NEW INITIATIVE STARTS IN BRITAIN

A new Constitution for the European Union is being placed before member states, and is due for ratification in 2004. Those that ratify the document will face the inevitable dismantling of their old constitutional arrangements, and will surrender their sovereignty on a permanent basis. In Britain's case, such action would mean the end of one of the most ancient parliamentary traditions in the world, together with a unique form of Common Law based on Christianity. It would also mean the end of the Monarchy as anything other than an anachronistic tourist attraction.

There seems little doubt that the Blair government intends to ratify this document without asking in any meaningful way the sanction of the British people. It seems incredible that any government could sign away the essence of its own structure, its ancient rights and freedoms, its decision-making process and its responsibility to those that elected it without seeking the considered opinion of those from whom it derived its authority. To sum up, it would be the end of Britain.

There is certain to be some contentious debate about this step. A few courageous MPs may protest, and ordinary citizens express their opposition. But modern governments, while paying lip-service to the democratic process, have sub-consciously accepted Harold Laski's proposition that Parliament is sovereign, and is there to "manage" rather than "consult" the people. There is now no room in any English-speaking country for such momentous issues to be resolved successfully through party politics, which have successfully emasculated representative government. Creating new parties to enter the fray and challenge the status quo has been a signal failure. It is similar to challenging the existing private bank monopoly by starting another private bank.

It is extremely hard for ordinary people, faced with such an impasse, to conceive any way of challenging power and money except with the same tools. C.H. Douglas stressed time and again the futility of trying to fight fire with fire. New parties, however noble their sentiments, are a waste of time, becoming mini-versions of that which they claim to fight. Douglas suggested that the circumstances of the battle offered few avenues for a successful change until the forces of monopoly began to founder in their own bow-waves. At such a moment, small numbers of people might effect momentous changes by knowing what to do.

The movement in Britain, simply calling itself "The Few", plans to put in place a volunteer mechanism across the country to run a National Referendum on the move for a European Constitution binding on Britain. It is not a new party; it won't be standing candidates or supporting existing ones. It will concentrate all its efforts on setting up, advertising, coordinating and motivating volunteer teams in every appropriate polling place in Britain, so that the nation is enabled to speak with certainty about its own future on one day. The whole operation will cost, it is estimated, some six million pounds. It will be made operational by 2,000 initiators, who in turn will devote time and energy to building the required number of pollsters to make the referendum available to every Briton who wishes to have a say.

The subsequent collation of votes will be a mammoth operation on its own. The final outcome will have no way of enforcing itself with the sanctions of the military or the police. But it will present every politician with a position never faced in recent times - the emphatic, considered, nation-wide will of the people on a single issue. It will raise as the overriding factor the responsibility of the elected parliament to act on that expressed will.

It is becoming increasingly clear that "Parties Divide: Issues Unite".

If this realistic proposal begins to roll, we can predict a swell of support which cuts right across usual sectarian divisions. Those running polls will come from "the rich man in his castle", to "the poor man at his gate". Hard-nosed miners from the Midlands will rub shoulders with the young yuppies of Belgravia. Labour, Conservative and Social Democrat sentiments will be lost in the concern for the future of a Britain in which all must live. The idea of asking the people will begin to live again in a nation which originally fostered the idea into an art form.

It was towards such united action on "one issue at a time" that Douglas continually pointed. He added one more factor - the issue of steam. The issue, and the amount of concern that attended it, were crucial factors. It took time for, in Arthur Chresby's words, "Opinions to become Convictions." Precipitate action on a vital issue could squander the chance of success. A big issue had its own period of gestation - a time in which misgivings became concern, and concern became anger, before finally giving way to united, determined action.

To judge when an issue had enough "steam" for successful action was a matter of experienced judgment, and the service offered in devising the right mechanism for the right action at the right time of incalculable value. "Steam" is now escaping from safety valves in many parts of the English-speaking world. People have had government and politicians up to their ears! They have few ways of expressing their frustration. Last year's huge protests in Britain over the seemingly inconsequential issue of fox-hunting became the touchstone for an outpouring of frustration over the way the nation is being run. If that steam - which is still there in quantity - can be directed into a constructive outlet which lets the people speak, the sky may be the limit!

AUSTRALIAN POLITICIANS DISGUST VOTERS

A survey conducted by The Australian Readers' Digest towards the end of last year showed politicians came last in the professions trusted by the public. A summary of the survey, carried in The Herald Sun, November 27 2002, said:

"… In the least trusted stakes are politicians, then car salesmen, marketers and trade unionists. Politicians were seen as dishonest by 66 per cent of those surveyed …."
This has been amplified in a major survey conducted by researchers at Monash University. An article in The Age, 6/3/03, said:

"Victorians view politicians as liars who distort things to suit themselves, arrange jobs for the boys, and believe they do not run the state in the community's best interests, Monash University research shows. The research shows most do not know who their local State MP is and view state politicians as unimpressive.

