Any time I’m unfortunate enough to capture a snippet of former prime minister John Howard’s mug on television, I think: why isn’t this man in prison? Now, I’ve felt this way towards him since I was old enough to talk, but my upbringing aside, I feel it is the only valid response towards any of the proponents of the Iraq War. Twenty years on, and it’s almost as if we as a nation have been actively encouraged to forget our involvement in that great illegal calamity, and in so doing, forgive the people responsible for getting involved.
But I’ve found it hard to forget the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, and harder still to forgive the people responsible. This, to me, will always be the bloodied crown atop Howard’s already repulsive legacy, and I find it repugnant to see him interviewed or platformed without someone reminding him first of the blood on his hands.
Perhaps this makes me a poor, “biased” journalist, but when it comes to mass killing and genocide, forgetting and forgiving do not enter my mind as valid options. The enactors and enablers of such crimes — rarely if ever brought to trial — should have to lug their guilt and shame around for the rest of their days and beyond. To me, thinking it should be at all otherwise is cowardly and stupid at best, cruel and evil at worst.
Yet our politicians, media, and self-mythologisers hedge their bets on this forgetting. It is only natural for a colonial outpost keen to disavow the gory reality of its criminal past to encourage its citizens to let bygones be bygones, lest they pick at scabs and unleash the pus of our sorry, sordid past.
This forgetting, this forgiveness, is encouraged by a political class as hopeless as they are haunted by the knock-along tragedies of their actions. From Tampa, to Afghanistan, to Iraq, to ecological collapse, to Indigenous deaths in custody, again and again we witness Australian politicians and politicos shrug off the long-term consequences of their decisions as if those consequences were bound to the same term limits that they are.
It isn’t so much a matter of “what can we get away with?” as it is a matter of “what will they let us get away with?” In that shirking of culpability comes a wretched complicity, which the citizenry of this cucked and cowed country is made to burden on our government’s behalf.
You can feel the weight of it descending on us now, as Israel commits genocide in Gaza with only the wimpiest of pushback from the Albanese government.
I am not a staffer at the ALP or the ABC — I am a wandering freelancer and rent-a-crank — so I have the privilege of calling it what it is (genocide, ethnic cleansing), with little more to fear than fewer underpaid gigs and a comments section I never stoop to read anyway. Yet all around me I am beholden to leaders, wonks and — most disconcertedly — journalists who fear nothing more than acknowledging what is plain to see to anyone with eyes in their head and even the slightest morsel of a soul. Every day I am made privy to a government and media already paving over this grim moment with the tar-black bitumen of forgetfulness, and their blatant longing for the forgiveness said forgetfulness carries with it.
But will that forgiveness be forthcoming for Labor leaders past and present and those supporting this genocide either proactively, tacitly, or apologetically? For that’s what you are doing when you continue insisting on Israel’s “right to defend itself,” or obfuscate and defer when asked to call for a ceasefire, or sign a letter drafted by the Zionist Federation of Australia, or approve 322 arms exports to Israel over the past six years.
The leaded cynicism which burdens Albo and the ALP allows them to fob off every failure or any friction onto voter apathy, an apathy that their truly uninspiring performance plays no-small role in fostering — an apathy that is swiftly becoming their go-to get-out-of-jail-free card. They may have overestimated its reach this time, however.
The problem with their particular strain of solipsism is it tricks them into believing what is true for them is true for everyone else. The protests are growing larger, the outrage is becoming hard to contain, and even the self-gagging and wholly unnatural “neutrality” of our mainstream media is buckling under the weight of the mounting dead. Albanese’s glib cocksureness is now curdling into something reminiscent of ScoMo’s sour-milk smugness, and it sits on his skull like a death mask as he is harried by people wherever he slumps, reminded that he is an active participant — a mild mannered middle-man backer — of this inhumane barbarism.
In regards to this slaughter, the ALP has reached the limits of legacy building on a foundation of branding, slogans, and remember-whens. At the end of the day, a diverse team of forward-thinking go-getters who support genocide is simply just a team of people who support genocide. You can hang your hat on your own forgetability — your lifelong career as a hollow man with more conviviality than conviction — in the hopes that you will end your days like Howard has: just another hoary old ghost at the banquet, rattling your chains to an audience that are as bemused to your presence as they are nauseated by it, but that is a long-term high-risk gamble that requires you to put up your short-term prospects — a dicey bet for someone on a losing streak as dire as Albo’s.
Howard got away with it, as shameful as that is, but Howard had the advantage of hatefulness as his mission statement, an advantage that Albo and Co. lack (or like to think they do). It is easier to forget and forgive Howard for his role in something like Iraq because Iraq was a natural decision for a man of such low character, calibre, and conviction. Iraq was classic Howard. Is this tacit support of genocide classic Albo? It is a failure rooted in hypocrisy and equivocation, so it certainly seems to be.
The real question is not for Albo and his government, however, but for us: will we let them forget this? Will we let them forget where they stood during the killing, after the final toll is counted, and the final Palestinian is murdered in cold blood?
