Tom O’Lincoln

150 years of Karl Marx’s Capital

It was June 1964 in San Francisco. Republicans were streaming into town. They were to meet at the aptly named Cow Palace.
So were we – the demonstrators. We had taken on the seemingly heartless task of keeping Barry Goldwater out of the White House.
Goldwater was an ultra-conservative and had sworn to use nuclear weapons and decisively escalate the war in Vietnam. The presidential primaries were over, and he was the presumptive nominee. The hard Republican right declared, “In your heart, you know he’s right”.
The liberals replied, “In your guts, you know he’s nuts”. But it was scant consolation.
Down on the convention floor, I was making a discovery. The anti-Goldwater forces of the party had apparently opened the doors to Cow Palace and thrown away the keys.
I led a few chants and waved my placard around. This in turn got me on TV.
The anti-Goldwater forces were pushing for the nomination of governor William Scranton of Pennsylvania. Still full of excitement, I went down to the Scranton headquarters to stuff envelopes –the start of a scurrilous rumour that I was once a member of the young Republicans.
The Scranton push failed and Goldwater was officially nominated. He went on to get thrashed in the election by Lyndon Johnson.
Relieved, I scribbled in my diary: “Goldwater is destroyed”. But he wasn’t. LBJ sent half a million troops to lay waste to Vietnam.
The demonstrators went on to bigger things.
What did I accomplish, enrolling in a liberal capitalist campaign? To stuff envelopes. But five years later I joined a revolutionary organisation. There I learned to organise against the bosses. I never looked back.

