Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

Marilyn, a person who advocates a particular idea, concept, theory or ideology zealously, is an ideologue. I understand ideological zealots pushing their ideals against reality and common sense, along with their desperate need to accuse others of their obvious negative reality. Luckily they fail most of the time as their arguments are as flimsy as their experienced knowledge, you fit the bill well.

Marilyn Shepherd: "Those who refuse to fight and kill are the heroes, not those who want to kill and maim with the bogus intent of "bringing democracy", this so-called democracy went to two world wars for England and still maintained the White Australia policy until 1972.”

Your emotional hypocrisy seems without limits, you abuse and insult those who have served, laud your own relative for his service and then turn round saying only those who refuse to serve, are hero's. I admit there's those who want to kill and maim, but they are ideologists, just check out religion for all the evidence you need for this or any other time of history. You fervently support and encourage those whose beliefs use and condone cultural/domestic violence to come to this country, demanding they be allowed to practise and push onto the community the same suppressive culture, yet try to state you are against violence.

It was the free thinking responsible people who changed things in the 1960's-70's, consisting of those who served and their families who didn't want to see any more suffering. Plus the young who saw first hand the effect war had on their families. Most of the young were free from ideology at that time, otherwise the referendums and law changes wouldn't have got up. Ideology is about irrational control, something you're completely familiar with Marylin.

Marylin Shepherd: “It is incumbent on those who disapprove to do it noisily instead of pretending there is honour in wars and those who go to war.”

You really know nothing of those who served, 99% I have known never see honour in war. But those who are forced to go, are very honourable and loyal to family and country. The depth of their fear didn't stop them being prepared to become a sacrifice, in the hope their families could survive.

I'm all for not sending troops to anywhere, except for our own region and when asked by the people. I wonder how your viewers would be accepted Marylin, back in the 1940's when Japan was moving to take over Australia, or your abuse and fervent disdain for returning soldiers after WW2. Maybe next ANZAC day, you should carry a banner to the dawn and 11am services stating, there are no hero's or honourable people named on this memorial or attending the service.

Marilyn Shepherd: "You seem to think I hate Jews when absolutely nothing could be further from the truth."

I don't know who you hate, and my care factor is even less. I never accused you of hating anyone.

Personally, I don't really see much anti-Semitism (granted I'm not Jewish). Apart from a chunk of Arabs (who hate Jews), I see anti-Semitism in the west along side anti-Irish, anti-Pole, anti-Italian etc. All of these groups have become so integrated into "western" society the contradictions of hating these group or that are ridiculous.

Up until about two decades ago it wasn't unusual for, say, finance, law, and membership only clubs to be divided along cultural-religious lines. A changing and more competitive world pretty well has seen that last vestige of "old school class" off. When I see some yahoo on TV with a swastika tattooed on his neck (quoting Adolf), I don't picture him in the pen fighting off marauding Jewish accountants over at the shower block.

No, you appear to be a serial underdog supporter. A psychological response found in the majority of people (they think of themselves as such). How do people think something absurd as wrestling become the multi-billion dollar industry it is?

Geoff Pahoff: "Group memory has been replaced by group amnesia. The lessons of WW2 about racism, modern war mass killing and genocide are forgotten. The old monsters thought long dead are raised. The evil ghosts are stalking the world again. That kid scares me more than all the acts of the terrorists because it's a sign that the terrorists and their western accomplices are winning."

What scares me is people who have the attitude you have, no care for anyone but your agenda. Nothing that happened in the last century or this one is any different than any other century, it all boils down to ideology, which is the cause of all wars and in the main, religious ideology. Genocide is proudly displayed in the bibles and since has been carried out by every religious institution against those who differ in their outlook on life, throughout history.

This is Australia Geoff, every religion has been involved in the genocide of our indigenous, including Jews, as well as indigenous from all round the world. I hate war as I've experienced it first hand, but I deeply respect the actions of my peers and forebears who gave their lives and minds to stop war. Even if it was misguided, they require thousands of times more respect than the words and thoughts of those who do all in their power to belittle them, abuse their sacrifice and certainly are not worthy to be called Australian, just bludgers on the nation.

I will not respond to your point about trauma, Anthony. I do not understand it at all. Therefore there is nothing I can usefully say beyond that I have obviously missed your point by more than a Wobbly's red card on May Day.