"Politicians are overwhelmingly seen in a negative light," says the research paper by Dr Colleen Lewis and former speaker of the Legislative Assembly, Dr Ken Coghill. "People no longer trust or respect them, and a political career is not thought of as an honourable or respected career."…."
The article went on: "…The $100,000 research project funded by the Australian Research Council and the Victorian Parliament, found many voters could not pick their local state MP from their Federal MP or a local councilor. The research found that people viewed MPs' benefits as excessive. Older voters reminisced that politicians from the old days "were not simply robots" …. Voters believed politicians specifically created a profile to win a seat in parliament.
"They complain that they do not hear from MPs until an election is imminent, at which time they are flooded with leaflets and letters," the research said.

Voters also condemned the media for their coverage of politics and the spin doctors employed by politicians.. Dr Lewis said: "I think it demonstrates a lack of interest by the voters out there of the actual workings of the institutions which govern them …."

WHY? Could it be that ordinary folk no longer equate their MP with representation? Apart from Cabinet Ministers - who are part of the Executive - back benchers no longer vote on conscience, simply doing what they are told by the party whip. They receive large salaries, large electoral allowances, excessive superannuation without ever sticking their necks out.

Like Britain, Australia has largely lost representative government, with faceless, nameless robots filling up the benches, anxious not to rock the boat and really concerned only when there is a risk of losing the next election. Nothing will change until voters themselves have devised another way of getting their attention.

WHAT SORT OF 'DEMOCRACY'?

The latest news from Iraq shows an ominous slide in the situation, with continued looting and lawlessness. Nick Hordern, writing in The Australian Financial Review (21/5/03), commented:

"During the 40 days of seeming drift since the fall of Baghdad, the prospects for a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq have been growing steadily worse. Public health and security remains parlous. The latest bad news came yesterday, when the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei said Iraq could be in the throes of a radiological contamination emergency. "I am deeply concerned by the almost daily reports of looting and destruction at nuclear sites," ElBaradei said …"

Meanwhile, the various contending factions for power are making life difficult for an American administration which has not even got the lights on, the water running and the hospitals working . Nearly all Iraqis have arms, or access to them. Attempted policing of the situation without speedily restoring essential services place American soldiers in an invidious position. Sooner or later the world will see the US never had any intention of returning freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people. The possibility of a "puppet government" benignly carrying out America's wishes is mere wishful thinking. It will either be "Stop pretending and rule with a rod of iron" - or it will be "Get out". Or perhaps the already-touted war against Iran will divert attention away from US failings in Iraq?

ONLINE ISRAELI COMES TO DEFENCE OF UNITED KINGDOM MP

Under the heading, "Menacing Candour", On Target 11th May 2003 we reported on the move by influential Jews in the UK to "scalp" Tam Dalyell, veteran Labor MP, for daring to publicly claim that Tony Blair relies "too much on Jewish figures in Britain and the US." Outspoken online journalist Israel Shamir writes on further developments: "Good friend of our list, Jeff Blankfort, wrote in defence of MP (Tam) Dalyell who spoke out against the Cabal. Let us hope the Guardian will print his letter (letter below…ed).

In Britain, it is permissible to attack the Queen, and every other group of men and women - but the Jews should not be even mentioned. Immediately the 'outspoken MP' was attacked by a 'left-wing' Jewish enforcer Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian. He is not too bad a guy, this Freedland, and usually he speaks for the Israeli soldiers who refused to serve in the 'territories'. However, this is the payment he wants for his lukewarm support of the Palestinian cause - total obedience to the Jewish 'influence'. It is illuminating that while in the US every politician who 'spoke out' against the Jewish Power, was forced to go begging forgiveness to Canossa, the British MP appears to be made of sterner stuff. Below, the letter of Jeff …"

THAT IS A RACIST SLUR?

To the Editor, the Guardian U.K. 7/5/2003:
"Being on the other side of the Atlantic, I am not prepared to judge MP Tam Dalyell's comments regarding the influence of either Lord Levy, Peter Mandelson or Jack Straw on PM Tony Blair's decision to join the US in making war on Iraq, but Mr. Dalyell's assertion that "a 'cabal' of neoconservative Jews controls Bush," in the words of Jonathan Freedland ("This is a racist slur", May 7) has considerable evidence to back it up, as any careful reader of the British, the US, or the Israeli press should be aware of by now.

