From Cheshire Cats to Armchair Generals ...

(Above: speaking, as we love to do on the pond, of Lewis Carroll, Alice, lions and smirking Cheshire cats. More brave Popery here).


What's that you say, Boss Hawg, the deputy sheriff of the Pacific has been caught with their paws in the Qtela snack jar?

But the gunboat diplomacy was going so swimmingly well, and never mind human rights. Why Bob Carr himself was right on side ...

Not to worry, the pond always looks at the glass half full, which in the case of the Bolter and his report, always turns out to be heading towards empty.

Yep, on a soft Sunday, the Bolter was down the drain, as Ten teeters and totters like a drunk:

Insiders: 167,000 / 110,000 / 47,000
The Bolt Report: 104,000 / 79,000 (here)

Remember the glory days when the Bolter claimed he was doing better than The Insiders in total, even if it meant skewing the data a little, here? And conservatives were wildly excited, here? Sic transit preening Grange-sipping, opera loving Bolter, and Gloria while you're at it.

Does it get any better?

Why of course it does. Today the discerning palate is well served, and it's a question of where to start, with the oyster or the gherkin?

Let's go with the gherkin, because Nick Cater has once more delivered a splendid paen to self-serving self-interest in the lizard Oz, And so begins the taxing task of Labor trying to save itself (behind the paywall but if you pay for it people will begin to doubt your sanity).

First up the Caterist cause shows a distinct suspicion of and disdain for email, a devilish social media device far too frequently used by people wanting to stay in touch:

Oh yes, that email list! Dangerous, deadly and far too sophisticated electronic campaigning. Next thing you know they'll be on Facebook and have a Twitter account. Doomed ...

What we get instead is honest yeoman advice, right up there with a decent ploughman's sandwich. 

Without wishing to distract one iota from the importance of saving the planet, a more pressing task right now for Labor is to try to save itself.

Oh please. Let's not have any false modesty. Cater doesn't give a fuck about the planet. The absolute first thing Cater wants to distract us from is the importance of saving the planet.

You see, Cater has an image of the Labor party which resides circa 1949 and Ben Chifley trying to nationalise the banks, full of stout-hearted Tasmanian timber workers who just want to destroy forests and where's the harm in that.

And so he vents all the usual stereotypes, in language so stereotypical and shop worn, it's startling to read such cheek.

Replete with the usual smug condescension: Averting the coming climate catastrophe is, of course, a laudable ambition ...

What a class A twit, and then the amiable twat follows that up with tree hugging is a middle-class luxury the workers' party can ill afford (there, that'll teach all you tree hugging Tolkeins) and Talk of bourgeois Left and middle-class trendoids, party of the chattering classes, and so on and so forth.

Of course on any alternative day, the rhetoric is how the party remains captive to brutal trade unionists representing the most brutal side of wretched lumpenproletariat thugs in rough working class havens like the construction industry. You know, the sort of chattering class rhetoric claptrap Caterist hacks just love ...

It was such a stupendously silly, mind-boggling effort that for a moment the pond thought the Caterist was channeling Gerard Henderson, like the ectoplasm the Victorians and Conan Doyle so loved.

But it was an epic fail, because he simply didn't mention inner city elites, perhaps mindful that most Caterists don't actually work in coal mine or pine forest in Woop Woop.

The pond realised the error. No point in wasting time with pale ectoplasmic imitations of a Caterist reptile kind, when the exciting original, prattling oysterish Polonius, is on hand with Great moderniser often disturbingly old-fashioned.

Gerard Henderson disturbed by people being old-fashioned? Fuddy duddies? Yep, at least when it's Paul Keating ...

Polonius is of course deeply resentful that Keating has scored a four parter on the wretched ABC.

And he parlays that - for an alleged historian - into the most simple minded understanding of the causes of the first world war.

Now here the pond must declare an interest. At one time, the pond embarked on a detailed study of the causes of the first war.

Somewhere in the house, a shelf still groans under the weight of The Origins of the War of 1914 - you now have to pay a fortune for it on Amazon, here - a three volume set, each volume running a wretched 700 pages or so. And that was just the start of it, because there are endless other explanations and insights in hundreds of books, as you can discover if you do a Greg Hunt and wiki up Historiography of the causes of World War 1.

In short, many factors were in play, and many deep causes - like the race for empire, and the naval race, and the jostling for power in Europe, and the discontent of various populations - set many strands running.

So how does Polonius deal with this extensive set of issues?

Why by wheeling in a simplistic, reductionist interpretation, which is, it has to be said, disturbingly old-fashioned, as well as laughable. Let's see it trotted out at length:

To use a well-worn phrase, last week the former prime minister exhibited more front than Mark Foy's - or Myer's in Melbourne parlance. He used the platform provided by the Australian War Memorial, an occasion which remembers the 60,000 Australian dead in 1914-18 to declare that "the war was devoid of any virtue". 
Sure, there was considerable tension in Europe before the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. 

