Australian Anti-War Activist Joan Coxsedge's October 24, 2020 Letter

 

The following letter from Australian anti-war and Latin American solidarity activist Joan Coxsedge--who is also a former member of the Victoria state parliament--originally appeared in an Australian-Cuban solidarity group's newsletter.

"October 24, 2020

"Dear Comrades,

"This year has been bizarre, one that most of us would like to forget. Now starting to slowly unwind, thank god.

"Having said that, I believe the attacks on Daniel Andrews are disgraceful, which says more about the Liberals and their right-wing viciousness than it does about Andrews, a viciousness which extends into their policy-making decisions where universities, artists and workers are the enemy.  Part of class warfare intensifying as labour rights continue to be violated.  As someone said, the problem with political jokes is that they tend to get elected.

"I laugh when people talk about returning to ‘normalcy’. Normalcy brought us the Iraq War, the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, torture, assassination by drone, billionaires, homelessness, gutting of welfare, wiretaps, militarised police, fracking, and let loose a psychotic American Empire on the world, with us crawling along behind.

"And the Defence Legislation Amendment, already passed by the House of Reps, is about to pounce.  This latest repressive nightmare aims to regulate the call out of defence forces responding to natural disasters, a bill that fails to define ‘other emergencies’ but permits foreign armies and police forces to be brought in to ’help us’, doesn’t restrict their use of force and gives them high levels of immunity under our laws.

"`Emergencies’ could include industrial disputes, demonstrations, and other protest actions that are perfectly legal if we lived in a democracy. For good measure, the government has extended ASIO powers even more, where journalists, environmentalists and advocacy groups could face compulsory questioning and being fitted with tracking devices.

  

"‘Democracy’ is popular because of the illusion of choice and participation it provides, but when you live in a society like ours where most people’s knowledge of the world extends no further than sports, sitcoms, reality shows and celebrity gossip, it’s downright dangerous.  Until people are properly educated and informed, democracy is nothing more than a clever tool used by the ruling class to subjugate the rest of us.

" Noam Chomsky, who can’t get published in his own country, put it this way: ‘It is regrettably, no exaggeration to say that we are living in an era of irrationality, deception, confusion, anger, and unfocussed fear - an ominous combination, with few precedents. There has never been a time when it was so important to have a voice of sanity, insight, understanding of what is happening in the world…’

"In the 30s, the Germans thought they were free, ignoring the ever-widening gap between the government and the people. It took place so gradually, each step so small and inconsequential and disguised as a temporary emergency measure, that people failed to see what was going on beneath the surface.

"When the US entered WW2, the future head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, bemoaned that his country was fighting the wrong enemy. The Nazis, he explained, were pro-capitalist Aryan Christians, whereas the true enemy was godless communism and its resolute anti-capitalism.  After all, the US, only some 20 years earlier, had been part of a massive military intervention in the USSR when fourteen capitalist countries sought to ‘strangle the Bolshevik baby in its crib’.

"Dulles understood, like many of his Government colleagues, that what would later become known as the Cold War was actually the old war against communism - and has never stopped.

"The danger, as Orwell wrote, is in the language. The sterilisation of words where meanings are cleansed and honed down. Torture is what other people do, whereas ‘we’ use ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’. Propaganda is what others do, we ‘promote democracy’.

"Like war, we prefer ‘pre-emptive actions to defend ourselves’ and engage in ‘targeted strikes to remove threats’ instead of assassinations.  Bombing raids on Iraq, Libya and Syria were ‘humanitarian missions’. The double-talk is everywhere.

"People like Chavez and Castro who redistributed wealth to the poor were ‘corrupt’ while western politicians taking jobs on the boards of banks, pharmaceutical companies and arms manufacturers are trying to make the world a better place.

"A case of ‘tell the truth if you dare’, like Julian Assange who dared. And we’ve seen what’s happened to him. Tortured so that his pain and suffering acts as a warning to others in case they want to warn us that the people we elected are corrupt, dishonest killers.

"It’s hardly news that the 800 US military bases in more than 70 countries around the globe have played a fundamental role in turning the entire world into a bloody battlefield, a massive military presence unlike anything we’ve ever seen before but rarely acknowledged, and a major reason why the US has consistently been in a state of war or military invasion for almost every year of its existence.  Once, weapons were manufactured to fight wars.  Now wars are manufactured to sell weapons. 

"From George Orwell:  ‘The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.’   So speak out even louder, dear friends…

"Joan Coxsedge"

                                                                                                          

Australian Anti-War Activist Joan Coxsedge's February 24, 2020 Letter

The following letter from Australian anti-war and Latin American solidarity activist Joan Coxsedge--who is also a former member of the Victoria state parliament--originally appeared in an Australian-Cuban solidarity group's newsletter.

"February 24, 2020

“Dear Comrades,

“Peace in our time? Not bloody likely. A quick scan through the news makes one reach for a glass of wine or two or three. I still get the Age, mainly for the crosswords, because most of what passes for ‘news’ is syndicated right-wing crap from overseas. The other papers are even worse, especially the ones from the Murdoch stable.

“I spoke at a rally for Julian Assange last Friday outside the State Library, and did my best to be heard among the noisy crowds, Hare Krishnas and Swanston Street trams. There should have been a lot more taking part, but that’s about where we’re at in this country, a mixture of apathy, ignorance and stupidity.

“And where’s the leadership? With all his flaws, Gough Whitlam was a leader with a program who did his best to legislate for it. The one fly in the ointment was his support for State Aid and we’ve seen where that’s got us. And while I’m talking about Gough it’s worth raising the ‘Loans Affair’, part of the conspiracy to oust Labor and still widely misunderstood. We were told that the government was about to sell us to the Arabs in return for massive bribes.

"The facts? OPEC countries had accumulated vast sums following the 1973 leap in oil prices and had invested thousands of millions of dollars in the United States and made loans to the governments of Britain, France, Denmark, Italy and Japan, without raising any fuss. An Executive Council meeting in Canberra on 13 December 1974 authorized Minister for Minerals and Energy Rex Connor to seek loans of up to $400 million ‘… to strengthen our external financial position, to provide immediate protection for Australia in regard to supplies of minerals and energy…’ In other words, to buy back our mineral resources from the multinationals. To buy back the farm. The authority was not given to Treasury, because it wasn’t trusted.

“ ‘Offers’ came from everywhere. One came from Tirath Khemlani, a dodgy Pakistani ‘financier’. Connor authorized Khemlani to scout for funds among OPEC countries, but it turned out that Khemlani was sent by a Hong Kong arms firm, Commerce International, part of a powerful Brussels-based outfit linked to the CIA. A short time later, Federal Treasurer Dr Cairns was approached by George Harris, a dodgy Melbourne ‘businessman’ with a similar offer of money, whose principals were from the New York office of the same crooked firm, Commerce International. Both Connor and Cairns were dudded. Naive? Stupid? Certainly. Corrupt? No.

“Despite screams from the media, not one cent was paid to anyone by the government, nor did any member of the government profit from the affair. The anti-Labor forces, however, profited greatly. As we know from that date in infamy, 11 November 1975 when Whitlam was sacked, a watershed in labour history, which is why I raised it.

