From: ".: s0metim3 :." <s0metim3-AT-netlink.com.au>
Subject: AUT: RE: brief Melbourne demo report
Date: Sun, 16 Feb 2003 11:38:15 +1100


Steve:

: OK, there you have it, some pretty superficial
: impressions. I thought it
: boded well, though - perhaps it will all
: disintegrate if the Security
: Council sanctions military intervention, but I
: came away with a sense
: that such a course of action would not be
: acceptable to a great many
: people there ...

I'd like to be wrong, but I think it will disintegrate
if/when the UN sanctions war in some fashion. That is: the
united front that underpinned the rally will disintegrate,
and in large part bc the coalition partners who don't adhere
to a 'not without the UN' position are too scared to address
it lest it disrupt that coalition-building exercise.  The
only response I've seen is a vague pacificism: war is bad.

There's a specificity to the predilection for a UN-led
conflagration in Australia: it touches upon all the
historical racist paranoias of Australia being an 'isolated
white, Christian nation', and especially the fantasy that
Indonesia -- increasingly described as 'the most populated
Muslim nation' -- is ever threatening to invade.

A large part of the 'No war on Iraq' position has echoes of
the 'we should be focussing on fighting the threat closer to
home', a la Japan in WW2.  Polls already suggest that more
people in Australia see N. Korea as more of a threat than
Iraq, that 'we' should be defending 'ourselves' closer to
'home'. As well as a panic that there will be bombs in the
Bourke St Mall if 'we' align with GWB.

Superficially, it might be heartening to see so many people
on the streets. But I'm not sure I would count many of them
as friends or allies, unless I wanted to be entirely
Kissingeresque about it.  I always get confused about
terminology, is it a united front or a popular front when
one cites a grand alliance of 'the ALP, Greens, Democrats
and One Nation'?  There really isn't much of a debate about
racism and united fronts I think.   Which feels like a major
relapse into idiocy, esp after the trajectory of
S11->Woomera2002: the first consisting of a sustained debate
over the nationalism of 'anti-globalisation' and hence the
necessity for decentralised, autonomous actions that was,
subsequently, emphasised by the second.  I think that this
trajectory seems to have been smothered by the joys of the
united front...

Also likely that opposition will be muffled in the absence
of 'our boys dying', and US military technology and strategy
have largely seen to this (Somalia excepted).

Angela
_______________

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