More toadying from the FCM

Governor General Quentin Bryce: stooping to lower lows even than Julia Gillard

By Andrew McKenna

Our Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) are currently basting themselves in an orgy of eulogies to murder, militarism and empire, twisting words to sell more papers and make more corporate dollars. They have become toadies to Canberra’s most savage whims, unquestioningly sucking up the spin of the military establishment as well, (and all that before breakfast).

And when the FCM are not twisting words to their own ends, they’re quoting the Department of Defence verbatim. Anyone heard of asking questions, fellas? Isn’t that what journalists do?

Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith

On the cusp of Australia Day, the Melbourne Age, the Herald-Sun, the 7 Network and numerous other FCM outlets around the country are in paroxysms of cringeworthy patriotic fervour over an Australian soldier’s actions in Afghanistan that killed scores of ‘Taliban’. They’ve gone mental over what this Corporal did there, and ‘having a crack’ is about to enter the lexicon. The FCM are trying to outdo each other with hyper-inflated descriptions of boys’ own derring-do in the desert.

The corpses left strewn on the Afghan desert floor, we have been told over and again, were Taliban. Wicked evil men who were ‘silenced’, ‘knocked out’, ‘neutralised’ and even ‘hurt’. (Simply administer smelling salts, a neck massage and a few bandages and these ‘Taliban’ will get up to fight another day, like the Injuns in a Western or the gooks in a Sylvester Stallone movie. We do learn, however, if we read the DoD communique closely enough – so faithfully reproduced word for word in news organisations throughout the country – that about 60 ‘Taliban’ were killed, even though our brave Aussie boys faced odds of four-to-one … besides our air cover, of course.)

‘Victoria Cross winner Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith didn’t know how many guns he was braving when he leapt into the firing line. But as far as he was concerned, it didn’t matter much,’ the Herald-Sun gushed.

‘Corporal Roberts-Smith was lauded as a true hero, by political and military leaders alike, at a ceremony at SAS headquarters in Perth.

‘He and the other two Diggers had crawled to within 20m of the insurgents’ position. Grenades were thrown.’

PM Julia Gillard, of course, stepped to the forefront of the podium to bathe herself in this stomach-churning lauding and applauding of slaughter, with her memorably glib: ‘Benjamin Roberts-Smith, you went to Afghanistan a soldier. You came back a hero.’

She had ‘summed up the prevailing mood’, according to the Herald-Sun.

These kinds of phrases are never far from the keyboards of the stenographers at the Herald-Sun. Most of the media outlets have quoted verbatim from a Department of Defence communique.  But the Age’s Damien Murphy  has plumbed new sewage inside the FCM pack, waxing lyrical as he described the Corporal as:

‘Taut skin, thin-lipped and determined jaw, Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith’s face looks the very essence of the Digger drawn by war artists and filmed by photographers down the years.’

The powerful, thin-lipped determined-jaw Digger out there blowing away little brown men for our sake – isn’t this one of the myths we have been raised on since Gallipoli?

Haven’t we always gone to far off lands to do slaughter upon little brown men, except when we were really threatened, and we were forced to take pot shots at ‘our own’ little black men?

Australia invaded Afghanistan illegally on the shirt tails of the illegal US invasion in 2001. Our troops have even killed four-year-old children there. (At least they won’t grow up to be Taliban terrorists insurgents.)

The FCM, of course, label any resistance to the West’s noble invasion as ‘insurgency’, ‘Taliban’ and ‘terrorist’. Those of us in the West who unfortunately regard the FCM as purveyors of anything resembling news are still in the dark about the real reason for the invasion: initially it was to track down Osama bin Laden (whom the Taliban had offered to hand over to the US, but the US heroically ignored their offer because they wanted instead to invade); so then the mission was to … ?

• Liberate the women of Afghanistan. (In that case, why didn’t we invade Saudi Arabia too?)
• Perhaps we’re over there to stop the inflow of foreign-born terrorists flocking to Afghanistan to fight the … invasion force … that is there to … stop the inflow of foreign-born terrorists …
• Stop poppy growing and heroin production (that sure hasn’t worked, with Afghanistan now the heroin capital of the world)
• Mineral wealth?
• Oil pipelines?
• Empire?