“On 24 February, fellow-Australian Julian Assange will front London’s Woolwich Crown Court which will decide whether or not he will be extradited to the United States for publishing the Iraqi and Afghani War Logs and State department cables that exposed massive war crimes and corruption by the US military and intelligence establishment, the first journalist to be charged under the Espionage Act. Especially damning was the video of the American helicopter crew laughing and joking as they machine-gunned and fired rockets at a group of civilians, including children and a Reuters journalist.

“If his last court appearance is anything to go by, he won’t get a fair hearing. A shonky magistrate was virtually told what to do by five US government agents sitting behind the prosecution team. And it has now been disclosed on prime time German TV that while Julian was in the Ecuadoran Embassy, a Spanish private security mob made audio and video recordings of his meetings with lawyers, photographed passports of his visitors and took their phones, all of which were passed on to the CIA.

“The program also showed how allegations against Julian were a pack of lies to keep him in gaol. The one that led many to believe he was a rapist was also shown to be fraudulent in the same way that George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard lied that Saddam had ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ to justify the dreadful Iraq War that killed more a million people and destroyed a nation. And WikiLeaks exposed Hillary Clinton’s corruption and mendacity, getting millions from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two major funders of the Islamic State, and being the main architect of the Libyan War.

“The publication of classified documents is not yet a crime in the US, but if Assange is convicted, it will be, even though he’s not an American citizen and WikiLeaks is not a US-based publication. It would mean the end of investigations into the inner workings of power and cement into place a terrifying, global, corporate tyranny under which borders, nationality and law mean nothing.

“Our federal cops have already raided the homes and offices of the ABC and a commercial paper, with a federal court judge ruling the raids were valid. Community outrage? Nothing.

“But many voices are now speaking out for Julian. Jeremy Corbyn urged Boris Johnson to back the Council of Europe demanding Julian’s release just after Julian was nominated for the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize, along with Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowdon. He's also won the 2020 Gary Webb Freedom of the Press award. Did you hear about that in our media?

“Throughout his protracted ordeal, to our shame, not one word of support from the Australian Government or the Labor Party hierarchy. But he was visited by two MPs, Independent Andrew Wilkie and Liberal George Christensen, to their credit.

“While Daniel Ellsberg was treated as a hero for revealing the truth about Vietnam, Assange faces 175 years in prison for disclosing vastly more serious crimes than those in the Pentagon Papers.

"This is a critical moment for press freedom and our right to know. If there is any sense of justice left, this travesty of a case must be thrown out and Julian Assange must be brought home as a free man. If he isn’t, then we’re heading into darker times when the US Empire will continue on its destructive path unchecked and freedom of speech will be a thing of the past. As Julian said: ‘People don’t like wars. They have to be lied into them’.

“Joan Coxsedge”

Australian Anti-War Activist Joan Coxsedge's November 26, 2019 Letter

The following letter from Australian anti-war and Latin American solidarity activist Joan Coxsedge--who is also a former member of the Victoria state parliament--originally appeared in an Australian-Cuban solidarity group's newsletter.

“November 26, 2019

“Dear Comrades 

"Here we are again, surrounded by Christmas crap and messages of good will, but not for those at the bottom of the heap. Infuriating when you see what the top CEO mobsters are getting as they cream off the system. The average full-time wage-earner earns about $1,695 per week and pays exorbitant rent (can’t afford a house), the occasional meal out, rates that keep going up and up, and a heap of other things if she/he has children. Unemployment and under-employment are wickedly high - like wage theft - while worker’s pay checks remain stagnant. Australia’s top ten corporate thieves make 270 times the amount the average full-time Aussie worker earns and as for those Australians on Newstart and the pension.

“Leading the pack is Qantas chief Alan Joyce who pocketed a staggering $23,876,351 million last year. A half-head behind him is Macquarie Group CEO Nicholas Moore with $23.86 million in his kick. Some near the bottom of the ‘ten’ only managed to garner a mere $13,246,088 million. And then there’s the ‘bonuses’. For what? Sacking workers to increase the bottom line? To describe them as having ‘a sense of entitlement’ doesn’t even come close.

“Never have we needed a stronger, more vigorous trade union movement than we do now. Instead they’re about to be belted over the head with more appalling fascist-style legislation. The same huge divide exists between ‘public’ and ‘private’ schools, where inequality begins. A survey found that in four years, four private schools spent $100 million each on capital works, while in the same period 1300 state schools had been waiting for up to 15 years for urgent repairs to their buildings.

“Back in 1935, one of the most influential Marxist playwrights of the 20th century, Bertolt Brecht, described fascism as an integral part of capitalism. ‘Those who are against fascism without being against capitalism are like people who want to eat veal without slaughtering the calf,’ he said. ‘They’re happy to eat the calf but can’t stand the sight of blood.’ Fascism and war are not natural disasters but are launched by the ruling class to control everyone else. His plays were banned in the early 1930s, so he moved to California, attracting the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and then on to Switzerland, and on to East Berlin in 1949 where he ran a theatre company, the Berliner Ensemble.

“The media here infuriate me. The whole bloody lot of them, and that includes ‘our’ ABC, a pale shadow of its former self. And yes, I’m sorry to hear that the ABC’s budget’s been cut yet again, so why allow so many coalition bastards on to their programs. And if they must, demand answers to their questions, when some interviewers don’t seem to know what questions to ask.

"The ABC reported that Sweden had dropped its rape allegation against Julian Assange, because of the ‘time factor’, when Sweden’s always been a stalking horse for the US government, and on three occasions was forced to shelve its investigation for lack of evidence, confirming that claims of ‘rape’ are a politically motivated fraud. Now that the US and Britain have Julian where they want him, on the cusp of being extradited to the US, they can say thank-you Sweden for smearing him and undermining support for his freedom, just bugger off because we no longer need you. Sweden has a nasty history of rendering people into the hands of the CIA, while in the ‘Land of the Free’, Trump has just pardoned three US soldiers convicted of serious war crimes.

“The corruption multiplies. The presiding judge in the extradition proceedings, Lady Emma Arbuthnot, is embroiled in a massive conflict of interest and will be turning over certain courtroom proceedings to another judge, while her husband, Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom - you couldn’t invent the name--is a former British Defense Minister with financial links to the British military establishment, including institutions and individuals named by WikiLeaks. And son. Alexander, is the vice-president (vice is the right word) of a firm heavily invested in a company founded by GCHQ (Britain’s secret electronic spy agency) and MI5 (equivalent to our ASIO) which is diametrically opposed to everything WikiLeaks stands for. To call this a conflict of interest is like calling Adolf Hitler a small-time crook. And our media haven’t reported one word of this shocking situation.

“In Bolivia, like nearly all of Latin America, is in turmoil after Evo Morales was forced into exile after a CIA-run coup. Politicians and journalists have been swiftly rounded up while the security services were given exoneration in advance for any crimes they might commit. The new self-declared president, Jeanine Anez, whose party only received 4% of the vote in last month’s election, has already expelled hundreds of Cuban doctors, broken ties with Venezuela, pulled Bolivia out of multiple international organizations and treaties and described the indigenous majority as ‘satanic’.

“And now we have a Chinese spy ring, a re-run of the Petrov Affair, the name of a married Russian couple who worked in the Soviet Embassy in Canberra in 1954. Vladimir, a nasty drunk, made a deal with ASIO without telling his wife, that he was part of a Russian Communist spy network and wanted protection to become an Australian citizen. A few days later, PM Menzies announced Petrov’s defection in parliament and won an unwinnable election. The Petrov Affair took place after the High Court’s rejection of the Communist Party Dissolution Act of 1950 and the people’s rejection of the 1951 proposal to ban the Communist Party. In 1954-55, the Petrov Commission failed to unearth one spy or traitor. If you substitute China for Russia it’s a case of here we go again!

