Lessons From Howard Zinn by Anthony Arnove

The late historian and activist was a compelling example of someone committed to, and enjoying to its fullest, a life of struggle.

Filming our documentary, The People Speak, in Boston one afternoon, Howard Zinn said that the camaraderie between our cast members, the sense of collective purpose and joy, was a feeling he hadn’t experienced with such intensity since his active participation in the civil rights movement.

Since Howard’s passing, I have thought often of that moment, which crystallizes for me what made him so compelling an example of someone committed to, and enjoying to its fullest, a life of struggle.

Howard jumped into the civil rights struggle as an active participant, not just as a commentator or observer. He decided that the point of studying history was not to write papers and attend seminars, but to make history, to help inform struggles to change the world.

He was fired from Spelman College as a result, and only narrowly escaped losing his next job at Boston University for his role in opposing the Vietnam War and in supporting workers on the campus.

When there was a moment of respite after the end of the Vietnam War, Howard did not turn back to academic studies, or turn inward, as so many other 1960s activists had done, but began writing plays, understanding the importance of cultural expression to political understanding and change. He also began writing A People’s History of the United States, which came out in 1980, right as the tide was turning against the radical social movements he had helped to organize.

A People’s History would provide a countercurrent that developed and grew, as teachers, activists, and the next generation of social movements developed new political efforts, new movements. And Howard was there to fight with them.

Throughout, he reminded us of the history of social change in this country, and kept coming back to the essential lessons that it seems we so often forget or need to learn anew. That change comes from below. That progress comes only with struggle. That we cannot rely on elected officials or leaders. That we have to rely on our collective self-activity, social movements, protest. That change never happens in a straight line, but always has ups and downs, twists and turns. That there are no guarantees in history.

But Howard added a distinctive element to these arguments by embodying the understanding that the process of struggle, the shared experience of being part of work alongside and for others, is the most rewarding, fulfilling, and meaningful life one can live. The sense of solidarity he had with people in struggle, the sense of joy he had in life, was infectious.

The stereotypical image our corporate media presents of the Left, especially the radical Left, is that it is humorless, it lacks culture, it’s based on self-denial and conformity. Howard shattered this convenient caricature.

Howard’s talks were like a Lenny Bruce monologue, with punch-lines that delivered keen social observations. His play Marx in Soho manages to simultaneously reclaim Marxism from its bourgeois critics and its Stalinist distorters, while bringing down the house with physical comedy that evokes Sid Caesar and Zero Mostel.

He returned repeatedly to discussions of the importance of music, theater, film, literature, and the arts to political change. When he spoke of his turning points politically, Howard would often evoke Woody Guthrie, Charles Dickens, Dalton Trumbo, Alice Walker (his former student), and Marge Piercy.

He enjoyed mussels, Italian food, wine, the company of friends, vacations. And especially he loved time with his family, Roz, his life partner, his two children, and five grandchildren.

We should avoid hagiography, though. Howard was not a saint. None of us are. It’s important to remember that whatever revolution we make, it has to be made with people as they are, with all the contradictions that come with living under capitalism. There is no other way for it to happen. But in the course of trying to change the world, with others, we change ourselves, and new possibilities emerge.

It is a problem that the Left in the United States and in much of the world today relies so heavily on a few charismatic leaders, who often are elevated above or set apart from the movements of which they are a part. The reasons are many. Some people cultivate or contribute to this dynamic, of course, but Howard was not one of them.

There are, from time to time, people who can crystallize the aims or goals of a movement in an especially compelling way. Who can rally greater numbers of people to take a particular action or, in the case of Howard, make a lifelong commitment to activism. But such people cannot substitute for a movement. Eugene Debs, who understood this problem well, put it this way, once: “I am no Moses to lead you out of the wilderness … because if I could lead you out, someone else could lead you in again.”

That was the spirit of Howard: think for yourself, act for yourself, challenge and question authority. But do it with others. As he writes in Marx in Soho, “If you are going to break the law, do it with two thousand people … and Mozart.”

Anthony Arnove is co-director of the documentary The People Speak, just released on DVD, and co-editor, with Howard Zinn, of Voices of a People's History of the United States, a collection of first-hand accounts from those involved in the historical movements Zinn discusses in A People's History of the United States.

Published on Thursday, February 18, 2010 by YES! Magazine

Howard Zinn: The People’s Historian by Amy Goodman

Howard Zinn, legendary historian, author and activist, died last week at the age of 87. His most famous book is “A People’s History of the United States.” Zinn told me last May, “The idea of ‘A People’s History’ is to go beyond what people have learned in school ... history through the eyes of the presidents and the generals in the battles fought in the Civil War, [to] the voices of ordinary people, of rebels, of dissidents, of women, of black people, of Asian-Americans, of immigrants, of socialists and anarchists and troublemakers of all kinds.”

It is fitting to write of Zinn’s life at the start of Black History Month. Although he was white, he wrote eloquently of the civil rights struggle and was a part of that movement as well. Fifty years ago, on Feb. 1, 1960, four black students entered the F.W. Woolworth store in Greensboro, N.C., and sat down at the “whites only” lunch counter. They were refused service, and returned day after day. Each day, more and more people came with them. The lunch-counter desegregation movement spread to other Southern cities. By July, the Greensboro Woolworth lunch counter was desegregated. This week, the International Civil Rights Center and Museum opened at the site of that original lunch-counter protest.

At the time of the sit-ins, Zinn was a professor at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college in Atlanta. He told me why, after seven years there, he was fired: “The students at Spelman College rose up out of that very tranquil and controlled atmosphere at the college during the sit-ins and went into town, got arrested, they came back fired up and determined to change the conditions of their lives on campus. ... I supported them in their rebellion, and I was too much for the administration of the college.” Zinn wrote in the afterword of “A People’s History”: “It was not until I joined the faculty of Spelman College ... that I began to read the African-American historians who never appeared in my reading lists in graduate school. Nowhere in my history education had I learned about the massacres of black people that took place again and again, amid the silence of a national government pledged, by the Constitution, to protect equal rights for all.”

One of his students at Spelman was Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker. Soon after she learned of Zinn’s death, Walker explained: “He was thrown out because he loved us, and he showed that love by just being with us. He loved his students. He didn’t see why we should be second-class citizens.” Just a few years ago, Zinn was invited back to Spelman to give the commencement address and receive an honorary degree.

World-renowned linguist and dissident Noam Chomsky, a longtime friend of Zinn’s, reflected on Zinn’s “reverence for and his detailed study of what he called ‘the countless small actions of unknown people’ that lead to those great moments that enter the historical record.” Zinn co-wrote, with Anthony Arnove, “Voices of a People’s History of the United States,” with speeches, letters and other original source material from those “unknown people” who have shaped this country. It was made into a star-studded documentary, which premiered on the History Channel just weeks before Zinn died. Matt Damon, its executive producer, gave “A People’s History” enormous popular exposure in the hit movie “Good Will Hunting” when his character Will recommended the book to his psychiatrist. Damon was Zinn’s neighbor in Newton, Mass., and knew him since he was 10 years old.

Last May, when I interviewed Zinn, he reflected on Barack Obama’s first months in office: “I wish President Obama would listen carefully to Martin Luther King. I’m sure he pays verbal homage, as everyone does, to Martin Luther King, but he ought to think before he sends missiles over Pakistan, before he agrees to this bloated military budget, before he sends troops to Afghanistan, before he opposes the single-payer system.

“He ought to ask: ‘What would Martin Luther King do? And what would Martin Luther King say?’ And if he only listened to King, he would be a very different president than he’s turning out to be so far. I think we ought to hold Obama to his promise to be different and bold and to make change. So far, he hasn’t come through on that promise.”

Published on Wednesday, February 3, 2010 by TruthDig.com

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.


Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 800 stations in North America. She was awarded the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the “Alternative Nobel” prize, and received the award in the Swedish Parliament in December.

Duncan Williamson-Teller of Scots travellers' tales-sent by Rory McLeod

Hello, I thought I'd quickly send you this short biography below to honour the memory of freind Duncan who just passed away. I visited him again at home just last month (October) driving North on my way back home up to Stromness Orkney. I'm happy we caught up again, though he was poorly, coughing much more than usual. We'd told each other stories, riddles and jokes and bantered. between cups of tea. We both met each other when we were performing together at a storytelling festival a few years ago, then I drove us both home in my van back up to Scotland, singing to each other to keep good company all the way. I'm going to have a wee whisky now in his memory.....Health and joy....to you...too, hoping you're well,
Cheers for now
love from Rory (McLeod)

Duncan Williamson
Teller of Scots travellers' tales
Published: 13 November 2007

Duncan James Williamson, storyteller, singer and writer: born Furnace, Argyllshire 11 April 1928; married first Jeanie Townsley (died 1971; three sons, four daughters), second 1976 Linda Headlee (one son, one daughter), (one daughter by Martha Stewart); died Kirkcaldy, Fife 8 November 2007.

The story-teller and singer Duncan Williamson was one of the greatest voices of Scots traveller culture, a name to speak in the same breath as the highest of the high, such as Lizzie Higgins, Jeannie Robertson, Stanley Robertson, Belle Stewart and Sheila Stewart. In his radio history of storytelling, Something Understood: a chain of voices, broadcast on Radio 4 in 2005, Hugh Lupton recalled of Williamson:

It was Duncan who told me that when you tell a story, or sing a song, the person you heard it from is standing behind you. When that person spoke, he, in turn, had a teller behind him, and so on, back and back and back. I love this idea, the story has to speak to its own time, but the teller has also to be true to the chain of voices that inform him or her.

