You can listen to the Front on your smart speaker every morning to hear the latest episode, just say play the News from The Australian. From The Australian, I'm Claire Harvey. A special bonus episode of The Front for you Today. Over six weeks, The Australian is publishing six essays by remarkable Australians to mark our mast Head's sixtieth anniversary. Today journalist Chris Yelman, who's recently joined The Australian and Sky News as a commentator. He's writing on the theme of power.
This January remarks a big anniversary for troops who fought an Operation Desert Storm.
Of Operation Desert Storm amount of Desert Storm thirty years ago, one of the largest air campaigns in our military's history took place Operation Desert Storm. Operation Desert Storm the United Nations led response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Here's how then US President George Herbert Walkerbush announced it to the world on January seventeenth, nineteen ninety one.
Just two hours ago, Allied air forces began an attack on military targets in Iraq and Kuwait. These attacks continue as I speak. Five months ago, Sadam Nssein started this cruel war against Kuwait. Tonight the battle has been joined.
A bit over a month later, the ground assault came his General Colin Powell.
Our strategy to go after this army is very very simple. First we're going to cut it off, and then we're going to kill it.
At the time, Kuwait was occupied by Iraqi forces. They'd been there for seven months.
The answer to that question and will splitter is at your old workplace to the undergo.
Newsrooms around the world watched this stunning assault, Operation Desert Storm unfold in real time via a CNN live feed.
The President maybe going on television later this evening to explain what I'm sorry to winter rupt. We're going back to Baghdad now because we can and we have.
But we are then include them.
Okayrding, go ahead, I can hear you, and can record Please come in to us from Baghdad.
Journalist Chris Hulman watched it from the news floor of the Canberra Times, where a rare mid morning edition of that paper had been sent to the printers. But it became old news almost immediately.
We were standing to take a photograph with the mid morning edition that had done. We'd all work very very hard on. It was to keep the good Burghers of Canberra across all of the details. And there was a television in the corner, just one television, and it was streaming CNN, one of the local stations. I can't remember which one had CNN on full time. And you might recall at that time they were the only ones who
stayed in Iraq for the war. And they had a single camera which was on the balcony at the hotel, so it actually recorded the first shots of the war. It was the thing that made CNN. But as we were lining up for the photograph, what happened was that it cut dramatically to tele Aviv and there was a reporter in a gas mask it looked like a World War One issue gas mask, who said that a SCUD missile had fallen in Tel Aviv and it could be
carrying a chemical payload. Now that was the great fear that Israel would be dragged into this war and there'll be a broader Middle Eastern war. Now we didn't know at the time that that wasn't the case, It wasn't carrying chemical weapons. But I looked at that television and at the front page which was out of date before the print run had finished, and thought, this changes everything, and it did.
Desert Storm was a turning point in the way we report the news, both because of the dawn of the twenty four hour news cycle and of the Internet. In twenty oh seven, the smartphone followed.
It's the Internet in your pocket.
For the first time ever. Suddenly everyone everywhere had access to information, news, ideas, entertainment all the time. It was a technological revolution with implications we couldn't imagine.
But this much is certain. We're living through the greatest power shift in human history.
That's Chris Yulman reading excerpts of the essay he's written for The Australian.
Because the well head of power does not flow down from monarchy's to tyrannies or democracies, but up from the air and flow of ideas that transform crowds into mobs. Ideas are the source of all power in human affairs, as rational animals. Ideas are the ground of our being because we only make sense of ourselves and the world by standing on the mental flagstones of our culture. That's both a blessing and a curse, because cultures can be
wildly divergent. Two people witnessing the same event can take pole or opposite views on it based entirely on their worldview. In a politically diverse, multicultural democracy, those differences exist in the same postcode.
To explain this, Yulman invokes John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost, published in the seventeenth century. Milton's masterpiece explores over ten thousand lines the biblical conflict between God and Satan over the devil's corruption of humanity.
