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By Hamish Ford - posted Friday, 6 January 2012


Meanwhile, if certainly in crisis at home the USA's international decline is both very real (cutting a lonely figure at the UN on issues like Israel/Palestine) and deceptively exaggerated by serious media commentary. The tendency towards regional cooperation – such as in Latin America, which has enabled the region to free itself from US influence that has bedevilled democratic and economic development since the 1823 Monroe Doctrine – is certainly a crucial and underreported event. However, with a military budget nearly matching the rest of the world combined, the world's sole superpower remains supreme where it really counts.

For the large populations that have felt the wrath of such historically unprecedented power enabled by this exorbitant military force, a very different American is immeasurably more popular and morally respected than any US president. By odd synchronicity, the world-famous public intellectual Noam Chomsky was in Australia just before Obama, speaking to huge crowds and receiving the Sydney Peace Prize as presented by Patrick Dodson. The most quoted living author – not that you'd know it from the virtual mainstream media blackout that greeted his visit – told a starkly different story during his extensive tour than the Obama-friendly one usually drummed into us, arguing that his nation is the largest terrorist force in the world. If, that is, we apply the official definitions of terrorism used by the US State Department.

This charge concerns both 'wholesale' terror – most notably in Indochina where the USA (and Australia) killed millions of people, mostly civilians, almost destroying three entire countries – but also the backing, funding, and encouragement of countless 'retail' terrorist groups and the juntas they install. Those who scoff at such well-documented history should consider that in 1984 the USA became the only country condemned for international terrorism at the International Court of Justice for its actions against Nicaragua. (Needless to say, Washington dismissed the finding out of hand and not only continued but enlarged its violent campaign unabated.)

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In his recently updated best-selling book on the topic, Chomsky unambiguously describes the events of September 11, 2001 as an atrocity, before explaining that what the US suffered was essentially what it had been doing to the rest of the world for decades. The results have often been actually far worse, he argues, offering the apposite example of a much less known event in the West, which in Latin America is often called the 'first September 11': when Chile's democratically elected left-wing government lead by Salvador Allende was overthrown in a US-backed military coup in 1973.

'Successful defiance of the Master could be a "virus" that will "spread contagion".' This is Chomsky's description of what he calls the 'Mafia logic' necessitating such typically brutal anti-democratic interference by the US in others' affairs. The key phrases in the quote are taken directly from Henry Kissinger's justification for smashing Chilean democracy and installing Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship, which killed thousands and imprisoned countless others without charge over two decades. Chomsky's concluding question should be morally elementary yet is apparently outrageous: Imagine the response if this appalling event was reversed and it happened to us.

Despite all this, unique in joining every American war since Korea, Australia has long been politically and culturally obsessed with the USA. Responding to the embarrassing but time-honoured hoopla surrounding Obama's visit, Mike Carleton suggested in the Sydney Morning Herald that if once it seemed second nature to love America (Fonzie from Happy Days and Paul Stanley from Kiss were my idols when I was eight), thinking people should really grow out of such a childhood crush if they have any grasp on reality.

Even so, while Australians are generally quite pro-American, a mere 3% thought we were not close enough to the US before Obama's visit, with a vast majority saying our future is much more tied to Asia. Yet such is the distain for democracy in matters that possibly pertain to our very survival that the crucial decision to become even more enmeshed in the Godfather's vast empire was not even debated in Parliament.

Rather than a rampant China – or the more unambiguously hated Iran, which has not invaded anyone for centuries (its own democracy, meanwhile, was overthrown by a CIA-sponsored coup in 1953) – historical precedence is with actual power.

'The United States of America has no stronger ally than Australia', said both Bush and Obama. They were correct. Successive governments have since the 1960s abjectly implored Washington to invest in a base with permanent troops here.

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True to the still disavowed violence of the country's origins as a far-flung British colony, Australia's fear of our region and the world is seemingly pathological. Far from expanding the alliance with the greatest and thereby most globally violent power in history, if we were guided by basic moral standards and facts over obsequiousness and fear, a properly adult nation would rip it up.

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About the Author

Hamish Ford is a lecturer in Film, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Newcastle.

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