2011-03-17
Hello Andrew Wilkie
Open letter to Andrew Wilkie, independent Australian MP.
Dear Sir. At yesterday's town hall meeting about Wikileaks, I stood patiently in line for about an hour waiting to have a voice in the real world. Unfortunately it was denied to me due to time constraints. I was going to keep my question short, but now I can do it fully.
First of all some context. I believe it was you, but maybe it was John Pilger who made the comment that Australia needed to grow up and say "no" to America. Canada and New Zealand were cited as examples of countries that could say "no". Were you not aware that when the US humbly asked of Australia "please don't pull out of Iraq - we need you and so do our mutual Iraqi allies", Rudd did in fact say "no". I would consider that to be the childish foot-stamping stance, quite apart from the abject immorality.
But the whole context is completely wrong in the first place. It should be Australia that is concerned about the human rights of Afghans, Iraqis and Libyans, and Australia who leads the way in war of liberations, and it should be *us* that humbly asks the question "can you please help us" to the US, and it should be the US that is grown up enough to say "sure, we'll do whatever you want - you're a longstanding ally and friend and it will be a cold day in Hell before we reject a plea from you guys!".
Anyway, my question was just going to be:
Wikileaks has been part of an incredible chain of events:
"Another cause for the uprising has been attributed to the inability of the Tunisian government from being able to censor information from reaching the Tunisian people, such as information from WikiLeaks describing rampant corruption in the Tunisian government."
As an unintended consequence (*) of that, Libya is now in a civil war, with the rebels losing territory.
Given that we can all agree that we want the rebels to win, can we please have a list of countries that can be trusted, and get those countries to provide immediate air support before the rebels are all wiped out? Is Australia one of those countries, and if so, how soon will our planes be there, and can you please confirm that dictators in the United Nations will not determine Australia's sovereign decision on whether to act in the defence of freedom?
I hope you can answer this question, given the effort I made to stand in line to ask the question.
Thanks in advance sir.
Paul Edwards,
Australian citizen.
(*) I notice that when it comes to providing air support to the Libyans, "unintended consequences" comes up, but no-one seems to care about the unintended consequences of leaving a loopy dictator in power for another 42 years, nor releasing the leaks???
P.S. I hope you can answer the Libyan question on its own instead of saying "we can't liberate Libya unless we simultaneously liberate every other country on the planet and fix all problems in general. Libya can be asked and answered in its own right.
P.P.S. Another common theme at the meeting was that online activism was not enough to get Julia Gillard to do the right thing, and that we should engage in civil disobedience. Since the number of people participating in civil disobedience will be much less than 50% of the country (ie 10 million), that will also be a small minority of people who are trying to set policy via terrorism/blackmail and should rightfully be ignored/jailed too. The only hope I see of changing the sick system we are in is to get a 3rd political party on the scene which is designed to create the transparency and honesty and representativeness we all seek. The third party should have no other purpose than that, and wherever elected, it should just vote with whoever would normally have won the seat.
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Dear Sir. At yesterday's town hall meeting about Wikileaks, I stood patiently in line for about an hour waiting to have a voice in the real world. Unfortunately it was denied to me due to time constraints. I was going to keep my question short, but now I can do it fully.
First of all some context. I believe it was you, but maybe it was John Pilger who made the comment that Australia needed to grow up and say "no" to America. Canada and New Zealand were cited as examples of countries that could say "no". Were you not aware that when the US humbly asked of Australia "please don't pull out of Iraq - we need you and so do our mutual Iraqi allies", Rudd did in fact say "no". I would consider that to be the childish foot-stamping stance, quite apart from the abject immorality.
But the whole context is completely wrong in the first place. It should be Australia that is concerned about the human rights of Afghans, Iraqis and Libyans, and Australia who leads the way in war of liberations, and it should be *us* that humbly asks the question "can you please help us" to the US, and it should be the US that is grown up enough to say "sure, we'll do whatever you want - you're a longstanding ally and friend and it will be a cold day in Hell before we reject a plea from you guys!".
Anyway, my question was just going to be:
Wikileaks has been part of an incredible chain of events:
"Another cause for the uprising has been attributed to the inability of the Tunisian government from being able to censor information from reaching the Tunisian people, such as information from WikiLeaks describing rampant corruption in the Tunisian government."
As an unintended consequence (*) of that, Libya is now in a civil war, with the rebels losing territory.
Given that we can all agree that we want the rebels to win, can we please have a list of countries that can be trusted, and get those countries to provide immediate air support before the rebels are all wiped out? Is Australia one of those countries, and if so, how soon will our planes be there, and can you please confirm that dictators in the United Nations will not determine Australia's sovereign decision on whether to act in the defence of freedom?
I hope you can answer this question, given the effort I made to stand in line to ask the question.
Thanks in advance sir.
Paul Edwards,
Australian citizen.
(*) I notice that when it comes to providing air support to the Libyans, "unintended consequences" comes up, but no-one seems to care about the unintended consequences of leaving a loopy dictator in power for another 42 years, nor releasing the leaks???
P.S. I hope you can answer the Libyan question on its own instead of saying "we can't liberate Libya unless we simultaneously liberate every other country on the planet and fix all problems in general. Libya can be asked and answered in its own right.
P.P.S. Another common theme at the meeting was that online activism was not enough to get Julia Gillard to do the right thing, and that we should engage in civil disobedience. Since the number of people participating in civil disobedience will be much less than 50% of the country (ie 10 million), that will also be a small minority of people who are trying to set policy via terrorism/blackmail and should rightfully be ignored/jailed too. The only hope I see of changing the sick system we are in is to get a 3rd political party on the scene which is designed to create the transparency and honesty and representativeness we all seek. The third party should have no other purpose than that, and wherever elected, it should just vote with whoever would normally have won the seat.
# posted by Paul Edwards @ 18:57 
