Women at war, the mother of political betrayals
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Watching Greg Combet, in his designer glasses, and robotic new-skool ACTU voice announcing that women would be able to serve in the frontline military, is a chilling reminder of the sources that Rudd Labor is drawing much of its energy from. Like that other designer eyewear, erm, wearer, John Faulkner, Combet is from the party’s Left, a faction that at one time had some principles about exactly when you commit your young people to kill and die in a war, especially when your military service years were spent crunching the numbers in the front bar of a Sussex St/Lygon St pub. John Curtin stands for the best of that tradition. A pacifist in WW1, and anti-war in the ’30s (as was, en passant, St George of the Orwell) he committed himself fully to the war against Japan when it was clear that, whatever its origins in European imperialism, it had become a struggle for national survival. The Afghan war, on whose altar Faulkner is now sacrificing his morality, his reputation, the memory of his good works and the lives of an as yet unknowable number of Afghans and Australians, is not that war. But Labor (and Obama) have decided to own it, and rebrand it, as a way of not being outflanked on national security. Part of that rebranding means emphasising the “progressive” qualities of the war. This connects it to a tradition of imperial wars waged by the Liberal-left, from the 1896 US invasion of Cuba onwards, on a variety of slippery justifications, from the best interests of the civilians being bombed, to the cause of world peace. The push to have women at the frontline completes that process, because it puts the cause of rights-based equality at the heart of the war — one of its justifications then becomes that process of gender neutrality. Bravo! The war is an advance for women! Who could be against such a progressive cause. That may be why this push to have women killing and dying to no purpose has thrown some sections of the anti-war contingent into a bit of a loop — because they can’t trust their own deep-seated abhorrence at the prospect, in the face of a rights-based, equality argument. In this respect Greg Sheridan’s article against front-line feminism is interesting in several respects. Much of it is tangled in an old DLP masculism — discussing the ferocity of rugby league to point up essential gender difference, he seems to suggest that the physical mayhem of league is the highest and unequalled expression of physical bravery. It isn’t. Ferocity is not courage per se, as female mountain climbers, astronauts, downhill skiers, etc, would tell him — and even the groupers used to have the grace to acknowledge that the pain and foreboding of pre-modern childbirth demanded a courage and fortitude few men are so regularly or routinely called upon to summon. But Sheridan’s core point — that war requires propensity to extreme violence in large quantities — is well made. Trouble is, he makes the anti-war, anti-standing army point, without realising it. Women, Sheridan argues, lack the male capacity for violence that armies rely on. Mostly true, but the past century has shown us that large numbers of women can commit to such violence in two situations — revolution and the defence of their homeland and people. From the USSR in WW2, through Cuba, Vietnam, South Africa, Timor and elsewhere, women will fight and kill with no hesitation when the cause is real, justified and no other option is available. What they won’t do, in large numbers, is kill for kicks, for pay, or because slick ads convinced them it would get them laid. In other words women tend to embody the principles of a just war, while men can be more easily re-engineered as violence machines, pointed in any direction you choose. No wonder people such as Sheridan, ready to sign on for any military adventure their masters’ voices order up, don’t want them in combat units. Sheridan blames feminism for this push — in fact the only army with a major female frontline combat contingent is the US army and the social group pushing it the most is evangelical Christian churches. But it’s true, the push for female combat troops is the culmination of imperial feminism, the war fever spruiked by people such as The Age’s Julie Szego and the late Pamela Bone — and then adopted by the pro-war party en masse when all other justifications had run out. It is death masquerading as life, and Left-liberals confused, as they always are, by talk of equality, should trust the originary sense of abhorrence that the prospect brings up. The Rudd government’s policy of equality will be fulfilled when a young Australian mother is killed on the front line, and her small children can fold up a flag and put it on her coffin, while the guns fire uselessly into the air. Great result, Mr Combet, Julia, Nicola, et al. Well worth those decades of struggle and something to be proud you were a part of. MARK DAY VERSION: Greg Sheridan, the bearded man with the toy soldiers in your office, in lieu of ever actually reporting from a war zone himself, has done a piece telling women they lack courage. |
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23 Comments
I’ll wager a warm stubby of Fourex Lite that Greg Sheridan just missed the conscription era, never considered enlisting and remains an armchair commentator.
