The Partisan

Talented Russians

2010-02-10T23:11:00.001+11:00

Song for Bob

2010-02-10T22:34:00.000+11:00

La maison/ questo ragazzo/ cement

2010-02-10T22:07:00.002+11:00

Smog

2010-02-10T22:02:00.000+11:00

Cod Liver Oil

2010-02-10T22:01:00.000+11:00

Alone and Forsaken

2010-02-09T18:13:00.000+11:00

My friend, the rose...

2010-02-04T22:10:00.000+11:00

Song for Australia Day

2010-01-27T00:19:00.002+11:00

Backpedalling of the Beclowned

2009-10-14T14:13:00.002+11:00

Last week, Beck was all, like, the science on DDT is 'not a sturdy cornerstone of scientific truth but rather an elaborate tissue of exaggerations and lies.'

This week, Beck is all 'Where did I say that DDT is harmless?'. He's also muttering something about bald eagles, and denies having been shown any links to scientific research, despite being directed to links on this blog, to those at Lambert and Darrell, and to those of his friends at Pure Poison. As Tobias Ziegler noted on the latter blog, all of this could have been ascertained with about 5 minutes googling. Beck must have been too busy googling the latest on Jeremy Sear's grooming habits.

Beclowning Continues

2009-10-11T15:20:00.004+11:00

My recent post looking briefly at J. F. Beck's article on DDT and Carson seems to have gotten Beck a little upset.

To recap, Beck claimed that 'In making her case against DDT Carson constructs not a sturdy cornerstone of scientific truth but rather an elaborate tissue of exaggerations and lies.'

Unfortunately for Beck, he attempts to make his case by citing two passages from Carson that don't actually have anything to do with DDT. He then goes to claim that 'no amount of DDT can cause leukemia or any other form of cancer to develop in a matter of months, if ever', and that if DDT is toxic, it is not 'acutely' so. He calls to his aid one researcher named Ames, who apparently says that 'a single cup of coffee contains more potential natural carcinogens than a human will consume of potentially carcinogenic synthetic pesticide residues in a year'.

Beck was called on this stupidity, and began backpedalling and qualifying his inane comments. He also accuses me of stupidity and relies on ad hom arguments to make his clumsy points.

Beck's obfuscation notwithstanding, the facts are clear. Beck has repeatedly lied in order to misrepresent Carson, in order for he followers to be able to demonise an environmentalist.

DDT has been linked, repeatedly, with a range of medical conditions, including forms of cancer. Evidence for this can be found in the links and comments for the previous post, all of which have been duly ignored by Beck. Over time, governments around the world have decided that the costs of DDT outweigh the benefits. (It may comfort Beck to know that its use is allowed in North Korea). The benefits are themselves over-rated, given that insects can be become resistant to the pesticide. Furthermore, concerns about DDT arose long before Carson ever wrote her book, as can be seen from this article from 1945. The article on Marxist-controlled Wikipedia has plenty of detail on the dangers and problems associated with DDT. Like his US-based namesake on Fox, Beck will no doubt prefer conspiracy theorists and smear tactics to anything like evidence.

The Ames Test, whilst legitimate, has been implicated in secret testing by tobacco companies, and is not the 'bullshit' that Beck claims. (Quiggin has links regarding other connections between DDT and Big Tobacco).

Beck tries a bait-and-switch with some irrelevant trivia about Bendiocrab. He then claims that 'No chemical insecticide is without risk – it's a matter of weighing the risks against the benefits'. It's nice for Beck to say this, but nowhere does he explain that DDT has been repeatedly shown to pose many risks. Instead, he lies and dissembles, like many of his fellow 'conservatives' on this issue, in order to smear Carson and environmentalists more generally. As I indicated earlier, it's evident that these people couldn't care less how many people in developed countries develop medical conditions through massive exposure of DDT. All that matters is scoring a cheap political point.

Finally, and bizarrely, Beck invoked one Tim Blair in his little tirade. I can't imagine why, unless, perhaps, like his comrade, Beck has been so intellectually out-gunned that he's feeling immeasurably hurt.

UPDATE:

It turns out that Bendi... was misspelt. Beck, true to form, has been big on smear and name-calling in his responses to my posting, but very light on when it comes to actual argument. He doesn't seem to realise the extent of his backpedalling.

Beck in Quadrant:

[A] single cup of coffee contains more potential natural carcinogens than a human will consume of potentially carcinogenic synthetic pesticide residues in a year.

Beck now:

I didn't say "that a splash of ddt is safer than a morning coffee", and neither did Bruce Ames. Ames' point is that the danger to human health from pesticide residues in food is overstated.

Pathetic. Stay tuned.

Beck Beclowned

2009-10-09T05:59:00.003+11:00

J. F. Beck, a keen ~~stalker~~ observer of the left, with a penchant for attacking minor publications, gets himself printed in a minor publication. (Well, not actually printed, as Quadrant probably couldn't spare the ink).

In any case, it seems that early environmentalist Rachel Carson was, like all her Green comrades, responsible for malaria deaths, and exhibited a Luddite fear of chemicals. (According to Beck, coffee is worse for you than pesticide).

Or maybe not.

Misconstruing Power

2009-08-30T08:02:00.003+10:00

The libertarians and conservatives continue to push for 'small government', seeking minimal encroachment by authorities in individuals' personal affairs. The co-called 'anarcho-capitalists' even propose that no government exist at all. To the extent that state coercion and idiotic bureaucracy are to be avoided, people across the political sphere may agree with this push.

In the case of libertarians and conservatives, this push arises from a complete misunderstanding of power. It appears to be viewed in somewhat medieval terms, wherein power is localised within members of a hierarchy, such as a monarch, or legislature.

Another way to understand power - a more philosophical, and more French reading (I'm think of Foucault and Deleuze, ignored and/or despised by the right) is that power is dispersed throughout a system or society. It has no center. Therefore, even in the case of an idealised 'small government', or even in the case of no government altogether, power and coercion would simply be transferred from agents of the state to private actors. In others words, the overall system would not be one iota less oppressive or coercive; you would merely have different agents calling the shots. The 'hard' forms of coercion (police, military, prisons) would almost certainly remain as is. The soft forms of coercion (education, mental health, etc) would be privatised, but would be no less coercive for all of that. You would still have a judicial system, and you would still have exploitation and domination in the workplace.

Consequently, when attempting to think a small government, we ought to completely reject the infantile notions of conservatism and libertarianism as the medieval misunderstandings that they are.

Here's some music:

Possible Turning Point?

2009-08-06T15:11:00.003+10:00

Of all the state ALP governments, Victoria's is the most adept at spin. Given this, and given the huge majority the ALP has in the lower house (notwithstanding a few lost seats in 2006), I figured they'd be a show-in for the 2006 election.

It may not be so simple. This week, we've seen public servants complaining about poor working conditions, the public complaining about poor quality from the public service, and everybody blaming the government.

Today, intensive care paramedics have resigned in the face of years of poor pay, and dangerously unsafe working conditions:

INTENSIVE care paramedics have resigned en masse outside the Premier's office, warning any resulting deaths are on his head.

The state's mobile intensive care ambulance paramedics are in a deadlock with the State Government over pay and have invited John Brumby to join them for a shift to experience life on the streets.

After months of negotiations, the state's 300 MICA paramedics have taken the unprecedented step of leaving hundreds of their resignation letters and shoulder insignias outside the Premier's office in the city this morning.

The resignations will take effect from early September with MICA paramedics returning to normal ambulance duties - unable to perform intensive care services for heart attack or car crash victims on site.

MICA paramedics face a $6000 fine for talking to the media, but one officer said the Brumby government had treated MICA workers with contempt and that its false promises were putting lives at risk. (source)

Curiously, the union are nowhere to be seen in the media on this issue, and the Herald Sun has deferred to the shadow health minister.

This comes in the wake of almost daily storied in relation to the state's child protection crisis:

The Premier today said at-risk children were being forced to wait because the government could not attract and retain staff.

But he denies any child is left uncared for while waiting to be assigned to a permanent child protection worker.

A whistleblower claims 2000 Victorian children alerted to the Department of Human Services (DHS) do not have case workers. (source)

So, it would seem that Brumby, and the government more generally, have been caught out lying by this whistleblower. It has been rare, over the years, to see the Herald Sun directly attack premiers. They've attacked particular ministers, or departments, but have used the kid gloves approach with Kennett, Bracks, and now Brumby. This could mark an interesting turning point in the run up to the 2010 election. The unions need to pull their finger out, as the Brumby government has treated them with contempt in recent times. Secondly, the Greens need to work on some grass-roots campaigning. There are plenty of (mostly) inner-city areas where the Greens could have a serious chance, if they work hard, and there's plenty of disillusionment in Melbourne's suburbs, where the working masses are fed up with labor, but don't necessarily want to get fucked in the ear by the Tories.

RIP Grods

2009-08-03T12:51:00.000+10:00

Best wishes to all concerned on a great blog, and hope to see you all on the internets still.

Disgrace

2009-07-17T17:22:00.002+10:00

The title here doesn't refer to the excellent book (and film) of the same name, but rather, some stupidity from yesterday's Herald Sun:

THE mother of Daniel Valerio has broken 16 years of silence to condemn the State Government for failing to stop systemic child abuse.

Cheryle Butcher was 26 when her youngest son Daniel, 2, was fatally bashed by her de facto husband, Paul Aiton, in one of the most notorious child abuse cases in Australian history.

The case led to the introduction in Victoria of laws requiring police and health and teaching professionals to report suspected child abuse...

Ms Butcher, who said she had had counselling for years, said she blamed herself for Daniel's death.

But she believes she was also failed by an incompetent and poorly resourced child protection authority - a system she said was still failing children today.

"Yes, it was happening in my own house. I am the one who has to live with that knowledge for the rest of my life," she said.

"Unless you are me in that situation, I can't explain it. I had no help, no support...

"Nothing is being done, and kids are still dying. Don't let Daniel die in vain. Get some support systems, make counselling available, build refuges for women. As long as the Government keeps screwing up, it will keep happening."

So let's be clear here. If you're a woman with cow dung for brains, and partnered to a psychopath who is systematically abusing your child, it's the governments responsibility to magically become aware of this and fix everything. Right.

I don't like beating people with the stick of 'personal responsibility' - the concept is bunkum to somebody nurtured on Nietzsche and psychoanalysis - but this mother was complicit in the murder of her son. Governments cannot raise children - only parents, families, and communities can. To expect otherwise is itself a disgrace.

The resources Ms Butcher mentions - counselling, refuges - certainly exist. Any woman in Victoria can be provided with emergency accommodation if it helps her and her kids flee a violent situation. Yes, the resources are limited, and not necessarily brilliant. Yes, there are also some basic things expected of the woman (i.e. don't get shitfaced and assault staff, don't bring your psychopathic ex-partner into the refuge, etc). But the resources are there.

Finally, by way of clarification, I should be clear that I think the Victorian State Government, under both Bracks and Brumby, absolutely pathetic on issues of child protection, health, mental health, disability services, housing, and a range of other things. A large number of politicians and senior public servants ought to be sacked, if not shot, for their criminal neglect of Victoria's most vulnerable. Systems need to be rebuilt without the cronyism and backside-covering that infect Victoria's public service to its core. It does not follow from this, however, that the government can or should miraculously solve everything when you are turning a blind eye to the abuse of children.

Support terrorism

2009-07-15T04:21:00.003+10:00

Your happy revolutionary has suffered great personal tragedy, and is in mourning.

But he hasn't given up.

Here's a couple of ditties to rouse yer:

'Self-defence'

2009-07-03T22:54:00.002+10:00

Asked if Israel had targeted unarmed civilians, Chris Cobb-Smith, an artillery expert engaged by Amnesty, said it was "very difficult to come to any other conclusion".
Israeli troops forced Palestinians to stay in one room of their home while turning the rest of the house into a base and sniper position, "effectively using the families, both adults and children, as human shields and putting them at risk", Amnesty said. (source)

Israeli forces killed hundreds of unarmed Palestinian civilians and destroyed thousands of homes in Gaza in attacks which breached the laws of war, Amnesty International concluded in a new 117-page report published today - the first comprehensive report to be published on the 22-day conflict earlier this year...“Israel’s failure to properly investigate its forces’ conduct in Gaza, including war crimes, and its continuing refusal to cooperate with the UN international independent fact-finding mission headed by Richard Goldstone, is evidence of its intention to avoid public scrutiny and accountability,” said Donatella Rovera, who headed a field research mission to Gaza and southern Israel during and after the conflict. (source)

Iran and the Left

2009-07-03T21:43:00.004+10:00

A theme has developed in the wingnut media, namely, that 'the left' has neglected Iran. This is presumed to indicate either hypocrisy and double standard ('They always criticise Israel!') or tacit sympathy for Ahmedinejad, the Ayatollah, and the mad mullahs who run the regime.