“But it’s the end of the year and I reckon we all need a break, so spend time with your friends, share a bottle, read a book and take care on our crazy roads. Next year will be an important one and we need you, every single one of you. Viva!

“ Joan Coxsedge”

Australian Anti-War Movement Activist Joan Coxsedge's September 29, 2019 Letter

The following letter from Australian anti-war and Latin American solidarity activist Joan Coxsedge--who is also a former member of the Victoria state parliament--originally appeared in an Australian-Cuban solidarity group's newsletter. 

“September 29, 2019

“Dear Comrades,

“Once upon a time I felt OK in saying I was an Australian. But that was back in the era when Australia was one of the most egalitarian nations in the world, when there was vigorous debate about important issues and when our basic commodities were in public hands and jobs gave security and even some satisfaction. My grandfather worked all his life as a train driver (steam) and my father followed him into the railways, a solid career move back then, which was why I was born in Ballarat.

“What a different story today. Counted as full-time even if you only work for a few hours a week, with no sick leave, holiday pay, security, or the other basics unions fought so hard for - when bang, you’re on the scrap heap and have to fight like buggery to get a lousy payout, leaving you to subsist below the poverty line, with no hope of redress. The corporates love our system because they can screw workers into the ground. The crooks and rorters love it because no-one stops their rorting.

“Capitalism’s terrific if you’re rich and crooked and stupid, but it needs growth and growth is killing our world and killing our animals and birds and trees and flowers that make it so special. We should all be shouting from the rooftops like gutsy 16-year old Greta Thunberg who told the UN with passion and integrity. ‘People are suffering, people are dying, entire ecosystems are collapsing and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth…I want you to act as if the house is on fire’. 

“And our house is on fire. But miserable sods like our Pentecostal PM didn’t speak at the UN forum because he had nothing to say, preferring to hob-nob with slimy Uncle Sam, a war-mongering dud on the cusp of impeachment. When Morrieson spoke at a lesser gathering he made a gig of himself, pushing us even further down the plughole.

“In Hong Kong the protests are getting nastier and more violent. A slice of history might help. Hong Kong was part of China since the Qin Dynasty in about 220 BC before morphing into an international financial center. Trade kicked in with the arrival of the ruthless East India Tea Company in 1711, when the Brits refused to pay for tea in silver, smuggling in opium as a means of exchange. By 1787, the Company was illegally sending in 4.000 chests of opium every year, causing massive addiction and corruption.

“Back in 1820, China’s economy was still the largest in the world - until the Opium Wars - but by the end of the second war, its share of global GDP had halved, and sovereignty over its territory had been seriously compromised. In 1841 a defeated China was forced to cede Hong Kong Island to the Brits as part of the Treaty of Nanjing, to lease the Kowloon Peninsula in 1860 in perpetuity and the New Territories in 1898 for 99 years, areas that make up present-day Hong Kong.

“At the end of Japan’s occupation during WW2, HK reverted back to Britain, which was then forced to transfer sovereignty back to China after the lease expired in 1997 when they negotiated a transition period called  the Sino-British Joint Declaration designating HK as a ‘special administrative region’. China reluctantly agreed to extend semi-autonomy until 2047. This is the genesis of the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ rule at the heart of today’s conflict, highlighting that China and Hong Kong have been on two distinct and intersecting paths of development.

“It’s now 22 years since the British left after an agreement stipulating that all interventions and colonial claims would end with full sovereignty returning to China. Calling for secession from China would be like calling for Manhattan to secede from the US. Can you imagine Washington ever agreeing to that? Hardly.

“And times have changed. In 1997, HK’s domestic product was 27% of China’s GDP. Today it’s 3%. Shenzhen and other major cities are now China’s financial hub and threaten Western hegemony. China, Russia, India and Pakistan, plus a few others, are members of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO) comprising about half the world’s population and controlling about one-third of its economic output, and are moving out of the dollar economy.

“And what do you reckon western reaction would be if it was confronted by marauding gangs of protesters dressed in ninja outfits holding metal bars, with black scarves covering their faces and backpacks churning out the Star Spangled Banner, smashing up Heathrow, JFK or Melbourne Airports? You’d be beaten up and thrown into gaol. The gangs also smashed up HK’s MTR, its public Mass Transit Railway and attacked passengers.

“Fighting for democracy? My foot. Leaderless? Not. There’s tycoon Jimmy Lai, who owns a local tabloid and who’s met US Vice President Mike Pence at the White House, and politician/barrister Martin Lee, founding chair of the local Democratic Party. ‘Protest organiser’, politician-in-waiting, Joshua Wong flies around the world, hobnobbing with far-right US Congressmen like Marco Rubio and the head of the notorious White Helmets outfit, Raed Al Saleh.

“What, I ask, would a ‘grassroots leader’ in China have in common with a belligerent Syrian propaganda war mob? Because both have links to the CIA’s National Endowment for Democracy, infamous for subverting and manipulating democratically-elected governments, which has admitted funding HK dissidents for more than two decades in the name of ‘Freedom’.

“In Washington, Trump and Co. have just announced sanctions against Raul Castro and his four children for ‘gross violations of human rights in support of the Venezuelan government’ - for ‘freedom’, of course.

“In today’s society, tell the truth if you dare, like Julian Assange who, with Edward Snowden (exiled in Russia) and Chelsea Manning (detained indefinitely), exposed massive crimes and corruption by the US government and its allies, and remains locked up in Belmarsh Maximum Security Prison in appalling conditions. ‘Wherever America goes, terror follows’.

“Viva Cuba!

“Joan Coxsedge”

Australian Anti-War Activist Joan Coxsedge's July 28, 2019 Letter

The following letter from Australian anti-war and Latin American solidarity activist Joan Coxsedge--who is also a former member of the Victoria state parliament--originally appeared in an Australian-Cuban solidarity group's newsletter.

"July 28, 2019

"Dear Comrades, 

"Hope you’re all OK and surviving the chilly weather. It’s hard to believe that we’ve passed the half-year mark. I reckon someone ‘up there’ is fiddling around with our time machine, or maybe it’s just that the older you get the quicker its gets and when you look around at our shitty little world, perhaps that’s a good thing. Especially when you look at what passes for leaders.

“In our worst nightmare we couldn’t invent Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, an unhinged crook and a weird Tory toff. At least Ukraine had the good sense to elect a professional comedian, not just a couple of dangerous clowns.

“Regardless of who inhabits the White House, Pine Gap and North West Cape will always implicate us directly in America’s war machine. A nasty thought, when only last week at a press conference with Pakistan PM Imram Khan, Trump spoke ‘casually’ of reviewing plans to ‘wipe Afghanistan off the face of the earth’, a blasé reference to hypothetical mass murder. But it wasn’t offhand. Such a policy of total destruction could only apply to Iran with the potential for nuclear weapons being used far from hypothetical.

“Reporters who dismiss his endless stream of hyperbole forget that this man is the commander in chief of the greatest military force in all time. Take a look at its history. Since the United States was founded in 1776, it has been at war for 214 out of its 235 years of existence. In other words, there were only 21 years when it wasn’t waging war.

