Extract from The Weekend Australian Magazine
As I
trudge through ruins ancient and recent in search of the memories of
war-torn Vietnam and Cambodia, I'm trying to cope with the
intolerable heat. I'm making wireless programs where millions have
died in prolonged horrors perpetrated or precipitated by Western
nations, ours included, in wars waged against the tide of history in
the discredited name of democracy or the domino theory.
As surely
as ISIS was unleashed by Bush's Coalition of the Willing, Pol Pot was
created by Nixon, Kissinger and another coalition of which we were an
enthusiastic member. The death and destruction we rained down in
Indochina, with bombs, napalm and defoliants, compared in rage and
scale to the air raids in Europe. Yet they failed to defeat a small,
valiant people who'd only recently endured invasion by the Japanese
and colonisation by the French. Learning less than nothing from those
monumental stupidities, the Coalition of the Willing did it again
with its “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq, killing a disputed
number of civilians – perhaps a million – while mutilating,
maddening and displacing millions more.
The
Vietnamese imagination is haunted by a literal belief in wartime
ghosts. The air you breathe here is as heavy with ghosts as it is
with humidity. As in Iraq, the death toll of troops and civilians is
disputed; a figure of a million seems likely, though the Vietnamese
government doubles that. Add perhaps two million for the killing
fields of Cambodia.
Yet
already the jungles have hidden most of the evidence, and memories
are fading. To the young of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City the
overwhelming majority of the population, the past I'm seeking is as
remote as Agincourt to the French or Anzac (for all the patriotic
marketing) to our children. I remember being in Tiananmen Square on a
significant anniversary. The menacing military presence to keep the
peace was unnecessary – as the place was almost deserted. Not out
of fear, but because the crowds were crowding Bejing's shopping
malls. It's the same here. Shopping is the new ideology.
There's
renewed criticism of Japan's continuing reluctance to apologise for
its war crimes, with the increasingly aggressive Shinzo Abe carefully
calibrating what he's willing to concede. And our own reluctance to
atone for the brutalities inflicted on the Aboriginal people – our
Sorry day was a long time coming and PM Howard refused to take part –
is another case in point. So don't hold your breath waiting for a
“sorry” from Bush, Howard, Blair and the rest responsible for the
grotesquely misnamed Operation Iraqi Freedom. Based on lies and
political, cultural and historic blindness.
Much of
the mess in the Middle East is a consequence of colonialism – and
the wholly arbitrary designation of nations by bureaucrats from
Britain and its departing mates. They'd literally nail a piece of tin
on a palm tree and say “this is Kuwait, the other side's Iraq”.
Ditto in Africa, where Europeans drew straight lines on the
landscape, ignorant or indifferent to ancient tribal enmities. Which
led, generations later, to the genocide in Rwanda between Tutsi and
Hutu. Have the French apologised? Did the Belgians ever apologise for
the king's genocidal attacks on the Congo (the Belgian Congo was
Leopold II's personal property) where perhaps 10 million were
slaughtered as His Majesty massed his millions from rubber for the
new pneumatic tyres for the world's bicycles.
Vietnam
and Cambodia are currently calm., but if you spin a bottle on a map
of the world it's likely to point at a conflict. Economic or
ideological or religious factors or all of the above detonated many.
And all of them are connected, in one way or another, to their
colonial history. Sorry.
No comments:
Post a Comment