No one better encapsulated the power of the human psyche to shape its own reality than John Milton in Paradise Lost. When he's fallen, Satan decides it's better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven. The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven. Political power may grow out of the barrel of a gun, but it is an idea that compels someone to pull the trigger to raise an army to start a war.
Coming up. If power flows from ideas, where can we expect it to land. The Australian has been holding power to account for six decades and our subscribers are the first to read our lively commentary, in depth analysis and game changing news. Join us at the Australian dot com AU and we'll be back after this break. The Internet and smart devices have facilitated an unprecedented information exchange, but they've also helped miss and disinformation to spread unchecked.
The best and worst desires of almost every human heart have now been grafted to an irresistible Internet appendage, just a hair brained thought away from international broadcast. The portal to all this is in your pocket. Step through the looking glass, and all manner of wonder and horror abound, and it comes with the illusion that you are in control.
All this chaos springs from ideas and from our unfettered access to them. But if, as Chris Yilman argues in his essay for the Australian Power, is born of ideas, who's going to end up holding it?
Well, it's impossible to know. And that's just it. All of us want to know the future. It's one of the great human longings. I'm constantly being asked, who's going to win the next election? Have been all of my political career. I don't know. It's the answer to that question. Sometimes you can have some sort of idea about where things are heading. But we can't stand the idea that we don't know what's going to happen next. All that I know is that the most powerful things are human ideas.
The great changes that we see in history, the monumental events, are all driven by the invisible changes in human ideas. And you might think that power comes down from monarchies or from tyrannies, or from democracies. It flows up from the mob to those people in power. And when the ideas of the mob change, it doesn't matter what form
of government you have, then government's full. So it's the power of ideas, I think, which are the driving force of change in the world and have always have been in human events because our culture is the ground of our being, and our culture decides everything that we perceive.
What makes a good idea good and a bad idea bad then is a matter of perspective, not speed.
It's bewildering. We can't keep up with the rate of ideas as they flow and things change. That wherein constant takes a state of flux, now of chaos, and human ideas have always thrown up good ideas and bad ideas. We all know that as as far as government forms go, I think fascism is a bad idea. I think communism has turned out to be a pretty bad idea in democracy, for all of its faults, turns out to be one of the best ideas about how you should order human affairs.
But all these forms of governments now face their challenges with this, and they're all responding in different ways. In Hujing things, China is essentially locking down the Internet and making sure that only the ideas that are sanctioned by the government can be put before the people. He spends more time and more money policing his own people than
he does in building his enormous defense force. In a democracy, it's much more difficult, you know, how do we be gatekeepers to these ideas that a lot of people talking at the moment about the ideas that they would like ban. And I think sometimes the only difference between left and right are the things that they want to ban. And it is a difficult thing when you believe, as I do, that free speech is a foundation stone of a liberal democracy,
and yet some of these ideas are clearly destructive. Free speech has always been regulated in some way, but I don't know how liberal democracy confronts this challenge, and what's happening is that we are being eaten apart internally by the warring tribes. And that's not just cultural differences, that's
political differences. We're constantly being told about the threats from the right, and we saw that with Donald Trump not wanting to leave power in the United States, and that's clearly a threat because the defining feature of democracy is the governments willingly give up power. If you decide you're going to challenge that, then you really are starting to
make a challenge of the foundation stones of democracy. But there's also a project on the left which would appear to be that it wants to lift up every flagstone of the ideas that have built our society and dismissed them all as a white, colonial, racist project. And when they rip up the last flagstone, where will we stand
where we plant our feet? So I genuinely think that at the moment, liberal democracies face the biggest threat from what we're seeing and the expansion and the sort of rapid changing of ideas and of the chaos that that sort of has engendered in society.
You can read Chris Yuelman's sixtieth anniversary essay at the Australian dot com dot au. This episode of the Front was produced by Kristin Amiot