The evidence for this charge lies solely in the claim that leftists have been mute on Iran. They probably have been mute in the News Ltd media, since they don't exist at all within Murdoch empire, but a quick click on the links of my blog, and about thirty seconds googling revealed anything other than silence or complicity when it comes to the Iranian autocracy:

Lenin's Tomb is probably the foremost socialist blog in the UK, if not the world, excluding the large group blogs. Bloggers Richard Seymour and Yoshie have repeatedly tackled the issue of Iran, the elections, and the uprisings. Significantly, this extensive coverage has also encompassed critique of the deceits and conceits perpetuated regarding this crisis by the ruling elites in the Anglophone media.

Slavoj Žižek has published a widely-circulated text supporting the protestors in Iran, and calling for the downfall of the current regime. From a rather different leftist perspective, Chomsky has given this interview on the subject.

In Australia, Mark Bahnisch made some cautious remarks in support of the dissenters. Quiggin looked at things with reference to Obama. Slack @ndy has compiled pro-protestor links, anti-regime, and has criticised a presumed concordance between Ahmedinejad and Chavez. Green Left Weekly expressed solidarity with the dissenters of Iran.

In the US and beyond, there has also been plenty of critical comment on the topic of Iran's sham elections and their aftermath. Minnesota-based Trot Renegade Eye lent his voice of solidarity. Counterpunch has been providing almost daily coverage, including these two pieces. AlterNet had provided a number of pieces on this topic, particularly attacking the lack of freedom of speech. Marxism.com has published multiple pieces int he past week or so - see the link here. Zmag has sharply attacked the democratic pretensions of the regime, as has Socialist Worker.

Now for some general remarks. The above pieces are all well worth reading. Many are sceptical about the possibility of the protestors effecting lasting change. Even greater scepticism is reserved for Ahmedinjad's opponent, Moussavi, whose 'reformist' credentials are regarding by many commenters as dubious, at best. (Interestingly, Žižek is an exception here). All the same, each and every piece is concerned with the welfare of the protestors, and none supports the existing regime in any respect whatsoever.

Another point worth noting is that, roughly speaking, the further left you go, the more decisive the statements you are likely to find in relation to Iraq. Centre-leftists and social democrats such as Bahnisch and Quiggin are far more equivocal than are the socialist and anarchist commenters above.

It goes without saying that everybody of value in the left supports the opverthrow of the existing Iranian regime, and wishes the demonstrators success in their task of liberating Iran.

Finally, the attempt by rightists to pretend that the left are somehow opposed or indifferent to the uprisings in Iran is sheer chutzpah, occasioned by years of controlling both politics and the mainstream press. Not only do these clowns attempt to falsify the past, they are now, increasingly, it seems, trying to distort history as it happens. They must presume that leftist audiences are as stupid and apathetic as their own. It is an ongoing fight to ensure that these deceptions are rectified.

Another Central American Coup

2009-06-29T13:56:00.003+10:00

The military of Honduras has reportedly seized power, exiling president Zelaya at gunpoint yesterday. This follows the recent murder by the military of a leftist presidential candidate.

Obama and Hilary have reportedly been tut-tutting the coup, but given that the US has a military base in Honduras, and directly funds the pro-US parties, it is highly unlikely the coup could have occurred with prior US approval, if not direct assistance. Some things never change, regardless of who is in the White House.

UPDATE:
At this time, the State Dept has officially condemned the right-wing military coup, and there is no clear evidence that the US has conspired to oust the legitimate president. We shall see what unfolds in the next few days.

'Mission Accomplished'

2009-06-29T11:06:00.002+10:00

Despite being immensely unpopular, the Iraqi Government is throwing open the nation's oil fields to foreign investors. As we have seen, oil was the last thing to be economically 'liberalised' by the occupiers and Vichy Government:

Domestic firms, including SOC, are furious, however, that contracts are being awarded to their foreign counterparts.

Jaber Khalifa Jaber, head of the Iraqi parliament's oil and gas committee and a Fadhila MP, said Iraq is under threat from an "economic occupation".

"The companies will just share the oil between the Americans, the French, the British and the Japanese ... just like the Sykes-Picot agreement," he told AFP, referring to the Anglo-French accord that divided up influence in the Middle East in 1916.

The 'Good' War

2009-06-29T11:00:00.002+10:00

Simon Jenkins of the Guardian has an article on Afghanistan, with which I find myself largely agreeing:

Vietnam began with President Kennedy's 1963 intervention to keep the communist menace at bay and make the world safe for democracy. That is what George Bush and Tony Blair said of terrorism and Afghanistan. By 1965, despite Congress scepticism, American advisers, then planes, then ground forces were deployed. Allies were begged to join but few agreed.

The presence of Americans on Asian soil turned a local insurgency into a regional crusade. The hard-pressed Americans resorted to ever more extensive bombing, deep inside neighbouring countries, despite evidence it was ineffective and counterproductive.

No amount of superior firepower could quell a peasant army that came and went by night and could terrorise or merge into the population. Tales of American atrocities rolled in. The army counted success in enemy dead. A desperate attempt to "train and equip" a new Vietnamese army made it as corrupt as it was unreliable. Billions of dollars were wasted.

Every one of these steps is being re-enacted in Afghanistan. Every sane observer, even serving generals and diplomats, admits that "we are not winning" and show no sign of doing so.

History is not a forte for most in the mainstream media. As history is occurring now in Iran, for instance, the conservative MSM is attempting to spin the protests as somehow being analogous to the 'colour' revolutions of the former Soviet bloc, protests that the left don't support as the left allegedly admires the Iranian regime's 'anti-Americanism'.

It's not merely the Tory shysters who are to blame, however. Jenkins hits the nail on the head when he says that 'a heavier guilt lies with liberal apologists for this war who continue to invent excuses for its failure and offer glib preconditions for victory.'

Neoliberal Iraq

2009-06-16T23:22:00.002+10:00

"Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, promulgated four orders that included 'the full privatisation of public enterprises, full ownership rights by foreign firms of Iraqi businesses, full repatriation of foreign profits...the opening of Iraq's banks to foreign control, national treatment for foreign companies and...the elimination of nearly all trade barriers'. The orders were to apply to all areas of the economy, including public services, the media, manufacturing, services, transportation, finance, and construction. Only oil was exempt (presumably because of its special status as revenue producer to pay for the war and its geopolitical significance). The labour market, on the other hand, was to be strictly regulated. Strikes were effectively forbidden in key sectors and the right to unionise restricted. A highly regressive 'flat tax' (an ambitious tax-reform plan long advocated for implementation by conservatives in the US) was also imposed.

These orders were, some argued, in violation of the Geneva and Hague Conventions, since an occupying power is mandated to guard the assets of an occupied country and not sell them off."

(p. 6)

Harvey, D. (2007). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

They're not quite lying...

2009-06-16T11:03:00.003+10:00

...But they're hardly telling the truth.

Recently, I've had occasion to raise some concerns about what is arguably one of Australia's leading conservative blogs. The author of said blog is not an idiot, but holds some views that seem to me to be rather off the mark, particularly as regards modernism, feminism, and racism.

On this latter topic, I noticed these comments recently, in an apparent attempt to inflame white resentment:

Again we have the double standard. Whites are held to have wealth solely on the basis of inherited privilege...

The other problem with all the claims about white males being privileged is that it hides an underlying trend in which the real wages of white working class men have been falling since the 1970s.

It's a double whammy: you get paid less in real terms than your father did and at the same time you're told that you should be punished for being privileged - even though there are other groups doing better than you.

This is a deceptive bit of 'reframing', and both the far-right, and the more mainstream ruling elites do it all the time.

Let's take a look at the main substantive claim here, namely, that the wages of 'white working class men' have declined since the 1970s. Whilst it's technically true, it's extremely misleading. The author does not specify his source, but I presume he is referring to this data from the US, where 'real', inflation-adjusted wages peaked in 1972, only to enter steady decline thereafter, with a feeble, if temporary improvement in the late 1990s.

From this chart, we can conclude that it is not only the 'white working class' that has suffered, but all non-farm workers in the US, on average. We might just as easily claim that Black or Hispanic workers' wages have also gone down.

Now, many of the problems that conservatives note in society are genuine. There are plenty of things for people to be aggrieved about. The problem for conservatives is that they can't implicate capitalism in their grievances. This means that they are doomed to misunderstand our wages chart above. Our chart tells us that wages began to decline in the US in the wake of stagflation of the economy, the oil crisis, and the gradual abandonment of Keynesian welfarism for neoliberal economic policies.

We can see further that wages continued their decline under that cherished conservative, Reagan, whose assault on organised labour, and whose transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich has since been known as Reaganomics. By the early 1980s in the US, the seeds were basically sown for the immiseration of workers thereafter, by way of the 'reforms' implemented by Reagan. No mention of this by the conservatives, however.

Furthermore, when wages peaked in 1972, union membership in the private sector was 28%. Today it is 8%. A quarter of all workers in the US earn wages that place them below the poverty line. The minimum wage in the US has repeatedly been attacked as a supposed barrier to employment. Today, it stands a third lower than it did in 1968. (source)

Meanwhile, the pay of CEOs was 26 times that of the average worker in 1965. In 1980, it was 40 times greater. By 2004, it grew to being 500 times greater (source). Clearly, as Mark Richardson said, 'some groups' are doing vastly better than others, however, this is on the basis of class, not race.

It's a shame, really, that rather than form a broad coalition seeking better rights for all, conservatives are all-too-often content to remain silent about their counterparts in power, and choose instead to scapegoat mythical 'liberals', or to indulge in the worst sort of race-baiting. Nonetheless, it has ever been thus, and this is why a better deal for all workers, white or otherwise, will never derive from the dead-end of conservatism.

A response to AWH

2009-06-14T22:42:00.002+10:00

Brett at AWH has a particularly stupid post here, indicating that all differences between right and left are reducible to economics. Further, Brett claims that anarchism is 'extreme right'. Because I'm banned at AWH, and because my attempts at sockpuppeting under various Russian monikers were unsuccessful, I'll include my brief response here:

If economics is the sole means by which you establish a person's politics, you end up with all kinds of stupidity, as you see in this post. Britain's economy under Churchill had an enormous amount of planning, particularly during WWII. Churchill even nationalised the banks, so by your logic, he is therefore a leftist. Ditto Dubya. Reagen greatly increased state control over the economy by means of regulating labour. He must be a lefty too.

Meanwhile, the most noted anarchists in history - Proudhon, Kropotkin, the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists, Chomsky - are all firmly on the left.

I presume this post was just another pathetic attempt to claim Hitler was a lefty. Attempt failed.

Damn these guys are stupid.

'Socialism' under Obama

2009-06-14T22:28:00.002+10:00

Some people are saying that the GFC has plunged Obama's US into socialism.

But then, some people are morons.

(Chart taken from here).

Conservatism and Fascism

2009-06-14T21:54:00.003+10:00

The following has been taken from Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism:

Italian and German conservatives had not created Mussolini and Hitler, of course, though they had too often let their law breaking go unpunished. After the Fascists and the Nazis made themselves too important to ignore, by the somewhat different mixtures of electoral appeal and violent intimidation...the conservatives had to decide what to do with them.

In particular, conservative leaders had to decide whether to try to coopt fascism or force it back to the margins. One crucial decision was whether the police and the courts would compel the fascists to obey the law. German chancellor Brüning attempted to curb Nazi violence in 1931-32. He banned uniformed actions by the SA (Sturmabteilung, i.e. brownshirts - THR) on April 14, 1932. When Franz von Papen succeeded Brüning as chancellor in July 1932, however, he lifted the ban...and the Nazis, excited by the vindication, set off the most violent period in the whole 1930-1932 constitutional crisis. In Italy, although a few prefects tried to restrain Fascist lawlessness, the national leaders preferred, at crucial moments, as we already know, to try to "transform" Mussolini rather than to discipline him. Conservative national leaders in both countries decided that what the fascists had to offer outweighed the disadvantages of allowing these ruffians to capture public space from the Left by violence. The nationalist press and conservative leaders in both countries consistently applied a double standard to judging fascist and left-wing violence.

...

Conservative complicites in the fascism's arrival in power were of several types. First of all, there was complicity in fascist violence against the Left...Mussolini's squadristi would have been powerless with the closed eyes and even the outright aid of the Italian police and army. Another form of complicity was the gift of respectability...Alfred Hugenberg, Krupp executive of the party that competed with Hitler most directly, the German National Party (DNVP), alternately attacked the Nazi upstart and appeared at political rallies with him...But while Hugenberg helped make Hitler look more acceptable, his DNVP membership drained away to the more exciting Nazis.