“To put it into perspective, since 1776 there is a 91% chance that America was involved in some conflict, with not one US leader qualifying as a peacetime president. The US has never gone for a decade without fighting a war. The only time it had a five-year lull was during its isolationist period of the Great Depression. So we shouldn’t be surprised at the current outbreak of belligerence. It’s what passes for ‘normal’ in today’s crackpot society.

“In the latter half of the 20th century, two visionary books cast shadows over our future. One was George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its horrifying vision of a brutal, mind-controlling totalitarian state that gave us Big Brother and thought crime and newspeak, along with the memory hole, torture palace called the Ministry of Love and the unpleasant spectacle of a boot grinding into our faces. The other was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, published in 1932, that offered a different and softer form of totalitarianism, one of conformity achieved through engineered and hypnotic persuasion, of endless consumption that keeps the wheels of production turning, and of officially enforced promiscuity that eliminates sexual frustration. A pre-ordained caste system ranged from a highly intelligent managerial class to a sub-group of dim-witted serfs programmed to love menial work and soma, a drug conferring instant bliss.

"During the Cold War (one) Nineteen Eighty-Four had the edge, but when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, shopping took off and there were already soma-type drugs circulating throughout our society. Promiscuity took a whack from AIDS, but on balance we seemed to be destined for a trivial, drug-enhanced spend-o-rama with Brave New World out in front. And then we had the attack on New York’s twin towers in 2001 and thought crime and the grinding boot could not be eliminated so easily, along with the Ministry of Love.

“But Brave New World hasn’t gone away. Shopping malls stretch as far as the eye can see and there are ‘believers’ prattling on about the gene-rich and gene-poor - Huxley’s alphas and epsilons - busily engaged in a world of genetically modified babies, boundless consumption, casual sex and drugs. I think we’re edging towards a combination of the two.

“Whatever your definition, we live in a political jungle, in an out-of-control, corrupt, brutal system that is run by and for powerful corporates, turning what most still think of as a democracy into a charade. Our votes conceal the reality that our so-called leaders are not there to represent us, but to promote the interests of large crooked global elites.

“Take a gander at the election of Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn who is ‘clean’ but whose treatment is shameful. A handful of MPs nominated him to give the impression that the ballot was fair and open, not expecting him to win after the odious Tony Blair and his gang had done everything they could to remake Labor by eradicating any vestige of socialism, and who were furious when he won. Since Corbyn’s victory, the attacks have become even more virulent in an attempt to stop him from ever becoming prime minister. Like America’s attacks on Cuba.

“For almost 60 years, Cuba has successfully defended its revolution against a steady onslaught of US aggression, but Trump has upped the ante by blacklisting Cuba for ‘using its international medical program for human trafficking’, accusing it of ‘not doing enough’ to stop it.

“Trump should be frog-marched out of the White House and put into a padded cell. Political and economic events are telling us that justice is losing and greed is winning. Humanity has been asleep at the wheel or, more accurately, in an induced coma, for far too long. Is it too late for change? I hope not.

“WikiLeaks pushed everything forward, but we need to do a great deal more. Do we have enough journalists willing to stick their necks out and tell the hidden stories to a wide enough audience? The lawyers willing to suss out the evidence and build a case? I’m not holding my breath.

“The British Foreign Office has just banned two Russian outlets, Russia Today and Sputnik, from attending a Global Conference on Media Freedom to be held in London. It takes a special brand of hypocrisy and gall for a government that tortures journalists, bans inconvenient voices and slanders alternative media to advocate for freedom of the press.

“Viva Cuba!

“Joan Coxsedge”

Australian Anti-War Activist Joan Coxsedge's April 28, 2019 Letter

The following letter from Australian anti-war and Latin American solidarity activist Joan Coxsedge--who is also a former member of the Victoria state parliament--originally appeared in an Australian-Cuban solidarity group's newsletter.

“April 28, 2019

“Dear Comrades,

“Only a few weeks to go before we cast our votes for bad or much worse, and I’ll let you nut that one out for yourselves. Either way, the rorts and inequalities will continue with the rich getting richer and the rest of us getting slugged for the basics like gas, electricity, transport and water that were once in public hands.

“We don’t nurture our land, but allow the road lobby to do what it likes, cutting a swathe through precious Aboriginal sites and ancient trees and places of natural beauty. Climate change? Not interested. Homeless people? Ditto. Money talks and big money talks even louder.

“The world as a whole isn’t looking too flash. Fresh catastrophes just keep coming, some ‘natural’ and some not, mostly committed by screwed-up young men. Headlined for a day, before another nightmare comes along to take its place. The only thing that’s made me laugh out loud recently was the Ukrainian election which was won by a comedian, a fair dinkum comedian. Why not? When you cast your eyes around the world’s leaders, they certainly qualify as clowns, not funny ones though, just cynical caricatures who dish out crap and like to act tough. To impress the lying war-hungry clown who inhabits the White House?

“Even when Trump goes, he will be replaced with another war-hungry clown because they’re the ones who get the big gigs. Like corporate toady Joe Biden, who’s put his hand up to ‘rescue the Democrats from Bernie Sanders’.

“You’re probably sick of hearing about Julian Assange, but you shouldn’t be, because that’s what the powers-that-be want, so a few more facts about his incarceration in Britain’s maximum security Belmarsh Prison - its ‘Guantanamo Bay’ - wouldn’t hurt. And the knowledge that the slimy English magistrate who put him there is the same one who stopped a private prosecution of Tony Blair for war crimes. Assange is not allowed any visitors, including from his doctors and lawyers, despite needing urgent medical care. He’s being held in appalling conditions for exposing US war crimes. For being a journalist.

“A few weeks ago, the American Civil Liberties Union noted that ‘criminally prosecuting a publisher for the publication of truthful information would be a first in American history and unconstitutional…and would open the door to criminal investigations of other news organizations’. The manufactured FBI indictment contains no evidence, no documents and no genuine testimony but was concocted by the Pentagon’s shadowy Cyber Counter-Intelligence Assessments Branch.

“On 2 May Julian Assange will appear in custody at Westminster Magistrates’ Court for a preliminary extradition hearing and the US must request his extradition from the UK by 12 June. But he could be in UK gaols for years if the extradition is contested in court. While the Ecuadoran, British and US governments are flagrantly violating its own laws in persecuting Julian, individuals and civil society organizations are mobilizing to defend him. The Australian Government? Labor Opposition? Not a peep. 

“Trump and his cabal despise civil rights and are doing everything possible to wind back former treaties and alliances enshrining progressive international law. A free press? You’re kidding. The aim of these thugs in suits is to dissuade investigative journalists from ‘investigating’. Beat them up and lock them up as an example to others who might still want to write the truth about American barbarism. And journalists and governments are watching and taking note.

“The Deep State has gone ballistic, especially after WikiLeaks published the Vault 7 files, detailing the CIA’s gigantic hacking/cyber espionage repertoire, including the activities of the ultrasecret Centre for Cyber Intelligence, its NSA counterpart. There is every reason to believe that Assange will be hit with far more serious charges once he lands on US soil. They’re not going to all this bother to put him away for five years, but are clearly intent on setting a legal precedent to enable a US government to imprison any journalist who steps out of line.

“Never before in my long life have I seen such a belligerent United States. Jimmy Carter agrees. ’The most warlike nation in the history of the world’, he said. Vice-President Mike Pence told the UN Security Council that the White House intends removing Venezuelan President Maduro from power with ‘all options on the table’, adding that: ‘Russia and other friends of Maduro need to leave now or face the consequences’.

