watermelon

Grayndler and the Greens’ dilemmas

2013-09-17T00:45:00.000-07:00

By Hall Greenland

In the days that followed the election perfect strangers were constantly bailing me up to express their congratulations and commiserations. They were aware our vote in the seat of Grayndler had dropped compared to our 2010 result - three percentage points as it turned out - and were disappointed (and wary of the Abbott victory) but they were not despondent.

They were right. The drop in Grayndler was nowhere near as large as the overall fall in the Greens vote across the country (see the accompanying table at the end). And if we take a longer view, the Greens vote in Grayndler is up 20% on our 2007 vote (from 19 to 23 per cent). Undoubtedly also injecting some optimism into the reaction was the magnificent victory in the seat of Melbourne, the re-election of Senators Scott Ludlum and Sarah Hanson-Young and the extra senator (Janet Rice) in Victoria.

The local reaction reflects the certainty that we won the political debate during the campaign. There was, after all, no convincing Labor answer to the criticisms of their punitive refugee policy, or the cuts to single parent pensions, or the slashing of university funding, or the promotion of coal exports, or the approval of fracking, or the failure to protect iconic wilderness areas and farmland.

The positive vibe also had much to do with our campaign. We definitely won a few rounds during the run-up, including the Meet-the-Candidates debate in Marrickville Town Hall. It is little wonder that the sitting member Anthony Albanese refused our challenge for debates during the campaign.

The wins during the campaign were important because at the beginning of this year the Greens in Grayndler were in the doldrums after the setbacks in the local elections last year. In all the municipalities within Grayndler, the Green vote went backwards – in some cases by as much as 25%.

Early in the campaign we were buoyed by exaggerated hopes (based on 2010 figures) of actually winning the seat. However that close-run thing in 2010 was the result of receiving Coalition preferences and five weeks out from this election Tony Abbott announced that Labor not the Greens would be getting Coalition preferences this time. It was testament to the strength of our campaign team – and our campaign coordinator Lesa de Leau - that we did not falter.

Our media people, to cite one example, were terrific. We received a number of front pages in the local press and our social media and internet presence could not have been better. The campaign videos were also consistently interesting and garnered positive feedback.

This local and social media presence was important because Anthony Albanese received a charmed ride from the liberal mainstream media. The ABC and SBS rallied to Albanese’s defence with soft treatment on everything from Radio National to the Hamster Wheel to the Observer Effect.

The Grayndler Greens campaign was well-funded compared to other Greens lower house campaigns in NSW. But to put it into perspective, we only had about one-tenth of the resources of the Greens in Melbourne and less than half the resources committed to the key seats in the last state election.

Why then didn’t these strengths translate into more votes? The short answer is we should not underestimate either the strength of our Labor opponents or the mood of our electorate. We were pitted against the deputy prime minister and long-term incumbent, who had comparatively huge party, union and media networks to draw on as well as solid vote banks in the local ethnic and sporting communities.

As for the mood, the most common reaction I encountered from sympathetic voters when I was doorknocking was, “Yes, I like the Greens but the important thing is to stop Tony Abbott, so I’m voting Labor”. This defensive, fear-of-Abbott mood largely explains the continued strength of the Labor vote in Grayndler which was relatively impervious to reminders of how right-wing Labor had become, or to explanations of how preferences worked, or to assurances that the Greens would never support an Abbott government. It completely overwhelmed any impact the Greens official campaign messages might have had.

Yet it is important not to miss the first part of that doorstep declaration – “Yes, I like the Greens…” It is that which is also a source of our measured but upbeat reaction. There is much goodwill towards us in the ranks of Labor voters, which is no surprise as most of us are former Labor voters.

This raises the strategic question of how the Greens relate to Labor now. The experience of the past three years is instructive. There was no real alternative to guaranteeing confidence and supply to the minority Labor government after the August 2010 elections. It was the best government that was available in the prevailing circumstances. It was also right to secure concessions from the minority government. What went wrong – and the work of Tad Tietze & Elizabeth Humphrys and Tony Harris is pretty valid on this subject - was to get cosy and close to that government and to oversell the concessions. Any unpopularity of that government was also sure to rub off on us.

We needed to keep in the front of our minds that the minority Labor government was committed to an unsustainable model of capitalism, its policies were neoliberal to the core and it was a toady of Washington in foreign affairs. Fortunately the party room in Canberra has now reclaimed its freedom of manoeuvre.

While a dynamic, critical, alternative approach to the Canberra consensus is always in order, there is no guarantee that it would have produced better results in the political circumstances of a general shift to the right among voters. The magnitude of this shift is being overlooked in too many quarters: the combined Greens-Labor vote in 2007 was 52%, 50% in 2010 and 43% in 2013.

This problem of relations with Labor remains a real political dilemma for us as we will need to attempt some kind of cooperation with Labor in resisting the Abbott government’s bid to reverse climate change action, undo environmental safeguards, turn the screw on refugees and accelerate redistribution upwards.

The dilemma is thrown into sharper relief by the current Labor leadership ballot. We in Grayndler know how fake or limited Albanese “progressivism” is – given his support for the imprisonment of refugees, promotion of coal exports, privatisations of public enterprises, local Council alliances with the Liberals etc – but his victory can make resistance to Abbott stronger in that it could revivify the long-suffering Labor base who will almost certainly vote overwhelmingly for Albanese as the most “progressive” candidate.

We are now entering a new period. It is to our advantage that Senator Lee Rhiannon has kicked off the discussion amongst us about how we proceed after the election setbacks. Left Flank and Antony Loewenstein are weighing in as well. The virtue of the Greens party room’s present position is that the Greens can regain their freedom of political independence and initiative. What the issue or issues will be that arouse important parts of the citizenry to action is yet to be determined but already climate change has joined refugees as causes around which people – and certainly the Grayndler Greens - are willing to act.

14 September 2013

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My initial response to election result https://www.facebook.com/greensforgrayndler

The Greens’ percentage of the vote: House of Representative/Senate

	2007 election	2010 election	2013 election
National	7.79 / 9.04	11.76 / 13.11	8.33 / 8.58
NSW	7.88 / 8.43	10.24 / 10.69	7.76 / 7.57
Victoria	8.17 / 10.08	12.66/ 14.64	10.32 / 10.70
Tasmania	13.5 / 18.13	16.82 / 20.27	8.08 / 11.37
South Australia	6.95 / 6.49	11.98 / 13.30	7.99 / 7.03
Western Australia	8.93 / 9.30	13.13 / 13.96	9.54 / 9.78
Queensland	5.63 / 7.32	10.92 /12.76	6.03 / 6.09

As the Gallipoli centenary approaches: is the Anzac Legend bubble in danger of bursting?

2013-05-09T06:19:00.000-07:00

Anzac Day has come and gone as principle urgers like Australian War memorial Director Brendan Nelson and NSW Anzac Centenary chief and ex-General Peter Cosgrove crank up the volume on their plans for the 2015 Gallipoli anniversary. On the surface this year’s Anzac commemorations continued to demonstrate rude good health with new records for dawn service attendance – close to 50,000 in Melbourne and 35,000 in Canberra.

But the commemorations have not gone unchallenged with thoughtful critiques this year appearing in the mainstream media from Clare Wright, Ian Sysons, Christopher Bantick, Ben Pobjie, Kim Johnston, among others. There was Robert Bollard’s new book re-challenging the myths of Gallipoli and World War One. And a debate on the “puff” versus “substance” of Anzac Day, featuring Marilyn Lake, Jeff Sparrow and ex-ADF solider Graham Wilson, against a team including new Australian “War” Memorial generalissimo, Brendan Nelson, saw Lake et al win 71% of the 250-300 person audience vote, with few pro-Anzac contributions from the floor discussion. When it comes to the arguments the anti-Anzac perspective is strong but is crowded out by the jingoistic commemoration, fuelled by a largely obsequious and compliant mainstream media.

But is it possible to detect a whiff of panic and bluster among the Anzac legend urgers? Are they running the risk of going “over the top” in the run-up to 2015? Might the bubble burst?

While the numbers turning out to ceremonies in Australia and overseas are impressive we should remember that they represent a shifting concentration of public turnout, towards dawn ceremonies, that may be still be less than the number who turned out for (the now less significant) veterans’ marches during the 1950s and early 1960s. Should this perhaps be the point of comparison, relative to population size, rather than comparing the current turnouts with the downturn from the late 1960s?

Anecdotally and subjectively I recall a bigger fuss being made in my hometown in the 1950s and early 60s with not one but two Anzac marches, a preceding schools march on April 24 (with the benefit of losing a double period in the classroom two mornings a week, in the weeks prior, to practice marching). And even in the classroom it seemed then that Anzac Day received more attention with mass compositions written on Simpson and his Donkey etc. On this point I take issue with Marilyn Lake. It seems to me as a teacher who has spent a good part of my teaching of history and politics at matriculation and university level, the interesting question is not the use of pro-Anzac materials provided by Remembrance institutions like the AWM and Veteran’s Affairs, but why, after decades of teaching by baby-boomers like me: the WWI “Home Front” conscription struggles, the Vietnam War and peace movements; the Anzac Legend is so enduring. This points to the more important cultural and political setting outside the school.

Again, anecdotally, even the “good war”, World War Two, received more attention back in the 1950s and 1960s. Coral Sea Week, following close on the heels of Anzac Day was prominent and in my town and featured an annual fly over by military aircraft, (and we were nowhere near an airbase) with pilots flown back by transport that evening for a ball! This was a celebration of the alliance with the US. There has been the more recent nationalistic shift to Kokoda and the bombing of Darwin, but with the alliance still in tow.

This writer senses that what we may be seeing with the current commemorative hype may be all we are going to get – that the Anzac urgers have committed much of their army to the field. Living in a part of Melbourne where “leakage” from such patriotic events might show up in boozy public displays of nationalism, there was none of this around on Anzac Day this year, as the populace largely seemed to get on with enjoying the sunny late autumn opportunities of a (in this case informally extended) long weekend - something that is going to happened every time Anzac Day does not fall on a Wednesday.

The jingoes potentially are facing problems – could it be that the 2015 anniversary might mirror 1915 where the news from Gallipoli caused a flush in recruitment before enthusiasm for the war waned (back then, in the face of industrial conflict and the conscription debates)?

As historian Clare Wright has pointed out the revitalisation of Anzac commemoration has been part of the political project emanating from the Hawke-Keating and Howard eras. Howard in particular, she argued, used the Anzac legend “as a political opportunistic tool for rallying the nation behind a particular version of Australia's history.”

Anzac and neo-liberalism.

Much of this relates to the emergence of a dominant and largely unchallenged neo-liberalism in the Hawke and Howard eras. The corollary of this emphasis on free markets and the rule of capital has been the attempt to collapse the state back to its core military-security function: not just war making but also anti-terrorism policing, containing unionism and border security. This has been accentuated since 9/11 and the “war on terror”. The focus on the state’s war-making function has required an intensifying of the military legends provided by Anzac to sustain this. It may not be, as Wright and Marilyn Lake argue, that the Anzac Legend crowds out other important national narratives, such as the emergence of democracy in Australia. Rather it may be the other way around – the weakness of any strongly articulated social democratic, internationalist and peace alternatives in Australia’s contemporary political culture, gives full reign to the jingoistic nationalism of the Anzac Legend.

Both the Labor Party “Left” and the Greens, have effectively given up on presenting antiwar perspectives. This is particularly egregious for the Greens, which in large part began in the 1980s as an antiwar global movement (linked to ecology through the nuclear issue). While critical of US alliance policy, the Greens have recently subtly embraced the alliance itself – and how many people noticed, especially in the mainstream media (MSM), that the 2010 Afghan War debate contained no Green criticism of that alliance – the equivalent of criticizing global warming without mentioning carbon.

At its worst this is electorally-driven cowardice by Labor’s “Left” and the nominally antiwar Greens - at its best it is a gross political negligence. However in the context of global economic crisis, the neo-liberal consensus underpinning war culture is in danger of fracturing. This, coupled with the waning enthusiasm for the war on terror and the failures of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, may open up more space for alternative political visions, threatening the Anzac Legend.

The jingoes’ commemorative problems.

In this wider context there are other more immediate commemorative problems.

There is the increased and overt military presence on Anzac Day, with catafalque guards, fly-pasts, speech-making by the military brass, and the presence of uniformed veterans. Unlike the short-term volunteer armies of the two world wars, and conscripts of Vietnam, veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan contain among their numbers a higher percentage of still-serving soldiers. This increased presence of uniforms on Anzac Day, and its threat to the image of the citizen-veteran has been concerning enough for arch-hawk and Australian Defence Association chief Neil James to express concern.

The military is in a jam here. The war culture, which the Anzac mythologies promote, is a “Janissary” culture which says it is fine to have sacrificed one’s life for empire (British or American) and military defeat (Gallipoli, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan). This has been essential to maintaining Australia’s war machine – one still built around the alliance with the US. There is also the general fear, recently expressed by the Chief of Army, that post-Afghanistan, governments might be tempted to wind back military spending and recruitment, as happened for a time after Vietnam. This is a particular danger at a time of fiscal problems associated with the GFC and these anxieties have been expressed around the release of the latest Defence White Paper. Hence the military’s hyperactive support for Anzac commemoration, a support that risks martialising and damaging it.

But along with this is the shift in focus away from the big marches as a consequence of the overall declining number of veterans. While we need to remember 17,000 Australian’s have served in Iraq, and the wash-up from Afghanistan may be similar, the veterans from the first AIF have gone, the second AIF almost gone, and the 50,000 who served in Vietnam are ageing. It is doubtful, and controversial, as to whether families wearing dead ancestors medals can compensate for this (ex-ADF Graham Wilson savaged this trend at the above-mentioned Melbourne Town Hall debate). Thus the shift to the dawn services and the attempt to widen commemoration to the Western Front and to Kokoda and Darwin, encouraged by the remembrance elites in order to guarantee the survival of the Anzac Legend.

