Time to let go of the Ring of Power!
From time to time on this blog I’ve covered the topic of the overseas polices of the Australian Greens – in an attempt to blow the whistle on polices I’ve seen as more and more at odds with Greens’ principles.
My efforts go back a few years now and I probably need to face reality: they’ve been spectacularly unsuccessful.
Should I just shut up and forget about The Greens? Perhaps. Should I roll over and accept that Bob knows best? That at least is not an option. It might be nice to rejoin the fold, but I KNOW it would be based on a lie. Bob does not know best; he’s making a real hash of foreign policy.
Not ready yet to leave The Greens in peace to support war, this is my best attempt to portray graphically what’s most fundamentally wrong with decision-making in the Australian Greens on foreign policy issues. If it isn’t dominated to a most unhealthy degree by Bob Brown and a few close (and nameless) advisers, The Greens do a great job faking it.
Bob Brown’s expertise in foreign affairs doesn’t seem substantial to me. That’s a factual observation – not a judgment. The Senator has been an effective advocate in many other policy areas and his role in building The Greens in Australia already assures him a place in history. No-one can know everything.
Yet Bob Brown hogs the Foreign Affairs, Defense & National Security portfolios within the Greens and has done so for years, although (Burma, East Timor & West Papua have been spared Brown’s incompetence in the latest allocation of responsibilities – lucky for them!). It’s a real shame for most of the world, because these days whenever Bob says anything about somewhere overseas he’s rarely mentioned before (Libya and Syria spring to mind), it makes me feel like wincing. I can almost guarantee – even before I’ve heard his words – that he’s got hold of the wrong end of the stick and is poking it in the wrong direction.
Under his dismal mismanagement, the Party with an exemplary Charter that advocates non-violent conflict resolution, self-determination and grass roots democracy has morphed into a routine supporter of NATO military intervention and the crude imposition of forced ‘solutions’ on nations that were actually managing OK beforehand – and certainly gain nothing from bombing, infiltration by western spooks and all the rest of it. Oh – and I nearly forgot to mention, these weird neo-imperialist polices are issued like edicts by Bob and one or two other equally imperious Parliamentary “leaders”, without any regard to opposition from rank and file Greens members or (what remains of) Australia’s peace movement. So that’s “Grass Roots Democracy” Bob? Pull the other leg!
Under Bob Brown, the Australian Greens took almost a month, after the Israelis began savaging Gaza from air, sea and land back in 2008/9, before any of them said a word about it in public. When Bob’s statement came it was wishy-washy in the extreme.
It’s true the Greens now oppose Australia’s troops fighting in Afghanistan – but even there the record is blemished. As recently as 2007 Brown was criticising the USA for not putting more of its war offort into Afghanistan!
In the case of Libya last year, Bob Brown & co led the Greens into uncritical support for UN “intervention” – a euphemism for massive and sustained NATO aerial bombing over many months, funding and training of “rebels” with very dubious backgrounds and motivations, injecting special forces into the mix and actively formenting civil war that continues to this day.
After half a year of one-sided brutality, NATO’s bombing spree culminated in the destruction of both government and governance in a nation that prior to “humanitarian intervention” had achieved the highest UNDP Human Development Index rank in Africa and proudly boasted the continent’s highest life expectancy & lowest infant mortality.
Libya was a nation that,a year ago, had hundreds of billions of cash reserves, close to double digit economic growth, highly ambitious infrastructure projects and free public healthcare and education. It was noted for women’s rights. It had helped fund projects in Africa as a whole that had helped transform the life of hundreds of millions.
All this apparently didn’t impress Bob (if he was even aware of it – one can’t be sure because he never responded on these points to critics and needless to say the media never asked him to). Bob knew best what was best for the Libyan people and rushed to join the pack of mainstream media and conformist politicians, as soon nas well-crafted zionist propaganda painted Ghadaffi as the devil incarnate and a gaggle of instant Libya experts, purportedly motivated by (one-off) concern for the well-being of Libyans appeared on the scense, shrieking in outrage about alleged Libyan Government atrocities that have since been exposed as falsifications.