Williamson kept a covenant with those chains of voices - known and unknown - that had spoken down the generations. Still, he was born into a culture that values traditional knowledge and skills. Wonder stories, trickster tales, nonsense doggerel, riddles and ballads about bloodletting, dark deeds and revenge, held his people in campfire thrall. The supernatural figured prominently. Without spoiling the ending, Williamson's "Tailor and the Skeleton" concerns stitching together a body. Maybe, generations back, this unhallowed tale of a modern Prometheus flickered through Mary Shelley's mind in the 1800s.

"Tam Lin" - a real hand-me-down, whether through Robert Burns's The Scots Musical Museum or Francis J. Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads or recordings by Fairport Convention or Anne Briggs - reveals the world of faery beyond the firelight. Williamson recorded his version of "Tam Lin" for Put Another Log on the Fire: songs and tunes from a Scots traveller (1994). He took what had been handed to him and turned it into his own. As storytellers should, he took it to new places.

Duncan Williamson was a Scots traveller - travellers are a historically nomadic people separate to gypsy or Romany people, though they too know about prejudice and vilification. The seventh of 16 children, he was widely reported to have born in a bow tent by Loch Fyne in Argyll, though this may well be a romantic construct.

In his preface to Williamson's A Thorn in the King's Foot: folktales of the Scottish travelling people (1987), the Scots folklorist Hamish Henderson records that Duncan's mother was Betsy Townsley and that his "travelling basketmaker and tinsmith" father was Jock Williamson. Both were unlettered, but steeped in the oral transmission of traveller lore in all its variety. Piping, singing and storytelling was in Duncan's genes. Like many traveller families, they were Roman Catholics.

After leaving school at 14, Duncan Williamson became apprentice to a stonemason and drystone dyker, Neil MacCallum, in Auchindrain in Argyll. MacCallum told stories in English with Scots Gaelic punctuations. Williamson's stories would cover similar linguistic terrain, but with traveller "cover-tongue", or cant, interspersed for good measure.

Inevitably, he took to the road, obtaining agricultural work here, learning horse-dealing there, picking up songs and stories as he went, overlaying the versions he knew with new ones to make them wholly his own. Travellers were known as the "Summer Walkers" in many parts and earned money from seasonal work like freshwater pearl-fishing or berry-picking. Williamson's autobiography, The Horsieman: memories of a traveller, 1928-1958 (1994), tells tales of horse-whispering from another age.

In the mid-1950s, collectors from the School of Scottish Studies hit the mother-lode when in 1955 Henderson "discovered" the singer Jeannie Robertson - hailed as the greatest traditional Scots ballad singer of her day - and in the same year Maurice Fleming discovered the Stewarts of Blair. Within a 12-month the School was discovering so many folktales that the School's Calum MacLean argued prioritising their resources from ballad- and song-collecting to story-collecting. Yet, as Henderson wrote, the man

who was in many ways to turn out possibly the most extraordinary tradition-bearer of the whole traveller tribe had not at that time emerged above the horizon [namely] Duncan Williamson, who in 1956 was only 28 and therefore a youngster compared to many of the informants.

Helen Fullerton, an activist for traveller rights, was the first collector to tape Duncan Williamson, having got to his mother and several of his siblings in 1958. She finally met him in 1967 on one of his visits to his mother. She taped original poetry, songs and ballads. Afterwards, she tipped off the collector Geordie MacIntyre, which led to further recordings that year. The following year, Williamson appeared at the Blairgowrie Folk Festival, organised by the Traditional Music and Song Association of Scotland. The TMSA's founder Pete Shepheard would release Williamson's audio-tape Mary and the Seal and Other Folktales on his Springthyme label in 1986.

Williamson went on to international recognition, especially as a storyteller, appearing on literary and folk-music billings. His books documenting traveller life and lore included The Broonie, Silkies and Fairies: travellers' tales (1985), The Genie and the Fisherman, and Other Tales from the Travelling People (1991) and his highly recommended Horsieman. He recorded extensively, appearing most recently on Travellers Tales, Volumes 1 and 2, recorded by Mike Yates and released on his Kyloe label in 2002.

Academic archives holding Williamson's work include the School of Scottish Studies at Edinburgh University, the Center for Appalachian Studies and Services at East Tennessee State University, and the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh.

Ken Hunt





From The Times
November 16, 2007
Duncan Williamson
Memerising Scottish storyteller who had a huge repertoire of tales from his nomadic youth among the travelling families

Duncan Williamson was one of the most celebrated storytellers in Scotland. His fame became international when he appeared at storytelling festivals in North America and Australasia and he published many books and recordings of his stories.

Duncan Williamson was born to a travelling family, "under a tree" as he told it, on the shores of Loch Fyne, near Furnace, Argyll, in 1928.

Life in a traveller's bow tent with 15 brothers and sisters was hard in the 1930s, and he would recall "sitting in school pure starving hungry" - so hungry he could not heed the teacher but he knew he had to sit there and put in the legal number of attendances or he would not have the real life of travelling the summer road in horse and wagon with his family. That road would take him to the community of pipers, ballad singers and storytellers that fed in him the passions that were to drive his entire life.

But it was closer to home that these passions began, from his father, uncles and two grannies.

"My wee granny was the best thing ever happened to me," he recalled. His wee granny, Belle, 5ft 2inches tall, was a brilliant storyteller, and as a little boy he determined to be as good as she was. His big granny, 6ft 2in "like a warrior lady", could stop a whole street with the power and beauty of her singing.

The course of his life was set. Travelling the road, working with shepherds, drystone dykers, berry-pickers, fisher folk, cattlemen, moving from the Western Islands to the East Coast harbour towns he gathered stories and stored them in the extraordinary library of his mind.

He left home equipped with two educations: the brief, strict curriculum of the Furnace School that, however, gave him a love of the great British poets, and the education from his family and the travelling people. By the age of 13 he could handle axe and cross-saw, build dykes, dig peats, survive on the fare of river, shore and countrysides, tell a story and sing a song. This life he would later describe in his autobiography, The Horsieman - Memories of a Traveller (1994).

As a young man he married a traveller-lass, Jean Townsley, and together with horse, wagon and tent they took to the road, taking work wherever he could find it.

In the early 1960s Williamson's life changed. He was "discovered" by the School of Scottish Studies and began to sing in Glasgow with the folk luminaries of the day.

After his wife died in 1971, he met another crusading spirit, Linda Hedley, an American student. She recorded his songs, became his wife and, living with him and their two children in the traveller's tent, discovered his huge repertoire of stories. She convinced him that they should be published, and in Stephanie Wolfe-Murray, of the publisher Canongate, they found an enthusiastic advocate. Fourteen books, a tiny morsel of his reputed 3,000 stories followed, and invitations flowed in from around the world.

It was in the telling of his stories that Williamson's genius glowed brightest. Hamish Henderson, the greatest Scottish folk-collector and himself a legendary figure, was quick to recognise his unique qualities of singer and storyteller: "Duncan Williamson," he said, "is the Scottish folk traditions in one man."

It was not Williamson's huge repertoire of story and song that made him one of the world's best-known storytellers, it was the sheer storm force of his being, a force that expressed itself in a tireless generosity, a lavish giving. The old Celtic saying says of the generosity of Finn McCool, "If the leaves of the trees were gold / And the waves of the sea silver / Finn would have given them all away", and Williamson was his spiritual descendant. From Alaska to Australia pilgrims and story enthusiasts came to his ever-open door.

Where two or three were gathered together, for Williamson it was a ceilidh, a night-long feast of story and song. Even if it was only one stranger visiting, Williamson would give him or her his full intent attention, dispensing from his huge purse of tales and songs till the sun shone out of the morning.

For him a story was the greatest gift - "stories was wir education" - and he gave freely.

Williamson is survived by his wife, Linda, and his ten children.

Duncan Williamson, Scottish storyteller, was born on April 11, 1928. He died from the effects of a stroke on November 8, 2007, aged 79

The History and Politics of Sainthood, Fascist Beatifications By GARY LEUPP

Spanish Fascist Dictator Francisco Franco

The earliest Christian texts (such as the epistles of Paul) use the term "saint" (Greek, hagios) to refer to the members of the Christian community, including those who have died (for example, Ephesians 1:1). Gradually the term came to refer more particularly to persons martyred for the faith. By the fourth century, exemplary persons believed to have performed miracles were added to the list. Saints by canon law must be venerated as having entered Heaven and possessing the ability to "intercede" between the believer and God.

They are, that is to say, not regarded as having the capacity to answer prayer themselves but to facilitate the process. The whole concept is rejected by most Protestants but is central to the history of Roman Catholicism. Indeed, as the historian Peter Brown writes, the cult of the saints became the dominant form of religion in Europe after the fall of Rome (The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity [University of Chicago Press, 1982], p. 3). For centuries it was closely related to the cult of saints' relics, collected by almost every church.

