Believe it or not, for a site that spends so much time in the sewer, otherwise known as News Corp, the pond has certain standards.
Better to leave jokes about sputtering robots to master professionals like the papists; better to leave David Feeney to David Feeney, or at least the Daily Terrorists ...
And better to leave Barners to the gob-smacked standard denials, as the lad does his very, very best to continue to maintain and improve relationships with Indonesia ...
They would say that, wouldn't they, but when it comes to fear-mongering and a decent scare campaign, Barners knows the truth.
Why the pond has long suspected that the Indonesians promoted a rise in boat arrivals to ensure the election of Tony Abbott! That's how clever these wretched, perverted deviants are ...
But the pond can only go so far. This day the Daily Terrorists also featured their new tandem team ...
The Bolter having another go at the blacks? The bigoted racist on the march again ...
The pond tried everything - peg on nose, a good dose of rental car parfume - but it couldn't go there ...
But that mention of Vietnam intrigued, and luckily there, galloping out of the DLP far right came the pond's manly rescuer, the bromancer, with many wondrous insights into those unhappy war years ...
The pond is always up for a history lesson from the bromancer.
After all, anyone who sucked at the teat of B. A. Santamaria is sure to be able to explain what a wonderful and successful time was had by all in the Vietnam war ...
Oh indeed, indeed.
The coherent position, no doubt, was to send off young Australian conscripts to get killed in an exercise in profound futility ...
And there you have it, as wondrous a furphy as any. If Communism controlling Vietnam was an existential threat to Australia, how are we now dealing with the Communist government still in Vietnam? Only now it's the entire country ...
And why is President Obama flying there for a chinwag ...
And the monstrous stupidity of the Vietnam war is always a vote winner for the coalition? Go tell that to Gough Whitlam comrade ...
Of course it's just a more subtle extension of a long running guerrilla war, one worthy of the tunnels of 'Nam ... per this back on 25th April 2016 in the AFR:
Evelyn Waugh couldn't make this bloke up?
Sorry, if you can't find at least a smidgin of the bromancer in Scoop, you're not trying ...
Which brings us to Catherine McGregor. Now the pond has no argument with the soldiers that fought, and sometimes died in Vietnam, at the behest of the federal government. They didn't set the policy or the fight, the Federal government did, and the alternatives - going under cover or going to prison - were dire and required a passion many didn't feel. Some even felt they might be able to do some good, though the ones that returned that the pond has talked to didn't feel the same way after it was all done and dusted ...
But right at the end, after a tribute to the first conscript killed in Vietnam, McGregor offered a half-assed, pathetic attempt to justify the unjustifiable ...
Especially Thailand and Laos?
Well there's a strategic hop. Not a mention of Cambodia, or Pol Pot or the killing fields ...
Would it have been different if Nixon hadn't ordered ground fighting in Cambodia by some 70,000 US and South Vietnamese troops, and the dropping of some 500,000 tons of bombs on the country, more than three times the amount dropped on Japan during World War II?
Who knows, all that can be said is that Cambodia was fucked, while at the same time, much of Vietnam was ruined by chemicals and carnage ...
And that blithering twit McGregor has the audacity to talk about how it all worked out tremendously well for Australia ... while the Communists still control Vietnam.
Of course McGregor is too young to have much of a clue - according to the wiki she was ten in 1966 but it needn't have been that way.
The Hendersons of the time - stoically avoiding the notion of army service - and the BA Santamarias and his rabid supporters of the Tony Abbott and Greg Sheridan kind (what did they do in the war daddy?) joined in a disaster, in much the same way as Australia rushed off to be deputy sheriff to GWB in the Iraq war ... with all that followed from that enormous disaster.
Now the pond isn't about to send the white feather to the lot of them - after all, they were also young and stupid and infested by Catholicism - but the notion that Australia snatched victory from defeat, Gallipoli-style, is the most insidious canard of all ...
Please, please, peddle the usual fear-mongering, but stop peddling the sublime guff that every commitment of the Australian army made by Australian politicians has been critical to Australia's security and prosperity ... and worked out tremendously well.
There's swilling on the soda pop, and then there's just straight grade A kool aid ...
Time then for a cartoon that refreshes, and wouldn't you know it, Barners hits the Rowe jackpot, and more Rowe here ...
Dammit, that reminds the pond of an old movie, and tell me this street doesn't look like Tamworth ...why we even had a pick-up like that in the extended family.