Remembering the 1964 Republican National Convention

Tom O’Lincoln gives an overview of Australia’s imperialist history, and explains why governments have been so keen to send the military to overseas conflicts, in extracts from his recently released book, The neighbour from hell: two centuries of Australian imperialism.
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“Another Australian expeditionary force” is a familiar phrase to the world. Australians have fought on more battlefronts than any other men since the time of Genghis Khan. – Washington Post correspondent Richard Oulahan
When Australia fights an overseas war in, say, Afghanistan alongside the United States, responses on the broad left generally fit a pattern. Critics will point to Australia’s dependence on the US. This is undeniable – most states in the world depend on US power in some way. From that recognition, however, the left generally proceeds to a much more questionable argument, lamenting what it sees as chronic Australian subservience towards the big power ally. The USA is accused of dragging this country into wars that are not in “our” interest.
Yet Australia is an imperialist power in its own right, which has sent troops to distant wars to gain credit with Britain, and more recently America, hoping that these “great and powerful friends” would back up Australia’s interests in our own region. It doesn’t make Canberra a “lapdog” for the Americans. It’s part of a strategy for leveraging power, a sort of boutique imperialism in which Canberra manoeuvres carefully to maximise its clout.
Spoiling for a fight
Across the empire in the second half of the 19th century, conflict was growing. Lord Salisbury, the British prime minister, complained in 1887 that the Australian colonials were the “most unreasonable people I have ever heard or dreamed of”. Their offence? Demanding that the empire seize nearby islands (Vanuatu) that to the mother country were “as valueless as the south pole”.
This was part of a wider pattern in which colonists also demanded the seizure of Papua, Fiji and New Guinea. Australian leaders were backed by loud public meetings. They accused Britain of betraying the white race in the Pacific.
For the NSW government, an opportunity arose in 1885, when Britain faced a colonial rebellion in the Sudan. Immediately, NSW premier Dalley offered troops. He had several objectives, but one important one was an informal plan to boost reciprocal British colonial support for Australian colonial ventures in the Pacific. The Victorian premier admitted it was “difficult for us to say what [the merits] of the Sudan expedition are”. But no matter, the point was to score points with the British.
Another opportunity came with the Boer War at the turn of the century. Sixteen thousand young men travelled off to kill or be killed in southern Africa. What did this have to do with Australia? Seemingly nothing, until you remember the underlying aims: to promote British support for the “unreasonable people”.
This imperial drive reached its peak with Gallipoli and the First World War. Australia was never under threat, but joined the invasion of what is now Turkey. Australia suffered almost 30,000 casualties, but nothing like the 250,000 on the Ottomans’ side as they tried to defend their land.
Australia came out of the war in control of former German New Guinea. This had been a long term aspiration. Deputy prime minister Joseph Cook hoped the territory would be full of great resources (hopes that were realised in the enduring plundering of the region by Australian companies). To be sure, Canberra also acknowledged it had responsibilities: in Senator Matthew Reid’s words, Australia must treat local peoples “like grown-up children”.
Papua New Guinea became a stepping stone to claims in West Papua. The latter territory, wrote the Department of External Affairs, was part of New Guinea since West Papua had been “included in the Australian declared Pacific Security Zone in 1944”. To the disappointment of Australia’s elite, West Papua remained in Dutch hands, before later being transferred to Indonesia.
White settlers pioneered a new pattern of imperialism. Britain was the pivotal power, and the relationship was underpinning the independent and aggressive state that Australia became after federation. Over the next several decades, Canberra sought to formalise arrangements. But World War Two sealed Britain’s decline, while opening the way for an “American century”; and at the same time Australia slowly reoriented from London to Washington.
Reorientations
In 1951 Australia deployed troops in Korea, securing in return the Anzus treaty. The invasion was the beginning of a catastrophe for the Korean people, but it created salivating opportunities for the Australian government, and foreign minister Percy Spender eagerly cabled Menzies in London about seizing them:
“I feel very strongly that we must give some immediate response … My appreciation of the military position in Korea is that the US, though not prepared to admit it, is in a very difficult if not desperate position … any additional aid we can give to the US now, small though it may be, will repay us in the future one hundred fold.”
The military impact might be slight, he added, but it could have considerable political impact. On the other hand, to hold back could cost “an opportunity of cementing friendship with the US which may not easily present itself again”. Menzies was overseas, hard to reach, and known to oppose any such ventures.
Neither did he share Spender’s enthusiasm for a formal alliance with the US. But when it became clear that Britain would send troops to Korea, acting PM Artie Faddden agreed to do the same, making a point of dispatching forces before London did. US president Harry Truman and secretary of state Dean Acheson signalled their pleasure by facilitating a large World Bank loan to build infrastructure in Australia. This sounds like surprising generosity from Uncle Sam, but the infrastructure would enhance Australian military power, contributing to a stronger alliance.
A secret 1963 memorandum between Washington and Canberra said key passages in the Anzus treaty “related only to overt attacks and not to subversion, guerrilla warfare or indirect aggression”. This was not particularly helpful, seeing as Australia was the aggressor in the region. Every Australian military scheme was for “defence”. But a key element was “forward defence”, sending troops far to the north to fight people who had never dreamed of invading us. Key documents show there was no meaningful threat to Australia. That is, while there were threats to Australia’s ability to exploit the world market, there was no military threat to people living on this continent.
An internal government analysis of Australia’s strategic position from 1946 dismissed the major powers as being benign or lacking the power to attack. Russia was a “potential enemy of the future”, but even that country couldn’t mount more than raids on the Australian continent. Likewise, a 1953 document dismissed actual defence of the Australian continent as presenting “a comparatively small problem”.
When Australian strategists spoke of defence, they meant protecting “Australia’s interests”, which tended to mean overseas investments, assets, revenues, trade links. A military raised only to defend Australia, Menzies jibed, would be like a “wooden gun”. It was in this context that Canberra desired to “take responsibility” for a strategic zone to the north and east.