“The crisis in Venezuela could become global as Russia gears up for war. Like Iran, after Washington declared that part of the Iranian military was a ‘foreign terrorist organization’ and therefore subject to attack.

“As an antidote, I came across an article by George Burchett, son of the famous Wilfred, who recently attended the 70th anniversary of the founding of Ho Chi Minh’s School of Writing and Journalism, some 80 kms north of Hanoi. In 1949, resistance against the French colonialists, backed by US Imperialists, was almost impossible. In that year, 49 young students were trained as lecturers, including the famous General Giap, in revolutionary journalism so they could contribute to their country’s struggle for independence and liberty.

“Uncle Ho’s principles? Know why you write and who you write for. Be succinct. Get your facts straight. Don’t use complicated language. Believe in what you write. Revolutionary journalism is only possible when truth is on your side. Then the pen is indeed mightier than the sword. When words serve a just cause, no army can defeat them. Viva!

“Joan Coxsedge” 

Joan Coxsedge's `Some Facts About Libya'--Part 3

Pharma 150 chemical plant in Rabta, Libya

 In  Part 3 of her 2018 book, Some Facts About Libya: How the West destroyed this once prosperous nation, long-time Australian antiwar and Latin American solidarity activist Joan Coxsedge--who is also a former member of the Victoria state parliament--recalls her 1989 visit to Libya in the following way:

Visiting Libya ten years later in 1989.

I returned to Libya in 1989 when it looked as if World War Three was about to break out. Washington had accused Libya of building a chemical weapons plant and was threatening to militarily destroy the country unless Qaddafi closed the plant down and allowed a US team to inspect the site. Based solely on US intelligence sources, Washington claimed with mounting hysteria that a satellite had pinpointed a construction site at Rabta, about 85 kilometers from Tripoli. We were assailed with a load of PR bull about Libya ‘threatening world peace’, which echoed around the world for most of January. Qaddafi continued to deny the charge.

Pressure from Washington was heating up and people became very nervous about the consequences for global stability. No one doubted the capacity of the US to carry out its threat. In 1986 US planes had bombed Tripoli and killed a number of people, including Qaddafi’s infant daughter. There was also deepening concern that President Reagan – already well away with Alzheimer’s disease – was about to vacate the White House with a literal bang. There was an added sense of urgency when two American F-14 Tomcat fighter pilots chanting ‘good kill, good kill’, shot down two Libyan MIG-23s over the Mediterranean, claiming self-defense. The Libyan pilots died.
  
Rather than waiting for something to happen, small groups from around the world traveled to Libya during that critical period to act as human shields to encourage some thoughtful talk. But once our media heard that a group of Australians were joining them they went feral, deciding for us in advance that our mission was solely concerned with passing judgement on Libya, to find it ‘guilty as charged’. We were also attacked for going to a country that was supposedly developing chemical and nuclear weapons, neglecting to mention that the nations they ardently supported – the US and Israel – had both in abundance.

We had many meetings with a variety of Libyans, the standout being our audience with their leader, Muammar Qaddafi. It took place in a large red, green and yellow Bedouin tent in the center of the Aziziya Barracks in Tripoli. Draped in a striking camel-colored mohair cloak, he talked of peace and that a genuine peace was not based on terrorism but based on love (tell that to the Yankees, I thought), and expressed surprise that the smear campaign against him had reached Australia. He believed that Australia should remain aloof from the imperialists – so did we – and expressed disappointment that bilateral agreements between us were sacrificed too readily considering that major programs of cooperation could be expanded.

In the General People’s Congress, we met Libya’s Deputy Prime Minister, Ibrahim Abukhazan, who also mentioned his desire to re-establish links with Australia. Libya had been forced into confrontation with the United States after its revolution, he said, and any genuine revolution would get the same reaction. Prior to 1969 all of Libya’s resources went to overseas capitalists, who used the country as a military base, with their political institutions getting their instructions from the British and American embassies. He believed Libya should be allowed to build new relationships, but the shock of its revolution was so profound that Western reaction remained one of undiluted hatred, despite its style of democracy being a consecration of what was aspired to in the West by Voltaire and the Rights of Man, but never realized because our governments got their orders from Washington.

We were eventually driven to Rabta, but only on the outskirts where a huge tent city had sprung up, not close enough to pass judgement on its function one way or another. We joined thousands of anxious people keeping vigil, singing and holding hands and praying for peace. The furor over Libya lasted for most of January, but collapsed with the end of Reagan’s presidency. A story buried on page 17 in the New York Times on 2 March 1990 – ignored by our own media – stated that White House officials had admitted that the Pharma 150 plant at Rabta was not going to manufacture chemical weapons after all, but was being ‘converted’ into a pharmaceutical plant. Which was precisely what the Libyans had been saying all along. 

Joan Coxsedge's `Some Facts About Libya'--Part 2

Jamahiriya Museum in Libya

In  Part 2 of her 2018 book, Some Facts About Libya: How the West destroyed this once prosperous nation, long-time Australian antiwar and Latin American solidarity activist Joan Coxsedge--who is also a former member of the Victoria state parliament--recalls her 1979 visit to Libya in the following way:

Visiting Libya in 1979.

In 1979 I was invited to Libya to take part in a conference on Palestine with the moniker ‘The Conference of Tripoli on Imperialist, Zionist and Reactionary Scenes against the Arab Nation, the Danger of these Schemes to the Vital Interest of All Nations and to the Problems of Peace and Liberation all over the World’. Not the most popular subject in Australia, but of interest to me because I believed the Palestinians got a spectacularly rotten deal when the world salved its conscience by giving away their land after WW2. It took place six years after the Yom Kippur War, a year after the ‘Camp David Agreement’ and a year before the Israeli Knesset (parliament) passed a new law proclaiming Jerusalem the ‘eternal capital of Israel’. 

The conference was well organised and extraordinarily interesting. Security was tight, for good reason. Palestinian leaders with a price on their heads using aliases flew in from around the world. Many of their colleagues had been assassinated by Israeli hit squads.

Apart from Muammar Qaddafi who opened the conference, I met George Habash, head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Vanessa Redgrave, the tall, strikingly handsome British actress. And we all rose to our feet to give a standing ovation of welcome to a delegation from the newly elected Sandinista government in Nicaragua, their debut on the international stage.

At the start of proceedings we were each given a copy of Qaddafi’s The Green Book, Libya’s answer to Mao’s Little Red Book, except the Libyan version was much longer. In it Qaddafi called parliamentary democracy a sham where voters ‘stand in long queues to cast their votes in ballot boxes in the same way as they throw other papers into the dustbin’. Quite a few would agree with that. He preferred direct popular participation in people’s congresses – a notion not too far removed from the slogan of Russia’s 1917 October Revolution, which called for ‘all power to the Soviets’ (local committees) – even though that slogan later bit the dust. On the second day, I gave a paper titled ‘The Impact of US Imperialism on Australia’.

 Thanks to a hostile media, I doubt if many would associate Libya with art and architecture, despite it being an archaeologist’s heaven back then. In the centuries before Christ, when Greek supremacy went down the drain after the sacking of Carthage and Corinth, Rome ruled the region for more than eight centuries before it lost control to the Arabs in the seventh century AD. Despite another thirteen hundred turbulent years, many of the ancient monuments survived. Western Libya in particular was richly endowed as I discovered during my tour of Sabratha and Leptis Magna, birthplace of Emperor Septimus Severus. 

