The broadcaster’s response to my editing of international news stories amounted to a show trial, reflecting a malaise within mainstream media. (more…)
Tag: International relations
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Corporate media leaves out the very insights that made John Pilger a man not afraid to speak truth to power
John Pilger, the investigative anti-war journalist who spoke up for China and humiliated the western corporate media, has died—and every single report on this in the western media I have seen has carefully omitted this fact. (more…)
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Goodish guy in bad company
Gibran Rakabuming Raka is smarter than his stolid Dad Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo, President of our huge neighbour since 2014. As Vice President Gibran could be a positive change agent – but that demands missionary zeal and the guts to challenge his dangerous leader. Does he have The Right Stuff?
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China and Australia once were allies
With QUAD and maybe JAUKUS, Japan is anxious to recruit us and others as spear carriers against China. The anti-China cause is long standing in Japan. (more…)
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In the Australia-China relationship, Australia will always follow the US-A repost from October 16,2023
From China’s perspective, Australia will always follow the US no matter what. And the US is out to contain China – there is nothing that China could do to change that. Australia has made relatively little effort to change this perception. This means for China, there is little point in putting much effort into dealing with Australia directly. The only way for the China-Australia relationship to be noticeably improved is for the China-US relationship to be improved first. This all sounds dismal. But in fact, nothing is inevitable. Both sides have agency to change those perceptions. (more…)
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The remarkable durability of a failed embargo
Despite its failure to isolate Cuba and overthrow its government, and its near unanimous opposition from the international community, the 62-year old US embargo seems likely to endure into the foreseeable future. (more…)
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Protest against war at last
From the perspective of a 1960s and 1970s protester, the domestic and international scenario looks worse than grim. Following the 2016 US election cycle, a campaign worker for a moderately liberal Congressional candidate working from an upstate New York campaign headquarters told me after that candidate’s abysmal loss to a far right-wing Republican, “I refuse to be cynical.” Electoral politics in the US and elsewhere most often fuels the march toward cynicism with left parties and candidates often herded to the desert of oblivion, the so-called scapegoat. (more…)
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Christ is born in Gaza
Why was Christ born in a stable? Because the Israelis bombed all the houses. Truly. Every year Jesus is born, dies and is reborn. He is reborn into our world – that is part of what makes Christian symbology meaningful. This year Christ is a brown skinned Middle Eastern man about to be born in Gaza. (more…)
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Courage and conscience: It’s time for independence in media reporting on China
For the sake of Australia’s national interest, and for journalistic integrity that will be judged by history, can mainstream media maintain independence from short-term, vulgar political and geopolitical influence and interference, especially with regard to reporting about China? (more…)
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Australia’s three wars
In a lead article last week in The Sydney Morning Herald the political and international editor Peter Hartcher declared that Australia was ’connected to three wars’, but only one of them would be measured in decades. He was referring to the conflict in Gaza and the war in Ukraine both of which ‘affect Australia’s security’. How this was so was nowhere explained. But it is the third war which was ‘a direct threat to our sovereignty and liberty.’ Here he was pointing to ‘the Chinese Communist Party’s war to dominate the Indo-Pacific and, ultimately, the world.’ This ’unconventional war’, he declared, had been ‘underway for over a decade already’ and would continue long into the future. (more…)
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Two solutions for the “Question of Palestine”
In these terrible times in the wake of October 7, there is one perception as to which the Israeli government and virtually all other governments now publicly profess to agree, sincerely and passionately in the Israeli case and at least rhetorically in the case of the Global West: The “Question of Palestine” can no longer be ignored or “managed” but must, finally, be definitively resolved. (more…)
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What happened to the UN’s ‘Responsibility to Protect’?
The world watches the destruction of Gaza as 13,000 thousand Palestinians are killed including 5,600 children. The world watches as Gazan hospitals are invaded, patients ordered to flee south where there is neither water, food nor safety. The world watches while Israeli spokespersons claim they never target civilians, and then comes the propagandist fig leaf to conceal all the cruelties. An Israeli spokesperson points to a hole in the ground beside a hospital as evidence of Hamas’ headquarters. (more…)
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COP-out: Why the petrostate-hosted climate talkfest will fail
After a succession of record-breaking months of record heat including 1.8°C in September, global warming for 2023 as a whole will likely tip 1.5°C, with 2024 even hotter as the effect of the building El Nino is felt more fully. Already hundreds of thousands have died and millions displaced, primarily in countries least responsible for climate change. The annual economic cost globally is in the hundreds of billions. (more…)
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Australia’s role in the bombing of Gaza
Being part of the global supply network that supplies parts for the Israeli F-35 jet fighters used over Gaza implicates Australia in their alleged war crimes. (more…)
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America, why don’t you get your bloodied hands off Hong Kong
Weaponising human rights against the city and mainland China only becomes more farcical when the US and its close allies are busy violating them. (more…)
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Gaza – What is the end game?
