The Juice Media strike a blow again defending Australian's democratic rights that are under attack from both the ALP & LNP across the nation as they defend the Fossil Fuel Mafia, I shouldn't compare big oil and gas companies to the Mafia as destroy life on our planet. The Mafia has some ethics where as Big Oil & Gas and the politicians who support them don't. To see why the South Australian government is upset about Juice Media's latest add click on the blue. By the way I support Juice Media with my patron account.
John/Togs Tognolini
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For anyone that believes the the US is benevolent Superpower how come Henry Kissenger is not on trial for crimes against Humanity. Mehdi Hasan puts forward that question in detail, a powerful little seven & half minutes that is indeed worth checking out so click on the blue. John/Togs Tognolini
On May Day, thousands of workers from in and around the
industrial trading city of Port Kembla in New South Wales (NSW) rallied against
the AUKUS deal. AUKUS will see Australia procure nuclear-powered submarines
from the United States, and is designed to counter the rise of China as a
global power. To date, this was the biggest demonstration against the pact held
anywhere in the world.
AUKUS potentially involves Port Kembla hosting a US nuclear
submarine base. This would come at the expense of the region’s developing green
energy infrastructure. The protesting workers argued that the current drive to
war will endanger the city and imperil the many thousands of union jobs that
would be guaranteed by a green transformation.
International media outlets in AUKUS partner countries and
China have begun to take notice. The workers of Port Kembla will now prove
decisive in shaping not only their own futures, but Australia’s role in the
biggest conflict of the era.
Jacobin spoke with Arthur Rorris, secretary of the South Coast
Labour Council, to find out how this small city came to take the lead in the
fight for jobs and peace.
________________________________________
CHRIS DITE
Why are the workers of Port Kembla and the wider region
opposed to AUKUS?
ARTHUR RORRIS
The vast majority of workers and the community in the region
are opposed to this. We saw evidence of that on the weekend. Some context here
is important. Port Kembla is a trading port in a coal mining region. About
fourteen years ago it became very clear that decarbonization was not an if but
a when. We were carbon central: our steelworks alone accounted for 7 percent of
all greenhouse emissions for the state of NSW.
As union leaders we decided that “saving the planet is going
to take a lot of work, and we want that work to be done in Port Kembla.” We
built a successful coalition of workers and unionists who agreed on one key
thing: this revolution is happening. The only choice we had to make was whether
we got these new green jobs or let them go offshore like almost everything
else.
According to NSW government analysis, there are now
expressions of interest for more than $43 billion in wind, solar, and hydrogen,
centered around our port. We’re looking at eight thousand jobs in this region
alone in the next decade through renewable energy projects — not including the
offshore wind farms! For that to happen we have to now start building our green
hydrogen capacity. This requires renewable power generation: a combination of
offshore wind and terrestrial-based solar industries. Our approach to this is
very pragmatic; it’s a planned and costed way forward.
The proposed nuclear submarine base screws our region’s entire
renewable agenda and industrial transformation. This is at the heart of a lot
of the angst here. We can’t do both. It’s not a big trading port. Any space we
do have left is earmarked for our renewable sector. And even if there was room
in the port, the exclusion zones around any future base will rule out the wind
farms we need to drive power into the industrial area.
CHRIS DITE
So the opposition is mostly centered around green jobs?
ARTHUR RORRIS
The nuclear issue is also causing a storm here. Port Kembla
was declared a nuclear-free port and city more than forty years ago; this was
reaffirmed by city hall last year. We worked very hard to educate our community
and are still educating them about the nuclear issue. We put up posters
explaining how each one of these proposed submarines will have enough enriched
uranium to account for three Hiroshimas. We rolled out the maps so people could
work out how their homes, schools, and hospitals could be affected by a nuclear
accident.
They’ll call us NIMBYs. But no one’s going to believe we’re
prissy about things. We’ve got steelworks and every carcinogen known to humanity
in our backyard. This is different. It’s an attempt to conscript our entire
community into a war machine, then put a nuclear target on our backs for our
troubles. That will not happen here under our watch.
CHRIS DITE
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on the weekend that AUKUS
is more about jobs than national security. What’s your response to this?
ARTHUR RORRIS
What jobs? The government says that AUKUS — which is set to
cost close to half a trillion dollars — will only create twenty thousand jobs
over thirty years. These claims haven’t been backed up. They’re not proposing
to actually make the ships here in Port Kembla. They’re not even really
proposing to service them. It’s not as if we’ll have apprentices from the steel
mill allowed to work on these ships. No one believes we’ll be allowed anywhere
near them.
Like the Rust Belt in America, we’ve been losing thousands of
jobs for years. The steelworks used to employ twenty-three thousand people
directly. It now employs three thousand directly, and we’ve got another ten
thousand as contractors. Only renewables will get those jobs back and everyone
knows it.
It’s the first time in my memory where we are not wedged in
the labor movement between jobs or the environment. We’ve actually got jobs and
the environment on one side.
Politically this is quite an amazing moment. It’s the first
time in my memory where we are not wedged in the labor movement between jobs or
the environment. We’ve actually got jobs and the environment on one side. On
the other side are the imperialists, United States, and Australian navy. This
is why both governments might be a bit nervous about this agenda now —
particularly when it comes to Port Kembla. There’s no way you’re going to
convince this community that both renewables and the nuclear base are possible.
