The darkness descending

It ought to have felt good to be alive in Sydney on the long weekend. The breeze wasn’t too cold and there was enough winter sun to warm an old marsupial’s back. I sat at my favourite chair outside the Brushtail Cafe skimming through the ever-shrinking Sydney Morning Herald and felt despondent. Everywhere, things were spiralling downwards.

And I remembered the 1960s and ‘70s. Capitalist, communist, or somewhere in between, you felt optimism in the wind. In spite of the Cold, Korean and Vietnam wars and a bunch of other little conflicts, hope was abroad. We were all fighting over the future, but everybody agreed it was better up ahead somewhere, real soon now.

And I thought about the Hippy Trail to London. Australian kids were driving there in old Kombi vans, or crossing the Indian subcontinent hitchhiking and taking the local coaches. They went through Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq, Syria, and on into Turkey and then on up through the Balkans. Personally, I never took the trip, but I knew plenty who did. They say you met the odd dodgy local along the way, but almost everybody was lovely.

Nobody even thinks of trying it nowadays. Almost everywhere along the Hippy Trail west of the India-Pakistan border, the days of possibility and hope are over. Between the drone strikes, the mad mullahs, the barking-mad Zionists, the sectarian violence and the spiral into warlordism and poverty, the darkness is descending.

It isn’t that militant Shia Islam is in the ascendency. Hell, Iran is, compared to most places in the region, a model of stability. Not my sort of people, but they have a functioning state and a democracy of sorts. Alas their oil has almost run out and they live under the constant threat of nuclear attack from the US and Israel.

Afghanistan is a basket case. It will probably fall apart a few hours after the last NATO soldier flies out. They say President Karzai’s chopper is on standby 24/7 and his Green Card never leaves his pocket. The whole Western intervention, with its idle media chatter about improving the lot of women and building a functioning democracy was always a feckless and cynical ploy. When the last of our professional backpackers with guns fly out they’ll abandon the hapless women who “came out” and a few hundred thousand people who supported the Karzai Government.

Soon these people will be making their way south towards the Indian Ocean and the hope of asylum with their (false) Australian friends, desperate and stateless. Joining the exodus will be an increasing flood of Tamils from Sri Lanka. If they don’t drown on the voyage we’ll incarcerate them in our ever-swelling concentration camps. And if Tony Abbott and the vile Scott Morrison come to power? Well, to hear them tell it they’ll “turn back the boats”. To where? With what? Machine-gun fire? Drone strikes?

Throughout the 1970s it was possible to look back on George Orwell’s 1984 and feel that his vision was altogether too bleak. Nineteen eighty-four arrived I breathed a sigh of relief. And then came the drone strikes and the Wikileak of the 2007 Baghdad helicopter gunship massacre, and suddenly Orwell looked prophetic again.

April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere […] Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him […] then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank […] audience shouting with laughter […] a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it […] then the helicopter planted a 20-kilogram bomb in among them terrific flash … a wonderful shot of a child’s arm going up up up right up into the air, a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up, and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids […]

The streams of desperate people setting sail for Australia are a sort of punishment inflicted on us for supporting the wrong side in three wars. We should never have backed the Sinhalese chauvinist Sri Lankan Government in the civil war.

Once the war had broken out – it was the result of centuries of oppression – we ought to have backed the Tamils, but, like the rest of the West, we labelled them “terrorists”.

They said things would get better in that country once the government had won; that the usual suspension of rights that characterises war, and particularly civil war, would naturally come to an end. But it hasn’t happened. Things are going backwards, there’s less democracy and human rights, not more – a situation that isn’t going to improve anytime soon.

And Iraq is heading towards a civil war that will pit the Sunni minority in the west of the country – they’ll be backed by al-Qaeda, Saudi Arabia and, semi-covertly, the United States – against the Shiite majority backed by Iran, Syria and Lebanon’s Hezbollah. Tragic thing that. Under Saddam Hussein Iraq was more united, and certainly more prosperous than it is today.