Execution - Slaughter in the Jungle

Since the execution of eight people in Indonesia this week, including two Australians, all of whom I do not believe deserved to be killed, I have been torn as to how to respond. I have read almost everything that has been written by politicians and the commentariat and I have discussed the events with friends and family. I feel both angry and saddened, but I wanted to stay my hand for a day or two before I decided on my final position.

I think the dilemma here is a human rights dilemma. How far should a country like Australia be friends with, trade with, have cultural exchanges with, education arrangements with, tourism arrangements etc with a country which has less than a glowing human rights record? And we need to be careful here for Australia itself has been accused by the United Nations for being less than wonderful in our treatment of our indigenous, so we are not really in a position to throw too many stones. And yet, it is essential in my opinion to evaluate and make judgment upon other countries’ records. I do not see how we cannot, while we strive to be better ourselves.

Australia’s political class for the most part have, thank God, moved on from capital punishment. It is unlikely that capital punishment will ever be re-introduced into this country again in the future, so total has the move away from it been for us politically and socially. Most would see it as being immoral. Yes, there are people out there who still agree with it, but they are unlikely ever to agitate for it and were they to do so, they would never get it past the politicians and the bulk of the population who would nowadays have nothing to do with it.

And anyway, there is a simple and powerfully effective argument that not one of them can stand against. If it was their son or daughter or them themselves, would they still say, ‘well, they knew what they were getting into when they did this crime. Do the crime, pay the penalty’? No, when it’s their loved one or themselves, then there is every reason to believe in redemption, that people can change, that people can be remorseful and turn their lives around. Their argument for the death penalty is theoretical only and distinct from the human. When it touches them, they change their tune very quickly. They didn’t shoot through the heart the drug smugglers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran this week, they shot the newly married Rev. Andrew Chan and the artist and prison counsellor Myuran Sukumaran; two very different men from the two who were imprisoned ten years ago. Of course there is rehabilitation and redemption. What a sorry species we would be if it were not so.

There is no need for me here to reiterate the many and sound reasons as to why capital punishment is abhorrent. I will just say that for all those reasons for me personally, I do not believe any individual or body or institution or state has the right to delete the existence of another human being. It is judicial or presidential or state murder, nothing less. When the theatrics are stripped away, it cannot be anything else. It is cold and calculated and in the case we have seen this week, also cruel and torturous.

No amount of rationalising by the Indonesians or the Americans or the Chinese or the Saudis can ever justify killing another. Do not get me wrong. I understand only too well that there are evil people in this world who are not fit to be part of a society. Societies cannot have these people meting out destruction and devastation in their wake. They are dangerous and they must be removed. That’s why we have the rule of law. If it costs the tax payer a considerable amount to have such people incarcerated, then so be it. I am happy to have my taxes go to keeping some people off the streets where they can do no harm, be they drug lords, murderers, rapists, terrorists or any other kind of evil personified, and forever if necessary. So, I did not agree with Saddam Hussein’s hanging or even Osama bin Laden’s summary execution. There can be no double standard. We cannot kill the ones we don’t like and save the ones we do. Killing is killing and killing is wrong. I think state initiated murder demeans the country that legislates it. Some of the Nazis imprisoned after WWII stayed in prison for life and died there. That’s how it should be.

I would like to see Australia stand tall and proud in its dealings with other nations and have a range of different levels of friendship. The highest level would only be offered to democratic countries with the rule of law, certain freedoms that are espoused by the UN Declaration of Human Rights and who have no truck with capital punishment. We should be able to say, ‘we cannot be as close a friend to you as what we would like to be while ever you have capital punishment. Given that, we limit our friendship and therefore our contact’. Idealistic dreaming, they would say. So, yes I would expect the comments, ‘what about trade, what about commerce, what about the economy’? And I guess I am saying, ‘what about it’? Do we want a better world or don’t we? Do we want to improve the lot of humanity or don’t we? When do we take these things seriously and not just pay lip service to them? I am talking about human rights. There are countries in the world today where I, just for being gay and being married to Chris, could be legally put to death. What happens if I were to be picked up in an airport transiting through in one of those countries and thrown in prison there to rot and eventually be killed by judicial process. Are we going to really say, ‘well he should have known better than to be gay in that country?’ The problem is that I am gay wherever I go.

