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Keywords: Soldier

  • AUSTRALIA

    International Criminal Court's African bias

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 13 July 2012
    3 Comments

    On Tuesday, the International Criminal Court sentenced Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga Dyilo for his use of child soldiers. It is the first sentence handed down by an institution regarded by many as a political front. As one Congolese official noted, 'You'll never see an American pass before the ICC. All of the accused are Africans.'

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    History curriculum perpetuates East Timor myths

    • Susan Connelly
    • 10 July 2012
    7 Comments

    The draft senior secondary history curriculum glosses over Australia's relationship with East Timor. It needs to go beyond the false media and political view that Australia's involvement in East Timor has been unremittingly courageous, generous and exemplary. There is a danger that students will believe Australian soldiers went into Portuguese Timor in 1941 'to protect the Timorese' and that Australia 'saved' East Timor in 1999.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Letter from a lost soldier

    • Brian Matthews
    • 27 April 2012
    5 Comments

    'I wish this war was finished for I am fed up. My dear Ann, you and the children try to be as cheery as you can. I feel all buggered up but I shall just have to carry on the best way I can ... we are on another front now and it is actually hell ...' Whatever ambiguous solace Annie could derive from Alex's letter, it was soon lost.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Dismembering the dead in Japan and Afghanistan

    • Walter Hamilton
    • 26 April 2012
    7 Comments

    The publication of photographs of American soldiers posing with the body parts of dead Afghani insurgents has provoked a lively exchange of opinion in the media. Just as in Afghanistan, American and Australian soldiers fighting the Japanese saw themselves pitted against an opponent who acted by a different — inhuman — set of rules.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Targeting aid workers

    • Duncan MacLaren
    • 03 April 2012

    Australian aid worker David Savage was severely injured by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan. The Taliban tried to kill him in revenge for the shooting of 17 unarmed Afghan civilians by a deranged American soldier. In more innocent times aid workers were regarded as angels by all sides.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Life lessons on the Thai-Burma border

    • Duncan Maclaren
    • 16 December 2011
    2 Comments

    Jimmy was among the quietest of the refugee students we taught. He is now a leader with a 'backpack' medical organisation whose members take medicines into the areas where 'internally displaced persons' are found. He risks his life every day since the jungle is awash with Burmese soldiers.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Mothers, soldiers and other entrepreneurs

    • Brian Doyle
    • 04 May 2011
    3 Comments

    To attempt, to begin, is really to dream, to envision, to speculate, and then to work like a burro to implement, to create, to make real. How is it that a word like entrepreneurship, which means vast and amazing things, has become so commonplace and thin?

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  • MEDIA

    Sex scandals and SNAG soldiers

    • Lyn Bender
    • 21 April 2011
    5 Comments

    Listening to the Defence Force top brass talk about the 'female' cadet scandal is like taking a trip back to the 1940s. The stoic military 'warrior culture' can be tempered by encouraging men to develop appropriate self-disclosure and empathy against the dehumanising effects of training.

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  • RELIGION

    Uncomfortable Easter and Anzac Day

    • Andrew Hamilon
    • 21 April 2011
    10 Comments

    Good intentions are not sufficient to give life meaning. Easter's significance comes not from Jesus' choice to die, but in God's gift of raising him from the dead. In the Anzac story, it may be comforting to say young soldiers died that others may live, but the comfort is too easy.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Anzac revelations

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 20 April 2011
    9 Comments

    My father was just 23 when he saw action. He is now nearly 90, and his recent description of the Borneo beach landing, which he had never mentioned to his offspring before, made my brother's blood run cold.

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  • MEDIA

    Shit doesn’t just happen

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 09 February 2011
    55 Comments

    While it is refreshing to hear politicians speak in unguarded colloquial language from time to time, any human misfortune is demeaned if we believe it is a sufficient explanation to say, as Tony Abbott said of the death of a soldier serving in Afghanistan, 'shit happens'.

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  • MEDIA

    Wikileaks' problematic moral justification

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 28 October 2010
    8 Comments

    It has been argued that even if the leaks do endanger the lives of some allied soldiers, even more lives have been lost because governments have concealed the reality of the war. This utilitarian argument undermines Wikileaks' claim to be ethically superior to governments.

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