November 11, 2004
ghost of the 1960s
This is polemics. A polemic responding to another polemic.
The Australian waxes lyrical over the death of the 1968ers.
Leak
The polemical editorial in The Australian reckons the 1968er's imagination has withered and their dreams have died. They're all washed up and are little more than the walking dead. The Australian says:
"The ghost of the 1960s is being exorcised from Australian public life. The assumption that proper politics should focus on minority interests and that people interested in the economic and social stability of the traditional family unit were ignorant and irrelevant to a just Australia took root when Gough Whitlam was prime minister. But while the political winds are shifting in a way we have not seen for a generation, the intellectual ideologues who have assumed the right to chart the course of the national conscience for 30 years do not understand where they are taking us."
It smirks at the self-appointed keepers of political morality, orators with easy access to the opinion pages of [presumably liberal] newspapers and microphones at the ABC. Then it says that this:
"...does mean the days when community values were dismissed by opinion leaders in the public sector and media as an imposition on the oppressed are ending. What Francis Fukuyama calls the "great disruption" of the 1960s and 1970s, when radical social reformers sought to erode community consensus around traditional social values, is now being renounced in favour of traditional ideals of family life. It seems the only people who do not now see it are the ageing radicals of that distant age. Bourbon-like, they have forgotten nothing and learned nothing."
Well I've got news for this limp organ of the international capitalist press, which reckons that the path to the new Jerusalem leds back to the ordered days of yesteryear. The social consensus around the traditional social values it professes to idolize are being trashed by the entertainment (culture) industry. It is the logic of free market capitalism, and its nihilisitic consumer culture, that is the source of the moral decay the hypocritical Australian bemoans with crocodile tears.
Yes, we old 68ers, who celebrate Paris 68 each year with champaigne then read Deleuze and Guattari about schizophrenics going for a walk in the shopping malls with master cards, have learned nothing. Just like that ole boy General Glut, ( link courtesy of John Quiggin) I too continue to maintain along with:
"... Marx and Keynes that capitalism's tendencies are toward crises of overaccumulation and underconsumption. Globalization performs this sorry old tale through debt, deflation and depression on the stage of the whole world."
Incurable romantic! That is a desiring 68er who celebrates the body. Our bodily impulses resist the dull rhythms of the call centres as we re-value the old rotten values.
We see our role as soaring, free spirits to philosophize with hammer, so as to sound out the idols of the corpulent bourgeoisie who have allied themselves with the counter enlightenment.
We philosophical eagles, harded by the discipline of critique and dialectical severity, swoop with gay abandon through a nihilistic world of naked capitalism, because we love to dine out on the weakly bourgeoisie's bloated entrails.
Ghosts? What ghost? Our will to power has no room for pity for bourgeoisie's sickly state or their need to eternally suck the tit of the corrupt corporate state. We free spirits, who are by necessity the people of tomorrow, love to knife vivesectionally the counter enlightenment's faith-based values of good and evil.
Do you know the secret unearthed by a postmodern schizonalysis? The schizophrenics are in charge of corporate governance. The results are all round us and are daily reported in the financial press in loving detail.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 07:02 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
September 02, 2004
Murdoch's Green-bashing
If you still have any doubts that the conservative, anti-democratic Murdoch Press has an explicit strategy of Green-bashing, then you can read a variety of attacks.
Andrew Bolt in the Melbourne Herald Sun does not disappoint. He talks in terms of the Greens increasingly rejecting civilisation and freedom and embracing the tyranny of tribalism -- the purity of the noble savage. The Greens are actually like the Nazi's--ecofacists!---says Bolt. That hostility reminds me of this. George Brandis' original speech can be found here.
Then there is this from tirade from Greg Sheridan in The Australian. A sample:
"The Greens are essentially left-wing Hansonites, simultaneously reactionaries and revolutionaries, who combine a hatred of modern society as it actually exists with a conspiracy-laden, fantastical view of how the world works. They offer nothing positive beyond dreamlike cliches and slogans, but their negative power is quite great. They can build nothing, they can damage much. But they may hold the balance of power in the Senate...The Greens' policies on the party's website are a mishmash of contradictory and incoherent generalised statements. Brown is smart enough to know that the Greens can only suffer from having intelligible or specific policies on the record. They seek to embody a sentiment of rage and frustration rather than to advance real policies."
The Greens have no reason. They are violently emotional, driven by nasty out-of-control passion. They should not be allowed to have a say in ruling the country. This is the standard conservative attack on democracy, which has its roots in Plato.
It always suprises me how the conservative voice of reason in politics is so violently emotional. I should not be suprised, since conservatism in politics is about fostering fear and threats to justify its demand for order.
Well, the conservatives are going to have to get used to a Green Senate.
The Australian's editorial strikes a more reasonable tone. It says that:
"The Greens are now too powerful and popular to be dismissed as eccentrics.... Which means their platform should be subject to serious scrutiny, like those of any other major political party. The party's policies demonstrate an utter absence of coherent thinking on the issues that matter most for a safe, fair and prosperous Australia....But the prospect of any government having to negotiate with [Bob Brown] to pass its program is alarming. There is no need to call Senator Brown and his supporters unnecessary names to demonstrate that his party presents a threat to the prosperity and well-being of all Australians. The Australian Greens' program does the job very well."
I guess that we can expect the Murdoch Press to stay on message throughout the next six week. So we will witness more violent eruptions from the conservative political unconscious.
The Green-bashing isrepeated by Howard and co. So what we have is the conservative's third front of the scare campaign (the others are the economy and terrorism).
More on the issue over at Road to Surfdom.
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July 04, 2004
Robert Menzies
I'm reading Robert Menzies Forgotten People Essays at the moment. These were radio broadcasts made by Menzies in early 1942 just after the fall of Singapore.
I'm reading Menzies to understand how John Howard has taken an inherited political language developed for a bounded industrialized nation state, and then adapted it to the political present of Australia in globalized world.
Howard's political rhetoric adds social conservatism to the economic liberalism and the dry economic language of competitive, market-based liberalism. He connects this social conservatism to the experiences of the battlers----families and small businesses: to their lived experiences around work, family and neighbourhoods. This mainstream Australia was then enveloped in a taken-for-granted assimilationist nationalism. Hey presto, we can start talking about the nation as a common Australian culture again. The battler package became a political touchstone.
Howard's battlers move is similar to Menzies' forgotten people move 50 years earlier. That move adapted an inherited political language to the new circumstances of industrial Australia. In the Forgotten People speech Menzies says:
"In a country like Australia the class war must always be a false war. But if we are to talk of classes, then the time has come to say something of the forgotten class - the middle class - those people who are constantly in danger of being ground between the upper and the nether millstones of the false class war; the middle class who, properly regarded, represent the backbone of this country. We do not have classes here as in England, and therefore the terms do not mean the same; so I must define what I mean when I use the expression 'middle class’."
The middle class for Menzies lies between the rich and powerful and the unskilled labouring mass. This class consists in:
"....the intervening range - the kind of people I myself represent in Parliament - salary earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers, and so on. These are, in the political and economic sense, the middle class. They are for the most part unorganized and unselfconscious. They are envied by those whose social benefits are largely obtained by taxing them. They are not rich enough to have individual power. They are taken for granted by each political party in turn. They are not sufficiently lacking in individualism to be organized for what in these days we call "pressure politics". And yet, as I have said, they are the backbone of the nation."