The focus on the dawn services and the cemeteries of Gallipoli and the Western Front however is problematic. Thousands of young people are looking not at marching hero-veterans, but at the graves of the dead. This produces conflicting emotions among these participants about the nature and purpose of war, as has been documented in the research of historian Bruce Scates. Those turning out to these ceremonies may be open to alternative antiwar narratives. They’re just not getting them.

Soft Jingoism.

One of the responses to these problems, and the more questionable, and questioned, wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, has been for the commemorative elites, the military and politicians, to shift to a kind of “soft jingoism’ which admits of the “futility” of war but still sees it as inevitable: a kind of melancholy acceptance of war. This is reflected in the just-ending “peace” exhibit at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne (see comment my earlier “Lies of War Memorials” blog below) with its website summation that “peace cannot be taken for granted and, it seems, demands our eternal vigilance” a softened version of the longstanding RSL motto that “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance”.

This melancholy acceptance of the permanence of war can be seen in the Anzac Day speech given by the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, at Townsville. The site of a major military base, the location of this year’s speech is testament to the conscious link between the Anzac-driven war culture and the war machine.

The danger for the jingoes is that this softened approach may nonetheless open the door to more critical appraisals of the Anzac legend. What do we make for example of the Anzac Day comments of the Tasmanian Governor who in 2012 suggested that Anzac Day should be used to “ask hard questions about the meaning of wars, their causes and outcomes” and this year made controversial reference to Australian soldiers pissing his pants in fear in Vietnam, while cautioning that Gallipoli centenary may cause people to overlook the brutality and reality of war. Veterans, he said

deserve honouring and remembering as they struggled to overcome the terror and do their duty: not the mythical tall, lean, bronzed and laconic Anzac, enthusiastically and unflinchingly carrying the torch of freedom in the face of murderous enemy fire, Australia needs to drop the sentimental myths that Anzac day has attracted.

This may still be soft jingoism, but of a form that runs the risk of straying too far off message.

Can the bubble be burst?

While the jingoes run the risk of puffing up an unsustainable Anzac mythology it is going to take more than a little help from outside to burst the bubble

Hopefully this may come through a revitalised antiwar movement. The problem is that, notwithstanding the actions by a number of antiwar groups, and Anzac-related initiatives like the Melbourne Town Hall debate, such a cohesive and assertive movement doesn’t really exist at the moment. Of course it may be possible that the 1914/15 centenaries, and the jingoes over-reach, may open the door to the entry into the debate of the thousands who came out in Australia before the Iraq War. This shows how quickly political support for an antiwar position can come to the surface. There certainly seems to be a potential antiwar sentiment linked to lack of public support for the Iraq and Afghanistan adventures.

Occasions such as the centenary of the outbreak of World War One and the Anzac Day events of 2014 and 2015 might be an opportunity for large events such as “Never Again” rallies around the anniversary of the outbreak of World War One, or Anzac Day Eve sunset vigils. The latter may provide a counterweight to the dawn services, pointing out that for the victims of war the day is ending, not beginning.

But how to get to this point? Much of this will be tied to the general re-emergence of political alternatives to neo-liberalism and its related military-security nationalism. But much will also need to be done to actively combat the Anzac Legend, and the war culture it sustains, in order to build to action around the centenaries. The entry of Wikileaks into the up-coming federal election may have some impact given the antiwar tenor of their disclosures, particularly as the result of Bradley Manning’s work. But clearly the main focus is going to have to be at a grassroots activist level, hopefully building support for wider action.

There are already signs this is happening with Anzac eve peace concerts and vigils emerging in Australia’s major cities, and the Melbourne Town Hall debate, showing there is a thirst for alternative activities and perspectives. However even this can become a battleground with the jingoes seeking to appropriate the soporific term “peace” as evidenced in the Shrine of Remembrance Peace exhibit (which eschews any meaningful reference to Australia’s antiwar history) and the Anzac eve concert spot in Brisbane occupied by the RSL.

We need more than a “peace” response. We need an assertive antiwar response that specifically and critically takes on the historical misrepresentations and omissions of the Anzac Legend and the memorialisation of war: the absurd notion of a (masculinist) national ethos or character type emerging from Australia’s war history; the absence of any commemoration of the non-Australian military victims of war; the assertions that Australian soldiers have died in war for “democracy”, “freedom”, or just “us”; and the shameful celebration of a national history that has seen Australia almost continuously at war.

We need a critique that links the Anzac-driven war culture to the maintenance of Australia’s war machine, its alliance relationship to the US, and its bloated military expenditures.

There is, of course, a need for a compassionate respect for veterans. Given what we now know about mental and physical health issues, and the grief of veterans and families for the dead, we need to give them space to gather – for veterans for example, meeting and seeing each other is important (I came to appreciate this in part from the experience of my WW2 ex-POW father). This of course reveals the true cruelty of the Anzac Legend-driven war culture, the way it appropriates the personal experiences of soldiers, and the grief of families, and fashions this into a collectivised, phony, national legend and mawkish, insincere public grieving, dominated by politicians, military brass and remembrance elites. Any challenges to this during official commemorations will probably have to come from antiwar veterans and their families.

Occupying war memorials?

However outside and around the official commemorations, “war” memorials are prime sites for protest, utilising them for example for “flash” poetry readings, antiwar songs, speeches or visual protests and antiwar performance. Social media provides outlets for the dissemination of these activities. Memorials can be useful sites for protest action in support of Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, Wikileaks, and other activists under legal threat. This kind of action can be done by individuals, through to small and larger groups of people.

As I have argued in an earlier blog below, these monuments are not in truth “war” memorials but military memorials and museums – they leave out stories about the (non-Australian military) victims of war or any analysis of the causes of war. And they are not (as Alan Bennett points out in The History Boys) about remembering, but forgetting.

Hopefully, actions and debates around Anzac Day, and at memorials year round, might start to inspire (or embarrass) more prominent political and cultural figures to come out and shine the light on the “inconvenient truth” about the Anzac Legend.

That it is a lie.

OPPOSE ANZAC DAY JINGOISM 2013

2013-04-20T07:07:00.000-07:00

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This is not a Shrine of Remembrance:

And this is not a war memorial

The militarisation of the Canberra constitutional landscape

SEE BLOG BELOW ON THE LIES OF AUSTRALIA"S "WAR" MEMORIALS

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Peacewashing Syria?

2013-03-24T17:30:00.000-07:00

Marrickville Peace Group held a vigil calling for an end to the violence in Syria on March 20. Their statement reporting on this is reprinted below.

The attention of MPG to the Syrian crisis and their vigil is to be applauded – we need more groups and initiatives like this around peace and disarmament issues and the members of this group deserve support and respect for their action. It is however in this vein that I must take up some of the arguments used. I respectfully take them up because they have wider currency in Left/antiwar thinking about the situation in Syria. First the MPG statement:

Marrickville residents call for peace in Syria

Residents attending the peace vigil at the war memorial at Marrickville Town Hall on Wednesday morning called for a peaceful resolution of the war in Syria and an end to arms sales to either side of the conflict.

“The terror that each day confronts the people of Syria is fueled by the international arms trade, said Colin Hesse, spokesperson for Marrickville Peace Group.

“The five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States are the five largest arms exporting countries in the world, and these weapons are predominantly used against the civilian populations of the countries these weapons are sold to.

“The suffering of the Syrian people is directly supported by the most powerful nations, so we call for an end to the arms trade and peaceful resolution of the civil war in Syria, said Mr Hesse

Father Dave Smith from Dulwich Hill Anglican Church spoke passionately for peace, saying “So many of our sisters and brothers have suffered and so many acts of inhumanity have been performed that the country will remain scarred for many years to come.

“Though it’s not always obvious what we can do from here, one thing we can do is to tell the truth about what is really happening - about media bias, and about the way we profit from seeing Syria destroyed.

“We all have blood on our hands, but we can make a stand today for truth and for peace for the people of Syria, said Father Dave.

“Amnesty International has been campaigning for the last 10 years for an international arms trade treaty to stop the flow of weapons to those who will use them to abuse human rights, said Amnesty International spokesperson Karl Weaver.

“This week the negotiations for that treaty have resumed at the United Nations in New York and we are hopeful that a treaty will be secured.

"It is time for the killing in Syria to stop. It is time to take the weapons out of the hands of those who will use them to commit war crimes.

There is much to agree with here: the sentiments in favour of peace in Syria and opposition to arms flowing into the country, and the role they play in the commission of war crimes, no matter on which side of the conflict. The last thing the Syrian people need are weapons coming in from ANY source, or foreign intervention by ANY of the imperial powers or the wannabe’s like the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey or Iran. However I take issue with the casting of the Syrian conflict as some kind of symmetrical civil war.

The principal dynamics of the conflict in Syria have their origin in the brutal response of the Assad regime to demand for political reform and the determination of the Syrian people to resist. Sure the conflict has taken on the characteristics of a civil war through its degeneration into an armed conflict. Like all such armed conflicts it has seen the emergence of some dodgy, armed groups, and human rights abuses but the underlying politics cannot be ignored. The task for a peace group, I believe, is to assert the primacy of civil resistance in the struggle, not retreat to position of false political symmetry.

This is analogous to casting the Israel-Palestine situation as a “conflict” between equal partners, only needing the intervention of a peace process. This ignores the asymmetry of the situation faced by the Palestinians and the validity of their struggle against occupation and ethnic cleansing, So it is in Syria, describing the struggle as a civil war only requiring only the intervention of arms controls and a peace process ignores the underlying asymmetrical political dynamic.

Further, as recently highlighted by a Syrian Leftist activist Ghayath Naisse in Socialist Worker, the principal imperial intervention in terms of supplying arms, and fuelling the violence, is the role of the Russians. There is also the lesser imperial wannabe in this context, Iran. This isn’t to say that the other powers, principally the United States, Britain and France aren’t playing a role or would not like to do more, but while fanning the conflict, they have to date been limited by their own fears of weapons in the hands of Islamic-oriented groups. Paradoxically, the Western imperialism’s trying to operate through their proxies in the Gulf states and Turkey has probably made this situation more difficult, skewing some of the power in the Syrian armed resistance further towards the more violent sectarians.

But as Ghayath Naisse and others have pointed out, here is a lot more going on in Syria, with the armed sectarians actually not as significant as both the West, and some in the anti-imperialist Left, believe, Outside of and alongside the armed struggle (which, as a response to the violence of the Assad state, I understand but do not, as a non-violent, antiwar activist, support) there is a vibrant civil resistance and tens of thousands of Syrians building community governance mechanisms to try and manage their lives in a war zone or in areas freed from Assad’s influence.

Of course elements in the Syrian opposition “leadership” are calling for US and Western armed assistance but does this invalidate the Syrian people’s struggle on the ground? The links of the Palestinian leadership to foreign powers (the corrupt Fatah to the US and the authoritarian Hamas to the Iranians and the Brotherhood-dominated Egyptian government) does not invalidate the grassroots Palestinian struggles, particularly those involved in civil resistance, the BDS campaign and what is likely to be a coming, renewed, intifada. People fighting for their liberation are not necessarily to blame for the manipulations of their often self-appointed or unaccountable leaderships. The presence of this manipulation in the direction of encouraging foreign intervention in Syria is no excuse to abandon political support for the oppressed Syrian people.

We are right to be concerned by the US and other Western imperialists – the US is the principal predator power in the Middle East with its support for Israel, its invasion of Iraq, its fuelling of conflict with Iran, its link to undemocratic states from Jordan through to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, and its attempts to undermine the Egyptian revolution through continuing to fund the Egyptian military. But as explained, it is not, as yet, the pre-eminent imperial power in Syria.

In this context I find the date chosen for the Marrickville vigil, March 20^th, curious. This is the anniversary of the outbreak of the Iraq War, an American imperial venture. Why not the preceding Friday, the second anniversary of the March 15 beginning of the Syrian revolution, when protest broke out in Dara’a over the arrest of school kids for painting anti-Assad slogans on walls?. This avoids singling out the prime culprits in Syria, the Assad regime and its Russian backers, for criticism. MPG was not alone in ignoring this important anniversary, It was also ignored the bulk of the anti-imperialist Left, the Greens and anti-war activists in general. I except here Socialist Alternative, and there are no doubt others, who have maintained a consistent and principled stance of support for the struggle of the Syrian people.

If we are to genuinely seek peace in Syria it has to be in the context of supporting the Syrian people in their struggle, one which is part of the broader uprising throughout North Africa and the Middle East and which encompasses the struggle of the Palestinian people. The rights of people to push for their liberation are not divisible.

There are plenty of ways those of us who oppose violence can offer our support to the Syrian political struggle. By taking the side of the Syrian resistance political terms and being willing to clearly sheet home to the Syrian state and its Russian backers that the starting point for peace must be their ending attacks on the Syrian people, releasing political prisoners and implementing genuine democratic reforms (the departure of Assad will come, it does not necessarily have to be a precondition). And yes, we should call on the opposition to respond in kind, reject violence, and demand that both sides respect human rights. And yes we should continue to be vocal about demanding an end to all attempts at foreign interference in, and arms flows to, Syria, as MPG has effectively emphasised.

As peace activists, we should support a renewed emphasis on civil resistance against the Assad regime, in preference to armed struggle which ultimately only internalises the violence of the oppressor and debauches movements for political change.

Further suggest reading: the informative “Why Civil Resistance Works” by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan (Columbia University Press, Paperback Ed. 2013). Includes sources to the wider discussion on non-violence and civil resistance. There was also a shorter Q and A by Chenoweth on this subject in a 2011 edition of Foreign Policy magazine.

See also my February 11 blog below which deals with broader issues of war and violence.

Australian Labor in Crisis – go back to where it all began.

2013-03-23T19:51:00.002-07:00

With the unravelling of the Left in the ALP in the 1980s.

This case study of the “making and unmaking” of the Labor Left in Leichhardt Municipality in the 1970s and 1980s presents insights into the changes in social democracy in Australia during this period – part of the global changes related to the post-Keynesian capitalist economy, the rise of the ecology and other social movements and the onset of the post-Cold War (and new Hot War) world.

