By John Pilger
Socialist Worker
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Remembrance
for Australia's war dead has long been used to glorify militarism--and
promote Australia's status as a junior partner to U.S. imperial aims.
THE STREET where I grew up in Sydney was a war street. There were long silences, then the smashing of glass and screams.
Pete and I played
"Aussies-and-Japs." Pete's father was an object of awe. He weighed
barely 100 pounds, shook with malaria and was frequently demented. He
would sit in a cane chair, drunk, scything the air with the sword of a
Japanese soldier he said he had killed. There was a woman who flitted
from room to room, always red-eyed and fearful, it seemed. She was like
many mothers in the street.
Wally, another mate, lived in a
house that was always dark because the black-out blinds had not been
taken down. His father had been "killed by the Japs." Once, when Wally's
mother came home, she found he had got a gun, put it in his mouth and
blown his head off. It was a war street.
The insidious, merciless, lifelong
damage of war taught many of us to recognize the difference between the
empty symbolism of war and the actual meaning. "Does it matter?" mocked
the poet Siegfried Sassoon at the end of an earlier slaughter, in 1918,
as he grieved his younger brother's death at Gallipoli.
I grew up with that name,
Gallipoli. The British assault on the Turkish Dardanelles was one of the
essential crimes of imperial war, causing the death and wounding of
392,000 on all sides. The Australian and New Zealander losses were among
the highest, proportionally; and April 25, 1915, was declared not just a
day of remembrance, but the "birth of the Australian nation." This was
based on the belief of Edwardian militarists that true men were made in
war, an absurdity about to be celebrated yet again.
Anzac Day has been appropriated by
those who manipulate the cult of state violence--militarism--in order to
satisfy a psychopathic deference to foreign power and to pursue its
aims. And the "legend" has no room for the only war fought on Australian
soil: that of the Aboriginal people against the European invaders. In a
land of cenotaphs, not one stands for them.
THE MODERN war-lovers have known no
street of screams and despair. Their abuse of our memory of the fallen,
and why they fell, may be common among all servitors of rapacious
power, but Australia is a special case. No country is more secure in its
strategic remoteness and the wealth of its resources, yet no Western
elite is more eager to talk war and seek imperial "protection."
Australia's military budget is $34
billion a year, one of the highest in the world. Less than two months'
worth of this war-bingeing would pay for the reconstruction of the state
of Queensland after the catastrophic floods, but not a cent is
forthcoming.
In July, the same fragile flood
plains will be invaded by a joint U.S.-Australian military force, firing
laser-guided missiles, dropping bombs and blasting the environment and
marine life. This is rarely reported. Rupert Murdoch controls 70 percent
of the capital city press, and his world view is widely shared in the
Australian media.
In a 2009 U.S. cable released by
WikiLeaks, the then-Labor prime minister, Kevin Rudd, who is now foreign
affairs minister, implores the Americans to "deploy force" against
China if Beijing does not do as it is told. Another Labor leader, Kim
Beazley, secretly offered Australian troops for an attack on China over
Taiwan.
In the 1960s, Prime Minister Robert
Menzies lied that he had received a request from the American-created
regime in Saigon requesting Australian troops. Oblivious, Australians
waved farewell to a largely conscripted army, of whom almost 3,000 were
killed or wounded.
The first Australian troops were
run by the CIA in "black teams"--assassination squads. When the
government in Canberra made a rare complaint to Washington that the
British knew more than they about America's war aims in Vietnam, U.S.
National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy replied, "We have to inform the
British to keep them on side. You in Australia are with us come what
may."
As an Australian soldier once said
to me: "We are to the Yanks what the Gurkas are to the British. We're
mercenaries in all but name."
WikiLeaks has disclosed the
American role in the Canberra "coup" in 2010 against Rudd by Julia
Gillard. Lauded in U.S. cables as a "rising star," Gillard's Labor Party
plotters have turned out to be assets of the U.S. embassy in Canberra.
Once installed as prime minister, Gillard committed Australia to
America's war in Afghanistan war for the next 10 years--twice as long as
Britain.
Gillard likes to appear on TV
flanked by flags. With her robotic delivery and stare, it is an
unsettling tableau. On April 6, she intoned, "We live in a free
country...only because the Australian people answered the call when the
decision came." She was referring to the dispatch of Australian troops
to avenge the death of a minor imperial figure, Gen. Charles Gordon,
during a popular uprising in Sudan in 1885. She omitted to say that a
dozen horses of the Sydney Tramway Company also "answered the call," but
expired during the long voyage.
Australia's reputed role as
America's "deputy sheriff" (promoted to "sheriff" by George W. Bush) is
to police great power designs now being challenged by most of the world.
Leading Australian politicians and
journalists report on the Middle East, having first had their flights
and expenses paid by the Israeli government or its promoters. Two Green
Party candidates who dared to criticize Israel's lawlessness and the
silence of its local supporters, are currently being set upon. One
Murdoch retainer has accused the two Greens of advocating a "modern
rendering of Kristallnacht." Both have since received multiple death
threats. Put out more flags, boys.
First published at JohnPilger.com.
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