Your other point? My few modest posts on this thread have all been about loss of memory on a huge and terrifying scale. In fact it is the full blooded attack on memory, that is the quickly becoming the defining feature of our age, that scares me much more than any terrorists' bombs.

Last night I kind of watched Q&A, as you do. One incident caught my attention like being slapped with a live fish. A young student type, barely out of nappies, asked a "question" that, with a little prodding, went something like this:

" How does genocide in the twentieth century [of the Jews] justify genocide [of the Palestinians] in the twenty-first century?"

Not long ago, anyone who said anything like that would have been automatically dismissed for what they were. Some kind of dribbling lunatic not to be taken seriously. Some kind of fanatic or mental defective, probably spiteful or even hateful, best ignored. Probably there is a history of particularly grubby criminal behaviour. Leave the diagnosis, and treatment, to the experts.

But not this kid. He (or was it a she? Strangely I can't remember) was fresh faced, smiling and apparently earnest. The kid was smug and obviously pleased with himself when she sat down. Incredibly, a portion of the audience applauded.

Naturally a kid that young cannot be expected to have a memory reach longer than who has the ID card let alone from before she was born. That is why we invest so much in the group memory. Teachers, academics, writers, spiritual leaders, politicians, reporters, journalists, commentators, thinkers, community leaders. It's called getting the very basics right. You know. Like truth.

For a kid like that to say what she did can only mean she neither knows or perhaps even cares about what she is talking about or even about the meaning of the words she uses. She has been badly let down by people who should know better and the rest of us have lost our investment. Group memory has been replaced by group amnesia. The lessons of WW2 about racism, modern war mass killing and genocide are forgotten. The old monsters thought long dead are raised. The evil ghosts are stalking the world again. That kid scares me more than all the acts of the terrorists because it's a sign that the terrorists and their western accomplices are winning.

So regretfully, Anthony, I must reject your allegation that I am off-topic on this thread. I wish I was. It hurts that I'm right on-topic.

Not guilty.

I have read the thread on ANZAC Day and Australian identity with interest up to the point where those diarists unable to contain their originary trauma commenced dragging up issues totally unrelated to the thread. Specifically, Geoff, whose capacity to play the trauma game is astonishing and clear evidence of what I mean by trauma repetition compulsion. The game consists of a crude form of goading until such time as any divergent voice can be constructed into the role of the anti-semite whereupon he cries foul.

Psychological trauma is fascinating to those in its grip but the trauma of others is of little interest to those who have made the (often immense) effort to heal themselves. Geoff thinks that it is someone's job to heal his trauma. Well, it ain't like that mate. That is your job and yours alone. Why not do it?

But back to the thread: the meaning of ANZAC Day and how it is commemorated is probably the most significant site at which Australian identity can be contested. For years I was repulsed by the way that reactionary forces within the RSL had captured the meaning of the day and turned it into what appeared to me to be a celebration of war. That was most of my youth.

I approved of the infamous feminist attack on the Cenotaph (sometime in the 1970's?) in commemoration of the women and children who had been raped and maimed by men in war. I was aghast at Howard's capture of the day, the way the various sporting bodies (AFL, NRL) have tied gladiatorial sport to the day and the way crowds of largely historically ignorant "Aussie Aussie Aussie" oicks started descending on Gallipoli for the day. One wonders what the memorial poem by Attaturk meant to them. One cringes in front of Turkish people at the thought of crowds of slobbering drunks celebrating Australia's identity every year by puking on each other and singing Johnny Farnham songs.

I could go on.

I am however very proud of those diggers who urged me to join the peace movement. Proud of my family history of non-conformist conscientious objection and radical socialist activism. Proud of many other things about the way that ANZAC Day is treated by Australians not least of all the army of historians who've done superb work to validate the significance of the day in our efforts to create a peace loving nation.

The best anti-war slogan I ever saw was an old one of the Wobblies:

"A bayonet is a weapon with a member of the working class on either end".

I think that the message there is generalisable.

Paul Walter: "I should mention that I don't to subcribe to Holocaust denial, altho am critical (nauseated?) of the way the Zionists have milked the Holocaust to strengthen their emotion-based claim to Palestine."

This statement  has about the same moral tenor as:

"I should mention that I don't to subcribe to rape as such, nor do I agree with those who say that all allegations of rape are false, altho am critical (nauseated?) of the way women and the Feminists have milked rape to strengthen their emotion-based claim that women should be free from fear of attack, whether indoors or outdoors."

