With Friends Like These (Down Under)
As it turns out, even here Down Under, we were not immune to the attentions of the putsch pirates. Whilst not widely suspected at the time, with good reason there is now a not insignificant number of Aussies who believe that elements of the CIA -- colluding with our own intelligence community, local U.S. diplomats of the day, and Rupert Murdoch's News Limited as the self-appointed MSM agent provocateur -- were directly involved in leveraging in 1975 not dissimilar regime change strategies.
These machinations contributed to the political instability thereby seriously undermining the duly elected Labor government of the day (one that this 'boots-on-the-ground' writer remembers all too vividly), and in the process giving many of us an inkling of what it might have felt like to live a 'banana republic'. And Australia was then -- and remains to this day -- one of America's most loyal (many would say obsequious) allies, a reality that prevails irrespective of the political party in office at any given time. For many Australians who since then have come to increasingly suspect U.S. involvement in Prime Minister Gough Whitlam's unceremonious ouster, it was/is a case of, 'with friends like [the Americans], who needs enemies?'
Whilst the catalyst for this treacherous subversion and the convoluted backstory behind it remains a narrative for another time, for our purposes herein it is instructive to note it led to an unprecedented Constitutional crisis that eventually saw our whole government 'putsched'. To this day, regardless of political persuasion, Whitlam -- who'd earlier pulled Australia out of the Vietnam quagmire and had even begun heretically questioning our ongoing commitment to maintaining America's much prized Pine Gap intelligence and surveillance facility, actions which inevitably outraged President Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and the putsch pirates of the day -- remains the only PM in our history who dared challenge the prevailing Washington orthodoxy. Quelle surprise!... ...many might say!
Interestingly, Whitlam, when some years later was presented compelling evidence his government was indeed 'termited' by the U.S., experienced what can best be described as cognitive dissonance; so entrenched is the benevolent, credulous view of the U.S. in the Australian political psychopathology, even he all but refused to believe it.
(Readers seeking further insight into this little known U.S. intervention in the affairs of other countries might follow the links here, here, and here. They make for fascinating reading. The John Schlesinger film The Falcon and the Snowman is also worth seeking out.)
As for the aforementioned coups in Guatemala and Iran (along with several others that followed in their wake, e.g. Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1961 and Indonesia in 1965), those in the know with regard to the short- and long-term outcomes from these prototypical examples of what signaled Washington's predisposition to regime change recidivism, will readily recall there were no happy endings. This proved to be especially so for the ordinary citizens of most countries affected along with their families and communities, who for those remaining alive at least are still recovering from the devastating effects -- personal, political, economic, social -- of this meddling by the U.S. intelligence community and their confreres populating the ranks of the foreign policy power elite on both banks of the Potomac.
And even when these strategies spectacularly went pear-shaped and back-fired on the perps, most notably with the Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, the well-documented blowback was no less marked in this case, albeit "blowback" of a different kind. As is well known, this regrettable, avoidable chapter in the chronicles of U.S. Cold War interventionism eventually brought America to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and triggered ironically events that contributed in no small measure to the assassination of the man who gave the ill-fated coup the 'green' from the off. If this 'blast from the past' is ringing alarm bells with some -- which might be expected given the blowback from events as they appear to be unfolding in the Ukraine -- then it has probably served a useful purpose.
It is of course one we shall come back to.
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