‘…[In] such trying games of conquest, results might never be expected to take shape quickly…Imperial stratagems are protracted affairs. The captains of world aggression measure their achievements…on a timescale whose unit is the generation. It’s within such a frame that the incubation of Nazism should be gauged: it was a long and elaborate plan to eliminate the possibility of German hegemony over the continent. And the stewards of the empire took their time.’ — Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Created the Third Reich, Guido Preparata (© 2006).

—*—

‘Germany’s unforgivable crime before the second world war was her attempt to extricate her economic power from the world’s trading system and to create her own exchange mechanism which would deny world finance its opportunity to profit.’ — Winston Churchill to Lord Robert Boothby, quoted in the Foreword, Propaganda in the Next War (2/e), Sidney Rogerson (2001).

—*—

‘History is like a badly constructed concert hall, [with] dead spots where the music can’t be heard.’ — Archibald MacLeish (© 1967)

—*—

‘Money plays the largest part in determining the course of history’. — The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx(1848)

—*—

Brief: With all the talk about a third world war, it isn’t just instructive but essential to understand the real origins and causes of the first two. Like the proposition it was Germany’s imperial ambition that kindled the First World War in 1914, the notion that the rise of Adolf Hitler was an aberrant manifestation of the economic, social, and political chaos prevailing in post-War Germany is one we still teach our kids in school, and embrace without question in our public discourse. Both of these doctrines — to this day perpetuated by the custodians of the historical record on behalf of the Anglo-American-Zionist establishment — are the most enduring deceits and existentially dangerous delusions infecting the Western body politic. There seems no better time to begin appreciating the implications for humanity of preserving them. To underscore this, it’s sufficient to grasp that the power elite mindsets, societal developments, economic conditions, and the broad geopolitical goals and objectives that marked the prelude to these cataclysmic events uncannily parallel so many of those unfolding now. As we will see, this is not simply a matter of history tripping over itself once again!

---

— The Protracted Affairs of Imperial Stratagems —

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]y way of a fitting entrée into the main course of our narrative, the following anecdotes should serve us well. In his myth-shattering 2006 tome Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Created the Third Reich, Guido Preparata recounts the occasion when Joachim von Ribbentrop, later to become Germany’s U.K. ambassador and then her foreign minister, travelled to Britain in May 1935 to ‘negotiate’ of all things, German naval rearmament ratios with the stewards of the Empire du jour. During his trip the then military attaché of the Japanese embassy in London, Captain Arata Oka, bent the ear of the former champagne salesman cum Nazi diplomat with this sage advice:

‘…Never forget….the British are the most cunning people on earth, and that they graduated to absolute masters in the art of negotiation as well as in that of manipulating the press and public opinion.’

As history tells it, neither Ribbentrop nor his beloved Führer Adolf Hitler fully appreciated the history behind Oka’s counsel or its implications.

And in what will doubtless resonate with folks critical of the present state of the world banking and financial sector and its amoral alchemists, on another occasion the following exchange took place between an unnamed American banker/financier and the then President of the Reichsbank Hjalmar Schacht, the Nazi’s banker and for a time the Third Reich’s ‘economic Führer’. In this most telling of historical tête-à-têtes, the American snootily suggested to the financial guru—one of three men pivotal to the Wirtschaftswunder, the fabled German economic miracle that enabled it to revitalize its economy after the turmoil of the Weimar era and the devastation of the Great Depression, and from there rebuild its formidable war machine—that he (Schacht) ‘…should come to America. We’ve lots of money, and that’s real banking.’ Not to be upstaged, in a priceless (and for some, possibly rare), moment of Teutonic Drolligkeit, Schacht reportedly countered with this: ‘[No] You should come to Berlin. We don’t have any money. Now that’s real banking. (1)

What lends this exchange—on its face at least—even more compelling irony is the reality that whilst Germany was experiencing this unprecedented economic resurrection, the U.S. itself (indeed Europe and the West in general including here in Australia) was still wallowing in the pits of the Great Depression, one that had been purpose-built by the financial and banking elites of the Anglo-American establishment. Which is to say, the outcome of this state of affairs was not an accident of history, bringing to mind a remark attributed to the then U.S. Depression-era president Franklin D Roosevelt (FDR), ‘In politics, nothing happens by accident….[I]f it happens, you can bet it was planned that way’.

Now although some doubt whether FDR was cited correctly, in the case of the German “economic miracle”, the sentiment of this quote is nonetheless apposite to our narrative. For that matter, FDR might as well have been talking about some of the events (Pearl Harbor anyone?) in which he himself played a role. Much of what came before, including the chain of events in the twenty-odd years prior to 1914, and most of the key events between 1919 and the outbreak of its sequel 20 years later, were most definitely planned with malice aforethought. This included the rise of Hitler—or at least someone like him—and the “Good War” itself.

—SIDEBAR—>
See the video interview.

Around three years ago, two Scottish authors Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, published a book called Hidden History – The Secret Origins of the First World War. As the title hinted, their investigations uncovered many of the biggest deceptions, lies, and treacheries that attended the events and developments leading to the outbreak of the Great War of 1914-18, and which have long been excluded from the official narrative. To all intents, they’ve turned on its head everything we think we know and were taught about this war. Taking my cue from their research, this writer penned an essay titled From Great Games, Come Great Wars.

Along with showcasing the significance of their work, I attempted to provide a broader perspective on the war’s origins, conduct, outcomes, and the lessons such a perspective might have for us all today. One might briefly sum up their findings this way: they completely obliterated any of the accepted notions that it was Germany’s militarism and imperial ambition that precipitated the Great War. They laid the full blame squarely on the Warmongers of Whitehall, with Tsarist Russia and France playing back-up. It was in short, the then stewards of the Empire upon which it was oft said the ‘sun never set’, who’d secretly planned—then deliberately railroaded Germany into—this most consequential of conflicts. Their book delivered us a radical new and updated verdict on who the real good guys and bad guys were. (And when it comes to playing the Great Game, their work unequivocally reinforced Captain Oka’s observation about the British being the ‘most cunning people on earth’.)

Such is the achievement of their master class of historical revisionism, it recalls Gore Vidal’s quip  about history’s “official fictions”, all of which have been ‘agreed upon by altogether too many too interested parties, each with his own thousand days in which to set up his own misleading pyramids and obelisks that purport to tell sun-time’. With their book (the content embracing the factors leading to the outbreak of war), together with their “Hidden History” website (its content expanding on their research to include new findings on the actual conductof the conflict), if there’s a more complete, better documented, and authentic history of this War, it’s difficult to think of any that approach it in ambition, scale, and significance. Or that obliterate utterly Vidal’s “pyramids and obelisks”. Needless to say, the book was all but ignored by the MSM reviewers, its content also unlikely to trouble the writers and editors of history textbooks anytime soon.

(Author’s Note: Macgregor and Docherty will be publishing later this year a sequel of sorts to Hidden History, titled Prolonging The Agony: How International Bankers and Their Political Partners Deliberately Extended WWI.I’ve been privy to an advance copy, and it will form the basis of my next essay. As the title indicates, it promises to be as iconoclastic as their first work. I’ve been posting extracts from this book on both my Facebook pages here and here, and will continue to do so for interested readers up until publication time.)

For all we can say about the work of Macgregor and Docherty, we might say same about another similarly inclined truth-seeker, who’s revealed that most of what we’ve accepted as gospel about the roots and triggers of World War Two is equally myth-laden. In Conjuring Hitler, the aforementioned Preparata goes to great lengths to deep-six the notion of WWII as the “Good War”, of Hitler’s rise as an accident of history, and most importantly, that of Great Britain and America and the assorted allies, including my own country Australia, as the “good guys”. At the outset, the author unambiguously lays out his stall, simultaneously emphasising the credence of his central thesis whilst flagging its contemporary import:

‘The leitmotiv of this book is the conscious nature of the effort expended by the British to preserve the empire, it being understood that such an effort was worthwhile even if it meant surrendering leadership to the American brethren, whom the London clubs cultivated as their spiritual heirs. The message here is that Britain’s imperial way was possibly the most atrocious manifestation of Machiavellism in modern history…[she knew] of no means that could not justify the end. To achieve world hegemony, Britain did not retract from planning in Germany an interminable season of pain and chaos to incubate an eerie, native force, which she thought of manipulating in a second world conflict…All of this was, from 1919-1945, a cool-headed, calculated plot…I’m aware such a thesis might easily lend itself to being booed as another grotesque conspiracy theory; [but]…this thesis provides a collection of clues and solid evidence, which have been available for years, and have formed a platform for those students of history who’ve had the candor to acknowledge that the central tenet of international relations was, then as now, secrecy.’

