Australia: the new 51st state
By John Pilger
02/01/07 "ICH" -- - John Howard's servility to the US is even
greater than Tony Blair's and has earned him the nickname Bush's
deputy sheriff. The conspiracy between Washington, the media and
politicians is eroding the country's freedoms
In June this year, 26,000 US and Australian troops will take
part in bombarding the ancient fragile landscape of Australia.
They will storm the Great Barrier Reef, gun down "terrorists"
and fire laser-guided missiles at some of the most pristine
wilderness on earth. Stealth, B-1 and B-52 bombers (the latter
alone each carry 30 tonnes of bombs) will finish the job, along
with a naval onslaught. Underwater depth charges will explode
where endangered species of turtle breed. Nuclear submarines
will discharge their high-level sonar, which destroy the hearing
of seals and other marine mammals.
Run via satellite from Australia and Hawaii, Operation Talisman
Sabre 2007 is warfare by remote control, designed for
"pre-emptive" attacks on other countries. Australians know
little about this. The Australian parliament has not debated it;
the media is not interested. The result of a secret treaty
signed by John Howard's government with the Bush administration
in 2004, it includes the establishment of a vast, new military
base in Western Australia, which will bring the total of known
US bases around the world to 738. No matter the setback in Iraq,
the US military empire and its ambitions are growing.
Australia is important because of a remarkable degree of
servility that Howard has taken beyond even that of Tony Blair.
Once described in the Sydney Bulletin as Bush's "deputy
sheriff", Howard did not demur when Bush, on hearing this,
promoted him to "sheriff for south-east Asia". With Washington's
approval, he has sent Australian troops and federal police to
intervene in the Pacific island nations; in 2006, he effected
"regime change" in East Timor, whose prime minister, Mari
Alkatiri, had the nerve to demand a proper share of his
country's oil and gas resources. Indonesia's repression in West
Papua, where American mining interests are described as "a great
prize", is endorsed by Howard.
This sub-imperial role has a history. When the six Australian
states federated as a nation in 1901, "a Commonwealth . . .
independent and proud", said the headlines, the Australian
colonists made clear that independence was the last thing they
wanted. They wanted Mother England to be more protective of her
most distant colony which, they pleaded, was threatened by a
host of demons, not least the "Asiatic hordes" who would fall
down on them as if by the force of gravity. "The whole
performance," wrote the historian Manning Clark, "stank in the
nostrils. Australians had once again grovelled before the
English. There were Fatman politicians who hungered for a
foreign title just as their wives hungered after a smile of
recognition from the Governor-General's wife, who was said to be
a most accomplished snubber."
Australia's modern political class has the same hunger for the
recognition of great power. In the 1950s, prime minister Robert
Menzies allowed Britain to explode nuclear bombs in Australia,
sending clouds of radioactive material across populated areas.
Australians were told only the good news of being chosen for
this privilege. An RAF officer was threatened with prosecution
after he revealed that 400 to 500 Aborigines were in the target
zones. "Occasionally we would bring them in for
decontamination," he said. "Other times, we just shooed them off
like rabbits." Blindness and unexplained deaths followed. After
17 years in power, Menzies was knighted by the Queen and made
Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports.
An undeclared maxim of Australian politics is that prime
ministers become "statesmen" only when they serve imperial
interests. (Honourable exceptions have been dealt with by smear
and subversion). In the 1960s, Menzies connived to be "asked" to
send Australian troops to fight for the Americans in Vietnam.
Red China was coming, he said. Howard is more extreme; in his
decade of power, he has eroded the very basis of Australia's
social democratic institutions and cast his country as the model
of a Washington-style democracy, where the only popular
participation is that of voting every few years for two
"opposing" parties which share almost identical economic,
foreign and "cultural" policies.
For "cultural", read race, which has always been important in
creating an insidious state of fear and compliance. In 2001,
Howard was re-elected after manipulating the "children overboard
affair", in which his senior advisers claimed that Afghan
refugees had callously thrown their children into the sea in
order to be rescued by an Australian naval vessel. They produced
photographs that were proven false, but only after Howard had
touched every xenophobic nerve in the white electorate and was
duly re-elected. The two officials who brought the "crisis" to
its fraudulent fever pitch were promoted after one of them
admitted that the deception had "helped" the prime minister. In
a more scandalous case, Howard claimed his defence department
had been unaware of another leaking, stricken boat filled with
Iraqi and Afghan refugees heading for Australia until after it
had sunk. An admiral later revealed this, too, was false; 353
people were allowed to drown, including 146 children.
