Pearls and Irritations

Category: Defence

  • Walter Hamilton. Japan and China: agreeing to disagree

    In diplomacy, sometimes a nod is as good as a wink. You can argue later over the question of who nodded first (if at all). The leaders of Japan and China are maneuvering towards their first face-to-face meeting after two years of chilly and occasionally belligerent relations. To enable the meeting to happen officials on both sides have been engaged in a tortuous diplomacy of the nod/wink kind.

    The Japanese have a word, nemawashi, which loosely translates as ‘spade work’. They are masters at the patient, protracted negotiations––and accompanying softening up process––necessary to bring off a business deal, public works project or diplomatic coup. Their obvious equals in this are the Chinese.

    Two years ago, the centre-left government of Yoshihiko Noda, jammed in a wedge by right-wing agitators, took the fateful decision to nationalize several islands in the Senkaku group, close to Taiwan, which have been administered by Japan for most of the past 120 years. This, as far as China was concerned, changed the status quo in the two countries’ management of their territorial dispute over the islands.

    The Communist Party gave the green light for widespread protests in China, which sometimes turned violent: Japanese business premises were attacked, trade flows declined sharply and Chinese tourists stopped visiting Japan. When Chinese military vessels and aircraft started aggressively intruding into the sea and airspace around the islands, and Beijing unilaterally declared an exclusion zone in the East China Sea, it seemed possible that a military conflict might be triggered.

    The replacement of the Noda administration by the conservative LDP-led government of Shinzo Abe in December 2012 only sharpened the conflict. Abe adopted a hardline ‘no recognition’ policy towards China’s claim to the Senkaku (Diaoyu) islands and deployed additional military resources to defend Japan’s interests.

    Though the risk of an ‘accidental’ clash remained real, this writer never believed a military conflict was imminent, for several reasons. First, it was not in Japan’s interest to start one. Secondly, China knew that its naval power, at this stage, was not sufficient to be assured of victory. Thirdly, the Chinese economy is going through a delicate transition to a lower pattern of growth and would be vulnerable to any shocks flowing from a military clash with Japan. Finally, the Senkaku/Diaoyu issue is essentially about muscle flexing; the islands have little intrinsic value. In an exercise of muscle flexing, the idea is to display your biceps and triceps without actually lift the weights. This goes for both Abe and China’s President Xi Jinping.

    Diplomacy, rather than war, always held out the best solution for both sides: hence the months of backroom meetings aimed at achieving a result that allows both to maintain face. The APEC leaders forum, which kicks off in Beijing tomorrow (Monday), is the obvious occasion for a first tête-a-tête between Abe and Xi. It’s not a guaranteed success, but it seems likely that it will mark the start of a new modus operandi for managing the territorial dispute.

    The fact that the meeting will happen in China satisfies Beijing: ‘Japan came to us’. The formula to be adopted, according to reports, is that both sides will ‘agree to disagree’ over which has sovereignty over the islands. This would satisfy Tokyo by falling short of an open admission that China has a claim to the islands. The two leaders are also expected to endorse the work of officials, undertaken during the past year, to put in place a conflict-resolution protocol for de-escalating situations that could give rise to a military clash.

    The presence of a great number of coast guard and military vessels from the two nations, not to mention their competing fishing fleets, in the crowded East China Sea has been causing alarm in the neighbourhood and beyond. If Japan and China can agree on a better way to manage the consequences of their dispute, even if they cannot resolve it fundamentally, much will have been achieved.

    The other concession sought by China is that Abe should stop making visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, a symbol of Japan’s wartime aggression, and do more to acknowledge the nation’s past mistakes.

    On these issues, the diplomats will have been throwing out their most delicate nods/winks. But remember, the horse is blind. Abe almost certainly will not publically abandon his prerogative to visit Yasukuni––but having stayed away during the recent autumn visiting ‘season’, he may already have sufficiently signaled his intention to tread carefully. (Other members of his Cabinet, however, have continued to visit the shrine where 14 convicted Class ‘A’ war criminals are commemorated among the 2.5 million war dead whose spirits are enshrined there.)

    Whether the two leaders can bring to their talks anything constructive on the vexed issue of historical accountability is very unlikely. The meeting, in fact, may prove little more than a handshake and a photo opportunity: the first step on a long and difficult road back to a saner future.

    Walter Hamilton reported from Japan for the ABC for eleven years.

     

     

     

     

  • ISIS and Vietnam.

    In an op ed column in the New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman spoke of the parallels between the war in Vietnam and the conflict now in Iraq and Syria. He mentions how the executive of foreign journalists is designed to provoke Western intervention. See link below for Thomas Friedman’s article.  John Menadue

     

    http://nyti.ms/1vcTEK5

  • Annabelle Lukin. When governments go to war, the Fourth Estate goes AWOL.

    A year after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the University of California, Berkeley, conducted a postmortem of the media coverage of the so-called “Iraq war”. The conference included academics, journalists, UN weapons inspectors and diplomats.

    UC Berkeley also invited Lieutenant Colonel Rick Long, whose job it had been to prepare journalists to be embedded with American forces as they rolled into Iraq. The invasion would soon be described as “the greatest strategic disaster in US history”, by no less than retired Lieutenant General William Odom, a former senior military and intelligence official in the Carter and Reagan administrations.

    But, as Long told the gathering, the strategy for managing the media had been beautifully executed:

    Frankly, our job is to win the war. Part of that is information warfare. So we are going to attempt to dominate the information environment. Overall, we were very happy with the outcome.

    When we needed them most, the Fourth Estate rolled over and let the military establishments of the belligerent countries tickle their tummies.

    By “we”, I mean the thousands upon thousands of dead Iraqis, the millions of Iraqis made homeless, the dead and permanently disabled servicemen and women and the constituents of the belligerent countries who saw trillions of their hard-earned tax dollars flushed down the sewer of the military industrial complex.

    Democracy depends on informed and engaged citizens

    When Dwight Eisenhower coined the term “military industrial complex”, the US president and former general prescribed only one antidote to the potential misuse of its power, an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry”. But Eisenhower’s alert and knowledgeable citizenry requires a critical and independent media.

    Sadly, it is not that hard to take legions of journalists along on a military adventure. It helps that media moguls get a nice windfall when America is “at war”. Murdoch used his used his newspapers – he owned 175 at the time – to support the 2003 Bush-Blair-Howard Iraq invasion.

    But the coverage by papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post was also so poor that both apologised to their readers for the gullible fashion in which they bought into the official narrative.

    The narrative of war

    Ideologies around “war” run deep, so deep that when a country is “at war” – or “a mission”, as prime minister Tony Abbott prefers to call the current exercise against Islamic State – its media get caught up in the “rally around the flag” effect.

    I say “war”, in scare quotes, because what made the last “Iraq war” a “war” is not self-evident. The observable phenomena of “war” – the violation of sovereignty, the bombardment of cities, towns and remote outposts, the rolling tanks and marching armies – look exactly like a “crime of aggression”.

    One is the stuff of honour and sacrifice, the other, according to the 1946 Nuremberg judgment, is:

    … the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

    Media mouthpieces

    For the military to “dominate the information environment” they have to naturalise their version of reality. They need us to believe their acts of war are warranted. They need journalists to use their words – their words for “the enemy”, their words for what makes this enemy especially “evil”, and their words for what they are doing.

    They need us to believe that their killings and maimings, their destruction of property and infrastructure, their creation of new refugee camps, are legitimate because this is part of a striving towards some greater good.

    They need the media to echo and reiterate the aims and goals of “the mission”, to report uncritically announcements about “the campaign” and to fill news stories with ongoing updates on “operations”.

    And they need the media not to mention whose pecuniary interests are being served, never to seriously consider whether the military actions are legal, and to avoid historical facts, context or comparisons which could provide an alternative view of what is going on, and what it might lead to.

    Once the official version gets momentum, it doesn’t matter if things go wrong. If some journalists report on “collateral damage”, or disquiet about “strategies” or “tactics”, this won’t shake the firm foundations on which the dominant narrative rests.

    The ABC’s record on Iraq

    My research into the ABC coverage of the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003 shows how this same old script was allowed to run its course.

    I examined the ABC’s nightly news bulletin and its flagship current affairs program during the initial period of the Coalition invasion of Iraq (March 20 to April 2, 2003), when the “Iraq war” dominated the news. The ABC put five correspondents in Washington, but had none in Baghdad and none at the UN in New York. In this period, not one news item on the ABC was solely devoted to covering Iraqi civilian deaths – but there were four separate stories on the killing of a cameraman working for the ABC.

    The ABC’s embedded reporter dramatised the experience of one troop of marines, with vignettes of individual marines and banal recounts of their reactions to daily events. By levelling his vision squarely on one small group of American soldiers, his reports lacked the wider context of the unfolding invasion.

    He reported, wrongly, that Iraq had fired scud missiles. If his source was the Australian Defence Force, he missed the correction they issued the following day.

    From the Coalition media centre in Qatar, the ABC’s correspondent told viewers that Australia’s mission had “a code name all of its own” and that Australia would have a “frontline role”. He recounted the comings and goings of HMAS Anzac and the FA-18 Hornets, and gave details of events and places so far away from his personal gaze that he could have been in Timbuktu. He reported that the bombing of 1000 Iraqi soldiers was a case of the Coalition “heading off fighting”.

    The ABC duly regurgitated Australian Defence Force briefings. Three days into “the war”, the ABC news anchor, in a tone suitable for announcing a world cup victory, reported that Australian forces had “engaged the enemy”.

    The ABC used Defence Department footage of Aussie soldiers boarding a civilian Iraqi boat with a cargo of dates. They did not acknowledge the provenance of the footage, or that it had nothing to do with the content of the story. Instead, they reported the view of Defence Force Chief Peter Cosgrove that our diggers had just prevented “mayhem in the Gulf”.

    Australian forces were “fighting on the frontline”. The “elite armed forces of Australia” were “intercepting Iraqi ballistic missile sites (sic)”. Our navy divers, ABC viewers were told, were doing the hard yards to clear a port for the delivery of Australian humanitarian aid. In fact, the aid was a boatload of stranded AWB wheat that the government had stepped in and taken off AWB’s hands.

    The invasion of Iraq was reported by the ABC as Coalition troops “crossing the Kuwaiti border”.

    We got the “rules of engagement” story – the one that trumpets the ADF pilot for aborting a “mission” for fear of killing civilians. Here, it is being recycled for Iraq War mark III, so eerily familiar that plagiarism software would detect the similarities.

    On the 7.30 Report, Kerry O’Brien interviewed a panel of Australia’s “best military minds”. In my study of the questions O’Brien put to his panel, I could not avoid the conclusion that the 7.30 Report was, in this period, a megaphone for the official narrative. And in this way, it helped legitimise the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

    These military experts made wild predictions: Saddam was dead, the “war” would soon be over, the Coalition would be able to take charge of Baghdad because their tanks had “a very good frontal arc”. They had free rein to roll out their pseudo-scientific military twaddle about the campaign’s “centre of gravity”, “the modern battlefield” and the war’s “psychological phase”. These “experts” showed not even a glimmer of understanding what was to come.

    The ABC journalists who strayed from the script – Linda Mottram and John Shovelan – endured official complaints by then-communications minister Richard Alston. Their words were raked over by a bevy of review panels.

    Outside the chorus line

    Of all the gigs that journalists do, reporting on “war” is the toughest. Not because of the dangers – though these must not to be underestimated. But when reporting “war”, journalists face off against the world’s most powerful vested interests and compete with society’s deepest cultural mythologies.

    At its best, the Fourth Estate uncovered the My Lai massacre, the Abu Ghraib scandaland the incestuous relations in the Bush era of retired military officers, the US Defence Department and the “defence” industry.

    In this incarnation, the Fourth Estate frightened even Napoleon. In his words:

    Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.

    But the military’s “reality” is powerful, insidious and covert. It is seductive.

    To be truly independent, you can’t just criticise it, you have to stand right outside it. You have to find your own words, and you to have know some history. Then your language will sound “ideological” – like Fisk or Pilger – because you’ll no longer be humming the military tune.

    Annabelle Lukin is the Senior Lecturer, Linguistics at Macquarie University.

    This article first appeared in ‘The Conversation’ on 28 October 2014.

