verging_on_random

Fighting the unseen foe

June 13, 2007 on 4:47 pm | In Uncategorized |

Australians and North Americans are amongst the few peoples of the world that have never suffered invasion by foreigners. While other nations celebrate or memorialise titanic wars of conquest or liberation, the best the yanks can come up with is the Boston tea Party and that insane Civil War. We haven’t even got that much … we have to settle for State of Origin football.

The result is that while most every other country in the world has good reason to worry about external threats, Australians and North Americans don’t. Europeans came to those parts of the world, brushed aside the indigenous inhabitants with little thought for the practical or moral implications, and settled in comfortably to this day.

Nevertheless the human species must be genetically programmed to create external threats because we and the yanks have made a habit of inventing dark forces that imperil our very existence (though ironically, we were slow to recognise the only really serious external threat we ever faced, namely Japan in 1941).

In Australia the external threat has generally been based on race. At least as far back as the Lambing Flat riot in 1861, white Australians tended to fear the ‘Yellow Peril’. More recently it’s been a more diffused fear of Asians and Muslims and any version of ‘The Other’ who are perceived to want to destroy our way of life. It’s a low-level paranoia that sputters into life every now and then but thankfully it’s become increasingly disorganised and fragmented.

It’s a different story in the USA. There, fear and loathing during the 20th century was inclined to be directed at nameless global enemies and the daddy of them all was Communism. Communism was reviled as some kind of dreadful force that was trying to take over the world. From the late 1940s until the collapse of the Soviet Empire, many Americans sincerely believed that they were engaged in some kind of real war, although they would have struggled to tell you who they were fighting against or what weapons were being used. They were just Fighting Communism.

This childishly simplistic view of history is apparently alive and well. Just a few days ago, a ‘Victims of Communism Memorial’ was opened in Washington, DC.

To be located at the busy intersection of Massachusetts and New Jersey Avenues (and ‘G’ Street), NW, in Washington, D.C., the Memorial will feature a statue modeled on the “Goddess of Democracy” used by the Chinese students in Tiananmen Square in 1989, that statue itself deliberately reminiscent of our own Statue of Liberty. Its inscriptions, front and back, will read as follows: “To the more than 100 million victims of Communism and to those who love liberty,” and “To the freedom and independence of all captive nations and peoples.”

What’s wrong with this? Well it simply glosses over the complex nature of human history. The memorial claims that ‘some 100 million victims have died from Communist terror’. Who were they? They ranged from those who died during Mao’s efforts to drag China into the 20th century, through Stalin’s purges of the Kulaks, Pol Pot’s atrocities and even Cubans allegedly killed by Castro. The memorial’s designers don’t acknowledge that these were all quite separate phases in the respective countries’ development, explicable only by a deep understanding of complex national circumstances; no, they were all caused by this faceless beast ‘Communism’.

It’s as meaningless as saying all the people who died in the Indian partition in 1947, or in East Timor 1975-2002, or in Sri Lanka to this day, were killed by ‘Imperialism’. Or that the victims of the two European wars 1914-18 and 1939-45 were killed by capitalism. Or, for that matter, that the half million Americans killed in the Civil War were the victims of federalism.

There was no global monolithic ‘Communism’ that caused any deaths. There were just the sad violent forces that have been building nations for as long as people have been keeping records of human history. Yes some of the national leaders called themselves communists but that’s about as significant as Adolf Hitler and Francois Mitterand both calling themselves socialists.

The reason this matters is that many Americans still see the world through child-like eyes. The memorial to the victims of communism wasn’t some minor affair supported by a few ageing cold war obsessives; it was built by an act of Congress and the opening was attended by sundry notables including President George W himself … all celebrating their role in defeating the evil force that claimed 100 million fellow human beings.

You can see this urge to reduce complex issues to a simple ‘pin the label on the bad guys’ question in the response of the USA to the events of September 11, 2001. Terrorists were to blame so now they’re fighting a war on terror, which is every bit as meaningless and misleading as the war on communism was. The troubling thing is that this tendency to paint enemies as a faceless ‘ism’ is scarily reminiscent of the wars against Zionism (or ‘international Jewry’) that some Europeans felt compelled to fight in the last century.

Communism doesn’t kill people, people kill people, for their own unique and particular reasons. You’d think the gun-toting Americans of all people would understand that.