The Roman Catholic Church, acting as its adherents see it under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, has a procedure to select certain dead people for recognition as saints. The first step is beatification, which pronounces the individual "blessed" but doesn't oblige believers to venerate him or her. It merely allows the believer to pray in the beatified's name. The skeptic might suspect that politics have as much to do with beatification as divine inspiration; the Frankish Emperor Charlemagne (surely no "saint" in the colloquial sense) was beatified soon after his death in 814. The Pope, as Christ's Vicar on earth, has the final say. The late Pope John Paul II, who will surely himself be beatified eventually, beatified 1338---the largest number of any pope in history.

I personally think that this concept of beatification and sainthood, and the notion of praying to various persons in Heaven, was no part of the earliest Christianity but quite likely a meme derived from Buddhism. In Mahayana Buddhism (to which some Christians in Syria and Egypt were exposed by the second century if not earlier) we find the concept of the boddhisattva---the enlightened being who, after death, remains in the cosmos out of a spirit of compassion and is available to answer prayer. Some boddhisattvas have specific qualities or functions: for example, Avalokitesvara is associated with compassion, Manjushiri with wisdom, Vasudhara with wealth and fertility. St. Christopher (downgraded in 1969 by the Vatican due to questions about his histroical existence) was long the patron saint of travelers. His Buddhist counterpart is Ksitigarbha, the bodhisattva who helps travelers.

In the 190s, in Alexandria, Egypt, church leader Clement (later made St. Clement) in his Stromatae made the first known Christian references to Buddhism. He mentioned Buddha by that title. He also described Buddhist monks (in an era before there were any Christian monks, although he compared them with the heterodox Christian ascetics of Syria, the Encratites), and the Buddhist practice of reverencing the bones of virtuous persons under pyramids (by which he means stupas). (See John Ferguson, trans., Clement of Alexandria: Stromateis, Books One to Three [Catholic University of America Press, 1991], p. 293.) There were almost surely Indian Buddhists in Alexandria and in Antioch, the terminus of the Silk Road. Ideas like the reverence of saints often pass from one religious tradition into another quite different one. I think monasticism itself, along with the cult of relics, the use of prayer-beads, and the cult of saints---none of which are mentioned in the New Testament or are likely derived from Roman pagan practice---are Buddhist memes.

In short, I personally think the cult of saints and this whole beatification thing is a human invention to be logically and historically explained from the standpoint of comparative religious studies. It's very interesting, and perhaps harmless or even psychologically helpful for the believer; a Buddhist monk is likely to tell you, "If it alleviates suffering, what is the harm?" Nevertheless maybe sometimes the selection process can do harm. If you chose the wrong person to beatify, you may open old wounds.

In Vatican City on Oct. 28, in the largest beatification ceremony ever held, Pope Benedict XVI placed 498 persons on the road to sainthood. They all died during the Spanish Civil War (1936-9), and were presented as martyrs to their faith. This was just days before the Spanish Parliament was scheduled to debate the "Law of Historical Memory" requiring local governments in Spain to fund efforts to unearth mass graves of victims of that war containing thousands killed at the hands of the fascist dictator Francisco Franco. Is the timing not curious?

Half a million people died in the war. On the one hand there were the partisans of a Republican government under a leftist Popular Front coalition that won parliamentary elections. They were leftist and anticlerical, hostile to the great wealth and power of the Catholic Church. (The Church, consisting of about 115,000 priests, monks and nuns in a country of 24 million, controlled over 15% of all arable land, and had large holdings in bank capital and other financial enterprises.) On the other were the Nationalists under Gen. Franco, "hero" of Spain's colonial war in Morocco and devout son of the Church. The Republicans were supported by the Soviets, the Nationalists by Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy---and the Church.

The brutality of Franco's fascists and foreign allies is immortalized in Picasso's painting "Guernica," depicting the German Luftwaffe bombing of a Basque town in 1937. While there was brutality on all sides, the Nationalist dead were treated with respect following Franco's victory and during his long dictatorship to his death in 1975. (He enjoyed massive U.S. support during the Cold War, and continuing warm, grateful support from the Catholic Church.) There are tens of thousands of victims of the fascists whose remains have not yet been located, and some prominent clerics in Spain seem content with that. AP quotes Francisco Perez, the archbishop of Pamplona, as opposing the bill before the Spanish parliament. "You can't change history," he says, urging victims "to look for ways to forget."

In a Spanish language sermon in St. Peter's Square Sunday, Benedict declared that the beatified ones were "motivated exclusively by their love for Christ." "These martyrs," added the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone (the number two man at the Vatican, according to Reuters) "have not been proposed for veneration by the people of God because of their political implications nor to fight against anybody" but because they had been exemplary Christians.
The Pope, meanwhile, has been an outspoken critic of the growing secularization of Spanish society. Church attendance has fallen dramatically since 1975, and according to a 2002 survey only 19 percent of Spaniards consider themselves practicing Catholics. Spain has under current President Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero adopted a liberal divorce law and legalized gay marriage. An indignant Pope Benedict in 2005 urged Spaniards to firmly resist "secular tendencies," and perhaps he associates these with the present attention given to "historical memory."

The Spanish state wants to dig up the victims of fascism. The Church wants to leave them buried, while launching its own remembered martyrs into the stratosphere for veneration. Whom do these include? Augustinian Fr. Gabino Olaso Zabala, executed by Republican forces. In 1896 he participated in the torture of a priest in the Philippines, a Filipino Fr. Mariano Dacanay, who was suspected of sympathy for anti-Spanish revolutionaries. He encouraged prison guards to kick the priest in the head.

But as of Sunday, Catholics so inclined are authorized to seek his intercession between themselves and God.

No political implications here, says the Vatican Secretary of State, although many Spaniards seem to disagree. I wonder what they're saying in the Philippines.

from CounterPunch

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.
He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu

History - not so 'safe' for those who live it. A Review of Les Carlyon's Gallipoli and The Western Front by John Tognolini

The soldiers in this picture are top row; Sergeant Norton Niblet Mentioned in Dispatches, Wounded in Action three times, Lance Sergeant Stephen Tognolini Military Medal and Bar, Wounded in Action twice, Lance Sergeant Victor Edwards Military Medal and Bar,

Middle row; Sergeant J.S. Sheringham Wounded in Action, Company Sergeant Major George Hunt, Distinguished Conduct Medal, Wounded in Action twice, Killed in Action July 4 1918, Company Sergeant Major William Trevascus Distinguished Conduct Medal and Bar, Mentioned in Dispatches, Wounded in Action and Boer War Veteran,

Bottom row; Lance Corporal J.H. Cotterell Military Medal, Died of Wounds September 18 1918, and Lance Corporal J.J. Craigie Military Medal

Gallipoli Les Carlyon Macmillan, 2002 600 pages, $35 (pb) The Great War Les Carlyon Macmillan, 2006 880 pages, $55(hb)

Les Carlyon’s books The Great War and Gallipoli are “safe history”. They don’t delve deep enough into class and power of a society at war. Moreover, Carlyon doesn’t even look at race properly. He touches on one German ANZAC in The Great War but Aboriginal ANZACs don’t even get a mention in either of these major works. Carlyon’s books fall into the tragic adventure scenario.

If you’re looking for a book that can concisely tell the tragedy and slaughter of World War I, well you have some of that from Carlyon’s description of the battles that Australians endured in the bloody years of 1916-18 on the Western Front. Unfortunately, you also get a pack of pathetic justifications supporting Australia’s involvement in the war.

Ludicrously, Carlyon also makes a big thing about PM John Howard’s father and grandfather serving on the Western Front. One of the results of Howard’s militarisation of history is that the stories of ordinary soldiers and people on the home front are swept to the side. They become smothered by this “safe history”.

In The Great War, Carlyon becomes an apologist for the infamous British mass butcher General Douglas Haig. It’s Haig who said of his former allies in 1919, “The French! They’re the fellows we shall be fighting next.”

Even Charles Bean, the official Australian historian of World War I said of Haig, the commanding general at the infamous battle of Passchendaele, “A general who wears down 180,000 of the enemy by expending 400,000 men … has something to answer for.”

As a socialist and Marxist I tend to be on my own, with my research into Australia’s military history. The more I’ve delved into it and studied its blood-spattered carnage in detail, the more I feel convinced of the need of socialism as an alternative political system to the one that produced the horrors of World War I and II and imperialist adventures such as Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

As for World War I, what was it for working people but a bloody slaughter that would later produce another world war, one more slaughterhouse of a global conflict on an even bigger scale than the first one? World War I was driven by imperialist rivalry. Germany wanted a colonial empire, just like the British and French.

It is apt to say that it was one of those wars, like so many others, where a bayonet was a weapon that had a worker on both ends of it. If that was the case for workers, what was it for an Indigenous Australian such as George Hunt? He had no rights at all as an Aborigine. Officially he didn’t even exist in Australian society.

When my uncle Stephen returned from the war to his job on the Melbourne waterfront as a wharfie, he found his union outlawed, his wages cut in half and a non-union workforce doing his work. During World War II the Italian origins of our family name would lead to him suffering racist abuse, despite his own military service, his brothers’ service — Andrew, (both Stephen and Andrew served at Gallipoli as well as France and Belgium) and Jack who was killed in action at Villers Bretonneux, France, and having his two younger brothers, Bill and Vic (my father) over in the army in the battles of Greece and Crete against the Nazis.

I often wonder what went through my Uncle Stephen’s and Andrew’s minds when Billy Hughes, Australian Prime Minister from 1915-23, said “Are we to be subservient to the dago … We believe in the White Australia Policy and a British White Australia Policy at that.”