We saw...that the Nazis received less direct financial help from business than many have assumed. Before the final deal that put Hitler in power, German big business greatly preferred a solid reassuring conservative...to the unknown Hitler with his crackpot economic advisors...[B]usiness contributions did not become a major resource for Hitler until after he attained power. Then, of course, the game changed. Businessmen contributed hugely to the new Nazi authorities and set about accommodating themselves to a regime that would reward many of them richly with armaments contracts, and all of them by breaking the back of organized labour in Germany. (pp. 99-100).

On the 'socialist' misnomer:

Fascists had also found a magic formula for weaning workers away from Marxism. Long after Marx asserted that the working class had no homeland, conservatives had been unable to find any way to refute him. None of their nineteenth-century nostrums - deference, religion, schooling - had worked. On the eve of WWI, the Action Française had enjoyed some success recruiting a few industrial workers to nationalism, and the unexpectedly wide acceptance by workers of their patriotic duty to fight for their homelands when WWI began foretold that in the twentieth century Nation was going to be stronger than Class.

Fascists everywhere have built on that revelation...As for the Nazi Party, its very name proclaimed that it was a workers' party...Mussolini expected to recruit his old socialist colleagues. Their results were not overwhelmingly successful. Every analysis of the social composition of the early fascist parties agrees: although some workers were attracted, their share of party membership was always well below their share in the general population. (p. 103).

Also, Wikipedia has some reasonable information about the Nazi's attempt to position themselves as a workers party that aimed to include the middle class, and which utterly rejected Marxism.

And whilst I haven't quoted the relevant passages at length, the final power grabs of both Hitler and Mussolini came courtesy of conservatives attempting to form coalitions. We can conclude that whilst conservative and fascism are not the same thing, neither has anything remotely to do with leftism, and leftism is not implicated in the rise to power of fascists in Italy and Germany.

Some reflections on ideology, Zionism, and fascism

2009-05-28T15:19:00.002+10:00

In response to an excellent and timely piece by Richard Seymour, debunking the myth that fascism was a leftist political movement, I provided some brief thoughts of my own, when the subject turned to Zionism. I've done a little reading in this area of late, and this are my current thoughts, ever provisional:

I think there's a tendency to simplify Zionism. Zionism came in many different forms - left and right, religious and secular. The ruling ideology of Israel is probably best understood as simply violent national chauvinism, perhaps with a few Zionist features thrown in, but not strictly identifiable with Zionism.

I think also that the tendency for the lunar right to support Israel is tactical, in many cases. Paxton makes the point that if fascism were to come to the US, it would steer clear of the repugnant symbols of the fascism of old (i.e. jackboots, swastikas, etc). It makes sense that budding fascist groups would view Muslims as the enemy, and would therefore support the IDF's efforts against 'terrorism'.

...

Maybe the ruling powers in Israel have some fascist tendencies. However, when we look at the most belligerant of Israeli hawks, look at their rhetoric and, more importantly, their actions, there's little that's specifically 'Zionist' about it. They might as well be chauvinist thugs from Russia or anywhere else.
Obviously, we cannot ever accept Zionism as a legitimate solution if we are universalist and internationalist. That goes without saying. But I wonder if Zionism is to the ruling Israeli elite what German Romanticism was to the Nazis - a necessary, but hardly sufficient condition.

Human trafficking

2009-05-28T13:06:00.001+10:00

Here is a great resource for anybody interested in the sex trade, and human trafficking.

Courtesy of Hossam.

GFC hits Ireland

2009-05-28T00:15:00.002+10:00

Shane MacGowan forced to get teeth.

From this:

To this:

Let's remember the good old days, of lilting folk songs:

And, for your patience, for those of you of my generation, you'll remember tolerating Mr Valentine's antics in order to hear this unzud classic:

'The fashionable ideas of the left'

2009-05-27T15:38:00.004+10:00

I've had previous occasion to disagree with Mark Richardson, self-identified 'traditional conservative'. He's at it again today in a post on racism:

There's a fashionable idea on the left that whites invented the concept of race in order to gain an unearned privilege by oppressing others. Therefore, whites are held to be uniquely guilty of preventing the emergence of human equality.

It's hard to know if Richardson is being disingenuous here, or if he's just plain ignorant. Anyway, for his enlightenment, I left him the following response:

Firstly, the notion of race did emerge in its most elaborate form in Europe. This wasn't done to obtain 'privilege' or other such nonsense, but to justify brutality at the expense of colonised peoples. It's a recurring pattern you can find in relation to England, Nazi Germany, imperialist France, fascist Italy, etc. There's overwhelming evidence that this was the case, and I am quite happy to point you to numerous references if you think otherwise.

Secondly, whilst it's quite possible to find examples of various kinds of non-white racism, there is no historical precedent for the racism exhibited by Europe toward the rest of the world. Remember, by the 19th century, pretty much the entire world (with a couple of notable exceptions) was the property of one European power or another. This might give you some idea as to why the ideologies underpinning European racism are of somewhat more interest than racism by Inuits or Khmers.

Finally, as you know full well, 'diversity' has always been evident in Australia, from the time of the Aboriginals onwards. It cannot be got rid of. What we are seeing today, albeit, in the form of limited, localised examples (Cronulla, Camden), are thick-headed would-be brownshirts trying to impinge on the rights of those they see as the enemy (typically Muslims or middle-easterners). There people, whilst on the margins, have nonetheless formed organised groups to further their cause. Can you point us to any nascent fascist groups run by Vietnamese or Somalians that are promoting racist hate, or is post yet another ugly exercise in quashing strawmen and pinning moral responsibility exclusively to minorities?

POSTSCRIPT:
Looking at the output of Richardson and his followers, 'traditional conservatives', I'm struck by the preoccupation with themes of racial and cultural ~~purity~~ homogeneity, the need to restore patriarchal arrangements, the reduction of relations between the sexes (and the nations) to biology, the strident opposition to both leftism and liberalism, the niggling sense of grievance and resentment, as if White Australian Males were the most oppressed group on the planet...
Let me be very clear - I'm not suggesting Mr Richardson is a fascist. But take these precise views, add the slightest hint of radicalism to them, and what you'd end up with is a creed that is formally indistinguishable from the brownshirts of old.

Tell Me Lies about Vietnam

2009-05-19T10:31:00.003+10:00

Where else but in The Australian do we see a shameless attempt to re-fight old culture wars, and bring back to life the long-since discredited spectre of the 'domino theory'? A fellow named Colebatch has decided that the domino theory was 'largely borne out' in events in South East Asia and Eastern Europe. Colebatch avers that we cannot allow 'Western military defeat' in Afghanistan, whatever this means, as Europe, having a large minority of Muslims, would be in strife - 'jihadist elements would be encouraged everywhere.'

This is the sort of imperialist bullshit that one expects to find on the stupidest of right-wing blogs (or in The Australian). There are lies and distortions from almost the first line. Take the claim that the domino theory was demonstrated in 1975, because 'Cambodia and Laos fell as, and plainly because, Saigon fell'. Putting aside the mass carnage wrought by US forces on all three Indochinese countries in this period, (strengthening support for the Khmer Rouge in particular), Cambodia went down the revolutionary path in spite of the Communists winning the war in Vietnam. It was actually the latter who eventually liberated Cambodia in 1979. Opposition between Vietnam and Cambodia was itself sympomatic of the Sino-Soviet split, wherein Cambodia was backed by China (and armed by Western Europe and the US), whilst the Vietnamese were backed by the Soviets. Hardly an example of 'domino theory'.

This shoddy, dishonest logic is at work throughout the piece, where Colebatch makes vague and sinister claims that defeat in Afghanistan (a campaign largely concerned with aerial bombings these days) will have 'consequences' for the West, because of the latter's supposedly latent radical Muslim population. In addition to the shameless bigotry, Colebatch insists that this scenario 'puts Australia's commitment of an additional 450 troops there into perspective'.

Indeed it does, but not in the way that Colebatch thinks. Once the 'good war' to Iraq's fiasco, Afghanistan has, for a long time, been a 'quagmire', where Coalition forces have supported all manner of butchers, warlords, and (despite official rhetoric) Islamists, for reasons that were dubious in the beginning, and utterly unjustifiable now. Casuistry such as the domino theory aside, there can be no military solutions to what are longstanding political problems.

Chomsky on 2009

2009-04-16T00:39:00.002+10:00

Here's a wide-ranging interview transcript with the indefatigable Noam Chomsky. Some highlights:

On the economy:

In fact, if you look today, it's quite striking to see the advice that the Western powers are following, the programs that they're following, and compare them to the instructions given to the third world.

So, say, take Indonesia again. Indonesia had a huge financial crisis about ten years ago, and the instructions were the standard ones: "Here is what you have to do. First, pay off your debts to us. Second, privatize, so that we can then pick up your assets on the cheap. Third, raise interest rates to slow down the economy and force the population to suffer, you know, to pay us back." Those are the regular instructions the IMF is still giving them.

What do we do? Exactly the opposite. We forget about the debt, let it explode. We reduce interest rates to zero to stimulate the economy. We pour money into the economy to get even bigger debts. We don't privatize; we nationalize, except we don't call it nationalization. We give it some other name, like "bailout" or something. It's essentially nationalization without control. So we pour money into the institutions. We lectured the third world that they must accept free trade, though we accept protectionism.

On party politics in the US:

I mean, we basically are a kind of a one-party state. I think C. Wright Mills must have pointed this out fifty years ago. It's a business party, but it has factions—Democrats and Republicans—and they're different. They have somewhat different constituencies and different policies. And if you look over the years, the population has—the majority of the population has tended to make out better under Democrats than Republicans; the very wealthy have tended to make out better under Republicans than Democrats. So they're business parties, but they're somewhat different, and the differences can have an effect. However, fundamentally, they're pretty much along the same lines.

On healthcare in the US:

I mean, for decades, the healthcare issue has been right at the top of domestic concerns, for very good reasons. The US has the most dysfunctional healthcare system in the industrial world, has about twice the per capita costs and some of the worst outcomes. It's also the only privatized system. And if you look closely, those two things are related. And the privatized system is highly inefficient: a huge amount of administration, bureaucracy, supervision, you know, all kinds of things. It's been studied pretty carefully.

On the potential for a rise in fascism:

Now, if you listen to early Nazi propaganda, you know, end of the Weimar Republic and so on, and you listen to talk radio in the United States, which I often do—it's interesting—there's a resemblance. And in both cases, you have a lot of demagogues appealing to people with real grievances.

Grievances aren't invented. I mean, for the American population, the last thirty years have been some of the worst in economic history. It's a rich country, but real wages have stagnated or declined, working hours have shot up, benefits have gone down, and people are in real trouble and now in very real trouble after the bubbles burst. And they're angry. And they want to know, "What happened to me? You know, I'm a hard-working, white, God-fearing American. You know, how come this is happening to me?"

That's pretty much the Nazi appeal. The grievances were real. And one of the possibilities is what Rush Limbaugh tells you: "Well, it's happening to you because of those bad guys out there." OK, in the Nazi case, it was the Jews and the Bolsheviks. Here, it's the rich Democrats who run Wall Street and run the media and give everything away to illegal immigrants, and so on and so forth. It sort of peaked during the Sarah Palin period. And it's kind of interesting. It's been pointed out that of all the candidates, Sarah Palin is the only one who used the phrase "working class." She was talking to the working people. And yeah, they're the ones who are suffering. So, there are models that are not very attractive.

The Bubble

2009-04-15T15:57:00.003+10:00

This post is largely unreferenced, though I've been reading a number of sources in recent days, including Business Spectator, and the highly recommended Bubblepedia, and these are my reflections.

Banks, property developers and governments, State and Federal, have been colluding to keep the housing market inflated. This has failed in the top end of the market, where housing prices have already dropped significantly (good news for those who need a bargain house in Toorak), but has kept the lower end of the market (often defined as reaching $400 or $500k!), dominated by first home buyers, in a bubble.

Everybody, from real estate spruikers, to government ministers, has been saying that now is the time for first home buyers to jump into the housing market, as the market has hit its 'bottom', and will only be going up.

The behaviour of these people belies their words. For instance, the government has struck an agreement with banks to guarantee mortgages for 12 months, in the instance of the borrower being unemployed. Banks themselves appear to be tightening their lending criteria. The first home buyers grant has been extended until June 2009, and lobbyists are campaigning for it to be continued, and even extended to other parts of the market.

