One of the most famous lines in recent cinematic history belongs to a (then) youthful Tom Cruise in the blockbuster flick A Few Good Men. Cruise plays a hot-shot young navy lawyer with thinly veiled daddy issues, and in the film’s most famous scene he has a perfectly wicked Jack Nicholson on the stand in a tense courtroom showdown.
Nicholson plays a decorated US marine colonel who secretly has gone rogue, and Cruise is trying to goad him into confessing to murder. Nicholson is, of course, brilliant, channelling hints of Randle McMurphy from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as he stares down Cruise’s impassioned demands for the truth. You can’t handle the truth, he bellows in return. And thus a legend was born.
This was a work of fiction but we are living it today, this aversion to the truth. Australia collectively is incapable of facing up to so many of the things challenging who we are and the values we’ve built across generations, the values hewn from the blood, sweat and tears of Australians from all backgrounds, creeds and faiths.
We may not be able to handle it, but believe me when I say Australia needs a headfirst encounter with the truth.
There is no greater example than the war against Hamas, which I might point out is a war against terrorism that the global community is happy for Israel to fight alone.
As this awful, necessary conflict continues, as the Israel Defence Forces edge closer to the goal of wiping out Hamas, there have been repeated calls for a ceasefire because of the start of Ramadan, which began this week.
As the Muslim holy month began, Australians, both notable and beautifully including the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, wished our Muslim community Ramadan Mubarak. This represents the Australia we want to be part of, truly tolerant in the face of significant differences.
However, the calls for a ceasefire because of Ramadan ignore important truths. Let me lay them out for you. Hamas broke the ceasefire and started this war on the Sabbath, the Jewish holy day. Not only was it the Sabbath but the violent orgy of murder, rape and mutilation was carried out on Simchat Torah, a time of Jewish celebration to mark the completion, and the restart, of the annual cycle of reading the Torah.
Another truth, courtesy of 1973: the Yom Kippur war was started on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. Day in, day out, every month of every year since, rockets have been fired at Israel and its citizens on any and every single day, especially on the Sabbath. Israel’s enemies know many soldiers will be in synagogue.
What I’ve just shared isn’t my opinion. It is the truth that Hamas started the war last year on Simchat Torah and the Sabbath. It is the truth that the Yom Kippur war was started on Israel’s holiest day. It is truth any ceasefire without surrender is simply an opportunity for Hamas to regroup and do what it says it will – repeat October 7, not only in Israel but in all Western countries. It has promised it; we best believe Hamas means it.
This is the awful truth, and millions of Gazans are suffering because Hamas continues to knock back every ceasefire deal put on the table. This is the truth.
So many Australians, especially in the progressive left, simply can’t handle it. They continue to deny the cancerous culture of anti-Semitism that has been laid bare in this country since October 7. They deny. They deflect. They gaslight anyone who dares call it out. They follow any conversation around the brutality of Hamas’s use of sexual violence with the word “but”.
Ah, the truth is hard, the truth hurts. There’s a reason that’s a cliche and that’s because it’s true. Psychologists have studied a phenomenon called the backfire effect, a term to describe what happens when someone presented with irrefutable truths on a matter that should shift their thinking instead doubles down.
Gregg Ten Elshof is a professor of philosophy at Biola University in the US. In 2009 he wrote a book called I Told Me So, in which he unpicks humanity’s seemingly unmatched capacity for self-deception. Ten Elshoff unravels, with excruciating accuracy, what happens when finding the truth becomes the secondary motivation for asking questions. It turns out humans are masters in the art of embracing denial when it suits us.
So, in the Australian context, what is the primary goal? Is it electoral? Is it fear of being wrong, is it the pain of having to look at your ideology and accept it’s flawed?
Beyond the war in Gaza, there are many examples of what I’m talking about, few as striking as the treatment of gender dysphoria in children.
This past week in Britain, the National Health Service announced that puberty blockers would no longer be prescribed to anyone under 18. This follows the damning scandal and subsequent closure of that country’s Tavistock gender identity clinic and a growing bank of evidence on the danger of these treatments more broadly, which includes links between transgender hormone therapy and cancer.
This is truth. Australia? Still stuck on the fence. Clinging to the idea that gender-affirming care is the only valid approach.
The British decision is based on truth, based on science. Finally, the truth in this space is being accepted but here in Australia so many still hold that children who the law recognises are too young, too emotionally (and in all other ways) vulnerable to consent to sexual relationships, can decide to take life-altering medication from which there is no return.
So many other issues. Our energy mix and reckless refusal to consider anything other than renewables. The plight of Indigenous Australians who live in places that are out of sight, hence out of mind.
What will it take? This question runs laps around my mind and my heart daily and this is where I have landed.
We need an encounter with the truth. Australia and Australians need a headfirst, deep-hearted, full-frontal collision with the truth.
Not “my” truth, or his or her truth, the facile indulgence that allows people to construct and reconstruct various matters to suit their own narrative. But the truth.
Most of us in this country do not understand existential threat. We have the luxury of not knowing what it’s like to have to defend our borders or go catch the bus wondering if you’ll be knifed or shot by a terrorist. So many times I’ve said to people, in relation to the Hamas war, what if it were your daughter who had been raped and desecrated? What if it were your son who had his eyes gouged out in front of his children while being forced to listen to the sexual brutalisation of his own wife? Would that be an encounter with truth enough?
We don’t need any more facts. We have scant need for more information. But boy, do we need a collective come to Jesus moment on more than one front, and I pray this happens without a need for first-hand experience.
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