Michael Moore was kind enough to publish my piece on the United States’ new national security strategy on his website, and I’ve had a steady stream of hits from the United States ever since.
Yesterday, US citizen M.K. Harrison responded to Manifesto for world dictatorship (webdiarySept22). After her piece, David Spratt suggests you check out the unsavoury history of US undersecretary of state Richard Armitage, who’s visiting Australia on Friday to straighten our backs on Iraq.
Before that, Sue Bushell discusses Moore’s book Stupid white men, relating the censorship surrounding the publication of his book to the dearth of coverage of the SIEV-X controversy. (The Senate this week passed a motion urging a judicial inquiry into SIEV-X, with another motion asking the government to extradite boast organiser Abu Quassey from Indonesia to face homocide charges on the go. For the details, go to sievx).
To end, responses to David Makinson’s year-in-review opus Never give up on your disbelief from Mike Lyvers, an American in Queensland, and Sean Hosking.
It’s the end of another big, bad year. Late Night Live finishes for the year this week, and I had a go at a year-in-review last night. In the run-down to Christmas, I’d like to publish your highlights and any 2002 quotes that have stayed in your mind. Who’s your Australian of the year? Mine is Michael Kirby.
Webdiarist Cathy Bannister didn’t need to be asked, and today her end-of-year piece, including a poem for the Bali dead.
But to begin, drought-stricken NSW had great rains yesterday, and Webdiarist Merrill Pye celebrates.
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Merrill Pye in Pyrmont, Sydney
On the way home tonight to my inner-suburban plot (with its proudly browned-off patch of lawn under the Hill’s Hoist, well-mulched tiny herbal bed and shaded bowl of water for thirsty wildlife), hopping over the flooded gutters, wading through the sheets of water across driveways, I let my tears mingle with the drops driving under the hat brim.
A heart overflowing thankfulness at the steady, soaking downpour fought with a deep upwelling pain at seeing those gushing streams flowing across the hard concrete and asphalt down through the stormwater drain to lose themselves in the salt of the harbour.
How I would have loved to see those streams flowing down into dams and through channels to replenish the soil, bathe the yearning roots and let the green come through again.
The original title of Dorothea Mackellar’s My Country was Core of My Heart:
Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When, sick at heart, around us,
We see the cattle die –
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady soaking rain.
Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the rainbow gold,
For flood and fire and famine
She pays us back threefold.
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze…
The opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land –
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand –
Though Earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.
***
Cathy Bannister
I wrote this poem some time ago for the parents of Bali bombing victims, but by the time I was finished it was way too late to publish. It might be worth putting in some yearly wrap?
After September 11 last year, I think the left fell into a deep depression en masse. That sort of shock takes 6 to 12 months to get over. While depression can inspire some people to greatness, the vast majority are knocked into useless turpitude, so it’s no wonder that the left has been so bloody useless this year. Thank heavens for Carmen Lawrence – let’s hope she is the catalyst for huge change.
Anyway, here’s my poem.
***
An epiphany
That sweet moment which is
Not mere realisation
Not fresh thought gelled or distilled
But a watershed,
As sudden and shocking as the earth shifting,
As waking in a room flooded
at war
or on Mars,
Might come the moment your baby’s
Head hits your perineum
And you wonder, lucid in exquisite agony, how this child will ever be born
without tearing you in two,
Or perhaps, in the confused, weary, long dark hours that first night home
alone,
With the tiny, fragile, needy parasite crying in sheer terror, craving the
womb and lonely,
And you realise you must fight the exhaustion of the previous days’ labour
that there is no choice
that you must rise
and tend her.
A father might be captured the first time he lock eyes with his baby,
Or the first time he holds this delicate little person, his child, with arms
too large and clumsy,
Or maybe sometime later, when he throws his body between the baby and an
indifferent world
and breaks something.
For parents in a moment know that they are nothing, and the child is
everything,
That without a moment’s thought, your would give your own life to save your
child.
*
So for eighteen years, give or take a few, you tend, you shape, you nurture.
You raise, you punish, you support, you love,
you are punished, exasperated, bewildered and elated.