This non-manual class becomes the forgotten people who are the backbone of the nation. The forgotten people constitute a moral community; they see themselves as the individual bearers of moral qualities or virtues; and they have their own homes in the suburbs. Menzies says that the value of this middle class is multiple. The first is that:
"...it has a stake in the country". It has responsibility for homes - homes material, homes human, homes spiritual...The material home represents the concrete expression of the habits of frugality and saving "for a home of our own"...homes human is where my wife and children are...homes spiritual....combines dependence upon God with independence of man."
The value of the middle class also included other moral virtues:
"Second, the middle class, more than any other, provides the intelligent ambition which is the motive power of human progress...Third, the middle class provides more than perhaps any other the intellectual life which marks us off from the beast: the life which finds room for literature, for the arts, for science, for medicine and the law....Fourth, this middle class maintains and fills the higher schools and universities, and so feeds the lamp of learning."
Hence we have the moral middle class as a people with virtuous character who were deeply concerned with what is good for the nation.Personal virtue and national strength were linked to give an account of how people could live together and cooperate for their shared endeavours of nation-building.
What Howard was able to rework this understanding of the virtuous middle class and the nation. He drops all Menzies talk about service and obligations re citizenship and links what is left to the nation's history read through the prism of the Anzac legend.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:36 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
June 06, 2004
little Johnny
I guess that when John Howard returns to Australia we will all hear the "John Howard is an international statesman" and the "ALP is anti-American" script circulated through the Canberra Press Gallery and the shock jocks. Along with 'only John Howard can protect the Australia/US alliance.'
As they say, "well, he would, wouldn't he?" What else can Howard do? Iraq beginning to hurt him, and he has nailed himself so securely to the Bush Administration's mast. He has to play the Bush card.
When we hear the above script we should remember the political realities of Howard's conception of Australia as the Deputy Sheriff of the US:
Bill Leak
Being critical of the above Howard rhetoric is less about having a joke at Howard's expense than keeping our wits about us as democratic citizens. After all, the recent US interventions into the Australian domestic politics means that the ALP's disagreement with the Bush Administration is not about Iraq any more. It is now about the US-Australia alliance itself. Bush has put the alliance on the line over Iraq. The imperial presidency is not willing to accept that the US and Australian governments can differ over the specifics of Iraq. and yet still continue with a strong and mutually beneficial alliance. Its all or nothing now.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 02:54 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
May 13, 2004
spinning on spin
I've mentioned the spin adopted by the Howard Government senators that endeavours to disconnect Australia from the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Here is how it is being done in the US. The line is that Donald Rumsfeld was deeply committed to the Geneva Conventions protecting the rights of prisoners, that everyone knew it, and that any deviation had to come from "the command level."
In both countries the administration/government is determined to avoid taking any concrete steps that might convince the world it is serious about dealing with the underlying systemic roots of the scandal. So both Canberra and the White House continue to keep repeating how shocked, horrified and disgusted, etc etc. everyone is. They would never condone the torture.
That then is the Karl Rove strategy to deal with the problem—a political and public-relations disaster for the imperial presidency. Up to this point the general strategy to deal with the problem had been keep the issue quiet for the first months of this year and to restrict knowledge of what had happened to a small group.
The official chain of command flows from General Sanchez, in Iraq, to General John Abizaid, who is in charge of the Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, and on to Rumsfeld and President Bush. It was that chain of command which would have decided that the Army prisons to be first and foremost geared to interrogations, and the gathering of information needed for the war effort. Hence military-intelligence operatives were placed in control of the prison system, instead of the usual procedure of military-police units being in control.
It is to the credit of Robert Hill, the Defence Minister, that he refused to follow the Howard/Downer line, which qualifies their condemnation of the torture of prisoners by the US in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Howard's version of line says the torture commited by Saddam Hussein was far worse, so we need to keep a sense of perspective. Downer's version is that there are a lot of barbaric people in Iraq. In Downer's moral universe that makes the American's civilized. So what is civilized about sexual brutality and torture that is designed to humiliate another culture?
Hill, in contrast, rejected out of hand the argument that some torture was justified by the need to "soften up" prisoners for interrogation.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:32 AM | Comments (12) | TrackBack
March 16, 2004
at the pub: the politics of security
Whilst Spain suffers dreadfully and changes its government the conversation in the Australian pub goes like this:
Wilcox.
That's an educated guess of what a conversation would go like.
Over in the States they see things differently. Something strange is forming, as Tim Dunlop notes. The Spanish people have acceded to terrorism. Or terrorists have succeeded in toppling the Spanish Government as expressed here. Even Billmon sees it as "an unqualified success for Al Qaeda, and an unqualified defeat for the United States".
What happened to Spanish democracy on that account?
Meanwhile The Australian thunders away against appeasement. And "Munich" is never far away. Tim Blair runs appeasement whilst Mark Steyn plays around with the politics of fear.
'Appeasement'---it is such tired cliched public language. Spanish citizens can make a judgement that the conservative government of Jose Maria Aznar was wrong to join the US invasion of Iraq. Not everybody swallows Fox News whole. Maybe the Iraq war was unpopular in Spain and it become an unconscious emotional template in the election.
Do you remember all that stuff about moral clarity.
As Don Watson observes "Words are bullets. They are also good for smothering, strangling and poisoning..."
That kind of politics sinks deep, causes lots of resentment and becomes part of our political unconscious. Things twist around in the unconscious--look at the odd reaction by Howard and Ruddock to Keelty's truth telling that Australia could be at greater risk of terrorist attack as a result of its role in Iraq.
Update
Michelle Grattan addreses the argument that the Iraq war didn't make Australia more of a terrorist target and that Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty wasn't worth listening to when it came to threat assessments.
Alexander Downer's remarks, "I think (Mr Keelty) is just expressing ... a view which reflects a lot of the propaganda we're getting from al-Qaeda", are shocking in their baseness.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 07:09 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 05, 2004
Media & public policy
This article by Catherine Lumby on the way the media shapes politics is pretty good. She says:
"Politicians simply aren't rewarded [by journalists] for posing questions that they don't have an answer to. Indeed, there's a long history of mocking anyone in politics who brings anything that smacks of book learning into parliament......In conventional journalistic terms, proper politics is about economics, foreign affairs, defence and factional power struggles. Before it can be taken seriously an issue has to be crunched down into facts, figures, graphs and stats."
This is a problem because politics cannot be squeezed into such narrow categories. Lumby says:
"......many of the political issues that confront Australia today - issues such as how we balance work and kids, how we give young people the best chance in life, how universal we want our education to be - can't be rendered so starkly."
She adds that the depth and vision to make broad changes is never going to happen whilst public debate is structured by the conflict-driven, left versus right, hard news versus soft news culture that currently dominates the media agenda.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 04:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 25, 2004
the decay of public language
As a result of reading Don Watson's Death Sentence I've become sensitive to public langauge. Here is Janet Albrechtson having a swipe at Australian feminists in the ALP:
"On the home front, proud feminist agitators such as the ALP's Carmen Lawrence and Tanya Plibersek push for women's participation in politics. They agonise publicly over the plight of Iraqi women and children in Australian detention centres. The stentorian sisterhood had plenty to say about the Iraq war but have gone quiet over the good news coming from Iraq.