Carlyon’s books have achieved significant sales, but holes can be poked into the cracks of his imperial parchments. You won’t find in Carlyon’s books any mention of Australians (along with New Zealand, English and Scottish soldiers) being a part of the mass mutiny of 20,000 soldiers at the British army base at Etaples in 1917, nor Australians shooting British military police and training instructors (who came from the British prison system and were widely hated as sadistic, front line/trench dodgers). The English war poet Wilfred Owen called Etaples “the bull ring”. Nor that many of those mutineers were killed at Passchendaele. That wouldn’t be “safe history” would it?

From: Cultural Dissent, Green Left Weekly issue #728 24 October 2007.

Mother Teresa, John Paul II, and the Fast-Track Saints by Michael Parenti

Michael Parenti

During his 26-year papacy, John Paul II elevated 483 individuals to sainthood, more saints than all previous popes combined, it is reported. One personage he beatified but did not live long enough to canonize was Mother Teresa, the Roman Catholic nun of Albanian origin who had been wined and dined by the world’s rich and famous while hailed as a champion of the poor. The darling of the corporate media and western officialdom, and an object of celebrity adoration, Teresa was for many years the most revered woman on earth, showered with kudos and awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her “humanitarian work” and “spiritual inspiration.”
What usually went unreported were the vast sums she received from wealthy contributors, including a million dollars from convicted savings & loan swindler Charles Keating, on whose behalf she sent a personal plea for clemency to the presiding judge. She was asked by the prosecutor in that case to return Keating’s gift because it was money he had stolen. She never did. She also accepted substantial sums given by the brutal Duvalier dictatorship that regularly stole from the Haitian public treasury.

Mother Teresa’s “hospitals” for the indigent in India and elsewhere turned out to be hardly more than human warehouses in which seriously ill persons lay on mats, sometimes fifty to sixty in a room without benefit of adequate medical attention. Their ailments usually went undiagnosed. The food was nutritionally lacking and sanitary conditions were deplorable. There were few medical personnel on the premises, mostly untrained nuns and brothers.
When tending to her own ailments, however, Teresa checked into some of the costliest hospitals and recovery care units in the world for state-of-the-art treatment.

Teresa journeyed the globe to wage campaigns against divorce, abortion, and birth control. At her Nobel award ceremony, she announced that “the greatest destroyer of peace is abortion.” And she once suggested that AIDS might be a just retribution for improper sexual conduct.
Teresa emitted a continual flow of promotional misinformation about herself. She claimed that her mission in Calcutta fed over a thousand people daily. On other occasions she jumped the number to 4000, 7000, and 9000. Actually her soup kitchens fed not more than 150 people (six days a week), and this included her retinue of nuns, novices, and brothers. She claimed that her school in the Calcutta slum contained five thousand children when it actually enrolled less than one hundred.

Teresa claimed to have 102 family assistance centers in Calcutta, but longtime Calcutta resident, Aroup Chatterjee, who did an extensive on-the-scene investigation of her mission, could not find a single such center.

As one of her devotees explained, “Mother Teresa is among those who least worry about statistics. She has repeatedly expressed that what matters is not how much work is accomplished but how much love is put into the work.” Was Teresa really unconcerned about statistics? Quite the contrary, her numerical inaccuracies went consistently and self-servingly in only one direction, greatly exaggerating her accomplishments.

Over the many years that her mission was in Calcutta, there were about a dozen floods and numerous cholera epidemics in or near the city, with thousands perishing. Various relief agencies responded to each disaster, but Teresa and her crew were nowhere in sight, except briefly on one occasion.

When someone asked Teresa how people without money or power can make the world a better place, she replied, “They should smile more,” a response that charmed some listeners. During a press conference in Washington DC, when asked “Do you teach the poor to endure their lot?” she said “I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.”
But she herself lived lavishly well, enjoying luxurious accommodations in her travels abroad. It seems to have gone unnoticed that as a world celebrity she spent most of her time away from Calcutta, with protracted stays at opulent residences in Europe and the United States, jetting from Rome to London to New York in private planes.

Mother Teresa is a paramount example of the kind of acceptably conservative icon propagated by an elite-dominated culture, a “saint” who uttered not a critical word against social injustice, and maintained cozy relations with the rich, corrupt, and powerful.

She claimed to be above politics when in fact she was pronouncedly hostile toward any kind of progressive reform. Teresa was a friend of Ronald Reagan, and a close friend of rightwing British media tycoon Malcolm Muggerridge. She was an admiring guest of the Haitian dictator “Baby Doc” Duvalier, and had the support and admiration of a number of Central and South American dictators.

Teresa was Pope John Paul II’s kind of saint. After her death in 1997, he waved the five-year waiting period usually observed before beginning the beatification process that leads to sainthood. In 2003, in record time Mother Teresa was beatified, the final step before canonization.

But in 2007 her canonization confronted a bump in the road, it having been disclosed that along with her various other contradictions Teresa was not a citadel of spiritual joy and unswerving faith. Her diaries, investigated by Catholic authorities in Calcutta, revealed that she had been racked with doubts: “I feel that God does not want me, that God is not God and that he does not really exist.” People think “my faith, my hope and my love are overflowing and that my intimacy with God and union with his will fill my heart. If only they knew,” she wrote, “Heaven means nothing.”

Through many tormented sleepless nights she shed thoughts like this: “I am told God loves me-and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.” Il Messeggero, Rome’s popular daily newspaper, commented: “The real Mother Teresa was one who for one year had visions and who for the next 50 had doubts—up until her death.”
Another example of fast-track sainthood, pushed by Pope John Paul II, occurred in 1992 when he swiftly beatified the reactionary Msgr. José María Escrivá de Balaguer, supporter of fascist regimes in Spain and elsewhere, and founder of Opus Dei, a powerful secretive ultra-conservative movement “feared by many as a sinister sect within the Catholic Church.” Escrivá’s beatification came only seventeen years after his death, a record run until Mother Teresa came along.

In accordance with his own political agenda, John Paul used a church institution, sainthood, to bestow special sanctity upon ultra-conservatives such as Escrivá and Teresa—and implicitly on all that they represented. Another of the ultra-conservatives whom John Paul made into a saint, bizarrely enough, was the last of the Hapsburg rulers of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Emperor Karl, who reigned during World War I.

John Paul also beatified Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac, the leading Croatian cleric who welcomed the Nazi and fascist Ustashi takeover of Croatia during World War II. Stepinac sat in the Ustashi parliament, appeared at numerous public events with top ranking Nazis and Ustashi, and openly supported the Croatian fascist regime.

In John Paul’s celestial pantheon, reactionaries had a better chance at canonization than reformers. Consider his treatment of Archbishop Oscar Romero who spoke against the injustices and oppressions suffered by the impoverished populace of El Salvador and for this was assassinated by a right-wing death squad. John Paul never denounced the killing or its perpetrators, calling it only “tragic.” In fact, just weeks before Romero was murdered, high-ranking officials of the Arena party, the legal arm of the death squads, sent a well-received delegation to the Vatican to complain of Romero’s public statements on behalf of the poor.
Romero was thought by many poor Salvadorans to be something of a saint, but John Paul attempted to ban any discussion of his beatification for fifty years. Popular pressure from El Salvador caused the Vatican to cut the delay to twenty-five years. In either case, Romero was consigned to the slow track.

John Paul’s successor, Benedict XVI, waved the five-year waiting period in order to put John Paul II himself instantly on a super-fast track to canonization, running neck and neck with Teresa. As of 2005 there already were reports of possible miracles attributed to the recently departed Polish pontiff.

One such account was offered by Cardinal Francesco Marchisano. When lunching with John Paul, the cardinal indicated that because of an ailment he could not use his voice. The pope “caressed my throat, like a brother, like the father that he was. After that I did seven months of therapy, and I was able to speak again.” Marchisano thinks that the pontiff might have had a hand in his cure: “It could be,” he said. Un miracolo! Viva il papa!

Published on Monday, October 22, 2007 by CommonDreams.org

Michael Parenti’s recent publications include: Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (City Lights, 2007); Democracy for the Few, 8th ed. (Wadsworth, 2007); The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories, 2006). For further information visit his website: http://www.michaelparenti.org/.

Bush, Vietnam and Iraq, Eyes Closed to History By WILLIAM SCHRODER

In his speech at the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the President said the American pullout from Vietnam caused the deaths of millions in Cambodia and Vietnam. Thus spoken, Mr. Bush would have us believe invasion and bloody occupation of sovereign nations is not problematic. Instead, stopping the fighting and leaving the indigenous citizens to their own affairs is the greater evil.

The facts, however, are at variance with Mr. Bush's statements concerning the suffering of Southeast Asians. Millions of Cambodians died on the "killing fields" because secret American carpet bombing destroyed their nation and created an environment in which armed thugs led by Pol Pot took over unchallenged. In 1969, President Nixon ordered every available American plane into Cambodia to "crack the hell out of them." He wanted them to "hit everything." Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, subsequently transmitted the order to his top aide, Alexander Haig, this way: "Anything that flies on anything that moves." When Cambodia collapsed under the weight of the American Air Force, Prince Sihanouk fled to China, and the bad guys took over. Cambodian life under the bloody rule of the Khmer Rouge is well documented.