Enemies are many, DP, and the threats may be unseen but they are manifold. We need a Leader who can anticipate the evil being nurtured in the minds of those who would do us harm.
ReplyDeleteTake Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House in the US. He exemplifies the will to act, in his command Mosquitoes Carrying Zika Must Be Killed. Job done!
Now, per Barnaby, we know there are unseen forces in a near neighbour (wink! wink!) who plan to undo us. What if they get hold of the Zika virus and surreptitiously infect our mosquitoes? Ay?
Direct Action is required. Send in the Phantom!
"Now the pond has no argument with the soldiers that fought, and sometimes died in Vietnam, at the behest of the federal government."
ReplyDeleteWhich is how things are now, but not as they were then: back "then" (1962 onwards) there was a clear split in Australia's youth with many passionately opposed to the Vietnam War and much abuse was heaped on armed forces personnel, especially on the conscripts; many of whom were mindlessly enthusiastic about it all.
Personally, I was very lucky: too young for the universal 3 months Nasho (1951 to 1959 see: http://www.nashoaustralia.org.au/history.htm ) and too old for the Nasho conscription ballot for Vietnam (1964 to 1972). So I didn't face prison as a "draft resistor" as many of my slightly younger contemporaries did.
Not good times.
Nonetheless, you might be just mildly amused - as I was on seeing the newsreel movie made of the event ( http://aso.gov.au/titles/sponsored-films/operation-blowdown/clip1/ ) in a picture theatre - by the Operation Blowdown escapade. You can read all about it here: https://mojowire.net.au/2013/11/06/operation-blowdown-the-day-a-very-big-bomb-brought-the-cold-war-to-far-north-queensland/
Actually, you can't read ALL about it: the story misses out on the army sergeant who had to climb up onto the tower with its 50 tons of TNT to fix the detonator which had malfunctioned. He did so and survived to be awarded a military medal for his great bravery - without him we may never, ever have found out that a big explosion in a tropical forest largely defoliates the place. And how then would the Americans have known to carpet bomb Cambodia, thereby handing it over to the Khmer Rouge.
So it goes.
Hi Dorothy,
ReplyDeleteFifty years on and the revisionists are still trying to rewrite the carnage of Vietnam as a success with nary a mention of the secret carpet bombing of Cambodia and Laos. Even now unexploded ordnance is still taking it’s toll in these poor countries but for the likes of McGregor and Sheridan that’s alright as long as it kept the US engaged in the Pacific.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Menu
They do however seem to have gone awfully quiet about what a rip-roaring success the “liberation” of Iraq has turned out to be. Still give them time…
The mention of the killing fields reminded me of the excellent monologue by Spalding Gray, “Swimming to Cambodia” and that you can now watch the whole thing here;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieMCKk_7Hs8
It’s both funny, tragic and educational.
Gray sadly killed himself in 2004 but it was only after the death of Oliver Sacks that I discovered the reasons why.
Sacks last published piece was in the New Yorker outlining how he had been treating Gray, who had recently suffered a frontal lobe injury and had descended into a deep depression.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/27/the-catastrophe-oliver-sacks
DiddyWrote
Re the "liberation" of Iraq, DW, I was amused, bemused and just mildly outraged to catch on last night's tv that Tony Blair (no relation to Eric) has concluded, in his advanced, sophisticated reasoning that "... the power vacuum that was created in Iraq made it possible for ISIS to emerge".
DeleteOh, isn't he such a wise, sharing, caring man nowadays. You just wouldn't credit his childish passion for more planes 'n' tanks 'n' guns in Iraq. Why, it was going to usher in the millennium of The Third Way.
Isn't there some, any, war crime we could charge that self love addict with ? Couldn't we invent a few just for him ? Oh, and Kissinger, too, who, it is too readily forgotten, gifted West Papua to the Indonesians ... with gutless Australian compliance, but of course.
Hi GB,
DeleteI fear the odious Blair is merely repositioning himself prior to the eventual release of the Chilcot Report in July. He knows he will be criticised and now seeks to argue that nobody could have foreseen that Iraq and indeed the whole Middle East were a far more complicated place than had been previously assumed.
Along with the Shrub (Bush junior), Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz he will never be brought to task for this unholy clusterfuck but then as with Kissinger, none of these warmongers ever are.