I walked down streets where ruts from ancient chariot wheels were still visible and past the remains of houses where people had lived and worked until the end of the 4th or 5th century. I fingered grooves on a stone counter made by ancient butchers and fishmongers when they sharpened their massive knives and roamed in and out of small shops and stalls that had once sold spices and wines and goods made from leather.

But the building that took the cake was the ‘Hunting Baths’ whose domes and vaults had been buried under sand for fifteen centuries. Inside, a series of warm and hot rooms were lined with hollow tiles where hot air from the furnaces passed through, and most astonishing of all was the discovery that the 2000-year-old bathhouse still worked!

During my drive to Sabratha I stopped at the Jamahiriya Museum to look at its collection of priceless mosaics and worry whether these magical places and ancient artefacts have managed to survive the savagery and barbarism of the 21st century.

Australian Anti-War Activist Joan Coxsedge's November 25, 2018 Letter

The following letter from Australian anti-war and Latin American solidarity activist Joan Coxsedge--who is also a former member of the Victoria state parliament--originally appeared in an Australian-Cuban solidarity group's newsletter. 

“November 25, 2018

“Dear Comrades

“Matthew Guy’s been done like a dinner so it’s over to Labor to deliver. There’s lots of other things to write about, none of them particularly Christmassy I’m afraid, but that’s the way things are. Once a time of celebration, now a time of reflection and wondering what the devil 2019 will throw at us.

“I’d rather not talk about Trump, but he’s still mindlessly bunging off tweets full of exclamation marks and slogans about ‘America First’ and crap that Iran is the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism when It’s Saudi Arabia and Israel and his very own US of A. A man bereft of either integrity or justice, although even he might have gone a bit beyond the pale for defending Saudi Arabia in face of their horrific act of violence in dismembering a journalist while he’s still alive, even if it was a typical Tuesday afternoon for Saudi’s rulers. Amid media outrage, a less publicized story didn’t seem to cut it in the same way. About 85,000 Yemeni children under the age of five died of starvation between April 2015 and October 2018 as a direct result of Saudi’s blockade and relentless violence.

“Who really matters in our world? 9/11 saw 2,996 human beings die in a blaze of publicity. Horrible. But is it worse than the deaths of more than a million Iraqis in a war based on lies? A war engineered by government secret agencies and Washington insiders and sold to the public and rammed through without any public accountability. No-one was tried for war crimes. No-one was sacked. No changes were made to prevent such horrors ever happening again. You don’t need a conspiracy to understand the nexus between plutocratic thugs and elements of the government.

“Julian Assange’s eight-year ordeal is another case in point. Incarcerated under British house arrest by a servile UK government and then holed up in the Ecuadoran Embassy under the protection of former president Correa, despite the absence of any charges filed against him. The current president of Ecuador, the brutal, ultra-right, pro-torture, thoroughly evil Lenin Moreno who wants to privatize everything, including the Amazon, is rescinding Assange’s asylum so that he will be handed over to Washington where a secret indictment and a Grand Jury stands at the ready and where a large number of Democrats and Republicans reckon he should be executed.

“His crime? Telling the truth like Daniel Ellsberg, whose Pentagon Papers were published in the New York Times and the Washington Post and helped bring about the end of the Vietnam War and who was treated like a hero by the rest of the world.

“As an Australian, Julian Assange is not subject to US law. Tell that to the grovellers in Canberra. If he was an Israeli citizen?

“We live in a rich country, except the wealth isn’t shared. Ross Gittins used statistics to highlight the inequalities regarding our education system, with Gonski jettisoned to avoid a row with private schools. And when Catholics put the frighteners on, governments buckle.

“Australia is now in the shameful position of being equal fourth with the most socially stratified education system among the OECD’s 35 nations. Only Mexico, Hungary and Chile have a more class-segregated set-up. 95%of our most disadvantaged are in the state sector. It matters because it shows what happens when schools are funded on the basis of religion and powerful lobby groups rather than need.

“But some articles really pull you up in your tracks and one that got to me was by George Monbiot who describes a press conference held by climate activists last week called Extinction Rebellion. Asked by journalists if aims to reduce UK carbon emissions to zero by 2025 were unrealistic, a young woman stepped forward full of fury and grief. ‘What is it you are asking me as a 20-year old to face and to accept about my future and my life?…This is an emergency. We are facing extinction…what is it you want me to feel?’ No-one responded.

“Tinkering at the edges got us into this mess and will not get us out. Public figures talk and act as if environmental change will be linear and gradual, but the earth’s systems are highly complex and complex systems do not respond in linear ways. Only one of the many life support systems on which we depend - soils, aquifers, rainfall, ice, winds and currents, biological abundance and diversity - needs fail for everything else to slide.

“It was pointed out that 50bn tonnes of resources used per year is about the limit the Earth’s systems can tolerate, but our world is already consuming 70bn tonnes and is on target to use 180bn tonnes by 2050 making ‘green growth’ physically impossible.

“The problem is political. The oligarchic control of wealth, politics, media and public discourse explains the comprehensive institutional failure now pushing us towards disaster. Think of Trump and his cabinet of multi-millionaires; the Murdoch empire and its massive contribution to climate science denial; the oil and motor companies whose lobbying prevents a faster shift to new technologies.

“And it’s not just governments failing us. Public broadcasters have shut down environmental coverage while allowing opaquely funded lobbyists masquerading as think tanks, to shape the debate and deny what we face. Academics, fearful of upsetting their funders and colleagues, bite their lips.

“But growing numbers of people understand that continued economic growth is incompatible with our precious Earth. And we must not allow the Earth’s despoilers to tell us what we can and cannot do. It’s our world, not theirs. And we’re running out of time.

“But we still need a break. Enjoy the company of family and friends and as always, take extra care on our roads…

“Joan Coxsedge”

Joan Coxsedge's `Some Facts About Libya' Prologue

Former South African government head Nelson Mandela with Libya's Qaddafi 

In the Prologue to her 2018 book, Some Facts About Libya: How the West destroyed this once prosperous nation,  long-time Australian antiwar and Latin American solidarity activist Joan Coxsedge--who is also a former member of the Victoria state parliament--indicates why and how the Democratic Obama-Clinton administration launched its war for regime change in Libya in 2011: 

In March 1992 the UN imposed an arms and air embargo on Libya after Qaddafi refused to hand over the two Libyans accused of the Lockerbie bombing, sanctions that were tightened in 1993. But back then Libya had the highest standard of living in Africa that reduced their harsh impact. Libyans were provided with free education, healthcare, housing, electricity, subsidized food and interest-free loans, women wore Western clothes, went to work and attended university. If they wanted to farm, they were given a farmhouse, land, livestock and seeds, free of charge, and their state bank provided loans at 0% interest, as set out in law. And there were no terrorists. More than 60 countries had embassies in Tripoli, along with dozens of multinationals.

