At war with the armchair warriors ...

So there it was, the big question for the day, the elephant in the room it was impossible to walk around.

Routinely, week after week, Gerard Henderson bashes and belabours the ABC for all kinds of sins, real and imagined.

With acres, oceans of digital ink already expended on the Alan Jones saga, would he seize the moment, carry the day, by launching an all-out assault on commercial radio, and their shock jocks, and all the calumnies, lies, distortions, misrepresentations, abuse, verbal assaults and lowering of tone they produce on a daily basis?

Would he produce a baseball bat and take to 2GB in a frenzy in search of a solid batting statistic?

Would he explain that Alan Jones, being a consort of Tony Abbott, was a special, egregious example of the 'ditch the witch' rhetoric that had soiled public debate, inspired and licensed by Abbott's own persistent negativity?

Would he in short show some capacity for balance and fairness and a willingness to contemplate the overall picture? Especially pictures of the ones that wear like a pig's nose ...

Well after talk of overalls and elephants, we thought we needed a time out.

Would he have a go at Jones for pretending he was about the policy, not the person, when in reality Jones thought nothing of traducing a dead man with a cheap, low blow. He's always gone for the person, if it produces collateral damage ...

Not that the ABC should be let off the hook.

There was the matter of Amanda Vanstone on Counterpoint yesterday, doing her turn as the new host. 

There she was contemplating Australia and Asia, yammering on with Michael Wesley, former head honcho of the Lowy Institute, celebrating the Asian century and berating Australians for being parochial, for being head in sand ostriches who refused to engage with China and with Indonesia, and learn Asian languages and get out and about and be multicultural and diverse and embracing, as she had while on her junket in Italy.

And she followed up with a discourse on what might make a good person, in a chat with Simon Longstaff of the St James Ethics Centre. She rambled from point to point, but in the process it was clear that she was traumatised by politics, didn't miss it a bit, but needed to talk about it, as if talking would be a cleansing therapy that would wash away all the sins and the abuse ... the constant, relentless, unforgiving abuse. When really she just wanted to be a good, or at least decent person doing the right thing ...

It became clear that Vanstone was not professional radio talent. She felt free to make her own points at length, she liked to wander around the point, and hare off into areas remote from the topic at hand. But being an amateur was rather endearing. Like having a chat over a scone and a cup of tea at the CWA.

What would have agitated Henderson was the way she sounded so bleeding heart small 'l'-liberal, talking up language learning and understanding other cultures and being multicultural. Dammit, the sentiments were perfect inner west elite chattering class debating points, presented in a friendly engaged manner. She even began to sound a little like Malcolm Fraser, with the dropping of the political mask allowing humanity to emerge.

Malcolm Fraser! Sorry, let's channel Henderson. It was outrageous, shocking, the sort of thought crime that runs through the ABC like liberal weevils through flour.

Oh dear, I see the pond has done a Vanstone and wandered off the point.

The question at hand is whether Henderson would ramp up, stand up and deliver a ringing denunciation of Alan Jones and his stupid rhetoric about climate science and all the other nonsensicality that litters his program like pigeon droppings?

Well as you'd guess from this shaggy dog approach, the answer is a resounding "no", Henderson does no such thing.

Instead he turns on Major-General John Cantwell and delivers a stern judgment on the man for daring to regret, and daring to publish a book about his war experiences, as Henderson explains at great length in Commander's regret over Afghanistan proves case for public silence.

Yes, instead of yammering on about the war, it seems Cantwell should just shut up and brood in silence.

Armchair warriors of the stern relentless kind like our prattling Polonius, never having seen the horrors of war up close, can maintain the rage, and insist that war is a jolly useful thing, and go on and on about it in public and that's a jolly good thing.

But the minute you want to talk of the futility of war and in particular the Afghanistan war, that's a jolly bad thing and is defeatest offensive and unwarranted.

It's all this touchy feely shrinky sort of new age social media nonsense:

We live in a society that seems to be turning into a vast psychiatrist's couch. The Facebook society encourages public displays of self-reflection on a massive scale. It seems likely that writing Exit Wounds, with help from journalist Greg Bearup, has had a cathartic effect on Cantwell. 

How to criticise Alan Jones when you're as determined as Jones to be offensive?

You see, anyone damaged in or by war shouldn't do a Siegfried Sassoon.

Sassoon, you will remember, lived in a Facebook society which encouraged public displays of self-reflection on a massive scale, and so during world war one, the man - decorated for bravery - dared to write Finished with the War: A Soldier's Declaration.

Sassoon, known as Mad Jack for his courage, was treated for neurasthenia (shell shock), and later wrote Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, along with a number of other works which attempted to deal with his experiences in war.

