Posts Tagged ‘War’
Wednesday, April 28th, 2010
Tim Soutphommasane; 28/4/10
Watching Q & A’s special Anzac edition on ABC1 this week, I was struck by a question posed by a young woman of Asian background: does the Anzac tradition have any meaning for Australians of migrant heritage? Former Defence Force chief Peter Cosgrove, sitting at one end of the panel, responded that it wasn’t for anyone to prescribe to others how they should feel about Anzac. Another panellist, historian Henry Reynolds, responded that Australians were indeed divided about Anzac because the tradition was bound up in Britishness and hence could never include those of non-British backgrounds. As someone of Chinese and Lao extraction, born overseas, I confess that I, too, have had my doubts about the Anzac tradition. I recall more than 10 years ago sitting in a eucalyptus grove at Hurlstone Agricultural High School in Sydney’s southwest, listening to a fellow student deliver a speech about the Anzac spirit. She spoke passionately about our celebrated old boy John Edmondson, who was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously for his actions at Tobruk in 1941. She spoke movingly about how “our forebears” fought to defend our country and the Australian way of life.
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Tags: Australia, Migrants & Refugees, Tradition, War
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Monday, April 26th, 2010
Andrew Herrick; 26/4/10
We still have a weakness for backing our allies anywhere, any time. Too close to Anzac Day, I reluctantly follow my son into an army disposal store. There I watch him unearth World War II gas masks, Korean War shell casings, Vietnam-era ammo boxes and dusty desert camouflage nets. These castoffs of history, redolent of suffering, tragedy and triumph, rest lightly in my son’s small hands. Seeing him clad in jungle greens and slung with bandoliers, keen to head into battle with adrenalised glee, I can’t help thinking of my grandfather, who waded ashore at Suvla Bay with the Anzac 1st Division on April 26, 1915, aged 23. My father’s father, Wilfred Herrick, served as a signaller at Gallipoli for eight weeks until he was wounded. After recovering, Wil was sent to lay telephone wires through the mud of the Somme. He survived the battle of Villers-Bretonneux and returned to Australia suffering the effects of mustard gas. The damage was more than physical. Withdrawn and moody, Wil began to drink heavily. His young family endured the wrath of his inner demons until he died aged 44, when my father was nine.
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Tags: Australia, War
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Saturday, April 24th, 2010
Tim Soutphommasane; 24/4/10; Ask The Philosopher
Is it disloyal to criticise aspects of Anzac Day because you believe it involves myth and ritualised militarism? Tomorrow our nation pauses to remember. At cenotaphs and shrines across our cities, at memorials in country towns, and indeed on the sandy ridges of Gallipoli, Australians will be greeting the dawn with solemn patriotism. Anzac Day is for many Australians our true and authentic national day. But for others it is a day that evokes ambivalence rather than pride. Why, some ask, should we lend such sacred importance to a day that glorifies death and war? What is there to be inspired by when the original landing at Gallipoli was a failure and a product of British imperial folly?
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Tags: Anzac Day, Australia, War
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Tuesday, April 13th, 2010
13/4/10
Citing a series of fatal malfunctions dating back to 1777, flag manufacturer Annin & Company announced Monday that it would be recalling all makes and models of its popular American flag from both foreign and domestic markets. Representatives from the nation’s leading flag producer claimed that as many as 143 million deaths in the past two centuries can be attributed directly to the faulty U.S. models, which have been utilised extensively since the 18th century in sectors as diverse as government, the military, and public education. “It has come to our attention that, due to the inherent risks and hazards it poses, the American flag is simply unfit for general use,” said Annin & Company president Ronald Burman, who confirmed that the number of flag-related deaths had noticeably spiked since 2003. “I would like to strongly urge all U.S. citizens: If you have an American flag hanging in your home or place of business, please discontinue using it immediately.”
