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As I write Tony Blair is telling the British parliament that
his proposed changes to detention legislation are not an attack on human rights
or turning Britain into a police state. Seems that he and Howard and Bush are
all, as they say, singing from the same song sheet.
In a couple of weeks we'll hear on the radio and TV the sounds of kids singing,
"'Tis the season to be jolly, falala lalala la la la". Why is it the season to
be jolly? Why is it that our so called leaders fail to recognise the destruction
they are wreaking on our way of life? Why is it that we, as a community, seem to
be allowing them to take away what was so hard fought for and for which we take
a minutes silence this time each year?
Eighty seven years ago the first Armistice Day was observed here and in other
Allied countries as citizens took a silent moment to listen for the no quiet
voices of the slaughtered who, they were told, provided us with 'liberty',
'freedom' and 'hope' for the future.
The end of the "War to end all wars" saw ten million human lives erased and tens
of millions more forever suffering the scars of physical and psychological
trauma. It's hard to imagine what it was like in Australia at the end of World
War I. However in raw figures it is not inaccurate to say that we paid a higher
sacrifice per head of population than any of the other Allied nations.
From a population of about five million approximately 300,000
young men served between 1914 and 1918. If we take away from the population
figures all those who were not eligible to 'serve' (women, children, older men
and, of course Indigenous Australians who weren't even counted) we find that of
the total available cohort of eligible men one in two served. Of the 300,000,
about 60,000 were killed either on the battlefield or died from their wounds
while under military care. That means one in ten Australian men were killed and
of the total number over a ¼ were wounded. The odds of being killed were one in
five. The odds of being wounded were one in two. Eighty seven years later we
should be hearing about the reality of war and why is was, supposedly fought.
Instead we get lectures on how we should just accept the imposition of the
conditions our grandfathers supposedly fought to 'liberate' people from.
World War I war historian C.E.W. Bean describes the way Australian soldiers were
killed on a battlefield in the fight for 'liberty'. He wrote "[they] are simply
turned in there as into some ghastly giant mincing machine". Unlike his
colleagues today Bean was attempting to be dispassionate and tell it like it
was. No embedding. No cosying up to the majors, generals and politicians. He
leaves them no room todescribe their barbaric decisions and the resulting deaths
as somehow heroic. I am yet to hear one of today's military directors or
theirpolitical masters or any mainstream journalist describe, as British poet
John Mansfield did of a battlefield scene, in which "there was a cat eating a
man's brain...they were shovelling parts of men into blankets"1.
Sure we hear reports and see pictures of dead people but we don't see the dying
– unless we go to the movies. We don't hear the hours of groaning and crying and
screaming as men, women or children die with their guts strewn about them. We
don't see the images or hear the sounds of the soldiers dying in their Humvies
after an IED rips it apart. We don't see journalistic poetry that allows for a
real humanity and helps us to understand the futility of war. Yet we are
supposed to believe the empty rhetoric of our so-called leaders who express
their "sympathy" for the "victims" of war. The dead and wounded are not victims
of some inevitable outcome. They are dead, dying or wounded because of the
direct, conscious decisions taken by ideologues who decree a war should begin.
Poet/soldier Siegfried Sassoon, who was renowned for his want to wander off into
the battlefield on his own (no embedding in the trenches of the Somme), wrote of
his disillusionment of the war commanders in this way:
Good morning, good morning, the General said,
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers Owen smiled at are most of them dead
And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
Sassoon also wrote of the suicide of soldiers who, faced with death at the hand
of the enemy or out of shear desperate fear, turned on its head any notion of
the brave patriot fighting for King and country. Robert Fisk describes similar
scenes in brutal detail from his experience on the front lines of modern battle
fields around the world. None of the them are romantic or glorious places to be.
Today we find stage-managed events taking place and broadcast, not as what they
truly are – propaganda - but as if they are reality. We find that when threats
fail to alarm us sufficiently, the guns and dogs and helicopters come out and
the carnage is brought to our neighbourhoods and streets. Perhaps it is time
that we adopted the line from Sassoon who wrote that he would not return to the
French theatre because, "I can no longer be a party to prolonging these
sufferings".
Sassoon and the poet/journalists/soldiers of his day were far more engaged and
observant of what was happening around them than the weak and snivelling media
we have today. Sassoon and his contemporaries wrote what they saw and had no
need to resort to propaganda and deception. Perhaps our well coiffured news
anchors in their pancake make-up along with their never ending stream of
'experts' and 'reporters', who have dismally failed to report the effects of
this current war both here and abroad on those who are caught up in it, would do
to take a moment to reflect on the life and words of Edward Thomas.
Thomas was a young poet who decided to enlist in the British army. He was
married with two young children when he decided to volunteer. He wrote of his
decision, ". . . above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is war,
and the pity of war, the poetry is inthe pity."
As we know, the war is still not over. The lies, broadcast around the world and
unchallenged in any substantial way by the corporate and mainstream media,
prevail. These lies now tell us that we need to be subdued. We need to be put in
our place like so many unruly children. We are told we need to have our civil
and human rights taken from us so that we can be a better society. We are told
endlessly that the 'war on terror' must continue. But for what? For what?
Perhaps we need to take some time during the minute silence to reflect on our
part in attempting to stop wars, wherever they might be. Perhaps we should take
the time to read the history our so-called political leaders ignore and remind
ourselves of the pain felt by our grandparents as they found out about the death
of their mates and loved ones. Perhaps we should remember their rheumy eyes and
the way they spoke about their battles for our freedom. Only if we acquaint
ourselves with the lessons of history will we be able to better prepare for a
humane, just and lasting, peaceful, future. Those who fail to take note of
history, it is so often said, are bound to repeat it.
(1) Anthony Burke, Security: an Australian genealogy, PhD
thesis.