From the moment we heard the news of the executions, we heard Government ministers and the Prime Minister qualifying everything they said with how important our friendship with Indonesia is. The friendship and the future is the most important thing to them, otherwise they would not be qualifying their remarks with such obsequiousness. We are already talking about everything going back to normal as quickly as possible. Everything will be forgotten for the sake of the relationship. But I am not so sure the ‘relationship’ is the most important consideration.

I don’t think it should be business as usual in a week or two or three. I think that even if it costs us some trade, we should start to stand up to such countries and we should start encouraging other like countries to stand up too. We shouldn’t just settle back and forget. If human rights are more than just a pretty phrase and a nice thought, we have to make them so. I do not agree with mass boycotts usually. They are a blunt instrument. However, I did endorse a boycott of the last Winter Olympics in Sochi after Russia’s blatant and cruel crackdown on LGBT people. I just thought, sport is not worth the propaganda coup that Putin wanted in the midst of widespread LGBT hate crimes. And I don’t think trade is worth it either. We eventually did boycott South Africa and while it did hurt ordinary people for a time, it was a powerful driver that isolated the country and moved her into the process of change. I personally boycotted Fiji when it was under military rule. I have a thing about military rule. I don’t like it. Soldiers with guns should not be running our societies. I have personally boycotted Singapore since 2005 after they murdered young Van Tuong Nguyen. As much as I would love to experience Singapore, I feel like they owe Australia an apology and I still remain unwilling to go. I have not forgiven them for killing a very young man who made a mistake on the grounds that his death would be a deterrence to drug smugglers. Please Singapore show the wonderful change in drug statistics since 2005 so that we can all see how effective killing people is. So too with Indonesia. I look forward to a massive diminution in their drug statistics now that Andrew and Myu and six others, one of whom was schizophrenic and didn’t even understand he was being executed, have been shot dead.  

I am afraid that though I have Indonesian friends and have had two Indonesian boarders many years ago, I have not yet forgiven the Indonesian President or Government for perpetrating this vile act on eight people who more than likely, deserved a prison sentence, but who did not deserve to be murdered in a clearing in a jungle in the dead of night. It’s not the kind of world I want. And I know that the only way to effect change is to be the change. I hope I do get to see Australia stand up for what’s right. I am going to try to personally. After this week’s callous events, I would like to see Australia lead the world and push bi-laterally and in the United Nations for global change, for the total and complete irrevocable abolition of the death penalty. At the end of this week, that’s how I feel.

The Great Waste 1914 – 1918

On the Centenary of the Gallipoli Landings 25 April 1915

Today is Anzac Day. And not just any Anzac Day. It is the centenary today of the Gallipoli landings in the Dardanelles. This centenary is a big moment in Australian history. But what it means is debatable. We have been told by certain voices in the military that Australia became a nation there, that we grew up there, that our blood spilled was the evidence of a proud adult nation in its own right. We have watched the RSL attempt to own the Anzac myth and to fashion it according to the image of its erstwhile President Bruce Ruxton. We have seen the glorification of war in some quarters, celebrating military life, its ranks, its ordinance and its uniforms. We have seen business and commerce try to have piece of the Anzac tradition, selling everything from tins of biscuits to tea-towels. We’ve seen right-wing nationalists try to appropriate the tradition conflating it with their myopic view of what it means to be Australian such that if you’re not wearing a flag around your shoulders on Australia Day, you’re un-Australian. We’ve seen it linked with gambling. The two-up tradition. Drinking. Parades. Bands. Laughter. Shouting. Pubs. Joy. ‘Anzacery’, it has been called.

