Or ‘neo-Nazism’ or ‘extreme nationalism’, as you prefer. The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Julian Assange, who dared journalists to prove their readers had a right to know, is in his second decade of incarceration.
#Pentagon officials mad at hillary nuclear time free#
The most infamous of these, Blair, a prima facie criminal under the Nuremberg Standard, is free and rich. No writers’ congress in 2023 worries about “crumbling capitalism” and the lethal provocations of ‘our’ leaders. US admirals are paid thousands of dollars a day by the Australian tax payer for ‘advice.’ Right across the West, our political imagination has been pacified by PR and distracted by the intrigues of corrupt, ultra low-rent politicians: a Johnson or a Trump or a Sleepy Joe or a Zelensky. What does this mean?ĭemocracy is notional now there is the all-powerful elite of the corporation merged with the state and the demands of ‘identity’. An especially sinister law bans ‘foreign interference’ by those who work for foreign companies. Whistleblowers are outlaws, to be tried in secret. A once somnolent social democracy, Australia, has enacted a web of new laws protecting secretive, authoritarian power and preventing the right to know. Liberalism has pulled up its political ladder. In literature, the likes of John Steinbeck, Carson McCullers, and George Orwell are obsolete. The voices are heard in the samizdat of this website and others. “Where on earth are the voices saying no? Where is the comradeship?” “How did it come to this?” Martha Gellhorn would say if she were here. Neither has ever seen a war zone and its extremes of human degradation and suffering. The other one, Knott, is a mouthpiece for the suits in Canberra. I remember Hartcher from his Israeli government-paid jaunts. The authors of this grotesque piece of dog-whistling and obsequiousness to American power are Peter Hartcher and Matthew Knott, ‘national security reporters’ I think they are called. What do Chinese-Australians make of this? Many are confused and fearful. Yet China-bashing that draws on Australia’s long history of racism towards Asia has become something of a sport for the self-ordained ‘experts’.
The faraway ‘lucky’ country has no enemies, least of all China, its largest trading partner. “Australia’s holiday from history is over”: whatever that might mean. “We are not ready.” Billions of dollars are to be spent on American nuclear submarines, but that, it seems, is not enough. “Beijing could strike within three years,” they warned. A ‘panel of experts’ presented no credible evidence: one of them is a former director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a front for the Defense Department in Canberra, the Pentagon in Washington, the governments of Britain, Japan and Taiwan and the west’s war industry.
No logical reason was given for an attack on Australia by China. The Yellow Peril was about to fall down as if by the weight of gravity. Chinese eyes were martial, on the march and menacing. On March 7, the two oldest newspapers in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, published several pages on “the looming threat” of China. Her words echo across the silences today: they are silences filled with a consensus of propaganda that contaminates almost everything we read, see and hear.
I had witnessed the injustices and suffering delivered by the Depression, and I knew, we all knew, what was coming if silences were not broken.” Martha, who became a close friend, told me later over her customary glass of Famous Grouse and soda: “The responsibility I felt as a journalist was immense. The journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn spoke up for the homeless and unemployed, and “all of us under the shadow of violent great power.” Telegrams of support from Thomas Mann, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, C Day Lewis, Upton Sinclair and Albert Einstein were read out. They were electric events which, according to one account, were attended by 3,500 members of the public with more than a thousand turned away.Īrthur Miller, Myra Page, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett warned that fascism was rising, often disguised, and the responsibility lay with writers and journalists to speak out. They called on “the hundreds of poets, novelists, dramatists, critics, short story writers and journalists” to discuss the “rapid crumbling of capitalism” and the beckoning of another war. In 1935, the Congress of American Writers was held in New York City, followed by another two years later.
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