So why are first home buyers being asked to sign themselves up for a mortgage now? The answer is greed. With all other home buyers and investors slowing down their purchasing activity, first home buyers are being asked to play the patsy for property developers and banks, perpetuating the housing bubble.

All this would be one thing if we held to the belief that housing prices will rise forever. If they continued to rise at about 8% per year, as they have, until recently, then nobody would have anything to lose. The borrower would have no negative equity, and the banks would not be exposed to any great risk in the event of a default, as the house would have risen in price anyway.

Despite the Pollyanna attitude of some industry spruikers, there are some good reasons to believe that the market will not continue to magically inflate.

For starters, the RBA has already dropped the cash rate to 3.25%, a discount which the banks are not passing on in any case. Whilst in theory, the RBA can go even lower than this, it is difficult to see the use of monetary policy if the RBA is at odds with the banks.

Secondly, the much-mooted housing shortage is, at least in part, a fabrication. Yes, there is a dire shortage of housing for those sleeping rough, or couch-surfing, or living in caravans, or on the years-long government waiting lists. These people, however, are not like to be purchasing a home in the near future, and the shortage of housing for them is not pushing up housing prices for everybody else. A recent stat in the Age's Good Weekend stated that 77$ of Australian homes have a spare bedroom. I'll believe there is a genuine housing shortage when I see shanty towns on the outskirts of Melbourne.

Unemployment rose half a per cent in March 2009, to hit 5.7%. This doesn't take into account under-employment. For years, governments have considered you 'employed' if you didn't receive benefits, or if you worked an hour a fortnight. Unemployment is tipped by many forecasters to hit around 7.5% by the end of the year. Some have said it will double from current levels. All of this will eat into demand.

The first home owner's grant is due to expire, and arguably, has not actually increased demand at all, but rather, brought it forward by placing an end-date on the handouts. Even if this waste of money is extended, it is unlikely to be able to keep house prices afloat indefinitely. Housing in Australia is among the least affordable in the world, when considered in relation to income. Virtually every developed nation has suffered massive drops in housing prices since the GFC. It is difficult to see how Australia can escape the same outcome.

In view of this, first home buyers who purchase now are exposing themselves to enormous risk, and are propping up the housing bubble at their own expense. Many of them will be among the most vulnerable to unemployment in the coming recession.

It is in the interest of banks, therefore, to pretend that the bubble cannot burst, and to keep the housing market inflated. Should you have deflation in the market, coupled with rising unemployment and defaulting borrowers, the housing market will crash even further. Banks will face severe losses, mortgage guarantee or no. This is especially so when we look at the risks some of the big banks have been taking. I read recently that about 20% of all first homeowners have a loan-to-value-ratio (or LVR) of between 95-100%. Anotyher 25% have a LVR of between 90-95%.

In short, Australian banks have been gambling, and have exposed themselves to something akin to the sub-prime fiasco in the US. (Of course, the big banks in Australia have fewer 'toxic assets', as I understand it, because they have been less inclined than their US counterparts to bundle loans into securities). If it were simply a matter of a few banks failing, most people would allow their passing to go unlamented. After all, the deregulation of the Keating era, supposed to bring greater competition, and therefore better prices and service, has failed. The punter on the street knows that if you walk into a bank and blink, you get hit with 17 different kinds of fees.

The problem is that, by now, we know how this tune goes. If banks go bust, the Australian economy will be held to ransom. Government and taxpayers will become a utility of the banks, rather than the reverse. Banks will have gambled, and lost badly, and the taxpayer will be left to foot the bill.

So whatever happens, there are no winners. Either we have the rather unlikely outcome of the housing bubble continuing, in which low-income earners are barred from ever owning a home. Alternatively, we have a crash, and the greed of banks and others will be paid for by ordinary Australians. Naturally, this is an over-simplification, and there are some other complexities, but these are the basic parameters of the current situation. And yes, the speculation on the part of banks, and the greed of develops and investors, acting as parasites on first home buyers by gamlbing on assets is part and parcel of neoliberalism.

Direct Democracy

2009-03-29T14:53:00.002+11:00

Some 'populist' responses to the GFC:

Wall Street, according to one banking executive, is on red alert. "We are worried about a mob mentality. People are angry about the economy. And Wall Street is an obvious target."

Yes, it is.

Demographic Warfare and IDF 'self defence'

2009-03-23T05:15:00.001+11:00

'Every successful joke indicates a victory against the inhibition that critical reason imposes on thought in the normal waking psychic state. Unlike dreams, there is no need for secondary elaboration or disguise to escape censorship. ' (source)

'Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children's graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques - these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty...

There are also plenty of shirts with blatant sexual messages. For example, the Lavi battalion produced a shirt featuring a drawing of a soldier next to a young woman with bruises, and the slogan, "Bet you got raped!" A few of the images underscore actions whose existence the army officially denies - such as "confirming the kill" (shooting a bullet into an enemy victim's head from close range, to ensure he is dead), or harming religious sites, or female or child non-combatants.' (source, and here)

Conservatives and the GFC

2009-02-25T00:39:00.003+11:00

Conservatives seem to have major problems when it comes to admitting the dangers of capitalism. They're quick to criticise the perceived decline of society, but utterly unable to acknowledge that consumer capitalism may have at least something to do with this. Some of them seem to hate immigration, but just don't get that immigration, in Australia, at least, has been necessary for the economy.

This ducking and weaving has morphed into full-blown lying with the advent of the global financial crisis (GFC). The race has been on to find a way to spin this crisis as being firstly, the fault of the US Democratic Party, and secondly, to blame the GFC more generally on government intervention, 'socialism', etc.

Now, unless you're a complete half-wit, it should be clear that the GFC had multiple causes. It was, (to use a Freudianism) 'over-determined'. Not for John Ray, who insists that the GFC was caused by Dems and poor people:

[T]he financial meltdown was caused by worthless mortgages -- mortgages that were forced on banks by such Democrat-sponsored laws as the "Community reinvestment act" and harassment of bank officials by such hard-Left organizations as ACORN. The fact of the matter is that "the cause of all this misery was the market suppression that they [Democrats] promoted so messianically".

This refrain is becoming increasingly familiar.

What Ray doesn't tell you is that the Community Reinvestment Act has been in place since 1977, and has survived several Republican administrations. Obviously, the claim that the GFC is attributable to a single political party is therefore bullshit.

Moreover, as recently as 2007, Ben Bernanke was recommending that the Act be extended by way of expansion of Fannie Mae and co. The GFC was not the by-product of excessive regulation, but rather, under-regulation. Analysts have noted that the banks may have had a whole series of reasons for engaging in 'predatory' lending practices, and the said practices were not effectively monitored by any regulatory agency. We can conclude, therefore, that simplistic claims of the nature 'regulation=GFC' are also bullshit.

I've often suspected that lefties could benefit from more knowledge on economic matters, but it appears that conservatives are outdoing everybody else when it comes to ignorance. Then again, interventions such as Ray's are not so much about economics as they are class-warfare.

A number of hard-right characters have noted, perhaps correctly, that a crisis such as the present is the ideal time to engage in bare-knuckle class warfare, and recruit a few budding fascists to the cause. See the recent BNP opportunism in England, where the latter party rode on the coat-tails of striking workers to promote their cause.

But back to the GFC. Not only did regulation not cause the crisis, the low-income US borrowers - holders of 'worthless mortgages' according to Ray - also did not cause the crisis. The poor did not securitise the loans, and sell them for profit. The poor were not speculating in the derivatives market, or allowing China to purchase US debt whilst exporting cheap goods. The poor did not instigate a range of incentives for executives to oversee sub-prime loans in the first place. The poor did not globalise the economy and financial markets. And, finally, it was not the poor who, in the wake of the dotcom collapse early in the noughties, lowered the US interest rate to stimulate growth.

I encourage others to read up on this topic. Nonsense such as Ray's will be repeated ad infinitum in the coming years. We should combat it with facts, before it sediments into 'history'. Information on this is widely available, and the views of Ray et. al. easily discredited.

And finally, for those who are genuinely concerned about the poor, and the GFC, do the right thing, and kick a lying 'conservative' in the head.

News in Brief

2009-01-19T16:19:00.002+11:00

As we saw in the previous post, the wages of low-paid workers have often not kept up with inflation.

Adding insult to injury is a report that found that 41& of employers surveyed had cheated workers out of their wages. Most of the workers in question were young and low-paid.

Back to the Gaza Strip - Crikey has a decent wrap for a change. Note in particular the story about the doctor.

Finally, those well-known neo-Nazis at the Jerusalem Post have suggested that the Israeli Government should make the most of recent bloodshed, and grab a '$4 billion opportunity' by seizing control of gas reserves off the coast of Gaza. The ostensible reason for the proposed gas grab is to prevent any royalties being given to Hamas, apparently becuase in 'June 2007...Hamas violently ousted Fatah from power in the Gaza Strip, claiming ownership of the gas fields off the coast and the proceeds from the sale of the gas.'!

Ousted, voted in, who can tell these days?

Wading Through Economic Filth

2009-01-19T11:33:00.003+11:00

On the political Ozblogosphere, Queensland seems to throw up some fairly degenerate characters. From illiterate stalkers, to ex-Nazis obsessed with 'race theory', the Sunshine state appears to be struggling to produce non-idiotic 'conservative' opinion.

The latest such case is Leon Bretard, who claims to have 'pwned' me. Unfortunately for Leon, he's shot his pwning wad a little prematurely, and now has something of a mess on his hands.

Economic Filth
The crux of Leon's claim revolved around an economic argument, or, more precisely, two economic propositions.

The first proposition concerns what Leon calls the 'pseudo-economic left wing union theories about higher wages helping the economy'. Bear in mind that this article was pilfered from economist Harry Clarke, and Leon appears to have completely misunderstood it. In response to claims that higher wages can help an economy in recession, I said:

His [Harry Clark's] argument is that with reduced demand for labour, increased wages will contribute to unemployment. Fair enough. The other side of the coin is that reducing wages contributes to a decline in aggregate demand. Note that Harry himself does not reject this assumption. Consequently, wage cuts/freezes are no magic bullet to solving the economic crisis, particularly since, being in a global economy, no amount of wage cuts will bring labour costs in line with SE Asian levels, for instance.

This is one of the problems with capitalism. Whilst higher wages might, in theory, produce a higher aggregate demand, the potential for unemployment would offset this. I agree with Harry on this point, and nothng I've said points to the contrary.

However, it doesn't follow from this first proposition that a second proposition, (namely, cutting wages will help an economy is recession), is true. This is equivalent to saying that putting a leg of lamb in the fridge will give you a better slow roast. The myth that cutting wages will fix recession is comprehensively debunked here:

Reducing real wages–and thus reducing the capacity of workers to purchase output–may boost profits in real terms by skewing the distribution of real income further in favour of capital. But it will undoubtedly impact on some capitalists badly–not makers of sports cars perhaps, but certainly those who run supermarket chains–and the aggregate effect is a toss-up.

That is to say, cutting, or freezing wages (which during periods of inflation amounts to the same thing) leads to less spending, which in turn can create deflationary pressures. Furthermore, it is by no means guaranteed that cheaper labour costs will automatically result in an increase demand in labour, since the hiring of staff generally hinges on a range of differrent factors. For every worker or family who falls into poverty as a result of lost wages, additional burden is placed for supports onto either the Government (i.e. taxpayers) or NGOs (who are funded by a combination or private fundraising and taxpayers).

Issues of social justice aside, it is perfectly clear that you cannot 'fix' a recession by the wholsesale cutting of wages. Leon calls this argument 'stupidity', but is apparently unable to provide a single counter-argument in response. Evidently, even he doesn't believe his own bullshit.

The Myth of Prosperity

Imbecility is added upon imbecility when Leon claims that the Howard years in Australia were a period of unbridled prosperity, that all workers are better off, etc. This is nonsense. I've written before that the data suggests that many Australians have actually become worse off during the 'boom', through increased casualisation, additional working hours, increased 'mortgage stress', higher rates of poverty, etc.

Let's take a look at the claim the 'real wage growth' was increased for all Australians. Firstly, recent wage growth has been vastly higher in particular states and particular industries. It should be no surprise that wage increases are almost double in the mining state of WA compared to states such as Victoria and NSW. Miners were clearly the group with the highest wage increases, whilst industries such as communication, hospitality, accommodation, retail, health and community services were either 'very weak' or smallish in terms of wage increases.

One conclusion that we can draw from this is that overall figures for wage growth must be interpreted in view of the fact that wage growth varies widely across industries. A figure showing wage growth overall can mask the fact that negligible wage growth in some sectors is masked by periods of boom in others.