A balancing act
American strategy had prioritised Europe and the Middle East, with the Korean conflict seen as an anomaly. Canberra offered the “Australian territory” of Manus Island (part of Papua New Guinea) to the Americans as a military base, but this aroused little interest, and at first Washington also showed little enthusiasm for an Asia-Pacific security pact.
However, Communist successes in Asia began to focus minds in both Washington and Canberra. Since British power was clearly in decline east of Suez, entrenching Australian interests in Asia required a strengthened US alliance; and with France losing an Asian empire at Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam, in 1954, there was realistically no way the Americans would hold back from trying to pacify south-east Asia.
Canberra scrapped commitments in the Middle East in favour of the Commonwealth Strategic Reserve Centres in Malaya, and became a founder of the US-oriented South East Asia Treaty Organisation. Both the centres and SEATO were ineffectual; their importance lay in signalling a change in orientation.
There was, of course, a substantial common ideology between Washington and Canberra. The Americans were immersed in anti-Communist scares, and Menzies promoted his own. Australia’s 1955 dispatch of troops to Malaya to suppress Communist insurgents came within the same two years or so as the French defeat at Vietnamese Communist hands, the aftermath of the Petrov spy scandal and the anti-Communist split in the ALP.
But common ground didn’t prevent tensions. The Americans complained of a maddening Australian aggressiveness. The US State Department thought Percy Spender’s early 1950s interest in a Pacific treaty was less about a guarantee of Australian security than access to allied decision-making machinery, while Acheson thought that the Australians’ most cherished idea was to have a “direct and permanent relationship between their chiefs of staff and ours”, a fixation which became an “embarrassing problem”.
When a subsequent secretary of state, Dean Rusk, visited Canberra in May 1962, foreign minister Garfield Barwick “interrogated” him in a way that “visibly irritated the American and startled the New Zealanders present”. Far from being slave to Washington, Canberra jostled for an expanded influence.
The common ground rubbed against differing desires. Each time the Americans pressed Australia to commit more forces to US adventures, Canberra performed a balancing act. As described in former senior diplomat and cabinet minister Richard Casey’s memoirs, there was a desire to minimise the drain on resources, but also a desire not to appear to be penny-pinching or stalling.
Casey felt that Washington was aware of what a small military Australia maintained. For an ally constantly pestering the Americans to do things, the Australian imperialists didn’t contribute much themselves, which was embarrassing. Perhaps one ought to do more, Casey thought. Yet in cabinet, he stood against those who would follow the Americans “whatever they did”. He thought the pros and cons must all be carefully calculated even if some of them counted against Washington.
Here we have neither a conventional picture of the Americans charging headlong into war, nor one of Australian politicians crawling to the Americans. Instead there was cynical calculation on both sides, and not for the last time.
Vietnam
At the fringe of empire, things were tense. The 1954 Geneva conference following the French defeat had called for a temporary division of Vietnam, with elections to be held in 1956. But the Americans blocked the elections because the Communists would have won them. Bullets would decide.
While dispatching a battalion to Vietnam, Menzies declared the US invasion of that country was “one of the greatest manifestations of justice and principle ever made”. The core objective was locking the Americans firmly into Asia. Winning in Vietnam was secondary, and the pretence of safeguarding democracy came a dismal last. General John Wilton, chair of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, as if answering the standard leftist critique, said, “[I]t wasn’t a question of us being dragged in by the USA, it was us wanting to have the USA dragged in”.
Australian efforts to deepen Washington’s engagement in Asia went slowly. The only way seemed to be persuading the Americans to escalate, and then win, the Vietnam war; and Australia would have to provide troops to be credible in American eyes. Canberra prepared a diplomatic offensive around this agenda. Phase one, code-named Barrel Roll, was a brief intensification planned to run for a month. It would be followed by Phase two, code-named Rolling Thunder. But Johnson was so nervous that Phase One dragged on.
At this point a secret inter-departmental meeting recommended Australia should press the Americans to move to Phase two. Lobbying politicians from Canberra blitzed Washington. For perhaps the first time, the Australian government decided to attempt openly to change the direction of America’s Vietnam policy. “In point of fact,” writes diplomat Malcolm Booker, “it was the Australian government which in the early part of 1965 pressed on the American government the need for strong military action in Vietnam”.
One way to present Australia’s imperialism as superior is to suggest its record is free of war crimes. It is not. To begin with, the main culprits of wartime atrocities are not the soldiers at the front line, but the Australian leaders who encouraged and apologised for the genocidal American war effort.
And even where the Australians behaved better towards the local people, it didn’t change the reactionary logic of the war. Paul Ham records how the Australian commanders drafted a new mission statement that amounted to protecting the people from the enemy. The trouble, as he discovered, was that the people were the enemy. And so when private Paul Murphy later recalled another relocation exercise, he could say: “They hated us … Old ladies were crying and wailing; they’d just been thrown out of their ancestral homes”. Yet he could add that “militarily there was a justification for it”. The abuses of war were not an optional extra.
Who wins?
The war was a nightmare for the Vietnamese, a horror for the soldiers, a bleak torment for many Australians – and for whose benefit? Australian editor-at-large Paul Kelly wrote in 2002:
“For half a century the Australian way of war has been obvious: it is a clever, cynical, calculated, modest series of contributions as part of US-led coalitions in which Americans bore the main burden. This technique reveals a junior partner skilled in utilising the great and powerful in its own interest while imposing firm limits upon its own sacrifices.”
The Vietnam War ended in defeat for the West. In the aftermath, Australia shared America’s fear of waging imperialist war (the “Vietnam Syndrome”), but the hesitancy didn’t last long. The 1999 Timor intervention, led by the “Vietnam War hero” Peter Cosgrove, put the gloss on a new round of aggression in the South Pacific.
That experience opened several routes back to the front lines of blood for oil, via Afghanistan and the Gulf. And if we blink another moment, Australian boots may tramp through Syria.

