God Bless Our Australian
Cousins & Ever Faithful Allies! 
PING!
Posted on 04/28/2006 4:57:59 PM PDT by Fair Go
THE wholly justified furore over the dreadful misplacing of the body of Private Jake Kovco illustrates once more how profoundly Australians regard their servicemen and the memory of their dead servicemen.
The ins and outs of this case remain to be fully explained. But whichever way all the information falls, this was the most monumental bureaucratic blunder and failure to discharge a sacred duty. Much will be made, rightly, of the sometimes maddening bureaucracy of the Defence department and its inability at times to do the simplest things right even as it overperforms in its core war-fighting task.
But the incident provokes another set of reflections as well, and that is the absolute centrality to Australian culture of the Digger, the veteran and the war widow.
That Australians feel this way is one of the great strengths of our national culture. It was on display in the magnificent celebrations of Anzac Day this week, and it is paralleled only in the US.
This is not a suggestion of a militaristic culture, but rather an appreciation of heroism and sacrifice and a yearning for the quality, exemplified in soldiers, that can place something above even your own life, that can find a larger spiritual dimension. This is even more so given that the rest of our culture has become so resolutely secular.
Of course, not everyone sees it that way. A couple of months ago David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz reviewed the film Jarhead on the ABC's At the Movies. Jarhead is an American anti-soldier film that purports to show how military training deforms soldiers.
In the course of his review, Stratton comments: "The incredibly ugly and demeaning training sequences ... raise all kinds of questions about the morality of the way soldiers are trained these days - no wonder atrocities come to be committed. So this is a film ... about the way men are dehumanised to be turned into today's soldiers." Later, Stratton comments that the men have "been turned into monsters".
Australian military training is just as rigorous as US training. Yet beyond the left-wing arts luvvies who dominate the ABC and parts of the Fairfax press, does anyone really believe our soldiers have been dehumanised and turned into monsters?
Is retired general Peter Cosgrove, now helping flood victims in north Queensland, a dehumanised monster? Were the young men and women who gave their lives on the Indonesian island of Nias in the course of delivering aid to the tsunami victims dehumanised monsters?
Were the professional Australian soldiers who put an end to the murder and pillage in East Timor, and then carried out their peacekeeping mission with extraordinary sensitivity and competence, dehumanised monsters?
Or, to talk about Americans, how did former secretary of state Colin Powell avoid becoming a dehumanised monster? Or Rich Armitage? Or John McCain? Or any veteran you've ever met?
Pomeranz endorsed Stratton's views. They are the more telling in part because Stratton and Pomeranz are not overtly political, they just express perfectly the world view of the ABC.
Indeed, among all the egregious, ideological agit-prop that dominates ABC talk shows, At the Movies is light years from the worst. It is a warm and cuddly show. Pomeranz has the air of a daring nun who has just discovered milkshakes, while Stratton speaks in the avuncular tones of a kindly Uniting Church minister dispensing the day's liberal pieties.
But nothing better demonstrates the utter gulf between the ABC and ordinary Australians, who love and cherish their servicemen, than this attitude.
ABC commentators traditionally have great trouble with Anzac Day because the Gallipoli story just cannot be spun into a left-wing narrative. Thus during the week Tony Jones on Lateline was nearly beside himself with pleasure because he thought he had found a way to use Anzac Day against conservatives.
A young academic, Steve Barton, had written a piece in The Australian saying that while he honoured and cherished the courage of the Australians on the Kokoda Track, it was not a battle that uniquely saved Australia.
Perhaps Barton could have expressed himself a little better but he was making the broader point that the Australian Left has always been profoundly uncomfortable with the idea that our military contributions far from our shore have been not only honourable, but served our security interests.
Thus the Australian heroes of Kokoda fought and died to save Australia, but so too did the heroes at Tobruk, at Villers-Bretonneux, and indeed at Gallipoli. In all cases Australians were fighting a just war and fighting to preserve Australian security.
Jones had Barton on for a debate with Paul Ham, author of a book on Kokoda. It was typical ABC two-on-one television, as Jones monstered Barton, misrepresenting his position and talking over him, and oozed agreement with Ham. This is a characteristic Jones pose.
On those occasions when the ABC does allow a debate, Jones will often signal to the audience who is the designated good guy with a kind of oleaginous sycophancy while spitting venom and contempt at the bad guy.
There is talk of the ABC getting increased funding in the federal budget. The Howard Government would be derelict to do this while the ABC continues so manifestly to fail in its obligation to be balanced and unbiased. The wonderful thing is that the Australian people take what they like from the ABC and appear to be completely uninfluenced by its anachronistic and narrow ideology.
The US Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Jim Nicholson, was a visitor for Anzac Day and was profoundly moved by the dawn stand-tos and the gatherings of old Diggers wearing their medals, or their children or grandchildren wearing their medals for them.
There are 25 million US veterans and Nicholson's department has a budget of $US80billion ($106 billion), yet he plans to partly remodel Veterans Day on Anzac Day.
Abraham Lincoln, in his second inauguration address, towards the end of the Civil War, declared: "With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in theright, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finishthe work we are in: to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan..."
On this, as on so much, Lincoln was right. Our debt to our soldiers is eternal.
And the ABC is wrong.
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God Bless Our Australian
Cousins & Ever Faithful Allies!
PING!
BTTT
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