  • Hugh White on Australians and War from Honest History.

    In my blog of 20 October ‘It is becoming much easier to go to war’ I highlighted the reasons and the background  to developments since the Vietnam War that are making it much more likely that we will commit ourselves to war. 

    In an earlier posting of March 23 – see below –  I carried an interview with Hugh White.

    We are venturing into very dangerous territory. John Menadue

    Repost

    In this interview in November 2013 and related articles, Dr David Stephens of Honest History has drawn together comments by Hugh White on ‘Australians and war’.

    Hugh White is professor of Strategic Studies at the ANU and a former senior public servant in the Department of Defence. He considers several themes about Australians and war.

    • How ‘soft’ wars have made Australians more bellicose.
    • How the perceived need to preserve the American alliance makes most wars acceptable in Australia.
    • How Australians are reluctant to focus on the purpose of war.
    • How Australians celebrate the experience of war while downplaying the reasons for particular wars; the centrality of Anzac.
    • How romanticising war makes future wars more likely.
    • How these chickens might all come home to roost in the East China Sea in the not too distant future.

    The link for this interview can be found at:

     http://www.honesthistory.net.au/wp/stephens-david-hugh-white-on-australians-and-war/  and click on 188 Hugh White on Australians and War.

    Honest History (honesthistory.net.au) is a coalition of historians and others supporting the balanced and honest presentation and use of Australian history during the centenary of WWI.

  • The Italian solution.

    Last night the ABC program, Foreign Correspondent, carried a remarkable and moving account of the work of the Italian Navy in rescuing ‘people fleeing conflict or economic despair in the Middle East and Africa’.

    The Italian Admiral in charge of the operations in the Mediterranean said ‘We have the duty in these cases when we are at sea to intervene to save human life. If we are not at sea, then we can’t see what happens. We can close our eyes, turn off the lights and in that way, there’s no need to “turn back” the boats because they will die. We need to remember that International Rights exist. There are international laws that our countries have ratified’.

    I wonder if the Commander of Operation Sovereign Borders, Lt Gen. Angus Campbell, has time to watch this remarkable account of humanity in action.

    The Italian Navy shames our navy.   John Menadue

    See link to program below.

    http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2014/s4106724.htm

  • Cavan Hogue. The new Vietnam.

    ​We seem to be rushing forward to the past in the Middle East and it looks increasingly like a rerun of Vietnam which began with a request from the Saigon Government (that we had to ask for), initial popular support for intervention against the Communist bogey, followed by disillusionment and defeat. A domestic political asset became a liability,

    All the talk about evil skirts around the fact that however demented ISIL may be they are attracting young idealists to their ranks. Why? They are able to draw on longstanding distrust of Christian Europe and its American offshoots which goes back to the Crusades.This distrust was exacerbated by Western colonialism and the mess Europe made  of the region after World War 1. The more ISIL can push the West into involvement, the more they can build on existing distrust of the West. Australia is not a serious player in this region but we have identified ourselves with the Western nations who are seen as the bad guys in the Middle East where there are more factions than we have even heard of. This, plus our grandstanding over Ukraine, tells our Asian neighbours that we do not put our money where our mouth is.

    The Middle East is a mess and there are wider implications but what can outsiders do that will not just make things worse? Ultimately the people of the region have to solve their own problems. The Western track record in Iraq suggests it might do better to butt out.

    It is true that our identification with the West made us a target for terrorists before the present imbroglio but our strident public approach to current events can only increase that threat. Australia as such is not important enough to interest international terrorists but we might be seen as a soft proxy target for the USA and Western Europe. The domestic danger is that we will create more resentful Moslem youths than we stop. Tough security measures are only first aid.

    We have managed not to get involved with the Lord’s Army in Africa and other sick psychopaths around the world so why single out this current bunch of loonies? Presumably we are there to support the Americans and for domestic political reasons.

    You have to feel sorry for the Kurds who have been treated badly by everyone. Surely their case for a homeland is just as good as that of anyone else but this would take territory from Turkey, Iraq and Iran so they are likely to remain a persecuted minority. The US let them down after the first Gulf War and nobody is going in to bat for them now. Some of them at least will continue to fight for a homeland.

    Given the size of the problem and the size of our contribution Australia’s effort against ISIL is token and will not make any difference to the situation on the ground.  We are being drawn into a complex quagmire far from our shores and our leaders have yet to tell us which national interest is being served and how, let alone where it will all end.

    The Coalition of the Willing opened Pandora’s Box and I fear we have now joined the Coalition of the Lemmings.

  • Malcolm Fraser. Without a ground force and an end point, the war against ISIS will be a farce.

    In The Guardian, Malcolm Fraser has said ‘Air power alone will not make a difference in Iraq. Barack Obama and his allies have the worst strategic understanding possible of what they claim is an existential threat ‘  See link to article below

    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/08/without-a-ground-force-and-an-end-point-the-war-against-isis-will-be-a-farce

  • David Stephens. Is this justifiable delicacy or insidious censorship?

    The Battle of Bita Paka occurred in then German New Guinea on 11 September 1914. It saw the deaths of the first six Australians killed in the Great War, as well as the deaths of a German officer and 30 Melanesian soldiers. It was really a series of skirmishes rather than a battle.

    On the eve of the centenary of the ‘battle’ the ABC presented evidence that the German and the Melanesians had been massacred by Australian troops. Two historians with relevant expertise were more cautious and readers of the Daily Telegraph were outraged. In the absence of further research it is difficult to know what happened at Bita Paka. Of immediate interest though are the remarks of the Minister for the Centenary of Anzac, Senator Ronaldson:

    Mr Ronaldson told The Australian yesterday that the report [on the ABC] was based on unsubstantiated allegations and the timing of its broadcast was “insensitive and totally inappropriate”.

    “I was angry that on the day that the descendants of the first six Australian men killed in the First World War had gathered at Rabaul to commemorate their service and sacrifice, the ABC chose to run an unsubstantiated allegation’’, he said. (Emphasis added.)

    If the appropriateness of reporting or commentary is to be driven by its timing in relation to commemorative occasions then many, many days over the next four years may be off limits. There is an awful lot of commemoration coming up, presumably involving many descendants, however far removed. One official list includes more than 250 dates of events worth commemorating over the next four years. The potential commemoration dates relate not just to events during World War I but to ‘the century of service’ – military service – since. Consequently, any researcher wanting to say something publicly about, for example, the Battle of Mouquet Farm in France (11 000 Australian casualties), which went on for a month in August-September 1916, faces a potential problem.

    Why? The 2011 list has five other dates besides Mouquet for potential commemoration during August-September 2016, including the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan in Vietnam (42 Australian casualties) in 1966. Let’s apply the Minister’s test in this case. Will researchers publishing, around 18 August 2016, material which challenges received views of Mouquet be attacked because their work is seen as insensitive to the memory, not just of the Mouquet men, but also of the 18 Australians killed at Long Tan on 18 August 1966? (Remember that the Long Tan dead, like all service personnel since 1915, are seen as inheritors of the Anzac tradition that was young at Mouquet.)

    If, on the other hand, these researchers hold off publishing until there are no Great War dates nearby, will they cop it anyway for insensitivity regarding a proximate non-Great War date which is being commemorated? Further, given that we are now at war again (the Anzac tradition is in the custody of a new generation of service men and women), will questioning the deeds of former Anzacs be seen as critical of their fighting descendants today? Having a continuing Anzac tradition implies that questioning the early days of the tradition threatens the tradition today.

    Back to the Minister. His remarks raise more questions. He objected not only to insensitive timing but also to lack of substantiation. But would insensitively timed critical commentary be acceptable if it was properly substantiated? Does evidence trump timing?

    Secondly, how wide is the ‘sensitivity blackout’ – a week on either side of the commemorative occasion, a month, the whole four years of the centenary? The possibility of descendants of the dead being upset is still going to be present, regardless of timing. The longer such a blackout applies, though, the more it looks like the censorship that has applied in wartime; replicating wartime censorship would indeed be a novel form of commemoration.

    Thirdly, are there some commemorative occasions, say, Anzac Day 2015 or the centenary of the Battle of Fromelles in 2016, where the occasion is so important, so sacred, that any questioning is beyond the pale? Who decides which occasions qualify for this degree of protection? Could these sacred occasions be nominated in regulation, perhaps by extending the original 1921 regulations under the then War Precautions Act? The 1921 regulations refer to the use of the word ‘Anzac’ in trade and street names; that is, they target expression. Might the regulations be extended to control expression more broadly? If we have ‘race hate speech’ laws could we have ‘legend hate speech’ laws also? Might loaded adaptations of the word ‘Anzac’, like ‘Anzackery’ and ‘Anzacker’, be targeted also?

    Fourthly, who decides what substantiation is? It is a rubbery concept, as we saw not long ago in relation to allegations (again on the ABC) of asylum seekers being forced to touch hot pipes. Does the allegation have to be substantiated in the eyes of the relevant Minister?

    It is fair enough to argue over evidence, as has happened with the alleged Bita Paka massacre, but it is worrying when ministerial comments seem to question the rights of individuals to have different views and to express them how and when they like. The freedom to have and express awkward opinions is presumably part of the freedom referred to in the inscription on ‘the King’s Penny’, the commemorative medallion presented to the families of dead servicemen after World War I: ‘He died for Freedom and Honour’.

    All the stories of war need to be told, however uncomfortable they may be. The words of The Age editorialist earlier this year were spot on: ‘This [telling the full story] is not to sully the memory of Australian Diggers, but to add to it by presenting a complete record of war, abroad and at home’. And if the stories need to be told it should be possible to tell them at any time, notwithstanding the sensitivities of distant relatives of dead soldiers.

    David Stephens is Secretary of Honest History. An earlier version of this article (including citations) appeared on the Honest History website (honesthistory.net.au).

  • Marilyn Lake. fracturing the nation’s soul.

    You might be interested in this repost. John Menadue.

     

    During World War 1 Australia lost its way. Its enmeshment in the imperial European war fractured the nation’s soul.

    Marilyn Lake

    World War I had consequences for individuals as well as nations. HB Higgins’s life would be deeply affected by the British decision to invade the Ottoman empire in early 1915. As a member of the new federal parliament in 1901, Higgins had opposed Australian participation in the Boer War, fearing that this would set a terrible precedent for involvement in other imperial wars, whose purpose, goals and strategy would always be determined by other powers. He also doubted the legitimacy of the European war, writing to his friend Felix Frankfurter, Professor in Law at Harvard, ‘What do you think of it? … [T]here are higher ideals than attachment to a country because it is my country. I blame our British jingoes…’ Higgins was deeply troubled when his only child Mervyn elected to join British forces fighting in the Middle East.

    When his son was killed in battle on 23 December 1916 Higgins and his wife Alice were devastated. Higgins poured his grief – and his bitterness over the imperial cant that had justified the war – into a new commitment to internationalism and disarmament. The only good that might come out of the war was not national pride, but a new world order. ‘Vengeance is a fruitless thing’, he wrote to Frankfurter. ‘I feel that the best vengeance my dead boy could hope for would be an integrated world, an organized humanity.’ No nationalist flag-waving or eulogies to the Anzac spirit for him.

    We tend to forget the doubts and expressions of opposition to Australia’s participation in World War I in which in fact only 30 per cent of eligible men chose to enlist. The anti-war mobilisations have largely gone unheeded in official and contemporary accounts of the war, which have recast the widespread destruction as a creative experience, one that gave ‘birth to the nation’, conveniently forgetting that our distinctive Commonwealth of Australia, with its world famous democratic reforms, made its name on the world stage in the years before the war, between 1901 and 1914. Australian nation-building was a peace time achievement.

    A decade before the outbreak of the European war, in 1904, an American visitor to Australia, Victor Clark, one of a number of investigators who journeyed south to Australasia, noted that ‘New Zealand and Australia are the most interesting legislative experiment stations in the world and they experiment so actively because their political institutions are extremely democratic’. The colony of Victoria had first invented the idea of a legal minimum wage in 1896, which was later elaborated as a living wage calculated to meet the diverse needs of workers defined as human beings, in the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Court by HB Higgins, in the Harvester judgment of 1907. Australia and New Zealand had pioneered industrial democracy and women’s political rights. ‘While the principles of democracy were first enunciated in the United States’, noted the historically-minded American suffragist, Carrie Chapman Catt, ‘Australia has carried them furthest to their logical conclusion’. Thus did we take our place on the world stage, not in fighting an imperial war.

