1-24-07, 1:12 am
On the ABC AM program earlier in January, Kevin Rudd, in declaring his “strong support” for the US alliance declared that “America has been a noble force for good in the world since World War II”.
To have made such a statement, one can only image that he has been living in cloud cuckoo land for the last 50 years and has been taken in by the incessant propaganda pouring out of our newspapers, radio and TV in all this time.
The US ended the Second World War by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the war in the Pacific was all but finished. Their action killed over 200,000 people (Hiroshima was an open city and did not play any significant role in the Japanese war effort) and its legacy is still felt today. This use of nuclear weapons was aimed much more against the Soviet Union which had played the foremost part in the defeat of Nazi aggression and routed the most important part of the Japanese armies in Manchuria. The bombing of Hiroshima has often been interpreted as the first blow in WW3.
It was not long after this (1950) that the US launched war on the Korean Peninsular – and let’s not be taken in by the lie that it was the North that invaded the South. And let’s also not forget that General MacArthur intended to invade China at the time, an idea that was overruled by President Truman as being politically too dangerous even for the United States. (The People’s Republic of China had been established in October 1949).
And then, when the French where thrown out of Vietnam, the United States moved in and, together with Australia and a number of other countries that it was able to round up, imposed a monstrous war on that poorest of poor countries. More than two million Vietnamese were killed by the US (and others) using its high-tech weapons and by spraying the countryside with Agent Orange. Vietnamese children are still being born with serious deformities. Does Kevin Rudd see all this as “noble”?
Meanwhile, in Latin America the US kept in power a network of military fascist dictatorships which made the continent safe for US corporations by the use of death squads trained in the “School of the Americas”. The CIA was involved in the overthrow and killing of the democratically elected Salvadore Allende in Chile and the establishment of the Pinochet dictatorship. So much for the alleged promotion by the US of democracy and freedom!
The US has steadily built its network of military bases in more than 100 countries in its drive for world domination and has blocked every move to eliminate or even reduce weapons of mass destruction.
And now we have the illegal invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq and the resulting horrors brought to both these countries. It is even now threatening Iran with nuclear “bunker-busters” the consequences of which are impossible to foretell, except that such an action would destabilise the international situation and could lead to the Armageddon that Bush’s religious fanaticism seems to contemplate for the world.
It cannot be assumed that Kevin Rudd is ignorant of these events. More likely it is his sycophantic acceptance of everything American or is it a dismal lack of courage which prevents him from taking a stand against the leadership of the most evil and irresponsible regime since the world faced the Nazi plague in the 1930s and ’40s.
Fortunately for the world, the American people are more and more taking a stand. The latest poll indicates that a bare 21 percent support the intention of Bush to send more troops to Iraq.
One is entitled to expect that an Australian Labor Party leader would at least side with the American people rather than stay immovably embedded with John Howard who has for a long time indicated that he supports the present US leadership irrespective of what crimes they commit.
Slavish support for the American alliance, even if it is spiced with occasional feather duster criticism, ties both Liberal and Labor Governments to a policy which is clearly leading to a disastrous defeat. But in the meantime hundreds of thousands will lose their lives.
Noble indeed!
From The Guardian
