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HERO STOOD UP TO FOREIGNERS
Writing in praise of the ABC telemovie Curtin, antiwar leftist Kim asks:
Can anyone imagine today’s men of steel straw facing the sorts of challenges our WW2 pollies met?
Hmmm. That’s a tough one, Kim. Based on form, though, I’d have to guess Bush, Howard, and Blair might have met those challenges militarily, in much the same manner as did John Curtin. It’s much easier to imagine today’s antiwar left during WWII … wailing about Curtin’s introduction of conscription, smearing him as a drunk, protesting over Curtin’s “politics of fear” before the 1943 election, and painting him as MacArthur’s lapdog. Oh, and there might also be the occasional complaint about Jews and foreign wars, and – following the bombing of Darwin – claims that our closeness to the US and UK had “made us a target”.
Curtin was a brilliant wartime leader. In comments, Kim’s leftoid readers agree – but not for reasons you might expect, such as doing his utmost to defeat fascism. Instead, we get this:
Curtin was no South Pacific poodle. He stood up to America during a real World War.
Forget the Japs; Curtin took on the US! (He didn’t, of course. But the Left can’t tolerate the notion of a pro-US hero.) Here’s another champion commenter:
Yeah, with Tojo in place of GWB2 think of the arselicking and signing up to the Australian-Japanese Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Astonishing. But nothing beats this:
The Australian people know in their bones (and the polls) that we are about to face another almighty challenge to our existence as a nation, with the onset and acceleration of …
Islamic terrorism? It’s got to be Islamic terrorism, right? I mean, what else could it be?
… global warming. And when the going gets tough, they will vote Labor, just like they did in the war years.
Actor Geoff Morrell, who plays Ben Chifley in the program, is nearly as stupid:
“There’s an interesting parallel to present-day politics. At that time we really were just the providers of fodder for the protection of the Empire. To have a prime minister who stood up to these foreign leaders and who genuinely had the interests of the people at heart, that really does bring into perspective some of the stuff going on today.”
There is also the small matter of Curtin standing up to the Japanese, which might possibly be a better demonstration of his concern for Australia – but to celebrate that might, I don’t know, be racist or something. Better to hype perceptions of Curtin as some kind of anti-US, anti-UK peacemonk.
The Australian people know in their bones (and the polls) that we are about to face another almighty challenge to our existence as a nation, with the onset and acceleration of …
Islamic terrorism? It’s got to be Islamic terrorism, right? I mean, what else could it be?
… global warming. And when the going gets tough, they will vote Labor, just like they did in the war years.
It’s apparent to me that glowball warmening is a means for the left to act brave while cowering in their homes with respect to the true threat of Islamist terrorism.
Posted by wronwright on 2007 04 23 at 05:34 AM • permalinkI guess they also left out the bit about Curtin being hell bent on appeasing the Japanese before December 1941.
Posted by Young and Free on 2007 04 23 at 06:16 AM • permalinkCurtin’s appeasement of the Japanese.
Posted by Young and Free on 2007 04 23 at 06:18 AM • permalinkDon’t worry Tim, in 2050, leftists of that day will look back fondly on the Howard era, noting a time of “true conservatives” unlike the hated Prime Minister Bindi Irwin.
Posted by Quentin George on 2007 04 23 at 06:40 AM • permalinkDidn’t we intern a lot of “enemy aliens” during WWII? Does that mean the lefties are advocating locking up all the Lebs?
Oh, I forget. We are the enemy.
Posted by mr creosote on 2007 04 23 at 07:13 AM • permalinkCurtin gave us our own version of Gitmo for Italian immigrants - .Australian internment camps
Posted by mr creosote on 2007 04 23 at 07:17 AM • permalinkO/T but maybe kinda in the same catagory:
Ran into that at Free Republic thread titled “Farewell to Arts: Marxism, Semiotics, and Feminism.”
The FreeRepub link has his “Quadrant, May 1986, reprinted in Cricket versus Republicanism (Quakers Hill Press, 1995).”
Not too shabby a philosopher type guy, for an Aussie :)
Never shall an enemy set foot upon the soil of this country without having arrayed against it the whole of the manhood of this nation, with such strength and quality that this nation will remain forever the home of sons of Britishers, who came here in peace, in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race.