The forging of Australian imperialism

Shocking revelations seem easy to get a hold of these days.
Historian Jenny Hocking says leading conservative politicians were on the phone before the sacking of the Whitlam government. I’m aghast. Oh, and they had a special phone for affairs of state. Consider my gob thoroughly smacked.
Peter Barbour, who was director-general of ASIO from 1970 to 1975, tells us that Gough Whitlam gave the organisation oral rather than written instructions about talking to the CIA. This is sneaky, but working in the public service taught me that “avoiding leaving a paper trail” goes on all the time.
These mini-revelations will feed the ever-present conspiracy theories surrounding the dismissal. And that’s a problem. Not that the conspiracies weren’t present. But the chatter they arouse obscures more important things.
Let’s travel back to a moment after the June 1975 Bass by-election. Whitlam was still in office, but Fraser was on the offensive and the economy was in trouble. Labor’s primary vote dropped 17 percent and the Liberals won the seat 60-40 on a two party preferred basis. After minerals and energy minister Rex Connor’s resignation in October in the wake of the notorious “loans affair” coming to light, Fraser felt confident enough to block supply in the Senate and bring on a constitutional crisis.
At this point, according to Paul Kelly, “Fraser spoke with senior newspaper executives from at least two of Australia’s three newspaper chains … Almost without exception the press supported Fraser’s decision to force an election”.
Meanwhile, the government met obstruction at every turn in trying to resolve the supply crisis. When Whitlam sought a half-Senate election, conservative state governments refused to cooperate. When he sought temporary finance from the banks, they refused to extend it, which in turn gave John Kerr a pretext for dismissing the government.
In October, Queensland governor Colin Hannah and Robert Menzies joined the fray with a statement endorsing Fraser’s actions.
There are elements of conspiracy in all this. But much more important was Fraser’s ability to mobilise social forces. A mobilisation of social forces is not the same as a conspiracy, nor was there monolithic unity in the anti-Labor camp.
In fact, in the weeks before the dismissal, ruling class sentiment was fairly volatile. Shortly before Connor’s resignation, the Sydney Morning Herald questioned Fraser’s credibility: the opposition leader had begun hinting that “extraordinary or reprehensible” circumstances were not required to legitimise blocking supply, and the Herald suggested this new tack was itself “reprehensible”.
After Connor’s demise, the Herald changed its tune and declared “Fraser must act”. Yet even then, he did not have an easy run. As Whitlam sought to tough out the supply crisis, the Liberal leader had a grim battle of his own keeping control of skittish backbenchers, while the breakaway Liberal Movement condemned his actions.
Sections of the media also remained nervous, the Age urging the Liberals to back down and the Brisbane Courier-Mail pleading repeatedly for compromise. W.J. Sharp, managing director of Jennings Industries, thought the political uncertainty bad for business confidence, telling the National Times:
“I am in favour of passing supply … I believe the story that the business community was urging the opposition to stop supply was a complete myth and ought to be scotched. If a survey of business people had been done one month ago, I am convinced that the vote would have been overwhelmingly against the Liberal Party doing what it did. My own recollection, from conversations in the last few weeks with dozens of businessmen, is that only one executive was in favour.”
Among the media, there was a growing belief that Fraser had missed the boat. The Bulletin portrayed him as the “man in a muddle”. The British Economist thought blocking supply had “begun to look like a smart tactic which went astray”.
What overcame this ruling class fragmentation was not any of the conspiracies running at the time. It was Fraser’s determined mobilisation. We’re used to the idea that our side in the struggle must mobilise or face defeat – “If you don’t fight you lose”. But the other side faces the same imperative.