CHRIS DITE
You’ve criticized military officials for making these huge
decisions on behalf of the rest of us. You’ve also been critical of “spooks”
and “arms dealers” for trying to lecture us into accepting them. How did ordinary
workers get so shut out of this debate?
ARTHUR RORRIS
Many Australians are starting to understand that the decision
of whether or not to go to war has been taken away from the Australian
government and, by virtue of that, the Australian people. There’s clearly been
a coup in defense policy. We’ve seen how this works in Darwin. Very quickly and
methodically they extended US troop rotations. Slowly but surely they shifted
the focus of our defense from defending Australia to defending US economic
interest in the South China Sea.
It’s critical for people to understand how these crazy
decisions are made. It starts with military figures creating consultancies that
call themselves independent, but have an agenda. Former prime minister John
Howard used taxpayer funds to establish the Australian Strategic Policy
institute (ASPI), one of the leading so-called independent strategic think
tanks for the military. It’s funded in part by arms dealers, the Department of
Defense, and others. This collusion isn’t even hidden. It’s justified on the
basis that it is somehow in the national interest to have defense policy
manufactured by people who have the most to gain from conflict.
These are the people that drove much of the AUKUS agenda at
the start, as well as Scott Morrison in his dying political days. AUKUS was
really his parting gift. Morrison and these spooks took the opposition leader —
the current prime minister — into a security briefing that was big, scary, and
allegedly clear enough to commit them all to AUKUS within a day. Twenty-four
hours to hand over $368 billion and determine that China is our enemy — even
though there’s no evidence that they’re about to attack Australia.
The US navy has always wanted an east coast base in Australia
and under this plan they’re going to get one. Our laws say that you can’t have
foreign bases in Australia, so they’ll call it a joint military installation.
But the only thing Australian in this base will be the Australian flag. And
ironically it’ll probably be made in China.
One of the things our movement should do is bring the
beneficiaries of war into the daylight. We should shed light on who they are,
who pays them, and where they come from. Here in this region we’re very
determined to tell our community on which side these people’s bread is
buttered.
CHRIS DITE
The Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) has been a consistent
voice against AUKUS and the drive to war. Conservatives regularly argue that
the unionization of the ports is a threat to national security. Could you
explain the MUA’s long-standing argument that it’s actually privatization and
profit-seeking that threatens livelihoods?
ARTHUR RORRIS
Obviously, the conservatives will take any opportunity they
can to have a bit of a swipe. This line that unions are somehow a threat to
national security is disgraceful. Proportionally more unionized seafarers died
than navy sailors in World War II in Australia. That was all part of the war
effort against fascism.
The conservatives have been ideologically driven to keep
unionized Australian labor out of the coastal trade. They actually passed laws
to stop Australians getting jobs in Australian coastal waters. They now have
weaker security requirements for much of the exploited international labor
working on “flag of convenience” ships than they do for Australian seafarers
and maritime workers. So there’s an argument that the conservatives are the
ones compromising national security.
Having unionized local seafarers on domestic coastal routes —
cabotage as they call it — is an idea that our friends in the United States
know all too well ever since the Jones Act. Virtually every other country
around the world operates with the idea that your coastal waters are best
served by your nationals. Domestic routes are highly unionized almost
everywhere. Australia is a weird exception. That’s been driven politically,
mostly by conservative governments.
But some of the military chiefs recognize aspects of all this,
and some conservatives sort of have a foot in both camps. The current Labor
government has committed to an Australian strategic cargo fleet. The maritime
unions have been asking for this for a very long time. We know from numerous
reports about the current state of exploitation of foreign labor around the
coastal trades. It is to the benefit of everyone to have a domestic fleet, and
strong, unionized labor working those routes.
CHRIS DITE
There’s been a lot of opposition to the MUA’s proposal to
create a modest Australian shipping fleet. But Australia’s second-richest
person, Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, has spent the last ten years building his own
small independent armada. Clearly he sees a business case for owning your own
cargo ships in a volatile time. Is this a case of one rule for the bosses and
another for the workers?
ARTHUR RORRIS
The business cases are different. At the end of the day,
whether it’s at sea or on land, private corporations legally have to put their
shareholders in front of all other interests — including the national interest.
The steelmaker here in Port Kembla is a multinational company with interests in
the United States, Vietnam, and China. It’s threatened to shut down the
Australian industry on more than one occasion.
Their business is making money, not making steel. Whether they
make it here or elsewhere is not their primary concern. If making money for
their shareholders means shutting up shop in Port Kembla, then that’s what
they’ll do. That’s the reason we can’t let the market determine strategic
industrial development and retention — particularly when it comes to steel. I,
for one, think, and many others here would agree, that if corporations hold
communities to ransom, then the government has an obligation to nationalize
them.
At the end of the day, whether it’s at sea or on land, private
corporations legally have to put their shareholders in front of all other
interests — including the national interest.
CHRIS DITE
Workers in the region you represent now find themselves in the
leadership of something huge. They’re at the center of a coming storm and the
world is paying attention. What’s next for the movement?
ARTHUR RORRIS
My brief from the labor council is Port Kembla. And as a
leader of the council, part of my job is to analyze how all these things relate
to one another. The government says a decision hasn’t been made and won’t be
made for ten years. Well, we were born at night but not last night. The notion
that this government can promise us ten years — when they face federal
elections every three years — is just not credible. The conservatives have
already told us that if they get in power, the base is going to be here faster
than you can say San Diego. So no one buys this idea that it’s been kicked down
the road.
