Bernard Salt, Murdoch media insult the memory of Second World War Australians

(Illustration: For more on Colonel Blimp see "Notes" [1])

Original title was: "Mr Salt and Mr Murdoch team up again to can Australians". See also: "Bernard Salt and Murdoch press cook up recipe for invasion" of 2 May 09.

Into the Salty abyss

According to yet another article in Mr Murdoch's Australian newspaper by self-styled demographer, Bernard Salt,

Australia "quivered when a passing Japanese submarine lobbed shells into the eastern suburbs of Sydney in May 1942: property prices plummeted."

You can find the article, "Invasion victory ensured by complacency" in the business and property section in The Australian. A sort of where to buy and invade section, I guess. Here Salt advertises Australia as an easy target for any enemies. Pretending that he is writing for a mythical Peoples' Army in Bernardistan, he plots entry via the Kimberleys.

Why Salt's antics here are not seen as treacherous and inciting invasion would be a mystery to anyone seriously subscribing to the Axis of Evil myth. More sophisticated readers may wonder, however, if the property development industry is so worried by the Australian public's louder and louder calls for population stabilisation, that they must have decided to ask Mr Murdoch and Mr Salt to try provoke a full-on invasion.

Mr Salt probably realises that conducting a military invasion of Australia (rather than the economic immigration one) is not as easy as his imaginary character pretends. What may still be possible, however, is to misinform elderly Australians (members of the property lobby and readers of The Australian, for instance) via one of our only two national newspapers, and panic them into calling for a bigger population. Either strategy could work and, without an invasion - of immigrants or armed forces - the Colonel Blimps (and Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swann) of the Property and Development Lobby are doomed. A welcome extinction, in the view of many ecologists, which would prevent so many sad ones.

Australia Overloaded author, Mark O'Connor wrote recently in response to Bernard's attitude which seems to be that Australians are complacent cowards and the country needs more of them:

"If the Australians of our fathers' or grandfathers' generation had been as faint hearted as Mr Salt, back when our population was only a third of what it is today, Australia might now be a province of Japan."

(O'Connor was responding to an article, "Australia told to grow or risk invasion", in the Canberra Times, 31/3/2010, p. 6 which was reporting on what seem like Bernard Salt's attempts to commercialise fear and ignorance in yet another forum.)

James Sinnamon commented on the facts:

In fact, Australia achieved self-reliance in 1942 and stood a very good chance of being able to defeat a Japanese invasion. That is why the Japanese Army in March 1942 vetoed the Japanese Navy's plan to invade.

The reason why the Japanese Army vetoed the Navy's invasion plans is explained in detail by Andrew T Ross in Armed and Ready - The Industrial Development and Defence of Australia 1900-1945 Turton & Armstrong, Sydney, 1995, on pages 408-418:

By June 1942, the earliest date an invasion force could have been assembled, Australia would have 8 fully equipped divisions in the field as well as an air force capable of denying the Japanese total air supremacy. To win, they would have had to capture a deep water harbour in order to enforce a blockade to prevent Australia being able the resupply itself with some of the very few materials with which we were not self-sufficient (including petroleum). The northernmost deep water harbour was Newcastle.

Mr Sinnamon, who obviously has no serious investments in housing or infrastructure or bank shares, continued:

During the Second World War Australia was one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, a technological edge we have largely lost since then thanks to Australia having allowed its manufacturing sector to be destroyed as mandated by free market orthodoxy.

Of Australia's contribution to the Second World War, US President Truman said to the US Congress in a report on Lend Lease (including on Australia's reverse Lend Lease to the US during much of the Pacific War) on 27 December 1946:

"On balance, the contribution made by Australia, a country having 7 millions, approximately equalled that of United States." (Andrew T. Ross, Armed and Ready: the industrial development and defence of Australia, 1900-1945, Turton & Armstrong, Sydney, 1995, p 427)

Sinnamon asks,

Why would Bernard Salt wish to deny this, as well as this country's impressive military achievements, by focusing on only two episodes in the war?

In the case of the bombing of Darwin, the attacking Japanese force exceeded that which attacked Pearl Harbour, so I would think that the panicked response by some Australians was understandable.

(See also "The myth of the Howard Government's Defence Competence" of 21 November 2007 at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=6665)

Commercialising treachery

Well, I guess it doesn't matter to Mr Salt's objectives whether his statements are accurate or fair. The aim of the article seems to be to generate enough fear to overcome Australians' democratic desire for a small and stable population. This means we can expect many more articles like this one, sigh.

And the battle to invade and subdue Australia is half-won anyway. As Bernard Salt knows and Greg Woods writes, we are already well on the way to being a nation of disorganised captives to propaganda and consumerism.

So why would having a lot more of that kind of Australian serve to defend us against the tens of millions in some Bernardistan?

What The Australian wouldn't print

As Greg Wood writes:

Pray tell Mr. Salt, how would even tenfold more Australians, wedged into the alienating fringe of suburbia and the high-rise catacombs of your ambitions, and beguiled into apathy by myriad imported electronic eclectica, be of any practical assistance against this massed force from your imagination? As an audience to watch the news-feeds and up the ratings of the conflict perhaps?