But what of the Vietnamese people and their other neighbors? In his speech, Mr. Bush spoke of "boat people" and "re-education camps," certainly a chaotic, frightful time for millions of innocent peasants, but Mr. Bush failed to mention that was not the extent of their suffering. The tragic aftermath of the American invasion of Southeast Asia kills and cripples to this day. More than thirty years after the Vietnam War, the misery index rises even though the shooting has long stopped. Historians, scholars, political scientists and high-level government officials have written volumes about America's experience in Vietnam, and careful examination of a representative sample of this material reveals a wealth of understanding. Estimates range as high as 3,000,000 Vietnamese men, women and children and an additional 1,000,000 Cambodian/Lao were killed or wounded during the fighting, but that's only the beginning.
Today, vast expanses of once productive Southeast Asian land threaten the native population. Death, disease and disfigurement are embedded in the very soil under their feet. Records show between 1961 and 1971, the U.S. sprayed approximately 76,000,000 liters of herbicide (Agents Orange, Green, Pink, Purple and White), 8,800 tons over an area of 6,000,000 square acres, 14% of Vietnam's land mass. Dioxins, the active family of chemicals in Agent Orange, are known health risks to humans. Sampling studies undertaken in the 1990's revealed dangerously high levels of contaminant in Vietnamese forests, soil, fishpond sediment, fish and fowl tissue and human blood. Agent Orange Dioxin in human blood samples taken from Vietnamese men and women ranging from twelve to twenty-five years old clearly show the contaminant chemicals have moved up through the food chain into humans.

Science has only begun to catalogue the long-term effects of Agent Orange on the Vietnamese, but the statistics are frightening. As early as 1970, Saigon's leading maternity hospital reported a monthly average of 140 miscarriages and 150 premature births in 2800 pregnancies. As compared to others in the region, children living in areas sprayed with Agent Orange were found to suffer three times as many cleft palates, three times as much mental retardation, were three times as likely to have extra fingers or toes and eight times as likely to experience massive abdominal and inguinal hernias. In addition, Vietnamese children living in sprayed areas suffered dwarfism, impaired vision, Down syndrome, heart disorders, enlarged heads and other deformities. Studies show severely affected children rarely lived beyond age twenty.

More is known about the effects of Agent Orange from treating American servicemen, perhaps exposed while flying aircraft that disseminated the contaminant or ground troops caught in the fallout. Doctors treating veterans years ­ even decades ­ after exposure have recorded a procession of life-threatening and life-diminishing symptoms. American Vietnam veterans are far more likely to suffer immune system disorders, soft tissue sarcomas, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, respiratory cancers, liver disorders and even lower sperm counts. Children born to Vietnam veterans are more prone to birth defects relating to the nervous system, kidneys and oral clefts. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome is 400% more likely to occur in infants born to the men and women who served in Vietnam. Anecdotally, friends and family of Vietnam veterans tell stories of their loved one aging decades, seemingly overnight. The veteran's hair falls out in clumps and what remains turns white. Families report their veteran fathers, mothers, sons and brothers suffer from undiagnosed nerve disorders, irritability, weight loss, palsies and sometimes, sudden, unexplained death.

The Vietnam War misery index can be further expanded to include the estimated 100,000 Southeast Asian men, women and children subsequently killed, maimed or mutilated by unexploded landmines, artillery, bombs, grenades and a variety of other ordnance that lay concealed but still lethal in the forests and rice paddies throughout Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. After the cessation of hostilities, 3,500,000 landmines remained armed and buried in Vietnam. Short on funds and organizational support, in 2004, the Vietnamese government claimed to have cleared 100,000 mines in recent years, but United Nations estimates are closer to 59,000. According to UN officials, landmines in Vietnam are a primary obstacle to its social and economic development. In addition to killing or mutilating thousands of people each year, many of whom are children, their very presence in the countryside impedes the healthy development of millions of others.

In March 1964, five months before the first American bombing raid on North Vietnam, the United States organized a secret bombing campaign in Laos. Using unmarked planes, pilots initially attacked the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the increasingly important Communist supply route from North to South Vietnam. However, as the months passed, the air war intensified, and targets included Laotian villages, which drove a million peasants from their homes. For nine years, Laos was the most bombed country in the world. In 2004, Congresswoman Betty McCollum (D ­ Minnesota's 4th District) testified on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, "From 1964 to 1973, the U.S. flew 580,000 bombing runs over Laos ­ one every nine minutes for ten years. More than two million tons of ordnance was dropped on Laos, double the amount dropped in the European theater during the entirety of World War II. As many as 30% of the bombs dropped on Laos did not explode, leaving up to 20 million unexploded submunitions, also known as 'bombies' littered throughout the country.

"These American 'bombies' may be thirty years old, but they continue to kill and maim children as well as farmers clearing land for planting. In the first five months of 2004, 39 people died and 74 have been maimed by unexploded ordnance. In the thirty years since the end of the Vietnam War, an estimated 10,000 Lao people, including thousands of children, have died. And while Lao families struggle for food and survival, tens of thousands of acres of land cannot be put into agricultural production because the earth has been contaminated with this deadly cluster ordnance."

The negative effects of the American invasion of Southeast Asia ripple across the generations, and similar damage may already be done in Iraq. Researchers have yet to calculate the long term effects of depleted uranium (DU) munitions. Consider this testimony from Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, director of the Oncology Center at the largest hospital in Basra, Iraq at a 2003 conference in Japan: "Two strange phenomena have come about in Basra, which I have never seen before. The first is double and triple cancers in one patient. For example, leukemia and cancer of the stomach. We had one patient with two cancers - one in his stomach and kidney. Months later, primary cancer developed in his other kidney. He had three different cancer types. The second is the clustering of cancer in families. We have 58 families here with more than one person affected by cancer. Dr Yasin, a general Surgeon here, has two uncles, a sister and cousin affected with cancer. Dr Mazen, another specialist, has six family members suffering from cancer. My wife has nine members of her family with cancer.

"Children in particular are susceptible to DU poisoning. They have a much higher absorption rate as their blood is being used to build and nourish their bones, and they have a lot of soft tissues. Bone cancer and leukemia used to be diseases affecting them the most, however, cancer of the lymph system which can develop anywhere on the body, and has rarely been seen before the age of 12, is now also common."

Sadly, thirty years from now, another generation of researchers will examine the aftermath of America's misadventure in Iraq. We can only hope the politicians of that era will not ignore the facts when making policy.

William Schroder is a Vietnam veteran and with Dr. Ron Dawe, co-author of Soldier's Heart: Close-up Today with PTSD in Vietnam Veterans.

from CounterPunch August 24, 2007

Give ’Em Hell, Mr.Terkel By Amy Goodman

Studs Terkel, the great journalist, raconteur and listener, turns 95 this week. He was born in New York City on May 16, 1912, to a tailor and a seamstress. He says: “I was born in the year the Titanic sank. The Titanic went down, and I came up. That tells you a little about the fairness of life.”

His life’s work has been to tell the stories of the working class, the down and out, the forgotten and ignored. I interviewed him in a Chicago studio, his white hair made even more unruly by the headphones he puts on to hear better. His hands leaning on his cane, Studs exclaims: “Ordinary people are capable of doing extraordinary things, and that’s what it’s all about. They must count!”

Characters pour forth as Studs spins the stories of hundreds into a coherent tapestry of this century just past. His recall is extraordinary, his store of anecdotes prodigious. Without missing a beat, Studs threads together early icons of the labor movement, from Eugene V. Debs, to anti-Vietnam War organizer David Dellinger, one of the Chicago Seven charged with organizing the famed protests in Chicago in 1968, back to legendary miser Hetty Green.

He has written a dozen books, won the Pulitzer Prize, had a play produced on Broadway, won the National Book Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American letters, the George Polk Career Award and the presidential National Humanities Medal. He hosted a daily radio show on WFMT in Chicago from 1952 through 1997.

His parents moved to Chicago, opening a rooming house. There Studs learned of the essential dignity of work, of working people, of self-esteem. The residents worked in tool-and-die factories, on ships that plied the Great Lakes, and, sometimes, as prostitutes. He watched the devastation these folk endured when the Great Depression hit. The workers sat around then, drinking and fighting. Studs feels passionate about the New Deal, and about its Works Progress Administration, the WPA, which put people to work during the Depression. “Working class means you work!” he shouts. “With shovels and rakes. And there was work for artists!” In fact, work for him. Though he graduated from University of Chicago Law School, he was a WPA actor and writer. “There were artists and painters and dancers and singers. This was all part of the New Deal!”

He served stateside during World War II in the Army Air Corps, then went on to broadcasting. His support for the refugees from the Spanish Civil War, with the Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, earned the attention of Joe McCarthy. He lost his first TV show due to his views. Then Mahalia Jackson, the famed African-American singer, insisted that Studs be hired as the host of her show on CBS. When he refused to sign the U.S. loyalty oath demanded by CBS, Studs says Jackson told them, “Look, if you fire Studs, find another Mahalia Jackson.” CBS backed off. The lesson, says Terkel: “The answer is to say ‘No!’ to authority when authority is wrong.”

He is clear when asked about George Bush, and the war in Iraq: “What can we say, it destroyed one thing—this notion that we are an exceptional people, that we can never do wrong. We have lost the war. We lost Vietnam. How could this happen to us? We never lose! We are the city on a hill.” He calls Bush “a clown” and laments sharing his alma mater, the University of Chicago, with war architect Paul Wolfowitz.

