The following Editorial was published in "The Guardian", newspaper of
the Communist Party of Australia in its issue of Wednesday, July 9th,
2003. Contact address: 65 Campbell Street, Surry Hills. Sydney. 2010
Australia.
Phone: (612) 9212 6855 Fax: (612) 9281 5795.
CPA Central Committee: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
"The Guardian": <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Webpage: http://www.cpa.org.au>
Subscription rates on request.
******************************
Editorial: Things to come
The new Governor General, Michael Jeffery, is already making his
conservative and militarist views known even before he has formally
assumed the office. He has taken the Chief of Defence Forces, General
Cosgrove, to task for expressing his opinion that the Vietnam War was a
mistake. The new G-G declares that the Vietnam War was not only a
strategic and moral necessity, but a military victory as well.
Michael Jeffery was a commander of Australian troops in Vietnam and
seems to have been impressed by the shooting of a Vietnamese soldier by
a unit under his command. The Vietnamese soldier was in his own
homeland, defending it against the invading US and Australian armed
forces. The US and Australia were the aggressors. The Vietnamese soldier
was not trespassing on Australian soil or killing Australian citizens,
nor did the Vietnamese Government have any such thoughts or intentions.
Yet the G-G elect has the audacity to talk of "morality" and to parade
his "Christian" views. It is appropriate to recall the tons of Agent
Orange sprayed over Vietnamese forests, villages and farms by the
"civilised" Americans and their Australian allies. Agent Orange is still
poisoning the Vietnamese countryside and killing Vietnamese citizens and
deforming countless children being born today. Morality! Christian?
The Vietnamese soldier and the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese
civilians killed in the war also had mothers and fathers, wives and
children but it seems that to Michael Jeffery and Paul Sheehan (a Sydney
Morning Herald journalist who echoes Jeffery's thoughts (SMH June 28-29
and 30/6/03)), they are merely nameless and faceless Vietcong - the enemy.
Perhaps the most outlandish claim is that the Vietnam War was a military
victory. Do you remember those final scenes in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh
City) as the remaining US troops and diplomatic staff madly scrambled to
get on to the fleeing US helicopters.
In justification of this claim, Paul Sheehan quotes a book titled
Unheralded Victory by Mark Woodruff. He claims that "the US military
campaign defeated the Vietcong and decimated the North Vietnamese army,
but lost the propaganda war".
Paul Sheehan claims that the Vietnamese Army was "a spent force". He
draws comfort from the fact that, "The war also exhausted the Vietnamese
communists for a generation". He claims that Vietnam has become "a
political, military and economic backwater". Sheehan claims that "In the
broader sweep of history, the US crushed Vietnam as a regional power".
The fact that Vietnam had been a French colony before the US invasion
is, of course, not mentioned. Vietnam had been savagely exploited by
French colonialism and that was the reason for the long and courageous
struggle of the Vietnamese people for independence - from the French and
then the Americans and Australians. Their independence struggle was led
by communists.
The new G-G is also on a crusade to bring "spirituality" back into
society. He believes that "The deletion of religious studies from the
curriculum denied young people the opportunity to study the philosophies
behind the great religions or to see themselves as potential spiritual
beings."
The reality is that the rapid developments in all branches of science
have made a belief in a god more and more irrelevant and demonstrable
nonsense. This is a process that will continue irrespective of the
attempts of Michael Jeffery and others to turn the clock back.
Did Jeffery's God tell him to kill the Vietnamese soldier in cold blood?
In similar vein George Bush is reported to have recently told the new
Palestinian Prime Minister that "God told me to strike at al Qaida and I
struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did."
In a grim warning of things to come the new G-G believes Australia will
have "redefined our primary area of [foreign policy] focus to an arc
encompassing India and China" in the future.
John Howard will have a staunch ally as he crusades not only to
re-establish colonialism in the island states of Oceania but to then go
on to re-establish western imperial domination over the two most
populous nations in the world.
Paul Sheehan comments on this perspective, "This Governor-General may go
on the front foot and fly the flag in places he thinks the flag of
Australian interest has not been flown enough." Interesting times ahead!
**************************************************************
--
--
Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Archived at http://www.cat.org.au/lists/leftlink/
Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop
Sub: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Unsub: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
