Thursday 28th of March 2024

glorious whore and her pimp...

glorious whore

Great to see Alan Ramsay back at the Sydney Morning Herald, out of retirement (?). It's possible that the SMH decided it needed a bit more substantial meat to its commentaries on the news and on politics, as some of its younger opinionators are mostly fence sitters. Their butt must be hurting.


Ramsay's contribution today is about how Australia is becoming a whore to America. Well, Ramsay is more polite and proper but that is the gist of it.
This rings a bell somewhat with what General Ulysses Grant, the eighteenth President of the United States commented once:
"I know only two tunes: one of them is "Yankee Doodle", and the other isn't"
Nothing much here of note except that "Yankee Doodle" is sung to an old English air called "Kitty Fisher's Locket"... Apparently Kitty Fisher was a famous whore, glorified in a song...
So there you have it...
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That is, "rotate" the Marines from Okinawa, in relatively small numbers, to Darwin, base them there for six months of the north's dry season to train and acclimatisewith the Australian military, then fly them out. A year later, in the next dry season, they would "rotate" another lot to Darwin, only more this time. And keep on doing it, with the numbers gradually increasing.

When the first Marines arrived, in April 2012, they numbered 250. The following year it was again 250. Last year it was 1150. The new lot, again 1150, get to Darwin some time in the next fortnight. Always in early April, always gone again in early September. The numbers are supposed to peak at 2500 in 2017. What happens then should be interesting.

What did our Parliament say to all this? Nothing. Any debate in either the House or the Senate? No. Any individual MP ask a question of the Parliament as to what was going on? No. For the first time in the 225 years of Australia's white settlement, excluding World War II, we have opened our doors to foreign troops to be based here – and they are based here, despite what the politicians and the military say – and almost nobody says boo. Malcolm Fraser got angry and wrote about it in a book. Still nobody said anything, least of all Canberra. Our politicians are too busy "looking to America".

In 2001, at a packed "True Believers"' Federation dinner in Melbourne, one of three former Labor Prime Ministers who spoke was Paul Keating. He said, in part: "This [2001] election may well decide whether we have an Australian century in the 21st century or an American century, as America resists multilateralism and a multipolar world and tries to soak up its allies. The conservatives, you can bet on this, will forelock tug their way to Washington, and our future as an independent nation, as a republic in Asia, in our neighbourhood, will be lost."

You can have no doubt where Keating stands, just as you can have no doubt Australia is losing its future as an independent nation. Malcolm Fraser learnt that years ago. Gough Whitlam found out when he became prime minister in 1972 and was sand-bagged by a furious Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, Nixon's poisonous security adviser at the time. Nixon had Whitlam at No.2 on his self-styled "shit list", and Kissinger said of the new Australian Prime Minister: "He is a bastard."

Why? A new book to be published in May will tell you. Written by a Sydney University associate professor, James Curran, it is as important a book as you will likely ever read. Whitlam wanted to establish a more independent role for Australia in its relations with Washington. He refused to bend. Nixon and Kissinger were determined to crush him. Curran's book, wonderfully told, says much about how ugly the US monolith can be.

read more: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/australias-deferential-treatment-of-the-united-states-has-gone-on-for-too-long-20150327-1m8pd2.html