Tony Abbott thought he had a handle on the reason for our invasion last year, when during the Parliamentary ‘debate’ on Afghanistan, he said ‘War should never be glamourised or idealised but might there not be at least some nobility of purpose about a military campaign to defend other people against their persecutors? (War should never be glamourised, but … well, just ask the stenographers at the Age and the Herald-Sun, Tony. They do a pretty darned good job of it.)

‘The containment and the defeat of the Taliban would be worth a drawn out struggle if it helps to keep the world safe from September 11-scale terrorism,’ he said, persistently confusing the Saudi militants who flew the planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon with illiterate Pashtun tribesmen fighting to throw the invaders out of Afghanistan.

*

The MacMillan Dictionary describes ‘insurgency’ as an attempt by a group of people to take control of their country by force.

Australia’s actions would qualify as an insurgency, except that Afghanistan was not and is not our country. We are invaders.

At the awarding of the VC in Perth, Governor-General Quentin Bryce pinned the gunmetal cross (the medal was struck from Russian guns captured in the Crimean War, we are told) with its crimson ribbon to the Corporal’s chest, saying it represented the finest values and traditions of military service. No doubt the band played, tears were surreptitiously wiped away, and hearts swelled with pride. Bryce simultaneously rose to the podium to speak and stooped to plumb even more sewage than Gillard:

‘In these times of hardship and grief for many Australians, you bring our hearts to soar and you remind us of the strength and the endurance of the human spirit,’ she said.

‘Thank you for what you did and for what you will continue to do.’

Home flooded, Quenty? Nothing like a few blood-spattered, blowfly-ridden bloated corpses with their brains blown out in Afghanistan to lighten the grief.

Sixty men fighting invaders to their lands lie dead, most likely in unmarked graves, if they lie in graves at all, and according to the GG our hearts soar and we’re reminded of the human spirit’s strength and endurance.

The Governor General’s comments are corrupt, degenerate, immoral.

Smell the liquefying flesh, Quentin, and see how high your heart soars.

*

Our Corporal got to the wall and silenced the first gun. Then he moved forward nine metres and silenced the second gun.

‘You don’t really focus on yourself,’ he said, quoted breathlessly around the country in the FCM. ‘It is just like being a football team – you go as hard as you can until the game is won.’

So blowing people to bits in the desert is just like kicking a goal! The premiership is surely won when all the gooks lie dead about you.

From the Australian Government Department of Defence, and quoted in newspapers around the nation, including the Herald-Sun (our italics):

‘As he approached the structure, Corporal Roberts-Smith identified an insurgent grenadier in the throes of engaging his patrol. Corporal Roberts-Smith instinctively engaged the insurgent at point-blank range resulting in the death of the insurgent.

‘ … His actions enabled his Patrol Commander to throw a grenade and silence one of the machineguns.

‘ … His act of valour enabled his patrol to break in to the enemy position and to lift the weight of fire from the remainder of the troop who had been pinned down by the machinegun fire.

‘On seizing the fortified gun position, Corporal Roberts-Smith continued to assault enemy positions in depth during which he and another patrol member engaged and killed further enemy.’

‘Engaging the enemy’ is no leap at all from the colonial euphemism of ‘dispersing the natives’. In fact, it almost sounds sexy.

*

Jules and Quenty, grinning femmes fatales of state-sponsored - and rewarded - terrorism

So we pin a medal on his chest, and Gillard and Bryce, the two Grandes Dames of Australian butchery, two lovely handmaidens of death in pearls and shoulder pads, accompany the medal-awarding ceremony with inflated, self-righteous jibber-jabber.

And the FCM embellish it with grovelling, cringe-making words, unquestioningly slurping up and then regurgitating the DoD’s spin on what happened on that day last June for all good Aussies to read and our hearts to pump with pride on Australia Day.

*

We haven’t given medals to:

• those who have selflessly given their time, bravery and money to flood relief efforts
• those who have been working in environmental restoration for years
• the legions of doctors, surgeons, nurses and allied health care workers who daily save lives and alleviate misery
• those who create beauty and wonder in the world through art

Instead we give our medals to people who kill other people. Who kill other people in their own country.

Is this fascism or what?

*

How spooky is that?