In Australian Labor, the opportunity to build a vibrant diverse and combative Left within the party during these two decades, drawing on the energy of the new social and union movements, failed. The Left, particularly in the dominant NSW branch, chose to fight the Right on their own terms, becoming co-opted into branch-stacking, rulemongering, parliamentarism and the creation of an inward-looking, authoritarian, factionalism. This was to become dominated by the emergence of a party political caste of full-time political professionals and union bureaucrats.

Much of this was played out in the febrile politics of inner Sydney, where this case study is based.

In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of people sought membership of the ALP branches of the inner-Sydney municipality of Leichhardt. These were people whose politics had been shaped by the social movements of the times and by the hopes and disappointments associated with the Whitlam Government. The political clashes between this Left-leaning new membership and the conservative working class, and working-class-made-good, patriarchs of the local Labor Right have become legendary. Yet as the fruits of victory were in reach, the Left began to fall apart in often bitter conflict. By the beginning of the 1990s many of these participants, in what has sometimes been called the ‘middle-classing’ of Labor, had deserted the branches and switched their political allegiance to independents, Democrats and the Greens. This is the story of this turbulent transition told from the point of view of the members at the branch level, and the ALP political life they sought to construct. As the Australian Labor Party struggles with its identity and purpose at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Basket Weavers and True Believers provides a timely case study of the recent making, and unmaking, of the Labor Left.

Basket Weavers and True Believers, is based on my PhD and my own party activism, and is freely available on Google Books or in hard copy from Gould’s Book Arcade, Sydney (some may also be still available through Gleebooks, Sydney).

A curious historical footnote: One of the episodes in the book is the preselection contest, which resulted in the Left’s Peter Baldwin replacing the Right’s Les MccMahon for the federal seat of Sydney in 1980. I was one of the three Left candidates – the minor one on the far Left campaigning as a “Socialist for Sydney”. Our preferences along with those of the other Steering Committee Left candidate Ann Catling were essential to getting Baldwin elected but my own vote was quite small (around 35 out of over 600). One thing I didn’t mention in the book was that one of those votes came from an activist in Young Labor at the time: Anthony Albanese.

The Lies of Australian "War" Memorials

2013-03-17T18:16:00.000-07:00

This is not a war memorial – it is a museum of Australian military history.

The galleries of Australian military war dead at this military museum are moving, particularly when we consider that overwhelmingly these young soldiers had their lives thrown away for empire: British or American. But missing from these gallery walls are the victims of the wars in which Australia has fought: the Egyptian nationalists gunned down by Australian troops in 1919, the millions who died in Vietnam and the tens of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan; the thousands of Iraqi’s who died as a result of the post Gulf War naval blockade and sanctions (aided by the internal policies of the Hussein dictatorship). If this were a war memorial it would have something to say about these dead and the folly of the wars in which they died..

An example of the failure of this museum as a war memorial is seen in the exhibit dealing with post-1945 conflicts. While there is some lip-service paid to antiwar sentiment around Vietnam and Iraq, overwhelmingly the exhibit extols the virtues of Australian troops in these dubious conflicts complete with the usual display of war toys: a long-range patrol vehicle used by the SAS in Iraq and Afghanistan, (the military units most prone to situations of human rights abuse and unlawful killing); an armoured personnel carrier from the Vietnam era (of the kind used to drag dead suspected National Liberation Front fighters through a Phuoc Tuy village); a loud and ridiculous boys-own Iroquois helicopter display which ignores the fact that this was an instrument of terror deployed by occupying armies against the Vietnamese people. No mention is made of issues raised by veteran and historian Terry Burstall: the general carelessness and brutality directed against the Vietnamese of Phuoc Tuy province by Australians, water torture of a female National Liberation Front fighter, targeting of civilians with artillery, and forced relocation of villagers.

Set in a décor of battleship grey the post-45 exhibit is oppressive, presenting a dismal celebration of Australia’s war culture, concluding with the “soft-jingoism” that is becoming more typical of ANZAC and other commemorations in the light of more controversial recent wars – a melancholy acceptance of both the futility and inevitability of war:

Despite the efforts of all those who served in conflicts from 1945 to today, peace remains as elusive as ever

And near the aeroplane hall, the footnote to the museum’s exhibits, the extolling of the “Anzac Spirit Today”, the familiar nationalistic mythologising of “courage and endurance and duty, and love of country, and mateship, and good humour and the survival of a sense of self-worth and decency in the face of dreadful odds”

…And this is not a Shrine of Remembrance - it is a Shrine of Forgetfulness.

Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys has the teacher Irwin questioning the motives behind war commemoration. In Britain’s case it was to mask that country’s own responsibility for the First World War in the face of the large number killed.

We don't like to admit the war was even partly our fault 'cause so many of our people died. And all the mourning's veiled the truth. It's not "lest we forget," it's "lest we remember." That's what all this is about — the memorials, the Cenotaph, the two minutes' silence. Because there is no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.

Using memorials like this as part of a process of forgetting is seen in the current ”Peace” exhibit at the Shrine. The exhibit presents a mélange of items including Australia’s participation peace-keeping operations, some peace activist paraphernalia, quotes form the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, information on the Quakers and peace movements and activists in Liberia, Northern Ireland, and Afghanistan, to name a few items. But there is virtually nothing on the rich history of antiwar and peace movements in Australia (a photo of the Peace slogan daubed on the Shrine during the Vietnam War era is included). The Women’s Peace Army and WW1 conscription struggles don’t get a look in and nor does the antiwar movement of the Vietnam era in any systematic way. There is no reference to the antiwar opposition to the construction of the Shrine in the 1920s, including by Labor Premier George Prendergast.

Again, with recent wars being more controversial and the shift in ANZAC commemoration from the marches of declining numbers of living veterans to the war dead (commemorated at dawn services) it is necessary for the political, military and remembrance elites to soften the jingoism that has accompanied Anzac day in the past, referring to the futility, yet inevitability of war. As the Shrine’s own description of the Peace exhibit puts it:

Peace cannot be taken for granted, and it seems, demands our eternal vigilance.

Peace ultimately can only be secured by war.

“War is the Health of the State” (Randolph Bourne 1918) – war memorials and the militarisation of the Canberra constitutional Landscape.

The memorial to Australian and US collaboration during WWII (long called “Bugs Bunny” by Canberrans) forms the centre piece of the Russell Hill “Jannisariat” – the cluster of Defence buildings (with ADFA and Duntroon nearby) that holds down one of the points of Canberra’s parliamentary triangle, a physical expression of the construction of Australia’s war machine around the interests of the US. Indeed this is one corner of the Western part of the parliamentary triangle, the “iron triangle” that represents the increasing militarisation of the Canberra constitutional landscape. The War memorial/Anzac Parade and the bunker-like parliament house itself make up the other points with the new ASIO headquarters buttressing the base.

Below, the Eastern axis of the “iron triangle” from the Russell Hill complex and Australia-US memorial, looking towards Capital Hill – the new ASIO headquarters is being constructed along the base to the right.

The Western axis of Canberra’s “iron triangle” – looking from the “war” memorial to the Capital Hill parliamentary bunker

But does this war memorial also hide truths?

This Canberra memorial is to the seventy Australia men and women who went to Spain between 1936 and 1939 to defend the fledgling republic against Franco and German and Italian fascism. It is a welcome departure from the usual nationalistic and jingoistic remembrance of the involvement of Australians in war. It rightly commemorates those who were prepared to stand up to fascism at a time when Right-wing nationalists in Australia and elsewhere either ignored, or were sympathetic to, the emergence of military nationalism in Italy, Germany and Japan. Yet even here the full truth is avoided. As historian of the involvement of Australians in the civil war, Amirah Inglis, explained it:

The civil war has been argued and the character of the (International Brigades) disputed in Australia by old fashioned anti-communist and catholic journalists like Gerard Henderson and BA Santamaria by revisionist historians like Michael Jackson who following George Orwell and more recently Ken Loach ignore every other aspect of the Civil war but the May days of 1937 and focus only on the nasty facets of the Soviet Union’s role.

There was more to the conflict between Stalinism and the other revolutionary and socialist forces in Spain than a few “nasty facets”. Sweeping this history under the rug doesn’t serve the interests of revealing the truth about war, politics or revolution. For the Left as well it can be the case that “there is no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it”.

When war and violence are in the historical equation: shit happens.

2013-02-11T17:18:00.000-08:00

"I prefer to sniff French shit for five years than to eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life." Ho Chi Minh 1946.

A recent Al Jazeera survey showing strong Malian support for French military intervention was no doubt skewed towards those of the two-thirds of Malians who have a mobile phone and who are likely to be more concentrated in the south. With secular and some Islamic Tuareg resistance fighters in the north collaborating with the French occupation, it would seem Malians have opted for the time being to “sniff French shit” in the face of the alternative most felt they faced: a destructive quasi-criminal/religious warlordism.

The Malian people are not to blame for the breakdown of their own government and military (and the long-term consequences of colonialism), leaving them potentially defenceless, but eventually they will have to confront French neo-colonialism, its surrogates in the coming military presence from Chad, Niger etc., and the new Western “scramble for Africa” of which it is part. They will also have to confront the marginalisation, and demands for regional autonomy of the Tuareg and other minorities in the north, as well as ongoing divisions within the Malian army and society. There is also no doubt much more yet to come out in terms of the civilian casualties of French bombing and there is clear evidence human rights abuses (before and after the French intervention) by the Malian army directed against the northern minorities.

This situation in Mali is reflective of the “Sophie’s choice” that often confronts people where war and violence are concerned. The general context of violence and the threat of violence compels people to make choices among bad alternatives based on fear, confusion, lack of information, absence of hindsight and the immediate imperatives of the violent “moment”.

We can see this at a level that affects our own daily lives. Violence can impel us to act against our better political sentiments; like calling the cops (as I have done), on neighbours engaged in yet another a violent dispute, wrecking the house around their ears, while their primary school children screamed at them to stop. While I have personally intervened in such situations in the past this was unlikely to have been useful on this occasion. I wish there had been some other more appropriate social agency to call but there wasn’t. I felt the choice I made was the only one possible. We are often confronted by such situations throughout our lives.

In the larger context of war and violence, and the specific context of the Arab revolution, a similar problem was presented in the Libyan “Benghazi Moment” when, notwithstanding the early manipulations of the British, French, Qatari’s and ex-Gaddafi loyalists, the Libyan people as a whole were confronted with a choice between wrong and wrong: whether to take the risk and face the blood-curdling threats of Gaddafi (I see no evidence that he was likely to be any less brutal than the Assadists in Syria) or invite in the neo-colonial war machine of the British and French. The choice made would I think would have been welcomed at the time by most Libyans. To say this is not to endorse foreign intervention. Rather it is a question of empathising with the dilemma the Libyans faced, being willing to respect their decision and be supportive of them as they struggle to deal with the consequences, while at the same time maintaining a strong critique of imperialism and shining a harsh light on the realities of intervention.

We can cut a little slack for the Libyans, and the Syrians, just as we might cut some slack for the Vietnamese revolutionaries who aligned themselves with the US during WWII, later showed an initial willingness to cut a post-war deal with the French, and then ultimately sought assistance from the Stalinist states. Or the situation faced by the Bolsheviks who not only sought German Imperialist assistance to enable Lenin to return to Russia but who were later forced to bargain with them at Brest-Litovsk in 1918; choosing between wrong and wrong, and accepting German terms for an armistice in order to save Petrograd and the Russian revolution itself. Brest-Litovsk was in many respects the Bolsheviks’ “Benghazi Moment”.

World War Two also presented challenges for the anti-imperialist Left – a war with its origins in imperialist conflict but one that threw up a particularly virulent strain of military nationalism that had to be responded to. The concept of that war as an intersection of two wars: an imperialist war and a people’s war against fascism contains the inference that the interests of the imperialists (the Allies) and Leftists/Liberationists might at moments coincide – as they did in Vietnam, or in Europe where resistance groups collaborated with Western intelligence.

Recognising this does not mean becoming part of a “pro-war Left” or privileging imperialism over local dictatorships – rather it is a recognition of the imperatives driven by war and violence and the fact that in such circumstances the interests of imperialists and liberationists will sometimes, temporarily, coincide.

Take up the gun, take up the gun-runner.

In the Arab revolution, foreign intervention in Libya, and later Syria, began with the taking up of the gun against the Gaddafi and Assad regimes. Foreign intervention follows armed struggle as night follows day. Foreign supply or application of weaponry becomes inevitable on some level – the only questions remaining being to what extent the revolutionaries are able to hold together a cohesive, credible and genuinely inclusive organisation or movement and keep the level of foreign intervention under some sort of control. Once armed struggle had commenced, a Libyan rejection of British and French bombing, would still have led down a path that would have involved some degree of reliance on foreign assistance, perhaps, as in Syria, via the Gulf states, particularly Qatar.

There are obvious risks involved in accepting this foreign intervention in the context of armed struggle. After all the Vietnamese people relied on the “fraternal” Stalinist states for assistance in their revolution at the same time as these states were suppressing their own population and collaborating in the undemocratic intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968. The long-run effect of this may have been a further contribution to the Stalinist militarisation of the Vietnamese revolution. And in Syria, the limited support from the Gulf States and others, in the context of Western paralysis about supplying arms to potentially anti-Western groups, has no doubt skewed the Syrian opposition in a more Islamic and specifically Sunni direction. In Libya in contrast, the reliance on French and British bombing has left a legacy of Western interference at the level of the new Libyan transitional government.