The base in Port Kembla has to be ruled out. That is our chief
focus. But I can well understand that other ports around the country might feel
the same way as us. Our next step is to escalate this push by creating a
fraternal alliance with other central labor councils in ports around the
country. We started that process on the weekend at our rally. We had
representatives from other ports, from Sydney, the mountains, and elsewhere. We
want to accelerate this process.
There should be a national conversation about this. It should
be on the national agenda of the union movement. Our thinking is that we start
with our fraternal relationships with other regions. Knowledge is very
important, history is very important, analysis is very important. All this can
only be done through rallies, conferences, seminars, and building alliances.
Most importantly, this all has to be driven by the rank and file.
Opinion polls now tell us that despite the Sinophobic campaign
of recent years, only one in five Australians sees China as an imminent threat.
That’s a spectacular failure from the war hawks. Whether these four out of five
people will see the situation as alarming enough to mobilize is the challenge
for our movement.
CHRIS DITE
Do past struggles at the port inform your approach at all?
ARTHUR RORRIS
Port Kembla has been a very militant port, an internationalist
port, very strong on issues of social conscience. It was the site of one of the
world’s first social movement strikes, the Dalfram dispute in 1938. The
wharfies refused to load pig iron bound for Japan. They knew it was going to be
used as bullets and bombs against the Chinese in the first instance and then
against us. Everyone could see war was coming.
All of Wollongong supported the strikers. The bosses tried to
get the steelworkers to scab on the wharfies but they refused. So the bosses
shut down the entire steelworks as payback. We had market gardeners from Sydney
— the Chinese community in particular, but also others — who fed Wollongong
during that entire dispute. It ended up with Attorney General Robert Menzies
from the then-government coming down to Wollongong to “sort out the
communists.” He left with rotten tomato stains on his back and a nickname that
lasted his entire lifetime — Pig Iron Bob.
I’m not saying the community hasn’t changed at all since then, or that history compels us or determines our policy. But it certainly gives us confidence, strength, and insight into how these things can be won. It also helps to put a bit of fear into our opponents. We have been rolling it out lately for everyone who will listen. People like what they hear. A journalist asked us, “What happens if the government keeps going?” We said they’ll have to fight Port Kembla before they even get to China. And we mean it. The mood is that strong down here — we are not going to let this happen.
CONTRIBUTORS
Arthur Rorris is secretary of the South Coast Labour Council
in New South Wales.
Chris Dite is a teacher and union member.
After leading a government that trashed Australia’s relationship with China, Scott Morrison and Arthur Sinodinos have joined Kurt Campbell’s US influence network cashing in on war talk.
[WITH AN URGENT NOTICE AT THE END FOR A CHANCE TO MOBILISE AGAINST AUKUS].
At his 15 March 2023 appearance at the National Press Club, the media challenged former Prime Minister Paul Keating on whether his financial ties to China, from his role as Chair of the China Development Bank, influenced his firm views that China is not a threat to Australia or the United States. The imputation was that Mr Keating’s views were so out of step with the prevailing US-UK-Australian narrative, they must be influenced by Chinese money. Mr Keating revealed that his 13-year position at China Development Bank was paid $5,000 per year.
For some reason most of the Australian media are far less interested in the conga line of senior Australian ex-Ministers and government officials now lining up to shamelessly feed at the trough of mega-bucks flowing from the $368 billion AUKUS submarines deal.
They include:
The last two examples, which are also the most recent, are especially interesting and revealing.
First, it is shocking that there are even rumours of Morrison going to work for a British arms manufacturer like BAE Systems. AUKUS was hatched secretly between Morrison and the British PM Boris Johnson, not US President Joe Biden, who was only brought in later, seemingly without enough time before the announcement to learn Morrison’s name (“that fella down under”). The AUKUS deal involves a large chunk of the $368 billion for nuclear submarines going to the UK, for BAE Systems to help manufacture, at its shipyard in Barrow-in-Furness, the subs that will be based on the UK’s next generation design. None of this deal would be possible were it not for the drastic deterioration in Australia’s relations with China that occurred under Morrison’s watch, which fed the false narrative of the China “threat”. It would be blatant corruption for Morrison to go from provoking tensions with China and cooking up a deal to transfer hundreds of billions of Australian taxpayers’ dollars to British arms companies, to cashing in on those tensions by working for a British arm company.
US Strategy Svengali
What is confirmed is that Morrison has joined the Advisory Board of CNAS, at the same time as Sinodinos has joined The Asia Group. This is striking because both were founded by the same US foreign policy Svengali, Kurt Campbell, Joe Biden’s so-called “Asia Czar”.
Campbell co-founded the CNAS think tank in 2007 with Michelle Flournoy (her salary to run it was over $450,000 a year). Biden’s former press secretary Jen Psaki, and current CIA head Avril Haines, who had contributed to Obama’s drone program for extrajudicial killings, also served in CNAS. Arch-neoconservative Victoria Nuland, who has played a key role in the Ukraine escalation as Biden’s undersecretary of state, also served as CNAS CEO. The top donors of the CNAS include the crème de la crème of the US arms industry, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, which stand to profit handsomely from Morrison’s AUKUS deal.
