A week is a long climb in politics but last week lasted a hundred years. Or so it seemed to most Australians as time warped into an ANZAC wormhole, stopping the nation in its tracks with a heavy bombardment of all things old Digger in a frenzied bout of military nostalgia, myth peddling, sentimentality and falsehood. No expense was spared by a government which had to underfund advocacy groups for poor and needy citizens so desperate was it to find ‘savings.’
Australia’s half billion dollar effort to commemorate World War One will cost more than three times as much as those of the UK helping to cement Australia’s place amongst nations as ‘without doubt the most aggressive of the centenary commentators,’ in the words of one international scholar as reported by UNSW Canberra military historian Professor Jeffrey Grey. Yet in the past we were more reticent, reserved about the lessons of the past.
‘Let silent contemplation be your offering’, is inscribed on the War Memorial at Sydney’s Hyde Park. Instead we are set to indulge in ‘a discordant, lengthy and exorbitant four-year festival for the dead,’ writes military scholar James Brown in Anzac’s Long Shadow. It is already taking its toll in the lounge-rooms of the nation.
Our plucky young nation’s heroic re-baptism by fire and noble sacrifice proved the feature event of the week. Starring a mythic Gallipoli-born national identity and other false or foreign imports, the performances were gruelling on all sides. Surviving only through mateship, pluck and much wearing of rosemary, Australians at home weathered wave after wave of lounge-room carpet bombing and other assaults by sustained TV ANZAC ‘wraparounds’ led by scoundrels such as ex-Kiwi and former gladiator actor Russell Crowe, whose lack of military understanding and otherwise complete unsuitability is redeemed by his history of throwing telephones and other improvised ballistic devices.
Assisting Crowe was an army of other unlikely recruits, incorrigible grandstanders and up-stagers. There is some good news, however. Despite sustaining massive casualties to truth and despite its post-operative trauma from amateur open-heart and DIY identity reconstruction surgery, the nation is said to be currently in a stable condition, although future prospects are a concern, especially when the nation’s full-scale commemoration kicks in 28 July. Our death cult PM will however doubtless have the odd free trade announcement and terror alert up his sleeve to see us through. This week he set off at a blistering pace.
Abbott appears to have been poorly briefed on the truth.
Abbott exuded Turkish delight as he simultaneously scaled the twin peaks of trade and terror in Ankara, staging a virtual love-in with Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu who agreed to talk tough on terror. Abbott, in another captain’s call, then damned Turkey with very faint praise claiming windily, ‘it is prosperous, it’s pluralist, it’s peaceful and it’s a stark contrast to the kind of things we see happening in Syria and Iraq right now.’ The facts suggest otherwise, especially to Turkish minority groups but Abbott appears to have been poorly briefed on the truth.
Persecuted Alevi or Kurdish members of Abbott’s ‘pluralist’ Turkey could play the Australian PM a clip from President Erdogan’s last election campaign where racial vilification of his opponent proved a crowd-pleaser if not also a vote-winner.
“You know, he is an Alevi,” Erdogan told crowds in a cynical way while thousands booed “the Alevi Kilicdaroglu.”
Doubtless some fine-tuning of our own racial discrimination act could yet permit similarly ‘robust debate’ here.
Our thirty-third trading partner, Turkey’s economy was also no doubt vastly boosted by Abbott. And the help did not stop there. He promised expert advice, based on his own triumph, to help guarantee Turkey the G20 success Australia enjoyed for when Turkey hosts the next G20 meeting. His host just promised further talks -not to talk turkey.
Bishop had other matters on her mind.
Abbott thanked Professor Davutoglu for ‘helping deliver’ annual counter-terrorism talks between the two nations, the placement of Australian officials with Turkish police and for advancing discussions on the return of foreign fighters. If this doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, it will certainly amount to a whole lot of falafel. Whatever the case, it will be less worrying than Julie Bishop’s coup of the week, her arrangement to swap intelligence with Iran, a nation which Wilkie warns will only feed us lies and generally stitch us up to its own advantage. But Bishop had other matters on her mind.
Julie Bishop won best in show in Teheran by a short half head with her deconstructed burqa mantilla head un-covering. Preferring as she says to be ‘judged by what I do’ not by any feminist label, her deeds judged her a supporter of the oppression of women. In one half-veiled fashion statement, she antagonised both her host and those who work tirelessly for women’s rights around the world.
Bishop then capped this with a slap-down for her PM in her gloss on his sensitive advice to Europe to turn back the boats following one of the worst maritime disasters in Europe’s history. What the PM was doing was ‘offering up his experiences for everyone else to consider,’ she lied. His pitch was intended for domestic audiences to boost his standing with those ever willing to applaud a stoking of their xenophobic hatred of refugees.
Abbott talked up trade and terror and turn back the boats on his way to grace the centennial Gallipoli landing commemoration with the best oration his turd-polishing unit could pen.
Abbott preferred the simpler myth …
Glossing over the fact that 1915 marks the beginnings of Turkey’s policy of genocide which resulted in the massacre of one and a half million of its population of two million Armenians, Abbott preferred the simpler myth that Australia and New Zealand were forged at Gallipoli which he represented as a crusade for freedom undertaken by ordinary men doing their duty and their best. He lavished a fair bit of praise on our veterans but words are cheap. His government cannot count the number of homeless veterans sleeping rough in Australia today, let alone make some move to provide for living diggers.
Forged also in another sense was former failed Health Minister, Peter Dutton’s brutal return of forty-five hapless Vietnamese refugees who were last heard of in police custody in Vietnam. Claiming that Australia cannot possibly be responsible for what happens after repatriation, Dutton took a leaf straight out Scott Morrison’s book.
