My COVID-19-self-isolation reading for the last
few days has been a terrific new book by Terry Irving, The Fatal Lure of
Politics. It's the biography of a
remarkable intellectual, Vere Gordon Childe, who's definitely one of my heroes.
The long-rumoured report on Australian military atrocities in the Afghanistan war has just been released (and immediately kicked down the road by the national government). I have been thinking about why the Australian military were there in the first place. It's a familiar story: "forward defence", stop-them-over-there, Defend Democracy, our government's need for some violence to scare the voters with, and the same government's habit of doing whatever the American government wants done... But then, why do we have wars anyway?