    In Australia, it was noted by numerous overseas commentators, the working man and the voting woman advanced together, during the first decade of the nation’s existence, which saw a steady increase in the Labor vote, until the Fisher Government was elected, with majorities in both Houses in 1910. By war’s end, however, the Labor Party had split, conservative forces had triumphed, and the British Empire had gained a new lease of life in Australia. In World War 1 Australia lost its way. Its enmeshment in the imperial European war fractured the nation’s soul.

    Let’s look at this impact further through the experience of Higgins, now a largely forgotten Australian, but one of our unsung national heroes. Henry Bourne Higgins was a member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly in 1896, when it introduced the minimum wage. He became an opponent, as noted above, of the British imperial war in South Africa, a member of the federal parliament from 1901 and then, from 1906, President of the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, whose path-breaking reforms, shaped by a profound commitment to social justice and the public good, won him renown around the world. In 1914, he was invited by the Harvard Law Review to contribute an article on his innovative jurisprudence which he titled ‘A New Province for Law and Order: Industrial Peace through Minimum Wage and Arbitration’.

    By 1920, however, the conservative backlash unleashed by the impact of World War I and the fevered imperialism of Prime Minister WM Hughes, who sought to by-pass the Arbitration Court by setting up his own tribunals saw Higgins submit his resignation. It would seem appropriate to remember Higgins, the Australian idealist, and others of his generation, as we prepare to deal with the veritable tidal wave of military commemoration, funded already by $140 million, even as our universities face further funding cuts, increased student fees and the number of historians employed to teach students actually declines. Which funding bodies, one wonders, might finance commemoration of those who fought for Australia’s distinctive democratic and political ideals and support projects to carry their ideals forward?

    My current research project on the international history of Australian democracy has highlighted Australia’s high reputation around the world before World War I as a distinctive, pioneering, bold, independent-minded democracy. It was the perspective afforded by distance that enabled American Professor Hammond of Ohio State University to write of ‘the most notable experiment yet made in social democracy’ established in Australia in the first years of the Commonwealth, in the years preceding the outbreak of war.

    In 1902, in the shadow of the South African War, HB Higgins wrote an essay called ‘Australian ideals’ in which he asked prophetically whether the new Commonwealth of Australia was to become a militaristic nation or a progressive one: ‘Australia must make her choice between two ideals – the ideal of militarism and the ideal of equality’. Australians had to choose between the opposing standards of militarism and social reform, he suggested. He and his generation dedicated themselves to the latter, while we in our time seem to have committed to the former. Australian values we are now ceaselessly told are military values.

    One hundred years on from 1914, Australia has seemingly become the militarist nation Higgins warned about. Rather than celebrate the world-first democratic achievements forged by women and men in the founding years of our nationhood, the years that made Australia distinctive and renowned, we are told that World War I, in which Australians fought for the British Empire, was the supreme creative event for the nation. But those who lived through it knew that our nation was not born in the carnage of the world war, which left the country divided, disillusioned, disoriented, desolate and dependent on a resurgent British Empire.

    In the inimitable words of novelist Miles Franklin, writing to her American friend Margaret Drier Robins in 1924,

    it seems to me that Australia, which took a wonderful lurch ahead in all progressive laws and women’s advancement about 20 years ago has stagnated ever since. At present it is more unintelligently conservative and conventional than England and I am sad to see the kangaroo and his fellow marsupials and all the glories of our forests disappearing to make room for a mediocre repetition of Europe.

    Miles Franklin knew that although men could do many things they could not give birth to nations. Only women could do that. And in 1902, Australian women’s political ‘lurch ahead’ had made Australia the most democratic country on earth, an object lesson to humanity.

    _____________________________

    Marilyn Lake is Professor in History at the University of Melbourne. This is a revised version of a keynote address presented to the Annual Conference of the History Teachers’ Association of Australia, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 23 April 2013.

     

  • Bruce Duncan. Iraq: where to now?

    Threats from the self-styled Islamic State to kill Australians randomly on the street or wherever by any means possible have shocked us all. The threats were not just against Australians, nor only against westerners, but against other Muslims, even Sunnis who refused to bow to the IS, and especially against the modernising Muslims and the political elites in Muslim countries.

    It appears that Islamic State is trying to unleash a global war between Muslims and non-Muslims, believing that the final apocalyptic battle against the ‘crusaders’ or ‘Romans’ to be fought at Dabiq in northern Iraq will usher in a new golden age. Many Muslims in the Middle East believe that this battle will occur within decades.

    The response of the Australian government has been to urge western intervention and even to despatch fighter aircraft to help destroy IS forces. Urgent action was certainly needed to prevent the slaughter of minority groups, including Christians, Yazidis and Kurds. But commentators have been troubled by what appeared as overreach by Australia and grandstanding by our politicians.

    Australia is partly responsible for the chaos and disintegration in Iraq, since Australia was only one of three countries to invade Iraq in 2003, despite widespread public dissension in western countries and strenuous opposition by Pope John Paul II and other religious leaders. As they feared, the consequences have been that hundreds of thousands have died, millions have fled Iraq or been internally displaced, and most in the ancient Christian communities, over a million, have left the country which has been riven by sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shia.

    Yet many of the very politicians who determined to invade Iraq in the mistaken belief that Saddam posed a threat with nuclear weapons are now plunging us back into this crisis. Former Prime Minister, Mr John Howard, now says he was ‘embarrassed’ that no weapons of mass destruction were found, despite his earlier insistence that they had certain evidence. Australians still do not know how or why the government was so mistaken, and our politicians have failed to make any apology for helping precipitate this long and disastrous war.

    A cynical view might hold that politicians today trailing badly in the polls will readily wrap themselves in the flag of nationalism and embrace a military venture to restore their electoral fortunes. Not surprising the Labor Party is trying not to be wedged on this issue, and is largely endorsing Prime Minister Abbott’s interventions.

    The ‘crusade’ rhetoric

    One of the blunders some western leaders made, especially President George W Bush, was to demonise Saddam’s regime and even talk of a new crusade.

    Tony Abbott talks of a ‘hideous death cult’, a group of ‘ideologues of a new and hideous variety, who don’t just do evil but they exult in doing evil.’ He warned that Australian Muslims would be acting ‘against God’ if they joined IS.

    Our political leaders need to be very careful not to talk of the conflict in terms reminiscent of a crusade, or as a struggle between the forces of outright good and evil. Yes, IS fighters have committed barbarous atrocities against thousands of innocent people, including many women and children. Perpetrators of these crimes need to be brought to justice and tried according to the laws of war as massive human rights abuses. But the perpetrators still remain human beings. Though they have done atrocious acts, they are not the embodiment of Evil.

    This is not a trivial point. A danger is that we in the West would fall into a mentality that depicts IS and similar Islamists groups as ‘pure evil’ or a demonic force that has to be totally eradicated. In the Muslim world, this draws on memories of the crusades with both sides fighting in the name of God against opponents seen as being the forces of anti-God.

    This religious wrapping can also take on non-religious forms, as in the struggle against communism when depicted in extreme forms as a life-or-death struggle against the embodiment of Evil against the forces of Good, the West.

    This was particularly the issue during the Spanish Civil War, when both sides tended to see themselves in terms of absolutes, of Good versus Evil, almost as embodiments of metaphysical forces. With its long history of crusades, Spain appeared particularly vulnerable to this perception, on both sides, and even in parts of the Catholic Church.

    The French political philosophy and activist, Jacques Maritain, called this the ‘crusade mentality’ and blamed it in part for the ferocity and extremism of the Spanish Civil War. If enemies are depicted in terms of ‘total evil’, they are no longer being seen as human beings who still retain human rights when captured and need to be treated humanely. The crusade mentality involves a commitment to total war without compromise or political resolution.

    Maritain denounced any religious legitimation for war, insisting that it risked blasphemy to kill in the name of Christ. His call was taken up strongly by later popes, including Popes John Paul II, Benedict and Francis, reiterating that though a just war is possible, especially to protect innocent people against groups like IS, it must not be seen as a war of religion.

    Pope Francis has appealed to ‘stop the unjust aggressor. I underscore the word “stop”. I don’t say bomb, make war – stop him’, remembering how often powerful nations have dominated others in wars of conquest. In Albania on 21 September he reiterated: ‘No one must use the name of God to commit violence! To kill in the name of God is a grave sacrilege. To discriminate in the name of God is inhuman.’

    No military solution possible

    It is a mistake to think that IS can be defeated simply militarily. Islamic State has emerged from deep disillusionment among disaffected Muslims in crumbling states about the failure of modernising efforts to bring employment and prosperity to their peoples. Instead, it has invented an imaginary future drawn from a supposed golden era of Islam for how Sharia law could usher in an era of peace and justice.

    However its cruelty and atrocities have mobilised the international community against IS. Its beheading and crucifying of opponents have been particularly odious. But do not forget the huge human toll of the invasion of Iraq, followed by systematic use of torture which so disturbed Muslims among many others. The invasion was preceded by the UN sanctions on Saddam’s Iraq that resulted in the deaths of an estimated 500,000 children.

    In addition, foreign intervention exacerbates older notions in Islamic belief that if non–Muslims attack a Muslim country, Muslims elsewhere are required to come to the defence of the realm of Faith and repel invaders. This helps explain why the Islamists are able to attract tens of thousands of overseas Muslims to fight and perhaps die. You can see how counter-productive Australian military intervention in Iraq might be in such a context.

    Instead of rushing into military engagement in Iraq, Australia should be pushing diplomatic initiatives through the United Nations and perhaps supporting an arms embargo. Instead of recently ending our development assistance to Iraq and committing hundreds of millions of dollars to military action, Australia could play a directly humanitarian role funding urgent relief for millions of refugees, and expanding our refugee intake back up to 20,000 instead of the recent reduction down to 13,750.

    It will be up to the wider Muslim community to resolve the Jihadist movements, interpreting the Koran and Muslim traditions for contemporary circumstances in ways that can sustain in peace and justice not just the worldwide Muslim community, but all others as well. These Jihadist groups bring disgrace on themselves and dishonour their faith in the eyes of the world.

    Bruce Duncan is the Director of the Yarra Institute for Religion and Social Policy.

  • John Tulloh. Australia could fight another far away war in a better way.

    It is sobering to consider that the 21st century is only 15 years old and a geographically isolated and peaceful country like Australia has already participated in two major conflicts – Afghanistan and Iraq – and fought skirmishes in a lesser one, the birth of Timor Leste. Now we are preparing to join another one far away in Iraq and perhaps even extend that to Syria.

    It is just as sobering to consider a number of other facts:

    •      The disturbing images of police guarding Parliament House in Canberra being armed with assault rifles no less. This seems so un-Australian.
    •       The recommendation that servicemen wear civilian clothes where possible and avoid hanging their uniforms on the backyard clothes line so as not to draw attention to their presence. What is life coming to?
    •      The likelihood that the fastest-growing industry in our cities will come under the heading of threats. That is, extra security for public buildings, more cameras monitoring every movement, more thorough searches of airline passengers, bullet-proof vests becoming a common sight and chicanes guarding the more sensitive targets. We shall become a suspicious society. The friendly Australian assurance of ‘No worries’ will no longer be the same.
    •      That young people from Islamic families given haven in Australia from persecution should want to persecute others, including fellow Moslems, under an Islamic banner and in a means so vicious and gruesome as to disturb the emotions of people everywhere.

    What is happening to our once pleasant, safe, generous, tolerant and easy-going land?

    It may be to the good name of Australia that we are doing something about crushing a tyranny in a region far from our shores. But shouldn’t others closer with more to fear than Australia be doing something?

    It is heartening that Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have now contributed their planes to the fight against Islamic State (IS). But what about other Arab countries and European nations with large Islamic populations vulnerable to IS hatreds? Between them they have much more to offer than what Tony Abbott calls our ‘minimal contribution’.

