Australian Anti-War Activist Joan Coxsedge's September 24, 2017 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 24, 2017

“Dear Comrades

“I want to thank everyone who supported me during this difficult time. Cedric died on Sunday September 10. After a difficult year health-wise, he’d been in hospital for almost three weeks fighting yet another infection, perhaps multiple infections, and been given hefty doses of antibiotics and subjected to numerous tests, but it became clear he wasn’t responding, so we faced the heartbreaking decision of removing all life support and letting him die in peace.

“We sent him off in great style, celebrating his life at the Unitarian Church. It was warm and personal and a fitting tribute to this man who was my soul mate. We had been married for 64 years. I’m so thankful he didn’t end up in a nursing home.

“But life goes on. And while the world stands on the brink, with devastation and loss of life across the Caribbean and Mexico, Trump made his debut speech before the United Nations General Assembly, a 40-minute rant attacking socialism and communism and ‘rogue states’ Iran, Venezuela and Cuba. He openly threatened to wipe North Korea off the face of the earth, a nation that can barely feed its people and yet has to defend itself against an onslaught of Western hostility, ferocious UN sanctions and ongoing US/South Korean war games.

“America’s historical destruction of North Korea and today’s ongoing threats should be considered in the context of the living memory of its older generation. Pyongyang, a city of half-a-million people before 1950, at the end of hostilities had only two buildings left intact.

“Trump’s UN tirade was tailored for Americans who were born yesterday. It will go down in history as a marker of the final collapse of a terminally corrupt and rotten regime where any pretense of global co-operation has gone. And yet our local media hacks felt it was more important to treat his words with amusement and then headline a stupid story about a Tasmanian who shoved Abbott in the guts.

“But Trump is merely a ventriloquists’ dummy who read from a teleprompter transmitting to Americans words written by the Generals, all of them a distortion of historical fact. In a sane world, UN delegates should have handcuffed Trump and hauled him before a criminal court and shouted him down or walked out instead of listening to his litany of lies.

“The US has become the 4th Reich and we question whether the world can survive its brutal foreign policy. To our great shame, Australia supported his psychopathic threats, already up to our neck in America’s war crimes around the world. No wonder we’re on the skids. Amongst the world leaders, there was one who almost exceeded Trump in its mendacity and malignancy. Benjamin Netanyahu. For Israel’s leader, lying has become a creed.

“Robert Fisk honed in on Trump’s warped view of WW2 pointing out that it was Russia that bore the brunt of Hitler’s Wehrmacht and it was Russia’s destruction of Hitler’s military power that broke the Nazis. And it was Stalin who’d been pleading for a Second Front for two years. When Hitler marched into Poland and Norway and Holland and Belgium and Luxembourg and then France and threatened to invade Britain, the United States enjoyed a profitable period of neutrality - as it did for most of WW1 - until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, more than two years after WW2 began. We should also remember that it was Hitler who then declared war on the US, not the other way round.

“John Pilger writes about a heavily publicized recent TV series on ‘The Vietnam War’ shown on America’s highly corporatized PBS network (the ’P’ stands for Pentagon and Petroleum) directed by Lynn Novick and Ken Burns, experts at whitewashing the crimes of US imperialism. Their biggest backer, the Bank of America.

“The title itself is absurd. The Vietnamese called it ‘The American War’ which broadens the geographic lens to include Laos and Cambodia, when the world’s most powerful military empire invaded and assaulted a small peasant nation and its neighbors for more than a decade, spraying millions of tons of Agent Orange on to forests and crops ravaging and poisoning a once bountiful land, and frying human beings with napalm. No mention of Vietnamese dead, only Americans, justifying one of the great crimes of the 20th century, all too familiar to those who observe the close relationship between Hollywood and the Pentagon and the CIA (with 70 years of high crimes under its belt).

“The rewriting of history never stops and the blood never dries, it seems, with the bloodthirsty invader purged of guilt, legitimizing subsequent wars of aggression. As Pilger writes: ‘The true scandal is the insidious assumption of power by sinister warmaking vested interests for which no American voted’…an historic shift of power in Washington.

"But where are the angry people? Where are the protests? Bishop Desmond Tutu put it this way. ‘If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.’

“Joan Coxsedge”