It is for these and other reasons I remain an advocate of unarmed civil resistance as the best way forward for political change – it is not cost free but would 60,000 have died in Syria if the opposition had stuck to this path? What would the situation have been in Libya had the opposition not taken up the gun against Gaddafi in the first place? Civil resistance doesn’t guarantee that there won’t be attempts at foreign intervention by imperial powers, but the mass participation necessary for its success militates against interference. Armed struggle on the other hand creates inward looking, security conscious armed elites, clustering around the internalised violence of the oppressor and ready made, when the time comes, to enforce a political sell-out. An example here is the Fatah-led PLO, which choked off the First Intifada at the end of the 1980’s and took the Palestinians down the disastrous path of the Oslo Accords.

Armed struggle ultimately debauches the political movement/s it springs from. In the Palestinian struggle for example, the “success” of the Gaza based rocket attacks in resistance to the recent brutal assault by Israel is not a cause for too much celebration. The rocketeers of Gaza have no more long-term answers for Palestinians than the racketeers of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. Arguably a more effective way forward for Palestinians is to return to civil resistance and global boycott, building to a restarting of the First Intifada, engaging Palestinians inside Israel and in the refugee camps as well as Gaza and the West Bank.

It is imperative for those of us on the Left to continue to shine a harsh light on the machinations of the imperialist predators but not to the point of political paralysis in terms of supporting peoples, like the Libyans or Syrians, struggling against tyranny.

Notwithstanding human rights abuses on both sides of the equation in Syria, and the rise of some dodgy Islamist elements within the Syrian resistance, the situation emerged from the brutality of the Assad regime and its resistance to reform. At the very least the Assad regime should have been subjected to more pressure from the Western Left. For example, there have been virtually no public demonstrations of support for Syrians in Australia – the Syrian honorary consulate in Sydney, in the middle of Left-Green Balmain, has been undisturbed as has the Vietnamese consulate in Melbourne which hosts Syrian consular affairs there. Contrast this with the (quite correct) political actions against the Max Brenner shops in both cities, and the very rapid and effective protests against the Israeli assault on Gaza. Let’s face it, with notable exceptions (such as Socialist Alternative), Syria has not been the anti-imperialist Left’s finest hour.

While a supporter of unarmed civil resistance (and one who lies on the more non-violent end of the spectrum of what “unarmed” means) I feel we should nonetheless be empathetic towards, and supportive of, those who, in dire, historically determined, circumstances feel that they have had no choice but to go down the path of armed resistance and respect the problems of managing the influence of the imperial gun-runners that inevitably ensues. We should continue to shine the light on the real motives of the imperialists and interventionists while being supportive of the locals as they are forced to ultimately confront the consequences of this interference. We should support attempts to take violence out of the equation such as through political negotiations (while being critical of those negotiations, as in Yemen, that seek to cement in the status quo). Negotiations should be seen as a transition, not a “solution”: a transition that can restore non-violent and civil resistance/mass action methods to the centre of the move for political change. Such negotiations may now become possible with the stalemate in Syria, and in the context of restoring the Malian people’s control over their political situation, just as such negotiations may have been possible in Libya had the gun not been taken up, or at least in preference to the latter “regime change” stage of the British/French intervention.

Above all we should strive to find a way back to that peaceful mass political activity which can help shape a better world in ways that war and violence never can.

“Our allies”: Green zombies on the warpath?

2012-08-23T17:28:00.000-07:00

Tony Harris

This blog began its life with, and has largely focused on, the Australian Greens slide away from being an anti-imperialist and genuinely antiwar party, particularly the party’s gradual acceptance of the “reality” of the Australia-US alliance. This blogger rejoined the Greens around 2007/08 after a prolonged absence - I had pulled out of Green party politics at the beginning of the 1990s, having been involved in the early foundation of the Greens in NSW.

My involvement in the Greens from the early 1980s was very much motivated by and anti-imperialist stance – opposition to traditional imperialism through antiwar politics and opposition to the ecological imperialism of a capitalism colonising and depleting the natural environment. For Greens around the world in the 1980s this was linked through the nuclear question – the threat of nuclear Armageddon coupled with the ecological threat from nuclear power. With the end of the Cold War and the post-Chernobyl dampener on nuclear power this anti-imperialist stance of Green parties waned. This was coupled with a shift of Green parties to more mainstream politics, preoccupation with electoralism and a move to neo-liberalism, reflected ultimately in market based solutions to the problems of global warming (see Elizabeth Humphrys’ recent Left-Flank contribution to this debate).

This shift to the right appears to have occurred a little later in Australia than elsewhere but is proceeding apace. Hall Greenland in a recent post on this blog raised his concerns about the shift to neo-liberalism in economic policy (see below) at the Adelaide national Greens policy conference, and more is promised at the follow-up conference in November, particularly over funding for private education.

But the Adelaide conference also confirmed the drift away from a genuine antiwar politics for the Greens particularly as regards the Australia-US alliance. The previous Peace and Security policy nominally committed the Greens to withdraw from ANZUS. This has been replaced with a statement that the Greens will seek a “renegotiated defence relationship with our allies that promotes Australia's independent role in our region”.

With those two words, “our allies”, the Greens have signed on to military alliances, something that makes it impossible for them to honestly represent themselves as a party of “Peace and Non Violence”. Alliances exist to make, and prepare for, war and to mobilise vast armaments expenditure. They are fundamentally inconsistent with antiwar principles. In other words one of the “four principles” that motivated the Greens at their foundation globally in the 1980s has been quietly, and with little discussion, jettisoned. “Our allies” of course means principally the United States, and through that relationship privileges other alliance connections such as those with NATO and Israel.

Of course there are other creditable policies in the Peace and Security platform that technically undermine this – such as the commitments to opposition to foreign military bases and nuclear ship visits. This reflects the something-for-everybody, nature of the Greens policy program reflecting both the need to obtain consensus, and to offset the political shift to the right with gestures to left-wing rhetoric. The Greens are moving to the right but are still in transition.

But the move to the right in terms of written policy is only part of the story. The main one is the way in which general, vague, and often contradictory, policies are actually interpreted by the federal party caucus. Indeed it is the caucus that is driving the current policy review and it is difficult not to conclude that it is essentially a cynical process aimed at coming up with policies that give maximum scope for them to call the shots.

This was already happening in the foreign policy/antiwar field – the subject of many of the earlier blogs below. The move to play down opposition to the Australia-US alliance began with the 2010 Afghan war debate where criticism of the war was contained to war policy, and the war-committing, decision-making processes in parliament, not the alliance itself – bizarre given that the alliance is the whole reason Australia is in Afghanistan. This carried through to the obsequious performance of federal Green MPs at the time of the Obama visit and the failure to take him to task over the development of the new US war machine based on drone strikes, and special and covert operations. This has continued by excising the role of the “joint” intelligence facilities from any implementation of the Greens policy (then and in its new form) of opposing foreign military bases. The intelligence facilities at Pine Gap and Kojarena (WA) are directly involved in Obama’s drone wars and covert programs and as such embroil the Australian government (and by their silence, their Green parliamentary supporters) in the commission of war crimes - see my article in the recent Winter edition of NSW Greens, Greenvoice.

Senator Scott Ludlam has in the past probed the function of these bases, and he and other Green MPs continue to raise important questions about war and alliance policy. But a paper put out by Ludlam’s office earlier this year entitled “The Impact of Military Bases”, which made many good points, contained passing reference to Pine Gap, and no reference linking intelligence facilities to the drone wars. An earlier statement in March criticised the possible use of the Cocos Islands as a drone base, commenting on the civilian deaths involved, but making no connection to the intelligence facilities.

The reluctance to criticise these intelligence facilitates relates to the fact that they are the jewels in the crown of the US-Australia alliance and no sustained critique of their function could be undertaken without calling the whole alliance into question. In other words, the recent behaviour of the Green MPs and the latest changes to written policy constrain criticism within an acceptance of the alliance paradigm, depriving the Greens of a critique of imperialism in general, US imperialism in particular, and the existential racial fears that hold the Australia-US alliance together. Thus the Greens are depriving themselves of a critique of the causes of war and accept an approach that puts them very firmly on the warpath.

It will be interesting to see how far the Greens can continue to play this game. A decision to locate a major US naval base in Western Australia, for example, could see a reenergising of a local antiwar movement, putting pressure on the WA Greens and their Senators to take up more strident positions in opposition to the alliance.

To a certain extent this is what has happened in the asylum seeker debate. The horrific nature of the Government-Coalition stance, and the Greens policy and genuine advocacy of asylum seeker interests has seen the Green politicians taking a lead in parliamentary resistance (albeit within the limitations of the existing policy paradigm of “managing” the “problem” – see the recent Tad Tietze Left-Flank post on asylum seekers and open borders). What is likely to be a reenergised asylum-seeker support and protest movement will keep the pressure up. And of course a downturn in the mining boom, exposing Australia to the fury of the GFC may see the Greens newfound love of market-based solutions start to fray.

All this reflects the fact that the Greens are still in the process of transition from a party of (at least partially) an oppositional leftism to one of “sensible” and “moderate” centrism aimed at winning more seats and presenting the party as a partner in government. But the transition is quickening.

Underlying all this (and specifically underlying the national policy review) is the drive by the federal party caucus to arrogate to itself more power and authority in making and interpreting policy. In this regard the Greens are duplicating the errors of the Labor Party, developing a federal party structure dominated by an increasingly non-transparent and unaccountable caucus, sustained by a growing caste of careerist parliamentary and party staffers, and characterised by a “consensus” caucus authoritarianism as potent as the “majoritarian” caucus authoritarianism of Labor. Labor Senator Doug Cameron in 2010 lamented how the authoritarian caucus system was creating a party of “zombies”. He of course recently joined the undead on the asylum-seeker “compromise”. In many ways the Greens are stumbling off down the same road.

Electorally the Greens are being driven by the hubris and fantasy that they are going to keep on winning more seats and growing their vote. The Green vote for the foreseeable future is likely to remain at or below the 10-12 percent range, with minimal opportunities to draw further votes away from a Labor party unlikely, at this time, to lose its rock-bottom, rusted on, working class base. Liberal voters are unlikely to shift support to the Greens no matter how much the party moderates its policies. The Greens may find themselves in the parliamentary world of the undead centre: the political life drained out of them by abandoning harder edged left-oppositional approaches that characterised the Greens rise from the 1980s, yet unloved (if occasionally necessary) as a presence in a parliamentary and government culture that prizes the “stability” of the two-party system.

The Greens have been fond of repeating Bob Brown’s line that unlike the Democrats before them, they are not there to “keep the bastard honest” but to “replace them”. Unless they change course, the fate that awaits the Greens is that the only bastards they are likely to replace are the Democrats themselves.

Asylum Seekers: The sad, short, history of Labor’s deviation from a ‘White Australia” mentality.

2012-07-23T03:02:00.000-07:00

First published in Recorder, the newsletter of the Melbourne Branch of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History

Tony Harris

The recent attacks on the Greens by notable Labor Party figures over the refusal of the Greens to compromise over offshore processing of asylum seekers represents a new low for the Labor Party. The attacks by assorted Labor right-wingers are predictable, But most disappointing was Labor Left Senator Doug Cameron’s criticism, outrageously accusing the Greens of being responsible for asylum seekers dying because of their “purist approach”. This ignores the fact that Greens policy is similar to that of refugee organisations – such as the highly-regarded, Melbourne-based, Asylum Seeker Resource Centre. On ABC News 24, its CEO, Kon Karapangiotidis described the Labor and Coalition approach to the debate as “evil”. The sad truth is that when it comes to “purity” you couldn’t get anything more pure than Labor’s adherence for most of its long history, to a White Australia mentality.

Labor departed from this mentality for a relatively brief period from around the mid 1960s to the beginning of the 1990s. Its reversion to a white Australia mentality is a kind of White Australia Plus, embedded in an “acceptable” form of multiculturalism with strict borders. In terms of immigration and refugees, Labor has embraced John Howard’s 2001 barrier: “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come”.

The ALP freed itself of its White Australia mentality in the context of the emerging social movements from the mid 1960s. This mentality was of course never just about a discriminatory immigration policy but also embraced paternalism towards, and marginalisation of, Aboriginal Australians. It was also a mentality reinforced by our military alliance with the United States, which effectively originated in the 1908 visit of the Great White Fleet. It has been an alliance historically built around racial fear. The Vietnam antiwar movement challenged this.

Labor formally abandoned its discriminatory immigration policy on the eve of the election of the Whitlam Government. That government followed through with the abolition of discrimination in assessing immigrant applications and then underpinned it with the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act. This is arguably the most important piece of legislation to ever pass the federal parliament, also ending legal discrimination against Aboriginal people, laying the foundation for the later High Court Mabo decision, overturning the White Australia foundations of the Australian Commonwealth, and establishing human rights norms in accordance with international conventions. The Whitlam government backed this up with proposed NT Aboriginal Land Rights legislation, enacted by the Fraser Liberal Government. And while Whitlam remained a supporter of the alliance with the US it was an alliance in flux, with a critical Labor Left on the case.

The road back to White Australia in immigration began at the start of the 1990s with a new focus on asylum seekers. With a large influx of Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees, Labor introduced mandatory detention amendments to the Migration Act, laying the foundation of a system that would underpin both Liberal and Labor asylum seeker policy. While Labor, on its re-election in 2007, removed some of the more egregious elements of the Howard system, such as Temporary Protection Visas, the system of “punishing’ asylum seeker boat arrivals by extensive detention, and by “holding back” on intervening to intercept boats until absolutely necessary, essentially continues.

Labor’s march back to a White Australia mentality was also reflected in Aboriginal affairs. In 1986, the Hawke Labor Government buckled under pressure from West Australian Labor Premier, Brian Burke, and backed off national land rights legislation. The Mabo High Court decision was an important forward step for Aboriginal people but it, and the subsequent Native Title legislation, was as much, if not more, about confirming white dispossession, and calming white fears. However Labor under Keating and Rudd made important symbolic statements of reconciliation.

It was also the Hawke Government, which restored the alliance with the US to prominence, signing on to the 1990/91 Gulf War and the shift in the racial fears underpinning it to the Middle East. Since 9/11 these fears have widened to include south Asia though there has been a recently re-embraced a fear of China. The historical existential anxieties of these two colonial settler societies, both established by acts of ethnic cleansing, remain at the core of the alliance and reinforce the White Australia mentality.