But I think now that we have the perspective of one hundred years, we should be able to discuss the Anzac legend, this event that changed Australia, minus the myths, the glorification and the political spin that have attached themselves to the campaign ever since the early part of the twentieth century. These are my thoughts and I make no claim to expertise or rightness.

First, let me say that for me, talking about Gallipoli means talking about two groups of people:

•       The men who fought and died there on the beaches; and
•     The men who put them there.

I have enormous respect for the people in Group 1 for their unbelievable bravery and courage, their unmatched dedication to their mates and their willingness to ‘go over’ despite the utter futility and stupidity of the strategy and the certain knowledge that they would die. I cannot imagine how this must have felt. Eight thousand men died there in such circumstances in eight months. On average, that’s 1000 a month or 250 a week or almost 36 men every day for eight months. I shake my head in incredulity and anger at these figures.

I have little respect for the old men in Group 2 for their willingness to put young men into such a desperate situation and to go on sacrificing them when it was obvious that the strategy was a disastrous failure.

But first, the big picture. Gallipoli was only small fry compared to the main campaigns of the Western Front in WWI. So we have to contextualise the whole thing. Australians lost 46,000 young men on the Western Front, first, tortured by living in mud, and then death, along with 132,000 wounded. It was an unspeakable horror. A war of attrition on both sides. An abomination.

World War 1 was a waste. It was a waste of human life and it achieved little. It did not change the world to the same extent as did WWII, but merely hastened the demise of the old world empires, Ottoman, Habsburg, and Hohenzollern. It was not fought against a clear human evil such as Nazism in the WWII. It was a cross between an intentional war and an accidental war.

Australian historian Christopher Clark’s 2013 book, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, examines the way the alliances set up between the various powers saw the whole thing just run out of control. Serbia was upset with Austria because she thought Austria wanted to curb her independence. Austria was upset with Serbia for wanting greater influence. Germany thought Austria was the right horse to back as Germany was already a power in Europe but wanted to be a great power and her own sphere of influence to be increased and not contained, especially by France and Russia, who supported Serbia. France certainly didn’t want a powerful expansionist Germany on her doorstep, and Russia fully agreed with that sentiment, as Russia and France had been allies. Russia also didn’t want Austria to gain influence over Serbia. Britain didn’t want Germany to become the dominant nation in Europe especially since Kaiser Wilhelm II was becoming increasingly bellicose. What’s more, Britain had promised to protect Belgium, so when Germany attacked France and Belgium, Britain too, and her dominions, went to war on principle. None of these powers thought it would be a big war. None of them thought it would be a long war. None of them remotely contemplated that it would disintegrate into chaos and become a world war. The leaders of these nations were all wrong. That is exactly what it did. But it is more complex than even this and historians of the period to this day still debate the causes of the Great War.

World War I caused the deaths of over 16 million people with 20 million people wounded. Australia was a nation of five million people and we lost 62,081 lives, about 1.24% of our whole population. In today’s figures, 1.24% of our population of 23,800,000 people in 2015 would be 295,120 deaths. 1.24% is an enormous statistic for fatalities. Such a vast number changes a nation. And it did Australia. After WWI, Australia was in mourning. There is scarcely a town, city or hamlet anywhere in the country that does not have a WWI memorial that lists the names of the region’s fallen. No-where was left unaffected. The whole of Australia was in grief. So many lives lost. So much youth and beauty and promise wasted. Like Britain and her other dominions, not a drop of blood was spilled here in Australia. This war did not happen here. Our young men died in foreign fields and never came home.

The English poet Rupert Brooke, who himself died in 1915, rather romanticised this sentiment in his poem The Soldier.

“If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England”.

But shot into pieces lying dead in a field on the other side of the world is not romantic. It is quintessentially tragic. This is the heaviness at the heart of visiting these battle fields; we identify ourselves and our loved ones with the young men who never came home and it cannot but bring tears. I felt it myself in the United Nations cemetery in Pusan in South Korea where I read the ages of twenty and twenty one year old Australians who never came home from the Korean War. Tears came. Awful. Heavy.