After founding CNAS, in 2011 Kurt Campbell was the architect of Barack Obama’s Asia Pivot, to shift the USA’s strategic focus from the mess it had made in the Middle East to confronting China. This policy set in train the events that have poisoned US and Australian relations with China and normalised talk of war. It started with Julia Gillard agreeing in 2011 to the previously unthinkable basing of US Marines in Darwin, and expanded with the 2014 Force Posture Agreement, under which Tindal now also hosts nuclear-capable US B52 bombers. China’s much decried build-up of islands in the South China Sea didn’t start until 2013, in response to the Asia Pivot.
In 2013, having organised the Asia Pivot, Campbell co-founded the Asia Group, a commercial consultancy that helps companies, including defence contractors, penetrate markets in the Indo-Pacific region. It should be considered a conflict of interests that Campbell advocates a more muscular military presence in the region while potentially profiting from that posture, but such integrity concerns seemingly don’t apply to the military industrial complex.
The Asia Group’s website touts, among other exploits, a project in which the company helped an unnamed defence contractor get a multi-billion-dollar contract with the Australian government. The Asia Group’s press release on Sinodinos’s appointment makes clear he’s been hired to help them make money from the AUKUS cash cow:
Washington, DC | May 1, 2023 — The Asia Group (“TAG”) is pleased to announce the launch of an Australia practice, chaired by former Australian Ambassador to the United States the Honourable Arthur Sinodinos AO and the newest partner in the firm. … Ambassador Sinodinos joins TAG as Partner and Chair of the Australia Practice, where he is responsible for developing and executing the firm’s business strategy in Australia and supporting C-Suite executives from across TAG’s geographic portfolio to manage evolving risks and seize emerging growth opportunities. Ambassador Sinodinos’ experience in foreign service, particularly at the forefront of Australian engagement with the United States, provides an invaluable perspective at a time when multilateral engagements through AUKUS, the Quad, and the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework are all opening new pathways for commercial engagement. (Emphasis added.)
Morrison and Sinodinos are former senior leaders of the government that undermined Australia’s independent national interest, in terms of our relationship with our biggest partner, to align with the USA’s strategy of confronting China. It says something of the omnipresence of Anglo-American foreign influence in Australia that they can now join strategy Svengali Kurt Campbell’s US consultancies and think tanks that are cashing in on this confrontation, with barely a ripple of interest in the media or Parliament.
AUKUS: Urgent notice:
The just-established, very short Senate legislation inquiry into an AUKUS-related bill, the Defence Legislation Amendment (Naval Nuclear Propulsion) Bill 2023 [Provisions], may be the only chance the Australian public will have to engage with Parliament on AUKUS in a formal process.
It is a chance for all concerned Australians to swamp this inquiry with objections to the whole AUKUS deal, not just the nuclear-related legislative changes.
Enough email submissions to swamp the inquiry will send a shockwave through the politicians, especially those in the ALP already wavering from Paul Keating’s powerful intervention.
The email can be as long or short as you like—just register your emphatic objection to the whole AUKUS deal that sells out our sovereignty and escalates the danger of war.
However, this inquiry is very short, so it is imperative that emails be sent immediately, to:
Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee Department of the Senate
PO Box 6100
Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600
Phone: +61 2 6277 3535
Robert Barwick has been the research director of the Australian Citizens Party for more than 20 years, focussing on economic and foreign policy and Australian history, and is an editor of the weekly Australian Alert Service magazine.
J ohn Menadue's Pearls & Irritations 13-5-23
To His Majesty King Charles III,
On the coronation of my liege, I thought it only fitting to extend a heartfelt invitation to you to commemorate this momentous occasion by visiting your very own kingdom within a kingdom: His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh.
You will no doubt recall the wise words of a renowned playwright: “The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.”
Ah, but what would that bard know of mercy faced with the reckoning at the dawn of your historic reign? After all, one can truly know the measure of a society by how it treats its prisoners, and your kingdom has surely excelled in that regard.
Your Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh is located at the prestigious address of One Western Way, London, just a short foxhunt from the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich. How delightful it must be to have such an esteemed establishment bear your name.
“One can truly know the measure of a society by how it treats its prisoners”
It is here that 687 of your loyal subjects are held, supporting the United Kingdom’s record as the nation with the largest prison population in Western Europe. As your noble government has recently declared, your kingdom is currently undergoing “the biggest expansion of prison places in over a century”, with its ambitious projections showing an increase of the prison population from 82,000 to 106,000 within the next four years. Quite the legacy, indeed.
As a political prisoner, held at Your Majesty’s pleasure on behalf of an embarrassed foreign sovereign, I am honoured to reside within the walls of this world class institution. Truly, your kingdom knows no bounds.
During your visit, you will have the opportunity to feast upon the culinary delights prepared for your loyal subjects on a generous budget of two pounds per day. Savour the blended tuna heads and the ubiquitous reconstituted forms that are purportedly made from chicken. And worry not, for unlike lesser institutions such as Alcatraz or San Quentin, there is no communal dining in a mess hall. At Belmarsh, prisoners dine alone in their cells, ensuring the utmost intimacy with their meal.