Well before the younger Bush assumed office, several important think tanks initiated by Jewish neo-cons, long committed publicly to the policies of a militant Israel, came up with plans for the US to redraw the map of the Middle East with the Jewish state slated for a major role. The first of these, JINSA, or the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, was the brainchild of Richard Perle, formerly the chair and still an influential member of the Defense Policy Board which advises the Defense Department on matters of foreign policy, and who, along with his colleague, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz have been credited by both British, American and Israeli journalists as having been the "architects" of the Bush administration's Iraq policy.
JINSA was established in 1976, apparently in response to the decision the previous year by then Pres. Gerald Ford to halt aid to Israel for six months when Tel Aviv refused to comply with disengagement agreements signed on to following the 1973 war. At that time, Mr. Ford had indicated that he was going to downgrade US-Israel relations, but was forced to back down when confronted with a letter, drawn up by Israel's Washington lobby, AIPAC and signed by 75 of the US's 100 senators, advising him not to do so.

The second of these and rapidly becoming the most well known is the Project for a New American Century or PNAC, whose chairman is William Kristol, editor of the influential neo-con journal, The Weekly Standard and whose vice-chair is Robert Kagan, another well known op-ed writer whose wife, Victoria Nuland, has just been appointed US ambassador to Turkey. What has drawn attention to the PNAC is its master plan for US control of the planet, drawn up largely by the same Jewish neo-cons that we find in JINSA, as well as those in the more well established American Enterprise Institute, such as Michael Ledeen, who will be remembered as a major player in the Reagan administration's Iran-Contra scandal, and the once indicted Eliot Abrams who has been appointed by Bush to oversee the Middle East affairs of the State Dept.

Other think tanks dominated by Jewish neo-cons such as the Center for Security Policy, the Hudson Inst., the Washington Center for Near East Policy, and the Saban Center of the Brookings Institution, also play key advisory roles on Capitol Hill. In order to disguise their pro-Israel agenda, these Jewish neo-cons brought into their think tanks important players in the Republican Party such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld whose views and actions up to that time hardly qualified them as neo-cons. During the 80s both had been publicly and privately supportive of Saddam Hussein, Israel's bitter enemy. That both now have signed on to the Jewish neo-con agenda is no doubt a tribute to more than the latter's persuasive powers.

There is clear evidence of the pro-Israel neo-con agenda that Mr. Freedland chooses to ignore that is indisputable. In 1996, Perle and two other leading neo-cons, now a part of the Bush administration, Douglas Feith and Meyrav Wurmser wrote a position paper for then Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu describing the need to eliminate Saddam Hussein. It turned out that it was cheaper for the Israelis if they had the US do it.

I write all this as one of an increasing number of Jewish Americans who are ashamed at what Israel and its supporters have done and are doing in our name. To dismiss the key issues that Mr. Dalyell and others have raised by falsely accusing them of "anti-Semitism" and "racism" will not make those issues go away. It will only make them more difficult, if not impossible, to deal with at a later date. Respectfully, Jeffrey Blankfort."

QC INSISTS ISRAELIS MUST TAKE FIRST STEP

The Adelaide Advertiser 7th May 2003 published a response by Paul Heywood-Smith QC ("Israelis must take first steps to peace") to an article by Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council analyst Andrew Friedman, 2nd May 2003. Mr. Friedman had insisted, "The Palestinian Authority has the ability to decisively eliminate terror but there has been a failure of will to do so."

Do unto others… But, thought Mr. Heywood-Smith, "There is an alternative way of looking at these matters," and suggested they could start by looking at the past history of Palestine. By going back to when the British Mandate was established in 1922, they could at least acknowledge that the Arabs then made up 87 per cent of Palestine's population. But that was not all, the Arabs were not responsible for the Holocaust and yet were asked, or should he say, required, to atone for it with their homelands, villages, olive groves, families and lives.
Mr. Heywood-Smith listed the humiliations, acts of terrorism, occupations, killings and injustices these people have endured since then, leading to the now desperate acts of suicide bombings. "Terrorism," he says, "has resulted from 50 years of injustice.

Palestine brought us September 11 and Bali." Australian political parties must state their positions - and why: He insists Australian political parties should be forced to state where they stand on this crucial foreign policy issue. "Israel," he says, "cannot be allowed to just react. It must act. It must dismantle the settlements, starting with those built since 2001."

On Target readers could take a leaf out of Mr. Heywood-Smith's book and ask their own federal representatives the same questions he poses: · Do they support the creation of a Palestinian state on the 1967 boundaries? · If not, what do they support and why? · And what should Australia do to force compliance with the 'road map' to peace drawn up by an international diplomatic team?

FANNING THE FLAMES OF WAR

"There is no proletarian movement, not even a communist one, which does not operate in the interest of money, in the direction indicated by money and for the period permitted by money, all this without the idealist in its ranks having the faintest suspicion of the fact."
Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West.

