Polemos

Originally posted 3:30 AM, Friday, 8 October, 2004

In just over a day our nation goes to a federal election that will decide our international standing. Yet perhaps the most important question in our history has yet to be openly debated beyond the poorly reported anti-war protests. Should we support mass murder as foreign policy?

Our nation is about to go to a federal election that will decide which faction of the Australian Business Party will gain control of our nation’s economic, military and foreign affairs. Due to the constitutional gerrymander guaranteed by our two party preferred system of voting we can only choose between the social or ant-social factions of a parliament dominated by plutocratic interests, either that or we can vote informally or not at all. The last two choices are perfectly valid democratic responses to our limited form of mass democratic participation even though they will effectively be an informal vote for John Winston Howard.

The election campaign is currently being fought mainly on domestic terms and as a nation we seem to be largely ignorant of the world at large. While Howard has made noises about preempting terrorists on our neighbour’s soil it seems to have gone largely unnoticed that his policy of ‘preemptive’ strikes has already been put into practice. 10 000 slaughtered innocents including infants, pregnant women and the most elderly and infirm are testament to his iron will in defence of the good people of Australia. As a member of the Coalition of the Willing we support the widespread US terror bombing of Iraqi population centres currently underway.

So I have a question for the electorate:

As a nation should we support the slaughter of our neighbours children? Should we support mass murder as foreign policy?

Hitler also had a policy of preemptive self defence and he played to his people’s need for salvation, for god, for bread, for a restoration of their national dignity in a strong nationalist peace and for protection from ’semitic’ terror at home and abroad. It was his preventive war against Polish ‘terrorism’ that prompted the British Empire to declare war on Germany and brought bombs to London. Yet Hitler wanted peace with the West in order to launch his preemptive strike against the growing threat of Stalinist communism and it is ironic that WW2 not only failed to save the Poles but was immediately followed by the West taking up Hitler’s own fight against the Communist terror.

Nowadays us supposedly non-fascist democracies are being terrorised by a new semitic threat from abroad as we nervously look to our leaders to continue the constant growth in wealth we apparently enjoy, and while Nazi bombs aren’t raining down on London the bombs of the Coalition of the Willing are certainly raining down on Fallujah, Samarra, Baghdad and many other towns and cities in Iraq even as we write. The offensive against Iraqi insurgents is intensifying in the run up to the US elections with sustained bombardments of towns like Tal Afar in the north in September and air strikes on Sadr City. When Bush wins his second term it’s likely much more terror will rain down on defenceless men, women and children all over Iraq and beyond.

As a nation we seem to condone this illegal war of conquest and brutal occupation even as we seem to accept that it was sold to us on outright blatant lies. This is supposedly a preventive war against semitic/Islamic terror but as a war that has usurped the UN charter and international law it is a supreme crime of aggression that has resulted in the grotesque mass murder of over 10 000 innocents including babes in their mothers arms torn to bloody shreds of meat by razor shards of shrapnel. This slaughter isn’t collateral damage but state terrorism and the nation of Australia initiated it at the behest of our military and economic masters in order to help secure Persian Gulf oil for the next couple of decades in the face of an imminent global energy crisis.

I find the political debate in this country in the run up to what may well be the most significant federal election in our nation’s history utterly insane. And I’m not speaking rhetorically or for emotional effect here, we are simply and quite literally already a rogue nation drenched in the blood of thousands of our Iraqi neighbour’s children. While many people will vote for Howard without the benefit of any real debate on this most pressing national concern, largely due to the controlled and propagandised nature of our mass media, I find it rather chilling that our nation might reelect our war criminal Prime Minister this Saturday and effectively endorse our complicity in the murderous war crimes being committed for oil.

We are already well on the way to becoming a vassal state to a fascist imperial super power. Howard and Blair are quisling ‘arse lickers’ who are still using propaganda lies to manipulate their constituencies into following the proto-fascist neoconservative US administration along a path that leads to economic disaster, totalitarianism and a continuation of mass murder as foreign policy. Rather than international cooperation and investment in renewable energy to mitigate the problem this continued and expanding slaughter of innocents is our national strategy for the coming energy decline.

Most of us are aware of this Iraq problem of course yet it seems to hardly make an impact on the national psyche and talk of ‘fascism’ is written off as un-Australian leftist drivel. However, unlike us most Germans in the 1930’s didn’t have the historical hindsight to help them understand the modern democratic dictatorship that was Nazism and they dismissed its virulent anti-semitism as political rhetoric until the escalation of Hitler’s war on semitic/Jewish/Bolshevik terror overwhelmed them. We are already there with them, locked into a common belief in our already bankrupted individual and national morality, and the developing global energy crisis will drive us far deeper into this fascist abyss.

Again, I’m not speaking rhetorically here, I am trying to be as soberly literal about the reality of our current situation as possible. This coming federal election will not just decide which faction of our plutocracy will gain power, it will decide our nation’s standing within the international community at a time of an international crisis of historical proportions. I can only hope that those who intend not to vote Howard out might honestly think about what it means to effectively condone the murder of your neighbour’s children in order to steal their oil. Or better yet, since pictures are far more powerful, perhaps you might remember the faces of these innocent victims of the Coalition of the Willing as you prepare to not vote in good conscience.