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Castrating their own cause

Dear Editor,

ABR readers should be alerted to an outrage that has taken place in Canberra, one that exposes a violent, expansionist nihilism within our culture.

On 11 February, having been removed from the vicinity of the National Library, thousands of anti-vaccination demonstrators began squatting at the Canberra Showgrounds. There the Lifeline Bookfair, a popular annual charity event in support of people in suicidal crisis, was just opening. Crowds of demonstrators harassed Bookfair volunteers, shouted foul insults through loudhailers at attendees, blocked parking areas with trucks, and finally tore down a security fence, mobbing the venue. With public safety at risk, the Bookfair closed down.

The demonstrators went on to commit offences which were more serious – in their thousands, they threatened assault against a dress-up vaccination event for children, and guns were found by police at the squat – but it is the attack on the Bookfair that underlines the contempt that is driving the anti-vaccination movement and that signals grave societal trouble.

This was more than a case of feral, wrong-headed, self-defeating hooliganism, a national version of school muck-up day, although in shutting down a charity event the demonstrators did castrate their own cause. They abused the tolerance of Canberra residents, who had been inconvenienced for days by marches through the Parliamentary Triangle – an abstract and uninhabited place where protest has a rightful stage – and who now found themselves slighted and assaulted in their own community. The Bookfair is part of the life we make in the margins of Canberra’s capital status. These people besieged that life to make a political statement.

That statement was an incitement to violence against art and knowledge. The demonstrators trespassed, malevolently, to stop an event that promotes reading, thoughtfulness, curiosity, and conscience, in support of lonely and vulnerable people. The Bookfair usually takes place in an atmosphere of friendly treasure-hunting. Standing at its closed doors, the demonstrators promoted a bullying ignorance, an aggressive mindlessness, a lifestyle of passionate unreason.

The message is the opposite of freedom. Trampling over the local, it made itself national. Invasive though the demonstrators have been, they are not an alien species. They are our own people. Their homes, to which they will eventually disperse, are in cities, towns, and rural areas all over eastern Australia. Buoyant with self-belief at having got away with harming someone else’s community, they will wield corrosive influence in their own. Those who showed themselves in Canberra number more than fifteen thousand. Their sympathisers back home may number many more. To nurture the nihilist mindset on such a scale, some humane reinforcement we once offered one another must be rotting. The culture is not happy. It is not well.

The significance of memory

Dear Editor,

Oral History Australia joins oral historians around the world in condemning the closure of Russia’s Memorial organisation, one of Europe’s most important oral history projects. A Russian court ordered the closure on 28 December 2021. This appalling act represents an assault on human rights and an attempt to suppress the Memorial’s significant contribution to the history of the Soviet Union.

Memorial was set up in the late 1980s to document and record the crimes of the Soviet regime and the history of political repression in the Soviet Union. In a statement following the closure decision, Memorial wrote, ‘Memorial is not an organisation, it is not even a social movement … Memorial is the need of the citizens of Russia to know the truth about its tragic past, about the fate of many millions of people.’

As oral historians we understand the significance of memory and how an authoritarian state like Vladimir Putin’s Russia might wish to suppress memory to sustain a mythical version of the past which legitimises the regime. We urge Australian colleagues to protest about the Russian decision to close an oral history project that spoke truth to power.

For further details, see this article by British oral historian Graham Smith, at https://www.ohs.org.uk/general-interest/ohs-condemns-closure-of-memorial-international/

Alistair Thomson, President, Oral History Australia