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Tags: Global, Human Rights, USA, War
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Saturday, April 3rd, 2010
Henry Reynolds & Marilyn Lake, 3/4/10
Why do we accord the Anzac story priority over all other aspects of our history? The contemporary focus on Anzac has not been a constant feature of Australian historical thinking. There has been opposition to the militarism inherent in Anzac Day celebrations at various times since the 1920s and it intensified after the late 1950s. Most of the general histories written in the middle decades of the 20th century paid little attention to Anzac even though many of those historians had served in World War II. War history was seen as a specialist sub-discipline with little relevance to the mainstream of history. Australian history focused on what had happened here, not on what our soldiers had done overseas. The emphasis of history was, as we show, on political and social reform, on the egalitarian Australian ethos and the shaping of a vision of a new society. What we find remarkable is the sudden reinvigoration of Anzac and its effect on the writing of Australian history, contributing to its militarisation. Recently government has promoted the celebration of Anzac Day and the more general history of this country’s many and ongoing military engagements. Federal government departments and instrumentalities have been involved in unprecedented ways in the creation and dissemination of curriculum materials relating to war in a direct attempt to influence the content of classroom teaching.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, War
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Thursday, February 25th, 2010
25/2/10
The American people and the governing class have accepted that war has become a permanent condition. Protracted war has become a widely accepted part of our politics. – Andrew Bacevich, retired Army Col. (and now history professor at Boston University) whose son was killed in Iraq in 2007, on how eight years of war have affected American foreign policy. (Source: The Washington Post)
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Tags: USA, War
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Sunday, December 27th, 2009
Nicole Trian; 27/12/09; The Tiger Man of Vietnam; Frank Walker; (Hachette, $35)
In 1963, two years before the first Australian combat troops arrived in Vietnam, a young Australian soldier was seconded by the CIA to train a guerilla force of indigenous tribesmen to take on the growing threat of the Viet Cong. Barry Petersen was a 28-year-old erstwhile trainee of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, an untraceable body of spooks whose existence the Australian government had long denied. Fears that communism could threaten Australia if its spread were not stemmed in Vietnam were backed by the US government’s Domino noteory, one by one, south-east Asian nations would fall to the red scourge. Amid the political urgency, Petersen was assigned to Vietnam’s remote Central Highlands.
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Tags: Australia, USA, Vietnam, War
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Tuesday, December 15th, 2009
John Dear SJ; 15/12/09
President Obama’s speech last week in Oslo, where he received the Nobel Peace Prize, undermined the example of all the peacemakers of the ages. Standing before the world, he defended America’s military misadventures, dismissed non-violence and endorsed the just-war theory as the way to peace. The peacemakers Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. received particular attention. With a kind of rhetorical sleight of hand, Obama admired and scorned them at the same time, saying in effect: here are good men but, in our modern world, impractical men. With that, Obama undercut his own soaring campaign rhetoric espousing audacious hope. Hope withered on the moment. Here is yet another American president beating the drums of war in the name of peace. Nothing makes the heart sink like the notion, a very Orwellian nightmare: “the way to peace is through war.” His speech was a veritable call to despair. I leave it to others to comb through the speech’s details. I prefer to regard matters more broadly. Namely, Obama struck me as a modern-day Constantine who, in the fourth century, pulled off the unthinkable. He beguiled the early church into renouncing the nonviolence of Jesus. And he placed in the church’s hand something more “practical”–the pagan Cicero’s justifications for war.
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Tags: Terrorism, USA, War
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Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
21/10/09
Iran will never abandon its “legal and obvious” right to nuclear technology and will not curb uranium enrichment, Manouchehr Mottaki, the country’s foreign minister, has said. His statement was issued on Tuesday amid talks in Vienna that major powers hopes will lead to restraints on Iran’s atomic programme. Iran won a reprieve from harsher UN sanctions by agreeing in principle at a high-level meeting in Geneva on October 1 to send low-enriched uranium (LEU) to France and Russia for further enrichment into fuel for a reactor that makes cancer-care isotopes.
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Tags: Iran, Israel, UN, USA, War
Posted in Israel & Palestine, USA, United Nations, War | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 9th, 2009
9/9/09
Vietnamese and US officials have met in Hanoi to discuss further funding efforts to help those affected by the use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. Vietnam also called on the US to increase its monetary contribution at a fourth annual meeting on Tuesday, as well discussing ways to continue joint efforts to clean up areas that American forces contaminated during the war. US troops used the herbicide to destroy dense jungle in an effort to expose enemy forces during the conflict. Vietnam says that one to four million of its residents may have suffered serious health consequences because of the poisonous spray.
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Tags: Terrorism, USA, Vietnam, War
Posted in Arms, Health & Children, Human Rights, Terrorism, USA, Vietnam, War | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
Linda S. Heard; 8/9/09
War is dirty, bloody and indiscriminate. It is nothing more than officially sanctioned murder perpetrated as part of a strategic end game. There is nothing uplifting about man’s attempts to burn, dismember or torture his fellow kind. Can there be bravery in pressing a button at 30,000 feet in the foreknowledge that innocents – politely deemed ‘collateral damage’ – will die? Can the remote-controllers of a military drone be considered as honorable as those who fought hand-to-hand in muddy First World War trenches or on the beaches of Dunkirk? There is certainly nothing noble about fishing for vulnerable young recruits barely out of school, shoving guns in their hands, indoctrinating them that the enemy is less than human, and telling them that killing equates to heroism.