Beyond the gustatory pleasures, I can assure you that Belmarsh provides ample educational opportunities for your subjects. As Proverbs 22:6 has it: “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Observe the shuffling queues at the medicine hatch, where inmates gather their prescriptions, not for daily use, but for the horizon-expanding experience of a “big day out”—all at once.
You will also have the opportunity to pay your respects to my late friend Manoel Santos, a gay man facing deportation to Bolsonaro’s Brazil, who took his own life just eight yards from my cell using a crude rope fashioned from his bedsheets. His exquisite tenor voice now silenced forever.
“My late friend Manoel Santos…took his own life just eight yards from my cell”
Venture further into the depths of Belmarsh and you will find the most isolated place within its walls: Healthcare, or “Hellcare” as its inhabitants lovingly call it. Here, you will marvel at sensible rules designed for everyone’s safety, such as the prohibition of chess, whilst permitting the far less dangerous game of checkers.
Deep within Hellcare lies the most gloriously uplifting place in all of Belmarsh, nay, the whole of the United Kingdom: the sublimely named Belmarsh End of Life Suite. Listen closely, and you may hear the prisoners’ cries of “Brother, I’m going to die in here”, a testament to the quality of both life and death within your prison.
But fear not, for there is beauty to be found within these walls. Feast your eyes upon the picturesque crows nesting in the razor wire and the hundreds of hungry rats that call Belmarsh home. And if you come in the spring, you may even catch a glimpse of the ducklings laid by wayward mallards within the prison grounds. But don’t delay, for the ravenous rats ensure their lives are fleeting.
I implore you, King Charles, to visit His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh, for it is an honour befitting a king. As you embark upon your reign, may you always remember the words of the King James Bible: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy” (Matthew 5:7). And may mercy be the guiding light of your kingdom, both within and without the walls of Belmarsh.
Your most devoted subject,
Julian Assange,
Another great Youtube Wrap Up by Swollen Pickles, Click on the blue and check it out. John Tognolini. Interesting week with the Budget a few days a way the Government are drip feeding some announcements. This included the drop that the Government were likely to raise the jobseeker rate for the over 55's. No doubt this was designed to test the temperature in the room - could they get away with not raising the rate for all this time around? It's going to be hard for Labor and even their most rusted on supporters to justify not raising the rate for all, given their long history criticising the previous government for not raising the rate, and their election campaign focused on leaving no one behind.
Silences filled with a consensus of propaganda contaminate almost everything we read, see and hear. War by media is now a key task of so-called mainstream journalism.
In 1935, the Congress of American Writers was held in New York City, followed by another two years later. They called on “the hundreds of poets, novelists, dramatists, critics, short story writers and journalists” to discuss the “rapid crumbling of capitalism” and the beckoning of another war. They were electric events which, according to one account, were attended by 3,500 members of the public with more than a thousand turned away.
Arthur Miller, Myra Page, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett warned that fascism was rising, often disguised, and the responsibility lay with writers and journalists to speak out. Telegrams of support from Thomas Mann, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, C Day Lewis, Upton Sinclair and Albert Einstein were read out.
The journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn spoke up for the homeless and unemployed, and “all of us under the shadow of violent great power.”
Martha, who became a close friend, told me later over her customary glass of Famous Grouse and soda:
“The responsibility I felt as a journalist was immense. I had witnessed the injustices and suffering delivered by the Depression, and I knew, we all knew, what was coming if silences were not broken.”
Her words echo across the silences today: they are silences filled with a consensus of propaganda that contaminates almost everything we read, see and hear. Let me give you one example:
On March 7, the two oldest newspapers in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, published several pages on “the looming threat” of China. They coloured the Pacific Ocean red. Chinese eyes were martial, on the march and menacing. The Yellow Peril was about to fall down as if by the weight of gravity.
No logical reason was given for an attack on Australia by China. A “panel of experts” presented no credible evidence: one of them is a former director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a front for the Defence Department in Canberra, the Pentagon in Washington, the governments of Britain, Japan and Taiwan and the West’s war industry.
“Beijing could strike within three years,” they warned. “We are not ready.” Billions of dollars are to be spent on American nuclear submarines, but that, it seems, is not enough.”‘Australia’s holiday from history is over”: whatever that might mean.
There is no threat to Australia, none. The faraway “lucky” country has no enemies, least of all China, its largest trading partner. Yet China-bashing that draws on Australia’s long history of racism towards Asia has become something of a sport for the self-ordained “experts.” What do Chinese-Australians make of this? Many are confused and fearful.
The authors of this grotesque piece of dog-whistling and obsequiousness to American power are Peter Hartcher and Matthew Knott, “national security reporters” I think they are called. I remember Hartcher from his Israeli government-paid jaunts. The other one, Knott, is a mouthpiece for the suits in Canberra. Neither has ever seen a war zone and its extremes of human degradation and suffering.
“How did it come to this?” Martha Gellhorn would say if she were here. “Where on earth are the voices saying no? Where is the comradeship?”
Post-modernism in charge
The voices are heard in the samizdat of this website and others. In literature, the likes of John Steinbeck, Carson McCullers, George Orwell are obsolete. Post-modernism is in charge now. Liberalism has pulled up its political ladder. A once somnolent social democracy, Australia, has enacted a web of new laws protecting secretive, authoritarian power and preventing the right to know. Whistleblowers are outlaws, to be tried in secret. An especially sinister law bans “foreign interference” by those who work for foreign companies. What does this mean?