John Curtin, March 1942
I wonder how that one would go down at the next Labor conference. And what would our Catholics-under-the-bed lefties make of the 1940’s Labor Party?
Didn’t Uncle Ben want to start an atomic energy industry.
They don’t make Labor men like they used to.
How did WWII end again? If I recall correctly, Curtin held some kind of peace conference where everybody tried extra hard to understand the Japanese.
The Japanese kind of dug that whole empathy vibe and called that whole thing off. So I think we owe a lot to Curtin.
Posted by Margos Maid on 2007 04 23 at 08:00 AM • permalinkThey have learned the lessons of scapegoating very well. Gee, one would almost think that they studied under Goebbels AND Stalin. At the Learnium.
Replacing actual war with scary dum-de-dum-dum climate change!!!!, helps them to hide their cowardice from themselves. That way they can buy carbon credits and scream obscenities at anyone who disagrees in complete safety, and still claim virtue.
The war ended after a thorough examination of the root causes of the conflict. All the universities held symposiums with themes like “Why Do The Japanese Hate Us?” Many books were written about cultural insensitivity, Western imperialism and Orientalist prejudice against the Japanese.
Then the Americans dropped atom bombs on them.
It’s much easier to imagine today’s antiwar left during WWII …
The number of Grim Milestones between Port Moresby and Lae alone… (“We were attacked by Japan, not New Guinea! Stop this imperialist war for water!”)
Posted by Paul Zrimsek on 2007 04 23 at 08:14 AM • permalinkAnd who will forget Curtin’s landmark speech:
“Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it clear that Australia looks to people to just chill-out a bit, you know what I’m saying? I mean, why can’t we all just be friends?”
Posted by Margos Maid on 2007 04 23 at 08:31 AM • permalinkGot it in one. The pompousness of some of those commentators is astounding.
Regardless, Curtin was a good leader who did at least one wonderful thing for this country: helped us come through the war. The credit lies not only with him, obviously, but with Australians and the Australian military, but he did his part. It would have been an interesting film; I missed it. Who here saw it? Do you think it worked?
Interesting item on local Ch 9 show this afternoon about two squadrons of RAF Spitfires sent out here in 1942, just after the bombing of Daewin, and based at Strathpine, north of Brisbane. They were then deployed to Darwin to actuaaly provide some forward air defence to Northern Australia; I’m sure at this stage the Pommies had fighter squadrons coming out their bottom, so packing a couple of to the uncared for dominions wouldn’t be noticed.
I used to believe all this bollocks about Curtin as well. Of course the Brits had no personnel in the Malay peninsula, Burma or India either, and even if they did it was to protect their colonial interests so they could move back in as soon as the Nips were chased off. Which of course they did, shortly therafter granting independence to these peons.
MacArthur was worshipped in this country, as the savior of the nation; while this was a little excessive, the US presence in the Sth Pacific ended any ideas (no matter how minor) the Japanese had of invasion; it also finished their main plan of attrition by strangulation, cutting sea lanes to Australia.
The anti-Western rhetoric of the left these days is increasingly disconnected with reality, and smacks more of jealousy and impotence rather than indignation over issues of oppression and hegemony.
If any of these pillocks was grabbed by a bunch of their much admired “freedom fighters” in some third world shithole, they’d be the first to call for the Marines. (Then would later sdlag them off for their excessive force, cultural insensitivity and overt butchness).
On behalf of Amerikkka, I’d like to apologize for starting WWII, and for dragging you into it. US meddling knows no bounds, I’m sorry to say. While I’m at it, I might as well apologize for staging 9-11, the lunar landings, Amelia Earhart’s disappearance and the Hindenburg. Furthermore, I must admit that we really are storing alien remains and aircraft at Area 51, which unfortunately are the REAL culprits behind global warming.
Oh yes, and I also apologize for GWB causing the tsunami in 2004.