There is a malevolence to this muteness. Theirs is a new hierarchy of evil. Once driven by misandry, feminism in the wake of Iraq is ruled by the hatred of just one man -- US President George W. Bush."
...'a new hierarchy of evil'. It's hardly a moral equivalent to the gulag.
It's a good example of the decay of public language, is it not?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 05:50 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 31, 2003
The man's confused
Last Monday night there was an episode on the Downers on the Dynasties series. I was too busy cooking a meal to give it much attention, even though I was interested in their fusty belief in hierarchy. I respect Lady Mary Downer. She actually likes people.
I cannot say I respect her son Alexander, who was born of the Liberal Party and is now Australia's Foreign Minister.
I've just read Alexander Downer's article in today's Australian. It's trash, like most of the stuff that Downer signs his name to these days. He about his critics--those mysterious Australia-bashing elites under the bed--being infected by a virus, filled with self-disgust, and embracing the moral equivalent of the cultural cringe.
Now that can hardly be considered an example of the tolerance that is supposed to be fundamental to our spirit as a great nation.
Downer starts his article by asking a loaded question, and then provides his answer:
"People of goodwill and fair mind who opposed the liberation of Iraq would do well to end the year contemplating this question: In what shape would the world be starting 2004 if we had adopted their preferred option of acquiescing yet again to Saddam Hussein? If the US and its allies had not taken action after Iraq had defied the UN Security Council for the 17th time, Hussein's strength as a leading, rogue figure in the Middle East would have been enhanced."
It's loaded because of the 'acquiesce'. The core debate in Australia was about intervention under the UN vis-a-vis US unilateral military action.The case for justifying unilateral military action was not convincing in the court of world opinion.
Downer ends the article by saying that "It is difficult to believe anyone would seriously argue now that we should not have removed Hussein's regime." Of course it is. That was never the issue. The political conflict was over the 'how'.
With the light touch of Xmas resting on my shoulder I will ask my own question. What has Australia signed up as a result of the military advernture in Iraq. My answer is to the policy agenda of the US neo-cons.
What is that? Billman over at Whiskey Bar provides a good answer:
"It's easy enough to point to some common themes that are generally identified with the neocons: contempt for international organizations and the concept of multilateralism; impatience with traditional balance-of-power diplomacy; a cultish devotion to the use of military power; an outspoken belief in the superiority of Western culture and political institutions; a messianic vision of America's mission to "civilize" the world, which at times (Max Boot) makes them sound like caricatures of old-fashioned European imperialists. And of course: an intense identification with the state of Israel, and a willingness, even eagerness, to use American power to protect and further Israeli security interests."
My conclusion. It is difficult to believe that anyone in Australia would sign up to that agenda; or to hold that Australia is a considerable power eager and ever ready to act as the Deputy Sheriff in the Asia Pacific region for a hegemonic US.
Downer now speaks the language of Howard but he once held that China, Japan, and Indonesia were as important as the USA; he highlighted the decline of Australia's strategic and economic weight relative to East Asia; recognized the importance of Australia needing to adjust to living with a dominant Asia; and argued that Australia should be inside the Asian multilateral tent.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 08:41 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 29, 2003
something here?
Some see an earth shattering political significance of Mark Latham being a fan of Meatloaf, and the Bat Out of Hell. Taste expresses personality is the argument.
It is the Xmas season after all, and elevating suburban adolescent passion and desire to operatic dimensions does not seem amiss. And loving '70s pop culture as a fan is all the rage these days, is it not?
Meatloaf is all about humor and theatricality. Is that not politics? And Bat Out of Hell's pastiche of oldies, show tunes, prog rock, folkie narratives and blistering hard rock in this teen rock opera could symbolize Latham's pastiche of public policies.
Note Latham's fondness for the American music expression of teenage dreams, angst and sexual experience, as opposed to the Australian musical expression. That does not bode well for protecting Australian cultural content in the forthcoming free trade agreement.
It is the non-economic arguments---rarely acknowledged by free trade economists----that provide the backbone to the resistance to the free trade vision of a borderless world. Issues such as compensating those losing out, national security, environmental protection and cultural protection are usually dismissed as trivial and so do not require trade intervention.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 07:49 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
October 24, 2003
transgressing stage managed politics
It was all so stage managed. Right from the moment when the Imperial president's plane landed, the doors opened and there was Bush and Howard and their wives standing on the steps of Air Force One waving to all and sundry.
Did the imperial president's Air Force One land somewhere and Howard board it so they could make the big entrance together in Canberra for the cameras? It sure looks like it.
That set the theme for a series of set political pieces all of which were carefully stage managed. Bush arriving at Parliament in the long black car; Bush addressing Parliament; the protests down the road from Parliament; and Howard's cliched speech in the House of Representatives. It was all style and publicity that was very tightly controlled and choregraphed.
A dream visit opines Louise Dodson. It showed the political acumen of John Howard. It gave him---now the man of steel--- a big political boost.
Not quite. Rust never sleeps.
More seriously though, there was no democratic substance. The substance had to be forceibly pushed into the stylized set pieces by the Greens who interjected during the imperial president's spin of Washington generalities. That interjection was an act of political transgression. The reaction of the Canberra Press Gallery to the transgression was predictable. Michael Gordon said that "the high jinks of Green senators threatened to poison the atmosphere and demean the occasion".
It was the body language that was the key. The conflict over democracy in Australia could not be hidden from view. The Coalition acted like lackies before the power of the imperial presidency. Bootlickers one and all. Labor just looked uncomfortable, unwilling to defend democratic substance.
Crean's speech affirmed difference within an affirmation of the US/Australia alliance. It was a high note. The Coalition was more interested in physically stopping access to the body of the imperial presidency in our Parliament than ensuring free speech.
The two Green Senators who stood up and interjected were called unAustralian by the bully boys. After Bush left the Chamber, the Liberals looked a rabble inside Parliament, as elbows and abuse were thrown. The Liberals came across as thugs.
Nice image. Defending democracy inside the Australian Parliament is unAustralian by those acting as thugs. Hardly a dream visit.
Oh, it was thanks to CNN for defying orders from the Howard Government not to film in our Parliamentary chamber. We would not have seen the political transgressions otherwise. As Margo Kingston argues Howard went to great lengths to control the Australian media to ensure we saw only the image John Howard wanted us to see. And Alan over at Southerly Buster has more on media exclusion. The story he tells is one of the Australian media being excluded by the Americans.
Update
Here is a conservative attack dog foaming at the Greens. Andrew Dyson talks about Bob Brown in terms of "this vile Brown, this deflowerer of our hard-won national dignity, this despoiler of the restraint and courtesy that characterises the Australian parliamentary tradition." I read it as a parody at first. Alas, its not. Clearly you should not challenge the imperial presidency.
Not to be outdone Andrew Bolt says that Brown stands for chaos and mob violence that leads to totalitarianism. Bolt raises the spectre of fascism.
The violence that lurks beneath the conservative surface erupts with Adelaide radio announcer Andrew Reimer. He said:
"I’d like to grab Bob Brown for example, and just ever so delicately lift my knee into his face about five times. Smash his nose and his face in. That’s what I’d like to do."