Conspiracy theories about dismissal obscure more important things

Reviewing my chapter on Australia in a recently released book, Fighting on all fronts: popular resistance in the Second World War, Jeff Sparrow cites my statement that “the great majority of Australians would endorse the war effort on the simple grounds that a Japanese invasion must be avoided”.
He then remarks: “[O’Lincoln] dismisses this on the basis of the recently established scholarly consensus that Japan never intended to invade and lacked the resources to do so. It’s not an altogether satisfactory response. After all, ordinary workers could not have known Japan’s weakness at the time. If they did believe an occupation imminent, what attitude should they have taken?”
In the introduction to my book Australia’s Pacific war, I wrote:
“People ask me if I would have fought in the war. There were undoubtedly parts of the war worth fighting. I’m for armed struggle against imperialism, and on that basis would have supported the Chinese Red Army’s war to drive out all the colonisers, Japanese and Western, from China.
“In Australia, people whose politics were close to mine – socialist supporters of Leon Trotsky – favoured armed resistance to a Japanese occupation, but conducted independently of the Australian state. This seems to me correct in principle. However … the Japanese had neither the intention nor the capability of invading Australia.
“The war was not primarily about defending the Australian people, but rather was an imperialist venture. I would not have supported that.” I hope this clarifies my position (which seems a lot like Jeff’s), though I agree the questions remain vexed.

