This is the age of hate and paranoia. Astute (cynical?) political leaders know that nothing binds a nation's people together as firmly as an easily identifiable hate figure. In the early 1930s when I was about 8, I began to read newspapers and listen to the radio. Benito Mussolini, leader of Italy's fascists, attracted our loathing because he was bombing and strafing Abyssinians armed with muskets and spears. The communist ideology made manifest by Stalin's regime in the Soviet Union and by some Australian trade union leaders was the object of paranoid hatred propagated in many print media and the radio stations they sponsored. A curious child increasingly aware of the world around me, I wondered why we should fear and hate a political philosophy that had many features resembling the teachings of Jesus as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount. As I went through puberty and my early teens, my country which was Australia in those days, went to war against Germany, Italy and Japan; we were part of the Free World, in contrast to the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. It was easy to see and hear for ourselves if we understood German as I did - I was learning it at school - that Hitler was a very evil man. The USSR was evil too, or its leader Stalin was. He had show trials that led to execution of the intelligentsia, and brutally invaded Finland. Then a problem arose: in 1941 Soviet Russia was invaded by Nazi Germany and overnight became our second-best friend, surpassed only by Great Britain. That didn't last long though. By the late 1940s, many on the extreme right, my father among them, were asserting that we should nuke the Soviet Union before they too, like USA, got the atom bomb. Germany split asunder into good (democratic) West Germany and bad (communist) East Germany. All the countries of eastern Europe and the Baltic states were satellites of the USSR. They were bad. My passport wasn't valid for travel to any of those bad countries.
Meanwhile, bewildering political changes swept over former colonial empires. French Indo-China became Vietnam, the Dutch East Indies became Indonesia, Northern Rhodesia became Zambia, Southern Rhodesia became Zimbabwe. Portuguese East Africa became Mozambique, Belgian Congo became the Central African Republic, French Equatorial Africa fragmented into a dozen countries. Some of the leaders of these former colonies were on our side, therefore good, others weren't, therefore they were bad. Most were and are ruled by violent, bloody dictators, good friends if they grant us mining rights, our evil enemies if they don't. In Latin America, national boundaries remained intact but many countries that had been docile client states of the USA began to assert their autonomy and several had revolutions and civil wars. In Colombia the war between the government and the left wing FARC has been smouldering for 50 years. Some leaders were bad, some not, depending mostly on mining rights and whether they had democratic elections (no matter how dodgy the election may have been). Cuba was a special case. Cuba sloughed off a repulsive criminal dictator, Battista, and for a few weeks the new leader, Fidel Castro, young, handsome, bearded, speaking quaint English that made much sense, was our hero, got a ticker-tape parade in New York. Then he said some things that were labeled communist (or maybe socialist - it's a long time ago, and I forget). So overnight he became bad, and remained bad ever after. In Chile, the bloody military coup that ousted Salvadore Allende was a CIA operation that almost everyone in my personal and professional networks perceived as a profoundly evil example of American imperial excess - the worst until G W Bush's invasion of Iraq, which is having unintended consequences that seem likely to be with us for many years, perhaps until my grandchildren are my age.
In the Far East (Australia's near north) China, which had been our ally in the 1939-45 world war became the People's Republic of China and our enemy. When the PRC flexed its muscles a little bit, very nasty wars broke out in the PRC's neighbouring states, Korea and Vietnam. The Korean war began in 1950 and never ended, or at any rate there's never been a peace treaty. North Korea is the baddest of the bad, the worst of the Evil Empire, and acts accordingly. The war in Vietnam was unequivocally a war of liberation in which the people of Vietnam sought freedom and autonomy from French colonial oppressors. In one of the great political tragedies of my lifetime, American administrations saw Vietnam as another 'domino' that would fall into the evil hands of the leaders of the PRC unless they intervened. They expended untold blood - mostly Vietnamese blood - and American treasure in ultimately futile attempts to keep Vietnam within the orbit of what they chose to call the Free World. Future historians may identify the Vietnam war as the turning point that marked the end of American global hegemony.
Iran, formerly Persia, was our friend when ruled by the benevolent Shah (our leaders said he was benevolent and of course they were honest men). The Shah aspired to have atom bombs, had a large army and air force, and had secret police who pulled out schoolboys' fingernails - one little schoolboy grew up to become a student of mine in Edinburgh 10 years later. When he was 9 or 10, his fingernails had been pulled out by the Shah's police in front of his father, using needle-nosed pliers, in an attempt to persuade his father to confess to subversion of the Shah's regime. His deformed fingers never fully recovered. Then the Shah was replaced by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who was bad. His revolutionary guards were more brutal, more malevolent, than the Shah's secret police. My Iranian friends tell me many are the same people, even wear the same uniforms. My Iranian friends, almost all academics, despair of seeing changes for the better in their lifetimes. Iran is the living residue of one of the oldest organized civil societies in the world. It is sad, indeed tragic, that it is the target of bitter and perhaps paranoid hatred of the Israeli government. As for the Israelis, they seek to maintain a Jewish state in the implacably hostile Middle East. I have lost count of the number of wars they have fought against their neighbours, especially the unfortunate Palestinians. With American support, they have won all these wars. So far. They have nuclear weapons, and no doubt others as terrible. I think it is unlikely that they will go on winning these wars forever in the future. A few of my Israeli friends share my doubts and have left Israel to live in more tranquil countries. The closest I've come to the perpetual hostilities in the Middle East was during a visit to Beirut in 1998. The Lebanese civil war had ended but the scars remained everywhere in central Beirut, for example the top floors of the tower of the Holiday Inn, blackened, burnt out, destroyed by artillery and rocket propelled grenades. At night when the traffic noise quietened, I could hear distant artillery and small arms fire along the line of demarcation between the Israeli Defence Force and the Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon; this was a constant background noise throughout the weeks I spent in Beirut. My Lebanese colleagues told me they barely recalled a time when distant (and sometimes very close) gunfire could not be heard. No one can honestly say who is good and who is bad in this cauldron of ancient hatreds.
This is a haphazard partial summary based on memories that are bound to be selective. I do my best to stay abreast of these changing political alliances although some make me recall a song about the Vicar of Bray (dating from Restoration England) that a possibly subversive school teacher taught my Grade 3 or 4 class when I was 8 or 9 years old. The Vicar of Bray might be a useful role model for us all in these turbulent times.
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