by OWEN SCHALK
Any chance that Australia had of becoming a sovereign state ended in 1975 with the intervention of the CIA and Queen Elizabeth
In Canada and throughout the Western world, the fêting of the late Queen Elizabeth II is inescapable. Meanwhile, racialized people throughout the Americas and Britain’s former colonies are condemning what Priyamvada Gopal calls a “mandated devotional unanimity” regarding the queen’s legacy, a performative theatre of collective grief that completely suppresses the fact that the British Empire which Elizabeth headed for 70 years operated regimes of “systematized violence [and] legalized lawlessness” throughout Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.
In countries colonized by the British, the overlords of what Queen Elizabeth II lauded as “our great imperial family” interred millions of colonized people in concentration camps and torture facilities, organized paramilitary police forces to surveil and assassinate anti-colonial leaders, and imposed some of the most horrific abuses imaginable on entire populations simply because of their race, ethnicity, or perceived political affiliations. The queen’s image was used to justify these crimes against humanity. For instance, survivors of the concentration camps in Kenya (in which 1.5 million Kikuyu people, almost the entire population, were imprisoned during Elizabeth II’s reign) reported that the queen’s image hung in the camps, and the British officials who tortured them urged them to recognize Elizabeth and the monarchy she represented as their benevolent ruler.
In the context of Britain’s colonial administrations of terror, the 1975 constitutional coup in Australia may hardly seem worth remembering. However, as we tally the queen’s long legacy of anti-democratic acts, the removal of Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s reformist Labor government must be included, even though if pales in comparison to British atrocities in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean that occurred under her reign.
Unlike some of the other abuses, which Elizabeth II either ignored or praised from afar, she was directly involved in the removal of Australia’s elected prime minister in 1975. Letters between her office and then Governor-General John Kerr show that her representatives encouraged Kerr to dissolve Whitlam’s government, a power never before used by a governor-general, as Whitlam gradually moved Australia toward Cold War non-alignment.
Australian journalist John Pilger describes Whitlam, who was elected in 1972 with 53 percent of the vote, as “a maverick social democrat of principle, pride and propriety.” Today, one might find more similarities between him and center-left Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador than somebody like Fidel Castro or Hugo Chávez. While not embracing the leftist flank of the Labor Party, Whitlam nevertheless built an admirably anti-imperialist foreign policy and achieved some progressive gains at home. As Pilger explains:
Whitlam moved Australia towards the Non-Aligned Movement and called for a Zone of Peace in the Indian ocean, which the U.S. and Britain opposed. He demanded France cease its nuclear testing in the Pacific. In the U.N., Australia spoke up for the Palestinians. Refugees fleeing the CIA-engineered coup in Chile were welcomed into Australia… At home, equal pay for women, free universal higher education and support for the arts became law.
A US commentator wrote of Whitlam’s government that “[no country had]
reversed its posture in international affairs so totally without going
through a domestic revolution.”
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