Sydney Anti War Demonstration, 2003

Peter,You speak about "war" in the passive sense, "...everyone becomes a victim", as if people just sit around and then suddenly become victims out of the blue.

War is waged by one side against another. Sure, some people just become collateral damage, but others have a choice about war. They go out and wage it. They are not passive. They are active.

When you are on the active side of waging war, you should be sure you're sure about why you're doing it. The reasons should be in line with universal moral values, not self-interest, or financial, or religious or a coming election, or just letting off national steam. If you're not sure about why you're doing it, don't wage war.

There's a murderous little war going on in Burundi. I believe you when you cite the timing as being coincident with the opening ceremony. Help is not coming to Burundi or Sudan in a hurry. Why?

One reason is because the Iraq war has pushed both pro and anti war sides to extreme dialectical positions: one claiming preemptive rights to wage war, the other denying any right, any time to wage war. In the middle sit the innocents, waiting for a decision. The decision will be a long time coming because, in part, the opportunities for resolution of the Iraq problem were squandered for short-term advantage. Short version: no-one trusts the Americans any more, including, most importantly, a large proportion of their own people who wish to return to isolationism and certainly don't want more foreign involvement after Iraq.

In an earlier post you mentioned Timor. I'd like to clarify my position on Timor. I was in favour of Australian assistance being given to Timor. It was done under the auspices of the United Nations. There was a lot of background diplomacy before it happened. And it was the right thing to do. It righted the wrong that the Labor government began in 1975 when it abandoned the Timorese diplomatically. Whitlam's government could not have intervened militarily against the Indonesian army, and I doubt they could have drummed up the diplomatic support to influence the Indonesians to retire once the invasion had begun. But they didn't try, much to my personal disgust.

This policy of lasssez-faire was continued by successive governments from both sides of politics. The particular image I remember was from the Labor side: Gareth Evans champagne toasting the Indonesian minister in a Lear jet over the Timor Sea, as the oil exploitation treaty was signed. I am also pretty upset with the current one-sided negotiations by the right wing government over those same oil rights now that Timor is independent.

The waters are too muddied for me to have a final opinion on these matters. but I know that I have been ashamed by both sides of politics' dealings with Indonesia over Timor and with the Timorese directly: specifically with Labor's, because they're my side of politics, and I would expect better of them.

On the Opening Ceremony. It was absolutely fabulous. It put the tin sheds and the kangaroos on bicycles in a proper perspective. The bit that really made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle was when the pre-Classical face was illuminated by the laser-generated grid and then turned into a pastiche of human development - starting with simple geometric shapes and progressing to modern scientific and artistic accomplishments - from that point onwards. Just wonderful.

The tin sheds made me slightly embarrassed, in a pleasant sort of way, to be Australian. By contrast, the Athens opening made me proud to be a human being (something I've not been for a while).

Now, if only the Greeks could match the sentiments of the Opening Ceremony with humane treatment for the stray cats and dogs that live in misery there by the millions, that would be real progress.

I remember the little black female cat I saw at the Akropolis, almost too sick to walk and starving. Her meow was just a croak as she tried, in the manner of a fading prostitute, to be cute for me, to put on her act that was by that stage a pathetic memory. I didn't even have any water for her in my backpack as she tried to get my attention. I went away to get some, but when I returned she was gone, crawled into a hole somewhere. I can understand that a human beggar might have the art to fake it, but not this little cat. Her image still haunts me to this day, and it pains me to write about her, nearly five years later, for the first time.

 

I've had lots of animals - dogs, cats, birds - become part of my household over thirty years. All but one of them have been strays. I believe that stray animals can be looked after, their population reduced initially (yes, much of it by euthanasia) until it is manageable and that desexing can take care of much of the rest. A nation needs a will to do this. It needs the co-operation of the whole country. There is something in the otherwise wonderful Greek national psyche that seems indifferent to the suffering of non-human beings. To me, it is Greece's only flaw.

 

I know what you're going to say. It's not a flaw. It's Greece. You take the good with the bad. And you are right. I just wish there was another way.

 

And Australia is Australia. Dividing the area of the Australian continent by its population is a fairly crude method of determining a "national selfishness" index. We have a terrible shortage of water and arable land. Put to the test, I guess we could increase our population somewhat, but not much more than by double.

 

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but didn't Australia do just what you suggested it should do, from the 1950s onwards? Build a nation? From Eurocentric beginnings (the White Australia Policy) through to the more enlightened and evenhanded approach we now take (check out some of the faces in the picture as an illustration)? Australia's population has increased from 6,970,000 in 1945 to 20,000,000 in 2004 - a 185% increase, much of it from immigrants and the succeeding two generations of their direct descendants. Using the same percentage figure (since we're doing indices), taking the present population of the United states as 293,000,000, it should have had to have been 102,000,000 in 1945. It was actually about 200,000,000. The postwar increase in population has been about 50%. In the postwar period, Australia has outgrown the "immigrant nation", the United States, by about 3:1. I think the point that Australia has been "doing its bit" to utilise its resources by poulation growth is so obvious, that I feel I must be falling into a trap you have laid for me, Peter. Unless I have been overly simplistic, which is entirely possible.