    Australia has got involved ostensibly on the grounds that up to 60 Australian jihadists have lent their services to IS. But so have volunteers from many other countries which have not stirred themselves into action. The truth is that we want to remain eager to help the U.S. at any time, few questions asked.

    We like to think we are important to the U.S. when it comes to military adventures. We are not. We are useful. Our presence in the Gulf and Iraq wars was very small. We did not suffer a single death in action. President George W. Bush proclaimed John Howard a ‘man of steel’. Yet he and Australia barely rated a paragraph in his memoirs.

    A major casualty of IS’s rampage through Iraq and Northern Syria are the terrorist group’s potential victims fleeing for their lives. In the past week alone, an estimated 120,000 desperate Syrians fled to the sanctuary of Turkey. They joined tens of thousands before them who have sought safety in Turkey and Kurdistan in Northern Iraq.

    It is trauma on a mass scale. These people have lost their homes, their livelihoods, their possessions, their dignity, their way of life, their hopes and in many cases their relatives, neighbours and friends.

    This is and will always be very much a local issue with so many different religious, political and tribal interests involved. It should be for the immediate neighbourhood to deal with rather than 21st century Crusaders.

    It begs the questions:

    Should Australia, while giving moral support, not leave at least the initial heavy lifting against IS to Iraq’s fellow Arab countries and Turkey who are far more threatened than we are?

    And would Australia not make a greater contribution to the IS question by being at the forefront of the campaign to help the displaced victims than to provoke a threat to its own people and way of life by our ‘minimal’ military involvement?

    After all, IS had never threatened Australia until we joined the coalition. Its sole initial purpose was to create a Sunni caliphate and victimise anyone in the region who disagreed. But it seems old loyalties and habits will win out and Australia has probably gone beyond the point of no return in arming the RAAF fighters now poised for action at their UAE base.

    FOOTNOTE: When I returned to Australia in 1985 after living in security-conscious London and New York even then, I was enchanted by a Sunday afternoon scene on Sydney harbour. There were people in boats and yachts alongside a submarine in the old Neutral Bay base and sailing next to warships at Garden Island with no attempts to stop them. They were carefree days when truly there were ‘no worries’.

    John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign tv news.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Kerry Murphy. Kurds in the way.

    Since the collapse of three divisions of the Iraqi army at Mosul in June 2014, it has been the Peshmerga, Kurdish militias, that have strongly opposed the apocalyptic death cult of ISIS in Iraq. Already Syrian Kurdish forces had strongly defended their territories in Syria. The relief of the besieged Yazidis on Mount Sinjar saw Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga forces and Turkish PKK forces help on the ground. The conflicts in Iraq and Syria are continuing to mutate and some of the results mean that western countries have to support groups such as the PKK previously labelled terrorists.

    The Kurds have long sought their own country and they were right to feel they were misled after the First World War when they were promised independence in the Treaty of Sevres in 1920 only to lose it with the resurgence of Turkish nationalism under Ataturk and the subsequent Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. Since then, the estimated 30 million Kurds have been split between Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran. They have risen in rebellion in Turkey on a number of occasions and the Marxist PKK is their armed wing. There have also been Kurdish rebellions in Syria, Iraq and Iran, all have been severely repressed. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein infamously used chemical weapons against the Kurds in the Al Anfal campaign against the town of Halabja, during the time of the Iran/Iraq war. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Anfal_Campaign)

    With the end of the first Gulf War in 1991, the Kurdish region in northern Iraq was established under the protection of the West’s no-fly zone. Since then, the Kurds have managed their own territory with little control from Baghdad. The new Iraqi State saw the Kurds gain the positon of President and further develop the Kurdish Regional Government, where Kurdish in the main language, not Arabic. Until recently, even speaking Kurdish in Turkey was likely to get you targeted by the Turkish security forces. US forces worked well with the Kurds and there were no reported deaths of US military personnel in the Kurdish region after 2003.

    Now we have the PKK and Iraqi Peshmerga fighting ISIS in Iraq, with the Syrian Kurds (YPG) and some PKK fighting ISIS in Syria. The Kurds have a formidable reputation but are not well armed, as the Iraqi Government did not agree to the Peshmerga being equipped with modern weapons, so the old Soviet era Kalashnikov is still their main weapon.

    Now it has changed and Australia, the US, France and other western powers have sent modern weapons to the Kurds, with the reluctant agreement of the Iraqi government. Combined with US and western airpower, the Kurds are holding their ground and recovering some territory in Iraq from ISIS.   (http://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iraq-situation-report-september-18-19-2014) They have also expanded their territory to include the ‘disputed’ city of Kirkuk, and its surrounding oilfields. The Kurds have long wanted to control Kirkuk and get the economic benefit of the oil fields nearby.

    Meanwhile in Syria, Kurdish YPG forces have held their own territory whilst Assad and the mainly Sunni rebels fought it out. In some places, the Kurds were supported by regime forces to defend their territory against rebels, especially those of Jabhat Al Nusra (JN is the Al- Qaeda linked opposition force).

    The Kurds now are threatened by the rise of ISIS which is advancing against the Syrian regime, JN, the Free Syrian Army and several Islamist opposition forces. In the last week thousands of Kurds have fled into Turkey seeking shelter from ISIS, whilst their militias try to hold the ground and repulse ISIS. (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/22/syrian-kurdish-fighters-islamic-state-isis-kobani) . It is estimated that 100,000 Kurds have fled to Turkey in a week. (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/21/isis-kurds-escape-into-turkey-from-syria-kobani )

    The Syrian Kurds have worked with the Turkish PKK forces against ISIS and now it seems a coalition of US lead airpower is helping them, as well as their fellow Kurds in Iraq. It is likely that the Syrian Kurds will also need more weapons to help them hold back an expansionist ISIS so will these weapons be supplied by the West? This would be an intervention without the support of the Syrian regime, but ironically, it would support the aims of the Syrian regime against ISIS.

    A week ago we saw the smiling face of unveiled female Kurdish fighters in Iraq on the front pages of the Fairfax papers. (http://www.theage.com.au/world/is-australia-arming-terrorist-pkk-fighters-20140915-10h8cc.html) The PKK is more political than religious, and religious extremism like you see in ISIS is rare amongst the Kurds.  She was with the PKK, and the PKK and Turkish government have only recently reached a truce after decades of fighting which has cost the lives of thousands. We must remember that Turkey is a member of NATO, and so it would be difficult for the West to supply weapons to armed militias that have until recently been involved in armed conflict against the Turkish State. However the advent of ISIS means that survival trumps politics.

    It is possible that if ISIS can be constrained, or even seriously depleted, then the Kurds in Iraq will be in their strongest position to claim de jure independence since 1920. Such a move would be provocative for Turkey and Iran, neither of which would want to recognise an independent Kurdistan as that would only encourage the minorities in their own countries. What will happen in Syria is a harder question, but if the Kurds can survive and hold back ISIS, it will make their bargaining position much stronger for a post war Syria.

    Kerry Murphy is a Sydney solicitor who specialises in Immigration Law

     

  • Gaza, Israel and Palestine.

    In the link below from AlterNet, published on 9 September 2014, you will find a very important analysis by Noam Chomsky. John Menadue.

     

    http://www.alternet.org/noam-chomsky-real-reason-israel-mows-lawn-gaza?akid=12222.32110.TSqdYT&rd=1&src=newsletter1018632&t=2&paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

  • Will we ever learn?

    In an article in the Washington Post – see link below – Katrina vanden Heuvel says

    ‘Our interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan should have made one thing clear: we have neither the patience, the resources nor the willingness to wreak the violence needed to suppress the regional sectarian conflicts. For more than a decade, we have spent trillions, sacrificed lives and rained bombs on assorted targets from Pakistan to Libya. And the civil wars, tribal rivalries and sectarian violence have only increased.’

    Tony Abbott said that he agreed with Barack Obama’s pivot to Asia. Tony Abbott spoke of ‘more Jakarta and less Geneva’.

    It now seems that we are pivoting back to the Middle East.  John Menadue

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/katrina-vanden-heuvel-obama-reneges-on-his-foreign-policy-promises/2014/09/16/7490e1ee-3d0c-11e4-b0ea-8141703bbf6f_story.html

  • Secrecy and Propaganda.

    Yesterday Richard Ackland in theGuardian.com highlighted the way that the media cooperated with the government in the propaganda about raids on potential Muslim terrorists in Sydney and Melbourne. Both the NSW and Commonwealth Governments spared no effort to highlight the raids. What a contrast this is to the secrecy of ‘on water matters’ in Operation Sovereign Borders.

    Richard Ackland’s article can be found on the following link

    John Menadue.

     

    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/19/sydney-dawn-counter-terrorism-raids-why-now-and-why-so-few-answers

  • Richard Butler. Ukraine, not Sarajevo

    In recent months, there’s been no shortage of suggestions, indeed warnings, that Russia’s absorption of Crimea and now it’s pressure on eastern Ukraine, is the equivalent of the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand, in Sarajevo almost exactly 100 years ago: the “ shot heard around the world”, which saw the beginning of the First World War just 37 days later.

    This comparison is beguiling, neat, and I suspect it appeals particularly to those, such as Prime Minister Abbott, who have a very definite view that the world is simple. It includes bad people, all of whom are our enemies, and us and our friends, who are always good. Remember Abbott’s use of the term “ baddies versus baddies” when favoring Australian voters with his analysis of the situation in Syria.

    Much more importantly, the comparison between the situation of a century ago in Central Europe and today, is wrong. It significantly misrepresents key facts of history. These relate to NATO not to Russia or President Putin’s current, disturbing and apparently deceptive, actions.

    When the Berlin wall fell in 1990, and the question of the future of East Germany and the prospect of a united Germany was discussed between Soviet President Gorbachev and the western powers controlling West Berlin, newly available authentic records show that the latter allowed Gorbachev to believe that he had the assurance that NATO would not expand eastwards beyond a united Germany. This understanding and the financial incentives provided by the west to the USSR gained Soviet agreement to the reunification of Germany. Soviet forces then withdrew from East Germany.

    Since that time NATO has expanded eastwards to include 12 States which had been in the Soviet sphere and the Warsaw pact, all of them measurably closer to Russia, 5 of them sharing borders with Russia. All of them enjoy the undertaking given in Article IV of the NATO treaty that any attack upon them would be considered to be an attack upon all treaty parties.

    It is interesting that at the time the deal was done, Vladimir Putin was a member of the staff of the KGB office in Berlin.

    Ukraine’s disposition was not at issue in those developments. Now, it is beyond doubt that Russia would find it unacceptable, for fundamental as well as historical reasons, for Ukraine to become the next eastern member of NATO.

    The first step in the current serious dispute over Ukraine was the decision by the Yanukovich government in Kiev in late 2013, to sign a relationship agreement with the EU. This was seen in Moscow as presaging a drift by Ukraine towards NATO. Putin bought off Yanukovich with a financial package, but the people of western Ukraine then forced Yanukovich out. The people of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, predominantly sympathetic to Russia, but more importantly less than convinced that they would ever get a fair shake from Kiev, saw their future as best served by alignment with Russia: at least activists in those regions see it this way.

    While these are issues internal to Ukraine, especially involving the skewed and corrupt nature of its politics since it’s independence from Russia was achieved 20 years ago, it would be willful blindness to ignore the NATO dimension.

    A possible solution has been advanced by a leading member of the realist school of thought in international affairs, John Mearsheimer, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Chicago University. He proposes a neutralized Ukraine, similar to that of Austria, following the Second World War. He argues, characteristically for a dedicated realist, that Russia should simply not be expected to accept the western military alliance moving up to the Ukrainian/ Russian border.

    His proposal and an outline of the facts with regard to the understanding on the reunification of Germany, provided by Mary Elise Sarotte, Professor of History at the University of Southern California and Harvard, can be found in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs.

    Does Mearsheimer seriously suggest that absent such a solution, Donetsk will become Sarajevo? Probably not, but he does warn of the great danger in western refusal to accept the legitimacy of deeply felt Russian interests, which the Russians believe the west recognized when the Soviet imperium in Western Europe was dissolved.

    Applying Mearsheimer’s realist reasoning, which I do not entirely accept, because of my persistent belief that there should be some principles in international relations, greater than that of self-interest, shouldn’t there also be a warning about the dangers involved in great powers giving undertakings which they then break?