World War I was a waste. Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Dulce et decorum est’ more rightly captures the waste. Translated loosely, ‘it is a sweet and right or glorious thing to die for your country’. The final stinging lines:

“My friend, you would not tell with such high zest 

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est

Pro patria mori”.

Owen understood the lie about war. He understood the filth of the ‘war is glorious’ sentiment. His poem Futility speaks not only of the futility of this particular soldier lying in a field hospital, but also of the vast numbers of the dead, the hollow shells of men who survived and returned home and the futility of the whole war itself. It still affects me every time I read it. The wounded half dead soldier gets pushed out into the sun with the nurse saying:

“Move him into the sun—

Gently its touch awoke him once”.

Not any more.

The futility of the Great War is something that is inescapable. And it is in this chaos of mass homicide that Gallipoli occurs. It was Winston Churchill’s great plan to take the Dardanelles from Germany’s ally Turkey and force their way to Constantinople where it was believed the Turks would then surrender. The German commander’s uncle, Moltke the Elder, is quoted way back in the Prussian Wars as saying, “no battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy”. That aphorism could have been written about Gallipoli. It was an unmitigated calamitous disaster. You will recall that I divided the men into two groups. For Group 1 above, I have the utmost respect: for the men, the Anzacs and British and others, who were ordered into the middle of the hellfire that became Gallipoli. I lament their unspeakable tragedy. But I do not respect what was asked of them by their superiors; political and military alike.

Since then, we have been told by conservative politicians mostly and the military that Australia was born on the beaches of Gallipoli, or that Australia came of age on the beaches of Gallipoli. Neither of these propositions do I support. In 1914, Australia was a teen-ager and still part of an Empire. We still thought of England as home. We were still very much a British outpost. We were only at war because Britain was at war; no other reason. We were not being attacked. Britain wasn’t even being attacked. Britain had signed a European treaty ensuring Belgium’s neutrality and even German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, not expecting Britain to join the fight after Germany violated the neutrality, exclaimed mockingly that he couldn’t believe Britain would go to war “over a scrap of paper”.

Our young men were just young guys. They were 1914’s equivalent of young hipsters now. They were working, partying, getting into relationships, drinking, hanging out with their friends; no different to what young twenties do now. They ‘joined up’ with the AIF with fun, travel and maybe a bit of glory in their minds. They were products of their time. The rallying cry was “For God, King and Empire”. It wasn’t “For Australia”.

Young men to this day join the Armed Forces for fun and travel and comradeship and outdoorsy stuff where you get to play with little guns and big guns. It plays right into the model of masculinity that says boys are tough and love guns and fighting. They are easy picking for a willing military. We still see ads on tv for the Navy with great warships pounding through waves and young men and women doing their thing to ‘further their career’, firing off torpedoes and plotting courses on high tech maps. Very exciting stuff. Even I think so. The belief in personal invincibility that occasions youth is still strongly operative, but like the diggers in 1918 who were lucky enough to survive and come home, many young defence persons return from active duty deeply traumatised; all notions of fun and travel long dissolved.

Chris’ great grandfather survived and returned from WWI and never spoke of his experiences in the war to anyone nor would he go to Anzac Day marches. He was not alone. Not only was Australia awash in grief after this war, it was also awash in mental illness. Post-traumatic Stress Disorder can be one of the most debilitating of all mental illnesses, potentially robbing people of their ability to live and function back in society. Many diggers self-medicated with booze to try to anaesthetise the suffering, as the Army didn’t have a clue how to look after them.

I do not see that Australia was born at Gallipoli any more than I see her born on the Western Front. Such a model is a military model, a military way of looking at life; something I actively eschew. Such a model only makes sense in a military junta, not in a pluralistic democracy founded on responsible government. There is some notion that a nation is not a nation until it has been blooded; like a young greyhound getting the opportunity to chase a live rabbit and kill it so that it will be truly tested and its mettle seen to stand. Then and only then is it real. I find this notion obscene. It is not in ANY military operation that Australia imputes to itself nationhood or adulthood. We did that in peace. And we should be proud of that. It may not be as exciting to the young gung ho adversarialists, but it is in fact so much more adult in every way.