Guy, … nobility of women … co-opting the far left to support the war … or was that the religious right … I didn’t have a clue what you were talking about. Until I got to the Mark Day version and then it became perfectly clear.
Well I guess if women want to fight on the front line they should be able to…I’m not signing up anytime soon though. Equally if men DON’T want to fight on the front line they should be perfectly at ease in refusing to do so. Honestly, all that peer pressure to be tough and macho; I don’t know how the human race didn’t die out long ago because of all the blokes egging each other on to go and die heroically.
Hmm if conscription was ever re-enacted, does this mean men and women alike would be called up? Wow.
Bravo, Guy Rundle. And why is intelligent comment on the latest ramping up of the colonial incursion in Afghanistan, by Australians of either sex, on behalf of The US Imperium, so rare?? It’s got nothing to do with Burkas.
A few women coming home in bags might be enough to punch through the usual cloud of pious bullshit that surrounds war. Wiping out our own ability to have babies never goes over well.
On average men are faster and stronger than most women, that’s why we have women’s tennis and men’s tennis, women’s soccer and men’s soccer. That is all things being equal women can’t compete directly against men physically. But that is only an average, there are many men who would be unsuitable for the physical rigor of combat, and there are the odd women who most certainly could. Anyone viewing the physique say of Serena Williams, Sam Stosur or Amelie Mauresmo would reckon that they could hold there end up against the average man.
But as long as the physical standards for infantry are the same, the criterion used should be physical capability for the job.
Sovietisation of Australia?
Women in the Soviet Union still had some reasons to fight during the WWII as they were protecting their households/ country against German invaders. The whole nation was defending the country.
But to send women for somebody else’s war leaving their children and elderly parents/relatives behind would be probably too much to ask.
Or is it a case of ‘whenever men fail they would push their wives to finish off the job’?
Personally, I think, too many innocent women and their children have been slaughtered by male population of this planet. Do we need mothers killing mothers???
I used to be a driver in an infantry unit in the army reserves and the reason a lot of men there put to me that women shouldn’t fight on the front line is that men would put themselves at risk trying to protect the women.
However, the main motivation that anyone has when fighting in a war is to protect their team. You’re trained to work as a team and to help and protect the rest of your team. I’m sure men would try to protect the other men in their team as much as they would other women. Especially if they were used to having more women around.
In my experience, women can be just as warry as men, sometimes more so. Wars are stupid, and mostly pointless, but if we’re still having them now, we’re likely to still be having them in several hundred years time, and we might as well move with the times and start letting women fight on the front line if they want to. Why is it better for children to lose their fathers than their mothers?
Men have rarely had much function beyond fertilisation and when bulk grunt was needed, no questions asked, just point them. It’s their substitute for having children - though why they were rarely equally responsible for raising them is another cup of hemlock.
As to women lacking ferocity when their real concern, off-spring, is threatened, that’s simply untrue - as you wrote “when the cause is real, justified and no other option is available”.
War, per se, is political failure. If more women were intrinsically involved in politics there would be less war. This includes Thatcher & the “best man in the Israeli government, Golda Mieir” according to the sagacious Dr K.
Love the Mark Day translations.
This is a smoke screen. If you believe Aaron Russo (Google him), Women’s Lib was about the revenue problem the State faced because half of the population did not pay taxes. If women could be induced into the work force, the State’s need for an ever increasing revenue base would be solved. Well at least in the short term. Betty Frieden recently admitted that the Women’s Movement was funded by some of the major US foundations that were charged with devising a way of rectifying the low tax base situation after WWII. When you think about it, how is that today most of us need two incomes to live as folks did in the 1950’s and 60’s on one income?
In your heart of hearts, that place deep inside you. …does it seem right that women fight and die as mercenaries? Does it make sense that the very human beings responsible for bringing life into the world, spend their reproductive years killing others and possibly being killed? Australian soldiers are no more than mercenaries in Afghanistan - mercenaries for business interests. We are not defending our country against an attacker. Nor are we defending Afghanistan against an external foe. Nine months prior to the bombing of Afghanistan, the Taliban were in power and the West was dealing with them. NATO and the UN made little if any comment on the way they ran their country. Of course all of that changed after the Taliban decided they didn’t want to do business with the West. It surprises me that none in the cowardly mainstream media will even raise the issue of how Afghanistan impacts Australia. If we are so hell bent on freeing the oppressed, how about invading Zimbabwe, Burma, Sudan or any of a thousand other places? Why Afghanistan? Why Pakistan? You will find the answer in a book by Zbigniew Brzezinski called the Global Chess Board.
