Pretty sure there was a thread a few months back saying that research indicates that having people like that on their side is the best way to change people's minds
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AusPoliGAF |OT| Boats? What Boats?
- Thread starter Bernbaum
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I listen to British politics a fair bit, when populists like Nigel Farage talk about Australian style immigration policies, they're not talking about boat people, they're talking about the skilled migrant visa schemes that we have in place. I don't think anyone in mainstream politics in the UK has talked about mandatory detention and sending people back.
yeah, you can even tell it that article that they're talking about two different things
(fuck ukip though)
Seriously is this Iran deal confusing anyone else? I'm so used to considering the modern libs and republicans the same thing that a difference in policy this dramatic is giving me cognitive dissonance, particularly with people like Wilkie coming out against it. I didn't realise we hated asylum seekers quite this much.
I'm morbidly curious in watching Home and Away this week, looks like the cringiest shit ever.
viciouskillersquirrel
Member
People spout the same tired factoids they learned in Grade Four and never bothered to look any deeper at the greater aims of the war, the strategic situation at the time, the thought-world Australians at the time lived in or even have a good look at who it was we were invading. Talk to anyone about the Ottoman Empire or why taking the Dardanelles would have been valuable and they give you a blank stare and bark some variant of "Lest we forget" at you. It's all just lost in a haze of nationalist myth making.
Why, if you ask people who wrote the Ode of Remembrance, I bet a lot of people will tell you it was Banjo Patterson.
Why do we condemn the tragedy of child soldiers in wartime African countries like Sudan and Somalia?
Conversely: Why do we celebrate the bravery of our country's own child soldiers in ww1?
Is the difference because they volunteered? Child soldiers in African wars often have no choice, but by sending them in Australia's contingent to fight for king and empire, with a nation's support is in my view child abuse.
We should condemn the circumstances that let these kids go to battle, not celebrate their enlistment. They were victims of propaganda and the simultaneous shaming of people who opted not to go.
It's time this black mark was properly acknowledged for what it is. A war crime.
A
A More Normal Bird
Unconfirmed Member
An especially relevant conversation at a time when we're trying to figure out how to stop propagandists from convincing Australian teenagers to travel to the Middle East to fight.
viciouskillersquirrel
Member
Part of it is that they volunteered, part of it is the distance of time (a pointless and tragic fiasco can become an heroic sacrifice in the space of a generation) and part of it is that it plays into the myths we tell about ourselves. It's about spin - there was a lot to hate about a war that killed 1.2% of the population or 18% (roughly 1 in 5) of the forces deployed and wounded half, so it's only natural that people might want to justify that sacrifice by any means necessary.
Of course, this leads people to gloss over some inconvenient facts. For instance, examples of terrible, loutish, disrespectful, racist bullying in Cairo's red light districts become quaint anecdotes of "larrakinism". Nobody ever mentions the desertions or the people shot by their own officers for cowardice when they refused to go over the top with unloaded rifles to charge a well defended foe who just slaughtered the last few waves of human cannon fodder to no result.
All that unpleasantness gets papered over in the face of an agenda, in this case the goal of forging an identity for a new nation biased on something more macho than pastoralism at the extreme edge of viable civilisation. Better that those poor devils died as heroes for a just and righteous cause than to face the horrifying fact that everything they ever did, their blood, their sweat, their dying screams, their effort achieved precisely nothing, could achieve precisely nothing.
They died for an King and Empire none of them would ever see, on a foreign shore that ought not have concerned them. Their enemies even had to specifically ask who these people were, who kept throwing themselves at the guns day after day, despite being overwhelmed in placement, numbers, materiel and supplies. Why, they asked, are you fighting so hard. You're not Tommies. Who are you?
The most impressive part of the Gallipoli campaign was honestly the retreat. The rest was a mangled scream as the world of Napoleon and Queen Victoria died a painful death.