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]f course, Preparata—not unlike Docherty and Macgregor did with the Great War—is by no means the first to illuminate the Anglo-American establishment’s role in the manipulation of events that led to the second great conflagration of the last century. His book is exceptionally well referenced and draws on the work of many others, obscure and not so obscure, who’ve traversed in varying degrees this path before or contributed to a clearer understanding of the extraordinarily complex chain of events. These include people as diverse as Niall Ferguson, Charles Higham, David Irving (yes, that one!), Louis Kilzer, George Kennan, Ian Kershaw, Richard Pipes, Carroll Quigley, Anthony Sutton, Webster Tarpley, and many others.

Apart from being one of the most up-to-date, accurate accounts of the European war and its causes, perhaps what makes Preparata’s book unique in so many ways is his more or less equal emphasis on the economic and financial factors, as much as he does the more usual examination of the political, social, and ideological trends that gave rise to this apocalyptic cataclysm. We’re in “follow the money” territory, writ large!

Beyond that, Conjuring Hitler is an astonishing expose of the supremely furtive, audaciously amoral collusions undertaken in the inter-war years by the financial, political, diplomatic, and industrial elites in Britain, the U.S., Russia, and Germany. These were fuelled by the overarching geopolitical imperatives as articulated by Sir Halford Mackinder, the Empire’s gifted draughtsman of world economic and political dominion, aka the patron saint of hegemonic project managers. (Think here Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, et.al.)

— Where the Real Bankers Are —

Preparata’s achievements are many, not least how he intricately weaves the narrative to encompass all key factors, not just the financial and economic ones. And what a “narrative” this is! In his account of the financial machinations that were key to facilitating Hitler’s ascent—he highlights everything from:

 1. [How] Germany was quietly allowed to forgo payment of the bulk of the onerous reparations imposed on it at the Treaty of Versailles; [to]

2. [How] the currency manipulations which both deliberately triggered the massive inflationary trends of the early Weimar republic and later, the onset of the Great Depression; [to]

3. [How] the Nazis, once in power, were able to perform their economic ‘miracle’ and from there fund the buildup of their formidable military machine, herein again defying the diktats of Versailles.

In this, Preparata presents an expansive vista of monumentally criminal calculation and deception. Such grand ambitions were designed with one aim: for Britain and France—in collusion with Stalin—to ensnare Germany into another world war so as to permanently curtail any future Teutonic geopolitical ambition, whether unilaterally or, in the Empire’s worst nightmare scenario, in alliance with Russia. It was, in short order, designed to crush Germany once and for all. There are essentially three key people who ‘hold court’ in Preparata’s narrative, and it’s telling that none of them are Hitler himself. These include Montagu Norman, the Governor of the Bank of England (BoE); the aforementioned Hjalmar Schacht; and Benjamin Strong, the then Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve.

Make no mistake though: It is Norman who’s the most significant figure in this triumvirate. By colluding with the others to assemble his ingeniously iniquitous contrivances with currencies, credit (or debt), and commodities (the stock-in-trade of the global economy even then), this financial uber-savant was possibly the most influential—read: manipulative—political player in twentieth-century history most folks have never heard of. Put differently, no Norman, no Weimar hyperinflation, no Hitler, no Nazis; no 1929 Crash, no Great Depression; no Führer, Third Reich, German rearmament, no World War II, and well….One gets the drift!

If it is true that ‘all wars are bankers’ wars’, then Norman’s legacy remains an ineradicable testimony to that adage! The imperial stewards—to use Preparata’s phrase, the “Captains of World Aggression”—would never in their wildest imaginings have been able to achieve their goals without the Master Tailor of Threadneedle Street;he was their most secret, dangerous, and secretive of weapons. This was an assiduously furtive man with a mind like a steel-trap, attended by an amoral ambition and cunning more than befitting that of a Bond villain, one utterly enamored with the preservation and ultimate expansion of his beloved British Empire.

Montagu Norman, Bank of England Governor (1920-1944) — The Empire’s Secret Weapon and Destroyer of Worlds

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]nsofar as the Wirtschaftswunder went, such was the extraordinary feat of financial engineering, political corruption, grandly cynical realpolitik, and devious economic policy manipulation undertaken by the key players in this history diverting enterprise, it might well have left the estimable Nicola Machiavelli gasping for breath in admiration at the sheer audacity of their gambit to begin with, leave alone any mention of the accomplishment itself. Need we say anymore? Well “yes”, we can and should!

It’s worth recalling for our purposes herein the words of Edwin Knuth from his 1944 book The Empire of “The City”: The Secret History of British Financial Power. Knuth elucidated even before the war had ended how the Empire’s extraordinary control of the world financial system—possibly even moreso than its fabled rule of the world’s “waves”—had enabled their hegemonic supremacy in the world order up to that point. After noting that for nations to obtain and secure power ‘it is essential to ignore the moral laws of man and of God’, he had the following to say:

‘…promises must be made only with the intention to deceive and to mislead others to sacrifice their own interests; that the most brutal atrocity must be committed as a matter of mere convenience; that friends or allies must be betrayed as matter of course as soon as they have served their purpose. But, it is also decreed that these atrocities must be kept hidden from the common people except only where they are of use to strike terror to the hearts of opponents; that there must be kept up a spurious aspect of benevolence and benefit for the greater number of the people, and even an aspect of humility to gain as much help as possible.’ 

Though he made no mention of Norman’s role, Knuth could well have had him in mind when he penned the above words. That the Governor had no compunction in making promises ‘with the intention to deceive and to mislead others to sacrifice their own interests’ in order to precipitate another global conflict is patently evident and irrefutable: Preparata is unsparing in defining the motives and identifying the means by which he went about his business. That Norman, like the stewards—notably the execrable Winston Churchill and his coterie—was prepared to risk destroying the very Empire to which he was in thrall in order to save it is an even more sobering conclusion. If all this rings strikingly deja vu now, then that’s because it probably is. In his final chapter, Preparata asserts the following unequivocally, ‘the present geopolitical policy of the United States is a direct and wholly consistent continuation of the old imperial strategy of Britain’. [Emphasis added.]

By Webster Tarpley’s account, Norman could not have hoped to play the role of ‘currency dictator’ of Europe and America on his Pat Malone. His trump card was ‘his ability to manipulate the policies of the United States Federal Reserve System [the ‘Fed’] through a series of Morgan-linked puppets.’ In this enterprise, Norman was served well by his more than willing marionette Strong, Fed chair from 1914 until his death in 1929, himself ‘an operative’ as Tarpley notes, ‘of the House of Morgan’. (Strong, after his death, was later succeeded by one George Harrison; little changed thereafter—it was ‘same horse, different cowboy’). Along with ‘owning a large piece’ of Schacht, Tarpley further observes that,

‘…Norman himself, along with King Edward VIII, Lady Astor and Neville Chamberlain, was one of the strongest supporters of Hitler in the British aristocracy. Norman put his personal prestige on the line in September, 1933 to support the Hitler regime in its first attempt to float a loan in London. The Bank of England’s consent was…indispensable for floating a foreign bond issue, and Norman made sure that the “Hitler bonds” were warmly recommended in the City.’

At this point, it’s important to mention another extraordinary individual who features in Preparata’s book, albeit one who does not play a direct role in the narrative, but whose thinking clearly has informed his retelling of the backstory of the circumstances leading to Hitler’s rise. It was Norwegian-born American economist and social scientist Thorstein Veblen who was, in the author’s summation, the largely unsung sage who anticipated the rise of someone like Hitler, and later, after the Treaty of Versailles was ratified, the consequences arising from the treaty, and he predicted where they would lead. As an inveterate student of Teutonic history, society, culture, and its political economy, Veblen went so far as to prophesy the Great Depression and the eventual showdown between Germany and Russia, which was to be sure, the end game of the stewards.

In essence, Veblen portended all this more than 20 years prior to the events taking place. As Preparata notes, Veblen’s prescience, which appeared in a review of celebrated economist John Maynard Keynes’ book on Versailles, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, ‘…stands possibly as Political Economy’s most extraordinary document—a testimony of the highest genius—and as the lasting and screaming accusation of the horrendous plot that was being hatched by the British during the six months of the Peace Conference following World War I.’

Thorstein Veblen — Economic Visionary

For historians, diplomats, geopolitical analysts, and politicians, many a meal has been made out of the dangers of appeasement, such that in foreign policy circles it is something of a dirty word. Indeed, whenever Godwin’s Law is invoked, the terms “appeasement” or “appeaser” are not far behind. The policy of “appeasement” is considered to be one of the British Empire’s gravest foreign policy mistakes.

