Date: Saturday, 10 August 2024
https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/is-the-stupidity-of-australians-terminal
https://theduran.com/is-the-stupidity-of-australians-terminal/
Is the stupidity of Australians terminal?
Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)
UPDATE (this just in, from ABC Australia, later in the same day, on 9 August 2024): “Australia is still finding out what it doesn't know about its secretive AUKUS deal”. (I was the first journnalist who mentioned — on 13 July 2023 — that the AUKUS Treaty is “secret.” Finally, a mainstream news-medium is acknowledging that it is.)
——
On 15 September 2021, Australia’s Anthony Albanese Labor Government agreed with America’s Biden and UK’s Sunak to form together against China in the Southern Hemisphere a Pacific Ocean mutual-‘defense’ Treaty like America’s 1949 original one for the Northern Hemisphere and the Atlantic Ocean (NATO), to be called AUKUS, for U.S., UK, and Australia, thus jointly committing themselves to wage a war against China, which is Australia’s main trading-partner. For Australians, it’s insanity.
Ever since 2022, Australia’s Lowy Institute polling organization has polled Australians about this, and has been finding that, pretty consistently, half of Australians think that AUKUS “will make Australia/our region more safe”; only 8% say “less safe”.
On 14 June 2023, Australia’s Financial Review headlined “Labor’s internal dissent over AUKUS is building”, and reported that behind the scenes, “criticism of AUKUS that has been levelled by Labor elders Paul Keating and Gareth Evans, as well as” others, was growing in the Labor Party.
Finally, on 8 August 2024, Britain’s Guardian bannered “Aukus pact will turn Australia into ‘51st state’ of the US, Paul Keating says: Former prime minister argues Australia has made itself a target by aligning with American ‘aggression’ towards China”. It reported that on that night, Australia's former Prime Minister, Keating, was interviewed at length about AUKUS, and,
Australia had no quarrel with China, Keating said, and concerns about China’s designs on Taiwan were not justified because the island was “Chinese real estate”.
“Taiwan is not a vital Australian interest,” he said, adding that the American attitude to Taiwan was like China deciding that Tasmania needed help to secede from Australia.
“What Aukus is about in the American mind is turning Australia into suckers, locking us up for 40 years with American bases all around … not Australian bases,” he said.
“So Aukus is really about, in American terms, the military control of Australia. I mean, what’s happened … is likely to turn Australia into the 51st state of the United States.”
Keating told the show’s presenter, Sarah Ferguson: “We’re now defending the fact that we’re in Aukus.
“If we weren’t in Aukus, we wouldn’t need to defend it. If we didn’t have an aggressive ally like the United States – aggressive to others in the region – there’d be nobody attacking Australia. We are better left alone than we are being ‘protected’ by an aggressive power like the United States. …
Keating, a longstanding opponent of Labor’s support for the pact, said Australia had not been threatened by China, whose expanding military presence, he said, was in line with its position as the world’s second superpower.
“What do they expect [the Chinese] to do?” he said. “To move around in row boats? Canoes, maybe?
Well, now (perhaps too late), the cat is out of the bag, and Australia’s former leader — and of the same political Party as his current successor — has gone public about Australia’s (and specifically Anthony Albanese’s) “aggressive ally like the United States – aggressive to others in the region.” He even said, “‘What Aukus is about in the American mind is turning Australia into suckers, locking us up for 40 years with American bases all around … not Australian bases,’ he said.
‘So Aukus is really about, in American terms, the military control of Australia. I mean, what’s happened … is likely to turn Australia into the 51st state of the United States.’”
Any intelligent Australian who thinks about this — which had been delayed going public until now (three years after Australia joined AUKUS) — needs to ask him/herself whether Anthony Albanese is a traitor against Australians?
No printed articles that I have found have linked to that ABC-Australia interview so as to enable their readers to view it in full — ‘news’-media don’t require that (linking to sources) but think they have a right to be trusted by the public. So, I shall provide that link here:
8 August 2024, a hostile interviewer. It opens with:
Q: What’s wrong with cooperating with an ally deemed indispensable for Australian security?
A: What’s wrong is that we completely lose our strategic autonomy [he meant sovereignty, but his speaking isn’t even nearly as good as his thinking is] the right of Australian governments and the Australian people to determine where and how they respond in the world is taken away, if we let the United States displace our military and our foreign policy.
The interviewer didn’t provide any counter-evidence (though she obviously disagreed with him) but instead asked, “Is it your argument that increasing American troop presence and broader military presence here makes Australia more of a target?” He replied, “Yes.” Then, he went on to say, “If we didn’t have an aggressive ally …” But who WANTS an aggressive ally? The interviewer did. Polls indicate that overwhelmingly Australians don’t mind it at all.
If Keating had been a competent speaker, his answer to her opening question would have started with something like “Are you saying that if America weren’t our ‘ally’ as you put it, then Australia wouldn’t be able to defend itself? Defend itself from what aggressor? If that’s what you mean, then I certainly don’t agree — the U.S. Government is the aggressor worldwide; China is not. Why should we — Australians — be allied with the world’s aggressor-nation par excellence?” (Subsequently in the interview, however, at 5:35, he started his argument which concluded that, “You don’t NEED the United States in order to defend Australia. Australia is quite capable of defending itself.” His interviewer ignored that, and just continued with “I just want to come back to …” How many Australians recognized there, that he had just destroyed her fundamental assumption?)
When he said “What’s wrong is that we completely lose our strategic autonomy,” he was saying that Albanese is a traitor. But how many Australians understood this?
Deeply flawed as a presenter though Keating obviously is, his argument still was entirely correct. How many Australians understood it? What’s the point of paying attention to political news if you can’t understand it? Do Australians waste their time when they pay attention to political news?
There ought to be a movement now by Australians that is appropriate to their having a traitor leading their Government. Are they intelligent enough to understand this horrible fact? (Australia’s Constitution has no treachery provision; and its oath of office, shown on its page 35, isn’t to the people of Australia, but instead: “I, A.B., do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Victoria and Her heirs and successors according to law. SO HELP ME GOD.” In other words: that Constitution is a farce. However, there is a law in Australia against treachery, and its punishment is life in prison.)
The former leader of Australia, Laborite Paul Keating, has effectively raised the question of whether what the current leader of Australia, Anthony Albanese, has done to Australia by joining AUKUS, constitutes treason. Will this implicit accusation by Keating even be understood by the Australian people?
America’s President Barack Obama famously said (and repeatedly) “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation.” This means that every OTHER nation is dispensable — including Australia. Australians want to be allied with THAT?
What might explain such stupidity? Might it be racism? Might it be imperialism? Might it be religious bigotry? Might it be some combination of those? How is democracy even possible where stupidity reigns among the public?
The Australian people are now in one hell of a predicament. How can they get out of it?
The AUKUS Treaty is secret — even Wikipedia has no article such as “AUKUS TREATY” (but the ‘news’-media have ignored this startling fact) — and, so, whether there is a clause in it (such as in the NATO Treaty) on how to withdraw from it, isn’t publicly known. This means that any politician in Australia can publicly demand to see the Treaty so as to determine what (if any) withdrawal-provision it contains. If Paul Keating is sincere, he ought to lead that demand. But even if that demand gets rejected, he can then lead in demanding that Anthony Albanese be tried for treason.
—————
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