Elaugaufein
Member
I think part of it is the age, officially you had to be 18, so they weren't exactly sent with Australia's support. I would imagine that the recruiters probably turned a blind eye to a lot of underage recruits but probably not the really young. Which allows for people to regard it as heroic without taking responsibility for the wrong of it. It's worth noting that you had to be 21 to vote at the time, which is disturbing on lot of levels when you really think about it.
Whereas the child soldiers in Africa are not even necessarily in their teens.
Whereas the child soldiers in Africa are not even necessarily in their teens.
Does that mean that Madigan wins his lawsuit by default or do they still technically exist enough that they can drag him down with them?
What's changed?
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
I'm actually one of those people who think The Democrats cop way more shit than they deserved. I would never vote for them, but I think they were okay for a 'liberal' party.
DLP can go fuck itself.
Elaugaufein
Member
Labors rightward drift put the Dems in a rough place (a deliberately centrist party with a lot of progressive members in a system where the centre didn't remain still).
The rise of the Greens at the same time they lost their outsider position killed them dead.
The DLP was weird basically Nationals with less social conservatism and a lot less rural flavour. Its also died a final death if it can't make the appeal (the name isn't acceptable under current guidelines because of confusion with an existing party)
The rise of the Greens at the same time they lost their outsider position killed them dead.
The DLP was weird basically Nationals with less social conservatism and a lot less rural flavour. Its also died a final death if it can't make the appeal (the name isn't acceptable under current guidelines because of confusion with an existing party)
viciouskillersquirrel
Member
What always bothered me about this poem is that "mori" does not rhyme with "die" so much as with "Dee".
The first part is definitely true. They're formation before the era of deregulation put them in a weird spot. That and the fact that many of them were quite left wing (Andrew Bartlett) but they still played a key role in holding both parties to account reasonably well.
I don't think it really matters how old the African child soldiers are, whether its 8 or 14, it's still morally reprehensible that they end up in that position.
A 14yo kid nowadays doesn't have the judgement to pick an appropriate mobile phone plan, so they should not exactly be allowed to make their own choice in working in a role that is literally a life and death environment. There is a reason now we have UN conventions on the rights of children.
They may have volunteered, and thought they were doing a good thing. The people who let them sign up, from day dot through to their deployment through to their charge into death are all morally culpable in crimes against children of an unspeakably evil manner.
Ignorance is not a defence.
bobnowhere
Member
Yeah I was trying to watch something on netflix about that time and my transact/iinet fibre was going on and off.
As much as I'll happily wave them goodbye, the DLP at least have some decent history to them, you'd think there would be some level of dispensation for the age of the party when it comes to the name even with the missing years. Hell they just got a member in the Victorian upper house too.
Elaugaufein
Member
I'm not defending the practice, just pointing out a difference. The recruiters who deliberately turned a blind eye to obviously underage enrollments and those who pressured those under 18 to enlist performed a moral wrong.
And I use obviously there only because the quality of record keeping at the time was poor enough that there's no way a recruiter could be expected to tell the exact of a person if they were deliberately lying (there's no way you can tell someone who's 17 and 11 months from someone who's 18 by visual inspection). In the modern age the leniency granted needs to be reduced in light of the accessibility of information.
I don't believe there's a moral way to justify someone being adult enough to choose to go to war but not to vote (or undertake other potentially harmful but not strictly illegal acts like drinking alcohol). And there's certainly no moral way to justify conscription below the voting age.
Side node reply to last line: I have to say that unless a thing is almost universally reviled then ignorance should be a defense (or at least a mitigation) in the common law / legislative system that we use these days. There's simply too much law , often written for lawyers rather than laymen (or even experts in the field they apply too) for any person to get their head around and many of them are arbitrary and/or bizarre so there's no argument for rational derivation or intuition.
I wasn't attributing the argument to you, just to the wider framing of those kids as brave rather than as victims.