But in Conjuring Hitler, Preparata disabuses us of this notion: “appeasement” was a travesty, a charade, a diplomatic dog ‘n pony show of the first order. If there was a “mistake” made, it was on the part of the Germans who bought the Whitehall Warmongers’ audacious game-plan. History repeats itself as it did in the lead-up to the Great War. In short, there was no real division. As Preparata notes, the truth is somewhat different:

‘The British establishment was a monolithic structure: the dissension among the stewards, if any, was over policy, never over principles and goals, which were the same for all. The British were never torn by disagreement as to what ought to be done with Hitler. That much was obvious: destroy him in time, and raze Germany to the ground – imperial logic demanded it. Rather, the point was a pragmatic one: how could the Nazis be most suitably bamboozled into stepping, anew, into a pitfall on two fronts? The answer: by dancing with them. And dance the British would, twirling round the diplomatic ballroom of the 1930s, always leading, and drawing patterns as they spun that followed in fact a predictable trajectory.’

— Intermission —

Guido Preparata Interview

Guido Preparata discusses his book Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America made the Third Reich. Herein he talks about how Great Britain fomented two world wars to prevent an alliance forming between Germany and Russia and how the rise of National Socialism in Germany was not an aberration or accident of history but the result of Anglo-American financial support and intrigue. He also talks about why it all matters in the here and now.

— The Captains of World Aggression —

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he notable rise in recent years of extreme right, neo-Nazi, pro-Hitlerite sentiment within national boundaries and across the broad geopolitical landscape—whether from the Ukraine to Charlottesville and seemingly all points in between—have elicited some fascinating, yet perplexing responses from surprising quarters. What’s also a noteworthy trend is the earnest, hand-wringing propensity to label the West’s latest bete noir, from Slobodan Milosevic (Serbia), Saddam Hussein (Iraq), Muammar Gadhafi (Libya), Bashar al-Assad (Syria), Kim Jong-un (North Korea), to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and a multitude of other non-compliant flies in the globalists’ ointment, as the next “Adolf Hitler”. It seems it is so ingrained in the collective psychopathology of our political, media, and ruling power establishment, it’s become, as per the ‘dictates’ (sorry) of Godwin’s Law, a self-perpetuating meme. Quite apart from highlighting the mix of revulsion and fascination with which history’s most consequential regime and its unforgettable leader is held, both of these trends open up plenty of room for a renewed discussion about the circumstances surrounding the rise of Hitler and his Nazi hordes.

To underscore this unholy fusion of irony, sanctimony, hypocrisy, self-delusion, dissembling, and groupthink—all attended by the selective historical witlessness—that characterises such utterances, it is worth mentioning that in the first instance, recently we witnessed the truly Alice in Wonderland spectacle of former presidents George HW Bush and his son George “W” holding court decrying the “violence, anti-Semitism, and hatred”evident in the Charlottesville, Virginia riots. In response, they issued a media statement, which in part read: ‘As we pray [for Charlottesville], we are reminded of the fundamental truths in the Declaration of Independence: we are all created equal and endowed by our creator with unalienable rights. We know these truths to be everlasting because we have seen the decency and greatness of our country.’ [Emphasis added.]

Russian President Vladimir Putin — International Man of Mischief and the Next Hitler (according to the AngloZionist imperial script).

Placing to one side the predictable yet patently laughable “decency and greatness” conceit employed in the statement (itself a thinly veiled repudiation of the current Oval One’s perceived refusal to condemn the extreme right elements involved in the violence), the first observation one feels obliged to make about this stance upon the part of Bush père et fils is that it’s reasonable to assume only a small minority of Americans would be familiar with the dynasty’s less than auspicious backstory. In this, they could be forgiven for taking at face value their elder statesmen’s (sic) earnest concerns about the forces driving events in Charlottesville. Even many who weren’t fans of either president doubtless may have been inclined to accept they had their hearts (or what passes for reasonable facsimiles thereof) in the right place.

Yet those of us with a deeper knowledge of America’s past in respect of all things Nazi-related—in this case that of the Bushes’ forbears—have a much more nuanced perspective. If we shake the Bush family tree, a more interesting if sobering, picture emerges. Put simply, the late US senator Prescott Bush, “Poppy’s” old man and Number 43’s granddaddy, was a director and shareholder of numerous companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany. In the main, this was via his connections to the ‘venerable’ Wall Street behemoth, Brown Brothers Harriman, described by Webster Tarpley as ‘one of the most evil and most powerful banks in modern American history.’ A 2004 Guardian report is only one amongst many revelations of Prescott Bush’s business dealings with the regime which went well beyond Pearl Harbor, and as the report notes, ‘…continued until his company’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz…..’

This is only a hint of the family’s involvement in the rise of history’s most reviled regime, and for a deeper elucidation of the sordid past of the family over three generations, Russ Baker’s excellent 2008 book A Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Past Fifty Years is an indispensable eye-opener to American political ‘royalty’ as exemplified by the Bushes and their inextricable links to the Deep State. Yet, as it turns out, amongst America’s ruling power elites, the Bush family were far from being unique in this endeavour. Many familiar names along with well-known corporate, industrial, and Wall Street entities — indeed some of the world’s most famous brand-names — knowingly facilitated Hitler’s rise to power, and from there, knowingly aided and abetted the construction of the Nazi war machine, some efforts even extending well beyond Hitler’s ultimately reluctant declaration of war on the so-called “sleeping giant”. In his seminal 1976 expose, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, Anthony Sutton (2) neatly summarised these links:

1. Wall Street financed the German cartels in the mid-1920s which in turn proceeded to bring Hitler to power;

2. the financing for Hitler came in part from affiliates of U.S. firms, including Ford [Motor Co.], General Electric, Standard Oil, General Motors, IBM, and I.T.T….up to 1944;

3. multi-nationals under the control of Wall Street profited handsomely from Hitler’s military construction program at least until 1942; and

4. these same international bankers used political influence in the U.S. after 1945 to cover up their wartime collaboration. [Emphasis added.]

Moreover, Hitler’s fan-base and mentor network wasn’t just confined Stateside. The elites in both countries worked assiduously to ensure that even before they had any idea who Hitler was, or the plucky Little Corporal himself with anger management issues and penchant for peculiar facial furniture had any idea what he was going to do with his miserable life after he hung up his tattered uniform for the last time, [that] someone like him would emerge from the shadows of immediate post-War chaos and anarchy to seize the day, and bring about the predestined sequel to the War to End all Wars. This singular objective of the imperially minded Anglo-American ‘masters of embroidery’ became the grand game plan from the day the guns fell silent on November 11, 1918. No matter how determined Hitler was or how much support he might’ve been able to muster within Germany itself, and no matter how much the chaotic circumstances of Weimar anguish and disquiet might’ve lent themselves to the rise of such a radical political phenomenon, there was no way he would’ve reached the heights of power he did without outside help. As it was, the “chaotic circumstances” were an integral, deliberately fomented, part of Britain’s grand plan, and with that of their eager apprentices across the Big Pond.

— Another “Good War” in the Making (A New Season of Pain and Chaos) —

George Soros — Another International Man of Mischief (Of a Different Kind)

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]o the extent Hitler might’ve entered the history books at all then, it’s difficult to see how the aspiring redeemer of The Fatherland would’ve achieved any higher status than as a ‘blink-‘n-you’ll-miss-him’ footnote—a big-mouthed, Bavarian beer-hall bovver-boy if one likes—had it not been for the same elites on both sides of said Pond providing him a ‘leg-up’. If Hitler had delusions of ‘full-spectrum dominance’ grandeur fueled by cunning, malevolent intent and overarching ambition (and herein some folks have their reservations his ambitions were imbued with that much “grandeur”), they paled against those of his Anglo-American establishment minders and mentors, and later nemeses.

Again, like as with the Bushes, we’ve recently witnessed a similar measure of selective umbrage and confected angst by leaders in Europe. This was most evident in Britain and even in Germany itself, with Teresa May and Angela Merkel respectively expressing concern at the Nazi-inspired violence and mayhem in Charlottesville, where they singled out Donald Trump’s “failure” to roundly condemn the perpetrators. Few of these like-minded folks in Europe insofar as this writer can recall ever uttered a syllable of protest at the same ideologically inspired hordes that ruled the roost in the Ukraine in 2013-14. The resulting violence and bloodshed in Kiev’s Maidan Square is well documented of course: It was actively encouraged and funded by members of the previous Obama administration and assorted NGOs, most notably by the iniquitous George Soros. And at least tacitly, if not explicitly, it was all given the nod by Washington’s ever-subservient European satraps. The hypocrisy and duplicity is so breathtaking as to be asthma-inducing, even one imagines for those with few illusions about the motives and machinations of our power elites past and present.

