slackbastard

“Mr. Block is legion,” wrote Walker C. Smith in 1913. “He is representative of that host of slaves who think in terms of their masters. Mr. Block owns nothing, yet he speaks from the standpoint of the millionaire; he is patriotic without patrimony; he is a law-abiding outlaw … [who] licks the hand that smites him and kisses the boot that kicks him … the personification of all that a worker should not be.”

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. ~ Samuel Johnson, 1775

“This troop song was not popular with the officer class, who thought it bad for morale, though attempts to suppress it were unsuccessful.”

Almost a century ago, 8,141 Australians died trying to keep Turkey British. Last week, Simon Darby of the BNP announced that the BNP invasion of Australia has met a glitch: Nick Griffin’s ‘planned speaking tour of Australia has met a predictable obstacle, he recently received notification from the authorities down under that his visa application, “has been blocked and referred to a higher authority”.’

http://simondarby.blogspot.com/2008/11/st-georges-day-west-bromwich.html

On October 30, ex-PM Paul Keating launched Churchill and Australia by Graham Freudenberg (Pan MacMillan, 2008). In doing so, he created a storm in a teacup on the subject of ‘Gallipoli’:

[Asquith, Kitchener, Fisher, and Churchill] did produce Gallipoli. But with the Western Front in a quagmire and standstill and given Australian loyalties to ‘king and country’, it was entirely explicable that we would be there to help, including at Gallipoli.

So our motivations were, as Graham notes, divided by nationalism and imperialism; between loyalties to the empire and a desire for a more independent Australia. Importantly, he suggests that ‘Churchill’s ambivalence about Australia was a mirror image of Australia’s ambivalence about itself.’

On the one hand we were out to prove that ‘the British race in the antipodes had not degenerated’ yet we resented being dragooned into a war which did not threaten our own country or its people.

As Graham says ‘in an almost theological sense Australian Britons had been born again into the baptism of fire at Anzac Cove’, questioning, somewhat tongue in cheek, whether we needed being reborn at all.

The ‘reborn’ part went to a lack of confidence and ambivalence about ourselves. Who we were and what we had become. If our sons suffered and died valiantly in a European war, such sacrifice was testament to the nation’s self worth.

In some respects we are still at it; not at the suffering and the dying, but still turning up at Gallipoli, the place where Australia was needily redeemed.

The truth is that Gallipoli was shocking for us. Dragged into service by the imperial government in an ill conceived and poorly executed campaign, we were cut to ribbons and dispatched.

And none of it in the defence of Australia. Without seeking to simplify the then bonds of empire and the implicit sense of obligation, or to diminish the bravery of our own men, we still go on as though the nation was born again or even, was redeemed there. An utter and complete nonsense.

For these reasons I have never been to Gallipoli and I never will.

“He’s a witch!”
“Burn him!”

That said… nation-states are invariably built on blood sacrifice, and mass death is a seemingly necessary part of the national mythos. In the context of the modern nation-state, Fredy Perlman remarks:

World War I marked the end of one phase of the nationalizing process, the phase that had begun with the American and French revolutions, the phase that had been announced much earlier by the declaration of Aguirre and the revolt of the Dutch grandees. The conflicting claims of old and newly-constituted nations were in fact the causes of that war. Germany, Italy and Japan, as well as Greece, Serbia and colonial Latin America, had already taken on most of the attributes of their nationalistic predecessors, had become national empires, monarchies and republics, and the more powerful of the new arrivals aspired to take on the main missing attribute, the colonial empire. During that war, all the mobilizable components of the two remaining dynastic empires, the Ottoman and the Hapsburg, constituted themselves into nations. When bourgeoisies with different languages and religions, such as Turks and Armenians, claimed the same territory, the weaker were treated like so-called American Indians; they were exterminated. National Sovereignty and Genocide were – and still are – corollaries.

Common language and religion appear to be corollaries of nationhood, but only because of an optical illusion. As welding materials, languages and religions were used when they served their purpose, discarded when they did not. Neither multi-lingual Switzerland nor multi-religious Yugoslavia were banned from the family of nations. The shapes of noses and the color of hair could also have been used to mobilize patriots – and later were. The shared heritages, roots and commonalities had to satisfy only one criterion, the criterion of American-style pragmatic reason: did they work? Whatever worked was used. The shared traits were important, not because of their cultural, historical or philosophical content, but because they were useful for organizing a police to protect the national property and for mobilizing an army to plunder the colonies.

Once a nation was constituted, human beings who lived on the national territory but did not possess the national traits could be transformed into internal colonies, namely into sources of preliminary capital. Without preliminary capital, no nation could become a great nation, and nations that aspired to greatness but lacked adequate overseas colonies could resort to plundering, exterminating and expropriating those of their countrymen who did not possess the national traits.