Curtin wasn’t really a brilliant war-time leader. He tried earnestly to appease the Japanese before the war, offering them all the pig-iron they wanted, despite their already impressive list of enormities. He did not pioneer the radical openness to America - Alfred Deakin did that decades before and it was a growing cultural sentiment discernible in Australia from that time onwards. President Roosevelt thought Curtin’s We Look to America speech “smacked of panic”. He did not “save” Australia. He ordered some troops home - well, duh. He certainly didn’t run the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway. Watching the actor playing him pacing around in the grounds of The Lodge on that ABC hagiography was embarrassing. He came across as a skittish neurotic and, if accurate, one gives thanks that he didn’t play a more substantive role planning actual battles in those several fraught years. He died in office, his death expedited by alcoholism, heavy smoking and stress. The nation needed a myth and so the story began that he “saved” Australia and died from the strain. It’s mostly codswallop but he was a good enough man to be deserving of the myth and few resent that it remains attached to his tenure.
Did the ABC program mention that he had a mistress, and essentially left his wife in Lithgow to rot?
Posted by mr creosote on 2007 04 23 at 09:20 AM • permalinkProbably just as well he never lived to see daylight savings.
Posted by Margos Maid on 2007 04 23 at 09:22 AM • permalinkTripped over to Lav Rodeo to have a look, cripes what a catty bunch, miaowing about Downer.
I used to think it was a site for leftie eggheads but it’s really just a bunch of A.L.P. sycophants. They can quote the liberal philosophers line and verse but they don’t know their arse from their elbows.
Here’s a beauty from the other day - twelve hundred words of florid prose dedicated to the dark forces within the New South Wales Liberal Party:
The NSW Liberals & Co. are equalled only by their US Republican compatriots in the dark art of trawling the lower depths of the human soul in the quest for political advantage, and so they have made an issue of the tragic teenage past which Michael Coutts-Trotter has transcended in his adult life.
Yet the author couldn’t actually name a member of the parliamentary Liberal Party, or a Liberal Party staffer, or indeed anyone they could be absolutely sure holds a current membership of the Liberal Party of Australia, who criticised the gentleman’s appointment to Director-General of the NSW Education Department, based on the fact he used to be a heroin dealer.
But this is the best bit:
Then, after serving his time, he finds the inner strength to completely turn his life around. He recovers from his disability and goes to university where he earns both a degree and the love and respect of a very admirable woman.
Does Tanya Plibersek know about her?
This ‘Opus Dei ate my homework’ shit is getting very passé.
When oh when are the NSW ALP going to give me a high paying job? Speaking as a constituent, I have been fucked over by them for years.
Posted by Margos Maid on 2007 04 23 at 09:37 AM • permalinkI should add that this alleged paradigm shift associated with Curtin - that he “looked to America” and not Britain - was rejected by MacArthur himself at the Prime Minister’s War Conference in Melbourne on 1 June 1942, as the eminent military historian, Peter Edwards, has pointed out. From the notes of that meeting:
The Commander-in-Chief [MacArthur] desired to point out the distinctions between the United States and the United Kingdom in their relations and responsibilities to Australia. Australia was part of the British Empire and it was related to Britain and the other Dominions by ties of blood, sentiment and allegiance to the Crown. The United States was an ally whose aim was to win the war, and it had no sovereign interest in the integrity of Australia. Its interest in Australia was from the strategical aspect of the utility of Australia as a base from which to attack and defeat the Japanese. As the British Empire was a Commonwealth of Nations, he presumed that one of its principal purposes was jointly to protect any part that might be threatened. The failure of the United Kingdom and USA Governments to support Australia therefore had to be viewed from different angles.
Curtin, hurt and miffed, subsequently had to re-ingratiate himself and Australia with Britain - having been given a brutal tutorial in realpolitic by the General. He became the first (and only) Australian Prime Minister to appoint a member of the Royal Family as Governor-General. The hard work of institutionalising a relationship with America whereby Washington acknowledged the importance of helping to defend Australia (rather than merely seeing it as an ad hoc asset for operations in extremis) was accomplished by Liberal foreign ministers in the 1950s.
Murph—that’s a steenkin’ lie! We use Church’s Chicken to make black men impotent…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2007 04 23 at 09:50 AM • permalinkPopeye’s Chicken is also a hotbed of ethnic cleansing.
In fact, our chicken entrepeneurs taught the Israelis how to infect various fruits and veggies with the AIDS virus.
I always thought Australia during WW2 was the San Diego Naval Base Far West Annex. Seems MacArthur also thought that way.