The irony here is that the violence on the conservative side of politics is far greater than that shown by the Greens. The tragedy is that the conservative attack dogs are not aware of their bully boy violence, nor the way they project it onto the Greens.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 09:31 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
October 22, 2003
selling the imperial president
It is a bit difficult keeping up with public affairs down here on the South Coast of the Fleurieu Peninsula. The dial-up-internet keeps dropping out every few minutes and the server was down for about 12 hours yesterday.
It is pretty close to hopeless.
So I glanced through an old copy of The Australian and re-read an old article by Paul Kelly on the imperial presidency. You know, the one where he, along with Laurie Oakes, was hand selected by John Howard to interview President Bush before the latter's big imperial sweep through the Asia Pacific region.
What a snow job that article is in retrospect. Consider this:
"Interviewed in the Roosevelt Room adjacent to the Oval Office, Bush sat to one side of a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt on horseback, former Republican, president and warrior. George W is tanned and fit. He wears a light blue-grey suit, light-blue shirt with red tie. He is businesslike and friendly, looks you in the eye and engages like all good US politicians do. But wait for it - he's funny, he tells jokes and his body language is relaxed and confident. A long way from the wooden wonder of the silver screen."
I guess you do what you have to do to make a living. Kelly makes his living selling the imperial presidency by talking about fashion. Selling the imperial presidency is the politics of the Murdoch papers in Australia.
Kelly ends his puff piece ends on this note:
"When he visits, Australians should try to understand the source of his [President Bush] passion and the more complex character that he embodies - but then, they might see him only on television."
Of course we will only see the imperial president on television. I cannot see him address Parliament in person. I'm not allowed to. All I will be able to see is a stage managed affair in the form of a political spectacle.
All public affairs is now mediated by television. That is the postmodern reality we live. And the television stations are beginning to look more and more like their parodies. They appear like product, glossy wrapped.
The Bush visit is a stage managed political spectacle designed to celebrate Australian nationalism, conservative style. That means it is an authoritarian nationalism. Dissent is not welcomed. Scepticism is not welcomed. Critique is unpatriotic in this politics as spectacle.
Here is another snow job from The Age. The message that Tony Parkinson wants to send out is that Australia is a part of the US empire and that it is a good thing. Note the argument buried underneath all the stuff about hypocrisy:
"Massive disruption caused by terror attacks on the US mainland threaten calamity for all the markets in which Australia earns its living....if security is a collective good then it must also be a collective responsibility....These are the facts of life, and will be so for years to come.
Protesting against these facts of life may be a quaint intellectual pursuit."
Australia just has to align itself with the new Rome. It has no choice. The global market dictates that necessity.
Nothing is said about the imperial grand strategy of the United States to hold unquestioned power by acting to ensure the limitation of any exercise of sovereignty by states that might interfere with its global designs. The policy to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United States is assumed to be good. It is assumed right that the United States reserves the right to act unilaterally when necessary including unilateral use of military power to defend such vital interests as ensuring uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources.
Hence it is right that the Middle East is a key area of strategic power, because of its “strategic position and resources and that US control over the region and its resources is a key policy imperative and that this region should be accepted as Washington’s “backyard.” No challenge to US control by other nation states in the region (Syria or Iran) can be tolerated.
According to Tony Parkinson this is not US arrogance or militarism. It is just the way the world of international relations is structured at its joints. The hegemony of the US is written into the order of things---it is a fact of life. It just has to be accepted. Questioning that power and its use is a quaint intellectual pursuit. It is a quaint intellectual pursuit to question the disdain of the Bush administration for international law and institutions and for arms control measures.It is a quaint intellectual pursuit to argue for U.N. rather than U.S. leadership in international crises; or that the U.N., rather than the United States, should direct reconstruction in Iraq.
That is how they sell the imperial presidency.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:08 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 22, 2003
It's political spin
The link to this article by Josh Marshall about the selling of public policy is courtesy of Rodger A Payne. It also describes the political spin of the Howard Government.
Marshall argues that the Bush imperial presidency in the US has a pre-existing policy agenda, which is justified and supported with whatever arguments they deem to be useful to sell their case and shape public opinion in their direction they desire. Josh says:
"The president and his aides...speak untruths because ...their politics and policies demand it....Indeed, the aim of most of Bush's policies has been to overturn what FDR created three generations ago. On the domestic front, that has meant major tax cuts forcing sharp reductions in resources for future government activism, combined with privatization of as many government functions as possible. Abroad, Bush has pursued an expansive and militarized unilateralism aimed at cutting the U.S. free from entangling alliances and international treaty obligations so as to maximize freedom of maneuver for American power in a Hobbesian world.
Yet this is not an agenda that the bulk of the American electorate ever endorsed. Indeed, poll after poll suggest that Bush's policy agenda is not particularly popular. What the public wants is its problems solved: terrorists thwarted, jobs created, prescription drugs made affordable, the environment protected. Almost all of Bush's deceptions have been deployed when he has tried to pass off his preexisting agenda items as solutions to particular problems with which, for the most part, they have no real connection."
Josh shows this to great effect with tax cuts that are waved around like a magic wand to address all sorts of economic problems.
We can see this strategy with John Howard's war with Iraq. The decision to go to war was political and it flowed from the Government's position that the US alliance was absolutely paramount in shaping Australia's military strategy. The public reasons given for going to war (WMD, Iraq's links to al Qaeda, threat to Australia etc) were tacked on as justifications for a pre-exsiting policy. Hence the justifications could and did change (furthering democracy and freedom; the good consequences of a bad guy taken out).
Marshall Marshall then describes the effect of this stratgy. There is a lack of concern with evidence -- and a rejection of expert advice that disagrees with its ideology or pre-set agenda. These are seen as obstacles to be overcome through ignoring the evidence and discrediting experts. The effect created is a strong incentive to delegitimize the experts, who are seen as guardians of the status quo, who seek to block any and all change, no matter how necessary, and whose views are influenced and corrupted by the agendas and mindsets of their agencies.
Update
A core issue in the Hutton Inquiry in the UK is the discrediting of experts (Dr. Kelly) by the Blair Government. Ministers and bureaucrats will then cover their tracks in the strategies used to delegitimize the experts.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 01:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 15, 2003
Trash at the Centre for Independent Studies
The Centre for Independent Studies markets itself as a high quality, independent think tank. It's self-advertisment says that it is one of the best think tanks in Australia and that it's got the intellectual goods (quality).
Jason Soon, in responding to this article in the Sydney Morning Herald says that about half of membership of CIS is libertarian and a significant percentage of that would be quite opposed to the neo-con foreign policy agenda. I presume, judging from a quick read of the material, that the other half of the membership of CIS is neocon and politically conservative. Maybe this mix gives the Centre the intellectual oomph that is so often missing in the media.
Taking it at its word, I've started wandering through the CIS website. Some of the foreign policy material has been appearing in my posts here and here The material provides something to work with, even if some of it is polemics disguised as scholarship by Daniel Pipes. So I've been digging into back copies of its Policy magazine.
I was interested in this review of Blaming Ourselves: September 11 and the Agony of the Left edited by Imre Salusinszky and Gregory Melleuish. My concern is not for the content of the book---I won't be reading it---- but for the way the reviewer handles the conflict over the Iraq war inside Australia, and more broadly, the war on terrorism.
