Dec. 2004

The tsunami swells in the mind and raises questions. If a boatload of people who survived it approaches Ashmore Reef, do we put them back out to sea? Why not? Do we send them back to the tender mercies of a heaving ocean because 'they are not genuine refugees'? Why not? Do we argue that though the Indonesian forces are killing them, the Acehnese are still better off in Aceh? Why not?

A greater question arises from the numbers dead. A hundred thousand killed from a dozen adjoining nations is a great catastrophe, we all agree. Yet a hundred thousand killed in Iraq, and killed by our side in only eighteen months we call a 'liberation' they are or should be grateful for. On the numbers it's four times as bad as what happened in Sri Lanka when the tsunami struck, five times as bad as what happened in Thailand yet somehow it's a good thing, all this mutilation and bereavement, all this bombing of cities. How can this be?

No-one has yet said, 'The world changed on Boxing Day', but it did of course. It showed that Nature is a far bigger threat than Terrorism, and if Global Warming, for instance, threatens our sea levels and many forms of life on earth it should be looked to. It showed that Global Economics is useless in times of calamity and Global Socialism (that is, governments acting decisively in favour of those victims of the Shafts of Fate that now need help) is a much better option. It showed that John Howard's disempowerment of Radio Australia, which someone in every village in South-East Asia listened to, cost maybe twenty thousand lives when warnings therefore weren't heard on radios that were silent.

It showed, too, why the Third World resents us, and many want to blow us up. We fly out our wounded, and leave theirs behind. We push their boats of wounded back out to sea. We send money to their persecutors. We unleash economic tsunamis that trash their lives. We bomb to smithereens their cities and their traditions because one of their leaders, it was said, possessed lethal weapons, and said wrongly. One hundred thousand people died because of this mistake, and yet we do not even apologise. We say instead that none of the million family members bereaved by our bombs and bullets would want back life as it was before we came. We did that, and we said that, and we think we are making friends. And when some Acehnese fleeing the death squads approach in leaky boats and we turn them back we will think we are making friends that way too. And most of what we'll be making is suicide bombers, keen to blow us up. No, it's not our freedom they're against. It's our unimaginable cruelty.

The world did change on Boxing Day because it plainly showed, to those who could count, how cruel we are. And why we have, as Australians and Americans, no friends any more. And why we don't deserve them.