On the threat of Japanese invasion in WWII

This article is based on a chapter from <a href="http://www.bookmarksbookshop.co.uk/view/41132/Fighting+On+All+Fronts+%253A+Popular+resistance+in+the+Second+World+War">Fighting on all fronts: popular resistance in the Second World War</a>, edited by Donny Gluckstein. The book will have its <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/1065468690148759/">Australian launch on 21 August</a> at the New International Bookshop, Trades Hall, Melbourne.
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Histories of wartime Japan in English portray Japan as a monolithic entity, with the population united behind the militaristic goals of the state. The kamikaze pilots symbolise this perspective – young men eager to die for the emperor.
It is well documented that the Japanese state and military cast a heavy shadow over the whole society, imposing uniformity from above from the time they invaded Manchuria in 1931 until surrender in 1945. What is little known or reported in English is the resistance against the increasing militarism, exacerbated by the deprivation, misery and devastation of ordinary lives.
The resistance was both collective and individual as the state’s war of aggression was also waged against its own population. Left wing activists, workers, unionists and minorities such as Koreans and burakujumin (ethnically Japanese but considered outcasts) were particularly targeted. But the banning of left wing groups, the forced amalgamation of unions into an industrial association, Sanpo (Patriotic Industrial Association), and the gaoling and torturing of political and union activists, did not stop the resistance.
There are numerous examples of individual resistance from the military, including within the ranks of the kamikaze pilots, by peasants, Koreans forced into slave labour in the mines, workers and the intelligentsia. The resistance took the form of violent struggle, workplace sabotage and absenteeism and activists continuing their activism in the form of poetry, graffiti, jokes and publications.
Resistance in general society
Despite constant repression of left wing cultural activities, intellectuals and artists still found ways to protest. Dissident journals were published monthly until the war ended. One village performance included the anti-militarist commentary, “I don’t understand the guys that send you off to war with a cheer. No one comes back alive. Instead of cheering they would be better off saying the Buddhist death rites”.
Cultural circles in factories and villages allowed the illegal Communist Party and the left wing of the union movement to operate. This gave them an avenue for disseminating anti-war and revolutionary ideas.
The mood of the public was hostile to the government and the emperor. Police records from 1942 show that people were arrested for stating in conversation that the emperor should be tossed into the snow “like the Russian revolutionaries did with the tsar”. People also directed their rage at the military – residents whose homes had been burnt followed the car of a military officer shouting: “This damage is because of you military men!”
Workers’ resistance
As the war ground on, lack of food and poor wages and working conditions sparked resistance. Strikes were common. In 1939, there were 1,120 reported strikes. Although the number declined to 417 in 1943, the number of workers participating in strikes and other acts of resistance increased.
Sabotage was frequent. A general reported in July 1944 that an estimated 10 per cent of the aircraft manufactured in Japan were defective. Sabotage by workers at a Hitachi factory resulted in a 30 percent decline in production. Go slow measures were also common.
Absenteeism was high – around 10 per cent in 1943, rising to an average of 15 per cent in mid-1944. In April 1943, it was reported that 44 percent of women workers in the Kawasaki Aeroplane Factory had been absent from work. High school and university students conscripted to work in one Tokyo factory retaliated at being punished for stealing food by rotating work groups so that one group was always absent, ensuring that no finished products could be completed.
Dissolution of the union movement
Elements of the union movement had been active in opposing the war and militarism, but by 1937 many trade unions had limited their industrial actions and virtually stopped functioning as unions. By July 1940, the peak union federation had dissolved, as had most of the unaffiliated unions. The unions had been forced to become part of Sanpo, which was overseen by the police. Through this and other organisations, the authorities controlled 80 percent of the workforce.
Sanpo organised every workshop with the objective of compelling workers to submit unconditionally to forced labour, overwork and low wages. Through Sanpo, workers were indoctrinated with the ideology that the enterprise was an extension of Japan’s unique family system.
But not all unions disappeared. One of the unions that resisted dissolution was the Printers Union, which transformed itself into the Printers Club. The Printers Union stated that it wanted to “show the determination of Japan’s entire union movement”. The director of the club, Shibata Keiichiro, said: “Our members thought that no matter how much strain we were put under, we had to ensure the club survived.
“The right wing trade union officials dissolved the organisations and cooperated with the military. They sold the workers out to the enemy and because of that many other organisations were forcibly dissolved … If workers stood firm together and fought we would raise our class consciousness …”
The police ordered the club to dissolve in March 1940, and the members held a fake dissolution party in August. In October, the club had established a range of activity clubs, including travel clubs. The Printers Club continued to meet, print materials and conduct political education until most of the leading male members were arrested in 1942. The club was then run by women members.
Resistance inside the military
Unrest among soldiers was more significant than people realised. Soldiers developed tricks to escape fighting. In 1939, soldiers taken prisoner in China formed groups demanding improvements to the living standards of soldiers. They distributed propaganda to Chinese soldiers and peasants, which outlined the anti-war activities of Japanese people.
Diaries and letters show many tokkotai – conscripted young men, often university students, from elite families – loathed what they were doing and were critical of the war.
One pilot, Hayashi Tadao, begged his brother to lend him Lenin’s The State and Revolution, which had been banned. He read it secretly and concluded that Japan’s war was an imperialist war. He wrote in his diary in October 1941: “To die in the war, to die at the demand of the nation – I have no intention to praise it; it is a great tragedy”.
A sailor wrote in his diary: “This journey of ours is meaningless from the point of view of military strategy, and will cause no damage to the enemy. Our purpose is to prove the meaninglessness of such an action, and for this we are going to die”.
Other groups such as the Japanese People’s Anti-war League, formed in 1942, appealed to Japanese soldiers to surrender or refuse to fight and to participate in the anti-war movement.
These examples challenge the hegemonic vision of Japan’s wartime population as fully supporting the war effort. The Japanese elite feared the spreading of such resistance. Navy minister Yonai Mitusmasa commented: “The reason why I have advocated the end of the war is not that I was afraid of the enemy’s attack, nor was it because of the atomic bombs or the Soviet entry into the war. It was more than anything else because I was afraid of domestic conditions”.

Kaye Broadbent

The Japanese anti-war resistance during WWII

Old fears die hard. In May, US secretary of state John Kerry expressed alarm that the Islamic State was “trying to brainwash” Western youth.
This isn’t surprising. When we see a steady stream of dissident youth from Islamic backgrounds appearing on TV expressing hostility to Western culture – from its political fiascos to its military disasters – middle brow leaders like Kerry need excuses as to why.
With often charismatic social critics choosing to defect to the enemy rather than opt for the idiocy of, say, the Australian parliament, the people at the top of society need someone to blame. Who better to target than the evil practitioners of brainwashing?
Except that brainwashing is a myth.
Its origins were in the Korean War. A similar situation to today’s emerged during that bitter conflict. Some US soldiers were persuaded to defect by sophisticated jailers who displayed a disturbing knowledge of US society. North Korean and, later, Chinese fighters had inflicted defeats on their enemy. The US soldiers were at a psychological disadvantage when confronting their guards.
The jailers did use clever interrogation techniques, such as getting new arrivals to write autobiographical sketches. From these they identified political pressure points. As analyst George Keckeisen wrote: “They knew American slang and knew regional customs and issues. Most important, they understood the value of racial and social differences as tools to disunite the POWs”.
The impact of these methods was dramatic: 21 US soldiers refused repatriation in 1954. Even more shocking, they denounced the US government.
It wasn’t brutality that achieved this. “Peer pressure and reasoning were the preferred tactics”, wrote Keckeisen.
These methods were no secret. Red Army fighters had used similar techniques to organise Japanese prisoners into anti-fascist units in China during World War II. But US strategists showed little enthusiasm for learning from communists.
Instead the US set up resistance groups among the prisoners, with names like Free Hearts of America, to combat the non-existent brainwashing. They presented members with citations for resisting (alleged) mistreatment by the jailers. But whatever the effect of this, brainwashing remained a myth. And after the war ended, US Army and academic studies concluded as much.
It’s time to bury the myth. There is enough evil in warfare, without imagining more.

