The Presence of the Past
11/11/2014 11:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
izmeinaIt is said that the depressed are obsessed with the past while the more anxious sorts fear the future. So maybe it is a good sign that a certain serpent has been so busy with mundane matters of the present that she has not even observed a whole bunch of significant anniversaries.
The Australian obsession with war of all sorts has been pretty much on steroids since late July. There have been endless stories of soldiers and the significance of the events of 1914 and beyond but it seems no great desire to actually learn from the mistakes of the past since they always seem so eager to queue up to join in other people’s wars especially if they involve Great Britain or these days the United States.
But that does not stop the government giving the armed forces a pissy little pay rise of 1.5% which is lower than inflation meaning in effect that it is a pay cut. They are also drastically cutting the danger money paid to troops over in Afghanistan and probably Iraq while at the same time posing for photo opportunites with the troops and sending them off overseas at the drop of a hat. Then they come back from having being fighting fit and in the prime of their lives to being maimed and with messed up minds and then nobody wants to know them.
Even the old boys club (RSL) has the bad habit of sneering and claiming that the latest batch of veterans are just a bunch of wannabees who have not fought in a REAL war like they did. They certainly treated the Vietnam vets like they were lepers with Ebola. Maybe the real sin of the Vietnam veterans was to be on the losing side. They copped it from all sides while the folks who sent them there in the first place got their big fat pensions and gold card frequent flier points and probably never had a single sleepless night over the senselessness of it all.
Meanwhile there are nurses and doctors begging to be allowed to go off to assist in Ebola infected Liberia and the government was basically refusing to give them any assistance whatsoever. There was just one pathetic excuse after another until their reluctance became a national embarrassment. Ebola is far more of a threat to the world population than the Isis brand of terrorism but there’s just not enough glamour in it for the mad monk and his minions.
There was the funeral last week of a previous prime minister who had the top job for only 3 years way back some forty years ago. Such bad timing. Today would have been a much more auspicious day for his official departure from this mortal coil. He would have relished the thought of a state funeral on the anniversary of the very day he got sacked from his top job on 11 November 1975. It was even a Tuesday too. He had apparently requested a funeral pyre - in the Senate. What a wicked twisted sense of humour. History has treated Mr Whitlam much more kindly than is likely for the pathetic present incumbent who is doing his damnedest to trash every single one of the enlightened social reforms from forty years ago and bring us back to the dark ages when the plebs knew their place.
If I had to find a three word slogan to sum up the present federal government culture in Canberra it would not include terms like inclusive, visionary or egalitarian. Vindictive, petty and tricksy would be more like it.
Then there is the other recent anniversary which was of far more personal significance to me. Was too busy over in Nanoland to even get out the old bag of bits of Berlin wall. Not bought from dodgy souvenir sellers but picked up from rubble in the ground around Potsdamer Platz with bits of steel reinforcement and VEB manufactured valves and other electrical bits.
It was the fall of the Wall that made Germany especially interesting but which also led to the conditions which made it impossible for a foreigner like me at the bottom of the pecking order to be able to afford to stay there. I happened to be living near Hamburg and on holidays at the time the wall came down but was too broke to go over there to join in the party. I did manage to visit the Satanic city some five times since then and lurked a lot on the dark grey side. Some of the most beautiful and spooky towns were in the East. The spark survived in spite of the best efforts of the drab, dull colourless and soulless box tickers in charge of the place.
And all this 20/20 hindsight is an amusing thing. Folks making out that what happened was all so obvious and inevitable. Nothing of the sort at all. There were months and months of increased escapes over the borders in what used to be called Czechoslovakia, Hungary and then East Germany. There were protests in the streets that got more brazen as time went by but everyone was afraid it would end in tears like it did in Tianamen Square which had happened less than six months previously. If head honcho Honecker had gotten the thumbs up from Gorbachev I am sure he would not have thought twice about sending in the tanks to crush the uppity cockroaches.
In the craziness and confusion of the times, it seems that it was some little two bit player border guard who pushed over the first domino. The rest as they say is history.
But from this vantage point in history, it seems that the teflon coated B grade movie star Ronald Reagan has been given credit for it all. Poor old Mikhail Gorbachev seems to have been forgotten and consigned to the dust bin of history. Maybe the 40th or 50th anniversary will see him being given back his rightful place.
Who knows what wars and other significant events they will be remembering some 100 years from now. We can be sure of only one thing. It is so true that the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing at all from history.
The Australian obsession with war of all sorts has been pretty much on steroids since late July. There have been endless stories of soldiers and the significance of the events of 1914 and beyond but it seems no great desire to actually learn from the mistakes of the past since they always seem so eager to queue up to join in other people’s wars especially if they involve Great Britain or these days the United States.
But that does not stop the government giving the armed forces a pissy little pay rise of 1.5% which is lower than inflation meaning in effect that it is a pay cut. They are also drastically cutting the danger money paid to troops over in Afghanistan and probably Iraq while at the same time posing for photo opportunites with the troops and sending them off overseas at the drop of a hat. Then they come back from having being fighting fit and in the prime of their lives to being maimed and with messed up minds and then nobody wants to know them.
