- by Denis Doherty
- The Guardian
- Issue #2163
The Australian mainstream media
Sometime in the late 80’s the Australian mainstream media adopted the policy of not reporting on peace rallies or criticisms of the military by citizens. Imagine my surprise when contacted by the Courier Mail the Murdoch Brisbane paper and asked if I knew any victims of Hiroshima living in Brisbane, because “we were thinking about a local angle about Hiroshima Day.” I quickly got him some Brisbane contacts, and I presume there was an article printed. Why can’t more media look for a local angle?
An exception to the ABC’s policy of ignoring peace issues was the Foreign Correspondent program of 5 August this year. They dealt with the issue of the bombing of Japanese civilians in WW2. The program was an abominable attempt at dealing with the issues around the bombing of the two Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the firebombing of numerous cities by the US Airforce in 1945. The ABC should hang its head in shame at the lack of genuine criticism of human rights abuses by both sides in the war against Japan. The Japanese interviewed were elderly and were asking why the Japanese government didn’t surrender quicker, but no questions were asked about why US Airforce Commander Curtis Le May engaged in carpet bombing of civilians.
Former US Secretary of Defense Robert S McNamara said: “In order to win a war, should you kill 100,000 people in one night? Proportionality should be the guideline of war. Killing 50-90 per cent of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional. LeMay said if we’d lost the war we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he’s right!”
Ukraine War
While Trump’s promise of stopping the war in 24 hours is almost forgotten, the Channel 9 newspapers are hellbent on keeping the war going. The SMH printed a forlorn looking pair of Ukrainian soldiers on its front page recently under the headline ‘Ukraine fears it is being forgotten.’ The article then went on to say that Australia had not donated any military equipment for over a year. Already many countries in Europe have exhausted their resources to assist in this most unnecessary war. President Trump and others have indicated that the time’s up for this war and it is time to make a peace deal. The war is a squabble between countries on the other side of the planet and has caused massive casualties on both sides of the conflict. The war has the potential to swing out of control and quickly develop into a nuclear exchange – then we are all in trouble.
Resist these types of appeals for more military aid as it only keeps the war going. What is more, we have already spent $1.5 billion on it without making a dent in the problem. Time to pull out and tell the Ukrainians to make peace and stop pretending that they can win on the battlefield. Time to tell the Europeans to do likewise. Time for peace in Ukraine.
