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May 02, 2006
No doubt you have read Alexander Downers' recent intervention into the history wars in todays Australian and the various comments in the Australian blogosphere, and you've made up your minds about what's going.
Downer's op ed. is even worse than I 'd thought. Downer is not interested in taking a knife to ALP mythology. He is attempting to rewrite, nay distort, the historical record to paint the ALP as the party of pacifism, appeasement and little Australia. Try this for starters:
Curtin's view was that Australian soldiers should never be engaged in Europe under any circumstances. It was a view based on a blind commitment to pacifism and underpinned by the notion that Australia was "but a minor power, a small nation remote from the great centres" and incapable of playing any substantial role in the international fights against tyranny .
The historical fact is that it was John Curtin who stood up to Churchill's attempt to reinforce the imperial Burmese force with Australian troops (without air support or sea control) , and he successfully fought to bring Australian troops home to defend Australia from the Japanese threat in 1942. (See the comments in this post.) What Downer should have done--if he was intellectually honest---is undercut the myth of Curtin as a great war lord saving Australia from the Japanese on the grounds that the Battle of Australia never took place.
What we have is this--the main thust of the op.ed:
The Labor Party has continued the Curtin policy of pacifism and isolationism to this day. When it comes to great international challenges, be it Nazism or global terror, the Labor Party has adopted the position that Australia is a tiny, isolated backwater that has no responsibility to do any of the heavy lifting. Labor has lacked the courage to combat evil. It clings to the vain hope that by shrinking and hiding Australia may avoid the firing line of tyrannical regimes and terrorists.
Downer makes no mention of the ALP's historical commitment to a liberal internationalism, that is mixed into Labor's acknowledgement of Australia's reliance for its security on the British or the Americans. This mix cashes out through Gough Whitlam as placing a greater emphasis on a more independent Australian stance in international affairs.
And then Downer says this:
Kim Beazley sits squarely in this Labor tradition of weakness. Whereas Curtin said that it didn't matter if Germany was run by Nazis, Beazley thought that we should have left Saddam Hussein in power; we were wrong to help our allies get rid of him. "We are a small country in a world of giants," Beazley says. Can you hear Curtin's echo?
No I can't. What I hear is the fact that it was the deeply entrenched tradition of liberal internationalism that informed the ALP's decision to oppose a war against Iraq without an unambiguous UN mandate.
More can be found at Polemica
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Gary.You just had to do it Downer!Who cares what Downer thinks?In fact his own party doessn't care what he thinks.The question is does Downer think at all?Im sorry Im going out to shoot myself end of transmission-------------------------------------
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Phill.