The rage of a prime minister against a modest ranking cartoonist in a foreign government is foolish for a number of reasons.
It is in the first instance folly for the person at highest level to go into combat with a much lower level person, leaving no room to escalate discussion in the direction of peace or war.
In the second instance it is folly because, as John Menadue has pointed out, the Chinese cartoonist has read more of the Brereton Report than have those yelling at him.
Third, it reflects a lack of strategic vision.
There is a useful concept, advanced two decades ago in the US, of ‘pharmacotic war’.
Modern wars are pharmacotic. They allow governments to draw on the singular capacity of sacralized bloodshed to unify political communities and generate fungible political power, by orchestrating symbolically charged military operations against demonized foreign enemies, while scapegoating constructed domestic threats to internal security.
In Australia’s case pharmacotic war has largely been sedative, provoked awake only by the security industry. We have a selective understanding of violence. Shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 the Howard government launched a campaign against domestic violence. Domestic violence of the same cloth as the Iraq invasion: the sense of entitlement to go and biff when you think you are superior. I argued in two speeches at the time that the endorsement of violence by invading Iraq with a sense of righteousness would drift down into national affairs and indeed domestic affairs. As indeed it has.
We were, many of us, out on the streets to oppose the Iraq War in 2003 but we seem mostly to have forgotten or prefer not to think about the fact that we continue to be party to illegal war in Iraq and more of the Middle East. We slumber through the Afghan war, prime ministers and opposition leaders greeting returning caskets of dead soldiers with assurances of the war’s strategic merit. We were not woken up when the Washington Post reported a year ago that:
A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior US officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.
We woke up to the Brereton Report, with its identification of tabloid-exciting details of some soldiers’ lives … but with scarcely a thought for the disgraceful role of political masters who have sustained Australian involvement in the Afghan war, plus Middle East wars … and interventions far from home against China in the South China Sea, partly to protect shipping, presumably the shipping of most of Australia’s exports to China.
Few have noted the connection to persistent violence towards people held in detention, here and overseas.
Few have spoken against the government’s adoption as national strategy of a defence force strategy – a defence paper that identifies weapons and threats and is focused on fighting them. With new weapons to cost $270 billion.
The ABC produced mid-year an interesting chart on comparative spending on domestic crises, which is nowhere near the proposed defence equipment spending.
An international strategy for Australia must seek to avoid war and advance the social and economic interests of the nation, in peace. Defence perspectives – the identification of threats and the means to oppose them – must be subordinate to the wider vision. To confuse the two is naive and dangerous.
We have not failed to find voice to attack a Chinese official who finds our situation in Afghanistan ironic, while taking the opportunity to attack controlled media in China, although a great proportion of Australian media is owned by Rupert Murdoch. In whose media vile cartoons regularly promote violence and hatred.
The recent wild urgings to violence and expressions of hatred of the ‘different’ by some of the Coalition backbench is perhaps best compared to the unruly response of some Labor members of parliament to President Nixon’s resumption of bombing of North Vietnam in December 1972. At that time, of course, the Whitlam government was only a few weeks old and Labor had been out of power for 23 years, inexperienced as a government. The present Coalition has claimed to be the natural government of Australia, the best able to manage the nation, from long before that time.
So … are we committed to permanent war and isolation from the region in which we live? How can we make a break, not just in revulsion against some low-ranking soldiers but against the powerful people who have kept them there, for two decades, while the nation slept? How can we back away from the tragic notion that international engagement should be with violence? How can we move to treat others as equals?
Dennis Argall’s degrees were in anthropology and defence studies. his governmental work in foreign, defence and domestic departments and for the Australian parliament. His overseas postings included Beijing as ambassador, and Washington. He regrets the extent of his personal experience with disability but it has perhaps sharpened his desire that the future be a better country.
Comments
9 responses to “Ending permanent war, ending hatred of China”
I realise that before publication a paragraph of mine lost its indentation and link as quote. The link was then placed above this text which is not mine but a quote. No plagiarism intended!
Quote:
Modern wars are pharmacotic. They allow governments to draw on the singular capacity of sacralized bloodshed to unify political communities and generate fungible political power, by orchestrating symbolically charged military operations against demonized foreign enemies, while scapegoating constructed domestic threats to internal security.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/32650/summary
End quote
The ‘modest ranking cartoonist in a foreign government’ that Dennis Argall refers to is not an employee of the government. He is a young local artist who created the work we deplore, after reading the report released by our government about the killings in Afghanistan, which made him angry. The picture gained a lot of local approval before it was shared on Twitter by a real ‘modest ranking’ official in the Chinese government.