The worst ex-Health Minister of all time also channelled his guru Morrison in producing a duplicitous tourist video promoting a ‘fast-paced and vibrant’ Cambodia as offering ‘a wealth of opportunities’ to unwary and unwilling refugees who would rather be detained indefinitely on Manus Island where they can be sure of being fed. One third of Cambodia’s population must try to survive on 45 cents a day. Fortunately for the hapless minister, another promotional video upstaged Dutton’s.
Australian paediatrician and former party animal Dr Tareq Kamleh has appeared in an Islamic State video urging other medical professionals to travel to Syria and join the holy war against the West. His transformation into Jihadi despite the billions squandered on security and anti-terrorist intelligence gathering exposes flaws in the Abbott government’s beefed up security regime supposedly dedicated to preventing Australians travelling to Syria or Iraq to join ISIS. Kamleh’s case also opens another perspective on an ‘evil death cult’ world which our government insists on representing only in propagandist terms.
Hunt’s policy will fall short of stated goals.
Credibility gaps also yawned in Work Experience student Gregory Hunt’s ‘Stunning outcome’ as he called it of awarding $660.4m in emissions reduction contracts. Hunt has had a huge success giving our money away. His announcement of what is a government grant of taxpayer money to groups who promise to put it towards carbon abatement schemes such as planting trees raises more questions than it answers, especially how the scheme will work when industrial emitters want to throw their hat into the Direct Action ring but the funds are all gone. For the Climate Institute, the first ‘auction’ merely confirms Hunt’s policy will fall short of stated goals.
Environment Minister Hunt who has now already given away much of his funding, pledges that ‘we will meet our targets easily.’ Experts point out that carbon emissions are abating as a result of other more significant global factors such as China’s slow-down and its policy of deploying new power generating technologies. Yet a sure sign young Greg is in trouble is that ‘Greg Sheridan hails Hunt’s success as an election-winner.
Finally, Joe Hockey has differed with his PM over eighty billion dollars he says the states won’t be getting. Abbott has promised a cosy retreat where the state premiers can hold a free-flowing discussion about bailing out Western Australia a state which is now caught short by the mining industry downturn because of its own planning failure. Principle aside, if Abbott could ever get men such as Victoria’s Daniel Andrews to support a bailout, it seems pointless holding a retreat if the Treasurer has taken the money ‘off the table.’
Other hits of an action-packed week include Sussan Ley’s ‘industrial-strength’ review of Medicare to give it ‘better efficiency’ a process started two years ago by Labor but not, Ley claims about finding savings. Instead, as turd polishers have spun it, she is ‘modernising for the future’ and ‘maintaining its integrity’ yet all of us know that she has been told to cut her budget and the only real question is by how much. The last word must go to a writer who saw active duty in the Great War and whose inbuilt ‘crap-detector’ helped him see through the rhetoric of war and sacrifice and all the other weasel words that governments use to get us to part with our money and our lives.
I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.
—Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
• Tess Lawrence, EXCLUSIVE, Independent Australia: Turkey returns Gallipoli tickets as Hockey capitulates on Armenia Despite the Abbott Government doing everything possible to gloss over the horrific crimes, the Turkish Government has returned 150 tickets to yesterday’s Gallipoli ceremony in protest at Australia’s growing recognition of the Armenia genocide, reports contributing editor-at-large Tess Lawrence.
• Guardian: Turkey eclipses centenary of Armenian massacre by moving Gallipoli memorial
• Gina McColl, Fairfax: Fighting words: Do Australian jihadis have anything in common with World War I Anzacs? It’s a dangerous idea, drawing parallels between the idealistic recruits who left Australia for Gallipoli and World War I and young jihadis leaving to fight with Islamic State in Syria and Iraq today. And potentially incendiary on Anzac Day in its centenary year. But think for a moment. Young men, many from migrant families who came to Australia seeking a better life, going to the Middle East to fight in a war that shows their fellowship with an international brotherhood, fighting for Empire. Exploited as fodder in battle and put into unwinnable situations. The parallels have their limits but they are compelling.
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Marilyn Lake, historian and professorial research fellow at the Melbourne University, agrees the broader politics of World War I is often reduced to a binary of good allies and bad enemies in a simple nation-building narrative, when the reality of the past is more complex. When the Anzacs went to Gallipoli, they were part of a British imperial force invading the Ottoman Empire, because it was an ally of the German Empire. Lake points out: “It was a war between empires.” To occupy Constantinople (now Istanbul) would, among other things, help Britain’s ally Russia “which in 1914-15 was a Tsarist autocracy – and hardly a beacon of freedom and democracy, which is what children today are taught we went to fight for. “Binary oppositions are essential to politics, she says, but they are not useful to understanding history.”
• A girl walks into a bookstore: Review: Trooper to the Southern Cross, by Angela Thirkell Set just after WWI, Trooper to the Southern Cross is narrated by Major Bowen, a former military doctor. He and his wife Celia book passage on a trooper ship, the Rudolstadt, from England to Australia. On board are former military personnel, diggers, prisoners, and others, and this novel is the story of their voyage. The novel is based on personal experience. Angela Thirkell came from an illustrious family; her grandfather was the painter Edward Burne-Jones, her father was the first biographer of William Morris, her brother was Denis Mackail (author of Greenery Street, published by Persephone), Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin were first cousins, her son was Colin MacInnes, and JM Barrie was her godfather. Thirkell’s second husband was George Thirkell, one of the first Australians to enlist in WWI. In January 1920, the couple, newly married and with Thirkell’s children from her previous marriage in tow, set sail for Australia on the troopship SS Friedrichsruh.