 

Go ahead, spring your trap.

 

Well said, Peter.

The Greek people seem to have turned their backs on the whole Olympics!

When I was there a few years ago I got a distinct impression that something was going to go wrong with the Games. A casual walk through the new airport imprinted that impression on my brain. I even took a picture (here, in another folder).

For a while it looked like my prediction of chaos would come true. However, much of the Games were rescued at the last moment. The infrastructure was given a coat of paint (although the swimming stadium didn't have roof... what the hell, it's a hot summer anyway), a few desultory saplings were planted in time for them to die of thirst... and the Games began, sort of.

What's struck me lately was an impression of one civilization being grafted onto another in Greece. It's symbolized by the huge stadiums built... with no-one in the seats to watch the events. A shot I saw of a paramilitary policeman taking a drag on a cigarette as some IOC potentate had his car door opened by a flunky in the background. The tourists are worried about terrorists, and the Greeks aren't particularly worried about anything much at all, including the sport. One the one hand you have a society that is a little unsophisticated (in a thoroughly endearing way), with the trappings of another society (or civilization) that is all global, modern and wired. You have billion dollar airport terminals with stray dogs wandering through them unhindered. You have focussed "winners" running the local Games Organising Committee, but no locals at the actual games. In short, the infrastructure of the modern Olympics does not sit well with the Greek people, and the Greek people do not sit well (literally) with - or at - the Games. The elite organisers, trying to prove Greece is "up to" running the Games have spared no expense, but they still couldn't convince the Greeks.

Don't get me wrong. I think it's fabulous: a collective "f**k you" from the Greek people directed at those who would portray their country as something it is not. The Greek reaction to the Games is the best possible argument against the farce that the Games have become: sending whole countries into debt, building infrastructure that is destined for one-time use (just look at Sydney's Olympic precinct at Homebush... the windswept railway station, the tattered Superdome, the ducks quacking across the rowing lake at Penrith: it's a wasteland that costs the government $49 million a year, just for the janitors), riddled with drugs, hubris (another drug), national chauvinism and corrupt officials on the take. The best thing to do would be to keep the Games in Athens permanently, both to give Greece a chance to get their investment back and take some of the hot air out of the sails of the likes of the IOC and the corruption riddled sports they tout as bringing "prosperity" to the host city.

Greeks have a *very* healthy cynicism about most things in life. They're not "winners" in the American sense of the word. They're "livers". And in being livers, they're the real winners. Once you understand not to make plans while in Greece - for a boat trip, a car hire, a booking at a restaurant, an Olympic Games - you understand Life Itself.

I'd just love to be a fly on the wall at the Organising Committee debrief dinner afterwards. Talk about Greeks breaking plates! I think a few heads might go the same way.

Hi Tony,

 

an illustration of how much livers the Greeks are, was illustrated, when their soccer team became European champion this year. It turned Athens upside down.

 

The Greeks never expected it, but took the occasion to celebrate at every step they came closer to the final. And then winning it...

 

And so their soccer team made a long nose to all those teams with their expensive players and countries that expected so much.

 

BTW I must say, this part of photonet is a very interesting read: the least one can say is that it provides very refrishing thoughts.

Hi Eugenio,

 

Thanks for your compliment. We can dissect a photograph and its nuances of composition only so much, before getting on to other, more interesting things. A photograph, to me, is not a thing in itself. It is a window into the photographer's mind, his or her impressions of the scene. If we can have a reasonably civil discussion on the subject matter of the picture, and some of the thoughts behind it, then that is a good thing because it signifies that debate is not dead.

 

In short, this page is about my contention that photography is not just photography.

 

On the subject of debate, I receive not a few private emails about this page, mostly from American readers saying they would like to contribute, but are apprehensive about doing so. This greatly disturbs me.

 

There is a climate of fear that seems to have settled on America, supposedly the bastion of free speech. You see it everywhere - the newspapers, the television talk shows, politics. People are afraid to express their true beliefs for fear of being shouted down by the shrill loonies of the right wing, or even losing their jobs. Not all the people, not all the time, but more than the image of a "free" America should allow.

 

I find it incredible that criticism of President Bush is apparently so much of a no-no over there. It got to ridiculous extremes during the Democratic convention in Boston when the Fox News bobbing heads kept up a sort of "Partisan Watch" vigil on the speeches. The moment someone criticised Bush they jumped on it screaming, "Partisan comment! Partisan comment!". That it was the Democrat convention, that their opponent is George Bush, that an election is on in three months, that the idea is to actually win the election, did not diminish their bleating. Apparently, in American politics, it is permissible to seek election to the Presidency, but not to criticise your opponent, the incumbent, even at your own political convention! A very strange situation indeed. If someone accused me of criticising my opponent in an election I'd say to them, "What do you want me to do? Endorse him?"

