Conveniently forgotten

Michael Kane writes: Re. “Rundle: ever returning the guns of August can’t give WWI meaning” (yesterday). As Guy Rundle identifies, the revisionist line on the Great War is now in full swing in order to somehow underpin current Anglo-American thinking (and therefore of course in Australia) about the contemporary world.

It is a peculiar twist on “Lest We Forget” that in fact we are forgetting a lot of things. We are forgetting about the war aims of the British Empire and its French and Tsarist Russian imperial allies. We are forgetting that this war was not about democracy — certainly not before Wilson’s 14 points caused so much chagrin to the British and French governments. We are forgetting the secret treaties between the Entente to divide up the Middle East (ironically only revealed because of the Russian revolution), the consequences of which we still suffer today.

There is every indication that all of this is being remembered in Europe, including the slaughter, and that they haven’t forgotten. Let’s make sure the kids are taught the all aspects of Great War history, as presumably the government still wants.

Dennis Whelan writes: How great it must be to have never been in any armed force and  never served and just so middle-aged, well paid, complacent and stupid. You have no idea at all about war and its drivers so, as one who served, write about something else like trees and gas fracking  but please don’t moralise about something you only picked up from books and movies.

In cartoon, shades of children overboard

Jim Hanna writes: Re. “Critics fail to see the funny side of SMH and Oz Middle East cartoons” (yesterday). Bill Leak’s claim to be merely “doing a drawing that revealed the sad, unspeakable truth” about the carnage in Gaza is incredibly naive at best and blatantly biased at worst.

His drawing reflects the extremist Israeli lie that Palestinians are monsters who would happily have their own children killed to achieve a short-term PR victory over Israel — a tactic that goes back to former Israeli PM Golda Meir, who said — incredibly — “We can never forgive [Arabs] for forcing us to kill their children”.

It’s the sort of dehumanising racist claptrap the Howard government wanted us to believe when it claimed Islamic asylum seekers threw their children overboard.

Who’s at fault?

Peter Matters writes: Re. “The (attempted) exorcism of Eddie Obeid” (Thursday). Eddie Obeid is indeed the product of NSW Labor, but then this definition can be applied to so many aspects of both venal and moral corruption. The wholesale hacking of private emails and phones in the UK and US is the product of News Corporation, which in turn is a product of the corruption of our cherished freedom of expression by Rupert Murdoch.

Current federal Australian politics is the product of the combination of the self same amoral Rupert Murdoch with the hang-ups inflicted and emotionally immature Tony Abbott, generously helped by Rudd’s constant backstabbing of “that woman”.

This sort of moral corruption provides for endless entertaining dramas, biographies and novels, but it helps us poor sods not one little bit.