Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating is definitely one of the great Australians. He had a tremendous vision for aboriginal australia, and was a reforming and inspirational leader with a brilliant mind and an extraodinary wit - last year I laughed for a week when he described the soon to be ex-PM John Howard as a "dessicated coconut" and the soon to be ex-treasurer Peter Costello as "all tip and no iceberg". I applauded his lacerating comments about millionaires in"tupperware boats" racing around Sydney Harbour "at the expense of everyone else's quiet enjoyment.Every small boat is capsized by it and now they've been given a signal that 30 or 40 knots is really quite slow, you can do a couple of hundred..." Yesterday at a book launch, he made some more typically uncompromising comments, this time about Gallipoli, comments that are sure to enrage the shock jocks and typical talkback radio callers. Cant wait to read the tantrums they'll probably ellicit from the ghastly Miranda Divine and the tedious Gerard Henderson, right wing whingers who both write in the Sydney Morning Herald. Anyway this is what Keating is reported to have said about Australias involvement at Gallipoli
"Dragged into service by the imperial government in an ill-conceived and poorly-executed campaign, we were cut to ribbons and dispatched" He added he was disappointed some Australians still held the view Australia was "born again or even redeemed" at Gallipoli, and that those who visited there on Anzac Day were "misguided.An utter and complete nonsense," he said.
If ever there was a sacred cow of Australian cultural history, this would have to be it, and now Keatings put a hand on it, like he put his hand on the Queens arse when she was here a few years back, provoking an indignant moral outrage from royalists and Howard groupies. Already our current PM Kevin Rudd has announced Keating is "absolutely 100% wrong. I, for one, as prime minister of the country am absolutely proud of it.''
Personally I find this Anzac thing nauseating. To me every time we remember Anzac we teach and relearn the completely opposite lesson from the one we should be learning from it - it should be about what a shocking blunder that campaign was, and how ghastly and inglorious and degrading war is, and what an apalling failure it is when so called leaders allow wars to happen. Instead we glorify the war, we celebrate the battles at Lone Pine and Chunuk Bair and and tell ourselves all those wonderful brave young men who died were heroes, we sing hymns to the Christian God of Love and Peace and Turning the other Cheek, and engage in an hysterical orgy of drum beating flag waving and whipping up of nationalistic fervour. Isnt it sickening how the political masters of history have buried one of their greatest disasters in a cloak of glory and triumph? And how they are still doing it right now in Iraq? And soon it will be Afghanistan where next theyll proclaim Victory.
Those brave young men who went and died there so horribly and so far from home and for something that had absolutely nothing to do with them and their lives in Australia were victims of a political agenda, and were sadly blinded by the jingoism and the hysterical nationalism that politicians like to use to dog whistle the working class into line. When is it ever going to end?
Well there is one small ray of hope - or maybe I am clutching at straws - but read this quote from a speech made in 2002, just as the horror of Iraq was about to commence at the hand of George Bush, and see if it excites you a little, like it did me, when I realised who said it:
"I kn0w that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States or his neighbours; the Iraqi economy is a shambles; that the Iraqi military is a fraction of its former strength and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until in the way of all petty dictators he falls away into the dustbin of history.
I know that even a succesful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, encourage the worst rather than the best impulses of the Arab world and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars, I'm opposed to dumb wars"
Next week with a little luck, the Senator from Illinois who made such a wise prediction will be the next President of the US. Barrack Obama.