Democracy is notional now; there is the all-powerful elite of the corporation merged with the state and the demands of “identity.” American admirals are paid thousands of dollars a day by the Australian tax payer for “advice.” Right across the West, our political imagination has been pacified by PR and distracted by the intrigues of corrupt, ultra low-rent politicians: a Boris Johnson or a Donald Trump or a Sleepy Joe or a Volodymyr Zelensky.
No writers’ congress in 2023 worries about “crumbling capitalism” and the lethal provocations of “our” leaders. The most infamous of these, Tony Blair, a prima facie criminal under the Nuremberg Standard, is free and rich. Julian Assange, who dared journalists to prove their readers had a right to know, is in his second decade of incarceration.
The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or “neo-Nazism” or “extreme nationalism,” as you prefer. Ukraine as modern Europe’s fascist beehive has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who lauded Hitler’s “Jewish policy,” which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. “We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,” a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews.
Today, Bandera is hero-worshipped in western Ukraine and scores of statues of him and his fellow-fascists have been paid for by the EU and the U.S., replacing those of Russian cultural giants and others who liberated Ukraine from the original Nazis.
In 2014, neo Nazis played a key role in an American bankrolled coup against the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was accused of being “pro-Moscow.” The coup regime included prominent “extreme nationalists” — Nazis in all but name.
At first, this was reported at length by the BBC and the European and American media. In 2019, Time magazine featured the “white supremacist militias” active in Ukraine. NBC News reported, “Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real.” The immolation of trade unionists in Odessa was filmed and documented.
Spearheaded by the Azov regiment, whose insignia, the “Wolfsangel,” was made infamous by the German SS, Ukraine’s military invaded the eastern, Russian-speaking Donbass region. According to the United Nations 14,000 in the east were killed. Seven years later, with the Minsk peace conferences sabotaged by the West, as Angela Merkel confessed, the Red Army invaded.
This version of events was not reported in the West. To even utter it is to bring down abuse about being a “Putin apologist,” regardless whether the writer (such as myself) has condemned the Russian invasion. Understanding the extreme provocation that a NATO-armed borderland, Ukraine, the same borderland through which Hitler invaded, presented to Moscow, is anathema.
Journalists who travelled to the Donbass were silenced or even hounded in their own country. German journalist Patrik Baab lost his job and a young German freelance reporter, Alina Lipp, had her bank account sequestered.
Silence of intimidation
In Britain, the silence of the liberal intelligentsia is the silence of intimidation. State-sponsored issues like Ukraine and Israel are to be avoided if you want to keep a campus job or a teaching tenure. What happened to former Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 is repeated on campuses where opponents of apartheid Israel are casually smeared as anti-Semitic.
Professor David Miller, ironically the country’s leading authority on modern propaganda, was sacked by Bristol University for suggesting publicly that Israel’s “assets” in Britain and its political lobbying exerted a disproportionate influence worldwide — a fact for which the evidence is voluminous.
The university hired a leading QC to investigate the case independently. His report exonerated Miller on the “important issue of academic freedom of expression” and found “Professor Miller’s comments did not constitute unlawful speech.” Yet Bristol sacked him. The message is clear: no matter what outrage it perpetrates, Israel has immunity and its critics are to be punished.
A few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that “for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the Western way of life.”
No Shelley spoke for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damned the corruption of the ruling class, no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin revealed the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw had no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was alive then, “the last to raise his voice,” wrote Eagleton.
Where did post-modernism — the rejection of actual politics and authentic dissent — come from? The publication in 1970 of Charles Reich’s bestselling book, The Greening of America, offers a clue. America then was in a state of upheaval; Richard Nixon was in the White House, a civil resistance, known as “the movement,” had burst out of the margins of society in the midst of a war that touched almost everybody. In alliance with the civil rights movement, it presented the most serious challenge to Washington’s power for a century.
On the cover of Reich’s book were these words: “There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual.”
At the time I was a correspondent in the United States and recall the overnight elevation to guru status of Reich, a young Yale academic. The New Yorker had sensationally serialised his book, whose message was that the “political action and truth-telling” of the 1960s had failed and only “culture and introspection” would change the world. It felt as if hippydom was claiming the consumer classes. And in one sense it was.
Within a few years, the cult of “me-ism” had all but overwhelmed many people’s sense of acting together, of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated. The personal was the political and the media was the message. Make money, it said.
As for “the movement,” its hope and songs, the years of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton put an end to all that. The police were now in open war with black people; Clinton’s notorious welfare bills broke world records in the number of mostly blacks they sent to jail.
When 9/11 happened, the fabrication of new “threats” on “America’s frontier” (as the Project for a New American Century called the world) completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a vehement opposition.
In the years since, America has gone to war with the world. According to a largely ignored report by the Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival and the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the number killed in America’s “war on terror” was ‘at least’ 1.3 million in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.
This figure does not include the dead of U.S.-led and fuelled wars in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Somalia and beyond. The true figure, said the report, “could well be in excess of 2 million [or] approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware and [is] propagated by the media and major NGOS.”
“At least” one million were killed in Iraq, say the physicians, or 5 percent of the population.