The British and then the Americans have been interfering in ME politics for well over 150 years and we can see what an utter mess they have left behind. Take this minor coup for example;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Fucker
That led to Nasser and Arab Nationalism.
The masterminds involved in that, then went on to repeat the process with another coup in Iran in 1953 (that worked out so well in the end, leaving us with a belligerent Theocracy).
1953 Iranian coup d'état
No negative consequences for any of them. Kermit Roosevelt was of course the grandson of Teddy Roosevelt and above reproach and Miles Copeland went onto to be involved in all sorts of spookery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Copeland_Jr.
Interestingly his youngest son was Stewart Copeland, founder and drummer in the band “The Police”.
DW
Spooks. Bromancers. BASanta's Vietnam staging post to the RC Asian empire dream in a conquered China. The warping warpig revisionist re-assigners. Bah! Fuck 'em. Fucked 'em once, those fucking baby burners. Don't know if they'll be fucked again this time around though. All resistance down the tube, panters and slackers, no speed bumps now like the painters and dockers.
DeleteKill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (w/ Nick Turse)
Australia to deepen US ties by boosting bases
Marshall at the Revolution
The Marshall Plan
Andrew Marshall (foreign policy strategist)
U.S. model for a future war fans tensions with China and inside Pentagon
Australia lines up with US for war with China
Meet Andrew Marshall, the unknown but immensely influential figure behind American national security strategy
Is a US Marine base in Darwin really a good idea?
Air-Sea Battle
SOURCEWATCH - Andrew Marshall
The Ugly Truth About The Vietnam War Exposed
Thanks for those two pointers, DW - and your longer list, Anony.
DeleteThey're just childlike in their total unconsciousness of the evil they commit, aren't they. And they never grow up.
Always enlightening to read "An Idiot's Guide To The Way I Wish Things Were".
ReplyDeleteThe truth is that Gorton took over the reins of a lazy, worn out party.
The old and tired Chief Fawner had handed over to the Chief Fornicator who made one dumb decision too many.
Up to that point all they had in their favour was that they were a marginally better rabble than what Labor had to offer.
Gorton was too progressive for the party fuddy duddies and we ended up with McMahon whose biggest success was his wife's legs.
I would probably agree with our Idiot (Sheridan)if he reckoned that Abbott was not our worst PM. McMahon (by a narrow margin) gets my vote.
As for our Henderson's, etc, writing about Vietnam, what they never write about is the shattered lives that it left, on both sides. Sure, they may include a "how sad" sentence but having never seen or done what no young man should see or do, I guess it's easy to sit in an armchair, with pipe and slippers, and pretend you've got a clue. They disgust me.
Anon - perhaps you're forgetting the two Billy goats, Hughes and Snedden. Hughes had more political allegiances than Turnbull has reneged policies, and Snedden of course died on the job.
DeleteOooh, big mistake. Snedden was never PM, though he was leader of the Libs. I couldn't resist the billy goat reference, seeing as he had a fucking good death.
DeleteThanks anon. I wasn't around for Hughes but remember Snedden very well. Strange that one so inept should be remembered. Perhaps that was his strength?
Delete"...he reckoned that Abbott was not our worst PM. McMahon (by a narrow margin) gets my vote."
DeleteHmmm. Once upon a time, Anony, I'd have agreed with you unconditionally. But then it dawned on me a while ago, that despite having been there, and more or less compos mentis at the time, that the only thing I could remember about McMahon was Sonias' dress.
And his crackly, old man's voice.
But I can remember lots about Abbott - despite my aging mental diminution - and all of it bad, or maybe even very bad.
So these days, I've switched to Abbott. Though I think Harold The Holt might have run away with the title himself if he'd had just a little more time.
"...I think Harold The Holt might have run away with the title himself if he'd had just a little more time."
DeleteI rem my Dad (a Lib voter) shaking his head at various stages during the moron years. He admired Ming and Gorton but couldn't abide the other pair.
Perhaps that's where my preference for McMahon as the biggest loser is rooted.
But, there's so little in it, I wouldn't argue the point.
What Henderson never writes about is his active military service during the Vietnam War: because he didn't serve. Quite keen on fighting for the war, not so keen on fighting in it
ReplyDeleteMcMahon was Packer the Elder's pet weasel, wasn't he?
ReplyDeleteI remember the election of 1963. Menzies was running on bash the unions, Labor are useless at managing the economy, the yellow peril and socialists are destroying the joint.
ReplyDeleteNothing's much changed.