And so the final week of the recent parliamentary session was a sorry affair, not because of the Greens principled stand in favour of ready solution to the problem – by embracing and facilitating our international responsibilities, with the rapid and safe relocation of asylum seekers to the Australian mainland - but because of Labor’s refusal to abandon a mentality which sees it as important to resist and punish asylum seekers seeking to come to this country by boat. And of course this was the same week that the Government, with coalition support, extended the colonial and paternalistic Northern Territory Intervention through its Stronger Futures legislation, in the face of widespread opposition from Aboriginal groups and communities.

Throughout its history, the ALP had a fractious relationship to its dominant White Australia mentality, challenged at different points by Labor, and labour movement, socialists and internationalists, and ultimately influenced by the evolution of post-WWII migration. Labor can claim some achievements in the area of multiculturalism and indigenous affairs. And in NSW, Labor for Refugees, an organisation which played a major role in campaigning against the Howard Government on asylum seekers, has written to NSW ALP General Secretary, Sam Dastyari, expressing its disgust at the attacks on the Greens and pointing out that the Greens approach is consistent with ALP policy. We can only hope other voices will be raised inside the ALP and the labour movement and that hopefully Labor will return to the progressive path it set out on in the 1970s.

The Greens – and their better selves

2012-07-12T19:46:00.000-07:00

Post by Hall Greenland
Port Jackson Greens, NSW.

There can be no doubting the moral and political courage of the federal Greens MPs after their magnificant stand on refugees two weeks ago and their resistance to unrelenting mass-media hysteria ever since. So it appears to be a surprise that these same MPs led such a determined charge to drop the inheritance tax from the party platform at the Greens’ National Policy Conference in Adelaide last weekend.

The “party room” (as the federal MPs are called) moved for the deletion of the plank in an abbreviated debate – about ten minutes – in which Bob Brown seized the mike to spell out the reason for the elimination: it was electoral poison and costing us one or two percent of the vote. That was it. Truly. (Incidentally, the policy in question was a commitment to an inheritance tax on estates above $5m, with family home, family farm, small business and bequests to spouses excluded.)

The only votes cast against the dropping of the tax came from the entire NSW delgation. The move was carried 65-12 - an unrepresentative majority, aproblem I will return to.

On the face of it, the move – and the arguments used to ditch the policy - appear to confirm the Tietze-Humphrys thesis that the federal Greens leadership, not to mention the Greens membership as a whole, are veering to the right, driven by electoralism and an attachment to neoliberalism. They are, to coin a phrase, “neoliberals on bikes”.

A few hours earlier in a special plenary session called to farewell Bob Brown, both he and his successor, Senator Christine Milne, laid out the strategy of an alliance with what might be dubbed “the green bourgeoisie”, but which is usually referred to as Green businesses. The thinking is that there are firms out there with a real interest in an ecologically sustainable economy and that they can be split away from the Business Council of Australia and the Australian Industry Group to form a capitalist base for the Greens. As one of the leaders said – I think it was Bob Brown – this new alliance will also “afford us new funding opportunities”.

In that context, the dropping of the inheritance tax – and much else in the new economic platform – makes sense. The Greens don’t want to be scaring off those new Green allies. The other leg of the new party-room electoral strategy is to woo regional and rural Australia, which appears to be unobjectionable at this stage.

What this two-pronged strategy leaves out – and this is a silly oversight for an electoral strategy – is those areas where there are most votes: the western suburbs of the great cities. It is here that the Greens should be devoting any new energy we have, especially if we are to fulfil our dream of a dynamic mass presence leading on to the great transformation of existing society.

But it is unlikely the Greens can win the working class of the western suburbs if they are going to abandon tax strategies that attack great inequalities of wealth. Ironically, no sooner had the Greens abandoned the inheritance tax, than Labor MP and academic Andrew Leigh, published his latest research into income and wealth distribution in Australia. And sure enough, things are becoming more unequal.

The removal of this tax also reflected the very point of the rewriting of the Greens policy platform that is taking place this year: to pare it down and to remove as many concrete commitments as possible. According to one member who did a word count, in 2009 the Greens’ platform was 40% the length of the Labor Party’s, but the new draft platform published earlier this year was less than 20%.

This savage pruning was the work of the party room’s staffers who outnumber national office staff by a ration of 20:1. In Adelaide – the venue for the first of the two policy conferences being held this year – there was some pushing back and NSW was not alone in advocating restoring and adding material. It is difficult to judge what the results of this push-back have been as policies were amended and finalised in workshops and final drafts are not yet available.

Despite the loss of the inheritance tax, most of the NSW delegates believe that delegates from other states (and the party room) are still interested in a more egalitarian distribution of income and wealth, and that it is just a matter of finding the right mix of policies and they will swing behind it. One or two of the NSW delegates were more pessimistic, although they undoubtedly hope the optimists (or illusionists) are right.

The optimists are right that the picture remains mixed. For instance, the industrial relations policy adopted at the conference – based on informal reports - upholds the right to strike and pattern bargaining, supports the lifting of restrictions on solidarity industrial action, calls for portable long-service leave and a shorter working week, a better deal for apprentices and insists on the right of workers to have a voice in setting their own hours and work arrangements in order to get a better life-work balance. The economics policy also calls for – thanks to the NSW delegation’s advocacy - democratic control of the economy and public ownership of natural monopolies and essential public services. How much of this has been diluted and contradicted by illusions about markets, corporations and tax reforms, that have also been added, is the subject for another analysis.

Switching to other matters, a major disappointment of the policy conference was the initiative to drop from the platform any reference to particular countries (like Tibet, Palestine, East Timor and West Papua) and instead develop specific off-platform resolutions on these matters. This issue will be further thrashed out at the November policy conference but it is likely that NSW will be the one dissenting state.

Which brings me to the unrepresentative nature of the conference. Under the formula for delegates what we get at Greens national conferences is more or less equal numbers from each of the states. It’s more Senate than House of Representatives. So NSW, with over 30% of members, has approximately 15% of delegates. Victoria is in the same position.

A more representative set-up – and one that would involve the members – is to have local groups send delegates (the numbers of delegates from each group to be based on their membership) directly to the conference. This probably won’t fly nationally, but not to worry too much; it is the basis of NSW conferences which are now called upon to take the lead in policy development.

Finally, what was in many ways the saddest session of the conference, was the discussion introduced by Christine Milne about the need to kick-start climate change activism. Despite the triumphalism about the introduction of the “price on carbon” package, Senator Milne acknowledged that the community movement was still needed if the derisory target of a 5% reduction in greenhouse gases was to be increased. Regrettably, however, the steam has gone out of the extraparliamentary movement.

Whether it has occurred to her, or anyone else in the party room, that over-selling the victory of a carbon tax, and associated measures, may have contributed to the demobilisation, was hard to tell. Perhaps in the early hours of the morning some of the federal MPs awake and realise that the huge tasks confronting us will only be solved by policy boldness and the sort of courage the asylum-seeker debate has revealed they possess.

THE ANTIWAR LEFT NEEDS ITS OWN ANSWER TO ANZAC DAY: THE CASE FOR MAY 8 - MORATORIUM DAY.

2012-04-23T20:11:00.000-07:00

May 8 is the anniversary of the first Vietnam antiwar Moratorium in Australia in 1970. It is an ideal day to commemorate the history of antiwar movements in Australia and help rebuild an antiwar culture.

Specifically it could aim to:
1. Commemorate the individuals and movements that have campaigned against war throughout Australian history.
2. Remember ALL the victims of the imperial wars in which Australia has fought - civilians and military on all sides.
3. Promote an antiwar culture as a counterpoint to the jingoism that attends Anzac Day and the Anzac mythology.

A suitable form of commemoration might be a candlelit sunset vigil as a counterpoint to the Anzac Day Dawn Service - a reminder that for war's victims the day is not beginning - it has ended.

This kind of commemoration could also start slowly and grow - it would be good to have something like this established by the time of the 1914 WWI anniversary.

Brief summary of talk by Tony Harris, at NSW Greens Peace and Non-violence forum, Sydney, February 27th, 2012.

2012-04-10T23:53:00.005-07:00

(This talk was part of a forum also addressed by Elizabeth Humphrys of NSW Greens. Check out Liz's writing on Left Flank - link in sidebar).

I recall a discussion in the early Greens in NSW, around the time of the 1987 Senate campaign, as to whether to have “Peace and Non-Violence” as the description of one of the four Green principles, or “Disarmament and Non-Violence”. We opted I recall for the latter more active term: it is easy to believe in Peace, but are we prepared to take the more assertive steps towards Disarmament?

Apparently, it seems, not. We are currently falling short in our Peace and Non-violence principle by not confronting the war machine, which has at its heart, the Australian-US Alliance. The 2010 Afghan War debate and the recent Obama visit are cases in point. In the first, no criticism was made of the US-Australian Alliance, bizarre given it’s the whole reason Australian troops are there. And during the Obama visit, notwithstanding criticism of the Marine base proposal, no criticism was offered on the ANZUS treaty (it is our policy nominally to withdraw from it) and no mention made of the intelligence bases which are linked to Obama’s expanding global drone wars and covert operations (it is Greens policy that all foreign bases be withdrawn).

We have been the party of “inconvenient truth” on Asylum seekers and global warming, but during the Obama visit we sat back and allowed Gillard and Obama peddle convenient historical lies about the advantages to Australia of the Alliance, an Alliance that has embroiled us in wars that have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands, and has been rooted in racial fears, whether of Asians or more recently Arabs and/or Muslims.

There is no doubt that the federal Green parliamentary caucus is playing down our antiwar policies, specifically any critique of the Alliance, out of fear of an electoral backlash. The McCarthyite campaign against the NSW BDS policy earlier this year demonstrates what will happened if the Greens stray over in to the “no-go zone” of Australia’s key foreign policy relationships: the relationship with the US and its best friend Israel.

An example of the power of the war machine occupying this “no-go zone” can be seen in the extraordinary militarisation of the Canberra constitutional landscape with the defence and security establishment, clustering around the WWII US-Australia monument on one of the points of the parliamentary triangle at Russell. Historian Peter Edwards has also commented that the US-Australia Alliance has almost become part of the de facto constitution, rather like the monarchy!

The Alliance is also culturally and politically reinforced through the secretive Australian American Leadership Dialogue and Australia-Israel Leadership Forum. Leading journalists in the mainstream media are regular participants.

So certainly we should be realistic. If we are to take on the war machine and the Alliance we are going to be hammered by the mainstream media, the major parties, and the foreign policy and security elites. But we must do so, showing the same determination and courage as in the (equally unpopular at first) asylum seeker issue.

I want to conclude by turning briefly to the ways in which we can take on the war culture, particularly as it is expressed through Anzac Day and the Anzac mythology. This war culture is founded on the notion that it is a noble thing to enlist and go off to fight, and possibly die, in dubious imperial wars. Of course there are some contradictions within the Anzac commemoration process. The jingoistic, militarisation of Anzac Day, and the presence of uniforms, contrasts with the shift from the focus on the participation of (declining number s of) veterans, to the dead, through commemorations such as dawn services here and in Gallipoli and on the Western Front. We should not assume that participants in these commemorations, particularly the young, might not come away with questions about the futility and waste of war.

But if we are to provide answers to those questions we must think of ways of countering the Anzac mythology. One way might be to promote alternative antiwar commemorations on the day itself (such as the aboriginal “invasion day” activities on Australia Day). I would like to suggest that as an alternative we promote May 8 as “Moratorium Day” (it is the date of the first big anti-Vietnam War Moratorium in 1970). It could seek to commemorate the individuals and movements that have campaigned against war and mourn the lives of all victims of war. It would closely follow Anzac Day, and something like a dusk candle-lit vigil on that day might provide a poignant counterpoint to the Anzac Day Dawn services – reminding the public that for war’s victims it is an end, not the beginning. Much more needs to be done to counter the Anzac-based war culture but this might be a start.

Above all, if the Greens are to give leadership in confronting the war machine and war culture, then that leadership should be primarily focussed on building a strong antiwar social movement and culture, not just focus on achievable outcomes inside the parliament.

Postscript.

Since this talk the Greens have come out against the proposal to use the Cocos islands as a drone base for the US. But they are still making no mention of the intelligence bases in Australia which are crucial to the Obama administration's drone wars and covert and special operations, especially in the Middle East and South Asia. The reluctance by the federal Green MP's to focus on these intelligence bases (even though Greens policy is opposed to all foreign military bases) flows from the knowledge that they are essential to the US-Australia Alliance and any criticism of them will involve an attack on the Alliance. This the Green MP's are apparently not prepared to do. There are deeper questions here - with a national policy review that looks likely to water down national policy, coupled with the push by Bob Brown and others towards centralisation of decision-making, this is a harbinger of the growing lack of transparency and accountability by federal MP's on policy questions.

Bump Me Into Parliament: a Greens version?

2012-03-07T17:30:00.004-08:00

A cautionary tale! A piss-take to help us in the Greens think we're we are going.

Based on the original wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) song by Australian union activist Bill Casey - to the tune of "Yankee Doodle Dandy".

Come gather ‘round Green friends of mine

Consensus I am seeking,

A seat in parliament to find,

The numbers I am tweaking.

Chorus

Bump me into Parliament

Bounce me any way,

Bang me into Parliament,

On next election day.

As a Greenie activist

I really am quite frightening,

But now I’m off to parliament,

I’ll try to be enlightening.

Chorus

The carbon tax was my idea

All the party’s for it,

But whether it will work or not,

Well that’s up to the market.

Chorus

In Peace and Love I do believe

They’re principles inspiring,

But when it comes to Palestine,

It’s really just too tiring.

Chorus

“Yankee Doodle” Danby is

A Labor man annoying,

He’s after us on BDS,

It’s an issue we’re avoiding.