One of Qaddafi’s closest friends was Nelson Mandela. While the West was actively supporting the oppressive white regime, Mandela never forgot Libya’s support during the bitter anti-apartheid struggle, a friendship barely acknowledged in the West. Mandela became South Africa’s first black president in 1994 and rejected intense pressure from Western leaders to sever all ties with Qaddafi. He was accused of ‘supporting terrorism’ after refusing to cancel an official state visit to Libya. ‘A saint visiting a mad dog’, screamed the media. Mandela’s response: ‘No country can claim to be the policemen of the world and no state can dictate to another what it should do … those that yesterday were friends of our enemies have the gall to tell me not to visit my brother Qaddafi …’

And in March 1998, while visiting South Africa, President Bill Clinton was told at a news conference: ‘I have also invited Brother Leader Qaddafi to this country. I do so because our moral authority dictates that we should not abandon those who helped us in our darkest hour … and those who berated me for being loyal to our friends can literally go and jump in a pool.’ Clinton is said to have remained smiling throughout the event.

Today, Libya is a ‘failed state’, not because of Qaddafi but because of the treachery, greed and deceit of a number of Western countries and their allies in the Gulf. He was targeted for refusing to become a puppet after the 1969 coup, for closing down foreign military bases, and for swiftly nationalizing Libya’s vast oil industry that had largely benefited Western companies. He also hoped to free the entire African continent from Western financial dominance by introducing the ‘gold dinar’, a goldbacked African currency that threatened US dollar hegemony and the West’s central banking system. It probably sealed his fate, although in 2007, former NATO Supreme Military Commander General Wesley Clark  admitted that a ‘high ranking’ Pentagon official told him that Washington had been planning for some time ‘to take out seven countries in five years’, with Libya on its hit list.

After a decade of US sanctions, Qaddafi paid $1.5 billion to the Lockerbie families and abandoned his missile and nuclear program. Western leaders like Tony Blair and Condoleezza Rice paid him a visit and it was reported that he gave Sarkozy 50 million euros for his election campaign. Qaddafi probably thought that his rehabilitation was complete, but he was wrong. The West was only waiting for the right opportunity. It came in early 2011 when Cameron in Britain, Sarkozy in France and Obama in the US, with his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ‘leading from behind’, decided that Qaddafi had to go.

Secret agencies worked with Islamist groups to foment unrest around Benghazi using NATO for their criminal intervention. When Qaddafi sent his security forces to quell the unrest, it was claimed a civilian massacre was about to happen. It wasn’t, but a UN Security Council resolution forced a no fly zone over Libya without any evidence whatsoever. Germany, Russia, China and India declined to take part.

In March 2011, within 48 hours of the adoption of the resolution, Obama and Clinton ordered the US-NATO coalition to bomb Libya while the African Union was still desperately trying to find a solution to the impasse. More than 30,000 Libyans were killed, 50,000 injured, and the civilian infrastructure was severely damaged, including hospitals and schools – war crimes described as ‘humanitarian’ and a ‘historic success’ by the Pentagon. In October 2011, Qaddafi was hunted down by a mob and brutally murdered, with NATO warplanes playing a major role. His body was desecrated and put on public display before being buried in an unmarked grave in the Libyan Desert. Immediately after his death, NATO ended its bombing. Hillary Clinton, one of the main architects of the disgraceful operation, gloated on television: ‘We came, we saw, he died.’

Today, several terrorist groups, including ISIS and al-Qaida, have established a strong presence in the country and Libya is now a haven for human trafficking. Large quantities of weapons from Qaddafi’s arsenal have found their way to Mali, Niger and the Central African Republic, creating instability and mayhem, and Libyan arms and fighters have also found their way into Syria via Turkey.

Seven years after Qaddafi’s murder, this once-thriving country is fragmented and in a state of chaos. Despite its vast natural resources, its citizens face hunger, poverty and despair. So far no one has been held responsible for these crimes against humanity. It is highly unlikely they ever will be. 

Australian Anti-War Activist Joan Coxsedge's June 24, 2018 Letter

The following letter from Australian anti-war and Latin American solidarity activist Joan Coxsedge--who is also a former member of the Victoria state parliament--originally appeared in an Australian-Cuban solidarity group's newsletter. 

"June 24, 2018

"Dear Comrades 

"I hope you’re all OK in these extraordinarily difficult times. I’ve lived through the Great Depression, WW2, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Cold War and its aftermath, the Cuban missile crisis and god knows how many military incursions, takeovers and coups but I cannot remember a more fraught time than this.

"It’s hardly news that Trump is a coldhearted, capricious weirdo who shoots from the hip, but since his meeting with Putin in Helsinki, anti-Trump/anti-Russian hysteria has reached dangerous new levels with ‘proof’ of Russian interference in America’s ‘democratic institutions’ and talk of treason. Not only bullshit but total hypocrisy.

"Americans might suffer from amnesia but the Russians do not. They remember all the foreign invasions and attacks on its sovereignty. Even before the Bolsheviks won their revolution during the bitter civil war, the Allies sent troops into Russia with the intent of installing a more ‘acceptable’ government. By 1919, the US was giving direct military support to Admiral Kolchak’s White regime, but as prospects for victory faded, US troops withdrew in 1920, not by orders from the top, but because the ordinary soldiers were fed up and wanted to go home.

"In 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union before the US entered the war, Roosevelt and Churchill forged an alliance with Stalin, although their real intent was spelled out by Harry Truman, then a US Senator, ‘if the US saw the Nazis were winning it should give them a helping hand’, so once Germany was defeated, thanks to the Soviet Union, communism had to be dealt with. The US exempted key Nazis from prosecution for war crimes and used them to help overthrow the Soviets. One of its earliest actions involved Ukrainians (a close ally of the Nazis) parachuting them back into the Soviet Union to create mayhem. They failed, but it showed how the current furor over Ukraine is simply a replay of an old story.

"Post WW2, Germany was ‘managed’ by two new international agencies, the IMF and the World Bank, as part of an expanding US-style capitalist empire, while the Soviets were becoming increasingly concerned at the mounting crisis over Berlin, NATO, and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a direct warning from Washington. In response, Moscow ramped up its own nuclear programme and the US retaliated by encircling them with military bases armed to the teeth with nuclear aircraft and missiles. Cold War One.

"Russians also remember the promise made by Bush Senior to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand during negotiations for the unification of Germany, but it did, right up to its borders, a major reason why the Russians moved back into the Crimea. And they remember that it was Washington who helped install the drunken fool Boris Yeltsin who encouraged an avalanche of dodgy Western investments and hedge funds to walk in and create a corrupt oligarchy that bled the country dry while Soviet citizens were reduced to poverty.

"But how many Americans know about Washington’s malign influence on foreign elections, at last count more than 81. If Washington doesn’t like the result, it ‘moves in’ and installs some murderous psychopath sympathetic to the Military/Industrial Complex. With a massive $US1 trillion defense budget at its fingertips, it needs an enemy to justify such a grotesque sum, with Russia the constant, at the epicenter, and with other hate figures coming and going according to ‘need’.

"Iran is a useful second fiddle. You would reckon that only the unhinged would contemplate such a potential catastrophe. But not here in Australia in the Land of the Grovel, where we agree with all of Washington’s demands, happy for Pine Gap to play a crucial role in its war games, the most important base outside the United States. In 1975, Pine Gap played a major part in the constitutional coup that ousted the Whitlam Government.

"Julian Assange remains on a knife edge with Ecuadoran President Moreno visiting London with the assumption he is about to cut a deal with British authorities to withdraw his asylum protection. Sweden dropped its sexual assault investigation last year and the only criminal charge is a 2012 arrest warrant for ‘failure to surrender’ to UK’s bail conditions, an offence carrying a prison sentence of up to two years, but UK authorities refuse to give a guarantee that Assange will not be extradited to the US where he will be thrown to the wolves and eaten up. But the Turnbull government couldn’t care less.