... only with the volume turned up a thousand fold.

Marilyn Shepherd: "Jews actually don't get mentioned in Bacque's book but their disgusting treatment at the hands of the allies after WW11 is well documented by MacDonogh."

So Jews were badly treated? And by the allies? The very same allies that now protect Israel beyond "sanity"? The "Jews" being the very same people who play up atrocities for all they're worth, "and more".

I think someone, somewhere, lost the script.

It's too late, Trevor. We have forgotten.

We should call those who served in the trenches that their job is not over, that their country needs them again, not as warriors, but as educators and truth-tellers.

Or, we could ask the aborigines and refugees. Unfortunately, they have little credibility.

Pardon me, Eliot, but are you not a little naive, or possibly just selective, in turn, as to your sources.

Nizcor is a Zionist site.

There is a vested interest, for these, in maintaining sympathy for Israel, in this case through the boostering of Holocaust sympathy propaganda?

And what of McDonough and others who also claim that conditions in Europe were whitewashed, in the interests of "history from the victors" viewpoint?

I should mention that I don't to subcribe to Holocaust denial, altho am critical (nauseated?) of the way the Zionists have milked the Holocaust to strengthen their emotion- based claim to Palestine.

But on the basis of my reading of Solzhenitsyn's"Gulag Archipelgo" alone, the slaughter in Europe by no means stopped on VE day and I think its fair to say that the Axis powers would have suffered even worse in subsequent retribution, justifiably or other wise, had the Western Allies not woken up to the fact that Germans would have to be won over, to provide a bulwark against the Soviets.

Marilyn Shepherd: “It's all an abomination and ANZAC day makes me puke - they stand and bleat "lest we forget" blah, blah, blah, while people who have done us no harm are blasted to bits and we still lock up the refugees who escaped the hells we have created.”

Marilyn, you're in the wrong country, you need to be in a more fervent ideological environment so you can promote your agenda of disharmony and hate for anything Australian.

I doubt you'd ever understand how those who fought for this country, no matter the reason, feel about violence. In my experience they are the ones who abhor violence and the outcomes of ideological conflicts. When you've experienced it first hand and can see how wrong the ideology behind it is, you never want it to happen again.

Unlike you, I don't denigrate my country, nor those who gave their lives for people like you, who've made a career out of running Australians down. Anzac day returns memories of my grand fathers, uncles, Father and the friends I made in the Navy and RSLA. We don't glorify war, Marilyn, we remember it's futility and our loses. We do celebrate those who gave their lives for their mates and the efforts we all put in. But like all programmed ideologists, it's something you'd never understand.

Some of my mob, didn't even have the vote, but in the services they were all equal and no matter how they may have thought, when it came to protecting Australia, they did it. Sadly you want to destroy that heritage and give the country away, along with any sane future we could have.

James Bacque outlines the murder of between 9 and 13.7 million German civilian by the lovey allies after WW11.   The Australians served in the British quarter starving orphans to death, and children and forcibly evicting Germans to Berlin where Bacque shows that 6 million of 15 million people expelled under the Morgenthau plan have just disappeared and even in 1997 they had not been declared dead.

The gentle Czechs slashed the achilles tendons of the German women and raped them until they died, the Russians raped any female between 8 - 90, the US and all the others were not better.

This was a post war crime of mammoth proportions devised in the US by Henry Morgenthau and carried out under the Potsdam agreement of 1944 by Dwight Eisenhower who declared that German soldiers did not come under the Geneva conventions and simply starved them to death.

What is monstrous is that this crime from 1946-50 was happening while the US and UK were carrying on the bogus Nuremberg trials and in 1948 the terrorist gangs in Palestine did the same thing - they expelled 800,000 or 80% of the Palestinian population and sent propaganda machines to Europe to claim the unarmed Palestinian farmers were "trying to push them into the sea', the UN pictures taken while they stood around and watched show that it was the Palestinians pushed into the sea.

The true crimes of the west in Europe after WW11 though have scarcely ever been examined as we pretend we are the good guys.

It's all an abomination and ANZAC day makes me puke - they stand and bleat "lest we forget" blah, blah, blah, while people who have done us no harm are blasted to bits and we still lock up the refugees who escaped the hells we have created.

Humbug - listen to Eric Bogle's No Man's Land or It's as if they know where he describes the killing of the horses of the lighthorse men, or The band played Walzing Matilda, Or Never again, remember or Other people's children and if you can stomach those have a crack at I was only 19 and Safe behind the wire, the death of an agent orange campaigner who shot his brains out in "a rust red commodore".