For his part, even Prince Charles was prompted to get in on the act by invoking in the recent past Godwin’s aforementioned. In this instance, he was referring to Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, the man the Anglo-American establishment loves to designate then denigrate as the latest incarnation of the Bohemian lance corporal. Not unlike the faux-regal Bushes, ‘Bonnie Prince Charley’, the scion of the British royal family, by a country mile Europe’s greatest promulgators of plunder, pillage, and imperial primacy, was either ignorant of his own family’s wretched, ignoble history, or chose to gloss over such inconvenient realities in the hope that most people wouldn’t notice. We’re talking here about some of his incestuous, in-bred forbears’ infatuation with der Führer, itself being one of the least egregious examples of perfidy and treachery evident in that grotesquely appalling, and longest running, of history’s most epic of soap operas.

Of course, as Preparata illustrates so vividly, this “infatuation” with Hitler and shilling of the Nazi cause, most notably upon the part of his namesake uncle Edward (a former Prince of Wales) was itself part of the incubation conspiracy so deftly and cunningly assembled by the stewards of the ancien regime. And all this is without mentioning his great-great-grandfather King Edward VII, a man who until his death in 1910, was intimately involved in the imperial intrigues of the so-named “Secret Elites” who engineered the Great War, a role so well documented by Docherty and Macgregor. For that matter, when we allow ourselves to think about it, the First and Second World Wars were in effect history’s most consequential of family feuds.

By the same token, back across the ‘Pond’ we’d be well advised to take with a grain of salt those in the neo-conservative camp (e.g. John McCain, a veritable Maidan Square agent provocateur on behalf of these groups) as well as purported liberal cum progressives (e.g. Elizabeth Warren, decrying the Charlottesville violence and Trump’s response). Their own and other like-minded folks affiliation with and affection for all things Israel (with or without the attendant Jewish heritage and dual citizenship) is well recognised, such that they are willing to turn a blind eye to the “violence”, racism, “hatred”, and murder being perpetrated every other day by the Middle East’s only colonialist apartheid democracy. Israel is of course a nation which contrived itself into being via the regional machinations of la perfide Albion with the 1917 Balfour Declaration and whose actions in Palestine—themselves no less than a work-in-progress of ethnic cleansing and genocide—should help us to place the recent Sturm und Drang in the Old Dominion State in its proper perspective.

As is so often the case, all of these people appear as oblivious to the contradictions evident in the manner of their bespoke umbrage as they are to their own sanctimony and contorted logic. If there’s a more glaring example to be found in the official chronicles of human history, this writer would be keen to know about it. This pathological imperviousness to the inherent irony of their actions and motivations is further reflected in their eagerness to pin the label of das neu Führer on the Russian President. This is to say little of the deplorable history of self-serving interference in—and manipulation of—the economic and political affairs of Mother Russia on and off over the past hundred or more years.

At the same time, they see no apparent disconnect between doing so and then supporting and funding Nazi-inspired tub-thumping ideologues and rabble-rousers to foment political instability, violence, hatred, and racial discord in the Ukraine, the ‘next Hitler’s’ backyard. All this is expedited one suspects less so as to thwart Putin’s much-touted delusions of world domination grandeur than to provoke him and his Kremlin gremlins into sparking a conflagration which will in turn instantly transmute their own preposterous proclamations into a, a la “we told you so!”, self-fulfilling prophecy. We’ve been down this path before, and it seems we’re about to go down it again.

Guido Preparata — Author of Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich

Having now looked deeper into the consequential role played by the Anglo-American establishment’s in the ‘incubation’ of the real Hitler, it is reasonable to conclude that the multitude of myths, frauds, and deceits fabricated by this insidious bilateral oligarchy to hide the real truth behind the so-called “Good War”, like the one that preceded it, are the most monumentally monstrous and self-serving ever perpetrated upon humanity.

Today of course, the heirs of the political and power elites who knowingly led us into the earlier wars are seeking—attended by similar motives and employing the same methods and means—to once again take us all down the same path. Like the two previous wars—both of which were flagged years in advance by the aggressors such that they virtually became self-fulfilling prophecies—the motives of these elites have little if anything to do with preserving our freedom or democracy, or saving the world from tyranny or oppression. 

In everything then from our conventional historiography to the content of our education curricula, the notion of the Second World War as modern history’s definitive battle between good and evil is well entrenched. It is perennially underscored in public discourse, in the popular media, along with the recurrent, solemn commemorations of the tragedy, and the countless tributes to the fallen and their selfless sacrifices. Indeed, so “entrenched” in our collective psyche, and so protected by the gatekeepers of the historical record are these “myths, frauds, and deceits”, that if as a former history teacher I was suddenly thrust back into the classroom and attempted to expound the real truth behind these events, I’d be tarred ‘n feathered and run out of town in a New York minute! That this almighty, all-encompassing Manichean battle assumed then the mantle of the ‘Good War’ then is both a mystery of sorts and a bloody travesty, suggesting somehow in one fell swoop that is was inevitable, necessary, just, and right.

As British historian and author Paul Addison once noted (3), ‘the war served a generation of Britons and Americans as a myth which enshrined their essential purity, a parable of good and evil.’ In his 1972 book No Clear And Present Danger: A Skeptical View Of The United States Entry Into World War II, historian Bruce Russett also wrote,

‘Participation in the war against Hitler remains almost wholly sacrosanct, nearly in the realm of theology….Whatever criticisms of twentieth-century American policy are put forth, U.S. participation in World War II remains almost entirely immune. According to our national mythology, that was a ‘good war,’ one of the few for which the benefits clearly outweighed the costs. Except for a few books published shortly after the war and quickly forgotten, this orthodoxy has been essentially unchallenged.’

But like its predecessor, the so-called War to End all Wars, the designation “good war” qualifies as one of history’s cruelest deceptions and most bitter of ironies. It further adduces evidence of humanity’s unerring predisposition towards imperial dominion and hubris and underscores implacably the Hegelian apothegm that the ‘only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history!’ Again, as with the Great War, to suggest those who served for something much less than what they were told to believe is tantamount to a form of secular sacrilege, that one is churlishly impugning their sacrifice, their patriotism, their honour and self-respect, and their dedication to their country’s ideals, traditions, and values.

The notion that America especially—indeed that of the Anglo-American alliance – could conceivably view World War Two as a Righteous Cause (to paraphrase archetypal war monster and consummate blowhard Winston Churchill) is the real sacrilege. As he observes in his introduction, one of the key reasons a more detailed and accurate analysis of the emergence of Nazism is generally eschewed is because it might reveal too much; we might also suggest that since the ploy worked so well the first time, any widespread knowledge of this monumental gambit and awareness of its implications by the populace at large is unlikely to auger well for them repeating it again.

But for Preparata and a few others, the notion that the Nazis were an accident of history, or ‘a creature of chance’, is utterly fraudulent. It is, he notes with unswerving conviction, the Anglo-American clubs that have ‘carried the day’, with their tenure having little to do with ‘human rights, free markets and democracy, regardless of what they may shamelessly profess’. After first declaring that ‘the Anglo-Saxon elites tampered with German politics with the conscious intent to obtain a reactionary movement, which they could then set up as a pawn for their geopolitical intrigues’, the iconoclastic author further lays out his stall in a way which should not fail to resonate with those of us in tune with the here and now:

‘….When this movement emerged immediately after World War I in the shape of a religious, anti-Semitic sect disguised as a political party (that is, the NSDAP), the British clubs kept it under close observation, proceeded to endorse it semi-officially in 1931 when the Weimar Republic was being dismantled by the Crisis, and finally embraced it, with deceit, throughout the 1930s. This is to say that although England did not conceive Hitlerism, she nonetheless created the conditions under which [it] could appear, and devoted herself to supporting financially the Nazis and arming them to the teeth with the prospect of manipulating them. Without such methodical and unsparing ‘protection’ on the part of the Anglo-American elites, along with the complicit buttress of Soviet Russia, there would have been no Führer and no Nazism: the political dynamism of the Nazi movement owed its success to a general state of instability in Germany, which was wholly artificial, a wreckage engineered by the Anglo-American clubs themselves. [Emphasis added.]

And it is at this point the real story begins. But space dictates that for the moment at least, it must end….Although not quite! The last word herein must go to the Saker, the pseudonymous expatriate Russian blogger. In his recent Letter to My American Friends, along with observing that if international law were to be applied each case, ‘every single American president’ would be deemed ‘a war criminal’, he then paraphrases the indelible verdict of Robert Jackson, chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg, by noting that ‘imperialism contains within itself all the accumulated evil of all empires’. Insofar as to who the good guys and the bad guys are, for The Saker his own verdict is unequivocal — for him:

‘The best thing which could happen to this country and its people would be the collapse of this Empire. The support, even tacit and passive, of this Empire….only delays this outcome and allows this abomination to bring even more misery and pain upon millions of innocent people, including millions of your fellow Americans. This Empire now also threatens my country, Russia, with war and possibly nuclear war and that, in turn, means that this Empire threatens the survival of the human species. Whether the US Empire is the most evil one in history is debatable, but the fact that it is by far the most dangerous one is not. Is that not a good enough reason for you to say “enough is enough”? What would it take for you to switch sides and join the rest of mankind in what is a struggle for the survival of our species? Or will it take a nuclear winter to open your eyes to the true nature of the Empire you apparently are still supporting against all evidence?’

