Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
Earlier this week Australia’s state broadcaster ABC News published an article titled “US military spies to embed in Australia’s defence department to monitor regional threats in wake of AUSMIN talks” about one of the many recent developments in the nation’s continual abandonment of its last remnants of sovereignty to the most powerful empire of all time.
A few hours later, the headline was quietly changed to “US military analysts to embed in Australia’s defence department to monitor regional threats in wake of AUSMIN talks”.
Notice the difference? The word “spies” was replaced with “analysts”. ABC’s editors made no note or explanation for this change.
The headline was not made more accurate or clear — these will be US military intelligence operatives per the article, who are spies per definition. All that was changed is that “military analysts” sounds like less of a self-abasing abdication of national sovereignty than “spies”.
Looks like Australia’s state broadcaster got an angry call from Virginia on Tuesday.
Then on Thursday we saw an article in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald titled (I swear this is the actual headline) “To defend Australia, we must create a national citizens’ militia” by a man named Anthony Bergin, who is (I swear this is his actual title) a Senior Fellow at Strategic Analysis Australia. Strategic Analysis Australia is a militarist think tank which is stuffed to the gills with veterans of the malignant empire-funded think tank Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which has been playing a key role in manipulating public opinion about a future war with China.
“Successive governments have had a phobia about being seen, even remotely, to support schemes that smell of national conscription,” Bergin argues. “But should a time of crisis or conflict arise in the coming years, the Australian Defence Force will be forced to expand rapidly and use people who do not have the years of intensive training that is required of our military services.”
“To strengthen national security, we should no longer shy away from looking at options short of conscription models. This wouldn’t be hard to sell to the Australian people; the time is right,” Bergin adds.
To substantiate his claim that “the time is right” to “sell” the idea of widespread military service to Australians in order to rapidly prepare for war with China, Bergin makes the following baffling argument:
“There’s an appetite for political leaders to introduce measures to strengthen national resilience. We’ve seen in Ukraine just how valuable and effective a trained population can be in defending their homeland where, for the most part, the ranks of its armed forces are bolstered by volunteers.”
I mean, I don’t even know where to start with this. Can you imagine being so thoroughly immersed in Canberra swamp echo chambers that you think Australians have been watching what’s happening in Ukraine and thinking to themselves, “You know we should definitely have widespread military service like those blokes, it’ll strengthen our national resilience!”?
You cannot possibly be talking to any normal human beings in your day to day life and believe that’s an actual thing. Your interpersonal relationships must be exclusively with weird think tank swamp monsters.
Bergin argues that Australia should “establish a national militia training program” to “provide basic military training and knowledge to everyday civilians who wish to contribute to the defence of Australia if our home were threatened, without joining the military permanently or as part-time reservists.” Needless to say, at no time does he ever entertain the idea that Australia could simply refrain from participating in the US empire’s planned war with China. It is not Anthony Bergin’s job to traffic in that kind of sanity.
Australia’s media landscape is particularly conducive to mass-scale militarist propaganda due to the fact that the nation has the most concentrated media ownership in the western world, with a powerful duopoly of Nine Entertainment and Murdoch’s News Corp controlling most of the Australian press, with the aforementioned state-owned ABC making up another major chunk of the propaganda.
This is how our nation is being marched toward consenting to a military confrontation of unimaginable horror without Australians noticing that something wildly insane is happening. They are being Pied Pipered over a cliff by a mainstream press staffed entirely with bootlicking empire apologists who will do anything to grease the gears of the most destructive war machine on this planet.
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When you finally realize that all the western governments are the dumb kid in your circle of friends who thinks its a good idea to bat around that hornets nest..
I mean fight the battle of what? Nuclear winter?
Don't worry folks its only going to sting for that flash of a microsecond...
Humans have gone bat shit fucking crazy..
For mine, the Australian media's servile US/UK boot licking began in earnest when they turned a collective blind eye to the US/UK coup that removed the democratically elected Whitlam government back in 1975. Only a mindless idiot could believe it was the independent work of the US/UK boot-licker-in-chief, the often inebriated fool 'Sir' John Kerr. The same media's cow-towing subservience to these hegemonic overlords has of course been further entrenched and highlighted by their disgusting indifference to the plight of Julian Assange. How do we rail against any of this in a country where the same media refuses to hold to account the so-called representative politicians who recently allowed police to use rubber bullets against unarmed peacefully protesting citizens, no matter the reason for their lawful protest....?