verging_on_random

Rewriting history

February 12, 2007 on 8:54 pm | In Uncategorized |

It was grand to be alive in the 1950s. We were on the side of everything that was pure and good and righteous and on the other side were the Commies, who were evil and ignorant and intent on overthrowing us. A bit like the Terrorists, except there were a lot more Commies than Terrorists and they had The Bomb.

Commies did all sorts of Bad Things that we would never do. Like lock people up in preventive detention without a fair trial … ugh, the thought that anybody on Our Side would ever behave like that was an insult to our nation. And suppress dissent. Commies loved doing that, whereas we loved dissent. The more the better, cos our belief system was so superior it could withstand any challenge from silly borscht eating vodka drinking Coms.

One thing the Commos used to do was re-write history to suit their latest political position. Historical revisionism we called it. My how we laughed when they claimed they pretty much won the Second World War by themselves when we knew it was really President Eisenhower and General Montgomery. Straight out of that book 1984 it was. 1984 and Animal Farm … they were the books I grew up with. Allegories of how life was under the Commies.

Anyway I was thinking about that kind of stuff today when I read this:

Ever since World War II, when America rushed to Australia’s aid, the Australian public and its political leaders have valued the US alliance more than any other.

I felt like old Boxer the horse in Animal Farm when the pigs tell him that it’s not ‘four legs good, two legs bad’, it’s the other war around. Confused … wasn’t this somehow different to what I was told last time?

America rushed to Australia’s aid?

My parents’ generation, who actually fought the bloody Second World War, must be struck dumb with astonishment, if they’re still reading silly op-ed pieces.

America rushed to Australia’s aid?

Australia went to war in September, 1939. For more than two years, Australia fought alongside the other countries of the British Empire against Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, while America pursued an isolationist policy. The only thing it rushed to do was to make enormous fortunes selling war supplies to France and Great Britain.

The USA got dragged into the war in December, 1941, when Japan attacked it and Hitler declared war on it. To this day, it’s a moot point whether the USA would have entered the war against Germany if Hitler hadn’t made the decision for it. The Japanese attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbour, wrecked the American air defences in The Philippines preparatory to invading the place (successfully), and invaded the British colony of Malaya that was garrisoned in part by Australian troops. Thus Australia and America found themselves fighting on the same side - due to the actions of Germany and Japan. The notion that America had any objective of ‘aiding Australia’ is laughable. They were single-mindedly preoccupied with aiding themselves, as any nation would be that had just suffered two comprehensive military defeats.

America rushed to Australia’s aid?

What a load of revisionist bullshit. If it had suited America’s interests they would cheerfully have left us hung out to dry, just as they were prepared to let Poland and France and Norway and Denmark and Belgium and Greece and Great Britain be defeated by Hitler rather than join in defending them.

Never once that I can think of in its whole history has the USA gone to war as a selfless act of friendship for another nation. It’s one of the most militant countries in history and that war-like spirit is expressed in single-minded pursuit of its own imperial interests. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but let’s not misrepresent it as some kind of noble selfless purpose.

When Macarthur was driven out of The Philippines he came to Australia and tried to rule the place like a conquering generalissimo. It was a convenient base for him to use while he organised the American forces in the South Pacific for the inevitably successful counter-attack against Japan. After the first chaotic months, when it was clear that Japan had shot its bolt and presented no realistic further threat to the American homeland, Macarthur used this country in a completely opportunistic fashion. Determined to gather all the glory of defeating the Japanese for himself and his own country, he excluded Australian troops from his army of re-conquest. To its shame, the Australian Labor government of the day insisted that our soldiers be sent to fight some Japs, somewhere, anywhere, and they ended up in a pointless campaign in Borneo in 1945. They should have sat back and let Dugout Doug go to it.

Australian casualties in the Second World War were much lighter than in the First, despite our 1939 population being larger than it was in 1914. America fought the Pacific war pretty much by itself so it could dictate the terms of the peace, and Macarthur ruled Japan as an absolute dictator for five years after the war’s end.

Would we have had a rough Pacific war if the Americans hadn’t been involved? It’s a silly question. There wouldn’t have been a Pacific war if it hadn’t been for the USA. It was essentially a war between Japan and America in which we got involved because the Japanese wanted to secure their southern flank and it happened to have some British colonies that we were helping to guard. The first 12 months apart, far from needing ‘aid’, Australia spent much of the Pacific war with a comparatively large, well-trained army that couldn’t find anyone to fight.

And now these historical facts, which have been well-known for decades and reflect only the truth that modern nations go to war in their own selfish interests, not out of some quixotic sense of honour or looking after a little Aussie mate … these facts have been comprehensively revised as ‘America rushed to Australia’s aid’ … not just in this one piece I’ve quoted from today’s Herald, but you read this nonsense all the time, about how ‘grateful’ we should be to the USA for ’saving’ us.

Like I said, my parents’ generation would choke on their Iced Vovo biscuits. They sneered at the yanks (what happened to that good Aussie word, BTW?) for being late to the Second World War and even later to the First. I remember a great deal of bitterness at the way America stayed out of the fight until it was dragged in by Japan and then swaggered around boasting about how they’d had to pull the Brits out of the pooh yet again. The feeling was very much that if the yanks had had the balls to join in from the start in 1939, the war would have been over a lot quicker and been a lot less bloody.

You can argue whether that’s reasonable or not, and debate the wisdom of American foreign policy during the years between the two wars. But please spare us this drivel about America ‘rushing to the aid’ of Australia or anyone else. Just because they like to pretend they rescued the civilised world out of the goodness of their hearts it’s no reason to engage in revisionist history that would have made Joe Stalin blush.