8-25-06, 9:02 am
They regard it as a disgrace that the majority of Australians turned against this war and would like to obscure the fact that far from being a victory it was an ignominious defeat for the aggressors, particularly the US military and the US Government of the time. It was the “All the way with LBJ” mentality (the slogan used by the Holt Government during a tour by the then US President Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1966) that dominated the Australian Liberal Government of that time. It was the Coalition Government which was responsible for Australia’s involvement in that dirty, aggressive imperialist war.
The Vietnam War was the first war to have its consequences beamed into the living rooms of people around the world via television. It made the war real for viewers. Who could forget the massacre and torching of the village of My Lai by US soldiers, or the screaming children running from napalm bombs? The same factor has helped to bring undone the savagery of the recent bombing by Israel of Lebanon.
Needless to say our ignorant and racist political leaders cannot find it within their mean consciences to make any apology to the Vietnamese people for the horrors and devastation inflicted on them, to the families of those who lost their loved ones, to the families of the children, and the children themselves, who are still being born suffering the consequences of Agent Orange used by the US.
Australia had nothing to gain from this conflict. Vietnam, one of the poorest countries in the world which had suffered years of colonial occupation by the French and then the Japanese, did not threaten Australia in any way. But the Australian Government, in their evil aggressive eyes, saw the struggle of the Vietnamese people as an Asian “communist domino” rather than as a national liberation movement. As Asians they were to be feared – “the yellow hordes” – but at the same time they were “inferior” to the dominating white imperialist enslavers.
An event marking the Long Tan battle involving Australian forces in 1966 was also held last week in Vietnam obviously sanctioned by the Vietnamese Government – hardly the action of a vengeful nation. One of the former Australian soldiers who now lives in Vietnam with a Vietnamese family wrote that he and other former Australian soldiers are treated better in Vietnam than they were in Australia.
Last week, or any week for that matter, could also have been the occasion to apologise for or say sorry to the Indigenous people of Australia. But no apology is going to come from Howard or the leading members of his government, certainly not from the present Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Mal Brough.
The Vietnamese people were able to fight back and preserve their land and their independence but the Indigenous people had their land stolen from them. White settlers grew rich on this land, from its timber, agricultural and mineral resources. The Indigenous people were massacred and the remainder herded into “reserves” and “missions” in the belief that they would die out. Having defied this attempted genocide the Indigenous people of Australia remain on the fringes of society, marginalised by institutionalised racism, and continue to suffer joblessness, inadequate schooling and medical services and are systematically denied the recognition they must have as an historic right as the original owners of the island continent now called Australia.
Far from extending an apology for their treatment the Howard Government is taking back even the gains that have been made in the struggle for land rights. The government is trying to force Indigenous Australia to give up their collective land rights and collective way of life and turn them into individual capitalists and property owners. That’s the capitalist way, leading to enrichment for the few and hardship and poverty for the rest: the dumping of collective ownership and its replacement with naked greed.
Last week also, the Gurindji people celebrated their 1966 strike struggle for wages, working conditions and for land rights in the Northern Territory. The strike for conditions turned into the first successful land claim where, after many years, the land was handed back to its traditional owners. That’s the alternative story.
From The Guardian
