Suppose They Gave A War and Nobody Came?
Jane Caro tweeted recently “Reviewing a national curriculum that
has only just begun to be rolled out is, as a friend put it, a case of
premature evaluation.” If only it were as simple as that.
If there was one thing our former PM Julia Gillard was passionate
about it was education, but like so many other great reforms of the
previous 6 years, the Abbott government seems determined to vandalise
our education system as well. As if its well publicised attacks on
higher education weren’t enough, the coalition has just published a
report recommending greater emphasis on ‘morals, values and
spirituality’ and ‘the contribution of western civilisation’ in the
national curriculum. As a student of history this fills me with dread.
The word ‘fascist’ is often used loosely, but the early indoctrination
of children is quite literally straight out of Mussolini’s playbook.
Of course moral crusaders of the calibre of Bernardi and Abetz
probably see themselves as having a mission to uphold the moral
standards of our society, even as they go about trying to degrade our
real values. Tolerance, understanding, generosity, and egalitarianism
are things of which we all should be proud, both as a nation and as
individuals. These are the true moral standards we should be teaching
our young. Instead we have a government which encourages bigotry,
divisiveness, racial hatred and fear. Pathetic, ignorant and cruel are
but a few adjectives which come to mind.
I have written elsewhere on the dangers we face from Christian
fundamentalism in our parliament. Imagine the religious authoritarianism
of Francoism let loose on Australian society and you wouldn’t be far
off. The separation of Church and State exists for a good reason. Aside
from the Guttenberg press, it remains arguably the greatest legacy of
the Enlightenment.
One needn’t delve too far into history to see the atrocities which
have been committed in the name of religion. While there are stand-out
examples in the inquisition and the counter-reformation, one would be
foolish to think we have advanced much. While religious war may have
cooled down in the west, it is still raging hot in the Middle East. Just
the other day I heard these words from a Kurdish Peshmerga fighter
(presumably one of Abbott’s ‘goodies’) “God willing, we will drive the
infidels from our lands.” Just when I thought I had a sense of right and
wrong in this latest war, this hit me like a ton of bricks.
Like Reagan before him, the Bush Jr. presidency was largely made
possible by the backing of Christian fundamentalist preachers who
whipped their congregations into a frenzy of fear, nationalism and moral
indignation, urging them to vote Republican, and we all know how that
worked out. A war on terror costing millions of Iraqi lives and
trillions of dollars, and a debt crisis from which the US may never
recover are just the tip of the iceberg.
Our Prime Minister’s summation of the situation in Iraq and Syria
brings to mind a certain Nazi propaganda film in which the French were
accused of ‘medieval barbarism’ for recruiting fighters from their
African colonies. Of course racism had had plenty of time to fester in
Germany from 1933 onwards. But seven years is a short time, and with the
memory of the war to end all wars still fresh in the imagination of millions, it beggars belief that it could all turn so bad, so quickly.
I have long believed that we could rid ourselves of war within a
generation by giving children everywhere a sound, publically funded,
secular, science-based education which promotes humanist values. While
social engineering on this scale is well out of the ambit of this (or
any) government’s short sighted vision, it’s wholly unsurprising that
Abbott, Pyne and co should want to shift the emphasis in education away
from critical thinking and back to the ‘three r’s’, anyway from human
geography and back to physical geography, away from multiculturalism and
back to Judeo-Christian orthodoxy.
Some will argue that wars are always waged by the rich and fought by
the poor, and certainly there is evidence that the military industrial
complex exists to serve its own ends anyway (or that of the bankers).
But what happens when soldiers refuse to fight? Notwithstanding the
horrors of a war which claimed 10 million lives and left 20 million
casualties, it’s worth remembering that WWI might have been fought to
the last man had the Kaiser’s troops not mutinied. Imagine if they’d all
refused to go to war in the first place? There is no greater threat to
tyranny than a well informed and educated populus.
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