And eventually, reluctantly, you try to let go.
But, you never can. Not really. Not ever.
I can’t imagine losing a child.
Losing a child is not like losing a limb
There are no prosthetics
For that gaping wound,
where your love,
everything you have lived for,
so large a part of your soul,
has been ripped out,
They say you can learn to live again,
Gradually, moments will open,
When you can step outside into the glorious Australian Spring
And see the vivid blue through the golden wattle,
And breath the fresh air.
They say the pain dulls with time.
So, for what it’s worth, I feel for you
Who have lost children.
May you find solace and peace.
***
Sue Bushell
Regarding Tony Kevin’s piece about the reticence of the media to pick up on further SIEV-X disclosures (SIEV-X: Not the news, webdiaryDec9), I wonder how susceptible the Australian media is to a sustained public campaign demanding more information. One lone voice may not make a difference, but a flood of them might be impossible to ignore.
I have just finished reading the introduction to the UK edition of Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men. It is truly inspiring. With 50,000 copies of Moore’s book due to roll out of the warehouse on September 11, 2001, publisher ReganBooks (a division of HarperCollins) got cold feet after the terrorist attacks and refused to publish the book unless Moore agreed to rewrite at least 50 per cent of it and pay them $100,000 to reprint the books already printed.
“We can’t release the book as it is written. The political climate of this country has changed,” they told Moore, who understandably refused to make the suggested changes, including toning down his criticisms of George Bush.
Moore’s book might never have been published unless a librarian called Ann Sparanese, whom he had never met, but who happened to hear him speak about his plight one day, got on the Internet, writing a letter to her librarian friends and posting it on a progressive site devoted to librarian issues.
In response, thousands of people sent hate mail to HarperCollins, who eventually bowed to the pressure and agreed to release just the 50,000 copies in the warehouse as is, but refused to promote the book in any way. They assured him that would be the only print run.
Within hours of those 50,000 copies hitting bookstores, they sold out. By the next day Stupid White Men went to number one on the Amazon.com best-seller list. By the fifth day it was on its ninth printing. It shot to number one on the New York Times bestseller list and every other list in the country. It was months before people could be assured of going into a bookstore and buying a copy.
There has still not been a single ad for the book and Moore has appeared on only two broadcast shows – one that comes on around 1 am and the other at 7 am. But copies of that book, and a Penguin international edition, keep rolling of the presses.
Might not a campaign directed at editors of Australian newspapers achieve similar things?
Margo: My brother Hamish Alcorn recommends Turning the World into Hell?, a piece on the media by David Cromwell in Zmag. Unfortunately you need to subscribe to read it. A quote: ‘To be corrupted by totalitarianism’, George Orwell once warned, ‘one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.’ Instead, ‘the mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison’ that makes critical commentary on the status quo all but impossible.
***
M.K. Harrison
While I can’t find fault with anything you wrote in your article Manifesto for world dictatorship, I do want to make points that you didn’t.
Not all of us “Americans” consider ourselves supreme power of the world. In fact, many of us are quite embarrassed by what we have become and how we are presented to the world by our hideous head Dubya Bush.
You call us Americans. In that respect, I must say you are as guilty as “we” are. We are but one country in the Americas. We are US Americans. How self-serving it is to refer to ourselves as Americans while ignoring 54 other countries in the Americas, not to mention 549,028,570 people who live in the Americas and who aren’t residing in the United States.
Unlike most countries in this world: we don’t know politics, we haven’t a clue about geography, we only read headlines. This leads to a population who believes what the press says and what our leaders tell us. We hear how wonderful and generous we are to others. We just don’t hear – or perhaps listen – to the motivation behind our so-called generosity.
For years we have paid for the military of other countries, allowing those countries to (sometimes) pay for their own childcare, healthcare and elderly care. We are full of pretence that we are looking after the peoples in the countries where we have a heavy military presence.
In the meantime, we have shelters full of children, parents and grandparents who have no one to care for them. Certainly not our country! It is much easier to ignore these people under our noses – not to mention the fact that we have all of you to worry about.