The reviewer is someone called Martin Sheehan and he opens his review review with this insight:
"The image of the left has undergone a profound change in the past 50 years. Rather than being a working class hero, the typical leftist ...nowadays ....worships the Other, which is any culture or society radically different from their own...They are thus not so much in rebellion against poverty and oppression, but rather against conventional morality and common decency. Thus the contemporary left takes its cues from counter-cultural critics and bohemians like Friedrich Nietzsche ... rather than from stodgy Victorians like Marx or Engels."
It's a rough account as you can take your cues from Marx and Nietzsche. But we can let it pass. But note the left 'worships the Other'. That is a sign post of what is to come. The Other stands for the enemies of Western civilization--militant Islamists on Daniel Pipes reading.
And come it does. The political unconscious pours out. I will quote it to give you the flavour:
"The contemporary left sympathises with, if not openly supports, radical nihilists like Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda movement, for their rejection of the liberal capitalist order, and for their defiance of western attitudes and beliefs, particularly those embodied in the political and economic system of the US. In the minds of these people, the Other is always to be identified with, even if that means going against one's own society."
The contemporary left-----not a section of the left mind you----openly supports radical nihilists like Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda movement? Can that be taken seriously? And the contemporary left, as a critic of current policies of the Howard Government, is equated to identifying with Osama bin Laden? Even worships terrorists such as the Bali Bombers? And criticism=treason?
We are meant to take this as an example of quality work by the think tank in Australia?
I have to report that it gets no better. The reviewer goes on to say that he is disgusted by the open cynicism of many left-wing commentators in Australia and by the utter heartlessness of many on the left to mass murder and the plight of the survivors and their families in America after September 11. And, presumably, to the families and friends of those Australia killed in the Bali bombing.
There is a saving moment of redemption in the review. The moment comes when even Sheehan cannot swallow some of "the contributors writing as if any and every criticism of the US foreign policy is somehow tantamount to support for Osama bin Laden." Well, that moment of insight requires a bit of self-criticism, given that Sheehan has already made the equation of criticism=treason above. What is required here is an enlightening reason working on his prejudices.
Alas, self-reflexivity is not Sheehan's forte. Lacking the liberal virtues for public debate Sheehan quickly concludes. Blaming Ourselves he says is an:
"...excellent counter to the type of left-wing intellectual thuggery and hate mongering that has dominated the debate in our media since the attacks of September 11. It is time to call a spade a spade as the editors say in their introduction, and reject the anti-liberal and anti-Western tendencies of the left once and for all. This book is an important shot in that coming cultural war for the soul of the West."
The irony of this, which is lost on Sheehan, is that the whole tone of the book and his review is an expression of anti-liberal tendencies. No attempt is made to engage in debate and dialogue. We have a condemnation of the contemporary Left as the violent hateful Other; certain of its own rightness; and engaged in a violent purge. It is this book which is contemptuous of all discussion and compromise. It is an example of the sneering tone of dismissal.
Okay, the review is junk. Junk is useful as it gives you an insight into the dark and violent political unconscious of Australian conservatives.
But what is trash doing in the pages of a high quality, independent think tank that says it has the intellectual goods?
If they are what they say they are----Australia's leading independent public policy research institute that produces quality work--- then the editors should have refused to print this trash. That they didn't is an indication that the CIS is not what it claims to be.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:07 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
July 02, 2003
a bit of a rant
I had though the Institute of Public Affairs was a reasonable policy institute. Right wing for sure, but willing to argue its case in public. But this piece from Mike Nahan, its director, is bad. Its main argument is okay:
"PROFESSOR Allan Fels' legacy is that of a populist technocrat who promoted the popularity of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission at the cost of public support for market-based competition."
There is something to argue about. Now consider the language used in the next paragraph:
'His central flaw was to succumb to the lure of populism. He read the tea leaves of popular dissent and seldom let pass an opportunity to demonise big business, particularly those of a multinational nature in "political incorrect industries"'.
The whole article has phrases such as "instead of praising the workings of the market, he took cheap shots to pander to populist sentiment"; and "sought the political support of the so-called consumer movement".
Fels played politics as he saw the public demand for a competition tsar and interfered too often.This was bad because he should have pursued the task of assisting market-driven competition to the advantage of the consumer.
What can we make of this? We consumers should accept the benign workings of the competitive market, nor stir up dissent about the need for tough regulators to deal with the fallout of the market or uncompetitive behaviour. Our proposals as citizens amount to populist sentiment (prejudiced emotion) and should be dismissed as undemocratic. So we should allow, and accept, that the big corporations should rule our lives through the market whilst trusting the markets to do their thing.
That is politics in favour of keeping the lid on popular dissent and crushing the consumer movement and not public policy.
Gareth parker appears to be supportive of the man from the IPA.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 02:00 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
June 20, 2003
lying or exaggeration?
Christopher Sheil over at Troppoarmadillo makes the following statement.
"Those pursuing WMD-Gate without making much headway would be well to remember that unquestioning support for the Howard government’s decision to involve Australia in the Iraq invasion is psychologically and emotionally compulsory for many ... as is support for much else that government of whatever persuasion does in this country."
In other words Christoper Sheil is saying drop it. You are hitting your head against a brick wall. The neo-conservative Howard has public opinion locked in. There is little point in launching a political attack on the Howard Government because Australians are happy with the outcome of the war. It was a good thing to do because the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was bad.
But what does havign public opinion 'locked in' mean?
Consider this article by Robert Kagan from the Washington Post downloaded into The Age. Kagan says:
"There is something surreal about the charges that George Bush lied when he claimed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Yes, the Bush Administration may have - repeat, may have - exaggerated the extent of knowledge about what Saddam had in his WMD arsenal. But the critics' real aim is to prove that, as a New York Times reporter recently put it, "the failure so far to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq may mean that there never were any in the first place".
There is justification for 'the Bush lied claim' as can be seen in this interview with Noam Chomsky. He says the Bush administration gave contradictory responses, that then implies you should not believe a word they and implies that they are lying.
Let's dump the lie claim. I'll repeat that. Bush, Howard and Blair did not lie. Why not? I concur with Ted Hinchman over at diachronic agency on this. Being contradictory does not mean we should dismiss them as lying. We live contradictions daily and when we see them in our friends we do not dismiss them. We try to interpret the contradictions so as to make sense of them. This is what we should be doing with the Bushies.
But these guys sure exaggerated. We can dump Kagan's 'may have' bit. He's being precious and coy. Why dump it? Because exageration in politics implies spin. Spin is standard operating procedure in politics. We see it, distrust it, and try to counter it. Spin is another name for rhetoric---finding ways to persuade public opinion to support the war by appealing to their emotions. These leaders and publcists thought the WMD would do the trick--- it would get the fear working over time and shift public opinion over to their side of the debate. Lets calling it playing the Hobbes card.
It didn't work. So these leaders turned to another basic notion trust, which as Tim Dunlop points out, is the key virtue in a democracy that connects governors and governed. Trust is better than Christopher Sheil's faith and belief as the fundamental relation to make sense Christopher's experience of the relationship between governors and governed.
Trust goes something like this. In a liberal democracy the people give their representatives power freely with consent and without coercion. And in accepting that power, public office holders take on a special, and kind of responsibility based on trust. The people say to the public office holders that you wield that power within boundaries set by certain principles. We will trust you with that power if you act in according to these or guidlines about what is acceptable or unacceptable, admirable or contemptible, right or wrong.