According to the former head of the FBI in Los Angeles turned whistleblower, Mike Ruppert, the only real cash in the entire credit based system under which we operate is drug money together with the returns from a host of other illegal activities, which is why according to Ruppert, Afghanistan is so important.
After six months of Obama rhetoric, inaction in Iraq and escalation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, maybe the Left is starting to question whether there really is Left and Right or whether they are really just part of the Hegelian deception. You know, Hegel’s false choice. The State endures no matter what and the State decides what happens; not the politicians. Today, a leading official in the Cuban government said that although Obama talks the talk, there is not going to be any material change in the US relationship with Cuba in the foreseeable future. Even the Obama health care program is being recognised by many left leaning commentators as a fillip for the medical industrial complex and unlikely to make any real difference to the quality of life of the poor.
Until we recognise that the people we elect do not represent us but those who finance their election, there will be no change because those people do not want any change.
Former Goldman Sachs banker, John Talbott, in Australia to promote his new book “The 86 Biggest Lies on Wall Street”, said
“A total of 98.4% of the members of congress are re-elected every term because they can each raise $US20 million from the lobbyists to spend on television advertising at election time, Talbott said. The American populace understands this, leading to Congress’ current approval rating of 11%, compared with George W Bush’s final approval rating of 18%”. And he ought to know; Goldman Sachs in one way or another is one the biggest contributors to the re-election campaigns of US Congressmen.
Why are we not discussing the many amazing free energy technologies that have been suppressed over the last fifty years and are now close to development? Why instead do we talk ETS, cap in trade and whatever the latest rip-off concept happens to be? Why is the debate not about pollution and property rights. No one is entitled to pollute another individual’s personal space and the law should protect us accordingly.
The real issues are about our abilities to make choices as free citizens and they are disappearing daily under threat of terrorist attack apparently emanating out of Hellman province. According to the Hegelian social model, progress comes through contrived conflict. Hegelianism glorifies the State, the vehicle for dissemination of statist and materialist ideas and policies in education, science, politics and economics. It is in direct opposition to classic liberalism which is the basis of the 19th century British and American thinking. In classical liberalism, the State is always subordinate to the individual. In Hegelian statism such as Nazism and Marxism, the State is supreme and the individual exists only to serve the State. In the Hegelian state, the child exists to be trained to serve the state. You have probably heard children described these days by the statists, not as human beings but as “human capital”. The two party politics of the Anglo American Empire exists to enable a very small number of powerful individuals to control society for their own purpose. Don’t take my word for it!
“We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the world… no longer a government of free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men.” - Pres. Woodrow Wilson, 1921. (These statements were made after his realization that the signing of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 was the worst decision he ever made)
Hi Maria Johsson, as an ARES infantry foot-rotter from years ago (and your name actually rings a bell), that’s also the impression I had. Cannon-fodder were expected to keep fighting until the enemy were rendered into harmless chutney before going back to pick up their own wounded. Acting too much on protective instinct could lead to stupid heroics (stupid relative to running around where bullets are flying, that is) which in addition to being awarded a medal, would also lead to both self and wounded comrade being the ones rendered unto chutney, and consequently losing the firefight. Of all the questions I did ask the combat veterans, I never got around to asking them about that point.
The other thing I recall was that some of the women doing foot-rotter (infantry) training were very fit and effective, at least under training conditions which was all I ever saw.
Guy: I’m not quite sure what were trying to say in this piece, I’m a pacifist and yet I STILL believe that if a woman can do the job a woman should be considered for the job, no matter what it is (though preferably not soldiering for either sex). If you are against war say so, but don’t dress it up in gender politics (and spare us that sob piece about children folding the flag for Mom’s coffin … losing a Dad can be as bad if not worse in some families).