—Greg Maybury

19 September, 2017.

^1. Quoted in Hitler’s Banker: Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, by John Weitz

^2. Anthony Sutton’s Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler is one-third of a trilogy of books that document the involvement of the international financial community and Western political elites in engineering major events and developments in history. The other two are Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, and Wall Street and FDR.

^3. Quoted in Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, by Paul Fussell

‘[For us] it is one thing to remain a good friend, but too close an embrace will lead Americans and others to resurrect the “deputy sheriff” tag. The Americans have always put their own interests first and will continue to do so; we should follow their example. American interests will not always be the same as Australian and vice versa. The bottom line, however, is the domestic political one. Australians are afraid of the outside world and convinced of their inability to cope with it. Any Australian government which suggested that we do without a great and powerful friend to look after us would have to consider the electoral implications.’ Source: Cavan Hogue — fmr. Ambassador and Dep. Permanent Representative when Australia was last on the UN Security Council. He has also served as head of mission in Mexico, Kuala Lumpur, Moscow and Bangkok, along with other posts. He is an Adjunct Professor in International Communication at Macquarie University, Sydney.

—*—

recent PEW research findings). This mindset is precipitated in no small measure by the increasingly heavy-handed influence the U.S. seeks to exert globally, exemplified as much by its well-documented interference in the affairs of other countries and its propensity for imposing its frequently self-serving economic and strategic agenda on the international community. Along with examining why Australia might benefit from re-assessing the oft-presumed benefits of this partnership, and from there, seeking a more independent pathway, we will also reveal some of the past history of this complex, and for the U.S. in the ongoing pursuit of its hegemonic (global) ambition, sure to be a increasingly vital, geopolitical partnership.

Gen. Westmoreland inspects Aussie troops in Vietnam. The Aussie participation had begun in 1962. Australia also sent her soldiers to fight in Korea.

—*—

— High Dudgeon in Low Latitudes —

Aussie Journalist and Filmmaker John Pilger — Perennial Fly in the Imperial Ointment

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hen it comes to my country Australia, to the extent that less worldly Americans might think about it, amongst the first things likely to come to mind are kangaroos, convicts, koala bears, and Crocodile Dundee. Far beyond just broadening folks’ geographical awareness and cultural horizons, the following should provide a deeper appreciation of how our past history has fatefully intertwined with that of their own country. In so many cases this shared past has been to our detriment, our involvement in Korea, Vietnam for example, with Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen being more recent notable examples.

As we’ll see such “detriment” includes one momentous and consequential CIA-inspired gambit in 1975 that culminated in the ousting of our then duly elected prime minister (PM). In short, it was a coup d’état, the hammer in the U.S. foreign policy toolbox, the resort to which being a recurring theme in the Washington playbook. In a recent interview with the Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill, renowned author and historian Alfred McCoy touched on this very subject. McCoy was speaking with Scahill to promote his forthcoming book In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power, the title itself suggesting that it’s this “playbook” which has contributed significantly to the titular “decline”. Citing numerous examples, McCoy went on to say that,

‘all around the globe…any time that there was a serious electoral contest in which the outcome was critical to our geopolitical interests, the U.S. was intervening.’ [Emphasis added.]

Whitlam

With the allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election now a self-replicating meme, the profound irony of McCoy’s statement should not be lost on anyone! In a recent piece I also examined Uncle Sam’s decades-long penchant for coups and colour revolutions. Perhaps the least known ‘beneficiaries’ though of America’s well-documented regime renovation gambits involves Australia. As with the Iranian coup of 1953, ably backed up on this occasion by British intelligence in the form of MI6, the CIA had their not always plausibly deniable prints all over the 1975 Constitutional Crisis that triggered the dismissal – the firing in effect — by the then Governor-General Sir John Kerr, of PM Gough Whitlam and his government. As it turns out, the history of the CIA’s clandestine involvement in Australian politics is a story that is well documented. But like so many of these things often are, it is a history that is far from familiar even to most Australians, let alone Americans. And insofar as the dismissal of Whitlam went, this was one of these situations where the indelible Henry Kissinger maxim prevailed:

‘I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the [Ed. Note: insert name of offending country here] voters to be left to decide for themselves.’

Few would argue that Australia was experiencing a “serious electoral contest” at the time of this crisis, and it was one that certainly qualified as “critical” to U.S. “geopolitical interests”. In succumbing to its interventionist impulses however, whether America was justified in the covert actions it took is an entirely different matter. The track record in so many other countries would lead most to suggest it wasn’t. As Australia’s own dissident elder statesman and renowned filmmaker and investigative journalist John Pilger noted in a piece he wrote in 2014 eulogising on the death of Whitlam at age 94, Kerr was not just the “Queen’s man” in Australia; prior to being appointed as Australia’s head of state, he had “long standing ties” to both Britain’s MI6 and the CIA. Whitlam, who assumed power in 1972 after twenty-three years of conservative rule by a coalition of the Liberal and then Country (now National) parties, tellingly a ruling clique increasingly viewed by many as too subservient to Washington, believed that a foreign power shouldn’t control his country’s resources or dictate its economic, military and foreign policies.

Even though he’d visited China the previous year in his capacity as opposition leader, the eventual aim to both recognize that country and open up diplomatic relations once in office, Whitlam was hardly a card-carrying, left-wing radical. Yet the freshly minted Aussie PM was treated at first by many in and across the Washington establishment with no small measure of suspicion, paranoia, and later, by outright contempt and animosity. This tellingly extended to the palace intriguer nonpareil and then resident coup-meister du jour Henry Kissinger, along with his boss the estimable U.S. president Richard Milhous Nixon, a man with “suspicion”, “paranoia”, “contempt”, and “animosity” to spare.

Yet in seeking an entente of sorts with China, the political visionary Whitlam wasn’t just ahead of his time; he was way ahead of both of these folks in playing the Great Game as it was beginning to unfold then in Asia. As history tells it, less than twelve months later both Kissinger and “Tricky” were making a beeline to Beijing to do same, the media breathlessly announcing Nixon’s impending trip during Whitlam’s visit. To the best of this writer’s knowledge, there’s no record of either Nixon or his Grand Vizier publicly acknowledging Whitlam’s history-making diplomatic initiative and geopolitical meister stroke. It seems safe to say then that these much-touted masters of international diplomacy and consummate practitioners of realpolitik would’ve been less than happy that a political neophyte from Down Under of all places – not even yet in high office — had shown them both a clean pair of heels on both counts!

Described by Pilger as a ‘maverick social democrat of principle, pride and propriety’ (he wasn’t even of the left of his party, let alone communist), amongst other things Whitlam pledged to pull Australia out of Vietnam, provide universal health care, abolish university fees, and tellingly, proposed to “buy back the farm”, a term which would’ve come loaded with all manner of hidden meaning for many from Wall Street to Washington. Suffice it to say this was akin to Tonto telling the Lone Ranger he was moving on and that he could no longer count on him to have his back once the silver bullets ran out and the Native Americans began closing in on them. ‘Kemo Sabe’ it’s fair to say was not in the least bit pleased!

Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and President Richard Nixon Enjoy a Fireside Chat, 1973. Whitlam wanted his “farm’ back; Tricky, Hank & Co. had other ideas.

Whitlam had positioned himself then as an Antipodean version of Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz Guzman or his contemporary Chile’s Salvador Allende, (Chile incidentally, being the country Kissinger was referring to earlier) although one should add our politically ill-fated PM got off very light compared to Allende. Above else, he subscribed to basic principles of national sovereignty and self-determination in the management of our political economy, with any notion of empire or hegemony, much less any outward manifestation of it, being utterly anathema to him.

To say Australia – arguably America’s most steadfast to a fault vassal state — had not experienced anything quite like it before or since is an understatement of heroic proportions. And the reason why it has not happened since that time is simple: Our politicians, especially those from the nominally left side of politics, to their credit (dubious as such “credit” might be for many) learned their lesson well. They have behaved themselves for the duration, with now little sign any of Whitlam’s political heirs in the Labor Party will ever try and repeat history anytime soon. In what many Americans I suspect will view then as a not dissimilar state of play on their own turf, there is little daylight between the foreign policy positions of both our major parties. This is especially so when it comes to Australian-U.S. relations (much like one suspects that of the U.S-Israeli relationship where each party tries to top each other in its demonstrations of fealty to Tel Aviv, the key distinction being that the roles of David and Goliath are reversed), and that of ANZUS, the formal foreign policy and military-intelligence-security alliance that underpins these relations.