Posted by Some0Seppo on 2007 04 23 at 09:56 AM • permalinkI was transfixed by Curtin: The Movie. Seldom have I seen something such a poor script so badly acted. Would a a baseball-ignorant Australian in 1941 ever have said “He has to step up to the plate”?, as one of the characters uttered early on last night. I think not. All those narrative monologues delivered level-eyed to the camera. Not a mention of Curtin’s patronage of that corrupt, drunken, cowardly Blamey, who lost Victoria’s mace in a house of ill-repute when he was police commissioner.
The only thing that might have saved the flick was a hot sex scene involving Curtin’s daughter, who was quite easy on the eyes.
The great pity about bad TV is that, unlike a Phillip Adams’ column, you can’t wipe your arse with it.
#29 - Did the ABC program mention that he had a mistress, and essentially left his wife in Lithgow to rot?
mr creosote, I think you’re thinking of Ben Chifley:Chifley had a wife in Bathurst and a long-time mistress in Canberra, behaviour that would have been judged scandalous in post-war Australia. Chifley’s lover, Phyllis Donnelly, who had been his secretary since 1927, was with him when he suffered a heart attack in his room at the Hotel Kurrajong shortly before he died on June 13, 1951.
‘Died on the job’?
Posted by David Morgan on 2007 04 23 at 10:03 AM • permalink#37 - Blamey was indeed a yob, but the Victorian mace actually went missing in 1891.
It was in 1925 as commissioner that:
On 21 October police raided a brothel and found a man with Blamey’s police badge. Blamey privately maintained that he had lent his key ring, including the badge, to a friend, but refused to name him. Publicly, he claimed that the badge had been stolen.
A watertight alibi!
Posted by David Morgan on 2007 04 23 at 10:21 AM • permalinkIn a stirring alternate history on the Sci-Fi channel, witness the courage of Ozzie PM John Latham during WWII as he bravely breaks the arm of a Red Cross ambulance driver…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2007 04 23 at 10:50 AM • permalinkI think several of you are being a bit hard on Curtin. He was very much the leader that Australia looked to in the dark days and, I believe, understood only too well the realpolitic involved in his appeal to America.
My understanding is that the ongoing action in New Guinea and later Borneo wasted many Aussie lives but was also part of the realpolitic of needing to be seen to be taking part in order to gain our own seat at the table when the surrender and its terms were decided. Remember, after Coral Sea, Midway, Kokoda, Gona, etc. Macarthur wasn’t interested in Aussie troops taking part in the Phillipines campaign. We were essentially sidelined. Curtin had to deal with being a very small frog in a bloody big puddle.
As for the TV show, well I found it pretty disappointing. It looked like a lot of wankers with silly haircuts and worse clothes trying to talk like people who have never tasted chardonnay.
How fuckin’ big was Curtin’s suit in this show? - the bastard could have clothed the Eighth Division out of it. But it is recorded that he was pacing the grounds of the lodge in the middle of the night when he was waiting for the Seventh Division to safely get across the Indian Ocean, so that bit was accurate.
Other points like ‘step up to the plate’, his daughter wearing a bikini, and just the whole hokey, folksy family bullshit just smacked of the half arsed way they tend to make this stuff nowadays. No wonder our film industry is in such a mess.
Oh, and if you thought this was bad, just wait for the wharfies/Corrigan film the ABC have been threatening to show soon.Sadly Curtin was a MacArthur lapdog and surrendered Australian sovereignty and control of Australian forces ON OUR OWN TERRITORY, he refused advice from his General Staff and allowed MacArthur to waste Australian Soldiers in unnecessary assaults on Gona, Buna and Sanananda.
Great War veterans amongst the assaulting Australian units wrote that they were forced into repeating the errors made in the early part of WW1 by attacking across open ground without sufficient artillery against well fortified and cleverly sited Japanese defences.
MacArthur-who had fled the Philippines to Australia in March 1942 was not a soldiers’ soldier. He never ventured beyond Port Moresby, and never took the trouble to familiarise himself with either the terrain or the enemy’s defences.
Yet, for his own publicity purposes, he applied great pressure for quick results-which were quite impossible in the circumstances because he desperately wanted to claim a land victory against the Japanese with Army troops before the Marines on Guadalcanal could finish off the Japanese defenders.