We ridicule others for their lack of human rights and compassion and all the while we kill based on the color of one’s skin or sexual preference. How many countries other than the United States have a Hate Crime Bill? How many others need it? Let’s not forget how compassionate we are – after all, aren’t we the people who manufacture cattle, swine and fowl for human consumption at an alarming rate and in an inhumane fashion?
Certainly there is a method to our madness. We need oil so we have to do whatever is necessary to get it, right? I mean really…. can you honestly see citizens of the US driving electric cars – how glamorous is that? Have you ever seen a Mercedes-built Smart Car here? I don’t care if it is a MB – where is the luxury? Will my neighbors know it is a Mercedes or will they think I couldn’t afford a big car?
We need food – after all we do consume more food than any of you! We get hungry feeding the world. Oh, have you heard that we consume more food per capita than any other country? Take into consideration our high numbers of houseless and hungry people and you find a whole heap of hungry, glutenous Christians here.
What did you say? Our treatment of animals and humans? We can’t be concerned with our fellow citizens when we are trying to rule the world! We have higher incidents of animal abuse and human abuse than anywhere – yet!
We need to help you with your problems first!
Our lack of knowledge of politics and/or geography…. well, see, we live in our own little world. The Canadians are friendly folk who really cause us no problems. Those darn Mexicans can get on our nerves when they constantly try to cross the border into our country. But other than that, what do we need to know?
Australia is in the same boat – you are basically on your own. We aren’t like those unfortunates who live in countries the size of our States who have to keep up with the politics of neighboring countries just to know if they are safe or not. Besides all of them know geography because if you are in Greece and you want to drive to France – you better darn well know how to get there! And with all those Evil countries so close together and near Europe – well, you would be a fool not to know exactly where Hussein is.
Dubya Bush knows so it must be important.
Most of us know the names of all of our States! It is those pesky US territories that confuse the hell out of us. But they are out of sight and out of mind so we don’t think about them.
We don’t think too much of anyone – but you know that. I am just not sure you understand why we don’t. Our leaders (as scary as they are) are taking care of all of that. We don’t need to worry our pretty little heads about it. Yes, we will send our sons and daughters over somewhere filled with evil people and there will be some of our children who won’t make it home alive…. but, it isn’t our fault! Our leaders are just trying to keep this world peaceful by starting a war. If everyone would just behave as we do, we wouldn’t have these problems, now would we?
After everything we have done for this world now we find out we aren’t loved! That will keep us busy long enough to not look at the fact we don’t love each other or our own country.
It hurts us deeply that you don’t like us – you really don’t like us. When we put your best interest in front of ours constantly and consistently, how could you think so little of us?
Is it because we hardly know you exist until:
1) you do something that pisses us off or
2) you have something we want and is rightfully ours anyway?
Having lived outside US America (and loving every second of it) I have experienced the jealous looks, petty backstabbing, and unkind remarks just because I am from the US. I recited at record speed names of countries and their locations, I exhibited my dry wit at every given occasion, I name-dropped world leader’s names – even those who aren’t from the US. I made apologies for all of my people when in fact I can’t tolerate most of my fellow Americans………… It isn’t easy being me.
But back to you not honoring, respecting, admiring and loving us. We just don’t get why you don’t willingly let your world revolve around us – we do!
You must keep in mind: United States equals US: It’s all about us!
We aren’t forcing our policies and beliefs on you – we are sharing them – because we are right. Always have been, always will be. Just ask us.
***
David Spratt in North Fitzroy, Melbourne
Richard Armitage, US Under Secretary of State to Colin Powell, will be in Canberra this Friday, presumably to sell a war, not that it needs much selling with the present government. To get an idea of Armitage’s colourful past – Vietnam, Operation Phoenix, Indochina heroin trade, Irangate/Contras, etc, go to progressivereview.