    Mainly because the of the degree and quality of attention being given to solving the Ukraine problem by committed deeply informed and thoughtful people in governments and outstanding non-governmental think-tanks, which stands in stark contrast to the cavalier nonsense which passed for thinking about the problem in 1914, the history of Sarajevo will not be repeated.

    Nor will Prime Minister Abbott’s toe on this stage play a significant role. His warning to the Russians after the dreadful events of MH17, the threat to disinvite President Putin to the G20 meeting in Brisbane, for example, have plainly meant nothing of importance, except perhaps in his transparent calculation of domestic opinion within Australia. But that too would appear to be a miscalculation, in comparison with the obvious domestic concern, including within his own party, about broken electoral promises.

    Repeated denial of plain facts will not alter them just as, in international relations, pugilism is not policy.

    Richard Butler is a former Australian Ambassador to the United Nations, Head of the UN Special Commission to disarm Iraq, a Professor of International Affairs at Penn State University.

  • John Menadue. We ‘warn the Tsar of Russia’.

    In September 1892, the headline ‘The Hobart Mercury warns the Tsar’ did not threaten Russia sufficiently to attract a response or change its belligerent behaviour. I don’t think the Tsar thought it necessary to respond to people who have an exaggerated view of their own importance

    The Hobart Mercury over-reached itself. Australian Prime Ministers, particularly when they need a diversion from domestic issues, often do the same. There has been a lot of beating the drums of war and macho posturing lately. Perhaps we will soon see Putin-esque photos of a shirtless rider on his bare-backed horse.

    Despite all the international posturing what has really been achieved?

    • MH350 has still not been found, despite the Prime Minister telling us months ago that we had almost certainly found the black box. We have now decided to fund and contract out the further search for MH350. Why?
    • We projected ourselves quite naturally into the recovery of MH17, but it was the Malaysian Government and not the European governments that really delivered for us in the removal of 200 bodies by train and the retrieval of the black boxes. Thanking the Malaysians has been an afterthought.
    • We sent the AFP to Ukraine and the Netherlands to secure the crash site. They failed and had to be withdrawn.
    • We have become an ‘enhanced party’ in NATO.  What national interest is there in that?
    • By siding so deliberately with Japan in its dispute with China we have antagonised China, our ally in WW2
    • Now we seem exceptionally eager to commit Hornet aircraft to the war against IS in Iraq.  We don’t seem to learn from our mistakes and Tony Abbott now suggests that the failure of the Western involvement in Iraq from 2003 was the prosecution of the war rather than its flawed policy in the first place.

     

    As in the Hobart Mercury in 1892, our over-reach in foreign policy has led to extremist language. The Prime Minister has described the Islamic State (IS) as a ‘death cult’ and please ‘we should not give credence to people who are pure evil, pure evil’.  He added ‘people have been radicalised and brutalised through contact with this death cult’. He added further ‘this mob, as soon as they have done something gruesome and ghastly and unspeakable, they are advertising it on the internet’.

    Nothing could justify the barbarism that we have seen from IS in Northern Iraq, but Muslims would remember, even if Tony Abbott does not, the centuries of barbarism against Muslims.

    • In 1099 the first Christian crusaders stood ‘knee deep in blood’ of Muslims and Jews after the capture of Jerusalem.
    • The Muslim expulsion from Andalusia.
    • Tens of thousands of Muslim women were raped in Bosnia 20 years ago
    • We stood aside in 1995 from the massacre of Muslim men in Srebrenica.
    • Ethnic cleansing went on in Bosnia for years before the West intervened.
    • We cooperated in the invasion of Iraq in 2003 which George Bush called the new crusade. It resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people and the break-up of their country which has helped spawn IS.
    • More recently have we really expressed sympathy for the death of over 2,000 Palestinians, mainly civilians in Gaza? Israelis, yes. But Palestinians!
    • CIA officers in control rooms in Langley, press buttons for predator drones to kill insurgents and many civilians in Pakistan and Yemen. There is no blood on their hands like we have seen on the hands of IS killers. But is mechanised killing OK?
    • We did nothing for years about our good friends in Saudi Arabia and other Middle East countries who funded the Sunni rebels.
    • For the best part of a century foreign companies have exploited the vast oil resources of the Middle East.
    • We have been invited to join ‘team Australia’ but many Muslims feel it is directed against  them and  casts doubts on their patriotism

    We should not be surprised that some young Muslim men have been radicalised. In 2004 after the train bombing in Madrid the Commissioner of the AFP warned us and said ‘If this turns out to be Islamic extremists responsible for this bombing in Spain, it’s more likely to be linked to the position that Spain and other allies took on issues such as Iraq’.

    To avoid responsibility for the response of young Muslim men, John Howard and now Tony Abbott are repeating at almost every opportunity that ‘would-be terrorists don’t hate us for what we do but for who we are and how we live’. What tosh. They will judge us by our actions…what we do.

    Some young Muslim men are responding to the humiliation of centuries in unacceptable brutality. Yet when ethnic cleansing of Christians and Yaziidis occurred in Iraq and when American hostages were murdered in Syria, our response was immediate.

    Where is our even-handedness in resisting violence and injustice in all its forms against all people? It is time our leaders looked at the history of foreign intervention in the Middle East and the great injustice that has been done. We are now reaping the harvest of what we have sown.

    Overreach, like the Hobart Mercury’s posturing 120 years, ago is not serving us well.

  • Annette Brownlie. No new war in Iraq.

    Both major political parties are once again standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the US, in support of what amounts to a new military intervention in Iraq.

    The process began with the dropping of humanitarian aid supplies to the Yezidi. It has now moved on to the delivery of weapons and munitions to Kurdish Peshmerga forces. Meanwhile, Defence Minister David Johnston has indicated that Australian armed forces (Super Hornet warplanes and C130s) are to be made available to support whatever action the US decides upon.

    All of this has happened with scarcely any discussion – in or outside of the parliament. No questioning or dissent has been heard in this drive towards intervention and, possibly, eventual war. (However, a recent poll shows that 78% of the population opposes having Australian ‘boots on the ground’ in Iraq.)

    Even the proposal that there be a parliamentary debate about the intervention, so that the government could make its case to the Australian people, has been opposed by both major parties. There is no possibility for the parliament to take any part in the decision to send Australian forces overseas.  Nor has the Abbott government explained the sudden need to switch from aid to arms. And it has certainly not explained what Australia hopes to achieve.

    The horror in Iraq today is a direct consequence of the war on that began with the invasion of 2003. John Howard’s government joined that invasion on the basis of falsehoods and against the opinion of the majority of the population. It appears that the present government is eagerly waiting for a request to follow the US once again.

    The massive “shock and awe” bombing and the 11-year occupation of Iraq created huge numbers of civilian casualties – including more than 1 million dead – and massive internal displacement of people. The West’s propping up of the repressive regime that followed, laid the basis for the emergence of the Islamic State (IS) fundamentalists. IS has become the latest reason for intervention. Ironically, it is using weapons captured from the Iraqi army and originally supplied by the US.

    The lesson that should have been learnt from Iraq is that military meddling in the affairs of the Middle East does not work. There was a disastrous outcome last time and no evidence to indicate anything different this time.

    Australia and the US do not recognise Kurdistan as an independent state. Sending arms to the Kurds means that Australia is continuing to meddle – in this case within the movement for Kurdish self-determination.

    If the Australian government was serious about helping the Iraqi minorities, rather than following the US into military intervention, it would immediately:

    • Expand the refugee program and offer sanctuary to the displaced and traumatised
    • Send humanitarian aid – food; engineers; doctors and constructions workers. 

    Sending yet more armaments to the area, which is already wracked by years of warfare, will not reduce the level of violence it is experiencing. The area needs less weaponry, not more.

    Annett Brownlie is a member of IPAN (The Independent and Peaceful Australia Network)

  • John Tulloh. Canberra’s fork in the road – the humanitarian way or the warpath?

    What interesting, fraught and changing times we live in. This month marks the 75th anniversary of the start of World War Two. Britain and France with little ado told Germany to get out of Poland or else. Three days later King George VI made a radio speech to the British nation that good must prevail. Robert Menzies, the Australian Prime Minister, did his ‘melancholy duty’ via ABC radio and without further ado off went the men of both countries to war again. It all seemed so straight forward.

    But today we face another fearful dilemma about another occupying force:  how to handle the Islamic State (IS) insurgents whose barbaric behaviour in Iraq has been as evil as that of the Nazis. The need for humanitarian assistance by the West for IS’s victims required no debate. But then what? Another invasion was out of the question, of course. But clearly, IS cannot be left unchecked when its followers roam elsewhere in Iraq like primitive bandits imposing their brutal rule in the name of Islam.

    Other Arab countries have shown little or no interest in intervening, while Iraq’s own army appears not up to the task despite the billions of dollars the U.S. spent in training them. That leaves the West. In fact, it’s the West’s biggest and most acute predicament: how do what are essentially Christian democracies deal with Islamic extremism?

    Tony Abbott has been characteristically cautious in discussing any plans beyond the humanitarian air drops in conjunction with other Western countries and now the delivery of military supplies to friendly forces. But he has confirmed what is obvious: that he has already discussed with Washington a wider military role.

    Mr Abbott might care to refresh himself about what happened in the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq invasion. Neither conflict incurred Australian casualties as a result of warfare. The Gulf War was a UN-sanctioned operation to drive Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait which they had invaded the previous year. Bob Hawke, the Australian Prime Minister then, restricted our involvement to helping patrol the Persian Gulf and demining operations.

    In 2003, Mr Abbott’s mentor, John Howard, was in charge and more accommodating of Washington’s interests., He kept the public and the media guessing right up to the last minute. Once he had decided or rather confirmed that we would join President George W. Bush’s plan to invade, Australian SAS troops were operating in western Iraq with considerable success two days before the bombing of Baghdad began.

    Our intention to be part of the coalition of the willing was never in doubt despite all the ducking and weaving by Mr Howard. A few weeks before the invasion, the Sydney Morning Herald, ran a memorable cartoon showing an enthusiastic George Bush waving his Stetson and a grinning Tony Blair aboard a rocket bound for Baghdad with an alarmed-looking John Howard sitting on the tail and saying something to the effect of ‘Seriously, though, we haven’t decided yet’.

    Greg Sheridan, the well-connected foreign editor of The Australian, is in little doubt in the current case. He says Canberra is ‘considering deploying SAS soldiers, F18 Super Hornet jet fighters and sophisticated airborne early warning and control aircraft as part of a military contribution to US-led efforts in Iraq’. Here we go again.

    Our military involvement to date has been the delivery of weapons to the Kurdish militia, the peshmerga (‘One who faces death’). The U.S. are looking to these fierce fighters as a kind of first line of defence in Northern Iraq where IS followers have been rampant.

    Then what? How will the West deal with IS units terrorising communities elsewhere in Iraq? The era of ground troops is over. The new battles are being fought from the sky by warplanes and drones. As the Americans discovered 40 years ago over North Vietnam during that war, relying on just bombing is a futile exercise.

    The most the West could hope for is to drive IS followers back into their original sanctuary, Syria. Then what? You can almost imagine President Obama saying ‘I wish I knew’ when to date he’s had no idea how to deal with Syria and its nasty Assad regime. It would widen the conflict with who knows what consequences for Australia as well as the other participants.

    James Brown, a former Australian military officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and is now a fellow of the Lowy Institute, claims that Mr Abbott is using the military as ‘a tool of international policy’. He cited not only the Iraq developments, but now Australia’s startling involvement with faraway Ukraine. He told ABC radio that staff in the Prime Minister’s office are talking about an Abbott doctrine. ‘It’s a doctrine that’s reactive, it’s a doctrine that leads with the military and it’s a doctrine that’s very values driven’.

    For now Abbott’s biggest worry is the possibility of jihadists slipping through the cracks with the potential to cause mayhem to our safe and comfortable way of life. There is also the unthinkable: a fellow Australian – a media person, an NGO or even a soldier – being taken prisoner and beheaded. However, Mr Abbott can take some comfort from the fact that the overwhelming Moslem community in Australia feel the same way about IS as he does.

    The conflict has thrown up some developments which future historians will pore over.