Even the old boys club (RSL) has the bad habit of sneering and claiming that the latest batch of veterans are just a bunch of wannabees who have not fought in a REAL war like they did. They certainly treated the Vietnam vets like they were lepers with Ebola. Maybe the real sin of the Vietnam veterans was to be on the losing side. They copped it from all sides while the folks who sent them there in the first place got their big fat pensions and gold card frequent flier points and probably never had a single sleepless night over the senselessness of it all.
Meanwhile there are nurses and doctors begging to be allowed to go off to assist in Ebola infected Liberia and the government was basically refusing to give them any assistance whatsoever. There was just one pathetic excuse after another until their reluctance became a national embarrassment. Ebola is far more of a threat to the world population than the Isis brand of terrorism but there’s just not enough glamour in it for the mad monk and his minions.
There was the funeral last week of a previous prime minister who had the top job for only 3 years way back some forty years ago. Such bad timing. Today would have been a much more auspicious day for his official departure from this mortal coil. He would have relished the thought of a state funeral on the anniversary of the very day he got sacked from his top job on 11 November 1975. It was even a Tuesday too. He had apparently requested a funeral pyre - in the Senate. What a wicked twisted sense of humour. History has treated Mr Whitlam much more kindly than is likely for the pathetic present incumbent who is doing his damnedest to trash every single one of the enlightened social reforms from forty years ago and bring us back to the dark ages when the plebs knew their place.
If I had to find a three word slogan to sum up the present federal government culture in Canberra it would not include terms like inclusive, visionary or egalitarian. Vindictive, petty and tricksy would be more like it.
Then there is the other recent anniversary which was of far more personal significance to me. Was too busy over in Nanoland to even get out the old bag of bits of Berlin wall. Not bought from dodgy souvenir sellers but picked up from rubble in the ground around Potsdamer Platz with bits of steel reinforcement and VEB manufactured valves and other electrical bits.
It was the fall of the Wall that made Germany especially interesting but which also led to the conditions which made it impossible for a foreigner like me at the bottom of the pecking order to be able to afford to stay there. I happened to be living near Hamburg and on holidays at the time the wall came down but was too broke to go over there to join in the party. I did manage to visit the Satanic city some five times since then and lurked a lot on the dark grey side. Some of the most beautiful and spooky towns were in the East. The spark survived in spite of the best efforts of the drab, dull colourless and soulless box tickers in charge of the place.
And all this 20/20 hindsight is an amusing thing. Folks making out that what happened was all so obvious and inevitable. Nothing of the sort at all. There were months and months of increased escapes over the borders in what used to be called Czechoslovakia, Hungary and then East Germany. There were protests in the streets that got more brazen as time went by but everyone was afraid it would end in tears like it did in Tianamen Square which had happened less than six months previously. If head honcho Honecker had gotten the thumbs up from Gorbachev I am sure he would not have thought twice about sending in the tanks to crush the uppity cockroaches.
In the craziness and confusion of the times, it seems that it was some little two bit player border guard who pushed over the first domino. The rest as they say is history.
But from this vantage point in history, it seems that the teflon coated B grade movie star Ronald Reagan has been given credit for it all. Poor old Mikhail Gorbachev seems to have been forgotten and consigned to the dust bin of history. Maybe the 40th or 50th anniversary will see him being given back his rightful place.
Who knows what wars and other significant events they will be remembering some 100 years from now. We can be sure of only one thing. It is so true that the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing at all from history.
no subject
Date: 2014-11-12 01:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-11-12 03:43 pm (UTC)I am so over the whole religious cult aspect of the war. I'm sure it was not this bad some 20 years ago. It is easy to understand the need for relatives and descendents to create some sort of meaning in order to come to terms with their loss but all it does is make it easier for the next time around. Even as a kid I used to think when going past those countless "Lest we forget" memorials that the best way to remember the soldiers who were killed is to make sure that it does not happen again.
I have heard of Wilfred Owen the war poet but never bothered to read any of his stuff until the last few weeks. The same poem popped up on at least three different occasions. It is impossible to imagine for those who were not there but his words convey far more than the endless pontificating and glamorizing of the last few years.
With the whole Albany thing and that poem in mind, could not help but think that what they were really commemorating during that first weekend of November was the centenary of live exports of meat to the Middle East.
A big story here was about the two brothers who are vets from the second world war who were invited to some dinner with big wigs over in Canberra but expected to pay their own way there. One of them snarkily remarked that the government had no problem paying their fares back in the 1940s but has pretty much forgotten about them since.
But the really amazing thing is that each generation grows up believing that things will be different this time and the government won't abandon them after they lose their legs, their arms or their minds on active duty. They all suffer in silence rather than warning the young ones not to follow in their footsteps.
An American cartoonist hit the nail on the head absolutely spot on.
Veterans Day
We are more civilized here in Oz. We give them TWO days.
There's some scary stuff in that article about the toxic waste dump known as Fort McLellan in the USA. Here we had the government shamelessly exposing soldiers to nuclear radiation and then wriggling out of the responsibilities when they started getting cancer and all sorts of inexplicable ailments. If you let your so called allies test nukes in your own country then why even bother with an army? With friends like that who needs enemies?