ICC's
gonna get
Puny & Heil

Autistic Australia
Harold Hark
28 June 2002

The usual right-wing defence of excessive law and order is this: "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about." For the non-dissenting, law-abiding citizens who smugly throw this in your face, the logical extension of their argument is to accept total state control over every aspect of life.

Yet this standard conversation stopper went missing during the ludicrous "debate" over Australia's ratification of the International Criminal Court.

The reasons are obvious. Bob Charles, Illiberal MP for LaTrobe even spelled it out:

"If Australia has the right to try its own people for its own crimes, who is going to try Philip Ruddock for genocide because he happens to oversee a department which locks up asylum seekers?

"Nobody is going to do that in Australia, but what's to say that the International Criminal Court won't ultimately decide that it's not a bad idea to put the Australian Government in the dock for genocide?" (Michael Gordon, "Sceptics go a' courting" The Age, 15/6/02)

Mind boggling, eh? Almost childlike are these Illiberals. They are constantly blowing their rehearsed deceit by blurting the bleeding obvious. Kind of like Homer Simpson, who begs himself not to let the cat out of the bag and then goes ahead and lets it out. Must be enough to make Machiavelli turn over in his grave.

John "The Trog" Stone asserts John Howard agreed to break the deadlock and ratify because he was afraid of "the political egg that the government (and particularly the two ministers chiefly responsible, Alexander Downer and Daryl Williams) would have temporarily had on its collective face if it had belatedly backed off." (The Australian, 24/6/02)

(His use of the word "temporarily" is important here. He knows that within a few days the zombie majority would have forgotten it even happened, or if they remembered, would not have given a damn whether Howard had ratified or not.)

This, despite the intervention of Defence Force chief Admiral Chris Barrie and other top brass who pressured Howard to back the ICC.

Barrie cited the atrocities in Rwanda. "(Our soldiers) were simply appalled at having to stand around and watch atrocities being committed and then realising that nothing was ever going to be done about that." The soldiers involved in the UN peacekeeping operation were not authorised to use force except in self-defence. "Many of them watched these atrocities...and they were powerless to do anything...and psychologically that was very damaging."

As for the trumped up fears of Australian soldiers being hauled before the ICC for war crimes, Barrie said: "The way I read the system that's proposed, the only person in the whole defence force who might be exposed to action in the ICC is the Chief of the Defence Force himself. It's he who commands the operation, it's he who gives the orders." (Brendan Nicholson, The Sunday Age, 23/6/02.)

Perhaps Stone was unaware of Barrie's view and chose a quiet moment later on to wipe the egg off his own face. Regardless of the obvious reason to sign on the dotted line: an end to the free ride for tyrants and genocide, Stone speaks for all those who want their sovereignty kept safe from the prying eyes of international infidels. People like Frankenstein's wife with a mean streak, Bronwyn "Gnasher" Bishop and Sluggo Abbott's A.I. twin, Sophie "RoboLib" Panopoulos. He speaks for the xenophobes for whom the world out there is no more than a frightening figment of imagination. Even when some in the world arrive here, as with the asylum seekers, it and they still do not count. They are locked away and consciously forgotten in the isolationist island continent that might as well be under a rock.

One of the most moving aspects of the live television coverage of the turn of the century back there in 1999/2000 was the real-time chance to see people across the globe separated only by distance and time. For the first time in history, human beings were explicitly made aware of the simultaneous existence of other human beings.

But this mind blowing realisation passed Stone and his troglodyte cronies by. For them Australia is all there is and beyond the skin there is nothing.

A recent Nicholson cartoon seemed to symbolise this autistic response to the world and to The Other. John Howard is saying: "I can't decide whether to be a grumpy old xenophobe or a founding father of global justice..." In the end, he decided on the latter, but not out of principle.

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