Why do I get the feeling we are being 'set up' yet again? The Australian's report "US seeks bases in Australia", 22nd May 2003 informing us of America's interest in setting up military bases in Australia has left me feeling very uneasy. Claiming the huge financial burdens Australia will now have to bear in the 'war against terrorism', (the latest 'symbolic menacing-shadow' we are to fear now that communism has 'collapsed'), will be financially too much for us, the Australian's editorial of 23rd May 23, 2003 approves of such an intrusion on Australian soil. But we're writing about the same nation which the Sydney Morning Herald 20th May 2003, revealed ("Richest nations arming rights abuses: Amnesty") supplied at least two-thirds of all global arms transfers for the years between 1997 and 2001!

They are not putting out the fires of war. They are continually fanning them!

ACEH CHILDREN : LAMBS TO THE SLAUGHTER

The latest sacrificial victims in this 'war on terrorism' phase of the New World Order are the children of strife-torn Aceh. The 23rd May, 2003 edition of the Australian, "Aceh children on list of death", gives us the grisly details. Sian Powell, the Jakarta correspondent, said the children were shot by Indonesian military forces, pledged to "crush spies for the Achenese rebel movement".

He wrote, "After shooting the (two) boys at close range, blowing half the head off one, the soldiers went to the houses of another two. They dragged them away, shot them dead and hung their bodies on a fence near the village mosque."

I had recently read of this terror-technique and so searched out the source... All in the name of 'civilisation': Americans have made much of the twin towers bombing and subsequent killing of innocent people - and rightly so. But sadly, after reading the 1998 essay by Peter Dale Scott, Ph.D. "Using Atrocities: U.S. Responsibility for the Slaughters in Indonesia and East Timor," one comes to the realisation the Americans need to get their own house in order. The American authorities' own shameful involvement in atrocities comes to light. Mr. Scott researched his subject over thirty years, exposing America's involvement in "managed atrocities" around the world, and of the US role in the training and use of such techniques.

In 1962 a special U.S. MILTAG (Military Training Advisory Group) was set up to work with the Indonesian Army to implement its 'civic action programs'. The U.S. Government kept the Indonesian military budget secret - concealing it even from Congress. Peter Dale Scott continued:

"Atrocities can be used politically in different ways. They can be threatened (this practice is widespread). They can be committed. Or the commission of atrocity can be directed and exploited psychologically to induce further terror among survivors. This last stage, which I call managed atrocity, is known and taught at special U.S. military schools as part of psychological warfare or psywar. A fully managed atrocity is one in which the pretext for the exploited atrocity is developed by the managers of the atrocity itself. Not all psywar is managed atrocity. But all managed atrocity is psywar, and psywar is responsible for the seminal managed atrocities of today."

All major states are responsible for civilian massacres: "We close this century," he wrote, "with the sad awareness that virtually all major states, and particularly those states who have prided themselves on their degree of civilisation, have been responsible for major massacres of civilians. Recurringly, indeed predictably, it has been civilisation itself that has been cited as a justification for atrocious massacre. As was once the case with religion, people will commit atrocities in the name of civilisation that they might not contemplate otherwise. The greater the faith in one's civilising mission, the greater the likelihood of unprecedented atrocity." (The 'do-gooders' - they will 'do good' to people, whether the people want it or not...ed)

He explains that if the reader thinks his essay on atrocity "appears to focus inordinately on such management details as the display of corpses, it is because such details figure in America's psywar curriculum." Remember, he wrote: "The commission of atrocity can be directed and exploited psychologically to induce further terror among survivors." What did we read in the Australian about the display of the corpses of the Aceh children? "They dragged them away, shot them dead and hung their bodies on a fence near the village mosque." The purpose of displaying the corpses of the cold-bloodily murdered children was to instill more fear and terror among the survivors.

Further reading: "Legacy of Terror"; "A World Split Apart"; "Words of Warning to the West"; all by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. But don't stop there, Solzhenitsyn came through the terrible Gulag Archipeligo and went on to insist, "Enough of a society built on lies… What is needed are not half-measures of perestroika but a root and branch reform…revitalizing the traditional values of the people"…."Rebuilding Russia" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. All books available from the League Book Services.

THE OIL GIANT EXXONMOBIL

SOUTH AUSTRALIA'S CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION

BASIC FUND

The Fund has had a strong boost, thanks to the generosity of a number of supporters, and now stands at $37,060.00. That's just great! Please keep up the momentum and let's see the fund filled!

BETTY LUKS FOR QUEENSLAND: Betty Luks will be taking part in League 'in-house' meetings whilst in Queensland over the next two weeks. Other public meetings have been organised and details are available from Regional Councillors Ken & Judy McFadzen phone: 07 4950 5164

SYDNEY CONSERVATIVE SPEAKERS' CLUB

WEST AUSTRALIA STATE WEEKEND