Secondly, to discuss 'real' wage growth, we need to look at the figures for inflation, to be found here. Remember that these figures also conceal some important details, as inflation is calculated by excluding 'volatile' elements, such as the increase in petrol prices during the boom years, and the multiple increases in interest rates under Howard's watch. These figures for inflation minimise the extent to which prices have increased.

Now, if we look at the figures above, we see that the inflation for the year 2008 was consistently well above 4%. In particular, inflation increased by almost 1.5% for the quarter between late 2007 and early 2008. (Inflation continued to rise for the rest of the year, getting as high as 4.9%). During this same period, according to the ANZ data, only the mining and education sectors had wage increases above or around this level, which is to say that the workers of every other industry lost wages in real terms, as any pay increases they received did not keep up with the rate of inflation.

Whilst the RBA attempts to keep inflation with the rang of 2-3%, it has often been outside this range during the Howard years, peaking at 6% during 2000 and 2001. Since 2000, there have been 4 years when the annual rate of inflation was above the RBA's 3% boundary. Leon the Lamentable seems to ignore the fact that anyone whose wages did not increase above and beyond this rate of inflation did not experience real wage growth. Whilst this clearly wasn't the case in a small number of highly prosperous industry sectors (such as mining), growth was hardly universal across the board.

The Case for Wage Claims

Some unions in Australia have argued for wage increases for their members. In this, such unions are only acting in accordance with their member's wishes. We should remember that it was only very recently that workers were asked for 'wage restraint' for fear of alleged inflationary pressures. (NB: Whilst inflation has decreased in Australia as a result of the GFC, it hasn't disappeared altogether).

This is particularly pertinent as '1.2 million workers reliant on award wages have experienced a decline in the real value of their wages in the three years since the introduction of the Howard Government’s new minimum wage setting arrangements.' (i.e. since 2005). 96% of low paid workers actually experienced a loss of real wages in 2007, contrary to the claims of the Orwellian-named 'Fair Pay Commission'.

The thesis that Australia's lowest-paid workers have lost wages in real terms is supported by data from Catholic Social Services, who say that at best, wages for low-paid workers have merely kept up with inflation, and in many (if not most) cases, they have failed to achieve even that.

Once again, we have further evidence of Bretard's economic illiteracy. Not only do low-paid workers have, at the very least, an argument for wage increases, but many other industries have not kept pace with inflation. The Victorian public service, for instance, has not had wage increases higher than 3% at any time over the past few years, meaning that in high inflation years, real wages were actually lost. Calls for workers in these industries to cut wages is therefore a clear example of class warfare, and there is no evidence that any such cuts would miracously lift Australia out of impending recession in any case.

And the rest

Leon makes a variety of other nonsense claims against, most of which are so peurile and inaccurate as to be not even worth acknowledging. He asked why 'the Left' have staged demonstrations in response to Israel's demolition of Gaza. I indicated that this was, among other reasons, to influence Australian Government policy. In turn, he says:

What a lame excuse! Does anyone believe that far-left protests make any difference to Israel's actions? Many people think Israel must be doing something right when extreme lefties are foaming in the mouth over its actions.

Leon can add 'English' to his list of illiteracies, since I never made the claim that protests in Melbourne or elsewhere would directly influence IDF policy. Grassroots politics has many forms, and many functions. One is to influence the positions of one's own government; another is to draw attention to alleged injustice. Bretard must have mistaken blogging for activism if he thinks that such grassroots activism makes no difference. Workchoices was, in large part, overturned by activism, since parliamentary measures were utterly ineffective (given the Coalition's Senate majority). The widespread unpopularity for Australia's invasion of Iraq did not actually prevent the war, but it may well have influenced the use to which Australian troops were put, and the manner in which war policy was handled (i.e. troops were used in training rather than combat roles, conscription for the war was virtually unthinkable, etc).

Leon claimed that leftist criticism of IDF policy is 'undoubtedly' a consequence of anti-Semitism. I asked him for evidence of this claim, and he provided only links to his other posts, all of which are equally lacking in evidence. He must live in a room full of mirrors.

I mentioned, mockingly, in view of Bretard's supposed legal credentials, that maybe 'the Left' had been defamed by Leon tarring them with the brush of anti-Semitism. With his characteristic lack of irony, Leon responds:

THR, there's no such thing as defamation inside a court. Duh!

Another self-pwning. You are having a really bad year, 'comrade'.

If you feel you have a case against me in defamation, you are more than welcome to sue me.

The stupidity here is breathtaking, as if I (or anybody else) would seriously be proposing that 'teh Left' would initiate a class action against blogger, whose only tools are smear, and whose only sources are right-wing talking points. He probably thinks Springsteen's 'Born in the USA' and Neil Young's 'Rocking in the Free World' are pro-US anthems.

Anyway, I've wasted enough time and space on this cretin. When he can mount an honest and intelligent argument grounded in evidence, I'll be happy to engage with him further. Until then, he is merely a troll, and his cartoonish 'arguments' have been refuted again, for the umpteenth time.

The world's laziest reading group...

2009-01-08T14:43:00.000+11:00

...is back in action, here.

A few thoughts on Israel and Palestine

2009-01-08T12:03:00.003+11:00

I've been wanting to write something about this earlier, but I'm a little lost as to what to say. Again, Israel are committing atrocities against the Palestinians, and again, their apologists use every bit of sophistry at their disposal to justify it.

Let us be clear - it is Israel that broke the truce. On November 4, 2008, Israel entered Gaze and killed 6 members of Hamas.

Yes, Israel has a right to self-defence. The concept of 'self-defence' has clearly been stretched by Israel to the point of meaningless. Context is important. For an occupied people, battling blockade, ethnic cleansing, and colonial expansion to resist by way of rocket fire is not the same as say, Iran attacking Israel. The only way to make Israel look legitimate in this conflict is to airbrush away its history of brutality.

Israel may very well fail, both militarily and politically. Hamas rockets are still firing, and Israel has largely failed to draw Hamas into open areas of conflict thus far. Should the IDF enter built-up urban zones, both they and the Palestinians will likely suffer massive casualties.

Should Israel fail in its latest military adventure, it is likely that the rightists will take over at the next election. In addition, Hamas will probably see a rise in domestic support, and Iran may well vote in the conservatives. The only possible political victory that may emerge from this conflict is if the people of Egypt use it as a catalyst to oust the US-proxy neoliberal dictatorship in Egypt.

Israel have clearly been targeting civilians and civilian areas, as they did in Lebanon in 2006. Naturally, IDF spokespeople justify the carnage by alleging that every dead civilian is a terrorist.

Israel could have negotiated with Hamas, and have done so before. The alleged failure of Hamas to 'recognise' the state of Israel is purely symbolic. There is no recognition of Palestinian statehood by the Israeli government, so any lack of reciprocal recognition by Hamas is a moot point.

When I have debated these issues on rightist sites, I have very quickly been accused of 'anti-Semitism', as if Arabs were not also Semites. This smear is fairly common on the right. The recent Melbourne demonstration can be viewed on You Tube, for instance. I saw no evidence of anti-Semitism at this demo, yet the right-wing blog Little Green Footballs pieced together a slideshow of alleged anti-Semitism at the event.

Obviously, the charge of anti-Semitism is baseless, particularly when plenty of Israelis, and Jews worldwide, oppose the current slaughter.

For what it is worth, the IDF's latest actions are to be condemned as yet further collective punishment against one of the world's most oppressed peoples. When Israel's relationship to the Palestinians is one of oppressor-oppressed, claims of 'self-defence' are utterly disingenuous. On one point, at least, the rightists are correct - there can be no moral equivalence in this war, given that one side is starving, bombing, shooting, colonising and blockading the other.

Universal moral principles seemingly do not apply when commentators discuss the Palestinians. As per a previous post, it is as if the rightist defenders of Zionism have appropriated postmodern discourses on identity politics to justify Israel's moral exceptionalism. I have wondered aloud elsewhere whether these apologists would be so quick to defend the actions of, for example, a homosexual or Roma state.

None of this should be interpreted as 'support' for Hamas, though Hamas, like everybody else, has the right to defend itself. Religion can be incidental to liberation politics, but I see no reason to believe that religion alone, in the absence of a liberation agenda, can free the Palestinians in a political sense.

There is a wealth of information available on the internet, and the links are coming too quickly for me to list all of them. I personally recommend that all interested readers take a look at the writings of Richard Seymour and the much-maligned Robert Fisk.

On a positive note, the level of protest around the world has been heartening. The first goal must be an immediate ceasefire, preferably not on Israel's terms. Secondly, there must be negotiations between the Israeli government and Hamas, at least insofar as this latter group are still the elected representatives of Gazans. Finally, a universalist one-state solution is the terminus ad quem to which efforts should be directed. I realise that this is a long way off, but, short of purging the Middle East of Palestinians, Israel will have to contemplate this solution as some stage.

May there be peace and freedom for Palestinians soon, and may all honest men and women from all sides of political discourse express their solidarity with an oppressed and brutalised peoples.

UPDATE: Serial stalker and Australia's dumbest blogger Iain Hall has attempted to critique the above post. Moreover, his purpose in writing seems to be to label me 'anti-Semitic'. His post is full of lies and inaccuracies, and not worth much space here, other than to make a couple of points.

He says:

I don’t know about anyone else but I read his paragraph as saying that Israel does not have a right to respond to the many thousands of rockets fired out of Gaza.

The guff about ethnic cleansing and occupation are just your typical Marxist nonsense. I can only conclude that in Haps eyes the people of Israel are in some sense lesser human beings if they are not entitled to fight back when so constantly attacked and he thinks that they are lesser people because they are Jewish.

In fact, I explicitly said that Israel, like everybody else, has the right to self-defence. I added that this right didn't extend to colonisation, occupation, etc. Pretty straightforward, except to an illiterate like Hall.

Hall:

1300 dead are claimed but there is some suggestion that this number has been grossly inflated
There is in fact one suggestion of that, appearing in an Italian daily. The Israeli press has consistently reported the higher figure, and one assumes that they have no reason to lie.

Hall then splurts this garbled mess onto the screen:
firstly there is nothing to be gained by Israel targeting those who are actual civilians , the propaganda negatives alone are evident enough from the reactions when the IDF accidentally kills Palestinian civilians . Secondly if the IDF really wanted to massacre the Palestinian people it has more than enough capability to do just that and the death toll from military actions would be in the hundreds of thousands, not somewhere between 5 and 13 hundred.Finally if the IDF were “targeting civilians” the why do we here the reports about the IDF dropping leaflets and the sending of sms Messages warning of impending attacks on Hamas targets. There can only be one reason that Hap runs this line and that is to blacken the Jewish side of this conflict.

Well, it's already been documented that the IDF left vast numbers of cluster bombs in civilian areas in Lebanon, 2006. Various aid organisations have alleged abuses against civilians in the most recent conflict, and the IDF is itself investigating claims, such as the 'inappropriate' (i.e. murderous) use of white phosphorous. Again, all of these claims can be verified by a quick look at the Israeli dailies, such as Ha'aretz.

Hall:
Hap wants to pretend that none of the dead are Hamas fighters because then it is easier to portray the IDF as “evil” which is consistent with his views about the Jews in general.
Hall is engaged in his usual conjecture and speculation. In any case, hundreds of the dead Gazans were clearly not Hamas fighters. Naturally, Hall doesn't demonstrate how my views on the IDF are 'consistent' with those about the Jews 'in general'. He doesn't do this because he cannot, as it isn't true. Evidence counts, El Stalko, not mindless assertion.

Beardo:

How so is [the Hamas charter] it “purely symbolic”? because Hamas ’s Charter not only fails to recognise the existence of Israel but calls for its destruction…

1. Because all charters are by definition symbolic.

2. Because recognition is itself symbolic, particularly given that the Palestinian terroritories do not have State status as of yet.

3. Because the lack of recognition is reciprocated by the Israeli Government.

4. Because not all of Hamas endorse the Charter, let alone all Palestinians.

Hall then mentions a clearly anti-Semitic poster at a recent Melbourne rally. He claims this shows I was 'one eyed' about the demo I reporter above. Again, Hall demonstrates his room temperature IQ, as the rally I discussed above (also discussed on LGF) was not the same as the one reported by Nilk on AWH. But don't let the facts get in the way...

Noddy:

There is NO balance at all in his commentary here not one concession that the Palestinians in general or Hamas in particular have acted in an unacceptable manner in they way that they have prosecuted their “struggle”.
So unless one condemns all and sundry human rights abuses before criticising the IDF, one is anti-Semitic? Logic FAIL.

The rest is more of the same. It's classic, illiterate gibberish from Hall at his most petty. In defence of his claims that I am anti-Semitic, he fails to produce a single piece of evidence. He makes the following claims:

In short Hap is an anti Semite because:

(in no particular order)

He refuses to acknowledge that Jews in Israel should not be subject to attack from Hamas rockets. In fact he supports such attacks.

