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March 24th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda 
Gough Whitlam exhorted his followers to maintain the rage politically – not attack his opponents.
Source: The Sunday Telegraph
SOMETIMES it takes a death to remind us that as a society we have lost more, much more, than a friend and valued member of the community with the passing years.
The death of Margaret Whitlam a week ago is just such a reminder.
The many poignant obituaries over the past days and the eulogy delivered by two of her children, Tony Whitlam and Catherine Dovey, at her funeral at St James’s Anglican Church on Friday recalled a presence that began in an era in Australia when life was just as uncertain and politics was just as fiercely contested.
No-one can dispute the anxiety felt by families during the Depression or war years, the hardships endured by men at the front and their wives at home, and no single moment has captured the harsh rawness of the political challenge as the dismissal of Margaret’s husband’s government by governor-general Sir John Kerr in 1975.
Gough Whitlam’s bellicose address from the steps of what is now the Old Parliament House resonated with the personal hurt he felt at the hand he had been dealt.
A hand, it must be said, that was created almost entirely by his own cabinet’s dishonesty and woeful governance, and which owed absolutely nothing to any sinister involvement by the US or any other foreign power, despite the contrivances of conspiracists.
But while he urged his followers to “maintain your rage” it was not in the context of exhorting them to seek out opponents – as was the case with the exhortations to the half-crazed mob from the so-called “tent embassy” that was urged to beset the Opposition leader Tony Abbott after some prodding from staff within Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s office.
“Maintain your rage and enthusiasm for the campaign for the election now to be held and until polling day,” Whitlam told his flock.
While Gillard and her crew may wish to whip up rage within the electorate now against a handful of big mining investors, to wit Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer, the last thing she wants is an election to be held any time soon.
The big change that has occurred in the 47 years since the dismissal is the disappearance of the basic civility which existed in Australian politics nearly half a century ago at both state and federal levels.
This absence goes directly to the character of those participating.
In recent weeks the worst of Australian politics has been on display in Queensland where the embattled Premier Anna Bligh went well below the sewer in her efforts to find muck with which to smear her opponent, Campbell Newman.
The results of yesterday’s poll would indicate that the electorate could not stomach the egregious assault on Newman’s integrity.
As The Courier-Mail’s political writer, Dennis Atkins, said last week: “They needed to tear down Campbell Newman and make sure the damage landed heavily in the seat of Ashgrove.”
The assault on civility was just as publicly displayed during the leadership struggle between Gillard and her predecessor, Kevin Rudd, with supporters of both taking personal invective and betrayal to levels not reached during even the worst of Labor’s previous bouts of factional infighting.
Yet traces of the decency which applied among other generations are still to be found. Just before Christmas former prime minister John Howard paid a quiet and unpublicised visit to Gough Whitlam, the oldest living former prime minister at his city office.
“I’m glad I did. We had a happy hour or so, just talking,” Howard later told me. “I came into the House in 1974, about halfway through his three-year prime ministership, Gough was and is always interesting to talk to. After he left politics, he wrote to me, just as he explained, Bob Menzies had written to him, it was very civil of him.”
The visit was welcomed by Whitlam, according to members of his family, one of whom said: “Dad was very pleased to see John, to reminisce and talk over the politics of the day.”
Looking to the future, is it possible to imagine that Kevin Rudd, Mark Latham or Julia Gillard would be capable of such a relationship with an opponent from the other side of politics, let alone one from the ALP?
Or that a minister like Treasurer Wayne Swan or Infrastructure Minister Anthony Albanese would ever be held up as an exemplar to those who seek civility in politics?
When we think of a person’s life, the events that shaped their characters, we view them through the prism of hindsight.
Margaret Whitlam was a contemporary of my mother’s. They went to the same school, swam together, acted in the same plays, talked to the same boys.
When they were young, they lived in the shadow cast by World War I and grew up among families which had lost fathers and sons, brothers and lovers.
They saw the Sydney Harbour Bridge opened 80 years ago last week, they remembered the tragic collision of the Sydney harbour ferry Greycliffe and the mail steamer Tahiti in 1927 with a loss of 40 lives, schoolchildren among them.
They saw their brothers and fathers and lovers go to World War II, some never to return, and they built their families through that war and through the 1950s and ’60s.
Whenever we met, she was warm and welcoming, witty and amusing, current and curious, a great conversationalist and brutally honest in her opinions of those she felt had betrayed the trust she and Gough had extended them.
It has been reported that she was asked in 1953 as the wife of the new member for Werriwa what a nice girl like her was doing in the Labor Party, and that she replied: “I belong to a party which cares about people.”
Looking at the putrid wreckage of that self-centred party now, she may have wondered where it lost its way.
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