on 11-11-1975. I lived through that day as a sixteen year old nearly fifty years ago.
(Click on links to films, articles & websites)
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Like you Alexei I like his songs. I would hate to endure what Nic Cave has done with his loss of two children, but then how many children have been killed with Israel’s Genocide in Gaza? I believe he’s privileged arse.
Back to John Pilger, out of his 61 films that he made. I want to draw attention to the third episode of this 1988 Last Dream documentary trilogy Other People’s Wars, a lot of people should watch it in Britain, the US as well as here in Australia. On the relaunched John Pilger website it says;
’ In 1972, with the election of Gough Whitlam’s Labor government, ‘there was at long last the chance of independence’. wrote one observer. Whitlam was not anti-Washington, but he and his largely left-wing cabinet had no intention of allowing Australia to continue as America’s servitor. During his government’s first 100 days, Whitlam ended all military involvement in Vietnam, along with conscription. Those jailed for opposing the war were freed and pending prosecutions were stopped. Royal patronage was scrapped.
The US administration of President Richard Nixon feared for its secret bases in Australia, notably those at Pine Gap, Nurrungar and the North West Cape, when Whitlam made it clear that they were no longer sacrosanct and the treaty governing Pine Gap, due to expire in December 1975, might not be extended.
Whitlam also demanded to know the names of CIA agents working undercover in Australia, leading the agency’s chief of East Asia, Theodore Shackley, to describe the Prime Minister as a ‘security risk’ and threaten to end intelligence links with Australia.
There followed a ‘coup’ against Australia’s democratically elected government in 1975. This is examined by Pilger and a team that includes distinguished investigative journalists William Pinwill and Brian Toohey and, in the United States, Joseph Trento.
Ostensibly, the Whitlam government was sacked by the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, the British monarch’s representative in Australia, using archaic ‘reserve powers’, on the pretext of the Senate’s refusal to release budget resources. It was, says Pilger, a repeat of the CIA’s successful coup in Chile two years earlier against Salvador Allende. The CIA’s contacts with a senior Australian civil servant who had the ear of Kerr were vital. ‘Dozens of calls took place,’ says Trento, ‘[including] a recommendation to remove Whitlam from office… There was a call from the CIA to MI6 [in London], saying we have a security problem with the Prime Minister of Australia.’
The night before The Last Dream was broadcast, Pilger spoke to Whitlam on the phone. ‘We talked for several hours,’ he said. ‘He backed the film and said that this was the only time, to his knowledge, that there had been a comprehensive television investigation and he was grateful for it.
Whitlam didn’t believe that his overthrow had been directly engineered by foreign intelligence agencies but felt that they had played a significant part. In the end, he blamed the Governor-General, whom he loathed personally.’
Following the broadcast of The Last Dream in Britain and on ABC Television, Whitlam repeated that he believed the CIA and MI6 had played a part. In his 1985 book, The Whitlam Government 1972-75, he revealed that in 1977 President Carter had sent an emissary to Australia who told him that ‘the US would never again interfere in the domestic political processes of Australia’.’
Next year 11-11-25 will mark 50 years since Whitlam was sacked. The satellite intelligence collected at the US Base Pine Gap, near Alice Springs, has been used by Israel since Day One of its Genocide in Gaza, (TARGETING PALESTINE TARGETING PALESTINE Australia’s secret support for the Israeli assault on Gaza,Australia’s secret by Peter Cronau 3 November 2023, Declassified Australia
2023).
There are many reasons why the Australian Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is a disappointment to many people here who voted for him nearly three years ago, but allowing Australian territory to be used like this is the action of an American servitor supporting Israel’s Genocide.
Albo is a long way from Gough Whitlam or Jeremy Corbyn.
John Togs Tognolini Katoomba, Blue Mountains, New South Wales, Australia.