No one knows how many killed
The enormity of this violence and suffering seems to have no place in the Western consciousness. “No one knows how many” is the media refrain. Blair and George W. Bush — and Straw and Cheney and Powell and Rumsfeld et al — were never in danger of prosecution. Blair’s propaganda maestro, Alistair Campbell, is celebrated as a “media personality.”
In 2003, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the acclaimed investigative journalist. We discussed the invasion of Iraq a few months earlier. I asked him, “What if the constitutionally freest media in the world had seriously challenged George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and investigated their claims, instead of spreading what turned out to be crude propaganda?”
He replied. “If we journalists had done our job, there is a very, very good chance we would have not gone to war in Iraq.”
I put the same question to Dan Rather, the famous CBS anchor, who gave me the same answer. David Rose of the Observer, who had promoted Saddam Hussein’s “threat,” and Rageh Omaar, then the BBC’s Iraq correspondent, gave me the same answer. Rose’s admirable contrition at having been “duped,” spoke for many reporters bereft of his courage to say so.
Their point is worth repeating. Had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, a million Iraqi men, women and children might be alive today; millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and Islamic State might not have existed.
Cast that truth across the rapacious wars since 1945 ignited by the United States and its “allies” and the conclusion is breathtaking. Is this ever raised in journalism schools?
Today, war by media is a key task of so-called mainstream journalism, reminiscent of that described by a Nuremberg prosecutor in 1945:
“Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically… In the propaganda system… it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.”
One of the persistent strands in American political life is a cultish extremism that approaches fascism. Although Trump was credited with this, it was during Barack Obama’s two terms that American foreign policy flirted seriously with fascism. This was almost never reported.
“I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being,” said Obama, who expanded a favourite presidential pastime, bombing, and death squads known as “special operations” as no other president had done since the first Cold War.
According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016 Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people and people of colour: in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan.
Every Tuesday — reported The New York Times — he personally selected those who would be murdered by hellfire missiles fired from drones. Weddings, funerals, shepherds were attacked, along with those attempting to collect the body parts festooning the “terrorist target.”
A leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, estimated, approvingly, that Obama’s drones had killed 4,700 people. “Sometimes you hit innocent people and I hate that,” he said, but we’ve taken out some very senior members of Al Qaeda.’
In 2011, Obama told the media that the Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi was planning “genocide” against his own people. “We knew…,” he said, “that if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte [North Carolina], could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”
This was a lie. The only “threat” was the coming defeat of fanatical Islamists by Libyan government forces. With his plans for a revival of independent pan-Africanism, an African bank and African currency, all of it funded by Libyan oil, Gaddafi was cast as an enemy of Western colonialism on the continent in which Libya was the second most modern state.
Destroying Gaddafi’s “threat” and his modern state was the aim. Backed by the U.S., Britain and France, NATO launched 9,700 sorties against Libya. A third were aimed at infrastructure and civilian targets, reported the UN. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that “most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten.”
When Hillary Clinton, Obama’s secretary of state, was told that Gaddafi had been captured by the insurrectionists and sodomised with a knife, she laughed and said to the camera: “We came, we saw, he died!”
On 14 September 2016, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in London reported the conclusion of a year-long study into the NATO attack on Libya which it described as an “array of lies” — including the Benghazi massacre story.
The NATO bombing plunged Libya into a humanitarian disaster, killing thousands of people and displacing hundreds of thousands more, transforming Libya from the African country with the highest standard of living into a war-torn failed state.
Under Obama, the U.S. extended secret “special forces” operations to 138 countries, or 70 percent of the world’s population. The first African-American president launched what amounted to a full-scale invasion of Africa.
Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the 19th century, the U.S. African Command (Africom) has since built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments. Africom’s “soldier to soldier” doctrine embeds U.S. officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing.
It is as if Africa’s proud history of liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, has been consigned to oblivion by a new white master’s black colonial elite. This elite’s “historic mission,” warned the knowing Frantz Fanon, is the promotion of “a capitalism rampant though camouflaged.”
In the year NATO invaded Libya, 2011, Obama announced what became known as the “pivot to Asia.” Almost two-thirds of U.S. naval forces would be transferred to the Asia-Pacific to “confront the threat from China,” in the words of his defence secretary.
There was no threat from China; there was a threat to China from the United States; some 400 American military bases formed an arc along the rim of China’s industrial heartlands, which a Pentagon official described approvingly as a “noose.”
At the same time, Obama placed missiles in Eastern Europe aimed at Russia. It was the beatified recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize who increased spending on nuclear warheads to a level higher than that of any U.S. administration since the Cold War – having promised, in an emotional speech in the centre of Prague in 2009, to “help rid the world of nuclear weapons.”
Obama and his administration knew full well that the coup his assistant secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, was sent to oversee against the government of Ukraine in 2014 would provoke a Russian response and probably lead to war. And so it has.
I am writing this on 30 April, the anniversary of the last day of the longest war of the 20th century, in Vietnam, which I reported. I was very young when I arrived in Saigon and I learned a great deal. I learned to recognise the distinctive drone of the engines of giant B-52s, which dropped their carnage from above the clouds and spared nothing and no one; I learned not to turn away when faced with a charred tree festooned with human parts; I learned to value kindness as never before; I learned that Joseph Heller was right in his masterly Catch-22: that war was not suited to sane people; and I learned about “our” propaganda.