I asked Studs how he felt turning 95. “I feel like I always feel: rotten, physically, to tell you the truth,” he said. “However, here I am, breathing, inhaling, exhaling. When Robert Browning wrote in his poem, ‘Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be,’ he was telling as much truth as George W. Bush and Karl Rove. He was lying like a rug.

“My brothers, my father and I suffered from angina. But I am alive today thanks to technology. It can do wonderful things. But it also gave us Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

With the threat of nuclear war never far from his thoughts and frequently addressed on his radio show, Terkel remains, ultimately, hopeful. As he writes in his book “My American Century”: “For the next century, we’ve got to put together what we so carelessly tore apart with so little concern for those who were gonna follow us. ... You’ve got to sound off. The older you are, the freer you are, as long as you last.”

His memoir, due out this fall, is titled “Touch and Go,” from a line from Dylan Thomas’ “Under Milk Wood.” Reading Terkel, listening to this titanic storyteller, vigorous at 95, I am reminded of another line of Thomas: “Do not go gentle into that good night.”

Studs Terkel rages on, with wit and wisdom. Happy birthday, Studs.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 500 stations in North America.

© 2007 Amy Goodman; distributed by King Features Syndicate

The Day After ANZAC Day by John/Togs Tognolini

The day after another ANZAC Day, its worth to reflecting on what the day means, particularly with John Howard’s militarisation of Australian history. It’s worth looking at an interview I did with Brian Day, a former SAS Warrant Officer and a founder of the Australian Vietnam Veterans Association, from 1992.

“Togs: How far do you think Australia has to go in actually coming to grips with Vietnam and the war in Indochina?

Brian: Jesus! I don't really think that sections of Australian society, political, military and otherwise will ever admit Vietnam was a mistake. They just won't. There is too many people who still believe in the so¬ called ANZAC tradition. Now I have a great belief in certain parts of the ANZAC tradition because the ANZAC tradition was a very hard won honour.

[The soldiers in this picture are;

top row; Sergeant Norton Niblet Mentioned in Dispatches, Wounded in Action three times, Lance Sergeant Stephen Tognolini Military Medal and Bar, Wounded in Action twice, Lance Sergeant Victor Edwards Military Medal and Bar,

Middle row; Sergeant J.S. Sheringham Wounded in Action, Company Sergeant Major George Hunt, Distinguished Conduct Medal, Wounded in Action twice, Killed in Action July 4 1918, Company Sergeant Major William Trevascus Distinguished Conduct Medal and Bar, Mentioned in Dispatches, Wounded in Action and Boer War Veteran,

Bottom row; Lance Corporal J.H. Cotterell Military Medal, Died of Wounds September 18 1918, and Lance Corporal J.J. Craigie Military Medal

Querrieu, France, 27 June 1918, brother non-commissioned officers of the 21st Battalion.

The 21st Battalion fought at; Suvla and Gallipoli, The Somme, Pozieres, Bapaume, Bullecourt, Ypres 1917, Menin Road, Polygon Wood, Broodseinde, Poelcappelle, Passchendaele, Hamel, Amiens, Albert, Mont St Quentin, Hindenburg Line, Beaurevoir, Montbrehain.

The 21st Battalion's casualties were 872 killed, 2434 wounded (including gassed) A battalion was a force of 1,000 soldiers.]

For example if you look at our casualties in World War One where the ANZAC tradition was formed and if you look at Australia and New Zealand they suffered the highest casualties of any nations in World War One, per percentage of those put in the field and the ANZAC tradition after World War One. Although a lot of people have tried to put it down; the facts of battle, the things that occurred in battle, the amounts of times the Australians actually did heroic things in battle is well documented and can't be taken away. Where other armies lost places, the Australians took them back and that happened on a couple of occasions. So, the ANZAC tradition was there and the ANZAC tradition should always remain.

What I don't like about it is that people tend to use the ANZAC tradition as a form of propaganda to brainwash people into believing that war is good.So, the ANZAC tradition should be kept within its' correct perspective. The ANZAC tradition is the gallantry of men. The mateship of men. The ability to fight. The ability to stay together and do a job under terrible adverse conditions.

Nowhere should the ANZAC tradition say that war is good. Some good comes out of war. It must because the Japanese and the Germans were defeated in World War Two and that was good. So, good does come out of war if the war is just. But I don't think the ANZAC tradition should be used for political or for propaganda purposes to affect the minds of young people. So that they believe one, that we are the best soldiers in the world and all the other soldiers, the Asian soldiers and all these German soldiers and all these others are no good because that's not so. That is not so.

The ANZAC tradition should make our youth aware of war. It shouldn't make them want to go to war. ANZAC Day shouldn't make people want to go to war. ANZAC Day should make people aware of war and what war does.That's the part that upsets me. Is the way that it is used. And the way it was used in the Australian Army to make people believe when they went to Vietnam that what they were doing was correct.See for example, I just could not believe and found it very difficult in the end to believe that the Australian Army had been used for political and military gain in South East Asia. I always thought the Australian Army would be used for good things. I just didn't believe that our government would have used the Australian Army as a cheap mercenary outfit to run around the world killing people to make politicians happy or more powerful and this security of Australia.

That the Vietnamese could ever come down and invade us, you know, the Domino Theory, that was all crap. But people actually used the ANZAC tradition in conjunction with these theories to convince people like myself and thousands and thousands of others that by going to Vietnam we were serving our country and we weren't. We were serving the politicians. We were serving the Americans and we were there basically doing in Vietnam what the Japanese did in Asia and what the Germans did in Europe. We invaded a foreign country to stop those people from having the government they wanted, whether we agree with it or not, surely the first thing is democracy. By going there we were actually killing democracy. We weren't helping people to become democratic.”

Some readers might remember Brian from John Pilger’s book A Secret Country where he said, “I remember one night a very senior American officer, who was a close friend of mine, said he had nothing but praise for the expertise and discipline of the Australian soldier. He told me, ‘We really like having you guys here.’ And I said, ’Why’s that? And he said, ‘You’re very good, you’ve helped us a lot….it’s like the British having the Ghurkhas, we have the Australians.”

I’m working on a review of Les Carlyon’s books, The Great War and Gallipoli. These two works are what I would call “safe history”. They don’t devlve deep enough into class and power. And sadly Carlyon dosn't even look at race, Aboriginal ANZAC's don't get a mention in both works. his massive works unfornately falls into the tragic adventure scenario, they had to go and fight. In The Great War, Carlyon borders on being an apologist for the British Mass Butcher, General Douglas Haig.

One of the results of Howard’s militarisation of history is that the stories of ordinary people, soldiers and people on the homefront are swept to the side. They become smothered by “safe history”. Let’s not talk about ANZAC being a part of the mass mutiny in the British army at Etaples in 1917, and ANZACs' shooting British military police and training instructors (who came from the British prison system and were widely hated as sadistic trench dodgers). Wilfred Owen called Etaples, “the bull ring.” Like the above interview with Brian, holes can be poked into myths and cracks in the parchment of legends can be exposed to proper examination.

I believe that history is telling what happened and why. Free from any romantic nonsense of adventures. I believe in empathy and in studying my own family’s history with ANZAC in both World War One and Two, I know history can hurt and we should not let any politician or set of cronies play on it too justify imperial adventures such as Iraq and Afganistan.

ANZAC - For Whom? By Shane Elson

For the last ten years I've been trying to work out why I have lost interest
in the ANZAC day memorials. I attended my first when I was 15 and played in
the Municipal band. We played at a Dawn Service and my dad, a WWII vet, took
me down to the war memorial. It would be almost 20 years later that I spoke
to him about his war time 'adventures' and found out what his experience had
been.

It wasn't until many years later that I started to discover the truth about
the ANZAC legend and the wars Australian service people had died in. I
started to find out about the way our governments treated the widows and
families of the dead they supposedly 'honoured'. I started to find out about
the non-physical injuries our service people carried and how these injuries
tore apart families and how the dying continued in the garages and back
yards and in the cars and off buildings and cliffs and how the number of war
widows and orphans continued to grow long after the last shots had been
fired

And then along came the Howard government.

There is no denying that Howard is a populist. Any balanced and reasonable
commentator or political observer will tell you this. He is a man blown
about by the winds of fortune and change as much as he is, as some describe
him, a 'cunning' politician. One of the first moves by the Howard government
was to open up the ANZAC day memorials to a form of insidious privatisation.
I'll try and explain what I mean.

Howard's agenda is not at all removed from the neo-conservative push being
resisted around the globe. This ideology believes that each of us is solely
responsible for our own lives. These neocons believe that if you're born
into poverty then there is nothing a society can do to help you. You must
get out of your poverty solely by applying yourself to moving up the
economic ladder (sound familiar?). This same philosophy applies to every
aspect of our individual lives.

These neo-conservatives are not stupid. Far from it. They know how
ridiculous this sounds. In order to take our minds off thinking about how
ridiculous their proposals are, they try and find ways of distracting us.
The three main ways of doing this are highlighting crime, sex and
nationalism. They embark on literal crusades against crime and rail about
'deviant' sexuality, be it homosexuality, youth sexuality, pensioner
sexuality or whatever. If all that fails they turn to nationalism, the most
destructive of all tendencies among societies.

But here they face another dilemma. They have told us for so long "there is
no such thing as society", to quote Lady Thatcher, that we almost believe
them. Our so called leaders have told us that the only ones who think in
terms of society are 'lefties' and 'radicals' and other nefarious types who
will, if we allow them, break into our houses (crime), rape (sex) our women
and burn our flag (nationalism). In short, its only bad people who think in
terms of society.

