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
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