— Screwing Around & Bouncing Up & Down (Spies Amongst the Pines) —

For our purposes herein it is instructive to look at at least part of the backstory of this prototype colour revolution. Space herein precludes a blow-by-blow of the intrigue and complex machinations that brought about Whitlam’s downfall, and we’ll revisit this regime renovation project in a future narrative in more detail. Suffice to say that a number of ‘household’ names either played key roles in the removal of Whitlam or made not insignificant cameo appearances. Admittedly they did so ever so discreetly whereby it wasn’t until sometime later the true, if still incomplete, nature of their roles were revealed, an all too familiar leitmotif in the annals of CIA-inspired regime change management.

(This was especially applicable in relation to the notorious Nugan-Hand Bank (NHB) scandal, an epic ‘Lawyers, Guns, Drugs, ‘n Money’-like saga that prologued early in the Whitlam era and which is ‘up there’ with the best ‘entertainment’ that the CIA’s “Family Jewels” chronicle has to offer. Along with recounting the deeper narrative of Whitlam’s career demise, we will look into the NHB Thing in a future article.)

At this point, it’s enough to know the main catalysts for the coup. This requires an overview of some of the history and strategic nature of the U.S.-Australian relationship itself, if for no other reason than most Americans (and doubtless more than a few of my fellow Aussies) would probably not appreciate the importance to the U.S. – indeed, to the Anglo-American alliance overall – of this long-standing, albeit one-sided, marriage of convenience. As always with these things, context and perspective matters. If it indeed was a “marriage”, then it was one made less in heaven than in Washington, unless America’s capital might, in an as yet unimagined alternative universe, qualify as some idyllic empyrean equivalent thereof, a ‘meditation’ of sorts even its most deluded, deranged denizens might have difficulty undertaking.

As one of the Five Eyes, Australia for this reason alone, was not then – nor now — just another tin-pot, “Third World” backwater on the butt-end of the Big Blue Ball. For one thing our location, to say nothing of our sheer size, our modern economic and industrial infrastructure, our political stability, our continental island nation status and its very isolation, provided then as now the near perfect locus point from which the U.S. could project into the Asian region its all-encompassing hegemonic ambition via the charter explicit in its ‘full-spectrum dominance’ strategy. As in real estate, in geopolitics we might argue it’s also about “location, location, and location!” These considerations are even more critical now, some might opine existentially so. This is especially so with the ascendancy of China both strategically and economically, along with more broadly that of the East Asian, and increasingly South and Central Asian, nations.

It might surprise most Americans (and again, no doubt a few Aussies as well), that one of the most vital components of the U.S. imperial communications network is located at Pine Gap in the middle of the continent. This controversial, state-of-the-art facility forms the centrepiece of our Five Eyes infrastructure, and has done going back well before Whitlam’s heyday. So important is this facility, it’s arguable that without Pine Gap, the Apollo program – including the 1969 moon landing — would not have been possible. But Pine Gap was never just about getting a man on the moon and back: Of even greater relevance for our purposes, the facility serves as the linchpin satellite reconnaissance station for spying and surveillance of friend and foe alike. Its principal task throughout the Cold War was keeping a keen eye on those decidedly untrustworthy Soviets, essentially monitoring how diligently they were adhering to arms control treaties and nuclear testing agreements. The Pine Gap facility remains still an integral component of the central nervous system of the imperial panopticon.

The Pine Gap Facility, Alice Springs. Nerve Centre of the Imperial Panopticon Down Under. Once a “matter of contention”, now not so much!

For this reason alone, it is worth explaining a little more about its current raison d’etre. Along with affirming Pine Gap as the most important communications facility outside [the U.S.], performing a vital role in the collection of a wide range of ‘signals-intelligence’, Richard Tanter of The Nautilus Institute of Security and Sustainability(NISS) notes also that it functions in,’ providing early warning ballistic missile launches; targeting of nuclear weapons; providing battlefield intelligence data for U.S. armed forces operating in Afghanistan; and elsewhere….critically supporting…. missile defence, supporting arms control verification, and contributing targeting data to drone attacks.’ 

As Aussie based geopolitical analyst Binoy Kampmarknotes drily in a recent piece on the 50th anniversary of Pine Gap and the controversy such milestones inevitably give rise to,

‘…all this cut, dried and smoked material [in the NISS Report] conveys the relevance of Australia’s continued geographical role as a dry goods merchant for Washington. It supplies the isolation and the means for the U.S. imperium, as officials in Canberra keep mum about the sheer extent [to which] Pine Gap operates. It also supplies the bloodied hand that assists U.S.-directed drone strikes in theatres where neither Washington nor Canberra are [sic] officially at war. Australia remains America’s glorified manservant.’ [Emphasis added.]

As Pilger again has noted, from the off Whitlam didn’t exactly go out of his way to endear himself to Washington’s elites or the U.S. security establishment, akin to waving a red flag in a wounded bull’s face. Soon after his euphoric, Obama-like election triumph in 1972, he ordered that his staff should not be “vetted or harassed” by the Australian Security & Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) — then, as now, effectively a wholly owned subsidiary of The Company. Moreover, when his ministers publicly condemned the U.S. bombing of Vietnam as “corrupt and barbaric”, according to Pilger, an unnamed CIA station officer in Saigon said: ‘We were told the Australians might as well be regarded as North Vietnamese collaborators.’

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hitlam stretched Washington’s friendship further by demanding to know if the CIA was running a spy base at Pine Gap. Notwithstanding its official, somewhat anodyne function as described by NISS, Pine Gap was a giant vacuum cleaner, one which, as Edward Snowden revealed, allows the U.S. to spy on everyone everywhere. ‘Try to screw us or bounce us’, the prime minister warned the then US ambassador Marshall Green – himself a Kissinger hatchet-man, and a key architect of the 1965 Indonesian coup ushering in the decades long rule of ‘klepto-brutocrat’ and U.S. client dictator President Suharto, resulting in the wholesale massacre of upwards of 1m people – ‘[and Pine Gap] will become a matter of contention’. Widely seen himself as no slouch in the ‘coup-master’ stakes, Green was, in Pilger’s summation, ‘an imperious, sinister figure who worked in the shadows of America’s “deep state”’. Indeed, an alarmed audience member hearing his first speech to the Australian Institute of Directors described its as, ‘an incitement to the country’s business leaders to rise [up] against the government’.

As for Whitlam’s implied threats regarding Pine Gap, to say such utterances ruffled a few feathers in Washington would be an understatement, and it’s probably safe to say [that] from that day onwards, Whitlam’s political career – and Australia’s short-lived independence — entered its fateful downward trajectory. According to Pilger, Victor Marchetti, the legendary CIA officer who later went ‘rogue’ by writing a ‘kiss ‘n tell’ expose on The Company and who was actually involved in setting up the facility, told him that, ‘This threat to close Pine Gap caused apoplexy in the White House…[after which] a kind of Chilean [coup] was set in motion.’ 

— The Wicked Witch is Dead —

Christopher Boyce, A sort of Edward Snowden of his Day. Hobbies: Falconry, and Espionage

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t’s worth noting that the highly classified intelligence that Pine Gap gathered was deciphered and later revealed publicly by Christopher Boyce, who worked for a company called TRW, at the time a CIA contractor. Boyce was troubled by the ‘deception and betrayal of an ally’ and this was apparently what motivated him to do what he did. This espionage narrative was later turned into a film called The Falcon and the Snowman (from a book of the same name), and amongst other revelations Boyce disclosed that the CIA had infiltrated Australia’s political and trade union elite and they actually referred to the Governor-General of Australia, Sir John Kerr, as “our man Kerr”.

Boyce, who eventually did twenty-five years in prison for treason for selling secrets to the Soviets, in a wide-ranging 2014 interview, again confirmed his belief that the CIA was behind Kerr’s decision to oust Whitlam, by using a little known Constitutional provision that enabled the head of state (Kerr) to revoke Whitlam’s commission, and appoint a caretaker government. In CIA circles at the time he said, ‘you couldn’t say Whitlam’s name without the spooks…looking nauseated. He was viewed as a threat to the [Pine Gap] project…’ On the day of Whitlam’s dismissal he recalled the reaction of the CIA folks whom he liaised with:

‘[There] was a party, it was jubilation. The wicked witch was dead, you know. He was gone, nothing more to worry about. And it was just a sense of relief because they really did think he was going to close [Pine Gap] down. He was going to turn off our eyes, and they were worried, you know.’