Sean Bedlam: “Wiping out our own ability to have babies never goes over well.” The population of the world has more than doubled in my lifetime and stands at a figure never before seen in geological history: the human race’s ability to reproduce is one thing we don’t need to worry about (despite AIDS, various types of flu, resistant TB, etc). Also, men’s activities in war (pillage, rape, murder etc) can wipe out women’s ability to have babies just as effectively as if said women had been serving in the front line.
Moira - my point is that war isnt a job. something may well be worth fighting for, but if labor has got to a point where sending women to a useless war is an expression of equality, then someone’s taken a wrong turn.
personally, i find the prospect of women with young children dying in war far worse than men - and it’s the very irrationality of that that tells you something important.
sob story? can you think of an occasion where sobbing would be more appropriate? if you think it’s outlandish there are plenty of americans you can talk to….
Guy, old-timers in the army report that it’s already become modernized, corporatized, the soldiers are on contracts, the working conditions are subject to too much oversight, the old sense of if you can’t hack it go back to a desk job is gone. Somehow the hierarchy lost sight of one the things that used to attract people to the army: that it was completely different from the insurance-satisfying, whinger-appeasing world of civilian life, that you felt like something special just for being able to hack it in there and even thrive. The army used to be a place to belong for people who felt out of place in civvy street. So they now have a problem with attracting recruits, where in the old days recruits used to mob them whenever there was a prospect of real action.
So war is just a job now. And the ground has been prepared for egalitarianism as just the next logical step.
Guy. War isn’t a job, it’s an obscenity. We agree. It’s also bad karma (I don’t know if you agree on that point). But soldiering IS a job (with a pay packet and a career path) and has been for a long long time even tho we don’t agree with it. Also, soldiers do more than fight wars. They turn up after cyclones, for example, and deliver bottled water and build bailey bridges over creeks. They take part in UN peace-keeping missions. Sometimes we’re glad to see them.
If something is worth fighting for (eg recovery of a community after a natural disaster) would you rather have untaught amateurs mucking in, or a trained disciplined troupe such as the army is famed for producing?
Your (self-confessed) irrational comment about children losing their mothers in war tells us something about you, just as my equally irrational comment that I’d rather have lost my mother than my father at an early age tells anyone reading this something about me. Children losing parents is awful, so is children losing whichever adult brought them up be it grandma, auntie or big sister. That’s NOT the point in this debate. We can all weep, and in the end it doesn’t matter who we weep for, just that we lost them when we needed them, and can’t get them back again.
Finally, however: if sending women to a useless war is a [useless] expression of equality, then maybe we shouldn’t be sending anyone at all? (I think this was your original point.) But shouldn’t we be non-gender specific about the people we’re not sending to this useless war?
Actually I’ve just realised, the point is not whether war in general is a good or a bad job, or a particular war is useless or not. The point is that whatever the job is, women who are qualified should be able to apply. This applies to cleaning out toilets, and hangmen too (in nations where capital punishment is allowed). The horrible nature of the job is not the issue, the issue is that women have an equal go, and don’t need anyone’s ‘protection’. They have a conscience just as men do, and can decide if that’s really the sort of job they want to apply for. They don’t need anyone (including you or me) protecting their virtue or worrying about which of their sobbing children will fold the flag. All soldiers, male female or intersex should (we certainly hope) have come to terms with those issues before they set out with their backpacks and their rifles (or AK whatever-it-is they call rifles these days).
So Guy, you stop worrying about female soldiers, I’ll stop worrying about male soldiers, and together we can worry about the fate of humanity. And in doing so, we’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that whatever our views, they include and don’t exclude people like that unfortunate South African runner who has external female organs and internal testes where her ovaries should be (if we can believe the leaked reports).
Gender is not the most important marker of humanity. No more than ‘race’ or ‘colour’ is. YOU Guy know that those are furfies.
M
Moira: “don’t need anyone’s ‘protection’” reminds me of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s comment on man’s self-appointed role as a woman’s natural protector: “As a matter of fact, the thing a woman is most afraid to meet on a dark street is her natural protector.” She had a point.