This appeal to the trust card----we are liberating the Iraqi people from oppression----worked a treat. It locked public opinion in, and ensured that a neo-conservative government would retain power. And the rhetorical exaggerations?
Ted Hinchman says that "their [Bush, Blair, Howard] strategy was perfectly intelligible and no worse than the 'spin' that we're all entirely used to and know how to interpret." Well yes. But. The Bush regime pursued realpolitik to ensure that US strategic interests in the Middle East were protected. And it did so without regard to moral or legal constraints--eg., the pre-emptive strike, the right is might and the hostility to the UN constraints on the use of US power. This realpolitik was wrapped up in the appearance of conforming to moral and legal norms. Blair and Howard tagged along for realpolitik reasons.
So why call Bush & Co out on the rhetorical game? Because they abused this trust by not addressing the antiiwar arguments, not engaging in public debate mocking the critics by calling them appeasers and supporters of oppression. By doing this they were breaking the ethos of the guidlines about what is acceptable or unacceptable in the exercise of power. So they should be made accountable for the breach of the trust in the court of public reason.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:30 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
May 30, 2003
Cloud cuckoo land
The saga of the missing weapons of mass destruction continues to unfold. Remember the allegation?
The US, UK and Australian Governments claimed that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had both spent billions of dollars developing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and that he was poised to hand them over to terrorists or fire them at US troops or neighbouring countries. The national security of all three countries was threated. A pre-emptive strike was necessary to deal with the threat because the UN inspectors were unlikely to find them in time. Iraq was too tricky to allow that.
It looks more and more like a good old smoke and mirrors job. It was what many thought at the time because the argument just did not stake up. That was why the UN was not convinced to take the adopt a resolution authorizing war on a sovereign country. Not enough evidence to substantiate the claim.
It's all a bit ho hum in Australia. But they take the issue a bit more seriously in Britain than we do in Australia, judging by this report. It has to do with the credibility of the Blair case for attacking Iraq. Has the British public been conned?
Meanwhile The Sydney Morning Herald reports that back in the USA, Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, has said that:
'... the US decision to stress the threat posed by Iraq's supposed banned weapons above all others was taken for "bureaucratic" reasons to justify the war. "For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on."
Apparently this was said in Vanity Fair but there is nothing online. Its all subscription only. But it indicates that the Americans don't really care about questions of legitimacy. It was all spin and power from the beginning.
Meanwhile, back in Australia we find Coalition ministers singing different tunes. For instance, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer, continues to insist that the legal basis for Australia's role in the invasion is Iraq's alleged failure to comply with United Nations resolutions on weapons of mass destruction. Apparently the justification is solid because of the recent discovery of the two trailers.
It is soooo compelling. The minister always appears to be pulling rabbits out of a hat. He seems to have forgotten that John Howard had hummed the liberation from oppression tune. He plays the magician because he won't publicly say what he knows privately: the evidence is not there. Can we put the poor performance by the Adelaide hills boy down to jetlag? He is looking more and more like an old trouper who can't perform the old theatre tricks any more.
The Defence Minister, Robert Hill hums a different tune. He dutifully follows the Rumsfeld script. He says that that no banned weapons may ever be found. Then he echoes Rumsfeld. It might be the case that Iraq may have destroyed more than we believed he says. A good criticism of this line is given by Tim Dunlop at Road To Surfdom
Presumably that destruction was before the war started? Why would Saddam disarm himself? And only believed? And what has happened to the hard evidence? Never there? Just a few facts and lots of interpretation?
These guys in Canberra are so predictable. They just echo Washington. Some are just more up to date than others. But their act does not work. They are not working as a unit on stage. Not enough in the way of rehearsals? Its a bit embarrasing watching these old tricks go through their tricks. Too many mistakes.
They are not very good with the rhetoric. I thought that the purpose of rhetoric was meant to be one of persuasion. They are undercutting themselves. The threads of the government's script are unravelling on this one. But they don't seem to care. They know they have a stranglehold on power. Thats all that matters. But you can see the arrogance creeping in.
And us? Well we have a choice. We s can say that we have been conned yet again, or that the Coalition lives in cloud cuckoo land. Take your pick. You can choose both if you so desire.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 09:52 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
April 08, 2003
the politics of blogging
The post media dogs of war at philosophy.com about public reason captures an important aspect of blogging. It is the public debate/ civic conversation side of blogging, which has fallen into a bit of a hole in Australia, due to the partisan nature of the war in Iraq.
The despair "at the almost complete absence of calm, reasoned exchanges on any blogs since the war situation blew up early in the New Year" was expressed well here.'The atmosphere', as Ken Parish puts it, 'has been more unpleasant and acrimonious'since the war with everyone trapped inside their prejudices or biases.
The public philosopher with a Hegelian bent at philosophy.com has usefully connected blogging to the formation of public reason and deliberative democracy. (It has lots of links). The post---sort of philosophy behind the news--suggests that a public reason in such dark times can be critical--cut through the fog of war instead of lefties and rights smashing one another up.
The idea of public reason was tied to the agora, forum or coffee shop. Athenian democracy is what Ken Parish appeals to. Mark Poster questions Ken's Athenian democracy model on the grounds that the Internet instantiates new forms of interaction in the public sphere. He says that the old loci of interaction were:
"...the agora, the New England town hall, the village Church, the coffee house, the tavern, the public square, a convenient barn, a union hall, a park, a factory lunchroom, and even a street corner. Many of these places remain but no longer serve as organizing centers for political discussion and action. It appears that the media, especially television but also other forms of electronic communication isolate citizens from one another and sustitute themselves for older spaces of politics."
To all intents and purposes the media are the new public sphere, and blogging is part of the media. The Internet as a mode of life does away with face-to-face interaction in favour of electronic flickers. So we become electronic beings without bodies who produce photos of ourselves to show that are not cyborgs.
Maybe we need to re-think what we mean by the politics of the Internet?
Some think that the answer is being non-partisian By this is meant ensuring independence of thought:
"A partisan pundit is one whose opinions nearly always break down along party lines. When two people agree on everything, it's pretty certain that only one is doing the thinking. Assuming that it's unlikely that a partisan columnist is actually formulating the party platform, then the partisan columnist's opinions must therefore derive from allegiance to the favored party or hostility to the other party rather than from independent thought. "
Others reckon independence of thought needs to take a critical form to counter the spin and fog. A good account of what is here is provided by the mission statement of Spinsanity. This says:
"Robust political debate is essential to democracy. Our national political discourse is an important part of the democratic process and serves as a critical check on those in power. We are therefore deeply concerned that our public political dialogue, largely expressed through the channels of the mass media, is becoming systematically dominated by sophisticated tactics of manipulation rather than norms of public reason. Despite widespread complaints about spin, no one is adequately documenting the full ramifications of this development to our satisfaction."
So they set themselves the negative task of countering the spin as a way of protecting the norms of public reason. The task they set themselves is to:
"...expose the use and intent of the simulated reason and public relations techniques that dominate political discourse, and to document how they are disseminated through the media. By exposing these tactics and demonstrating their pervasiveness, we hope to create a greater awareness of how spin operates and corrupts, and contribute to a healthy and vibrant political discourse."