    One is that the Kurds, having been ignored by the West for years, cannot believe their good fortune in finally being the centre of favourable attention and in such demand. But they know there will be a limit to the West’s attention lest their long-held ambitions for an independent homeland lead to the break-up of Iraq.

    Another is the steady exodus of Christians from the Middle East where they have existed since the first century. Many are fleeing brutal oppression, such as from IS. Others see little future when sectarian differences and hostility dominate daily life. It is estimated that the region’s 12 million Christians will drop to 6 million by 2020.

    For Mr Abbott, he now has more rapidly changing developments than ever before to take into account in determining Australia’s future direction in foreign matters. While still playing a humanitarian role anywhere, it might be safer and more practical to focus on where our future really lies – East Asia.

    FOOTNOTE: In late 2002, the notoriously secretive Defence Dept in Canberra called a meeting of all media representatives to discuss accreditation in the event of a potential conflict, i.e. the looming Iraq invasion. The rules had been drawn up by a leading Australian legal company for some bizarre reason. They included censorship of all news reports. So much for ‘live’ reporting. The location of the UAE base where RAAF jets might be stationed was never to be mentioned despite them presumably being visible to passers-by. Violators of the rules would have their accreditation revoked. All this was part of what was code-named ‘Operation Chad’. As the RAN was also involved, the brigadier in charge of the briefing was asked why such a name was chosen. ‘Why not?’ he replied as if this were a stupid question. Chad is land-locked, he was informed. He still look puzzled. Needless to say, the media were unanimous in rejecting the terms of accreditation.

    John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news.

  • Tony Smith. The failure of imagination

    Australia has rushed to despatch even more armaments into the already troubled areas contested by men of violence across Iraq and Syria. It is clear that once again, our national government has assumed that this action is necessary and unavoidable. In reality, there are always choices and it is disappointing that the Coalition has failed to imagine any alternative to an escalation of warfare.

    The Government line is reminiscent of the disastrous entry to the invasion of Iraq a decade ago. Minsters argued that Australia had to do ‘something’ about the regime of Saddam Hussein, but the only thing on their minds was military action. We went to war then with inadequate information, and in some respects totally inaccurate information, particularly about the so-called ‘weapons of mass destruction’. The intelligence services are expensive financially and their cultural threats to civil liberties both here and abroad make their failures doubly tragic. Why, if we make such sacrifices of national sovereignty to be kept well informed by the big players in the USA and Europe, did we not see the need to take some lower level of action over the rise of ISIS during the last two years?

    There are several unpalatable possibilities. First, Australia has not been informed of the rising threat posed by ISIS. Secondly, we were informed but the Government deliberately chose to ignore this advice so that it could eventually resort to the action it has now deemed ‘necessary’. Thirdly, we just did not have the imagination required to address the rise of ISIS using other means. All three possibilities suggest that Australia does not have skills in this area and that we would be better off to vacate the field and not try to be important players in the ‘war on terrorism’ being conducted by the USA and Britain.

    Exactly what is likely to happen to arms dropped to those under threat is anyone’s guess. Some will almost certainly be captured by ISIS guerrillas. Some will no doubt be turned against the people we have professed to be helping, but we will suggest this is an unfortunate consequence, something like the acceptance of thousands of child deaths in Baghdad in the earlier conflict. After all, ours is a country which can put our hands on our hearts and export uranium to India, despite India’s refusal to sign the international conventions relating to nuclear non-proliferation. We delude ourselves by asserting that ‘our’ uranium’ will not play any role in India’s nuclear weapons program so perhaps we can just as easily pretend that weapons dropped in the path of the rampaging ISIS forces will not be used by them.

    In earlier attempts to disperse land mines across South East Asia, western forces made the same assumptions. Yet those land mines created numerous innocent victims. Now arms manufacturers and military strategists have turned to other means of killing; they now maim remotely by using cluster bombs and drone missiles. It is time that all those members of parliament and other commentators who support this weapons drop faced the reality that a world bristling with armaments will continue to experience instability. The availability of lethal weapons makes small problems into larger ones.

    In the invasion of Iraq ten years ago, some people of conscience, including some Australians, attempted to stimulate the imaginations of the strategists by offering themselves as ‘human shields’. They attempted to make it clear that some civilian targets such as schools and water supplies should be avoided. They risked death by positioning themselves near these sites so that the bombs and missiles of the forces of the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ would not damage them. For their pains they were vilified and condemned by the Australian Government. There is no opportunity for such an action in the present crisis. However, there remains an urgent need for creative thinking to avoid what will almost certainly become yet another humanitarian disaster. Millions of dollars will be spent daily on the campaign that is now unfolding. It is appalling that a Government which claims to be so careful of the taxpayers’ dollars will spend this money without any prospect of achieving a positive outcome. Where are the alternative visions for peace across Iraq and Syria?

    In 2014 the world began remembering the centenary of the outbreak of the war of 1914-1918. The propaganda of the time assured those who suffered that their sacrifices would not be in vain because this would be a war to end all wars. The century since 1914 has been a time of almost constant warfare. No war can end war. No amount of killing and violence can establish the principle that killing and violence are wrong and should be eliminated from world affairs. It really is time to imagine some other way of achieving our legitimate aims.

    Tony Smith is a former academic and regular contributor to Eureka Street, The Australian Review of Public Affairs and the The Australian Quarterly.

     

     

  • John Menadue. The ANZAC Myth.

    The four-year and well-funded carnival celebrating Anzac and WWI is now rolling. The carnival will depict WWI as the starting point of our nation, as our coming of age!

    It was nothing of the sort. It was a sign of our international immaturity and dependence on others. What was glorious about involving ourselves in the hatreds and rivalry of European powers that had wrought such carnage in Europe over centuries? Many of our forebears came to Australia to get away from this. But conservatives, our war historians and colonel blimps chose deliberately to draw us back to the stupidities and hatreds of Europe.

    It seems that the greater the political and military stupidity of wars that we have been involved in, the more we are encouraged to  hide behind the valour of our service people at Gallipoli, the Western Front and elsewhere.. The ‘leadership’ of Winston Churchill and General Ian Hamilton were catastrophic both for the British and for us. Australian and New Zealand forces at Gallipoli were commanded by a British General. No hiding behind the sacrifice of troops can avoid the facts. We should not have been there and it was a disaster.

    Unfortunately the more we ignore the political and military mistakes of the past, the more likely we are to make similar mistakes in the future. And we keep doing it. If we had a sense of our calamitous involvement in wars in the past like WW1 we would be less likely to make foolish decisions to involve ourselves in wars like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

    Our history is littered with tragic military adventures, being led by the nose by either the UK or the US.  And it goes on through the Boer War, the Sudan War and more recently, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. In all these cases, and just like WWI, we have desperately tried to hide behind the valour of our service people.

    The most important and justified war in which we have fought as a nation was WWII, in defence of our own people and land. But WWII is rated by the Australian War Memorial and so many others as of much less significance.  WW1 Is the Holy Grail.

    On April 25 each year we are told by tongue-tied people that the great sacrifice of WWI was in defence of freedom and the right. But I don’t think that they even believe it themselves. It just does not ring true. Tony Abbott says it was a ‘just war’. But he is yet to explain what was ‘just’ about it. It is claimed that it united this country, but it divided us in a way that we had never been divided before or since with Billy Hughes exploiting the anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiment in the country. Only 30% of eligible men chose to enlist. WWI was a great divider. It was not a unifier despite the platitudes of Anzac Day.

    Some claim that WWI was to bring peace to Europe. But the war and its aftermath laid the ground for even greater death and destruction in WWII.

    In relation to our population, our greatest loss of lives was in the Frontier Wars where over 30,000 indigenous people died in defence of their own land. But we ignore it in favour of the myths of Anzac. Best we forget the Frontier Wars.

    The first time Australians and New Zealanders fought together was against the Maoris in New Zealand in the 1850s and 1860s. The ANZAC connection was not forged at Gallipoli but half a century before in the Maori Wars.  It’s best that we forget that too. It doesn’t do our self-respect much good to recall that we fought together with New Zealanders in a race war to quell the Maori people.

    The early and remarkable achievements of this young country at the turn of the century and early in the 19th Century are blotted out by the blood and blather of WWI, ANZAC and Gallipoli.

    Federation in 1900 was a remarkable achievement, pulling together our six colonies into a nation. We led the world in universal suffrage, the rights of women, industrial democracy and the minimum wage. The ‘Australian ballot’ or secret ballot was progressively adopted in the Australian states in the latter half of the nineteenth century. We were a world leader. Our ballot was adopted in New Zealand, Canada, UK and US

    In 1904 we had not only Australia’s first Labor Government. It was the first in the world. The rights of working people as expressed in the Harvester Judgement of 1907 put Australia as a leader on the world stage. We were an advanced social laboratory. Before WWI there were two decades of remarkable nationhood and advancement for ordinary people.

    But conservatives were frightened of the future. They wanted to drag us back to the heart break of the past. And they succeeded with the help of Billy Hughes and other Labor renegades

    In the process we broke our own heart – or as Marilyn Lake has expressed in a blog on April 23 this year ‘WWI fractured the nation’s soul’.

    It is time we were honest with ourselves and discounted the myths of WWI, ANZAC and Gallipoli.

    Instead we should celebrate the two remarkable decades of progress before the catastrophe of WW1.

     

  • David Stephens. The children suffer.

    Osbert Sitwell’s The Next War, published in 1918, depicts some plutocrats deciding what would be an appropriate war memorial. The senior plutocrat puts a suggestion which his colleagues eagerly take up.

    “What more fitting memorial for the fallen
    Than that their children
    Should fall for the same cause?”

    Rushing eagerly into the street,
    The kindly old gentlemen cried
    To the young:
    “Will you sacrifice
    Through your lethargy
    What your fathers died to gain?
    The world must be made safe for the young!”
    And the children
    Went . . .

    Are we in Australia just as keen on roping children into war as Sitwell’s plutocrats were? We do not explicitly say to them, ‘you must fall for a cause’ but we sanitise and normalise and proselytise ‘sacrifice’ in war in a way that cannot fail to be attractive to some children, even while we protest that we abhor war and wish to save future generations from it. Teaching children about war can so easily become teaching war to children.

    Politicians keep track of the involvement of children in war remembrance. The then prime minister, Julia Gillard, said last year that she always looked for the number of children at Anzac Day services and noted there were ‘more and more’ and that parents admitted they had been ‘dragged’ along by their children.

    So it’s actually the children who are driving the next level of engagement and I think that that means that for all of time, we will commemorate Anzac Day and think about who we are as Australians on that day.

    This attitude is bipartisan. The current Minister for the Centenary of Anzac, Senator Michael Ronaldson, said to the New South Wales Branch of the RSL earlier this year that

    2014 to 2018 means that you and I have another opportunity to teach another generation of young Australians what their obligations are. And if we do not do so ladies and gentlemen, then we have failed them and we have failed ourselves.

    When I asked the Minister’s office what sort of obligations he was referring to (social? moral? legal?) the answer was non-committal. More recently, the Minister told Sydney Legacy that he wanted by the end of 2018 to have

    the next generation of young Australians doing what you and I are doing at the moment. They will be carrying the torch …

    And when they hop on a school bus, or they walk home, or they go shopping, or they go out at night with relative freedom – that they realise in many instances that freedom has been paid for in blood. And they must understand that.

    The Minister’s department, Veterans’ Affairs, runs an extensive education program, with booklets, posters and teaching aids flowing to schools or downloadable without charge. Marilyn Lake and others have questioned the appropriateness of this activity and have suggested it is government-sponsored indoctrination. Some teachers, nevertheless, say the DVA material is ignored, thrown away or balanced with other resources. Honest History’s research suggests that another flagship commemorative program, the Simpson Prize, is very much a minority activity and is, in any case, tentatively moving from civics education with a military flavour towards a genuine history activity.

    On the other hand, children are referred to the jingoistic tosh of retired Colonel Arthur Burke OAM, who wrote of the torch of freedom being passed from dying hands on the beach at Gallipoli to children today, or they sit through Anzac services with scripts downloaded from the Australian Army website. The Australian War Memorial encourages primary school age children to write messages on little crosses to be planted in the graves of dead soldiers in war cemeteries in France and Belgium. The Memorial has also commenced the Roll of Honour Soundscape project, where thousands of children are being invited to recite names from the World War I Roll of Honour for replaying in the Memorial’s cloisters continuously for the next four years. Questions about whether this is a sensible activity for 12 year-olds are brushed aside with rhetoric about helping children ‘connect’ with the dead.

