I am a resident of Tasmania. The son of a ‘Rat of Tobruk, a mentally disabled victim of WWII.
I am a witness to how PTSD wrecks families. Moving like a ripple on a pond through successive generations. And a witness too of how successive governments wash their hands of veterans, for whom they have no further use.
The point of this message is; upon reading to the end of the piece, should you ask yourself; where are the leaders going to come from who will lift us to a higher level of self aware nationhood?
I think I am asking; who is going to raise the quality of our polity?
Who is going to raise the quality of our damaged national character?
We have allowed some of histories most self serving intellectual bullies, to lead us into some of the worst social, military, economic and environmental disasters one could imagine. Yet we go back time after time, to their ilk and ask for another dose of metaphoric porridge.
An example historically is; our leaders did not tell us that the Gallipoli invasion fleet turned up two weeks earlier, realised the ships had ammunition loaded as last to come off and simply sailed back to Cairo, switched everything around and went right back. Fore warning Turkey.
The result was so terrible and the slaughter so great that Australian Journalist, Keith Murdock praises the ‘brave hearts’, endurance and ingenuity of the Australian troops and railed against what he saw as their needless sacrifice, describing the outcome of one battle as nothing short of the ‘murder’ of their own troops by allied headquarters.
Our leaders at the time Andrew Fisher and Billy Hughes spun the debacle into ‘Glorious dead’ and ‘Brave Sacrifice’ to bury their terrible decision making and culpability.
We still don’t acknowledge what ‘Lest we Forget’ really means. I say it means ‘Don’t let the bastards get away with this again and again and again’.
But we do!
What no one has accepted is that since John Howard looked out the hotel window and saw the Pentagon burning, he lost his bottle, suffered PTSD at the first shot and we have been, as was the intention, ‘Terrified’ by Al-Qaida and driven into disarray, disunity, fear and self hatred; into the acceptance of, the on going limit of our freedoms by a political class that has lost its courage and whom continues to be traumatized into thrashing around squandering our treasure; invading other peoples lands pursuing a small number of murderers, while we earn the furious, bitter hatred of people who should be our friends.
Come now, admit it, Osama Bin Laden has achieved more than he ever dreamt of. He has come as close to victory as one can get.
We have surrendered our courage and strength of character by allowing a weak man such as Howard to plunge our tiny army into impossible conflict, ill-equipped and under someone else’s command, when he [Howard] did not have the balls to say no to George Bush.
Since then the terror has moved into Board Rooms, Stock exchanges, insurance schemes to the extent that those who put their tiny hands up to lead us, are paralysed into getting the ‘balance right’ and making themselves a small target.
The generations who would have stood up to bullies and said “no more mate, just back off” are in their graves. We would have been better to have used our treasure to expand our cooperation with all nations affected, in relation to intelligence gathering and the expansion of the role of Interpol and the more accurate tracking and identifying of travellers.
By the way, no one has yet picked up on our constitution being an act of the British Parliament and therefore has no mention of prime ministers having the authority to send one person to invade another country, let alone an Army.
What if, we find that legally, there are no grounds to continuing to pay compensation to war widows or veterans because the actions of successive Prime ministers were not constitutional?
Will we be giving them the same answer that Queen Elizabeth the First (by the grace of God), gave when she was asked about the wounded and dying of Walter Raleigh’s sailors (privateers really), who fought the Spanish Armada, she said” but why? I don’t need them any more”.
Look up the records, you will find the USA has many more safeguards to prevent them just slipping into war. We have none. You see we all assume it’s OK because the boss made his decision.
Further to all of the above, I wish to bring to the attention of ‘you all’, the draconian measures still largely hidden from public view, that Prime Minister Menzies and the Cold War political conservatives, were prepared to use against militant trade unions and the Left generally.
A plan named Operation Alien, 1950-1953, was to use the armed forces against organised labour.
This top-secret operation was under the control of Prime Minister Menzies. It was part of a wider Cold War strategy to smash militant unionism in Australia.
Cabinet documents suggest that elements in the government sought to inflame industrial disputes during the period, particularly in the maritime industry, with a view to extending areas of dispute and justifying the implementation of Operation Alien.
The first use of the plan was in May 1951, trade union offices were raided by State and Commonwealth security agencies; the Crimes Act was used to prosecute prominent unionists.
Operation Alien never got into full swing; targeted unions were wary and avoided providing sufficient provocation.
Internment Camps were on the conservative agenda. Using the excuse of an expected Third World War, (hence a conscripted National Service), the Director General of ASIO, Colonel Spry, began the compilation in July 1950 of a list of people who needed to be interned in time of national emergency. Whole families, including children, were scheduled for rounding up and incarceration in camps.
By December 1950 the list included ’selected’ communists and unionists. Enemy Aliens were also included; these were mainly Eastern Bloc, Chinese, and Korean, people between the ages of 16 and 65 who had entered Australia after 1945. With the inclusion of these people, the list blew out to 16,660 people by April 1955. Predictably, former European “Nazis and Fascists”, amongst them war criminals, were specifically exempted from Enemy Alien status, some of them variously cementing themselves within the Liberal Party organisation.
Many thousands of ASIO files now in the Australian Archives indicate that during the Menzies era it was regarded as ‘offensive’ and ’suspicious’ merely to criticise the government or society in general, and to exercise democratic rights. Almost seditious even.
The internment plan and Operation Alien were hidden from scrutiny until 1992-1993, revealed by the patient Archival research of Associate Professor Les Louis (University of Canberra).
Who, once again I ask, is going to lift the standard out of the national moral mess it has descended to?
John Ward
Gordon
Tasmania
