A Certain Anniversary

[izmeina]

The powers that be have been boring us all witless with the endless commemorations of the centenary of what used to be called The Great War (or of course, the war to end all wars)
The events started in June and there will likely be at least a good four years of indulgence and nostalgia. One wonders why they even bother since some hundred years on they have not learned any lessons at all from the insane craziness and are once again ever so eager to sign up for the latest overseas adventures.
Strange how no one has spared a second thought for the 75th anniversary of the beginning of another war marked on this very day.

Here's guessing that when they have spent the last dozen years invading Iraq and Afghanistan and now want to do it all over again after a brief intermission, any mention of Poland is just a bit too embarrassing.
Even in a so called democracy, once the bosses start the dog whistling and beating the drums of war, the people fall ever so quickly into line. Even the so called opposition party that normally never misses a chance to take a swipe at the government. They are now all signing up to play for Team Australia and there's hardly a peek about how outrageous it is that once again The Fearless Leader can send the country down the warpath with one phone call from his Lord and Master without any requirement whatsoever to discuss the matter in Parliament.

The Greens and Andrew Wilkie are the only voices out there in the wilderness. Wilkie used to be a spook and went whistleblower over the weapons of mass destruction BS back in 2003. He is the most inconvenient proof about the outrageous lies told at the time no matter how they now try to whitewash the whole saga with talk of the wisdom of 20/20 hindsight in ferreting out all that faulty intelligence.

After the last few months where the talk has been of nothing but slash and burn in order to reduce the debt and deficit incurred by the irresponsible previous government, there is no question about the wisdom of signing over blank cheques to Uncle Sam.

Once again there will be the endless photo opportunities with toy jets and assorted members of the armed forces but should any of them crash and burn, get beheaded or return to Oz stir crazy or with bits missing then they will be given the usual runaround and made to jump through hoops to get any sort of assistance.

Who knows what wars they will be commemorating 100 years from now. That's assuming the planet has not been totally trashed before then.

Comments

[ozfille]

We seem to obsess over anniversaries of death and destruction, not just wars. Today according to the media is the thirty year anniversary of the Milperra Massacre. What is there about a mob of criminals shooting it out in a public place killing and wounding each other and at least one innocent bystander let alone frightening the wits out of the other innocent bystanders that is worth remembering but then white massacres of the indigenous population barely rate a mention and they are certainly not dredged up by the media every ten years or so and re-examined in forensic gruesome detail.

As for Iraq since the US and the coalition of the willing and stupid so totally trashed the place on their last adventure so that maniacs like ISIS had the chance to murder their way through Syria and Iraq, I'm not sure that we don't have some responsibility to stop them. And considering some of the maniacs in ISIS are citizens of the US, Australia and the UK are we not responsible to control their continuing acts of barbarity enacted against largely fellow Muslims. I agree with you that this is a handy diversion for Abbott, he can play the war card and attempt to look the great patriotic leader in a Thatcher-like attempt to resurrect some semblance of support from the Australian public and the danger is the great Ozzie sheep herd will go "baaa" and decide to vote for him and his fellow troglodytes again but this time without any controls in the Senate. I can't stand some of the nutters that have been elected in the Senate but at least they have attempted to stop some of the more outrageous actions of the Govt, even if it is for drumming up some faux popularity. Clive Palmer doesn't give a stuff about most of the things he has got his Senate minions to vote against he just sees a way of making himself more popular. I think the only area that didn't suffer too much from the slash and burn in the last budget was the military. I think some of their funding in some areas was expanded.

Actually the most saccharin of the TV shows about WWI is the one about the Australian nurses. Yes they are depicted as brave and dedicated but some of them seem just as obsessed with finding the right man and even the one sensible nurse has fallen by the way and is smitten by a newly minted officer. Very soapy! The other WWI drama being shown by the ABC is based on letters written from the front and is marginally better, it maybe dramatised somewhat but is not so much of a soap drama.

[izmeina]

Yesss. While I do agree with the policy "If you break it then you own it" concerning the consequences of the last dozen years or so of Australian overseas adventures meaning that we do bear some moral responsibility for cleaning up after our mess, the worry is that once again we will just make matters worse with our meddling. I can just imagine the ISIS mob gleefully gloating over their latest haul of Oz rocket launchers as they target some poor sucker passenger airliners. Here's hoping that no one is flying that way these days. Just wait until they get drones. That is the problem with the people at the top of the pecking order. They never seem capable of imagining that others will copy the worst of their behaviour and they will have long lost the moral authority to object or to convince others to do the same.

On a slightly related note, I am still waiting in hope for some one to nominate ten dozen ice buckets for Donald Rumsfeld and his mates.

The Saudis must be smirking and thinking that all their Christmases have come at once. Here's guessing that Eid would be a more culturally appropriate festival but I am sure they have banned that too for being a source of too much fun and frivolity.

The endless WW1 commemorations is yet another good reason for not having a television. Just been trying to find online the recent local cartoon featuring a certain Clive Palmer as a bull in the china shop. No luck so far.
Amused how the present govt is so busy trying to get rid of so many potential sources of revenue such as the mining and carbon taxes in spite of their endless claims of the dire state of debt and deficit. Interesting times indeed.

