In Indigenous Bodies in Borderlands Shino Konishi, Leah Lui-Chivizhe, and Lisa Slater make the following statement:
In Black Skin White Masks (1967) Franz Fanon claimed that ‘there are times when the black man is locked into his body’ ... Following the moral outcry generated by Nannette Rogers’ exposé on the prevalence of sexual abuse in remote Aboriginal communities on the ABC’s Lateline in May 2006....and the release of the Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle: 'Little Children are Sacred' Report (Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse 2007), Aboriginal people have been further 'locked' into their bodies. Despite the fact that domestic violence and sexual assault are widespread throughout Australia – a 2004 study finding that 48% of Australian women experience violence, and 34% sexual assault in their lifetimes (Sneddon, 2007) – and the Little
Children are Sacred Report found that 'a large number of perpetrators of abuse of Aboriginal children are not Aboriginal' (Behrendt, 2007: 17), sexual abuse has been pathologised as an exclusively Aboriginal problem.
Colin Leys in The Cynical State in Socialist Register (Jan 2007) says:
Governments have always lied. They naturally deny it, even long after it is abundantly clear that they have lied, trailing multiple red herrings, dismissing inconvenient evidence, implying that there is counter-evidence they are not free to produce. When a lie can no longer be credibly denied it is justified, usually by an appeal to the national interest. Governments of modern representative democracies are no different, even if they are more liable than dictators to be exposed. Half-truths and outright lies are routinely told. Facts are routinely concealed. Files are unaccountably lost. Tapes are mysteriously erased. Democratic checks and balances are rarely effective and the public’s collective memory is short.
the emergence of a new, neoliberal policy regime that is more brazenly willing to dissemble, more indifferent to evidence, more aggressive towards critics and distinctly less accountable – to the point of being virtually unaccountable – than ever before..... When this new policy regime is properly understood the lies about Iraq no longer appear as a special case, but only as a special dimension of a general one. Cynicism, we realize, is a necessary condition of neoliberal democracy.
In this regime the public service has been reorganized so that it no longer speaks truth to power through dispassionate advice and careful argument. What is looked for is a capacity for vigorous implementation of the government's policy ideas. A can do entrepreneurial type. So where does policy advice come from?
It is less from think tanks and more from the prime minister’s ‘senior’ policy advisers and the employment in key civil service posts of senior staff on secondment from the private sector with the circulation of personnel between the civil service and the private sector has become commonplace
The Bush administration is once gain shielding Israel, as the Jewish state carries out its seige of Gaza and brings its military campaign in Gaza to its conclusion. The form of words used is 'backing Israel’s “right to self-defense ”'; even though there is no equivalence between the unguided projectiles of Hamas, illegitimate and ill-considered as they are, and the might and technological sophistication of the Israeli air force and army.
According to the editors of the Middle East Report Online:
The most compelling explanation for the scope of the assault on Gaza is that militarist interpretations of the failed war in Lebanon have prevailed inside the Israeli establishment. As one general told the New York Times, the problem then was not that the Israelis hit Lebanon too hard and too indiscriminately, but rather that “we were not decisive enough.” Mark Heller of Tel Aviv University completed the thought: “This operation is an attempt to reestablish the perception that if you provoke or attack you are going to pay a disproportionate price.” Leave aside that the linchpin of Israel’s strategy is therefore the very lack of proportionality that Israeli spokespeople so bristle at being accused of by proponents of the laws of war. If this explanation for Israel’s actions is accurate, then Gaza will suffer considerably more punishment before Israel is satisfied that its “deterrence capability” is adequately acknowledged.
The editors say:
There is political purpose behind the bombing of the Islamist party’s “civilian infrastructure” and the closure of border crossings to needed shipments of food, fuel, medicine and cash -- closures, again, that long preceded Cast Lead. It is the same motive underlying the December 30 ramming of an activist boat carrying emergency supplies (and a CNN reporter -- oops) and the repulsion of a Libyan relief vessel on December 1. The purpose is to render Hamas totally unprepared to deal with humanitarian crisis in the hope of undercutting support for the party as it fails to deliver basic services.
However, the Israeli military tactics are flawed. They assume that if they hit Gaza (or Lebanon) hard enough, the local population will blame Hamas (for bringing tragedy upon them. But it doesn't work like that. Instead, Gazans blame Israel - and close ranks with Hamas.
An invasion, whose real objective was the toppling of Hamas, would require the permanent military reoccupation of Gaza. Instead Israel is using the current slaughter in Gaza as a big stick with which to beat Hamas into compliance --ie., Hamas being made to collude with the occupation.
The category "civic education" is an ambiguous concept since it is impossible to define it without giving an indication of the kind of society in which the person giving the definition lives. Bryan Cooke in Another Country in Traffic says that:
The ‘civic’ in civic education means education pertaining to the ‘city’ (Latin: civitas). It harks back to a time when the city was the basic political unit (Greek polis, also city); in the way that makes the Peloponnesian War, at its heart, a tale of two cities. Civic education, then, would be that which teaches us to be a citizen, which readies us for public life or, more broadly, the life in common.... But the idea of civic education carries two fundamental ambiguities even in its name. First, by ‘civic education’ do we refer to education for the city, or by the city? Second (and I mean to use this loosely so that it appliesto secular contexts as much as religious ones), to ‘the city of Man’ or the ‘city of God’ In common usage, civic education means education for the ‘city’. It is that aspect of education through which we become citizens: who can, at least in some minimal sense, act for the good and discharge our duties to the city, nation, ‘society’ or community. These duties can require anything from a total subsumption of the whole of one’s life (as in a totalitarian society) to the simultaneously nugatory and subtly strenuous requirements of our own liberal-democratic/capitalist consumerist societies.