I should add that Bacque's book makes that other one, After the Reich, look like a Mary Poppins picnic tale.

I must admit I needed Fiona's comment for a final penny-drop, as to what Richard Tonkin was really getting at, which is surprising since I was thinking last night watching what foolish exercises these wars are, as one tries to work thru the great glob of treacly poli-speak to ponder the real motives involved as to some thing like the current situation in Afghanistan.

Of course, since last night we have had Obama all but come clean, with today's statement concerning the real issue for them: teetering Pakistan, previously covert under the euphemisms Afghanistan and Taliban (ironically, examples of original US creations).

Of course, it's a mess the current era finds itself saddled with due to previous mistakes and its dimensions go way beyond just Afghanistan, or even if inclusion with Pakistanis allowed. The latest reports from Iraq and Lebanon, and superficially unrelated but actually quite connected issues like the Recession, were touched on by Obama: as he said, he has two wars and an economic system on the blink to deal with.

So all the more spin must be generated to justify Quixotic current actions against a backdrop of vested interests that must to be not offended, for fear of their reach and spite.

Still more resources are thus to be wasted cleaning the messes created thru the cleaning of yet earlier messes, often for the most base of reasons, while a sceptical, disempowered and often starving world looks on, as the example of the Iraqi on the news tonight noting that years after the arrival of the greatest of current world powers, there is still no more than a skerrick of electricity in a place still racked by bombs, poverty and communal strife.

"Mission accomplished", indeed!

Same with the recession. All those $trillions wasted propping up thieves, so that the problems they have created are not made even worse than they are for everyone else, because the realities of power, patronage and influence maintain a system based on war and poverty, so that the global poor must suffer worse than ever, while the few really responsible walk away with multi million bonuses for the ruin they have bought down on so many others.

My daughter attended the national folkie's fest in Canberra recently.  To my delight she met many other men and women my age who she described as "just like you".  Hmmm. She was stunned and moved by Eric Bogle's rendition of his own anthemic anti-war song.  And the fact that the audience sang along on some of the chorus like it was a hymn.

It is a hymn.

We have learnt about war. We haven't forgotten. The peace movement has  ensured that no-one died in vain by teaching our children well. 

My induction into the peace movement was by diggers.  They were active moratoriumists and offered the support necessary for a young bloke to take part. 

The real lesson here is that it never will ever again be possible to send masses of soldiers to die in pointless wars.  It is an unpopular business these days.

Rudd's just announced.  Will write more later.

A modest war monument between paddocks and a cattle yard is all that is left of the Tableland town of Evelyn Scrubs - but every Anzac Day the sun rises on a large crowd there.

Between the choruses of kookaburras, about 200 people stood silently on Saturday as the Last Post rang out across farming land once worked by a small community that sent 41 men to World War II.

Many did not make it home.

All over Far North Queensland on ANZAC day small communities stop to remember the fallen. It is a chance for us to reflect on past sacrifices. Sacrifices that have enabled us to live in freedom today.

It is a reminder to the young of the high price and self sacrifice our fathers and their fathers paid. We would all be better off if we valued self sacrifice more than greed. If we remembered our war heroes as well as our football heroes.

Richard, yes I agree with what you say.

If we were genuine about our defence, DEFENCE, look it up in a dictionary, we would go Swiss.

But it is costly. Instead we allow US profits in trade to pay for their bases all around the world. That way, we can say they are the guilty. We know how to get people to torture others. It inevitably gets out. It never actually achieves the stated objective, but what is the true objective of this conditioning? Why do we create killers out of our special forces?  What happens to them when they are released from sevice?

The US armed forces are a form of dole, soaking off unemployed and leaving jobs for others to fill. These people frequently have the highest aspirations. They perform under fire. Rarely are they defending anything worth the effort. Their sacrifice is always in vain. Vanity is one reason for armed forces. Such a waste. If we were to be invaded, it would be by the USA or the Chinese. Next century it might be the Indians. What happened to Harold Holt? Whitlam is still around. He wasn't disappeared. There are costs for allowing gangsters to control our largest ally. Training our young people to participate in the armed forces is not a bad thing, but intervening in small countries as an adjunct to the USA is not a foreign policy. But it has not changed. Nor will we become a Republic.