We have become a nation in increments. After an inglorious and bloody start with Australia’s indigenous people, a history we still have not owned fully, there came a peaceful growth of nationhood in a series of growth spurts that continues today. We federated the separate colonies, our states, into one commonwealth in 1901 only thirteen years before the Great War and we did it without a revolution, without blood being spilled; one of the few countries in the world to do so. We rejected conscription to the armed forces twice, in 1916 and 1917 in two referenda, after Britain started pressuring us to send 5,500 men per month in 1916 and 7000 men per month in 1917. Both referenda were defeated and put another nail in the coffin of Australian subservience to the British Empire and thus repudiating the belief of Empire devotees here in Australia that it was right and proper for us to continue to stock Britain’s armies with our youth.

The Statute of Westminster was enacted in 1931 establishing legislative independence from Britain for all her colonies and dominions and we signed our Statute of Westminster Adoption Act in 1942 making it law here and forever excluding the Parliament of Great Britain from having a say in our affairs. In 1986 we passed the Australia Act forever denying UK governments from having a say on any matter in Australian governance as well as denying Australians the right to appeal Australian court judgments in the UK. So no more appeals to the Privy Council in London. Our own High Court of Australia is our highest court, above which there is no other. We continue to untie the nursery strings from the mother with foreign policy as well, charting our own way, and no doubt making our own mistakes too. These days, we are so far from the old sentiments of Empire and England, that we favour our region for trade over the UK and eventually I think, we will become a republic throwing off an anachronistic monarchy and more than likely changing our ambiguous flag. The separation from parent continues even in 2015 as we witness the public reaction to Tony Abbott bringing back knights and dames and then awarding one of them on Australia Day to the Duke of Edinburgh; an act that most Australians found offensive to some degree.

Anzac Day is undoubtedly a special day. This is what I think it should be about. It reminds us all of the terrible price we paid for Europe’s great powers to have their squabble and then have it deteriorate into a world conflagration. We remember the unbelievable courage of the diggers and we mourn the loss of young life and the futures that they never got to live. We mourn too for the loved ones back here in Australia. Barely a family left untouched. My own grandfather was a Light Horseman, although he never saw active service, and one of my grandmother’s brothers, Will, went to the Western Front. We remember the lives destroyed left hollow as empty shells of those who survived and came home. We should remember to not be quick to get into violence. Let us not glory in the marches and the pomp and military pageantry and the stories of bravery, for this bravery need never have been forced upon these men. Anzac Day should also be about the lesson that comes out of fighting someone else’s wars. Australia should never again just sign up willy nilly to other people’s wars. It is a lesson we still have not learned, for we allowed John Howard to sign us up for America’s hasty invasion of Iraq, where other former British dominions, Canada and New Zealand, did not.

Some obscene blood sacrifice was not the birth of our nation. But I do acknowledge that such tragedy forges a bond and a solidarity among us without doubt. It is the bond of the ‘grief of death’, not the bond of ‘the joy of birth’. The plea of Australia's last Anzac, Alec Campbell, not long before his death in 2002 was: "For God's sake, don't glorify Gallipoli – it was a terrible fiasco, a total failure and best forgotten."

To finish this short essay, I want to post a wonderful piece by Professor Bruce Scates, who holds the Chair of History and Australian Studies at Monash University and is the director of the National Centre for Australian Studies. He is also the author of several books on Gallipoli. I think this is the most worthwhile newspaper article I have read on Gallipoli and the Great War. It is well worth your time. And if you bothered with my piece above, many thanks indeed. Best wishes on this important Anzac Day - Stuart

http://www.theage.com.au/comment/political-rhetoric-makes-a-parody-of-remembrance-20150422-1mqdc2.html