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Tags: Asia, Terrorism, USA, War
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Monday, August 31st, 2009
Patrick Walters; 31/8/9
The remains of the last two missing Australian servicemen from the Vietnam war are due to return to Australia today, nearly 39 years after their RAAF Canberra bomber crashed in remote jungle near the Laotian border. The families and RAAF 2 Squadron comrades of Flying Officer Michael Herbert and Pilot Officer Robert Carver attended a special farewell ceremony at Noi Bai airfield near Hanoi yesterday. Air force chief Mark Binskin, accompanied by parliamentary secretary for defence support Mike Kelly, paid their respects to the duo as their caskets were loaded onto an RAAF Hercules for the flight home. The Hercules will arrive at the Richmond RAAF base this morning, where the caskets will be received with full military honours by current and former members of 2 Squadron.
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Tags: Australia, Vietnam, War
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Sunday, August 23rd, 2009
23/8/09
The former US army officer found guilty of mass killings in the village of My Lai during the Vietnam war has finally made a public apology after more than 40 years. “I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry,” William Calley said. More than 20 soldiers were arrested over the killings and many charged with murder, but only Calley, a former lieutenant, was convicted.The exact toll of the massacre remains disputed but US estimates suggest that between 347 and 504 civilians were massacred on March 16, 1968.
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Tags: Human Rights, Terrorism, USA, Vietnam, War
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Saturday, July 25th, 2009
Phillip Adams; 25/7/09
The guilts that ate away at Robert McNamara in later life seem to have crept into the crypt. We conducted a thorough search of the rat- and bat-filled gloom of the ABC archives, that last resting place of deceased programs, to discover that something has been eating away at the two interviews I’d taped in recent years with McNamara – the former US defence secretary and architect of the Vietnam War, who died this month at 93. We wanted to replay them, but nary a trace. Not that McNamara would have minded their exhumation. US culture has a long tradition of breast-baring and beating, with US Christians preferring the public seeking of forgiveness to the privacy of the confessional. This can be seen in the televised pleadings of fornicating evangelists or adulterous governors – and in any episode of Oprah Winfrey’s show. Thus therapy becomes theatrical. And once McNamara started his self-flagellation it resembled the S&M whippings of an Opus Deist. He laid on the lash over the Vietnam War, admitting it had been misconceived, as was the Domino Theory he’d used to justify it. Yet I didn’t feel the depth of his regrets began to match the statistics. And McNamara lived his public and business lives statistically, from the Ford Motor Company to the World Bank via the Kennedy and Johnson White House. He loved statistics to death.
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Tags: Australia, USA, Vietnam, War
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Sunday, July 19th, 2009
Pauline Manley; Bondi Junction; 19/7/09
The horror! Australian soldiers drag corpses through a village as traumatised children look on (“Phantom force secrets”, The Sun-Herald, July 12). So we are the good guys, are we? The whistleblower, Don Tate, wants the truth to come out, not to serve justice but to ensure his mates get pensions. Against a majestic vista, head held high, medals shiny on his chest, he matter-of-factly states that “there are no bodies left to find”. That is because the bodies not attached to bumper bars were blown up. Recently, Mark Latham was universally castigated for daring to insult the armed forces. I’m with you, Mark. On Anzac Day I remember the conscientious objectors: those people who will not kill without absolute need. The Vietnam War was a travesty and yet we marched into Iraq. Some of those stories have already emerged: torture, sexual humiliation, wanton destruction of resources, reckless mutilation of children. This is not OK. It is not sufficient to say you were following orders. To stop war, people need to stop joining the military, stop invading sovereign states and stop making excuses. I do not want to pay your mates’ pensions, Mr Tate.
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Tags: Australia, Vietnam, War
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Friday, June 26th, 2009
Jake Lynch; 26/6/09
Early this year was a turning point in America’s relations with the rest of the world, and not just because Team Obama took over. What tells us more about the underlying dynamics of global conflict is that the US switched, at some point following the inauguration, from being a country usually at peace to one usually at war. The modern era of American war fighting started with what President Franklin Roosevelt called the “date of infamy”: Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941, which brought GIs into World War II. To this point, 811 months have passed, and the US has now spent 406 of those at war. That doesn’t count the innumerable logistical efforts, starting with the Berlin airlift, clandestine operations and proxy wars – even the odd peacekeeping mission.
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Tags: USA, War
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