War memorials
War and Capitalism is the Science of Euphemism. No photos of mutilated soldiers were printed, only the clear enrollment faces. People did not expect big casualties. The Boer War had few Australian casualties.
Like shearers, soldiers said: "We'll be home for Xmas". If people at home knew the truth, recruiting would collapse. Strict Military Censorship enforced no "bad news". Truth of Gallipoli still not told, .e.g. "Uncensored Dardanelles" by Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett.
Huge casualties Pozieres Village, France, July 1916 — 23,000 killed in seven weeks. The Sydney Mail printed each photo. Recruiting fell right away. Conscription referendum then forced on the people. Leaders have no idea of improvement in war slaughtering technology e.g. accurate, continuous, artillery firing high explosive shells. "Unknown soldier" on a grave meant "blown to pieces" — 54% of all casualties from artillery shells. Relatives didn't know and still don't know.
Wentworth Falls, NSW
Constitution and the republic
A Republic is a government in which supreme power is held by the citizens. Australia achieved this status in 1920. Politicians and the Judiciary have kept this fact to themselves to retain power.
Despite what Republicans or Monarchists may publicly state, the fact remains that Australia had shed its "Colony" status by January 10th 1920, and thus according to the principles of international law, became an independent nation in its own right with total extinguishment of British intervention by the Queen, Privy Council or Parliament from that day forth!
This is the birth date of the nation or republic of Australia as recognised by the legal department of the United Nations, it is of course the date that the League of Nations was formed with the sovereign nation of Australia as one of the founding members.
Further recognition of our republic status occurred when Sir Joseph Cook became the Australian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom on November 11th 1921, by accepting his credentials the UK recognised the sovereignty of Australia.
It is also time to inform the people that the Australia Act of 1986 "that severed the ties to the Monarchy" was about six decades after the event. What actually occurred in 1986 was that the people of Australia had their common law protection of Magna Carta and Bill of Rights removed.
Geelong
[Abridged.]
Regional Forest Agreement Bill
I responded to the recent Senate inquiry and forwarded my submission well before the deadline. I requested time to address the committee and waited keenly for a response that never occurred. I spoke to the chairperson on the second day of the hearing requesting that I would not accept not being heard on such an important issue as 20 year licences to clear-fell public native forests Australia wide!
They allocated me time to speak at the end of the two-day hearing and I did so with photographic evidence of the massive destruction of what was once a diverse ecosystem. I showed the evidence of creek elimination, tons of timber wastage every hectare, weed invasion, soil erosion and contamination, worthless road construction and water pollution.
I pointed at the ridicule of how if this legislation allowed this type of devastation to continue with all legal and environmental control gone from public access completely.
Two days to decide on the future of Australia's publicly owned native forest. When will we they realise that what we are doing is so short-sighted. Thatcherism is long gone in Europe and here we are 10 years behind.
Melbourne
[Abridged.]
Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism
A 22% rise in anti-Semitism or any type of social chauvinism is indeed a worrying trend (if one can actually quantify bigotry) as pointed out by both Norman Taylor (GLW #346) and Bill Fisher (GLW #348). However, the views of both are somewhat confused on the issue of anti-Semitism — particularly when related to the Palestine/Israel conflict. What struck me in both is a conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism (something also present in the original source of the statistics).
On one hand we have Norman Taylor citing intransigence from the Israeli right as a source of growing resentment. To be sure, it is a source, but for the most part a source of anti-Zionist sentiments from both Palestinians and the Israeli left. On the other hand we have Bill Fisher whose letter seems a touch ill conceived, citing ignorance about Israel as a major contributor to anti-Semitism.
Need we be reminded that the Palestinians are the victims of Zionist colonisation (and continue to be so), just as the East Timorese suffer under prolonged occupation by Indonesia. At this very moment Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza are lining up to be let into Israel as cheap, casual labour, precisely because they are Palestinian; hence their ethnicity has become for all intents and purposes a social relation of production and thus, exploitation (a situation that existed even during the British mandate).