No, I explicitly said that Israelis had a right to self-defence.

He calls for the destruction of the state of Israel which would mean that the Jews there would either be killed or “driven into the sea”.

Hall gives no evidence of this. Calling for Israeli to become democratic and secular, as I have done, is the opposition of calling for its 'destruction'.

He hides behind semantics of the term “Semite”

I noted, correctly, that Arabs are also Semites. Since Hall cannot produce a single instance of anti-Jewish bigotry on my part, you'd think he'd welcome the broadest definition possible. In any case, Hall seems to misunderstand the notion of 'semantics', and the fact that it has no relation to anti-Semitism, real, alleged, or otherwise.

He unquestionably accepts the worst case examples in all sources when it comes to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. he does not even have the semblance of a balanced consideration of the issues.

No, I accept substantiated examples. In any case, not being 'balanced' does not demonstrate racism or bigotry.

He creates the ridiculous straw man argument that an ‘anti- Semite” has to “deny the holocaust” just so the definition excludes him.

There's no definition of anti-Semite that includes me, and Hall knows this well. He's expended many words on the matter without providing a single bit of evidence to the contrary.

Finally given the fact that Hap hacked my email and blogging accounts last year for the most malicious reasons it is the hight of hypocrisy for him to seek to justify his rancour on the basis of my internet behaviour when his own is nothing short of despicable.

Forgive him comrades, because he is but a poor deluded Marxist who believes that the ends justifies the means.

Again, Hall makes assertions that he cannot substantiate. Don't expect a retraction any time soon, folks. Just expect more attack blogs to pop up, like this one:

Finally, whilst Iain; Hall claims to be a 'moral' blogger, we should note that he has considerable form when it comes to hurling false allegations of anti-Semitism. It's a tactic he's used with bloggers before, having attempted to discredit opponents by way of identity theft. This site has plenty more information about Hall's long history of similar behaviour. Some morality.

Pomophobia

2008-12-31T10:35:00.002+11:00

There's an interesting footnote to Australia's culture wars happening in the Australian today.

A couple of academics have written a book arguing that Howard's brand of 'conservatism' actually incorporates some elements of postmodernism, such as social constructivism:

Howard's battler, melded from largely left-wing folk stories, but with the anti-imperialist strain omitted to suit Howard's vision, is a classic example of such social constructivism. (source)

Cue predictable gnashing of teeth from the right.

Casuistry

2008-12-06T23:40:00.002+11:00

Welfare and related industries in Australia routinely shaft their employees, in terms of pay, workload and working conditions, and occupational health and safety. There are many reasons why I think this occurs, and I may save those for a later post. There are also reasons why I think such workers constitute a kind of proletariat, despite this term traditionally being associated with workers on the factory floor.

In any case, Jesuit Social Services have apparently victimised a union and OHS rep, a matter you can read about here. The most 'progressive' or radical thing that all workers can do is to seek more control in the workplace. To that end, union reps and OHS reps are essential, and it is vital that they be permitted to do their work. For a worker in a 'caring profession', protecting oneself and one's colleagues is every bit as important as assisting one's 'clients'. It is disgraceful that a purportedly Catholic service believes otherwise.

The Bias Police

2008-12-06T23:22:00.002+11:00

The Australian Senate has just completed its report on allegations of radical leftist bias in universities:

The committee heard from the Liberal Students' organisation Make Australia
Fair a description of the link between the radical philosophies and teaching practices
in vogue in university education faculties and schools of education, and the likely
application of those ideas in the classroom. Make Australia Fair tabled a 'dossier'
listing academics in education faculties who, it was claimed, share a commitment to
radical activism and who view politics and education to be' different perspectives of
the same reality'. They quoted from another submission to this inquiry to describe
activist methods of teaching as a:

… radical orthodoxy is composed to an almost slavish adherence to various
theories and political commitments associated with neo-Marxism,
postmodernism, deconstructionism, the theories of Michel Foucault, poststructuralism,
discourse theory, feminism, neo-Rousseauianism, radical
environmentalism, anti-Americanism, anti-Christianity, and related
ideologies.

3.29 Make Australia Fair argued that where ideological activism is entrenched in
the academia of education faculties, there is crossover into school teaching. 'After all,
universities provide the theoretical underpinning for school curricula and teaching and
training of future school teachers.'

3.30 The committee has no way of assessing the veracity of this claim, particularly
in regard to what is taught to B.Ed and other trainee teachers, but it suspects that it is
wildly exaggerated. Such content would be beyond the comprehension of many
students for whom it would have no practical use. Such comments as these neither
enlighten the committee nor persuade it of a case to be made. Indeed, the committee
believes that the case That Make Australia Fair makes for the existence of a leftist
conspiracy in education faculties and schools borders on the farcical.

Farcical indeed. Having spent many years - too many, if truth be told - in tertiary institutions, I've seen little evidence of systematic political bias. Academics, like everybody else, do fall victim to fashionable trends, but these trends are not necessarily political, and, if political, are not necessarily related to the 'activist' left.

Indeed, academia is inherently conservative, for most academics are busily defending the status quo that constitutes their little theoretical patch. When students come armed with new approaches that challenge dominant paradigms, they face a far greater burden of proof than those students who merely repeat accepted disciplinary truisms. Throwing down the gauntlet to a large body of work within a paradigm, or challenging academic consensus on a particular topic is always much more difficult than simply taking the line of least resistance, and conservatively endorsing the opinions of one's lecturers.

Now, when will the bias police be called off the ABC?

Lazy blogging

2008-12-02T16:51:00.002+11:00

Uncle Noam has a bit to say on the president-elect:

By usual indicators, the opposition party should have had a landslide victory during a severe economic crisis, after eight years of disastrous policies on all fronts including the worst record on job growth of any post-war president and a rare decline in median wealth, an incumbent so unpopular that his own party had to disavow him, and a dramatic collapse in US standing in world opinion. The Democrats did win, barely. If the financial crisis had been slightly delayed, they might not have.

You can find the article here.

Hiatus

2008-08-18T17:53:00.005+10:00

This blog will be doing very little for the next three months, as I'll be doing some travel.
Whilst I won't be writing very much, I will be checking in frequently, and keeping an eye on other people's blogs whenever possible. Please feel free to continue leaving comments/suggestions/witty abuse in the comments, or at my email address, the_happy_revolutionaryAThotmail.com

The Myth of Prosperity

2008-08-13T17:31:00.004+10:00

Almost a month ago, I wrote briefly of the need for the environmental movement to be united with workers' movements, particularly in the current context of possible economic downturn. Lo and behold, like Piers Akerman at a table of hors d'oeuvres, I have a fanatic repeatedly popping up at my blog. This fanatic is thrashing about like a fish out of water, gasping for air, and claiming to have 'pwned' me.
The said fanatic claims that the past few years, namely, the Howard years, could not possibly be viewed as anything but prosperous. This narrative is pretty common, particularly in the News Ltd cheersquad. So we see a series of fairly blunt statements in the comments thread, as follows:

[L]iving standards in Australia will continue to rise. If they fall, it will be due to a Greens-model carbon trading scheme.

Inflation isn't that high, particularly when compares to rising wages. As I pointed out on my blog recently, Australians tend to be a bunch of whiners when it comes to prices.

Like most lefties, your economic illiteracy speaks volumes. Go read about 'real growth' over at Wikipedia.

Whiners, eh?

Any discussion of wage rises and 'real growth' ought really to make mention of a well-established fact, namely, that Australians work a very high number of hours compared to other countries; the 40-hour working week is 'dead'. Furthermore, Australia's labour force has become casualised (a whopping 1 in 3 workers are employed as casuals), meaning that more Australian households suffer from uncertainty in terms of future income, as well as no sick or recreational leave, and difficulties in securing credit.

With this in mind, there are two areas I'd like to touch on where the prosperity narrative has been clearly undermined, to all but the most ardent of true believers.

Firstly, as a result of a number of factors, we have seen the emergence of widespread 'mortgage stress'. This latter notion is determined by the number of households for whom 30-35% of income is spent on mortgage repayments.

In 2001, the term mortgage stress applied to about 1 in 10 Australians. According to the ABS, in 2007, this figure was 47% for Australians below the median wage of about $53,000. Or take this (June 2008) article, for instance:

‘The number of households struggling to meet mortgage repayments jumped 15% to 784,000 in May and is likely to reach 923,000 by September, Martin North, head of Fujitsu Consulting, predicted.’

This is in the context of broader economic difficulties for Australians:

‘…The new figures were released as the Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed that household wealth fell by 15%, or $7500 per person, in the three months to March and the debt-to-asset ratio surged to a record 138%.

"The ratio shows that households do not have sufficient readily liquid assets to cover outstanding debt, highlighting a degree of vulnerability to an economic downturn," said Craig James, CommSec's chief equities economist.’

As one can see, 'prosperity' has been selective in terms of who has received its blessings. Despite Australia's much-vaunted growth during the Howard years, and despite rising wages, many Australians, particularly the most vulnerable, are clearly and significantly disadvantage by the cost of housing.

In addition to increased mortgage stress during the allegedly prosperous years, poverty has also increased. Between 1994 and 2004, the number of Australians living in poverty rose from 7.6% to 9.9% of the population. If a lower threshold is used to define 'poverty' (i.e. if it is defined as living on 60% of the median income), then poverty levels increased from 15.9% in 1994 to 20.4% in 2004, a clear indicator of growing inequality in both relative terms. In absolute terms, Australia's most poverty stricken and vulnerable have been demonised by the Howard government, and their financial lot has not improved.

Despite calls by Rudd for 'wage restraint', and the hand-wringing of the business community, the modest rise in wages for Australia's lowest-paid workers are insufficient to lift anybody out of poverty, particularly given that recent wage increases were below the rate of inflation (i.e. constituted a wage decrease in 'real' terms). This article also contains many useful references on this topic.

In sum, let the fanatics bray with fawning imbecility for 'fiscal conservatism' and Howard. Mortgage stress and rising poverty undermine their thesis, and this is before we have examined inflation, and the soaring cost of fuel and food. Whiners, indeed.

Hayek versus Brezhnev

2008-08-07T17:16:00.002+10:00

The libertarians picked up on a recent speech by Rudd, in which he had the temerity to question one of the foremost 'philosophers' of liberalism:

We simply don’t have to choose between Hayek and (former Soviet president Leonid) Brezhnev,” Mr Rudd said.

Of course, the Russians had a poll last year to assess which leader (of the past century) was the best, and which was the preferred era in which to live. The Hayekians might have hypothesised that free market, anti-communist, fire salesman Yeltsin would have got over the line. On the contrary, he was overwhelmingly trounced in popularity by Brezhnev (preferred by 31% as opposed to Yelstin's 1%). Hell, even Stalin got 6%.

Terrorist Document Found

2008-07-22T00:54:00.003+10:00

In the Middle East, a document has been found, threatening violence against British 'occupiers':

A pamphlet warning Britons to leave the Middle East or face death has come to light in a stash of illicit propaganda... It adds: “Most of you have been in this country for quite a long time. You have learned what the word ‘terrorist’ means, some of you may even have come into direct contact with them (and heartily desire not to repeat the experience). But what do you know about them?

Which 'terrorist' group penned this piece? Hamas? Hezbollah? Or somebody else?

Confrontations

2008-07-16T00:58:00.003+10:00

The Age, Melbourne's leading broadsheet newspaper, has an undeserved reputation for leaning to the left. In reality, the paper adopts a series of often meaningless causes in a tokenistic fashion (such as its support for 'Earth Day'). It is harder to find articles on class struggle, or imperialism, or with an anti-corporate message, or anything else that is recognisably 'left'. On the contrary - if we examine the glossier sections of the paper (particularly the lift-outs and magazines) - the paper is filled with expensive consumer items (and not merely as ads) presumably pitched to well-heeled, middle-aged bourgeois types who are happy to regard themselves as 'progressive'.

It was therefore pleasing to note an article included in yesterday's columns, re-printed from the Washington Post. Its author, Dionne, argued that we are presently at an economic juncture equivalent to the Great Depression of the 1930s, or the stagflation of the 1970s, and that we can therefore expect to see significant challenges to neoliberal economic orthodoxy. Dionne doesn't advocate anything too radical, merely additional 'regulation'.

Let us briefly consider the context of this economic moment. In Australia, inflation is higher than it has been for some years. An ailing labour movement has failed to assert itself in the face of this inflation, and some have argued that wages for workers have stalled, in spite of the economy having 'rocketed along'.