"Or about Timor Leste, one of the world’s poorest nations. When an ASIS agent blew the whistle on our government’s illegal bugging of East Timor’s cabinet room to advantage Australia in negotiations over boundaries and oil, ASIS Witness K and his lawyer Bernard Collaery were charged with conspiracy. The case will be held in secret and not allowed to be reported because Australians might be reminded about our shameful behavior towards the tiny struggling nation that sits right on our doorstep.

"There again, whether the case would be reported fairly or reported at all, is far from certain in our shrinking narrowly-based media landscape, which is about to get even more shrunken with Nine Entertainment’s takeover of Fairfax Media. Nine gets 51% of the deal and all the power and Fairfax gets sweet FA. A sell-out by the Fairfax board and a national disgrace. PM Turnbull allowed it to happen, while former PM Paul Keating slammed the sleazy carve-up, declaring Nine had the ‘ethics of an alley cat with no moral compass’. Balanced reporting of current affairs and the news? In your dreams.

"The ‘White Helmets’ are back in the news, darlings of the West extolled as ‘heroes’ and ‘saviours’, when they’re anything but. The name was ‘created’ by a shadowy New York-based PR mob ‘The Syria Campaign’ that was pinched from an Argentinian rescue outfit, the Cascos Blancos. The ‘White Helmets’ are not independent, apolitical or unarmed, but are funded by Western governments and Israel and only work in areas controlled by the armed opposition, mostly Nusa/Al Qaida, sometimes carrying weapons but always celebrating terrorist victories and assisting in executions and always supporting the overthrow of Assad.

"Amongst all the rottenness, some sweet news. A miracle when British divers found all twelve plucky Wild Boar soccer club members and their wonderful coach crouched on a ledge deep inside the flooded cave in Thailand’s north, but the effort to get them out was a truly global operation of courage and co-operation, with Thai’s Navy Seals playing a major role, along with our two locals, Dr Richard Harris who sedated the boys, and vet Craig Challen. All of them true heroes who achieved the impossible. Viva!

"Joan Coxsedge"

Australian Anti-War Activist Joan Coxsedge's March 25, 2018 letter

The following letter from Australian anti-war and Latin American solidarity activist Joan Coxsedge--who is also a former member of the Victoria state parliament--originally appeared in an Australian-Cuban solidarity group's newsletter.

   

March 25, 2018

Dear Comrades,

I am sitting down nutting out what to write when most sensible people are going to the footie or watching sport on the telly, or going to the mind-numbing Grand Prix, or maybe trotting off to the flower show, which is as it should be, while out in the nasty world, we’re going down the toilet.

I wish more Australians would fight back harder against all the rorts, the lies, the attacks on workers and the manipulated climate of hysteria being deliberately whipped up. We’re all supposed to believe the bullshit surrounding the ‘spy poisoning’ in London, with provocations multiplying to the point where they are becoming dangerous triggers for war, made more frighteningly real with the recent appointment of unhinged thug John Bolton as Trump’s new National Security Adviser.

But Bolton’s no ordinary neo-con hawk, he’s a full-on war-maker with a track record going back to George Bush Senior. Obsessed for years with plans to destroy the Islamic Republic, he has repeatedly called for the obliteration of Iran during his regular appearances on Fox News and was the major player in persuading Trump to tear up the Iran nuclear deal. In a sane society, people like Bolton wouldn’t be allowed on television, much less put in charge of American security. They’d be locked up.

For the record, Iran has never had a nuclear weapons program nor the opportunity to develop them. It has no heavy water reactor, only a small number of centrifuges and destroyed its stockpile of uranium for its medical reactor. Iran is also being actively inspected and no country under active UN arms inspections has ever developed a bomb.

But truth is missing from the current dirty propaganda campaign because big corporations like wars. Wars mean they can manufacture more shiny weapons and bombs, the ultimate in planned obsolescence. They’ve made another killing after a recent visit with Trump by Saudi’s Crown Prince, 2nd in command to one of the world’s most repressive dictators. A $12.5bn arms sale bonanza.

Next week marks the 3rd anniversary of Saudi’s intervention in Yemen’s civil war where US warplanes flown by US-trained pilots drop US-made bombs that have killed thousands of innocent civilians. So you can see where all the claptrap about Russian spy poisoners is leading us, with apparently not the slightest understanding or concern about the horrific consequences. A variation of the ‘weapons of mass deception’ lie all over again that was used to justify the calamitous war and invasion of Iraq that killed more than a million people and left a dysfunctional and corrupt occupied battlefield. According to peace activist Medea Benjamin the ‘million’ minimizes the enormity of the tragedy. Using the best information available (the US military refused to keep a tally) she estimates that 2.4 million Iraqis have died since the 2003 invasion, along with the obliteration of its history and culture. But no-one has been held accountable.

Russian spies and poisons are a ploy by Washington and its allies to conceal the fact that the West’s cant about ‘promoting democracy’ and ‘defeating terrorism’ is just hollow doublespeak to conceal the reality that the Pentagon is the nerve centre for a huge killing juggernaut that operates for the benefit of US capitalism, an out-of-control monster that is destroying our world. Trump is already lining up a ‘war cabinet’ of madmen and has deployed warships in the Red Sea, the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, ready to launch 400 long-range Tomahawks.

On March 17, the Russian General Staff warned about an imminent attack on Syria and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov declared that the US, Britain, France and others had special forces operating in Syria that were directly engaging the Syrian Army. ‘US instructors’ are training militants to stage false flag chemical attacks in southern Syria, said to be pretexts for air strikes on Syrian government troops and infrastructure, planned provocations that you can bet your bottom dollar will be widely covered in our media. But, and it’s a big but, Russia’s new suite of hypersonic weapons gives it an edge over would-be enemies and we can only hope that it might make the US and its NATO buddies think carefully before going to war.

As Tim Anderson writes in his excellent book The Dirty War on Syria: ‘Although every war makes ample use of lies and deception, the dirty war on Syria has relied on a level of mass disinformation not seen in living memory. British/Australian journalist Philip Knightley pointed out that war propaganda typically involves a depressingly predictable pattern of demonizing the enemy leader, then demonizing the enemy people through atrocity stories, real or imagined. Accordingly, a mild-mannered eye doctor called Bashar as Assad became the new evil in the world and according to consistent western media reports, the Syrian Army did nothing but kill civilians for more than four years. To this day, many imagine the Syrian conflict is a ‘civil war’, a ‘popular revolt’ or some sort of internal sectarian conflict. These myths are, in many respects, a substantial achievement for the big powers which have driven a series of ‘regime change’ operations in the Middle East region, all on false pretexts, over the past 15 years.’

Russia’s intrusion into the conflict in 2015 with its vast air power has turned the tide, which is why America’s wheels are coming off and why Russophobia has peaked. It is prudent to predict that the way America approaches war there will be a sensible technological response to Russia in the foreseeable future. Its track record over the past decades is a record of military and humanitarian disasters.

Finally, a quirky poem from Leunig:

I was radicalised by the butterflies

And later by a tree.

And then a word from a passing bird

Put radical thoughts in me.

And I am on the watch-list now

With the fish and pixies too,

Who call to me with a note of glee

‘Just do what you can do’

.

Joan Coxsedge