[ozfille]

I think they were trying to avoid just that scenario by delivering the arms directly to the Peshmurga. Admittedly though this is laying up trouble for Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran in the future in that there are significant Kurdish populations in all of these countries and most of them would like to have a united Kurdish homeland which would set off rebellions in all countries if they had the firepower to attempt it. Considering the nature of all the regimes that rule these countries it would just set off a whole range of massacres and counter-massacres. I think the Kurds in Iraq are probably not as murderously insane as ISIS foot soldiers but once passions are inflamed who knows how low human behaviour will go. The problem is you can't unpick centuries of Turkish imperial rule followed by post-WWI European/American imperialist interference that have left a carpet of different peoples often with different shades of belief sitting cheek by jowl with each other and now hate each other due to the shortcomings of the local dictator/regime running the country. If only someone could somehow develop a Caliphate of Peace and Goodwill rather than one based on narrow sectarian grounds where all peoples had equal rights and opportunities. Just a Pollyanna pipe dream really, considering the nature of man. But then we may not have to worry about any of this if Putin's dangerous games in Ukraine end up initiating a nuclear war.

Do you really think the Saudis have a hand in developing ISIS. Their maintenance of the fanatical Wahabi belief systems which helped spread the Salafist movement across the Islamic world certainly explained Al Qaeda, but the members of Al Qaeda despised the Saudi royal family and government as confederates of the Great Satan, the USA and worked to try and get rid of them. I don't know what the percentage of ISIS foot soldiers are angry young Muslims from Western countries attracted by the violence and anger of the movement and what percentage are from the Middle East. I'm assuming we see more of the Western recruits because they're the ones promoting themselves on YouTube. Are these products of Saudi influence in the mosques in the UK & Australia? You never hear of angry young Canadian or New Zealand Muslims. Is it that there are not large populations of Muslims in the two countries or that they don't end up alienated from the societies in which they live?

Speaking of Clive Palmer he had a little tanty last night when he got his silly little dupe Jacquie Lambie to have an ice bucket thrown over her in Canberra. According to the ABC he attended, dressed up warmly to keep out the Canberra cold but when he sighted a second bucket of ice he suspected the TEN team from The Project were going to pour a bucket over him and got very angry, kicked the bucket over and stormed off yelling profanities at all and sundry. Clive has got most of what he wants - the Carbon Tax and the Mining Tax are gone. Unless, he like that other megalomaniac from Queensland (no not Kevin, rather that corrupt old cretin Joh Bjelke-Petersen) fancies himself as PM material. But then considering Tony Abbott got elected maybe he thinks he has got some chance of it happening but probably its just that he enjoys taunting and annoying the current government. He'll last as long as they do and his party will wither on the vine unless the Mad Monk manages a war-lead resurrection of his political life before the next election.

Well there is still the Post Office and Medibank Private or any other vaguely profitable government agency to sell off. Once every income producing government agency is sold off to their mates, we will have an even bigger fiscal crisis. I believe it's no longer called asset stripping, it's asset recycling. I only hope that if the ALP manages to get re-elected it will screw up its courage (if it has any) and outlaw family trusts and the other assorted lurks and perks exploited by the rich to avoid paying tax on their bloated incomes. But then the Merde-ock Media will scream to high heaven about blatant discrimination against the working or in many cases non-working Rich, claiming it is all generated by envy and is class warfare. Funny how when you persecute the poor, nary a whisper is made about anything so vile as class warfare.

Actually the better one of the WWI commemoration series, the one based on the letters also covers the other side, people like Vida Goldstein, a feminist who campaigned against the war and Tom Barker of the IWW who opposed the government's position on the war as well as the local Irish objections to government's support for the war. Here is a link to the cartoon that got Tom Barker 12 months in the clink - http://libcom.org/files/The-Anzac-Myth.pdf

[izmeina]

Thanks for the tasty morsels. I enjoyed the wobblies link. It is so so true that it's the winners who write the history books. The cartoon did look like something straight out of "Der Sturmer" but the background information was most fascinating indeed. Thinking was not just the preserve of the middle classes in those days. Maybe the goggle box changed everything since then.

As for the Saudis, I just love to hate them ;) In the old days they were quite happy to fund all sorts of creepie crawlies. It's a bit like letting the genie out of the bottle. It's much harder to let it out than get it back in again. Like the United States, a lot of their minions started getting uppity ideas of their own. Al Qaeda comes to mind. Now all the trendy young things are against the pork barreling drunken bunch that is the Saudi royal family. It was disgusting to watch at the time how the US govt tried to disguise the obvious fact that 19 of the 20 911 hijackers were of Saudi origins and from pretty well to do families.

The other creepy thing is the whole pile of hypocrisy concerning who is the evilest of them all. It is much easier to kill people from the safety of some bunker in Nevada than to be out and about on the ground and we never see in the western media the effects of the drones or the bombings of civilians in Iraq. But the fact that ISIS and their minions so nonchalantly butcher people so up close and personal makes one wonder at the sort of training and indoctrination required to overcome the usual human aversion to such acts of one on one brutality. I just could not help but think of those two Nigerians who attacked the soldier Lee Rigby in England and got themselves and their knives plastered all over the front pages of the papers back in May 2012. I think at least one of them had been a born again Christian who then became a born again Muslim. The new believer is the true believer.

Young males are a scary and dangerous mob in every society. Passion mixed with teenage hormones and the victim mentality are a scary combination indeed. But now you mentioned it, most of the most violent and virulent specimens of the species seem to be of UK (and occasionally Oz) origins with no mention at all of Canada or NZ.

I heard Jacquie Lambie's official maiden speech in the Senate on Wednesday. She is a strange beast indeed. She sort of reminds me of Pauline Hansen. There's an element of a woman on a mission. Something dodgy happened during her time in the military and she is on a mission to sort it all out. It's a scary mix of brutal honesty combined with passion and paranoia.

And class warfare. Apparently in the USA, Murdoch and his minions are squealing that anyone who wants to increase the min wage from $7 to $10 is engaging in 'class warfare'. Times are scary indeed when children are more religious and more right wing than their parents.

Must be off. There's cakes to bake and champagne corks to pop for a certain anniversary ;)