Two suggestions for the politics of internet connected to cyberdemocracy. Both see blogging as a politicized place of resistance to corporatized media flows of the culture industry. Is not that a common ground between righties and lefties?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 01:40 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
March 28, 2003
A simple question
I watched some of the news on SBS tonight about the war. Northern front opening up, change of US military tactics, Iraqi's running a guerilla war by attacking coalition supply lines, more civilian deaths in Baghdad, British forces continue to shell Basra, urban warfare begins in Basra and Americans are bombing civilian areas.
Why are the British shelling---pounding--- the city? What is the purpose? Is that where al Qaeda are holed up? Is that where the weapons of mass destruction are hidden? What has this has to do with 9/11? Are they liberating the people in the city by starving them out?
Funny isn't it. One week into the war?--is it that long? And all the rhetoric about why we are going to war with Iraq has dropped away. Nobody seems to notice. The embedded journos are writing about this tank, this bridge, this explosion, this sandstorm ---nothing about why all of this happening. Its almost as it nobody believes all the pre-invasion rhetoric any more. A far more brutal reality has taken over.
Its all about power now in the live feeds, the expert commentary that wraps around the live media feeds and the studio journos getting excited by the breaking news. This is a pre-emptive war and if there are lots of civilian casualties, and British really don't find evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Basra, what then?
The British have a big political problem. Their standing and creditbility are shot to pieces.
So why are the British shelling Basra? And what has that got to with 9/11?
But then this war was always about power. And thats the pathway to a great human tragedy.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:06 AM | Comments (4)
March 15, 2003
No prizes for logic here
There is a paragraph in an article by Tony Baker and Laura Tingle, 'Howard's risky step into history', in the Financial Review, (subscription required, 15 March, 2003, p. 22) that concurs with the view of this weblog about the way John Howard has handled the war issue. The relevant paragraph states that Howard:
"... has to date successfully stifled internal debate [within government and the coalition parties] ---and ignored much public debate--- on the issue [of war with Iraq] by keeping himself to an exceptionally narrow rhetorical argument, with all the various scenarios, including warm dismissed as "hypothetical" and therefore not requiring a detailed answer for the electorate."
The only exception to this strategy was when John Howard engaged in debate at the Press Club, rather than crudely attack his critics using lines from a script downloaded from the Whitehouse. Still that was primarily a platform to sell his message of war now without the UN.
Baker and Tingle say that the danger of Howard's strategy is that it has given rise to a perception of a politician out of his depth in international affairs. That may be. It has also given rise to a political perception John Howard as George Bush's lap dog: justifying the unrestrained use of American power whenever it sees fit and criticising those who desire to constrain US power. Right on cue Howard attacks France calling them spoilers and that France is using the issue to resist American power and reposition itself to prevent its decline.
Howard's reasoning on international relations amounts to this. It is okay for the US to use its power to further its national interests. It is okay for France to do so. Why not? Because in doing so France and Germany are constraining the use of US power and that is bad. Unilateralism is good. Howard is an apologist for the unrestrained use of US power.
And how about this as an example of faulty war reasoning. The Bali bombing was an act of terrorism. The Iraqi regime supports terrorism. Therefore, war against Iraq is justified.
It is so crude and illogical that Howard is not really arguing or engaging in public debate. He is hunting around for images to sell his message and shift public opinion that is against war with Iraq without UN support. So the Howard government simply ignores intelligence reports that do not fit the US game plan or public arguments that are critical of its position. Anything that does not fit its preconceived picture of war now is displaced.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:12 PM | Comments (0)
March 03, 2003
Confession time
I have a confession to make. I agree with Christopher Pearson.
In his 'Online canons guard bards' column in the Weekend Australian (March 1, 2003, p. 2) he---wearing his hat as a member of the Australia Council---calls for the works of Australia's out-of-print poets to be available on an internet archive.
What a great idea: ---a national archive to preserve our cultural heritage before it has been forgotten. Why not include the out of print plays as well?
Common ground between lefties and righties? That puts a bit of sand in the wheels of the blog world eh.
Rest assured. Its not all confession. My mood is not one of contentment from complicity with the neo-cons.
My heart lifted, nay soared, when I came across the scornful tone of the brooding, bunyip professor who, he leds us to believe, lives near a bilabong. He is having a go at eastern liberal journalists reading Cicero and other Roman writers. He sees all of this self-education as a bit of a joke and he pokes fun at them.
The dark passions driving the neo-con 'attack the enemy now' polemics is alive and well. You can see it in the writing.
The good Professor wraps his words in scorn to makes us merry with laughter. Its an old trick: using expert academic knowledge to pour contempt on the other. Only the trick has a new style: ---a polemical humour that is a parody of the rhetorical tradition.
Many of his readers celebrate the writing. Yet the self-conscious, light heartedness of the writing has become false and bewitched. It has a certain dullness to it. Why? Because the good professor has been taken in hand by the new culture industry, and the light-heartedness has become sadistic mockery.
Buried in this writing is a tacit political claim that the cultural heritage is not for civilizing the hoi polloi. That humanist tradition has been trashed along with the need for a liberal education in a democracy. Its pull up the drawbridge time and take refuge behind the walls. Those inside the walls will keep the classical treasures for a select few: ie., those who the wisdom and esoteric knowledge to understand the truth content of the classics. These texts are too dangerous to be left in the hands the children of democracy living on the plains below. They might get the wrong ideas from reading Cicero, and they may not accept the good professors interpretation of these texts. We cannot have his authority being challenged can we?
No sir, I do not believe the Bunyip's comic line about living by the bilabong, being open to nature and caring for the animals. It is a life in the castle, which centres around the joys of masturbation and firing arrows from the turrets at democracy. The virtual professor may celebrate personal freedom and detest the dictates of the (liberal) culture industry, but he sure hates green. Its enough to turn him red and fire off his arrows.
When I read the conservative arrogance towards their enemy---the Other as uncouth, barbarian scribes of the liberal press--- I laugh at the laughter they cause. I laugh at the absurdity of this form of merriment and entertainment. What is remarkable is all that effort that goes into deploying the techniques of rhetoric---the moving force of eloquence--to savage and wound liberal journalists. It suggests that the conservative webloggers are fingering liberal journalists as the cause of a civilized liberal order going all hollow in the centre.
The big thesis, 'demented liberal journalists are the cause of catastrophe', provokes my laughter. But it is also laughter about despair at the decay of liberal values and the dumbing down of the content of rhetoric. Unlike the classic rhetorical writers, the new rhetorical writers rarely engage with ideas.
The trashing of rhetoric by those who profess to defend and guard it indicates just how much conservatism has been colonized by a cynical reason blinded by being on the pleasure machine of violence, death and destruction.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:51 AM | Comments (4)
February 25, 2003
Political Metaphors
There is a good post at Lying Media Bastards on the use of political metaphor, such as 'appeasement', in political discourse. Its a great read. Oh, the appeasement metaphor is kicked in the nuts.
Wondered what life is like in Kabul these days? Too busy to search to find out? Then read this. (link courtesy of way down here) I hope that this is not a model for postwar Iraq.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 09:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 21, 2003
They noticed
In an earlier post Have you noticed I mentioned that the rhetoric of the 'war now' crowd had shifted. After the big demonstrations last weekend the new rhetoric of the pro-war movement in Australia is now about liberation and democracy in Iraq. Those who oppose the war are therefore supporting political repression and totalitarianism. The spectre of the Gulag and the killing fields sits just behind this rhetoric.
The new rhetoric just slipped in quietly this week.
But these guys spotted it here and here. And they nailed it good.
What has happened to that long standing bargain: the US tolerance for Arab autocracy and political repression in return for oil and stability? What ever happened to the old strategy of containment and deterrence coupled to imperial divide and rule? It worked against the old Soviet Union. How come it cannot achieve achieve a similar result with a small regional Iraqi state?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 20, 2003
The weapons of Tim Blair
Tim Blair says it himself. He hates idiots. And he laughs at them. He sees himself beset on all sides by the stupidity, ignorance and folly of his enemies. His stance of sanity in a world of madness implies that we cannot expect reason to triumph, because the idiots are in the majority. So the strategy is to show them as laughable.
The reason is a along these lines. The best that conservative pundits can do in such circumstances of being beseiged by idiots is to discomfort the left by wielding the weapons of ridicle, of deriding their excesses and sneering against their errors. So they draw their readers into a scornful alliance against the fanaticism of the left.
Like Miranda Devine Tim scoffs at his opponents, rather than making any attempt to argue with them. The weapons deployed on the crowd below are those of irony and civilized satire, whilst the tone is one of scorn. A good example can be found in Tim's latest column for The Bulletin (subscription required). Called, 'Bin of the Brave', he says this about the UN:
"Now that he has outsourced Labor's policies on terrorism to the bunch of third-world dictators, flyblown Europeans and doomed communists known collectively as the United Nations, Simon Crean has more time on his hands to complain about the unfairness of everything."
These classical, rhetorical weapons of scorn and contempt, which are designed to wound the enemy, are launched from a citadel of unimpeachable rationality and they are driven by hate.
I do think that our Tim fancies himself as a bit of a savant who can make his readers merry by provoking their laughter at the left. Gianna's post, The Bull,(thursday Feb.13) indicates that she sees through the mask of 'the savant' to the bully boy behind.
Is the latter another mask?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 08:34 AM | Comments (5)
February 18, 2003
The boy from the Adelaide Hills
I have been wondering how Alexander Downer, the local boy from the Adelaide Hills made good as the Foreign Minster of Australia, argues for why war now. And secondly, how does he engage with the critics of the Australian Government more or less signing up to go to war with Iraq.
We can find the answers in the Foreign Minister's Statement to Parliament on Iraq on the 4 February, 2003. This is a stage for the boy from the Adelaide Hills to be eloquent orator. The speech has a particular rhetorical style as Alexander is addressing the Australian people as someone who possesses authority, high virtue (wisdom and prudence) and long experience in government. Alexander is educating us ordinary citizens and to persuade us to adopt the course of action taken by his government.
Downer poses the problem sucinctly. He says: 'There is no greater threat to our common future than the spread of nuclear weapons and their budget counterparts, chemical and biological weapons.' He then poses the key issue: 'why we must be part of the international effort to deal with this problem, and why the international community must not fail.'
Alexander understands the need to give reasons for why we need to deal with the Iraqi regime. Two are given:
1. 'that stopping Iraq, and other countries, from acquiring weapons of mass destruction is a key to ensuring our security.If we allow countries in other parts of the world to develop weapons of mass destruction, then these weapons will turn up in our own neighbourhood.If Iraq is allowed to develop weapons of mass destruction, what message does it send to countries like North Korea?'
2. 'And do we really need to consider what might happen if these weapons fell into the hands of terrorists?We know from two unnecessary wars Saddam started – against Iran and against Kuwait - that he is malevolent. And we know he remains a strong backer of terrorist organisations. Can we really sit back and accept the risk that this threat poses?'
So far that pretty much boils down to there is a risk to Australia's nation security. We cannot afford to take the risk. Why not? Where's the evidence? Trust me on that one says the boy from the Adelaide Hills. Saddam has the weapons alright and that is a very big risk.
It's a big move this 'trust me'. If we accept this then we go along with rhetoric being disconnected from truth. It is the pathway of eloquence being divorced from public reason. This is a rupture with the classical rhetorical tradition that was grounded on finding out the truth (ratio) and eloquence (eloquenta) to make us hear it.
So why war with Iraq now? Downer says that we---meaning the government-- feels pretty strongly about this issue for two reasons.
3. 'Australia and the United States share alliance commitments and obligations, and we benefit greatly from the influence we have in Washington, which enables us to help shape international approaches. Moreover, we also share common values and interests – and we value US global leadership in defending and promoting them."
And the other reason is that Saddam is guilty of trying to hide his weapons of mass destruction and that this matters to Australia.
Okay, so we feel strongly about this risk. Alexander says 'The real question today is what we – the international community – are going to do about it.'
Okay. So why war then? Why not vigilant containment? Alexander now turns to his critics. He says:
'Critics portray the situation as being a choice between giving the inspectors more time – of "giving peace a chance" - or going to war against Iraq. But this is a false distinction. More time on its own does not give peace a chance. But it will give Saddam a chance -- a chance to renege again on his obligations to the Security Council, and a chance to keep hiding his WMD capabilities, until he again can threaten us.'
Alexander builds his case against his critics further. He says that Saddam is a threat to our national security and containment will not work. Saddam will no co-operate, and he keeps playing a game of deception and contempt for the UN. Alexander reminds us of previous threats from the storehouse of history. Saddam is monster like Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo, who commit acts of barbarism at home, and aggression abroad. We have learn the lesson history we have to say no and take steps to protect the victims of barbarity.
Its not a good history lesson. Saddam is guilty of barbarism at home yes. But where is the aggression abroad in 2002/3?
Never mind, the boy from the Adelaide Hills then introduces the appeasement bit in a soft kind of way. He says that 'many – particularly on the political left – shrug and say that the murder, torture, and rape of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis – by their own rulers – should go unchecked. And they would trust Saddam not to repeat his use of chemical weapons on his own people and neighbours.'
Oh yeah. Who says that? Most agree with Alexander that Saddam is a bad guy who has oppressed and killed his own people. Its a mantra thats all. The boy from the Adelaide Hills needs to re-read his Cicero about cultivating kindly feelings so that he can exercise liberality and generosity(humanitas), reread Seneca about the need for mercey and compassion in public life.(clementia)
Alexander then ends with a big ornamental flourish. He cannot in all conscience:
'ignore the record of Saddam Hussein is a ruthless tyrant who tries still - in the face of concerted international pressure – to retain and develop the most evil of weapons. As the Foreign Minister of our great country, I will not be remembered for turning my back on such evil and allowing the spectre of Saddam to haunt future generations.'
There you have the case for war now. At the surface level it goes like this: Saddam has not disarmed. He won't. He will pussy foot around with the UN. Saddam is a threat to our national security.Those who say otherwise are appeasers who defend the totalitarian gulag. Its war now. At the deeper more philosophical level it is a moral argument:----a dead simple one. No more Auschwitz.
But you have to admit its rhetorical machinery is big on working on stirring up the emotions by appealing to the historical emotional undertow and very short on argument to establish truth.
Alexander's wisdom looks a bit tatty really. He lacks the qualities of character to be the truly and completely civic man that he poses to be. We must ask: is the boy from the Adelaide Hills really fit to administer public affairs?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:54 PM | Comments (11)