At this point also we require an appreciation of some additional history of our country, in particular how we morphed from being at the beck and call of the British Empire to playing a similar role vis a vis the U.S. imperium. Again the man who provides us a most illuminating insight into the events of 1975 is our own John Pilger. In seeking to break free from the confines of U.S. imperial power, Whitlam was up against as much opposition internally as he inevitably came up against externally, a not uncommon scenario in such instances where a new ruling party in an ostensible independent nation decides to take it up to Washington. And although his removal from office in such an unprecedented, unceremonious manner doubtless never figured into his trail-blazing reform calculus, in Pilger’s summation, Whitlam had few illusions about what might lie ahead of him, in either the domestic or foreign policy front.

In Peter Weir's Gallipolli, the director explored the continued coming of age of the Australian nation and its soldiers, and the disdain and lack of gratitude shown Australians by Britain's officers. A similar theme was examined in the prior new wave film, Breaker Morant.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n the post-World War Two era, having by then weaned ourselves off the attachments to imperial Britain that attended our former colonial status, the legacy of which had remained intact despite the country becoming an independent Federation in 1901, Australia’s political establishment was nonetheless wedded to the notion of dependence on a Great Power alliance for its national security. After all, to this end we’d dutifully served perfidious Albion from the Boer War to the Boxer Rebellion, from the Great War on up to the “Good War” (WWII), with interestingly little or nothing to show for such fealty to an empire which by then had morphed into the ancien régime. If this sounds like Britain got the better part of the deal then so be it, and it also begs another question as to whether anything has changed, a theme to which we shall return.

After WWII, that new Great Imperial Power of course was the United States, although admittedly in the immediate post-war years this incipient status was not immediately apparent. Less than five years after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ending the war in the Pacific, Australia once again found itself sucking up to empire in Korea, and fifteen years after that, in Vietnam, a war in which, as befitting our vassal status, we virtually begged to become involved. Put another way, it was “same deputy, different sheriff!”

For his part investigative journalist Jonathan Kwitny, in his seminal 1987 classic expose The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA noted that Kerr was a fully paid up subscriber to the long-since defunct Australian Association for Cultural Freedom (AACF), effectively the Antipodean ‘franchise’ of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The CCF was a U.S. based entity established by the CIA in 1950 whose mission ostensibly was to combat Communism and Soviet propaganda, and by extrapolation, to promote global democratic principles, at least as they were defined (then as now in a moving feast kinda way) by Uncle Sam. If this sounds awfully familiar for some, it is meant to be. Which is to say, clearly the Washington regime change playbook has been around so long now it’s no longer subject to copyright!

The Crimes of Patriots: Jonathan Kwitny’s Epic Tale of CIA hugger-muggery and skulduggery Down Under.

Founding secretary of the AACF was a man called Richard Krygier, who also founded, and became the first editor of, Quadrant, a conservative Aussie periodical (still ‘Johnnie Walker’), also originally funded by AACF and the CIA. Put another way, the AACF was an early forerunner to the types of front organisations such as Freedom House and the infamous, democracy-defying National Endowment for Democracy(NED). These NGOs as we now know are much favored by the Langley crowd and their neo-conservative confreres the Beltway Bedlamites, their titular nomenclature in true Orwellian tradition masking a raison d’être somewhat at odds with their real mission. Indeed, it was organizations such as these to which the CIA outsourced its regime renovation activities in 1983 under then CIA director William Casey. As noted geopolitical analyst William Engdahl has said, ‘the NED has been at the center of all major US State Department-financed “color revolutions” in the world since 2000 [including toppling]…Milosevic in Serbia.’

— A Matter of Contention No More —

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n order to view the U.S.-Australia relationship in a more contemporary context, it is important to consider the opinions of some prominent Australian public figures about the ever-evolving geopolitical landscape, and from there showcase a more detached, less insular appraisal of U.S. economic, foreign, and national security policy as it has been unfolding in recent years. The aim here is to portray how the continued maintenance of this relationship – a strategically lopsided affiliation which remains all but a bedrock principle of our own foreign policy, one embraced with equal, unerring enthusiasm by both our major political parties and which is likely to assume even greater importance to the U.S. over the coming years and decades – potentially places our political economy, our national security, our self-determination and sovereignty, and that of our future place in the increasingly Asian-centric geopolitical and geo-economic order, at even greater risk.

In an article earlier this year distinguished Australian public figure John Menadue posted an article on his blog, which suggested that the “increasing influence” of the military and defence establishment in shaping Australia’s foreign policy is such that it has effectively undermined the authority of our Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop and that of her Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade (DFAT). In what should amount to a familiar refrain for many in Washington, Menadue noted the following: 

‘Our ‘foreign policy’ (sic) has been taken over by the defence, security and military clique led by the Department of Defence, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute which is financed by DoD and defence contractors, ASIO, Border Protection and the Office of National Assessments…’ 

Although active players in contemporary political, diplomatic, and mainstream media circles might refute the tenets of his article, the most telling of Menadue’s observation was the following: For him it is patently obvious that our military and defence clique in Australia is in turn ‘heavily dependent on the US Departments of Defense, State, [the] CIA and FBI for advice.’ [Emphasis Added].

To underscore both the legitimacy and credibility of Menadue’s views, some understanding of his place in the political firmament and his background of achievement over six decades in both the public and private sectors is useful. From 1960 to 1967 he was private secretary to then deputy opposition leader Gough Whitlam. Menadue then moved into the private sector for seven years as General Manager of Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited, and from 1974 to 1976 was head of the Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet. Interestingly, he was “closely involved’ in the events of 1975 that led to Whitlam’s dismissal, and then served in the same position under Malcolm Fraser (of whom, more soon), the man who controversially succeeded Whitlam as PM. After a stretch as Japanese Ambassador from 1976 to 1980, Menadue returned to head the Department of Immigration & Ethnic Affairs, and later in 1983, the Department of Trade. From there he was appointed CEO of Qantas (1986-1989), became a Director of Telstra (our biggest telco; 1994-996), and was also Chairman of the Australia Japan Foundation (1991-1998). So all up, Menadue was not a man whose opinions might be dismissed easily. At 82, he’s still ‘Johnnie Walker’ and as his blog attests, remains a respected, robust voice in national and business affairs, and in public policy.

Whether academic, politician or public servant, as a prominent public figure, Menadue, of course is not on his Pat Malone in highlighting issues vis a vis maintaining our relationship with the U.S. in its current form. The failure or unwillingness of successive governments’ to grasp and respond to the new realities that are almost daily presenting themselves as the balance of the geopolitical and geo-economic order tips irrevocably eastward are of particular concern. Of equal concern is that of our reigning political and policy elites – and again our mainstream media ‘opinionocracy’ as well — continued insistence that the bedrock precepts of our foreign, national security, and even our trade policies — should remain aligned with, even in service thereof, the interests of Washington and Wall Street.

As he noted in an article last year, long time defence and intelligence analyst, Professor Hugh White of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University (ANU), criticised the most recent Aussie Defence White Paper (DWP) in its presumption of America’s enduring global primacy. In White’s view, whether in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, or especially in Asia, said “primacy” is no longer a given, even if Washington is struggling to come to terms with such realities. As he observes, the DWP promotes a vision of the ‘rules-based global order’ as a ‘seamless and indivisible whole that must be either preserved unaltered or surrendered in its entirety’. It sends he says, ‘a clear message Australia should be willing to join a war against China to preserve [the rules-based global order] unaltered.’ White doesn’t mince words here, ‘This is plainly wrong’. [Emphasis added.]

The implications for this should not be lost on Australians, and are increasingly seen that way, especially by younger folks. As to whether we might say the same for Americans is an entirely different matter. It most certainly will not be lost on the Chinese themselves – or for that matter other rising Asian powers such as India, South Korea, or indeed, even an economically resurgent Japan. All this, to say little of other potentially quiet achievers like Indonesia and to a lesser extent, Vietnam.

The latest PEW research indicating that amongst the above key U.S. allies, all are increasingly concerned about the threats posed by U.S. power. (The increases are up from PEW’s research from 2013.)

To add to all of this – and to underscore the reality that it isn’t just always about geopolitical considerations — for the first time in Australia’s history, we are facing a geopolitical and national security dilemma of considerable magnitude: Our long-time major business and trading (or economic) partner China – an alliance kick-started by Whitlam, and which has contributed enormously to our country’s stellar economic performance over the past two decades or more and which played no small part in enabling us in ways the U.S. itself wasn’t able to, [to] weather the fallout from the Global Financial Crisis (itself largely the consequence of the monumental recklessness of America’s multi-national corporate and financial behemoths, fortified by the enduring subservience and acquiescence of its political, legislative and regulatory elites), is now being challenged directly and no less recklessly and provocatively by our long-time military and security (or strategic) partner the U.S., in the words of a former Prime Minister “Our great and powerful friend”‘.