A critique of racism cannot merely rest on the facade of bourgeois moralism (as Fisher's letter does) but like all problems, needs to be addressed on the social and political-economic level.
For example, how did Israel "survive" 50 years in the supposedly hostile and fanatical Middle East? They survived because Zionist colonialism relied on both capitalism and the great capitalist powers of the time (Britain and the United States) to enable the exploitation of Arab and Jewish workers.
The issue of religious intolerance needs to be viewed in the same way — as Marx noted in his pamphlet On the Jewish Question. Racism and/or religious intolerance are products of specific historical conditions — that is, to paraphrase Marx, no one will be emancipated until society is emancipated from capitalism and all its social relations in reality, not fantasy (as religion would have it).
Let us not mistake the building of a nation(-state) as the path to freedom for any group for it has normally meant the oppression of another.
Scarborough WA
Kosovo and history
Up until the war in Bosnia, I subscribed to Â鶹´«Ã½. There was one journalist who constantly wrote what was so obviously Croatian propaganda, that I could take no more and did not renew my subscription.
I did, however, after a period, start buying the paper from Melbourne street sellers. Last Friday I got a copy in the mall from a young man, only to find a full-page story on Kosovo, it was not only propaganda for the Albanians, but was historically very wrong!
How can Michael Karadjis write of "illegal occupation" when Kosovo is Serb territory and has been for well over a thousand years? Kosovo is not for liberating; can any of the large ethnic groups in Australia claim to liberate part of Australia? He calls Milosevic's Serb forces Fascist. I know the Serbs fought against Hitler's fascists, all the others in the Balkans were on the Nazi-fascist Hitler's side.
In 1389 the Serbs were dying in Kosovo, defending their lands from invasions by Ottoman forces. If the US-backed NATO forces go into Kosovo, I hope the Serbs will fight again. Now that's what I call even-handed.
As a shop steward in the metal workers union, I was constantly told what I now tell your journalist, "get your facts right".
St Albans Vic
Labor and East Timor
Mr Laurie Brereton, opposition spokesperson for foreign affairs, has suddenly discovered that the policies of Australia's past leaders and governments on Indonesia's invasion of East Timor were reprehensible.
Given sufficient time, Mr Brereton might even discover that the policies of past and present state and territory governments were just as reprehensible, and, in most cases, still are.
East Timor does not need any plebiscite on autonomy, self-determination or independence, it needs a complete withdrawal of the occupying troops and their replacement with United Nations forces to oversee the peaceful restoration of an independent nation.
Alawa NT
Lenin and power
I recently subscribed to GLW and was impressed by its genuinely dissenting reportage of significant current events. However, the section devoted to the Resistance organisation contained numerous opinions I consider highly contentious, particularly those expressed in Zanny Begg's portrayal of Vladimir Lenin.
Although the prevalent view of Lenin as the villainous author of "Soviet" totalitarianism is obviously defamatory, to suggest that his "leadership" of the 1917 revolution was in any way democratic is no less a misrepresentation of history.
As an adherent to the Marxist ideal of "dictatorship of the proletariat", Lenin's primary objective was the conquest and concentration of state power, an ambition he achieved by means wholly inconsistent with the libertarian rhetoric he frequently espoused.
To arrive at this conclusion one need only consider the Bolsheviks' decimation of the fledgling Russian anarchist movement, their brutal suppression of the Ukrainian Makhnovschina and Kronstadt Sailors rebellion, and the eventual reduction of the original workers' and peasants' soviets to mere instruments of authoritarian administration.
Indeed, unless one is prepared to revert to the archaic conception of governing bodies as the legitimate representatives of the "general will", there would appear to be no place in any "democratic tradition" for Lenin and his exclusive, centralist approach to revolution.
I am disturbed by the tendency among members of the radical left to selectively ignore historical fact in their search for suitable role models. One would be better advised to reconsider the works of thinkers such as Godwin, Kropotkin, Murray Bookchin and the Situationists as more credible sources of inspiration.
Darlington WA
[Abridged.]