I feel afraid. And I’m not a person who feels afraid of much. The world is at war, and our leaders are either too stupid, too addicted to power, and too coerced into silence or complicity to speak up.
When will the Australian government ever grow the balls to stand up, and step away? This obsession with America, with this ludicrous allyship to a country that brazenly commits war crimes has to stop. Albo has been wallflowering around the world, waiting to meet with a president who couldn’t give a F about him. Or Australia. Apart from Pine Gap and the ludicrous $368 billion AUKUS contract for a submarine that no one wants and will never arrive, we’re a blip. We have to stop living in the shadow of a fabled democracy that no longer exists, and start focusing on how to better grow our own. We need to start calling out atrocities, not be complicit in them. We have to stop aligning with the world’s greatest bully, Trump, and leave the toxic relationship we have with America.
The news over the weekend that America had backed Israel by bombing three key Iranian nuclear sites was sobering. And predictable. It was always going to happen, there’s oil there. A shitload. Old men like Trump say they’re fighting for peace, but we know it’s oil. And oil is power. (I just can’t imagine a world where war is fuelled by the control of solar panels.)
The image of Trump, in his silly red MAGA hat posing with his cronies in the ‘situation room’ looked like a scene from a Will Ferrell film. Are these really the people who will decide the fate of the planet? It would appear so. The capitalist oligarchy is on ketamine. Dissociation from humanity reigns supreme, and in this real-time game of Fortnite, the decision-makers are clearly detached from the experience of people on the ground.
The people who have died. The people who will die. The people who always die. Because the powerbrokers are rich and privileged and the victims of war never are. They’re poor. They’re small. They’re many. And the last people standing? They’re fodder for body bags and mass graves, too many to be named or marked. And the men who make the decisions? They get statues and films and glory and safety and wealth. And protection.
We live in a present underwritten by false narratives of the past. In George Orwell’s 1984, a book about the future, that now lives ironically in the past, there is possibly one of the most biting observations of power. ‘Who controls the present, controls the past’. It’s why we are where we are. The justification for war takes root in the retold lies of powerful old men. I say this because powerful old women aren’t sending missiles into civilian populations in their attempt to kill their way to ‘peace’.
According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, on the Doomsday Clock it’s 89 seconds to midnight. But that was January this year. I fear that when one of the scientists wakes up this morning, he’ll have to move us closer to oblivion, and we are now only seconds away from global disaster.
The greatest risk when it comes to nuclear warheads is America (and Russia). They hold almost 85% of the world’s nuclear weaponry. The existence and proliferation of nuclear weaponry created to ‘defend safety’, has not made us safer. It brings us closer to midnight. To the forever end of safety. For some reason we accept this as the way things are and believe ‘peace’ and an end to war is the radical idea. I have never been able to fathom that mindset.
Twenty-two years ago over 700 women gathered on a hill in the Byron Shire to spell out NO WAR with their naked bodies. I can still remember the feeling of the grass on my skin and my sisters beside me. Maybe it’s time again. Except this time it’s not just 700 women.
It’s all of us.
- Mandy Nolan’s Soapbox column has appeared in The Echo for almost 23 years. The personal and the political often meet here; she’s also been the Greens federal candidate since before the last two federal elections. The Echo’s coverage of political issues will remain as comprehensive and fair as it has ever been, outside this opinion column which, as always, contains Mandy’s personal opinions only.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