Here again, the implications are stark indeed. It would not be unreasonable to suggest this “dilemma”, this challenge and the existential risk that attends it, far surpasses certainly anything we were presented in the First World War, and arguably even that presented to us in the Second World War, when Japanese planes were bombing Darwin and their Navy’s submarines were mischief-making in Sydney Harbour.

In an assessment in last year prior to our Federal election, renowned former diplomat and senior public servant Richard Woolcott also shared views not dissimilar to both O’Neill and Menadue. As a highly regarded commentator on international affairs with a special expertise on the Asian region (he was at varying points Aussie Ambassador to Indonesia, the Philippines, and the United Nations, along with at one point, president of the UN Security Council), his views cannot, indeed should not, be lightly dismissed.

For the now 90-year-old Woolcott — whose diplomatic pedigree, as impressive as that of Menadue’s in the nation’s public service, saw him in Australia’s embassy in Moscow at the time of Stalin’s death in 1953, and much later as the most senior diplomat at the DFAT — it is imperative for any future Australian government to be ever mindful of geo-economic factors as much the mutable geopolitical ones. Woolcott seems to appreciate in ways other commentators and analysts possibly don’t – including those on either side of the Pacific Pond and on both sides of the political divide Down Under — the indisputable historical reality that it’s (geo)economic factors that drive geopolitical developments (from relatively minor border skirmishes to world wars) and not so much the other way around. As he observes, the

‘unprecedented transfer of wealth from the West to the East, from the Atlantic to the Pacific…will continue into the foreseeable future.’ This seismic shift he says, ‘constitute(s) an historic global turning point to which Australia must respond if we are not to find ourselves left behind.’ [Emphasis added.] 

For his part in 2016, former PM Paul Keating (1991-1996) also threw his hat into the ring questioning the alliance. Keating said it was time to ‘cut the tag’, and that ‘focusing less on the alliance between the two countries and concentrating more on relationships within Asia’ was the way forward. He added, ‘We’ve got to this almost sort of crazy position now where the American alliance, instead of simply being a treaty where the U.S. is obliged to consult with us in the event of adverse strategic circumstances, it has taken on a reverential, sacramental quality….I’m not talking about simply the [present Liberal] Government, I’m talking about people on the Labor [opposition] side as well.’

— Going Forward Down Under (With or Without the Empire) —

And if that might not have been enough to unsettle the Beltway Bedlamites, in 2014, another of our former prime ministers Malcolm Fraser (1975-1983), gave an eyebrow raising interview. Fraser was at the time promoting his book Dangerous Ally, the “ally” in this case being the Empire du jour the U.S. Here was a former Liberal (read: “conservative”) PM of America’s most faithful geopolitical sidekick not simply emerging from the political closet and declaring our ANZUS alliance with the U.S. in need of a major strategic review – such opinions being anathema in political circles on both sides of the divide no matter how cautiously one advances them – but proclaiming it “dangerous” to adhere to this treaty.

In referencing our history of “strategic dependence” – firstly on Britain, then on the U.S. after WWII — he recommended a more independent stance, free of the diktats of Washington’s war-meisters. Fraser went even further by noting that not only is conflict between China and Japan ‘possible’, but that the U.S. have ‘made it plain that they would side with Japan’ if there is such a conflict. As things stand he said,

‘[We’d] get dragged in to that conflict, when our interest would be to stay well clear of it. Now, if you’ve got those troops in Darwin being used in relation to such a conflict, and Pine Gap was being used to give direction to a variety of weapons systems, the prime minister could [not] get up and say “Oh, look, we’re not involved, we’re not complicit”. [But] we would be complicit [and] the world would know [we were]. And that means that [America] has the power to take Australia to war[just] as Britain a hundred years ago had the power to take Australia to war because we were part of the Empire.’

What made such declarations both fascinating and anomalous at the same time was because it was Fraser – the man succeeding Whitlam after his unceremonious ouster – who was the primary political agitator for Whitlam’s demise, and a man who thereafter became reviled by the left and more liberal/progressive elements for his efforts in creating the Constitutional crisis. (There is no evidence of which I’m aware that Fraser knew of any CIA involvement in initiating the Crisis, either before, during, or after. For his part, and for reasons best known to himself, Whitlam always played the CIA factor down. One wonders as to what they might have talked about privately though in their years of dotage and many discussions.)

Fraser was also a Defence Minister for a period at the height of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, a military commitment on our part entered into by his own party, and one he later came to regret. For this writer, the fact that these men later became friends remains one of the most glaringly ironic and unpredictable developments in our own (and possibly anyone’s) political history.

Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser — He used to be a Fan of Uncle Sam you Know?

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]nd for Fraser to come out albeit many years later to declare that Australia should seek more independence from the U.S. – the very stance upon Whitlam’s part which upset Washington so much at the time and which contributed so emphatically to his political demise – is the stuff you simply couldn’t make up! Few politicians of which I’m aware have undergone such an extraordinary Damascene conversion on so many policy levels, and left so many folks including some of our sharpest political analysts and commentators scratching their heads, many as much in bewilderment and in wonderment.

It has to be said then that much of this soul-searching about our relationship with Uncle Sam can be attributed to the feelings generated by America’s ill-fated and ill-judged response to the attacks of 9/11; in particular the invasion of Iraq and the consequential blowback from that disastrous decision, and from the so-called War on Terror in general that has been raging seemingly without end since 2001. Like all countries, Australia has not been immune to the immense economic and strategic transformations that have taken place as a result of America’s relentless and ruthless campaign to achieve full spectrum dominance in all spheres of geopolitical influence – one that was triggered by 9/11 and on which said “campaign” continues to be justified, without any serious protest thus far from its Western partners and allies — whilst countering, even aggressively pre-empting, with every resource at its disposal any real or imagined challenge from other upstart power players. Until and unless the Bedlamites who seem to be running the Beltway circus begin to appreciate how catastrophically their actions and provocations are impacting on global peace, security, and stability, we are unlikely to see any change.

The argument here in Australia for those who unequivocally support this alliance will be that this is not a good time to be second guessing it, given the increasingly precarious situation in global affairs. These same folks though confuse cause and effect, and it is a specious argument. The reality is that in the pursuit of full spectrum dominance”, that “peace, security, and stability” has been consistently and deliberately undermined by the U.S. ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, and has been in hyper-drive since 9/11, with no sign of slowing down anytime soon. The irony here is as inescapable as it is profound. We could well end up embroiled in a cataclysmic confrontation not of our own making — yet as Fraser observed rightly, one in which we’ve allowed ourselves to become “complicit” — not unlike that of the one in 1914 with the ancien regime.

And although an aspect of the relationship that will be discussed another time, it’s worth noting the following. Given the largely bipartisan embrace of the now defunct Trans-Pacific Partnership, much the same could now be said of the economic relationship between the two countries. Again, that is unlikely to change anytime soon, if and when some future variation of the TPP is presented for consideration, which we can all expect that it will be at some point. Further evidence of this acquiescence and fealty in economic and financial matters can be found in both parties who for decades have until recently dragged the chain on calling major multi-nationals to account – predominantly U.S. incorporated companies such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Chevron, Pfizer, ExxonMobil, News Corp, and AMEX to name a few of the usual suspects — on their well-documented tax dodging sleights of hand. Even though the present Liberal/National coalition government has been signalling plans to halt these practices which are short changing our budget coffers by tens of billions of dollars if not more in lost revenue, they are at the same time (wait for it!) planning to reduce corporate tax rates, with the companies presumably on a recruitment drive to employ more tax accountants, lawyers and lobbyists to minimise the negative impact of any new legislation designed to curtail their current avoidance scams and maximise the benefits of the lowered tax rate when both come into effect.

The result: At best, a two-steps forward legislative outcome; at worst: the opposite! Though Australia fared relatively well in the wake of the 2008 GFC, in the view of many we will not fare anywhere near as well the next time around. In the absence of a Glass-Steagall-type legislative initiative imposed on our biggest banks, their current practices are beginning to emulate those of the Wall Street banks, which have themselves done little to curb their criminal ways, forever seeking to prevent any and all attempts to address the structural deficiencies in the U.S. financial system that brought the system to the precipice almost a decade ago.

For a lot of folks, it’s only a matter of time before the “precipice” comes to us. Whether on a geo-economic level or a geopolitical level, our continued alliance with the Empire du jour under the present arrangement is a zero-sum game for us. Those countries with similar alliances and attachments would do well to be also similarly concerned.

Dateline: 1 August, 2017