In the meantime, we are seeing an unprecedented focus on addressing issues of environmental concern. Or course, the politicians who are discussing carbon-trading schemes and the like are unwilling to consider the possibility that environmental destruction is a symptom of capitalism, and is not going to be cured by this latter economic system. The focus on the climate change pseudo-debate as the centre of environmental concerns is misleading. We do not require complex modelling to note the appalling pollution of many of the world's cities, or the fact of the Mongolian desert, the Gobi, expanding inexorably toward Beijing, or the massive deforestation that continues in developing countries. That industrial capitalism could fail to be implicated in these problems speaks volumes about the dishonesty of our politicians and media.

These problems, economic and environmental, provide a challenge and an opportunity to the left. In Australia, as elsewhere, electoral politics has almost entirely failed to provide left-leaning individuals with genuine representation. Yet almost never before have leftist politics and the critique of capitalism been more relevant or more urgent.

Naturally, a moment of crisis can also be seized upon by the lunatic elements of the right, whose constituent feels the effects of economic calamity just as keenly as anybody else. In addition, perfectly legitimate concerns about globalisation are displaced onto minority ethnic and religious groups. Hence, we see the (re-)birth of 'protectionist parties'.

Our tasks are becoming clearer - to develop a genuine worker's movement, which may mean unshackling trade unions from fat bureaucrats and other careerists, as well as the ALP machinery. Environmental problems are well-explained by a critical, Marxist viewpoint - just like the expropriation of surplus value by capitalists, environmental destruction is absolutely not the raison d'etre of capital. It is, however, its logical and inevitable consequence. This link, between the economic and the environmental, must be made explicitly and repeatedly. Finally, Green movements and parties need to appeal to an economic, class-based constituent, and not merely those who profess 'progressive' views on the environment and other matters. A Greens party whose sole focus is on elections, which cannot muster sufficient votes in working class areas to achieve anything of note, and whose modus operandi is merely to serve as an ideological chorus on the margins of parliamentary politics is a party that is stillborn before it could ever really take off.

We Have a Blog

2008-07-10T19:51:00.000+10:00

In progress

More tinkering to follow

Ideas - Online Reading Group

2008-07-07T22:24:00.004+10:00

I'll be missing in action for the latter months of 2008. When I return, I'd like to set up an online reading group. I envisage that this would be set up on another blog, and would possibly be a group blog. The idea would be for a group of us (and a small group is fine) to work through some meaty texts. Debate and discussion of the text would be encouraged (though not idiotic trolling unrelated to the text), individuals from different backgrounds would be welcome to contribute.

Does anybody have any interest in this sort of idea? If the answer is yes, do you have any proposals as to what it might look like?

Some areas of interest to me are philosophy, politics, history, psychoanalysis, and literature. It seems more worthwhile to me to attempt to work through difficult texts rather than straightforward ones. Having said that, novices are welcome. The aim of all this would be to create a shared online resource, and raise the level of discourse on the blogosphere up a notch or two.

Now whilst I have grand plans of returning late this year to launch into a reading group that looks at Marx's Grundrisse or Lacan's Seminar VII, for instance, I'd like to trial this idea with something much smaller, to see how it works. If it inspires a few dedicated readers in Melbourne, the discussion could also relocate off-line to somewhere suitably scholarly, like a bar. There's also a possibility that discussions could be filmed or audio-taped.

The format I have in mind is that each chapter/passage/few pages would be scheduled in advanced. One reader (probably me in the first instance) could then provide a brief bit of background and response to said chapter/few pages. Everyone else could then respond as they see fit.

Anyway, here are some suggestions for the trial run:

Politics - Maybe a short paper by Marx, or Lenin, or maybe Trotsky's paper on fascism. There are many online resources in this area, which is helpful, as it means people can access the texts for free. Hardt and Negri are also good for a laugh.

Philosophy - Badious and Zizek keep churning out interesting papers on a regular basis, though something a little less contemporary could be an option if people are interested. Some of this stuff is also available online.

Psychoanalysis - Since this area links up with the above two in many ways, as well as a plethora of other areas (sexual politics, anthropology, etc), I think it could be quite interesting if people arrive with an open mind. Some suggestions - Freud's Mourning and Melancholia, for instance, or Lacan's paper on the Mirror Stage.

Literature - I'm less inclined to delve into fiction as the blogosphere (and real world) have lots of reading groups that discuss the latest bestsellers. However, maybe as a trial, we could look at one of Nam Le's recently-published short stories, for instance.

Anyways, I'm very open to suggestions, and I encourage one and all to comment here or email me. A reading group of one is just going to be me taking notes (which I do already), and it's going to be a little sad to broadcast that over the blogosphere. So find something you like, and spare me blushes of embarrassment.

Until then, I'm off to Sydney in a couple of days to spread subversion for a short while. I might check out that bookshop belonging to that Gould chap. I hope to hear from you all in the near-future.

Lies and the Lying Liars who Lie Them

2008-07-07T20:20:00.006+10:00

Here are a couple of examples of self-declared conservative Christians peddling sleaze and grossly dishonest propaganda.

Over at AWH, the Crusading Rodent has the scoop on 'Hussein Obama', citing Obama's 'own words', allegedly taken from his book, Audacity of Hope. The quotes include these:

"I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother's race."

"It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names."

"I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction."

Incriminating quotes for rabid rightist who are fearful of blacks and Muslims, no? Except it turns out that these quotes are totally fabricated. This fact was pointed out to Mr Rodent, who not only did not retract any of the post, but kept up the pretence over at his own private blog, where his half-wit readers accept this chain email as gospel. A quick google search tells us that rightist fruitcakes the world over are peddling the above smears as factual. Pathetic.

The same goes for the serial liars over at TMS, who are trying to get us to take seriously the idea that a takeover by union thugs is imminent. Oh, those bad old days (1980s and '90s) of union activism:

That was an age when arrogant young union officials would storm into a job site, kick up a floor board and declare a job site closed.

Much better when arrogant old employers had carte blanche with respect to their employers, eh? We see more lies in this post, even ones that have been pointed out on TMS previously:

Kevin Rudd is a Chavez-loving socialist.

The link providing the 'reference' doesn't work, so I guess we'll never know if this ever-so plausible statement is true.

(He once named Chavez as his mentor).
Really? That'd be news to most people, Rudd included.

Unions are natural communists who hate business and the dynamic market.
No, unions require business and markets, otherwise their members would be out of a job. Actual communists (such as Lenin) frequently criticised trade unionism as a completely inadequate response to the crises of capitalism.

They almost destroyed us back in the late 80’s and early 90’s.
So the unions were to blame for the recession 'we had to have'? Forget macroeconomics or the global market, and blame the ACTU...

In practice, a Labor government under Mr. Rudd would re-regulate economic life. Over the past year he has promised to set up no fewer than 68 new bureaucracies and establish 96 reviews if elected.
None of which has anything directly to do with the 'regulation' of economic life.

He promises to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and commit Australia to a costly program of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions to 60% of 2000 levels by 2050.
Er, Kyoto happened several months ago.

His proposed industry policy—constructed by Kim Carr, a declared socialist—would create an uberbureaucracy of 12 Industry Innovation Councils.
Socialists! Uberbureaucracies! I'm feeling faint!

Kevin Rudd is no ‘Mr Innocent’. Don’t be fooled. He is the whitewashed figurehead of an evil socialist regime with the big heavies sitting on his cabinet waiting to do all the dirty work for him and the party.
Take that, Kevin Josip Il Rudd! Thou art now vanquished, o apparatchiks, Politburo denizens, and purveyors of the dreaded gulag!

Liars. Though I had to chuckle when I read what one poor deluded commenter had to say in response:
many believe rudd is a socialist, despite his efforts to distance himself from the communist party.

Which communist party? Russia's? Nepal's? The Freemason and Illuminati Party?

Maybe this one:

Snippets

2008-07-02T22:18:00.003+10:00

Rick Shenkman asks just how stupid and ignorant are his fellow Americans. Whilst Shenkman unveils a few embarrassing stats demonstrating that US citizens are far more knowledgeable about pop culture than world affairs, I suspect his argument doesn't fly. The picture he paints is not clear evidence of ignorance, still less, stupidity, (though frustrated agitators may interpret it as such). Rather, Shenkman seems to depict an abysmal disconnect between representatives and the represented, and a profound disengagement with politics on the part of the populace. These problems are not limited to the US - things differ here in Australia only in terms of degree, and we delude ourselves if we believe otherwise.

Speaking of politics - a majority of people surveyed in the US (and most other countries) believed that their nation should 'not take either side' in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the US, 71% of respondents adopted this position, a result that is hardly indicative of a dullard population in thrall to Christian Zionist lobbyists and other right-wing cranks. Incidentally, most nations apparently believed that both Israelis and Palestinians did themselves no favours in terms of resolving the conflict.

Now this position is not a 'leftist' position per se - for most leftists, it is perfectly clear who is oppressor and who is oppressed in this 'conflict'. Yes, neutrality is inherently conservative, in so far as it supports and rationalises the status quo. Nonetheless, these results show a US population that maintains rather different political perspectives compared to its elite political class. So much for representative democracy (to say nothing of at least $3 billion per annum in aid siphoned off to a militaristic Israel).

Finally, next to the US is a little country much-derided by the world's policeman. Nonetheless, in news you probably won't be reading in the mainstream media, researchers within this country claim to have developed a vaccine for lung cancer. Clinical trials were yet to be complete, but the vaccine itself will be made available to both locals and foreigners.

Neoliberalism: FAIL

2008-07-01T15:58:00.002+10:00

We have seen before that capitalism, particularly in its neoliberal version, is a thoroughly discredited doctrine.

We have more evidence of this today:

[T]o imagine the IMF investigating the US financial system is unthinkable, or was. But, at the weekend, Der Spiegel reported that the IMF would conduct a full investigation into virtually every aspect of it...
The fact that the IMF is knocking on the very doors of its parents and waving legal papers about who lost the house, the car and the kids will, if the past is anything to go by, be buried in the US by pom-pom waving on CNBC telling all what a great time it is to buy.

But the news that the US Fed has now lost its last vestige of credibility did not end with the German report.
Part of the problem is the US media, which has for so long pretended that all is or soon will be well, a bottom is near, a recovery awaits in the second half of the financial year that will sweep away all problems, sown over decades, in a new expansion, a cycle that is ordained to come. The latest fantasy is that with the quarter's end, new profit figures will invigorate the bull, which will seed fertility.

The next President will be handed at least two wars gone horrible wrong and, by then, an economy in similar shape. The bull will have to be a particularly fertile beast. (source)

It is not for nothing that, in the US, the self-declared most powerful of nations, 36.5 million people were living in poverty as of 2006. The triumphalist flag-bearers of capitalism may some day come to realise that the 'end of history' has arrived at the door just yet.

It's all about who you know

2008-06-26T22:09:00.004+10:00

'Who is still standing with the regime in Harare?' asked Jeremy Sear the other day. The short answer - not too many people. For years the Mugabe regime has been brutalising its citizens - this has been well-publicised in the media, across the world. As a 'failed state', we are now permitted to seriously look at a range of options, and engage in the typical hand-wringing: multilateralism versus unilateralism, sanctions, humanitarian intervention, 'surgical' military strikes, the imposition of democracy from above, and so on.

That we are even asking these questions suggests something relatively unique about the Mugabe regime. We should not merely ask who is standing with Harare, but note who isn't. For there are a great many regimes across the world who are more or less brutal to their people. There are many dictators who routinely display their contempt for democracy and its trappings, yet we do not see them on our news.

Why are we not called upon to debate possible 'interventions' for Mubarak, for instance, instead of Mugabe? What about Israel - the analogy of 'apartheid' to describe the occupation is limited - the IDF's actions with respect to Palestinians are indistinguishable from those of Mugabe towards the opposition, Israel's superior technology notwithstanding. Why are we permitted to condemn atrocities in the Sudan, but not the rampant bloodshed in the Congo, or the crushing of the democracy movement in Uzbekistan? Why is Chavez denounced as a 'thug' and 'dictator', when, in the very next country, Colombian trade unionists are murdered on a regular basis?

The only reasonable hypothesis that I can see for this phenomena, whereby the suffering of some victims is noted, and others ignored, is that our media and governments are distinguishing between victims based on the client status of their governments. Brutality in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Colombia, Central Asia and elsewhere is not merely tolerated, but largely ignored by our foreign affairs politicians and our media. Meanwhile, thuggish regimes who are outside of US hegemony or control are fodder for condemnathons - this category includes Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela (!), Sudan, 'terrorist' Somalia (but not Ethiopia), and, of course, Zimbabwe.

