Many governments that call themselves democratic and law-abiding are not. The United States has set the pace in the hypocrisy stakes for years. Its fascist tendencies are now clearly on display.

Leaders of other Western democracies are little better. They, too, talk up transparency but withhold facts from the public, oppose discrimination but practice it, outlaw genocide but do nothing to stop it, advocate peace but wage forever wars, deplore environmental disasters but build, buy, sell, and use the weapons of war that contribute to them. Hypocrisy has come to this, if it did not long ago.

President Trump is unusually honest and accurate in rebranding the Department of Defence as the Department of War. We wait to know if Pete Hegseth is “Secretary of War”. Trump now proposes a Ministry of Truth, which will fascistically strangle the best of American opinion and those who express it. The US constitution doesn’t have ministries of anything, nor confer on presidents the immunity from prosecution that Trump-appointed judges have now given him. Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu — equally immune — honestly admit they are bulldozing Gaza for a “real estate bonanza” while terrorised Palestinians flee.

Israel’s fascistic leaders assert that all Palestinians are Hamas, and hence terrorists. Trump now says all supporters of Antifa are terrorists, and prosecutions of Antifa people for terrorism are expected by American journalist Chris Hedges ( We Are All antifa Now, 18 September 2025). Trump informs “many U.S.A. Patriots that I am designating ANTIFA, A SICK, DANGEROUS, RADICAL LEFT DISASTER, AS A MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANISATION".

Why governments in the UK and Australia should so quickly fall in behind Trump and Netanyahu and impose militarism and unfree speech is a mystery, unless we are now following the example of the Murdoch media and Zionists in both our countries. For example:

Australia: Citing overwhelming demand for Freedom of Information, Attorney-General Michelle Rowland proposes to amend the FOI Act 1982 — which already makes getting government documents a nightmare — by adding further controls and a service fee. She explains that FOI is essential for “fostering public trust in government”, as it allows citizens to understand decisions and to participate “more effectively in Australia’s civic and democratic processes”. Yet due to the onset of “digital communications”, the volume of requests has exploded. Foster public trust and civic participation in government? No: reduce demand for them.

Australian mainstream media and the major parties are eager to attack domestic terrorism, even when no proof of it exists. They detected it in recent public demonstrations, and in the still unexplained Dural caravan fiasco and graffiti events. ASIO’s Mike Burgess has fingered Iranians operating through middlemen in Australia, without publicly revealing the source of his evidence. Maybe he doesn’t have enough. But he wouldn’t want ASIO to repeat its failure in 2014 to realise that Iranian-Australian man Haron Monis, the Lindt Café killer, was a potential terrorist.

Britain: The UK Government has recently proscribed the “Palestine Action” protest group and can impose long prison terms on its unarmed members who, protesting against the UK’s export of weapons to Israel, broke into Brize Norton RAF base in June and spray-painted two Voyager aircraft bombers. British authorities claimed £7 million worth of damage was caused. Even more absurd, arrests were made under terrorism legislation for acts that UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk states were patently not terrorist.

The UK has form in making terrorism a definitional free-fire zone. Ian Henderson, a senior inspector with the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, lost his job after he reported that bombs containing chlorine were not used in Syria as weapons of terror by the Assad Government, but by militant groups. Those included the White Helmets, suspected of placing bombs in houses, and the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham terrorists. The UK has never accounted for the death of the founder of White Helmets, former MI6 agent James Le Mesurier, in Istanbul in 2020, except by claiming he fell from his balcony. HTS, no longer “terrorists", are now the US-backed government in Damascus, where White Helmets are again operating.

The OPCW bent to British pressure when it reported on the poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in 2018. Initial speculation about what the poison was — fentanyl? VX? — and how it was administered, was soon dispelled by assertions from the Ministry of Defence, police, and less explicitly by Porton Down scientists, that it was the deadly Novichok, brought to England by two Russians posing as tourists. The Skripals survived but haven’t been seen since, apart from a staged interview with Yulia at a visibly identifiable RAF base.

More manipulated evidence and contortions by OPCW were required a month later when another “Novichok event” near Salisbury was claimed to have killed a local woman, Dawn Sturgess. An inquiry into “the circumstances surrounding her accidental poisoning with Novichok” — presuming in advance that it was both Novichok and an accident — will be held in October.

Memorably, after the death in 2003 of Dr David Kelly, a scientist who had been a weapons inspector in Iraq and had worked on chemical weapons at MOD’s Porton Down base near Salisbury, a British court found — despite conflicting reports — that it was suicide and sealed the evidence for 70 years. Kelly had criticised Tony Blair’s use of the WMD narrative to justify the US and UK invading Iraq.

United States: After Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram pulled Trump’s lies from their platforms, he set up Truth Social as his own megaphone. It opportunistically posted a  viral video  from TikTok blaming the media for Charlie Kirk’s death. Max Blumenthal reports that when Charlie Kirk’s doubts about Israeli propaganda grew, American Zionists threatened him for months.

Others claim Trump himself is played like a puppet by Christian Zionists, wealthy Jewish Americans and Netanyahu. Trump will oblige them by cancelling visas for critics of Kirk, putting lists of targeted citizens on social media and enabling Israel-supporters to take control of prime media organisations.

Assassinations, catastrophic events, coups and war crimes have for long characterised America’s domestic and international behaviour. Unresolved allegations about the murders of President Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King continue to trouble Americans and the world, as do mysteries about the collapse of three World Trade Center towers and the attack on the Pentagon in September 2001.

Joining these on America’s and Australia’s collective conscience is the propaganda that contrived the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the false claims that Afghanistan was culpable for 9/11 and Saddam Hussein had WMD, and the various justifications for subsequent attacks on Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Iran. We should measure our alliance and our “shared values” against these lies.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.