On Friday, October 22, 2004, at 08:29 PM, That Pete wrote:
--- Malcolm Riddoch <m.riddoch@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The war is not a mainstream concern here.
au contraire
Au contraire what?
I wasn't suggesting that the saturation media coverage of war and 'terror' have had no effect on the Australian populace ever since the WTC towers came down in the middle of the 2001 election campaign, quite the opposite. War and terrorism have been part of the background noise here for some time now as in Britain and the US. Howard trades on it to his electoral advantage and your news clippings are perfect examples of the way reportage confuses the issues at stake and merely adds to the tension. Insecurity tends to favour the incumbent generally speaking and voters go for the status quo as the SMH pointed out. The BBC got it wrong though, security didn't become an issue, nor did the illegality of our preemptive adventure in Iraq, the election apparently hinged on marginal mortgage belt seats and the empty promise of low interest rates and continued growth.
So what does the terrorist bombing in Jakarta have to do with the illegal war on Iraq?
Answer: nothing much except in a very general sense. The terms 'terror', 'Islamic', 'Al Qaeda', 'Sadam', 'Iraq', 'WMD', 'Bali', 'JI' and so on are constantly jumbled together here to the point there is next to no public discussion of the problems that does not come under the confused rubric of 'terror'. Iraqi insurgents become 'terrorists' even if they're a family of six civilians murdered in a US air strike on a Fallujah 'safe house' or children blown to pieces in another air strike on the crowded and narrow streets of Sadr City on the outskirts of Baghdad.
The Australian report is a bit more informative though, this is Rupert Murdoch's major news outlet here. As it reported:
It was rather strange that we have troops at war and they were hardly mentioned
in the campaign.
Very strange if you ask me, I feel like we're already part of the script of Gilliam's Brazil. I could of course paraphrase the above and say it was rather strange that we have troops at war and they were hardly mentioned in the press. What follows is rather typical of the mainstream press here, especially the Murdoch press, when it departs from reportage and offers politicised opinion as fact:
This is actually a bigger victory for Howard than if the
election had been fought on Iraq and he had won. His victory in the Iraq
argument was so comprehensive that Labor did not even raise it in the campaign.
What Howard 'victory' in what 'Iraq argument'? Although Latham had committed himself to a partial withdrawal this didn't play particularly well in the polls. But then the war debate in this nation is almost non existent apart from the usual cliches linking terror with doing a 'cut and run' from Iraq. Howard has been very successful in this obfuscation and the Murdoch press has been very sympathetic to his cause as it demonstrates above. Packer's media also like Howard. Of course both Packer and Murdoch look set to carve up Australia's media landscape once Howard passes his new media ownership laws free of senate oversight. The Australian writer even goes on to identify for us the media that were more receptive to Labor's stilted call to withdraw from the criminal occupation of Iraq:
This is because Labor understood that while it had campaigned brilliantly on
Iraq among ABC and Fairfax journalists, all these people put together still
don't make a single marginal seat.
I love the last part, it highlights the politicised function the media played in this election campaign. The electorate didn't have the benefit of an informed public debate on the geopolitical importance of the Iraq war and its relation to the war on terror because the mass media didn't run with the story and overwhelmingly supported Howard's message, all the media that mattered anyway, like the Australian, our only nationally distributed rag.
This election was about whether we Australians support the collapse of international law in favour of criminal state aggression and mass murder as foreign policy in a global oil war that threatens to explode far beyond the borders of the Middle East. It was about endorsing the murder of our neighbour's children in order to steal their oil as we enter into an extremely volatile era of ever increasing global energy competition. Australians have effectively given Howard a mandate to follow the US wherever the neoconservative extremists lead us, and their openly stated goal is global military and economic dominance through a total war that will not end in our lifetimes.
Instead, the electorate voted overwhelmingly for the chimera of never ending economic growth with low interest rates because the rising fuel prices are cutting into their weekly credit purchases. We're a rogue nation of debtors and our leaders have already started down the path of constant globalised war.
Regards,
Malcolm Riddoch
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