The whole point of ANZAC Day is that we should not forget that sending our children off to die and to kill in a foreign war, often led by donkeys, who care nothing for their allies, is a stupid tragedy. But we keep doing it. That is obscene.

Richard, I went to the Dawn Service in Cairns. I found it to be a moving ceremony - it is a time for us to reflect on the real costs of war and to pay homage to those who have paid the ultimate price and to their families.

Politicians often send our soldiers off to war for the wrong reasons. If we have an objection to war we should focus on the politicians, not the soldiers.

Many of the Vietnam veterans are still struggling with the way some in the Australian population treated them on their return, Soldiers often in their late teens or early twenties have no voice in which wars Australia decides to fight.

In the Vietnam war many were forced to go - it was a conscripted army. No wonder so many were on the streets protesting, where are they today?

They have done some of the most horrible tasks imaginable and often pay the price for the rest of their lives. Their families also suffer. What is wrong with setting aside a day to remember the sacrifices that have been made to protect our country?

Respect the soldiers and protest against the politicians.

Soldiers forge strong bonds in combat and some like to meet up once a year on ANZAC day. They drink and party. I guess they are a reflection of our society.

In a sense I understand Alga's response.

He's been given a fairly hostile reception elsewhere when playing it straight and is now reacting. This is what goes wrong when middle of the roaders are lumped in with calculating right wingers - the beginnings of  an alienation in these created by those who should know better, when trying to win dificult arguments, whereby progressives (albeit for the best of reasons, usually) only strengthen the hand of the reactionaries by demanding too much, too quick of the undecided.

But Richard's was a very good thread opener Alga: you have missed its point entirely. We have to know what we are fighting for. "My country right or wrong" is no longer good enough. It's uncritical nature allows too easily , a sort of slippery slope invitatons for governments, that has its final, irreversible culmination in regimes like the German one of WW2.

Fortunately Richard perhaps understands a little better also by going against a trend of elitist vitriol, although I urge him to retain patience and good faith for the same reasons as I will shortly offer Alga.

Alga, please don't react out of frustration at the lack of comprehension elsewhere. You may lose sight of people  and ideas of the kind most compatible with your own spirit.

Richard:  "What will be the psychological technique applied to exonerate Americans from the leaked CIA memos and the declassification of the damning photos, some of which are of torture of Afghans?"

Perhaps the same technique that was used to bury Australian war crimes during our own first military expedition abroad as a nation:

 “It seems a cruel thing to ride up to a farmhouse and give the inmates, always women and children, ten minutes to clear out what personal effects they can get together and then to set fire to the place,” wrote another officer from Sydney, “but when their husbands and brothers are up on the hills behind sniping at us, what else can you expect?”

In any case, most soldiers enjoyed looting and burning. “The best part of this game is sacking the houses,” confessed Lieutenant Douglas Rich from Queensland, “ although we poor devils of officers don’t get much of the fun as in most cases it is forbidden and we have to keep the men back.”

That was the Boer war. So, to cover that up, we wrote a whole lot of inane blather about our heroics at Gallipoli and celebrate that, instead.

Anyone can get on their high horse...

Hijacking ANZAC day trying to make those who served and those who died for this country feel guilty is obscene, particularly as the author seems to have no idea what Anzac day really represents to those remaining from any conflict.

Veterans do get pissed off when services are hijacked by elitists with agenda's and I'm sure if Richard ever sat down and asked veterans on other than ANZAC or Long Tan day how they saw it, he may be surprised at their replies, but still probably couldn't understand.

 Dumping ANZAC day in with the barbarity of the USA, who don't celebrate or recognise our days of remembrance, is disgusting and shows someone who has no empathy or understanding.

At our small country dawn service, we concentrate on remembering the soldiers who fought and died, and the dwindling number of our mates. Our service didn't make us feel sick, we understand how stupid the ruling elitists are and how they care little for anyone but themselves and their opinions. We are there for our mates and relatives we never got to meet, or who lost their sons, because of elitists and their ideological wars. It also allows our community to show their appreciation, not belittle their sometimes involuntary efforts.

We did experience one sordid occasion during the service as we stood in the dark and pouring rain, the local parson was asked to say a few words. There was an audible groan from veterans when his first words were, “oh god of love and peace”, then went on babbling about how god was looking after the dead and how he would give us all salvation. You may understand why he was completely ignored at the gunfire breakfast and left before eating.