William Soil July 2, 2012 at 4:44 pm
Syria is now over the flames of war, under the shadow of the wings of death. The current and future heroes of Syria are being hunted like animals, black hooded, murdered in the streets and piled into mass graves while the rest of us sit and debate what should be done, and how, and by who. Syrians stream over borders now, as humans, fleeing from unimaginable horrors. They are protected under international law, the international law that ensures human rights. These laws are the product of two world wars. These laws are the only shred of hope that emerged from a world reduced to rubble and bones and born into the third world war, the cold war, and yet, these international laws, they were written and they have survived.
I sit in the early hours of Monday morning, watching the story of the Allied bombing of Germany on SBS, completely absorbed in my own mind. We will sit and debate films, of which Downfall was the greatest, Saving Private Ryan second, Beneath Hill 60 third.
How quick we are to forget, to smooth over, to distance ourselves from modern history. How silly it seems on one hand to accept U.S troops on our soil, and embrace the US defence posture as their outer perimeter while simultaneously, wantonly, abhorrently, recklessly trying to ignore the most important pieces of international law to ever have existed.
But of course, after months and months of the most vacuous political climate in my lifetime, of a bland and strangled media littered with the odd honest diamond shining out of the rough, Australian’s are demanding action, right now, yesterday, real action, we are standing up for it.
The central illusion in all of this is that faith can be restored in a hollowed out democracy that does not represent it’s electorate by subverting the international protections that exist to ensure each human being is treated as such, a human being, it can’t. Now even the staunchest politician right of the Greens are guilty of commodifying asylum seekers to votes, to public approval.
The Australian people are expected to support a policy which infringes on human rights. Never mind the razor wire, the SERCO guards, the sewn lips, the suicides, the roof tiles or the riots. If not for the protection of people from other lands, if not to honour the lives lost, who fought under this flag and who equated the fight, the carnage, the apocalypse of the second world war to some kind of fight for a better world, then oppose offshore processing to ensure that our own people be considered human beings, with human rights in any future conflict.
Let the complexities of the situation in Syria stand as an example to complacent entities who may rest on the assumption that future conflict is an impossibility because Captain Team Police Force America will ride in on a drone and save the day regardless of reality. It won’t.
Once it seemed each person left of Costello was against offshore processing. You want to save lives? Embrace the Ellis plan, take the whole queue, now.
If Australia cannot abide the most important pieces of international law to ever have existed, what is to stop the next nation state closing borders to the Red Cross, dropping cluster bombs, laying land mines or hey, writing people off as subhuman and loading them into ovens?
Stop the boats, take the queue. Otherwise the tears cried by so many, the blood shed, the 60 million people that died in those world wars are all for naught and the tears cried by our current stock of politicians can only be interpreted to be tears cried for the slide of civilisation into a new dark age of inhumane obscenity.
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I respect you having those views. No problems. But bear this in mind when you give us the stuff about the war generation how they fought for this and fought for that. That generation (‘The Greatest’) wouldn’t have had a boat people problem, certainly not this flood of economic refugees and you should know it. They wouldn’t have allowed it. Full stop. They actually won wars in those days. There was a strong USA then. As was supposedly said, ” The Romans did not build a great empire by holding meetings. They built a great empire by killing everyone who opposed them”. This was how those wars were fought- and won. Thus the problem is down to this generation, the most selfish in centuries. Baby Boomers.
Stay sympathetic. That’s good and you might just realise that if and when the boats stop coming many thousands of lives will not have been put in danger by those people smugglers and their willing co-conspirators in Australia and elsewhere. Every time a planeload of truly war-ravaged refugees comse from camps in Africa and elsewhere you can use all your obvious and well-meaning empathy for their benefit.
As Cassandra Wilkinson put it tonight on the drum, the USA did not become a “great nation” without accepting the world’s refugees.
I wrote the above spurred on by the notion that The UN human rights convention and following agreements are surely among mankind’s greatest achievements.
I am utterly convinced as much as a person can be that the correct strategy is to clear the camps of all applicants. The population debate has been pretty much silenced, but now is probably the time to reignite that conversation.
I realise comments made about who fought for what are somewhat trite.
You can’t argue though with the fact the entire nation seems confused and bewildered over what should be done, it is seemingly urgent.
I wasn’t writing to be published, just to be read and considered. I have struggled with this issue. I can see the sense in the Malaysia solution. At one point I was ready to argue for it, I was ready to accept from the greens; acceptance of the unacceptable and the 12 month sunset clause. I don’t write methodically and for a couple of week’s I’ve really found it hard to write anything on this issue.
My old man is a Baby Boomer. I have been known to be delusional but fear not. I’d also take issue with “stay sympathetic”, Empathy is the word you are looking for I think, as empathy is what Soil does best. Empathy is the base of all social theory. Before there was Marx, there was empathy. It’s not something you can keep or stay. Culture, how she changes and morphs.
Many afternoons I sat at my grandmothers on my way home from school drinking cokes and eating biscuits. My Ten pound pom Nan, lived through the blitz, her old man was shot twice at Gallipoli & was in Dad’s army.
My Pa died before I was born, he was on the Kokoda, a staunch unionist, grew up on dusty floors around Canberra, didn’t have the nerves to drive; left that to his missus. He endured shock therapy and all sorts and I curse fate I was not born a few years earlier. I dream of climbing trees with him and shooting rabbits around Adaminaby.
If I did write methodically, I would have slept on it and post edit, I would of added that next ANZAC day at the war memorial, as the jets do their fly over, and everyone is at the pub or crammed onto the allocated seating overlooking the hallowed cliffs of Gallipoli – I will remember how much we invest in this myth as a nation, and how hollow this myth proves to be.
Good post,William. I also like your two-part poem on the Reinhard blog.
I wonder when Bob will announce the winner…
Thanks Helvi & thanks Mr Ellis.
Fuck William I’d be flattered too if I’d written that. Good job.
Thanks William.
What came out of the two world wars? An obliterated philosophy that no longer believed in meaning or truth and a mutated theology that either put forward that God is anything I want Him/’her’ to be, or dead – and we’re angry that He’s dead!
Nothing but a culture of death was spawned. Not just skepticism about faith, hope and love, but cynicism, malicious irony, materialism, self-absorption, self-assertion, the use of others as merely means to my pleasure and not ends in themselves.
So much died in those wars and is still awaiting resurrection… It may well come when the full import of JP2′s teaching and witness is realized
So good luck arguing humanitarian solutions for foreign, strictly conservative Muslims in the mean time. The remaining shards of Westerners have almost no ability to look beyond their own immediate interests, thanks largely to the fallout of those wars
Powerful, and from the heart. Thank you William. I am not sure that I can agree with all of it, but I feel the power of your argument.
We must think on these things, as Bob might say.