Chorus

Barak Obama came to town

Riding on Alliance,

With few demurs and grins all ‘round,

We gave him our compliance.

Chorus

Inheritance and private schools

Our policies are causing fear!

But in the MP’s caucus room,

We can simply make them disappear.

Chorus

New parliamentary friends of mine

They think I’m quite reliable,

And now my bum’s upon the bench,

I want to be called Honourable.

So bump them into Parliament

Bounce them any way,

Bung them into Parliament,

It’s the “Professional’ way.

.....

The Greens and Palestine: confronting the "inconvenient truths" of the party's right of return policy

2011-11-25T19:02:00.000-08:00

In March last year, 35 prominent Jewish Australians signed a petition renouncing their automatic right of return to Israel, labelling such a right a “racist privilege” while Palestinians, ethnically cleansed from Israel in 1948, are denied their rights of return under international law.

This goes to the heart of the problem of finding a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Palestinians are the largest refugee group in the world, and constitute the most protracted and long-term refugee problem – around 7 million of the 11 million Palestinians are refugees, 5 million living in refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere, under the supervision of the UN agency set up in 1951 specifically to deal with this population: the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNWRA).

The Australian Greens pride themselves on determined and principled defence of the rights of refugees. Green politicians and activists can righty take credit for focussing attention on the inconvenient truths of the rights of asylum seekers under international law, and in the process, helping to shift Australian public opinion over the appalling abuse of rights under current Federal Government asylum seeker policies. The Greens national website gives prominence to the fact that asylum seeker are not illegal, citing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Palestinian refugees who in May marched on the border with Israel, during the annual Nakhba commemoration, were not illegal either. Yet 14 paid for this right with their lives, shot by Israeli troops, in an extreme version of a Tony Abbot, “turn back the boats” exercise.

The right of return is the other side of the coin of seeking asylum. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights expresses this in a single sentence: “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and return to his country”. This is reinforced under the International Covenant on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Alongside this is the even more explicit Palestinian “right of return” under United Nations General Assembly resolution 194 of 1948, which was accepted by the new Israeli state as a condition of its entry into the UN. This resolution states that Palestinian “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss or damage to property.”

The Australian Greens position.

There is an emerging strategy by the Greens national parliamentary leadership, following on from the national furore over support in the Greens for the BDS campaign against Israel, to try and present a “small target” over the Israel Palestine conflict. This has involved a limited “cherry-picking” from the Greens national policy, focussing solely on the question of the “two-state solution” and by extension, support for the Palestinian Authority’s UN bid for recognition of a Palestinian state. But the Greens also have a policy on the “right of return” and the national leadership is bound to assert it. It calls for: “a just and practical negotiated settlement of the claims of the Palestinian refugees that provides compensation for those who are unable to return to their country of origin, Israel or Palestine”.

The insertion of the term “practical negotiated settlement”, is an example of the usual caveat that finds its way into a political party platform but does not absolve the Australian Greens interpreting this provision in line with international law. As has been pointed out above, this is less equivocal. Any “negotiated practical” outcomes cannot bargain away the right of return, and the alternative of compensation has to be offered as an option. In terms of who is defined as a refugee under international law, a guide is provided by the UNWRA definition: persons living in Palestine from the 1 June 1946 to 15 may 1948 together with “descendants of fathers fulfilling this definition”.

In this context there also needs to be a refutation of any notion of “trade-off” between Palestinian refuges and those Jews who moved to Israel from the Middle East and North Africa after 1948. While of these Jews were drawn to the new Israeli state, and others encouraged to do so by Zionist activists, there is no doubt that many were forced to flee from Arab states in the aftermath of the foundation of the State of Israel. The forced transfer of populations, whether Palestinian or Middle Eastern Jews, would today rightly be described as crimes against humanity under the Fourth Geneva Convention. One crime cannot be traded against another and the right of return of Palestinians is not diminished by the unwillingness or inability of Israeli Mizrahis to return to their countries of origin. Their right to do this, and be offered the option of compensation, is valid, in its own right. It needs to be put onto the Arab states, especially in the context of the human-rights based Arab Revolution, that they have responsibilities in this regard no less than Israeli responsibilities towards Palestinian refugees. Similarly, the willingness or otherwise of Arab states to grant proper settlement and citizenship rights to post-1948 Palestinian asylum seekers does not negate the Palestinian right of return.

In confronting this issue then the Australian Greens would be well advised to take up Bill Clinton’s 1992 Presidential campaign reminder that it was “the economy stupid”. For the Australian Greens approach to the resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict “it’s the right of return, stupid”. This has consequences for the other part of the Greens Israel-Palestine policy: the two-state solution.

The right of return and the two-state solution.

A right of return by Palestinians confined to just the 22 percent of historic Palestine, with nothing more than a token right of return to Israel, will not be acceptable to them or comply substantially with international law. This means that Israel will have to potentially absorb a considerable Palestinian population, substantial altering its demographics. On the other side of the fence any Palestinian state is likely to contain a sizeable number of Israeli Jews. The need to resolve the illegality, and land-grabbing, of the West Bank Jewish settlements aside, there are likely to be a considerable number of Israeli Jews remaining, perhaps being offered Palestinian citizenship. Indeed there is a strong argument that the settlements have effectively killed off a two-state solution, guaranteeing a bi-national state as the only effective resolution to the conflict.

Further, a Palestinian state on 22 percent of Palestine will not be economically viable and combined with a degree of Israeli dependence on the Palestinians, as a labour source, is likely to see the two states economically integrated. This of course would bring to the fore cross-border class tensions between a dominant Israeli, and subordinate Palestinian, capitalism on the one hand and potentially common class interests of Palestinian and Israeli workers and economically marginalised on the other.

All this begs the question why not just cut to the chase and have a bi-national state (which this writer supports), which is increasingly likely to end up as the default position. Nonetheless, a two-state solution may give a much sought after national identity to both Israeli and Palestinian peoples in resolving the conflict, but will inevitably encompass a bi-ethnic, cross-border, political, economic and social reality.

The Greens' political problem

Many in the Australian Greens have been focussing on the search for a “static”, electorally acceptable, policy which will keep the pro-Israel foreign policy and political establishments off their backs, and keep at bay their bete noir and staunchest critic, Federal MP Michael “Yankee Doodle” Danby (as Wikileaks reveals, he has communicated regularly with the US Embassy). The unfolding of the Arab revolution and the associated Palestinian resistance will at best render this strategy irrelevant. A good example of this was the debate over the BDS in the Senate in July where the Greens sole response, assertion of a two-state solution, ignored the then unfolding drama of the blocking of the Gaza Peace flotilla. In this context the Greens need to engage with the unfolding dynamics on the ground.

The right of return as a core Palestinian demand has been restored with the recent developments within the Palestinian resistance, which lay emphasis on a human rights-based approach (see extensive discussion of these developments by various commentators on Al Jazeera, at The Electronic Intifada, and elsewhere). This is typified by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, which has shifted focus from the final geo-political outcome of the Israel-Palestine conflict to the immediate reality of Israel’s violation of international law and human rights norms as regards the occupation, the right of return, and discrimination against Arab-Israelis. This is in the context of a shift in the nature of Palestinian resistance from armed struggle to wider civil resistance, with non-violent actions such as the BDS and protests against the separation wall. These civil resistance techniques are not new to Palestinians; this kind of action has been brutally suppressed down the years under both Israeli and British colonial administrations. But they are being re-energised through the rights-based resistance and the wider Arab revolution, as well as through a growing international support in such activities as the BDS and Gaza Peace flotillas.

This rights based civil resistance represents a “bottom up” approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict, emphasising that Israel has here-and-now obligations under international law which do not wait upon a final political settlement. This is an alternative to the bankrupt “top down” approach taken by the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority in recent years, under pressure from the Western powers, which has been exposed by the publication of the Palestine Papers. It is also an alternative to the static and authoritarian policies of Hamas in Gaza and come from frustration at the inability of Hamas and Fatah to resolve differences and give democratic and accountable political leadership to the Palestinian resistance. The Fatah-led bid at the UN for the recognition of a Palestinian state (problematic though it is for many Palestinians) is in large measure a response to this groundswell and to the wider Arab revolution to which it is linked. There is also great potential for links to growing Israeli opposition to the policies of the right-wing Netanyahu government, through the universalities of a rights-based agenda, notwithstanding difficulties in such areas as debates over the BDS and issues like the Palestinian right of return.

The political outcome of the Israel-Palestine conflict will need to involve two peoples sharing the one land. And there is also a wider historical symmetry between the Jewish and Arabic peoples as the common victims of Western imperialism and racism, an important narrative that is largely absent from the debate. There is a lay-line of human suffering that runs through the death camps of the Holocaust and the demolished Arab villages of the Nakhba; a timeline of Western imperialism and racism that extends from World War One, and its aftermath in both Europe and the Middle East, to the West’s backing of the “solution” of the Israeli colonial project. But since 1948 it has been the Palestinian people who have been expected to pay the price of this imperialism and racism. Palestinians, including refugees, have shown their determination not to pay this price.

Many in the Australian Greens have become frustrated with this situation, and the perceived excessive dominance of the issue in recent party debate. But it is history that has placed the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the Middle East generally, at the centre of world politics. The Greens must decide whether to be relevant in this issue, and engage dynamically with the Palestinians in their struggle, the wider Arab revolution of which it is part, and with the developing opposition within Israel. This struggle will intensify in the medium term as Israel, the US and their allies reject the UN Palestinian bid. Following through with support of the bid and its rejection will confront the Greens with the need to engage further with these dynamics on the ground. This would inevitably bring the Greens into further conflict with the pro-Israeli stance of Australia’s foreign policy establishment. The Greens must avoid the temptation to adopt a static, small-target approach for reasons of electoral safety, and follow-though, showing the same determination as in the asylum seeker debate, and confronting the inconvenient truths of the conflict, such as the Palestinian right of return.

Gathering on the frontier: racism and Australia's alliance/s with the US and Israel

2011-08-02T23:22:00.000-07:00

As I foreshadowed in an earlier blog, the Australian American Leadership Dialogue (AALD) s meeting in Perth this month. The climax will be a Gala Dinner on August 13, co-convened by mining magnate and AALD member Hugh Morgan, and attended by both Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott. Perth is an appropriate setting for this secretive, “private” talk-fest, reinforcing the alliance between two nations whose dominant foreign policy ideologies have been shaped by their histories as colonial settler societies. Perth is at the centre of Australia’s current new frontier mineral boom, with a new round of the dividing of indigenous inhabitants, buying off some and marginalising others - as the battles over the James Price Point gas hub, and with Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue Metals Group, illustrate. This sense of a go-ahead booming Australian economy at odds with the natural environment and an inconvenient indigenous past also has another frontier dimension, the fear of foreign (asylum-seeker) invasion, primarily directed at the north-western coastline.

There is a resonance here in the coming together of these two allies, whose dominant national identities and ideologies have been shaped by the frontier experience, with a recent analysis of the same kind of synchronicity between the US and Israel. Wring for Al Jazeera in May, Cambridge academic Tarak Barkawi described US support for Israel, including an implicit support for the Israeli settlers in the “Wild West Bank” as “their own preferred reflection of themselves”. Americans, he argues:

See a lone, devout and free people on the edge of a vast continent full of dusky, hostile natives. Like the European colonists who settled North America, the destiny of this free people is to build a “city on the hill” on virgin land, a beacon of freedom and civilisation in a tragic world

This bond he argued was sealed by the events of 9/11.Both societies see themselves as embattled and united against the savagery of terrorism.

This kind of analysis can also be applied to the US-Australia alliance and the emerging, triangulated relationship between the two countries and Israel. In Australia’s case this has also been sealed in the post 9/11 world with john Howard’s backing of the US war on terror, a position essentially continued by the Labor Government. Gillard in particular has taken this forward in the unashamed prejudice in favour of Israel in its conflict with the Palestinians. A bi-partisan (Labor and Coalition) position on this was re-enforced in the first week of the new Senate with the government and opposition uniting to declare Israel a “good friend” of Australia while explicitly rejecting a proposal to accord the same status to the Palestinian people.

This episode is merely the latest expression of an evolving Australia-US alliance, now more emphatically linked to Israel, which has its foundations in racism.

Empire and Race.

Australia’s alliance with the US didn’t begin with World War II or the post-war ANZUS Treaty but in a crisis of confidence in the British Empire linked to race. Britain’s desire to enter into an alliance with Japan in the Pacific before World War I raised fears in Australia that in order for Britain to appease Japan, the White Australia policy would come under pressure. Hence Prime Minister Alfred Deakin’s invitation, behind London’s back, to President Theodore Roosevelt to include Australia in the tour of the Great White Fleet in 1908. The fleet was a floating double entendre: so-named because the ships were painted white but also clearly understood as a projection of US white power in the Pacific. This was in the face of an emerging Japan, and Roosevelt’s own problems in dealing with anti-Japanese immigrant sentiment on the US west coast, and the more generalised home-grown racism in the era of the entrenching of Jim Crow.

World War I saw Australia re-cement its relationship to the British Empire as its principal protector, but when Australia turned again to the US after the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbour and Singapore, General Douglas MacArthur publicly affirmed a “consanguinity of race” between the two countries. This was moderated by US realism in terms of its national interest, which held back from the establishment of a permanent US-Australia alliance until the Korean War when the US agreed to ANZUS as an inducement to Australia to agree to the peace treaty with the new US ally, Japan. The conservative Menzies government was during this time, motivated by an ideological fear of communism melded with the traditional Australian racial fear of Asia, and sought to balance its new American friend with the old empire loyalties to the British.

It was the Vietnam War, which marks the beginning of the “real” alliance with the US. Australian fear of the Red and Yellow Perils from the north melded with racist US assumptions about Vietnamese “gooks”, “dinks” and “slopes”, linked to the home-grown racism on display in America in the death throes of Southern segregation and the challenge of the civil rights movement. The extraordinary military holocaust visited on the people of Indochina by the US and its allies could only be justified by a view of the lives Vietnamese as worth considerably less than those of Westerners, building on the old imperial views of Asian peoples as inferior.

