[Marxism] Re: Australian troops back in East Timor

[Nick Fredman <srcsra@xxxxxxxxxx>]

As the one who's asked (several times over the years) for any
*evidence* that the East Timor intervention had strengthened
pro-imperialist sentiment in Australia, I'll comment on the alleged
evidence Tony Hartin offered, from the Australian Defence Department's
so-called 'Community Consultation" in 2001 (and note in passing Greg
Adler makes the same old assertions without any evidence at all), and
try not to repeat the (entirely correct) points brought up by Ben,
Michael and Bob.

Tom O'Lincoln quotes this document thus:

"Representatives of groups which do not generally favour defence
spending seemed to be content to retain the existing level of funding.
We believe the success of the East Timor deployment, a cause that was
favoured by these groups, had much to do with this view"

And goes on to conclude:

"And what the report on the consultations says is that the type of
person or group
that usually turns up to lobby against the military did not do so this
time. They had been neutralised by the 1999 Timor events".

But from what Tom quoted he is totally stretching the *assumptions* the
Defence bureaucrats are making from their "findings" into *fact*. The
people who turned up to meetings or wrote submissions for this report
were totally self-selected, and were thus as representative as those
involved in those commercial TV current affairs ring-in and internet
polls that "find" e.g. that 99% of people would like young offenders to
be flogged in public. I couldn't see in the report at
http://www.defence.gov.au/consultation2/cctpaper.htm if there was any
comparison between this consultation and any previous ones re:
anti-militarists and anti-imperialists turning up to lobby, besides the
assumption Tom directly quoted - perhaps he could be more specific.
It's more likely that the group of people who were motivated to be
involved, or heard about it at all (I certainly didn't), were on the
whole biased towards the military and government policy to start with.

There's a number of dubious, at least very incomplete, conclusions in
this report, e.g: "There is strong support for the US alliance and the
majority view is that we should strive for as much self-reliance as
possible within the context of the alliance". I'm sure there is, among
some people, but the a much more representative (because of a random
sample) 2005 Lowy Institute report
http://www.lowyinstitute.org/Publication.asp?pid=236 found that 57% of
people were "very worried" or fairly worried" about US foreign policy,
a lot more than were worried about e.g. "China's growing power" (37%):
a finding that surprised many pundits.

Having said that, I'm sure this report, even though it was a marketing
exercise rather than valid research, does point to some real
sentiments, and that the 1999 intervention did have "some*
imperialist-illusion generating effect. But I think the evidence points
to the effects of the intervention being *polarising*. I.e. among some
of the already conservative, pro-Howard layers it may have served to
get them "on message" about the new Australian interventionism, and
those who later wanted to see parallels with Iraq were happy to see
them, whatever the facts and logic. However for many other people (many
more I would argue) the events were an education in the history of
Australian imperialism and not a few were radicalised. The fact that
anti-war sentiment in Australia has been consistently a majority or
close to it since 2002, and that New Zealand, Spain and Portugal, which
had large both East Timor solidarity movements in 1999, and
*successful* anti-Iraq war movements, not to mention the high
correlation between the groups, activists, social layers and parties
involved in both campaigns, rather undercuts the unproven assertions
that the 1999 intervention had some dreadful overall pro-imperialist
effect (and let's not forget the fact it prevented the East Timorese
left and national liberation movements being exterminated).


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