Above all, it is the control of dissent that has changed
Australia. Rupert Murdoch's influence has been critical, far
more so than in Britain. Whenever Howard or one of his more
oafish ministers want to bend an institution or smear an
opponent, they carry out the task in alliance with a pack of
rabid mostly Murdoch commentators. As Stuart MacIntyre describes
in a new book, Silencing Dissent, the Melbourne Herald-Sun
columnist, Andrew Bolt, conducted a campaign of ridicule against
the independent Australian Research Council which, he claimed,
had fallen into the hands of a "a club of
scratch-my-back-leftists" whose work was "hostile to our
culture, history and institutions", as well as
"peek-in-your-pants researchers fixated on gender and race". The
then minister of education, Brendan Nelson, vetoed one project
grant after another without explanation.
The National Museum of Australia, the national child benefits
centre, Aboriginal policy bodies and other independent
institutions have been subjected to similar intimidation. A
friend who holds a senior university post told me: "You dare not
speak out. You dare not oppose the government or 'the big end of
town' [corporate Australia]."
As embarrassing corporate crime rises, the treasurer, Peter
Costello, has blithely announced a ban on moral or ethical
boycotts of certain products. There was no debate; the media was
simply told. One of Costello's senior advisers, David Gazard,
recently distinguished an American-run seminar in Melbourne,
organised by the Public Relations Institute of Australia, at
which those paying A$595 were taught the tricks of conflating
activism with "terrorism" and "security threat". Suggestions
included: "Call them suicide bombers . . . make them all look
like terrorists . . . tree-hugging, dope-smoking, bloody
university graduate, anti-progress . . ." They were advised on
how to set up bogus community groups and falsify statistics.
Schoolteachers who do not fly the flag or music concert
organisers who discourage the attendance of racist thugs wrapped
in the flag are at risk of a dose of Murdoch poison. Equally, if
you reveal the shame of Australia's vassal role you are deemed
"anti-Australian" and, without irony, "anti-American". Few
Australians are aware that Murdoch, who dominates the press,
abandoned his own Australian citizenship so that he could set up
the Fox TV network in the US. The University of Sydney is to
open a United States Study Centre, backed by Murdoch after he
complained about the inability of Australians to appreciate the
benefits of the bloodbath in Iraq.
Stifling dissent
Having recently spoken at overflowing public meetings in
Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, I am left in no doubt that many
are deeply worried that freedoms in their sunny idyll are
slipping away. They were given a vivid reminder of this the
other day when Vice President Dick Cheney came to Sydney to
"thank" Howard for his support. The New South Wales state
government rushed through a law that allowed Cheney's 70 secret
service guards to carry live weapons. With the police, they took
over the centre of Sydney and closed the Harbour Bridge and much
of the historic Rocks area. Seventeen-vehicle motorcades swept
theatrically here and there, as if Howard was boasting to
Cheney: "Look at my control over this society; look at my
compliant country." And yet his guest and mentor is a man who,
having refused to fight in Vietnam, has brought back torture and
lied incessantly about Iraq, who has made millions in stock
options as his Halliburton company profits from the carnage and
who has vetoed peace with Iran.
Almost every speech he gives includes a threat. By any measure
of international law, Cheney is a major war criminal, yet it was
left to a small, brave group of protesters to uphold the Aussie
myth of principled rebellion and stand up to the police. The
Labor Party leader, Kevin Rudd, the embodiment of compliance,
called them "violent ferals"; one of the protesters was 70 years
old. The next day, the headline in the Sydney Morning Herald
read: "Terrorists have ambitions of empire, says Cheney." The
irony was exquisite, if lost.
John Pilger's bestselling history of Australia, "A Secret
Country", is available through
http://www.johnpilger.com
This article was first published at the New Statesman
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