In regards to your last point though, this isn't a complex law that is being broken. Or was broken. It's not like some obscure law about not wearing hats on Sundays when in the presence of a barber who just ate seafood. It's about sending minors to war.
It doesn't get any clearer than that.
In regards to your last point though, this isn't a complex law that is being broken. Or was broken. It's not like some obscure law about not wearing hats on Sundays when in the presence of a barber who just ate seafood. It's about sending minors to war.
It doesn't get any clearer than that.
Elaugaufein
Member
Well some of them were brave (they really did want to risk their lives for something they thought was greater than themselve). Being brave and a victim of social framing aren't exclusive.
People prefer to remember things in the best light because it seems less pointless and we depend on patterns and narrative for our society to function. Also there are of course certain interests who benefit from building up patriotic fervor for political or 'moral' reasons.
In what fields?
Elaugaufein
Member
Patent law for one. Amusingly this has in many ways rendered the original purpose of patents obsolete (since you can't reproduce them from the information given) but does them nice tools for lawsuits. I'd be really surprised if most people entering into contracts fully understood the applicable laws without consulting a lawyer too. I know that our accountant told my sister to get a property purchase contract run by a lawyer before signing for an example.
yeah the firebombings were much more horrific and kill far more people ( ͡ ͜ ͡
I'm going to hell for the chuckle this got out of me.
Bernie Fraser is probably one of the most underrated Australians ever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t4m0e_wV-A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t4m0e_wV-A
If we label them as brave we continue to avoid asking the hard questions about our country's history. Papering over the ugly truth with a shiny veneer doesn't change what happened.
Indeed. They were dropped on two days.
But more generally the Cold War was the greatest act of terror. Millions, maybe billions living with a real possibility of mutually assured destruction.
No one should ever have the authority to use such an arsenal.
Shh, don't question those who enforce the narrative
What did he say, who did he work for and who is he?
What pisses me off to no end is the reaction to these comments by the mainstream press, the SBS and politicians. Everyone decries these comments as inappropriate and yet I haven't seen an articulated response to his arguments expressing why they think they're inappropriate nor why they disagree. Blasting someone and saying that they're inappropriate without actually articulating anything is both lazy and meaningless.
If the allegations are historical facts then he is in the clear.
Everyone knows what happened in atomic bombings. They may have been viable military strategic actions, but the humanitarian toll was unacceptable in the opinions of many.
I don't think what he said is controversial if it is based on facts.
Everyone knows what happened in atomic bombings. They may have been viable military strategic actions, but the humanitarian toll was unacceptable in the opinions of many.
I don't think what he said is controversial if it is based on facts.
http://honesthistory.net.au/wp/gallipoli-club-peter-stanley/
I'll have to hunt down a copy and give it a read.
Cheers for the link. Certainly something that won't make inclusion in the national history curriculum that's for sure.
Aarglefarg
Member
That's inappropriate. >:-[
I've seen a few people complaining that ANZACs died for his freedom to say that. McIntyre was dumb to bring up the bombings, and is definitely guilty of generalisation, but nothing he said has less basis in fact that that does.
They're inappropriate because dissent is inappropriate. The language of nationalism is all about the silencing of dissent. "If you don't like it, leave" etc.
You guys keep talking about facts but I'm not sure why. The facts aren't really in dispute. Some Anzac soldiers did rape and pillage, Japan was nuked etc. Whether dropping the bombs constituted an act of terrorism is a question that can not be answered factually one way or another. Similarly you can't answer the question of whether Anzac day is worth celebrating with mere fact, it's an opinion.
That's right..far from strengthening our national character silencing dissent in such a manner weakens it. It's pathetic.
It would require a definition of terrorism to be broad enough to kind of make the term almost useless, no? I get that there's an argument for calling everything that instills fear "terrorism", but sometimes that argument feels like an excuse for using an emotive term. That doesn't invalidate your point that it can't be answered factually though.
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