In which the reptiles disappoint yet again, and the pond regrets it returned too early ...

 

 

The pond realises, too late, that it came back too early ...

Just look at the line-up this day at the top of the digital page ... the war on China, apparently not going terribly well, with bonus Clive, maintaining the rage, and Richo and Slo Mo, and the usual talk of cancel culture and the woke, and the pond felt the immediate desire to cancel the blather ...

As for the commentary section, what a dismal affair ... 

 

The brave lizard Oz editorialist forced to do all the heavy lifting, railing in the usual lizard Oz way at renewables - red flag there - and waiting for the jab ...

Stoic and heroic, but how many times can the lizard Oz run up the red flag on renewables, and renew its wedding views to decent, plucky, clean, innocent, virginal, dinkum Oz coal? As many times as you like ... at least until the planet expires ..

With great reluctance, the pond had to turn back to the usual circus, and a cluck-clucking and tut-tutting ...

 

At this point, the pond had to interrupt, because the reptiles inserted a swag of links, and the pond refuses to include such links.

Still, it was an intriguing moment. Could it not be that it was a coup, albeit only an attempted coup, one that the coupsters knew was destined to fail, but what the hell, why not bung on an attempted coup, just for the fun of it? A kind of belated celebration of the spirit of Guy Fawkes, and the chance for a bit of public preening and even mebbe fireworks?

A bit like the coup dog, always wanting to catch the bus, even if it wouldn't know what to do if the coup succeeded and the dog actually caught the bus?

Isn't the intent to commit a coup still an act of sedition, even treason, no matter that it can be given a light dressing of salad oil as a cynical stunt?

Never mind, the pond knew it was in proper lightweight turf, because the reptiles then produced a couple of photos to bloat out the text, a kind of visual seafood extender...

Wouldn't a cartoon have been a better offering, even if that shot of Joe is about as unflattering as it gets?

 

 

 

 

As for the rest, the Baker can't resist tossing the usual leaden lump of dough into the oven ...

 

 

 

A justified conviction that future elections must not be conducted in this way? But where would that leave the GOP and all the fraudulent nonsense and con artists and snake oil salesmen and women that infest it, with their open carry and QAnon ways? What about them?

And what if the cookie monsters manage to keep their hands in the jars this calendar day in the US?

Never mind, the rest was mercifully brief and featured a snap of Boxter, just to terrify American readers of the WSJ ...

 

And yet ... and yet ... this week's odious little exercise owes so much to Fox News, the Chairman and all who sail with him ... and the fun has only just begun ...

Not to worry. The pond was still on holidays, and had time to wander back in time ... and recall some of the glorious moments that faded too fast from memory, like that scene with Rudi, celebrated at The Daily Beast here ... and currently outside the paywall ...

And so to a bonus wander down memory lane. 

 Why wait for Polonius on a weekend when you can head off to the heady days when Polonius once scribbled for Fairfax, still available here if you have any free articles remaining ...

It ran on April 26th 2005, and was headed Thirty years on, an occasion for some to say sorry ...

April 30 marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) to communist forces - about two weeks after Pol Pot's communist Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia. Three decades ago Gough Whitlam's Labor government welcomed what was then fashionably termed the "liberation" of Indochina.

Jim Cairns, Whitlam's deputy prime minister and the then guru of the Australian left, on April 8, 1975, looked forward to communist victories in Vietnam and Cambodia - maintaining that this was "the only way to stop the carnage, the bloodshed and the suffering" in Indochina. On May 26, 1975 - two months after the fall of Saigon - Whitlam told the Parliament "the changeover has been peaceful and effective".

On Saturday, in the outer Melbourne suburb of Dandenong, the Governor-General, Michael Jeffery, will unveil a memorial which is the initiative of Vietnamese Australians who settled here after 1975. It depicts an Australian and a South Vietnamese soldier standing together, under a US helicopter. This is a tribute by Vietnamese Australians to the Australians and Americans who fought, unsuccessfully, to stop South Vietnam from falling to the North Vietnamese communist regime.

Once it was fashionable to support the communist victories in Indochina. This was the position of most leading ALP figures (Whitlam, Cairns, Tom Uren) and of the overwhelming majority of academics, journalists and other opinion leaders involved in the public debate on Australia's Vietnam commitment.
On January 26, 1978, Uren and some fellow Labor comrades issued a statement addressed to Pol Pot in Cambodia (the nation's name was changed to Kampuchea by the Khmer Rouge) and Phan Van Dong in Vietnam. The leftist signatories declared their support for the "national liberation struggles of both Vietnam and Kampuchea" and urged both leaders to resolve their "current border conflict". No mention was made about the human rights violations then taking place in both countries.

