What is a murdochracy? It is where the fealty and augmentation of Murdoch’s editors and managers are undisguised, an inspiration to his choir on seven continents, where even his competitors sing along and wise politicians heed the Murdochism: “What’ll it be? A headline a day or a bucket of shit a day?”
One of the most effective campaigns in the Australian murdochracy has been the whitewashing of a bloody colonial past, including a series of attacks on the distinguished chronicler of the Aboriginal genocide, Professor Henry Reynolds, and the director of the National Museum of Australia, Dawn Casey, for having dared to present the truth about indigenous suffering. Australia’s great maverick historian, the late Manning Clark, was smeared by Murdoch’s Courier-Mail as a Red agent, then as a fraud, in much the style that Murdoch’s London Sunday Times smeared the Labour MP Michael Foot as a Soviet agent.
Something similar awaits those who question the manipulation of the remembrance of Australia’s blood sacrifice for imperialism, old and new. Aimed at the young, a maudlin “new patriotism” reaches an annual climax on April 25, the anniversary of the first world war disaster at Gallipoli known as Anzac Day. The message is undisguised militarism promoting the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Thus, Prime Minister Rudd says, absurdly, that the military is Australia’s highest calling.
Such false flags are flown constantly for Israel, which sees a stream of Australian journalists sponsored and paid for by Zionist groups. The result is apologetic reporting of murderous actions that evokes the great appeasers like Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times in the 1930s. The debate about state war crimes has all but bypassed Australia. That a former and current British prime minister have been summoned before the Chilcot enquiry in London is viewed with bemusement as nothing like it would happen here. Yet John Howard, who also invaded Iraq, holds something of a record for having claimed 30 times in one speech that he knew Saddam Hussein had a “massive programme” of weapons of mass destruction.
The first time I met Al Jazeera’s Gaza team lead, Tamer Almisshal, was in July last...
