AFL & THE US DEEP STATE – Australian Rules Football and American nationalism
By Sasha Uzunov
In the National Archives of Australia there are Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) files on indigenous Australian activist Sir Doug Nicholls (1906-88), who in his younger life was a champion Australian Rules Footballer in the 1930s.
His every move was spied upon from the 1950s and into the 1970s. Sir Doug did absolutely nothing wrong, other than campaign peacefully and lawfully for equal rights for Indigenous Australians [Aborigines], dispossessed by British colonial settlement of Australia in 1788. Likewise fellow indigenous activist Bill Onus came under the ASIO microscope. Onus’ ASIO file was given to the US Embassy in Australia in 1952 as he was poised to visit the US. He was blocked entry. US was motivated by racism – it didn’t want indigenous Australian activists to get too close to African-American US Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 60s.
It’s truly baffling why the Australian Football League (AFL) , the governing body of Australian Rules Football in Australia, promotes US nationalism and the ex CIA Director David Petraeus, whose very agency was spying on and in some instances persecuting indigenous Australians, beginning in the 1950s under the reign of controversial CIA Director Allen Dulles. What’s more the AFL hypocritically lectures Australians on “colonialism, social issues, indigenous Australians.”
The AFL, originally the VFL (Victorian Football League), was founded by British people in the British Colony of Victoria (now part of Australia) in 1896. VFL remained culturally British well into the mid 1970s before culturally Australianising and now culturally Americanising. To disguise its support of US nationalism, the AFL has embraced unwitting indigenous Australians in the scheme.
The AFL has an Indigenous Round named in honour of Sir Doug Nicholls but also regards the disgraced Petraeus as a role model for leadership. Bizarre. The AFL aligning itself with the US government, and also in particular the US NFL, which have colonial issues with native indigenous Americans (Indians), is hypocritical to say the least. NFL has been accused of racism by native Americans.
The US government would be very sensitive to militant Indigenous Australian activism, especially if it touched upon the US spy base called Pine Gap in Australia’s Northern Territory. This is located on native land.
Dulles’s name, you would have noticed, has come up as a topic of discussion in the US because of the recent release of documents relating to the 1963 assassination of US President John F. Kennedy. What those documents reveal is the length and depth of US intelligence penetration of the US State Department, the US’s Foreign Affairs Office. Some of US Embassies were largely manned by CIA officers under diplomatic cover.
One such document reads:
On the day of President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in January 1961, “47 percent of the political officers serving in United States embassies were CAS”—intelligence agents working under diplomatic cover known as Controlled American Sources, White House aide, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. reported in a Top Secret memorandum on “CIA Reorganization.” In the U.S. Embassy in Paris, 123 “diplomats” were actually CIA undercover agents; in Chile, 11 of the 13 Embassy “political officers” were CIA undercover operatives. “CIA today has nearly as many people under official cover overseas as [the] State [Department]—3900 to 3700,” Schlesinger reported to President Kennedy. “About 1500 of those are under State Department cover (the other 2200 are presumably under military or other non-State official cover).”
I bring this up because the CIA Station (head quarters) in Australia, according to these newly released was listed as being in Melbourne during the 1950s and 60s. This would make sense because ASIO HQ was also in Melbourne, not Canberra, Australia’s national capital. The proximity of both CIA Station and ASIO HQ in Melbourne would facilitate the quick and secure passing of confidential information.
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