What has happened to Jeremy Corbyn echoes in so many ways the fate of Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam as far back as the 1970s.
Secret letters written in 1975 between the Queen and her man in Canberra, Sir John Kerr, have now been released.
That year, Kerr infamously sacked the reformist government of prime minister Gough Whitlam, which had been vilified in the British press, and delivered Australia into the hands of the United States.
Today, Australia is seen as a vassal state. Its politics, intelligence agencies, military and much of its media are integrated into Washington’s “sphere of dominance” and war plans.
Tip of the spear
In Donald Trump’s current provocations of China, the US bases in Australia are described as the “tip of the spear”.
During the Whitlam years, Australia briefly achieved independence and became intolerably progressive.
Politically, it was an astonishing period. An American commentator wrote that no country had “reversed its posture in international affairs so totally without going through a domestic revolution”.
Gough Whitlam was sacked as PM on Remembrance Day, 1975. When he died six years ago, it was hoped the truth of the CIA inspired coup against him, would be buried with him.
Pilger presents all this and much more in his three part documentary, the Last Dream: Other People’s Wars and in his book A Secret Country.
If you’re not in the mood for harsh anti-socialist reality turn to fiction and A Very British Coup, by Chris Mullins, (avoid his dreadful follow-up, Harry Perkins’ Friends, just ugh).
The story was adapted for TV in 1982 (find it on ebay or pay a heck of a lot on Amazon) and again in 2012 as Secret State, dramas loosely based on what happened in Australia mixed with the rumours of plots by MI5, MI6 and senior military to remove the UK’s then Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson.
Everyone of these events, real and imaginary, have resonance with much of what Corbyn has been through. You can have fun putting old plotters names to new faces!
Any future socialist PM hopeful can expect to face the same, with knobs on.
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