A Think Piece

In today's Herald Sun, star columnist/pensioner Alan Howe, having just been informed that World War One is over, turns his attention to Australia's most recent military engagement, declaring that the Director of Military Prosecutions, Lyn McDade, who has charegd three soldiers in Afghanistan with manslaughter, "may well be the most dangerous woman in Australia."

Howe does note that the campaign against Brigadier McDade "is driven mostly by the puerile, angry and uneducated"; but on the other hand, much of the abuse "comes from big hearts". So that's all right then. When it comes to abuse and threats, it's the thought that counts. You see:

Brigadier McDade, 52, has spent her life in the law, which she knows very well. She has been a police prosecutor, deputy Northern Territory coroner and served as an army lawyer for many years.

But she has never been in a firefight with enemy determined to kill her, has never dragged back to camp a zipped-up body bag with a mate's limp, lifeless but still warm remains - and has never knocked on a suburban door to tell the occupants their son has been killed serving their country in some overseas hellhole. Like Afghanistan.

So we can all agree that her legal opinions are, essentially, worthless.

So anyway Howe goes on a bit about how disgraceful it is for Australian soldiers to be charged with anything and about how the Taliban are really, really bad people, so there's no way anyone fighting against them could ever do anything wrong, etc etc.

And then he identifies the crucial point:

So what is manslaughter? Well, the most recent convictions - for which you can be jailed 20 years - involved lowlife dog-catcher Mario Schembri and his slutty accomplice, Bernadette Denny, who killed businessman Herman Rockefeller in January.

They bashed Rockefeller to death. Schembri said he fought "like Muhammad Ali" as his uncountable blows hit Rockefeller "harder than he had hit anyone before".

Then they went to Bunnings and bought a chainsaw, disposable overalls, facemasks and a shovel, dismembered Rockefeller's body, cutting off the arms and legs and burning it all in a 44-gallon drum in a mate's backyard.

That's manslaughter.

Are any of our soldiers in Afghanistan guilty of that?

Well, er...no. Not really. So Howe makes a very good point. NONE of our soldiers in Afghanistan are guilty of that, so Brigadier McDade's logic starts to look a bit ropey, doesn't it now?

On the other hand, should the military justice system be amended so that soldiers cannnot be prosecuted unless they beat to death a millionaire who has disappointed them by failing to bring his wife on an unannounced wife-swapping visit before dismembering him with a new chainsaw from Bunnings, it may just narrow the terms of reference for military courts to a rather extreme extent.

"And when the private threw the grenade into the maternity ward, did he at any time claim to have 'fought like Muhammad Ali' before burning the evidence in a 44-gallon drum?"

"No, your honour"

"Case dismissed!"

So as much as we don't want to see these three soldiers convicted, perhaps we should at least allow for the possibility of prosecuting soldiers for crimes committed in battle, as opposed to prosecuting them only for crimes committed in working-class suburban homes and backyards against millionaires with secret lives?

Hmm?

SERIOUS ADDENDUM TO AVOID DISTRESSING CONFUSIONS:

Incidentally, and so it is clear, these guys might NOT have done anything wrong, and hopefully when they're tried it turns out that they didn't - it sounds as if they may have a pretty good defence. I guess we'll see. But if they were just doing their jobs, so is Brigadier McDade, and despite her lack of combat experience, when it comes to decisions to prosecute I'll take the opinion of a military legal expert over that of an opinion columnist. Although perhaps Alan Howe can sway me by telling me how many firefights he's been in and how many doors he's knocked on, since that seems to be the way we determine whether someone's legal opinions are valid or not.



Alan Howe: Strongman of the Editorial Page

Is there anything the man can't do?

Andrew Bolt this week writes about the case of "Alex", a 17-year-old girl who wants to be a boy, and who was given permission by Chief Justice Diana Bryant to undergo a double mastectomy to allow her to do so.

Bolt says:

"I have not spoken to Alex. Bryant has. I am not a psychiatrist. Bryant, I presume, has consulted those who are."

And yet, it is a measure of the man's perspicacity, wordly knowledge and polymathic expertise that despite this, he knows the decision is wrong, why it's wrong, and what everyone should have done instead.