~ Fredy Perlman, ‘The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism’

Another former PM, John “If I was running Al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008, and pray, as many times as possible, for a victory not only for Obama, but also for the Democrats” HoWARd had the following to remark upon the subject of Gallipoli:

Ninety years ago, as dawn began to break, the first sons of a young nation assailed these shores. These young Australians, with their New Zealand comrades, had come to do their bit in a maelstrom not of their making.

‘I don’t want to join the Army’
(Tune: ‘On Sunday I walk out with a soldier’)

I don’t want to join the army
I don’t want to go to war
I’d rather hang around Piccadilly Underground
Living off the earnings of a high class lady
I don’t want a bayonet up me arsehole
I don’t want me bollocks shot away
I’d rather be in England
Merry merry England
And fornicate my fuckin’ life away (cor blimey)

Over eight impossible months, they forged a legend whose grip on us grows tighter with each passing year. In the hills, ridges and gullies above us the Anzacs fought, died, dug in and hung on. Here they won a compelling place in the Australian story. Today we remember the 50,000 Australians who served in the Gallipoli campaign. And the more than 26,000 who fell or were wounded here. We remember, too, the sons of New Zealand who died and suffered. And let us not forget the sons of Britain, France, India, Newfoundland and of course Turkey, who died in their countless thousands on this peninsula…

Those who fought here in places like Quinn’s Post, Pope’s Hill and the Nek changed forever the way we saw our world and ourselves. They bequeathed Australia a lasting sense of national identity. They sharpened our democratic temper and our questioning eye towards authority. We used to say that the ranks of the original Anzacs were thinning with each passing year. They are all gone now. Now what swells with each Anzac season is a hunger for their stories. Now we remember them not as old soldiers but as young Australians, often from the same suburbs, streets, districts and towns that we come from. Just as many of you have come here today with your brothers and your mates, so it was 90 years ago that the young of Australia surged forward to enlist along with their brothers and their mates…

History helps us to remember but the spirit of Anzac is greater than a debt to past deeds. It lives on in the valour and the sacrifice of young men and women that ennoble Australia in our time, in scrub in the Solomons, in the villages of Timor, in the deserts of Iraq and the coast of Nias. It lives on through a nation’s easy familiarity, through Australians looking out for each other, through courage and compassion in the face of adversity…

‘When this lousy war is over’
Tune: ‘What a friend we have in Jesus’
When this lousy war is over no more soldiering for me,
When I get my civvy clothes on, oh how happy I shall be.
No more church parades on Sunday, no more begging for a pass.
You can tell the sergeant-major to stick his passes up his arse.

(Repeat first two lines of first verse)
No more NCOs to curse me, no more rotten army stew.
You can tell the old cook-sergeant, to stick his stew right up his flue.

(Repeat first two lines of first verse)
No more sergeants bawling, ‘Pick it up’ and ‘Put it down’.
If I meet the ugly bastard I’ll kick his arse all over town.

TRANSCRIPT OF THE PRIME MINISTER THE HON JOHN HOWARD MP ADDRESS AT ANZAC DAY DAWN SERVICE GALLIPOLI [APRIL 25, 2005, PDF]

Then as now, war and state-sponsored terrorism had its opponents as well as its supporters, and during WWI in Australia, one of the more vigorous voices belonged to the revolutionary industrial unionists of the International Workers of the World. It was in no small measure due to the efforts of the IWW, but also the labour movement more generally — in addtion to the influence of what was then known as ‘The Irish Church in Australia’ (the Catholic Church under Archbishop Daniel Mannix) — that the Little Digger‘s attempts to conscript more bodies for the imperialistic slaughterhouses in Europe were defeated. Twice. One of the more famous expressions of opposition to conscription and the creation of more dead heroes was the following poster, produced by the IWW in 1916:

On the Australian IWW and opposition to WWI see Frank Cain, The Wobblies at War: A History of the IWW and the Great War in Australia, Spectrum, Melbourne, 1993 (‘Scaring hell out of the ruling class’, review by Phil Shannon, Green Left Weekly, #135, March 16, 1994); Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia, Cambridge University Press, 1995; and finally the fabulously titled ‘AUSTRALIAN STRIKE STARTED BY I.W.W.; Ex-Minister of Parkways Hoyle Tells How Agitators Used German Money. MENACE MET BY PEOPLE Organization Declared Illegal and Leaders Convicted of Crimes and Sentenced. Then I.W.W. Appeared. Leaders Found Guilty’, The New York Times, September 10, 1917.

And finally, a cautionary message from The Blairite Foundation for Troop Respect & Matter Investigation:

See also : ANZAC / ACNAZ / April Fools (March 31, 2008) | The meaning of ANZAC Day (April 26, 2008) | ‘The Great History War’, ABC 4 Corners (Reporter: Chris Masters; Broadcast: 10/11/2008)

Bonus!

The Minister for Uranium Mining & Woodchipping sings!