Gerard Henderson, a most unique pilgering, and conscription in other people's wars

(Above: a couple of anti-conscription posters from the World War I debate).

Memo: purveyors of The Week. Got your free pamphlet offering a free copy of "the most unique magazine to hit our shores in years", which offers "the perfect antidote to today's problem of information overload", but regrettably must decline this "most unique" offer because of a unique onrush of pedantry in relation to the use of the word unique with a modifier. What a pity, with all the very best stories from the media distilled into 35 succinct pages, in the most unique manner of a boutique information brewery.

Back to business, and week after week without fail, Gerard Henderson has delivered stimulating betting odds for a lively gambling ring based on his fondness for his idol John Howard. Week after week, he's always delivered, like a steady performer in the spring racing carnival.

But this week in Pilger loath to hear the roar of dissent, it's as close as it's ever been to having the whole betting ring shut down. Just one mention of John Howard, and that in the seventh paragraph!

What could have caused this terrible, almost catastrophic meltdown, this threat to the natural order, this almost terminal refusal to acknowledge and celebrate the glorious past of the golden age of the Howard government?

Well the answer makes it understandable, and it can be summarized in two words which evoke all that's wrong with the world's thinking: John Pilger.

Now Pilger has made a most unique contribution to political debate by offering up a verb (to pilgerize the truth) and an adjective/noun, to evoke the process of "pilgerization" (the pilgerization process led to a distortion of the truth, the pilgerization of the truth was problematic, and so on and so forth).

If you google either of these terms, you will be led unfailingly to people celebrating the Pilger political discourse of white heat and outrage. Of course if you're a modernist English person, you might well prefer the spelling "to pilgerise", in which case you will be led to the likes of Another for the word nerds.

That spelling will also take you to Pilger's personal wiki page, and Noam Chomsky's outrage at people turning his name into a verb. It might also lead you to the concept of "dowdified" reporting in the New York Times (here), and other lesser manifestations of playing the person, such as the concept of fisking.

Of course 'to Henderson' has no ring to it, and so we much prefer to think of him as a prattling Polonius, but this week, he's a most agitated and irritated Polonius, at the notion that this notorious hyperbolic ideologue, the said Pilger, was recently given the Sydney Peace Prize, funded by City of Sydney rate payers, and based at the taxpayer-subsidised University of Sydney (hint: this is how your taxpayer money is spent! Pilgerizing the world).

Well it's true that the always verbalizing great Pilgerozer is hardly a peaceful member of loon pond, relentlessly squawking from the left, but it seems he so preoccupies and befuddles Henderson that he almost forgets John Howard. Here's the one mention:

When John Howard was prime minister, Pilger criticised him from the left. Now Kevin Rudd is prime minister, Pilger criticises him from the left. Pilger accused Rudd of telling lies over Afghanistan and ridiculed President Barack Obama, comparing him to a "Calvin Klein brand".

Phew, a narrow squeak, and apart from doing my dough, I almost thought it was the end of the betting ring, for we've long vowed that the day Gerard Henderson doesn't mention John Howard in a column, all bets are off and employers would be mugs not to allow their employees to celebrate in the pubs in a kind of de facto national holiday (and Bob Hawke will show the way).

And as well as pilgerizing, in the sense of obliterating, the memory of John Howard, Pilger also manages to provoke Henderson into the exaggeration and hyperbole he so deplores in Pilger himself:

In his lecture, delivered almost on the eve of Armistice Day, Pilger asked: "Do the young people who wrap themselves in the flag at Gallipoli every April understand that only the lies have changed - that sanctifying blood sacrifice in colonial invasions is meant to prepare us for the next one?"

The answer to the question is almost certainly no. Young Australians well understand, for example, that Nazism was defeated on the battlefield and not by one or more pacifist societies or peace foundations. Australia, an independent nation since 1901, has not fought what the left sneeringly refers to as "other people's wars".

What, since 1901, and in every war?

Well, apart from the obvious breach of Godwin's Law (a dollar in the Nazi swear jar please), this is just the kind of sweeping, stupid statement you'd expect of John Pilger. Talk about pilgerizing.

It sweeps - for example - the great Australian conscription debate of the first world war under the carpet (you can wiki a summary here and the first vote in 1916 here).

There were plenty of people in Australia during the first world war who sneeringly referred to it as other people's wars, and not just the Irish, or Archbishop Daniel Mannix, but the likes of a young John Curtin, who then ironically led the country in the second world war.

And the conscription debate, when it re-surfaced in relation to Vietnam, led many to consider - with what Henderson sneeringly refers to as sneering left wing thinking - as it being a war that might well be termed an "other people's war", in which Australia had no business. And there are solid arguments that it was a useless paranoid war - as accepted even by some of its US architects - and that this thinking doesn't just belong to the sneering left wing.

Why even now there's a movement amongst the right as the realization dawns that backing a corrupt government, elected in the manner of a tinpot South American dictator, so that the heroin trade can properly flourish, and the poor and women continue to be oppressed, and the Taliban given fresh energy as remotely fired drones rain down with chaotic inaccuracy is leading Australia to participate in another war with a dodgy outcome. But let's not brood about Afghanistan, since the Iraq war was such a success story, and a wonderful model for further post-colonial military ventures.

Sure we like to be losers - Gallipoli, Vietnam and all that - but is there any virtue in being consistently a loser in the matter of warfare? Do we only have the Nazis (oops, Godwin's Law) to celebrate as a just war with the right outcome, in a century of trooping off overseas to fight in other people's wars?

Never mind. Perhaps the only useful function of Pilgerization is to upset, in a gadfly way, our very own prattling Polonius, so he can attempt to sound like he's a determined centrist:

Most Australians accept that the country has been well governed - by Labor and the Coalition alike - since Federation.

By golly, I should send him over to the Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt blogs, where they'd eat him alive on the spot, in a most unique way.

(Below: a couple more anti-conscription posters, the first in relation to Vietnam and the dreaded marble).