 

I watched a documentary on cable last night, part of a series called "The Cold War", about, well, the Cold War. This was the episode on "McCarthyism". That a goon like McCarthy, aided and abetted by Richard Nixon, the FBI, the CIA, media shills, film stars such as Ronald Reagan and Gary Cooper and thousands, millions of others could have attained any traction at all is a mystery to me. The Senate proceedings reminded me of the Nazi show trials after the June 1944 attempt on Hitler's life. All that was missing were the confiscated belts, removed by the Nazi accusers to humiliate the defendants, by forcing them to hold up their trousers when they stood for sentencing. Everything else was there: witnesses dismissed with a wave, crude humor at their distress, bullying, too severe punishments for trifling misdemeanors: a blueprint for Bill O'Reilly. The one saving grace that the McCarthy hearing had was that at least they entailed some passion (even if twisted), in stark contrast to the sanitised congressional hearings on 911 that seem to have applied a healthy coat of whitewash to the actions of everyone involved in the cover-up since and before that time.

 

Included in the "Cold War" footage collected for the documentary was a quote from a Truman speech, which I paraphrase, "We don't like Communism, but we don't like Fascism either," but it was drowned out in the hysteria of the times. Communism may have been a threat, as terrorism is today, but the loss of liberty and justice that occurred in American society at that time, was too much of a sacrifice to make in order to combat it. America became the mirror image of its enemy.

 

There was an article in today's Sydney Morning Herald by an Australian playwright, David Williamson. Summarised, Williamson wrote that he was first against the war, but didn't like Saddam. He remembers wishing there was some way Saddam could be gotten rid of, without resort to war. He was in the crowd in this photo, somewhere. Then, once the war started, he got caught up in the excitement (he used that word) of the Shock & Awe war. What was done, was done, and at least we'd be rid of Saddam. Then, as he realised it was not a video game, that little boys and girls, and other innocent civilians were being made to pay the price for Saddam's monstrosities - and in his name - he began to sober up. As the WMDs failed to appear, he realised he - and "we", all of us - had been lied to about why the war was so urgent. He was angrier at being duped than he was before the war started. He was angry that he did not do enough to stop the madness. The article he wrote in this morning's paper was his public admission of that, and his public mea culpa.

 

He couldn't have summed up my own position more perfectly.

 

We are all guilty of allowing ourselves to be duped by our so-called "leaders". Duped into believing there were WMDs to be found. Duped into giving them a franchise to go to war. Duped into believing that war could possibly be "humane" (Rumsfeld's asinine word when discussing "surgical" air-strikes). Duped into silence about our feelings.

 

The cynical bastards who led us into this mess, say "But everybody believed there were weapons of mass destruction!" as if that settles the issue. But they neglect to say that we only believed it because we were lied to... by them. They were in charge. They held all the intelligence cards. They told us, in dribs and drabs, only what they wanted us to hear. Their misrepresentations were the only game in town, aided and abetted by a compliant media that equated, and continues to equate "balanced reporting" with "equal time for talking points". These politicians and their cronies are effectively calling us fools for believing them. To me, this is indicative of the utter depravity of their cynicism. "You idiots! You believed ME?"

 

I am now at a position where I don't believe a thing they say. Call that a Pavlovian reaction to their tsunami wave of lies. Call it irrational. Maybe it is. But I don't care any more. I am sick of being lied to, manipulated, morally attacked for objecting to it and then scorned by the very people who have done this to me. I am sick and tired of being told to go out and do my own research to discover whether they've deceived me yet again. I'm sick of hearing that, somehow, voting for them carries with it some kind of mystical absolution for all that has gone before by way of lies, half truths and weasel words that come from their mouths. I find it easier to just assume that, if their lips are moving, they are lying. And, although it makes life easier, it also makes me very sad.

 

Joe McCarthy's day was eventually done... too late, too little... but he received his just desserts, his name becoming - literally - a dictionary definition, a synonym for all that is rotten and corrupt about demagogueary and deceit by our politicians, who then laugh in our faces for being mug enough to believe them. What a legacy, Joe! There was nothing more depressing than seeing the now old men and old women, from both sides of the McCartyism divide wondering out loud to the camera, fifty years on, how it could have ever come to this. In fifty year's time, if we are alive, will we be beating our breasts in the same manner, for the same reason?

 

George W. Bush once famously said, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice.... won't get fooled again." It's the most hilarious moment in Mike Moore's film, "Fahrenheit 911" (certainly more hilarious than the little boy with his arm blown off, his bones protruding from the shattered stump while a young Marine says how "pumped" he is at killing this little kid, the enemy).

 

What Bush meant to say was, of course, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

 

Well... Bush, Howard, Blair and all the rest of awful liars who have turned us into caricatures of decent human beings, we're waking up and we're saying, "Amen to that."

 

To American readers of these posts, don't waste your time writing to me, bleating about how much you agree, but how scared you are to say anything in public. I for one won't be impressed anymore. Get out there and DO something if you don't like what's been going on. Get off your backsides and vote, criticise, speak out, contradict. Play them at their own game.

 

This really *is* war.