It’s time for the people to speak up against the US empire as well as the AUKUS alliance and nuclear submarine deal.
At World BEYOND War we are inspired by the organisation of events in Australia against the USUKA, er AUKUS, alliance and in agreement with the statement released by Australians for War Powers Reform. Our sympathies for the French weapons industry are nonexistent. US and UK weapons don’t kill any more or less than French ones. The problem is the subservience of the Australian government to the US government, rather than to the Australian people (who were of course never asked), and the US agenda madly driving the world closer to nuclear war.
Helen Caldicott told me that she believed Australia was practically a 51st US state. That sums up the problem well, although Australia might need to get in line for a higher number, since people tell me the same thing in Canada, and Israel, and Japan, and South Korea, and over two dozen NATO countries, and so on. Did the Australian government learn nothing from Afghanistan, that it wants in on a war on China that would end life on Earth? Has 80 years of Pearl Harbor propaganda immobilised parliamentarian brains? Is the world really going to put up with a “democracy summit” the purpose of which is weapons sales and tell itself that it’s advancing democracy?
The Australian government and the people and governments of the world should be inspired by the people rallying in Australia on December 11 to say “no” to the whole filthy pretence that nuclear submarines are the products of sane minds, that the nuclear danger can be further increased by people who care about their children, and that there’s time to waste ignoring the climate crisis while puffing up a leading contributor to it, namely the industry of mass murder.
Instead of democracy summits and new acronyms for genocide, we need people to move their governments to uphold the rule of law applied equally, to democratise the United Nations rather than pretending it doesn’t exist, to compel the nuclear governments to obey the law, to advance the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and to promote human rights by example rather than through the twisted hypocritical atrocities that nobody believes in but too many tolerate: threatening, starving, bombing, and poisoning people for human rights.
This article was first published by World BEYOND War and is reproduced with permission.
David Swanson is an American anti-war activist, blogger and author.
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