 | | | | by Josie Appleton |
'How we express our collective grief, how we collectively respond to this horror, will help define us to each other and to the world. The Bali bombing gives us the chance…to unite, and to explore what difference we, as Australians, and our nation, Australia, can make….' (1)
| These words, from Sydney Morning Herald columnist Margo Kingston, echo those that we heard in America just over a year ago. America's 9/11 was followed by an unusual period of national unity - President George W Bush's ratings shot up, the Stars and Stripes were flown, opposition parties rallied around. But it was not long before the 9/11 hangover set in, marked by growing gripes, dissent and cynicism.
| While there are moves to unite Australia around a response to the Bali bombings, it has taken only a few days for the cracks to open up.
| According to recent reports, 30 Australians have been confirmed dead as a result of the car bomb attack on Bali's Sari nightclub, and dozens more are feared dead (2). Australian prime minister John Howard has responded to the attacks with rousing speeches, urging all Australians to unite in pursuit of those responsible:
| 'We fight terrorism because we love freedom; because we share the values of other countries that are in the war against terrorism; and because it's evil and you do not seek to reach an accommodation with those who would destroy your sons and daughters and take away the security and the stability of this country. I hope I speak for all Australians in expressing the fierce determination to do everything I, and we, can do to bring to justice those who have done such evil things to our people.' (3)
| But far from uniting the nation behind the war on terrorism, Howard has drawn immediate rebuke. Many Australian commentators are now saying that the Bali bomb attack was Australia's price for allying itself with America in the first place - that dead Australian teenagers are payback for the Afghan campaign and the moves to attack Iraq. John Howard has been forced to respond, saying that it was a 'totally inaccurate proposition' to say that the attacks were the price of supporting the USA (4).
| 'This has happened because Australia has followed George Bush', said Maggi and Doug Luke, whose daughter's boyfriend was killed in the bomb. This emotional response was leapt upon by the UK Mirror, which ran the story with the strapline: 'Hanabeth's mum blames president.' (5)
| | | Howard's case for the war on terrorism is undermined through cynicism |
| In The Australian newspaper, Phillip Adams wrote that he had warned people about the consequences of supporting Bush. 'I'd tried to remind Australia that rushing to America's colours was, as demonstrated in Vietnam, a health hazard', he said. 'Before we signed up for the war against terror, wherever that might lead us, I thought it important to remember that the US has been the most trigger-happy of nations. With a long history of bellicosity and a culture of violence. It is now my sad duty to say...I told you so.' (6)
| There is a sneering quality to Howard's critics. Webdiarist David Makinson says: 'Politicians and commentators of all persuasions will seek to portray their particular cause as noble because we have lost our friends.' He predicts that the country will end up resorting to force: 'We will dress this up in words of action and purpose, and imagine it a considered and effective response. We will convince ourselves it is necessary and just. It is neither - and it will not work.' (7)
| It is not that Howard's case for the war on terrorism is opposed, or countered with proposals for an alternative response. Rather, it is undermined through cynicism. The consequence is an opposition between the shrill moral absolutism of Howard (most of which has been drafted straight from Bush), and an inchoate defeatism from his critics.
| As Mick Hume has argued on spiked, the war on terrorism is marked by a failure to project a convincing case for war (see One war that Bush has already lost). So it is understandable that Australians are not signing up to this cause. But the kind of corrosive criticism of Howard's war calls into question, not just the war on terrorism, but almost any 'noble' cause that might carry the conviction of being 'necessary and just' enough to require force.
| The idea that the world is full of evil and atrocities are committed on all sides is dressed up as worldly wisdom. Alan Ramsey quotes Howard's statement that 'No cause…can possibly justify the indiscriminate, unprovoked slaughter of innocent people', and adds, almost sadly: 'It never can, Prime Minister - in Bali or New York or Israel or Palestinian refugee camps or Iraq.' (8)
| David Makinson says that he is neither with Bush or with the terrorists: 'We're against both of you.' But he seems to object less to the politics of both sides than to their intransigence - the fact that each fails to recognise more than one view. Both sides 'refuse to recognise the virtues in each other's case', he says, and so 'the true, far more complex solution eludes us' (9).
| In the end, the anti-war camp decides that the best response would be to do nothing. 'Time to pause with the angels, not rush with the fools', read one headline in the Sydney Morning Herald (10). Responding to the attacks would only provoke more terrorism.
| | | It is as if critics wish that America would just go away |
| This expresses the idea that the exercise of power causes 'blowback'; that every action breeds its reaction. The Sydney Morning Herald article concludes that: 'The further extension of unjust and unilateral power will simply increase the numbers of willing martyrs exponentially. We have never had a greater need for cool and calm reflection on our place in the world. Instead we are being asked to subscribe to patriotic dumbness.' (11)
| While Bush's drive to war with Iraq may be stupid, this wait-and-see line has equally little going for it. It is as if critics wish that America would just go away and stop causing so many problems in the world - would just stop doing things, which can only make the situation worse. This fear of action sparking off unforeseen consequences is a recipe for paralysis.
| Many of these Australian commentators, though, are in a way just rehearsing their response to 9/11. Blaming Ourselves: September 11 and the agony of the left, a collection of essays dissecting the view that America brought 9/11 upon itself, quotes many examples. One letter to an Australian national newspaper commented: 'Cuba, Chile, Vietnam, Nicaragua, New York. What goes around comes around.' In the Sydney Morning Herald a columnist apologised to the 9/11 attackers: 'We are sorry…. We accept that such hate as drove the planes into the World Trade Centre can only have come from terrible suffering, and we are desperately sorry for that suffering.' (12)
| Writing in the UK Guardian, Clive James wonders if the Bali bomb will turn things around. At present, he says, most of the Australian intellectual establishment '[shares] the view that international terrorism is to be explained by the vices of the liberal democracies.' James continues: 'It will be interesting, in the shattering light of an explosive event, to see if that easy view continues now to be quite so widespread.' (13)
| This doesn't look likely. Within days of the shattering light of Bali, Australia is marked, less by determination and unity than by splits and cynicism. The defeatist opposition that seems to be growing in Australia is no more noble than the war warriors it criticises.
| Read on:
Australia's 10/12, by Jennie Bristow
Imagining America, by Josie Appleton
Breaking up Indonesia, by James Heartfield
(1) So this is what it's like on the other side, Sydney Morning Herald, 16 October 2002
(2) Australians urged to leave Indonesia, BBC News 17 October 2002
(2) Quoted in The terror experience, by Mark Adnum
(3) Quoted in Deaths will not sway PM on Iraq stand, The Australian, 14 October 2002
(4) Daily Mirror, 16 October 2002
(5) Empire's always right, The Australian, 12 October 2002
(6) Quoted in So this is what it's like on the other side, Sydney Morning Herald, 16 October 2002
(7) If only it didn't take barbarity to civilise leaders, Sydney Morning Herald, 16 October 2002
(8) Quoted in So this is what it's like on the other side, Sydney Morning Herald, 16 October 2002
(9) Time to pause with the angels, not rush with the fools, Sydney Morning Herald, 16 October 2002
(10) Time to pause with the angels, not rush with the fools, Sydney Morning Herald, 16 October 2002
(11) Blaming Ourselves: September 11 and the Agony of the Left, (eds) Imre Salusinszky and Gregory Melleuish, Duffy and Snellgrove (Australia), May 2002. For a review of this book, see Imagining America, by Josie Appleton
(12) 'The day my country lost its innocence', Guardian, 16 October 2002
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