Having convinced enough of us to keep voting them back in, Howard's bunch
had to find a way of 'uniting' us even though their campaign and policies
are about dividing us. To achieve this end they had to find something that
crossed state borders and tapped into the basic good within us. They had to
find something, to use the psychoanalytic term, by which to sublimate our
needs. That is, to provide some new form of activity that would distract us
from our real need. ANZAC provides just the right amount of 'goodness' and
nostalgia to become something by which Howard wanted to define himself.

Seeing himself as Churchillian type leader, Howard unleashed the chains, not
only of the GST, but also of the 'creatives' in the PR and image management
industry to have a go at 'modernising' ANZAC. What has evolved over the last
few years is a bastard child that on the one hand wants to convince us that
war is peace and on the other, that to not embrace the remembrance of war is
to be unpatriotic. Orwell would be proud of what is being attempted as our
collective consciousness is sucked down the memory hole and burnt to a
cinder.

It was only a couple of years ago that it finally dawned on me why I had
lost interest in attending the ANZAC memorials. It was when I saw a McDonald's ad featuring the most egregious display of corporate sentimentalism I have ever seen. I watched this ad with my jaw literally on the ground and realised that the sacred had been turned into the profane, that ANZAC was now a fully commercialised venture.

What? Do you mean they'll soon be charging all those 'wonderful young
Australians', who John Howard says he won't have a bad word said against
them, an entrance fee to access Lone Pine and Anzac cove? You betcha. When
we allow the memory of a society to be sold for crass commercialism we
really need to ask ourselves some questions!

As far as Howard is concerned we can't be allowed to focus on the misery and
deprivation that hundreds of thousands of Australians face each day due to
the policies implemented by his government. We can't focus on the grief and
anger of veteran's families denied compensation for death or injury caused
by military misdeed. We can't be allowed to focus on the disintegration of
our society in the face of the privatisation of everything. We can't speak
about the loss of our national soul under the impost of the dollar. These
are the reasons I have become disillusioned with the memorial of ANZAC day.

All ANZAC day does for me now is leave me feeling empty. I want to
understand what it was like for the diggers. I want to embrace these men and
women and tell them how grateful I am. I want them to be able to tell me how
they feel and what it is they fought for.

I think I would be right in saying that most of them fought to make our
nation safe and a better place to bring up their and our kids. I think I
would also be right in saying they certainly didn't fight to allow the
commercialisation of their memory to be aided and abetted by their elected
representatives. I wonder if we, those of us still young enough, have the
true "spirit of ANZAC" and will do what Howard says we should do and fight
to make sure that we look out for the war widows and their families. And not
only them but also the poor, the disabled and the downtrodden. After all, if
that's what the diggers fought for, shouldn't that be the ANZAC legend we're
supposed to embrace?

Shane Elson

Alternative Radio Australia

A Racist and Insulting Film, 300 vs. Iran (and Herodotus) By GARY LEUPP

I always take in the Hollywood period dramas set in ancient Greece or Rome. My film-buff son is into this too, so we went last week to see 300, the Warner Brothers' blockbuster produced by Zack Snyder and based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller about the epic battle of Thermopylae between the Greeks and Persians. It had by that time grossed over 100 million dollars and no doubt influenced a lot of minds.
The film tells a familiar historical tale. (Rather, it ought to be familiar, but history instruction in our public schools is not necessarily comprehensive.) In 480 BCE, Greece was threatened by an invasion by the Persian army, the greatest war machine of its day. The empire of King Xerxes extended from the Indus River to Egypt, and drew its troops from the ends of the realm. The king personally led them in battle against the Greeks.

Or rather, some of the Greeks. Greece at the time was a collection of city-states, politically disunited, divided as much as unified by dialect and culture. Some city-states, including Argos and Thebes, actually aligned themselves with Xerxes. Herodotus, the "Father of History" and perhaps the world's first professional historian, paints a picture of a "free" Greece united against an oppressive "Asia." But that is a chauvinistic simplification. The fact is, Persia and the Greek city-states were all slave-based societies whose notions of "freedom" had little in common with our modern conception.

According to Herodotus (our sole source), 300 Spartan warriors alongside 700 Thespian volunteers defended the pass of Thermopylae against the invaders, inflicting heavy losses on Xerxes' forces. Led by Spartan King Leonidas, they went down in defeat but gave rival Athens time to prepare the fleet that decisively defeated the Persians at Salamis a few months later.

The story has been dramatized before, notably in the 1962 Hollywood production 300 Spartans starring Richard Egan as Leonidas and David Farrar as Xerxes. This new version is distinguished by what one critic calls the "monochromatic, cartoonish quality of [its] computer-generated special effects"---and by its timing. Warner Brothers had been planning a remake of the 1962 film since the late 1990s, based on a novel by Stephen Pressfield entitled Gates of Fire, with Bruce Willis in the role of Leonidas. But that project fell through, paving the way for 300---just in time to help subliminally shape the movie-going public's perception of Persians prior to the attack planned on today's evil empire by Vice President Cheney and his neocon staffers.

Persia is Iran. (I want to say, "Persia, of course, is Iran." But I can't assume that all or even most Americans make the connection.) The word comes from "Fars," a region of modern Iran, while "Iran" is related to the word "Aryan" and connotes "land of the Aryans." In 1935 the Persian shah opted to use the name "Iran" but the two terms are basically interchangeable. "Persia" just doesn't have the emotional baggage of "Iran." During the Iranian Hostage Crisis of 1979-81, many dealers in Iranian rugs decided to call them "rugs from Persia." Persia on occasion has thus served as the good Iran, the historical cultural Iran, as opposed to the modern evil enemy. But 300 makes Persia evil too.

The Iranian government has protested the film; last Wednesday President Ahmadinejad in his Iranian New Year's address called it part of a "psychological warfare" campaign against his country. Javadd Shamaqdare, a cultural advisor to the Iranian government, also denounced the film as "psychological warfare," accusing its producers of "plundering Iran's historic past and insulting its civilization" Editors of the Iranian newspaper Ayandeh-No declared that the film "seeks to tell people that Iran, which is in the Axis of Evil now, has long been the source of evil and modern Iranians' ancestors are the dumb, murderous savages you see in '300'." Iran's UN mission has stated that the film is "so overtly racist, so overflowing with vicious stereotyping of Persians as a dangerous, bestial force fatally threatening the civilised 'free' world", that it encourages "contemporary discourses of hatred ... [and] a 'clash of civilisations'."
Some western film critics have echoed Iranian objections. Dimitris Danikas notes that 300 depicts Persians as "bloodthirsty, underdeveloped zombies" and feeds "racist instincts in Europe and America."

Slate's Dana Stevens calls it "a textbook example of how race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to total war."
On the other hand film critic Dale McFeatters calls the Iranians "picky, picky," alleging (quite falsely), "Well, your leader did threaten to wipe Israel off the map." And Stanford history professor Victor Davis Hanson, reportedly admired by Cheney and his (professional historian) wife, posts his opinion on the right-wing "RealClearPolitics" website: "We rightly consider the ancient Greeks the founders of our present western civilisation ¬ and, as millions of movie-goers seem to sense, far more like us than the [Iranian] enemy who ultimately failed to conquer them."
Even if Zack Snyder and Frank Miller had no intention of making an anti-Iranian film, or promoting any sort of "psychological warfare," they've made a film in which Iranians are indeed generically depicted in the worst possible light. A Warner Bros. spokesman says, "The film 300 is a work of fiction inspired by the Frank Miller graphic novel and loosely based on a historical event. The studio developed this film purely as a fictional work with the sole purpose of entertaining audiences; it is not meant to disparage an ethnicity or culture or make any sort of political statement." But it does disparage.

Herodotus depicted the Persian ruler positively enough: "Among all this multitude of [Persian] men," he wrote, "there was not one who, for beauty and stature, deserved more than Xerxes himself to wield so vast a power" (Persian Wars, Book VII, 187). But the Miller-Snyder Xerxes is not even an Iranian-looking man but (like some other Persians in the film) a distinctly African figure, who happens to be effeminate and wholly vicious. Leonidas in contrast is white and manly and wholly heroic in his fight for "freedom."

Color is kept to a minimum in the film; the warriors appear in shades of black and white, with the Greeks' red cloaks standing out provocatively around the uniformly chiseled abs of the heroes. The Persians in contrast are ugly or deformed.
"The Greeks will know that free men stood against tyrants," says the cartoonish Leonides (Gerard Butler) preparing for his suicidal defense against the evil Persians. Greece is the "world's one hope for reason and justice" versus the "dark will of the Persian kings." "We rescue the world from mysticism and tyranny," he declares. "No retreat, no surrender. That is Spartan law. A new age has dawned, an age of freedom, and all will know that Spartans gave their last breath to defend it."
The message is indeed clear. Sparta = Greece = the Western World = freedom. Persia = slavery and oppression. This was perhaps the gist of Herodotus' message; he did write that while the Greeks knew that men were free, the "Asiatics" knew only that one (the ruler) was free. But that was a skewed notion in his time and can only dangerously circulate in our own, while Iran is in the neocons' crosshairs. Again, I think the Iranians might be over-concerned, since much of the film-viewing crowd won't even associate the ancient Persians with the modern Iranians, but the "clash of civilizations" theme is definitely there.