He caused attacks to be mounted without adequate preparation, without adequate support, and astride approaches that held no hope for success.
For every thousand Australians killed in action in New Guinea another thousand died from Malaria and Typhus.
Incredibly most troops went into action day after day in almost futile attempts to take ground one to two metres at a time riddled with Malaria and dysentery to the point they fell exhausted after each assault with shit leaking out of their shorts.
It’s worth noting that as the Australians set about burying their mates after the campaign, it did little for their morale to learn that the communist-led waterside workers in Australia had gone on strike for ‘danger money’ in return for loading ammunition.
MacArthur’s irresponsible attacks also cost the US National Guard’s 32nd Infantry Division dearly. It was thrown into the New Guinea battles with few weapons, little training and its men were slaughtered. The division quickly lost 5000 men through both disease and enemy action.
In the words of military historian Gavin Long, during the Curtin-MacArthur era, the Australian Government ‘had made a notable surrender of sovereignty’ when ‘no Australian government would have so completely surrendered control of its forces in its own territory to a British commander and staff’.
In Long’s view, a ‘strange aspect of this alliance of an Australian government and an American commander’ was how far apart were ‘their views on international and local politics’. So complete was the surrender of sovereignty that MacArthur from the outset appointed Americans to lead every branch of his staff even though there were several highly qualified Australian Army specialists who had the additional advantage of ‘recent and varied active service’.
And the left calls Howard a US deputy sheriff/bush poodle/lapdog.
Curtin’s legacy will be that an actor dressed as a Mark Latham lookalike played his role on a little watched, poorly scripted AyBeeCee tele-fillum.
I hope the AyBeeCee treat Kevin Rudd with such reverence when they make the tele-fillum of his battle against global warming.
Posted by Infidel Tiger on 2007 04 23 at 10:08 PM • permalink#47
Dugout Doug always had bad judgement in picking his staff officers. The one time he had a good one was early in his tenure as CinC of the Philippine Army, when Dwight Eisenhower was his Chief of Staff in building the new Philippine Army (Ike was a Major at the time). They did not get along. MacArthur’s longtime intel officer, Charles Willoughby, was an incompetent twit.Doug’s one really great campaign was the Inchon Campaign in 1950, and all the planning and command of the key parts of it were done by the Marines and the Navy. MacArthur’s contributions were in identifying the target and insisting on Inchon for its strategic decisiveness despite the immense risks involved. This advocacy was not a minor thing. The decisiveness of the landing was due to its being in a position to cut off almost the whole of the NorK army at one blow, and Doug had to be very firm and persuasive to get it done. But Dugout Doug was no Great Captain despite this and his performance on the Western Front.
Posted by Michael Lonie on 2007 04 23 at 11:38 PM • permalinkCan’t speak to all the particulars of the rather grim assessments of MacArthur’s various moves involving use of Aussie troops, but the US concern for Australia not being isolated - or invaded by Japan - was real. Coral Sea was all about that. So were concerns about possible Japanese thrusts against Fiji and Samoa (which were intended by Japan, or at least Combined Fleet commander Yamamoto, but naturally abandoned after the Midway catastrophe). Nimitz and King were fairly consumed by the issue of keeping lines-of-communication to Australia secure, it was probably their primary concern until the tide had turned such that the US had the initiative and its new carriers and other forces were entering the fray.
Several have already made salient points regarding some of the historical context - Peter Edwards got a mention in #33.
There were a few historically accurate points in the film, but they were overwhelmed by the way it was couched. The central focus was bringing home the 2nd AIF divisions for the Defence of Australia; this was portrayed and contextualised as something out of contemporary history - a bespectacled Labor leader defies the foreign powers and brings the boys home.
What they did once they got home was left for a postscript about their fighting in New Guinea and the DEI. It seemed the main point was bringing them home, rather than bringing them to where they could fight for victory.
That is one case of the grating ideology that made it not the best viewing experience.
Having HMS Prince of Wales described as a battlecruiser was almost enough to make me switch off.
A hagiography with some redeeming features, but far from enough.
Posted by Simon Darkshade on 2007 04 24 at 09:54 AM • permalink
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curtin huh. let’s hear it from Curtin himself: