Anita Bryant lives, but fades

The real Harvey milk

After watching the film Milk recently, an inspiring and tragic story which will hopefully reach a lot of young people and affect their thinking about the rights and treatment of homosexuals, I wondered about the arch-enemy of the tale, Anita Bryant, a former small-time singer driven, presumably by conscience, to campaign against the horrors of homosexuality.
The fact is that Bryant's campaign turned out to be a rather less than successful career move. Initial successes in the late sixties led to a galvanization and mobilization of the opposition. A campaign to boycott Florida orange juice, because Bryant featured in commercials for the drink, led to her losing the contract, and her singing career stalled because of the polarization of opinion around her. Later she came to regret the extremity of some of her anti-homosexual remarks, though one wonders if this was simply an acknowledgment of tactical errors, for in spite of her many setbacks, she still lends her name to churchy arguments against the so-called gay agenda.
It seems that, in spite of the noisiness of religious conservatives, especially during the Bush years, homosexuals continue to make more gains than losses, in spite of the passing of proposition eight, outlawing gay marriage, in California recently. Many of Bryant's legal victories have since been overturned, and I'm confident that as people learn more about the realities of human behaviour, and the dead hand of religion is gradually loosened, homosexual relations, of every formal and informal type imaginable, will be accepted and enjoyed as enriching the tapestry of social life.

getting the message through

one of John the Baptist's hangouts, yawn yawn

Societies change, and rapidly, and we’re reluctant to acknowledge this. A child wants her parents to stay together, to be happy with each other, as they have been. She wants to go on attending the same school and not to have to deal with different routines, different teachers, the loss of established and loved playmates. If a particular religion and its congregation and rituals are regular routines for her and woven though her family and social life, she’ll be most reluctant to deny that religion. Has it not sustained the family and community that has sustained her? The word denial is vital here, for it carries so much more weight than any intellectual skepticism can convey. Questioning the truth of a faith can come at an incalculable cost to our social being. It’s hardly surprising that many people would never even consider such a questioning, for they would see no meaningful existence at all without that faith.

Of course I’m convinced that they’re wrong to think that way, but it often seems a useless conviction. It can also be a dangerous one, I’m sure. If ever invited to Kandahar to spread the message of secularism, I’m sure I’d decline.

However, unlike regions deep-dyed in Islam, most regions that have adopted Christianity, particularly European nations, are no longer as deep-dyed as they were. They are the nations of course, most affected by the enlightenment and the scientific methods that have so rapidly transformed human life. And it’s funny how cultures can be like siblings. If one sibling strides out on a particular path, the next sibling will consider, almost as a matter of course, that that pathway has been eternally blocked for her. Many have argued that Islam needs an enlightenment like that sparked by the likes of Galileo and Newton in Western Europe, but it seems that sibling rivalry might prevent this, perhaps indefinitely. Of course, that is to be too monolithic as regards both religious cultures, but there’s no doubt that jealousy, competitiveness and resentment are part of the package of tensions between these cultures. It’s not surprising that the gradual abandonment of mystical explanations and prophecies by one might result in their more fervent appeal to the other. And of course the same goes for the tensions within one culture, such as that most heavily influenced by the Judeo-Christian mythos.

The point being that the refusal to adopt the scientific method, and the related urge to see sacred texts as rich in historical and cultural truth beyond enquiry, have many strong forces behind them, including resentment, stubbornness and a need to forge or maintain a distinct identity. These forces aren’t rational – few human impulses are. Ultimately they’re instinctive, as sibling rivalry is instinctive, and they’re about survival and thriving. Ultimately the battle must be along those lines – survival and thriving. We need to present the argument convincingly that the scientific approach provides our best hope in that quest. Not everyone is impervious to the argument, clearly. Science would never have gotten off the ground if that were so. It’s a matter of continuously plugging away, doing fruitful scientific work and advertising and distributing its benefits.

exercising body and mind, largely in vain

willi hennig

I've managed to do 15 kms on the exercise bike for three days in a row now, and my daily steps aren't bad, but my weight keeps increasing. Probably better to measure it weekly rather than daily. Starting to obsess over this, but I really look terrible. Some recent photos have shocked me to the core.

Monroe doctrine. Propounded in 1823 by the USA's 5th President, it was designed to impede any further encroachments on New World territory by European colonial powers - especially Spain. It was audacious for the time, as the USA was hardly then in a position to back up its hand off policy. Niall Ferguson mentions it in the context of Japan's Chinese adventurism of the thirties, in which there might've been a whiff of their proclaiming some sort of Asian Monroe doctrine against Western powers - but with much less likelihood of success. 

2009 is a big year science-wise. It's a big Darwin year of course [I think I've already mentioned that here] and I hope to continue to educate myself [and my many readers] on evolutionary matters throughout the year. Also, 2009 is the year of astronomy. Four hundred years ago, in 1609, Galileo reflected that a new invention, the telescope, could be refined and developed and pointed at the night sky. In so doing he explored for the first time the surface of the moon, observed that the so-called milky way was made of stars, and discovered those moons of Jupiter now called the Galilean moons. Modern astronomy was born.

So to today's topic in evolution: cladistics.

This is a massively complex topic in fact, so I'll just deal with it skimmingly. Cladistics is a taxonomic system based on evolutionary relationships between species. In recent years it has become the predominant taxonomic system. The term clade was first used by Julian Huxley in 1958, but the real 'architect' of the system was Willi Hennig, who began developing the system, which he called phylogenetic systematics, while a POW of the British at the end of WW2. 

The recent success of cladistics owes much to developments in biochemical analysis. The term clade is ancient Greek for branch, and cladograms are trees of connection between species and their common ancestor. The major difference between cladistics and the Linnaean [or neo-Linnaean] taxonomic approaches are that cladistics is strictly about phylogeny, rather than simply observed similarities between species. Cladistic branching can be enormously complex, so much so that the old classifications [family, order, phylum, etc], which suggest that a few fixed levels can be sufficient, has been rendered obsolete. Cladistics presents a more open classification, which can be filled out as more knowledge comes to light. This knowledge can be gleaned from the fossil record, but DNA/RNA sequencing has increased our knowledge of the relations between existing species considerably. 

A clade is also known as a monophyletic group. Other more inclusive groups are discouraged in cladistic classifications.

Finally, taxonomy is something of a ding-dong battleground, a bit like some branches of linguistics, so there are plenty of critics of cladistics out there. Also, there's a question about whether it will ever fully replace the Linnaean system on the popular, lay level.

  

why anti-semitism?

In his book on ancient Rome and Jerusalem, Martin Goodman suggests that it was the Romans who first became 'anti-semitic', demonising the Jews in order to justify their their overly harsh response to Jewish rebelliousness in 66CE. Their campaign to put down the rebellion ended with the complete destruction of the Jewish city four years later, and a subsequent diaspora that hasn't been matched, in terms of impact, by any other.

Jewish restiveness was apparently not the result of a general hostility to Roman overlordship, it was more 'reaction to maladministration by a low-grade governor'. The destruction of Jerusalem by Titus seems to have been completely unplanned, a spur of the moment decision by a general fed up with the toll taken by a stubborn, do-or-die phalanx of Jewish fighters.

Yet there's likely to have been another important factor in the decision to raze Jerusalem. Titus was the son of Vespasian, who, after the tumultuous year 69CE in Rome [which saw three caesars come and go], was in the running to become emperor himself. A glorious defeat, even an annihilation of the Jews [who had humiliated Rome by destroying the equivalent of a whole legion, an even without precedent in Jewish history], would clearly improve Vespasian's chances of gaining the laurel crown.

Before this rebellion, Jews were tolerated and even respected at Rome. Herod the Great managed to gain the patronage first of Mark Antony, then of Octavian, and his great building projects in Jerusalem matched the scale of those of Augustus in Rome. Later, Herod's grandson, Agrippa, gained the affections of Tiberius, as well as two later caesars, Gaius [Caligula] and Claudius. Due to their patronage, he was able to rule over even more territory than his grandfather. All this changed after 70CE, and the new Christian sect, keen to distance itself from the Jews and to gain the favour of the all-powerful Romans, found it highly politic to ratchet up their own anti-Jewish attitudes, blaming the Jews for not sufficiently supporting their Man in Heaven, and even for conniving at his death. 

Could anti-semitism, that monumental Western negative force, really have sprung from such arbitrary beginnings? Well, yes and no. More no than yes, I'd say. Or rather, its beginnings were believable enough, but its burgeoning growth would have to be sustained by other factors. 

One factor was the burgeoning growth of Christianity itself. At the time of Christianity's acceptance as the official religion of the empire, Augustine, that charming intellectual and sensitive soul, a truly worthy Church Father, argued that the Jews shouldn't be converted to the True Faith, but kept in their parlous state of subjection as an example to all of the wrong path taken. Such sentiments testify to the fall of Jewish stocks in society under the Romans in the centuries following the fall of Jerusalem.

The Jews themselves were much more tolerant of Christians than vice versa. They were accustomed to break-away versions of their faith, and the gospels, if any of them are to be trusted, provide proof of the more or less good grace with which Jesus' apostate preachings were tolerated.

This is a sketchy account of the origins of anti-semitism, but its growth as a force in the west would require much further analysis, some of which is given in Niall Ferguson's The War of the World, though his book really only covers the matter in detail from the nineteenth century. Why were all Jews officially expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1322, from Spain in 1492, and so on and on? Clearly they were the victims of their own success to some extent. Ferguson gives the figures for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the Jews were vastly over-represented not only in business and banking, for which they have been traditionally reviled, but in the arts and the sciences, in academia and politics, in every area of endeavour that demands a bit of brainpower. It's likely that this over-representation reaches centuries back. Expelling the Jews [and confiscating all their worldlies] was always a good ploy for cash-strapped monarchies needing to shore up the support of their subjects, but this only partially explains the phenomenon of anti-semitism, which is wrapped up in notions of ethnicity, in-groups and out-groups and, later, toxic concepts about race.

I might go into this in more detail in another post, but then again I might not.

impudicitia

Fiona Patten, Sex party convenor

The birth of the Australian Sex Party is something to celebrate, though I'm not expecting it to sweep the scene. I think though that we've reached the stage, even if it's only due to an increase in diversity, that we can seriously, if not too seriously, use the sex word in the title of a political party. Its stated aim, or one of them, is to counter what it sees as the growing influence of religious groups as lobbyists, and of Family First as an essentially Christian conservative party. The influx of Moslem immigrant groups, and other religious immigrants, might also be a concern regarding the maintenance of a truly secular polity. I'm hoping that secularism and the promotion of a sexually healthy and more open society can find common ground to work within.

I note that sex education, for example, is on the ASP agenda, and having noted the appalling response to a more inclusive attitude to homosexuality from the arch-conservative religious school of one of my previous foster-kids [who just happened to be a confused young homosexual], I feel strongly about defending a secularised, inclusive sex education system.

There are many focus issues, even if they're not so high on the agenda now that the economic crisis is carrying all before it. Sex education, abortion, gay marriage, the puritanical [and killing] conditions attached to overseas aid, censorship, the funding of religious schools and institutions, issues around prostitution and pornography, sex discrimination, sexual health issues, drug laws and other civil liberties issues, to name just a few broad areas. The whole idea of this party - the only sex party I'd ever have the chance of being invited to, I suspect [as an overweight, middle-aged single male] - is quite rejuvenating, and I'd quite like to get involved as more than just a member. I've bookmarked the site and I'll pay a membership fee and I'll email them re volunteering. I have writing skills to offer, at least. Of course I might have to tread carefully as a foster carer who receives, in that role, considerable support from a religious charity, though they've never mentioned religion to me and I doubt that all their workers are True Believers. Still, combining foster care with libertine causes might make for a tough juggle. 

I've already spoken of this stuff to my current foster kid [who's seventeen and about to fly the coop] and we discussed a couple of the issues, namely gay marriage and abortion. On abortion, he thinks it shouldn't be freely available, but only under certain conditions, such as not having the funds to care for a child, or being too young, or too old... and he also thinks the father of the child should have a say. Like most teens, he puts his finger well on the general dilemmas but hasn't thought through the details, the implications for each particular case ... but then he finished with the view that each individual case should be taken on its merits, which is fine but it doesn't take us too far. The whole discussion made me aware how little I know about what happens when a woman presents for an abortion. Presumably she has counselling choices but may not take those options. Presumably the father doesn't rate a mention? There are quite a few ethical issues kicking around just there. 

The lad also argues that gays shouldn't be allowed to be married, because marriage is a Christian ceremony and the Bible's dead against homosexuality. He's dead against the Bible himself, but he somehow seems to feel that if you're gay you wouldn't want to be married, or a Christian, because of Biblical injunctions against homosexuality. I pointed out of course that there were many homosexual Christians and that marriage isn't just a Christian tradition, and of course he said he knew all that... and he modified his view to allow at least civil gay marriages, which are presumably outlawed still by the current Federal government. Again I felt that I should bone up on the issues. Earlier this year, Federal Labor worked on reforming all they could reform re discriminatory legislation around gender and sexual orientation, but they stopped short of giving gay marriage the go-ahead. Why? What was their rationale? How instrumental was the Christian Rudd in this decision? And as to the reforms, have they now passed through both houses and become law? 

There are plenty of other issues to investigate and monitor. There is apparently a strong will within this Federal government to overturn the Harradine-inspired policy which ties overseas aid funding to an anti-abortion message, but it hasn't happened yet. And then there's this proposed internet filter...

This article on the Harradine policy is an online version of one I read yesterday in a doctor's surgery. Possibly a bit sensationalist, but not bad for a fashion rag, I thought. 

Hopefully I  can make a real connection with this party, but I'll have to change my shy ways. Apparently they're launching the new party at Melbourne's Sexpo, and I've never been able to dig up the courage to go to one of them....

the treason problem

Klaus Fuchs - a bit naive, a bit arrogant

Rebecca West's collection of essays, The Meaning of Treason, is both reportage and meditation. The edition I've been reading was published in 1952 and it deals with the treason of Nazi collaborators such as William Joyce [Lord Haw-Haw] and John Amery, the more or less incompetent founder of the British Free Corps, an organisation mired in haplessness. The later essays, however, treat of scientists who sold secrets to Soviet Russia, including Allen Nun May and the controversial physicist Klaus Fuchs. It's worth noting that these trials were conducted in, and contributed to, an atmosphere of anti-communist paranoia that came to a head with McCarthyism in the USA. 

In spite of the title, I'm not sure that West has come to terms with the concept of treason. Then again, I'm not sure if it's possible to come to terms with it or wholly capture it - it's a slippery and ever-contested concept. West's book is naturally of its time, a time buffeted by the most damaging war, perhaps, in human history. Considering this, West's judgment and those of her contemporaries seem measured and humane enough. Compare the response to September 11 [not an act of treason but yet somehow seen as a betrayal "of our freedoms''], when the tragic and senseless murder of 3000 people was seen as sufficient reason for invading two nations, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, imprisoning countless numbers of their inhabitants, suspending habeas corpus, dispensing with the Geneva conventions, encouraging the use of torture, creating secret prisons and so much more besides. At times like this, when a nation sinks so low, the line between treason and whistle-blowing becomes hard to draw. 

Rebecca West was faced with no such problems when she wrote her book. The defeat of fascism had laid bare all its murderous and nihilistic horror. Communism under Stalin had revealed itself as equally bereft of value. Still, treason isn't really about different systems of governance, it's about your country versus everyone else's. It's about the meaning of ''my country''. It's about patriotism, the flip side of treason.  

In her epilogue to the essay collection, West returned to the central concept, perhaps feeling she needed to sharpen the focus. She began by anticipating Peter Singer's notion of the expanding circle; the self, the immediate family, the larger community of interests... and then country. 

Born and bred in England, he will find it easier to understand the English than the rest of men, not for any mystical reason, but because their language is his, because he is fully acquainted with their customs, and because he is the product of their common history. So also each continent enjoys a vague unity of self-comprehension, and is divided from the others by a sharp disunity...

We can all sense what is being gotten at here, and it raises interesting questions, because it suggests that treason [and patriotism], isn't necessarily about nationhood, but perhaps more about [the betrayal or upholding of] a shared heritage, which may or may not be tied to a nation state. One can imagine being accused of treason against Athens in ancient times, for example, or even of being a traitor to the Aboriginal cause, but to claim someone as a traitor to the European Union seems way too fraught, the ''unity of self-comprehension'' being altogether too vague and too riven with competing allegiances to carry conviction. 

West goes on to say - but I'm oversimplifying, I know - that this simple pleasure in shared heritage has been 'lately' muddied by rationalism, by which

the ardours of patriotism were to be abandoned, and replaced by a cool resolution to place one's country on a level with all others in one's affections and to hand it over without concern to the dominion of any other power which could offer it greater material benefits

I would suggest though, that at all times there have been characters, and more than we might like to admit, who have switched national allegiences as frequently, and often for much the same reasons, as pro footballers have switched clubs. Think of Alcibiades, who worked just as hard for Sparta against Athens as he ever did for his birth state, and then again for the Persians against the Peloponnesians, or Josephus, the controversial adviser to Rome on all things Jewish. In troubled times, the self, the centre of that circle of affections, often becomes paramount. 

To us now, Nazi or Stalinist sympathisers seem beyond the pale for reasons having little to do with treason, unless we use the term in the sense of betraying the whole species. Still, we are able to make concessions – for the Brits of German background caught between two sides, for the hapless, uneducated POWs who joined the British Free Corps in exchange for kinder treatment from their captors, and even, though to a lesser degree, for those leftists who genuinely believed that communism would provide us all with something somehow better.

In an odd passage [she can certainly be obscure at times] West seems to mock and dismiss the internationalism which many would nowadays claim as a basis for shaking off or transcending the quasi-primitive charms of nationalism: 

So the evil moment of fascism came and was clear: not surpassed in evil since the days of the barbarian invasions. The devil of nationalism had been driven out of man, but he had not become the headquarters of the dove. Instead there had entered into him the seven devils of internationalism, and he was torn by their frenzies.

This is more sensationalist than illuminating, but West seemed to believe that this internationalist spirit was a product of a rationalism more dangerous even than the misguided nationalisms that had so recently damaged Europe, and the sphere of Japanese adventurism. It was defeated, she claimed, by the simple reassertion of ordinary folks' claims to their own heritage in the aftermath of the war. I think the term ideology should replace rationalism here, and her remarks are clearly better suited to socialist/communist 'blank slate' ideology, internationalist in spirit, than to fascism, with its focus on nationalist/cultural bloodlines. West's critique is both eloquent and at times hopelessly muddy. In the end it's about cherishing your own - not too much, for ... All men should have a drop or two of treason in their veins, if the nations are not to go soft like so many pears. Of course she’s right that we have to appreciate the small values, the small virtues, those that Nietszche sneered at in Zarathustra. That we shouldn’t aim so high that we lose sight of our foiblesome neighbours and their strivings. The question is, whether people should be punished for giving their all to an idea or a set of ideas rather than to their neighbours, as a matter of principle. It will depend, of course, on the idea, and on the neighbours. The problem with communism was never its international appeal, it was an appeal to a vague utopian concept of equality and social engineering. To sell your neighbours into danger for something so vague and dubious was both naive and arrogant. Was it treason? Probably, yes, but perhaps not quite as commonly understood. The meaning of treason remains unresolved, indeed never more so in an age of increasing global co-operation. In fact, with treason not having much of a profile in the courts these days, the question, both of treason and of patriotism has clearly become increasingly vexed. May it continue to be so - it might just be a sign of maturity. 

 

Rebecca West and William Joyce

Rebecca West is a name I've occasionally conjured with. I've been reading her for the first time recently, and before that I knew her by reputation as a sometime lover of H G Wells and a prolific writer/journalist, a fairly formidable figure in English letters in the first half of the twentieth century. When, a few years ago, I was reading up on Serbia and the Balkans, I came across her hefty tome, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, in a second-hand bookshop, but finally decided against buying it. Now, having almost finished her fascinating book-length essay on William Joyce [aka Lord Haw-Haw] in a collection entitled The Meaning of Treason, I can't wait to write about her and to read more. 

As Wikipedia tells us, West had a very long as well as productive life, dying in 1983 at the age of ninety, and always participating energetically in the issues of the day. Her writing on Joyce shows her to be a shrewd psychologist and a political pragmatist, wryly realistic and nobody's fool. It's a fascinating account of the polical tensions before and after WW2, with communists switching to fascism then switching back to communism, with anti-democratic political ideals holding far greater sway in the west than they do today, and with so many people caught up in the vagaries of family ideology, competing nationalisms and generally divided sympathies. 

William Joyce, for example, was born in the USA to Irish Unionist parents - which, since they were also Catholic, immediately rendered them anomalous. He returned to Ireland with his family as a young boy, where he received a good Jesuit education, proving himself industrious and disciplined. He moved to England as a teenager, and made various attempts to join the military. From an early age he seems to have been drawn to conflict and controversy. He was a rabid anti-semite and when he became prominent in the British fascist movement he emphasised that element in his oratory, polarising opinion on the BUF [British Union of Fascists] and possibly creating tensions with its leader, Mosley. 

Bigotry is an intriguing phenomenon. We know that it's all around us - anti-semitism, racism, homophobia - and we associate it with ignorance, and we find people who espouse  such thinking boring as well as dangerous, but its very familiarity masks its essential mystery - why do people engage in wholesale hatreds based on such flimsy pretexts? How did this way of thinking become so popular as to convulse the whole of Europe for a decade? Why did it attract so many reasonably well-educated types as well as the usual misfits and crazies?

West is ultimately no more able to provide answers to these questions than I could. In any case, anti-semitism was much more fashionable then than it is now, at least in Western Europe. Well, no, not just there, think of the USA, think of the highly respectable Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, and the backdrop that made their views respectable. Think too of the emphasis on race and eugenics in those pre-war days.   

Joyce’s hatred of communists was also something of a fashion, but it should also be noted that then as now, the people most consumed with the activities and the danger to society of the extreme left were those of the extreme right, and vice versa. It’s a kind of co-dependence in which each side must necessarily over-value the negative impact of the other. When Joyce was a young man he was slashed by an assailant at a conservative party meeting he was convening. It left him badly scarred. He always claimed the culprit to be a communist Jew. Of course if that were true it might be cause for resentment, but it’s much more likely to have been a convenient fabrication.

West makes much of the issue of class in Joyce’s ambitious make-up. He wasn’t a gentleman – West uses the term with only partial irony – in spite of his educated airs, and Mosley would never have considered him his equal. This seemed to make him more determined than ever to make his mark, and we get a strong sense of someone who feels himself worthy of better things than others are willing to concede to him. He wanted to become a British officer but was somehow blocked in that ambition. As a fascist organizer he was probably more successful than Mosley but was given little credit by him. When he finally left for Germany just as war was about to break out, the Nazis treated him with suspicion and disdain, to such a degree that he almost turned tail for England and incarceration for the duration. When, with great reluctance, he was given his head over more ‘gentlemanly’ broadcasters [the name Lord Haw Haw was transferred to him from earlier, more plummy announcers], he proved to be their most reliable propagandist.

Of course it was a very circumscribed success. Fascism, by its very nature, was always bound for failure, and its spectacular failure and spectacular destructiveness in the thirties and forties has discredited anything like it for a long time to come. Joyce’s broadcasts in any case probably did more good than harm to the British cause. He became a figure of fun but also a rallying point. People tuned into him both for amusement and to try to get a handle on how the enemy saw them, and how they were coping with the war.

West's reportage of the case, her description of the trial process and Joyce's response to it, is wholly absorbing. Her general remarks about treason are more open to question, though. However, my response comes from a time when Western Europe has known decades of peace and stability, and has even formed a union of sorts, with a common currency. Globalism has also played its part in rendering the concept of treason quaint, to some. It's worth having a closer look at West's reasoning in the light of the twenty-first century, and i'll do that next time. 

Thoughts on a passing administration

As the USA stumbles and crashes to the end of their first administration of the twenty-first century, I feel the need to provide a semi-educated dilettantish outsider’s perspective.

I’m neither an economist nor an American, so I’m not going to dwell so much on that nation’s current economic woes, its causes and effects. I’m more interested in the foreign policy of this administration, which has surely been disastrous for the USA’s global image.

Obviously the events of September 11 have dominated their foreign policy. I witnessed the unfolding events of that day with amazement and horror and sympathy, like almost everyone else, but it wasn’t long after realizing that the world wasn’t coming to an end that my thinking was dominated by one simple question – what will the reaction be?

As one wiseacre once put it, we ought to be judged not by how we treat our friends but by how we treat our enemies – or words to that effect. So many of us must have felt that the way the USA responded to this attack would be of enormous significance for the whole future of the west, and few of us would’ve felt too sanguine about it, given the new administration, and the returnees from the previous Bush administration.

Nevertheless, the invasion of Afghanistan didn’t raise too many eyebrows. Most of us felt a real disgust at the brutal, primitive ways of the Taliban, and sympathized with the push towards freedom of hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees. We watched the despicable destruction of the Buddhist statues, the beating of women in their absurd tent clothing in the streets, and we heard, many of us for the first time, all about Osama Bin Laden and al-Queda, and their training grounds in the south of the country. It seemed reasonable to make a strike against this sort of thing, perhaps.

Always perhaps. My concern, always, is with the suffering of civilians and innocents when the crude instruments of war are brought to bear. Those clean clinical strikes we all remember from the first gulf war, the demonstrations of strikepower, something like demonstrations of a new more effective washing machine or garbage disposal. Where were the human beings down there? Were there none?  Does anybody really believe advertising?

The argument that the September 11 attacks were first and foremost criminal, and therefore a police matter, an argument that seemed perfectly coherent to me, that argument was soon drowned out as the invasion of Afghanistan progressed and rumours surfaced that Iraq would be next. My own initial response was to discount the rumours and to reflect, from my safe and faraway computer desk, that Afghanistan was already ravaged by war and turmoil, the American invasion could hardly make it worse and might eventually bring about a happier outcome for the less benighted. An ignorant liberal fantasy.

News trickled out about Camp X-ray, and then Camp Delta, and the war of words against Saddam Hussein began, and my sense of anger and disgust grew. I was no fan of Saddam, but I could see no obvious connection between his regime and al-Quaeda and the September 11 attacks. Everything, on the contrary, pointed to a disconnection, an antagonism, since, al-Quaeda, like the Taliban, seemed to have grown out of a primitivist movement [primitivism being a term I use in preference to fundamentalism] which would be as hostile to Saddam’s quasi-secular dictatorship as it was to Christian infidel nations.

I tried to look at the other side. All of the Bush administration’s arguments for ‘’taking out’’ Saddam were clearly bogus, but Saddam was just as clearly a criminal and a murderer, and the Iraqis would be better off without him. Presumably most Iraqis would agree. However, perhaps an even greater majority of Iraqis were antagonistic to the US and profoundly suspicious of its interest in the region. These people would be prepared to take up arms against any invading force. Better the devil you know. Given the ‘’if you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists’’ rhetoric of Bush, these people, who if they had been Americans defending their land, would be honoured as patriots, would be in danger of being branded as terrorists, and given the moves by the Bush administration to dispense with the Geneva conventions in order to more ‘’efficiently’’ prosecute their unilaterally declared ‘’war on terror’’, they would be treated abominably for their patriotism. All of which would rebound on the USA itself.

A little investigation showed me that, though Saddam had behaved abominably in the aftermath of the first gulf war, to shore up his battered status, his regime in the years leading up to the renewing of hostilities by the US had been relatively peaceful. Saddam, it seemed to me, was brutal but not stupid. A prolonged rein of terror would not have done his cause any good, and nor would he have helped his cause by antagonizing the US unnecessarily. These fairly obvious reflections made me very suspicious about US claims regarding WMD. First, the Bush administration seemed bent on regime change in Iraq, no matter what, and WMD appeared to be a mere pretext. Second, there were massive contradictions between US claims and those of the UN weapons inspectors, and it was only reasonable, from a bystander’s perspective, to trust the UN, who had no particular barrow to push, over the US. 

In any case, we watched helplessly as the US moved towards war, disgusted and deeply ashamed that little Australia, under little Johnnie Howard, was backing the planned invasion to the hilt. Howard’s adherence to Bush didn’t surprise me though – what did surprise me was the support of Tony Blair. My understanding is that Blair was keen to remove Saddam but backed a more multilateral, UN-based approach. It seems that the Bush administration secured a promise from Blair that, if the US went through the motions of getting support from the UN security council, Blair would back the invasion. They did go through those motions, in the most bullying and belligerent manner possible, and Blair, as a man of his word, felt compelled to make the best of an unsatisfactory situation. Which raises the question of whether keeping a promise is more important than saving lives. Blair shouldn’t have made such a promise in the first place, though, considering the nature of the Bush administration, which should’ve been clear enough to him.  His own head of intelligence, Sir Richard Dearlove, reported to him in July 2002, well before the UN maneuverings, the real situation:

Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

 

Given this evidence of pig-headedness in the Bush administration’s intentions, and a cavalier callousness in regard to the fate of the Iraqi people, Blair’s support strikes me as unconscionable. Maybe he felt British troops could be a tempering influence in the invading force – as indeed they seem to have been, by and large – but the fact remains that the Americans were largely calling the shots, and their approach was a matter of the gravest concern.

The invasion of Iraq, and the mess it has created of that country for years, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, the shameless exploitation of the country’s resources, and the obvious strengthening of al-Queda and anti-American sentiment that has resulted, will be seen as one of the enduring legacies of the Bush administration. It took a long time for the administration to realize that the most important battle in Iraq was the battle for hearts and minds, but it does seem that, particularly under the leadership of David  Petraeus, things have improved greatly in recent times.

The most disturbing development, it seems to me, that has occurred under the George W Bush presidency, is the expansion of Presidential power to unprecedented proportions. This is a situation that should be reversed by the next administration as a matter of urgency. Of course, it’s unlikely that a President will act to curtail his own power, but it would be a measure of that President’s stature that he should so act. The abuse that has occurred under the soi-disant war on terror is flagrant and chilling, and a crime against humanity. Joseph Marguilies’ book Guantanamo and the abuse of presidential power provides much evidence on this matter, but it’s not far to find much other evidence on the brutality that this administration has unleashed and encouraged in its treatment of alleged enemy combatants – a huge number of them completely innocent and since released without charge – since the events of September 11 2001.

Another probably vain hope for the future is for the USA to recognize its international obligations and to accept international jurisdiction with regard to crimes against humanity.

This may all read like an anti-American screed, but I’m a sometime student of history and I know that, through the ages, every nation or state that has come to a position of dominance in its neighbourhood or the world has used that position for the purposes of exploitation. The ancient Aztecs built a magnificent nation on the exploitation and enslavement of its neighbours. The Athenians dominated the Delian League and ruthlessly exploited it to its own advantage. The Roman Empire was more or less archetypical in this regard, and the British Empire was all about expansion of its own power at the expense of others, no matter how civilized a spin you put on it. So it’s ridiculous to allow the US, or any other power that attains the position the US has done, to imagine itself the world’s police officer, as well as judge, jury and executioner. We must have stronger international courts, subscribed to by all.

I once used a schoolyard story to illustrate the US war on Iraq, and I will repeat and elaborate on it here as I think it still holds good. The USA can be compared to the strongest, toughest kid in the playground. Of course, in the past he has demonstrated this toughness in various ways, intimidating many kids who deserved it, some who didn’t, and accepting sycophancy as his due. Others in the school-yard have tried to steer an independent course, but have recognized that they need to keep on good terms with big Sam. One day, Sam gets tripped up and falls flat on his face. He feels humiliated, and he can’t get on his feet fast enough to catch the culprit, though he know well enough who he is. He spends a bit of time hunting around for him, then he beats up another boy he knows to be a good mate of his. However, this doesn’t satisfy Sam, because the mate was easy pickings and Sam still feels humiliated. He feels he has lost face, so he decides to get stuck into another boy with whom he’s been on bad terms for years. He makes up excuses for his bullying, saying that the boy has been hatching plots against him and that he’s secretly in league with the lad who’s tripped him up. He knows that the two boys have always hated each other, but so what? The kid deserves it anyway…

The sad thing about this story is that it really is spot on – there is nothing more to the invasion of Iraq than this – the restoration of big Sam’s pride and reputation. Of course there is one important sense in which this is an odious comparison, and that is that the September 11 attacks claimed thousands of innocent lives, and the attack on Iraq has claimed hundreds of thousands more. The USA has wrought some revenge on some of the September 11 attackers. To say they have been brought to justice would be going too far, since this administration has, in this sphere, dispensed with justice in the universally understood meaning of the term after declaring their ‘war on terror’. That the perpetrators of the Iraq invasion and occupation will never be brought to justice goes without saying. Yet still we can hope. 

Plugging in

google - written in the clouds

So much to keep track of outide of our teensy-weensy circle of life. Google is raising concerns and excitement with its cloudy new super-browser, Chrome. The Beta version of this open source browser was launched a few days ago, that’s September 2 I think. I don’t know much about what a Beta version is, or if a Beta version or a non-Beta version is more suitable for me, but I’m interested in the whole idea. I’ll explore it more fully later. That’s to say, I’ll wade just a tiny bit deeper into the shallows.

The Large Hadron Collider is also naturally making news, and highlighting the ignorance of many of us re physics and its significance in our lives. Not that all of those warning of the dangers of the LHC are ignorant. There’s apparently a genuine concern among some theorists that the LHC could generate tiny black holes which will eventually expand and gobble up the earth – or something like that. Michio Kaku provides us with plenty of reassurance here.

The role of the US in the extermination of some half a million soi-disant communists in Indonesia in the mid sixties has come under the spotlight with the recent release of damning documents. There’s a useful background to the horror here. Meanwhile, Spring’s freshening things up, and I’m hoping for a bit of rejuvenation meself.

more on bullying, and sunlight at the end of the tunnel

home made beer bottle solar panel [China]. It works, apparently

While the issue of bullying is important, and the Della Bosca Belinda Neale fracas [the night of the iguanas] is one example of the corruptions of power, which I was going to write about, there are plenty of other examples, some of them even more globally important.

It might be a stretch to speak of the rise of primitivist religions, or primitivist branches of established religions, as a form of bullying, but maybe not too much of a stretch. Certainly it’s not about reasoned debate – it’s about tactical maneuvering and aggressive lobbying for unrepresentative control of politico-social agendas. A small example of this is the threat, apparently from conservative Catholic MP Ron Boswell, that the government will experience a serious backlash if it tries to decouple overseas aid funding from a moralistic position regarding abortion and contraception. They wouldn’t get away with it in Australia, as pointed out in Mobile Science. Cheers too, to the Sunday Mail columnist [I forget her name] who strongly criticized the likes of Boswell and the bullying moral minority in last weekend’s paper.

That we’ve tied funding to such matters in the first place is something of a scandal – only the US, of course, also does this. It’s been happening here since 1996, thanks largely to the efforts of another conservative, ‘unrepresentative swill’ senator Brian Harradine. The labor government is about to overturn it, or such is our fervent hope.

The thing about political bullying is that it isn’t about convincing people about the truth of your position through evidence and argument, it’s about hectoring, playing the numbers game, threatening to remove backing if you’re a powerful organization like an established church, or a powerful person like a house leader, making a lot of noise and so forth.

In Indonesia, currently, it’s being taken to a whole new level. A weak central government is being blamed for the rise of, and increasingly aggressive tactics of extremist Islamic groups such as the Islamic Defenders Front, along with the rising power of the fatwah factory, the Ulema Council [originally set up by Suharto to keep the conservative clerics in line]. Recently, Islamist thugs broke up the annual rally of moderate religious folk which celebrates Pancasila Day, and generally there’s a lot of lawlessness of this kind around the country, polarizing the population. The strange and disturbing thing seems to be that, because of the perceived weakness of Yudhuyono’s government, the police and local authorities are taking the Ulema’s derees and pronouncements as law, and acting accordingly, in a most naughtily unconstitutional manner. It doesn’t look as if shari’a law is going to be instituted tomorrow, but still it’s a situation to watch and worry over. All this is well covered by the ABC’s Religion Report.

Meanwhile on the almost domestic front, our co-op is just going to install its first solar hot water system. We have a few properties with solar hot water at present, I think our two most recently built ones, and the three new ones that we hope will be handed over to us in August. We had to insist on getting solar hot water for them, even though we were given systems with out previous two houses, and even though they’re going to become mandatory for newly built houses soon. I’ll write about this next.

three horrid hypocrites

off with their heads

This issue of SA’s prison system and our government’s attitude to criticism in this area has got me hooked for the moment. The Independent Weekly’s article linked in my previous post pointed out that correctional services officers, as public servants, are consigned to silence on the condition of our prisons, as this might imply criticism of our reverend ministers. So they’re effectively muzzled, as of course are the prisoners themselves – which leaves only the judiciary, the media and those with a humanitarian interest, such as civil rights activists.

The newspaper article also claims that some cells, designed for one person, have three occupants, and that rape is an extremely common occurrence. If some of those quoted are to be believed, you’re pretty well certain to be raped if you land up in one of our prisons, for whatever reason. So I wonder if the likes of Atkinson has ever been publicly confronted on this mess [assuming the reportage to be fair and accurate] with any determination. By someone who simply won’t let him get away with an ignoble je ne regrette rien response. Or does he have complete control over the media? My fantasy is that he goes on one of those schools visits that ministers must occasionally do, and that some cocky brilliant student asks him, in front of the assembled multitudes and before a sleepy camera crew on a slow news day, excuse me mr minister, why do we have longer prison sentences than other states, and why are our prisons the most overcrowded in the nation, and why are recidivism rates so high here, and why is rape in our prisons so prevalent and why is it that when anyone questions you on these matters you deny that there’s any problem and say that prison sentences are probably still not long enough? And why is it that you’ve called our second most senior magistrate, Andrew Cannon, delusional for criticizing the overcrowding of our prisons when in fact many others including well-known criminal lawyer Simon Slade, and journalists of the Independent Weekly have voiced similar criticisms? Are they delusional too Mr Minister?

But these are dreams.

Still, it’s great to see the judiciary here and interstate closing ranks in support of Cannon. They point out that his main point, that the overcrowding in prisons should be a factor in sentencing, is well-accepted in criminal law, and that Atkinson is far more out of step than Cannon is. But of course the judiciary can’t call for the offing of Atkinson and his populist mates, including Rann, that’s a job for journalists, activists and, dare I say, bloggers. Oh, I feel the responsibility keenly. Anyway, much as I’m looking forward to this government’s plans for public transport, I can’t see myself, in all conscience, voting labor at the next state election or at least not until Rann, Foley and Atkinson are removed from their ranks. Make it be soon.

Atkinson: politicking at its worst

ordure in the house

I’m often fascinated by my own volatile responses, here in my desert home. The TV’s on, I’m channel-hopping, and there’s a news story on the ABC, regarding the state attorney-general Michael Atkinson’s response to a judge’s argument, written in a report, that, due to overcrowding in the state’s prisons and generally poor conditions, sentencing should be more lenient, at least until the problem is fixed, if it ever is. Now, if I’ve reported it aright, it seems an eminently sensible argument, though I don’t know myself whether the state’s prisons are over-crowded.

But of course with this state government having ridden for years on the bandwagon of law-and-order populism, Atkinson was having none of it. He described the judge’s comments as delusional, and directed the rest of the judiciary to ignore them, and went on to lambast him for daring to comment on an area ‘beyond his expertise’. It was basically a public display of apoplexy, presumably designed to divert the media’s attention from the issues raised by the judge. Meanwhile, here in my dusty-cluttered lounge-room, I was putting on my own private display of apoplexy at Atkinson’s mealy-mouthed crapola. I’ve already written here about how the democratic system transforms individuals with the usual scepticisms and hesitancies into political personae who are pillars of strength and certitude, and this is another nice example. Maybe Atkinson is sincere in his indignation, but it came across to me as obfuscation, manipulation and arrant dishonesty. I’m ashamed to say I wanted to beat him up [for being a bully-boy], but failing that, I wanted to be one of the media contingent, and to ask the question - and meanwhile, Mickey boy, what are you going to do about the disgraceful state of your prisons? But I suppose these are the sorts of questions that make you no longer one of the media contingent, and therein lies another problem with the political system.

Of course I very quickly realised that I don’t know if our prisons are in a parlous state, but the point is that Atkinson’s response struck me immediately as the behaviour of someone with something to hide. If one wants to actually find out how our prisons are functioning, the last person we would ask is the state politician in charge of our prisons. This is what the political system does to people, and it’s a bit of a tragedy. A better person to ask would probably be that judge Atkinson is so keen to muzzle, for he would seem to have no vested interest in the matter, and he would have a pretty clear idea about, or plenty of access to, the number of people being sent to prison, the lengths of their sentences, and the number and capacities of the prison facilities being used.

Politicians should be grilled by the media about their over-the-top claims. The media should be smarter and tougher about the questions they ask, and pollies should never be allowed to evade questions or to pick and choose the media reps they talk to. The very idea that they can use their power to call some mini press conference, assassinate someone’s character, and then walk away no questions asked is just outrageous.

But just a tiny bit of digging reveals my hunch about Atkinson’s attack-is-the-best-form-of-defence strategy to be spot on. Only a month ago, The Independent Weekly conducted an investigation into the state’s prison system and found that it was the most over-crowded in the country, with longer jail terms than elsewhere and poor rehabilitation programs. Apparently the government’s response to this was much as Atkinson’s response yesterday – to actually boast about their dereliction of duty in this regard. Kevin Foley’s hypocrisy on the matter is well worth reading about.

From time to time I’ve wanted to rename my blog something like ‘the daily bully dossier’, because bullying really incenses me. Atkinson, Foley and Rann are my bullies of the moment, their behaviour totally disgusts me, and I hope the media continue to hound them, preferably out of office. Not that the opposition will offer us anything better.

apart from a few rogue states...

model of the CBU-97 cluster bomb

It seems that progress is being made in the world by dint of hard work and determination. An agreement to ban cluster bombs has been endorsed by more than a hundred countries, and it’s believed or hoped that now cluster bombs will go the way of land mines after the international landmine treaty was brought into effect a decade ago, despite, of course, vigorous opposition from the US government, which also vigorously opposes the cluster bomb ban. In spite of this, land mines have become ‘stigmatised’ to such a degree, thanks to the ban and the publicity surrounding it, that only Burma now uses them.

Cluster bombs are like land mines in that they don’t discriminate, and are often detonated by children, or innocent farm workers. They are a particular problem in agricultural areas such as south Lebanon, because their presence is such a danger to field workers that cropping and harvesting can’t be carried out. Israel used over 1800 cluster bombs in attacks on Lebanon in 2006, and of course it opposes the ban. Other countries in opposition include India, Pakistan, China and Russia – all countries with significant military capacity and/or involved in conflict with neighbouring states.

Much of this piece is derived, appropriately, from a Lebanese newspaper, linked above.

Australia, along with the UK, has been dragging its heels over the ban, due largely to problems raised by their alliances with the US. What would be their liability if they were involved along with their allies, in attacks using cluster munitions? I don't know if they finally got what they wanted in terms of assurances, but they've finally agreed to the ban, which is due for ratification in December.

winning over the demos

just believe

I made a youtube vid of the following, but it's not very good. I've unfortunately spent a small fortune on a crappy camera, but that's not the only reason why the vid's crap.

The trial by media, and the judgment by politicians, of Bill Henson – I haven’t seen anything of the images in question apart from what has flashed across the TV screen – is an object lesson in the untrustworthiness of that particular specimen, the politician I mean. I heard Krudd venting his view that the images were disgusting and that they had no artistic merit whatsoever, and I’ve heard other pollies, particularly of the right, unsurprisingly, jumping on that particular bandwagon. Therein lies the cancer at the heart of democracy. But before focusing on that, let’s focus on Krudd. It has come to my attention that Mr Krudd is a Christian. Having read the bible not so long ago, I need to point out to my viewers – and this might relieve you of the onerous task of reading the thing yourself, though it does have a few bright moments – I need to point out that the deity whose biography is to be found in the old testament, or tanach is a mass-murdering curmudgeon with no redeeming moral features whatsoever. Mr Krudd presumably communes with this disgusting entity, the list of whose crimes makes Joseph Stalin look like a kindergarten teacher, every Sunday. It’s quite likely that he asks advice from him on how to run the country. The fact that this entity is merely a figment of the collective imagination, is neither here nor there, for Krudd believes in his existence, knows about the crimes he commits according to the tanach, and not only considers him a good sort, he actually worships him and considers him even more important than sliced bread.

Now I’ve heard of Stalin worshippers, and apparently there are quite a few of them in the old USSR, not to be confused with my greatly improved version. I’ve never met any of them – though I do recall encountering a drunken old Hitler fan in my younger pub-crawling days in the seventies. It made me feel a bit queasy. The point is, such a type wouldn’t draw me to him like a sort of moral magnet, really. Frankly, I wouldn’t be much interested in a Stalinist’s views on any moral issue. I’d just consider him a bit beyond the pale. And that’s how I feel, too about Christians. Sorry Mr Krudd.

And then there are politicians in general. Though there are honorable exceptions, they like to come on strong about these sorts of issues. Strength is always a winning sign in politics isn’t it? And politics is largely about winning. Winning your vote. Winning over the demos, the demotico, that’s you folks. And it’s come to be an essential article of faith in politics that you won’t win over the demos, by being wishy-washy. I don’t know. I’m not sure, I can’t answer that – these are rude phrases for politicians – they try not to use them in public. And one of the rudest phrases of all is – I haven’t made up my mind. You’ll rarely hear a politician being so gauche as to use such phrases in public, and if they do, it’s almost certain that they’ll get into a lot of trouble. And this is particularly the case if the subject happens to be one of those moral hot potatoes like, paedophilia and child pornography.

I’ve written more, but lost it – it’s on the video. It’s great how reading aloud makes editing so much easier, though then it becomes editing for reading aloud, not editing for pageworthiness, not quite the same thing.

Primary Colors and political morality

I do get a bit behind in my film reviews, or my film viewing - sixty-two years behind in the case of Dragonwyck, but only ten years in the case of Mike Nichols's Primary Colors, but with this latter, the subject at least is not out of date, and we find it in every political campaign. In the recent federal election campaign, Rudd's one-time visit to a strip club, and a tenuous link with WA inc's notorious [I'm not entirely sure why] Brian Burke, were just two attempts to bring the scandalous and salacious into the political fray.

Primary Colors takes aim at the most magnetic of recent politicians, Bill Clinton [magnetic especially in attracting scandal], by creating a fiction with obvious parallels. Presidential hopeful Jack Stanton [John Travolta] and his savvy wife Susan [Emma Thompson] have a way of sucking people into the stream of their ambition and enthusiasm, and the film is largely seen from the perspective of one such sucked-in character, Henry Burton [Adrian Lester], who becomes Stanton's campaign manager. It's an extremely well-written film, and the performances of Thompson and Travolta, and Kathy Bates as a torrential and formidable campaign force who joins up with the Stantons after years of questionable absence, are a joy to watch.

I'm not going to review the film, though, as such. I'm more interested in the dilemmas raised. I should start with my general view, which will of course soon be qualified, that having sex more often, and with more people, is a Good and Healthy thing.

First qualification, or problem, is that most people don't agree with this statement, or at least with the 'more people' bit. Fidelity and loyalty are viewed as a positive, and Robert Manne amongst others has emphasized this. My own view is that having sex with a variety of people isn't necessarily proof of disloyalty, and that there is a confusion between sex and love, though admittedly the road of promiscuity is a hard road to hoe for a genuinely loving and loyal person, given human jealousies and possessiveness. And to travel that road under the spotlight of a political life is essentially impossible, unfortunately.

While a lot more could be said about the above confusion [about the meaning of sex in the context of human relations], I'll leave much of that to my online fiction which tries to explore many of these issues. Another matter dealt with in Primary Colors is that of sex and power. The high-flying Presidential candidate who takes advantage of a friend's bedazzled daughter, the Governor who has no trouble and no compunction about seducing his secretary, etc. As the film shows, these issues cut more than one way - the secretary may have no compunction about exaggerating a dalliance into a full-blown affair, for the purpose of extorting money or favours. Jack Stanton tries to 'clear his name' via DNA tests and such, but some might feel that this misses the point, which is that Stanton shouldn't use his personal charisma or political status to exploit the vulnerable and naive. On the other hand, there seems to have been enough people willing to turn a blind eye, or even to have been quietly approving of his behaviour, for him to have gotten away with it [sorry, I'm switching my thinking here from Stanton to Clinton, though Stanton too was successful in the Presidential race].

One possible explanation for this is that people are aware [however consciously] of the harm principle, and that the question of the harm caused by a few, or even more than a few, dalliances in the context of a marriage the openness of which is itself an open question, is at the very least difficult to determine. One of the problems for me, I confess, is that the Stantons/Clintons would never admit to their marriage being an open one, if that's what it is, for fear of losing the support of vast numbers of more conservative voters. This is one of the points of the film, of course - how pragmatic are we allowed to be, in order to get elected? If Clinton's 'closed' - and close - marriage is a sham [but note that the pair are still very much together], what about, say, his religion? After all, we all know that, more than in any other country, the USA's leadership aspirants have no option but to be practicing Christians. So is Clinton really a god-fearer? How much is sincere, and how much pretence?

These issues are perennial for all campaigners in all democratic elections, and they come with the territory of representative democracy. You could even say it's the poison at the heart of this system. Is this candidate/incumbent saying what she's saying in order to get into/stay in power, or does she really feel and believe it? Did Howard throw money and resources at the tax payer because he felt they deserved it, or to get re-elected? Were his actions re Aboriginal communities and the abuse of Aboriginal children a matter of sincere conviction or political expediency? Some of these question are much more easy to answer than others.

The Clinton warts-and-all Presidency was something of a victory for flawed, ambitious humanity, though I see the flaws rather differently from most. In the film, someone commits suicide because she has ideals that the Stantons don't live up to - but nobody can be expected to live up to the ideals of others, or even to be aware of them. As it happens, the Stantons are by turns exploitative and compassionate, as we all are. I suppose the best way to judge them is also the most painstaking - to analyse who gets hurt and who benefits, how many and by how much.
It's essentially a never-ending process.

travels from Tibet to Cyprus

random hate-filled scumbags

I have mixed feelings about the current spate of protests over Chinese oppression, but for the most part I think that raising awareness about oppressed minorities - not only Tibetans - is more important than the smooth running of an international sportsfest. In fact it seems highly appropriate to raise these issues in the context of an event which is intended to promote international harmony, for reasons that I would hope are obvious. I’ll spell them out though. A harmony that seeks to keep oppression out of sight and out of mind is a harmony not worth having. It should have been obvious to the Olympic Committee that, in granting the games to China, a state renowned internationally for its cruelty to and oppression of its own minorities, they had provided a golden opportunity to those who have suffered from that state’s cruelties to raise issues of hypocrisy and the reality that belies the Olympic ideal.



So I must say I found the remarks made by one Kevan Gosper, an Australian Olympic official, on these events, to be particularly lamentable. On last night's news he made the claim that most people have probably not even heard of the cause being highlighted by the protesters, as if this was some kind of decisive argument against them. That's to say, oppression that people haven't heard of isn't really oppression at all. What his remark really highlights [or would highlight if it were true] is the woeful ignorance of most people about the crimes committed against minority ethnicities or belief systems by large, closed nations such as China, or Indonesia under Suharto. This may be true, though I suspect Gosper is merely generalising from the position of his own woeful ignorance.

I've read further absurd remarks today from Gosper, claiming that the protesters were 'professional spoilers' who 'take their hate out on whatever the issues are at the time'. I know there are professional protesters out there, usually one or two in a hundred at your average demo, but to brand them all in this way is laughable. Gosper apparently knows what makes all these people tick, and he doesn't think the actual issues they're upset about rate a mention, presumably because he's never given them a moment's thought in his life. Such appalling complacency tips me over to the side of the protesters, though I don't think that assaulting torchbearers is acceptable.

On a completely unrelated issue, I read this the other day in Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons, a novel cum political appraisal of Cyprus in the fifties:

... a village like Amiandos made us catch our breath in pain. It lies against the side of a mountain which has been clumsily raped. The houses, factories and shacks are powdered white as if after a heavy snowfall; mounds of white snow rise in every direction, filling the cool still airs of the mountain with the thin dust of asbestos. Men and women walked about in this moon-landscape, powdered into ghoulish insignificance by the dust. A man with a white wig and white moustache shouted 'Hullo' as we passed.

Durrell wouldn't have known then what we know now, which only makes the passage all the more ghoulish.
Apparently, as with tobacco, asbestos manufacturers are still aggressively pursuing markets in 'developing' countries. Ghoulish indeed.

Kissinger and Vietnam

criminal handshake? - Kissinger and Hanoi's Le Duc Tho, January 1973

Tomorrow, supposedly, we’ll be coming out of the biggest heat wave for any Austalian capital city in recorded history [which goes back only 120 years]. Biggest by a long drink, too, today being the fifteenth day with a maximum over 35. Previously, Perth held the record with 10 consecutives 20 years ago. I’ve survived this period – well, haven’t quite survived it yet – sans AC, though I helped Sarah install one from Radio Rentals a few days ago, and have been taking advantage of it just a little, nervously, being semi persona non grata over there.

Not surprisingly it has been an unproductive period, I’m having big trouble with my novel/memoir, it being too unwieldy, too personal, too obviously uncommercial for a publisher, too potentially dangerous [though that’s too strong a word] to people I love. I’m not sure what to do about it.

What do you do when someone you love lets it be known that she despises you? You have to let it go, I think. The Morcheeba song plays in my head: Fear can stop you loving, love can stop your fear. But it’s not always that clear.

So let me focus, for the time being, on Kissinger and Vietnam. I’ve just read a tatty old book, first published in 1973 when Kissinger was still at the height of his power and the Vietnam War was still being prolonged by the Nixon administration, called Kissinger: the uses of power, by David Landau. I was prompted to read it because, well, it was around the house, and I wanted to get some background to claims by some that Kissinger is a war criminal.

Landau’s book is unsympathetic to Kissinger, though far from unreservedly so. I doubt if it would’ve occurred to him at that time to consider Kissinger a criminal, especially as he deals in his book with considerably more hawkish characters, including Nixon himself. Also, as I argued in my piece on Suharto, the idea of bringing heads of state, or top brass, to book for their decisions is a relatively new one. Landau, who confines himself in the book to Kissinger’s involvement in the Vietnam War, contents himself with the conclusion [devastating enough, after all] that Kissinger and Nixon did more to perpetuate that war than anyone else.

Kissinger was a great admirer of the nineteenth century Austrian diplomat, Metternich, and he shared Metternich’s anti-democratic elitism. This elitism seems to have blinded him to considerations about what the Vietnamese people really wanted. In fact he would have doubted if they knew what they wanted, realizing that, for all sorts of reasons, they were more easily captured, in terms of minds and hearts, by the NLF than by the Americans and their European precursors. He was doubtless right in this, but it’s only a short step from having a certain contempt for a people’s ability to choose what is best for them, according to Kissinger’s lights, and treating them as dispensable.

We are moving away, I hope, from the ‘grand schema’, chess-playing politics of the nineteenth century, and its partial revival in the seventies under Kissinger and his ilk. With the growth of education and trade, and the opening of borders, we’re making many more connections well below the heady levels of world diplomacy. Kissinger’s reputation has become something of a victim of this more humane refocusing, and deservedly so. Vietnam was never a threat to the USA, and Kissinger, as much as anyone, must’ve known that its people were much more interested in self-determination and freedom from foreign interference than in chimerical concepts such as communism. It seems that his ambition and love of centre stage led him to conveniently adopt the more rabid anti-communism of others in the Nixon administration [many of whom were suspicious of his ‘dovishness’], which allowed him to play the interfering game on the world’s stage to his heart’s content – at a massive human cost.

Landau’s book, though full of an insider’s insights, doesn’t touch on Chile, East Timor or other hotspots and disasters mentioned on such anti-Kissinger sites as this one. Neither does he claim Kissinger as the architect of the Cambodia bombing, as seems to be commonplace among Kissinger detractors now. It may be that further information has come to light, I don’t know. It’s an important matter, for if it’s true that around a million civilians of Cambodia and Laos were killed in those raids, as is claimed on the previously linked site, then that is a crime for which the decision-makers should be held responsible. Claims that the government of Cambodia permitted the bombing are hardly exculpatory.

Is Kissinger a criminal? I honestly don’t know. The real problem is that the evidence will never get to be tested in an international court, because the USA recognizes no international jurisdiction over its citizens.

It should be taken as a given that the foreign policies of all nations are monumentally self-serving. The word ‘monumentally’ provides essential emphasis. This is a fact for the most powerful and the least powerful nations on Earth. However, the most powerful countries inevitably wreak most havoc in the global arena. Given this fact, international policing and legal institutions are essential to safeguard small nations from the depradations of stronger ones. The USA has placed itself above the law in this regard – a situation which is as unacceptable as would have been a monarch proclaiming the divine right of kings in the enlightenment era. As unacceptable as a police force, with almost unlimited powers, answerable to no higher authority beyond itself.

This untenable situation needs first to be fixed, otherwise all the evidence in the world will amount to very little.