Brainwashing: the creation of a myth

As the nightmare of the Great War subsided, the horrors of the peace replaced it.
So many bore terrible physical and mental wounds; the press called these the price of victory. Many others bore terrible economic wounds.
Our rulers rushed to create diversions before the anger against them boiled over. They held out the hope of a land “fit for heroes”, in which 9,000 in NSW alone were encouraged to go bush. These adventures took the form of special farming schemes for veterans. They were allotted small and marginal blocks of land.
This catered to popular notions that life on farms was happy and healthy. It also appealed to workers’ forlorn hopes of being “their own boss”. The authorities gave little heed to environmental dangers such as salinity. They were indifferent to the fate of the Aborigines already scratching a living on the fringes of these areas and now displaced again. But there was no way for them to ignore the financial crisis that soon afflicted many returned diggers.
The veterans wrote angry and eloquent letters. Arthur Calwell of Balranald told the NSW Lands Department: “Before taking up this property I myself owed no man a shilling … Today I’m practically insolvent, ashamed to walk down the street.” George Mathews wrote from Dubbo that he “had to walk off the place with nothing, and now you ask for payments”.
Local authorities squawked that several of these amateur farmers displayed “Bolshevik tendencies” – after the farmers had done nothing more than form an association in NSW. Few settlers actually took radical steps, even when the government seized their cows. Some stayed and suffered, some walked off the land.
However the soldier-settlers went at it, these schemes couldn’t contain the problems of a traumatised generation.
Unionists resisted in Fremantle and Townsville. They drove out scabs in a mobilisation by much of the population of Fremantle, led by returned soldiers familiar with bayonets. One wharfie was killed, but police, the premier and the scabs were driven out of Fremantle. As historian Bobbie Oliver relates in War and Peace in Western Australia:
“The crowd soon swelled to about 1,000 men, women and children, including several returned soldiers in uniform. The battle for possession of the wharf went on for over an hour, by which time the crowd had increased to three or four times its previous size … For the next few days, Fremantle was for all intents and purposes controlled by the lumpers [dockers]. Twenty-six police and seven lumpers had been injured …
“[A] series of riots involving returned soldiers and lumpers rocked Fremantle … a large crowd, several thousand strong, gathered between the Federal Hotel and the post office. Two constables had been set upon in High Street. The armed officers who went to their aid were also attacked.”
In Townsville during a bitter 1919 strike, writes Terrence Cutler, “300 men appeared at the yards armed with sticks and palings. They tore down the gates, drove the cattle out, cut up saddles and poisoned the drinking water.” After the police arrested prominent union leaders, and when workers marched to the lock-up demanding their release, the police opened fire.
“When several constables attempted to mingle with the crowd to note proceedings they were mobbed, and forced to take refuge in the bank … The main street of Townsville was in the possession of the meaties and their allies.”
As Mick Armstrong notes, “the police were forced to release union organiser Pierce Carney. The Queensland Labor government rushed police reinforcements to Townsville by rail to restore ‘order’.”
The birth of Anzac Day
But from 1916, the seeds of another evil tradition were sprouting: an ideological way to promote war in the guise of helping servicemen. 25 April was officially named Anzac Day. Australian troops marched in London, and a sports day was held in the Australian camp in Egypt. In the Sydney march, vehicles carried wounded soldiers from Gallipoli attended by nurses.
It sounded benign and reeked of evil. “For the remaining years of the war”, writes the Australian War Memorial, “Anzac Day was used as an occasion for patriotic rallies and recruiting campaigns”. In other words, to gather cannon fodder.
The ALP should have opposed this trend; after all, it claimed the mantle of anti-war party. Yet its political line contained deep contradictions, vacillating between defence and “anti-militarism”. The same ALP-aligned Brisbane Daily Standard that declared “Labor abhors war” also insisted that war was a fact that “must be faced” and workers must be mobilised for it. It got worse. According to the Westralian Worker, the official organ of the WA ALP, it was “supreme folly” to talk of peace.
This hypocrisy resulted from the nationalism that replaced so much of its initial socialism. For this, Labor bears a terrible responsibility. “The Labor Party is synonymous with ‘Australian’”, said the Tocsin in Melbourne. Indeed, Labor set the nationalist pace. Labor declared the day’s official status and told of how the “world marvelled at the men of Anzac”.
Based on this jingoistic stance, most Laborites could drift into an uneasy but persistent relationship with the key Anzac organisation, the RSL. Because the latter had up to 150,000 members at the end of the war, around 80 percent of them workers, Labor and the unions couldn’t afford to ignore it, especially with some veterans returning from the war with their former industrial loyalties weakened.
Complaints in the ’20s that Anzac Day had been “hijacked” by the conservatives were futile. Labor had helped the process.
Resistance to militarism
Not that there was no opposition.
Australian forces were dramatically affected by mass soldiers’ revolts across Europe in 1918. The troops held meetings, then found ways to disrupt parades. More than 100 were punished. But none launched measures comparable to the Fremantle and Townsville riots of 1919.
Back home, the Communists didn’t shrink. The Communist paper Workers’ Weekly argued for workers to oppose the commemoration by attending May Day and other workers’ celebrations instead. It published a letter from a “Class-Conscious Digger” in 1928, who declared:
“April 25 has become a day of imperial boasting and military boosting … On Anzac Day, capitalists, politicians and priests will don their silk hats and decorations and come out and chant about Anzac in order to build up a new military tradition in Australia, to get ready new Anzacs for recruiting, to prepare young Australia for another bloody massacre.”
Well said, but there were too few of these.
Similar problems returned during the Second World War. The country’s most celebrated anti-militarist, John Curtin, insisted: “We are the Anzac breed. Our men stormed Gallipoli, they were the rats of Tobruk.” Here was the famed anti-conscriptionist implementing conscription. Most workers thought this a military necessity to repel a Japanese invasion. Curtin, who had access to broken Japanese codes, knew there was no such threat.
There was resistance to the Anzac nonsense even in the right wing atmosphere of the 1950s. Provoked by an RSL campaign against the Communist Party, student journalist Geoffrey Haveers attacked the “yearly pageant of national necrophilia” and attracted surprisingly little complaint. Alan Seymour followed with his 1958 anti-Anzac play, The One Day of the Year. In this way, the intellectual left opened the way for a much more radical critique of militarism in the 1960s.
During the Vietnam War, protesters managed to paint P-E-A-C-E across the front of the Melbourne shrine. In the war’s aftermath, a significant minority began to consider the offensive foolishness of telling the world that the Anzacs fought for “freedom” when the Gallipoli fiasco was obviously an indefensible invasion of Turkey.
On 26 January 1988, Australia’s “Celebration of a Nation”, marking two centuries of white Australia, ended in a debacle. Demonstrations by Indigenous people and their supporters finally branded Australia Day with its fitting and enduring title: Invasion Day. Chastened white patriots had to beat a retreat, and their thinking focused now on turning Anzac Day into the preeminent day of nationalist celebration.
Yet Anzac Day faced a demographic threat. As service personnel gradually died off, the numbers marching declined; singer Eric Bogle’s lyrics haunted the RSL: “The band plays Waltzing Matilda, and the old men still answer the call. 
	But as year follows year, more old men disappear. Someday no one will march there at all.”
The day has revived, based on its government funding and family appeal, replete with religious claptrap and vintage cars. It’s probably easier to sell all this “Anzackery” to well-meaning families than it was to sombre old diggers who knew the reality of war.
Today, new ideological battles are arising. Prominent historians have unsettled conservatives with a challenging 2010 book called What’s wrong with Anzac, while Peter Stanley, the former senior historian at the Australian War Memorial, has led the foundation of online information source HonestHistory.net.au.
The Victorian Society for the Study of Labour History held a conference this year called “Fighting against war”, while historian Robert Bollard has brought a new focus on class analysis in his In the shadow of Gallipoli.