From Saigon to Tahrir Square

America’s defeat in Vietnam, and the successes of the civil rights movement at home saw the focus of US imperial racism shift in the 1970s, courtesy of the 1973 Israel-Arab war, the 1979 Iranian revolution, and the impacts on the west of the resultant oil shocks. Attention now turned to the troublesome “sand niggers” and “towel heads” and what followed were decades of US foreign policy manipulations, favouring the state of Israel and confounding the politics of Middle-Eastern and Central/South Asian states. This included the US backing Iraq in its war with Iran in the 1980s before turning on Iraq after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. It included Ronald Reagan’s backing of the mujahedeen against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, helping lay the groundwork for the development of al-Qa’eda and the Taliban. And it included the carrying out classic divide and rule policies among the Arab states, aligning itself with authoritarian regimes such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, among others. What also followed from the 1970s was a continued, conflated, orientalist view of peoples from Middle-Eastern/South-Asian/Islamic backgrounds in US popular culture. Hollywood was happy to play along with its crude characterisations, particularly of Arabic peoples. The movie The Hurt Locker was a recent and egregious example of this, with Iraqi Arabs portrayed as stupid, cruel and child-like, with its central, telling, paternalistic relationship between an American, bomb-disposal, soldier-adult, and Iraqi-Arab child.

Australia bought in to this racial construction by falling behind the US in the first Gulf War at the beginning of the 1990s, followed up by participation in the ongoing military blockade of post-war Iraq which, along with Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, immiserated the Iraqi people, taking the lives of thousands. This softening up laid the groundwork for the post-9/11 invasion of Iraq. And of course Australia has fallen in to line behind the US in its disastrous Afghanistan war. Australia’s commitment is based on orientalist views of the Afghan people as needing to be tutored in democracy and civilisation by outsiders. This racial construction is further reinforced by the asylum seeker “threat” from “dusky hostile natives” from countries including Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan; countries that have been on the receiving end of US (and Australian) foreign and military policies.

All this carried over into Australian governments’ backing of the US-Israel relationship, and a strengthening of direct relationships between Australia and Israel. Prime Ministers Bob Hawke, John Howard and Julia Gillard have been unashamedly pro-Israel. As with the Vietnamese at the time of the Vietnam War, this basically boils down to a view that an Israeli life is worth more than that of a Palestinian. Gillard underscored this view in her official response as Acting Prime Minister to the Israeli invasion of Gaza in early 2009. It was further underscored by the Australian government’s opposition to adoption of the UN Goldstone report on the Israeli invasion of Gaza and the recent bi-partisan Senate vote mentioned above. These developments in an Australia-US-Israel triangulation since the 1990s have been marked by the parallel development and strengthening of the secretive, “backdoor” diplomatic forums underpinning this triangulated alliance structure: the Australian American Leadership Dialogue and its offshoot, the Australia Israel Leadership Forum,

This then is the background to the meeting of the AALD in Perth. But it comes at a time of revolutionary upsurge in the Middle East and North Africa, associated with the growing support for Palestinians through the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign and the moves for the UN to recognise a Palestinian state. The potential threat of these movements is profound. The US defeat in Vietnam shattered the assumptions of Western (and specifically US) military and cultural superiority. The shift in focus to the Middle East and South Asia in the aftermath of Vietnam was in many respects an attempt by the US to restore that superiority. The Arab Spring, and the political and military failures in Iraq and Afghanistan again challenges this superiority and the racist and orientalist assumptions underpinning it, and places the colonial, settler cultures of the US, Israel and Australia under existential strain.

So in Perth on August 13, as the AALD dinner guests gather, there will be a great degree of backslapping, and self congratulation, not least among the coterie of hand-picked, mainstream media hacks in attendance. But there will be a little nervousness in the laughter, and the wagons on the frontier will be circled a little tighter.

Week One in the New "Green" Senate - Gaza flotilla abandoned; Palestinians thrown overboard.

2011-07-09T19:55:00.000-07:00

The first week of a new Senate has just passed, with nine Green Senators, and much media attention on the “balance of power” and the “new political era”.

And it was a crowded agenda before the winter recess with issues like climate change and treatment of animals in live exports taking up the focus among other issues. But one issue, which the Greens assisted in throwing overboard, was the Greek blockade of the Gaza peace flotilla, and the plight of the Palestinians - in the context of a parliamentary attack on the BDS position of the NSW Greens and Marrickville Council. Unlike Indonesia-bound cattle, the plight of the Palestinians barely rated.

The principal attack, in the form of a National/Liberal motion in the Senate (supported by Labor) provided an opportunity for the Greens to show some concern for the blockading of the Gaza flotilla (involving a number of Australian activists, among them former NSW Green MLC Sylvia Hale). After all this outrageous Greek government piracy (under pressure from Israel and its Western allies) was an urgent human rights issue of the moment, occurring as the new the Senate met, with no further opportunity to raise this in the parliament until after the winter recess. Even if the Liberals hadn’t delivered up an opportunity to raise this, the Greens could have found a way to highlight it. But as it was, they bunked off from the opportunity that was presented, effectively conspiring with Liberal and Labor to shut down debate on the Palestinian issue.

Here’s how it happened (July 5 Hansard p 38).

Queensland Nationals’ Senator Ron Boswell moved the following resolution to attempt to embarrass The Greens in the light of the debate over Israel and the BDS:

That the Senate –

(a) condemns the boycott of Israel instigated by Marrickville Council – part of the Global Boycott Divestments and Sanctions – banning any links with Israel organisations or organisations that support Israel and prohibiting any academic, government, sporting or cultural exchanges with Israel;

(b) acknowledges that Israel is a legitimate and democratic state and a good friend of Australia; and

Bob Brown, on the behalf of the Greens responded with an amendment that would have effectively replaced the motion with this:

That the Senate recognises the rights of the people of Palestine and Israel to live together as self-governing states based on the 1967 borders.

That was it. Brown made no attempt to explain the amendment (though there did appear to be Senate procedural restrictions on debating the issue – an appalling thing in itself).

Even so, if we set aside the bald “two-state” solution presented by Brown (it is Greens policy, though contested as the only possible solution to the conflict), his amendment could have said a lot more about the plight of the Palestinians and offered support to the Gaza Peace flotilla. This could have been followed up by public statements outside the Senate, and press releases on the Greens website. Alternatively, the Green Senators could have made use of other parliamentary procedures during the week such as adjournment motions or “matters of public interest”. One Liberal Senator used this latter procedure (July 6 Hansard p 30) to mount an attack on the BDS campaign. As it turns out the Green Senators chose to say nothing, either in the Senate or later outside. It was left to Independent Senator Nick Xenophon to express some support for the Palestinians in his amendment, which would have retained the original Boswell motion (which Xenophon voted for) but added:

(d) notes:

(i) the detrimental effect of the Israeli and Egyptian blockade in Gaza on the Palestinian people living in Gaza, and

(ii) that Australia is a good friend of the Palestinian territories and its people.

Xenephon sought, and was granted, leave to speak to his amendment, something that Brown didn’t do. Both Brown’s and Xenophon’s amendments went down, with the Greens voting for both, and then voting against Boswell’s original (well at least that was something!).

That Labor lined up behind the Liberals, effectively endorsing the implicit racial prejudice behind the resolution (especially with the rejection of Xenophon’s proposed reference to Australia as a “good friend” of the Palestinian people), is shamefully predictable. But the new Green caucus didn’t come out of this looking much better.

Of course it would have been great if Green Senators had taken the opportunity to defend the BDS, or at least the right of elements of the Greens to advocate it, but even setting this aside in the light of the unresolved debate within the Greens, the opportunity to rally support for the Gaza flotilla and highlight Israel’s occupation was not taken up. The simple restatement of the two-state solution asserted the false symmetry that obscures the reality of the power imbalance between Israel and the Palestinians and masks the “inconvenient truth” of the brutality of Israeli occupation and dispossession.

It would be interesting to know about the debate in the Green party room and the dynamics of the relationships between Green senators as far as this issue is concerned, given that some Green Senators have good track records in advocating on behalf of the Palestinian people. Lee Rhiannon for example has been outspoken in her support for the Gaza flotilla. There may have been an argument that the Greens should not rise to the bait of Coalition, and Labor, determination to use the parliament to wedge the Greens on the Israel-Palestine question (there were also attacks by a Liberal and Labor MP on Bob Brown and Lee Rhiannon in the House of Representative - Hansard July 4 - though also an extraordinary speech over the health impacts of the Israeli blockade and occupation on the Palestinian women of Gaza and the West Bank by Labor MP Maria Vamvakinou). Nonetheless, the need to give urgent support to the Gaza flotilla activists, and an ongoing voice to the Palestinian people, during this crucial, four-day parliamentary window, required that the Green caucus show courage and rise to the occasion. Instead it was paralysed and silent.

This sadly seems to be a result of the Green Fear and the pall of silence descending on the Greens, in the aftermath of the recent savage McCarthyite campaign against NSW Greens and the BDS policy. In the Victorian Greens, which is leading the charge against NSW on the BDS question, the issue is being dealt with as a procedural matter relating to toeing the federal policy line. Victorian Greens are paranoid about debating the issue itself. In my own local branch (great people and hard-working Green activists) it was made quite clear that a proposal by me that Vic Greens organise a membership seminar, with speakers for and against, to debate the substance of the BDS issue, would not be supported.

In the Senate, this episode also highlights a danger for the Greens as the caucus expands and encompasses a wide range of opinions, the BDS and Israel being one of the more contentious issues. This is the danger that the Greens will replicate the caucus cretinism of the Labor Party where all debate is stitched up and closed down behind party room doors. Labor Senator Doug Cameron highlighted the impact on the ALP of its strict caucus rules, creating MPs who functioned like “zombies”.

The Green rank-and-file need to make it clear to elected Green representatives that they are not to go down this path. The rights, and responsibilities, of MPs and Senators to get up in the parliament and advocate differing points of view, representing the different Green party tendencies, must be asserted, even if this affronts the political and media establishments’ (and certain Green leaders’) notions of how “united”, “sensible” and “constructive” mainstream parties should behave. When it comes to the Israel-Palestine question and issues like the BDS, there will be other opportunities. We have the right to expect that Senators overcome the Green Fear and use the Senate platform to speak out.

'Dialogue' for Perth in August: time for the Greens to get off the fence

2011-06-25T23:11:00.000-07:00

Perth in August, and who’s that who’ll be sneaking into town? Why the Australian American Leadership Dialogue, the annual secret gathering of politicians (former and current) public servants, business leaders, academics, journalists and other worthies that has become one of the most significant “private” foreign policy bodies, providing a discursive and cultural underpinning for the US-Australia Alliance.

The Dialogue will be meeting at the Stirling naval base south of Perth and in Perth itself (at a venue not yet publicised) in the second week of August. It tries to operate out of the limelight and you will find no details of this upcoming meeting on its website where past meetings are only recorded by brief notation. The organisations founder, former business and NGO entrepreneur, Phil Scanlan, has proudly boasted about the ability of the Dialogue to keep its deliberations secret in accordance with the “Chatham House Rules” format.

Scanlan, appointed by the Rudd Labor government to the plum post of Australian Consul-General in New York, in 2009, initiated the Dialogue after conversations with US President George H W Bush during his 1992 visit to Australia. It alternates its annual meetings between the US and Australia. There is also a related West Coast Leadership Dialogue, providing a Pacific focus and sponsored by Stanford University and the University of California, San Diego, as well as a Young Leadership Dialogue which also meets annually in the US and Australia by turn. The last Young Leadership Dialogue was held in Canberra in May. It was addressed by both Julia Gillard and Tony Abbot, with Abbott’s comments about refugees seeking out Australia’s “Anglo” values leaked, apparently breaching the Dialogue’s impregnable wall of silence.

To understand the significance of the Dialogue in Australia’s diplomatic and security set-up we can turn to the recent comments of one of its participants and boosters, The Australian’s Paul Kelly.

The 9/11 decade has seen a truly dramatic deepening of the Australian-American alliance and personal concord. The furious domestic splits over the Iraq war and public rage towards George W. Bush are washed away with little cultural or strategic downside while Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard compete to be as pro-American as John Howard. Who would have believed?

At home, the Left was the big political loser from this decade. With Barack Obama in the White House, Labor has rarely been more pro-American as Gillard helps with Obama's war in Afghanistan and tells America it can still be great. The once notorious anti-American Labor Left is broken and silent. Through the decade, Australia's institutional bonds with the US surged with a free trade agreement, closer intelligence links, tighter military ties and stronger private networks typified by the US Studies Centre, the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue and the Lowy Institute, let alone Rudd's addiction to kissing Hillary Clinton.

The worry in Australian politics is that the Greens may also be drawn into this post-9/11 silence when it comes to confronting the truths of the US-Australia Alliance. The ambivalence of Greens policies in this regard, and the remarkable refusal of its federal parliamentarians to criticize the Alliance during last-year’s Afghan War debate, are disturbing signs. Indeed it is not inconceivable that Green politicians have been, or may be, invited to participate in the Dialogue. They should certainly tell the Green membership if this is the case. If any have been approached, one can only hope they said no.

Kelly’s defence of the Dialogue points to one of its most alarming aspects, its duchessing of the Australian media. Dialogue critics Antony Loewenstein and Scott Burchill have highlighted the effects of participation of journalists in these meetings as part of their critiques of the wider failures of the media when it comes to critical reporting on the relationships between Australia and the US, and Israel. Foreign editors of the Murdoch and Fairfax press and former ABC journalist and MP Maxine McKew, have been participants in the Dialogue and last year, Chris Uhlmann, now co-host of the 7.30 Report, travelled to Israel with Fairfax and News journalists, and politicians from the major parties, at the invitation of the Australia Israel Leadership Forum, a pro-Israel body modelled the Dialogue. The ABC apparently relaxed its rules to allow Uhlmann to attend and It would be interesting to know if ABC journalists are going to attend the Perth gathering, Key Fairfax and News journalists will no doubt line up again.