Bravo, Andrew, your mighty brain leaves us stuttering in awe

Gather Up Your Bombs

So the Victorian government will probably legalise abortion sometime soon. The Bill has been put forward, it's being debated, and the odds look to be - just - with the pro-choice side.

Of course I mean "legalise" in the sense of "remove from the Crimes Act", rather than the sense of "allow to happen with no repercussions for those involved", since that's what happens already and has done for years.

This is, naturally, controversial, with the usual noises about baby-killing from the usual people, like Bill Muehlenberg, who is himself an excellent counter-argument to the "what if Beethoven had been aborted?" argument. And of course Mirko Bagaric has weighed in, saying abortion should be completely criminalised and nevr allowed under any circumstances; given his previous forays into public life, most likely he is worried that if we abort too many people, there won't be enough left to torture. Or maybe he is thinking, what if Tony Mokbel had been aborted? Then Mirko would have nobody to pay him large amounts of money to try to avoid the justice system. Oh, Mirko, how terrible that would be, and what a moral giant you truly are.

Pro-lifers are wheeling out the usual schtick: zygotes are people too, if something looks a bit like a baby it is one, culture of death, God God God etc.

The funny one is the argument that more people will have abortions now. Imagine all those girls, desperate for the fun and excitement of an abortion, who are prevented from having one now by the fact there is a never-enforced law against it. The minute it's no longer a crime they will rush out and fulfil their perverted abortionary lusts. Why wouldn't they? Abortion is something these kids do for kicks! So we mustn't make it legal. Let's keep things as they are, with abortion being available pretty much anytime anyone wants it, rather than changing things to make abortion available pretty much anytime anyone wants it. Otherwise the abortion rate will surely skyrocket!

It's sometimes hard, when I write, to decide whether to make jokes about a situation or simply put down the stream of bellowed obscenities running through my head when I listen to pro-lifers like Bill "Feel the Love" Muehlenberg.

This is the curious thing: here are people who believe the government is sanctioning murder. They think the aborted foetuses are in fact fully-fledged people. They think thousands upon thousands of children are being slaughtered every year. Wow, that's pretty awful. It's like Rwanda or something. Right here in our country. Better do something about it, right?

"Let's write a letter to the Herald Sun! That is LITERALLY how angry the issue makes me!"

Seriously? You think this is mass infanticide and you're writing letters? You're asking for Medicare funding to be withdrawn? Some of you, like Mirko, would even allow exceptions for victims of rape or incest and so forth.

Doesn't seem very moral of you, Mirko. You're willing to let children be killed because their mother was raped? That's terrible!

Imagine if people were taking their children to the doctors to have them killed. One-year-old, five-year-old, ten-year-old children. Imagine if this was approved by the government. Imagine if this happened thousands of times a year.

Horrible, yes?

This is what pro-lifers think is happening now. According to them, anyway. They say that's what it's all about: killing children who have as much right to life as any of us. Killing people. It's not, they say, about wanting to control women, or about wanting to punish those nasty sluts who get themselves pregnant because they can't keep their legs together. According to them, they believe that government-sanctioned homicide is occurring daily.

And they write letters and opinion pieces and have civilised debates about it, and argue over government funding, and how to "reduce the rate", and talk about the psychological effect on the woman, and say maybe it's OK to murder kids if mum got pregnant in an unpleasant way.

Seriously? If you think this is a slaughter of the innocents, you should be taking to the streets, screaming it long and loud, getting violent, doing everything you physically can to prevent the little kiddies being killed.

How can you sleep at night, pro-lifers, when you think of all the children being murdered and all you did to stop it was a fifty-word email? How do you sleep? Hey, you know it's happening; it's not going on a thousand miles away in the Third World. It's right here in your town. You can go down to the clinic, you can block the doorways, you can grab those potential pregnant murderers, take them away at gunpoint and hold them till they deliver. You can have a go at taking out the politicians who allow this with a sniper rifle. Sure, you could get hurt, you could get arrested, but don't you have to try?

In short, pro-lifers, blow up a clinic, or shut the fuck up.