I would propose that those exposed to it imagine a different Xerxes that the nose-pierced caricature in the film. Imagine a Xerxes who addresses the American audience, including the Christian fundamentalist audience, as follows:
"I am Xerxes, Emperor of Persia, son of Darius, grandson of Cyrus. My grandfather Cyrus liberated the Jews from their Babylonian exile and let them return to Judea and rebuild their temple. My father Darius urged our people to revere the 'God of Daniel.' I myself married Esther, a Jew."

"I come from a long line of believers in the One God preached by Zarathustra, our Persian prophet whose teachings have influenced the Jews during their exile among us. I refer specifically to their concepts of Satan, Heaven and the future Messiah which weren't part of their pre-exile belief system and are clearly borrowings from our Persian religion.

"I am now embarking on the conquest of Greece, a backward region populated by primitive polytheists who worship capricious amoral deities and practice absurd religious rites. But my ancestors and I, having already conquered many Ionian Greeks, respect Greek philosophers and indeed have many of them in our employ. We have established a multi-ethnic empire. In that empire, Greeks fill important roles from the Mediterranean to India.

"These Spartans confronting us at Thermopylae are cruel men who annually--for sport!-- make war on the defenseless helots that live around them. They have nothing to tell us Persians---or the world in general---about 'freedom.'!"
The writer of such a script could claim Biblical authority. In Isaiah 44:28, the God of Israel declares through his prophet that Cyrus "is my shepherd, and he shall carry out all my purpose." Throughout Chapter 45 of Isaiah he speaks directly to Cyrus---"his anointed"---calling him "righteous" and informing him that "the wealth of Egypt and the merchandise of Ethiopia" will "come over to you, and be yours." The Book of Ezra opens with King Cyrus issuing an edict declaring, "The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem in Judah." In Daniel 6:26 a King Darius issues a decree that "in all my royal dominion people should tremble and fear before the God of Daniel." Esther 2:15-18 describes Xerxes' marriage to the Jewish maiden Esther. None of this is historically reliable; Daniel and Esther are indeed novelettes rather than history. The point is, these texts revered as Holy Writ by many if not most Americans depict Persia positively.

The Greeks, on the other hand, cause "many evils on the earth." They build a gymnasium in Jerusalem, for example (1 Maccabees 1:8). The Jews don't approve of that sort of Greek thing, so Judah rises up in rebellion against Seleucid rule in the second century BCE. Their rebellion against the "free," "rational" Greeks is depicted as heroic.

The Greco-Roman world continued to make war on Persia off and on up to the end of the Roman Empire. But Alexander the Great, having defeated the Persian King Darius a century and a half after the battle of Thermopylae and acquired his vast empire, admired Persian ways and actively promoted the cultural synthesis we call Hellenism. Roman troops brought the worship of the Persian god Mithras back to Rome from their Persian campaigns; the cult of this god born on December 25 was a formidable rival of Christianity to the fourth century. The greatest of the late Roman philosophers, the second century Neoplatonist Plotinus, admired and sought to learn from the Persians. Manicheanism, founded by the Persian prophet Mani, was another religious rival to Christianity from its inception in the third century. The knowledge of the Persian Magi (Zoroastrian priest-astrologers) was respected in Rome and Magi of course appear in the New Testament (Matthew 2:1-12).

In short: 300's depiction of the battle of Thermopylae is not merely inaccurate, as any film adaptation of a graphic novel has the perfect right to be. It's what the Iranians say it is: racist and insulting. It pits the glorious Greeks with whom the audience must sympathize against a "mystical" and "tyrannical" culture posing an imminent existential threat. It is, de facto, an anti-Persian/anti-Iranian propaganda film, and should be rated appropriately: not just R (for racist) but X---for extremely stupid and vicious and dangerously ill-timed.

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.
He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu.

from CounterPunch March 31 / April 1, 2007

Reflecting on History by Jonathan Strauss

Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History
By Paul Blackledge
Manchester University Press, 2006
218pages, $24.95
“The History Question: Who Owns the Past?”
By Inga Clendinnen
Quarterly Essay, issue 23, 2006
72pages, $14.95

[“Well said, old mole! Canst work I' th' earth so fast? A worthy pioneer.” Marx, of course, was referring to spectres rather than ghosts, but that's an indication of how much of Shakespeare's Hamlet has become part of our everyday language. Togs]

The ideas that might help us understand history are the concern of both Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History by Paul Blackledge, and the latest Quarterly Essay long essay, “The History Question: Who Owns the Past?” by Inga Clendinnen.

Blackledge surveys many contributions to Marxist historiography. Still, his survey is largely confined to European writers and, for the period after the Second World War, almost entirely to those from Britain, France and English-speaking North America.

In considering the work of Marx and Engels, Blackledge identifies and exemplifies the centrality of production as a social, political and historical process in the Marxist theory of history. He also discusses the interpretations of the theorists of the Second and Third Internationals, culminating in the study The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia by the Soviet scholar Boris Hessen, and the development of the school of “people’s history” by British communist historians.

The debates among Marxists about the character of modes of production and the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and about the roles of social structure and human agency in making history, as well as Marxist historical theory’s relationship to postmodernity, are the topics that carry the book through to today.

Blackledge’s reflections are a readable and very competent introduction to these ideas. However, his presentation of the Marxist historical debates becomes somewhat bogged down in point and counter-point. The bones of contention about the transition from feudalism to capitalism, he argues, are about whether the feudal class struggle between lords and serfs; or the rise of trade, including the Atlantic slave trade, and the development of towns, drove the transition. Also, whether the revolutions related to the development of capitalism were “bourgeois” because of their outcomes, or that the term “bourgeois revolution” should be rejected because the revolutions did not involve confrontations of nobility and bourgeoisie, but were fought out primarily within a capitalistic-aristocrat class.

Blackledge offers no definite conclusion — and most likely is unable to since he relies on the example of the English transition to capitalism and its Civil War almost exclusively. However, these social transitions considered as a whole, show that there were bourgeois revolutions against feudalism and that the results of these were the encouragement of capitalist-commodity production where large-scale commodity producers were ultimately victorious over small-scale ones.

Thus the transitions from feudalism to capitalism depended on the peasants and the “middling sort” to end feudal relations of production and the political privileges of feudalism. But they also needed trade and other accumulations of wealth to provide the basis for the accumulation of capital, which was used to spark generalised commodity production. Among the work of the historians of the English transition from feudalism to capitalism, that of Maurice Dobb and Brian Manning seems most suggestive of this outlook.

With regard to structure and agency in history, Blackledge in the end plumps for Alex Callinicos’s argument that “the class struggle is the central mediating ‘bridge’ between long-term historical tendencies and short-term revolutionary upsurges”. In this, “proletarian self-awareness” is what is required for the working class to realise its political potential in collective action and revolutionary class consciousness.
A revolutionary working class, however, must be aware not only of itself in society but of all social relations, and this consciousness can’t come from the class’s own experience alone.

The ideological struggle against capitalism can only be won in conjunction with the practical work of social transformation through a mass revolutionary movement. Short of this, revolutionary theory must be developed and propagated by its advocates in the working class movement without losing contact with working people and their experience.

Clendinnen’s essay is, in contrast to Blackledge’s work, a polemic. Its stance is tenacious, progressive-liberal historiography.

The historian, Clendinnen argues, must recognise the distinction between dynamic potency of stories — constituting memory — and the critical evaluation that telling history requires. Unlike the fiction writer or politician, the historian should resist opportunistic appropriations of their material or the concoction of large inspiring narratives because that would manipulate the truth.

Clendinnen does not call simply for objectivity and the application of the rules of the discipline in research, however. She says the energy to do history comes from what historians most care about and “the most assured historians reveal their moral vision in everything they do”. Her exemplars are the Australian historian Henry Reynolds, who declared “history should not only be relevant but politically utilitarian … It should aim to right old injustices to discriminate in favour of the oppressed, to actively rally to the cause of liberation”, and E.P. Thompson, author of The Making of the English Working Class.

In this way, Clendinnen allows us to discover a deep-set liberal prejudice. “Who owns the past?”, she asks and answers: “In a free society, everyone.” Perhaps she means no more than that all may tell “a powerful story [which] might elicit remorse in a dominant group, and even stimulate the desire to recompense injury”. What she considers worth discussing, however, is how “to create and nurture new nation-unifying experiences” that will lead to “informed patriotism”. Clendinnen’s nationalism distorts her critical outlook. Thus, the irresponsibility about the past she decries becomes her fate.

For example, in discussing the poster of (John) Simpson (Kirkpatrick) placed in schools in 2005 to celebrate the so-called ANZAC spirit, she asks “is there a better legend for primary-school kids than [someone] who insisted on practising civilian virtues in the middle of a battlefield?” But perhaps Simpson’s virtues were rather those of his non-conformism and socialism instead?

All this is underpinned by Clendinnen’s view that the nation is an entity outside history. She says, for example, that several dates she could suggest for the formation of the Australian nation would all be arbitrary. For Marxists however, the rise of nations is intimately associated with the rise of capitalism, with all the injustice and oppression that dictates. For Clendinnen, the nation can be what she wants it to be, and, thus, necessarily, Australia is “a fine country” nevertheless.


From: Cultural Dissent, Green Left Weekly issue #694 17 January 2007.