This unprofessional and unethical behaviour is something that the journalism profession, and their union, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, needs to take up. This issue also needs to be confronted by academics, and the National Tertiary Education Union. Some academics are also Dialogue participants and the event has been hosted at universities. Secretive forums such as this is are in contravention of the openness of research and debate that is supposed to be at the heart of a university’s function.

But the Dialogue needs to be opposed on a more fundamental level as re-enforcing a relationship with the US that is essentially aimed at tying Australia to US military, economic and cultural imperialism. The Perth meeting may present opportunities for protest by antiwar activists and Western Australia has a good history in this regard. It is also an opportunity for protests by BDS campaigners given the close relationship between the Australia-US Alliance and support by both countries for Israel.

Hopefully the WA Greens would be to the fore in this. Nationally the Greens have an important role here and need to overcome their ambiguities over the US-Australia Alliance. As mentioned, these ambiguities are reflected in their policies, which are, in some ways, implicitly hostile to the Alliance, without explicitly saying so. They were also reflected in the parliamentary Afghan War debate where the Australian and US assumptions justifying military operations were challenged, but the Alliance itself not criticised.

With new Green Senators coming into office, the national parliamentary group needs to start probing the relationship between the major parties and the Dialogue, and the expenditure of public money involved in supporting this “:private” diplomatic initiative (hosting it at a naval base for example). The privacy of these types of initiatives is a furphy. The Dialogue is part a back-door means of carrying on diplomatic and security business beyond the normal scope of public accountability (difficult enough through official institutions, as the recent Wikileaks debate has shown). There is a parallel between “private” institutions like the Dialogue and the growth or private security and para-military organisations like Xe (Blackwater).

But over and above this the Greens to get off the fence, and come out clearly and publicly in opposition to the US-Australia Alliance. Confronting and criticising the role of Australian American Leadership Dialogue, and its secretive Perth deliberations, is a good starting point.

More deaths in Afghanistan - the Greens must confront Australia's war culture

2011-06-11T21:07:00.000-07:00

The Greens attempt to challenge Australia’s Afghan war policy in parliament last year has by and large sunk without trace. In spite of recent polls showing overwhelming public opposition, Australia’s Afghan commitment rolls on, with the recent deaths of more Australian soldiers. And the war continues to claim the lives of Afghan civilians.

For the major “war” parties, and the military, political and media elites who support Australia’s war culture, it has been “as you were” since the parliamentary debate. For the Greens the debate reached an inevitable dead-end, based as it was around the limited argument that only parliament should approve foreign troop deployments. With the major parties supporting the Afghan commitment such a vote would make no difference to the current situation. While the recent military deaths has seen the Greens national parliamentary leadership renew calls for Australian troop withdrawals, a new, more assertive, strategy is called for.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard in her 2010 Christmas message remembered those Australian troops killed during 2010, - “they died for us” - and this sentiment has been re-enforced through the passing of another ANZAC Day, and the positive spin it places on the notion of “sacrifice”. But as playwright Alan Bennett put it in The History Boys, memorialising war is about forgetting its truths: “it's not lest we forget, it's lest we remember”. So what are the Greens to do in the face of the national amnesia underpinning Australia’s war culture?

Firstly they need to overcome their own timidity, reflected in an Afghan war debate in which no criticism was made of the Australia-US alliance, a crucial part of the war culture, and in which some Green MPs, in spite of their criticisms of the war, felt the need to fall in and march to an unqualified “we support out troops” cadence. This begs the question, support the troops doing what? The answer to this requires a little more historical depth and political courage. The Greens need to confront the war culture head on.

A starting point is to challenge Prime Minister Gillard’s assertion that troops killed in Afghanistan “died for us” and point out that in reality they have been sacrificed in the “national interest” of keeping the US on side in the US-Australia alliance, and that their names have been added to the more than 100,000 Australians killed in war in the past century, overwhelmingly lives thrown away in the interests of our British and American “great and powerful friends”. It is difficult to say this in the face of the grief felt by families of recently killed Australian troops but it has to be said. The sacrifice of tens of thousands of Australians in wars has not been noble. It has not been for “freedom” or for “us”. It has been a tragic waste. It is a sad reflection on Australia’s war culture that old soldiers from the great wars of the twentieth century, in their final years, have often lamented the futility of war, while young thrill-seekers continued to line up at the barracks gate.

While soldiers may have fought bravely and committed heroic deeds, fighting for their lives and looking out for each other, their deaths, and the, physical and psychological maiming of thousands more, has not been heroic but tragic. And we should particularly remember the lives lost in countries in which the Australian military forces have fought – the hundreds of thousands who have died in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Their deaths remain unmourned, and the responsibility that Australian governments, military leaders, and ordinary soldiers, must to one degree or another bear for the role they have played in their deaths, has gone unacknowledged.

Even the Second World War, often seen as the “good war” because of its confrontation with fascism and the (only) direct threat to, and attacks, on Australia, had bad origins. These lay in the unfinished business of a disastrous post-World War One “Peace” Treaty; and the rivalry in the Pacific between the new empires of Japan and the US and the decaying colonial powers, Britain, France and the Netherlands. Australians were justifiably fighting to defend their country and oppose Japanese imperialism, as well as participate in the wider struggle against fascism. But their sacrifices were soon betrayed, as old empires were re-installed in Asia, laying the foundation for new wars, and a new waste of lives.

Australian historians debate the contested meanings of the ANZAC legends, and the recent upsurge in commemoration and remembrance at Gallipoli, the Western Front, and on the Kokoda track. It is by no means certain that young people in particular come away from these events uncritically supporting Australia’s participation in the wars of empire. But there is no doubt that the War Party: the pro-war leaderships of Australia’s two major governing party blocs and their attendant war machine, seeks to use these public commemorations to reinforce a positive view of Australia’s war culture, linked in to a populist “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi” nationalism, and overlaid with hypocritical and mawkish official expressions of sorrow for the lives of the fallen.

For the Greens, taking on this war culture will not be easy. Green policy already lays the foundation for this with its support for “the right of ADF personnel to conscientiously object to particular military actions”. But this needs to be more than a clause slumbering away on the Greens national policy manifesto. Federal Green MPs need to start publicly asserting this as both the right, and duty, of Australian military personnel. For example the Greens could encourage Australian troops to stay in their bases (defend themselves if they have to) and refuse to go out on patrols or other activities until the government brings them home. This goes to the heart of opposing the war culture of uncritical service to military alliances, challenging Australian soldiers in Afghanistan and elsewhere to accept a degree of moral responsibility for choosing to fight or not.

This is a complex question. Australian soldiers serve in the armed forces under threat of draconian disciplinary punishments. Equally complex are the reasons why young people choose to sign up to be part of the military, ranging from patriotism and military careerism through to naïve adventurism and economic conscription. So Greens need to be understanding of the pressures placed upon serving personnel. Responsibility for Australia’s war policy and culture ultimately lies with those at the top – the political and military leaderships. Nonetheless soldiers need to reflect on their own situation. This particularly applies to those serving in the special forces units, the aggressive arm of the military that is most implicated in civilian deaths and potentially in war crimes and human rights abuses. Let’s face it; you don’t get to be in the special forces unless you really want to be there.

Thus the statement that we must “support the troops” needs to be qualified. Yes support them in the circumstances where they find they have little choice but to obey their superiors. Yes support them if they suffer injury, physical or mental, as a result of their war service. Yes support them by demanding that they be brought home to their loved ones, and yes support them, most particularly, if they choose to conscientiously object to their war service. But we also need to make clear that this is not support for the war in which they fight, not for any re-writing of history to justify a sacrifice in lives as part of a disastrous war culture, and in the service of empire, and not for actions by soldiers that put Afghan civilians at risk and violate human rights.

Green Fear - staying out of the 'no-go zone' of Australia-US-Israel relations

2011-06-11T20:50:00.000-07:00

This piece appeared as a guest post on Left_Flank. You can check it, and the Left_Flank blog, out here: http://left-flank.blogspot.com/2011/05/green-fear-staying-out-of-no-go-zone-of.html

Here is the text:

Marrickville Council may have backed off supporting the Israel BDS campaign but by highlighting the plight of the Palestinians, the Council’s initiative in this area, and the pro-BDS stance of the NSW Greens, has ensured that this will only be the beginning of the debate, not least of all within the Greens themselves. The Australian Greens may pride themselves on confronting the “inconvenient truths” of climate change but when it comes to exposing the inconvenient truths of the plight of the Palestinian people (as the BDS campaign does), some in the party are ducking for cover.

Led by elements in the Victorian Greens and the national Green leadership, the move is on to force NSW Greens to back away from its BDS policy. There are those who genuinely feel the BDS campaign is counterproductive, imperilling the achievement of peace between Israelis and Palestinians, those who are afraid the issue will divide the party, and at its most basic level, those who fear a loss of votes. For many in the party, the BDS campaign is trouble, and that is enough. The Victorian Greens are trying to limit the debate to the question of process – the extent to which NSW is out of step with national policy and decisions. There is resistance to discussing the merit of the BDS issue itself.

But the Great Fear emerging among some in the Greens is wider than the BDS. It is the fear of the political cost involved in breaching the “separation wall” and entering the “no-go zone” established by the major political parties, the defence and foreign policy establishments, and elements in the mainstream media. That no-go zone is any attempt at realistic or insightful criticism, or analysis, of the Alliance between Australia and its best mate Uncle Sam, and as part of that deal, any principled criticism of the actions of Uncle Sam’s best mate, Israel.

The demonstration of this lies not just with the inner-party reaction to BDS but the Afghan War debate in parliament last year. That five Green senators and one Green MHR could get up in the parliament and not criticise the Australia-US alliance, the whole reason Australia is in Afghanistan, was somewhat bizarre.[i] Notwithstanding some good political points made in the speeches, this was akin to holding a debate about global warming and not mentioning carbon. The speeches in some respects were not at odds with continuing support for the US Alliance, with the Iraq and Afghan wars, like Vietnam before them, seen as “mistakes” imperilling the alliance’s effectiveness.

To understand what the Greens are up against, we need an appreciation of the entrenched nature of the Australia-US-Israel relationship, which has protected it from critical analysis in Australian politics and sections of the mainstream media. Historian Peter Edwards has pointed out that the Australia-US alliance “has become a political institution in its own right comparable with a political party or the monarchy”[ii]. It has certainly become a part of Canberra’s constitutional landscape, with Australia’s military-intelligence complex clustering around the Australia-American memorial at Russell and holding down one of the points of the parliamentary triangle.

Following US policy in privileging Israel in its conflict with Palestinians is part of this architecture. This was demonstrated by the Australian government falling into line and helping the blocking in the UN of the Goldstone Report on the 2008-9 Israeli invasion of Gaza, an egregious act in no way justified by Goldstone’s recent reservations, repudiated by his report’s co-authors.[iii] And this stance was earlier demonstrated by Australia’s official response at the time of the Gaza assault, by then Acting Prime Minister Julia Gillard, which singled out Hamas for criticism but made no comment on the disproportionate use of force by Israel.[iv] To Gillard and the Labor government, following the US on Gaza meant accepting Uncle Sam’s realpolitik, and underlying racial prejudice: a Palestinian life is not worth that of an Israeli. And of course not a peep out of the Australian government when the US recently used its veto to protect Israel from criticism in the UN Security Council over West Bank settlement expansion.

Support for both the US Alliance, and the US’s pro-Israel stance, is reinforced by Australian participation in the closed door, “Chatham House Rules”-based Australian-American Leadership Dialogue and Australia-Israel Leadership Forum.[v] Participation of politicians past and present in these secretive dialogues, aimed at providing discursive and cultural support for US foreign policy, and for Israel, is predictable. But it is shameful that Australian academics and journalists participate in contradiction with the ethics of transparency and open debate that are supposed to be at the core of their professions.

The McCarthyite campaign of ignorance and vilification, directed at NSW Greens over the non-violent BDS campaign, shows the fate that awaits those who seek to breach this “separation wall”, and for some the Greens, seeking to enter the no-go zone has too high a political cost. But there are those in the Greens, in NSW in particular, who are unlikely to back down, as demonstrated in Marrickville Mayor Fiona Byrne’s courageous, dignified and principled stance, along with two Green councillors, in resisting her council’s retraction of support for BDS.

The “blue” within the Greens is just beginning, but the Palestinians are unlikely to wait for the Australian Greens or anybody else to decide what’s good for them. The remarkable Arab Awakening is influencing the Palestinian territories, most recently in pushing Hamas and Fatah into some sort of agreement. It is unlikely to stop there, promising a new popular uprising against Israeli occupation and blockade. This may spread to the Palestinian population within Israel itself, and who knows, maybe also to those non-Arab Israelis who are resisting what Israeli academic, and BDS supporter, Neve Gordon has labelled the “proto-fascist mindset” of the Israeli government.[vi] Indeed it could even begin within Israel. If and when this uprising comes, it is likely to be a game-changer.

[i] http://www.aph.gov.au/hansard/index.htm

[ii] Peter Edwards, “Permanent Friends: Historical reflections on the Australian-American Alliance”, Lowy Institute, 2005: http://www.lowyinstitute.org

[iii] “Authors reject Goldstone rejection remarks”; http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/04/201141416491382747.html

[iv] Media Release, Acting Prime Minister; http://www.ausaid.gov.au/media/release.cfm?BC=Media&ID=7215_3768_3028_5536_5150 and “Julia Gillard refuses to Condemn Israeli Attacks”; http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/gillard-quiet-on-gaza-attack/story-e6freuy9-1111118480528

[v] http://antonyloewenstein.com/2010/10/25/israel-lobby-snares-elite-australian-minds-and-very-few-resist/

[vi] “BDS campaign wants Israel to abide by international law”; http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/11/israeli-academic-boycott-commentary