In September 1978 Whitlam addressed a conference in Canberra where he declared he did not accept the validity of any of the reports about human rights violations in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos. He was particularly emphatic about Cambodia, declaring: "I make bold to doubt all the stories that appear in the newspapers about the treatment of people in Cambodia." This was a severe case of denial.

By 1978 general knowledge about the Khmer Rouge killing fields was available to anyone, even if the extent of the horror was not fully understood. Likewise, the oppression in Vietnam - directed at followers of the former anti-communist government - was a fact of Indochinese life.

In late 1978-early 1979, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and drove the Pol Pot regime out of Phnom Penh. The Khmer Rouge was now deserted by all but a few of the left. However, Vietnam continued to be well regarded and its appalling human rights record overlooked. It is true the regime which took Saigon in 1975, assisted by the communist leadership in the Soviet Union and China, did not engage in widespread killings. But it did incarcerate about a million South Vietnamese in Hanoi's gulag.

Some Australians who once supported the communists in Vietnam - and who proudly chanted "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh" in praise of the North Vietnamese dictator - have regretted their deeds. The Melbourne academic Dr Douglas Kirsner, for example, in a contribution to the Crikey website in November, acknowledged the continuing human rights abuses in Vietnam and asked whether "the radicals of the time were right". Yet he is very much a voice in the wilderness.

The recent change of view in Australia to the Vietnam War has been primarily due to the influence of Vietnamese Australians living in Australia: Tuong Quang Luu, Quynh Dao and Khoa Do, among others.

Luu was counsellor at the South Vietnamese embassy in the early 1970s. On August 29, 1973, he was subjected to a violent demonstration by members of the radical left when invited to speak at La Trobe University in Melbourne. He returned to Saigon where he was head of the foreign ministry until the city fell to the communists.

Luu fled Vietnam over land and then by sea to Thailand, and later settled in Australia. His courageous story was told in The Bulletin in June 1975 and more recently, on the ABC FM's The Listening Room program in December 2002.

Presumably, none of the one-time student radicals who denied Luu his right to free speech at La Trobe University would know that he returned to Australia, became an Australian citizen, and is now head of SBS Radio in Sydney and the recipient of an Order of Australia award. Luu was one of many South Vietnamese refugees who received little help from the Whitlam government, which showed scant sympathy to anti-communist asylum seekers.

Dao, one of an estimated 2 million Vietnamese who fled the communists, settled in Melbourne. Writing in the Spring 2004 edition of the National Observer magazine, she criticised the likes of Noam Chomsky and John Pilger who "saw it as their mission to support the northern communists who persecuted Vietnamese intellectuals, who imprisoned poets and novelists, who silenced anyone who dared to speak out against the party line". Dao wrote one of the best critiques of Phillip Noyce's film adaption of Graham Greene's The Quiet American in The Sydney Institute Quarterly of March 2003.
Last January Khoa Do, who was born in Vietnam, won the Young Australian of the Year award. During a speech in Sydney, he proudly declared that his family was on the side of the Aussies and the Americans during the Vietnam War.

On Sunday ABC TV will screen a documentary, All Points of the Compass, based on the story of one-time South Vietnamese foreign minister Tran Van Lam and his family. Judy Rymer, its producer, admits that she once supported the Vietnamese communists but now acknowledges her position was "naive, simplistic and typical of Western myopia".

New Year's Day next year will see the release of the cabinet papers for 1975. They will give a clearer idea of the Whitlam government's position before and after the communist victory in Vietnam. They will also document Whitlam's lack of compassion for the plight of Vietnamese asylum seekers.
Yet, in spite of Whitlam, anti-communist Vietnamese refugees arrived in Australia where they have been primarily responsible for changing attitudes in Australia to Asian communism and to Australia's military commitment in Vietnam.

Gerard Henderson is executive director of the Sydney Institute.

Indeed, indeed, and what fun it is to head here to see ...

... and to read, if only the first few pars, with the rest of the guff at the link ...

 

Oh it's a funny old world,  no doubt about it, and no doubt Polonius will in due course talk again of myopia, but at least it got the pond's head out of the current world of the reptiles for a moment.

Now have a cartoon, just as a way of plunging back into that strange world ...

 

Ah yes, good times ... and Graudian away here for more ...

 

 180,000? So it goes, and so ends the pond's desire or need to return to ancient times ...