The other day the Australian Broadcasting Corporation released “The Afghan Files”, covering the leaked secret defense force documents which revealed how Australian troops killed unarmed men and children in Afghanistan and tried to hide it. These horrific events transpired in the wake of a military operation which should never have happened and which Australians never stood anything to gain from.

On the 11th of November, 1975, Australia’s democratically elected prime minister Gough Whitlam was removed from office in a coup staged by the CIA and MI6, ending an administration which had made leaps and bounds in social progress, Aboriginal rights, national sovereignty, demilitarization and nuclear weapons opposition. Legendary Australian journalist John Pilger reports that in the 1980s it was learned that the CIA had discussed “with urgency” how best to resolve “the Whitlam problem”, and that prior to his removal Whitlam was shown a top-secret message from the head of the CIA’s East Asia division saying that the prime minister was “a security risk in his own country.”

I’ve been getting a lot of flak lately for writing so much about US politics without publishing much commentary on what’s going on in my home continent. “Aren’t there any problems in your own country you can write about?” these people often ask. “You should mind your own business and stop meddling in our country’s affairs.”

Pardon my Portuguese, but these people can all kiss my ass. You don’t get to live in a country which consistently uses its military and economic might to manipulate world affairs and then bitch when people in other countries have opinions about it. You don’t get to be one of the world’s two nuclear superpowers and tell me I’m not allowed to be loudly and unapologetically opinionated about your nation’s insane escalations with Russia. You don’t get to live in the nation that keeps my nation from having its own government and then say I can’t criticize yours. That’s not a thing.

I mean, what do these people think is actually happening on their planet? It’s really dumbfounding to consider the belief systems that must foster this kind of worldview. They must honestly think that they live in a separate little nation that pretty much tries to just do its own thing like the other countries in the world. The amount of American privilege it must take to even be able to see the US in this way is truly staggering.

One of the more innocent reasons everyone freaked out when Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine at the request of the Crimean people was because annexations are so last century; governments just don’t do that anymore. Instead of claiming territories as their own in a way that everyone can look at on a map (“See here, here, here, here, here, here, all this, these over here, and here? That’s Britain!”), governments now covertly expand their power and influence through treaties, trade agreements, alliances, coups, intelligence operations and other manipulations to increase their global influence. If you were to trace all of these puppet strings back to their masters, far and away the greatest number of them would lead back to the United States. This is the new imperialism — so much harder to see and define than the classical variety, but no less real.

For this reason I insist that it is every non-American’s responsibility to speak out against the US government’s transgressions at every opportunity. As long as the oligarchs who’ve set up home base in America are pulling the world’s strings, we should all be pointing at them and making lots of noise about what they’re doing. Speaking from experience I can say that my own humble commentary gig here has been greatly served by my own outsider’s perspective, and I strongly encourage any non-Americans who’ve shied away from the megaphone to step forward and bring their own outsider status to speaking about US politics. The US has invited your perspective with its relentless manipulations toward global domination, and you are therefore entitled to share it as far and as wide as you can.

I love Americans (so much so I even married one), but because they barely travel and are saturated in establishment propaganda every day they really don’t know which way’s up in a lot of ways. They could use a lot more outsider’s perspective to help them orient themselves, not just on foreign policy but on things like their ghastly exploitative healthcare system and their joke of an electoral system as well. Everything that happens in US politics ultimately impacts us all, so we should talk about every aspect of it. The new media has opened up many more opportunities for doing so by making it possible to share opinions from the other side of the planet, but I think we can all take advantage of it a whole lot more than we have been. Speak your truth, say it like you mean it, and plunge your ideas right into the heart of the beast. The world can only benefit from this.

Those of us who live in vassal states of the US actually have more of a right to comment on American politics than any American has, because it’s all we get. At least US citizens get a fake vote that they can throw away in their pretend elections; we don’t even get to have that. So I’m going to go right on ahead and keep writing about US politics, thank you very much. If anyone has a problem with this, don’t tell people like me to shut up, tell the plutocrats who rule your country to stop screwing us over. You’ll be amazed at how little we have to say about you once you stop dragging us into idiotic wars and manipulating our lives.

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