Anzac Day is a right-wing invention

It’s one of the great frauds of our time. Malcolm Fraser, wrecker of Medibank and enemy of trade unions, turned into a cuddly stuffed toy. Mourners spoke glowingly of how he had “embraced the left”.
Ever the chameleon. Intellectually, Fraser was a traditional conservative, who defended standard institutions; an admirer of Keynesianism who discovered in 1976-78 that Keynesian economics had broken down by the time he was ready to grab power. This led to monetarism, which led to economic rationalism – and from there it was just a linguistic jump to the neoliberalism we know so well.
Fraser wasn’t theoretically committed to any of them. He just wanted to be prime minister. In old age he returned to something like Keynesianism, because it fitted the sensibilities of the green and leftish Labor voters who gave him an audience.
For decades this fakery was about winning and holding power. More recently, no doubt, it was about the view of posterity.
Is this all too harsh? Didn’t the man stand for the rights of refugees, along with land rights for Aborigines and the whole social revolution of multiculturalism?
The recent stands on refugees were real enough, but they cost the retired grazier little. The test for a politician is what he does in power. Fraser’s approach to refugees from Vietnam in the ’70s fitted neatly into anti-communist efforts to increase the right wing mood in society – right alongside his boycott of the Moscow Olympics.
I spent some of the Fraser government years scratching anti-refugee stickers off lamp posts. The Nazis who put them up could relax knowing the government wasn’t campaigning against them. And the stand on refugees is the best part of Fraser.
Aborigines discovered that the seeming land rights champion used his credibility to sell them out. Facing pleas to boycott the 1982 Commonwealth Games due to the level of racism in Queensland, African states declined because they were impressed by Fraser’s rhetoric on tour in Africa.
Nationally, Fraser intervened to block alliances, forcing the cancellation of a national campaign linking Aboriginal and anti-uranium activists. Aboriginal leader Galarrwuy Yunupingu described what he and his comrades faced from the Fraser government: ”They threatened us. It was long, tough and hard.”
Multiculturalism, closely associated with Fraser, was another deception. It brought genuine benefits for migrants, and we have been right to defend it against right wingers like John Howard.
But as Dr Robert Tierney argues, at bottom it was a strategy to contain an industrial-social rebellion that was emerging among immigrants in the factories and the inner suburbs. The strategy involved infusing each ethnic group with a monolithic identity, which in turn would take a lead from selected leaders, media and such.
It was better than traditional assimilation policies, but still designed to prop up the status quo. The relative quiescence of middle class Muslim leaders in the face of recent provocations owes something to Malcolm Fraser.
And now for the bad news. As minister for the army, he bore major responsibility for the Vietnam War. This included introducing conscription, and presiding over atrocities – at arm’s length, of course. Peter Barham, a former SAS sergeant, has confirmed these happened – including water boarding.
But Fraser’s biggest outrages occurred in the ’70s. We will never forget the dismissal, echoing as it does other political crimes such as governor Philip Game’s sacking of NSW premier Jack Lang. After Fraser took power, Liberal election ads displayed a visceral conservative arrogance toward Labor in office: “Three years of so-called working man’s politicians groping around trying to handle something they were never capable of doing: run the country.”
The subversion of democracy went deeper than it seemed. In normal times, the capitalist ruling class is divided on most issues. Only in crises does it mobilise in a bloc. So it was in 1975. It was Fraser’s tireless campaigning that mobilised key power brokers on a class-war footing. While important for the actual sacking, governor-general John Kerr was a minor player overall.
Even more fundamental than the attacks on democracy was Fraser’s onslaught on social programs. Some of this was just the usual budget cuts to be expected from conservative politicians. But when you added them up, they amounted to a reactionary social program.
And the attacks on Medibank struck at the heart of workers’ hopes for a better society. Their anger was expressed in massive general strikes, contained only by the manoeuvres of trade union officials, most importantly Bob Hawke, who preferred social peace to winning battles.
In the aftermath, the way was open for Fraser to launch further attacks on the unions. These failed to break them, but the battles wore them out. It fell to Hawke in 1983 to strangle the traditions of Australia’s mass trade union militancy. But Hawke’s Accord didn’t fall from the sky. It had its origins in Fraser’s 1982 wage freeze.
All too typical of Malcolm Fraser in power.
[Tom O’Lincoln is the author of Years of rage: social conflicts in the Fraser era.]

The real legacy of Malcolm Fraser

It was brazen and insulting that Queen Elizabeth’s Christmas message dwelt on the truces in the trenches during World War I. Her predecessors and their ilk sent millions of people to their death despite the truces, which the royals and their henchmen were eager to stop.
It was also misleading. She was talking about one case, which could be made to seem unique. But contrary to the impression created by the Queen, there were many truces organised by rank and file soldiers. They were endemic for a time. The authorities hated any hint of workers acting for peace, and tried to stop them.
Historian Tony Ashworth, in his book Trench Warfare, quotes a British officer touring the trenches in France, who reported that he was “astonished to observe German soldiers walking about within rifle range behind their own lines. Our own men appeared to take no notice. I privately made up my mind to do away with that sort of thing when we took over; such things should not be allowed. These people evidently did not know there was a war on. Both sides apparently believed in the principle of ‘live and let live’.”
How was this possible despite fierce repression from officers on both sides? After a few months, military tactics in 1914 shifted from highly mobile actions to trench warfare. Non-aggression deals happened almost as quickly; by Christmas they were widespread. But these were stamped out easily. Orders were issued that the soldiers “were in France to fight and not to fraternise with the enemy”, several soldiers were court-martialled and whole battalions were punished.
So the soldiers moved to new tactics. These were built on the principle of shoot-over-their heads. Activists on both sides noted when their counterparts would do during certain things such as pause for meals. Formally or informally, the troops negotiated when and where firing took place. The other side was tipped off, but one’s own officers were kept in the dark. To them it all just looked like aggressive military action.
A British officer reported what he saw when facing a Saxon unit of the German army: “We heard a lot of shouting and went out to negotiate. We found our men and the Germans standing on their respective parapets. Suddenly a salvo arrived but did no damage. Naturally both sides got down and our men started swearing at the Germans, when all at once a brave German got on his parapet and shouted out: ‘We are very sorry about that; we hope no one was hurt. It is not our fault. It is that damned Prussian artillery.’”
This exercise in mass solidarity was ended by new military tactics that the rank and file couldn’t easily manipulate. But that wasn’t the end of the story. These experiences must have been in many soldiers’ living memory when the unrest began that led to revolutions in Germany and Russia in 1917-18.

150 years of Karl Marx’s Capital

Remembering the 1964 Republican National Convention

The forging of Australian imperialism

Conspiracy theories about dismissal obscure more important things

On the threat of Japanese invasion in WWII

The Japanese anti-war resistance during WWII

Brainwashing: the creation of a myth

Anzac Day is a right-wing invention

The real legacy of Malcolm Fraser

The Queen’s insulting Christmas message

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