I join with Mr. Teow in thanking you Mr. Argall for your welcome contribution.
Mr Argall,
I am so happy that you are back contributing an experienced, considered and rational voice that cuts through the cacophony of ill informed mainstream media voices. I am concerned about the need (made sometimes into a mission) of the government to make an enemy of those whose political and cultural difference they do not approve of. Yesterday, I happened to read a speech by John Garnaut titled: “Engineers of the Soul. Ideology in Xi Jinping’s China.” My reaction to the article was alarmed and distress, to say the least. I would urge all who are interested in China/Australia relations to read it. The article is available from the following website.
https://sinocism.com/p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in
The reading is not complete without reading Tim Clissold’s comments following Garnaut’s article. It is the nuanced and reasoned voice of another more experienced China Hand.
What distresses me about Garnaut’s article is the way in which he ascribed thoughts to Xi which are the products of his own narrow narrative. For example:
“The challenge for us is that Xi’s project of total ideological control does not stop at China’s borders. It is packaged to travel with Chinese students, tourists, migrants and especially money. It flows through the channels of the Chinese language internet, pushes into all the world’s major media and cultural spaces and generally keeps pace with and even anticipates China’s increasingly global interests.” In one fell swoop, he condemned all the Chinese citizens of Australia to the class of a “fifth column”. In this I see him as callously making the Chinese a pariah class, or harijans, of Australia. And that includes my children who grew up in this country and my grandchildren who were born here.
Another paragraph which I consider particularly presumptuous is the paragraph:
‘And he is pushing communist ideology at a time when the idea of “communism” is as unattractive as it has been at any time in the past 100 years. All that remains is an ideology of power, dressed up as patriotism, but that doesn’t mean it cannot work.’ Whether Xi Jinping is a patriot or not is a moot question for others and a decision for the Chinese people themselves to make.
John Garnaut’s portrayal of China, based on his so called expertise as a journalist in China, appeals to those in Australia who fear the unknown engendered by an Eastern power growing monstrously; the fear of being swallowed up by the monster. By the way, my favourite fiction is JR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings – in which, like many other Western works of fiction, evil comes from and out of the East. He catered to this fear and has earned his bread as “China advisor” to the government. It is not difficult for the Chinese Australian to see the influence his ideas has had on the government of the day, not the least of which was Eric Abetz attempt to coerce three young Chinese to condemn China. The Chinese in this country, and I believe like those in China, only wish to be left alone to live their lives in peace. The Chinese are no strangers to chaos and suffering in their long history.
On John Garnaut’s callous use of his fellow Australian citizens of Chinese extraction as political football, I can only say that there is something missing in his soul by quoting John Clissold who quoted a Chinese sage:
‘Huang Liuhong noted six hundred years later that Mencius believed, “All men have a mind which cannot bear to see the suffering of others.”‘
Sincerely,
Teow Loon Ti
Hello again Mr Teow
Thank you for drawing attention to the paper of John Garnaut. A curiously ideological diatribe against ideology.
That paper has historical importance in that it was written in 2017 when Mr J Garnaut was working in the Prime Minister’s Department and in the office of Prime Minister Turnbull. It thus shaped a lot of thinking and enabled a lot of writing by others, similarly bitter and ideological. That is the point at which our relationship went off in a hostile direction.
In 1980s, in a submission to cabinet, decisions from which set the direction for the modern, diverse, post-Cultural Revolution relationship with China, I wrote that we needed to have a relationship valued by any future government in China. I should perhaps have written “…and in Australia.”
Western governments turned on China out of desperation when they realised that China offered better returns and greater security to Western investors than they could get at home.
Dear Teow Loon, I am grateful to you for bringing me to Tim Clissold. After reading his comment, I am immediately fascinated by his erudition on China matters and have since borrowed 2 of his books.
John Garnaut, on the other hand, one does not expect anything less bitter and malign. It is tragic indeed for our country when our leaders listen to those of his ilk.
Hi Lai Fong,
You are welcome. Have you read Theodore H. White’s book on China titled: “Thunder Out of China”? I read that book more than four decades ago. It is an eyewitness account of China during WWII. I have never forgotten the compelling read and some of the harrowing scenes he described. To me, it is a “must read again” book.
Sincerely,
Teow Loon Ti
Thanks Teow Loon, unfortunately it is not in the SA library network, neither is it in Amazon kindle store. Just as well as I would likely find it distressing, as I did with Henry Kissinger’s On China, which I am halfway through, in the section on China’s century of humiliation. This book is a classic, and possibly the best I have ever read about China history and politics.