    Meanwhile, school visits to the Memorial continue to be subsidised and perhaps half a million children a year visit. The Memorial continues to offer its mini-theme park ‘Discovery Zone’ (‘touch, listen and smell’ but no corpses in the imitation World War I trench), its Memorial boxes, and various other resources and activities, at minimal charge. Projects in schools feature prominently in the Anzac Centenary Local Grants Program and schools compete for the Commonwealth’s Anzac Day School Awards and many similar Anzac-themed competitions and events in the States and Territories.

    When you question teachers or resource providers about the ethics of teaching children about war, the answer is often along the lines of ‘we give the children something that is appropriate to their age’ or ‘they get a nuanced view when they are younger and then more details later’. That this process may never work its way towards honesty is indicated by the continuing tendency of adult, official spruikers of war commemoration to use euphemisms like ‘fallen’ and ‘sacrifice’ in relation to dead soldiers, to avoid terms like ‘eviscerated’, ‘decapitated’, or ‘blown to bits’ to describe the circumstances of those deaths, and to continue to peddle overblown rhetoric about ‘dying for freedom’. What is involved in the rather nebulous concept of ‘connecting’ with the dead is never really spelled out. Connect with what purpose?

    We adults are champions at ‘nuance’ in relation to war so it is no wonder that children are fed loads of it. The essential message that war requires soldiers to kill or be killed is lost in nonsense about connecting or ‘understanding’ or smothered by sanitised collections of war memorabilia and dress-ups.

    I saw the Anzac Day march in Lismore, New South Wales, this year. There were lots of school children there in uniform, some of them marching in step, like soldiers. I wrote to the local RSL afterwards, suggesting it was wrong for children to imitate military practice. Had the gentleman replied, I’m sure he would have said something about ‘not glorifying war’. He would also have avoided the question of whether relentless, ubiquitous, sentimental commemoration gives children a rosy impression of war. He would have skirted the implications for future generations of their ‘obligations’ to carry the torch of remembrance.

    This torch carries many messages – has many ‘nuances’ – including the usually unspoken one that freedom, allegedly ‘paid for in blood’, may have to be redeemed in similar fashion in the future. Meanwhile, there is a club in Lismore, a club where old Diggers go after the Anzac march. It has a neon sign, ‘The price of liberty is eternal vigilance’ The vigilant are getting younger every year.

     

    David Stephens is secretary of Honest History (honesthistory.net.au). Honest History is a broad coalition of historians and others, committed to frank debate and expressing a diversity of opinions on specific issues. Views in this article are the author’s own. The Honest History website contains a version with links.

     

  • Tony Smith. Dubious celebrations of war.

    On 28 July 1914, the world was thrown into a terrible conflict. On that day, a Serbian nationalist assassinated an Austrian archduke and his wife. Because European states belonged to alliances which were heavily armed and many countries on other continents belonged to their empires, the war spread until it had consumed over a million lives. Between 2014 and 2018 those terrible events will be remembered in various ways. Some of those commemorations might be regarded as neutral, but inevitably, many will be matters of controversy. While Australia’s events will start in earnest around the centenary of the Gallipoli landing next year on 25 April, the screening of a television series on Anzac nurses suggests that one theme will be the evocation of sentimental responses in admiration of those who enlisted.

    The Anzac legend has been exploited cynically by politicians over the last 100 years. In all conflicts, there is a distinct pattern that most of the population opposes Australia entering a war until such time as troops are committed. Then people understandably feel an obligation to support the ‘diggers’ as they engage in their dangerous tasks. There is a desire to get the fighting over with and then return to normal politics.

    This leaves opponents of war in a difficult situation. During times of conflict, the expression of any doubts about the wisdom or correctness of engaging in military action is construed as disloyalty to the troops and to the country. At other times, however, the issues do not have the urgency to grip the popular imagination and so opportunities to discuss matters of war and peace are limited. It is understandable that people do not want to be forced to discuss such matters when they are enjoying peace. They want to get on with the ordinary everyday things that help them to develop their lives – work, play and building relationships.

    Over the next five years the nature of the commemorations could mimic either war or peace. It is important to discuss the issues critically. As the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine shows, the world is over armed today, and the situation is more serious than it was in 1914. Alliances still cause blind responses to crises. Russia has been reluctant to condemn the Ukrainian separatists and the USA has been weak in its response to Israel’s military actions in Gaza. The international agencies which could assist to ameliorate the problems are weakened by states which refuse to compromise on matters of national sovereignty. The archduke’s assassination may have been the spark which ignited a conflagration in 1914, but the background conditions of war are just as dangerous in 2014. This suggests that merely contemplating earlier tragedies has not enabled the world to progress in its thinking over the last century.

    An alternative explanation for the failure to learn from the 1914-18 war is that discussion has been stifled by cynical forces. Patriots have been reluctant to allow a focus on the folly, waste and evils of war because they are afraid that our veterans might be dishonoured. They fear also that if killing in war is condemned as evil, then the stories of Australia’s wars might be revised. By most popular interpretations, Australia has prevailed in its wars because its cause has always been just and its engagement reluctant. The controversy over the Vietnam conflict shows that veterans can indeed be hurt when the political motivation behind a commitment is questioned. We do however have a duty not to despatch the military for dubious reasons such as the call by a powerful ally.

    Recently deceased Tasmanian Governor Peter Underwood caused some controversy in an Anzac Day address this year when he questioned the importance of studying Simpson’s donkey rather than scrutinising the reasons for Australia’s lengthy involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan. During the election campaign, the Coalition suggested that Gallipoli was not studied enough in schools and critics immediately argued the desire to include more about the Anzac legend in education programs was a part of the broader ‘history wars’. Formerly this cultural controversy has focussed in on the treatment of Australia’s Indigenous peoples. Despite some positive statements about Indigenous policy, the Prime Minister recently attracted the criticism of Labor’s first female Indigenous parliamentarian when he suggested that Australia was undeveloped until the British arrived in 1788.

    Over the next five years, all thinking Australians should regard it as their duty to look critically at First World War commemorations. They should be very sceptical about any events which could make it easier for a future Australian Government to commit the military to conflicts overseas. In particular, they should scrutinise the statements of current politicians who, unfortunately, are likely to cynically exploit every occasion to enhance their popularity.

    Tony Smith is a former academic and regular contributor to Eureka Street , The Australian Review of Public Affairs and the Australian Quarterly

     

     

     

  • John Menadue. Anzac and hiding behind the valour of our military.

    For those who may have missed this. I have reposted this earlier piece about Anzac and hiding behind our heroes.  John Menadue

    There is an unfortunate and continuing pattern in our history of going to war- that the more disastrous the war the more politicians and the media hide behind the valour of service men and women. We will see this displayed again on April 25.

    The Director of the Australian War Memorial, Brendan Nelson, drew attention to this well-honed way of distorting and excusing our strategic and political mistakes. In the SMH on October 5 last year, he said ‘The more obscene the war, the more inexplicable it seems for us today, the more many [young people] admire those men and women who went in our name’. (See my blog October 11, 2013, ‘The drumbeat grows louder’.)

    It is not only young people who have been drawn into this distortion of history. Governments and the media have encouraged us to ignore the disastrous wars that we have been engaged in and learn from our mistakes. Rather than face the consequences of acknowledging those disasters, governments and the media then change the subject to the valour of our heroes. We refuse to face the fact that these heroes have often died in vain

    By any measure our involvement in the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan have been disastrous. So what do our governments, the Australian War Memorial and the media do? They avoid examining how we got into such disastrous wars. They do this by dwelling on the heroism of our service people. VC winners are an ideal way to change the subject from a disastrous war to an Australian hero.

    There is no doubt that they are heroic, but the wars they fought in were anything but heroic. These three wars were disastrous but we refuse to acknowledge that fact. The consequence will be that in the future we will continue to make foolish decisions about getting into war. That could occur over the dispute between Japan and China over the islands in the East-China Sea.

    In this cover up of failed policies, prime ministers, ministers, opposition leaders and the media have attended almost every ship taking Australian service personnel to or from war zones in the Middle East. I don’t think the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition have missed any funeral of a veteran of those wars. There was even a fly-over in Gippsland for an Australian soldier who had accidentally shot himself.

    Our involvement in WWI was disastrous in every way. We acted like a colony at the behest of England But we didn’t spend time dwelling on the catastrophe as a result of our strategic and political mistakes. That hopefully would discourage us from repeating them in the future. Instead we deluged ourselves and continue to do so in the valour of those who served and died in WWI.

    WWII was much more a war we had to fight in our own national interest and for the freedom of our region. But the recall of that war and the sacrifices of our military personnel is quite small at the Australian War Memorial compared with the coverage of WWI. We had a strong case for involvement in WWII but not WWI. Yet the coverage at the Australian War Memorial does exactly the reverse. Strategically Kokoda was more important to Australia than Gallipoli.

    In his excellent new book ‘Rupert Murdoch’ – a re-assessment” Professor  Rod Tiffen draws attention to the way that News Ltd in the UK covered its mistaken  support for  the appalling  wars in Iraq and Afghanistan . It just changed the subject. News Ltd never attempted to seriously  examine the fiction and mistaken policies which it supported and which led the UK into those wars. It changed the subject by attacking PM Gordon Brown for not looking after the veterans. Rod Tiffen put it this way.

    ‘In one of the last issues of The Sun edited by Rebekah Brooks, the front page consisted of the faces of the 207 British soldiers killed in Afghanistan, with a large headline across the middle, reading “Don’t you know there’s a bloody war on”. The strap at the top said “Message to politicians failing our heroes” … The multipage splash was accompanied by a cartoon of a wounded soldier with the caption “abandoned”.’

    Tiffen added ‘Responsible newspapers such as the Washington Post and the New York Times reflected publicly on their journalistic failings during the period [of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars]’.  

    But not News Ltd and Rupert Murdoch.

    What the Murdoch papers did in the UK is common amongst governments and media generally. They refuse to acknowledge their complicity in disastrous wars. To cover their tracks they focus on the heroism of service people.

    It is unpatriotic and cowardly to refuse to examine and publicly acknowledge decisions about going to war. That is surely the most momentous decision that any government can make. But by focusing on the story and the valour of service people, like successive Australian Prime Ministers, Rupert Murdoch and the Australian War Memorial, we are discouraged from looking honestly at our history.

    If we don’t learn from our mistakes we will keep repeating them. We must stop hiding behind our heroes.

     

  • Graham Freudenberg on ‘The Making of Australia – A Concise History’ by Robert Murray

    When I was a teenage Tory in Brisbane in the early Fifties, Bob Murray, a bright young spark from the Melbourne Argus was the most persuasive of my newspaper contemporaries who led me gently towards the light.  In Sydney a couple of years later, at the end of 1954, in midnight to dawn sessions at the old Phillip Street Journalists’ Club, we debated the coming of the Labor Split, unwittingly laying the foundations for his classic account The Split – Australian Labor in the Fifties (1970).

    In the halcyon early Seventies, as one of the few people I knew who had actually been behind the ‘Iron Curtain’, he helped me keep Ostpolitik and  Détente in the perspective of the continuing awfulness of regimes like the East German. This clarity of views, sharpness of insights, balance and common sense abound in his octogenarian opus The Making of Australia – A Concise History (Rosenberg Publishing).

    This is the first single-volume general history of Australia since the ‘history wars’. To some extent it complements from a more conservative perspective the monumental Cambridge History of Australia edited by Stuart Macintyre, at less than a tenth of the price. Both works show how the ‘history wars’ have transformed our approach, especially about the relations between the Aborigines and the occupiers after 1788.

    For the first time, the relations between the aborigines and settlers form an integral part of the whole narrative. In the index, there are 196 entries, with substantial references, by my count, on 103 pages – one third of the book. The aboriginal story is woven into the ongoing narrative. This inclusiveness is unprecedented in Australian general histories.  We have come a long way from the great flowering of Australian historiography in the 1950s and 1960s, when Manning Clark subsequently apologised for his comparative neglect of Aborigine studies and Gordon Greenwood, in the first post-war general history Australia, ignored them altogether.