After “humanitarian intervention” morphed into hell on earth, and a Libya “No Fly Zone” turned into 8,000+ bombing sorties entailing tens of thouands of deaths, hundreds of thousands of refugees and the ruination of a nation – I naively hoped Bob Brown & his advisers might at least realise they’d been fooled. Bob Brown’s lack of public contrition, I assumed, was the result of embarrassment.
But no, Senator Brown is now onto the Syria Crusade in much the same way – again backing the wrong horse, demanding the demise of one of the last remaining secular and pluralistic states in that region, on the say so (presumably) of the same knaves and charlatans who sold him the utterly disastrous Libya “intervention” a year ago. He made his first statement about Syria last July, hours after the zionist commentator Ted Lapkin goaded him in the media. Then a long silence… until last week, when Bob tried to upstage the Gillard Government in his passion for “regime change” in Syria by suggesting it’s time to close the Syrian Embassy in Canberra.
It’s even possible I played some small and inadvertant part in this latest debacle. Last week, I tweeted Brown regularly on the topic of Syria – mainly to beg him to raise questions in Parliament about the trashing of the Syrian Embassy in Canberra on February 4th, in which some 40 thugs invaded the Embassy, terrorised staff, vandalized the place then vanished. Australia’s burgeoning “Counter-Terrorism” forces (another charade?) have apparently been unable to find any of the culprits since. A day or so later, a Syrian man was shot three times in the legs by two armed assailants in Punchbowl, Sydney; he was shot on his doorstep and may be permanently crippled as a result. As he happened to be pro-Assad, the media showed little interest – and none at in recent days. I asked Bob Brown to take up both matters in the Senate. I received no reply to any of my requests, as usual – but perhaps Brown’s statement that the pesky Embassy should probably be closed was my answer.?
Under Bob Brown’s leadership, the zionist bias of the Greens has arguably become worse than that of the Australian Government itself – mirroring the disgusting pro-war, pro-Israel role played by Euro-Green zionists in countries like Germany. On the issue of whether or not to break diplomatic ties with Syria, Brown’s position approaches the one-sided mania of the fanatical zionist Labor MP for Melbourne, Michael Danby.
It would be funny if it wasn’t so very sad. But it’s worse than sad, it’s dangerous. Once Bob Brown issue a statement on foreign policy, the Greens’ loyalty syndrome kick. Once he passes judgment on who should be in power in Libya, Syria etc, few Greens are willing ro speak openly in favour of alternative approaches. Thus it is that a peace movement that’s already weak in this country is effectively throttled inside Parliament – silencing even the handful of politicans who were, in part, put there by activists who care passionately about peace and international justice.
It’s time Bob Brown hands on The Ring of Foreign Policy to safer hands within the Party.
The way things are heading now, The Greens should be challenged at the next Federal election by politicans and parties who WILL speak out loud and clear for PEACE and against this sordid revival of imperialism. Unless they change course fast, the Australian Greens need to be opposed by candidates who, not to put too fine a point on it, are sufficiently savvy about zionism to have graduated from wearing short pants. In the Senate contest there may well be a significant vote for outspoken peace candidates. At the very least, this would force the Greens to justify their own polices in open debate.
In this year, 2012, with the drums of war beating along the Road to Damascus and beyond – beating as loud as at any time over the last 50 years – we need articulate peace advocates in Australia like never before.
Sane, moral and courageous international policy is too precious to be one man’s personal possession.
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It takes about ten minutes to see through the lies and nonsense perpetrated during last year’s furore for “regime change” regarding Libya.
Have Bob Brown and his mysterious foreign policy advisers ever taken that time to understand the lies they helped to spread about a formerly prosperous nation that had done Australia no harm?
Who knows? They probably just rely on advice from a chosen few, such as “Amnesia International” (watch the vid!) and the creepy zionist Euro-Green Franziska Brantner whose named was sometimes mentioned in a reverential tone on the rare occasions critics were able to get anything resembling an answer from Greens HQ apologists for Bob Brown’s Libya policy.
More must-see videos at TheHumanitarianWar.com