My interest? I am an activist in the Victorian Peace Network, a broad-based coalition opposed to war on Iraq. (see vicpeace)
By the way, on first strike: Anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Miama have long used the United States as a base for planning and executing acts of terror against Cuba, including the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner, killing 73. Does Mr Howard support Cuba striking Florida first? Or India striking at bases in Pakistan where Kasmiri militants may be based? Or Israel striking at Iran, which supports Hezbollah? Or New Zealand striking at France to derail a subversive plot hatched in Paris to bomb a Greenpeace ship in a New Zealand port? Or Iraq to strike at Washington because it ‘becomes aware’ of a reported CIA plan to assassinate its leader? In the name of the ‘war on terror’ are we in danger of making the world even more insecure? By labelling political opponents as terrorists (as Margaret Thatcher labelled Nelson Mandela) could the ‘war on terror’ become transformed into a war of the rich and powerful against the poor but resource rich? Isn’t that precisely the sleight of hand that underlies George Bush proposed war on Iraq?
***
Mike Lyvers in Queensland
I just read David Makinson’s latest and feel compelled to make a few comments.
David wrote: “You don’t put out fires with gasoline, and you don’t stop violence with bombs.” Dumb, David. Germany and Japan have both been peaceful, nonviolent countries ever since they were bombed to smithereens in WWII.
David laments the fact that the left offers no alternative to the war on terror or the temporary detention of boatpeople, yet he fails to offer any specific suggestions himself. (I sincerely would like to here them, if he has any.) He then presents a Tolkeinesque parable of the terror situation which suggests that the problem is somehow related to the distribution of wealth.
Oh really? Does David think bin Laden spent his $600 million dollar fortune on weapons to kill the infidels as a means to distribute wealth more fairly? I can’t believe David thinks that. So what is he trying to say then?
David was quite accurate when he noted that the Sept. 11 attacks presented a problem that cannot be understood within the current left/right political framework of the west. Al Qaeda represents an ultra-right-wing philosophy with roots not in any modern conception of social struggle but in the Koran’s admonition to the faithful to wage Holy War on the infidels.
Some on the (western) right recognize this, perhaps because it is not so different from their own fundamentalist religious leanings.
The left, however, has failed to acknowledge it, instead conjuring up other motives that have nothing whatsoever to do with Al Qaeda. Thus David asserts that the statement, “They hate us because we are free” is a lie, but he fails to recognize that religious fanatics do indeed hate those who are free to disagree with them, who flaunt a lifestyle they despise and consider satanic, and who – like David – advocate DISBELIEF (which is punishable by death under Islamic law).
Those of us who are non-religious find it difficult to grasp the mindset of religious fanatics. But we should recognize what they are all about, however alien their way of thinking is to our own.
I’m no apologist for Dubya the Dunce (I voted for the other guy), and do NOT think the war on Iraq is justified unless the U.S. government has solid incriminating information showing a clear link with Al Qaeda (in which case Dubya and his fellow morons should reveal this information to us all immediately). But David’s arguments are naive at best. Both he and John Wojdylo are too fond of abstractions for my taste.
Keeping the arguments in real-world, down to earth terms would do wonders for them both. Offer real-world solutions to real-world problems. John does: attack Iraq and take out Saddam. David – any suggestions?
***
Sean Hosking
Thanks to David Makinson for one of the most honest and powerful pieces I’ve encountered in Webdiary.
In some ways the difference between the positions of David and John Wojdylo reminds me of an argument I used to have with my brother about the Indian spiritualist Krishnamurti. Krishnarmurti argued strongly against the black and white rationales and childlike ideologies around which we construct our lives, and saw politics and organised religion as nothing more than futile power games. Only through personal reflection and self knowledge could one go beyond the transitory interplay of crude emotions and flawed reasoning in order to approach something verging on the truth.
This was seen as a process rather than an end in itself, rooted in an ethic of enlightened self consciousness. At no time did one individual have the right to preach to another (apparently Krishnamurti wasn’t preaching, he was just thinking aloud).
Being a political animal I took issue with this view on a pragmatic rational level, arguing that it bordered on self-obsessive navel gazing and that it didn’t account for those times when practical reality necessitated expedient political action.
“What happens if a nuclear bomb is about to be dropped on us?” I would say. “Your passivity would condone the use of nuclear weapons.” My brother would reply that he didn’t want to die in a nuclear explosion, but that it was a stupid question. In other words, as David Makinson emphasises, he refused to engage with the contrived logic of the question.