    In dealing with Australia’s military history, Bob Murray has taken a very different approach, and I think less successfully. He has chosen to lump the First and Second World Wars together in a single chapter entitled ‘The Call of Khaki’. This approach may emphasise the continuity of the two wars, at least in their European and imperial context. But, besides wrenching the chronology of the narrative somewhat, this treatment understates what I believe to be the centrality of the wars to our political, social and economic development.

    There are signs that the Anzac Centenary is going to spark another round of ‘history wars’ in much the way that the Bicentenary set in train the debate that led to the ‘history wars’ about Aboriginal Australia. Perhaps John Menadue’s blog last year about the political manipulation of the Anzac tradition was a first shot.

    This time around, I hope we are mature enough to avoid some of the nastiness that accompanied the last round. In his book on the Split, Bob Murray memorably noted ‘the absence of goodwill’ as a major factor in Labor’s self-destruction. There was a notable absence of goodwill in the waging of the first ‘history wars’.

    It would be ironic if the renewed debate on Australia’s military history came down to competing slogans of ‘best we forget’ versus ‘lest we forget’. After all, ‘best we forget’ was a sentiment often used to discourage the quest for truth about the Aborigines.

    When it comes to Anzac (as shorthand for all our wars) I uphold ‘lest we forget’ in the sense that the author of the phrase, Rudyard Kipling, used it in his poem Recessional, written for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee in 1897. Kipling meant it as a warning against the pride and arrogance of imperial power and that even the mighty British Empire would one day be ‘as Nineveh and Tyre’.

    Bob Murray and I belong to the last Australian generation for which the British Empire was still a going concern. This fine book can stand as the testimony of our generation and our understanding of what it means to be Australian.

    We were the depression babies, formed politically in the Chifley-Menzies era, with our adulthood dominated by the Cold War in all its manifestations. Despite this tumultuous and often menacing background, we have been an exceptionally lucky generation of Australians. Perhaps because the low birth rate in the Depression made our path to education and employment so easy, we were optimists. Fittingly, Bob Murray ends his book on a high note, quoting the ‘other half of Malcolm Fraser’s (and George Bernard Shaw’s) ‘Life wasn’t meant to be easy.’ – ‘But take courage, it can be delightful.’ Both halves of the quotation apply to the writing of books about Australian history. And in this case, the second half certainly applies to the reading of it.

  • John Tulloh. The French at Gallipoli – Lest we not Forget

    A popular myth is that the Gallipoli landings were all about the Australian and New Zealand troops – the Anzacs – with the British somewhere involved, having concocted the unfortunate military adventure.

    But what is so often overlooked is the participation of France in the Gallipoli campaign. It may surprise a lot of people to learn that France suffered more deaths than Australia and New Zealand combined.

    France contributed over 40,000 troops. About 15,000 were killed as against 8141 Australians and 2721 New Zealanders. France has its own war cemetery aptly named Morto Bay, meaning Death Bay.  It has 3236 individual graves and several large ossuaries containing the unidentifiable remains of thousands of militaires. It is maintained with the same devotion and attention as the Commonwealth war graves.

    But France’s participation features only briefly in the comprehensive website of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs dedicated to Gallipoli. It is understandable when the department is there to serve Australian interests. But as an educational instrument it is lopsided in the broad view of Gallipoli.

    That is a pity when the Australian government has budgeted millions to create public interest like never before in recent peacetime to commemorate the centenary next year of Gallipoli and the birth of our most solemn anniversary, Anzac Day.

    The French participation was the result of its politicians rather than its military – hard pressed by the Western Front stalemate – being enthused by opening a new front. This was the British idea of attacking Germany through ‘the back door’, Turkey and its tottering Ottoman empire. They thought it would be a simple exercise to tackle Berlin from there and they could divide the spoils. What’s more, France thought such participation would help maintain its Middle East interests after the war and counter any undue additional British influence in the Mediterranean.

    Needless to say, given the historic enmity between Britain and France, there was much bickering of who would be in charge and who would do what.  From the very start, it was an unequal partnership, wrote Eleanor Van Heyningen, a historian for the Imperial War Museum in London. The British made the decisions under the overall commander, Sir Ian Hamilton.

    In the end, the task of the French troops was to neutralise the Turkish presence on the Asian or eastern side of the narrow Dardanelles Strait to ease the threat to the British-led forces on the European side where Gallipoli is. In fact, of all the Allied objectives on April 25, only one was secured when the French took the the town of Kum Kale, close to the ancient city of Troy.

    But thereafter the French forces encountered fierce resistance in rugged terrain and suffered  casualties on a scale which disturbed their commander. They were not helped by the fact some of their soldiers wore brightly coloured uniforms with red trousers and white hats, making them an easy target, according to Van Heyningen.

    The French troops consisted of Foreign Legionnaires, settlers from North Africa, Senegalese and those from metropolitan France. They met some of the greatest Turkish opposition at Kereves Dere, a place they later called Le Ravin de la Mort, the Valley of Death. This was a ravine which the French had to cross to advance except the Turks had control of the high ground.

    A French medical officer wrote: ‘‘We laid the poor fellows in rows…groans were piteous to hear…bandages soaked in blood, clothes torn to ribbons…ever more wounded arriving’.

    As with the other Allied forces, the French had some later success, including at Kereves Dere, but it proved to be a doomed campaign. It led to embarrassment and unhappiness back in France. Within five months, the French realised the folly of it all and pulled out. It came as no surprise that their new commander did not bother to secure the approval of Hamilton.

    After the war, France did not forget the Gallipoli campaign easily. Van Heyningen writes:

         ‘Gallipoli was the subject of frank public debate and resentment in France. The French had clearly been under the command of the British in the disastrous Gallipoli campaign and so were quick to criticise its organisation, execution and cost. For a time, it was seen as typical British incompetence and willingness to shed Allies’ blood’.

    It should be noted that the British themselves suffered 21,000 deaths at Gallipoli. It should also be remembered that the Indian Army also came ashore there and suffered heavy casualties.

    It is unclear how France will commemorate the Gallipoli centenary, if at all. Given its long history of military victories and losses, especially on its home front in WW1, what happened on the distant shores of the Dardanelles may be regarded as little more than just another bloody chapter in centuries of French military campaigns.

    De peur que nous les oublions. Lest we forget.

     

         John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news, including 15 as the ABC’s first international editor for television news and current affairs.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

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  • Mid-east Journey to Nowhere. Guest blogger: John Tulloh

    I read Marcus Einfeld’s response to my blog regarding Israeli settlements posted on October 16 with both interest and incredulity. It seems that he has grasped my piece as an opportunity to voice his own musings on the question of Israel/Palestinian relations.

    Mine was based on my own personal bewilderment why Israel on one hand says it wants peace, but on the other insists on aggravating the Palestinians by building settlements in disputed land when it has five times as much undisputed territory of its own. To a distant outsider, it doesn’t make sense.

    Mr Einfeld suggests I have come up with ‘instant judgments and simplistic solutions’. Excuse me? I have made no judgments let alone been so naive as to offer solutions. He goes on to claim that for me ‘the only or principal cause’ of the current problems is the question of settlements. I wrote it was ‘one reason’ (my italics).

    He then accuses me of ‘one-sidedness’. I do not understand this when I was merely laying out what were mostly indisputable facts about just one of the many factors in this endless conundrum. The question of settlements has been a recurring theme in news reports for years. An international journalist friend, having read my blog, wrote to me to say: ‘I would like to see you give (your) opinion’.

    Mr Einfeld seems to believe I was – or should have been – writing an overview of the entire Israel/Palestinian question because that was the thrust of his tortuous response. My interest was simply the question of settlements.

    He views it all through rose-tinted glasses, possibly based on his own involvement there in the 80s and 90s when there was a real chance of a deal. Indeed I recall assigning ABC coverage of his much-lauded aid visits to help the Palestinians. He says the overwhelming majority of Israelis want a peace treaty which would involve the ‘evacuation of…the settlements’. In such a case, ‘most of the settlements would be no more than a passing phase of history…’ That may have been an idealism in his late 20th century world when there were far fewer settlements, but the reality in the 21st century is different. After all, why would so many settlers today – 350,000 at the latest count – invest their long-term future in the West Bank if they seriously thought they would be forced to move elsewhere and lose most of their money in return for a two-state settlement? Again, it doesn’t make sense.

    John Lyons in the Weekend Australian of November 2-3 has an article, quoting a Palestinian official, which says 15,000 Palestinians in Jerusalem will be left homeless because their apartment blocks are to be demolished by order of the Jerusalem Council. Meanwhile, the newspaper Haaretz reported that ‘Israel was about to advance construction plans for 5000 new housing units in Jewish settlements’. These are hardly the actions to enhance the prospects of a peace deal which Mr Einfeld says the overwhelming majority of Israelis want.

    In fact, the same article also says: ‘Reports in the Israeli and Palestinian media suggest the talks are collapsing. Both sides are facing strong internal opposition. On the Israeli side, right-wing elements in the Knesset, led by the Minister of the Economy, Naftali Bennett, have made clear their opposition to any Palestinian state’.

    Two other statements in Mr Einfeld’s response require an explanation:

    What was Netanyahu’s ‘shameless role in Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination’? This is a rather extreme accusation.

    Also, what does he mean by ‘They (Palestinian leaders) know that the so-called “right of return” of Palestinians to Israeli coastal areas is a hoax and a cruel play on words used to save Holocaust survivors, with no chance of fulfilment’? I do not understand what he is trying to say.

    I am surprised that a man who has a distinguished reputation as a jurist could be so loose with his claims and statements. I hope you can find room on your blog to note the above

     

     

  • The Wars we would rather forget. John Menadue

    Aboriginal Wars

    The Australian War Memorial records as follows:

    “When it became apparent that the settlers and their livestock had come to stay, competition for access to the land developed and friction between the two ways of life became inevitable. As the settlers’ behaviour became unacceptable to the indigenous population, individuals were killed over specific grievances. These killings were then met with reprisals from the settlers, often on a scale out of all proportion to the original incident. … It is estimated that some 2,500 European settlers and police died in this conflict. For the aboriginal inhabitants the cost was far higher: about 20,000 are believed to have been killed in the wars of the frontier, while many thousands more perished from disease and often unintended consequences of settlement. Aboriginal Australians were unable to restrain – though in places they did delay – the tide of European settlement; although resistance in one form or another never ceased, the conflict ended in their dispossession.” (www.awm.gov.au/atwar/colonial.asp)

    Where are the memorials to this tragic war?

    Maori Wars

    The State Library of South Australia records these wars as follows:

    “Between 1845 and 1872 just over 2,500 Australian volunteers saw service in New Zealand. The majority of these volunteers came from the colonies of New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania.

    The cause of all conflict between whites and the Maori people was land. … British forces were sent from Auckland to defeat and capture Maori Chief Hone Heke but the Maori chief and his warriors were skilled in the art of war, but it took [many steps including] a local militia and troops rushed in from Australia … to conclude the first Maori war.

    By 1860, the grab for land again sparked conflict between whites and the Maoris, this time in the Waitara River area. … Again, the Australian colonies were asked for urgent assistance. The colonies rallied and sent troops. The colony of Victoria even sent its entire navy which comprised the steam corvette HMVS Victoria. New South Wales also sent gun ships to support the troops.

    Only later war broke out again, this time in the Waikato area. And again Australian troops came to the aid of local British forces.

    Soon after the Waikato war, the New Zealand Government decided to form a more permanent force and actually recruited troops from among the Australian colonies. They were offered land in exchange for service in the armed forces. Some 3,600 Australians took up the offer. They were formed into the Waikato regiments.” (www.guides.sisa.sa.gov.au/content.php?pid=76180&sid=594745.  The Australian War Memorial has a similar account of Australian participation in the Maori Wars)

    Some may claim that all this occurred before Australia was federated and we were still colonies. I do not think that this can obscure the fact of Australian participation in the Maori wars. The first association between Australian and New Zealand forces was not at Gallipoli in 1915. It was in the Maori wars 70 years earlier.

    John Menadue