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Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release Thursday, 29 March 2018

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://www.cecaust.com.au
 

McCarthyism in Australia: CEC called agents of Russian influence, but who represents the national interest?

Russia expert and former diplomat and intelligence official Kyle Wilson claimed to Patricia Karvelas on the 27 March Radio National Drive program that Russian diplomats addressing a 2015 Citizens Electoral Council conference was an instance of Russian interference in Australian politics.

Listing off Russia’s supposed international “crimes”, including the annexation of Crimea and alleged bombing of hospitals in Syria, Wilson included Australia as a target, saying: “We’ve even had, actually, small attempts to influence politics in Australia. Russian diplomats have addressed the Citizens Electoral Council of Australia, a very strange right-wing group, which is funded by the LaRouche organisation in the United States of America.”

There you have it. A spokesman for Australia’s political/security establishment is claiming that a CEC international conference counts as Russian interference. (His last claim, of US funding, is flat out false.) Wilson is a retired diplomat who finished his career as an intelligence official with the nation’s peak intelligence agency, the Office of National Assessments (ONA). ONA and Australia’s security and intelligence agencies are part of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, which operates under the direction of Britain and the USA, and constitutes a supranational authority over Australia that very few Australian political leaders would dare to go against.

Wilson’s claim is a baseless distortion, and revealing of the poor quality of “intelligence” that underpins the current anti-Russian hysteria. He is referring to the CEC’s March 2015 international conference in Melbourne called “The World Land-Bridge: Peace on Earth, Good Will towards All Men”. The conference was organised to promote in Australia the positive development of the emerging BRICS alliance of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, as a new model of international relations based on respect for national sovereignty and cooperation on economic development, exemplified by China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. The conference was addressed by speakers from the UK, USA, Germany, Ukraine, South Africa, Sweden, and by Russian diplomat Professor Georgy Toloraya, Executive Director of the Russian National Committee on BRICS Research. The CEC publicised the proceedings of this landmark conference widely, publishing full transcripts of the speeches in a special magazine, and alongside the videos on a dedicated page on the CEC’s website.

For the record, the CEC does support Russia:

  • against the aggressive eastward expansion of NATO;
  • against the regime-change agenda of Anglo-American neoconservatives and so-called liberal interventionists who have the blood of millions in Iraq, Libya and Syria on their hands, and are ultimately targeting Russia and China;
  • against the Anglo-American- and Gulf kingdoms (Saudi)-backed Islamist terrorists, including al-Qaeda, who since the 1980s Afghanistan war have been used to destabilise nations on Russia’s border and inside Russia itself, and in regime-change assaults on Libya and Syria;
  • against the USA’s unilateral withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and subsequent targeting of Russia with BMD installations, which forced Russia to compete in a new arms race;
  • for participating in the BRICS alliance, which provides an example to the world of a new basis for international relations based not on subservience to a sole superpower, but on respect for national sovereignty and cooperation on mutually beneficial economic development;
  • for opposing the criminal regime-change interventions in Iraq, Libya and Syria in which Australia has been complicit, and which have had disastrous consequences for the Middle East and North Africa, as well as for the rest of the world through their fuelling of international terrorism.

In other words, the CEC, as a patriotic political party firmly committed to the principle of national sovereignty, understands that it is not Russia, or China, that is a threat to Australia and the world, but the bipartisan foreign policy we pursue at the behest of Britain and the United States.

Australia’s political/security establishment, which in recent decades has become almost universally conditioned into sycophantic subservience to Anglo-American foreign policy, would like Australians to buckle to a 1950s McCarthy-style paranoia that believes anyone who opposes Australia’s foreign policy must be an agent of Russia or China. For too long, they have enjoyed a foreign policy consensus which was never questioned, but is now falling apart.

Like many Australians, as well as many people in the UK and USA, the CEC opposes our foreign policy because it has been such a disaster, Iraq being the leading example. The wars we have joined have blown back on us through terrorism and refugee crises.

It is also not in our national interest. Especially pathetic about Australia’s foreign policy is that we have subjugated our national interest to the strategic agenda of the UK and USA—an agenda that’s not in the interests of the people of Britain and the United States, but only serves the militarism of the neoconservatives who since the 1992 declaration of the so-called Wolfowitz Doctrine have pursued a strategy of stopping the rise of any alternative military or economic power to the USA.

The late statesman and former prime minister Malcolm Fraser tried to warn his fellow Australians of the consequences of our lack of independence in his 2014 book Dangerous Allies, in which he identified Anglo-American foreign policy as the biggest threat to world peace, including its provocations against Russia. Malcolm Fraser worked with the CEC in February 2014 to expose the Anglo-American coup in Ukraine using actual Nazis to overthrow an elected government, and he gave a half-hour interview to Russia Today for the world to see that a former Australian PM was standing in opposition to the escalation against Russia. Many European senior statesmen agreed with Fraser. Another former prime minister with extensive foreign policy experience, Paul Keating, has also expressed his disapproval of the provocative expansion of NATO up to Russia’s borders. Were and are these distinguished Australians also agents of Russian influence?

As ridiculous as it sounds, that’s what our political/security establishment would like people to start to think. Their British counterparts have slandered UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn this way, for his decades of opposition to Britain’s disastrous wars, and for daring to ask for evidence about the Skripal poisoning. And of course, their US counterparts have done the same to Donald Trump, who famously denounced the Iraq war and the regime-change agenda in his election campaign, and expressed a desire for better relations with Russia in order to reduce the danger of nuclear war. In collusion with the British, the US intelligence agencies and their media accomplices have created a McCarthyite hysteria to box Trump in so he cannot follow through on his Russia policy.

As patriots, the CEC is arguing that peaceful cooperation with Russia and China is in Australia’s national interest. It is the political/security establishment that is determined to keep Australia in step with a foreign policy agenda that is not in our interest. That’s the source of foreign interference in Australia, and the CEC is leading the fight against it.

Click here for a free copy of the special magazine containing the proceedings of the CEC’s 2015 international conference, The World Land-Bridge: Peace on Earth, Good Will towards All Men.

Click here to join the CEC as a member.

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