At the time I had enormous difficulty coming to terms with his perspective. I still do. But in another sense I can see where he was coming from. He was attempting to extract himself from the narrow insular logic, crude slogans, simple solutions, and inevitable realities which he saw constituted so much of modern society. I was doing my best to wake him up to reality as I called it.
It is often the case that anybody who holds to an ideal will do so in the face of a barrage of pragmatic realists, each posing their own barbed hypothetical questions designed to expose the fundamental naivity/stupidity/hypocrisy of the position held. We live, after all, in one of the most conformist ages in history – the age of reason as we like to call it. The disaster scenarios prophesied in such reasonable arguments will range from everything from personal ostracism to nuclear obliteration. It’s no wonder that a look of mild consternation came over his face when ever my self righteous face homed into view, ready to assail him anew with a vigorous display of logical gymnastics.
This is not to say questions of this kind shouldn’t be posed, particularly in the current climate (John’s contributions on the subject have certainly got me thinking). It’s just that such questions, despite their veneer of clinical rationality, often come with their own extra-rational baggage.
In regard to the present debate all proffered scenarios – war, peace, and the innumerable options that experience tells us almost always loiter unheralded between any two given extremes – involve leaps of faith, assumptions, possible inherent contradictions and risks.
Those advocates of war with Iraq have based their arguments on a range of assumptions about Saddam’s nuclear capacity and his willingness to use it. The threat of this they are likely to have weighed up against the long term implications of a fractured and vengeful middle east.
Those against war may be making similar assumptions and leaps of faith in regard to Saddam’s capacity and/or commitment to peace.
Others may be just thinking about the oil.
Whatever the perspective, in the absence of hard evidence the values of the individual (and the assumptions through which these values are often expressed) will, to a large degree, determine the approach – and these values are as much present in the pragmatists as the idealists.
This is not withstanding the fact that in making this argument you run the risk of arriving at one of those bleary-eyed post positions where everybody’s wrong and everybodys right at the same time (cos its all relative man). In this case the protagonists may be so high on relativity that they won’t notice whether there has been a large explosion or not.
Alternatively we could play the game of good old Aussie two-up as advocated by our prospective great war time leader J Winston Howard. To be nuked or not to be nuked – that is the question. Reality, in relation to any contrived proposition, is generally a question of one or the other.
We could all – doves and hawks alike – have a big party and take bets on whether tomorrow will be the end of the world as we know it or just another tedious day listening to our deputy sheriff tell us that it will soon be the end of the world as we know it unless we go a shooting with uncle George.
On the other hand, possibility and the number of options attendant to it is theoretically infinite. David’s point about the need to remain critical, to disbelieve, is well taken. Discovering new avenues of possibility hinges on our ability to constantly question the inevitabilities that politicians regularly throw up at us – the you’re either with us or against us war cries.
To paraphrase William Pitt: Inevitability is the language of tyrants and the creed of slaves. To remain critically alert at the risk of offending the Miranda Devine’s and Bob Carr’s of the world one of the most positive things we can do. Modern civilisation, from Socrates up, is founded on it.
An ethically-oriented critical perspective poses questions, seeks deeper levels of understanding and in doing so exposes options. Realistic options, some of which would possibly not involve such things as innocent civilians being blown up.
In this sense it might not be sacrilegious to explore in depth the reasons for terrorism, including a critique of the Western world’s relationship with the Muslim world. This could form the basis for redefining the relationship between the two perspectives.
It would be a long and complex process and would definitely not lend itself to easy slogans such as the war on terrorism, good versus evil, they hate our freedoms or he tried to kill my Dad.
All in all, in the absence of incontrovertible evidence predicting our imminent destruction (in which case it will probably be all the way with George) it is our basic values in tandem with our critical faculties which will guide us.
To advocate for peace is not to deny reality, but to hold out on the idea that the simplistic either/or formulas which we are constantly offered are only a very small component of a much wider reality. So I suppose my brother was right …kind of.