Phillip Adams - What is it good for?

Extract from The Weekend Australian Magazine

As I trudge through ruins ancient and recent in search of the memories of war-torn Vietnam and Cambodia, I'm trying to cope with the intolerable heat. I'm making wireless programs where millions have died in prolonged horrors perpetrated or precipitated by Western nations, ours included, in wars waged against the tide of history in the discredited name of democracy or the domino theory.

As surely as ISIS was unleashed by Bush's Coalition of the Willing, Pol Pot was created by Nixon, Kissinger and another coalition of which we were an enthusiastic member. The death and destruction we rained down in Indochina, with bombs, napalm and defoliants, compared in rage and scale to the air raids in Europe. Yet they failed to defeat a small, valiant people who'd only recently endured invasion by the Japanese and colonisation by the French. Learning less than nothing from those monumental stupidities, the Coalition of the Willing did it again with its “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq, killing a disputed number of civilians – perhaps a million – while mutilating, maddening and displacing millions more.

The Vietnamese imagination is haunted by a literal belief in wartime ghosts. The air you breathe here is as heavy with ghosts as it is with humidity. As in Iraq, the death toll of troops and civilians is disputed; a figure of a million seems likely, though the Vietnamese government doubles that. Add perhaps two million for the killing fields of Cambodia.

Yet already the jungles have hidden most of the evidence, and memories are fading. To the young of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City the overwhelming majority of the population, the past I'm seeking is as remote as Agincourt to the French or Anzac (for all the patriotic marketing) to our children. I remember being in Tiananmen Square on a significant anniversary. The menacing military presence to keep the peace was unnecessary – as the place was almost deserted. Not out of fear, but because the crowds were crowding Bejing's shopping malls. It's the same here. Shopping is the new ideology.

There's renewed criticism of Japan's continuing reluctance to apologise for its war crimes, with the increasingly aggressive Shinzo Abe carefully calibrating what he's willing to concede. And our own reluctance to atone for the brutalities inflicted on the Aboriginal people – our Sorry day was a long time coming and PM Howard refused to take part – is another case in point. So don't hold your breath waiting for a “sorry” from Bush, Howard, Blair and the rest responsible for the grotesquely misnamed Operation Iraqi Freedom. Based on lies and political, cultural and historic blindness.

Much of the mess in the Middle East is a consequence of colonialism – and the wholly arbitrary designation of nations by bureaucrats from Britain and its departing mates. They'd literally nail a piece of tin on a palm tree and say “this is Kuwait, the other side's Iraq”. Ditto in Africa, where Europeans drew straight lines on the landscape, ignorant or indifferent to ancient tribal enmities. Which led, generations later, to the genocide in Rwanda between Tutsi and Hutu. Have the French apologised? Did the Belgians ever apologise for the king's genocidal attacks on the Congo (the Belgian Congo was Leopold II's personal property) where perhaps 10 million were slaughtered as His Majesty massed his millions from rubber for the new pneumatic tyres for the world's bicycles.

Vietnam and Cambodia are currently calm., but if you spin a bottle on a map of the world it's likely to point at a conflict. Economic or ideological or religious factors or all of the above detonated many. And all of them are connected, in one way or another, to their colonial history. Sorry.