It's time for Australia to face up to its dark military past and present
Posted on March 5, 2014 July 3, 2019
My weekly Guardian column is published today:
Official, government-mandated story telling should be treated with suspicion. How else to to separate the truth from hagiograhy?
Australian prime minister Tony Abbott was in Darwin last week-end to… attend a welcome home ceremony… for soldiers who fought in Afghanistan. "Australians don't fight to conquer", he said in a voice filled with emotion. "We fight to help, to build and to serve. So yes, it was worth it. The price was high but the cause was great and the success has been sufficient."
Abbott announced that a national day of commemoration for the Afghan war will be held for the first time on 21 March 2015. It's hard to imagine that this occasion will be anything other than a chance for the state to praise the soldiers who fought in the war, rather than any serious examination of… our legacy in Uruzgan province, where 40 men died during our deployment and 261 were seriously wounded. Around 400 "military personnel" remain in the country.
On the ground in Afghanistan, the evidence for any long-lasting and positive legacy is… lacking, with many infrastructure projects now abandoned. Britain faces a… similar desultory result… in the Helmand province.
The coming years will see plenty of celebration and reflection on the contribution of Australia (and Britain) to countless conflicts since the first world war. Author Thomas Keneally… recently said… he hoped that "no one says "˜Australia was born at Gallipoli'. Australia was born in 1901, and there needs to be a certain amount of de-mythologising. Let's hope the historians win out over the politicians, who strike me as fairly jingoistic."
Keneally was correct to call for a rational recollection of the horrors of war ("we let them down when they came back") though it's arguable whether Indigenous Australians would agree the country started in 1901. Aboriginal people already feel ignored by official historians, as shown in John Pilger's documentary… Utopia,… when he visits the Australian War Memorial in Canberra and finds no recognition of Aboriginal involvement in… our foreign or local, frontier wars.
Ask any soldier about the brutality of war – and I've spoken to many in Afghanistan – and few of them idealise the battle. Yes, tales of heroism are guaranteed and the latest Hollywood blockbuster… Lone Survivor… proves that there' s still an appetite for an Afghan war movie without any Afghans. But the toll of post-traumatic stress, mental health problems, lost limbs and suicide,… now an epidemic… amongst returning US war veterans, cannot be ignored. Moreover, far too often in the western consciousness local, ethnic voices are diminished or ignored.
War isn't glorious or beautiful but messy, bloody and destructive. Victory isn't clean or pretty, a fact that any objective observer will recognise when assessing the the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, two wars with a very questionable outcome (an indisputable victory would perhaps embolden Canberra, London and Washington to embark on yet more colonial adventures). Instead, as… Dirty Wars author Jeremy Scahill… explains, the Obama administration now prefers covert assassination squads and drones to defang an unseen enemy.
So how should we, as a nation, remember the fallen and living, the disabled and broken, both our own victims and the ones we've created in foreign lands?
The job of governments who send men and women into battle is to insulate the public from the bloody mission, but our focus surely must be on avoiding futile and costly foreign wars for the sake of backing our bigger allies. I hope for a day when an Australian prime minister, along with both major sides of the political divide, have the moral fortitude to reject an American request for soldiers or grunt. The world is not designed to be conquered by newest weapons, fastest satellites, deadliest missiles and… metadata-acquired intelligence.
James Brown, a former Australian army officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, argues in his new book… Anzac's Long Shadow… that the lack of skeptical thinking, and excessive spending on first world war commemorations, is "creating a culture in which critical analysis is rare and difficult. That is very dangerous for a military that should be adapting to face new threats." He's right, to a point. And yet his vision remains narrow, as Brown then argues that, "it is bizarre and inexcusable that there is as yet no commissioned official military history of the conflicts in East Timor, the Solomons, Iraq or Afghanistan … Serving generals should be making the case to government for the urgent completion of these histories so that the military can learn and improve, but they are not."
This is exactly the wrong way to approach history. The "official" version of wars are guaranteed to ignore what the public needs to know and feel (look at the Pentagon's… deeply dishonest… rendering of the Vietnam war to commemorate the conflict's 50th anniversary). The 2013 New York Times best-selling book,… Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, uncovers new research by journalist Nick Turse that torpedoes the idea that the infamous… My Lai massacre… was an anomaly. Instead, we discover that US forces routinely killed Vietnamese non-combatants on an industrial scale. Former US army medic… Jamie Henry… is just one man who tried to detail the atrocities committed by his unit, but the military ignored his allegations and shunned him.
The danger signs are here if we care to look, and a true reckoning of any military past is incomplete without hearing the testimony of all participants, not just our own.
This is the kind of real history that the late Howard Zinn tried to capture in… A People's History of the United States; unvarnished, honest, truthful. Is Australia even willing to begin a similarly sober conversation about our eagerness to join distant wars?
Tags: Afghanistan, Australia, Barack Obama, Iraq, Tony Abbott, United States, war on terror
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