According to Henderson, he should have just shut up and been treated in private, instead of showing Cantwell the way:

Clearly, writing Exit Wounds has been beneficial to Cantwell. For example, in the book's epilogue he wrote that his ''sentences sometimes drift to a halt because [he] can't remember the word for something''. 
Yet Cantwell's recent media performances were verbally flawless. There is clearly a role for disclosure and/or confession when recovering from a mental illness. It just does not have to take place in public. 

Ah yes, freedom of speech. Wonderful stuff, except when you should do it in private. Keep it to yourself, stiff upper lip lad, wot wot, no need to air dirty linen in public wot wot, show a little spine, wot wot, maintain the silence, especially if you happen to disagree with Gerard Henderson, safe and smug in his armchair and sure that embarking on war and encouraging the killing fields is a jolly good thing, wot wot, eh Biggles old chum.

And it's not just Cantwell embarrassing himself and the world and Gerard Henderson by doing a Sassoon. There are all sorts of wretches and recidivists and malcontents who do their bleeding heart in public, to the considerable irritation of our stern Polonius.

For starters, there's that wretched Robert McNamara:

The case for public silence is never more substantial than when politicians or public officials look back on the decisions they took that led to deaths and woundings in conflict. Robert S. McNamara (1916-2009) was a leading figure in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, which committed US forces to Vietnam. 
In 1995, McNamara wrote In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, in which he effectively called the commitment, in which close to 60,000 Americans died, a disaster. In 2003, he was the star of the documentary The Fog of War, another contribution to the they-died-in-vain syndrome. 

Meanwhile, Vietnam continues to be run by a Communist government, the United States has decided it will do something about the suffering produced by Agent Orange - way too late - so it could be said that the many who died in Vietnam were rewarded by a country united under Communism.

What a pity Dr. Henderson didn't have the time to join in the fighting to produce such a splendid died-for-glory and Communism result.

And then of course, there's inevitably Malcolm Fraser, who has also wriggled on the hook of a futile, useless war, right up there with the futility of the current exercise in Afghanistan:

In Australia, Malcolm Fraser, who held senior roles in the Coalition governments that committed Australian troops to Vietnam, effectively endorsed McNamara. In his memoirs and elsewhere, Fraser rationalises his change of mind as due to the knowledge he gained after the war that the US government and CIA was involved in the overthrow of the Diem administration in South Vietnam in November 1963. 
A tall story indeed. I was in secondary school in 1963 and the US involvement in Diem's assassination was discussed in class. It was no secret. 

Yep, better not to discuss the past, or express regret or imagine an alternative world without the killing fields. Not even if you're a Russian remembering your time in Afghanistan on an entirely useful excursion into a strange land.

Former politicians have a special responsibility not to seek public forgiveness for latent regrets. Cantwell does not exhibit the self-indulgence of a McNamara or a Fraser. But publishers and journalists should take into account that Cantwell suffers from PTSD. 

Why? Why stop one expressing their experiences of war, even if it doesn't conform to your own narrow-minded prejudices and opinions?

Why not open yourself to the experience of war, as told by those who've lived and sometimes died it?

What's wrong with regret and reflection? Is it a greater crime than being a war monger?

Once upon a time, reading a book by poet Keith Douglas, a memoir Alamein to Zem Zem, an account of the North Africa campaign from "inside the tank" by a junior tank officer, was a transformative experience for the pond, courtesy my father. (Douglas was later killed during the invasion of Normandy by the casual gratuitous violence of mortar fire).

It captured the exhilaration, the nightmare and the carnage of a war which might see you fried like a sardine in a tin can.

More people should write about their experience of war, more should examine war and what it means and whether you can produce a democratic regime by bombing people back to the stone age.

Politicians should indulge in regret and self-indulgence and reflection, all the more so because someone like Henderson is incapable of any depth of self-understanding, or considered insight, preferring to maintain a rigid censoring blinkered approach to the world.

But there you have it in a nutshell, as to why the ABC will continue to be the target, and quite possibly self-refective, engaged Amanda Vanstone after insights along with it, for a head-kicking Henderson, while the rampaging boorish shock jocks will continue to berate and revile without a hint of reprimand from him.

Under the skin, and not so deep under the superficial skin, they are much alike, herding the sheep off to war, and urging silence, so that their own loud voices can resound without opposition or divergent,alternative thinking ...

And so the pond presents to you this day an unrepentant, not really sorry, not really regretful, self-justifying, continually appalling Alan Jones, and a censoring, hectoring Gerard Henderson ... peas in a like-minded pod waiting to drop their next chaff bag on a politician or a soldier suffering from PTSD.

Come to think of it, you'd be better off eating cardboard than listening to one or reading the other. No wonder Amanda Vanstone looks and sounds like a liberal.

(Below: and so to a few books that make better reading than Gerard Henderson. Long may the tradition of genuine soldiers writing books about war continue, and let the armchair generals write their books about war as they will).