Your narrow and convenient account of WW2 Australian response to Japanese attack is simply bad history. In fact the response was broadly self-sacrificing and heroic. That earlier time exhibited remarkable social identity and spirit, which acted as the glue that draws together the resistance your argument so disingenuously questions. That character is now largely lost as recent decades have seen genuine neighbourhoods sacrificed as commodities for trade in the game of property speculation and growth-for-profit that you advocate.

And the futility of your proposition sucks one’s breath out. Why bother to invade Australia when it is already for sale world-wide on the internet to the highest bidder with the strongest exchange rate? N.B. 80% of Australians (and growing) need not apply – insufficient funds!

Well, that's right, Greg. And the Property marketers of the Growth Lobby want more customers with ready cash. For some reason they think that the Peoples Army might have the ready. (After all, armies are where a lot of foreign aid ends up and big spending goes on.) So Bernard is getting the message to them, via Mr Murdoch's Australian that it would be a doddle to invade Australia. While they're perusing our topology on GoogleEarth, they can also have a look at property on Mr Murdoch's www.realestate.com.au

But Greg continues, referring to the treacherous conduct of The Australian as a 'community sell-out' in printing an article that purports to give fail-safe directions to invade your country:

Harking back to WW2 and what it truly does take to secure freedom, a community sell-out of this magnitude would have earned a bullet in the back of the head from the French Resistance. Or does your curious brand of history see them as an extremist terrorist group?

However, if you peruse the emailed responses to Salt's article, it really isn't so easy to invade Australia. Perhaps, in fact, Mr Salt was just using the Peoples' Army as a kind of code for the elderly tax-payer army that supplements the Growth Lobby's continued purchase of power in this country.

At any rate, here are some of the best of the responses in The Australian:

ID Langford Posted at 6:13 AM Today

Bernard, you are entirely out to lunch... Consider the SE Asian archipelago that you navigated down to get here...you don't think we will see you coming? Consider the vast interior of the Australian landmass that you will need to penetrate in order to project military force into our decisive areas...does it remind you of the German attempt to conquer the Soviet Union in WW2? Or Napoleon's attempt a century earlier?? Consider the logistics involved in forcing entry onto Australia and then sustaining it...consider the wet season which prohibits movement in northern Australia for much of the year...go read some the Defence of Australia foundational documents that are out there. Most of us are complacent about history; some of us however, are students of history and understand the efforts required to lodge and deny access to an area the size of the Kimberley would be a truly monumental task. It took over 205 German Divisions to invade the Soviet Union and even this massive war machine failed. Have a real think about it...who can even closely imitate this force structure today??

Jason Ransome of Basel, Switzerland Posted at 7:29 AM Today

Fantastic article! But did you take into account our anzus treaty with America. Let's not forget Australia is a huge country, you can start from the west and move east but our army will come from behind and cut your supply routes every time, so you better bring enough personal to protect those supply routes. If it was so simple to invade Australia then it would of been tried by more than just the Japanese Good luck with your invasion, your going to need it

I like this one - short and to the point:

Mr Squiggle of Melbourne Posted at 9:58 AM Today

What an odious little article this is. China's population is 1.3bn. Indonesia's is 231m. Even if we increased our population size four-fold tomorrow, we would still be strategically outnumbered. Just let it go Bernard, we'll never create national security by ramping up our population. The starting gap is too large.

neil of melb Posted at 11:05 AM Today

The problem with invading Australia is purely logistical, How may countries have the capability of transporting 150,000 soldiers, equipment and ongoing supplies over 1000's of km of ocean? The only countries that could conceivably do it are the USA because of their military power and Indonesia because of their proximity. But Indonesia does not have the capability to destroy our air force or stop it being reinforced from allies. They don't have the capacity to land 10's of thousands of paratroopers. We would have control of the skies and the resulting carnage inflicted on a marine invasion would catastrophic. Military strategists run simulations on these scenarios constantly, this is why we are spending billions on long distance radar, aircraft and submarines rather than a huge army. A war would be fought in the Pacific or Indian oceans or Timor sea, not on Australian soil.

Rhetorical Question to the Elites who make money out of the rest of us through war and housing games

Is The Australian in fact un-Australian? Didn't the diggers die to preserve free speech? How come only Mr Salt and his doyen get to say whatever they like?

NOTES

[1] Colonel Blimp was a cartoon character created by Sir David Low (1891-1963), a New Zealand political cartoonist and caricaturist who lived and worked in the United Kingdom for many years. Low was a self-taught cartoonist. Born in New Zealand, he worked in his native country before migrating to Sydney, Australia in 1911, and ultimately to London (1919), where he made his career and earned fame for his Colonel Blimp depictions and his merciless satirising the personalities and policies of German dictator Adolf Hitler, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, and other leaders of his times. Source, Wikipedia

See also: "Bernard Salt and Murdoch press cook up recipe for invasion" of 2 May 09, "Madang landowners fight ecologically devastating Chinese mining invasion" of 1 Apr 10.