Guy, I just want to take you up on your comments re my old friend and colleague, the late Pamela Bone, who you say “spruiked war fever”. I assume you’re referring to her support of the invasion of Iraq. She was much vilified for this stance, but as she made clear at the time, she believed that this was the only way to get rid of a brutal dictator who was ruining the lives of his people, men and women alike.
As she also made clear later on, she changed her mind about Iraq once she saw the disastrous consequences of the invasion. She sets out her position, and how it changed, very clearly in her book ‘Bad Hair Days’.
Of course you can criticise her opinions, but I fail to see how they have ever amounted to “spruiking war fever” or “imperial feminism”, whatever that is.
Rundle…even an idiot like me understands you perfectly in this piece. This article is vintage in so many ways.
You opened up a pandoras box of a 1000 isues.
(((one of its justifications then becomes that process of gender neutrality. Bravo! )))
Side note: A few years back did anyone notice some rather stange and mysterious NAB advertisments on the back of buses and various bill-boards around town?
They depicted 2 people close-ups, standing together and assumingly they were male & female…but the gender lines were blurred, you could n’t tell if they were male or female…hmmm.
Jane
Pamela Bone abandoned every conception of ‘just war’ that philosophers have put in place to give some framework for assessing whether a war is moral, she bought into the obviously dodged-up arguments about WMDs, and then admitted that this was a cover for a war against Saddam Hussein on human rights grounds, she treated the anti-war arguments with sarcasm and contempt when she should have paused to listen and think, she was ludicrously uninformed about the state of women in Iraq, which was considerably better than that of many other arab countries, and her primary concern when the occupation started to become a bloody quagmire was that the anti-war movement was being ‘smug’.
Finally, after years and several hundred thousand deaths, a society with re-imposed Sharia law, she said that the war wasn’t worth it. Given the moral weight she’d lent to a right wing cause from the left-liberal side, that wasn’t good enough - she leant her shoulder to the war effort and pushed mightily. Nobody compelled her to spend the last five years of her life supporting mass killing, but that’s what she did
Imperial feminism is exactly what it was - it takes gender equality and strips away every other principle that guided second-wave feminism - insights about patriachal violence, about western imperialism - and wound up endorsing the bombing of civilians to extend the gains of the western feminist social revolution by force of arms. It’s the same process that’s been used to defend these sort of lethal wars all through the twentieth century - with the same apologies and mea culpas coming after. I’m not really interested in Bone’s remorse after the fact., or whether she was sincere. I’m interested in identifying the wilful obtuseness that led her to ignore basic moral principles in forming a position.
Moira
you’ve clearly mistaken me for a left-liberal, who believes that men and women are identical, or that gender is a construct. They’re not, it isn’t. I believe in essential, biologically grounded differences between men and women which structure the fundamental cultural categories through which our lives have meaning. So don’t go telling me what I know or don;t know. Gender probably is the most important category by which we live IMHO.
Guy, I do believe in ‘essential, biologically grounded differences’ between men and women but I believe that 50% of that difference is also a construct (eg boys can go to school and if they’re clever enough go to university, girls can stay home and milk cows and card wool). (Yes that doesn’t happen now in this society but even in Western society the change is VERY recent. As a university graduate I find that very hard to deal with, personally. Did you know that it wasn’t until the 1920s that women were allowed to receive their deserved Oxford degrees even though they’d done the classes and passed the exams? That’s less than a hundred years ago, doesn’t seem a long time to me.)
Gender IS probably, as you say, the most important category by which we superficially live … as in the Very First Question ‘Is it a girl or a boy?’ - but is it the most USEFUL question?
As social mammals/primates we are adept at categorising others who we meet as to gender; species; race; tribe; group; status; colour of fur (probably) … we continue to do this as humans. But as humans, is it possible we also have the ability to be a bit more flexible and aware?
And to repeat: I said ‘Gender is not the most important marker of humanity. No more than ‘race’ or ‘colour’ is’. I challenge you to challenge that statement, I’d be interested in your comments (I mean that).
Moira
(((((but I believe that 50% of that difference is also a construct (eg boys can go to school and if they’re clever enough go to university, girls can stay home and milk cows and card wool). ))))
Contruct??…that’s not a contruct!
Now this… is a contruct!!!
http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/current/artgallery/lesbianrangers/index.shtml