In recent weeks some frightening possibilities have come to the world’s attention. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has noted plans, by some, for high density Jewish cities in the Gaza Strip. Such plans call for total destruction and mass expulsion in Gaza. (more…)
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The enemy within: Democracy and ‘Boys’ in the backroom
The US national security establishment has long-standing, pervasive and influential linkages with civil and military bureaucracies throughout the world who see their primary role not as serving their own governments but subordinating them to the interests of the United States. There is need for constant vigilance against this enemy within. (more…)
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Does Israel have a right to exist?
Israel’s membership of the United Nations was approved in 1949. Unlike other states, it was approved conditionally upon Israel complying with Partition Resolution 181 as to the limits of the Israeli State, and UN Resolution 194, allowing the return of refugees. Israel has complied with neither condition. It refuses to define its borders and is today governed by an Apartheid regime that has murdered over 4,500 children in Gaza in the space of one month. Israel’s membership of the UN must be illegal. It should be expelled from the community of nations. (more…)
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Tuvalu: A good deed, gone bad
Australia’s offer to Tuvalu, allowing residents facing displacement from climate change to resettle in Australia, was clearly a good deed. It was an act of humane generosity. But the good deed was besmirched by the conditions attached to it. In return for this good humanitarian deed, Australia will have effective veto power over Tuvalu’s security arrangements with any other country. (more…)
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US and Israeli exceptionalism and the exception of humanity
Both The US and Israel have turned out to be exceptionally brutal, exceptionally authoritarian and exceptionally unjust. The zeitgeist is peace, and Israel and the U.S. will be left behind when the world moves towards humanity and cooperation. Meanwhile they are going to dig in, stand firm on their use of blood curdling violence against their prisoners and send us all to hell unless the general public resist with every ounce and fibre of their humanity. (more…)
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US ranks last on adherence to UN Charter
At the very bottom of a new index ranking 74 countries adhering to the UN Charter is the United States, with Israel being the second from the bottom. Both countries are frequently at odds with the UN multilateral system. The US needs to recognise that the UN system, operating under the UN Charter, is the true “rule-based international order.”
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Gaza and ‘the graveyard for children’: the moral decline of Western politics
Weak Western leaders, certain of their own exceptionalism, have endangered world peace by peddling narratives that justify the unjustifiable. Abuse of the charge of antisemitism silences those calling for an end to the bloodshed, fomenting a callous response to the killing of Palestinians. (more…)
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Tuvalu: Paradise lost?
The recent treaty with Tuvalu opens the way for a more generous treatment of Pacific people. (more…)
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Gaza: Israel is winning the battle but losing the war
As was to be expected, Israel is winning the battle for Gaza, albeit at an enormous cost in lives. But what are Israel’s and its backers’ plans for winning the peace, as without an enduring peace settlement the war can never be won. Is a US-led, UN mandated Trusteeship for Palestine the way forward? (more…)
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The Holocaust should be a lesson not a template
“Jewish people exterminating men, women and children in a concentration camp is _______.” (more…)
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Spooky fiddling: The CIA playbook and the overthrow of Whitlam. Part 4
In a telephone conversation between Kissinger and Nixon following the 1973 military coup d’état in Chile, the President asked if “our hand” showed in the overthrow and death of the democratically elected President Allende. Kissinger explained that “we didn’t do it”, in terms of direct participation in the military actions. “I mean we helped them”, Kissinger continued, “[redacted words] created the conditions as great as possible.” (more…)
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High court launches full frontal assault on indefinite immigration detention
Mandatory immigration detention is a policy that has caused indiscriminate harm, including death, and permanent incapacity. It has been rightly described as our national shame. On Wednesday November 8, the High Court of Australia found indefinite immigration detention constitutes punishment, making the relevant legislation unconstitutional. (more…)
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Australia-China relations: Diplomacy and a win “Without a Fight”
We should be greatly encouraged by Prime Minister Albanese’s visit to China. Isolation is always a bad thing. Dialogue is essential for relationships to be sustained or nourished. This is the most important aspect of the visit, far outweighing in importance any specific outcome. (more…)
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Stress testing the US alliance: Whitlam and the secrets of Pine Gap. Part 2
When Marshall Green, a very senior official in the State Department, was appointed as Ambassador to Australia in early 1973, President Nixon’s briefing regarding the relationship with Whitlam was succinct and on point: “Marshall, I can’t stand that cunt”. Green later reflected this was “a strange kind of parting instruction to get from your president”. (more…)