All through that war, the propaganda said a victorious Vietnam would spread its communist disease to the rest of Asia, allowing the Great Yellow Peril to its north to sweep down. Countries would fall like “dominoes.”
Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam was victorious, and none of the above happened. Instead, Vietnamese civilisation blossomed, remarkably, in spite of the price they paid: 3 million dead. The maimed, the deformed, the addicted, the poisoned, the lost.
If the current propagandists get their war with China, this will be a fraction of what is to come. Speak up.
First published in Consortium news May 1, 2023
This weekend, Democracy Now! co-host Juan González gives the opening plenary at American University's one-day conference, "Burying 200 Years of the U.S. Monroe Doctrine," marking 200 years since the Monroe Doctrine, the foreign policy directive from President James Monroe that effectively declared all of Latin America a U.S. sphere of influence. For the past two centuries, the Monroe Doctrine has been repeatedly used to justify scores of invasions, interventions and CIA regime changes in the Americas. On today's show, we speak to two other conference guests, CodePink's Medea Benjamin and The Red Nation's Nick Estes, about the Monroe Doctrine's long and brutal legacy within U.S. imperialism. So that they couldn't make treaties with other European powers
Australia has been paying insiders of the US war machine for consultation on how to run the nation's military, a massive conflict of interest given that Washington has been grooming Australia for a role in its war agendas against China.
In an article titled "Retired US admirals charging Australian taxpayers thousands of dollars per day as defence consultants," the ABC reports that according to documents which were provided by the Pentagon to congress last month, "dozens of retired US military figures have been granted approval to work for Australia since 2012."
For those who don't speak imperialist, "retired US military figure" generally means "Someone who used to be paid by the US government to advance the interests of the US empire, and is now paid by corporations and/or foreign governments to advance the interests of the US empire." These corrupt warmongers rotate in and out of the revolving door of the DC swamp, from government to war industry jobs to punditry gigs to influential think tanks and then back again into government, advancing the interests of the US empire the entire time and growing wealthy in the process.
This dynamic allows a permanent constellation of reliable empire managers to continually exert influence around the world in support of the US empire, regardless of who gets voted into or out of office in the performative display of electoral politics. It's a big part of why US foreign policy remains the same regardless of who's officially running the elected government in Washington, and it's a big part of why the media and arms industry which support the US war machine keep playing the same tune as well.
Among the American swamp monsters Australia paid for consulting work is the Obama administration's spy chief James Clapper, who has an established track record of lying and manipulating to advance the interests of the US empire:
In 2013 Clapper committed perjury by telling the Senate under oath that the NSA does not knowingly collect data on millions of Americans, only to have that lie exposed by the Edward Snowden leaks a few months later.
In 2016 Clapper played a foundational role in fomenting public hysteria about Russia with the flimsy ODNI report on alleged Russian election interference, which remains riddled with massive plot holes. He would later go on to repeatedly voice the opinion that Russians are "almost genetically driven" toward nefarious and subversive behavior.
In 2020 Clapper signed the infamous and now fully discredited letter from former intelligence insiders saying the Hunter Biden laptop story was likely a Russian disinfo op, falsely telling CNN that the story was "textbook Soviet Russian tradecraft at work" and that the emails on the laptop had "no metadata" on them.
Also among the American military consultants paid by Australia is a man we just discussed the other day, William Hilarides, who will be telling Australia how to reconfigure its navy because apparently no Australians are available for that job. We now know that according to the released Pentagon documents Canberra has already paid Hilarides almost $2.5 million since 2016 for his consulting work.
This information was originally reported by The Washington Post's Craig Whitlock and Nate Jones, who last year also broke the remarkable story that a former US navy admiral named Stephen Johnson had actually served as Australia's deputy navy secretary, a position which needless to say is not normally open to foreigners.
This is just one of the many, many ways that Australia is being interwoven into the US war machine, from our 2023 Defence Strategic Review which further enshrines our position as a US military asset, to our Secretary of Defence Richard Marles saying that the Australian Defence Force is moving “beyond interoperability to interchangeability” with the US military and being suspiciously secretive about who his golfing buddies were in his last trip to the US, to Australian officials angrily dismissing attempts to find out if the US has been bringing nuclear weapons into Australia, to the Australian media pounding Australian consciousness with anti-China hysteria to such an extent that we're now seeing hate crimes perpetrated against Asian Australians.
I've always wondered what it would be like to witness the information environment of Washington's next military proxy from the inside — what it would be like to be a Ukrainian with an ear to the ground during the lead-up to the 2014 coup or whatever. Well, now I know. Now all Australians with an ear to the ground know.
I've been generally dismissive of Australian affairs throughout most of my commentary career despite living here, since my focus is on resisting the disasters that humanity as a whole is headed toward, and Australia has always seemed like a fairly irrelevant player on the world stage because of its impotent subservience to Washington. But it's becoming clearer and clearer that it is exactly because of Australia's blind subservience to Washington that Australia is worth paying attention to, since that relationship may well end up giving our nation a front-row seat to World War Three.
Australians are going to have to wake up to what's being done to us and the abominable agendas our nation is being exploited to advance. We're being groomed for a military confrontation of unimaginable horror, one which absolutely does not need to take place, all in the name of something as trivial as securing US planetary hegemony. We've got to start saying no to this, and we've got to start right now.
https://soundcloud.com/going_rogue/australia-pays-washington
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