It's at this point, after you cut past Keating's rhetoric - he was after all making a conventional "war is horrible" speech of the kind required on such commemorative occasions - that you realise that armchair General Polonius is on a hiding to nothing.

Considerable tension? Now there's a knockdown laugh.

And then what do you know, but that the entire set of causes that caused poor old Luigi to scribble 2,100 or so pages, with more bloody footnotes than the Book of Mormon, is reduced to an explanation which shouldn't satisfy a high school student:

Yet one fact is incontestable. What was called the Great War began when Germany conquered neutral Belgium and invaded France. 
In 1914 only the pacifists and some revolutionary socialists, for differing reasons, believed that Imperial Germany should get its way with respect to France and Russia. Yet, about 99 years after the guns began firing on the Western front, Keating has declared that the war was devoid of any virtue. 
Keating believes that the First World War "arose from the quagmire of European tribalism; a complex interplay of nation state destinies overlaid by notions of cultural superiority peppered with racism". Nonsense. 

Complex interplay?

Nonsense brays Polonius, showing a singular failure to understand anything of European tribalism, the race for empire and influence and power, or the quagmire that arose from such forces...

As a one-time successful politician, Keating knows that the leadership in Britain had to make a decision in August 1914 - one that was unrelated to tribalism or cultural superiority or racism. It was this: should the Kaiser and his armies be allowed to conquer France and Belgium? Or should Britain with the assistance of its then dominions, support France and take a stand against German militarism? Then there is Australia's support for Britain. 
According to Keating, "we had no need to reaffirm our European heritage at the price of being dragged into a European holocaust" but "we returned to Europe's killing fields to decide the status of Germany, a question which should earlier have been settled by foresight and statecraft".

Well yes, but to imagine militarism was only on one side, and that the Germans, is remarkably old-fashioned, and requires a blinkered approach which overlooks the knack of the British to use force of arms to build a remarkable empire (any one on hand down under for a jolly adventure against the Boers? Send in the Breaker)

One of the key reasons that the pro-conscription campaign foundered in 1916 and 1917 wasn't just because of Catholics like Henderson and Mannix but because a majority of the population was swayed by the issues embedded in Keating's rhetoric (go on Greg Hunt, wiki about it here).

So how does Henderson handle this?

Certainly Labor split over conscription in 1916, but Labor never adopted the view that the resistance to German aggression - in the northern and southern hemisphere alike - lacked virtue.

Actually the entire country split over the conscription issue, and many in the country did decide that the war lacked virtue - because it was surely the bloodiest, most futile and useless war ever conducted on such a scale, and it was then resolved in such a way by the Treaty of Versaille as to set up many of the causes of the second world war, creating a platform for the crazed right wing rhetoric of the fascists and Nazis.

So what else? Well Polonius accuses Keating of isolationism, standing alongside Arthur Calwell, who apparently didn't ever get over opposing conscription, and then he chides Keating for a rhetorical flourish about young Australians being dragooned into military enterprises on the whim of  so-called statesmen.

It is, says Polonius, a meaningless statement, because it was a volunteer army. And then he comes up with this:

Keating seems to retain an Oh! What a Lovely War interpretation of 1914-18 in which the Allied politicians and military leaders of their day were fools and the Germans misunderstood. Very few historians hold this view today.

Talk about a meaningless statement. Oh! What a Lovely War is a bloody musical and very few historians have ever held the view of a musical.  In much the same way that very few historians hold the simplistic Polonius view that it was all the fault of the Germans.

History, and life and the start of the first world war is a bit more complex and nuanced than that.

The difference is, at heart of course, that Keating isn't that keen on war, while Prattling Polonius is the very model of a modern ersatz British empire armchair general - speaking of musicals, fresh out of a Gilbert and Sullivan sketch, and still standing by, ever ready to celebrate fighting for Britain and for empire:

In the conclusion of Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War, Joan Beaumont reminds her readers that in 1914-18 Australians chose "to fight in the defence of core national values" and that "these values may at times have to be defended far from Australian shores". Perhaps Dr Beaumont should be given a speaking gig at the 2014 Remembrance Day ceremony at the Australian War Memorial.

World War One was about Australia's core national values? Does this mean the core national values are fucked?

No, no, no, the core national value on view here is that it's all about speaking gigs.

Not for armchair Hendo the snicker snacker of vorpal bayonets, or the tang of hot lead carving up gut, but a fight about who should get to speak on Remembrance Day, and pose and pretend that they were there, if only in spirit, fighting for empire, in the Flanders mud ...

What pathetic, reductionist, simpleton nonsense. The pond is now accustomed to Polonius rabbiting on each week about inner urban elites and the ABC, but does he have to show how inept and simple-minded he is as a historian?

Never mind, it gives the pond the chance to run a few World War One posters.

Gerard Henderson's view:

A few alternative views, since Hendo seems to think history is a matter of a few slogans and posters: