Malcolm Fraser to Australia: become independent of empires, or be destroyed by war, soon!

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser has again intervened in the rapidly escalating war build-up against Russia and China, with a call for Australia to break decisively with the British Empire, and with an America presently acting in that British imperial tradition, and assert ourselves at long last as an independent sovereign nation.

[Click here to read the 25 April Sydney Morning Herald coverage of Malcolm Fraser’s new book, Dangerous Allies, which includes a 16-minute video of an interview with Robert Manne.]

Fraser has long warned that the U.S. targeting of China (and Russia) with its ballistic missile defence (BMD) system, and the policy of “containing” China, including through Barack Obama’s Asia Pivot, which involves Australia, is leading towards nuclear war, in which Australia will be a target.

Last month, he was one of the few Western statesmen to speak out against the U.S. State Department’s backing of the violent neo-fascist groups in Ukraine which overthrew the elected Ukrainian government; Mr Fraser pinned the blame for the present dangerous flashpoint with Russia on the long-term Anglo-American strategy of encircling Russia with NATO forward bases and BMD installations.

Fraser’s message in his new book, Dangerous Allies, is that Australia can contribute to world peace and our own security, if we break with our historical dependence on the imperial powers that drive the world to war.

The former PM starkly warned that Australia’s hosting of the U.S. Marine Air-Ground Task Force in Darwin targeted at China, the deployment of guided missile frigate HMAS Sydney as part of the 7th Fleet of USS Washington, the appointment of Australian Major General Burr as second in command of the U.S. Army in the Western Pacific, and our hosting of Pine Gap as a targeting installation for America’s nuclear missile systems and murderous drones program, makes us automatically involved in U.S. wars, in the same way historically that Australia was automatically involved in British wars.

Fraser writes, “To avoid complicity in America’s future military operations, the Marine Air-Ground Task Force would be asked to leave. The deployment of our frigate, as part of the carrier strike group, would cease and Major General Burr would be replaced, presumably by an American. These three actions could be undertaken relatively easily and quickly, without too much disruption. Pine Gap is another matter… To shut the facility down forthwith would leave a gap in America’s strategic capabilities, which would be much more than an annoyance to the United States, but a requirement to close it within five years would be reasonable.”

Fraser expounded to interviewer Robert Manne, “I’m asking Australia to break with her long past—the whole history of Australia from colonial times… Britain had the capacity to drag us into wars, and America now has the capacity to drag us into wars, and I think it is time we grew up…

“We should also make up our minds to do something with Australia as a nation,” he stated. “And just as Australians did after World War II: ‘Look we’re not defensible with 7 million people. We’ve got to build, people, we’ve got to have more people from more countries.’ … We could afford it, we could be a nation of 40-45 million people, we’d have to spend, invest in environment and water and infrastructure, but these things are not beyond us, and if it meant giving up some of today’s consumption to accomplish a better and a greater Australia, I believe all Australians would feel proud at the end result. And we’d be in a better place to advance peace and security throughout our part of the world. … We would have to be a citizen in the world, and not believe we can shut ourselves off from the world, as though we can be entirely separate.”

Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood today applauded Fraser:

“Malcolm Fraser is providing the leadership which Australia and the world desperately need in this time of crisis,” he said.

“Australia must break with Anglo-American imperialism, which inexorably leads to financial collapse and world war. America is not inherently imperialist, in fact it was founded in a war against the British Empire, as a ‘Beacon of Hope’ and a ‘Temple of Liberty’ for the entire world, a nation whose Constitution at the very outset commits it to the ‘General Welfare’ of all its citizens. But increasingly since the death of Prime Minister John Curtin’s great ally President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in April 1945, the U.S. has acted as a puppet of that still existing British Empire, centred in the Crown and the City of London and whose main branch office in Wall Street has increasingly seized control of America. Roosevelt reined in Wall Street’s speculative mania through his Glass-Steagall banking separation and his direction of national credit to industry, agriculture and great infrastructure projects. But recent U.S. presidents such as George H.W. Bush (1989-1993), his idiot son George W. Bush (2001-2009) and now a Nero-like Barack Obama have been nothing but grovelling stooges for Wall Street and the British Crown.”

Isherwood concluded, “As Malcolm Fraser so courageously said, we have to finally break with this imperialism—the essence of which is monetarism, what old Labor used to call the ‘Money Power’—or we will never have durable peace and prosperity in Australia. Therefore, the CEC is leading the fight in this nation for a Glass-Steagall separation of banking; for a government owned and controlled national bank to direct public credit into economic development; and for large-scale nation-building infrastructure projects to develop the continent. Only so can Australia finally break the financial stranglehold of London and Wall Street, and achieve true national sovereignty.

“Australians—join me in this fight!”