In all of this, I am not suggesting that Mugabe and his cronies are anything other than murderous. Nonetheless, even if such a thing as 'humanitarian' sanctions or military involvement were possible, I would still think it essential to point out that most of the world's 'failed states' are propped up by the US, or some other would-be imperialist (increasingly China and Russia, occasionally still Europe). South Africa is no more morally obliged to 'pressure' Mugabe than are we Australians when it comes to 'pressuring' the US government for its contempt for human rights and human life.

Some interesting polls

2008-06-26T21:37:00.002+10:00

I'm reluctant to place too much faith in polls purporting to represent anything as abstruse as 'world opinion', but I've been forwarded a few interesting ones lately that I feel are worth sharing.

Firstly, one poll showed that in 17 of 18 nations surveyed, a majority of participants opposed the criminalisation of abortion. (The exception was Indonesia). This poll included countries whose current laws criminal abortion:

Contrary to their public's preferences, there are criminal penalties for abortion in Egypt, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, the Palestinian Territories, Poland and South Korea.

A second poll has shown that a majority reject the use of torture, even in the mythical 'but it's to prevent terrorism' scenario:

A WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of 19 nations finds that in 14 of them most people favor an unequivocal rule against torture, even in the case of terrorists who have information that could save innocent lives. Four nations lean toward favoring an exception in the case of terrorists.

Support for the unequivocal position was highest in Spain (82%), Great Britain (82%) and France (82%), followed by Mexico (73%), China (66%), the Palestinian territories (66%), Poland (62%), Indonesia (61%), and the Ukraine (59%).

Since the 'strategic' use of torture against terrorists is likely to be 'exceedingly rare', according to this report, it is reasonable to conclude that a majority of people reject the use of torture by their government. These are interesting results in a decade that has seen the decline of liberalism, and should (but won't) give the US government pause for thought with respect to its policies of extraordinary rendition and the like.

More lazy blogging

2008-06-21T09:21:00.002+10:00

Here are some search terms that took people to The Partisan:

'nuffers' (x 8)
'get thee behind me satan' (x 7)
'muslims taking over europe' (x 5)
'molto bene' (x 2)
'don't know much bout anything' (x 2)
'underbelly roberta toejam'
'the trouble with libertarians'
'background history of the "russian male"'
'Hegelians 1842 satanic interests'
'the truth at last by john ray'
'Non molto bene'
'roberta williams turns to islam'
'liquidate President Sukarno, depending upon the situation and available opportunities'
'Nous Somme Tous Americains'
'sycophant grodscorp'
'gangster yarmulkes'
'marxism in scarface'
'berlusconi bugger'
'GET THEE BEHIND ME SATIN'
'How to be tactful & charming'
'norse pornography'
'rand intellectual poverty'
'partisan de satan'
'splinter in his'
'why fukuyama is an idiot'

And many more relating to psychoanalysis, self-harm and the term 'projection'.

Chomsky and the Middle East

2008-06-18T01:03:00.002+10:00

It is next to inconceivable, within the mainstream of Western intellectual culture, that one might give a principled critique of the war – that is, the kind of critique we give reflexively, and properly, when some enemy state commits aggression: for example, when Russia invaded Czechoslovakia, or Afghanistan, or Chechnya. We do not criticize those actions on grounds of cost, error, blunder, quagmire. Rather, we condemn the actions as horrendous war crimes, whether they succeed or not.

This is taken from a recent interview, to be found here. Lazy blogging, I know, but I'm very busy.

Mal Brough is a Joke

2008-05-27T14:42:00.000+10:00

And not just to me, either. According to Chris Graham in today's Crikey, Brough has turned 'developer'. Remember those Aboriginal land rights that Brough assured us needed to be abolished to somehow 'save the children'? The rationale for these had little to do with child protection. Rather, according to Brough -

The idea is to make a profit in joint-venture partnerships.
This from a man who, when in charge of Indigenous Affairs at a Federal level, underspent the budget by about one-fifth, that is, $600 million.

In spite of all of this, Graham is correct to point out that our toothless media refused to criticise Brough's 'intervention', despite the fact it rested on little more than tough-talking rhetoric, and a shrill appeal to 'think of the children'. As Graham points out:

It all makes for a great spectacle. But the problem is Aboriginal Australia doesn't need another showman, it needs solutions. Brough doesn't have any now, and he didn't have any in office.
I said much the same thing about the media at the time:

A long-standing, genuinely tragic, but opportunely 'urgent' situation has to entail that all disagreement to the Government's proposal must be shouted down. One of the most authoritarian and hastily-conceived interventions in Australian history is to be imposed upon our most vulnerable people, without a whimper.

Noel Pearson was the most prominent 'bipartisan' (snigger) supporter of the NT intervention. He too has revealed himself completely politically inept, if not equally useless as a 'community leader'. In the May edition of The Monthly, Pearson attributes Obama's popularity in the US to little more than 'white guilt', a familiar trope with which he tried to chastise the left in Australia. Not only is this offensively patronising, it ignores that fact that the majority of whites in Australia undoubtedly feel no such 'guilt'. Australia's arid centre is far from the urban sprawl of the coasts, and on the basis of all available evidence, few citizens in the latter region know of care of the plight of desert-dwelling Aboriginals. Some know, however, that it is not Aboriginals who are the main source of child protection concerns (though they are over-represented), or the much-vilified Muslims or Sudanese. Rather, most child abuse in Australia, at least as far as official statistics report, relates to dirt-poor children of Anglo-Australian origins.

And what did Aboriginals think of the intervention? If the 2007 Federal election is any guide, they didn't think much. Several remote areas recorded 2PP results in favour of the ALP that were well into the 90% range.

Hopefully we can finally put to rest the destructive myth that these clowns, architects of an intervention in which genuinely informed opinion was eschewed in favour of media sensationalism, ever had anything other than their own wheelbarrows at heart.

Smackdown, one lunatic at a time

2008-05-21T10:11:00.002+10:00

Since the phony war on terror, we've heard plenty of nutters and propagandists invoke the ghost of WWII to justify otherwise indefensible policy by the US. But WWII rhetoric I mean the constant references to 'appeasement', or to 'Islamofascism', intended to conflate to radically different historical situations. In any case, it's nice to see one such winged monkey humiliated for such stupidity:

The trouble with libertarians...

2008-05-15T18:28:00.003+10:00

...Is that they are seldom 'libertarian' enough. We read once screed after another from angry Hayekians contending that taxation is theft. The welfare state, the public broadcaster, virtually all publically owned and funded assets are an affront to 'liberty', evidence of a society heading down the road to surfdom.

It is curious, then, that the libertarians do not apply the same analysis to precisely those insitutions that actuall can and do deprive people of their liberty, and are paid by the public purse, namely, the police and the army. How could these self-proclaimed defenders of freedom have missed so elementary a point?

History tells us that welfare states are not at all the same as police states, the latter often functioning as model capitalist economies. Fascism requires the population be disciplined by the local constabulary, not government funded schools or art galleries. Should a coup ever occur (and this is unlikely in Australia's near future), do our libertarians think it will arise from the military, who are in possession of genuine force, or by Tony Jones and Red Kerry on the 'tax-eating' ABC network?

The libertarians inevitably (and hypocritically) stop short of this radical juncture, preferring to dismantle the welfare functions of the state rather than erode the state's ability to enforce, brutally if need be, its dictates.

Ironically, it was Lenin who called for the abolition of a standing army.

Meanwhile, the citizens of Australia, Britain and the US continue to fund bloodshed in the Middle East, and the enforcement of unpopular laws, something that would likely go unchanged in the (extremely unlikely) event of a libertarian government.

International Partisan Music

2008-05-11T17:50:00.000+10:00

Italian:

Russian:

French:

More French:

Leonard:

Sixty Years

2008-05-09T11:49:00.003+10:00

Like all his predecessors, Ehud Olmert constantly invokes spurious security arguments in order to defend policies that are indefensible. The Palestinians do not pose a threat to Israel's basic security; it is the other way round. The contest is an unequal one between a vulnerable Palestinian David on the one hand and a heavily armed and heavy-handed Israeli Goliath on the other. (source)

The Kibbutz where we put up our little bivouac tents that day has become an economic enterprise, like any other. The social solidarity, of which we were so proud, has collapsed. Masses of adults and children live below the poverty line, old people, the sick and the unemployed are left to fend for themselves. The gap between rich and poor is one of the widest in the developed world. And our society, that once raised the banner of equality and justice, just clucks its collective tongue and moves on to other matters. (source)

One of the first laws passed by the Israeli state was the so-called Law of Return, which permitted any person of Jewish background from anywhere in the world to immediately become an Israeli citizen. Yet Palestinians, who now constitute the largest refugee population in the world, are still denied the right to return to their homes and lands from which they were expelled. The campaign against Israeli apartheid is fundamentally centered upon the right of Palestinian refugees to return. (source)

What started as a small and peaceful demonstration on the boardwalk of Tel-Aviv, ended with clashes with a large and violent police force. The demonstration was against an Etzel reunion convention held nearby at the Etzel Museum. Prior to Israel's declaration of independence, Etzel was one of the Zionist terrorist groups which was used by the Zionists to terrorise the Arab population into leaving their homes and lands. The convention was held to commemorate Etzel's contribution to the "liberation" of the city of Jaffa. By "liberation" the Zionists mean the expulsion of the Arab population from Jaffa by means of military and terrorist attacks with the generous aid of British imperialism. (source)

In 1973 Ariel Sharon boasted that Israel would "make a pastrami sandwich" of the Palestinians by building strips of settlements throughout the West Bank. In 1983 the former head of Israeli military intelligence, Professor Yehoshafat Harkabi warned that Israel's continued colonisation of the occupied territories would lead to the transformation of Israel into an Arab-Jewish state and the consequent "Belfastisation" of the area. (source)

They are filled with dread here, these people, my friends, the Israelis and the Palestinians both. Part of the dread is the realization that, no matter what direction the conflict takes, the result will in no way justify the violent deaths since 1948 of more than 24,000 Israelis and uncounted thousands of Palestinians. (source)

We should all get the vote...

2008-05-08T20:13:00.006+10:00

As I've said before.

As revisionist as communism

2008-05-08T10:41:00.004+10:00

Bolt has plumbed new depths of ignorance today with an attempt to draw parallels between the Federal ALP's new 'alcopop' tax, and Soviet Russia. Apparently, since the tax was introduced, there has been a 'surge' in thefts of the alcopops, leading Bolt to deduce that the ALP policy 'not only fails to stop the boozers, but drives some into thievery.'

Clearly, there are many reasons to be sceptical about a tax curbing a purported binge-drinking epidemic. That aside, however, Bolt has done a remarkable volte-face here for a vulgar Tory, and has gone so far as to attribute criminal behaviour to social conditions. Gone is the moralising rhetoric of 'responsibility', favoured by Bolt and other hacks and shock jocks. Apparently, social conditions and government policy are to blame for crime when this is ideologically convenient.

Let's see how long it takes for Bolt to back-pedal from this position in a future post. I cannot recall Bolt ever displaying such 'understanding' when it comes to the property crimes of Aboriginals, for instance. When drug users feel compelled to steal to support their habit, does anybody seriously expect the likes of Bolt to attribute this to the government policies that keep such drugs illegal (and expensive)?

Finally, in a kind of inverse-Godwin piece of stupidity, Bolt invokes the spectre of Soviet Russia to dramatise his hypocritical observations. This might have been well and good if it didn't directly undermine Bolt's point, and betray his profound ignorance of some basic facts.

Since the fall of communism (1991), consumption of alcohol by Russian men has tripled, making Russians the highest drinkers of spirits in the world. Since Putin was in power, and capitalism was embraced, the rising cost of vodka in Russia has led some impoverished citizens to resort to cleaning fluids, and other dangerous alcoholic material. Since the Iron Curtain was lifted, alcoholism is the primary reason why the life-expectancy for the average Russian male has dropped to just 58 years.

The lesson of all this is to get your lackeys to acquaint you with some basic logical and historical facts before launching into overblown, melodramatic comparisons.

Crises in Neoliberalism

2008-05-07T19:33:00.002+10:00

Neoliberalism is another name for free marker economic policies. The 'freedom' in question is not one for citizens, but for corporations, as neoliberalism has three fundamental aims, all convenient to business: lower taxes, lower input costs, and lower wages.

The other major pillar of neoliberal policy is deregulation. Again, this deregulation is more for capital than for citizens, and aims to remove barriers and restrictions on the way businesses operate. In this way, the 'invisible hand' of the market comes to the fore.

However, even the stooges of neoliberal, such as Thomas Friedman, have said that 'The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist'.

Different kinds of fists are being brought to bear behind different kinds of markets, both in Australia and across the world.

In Bolivia, the country's elite are threatening to take their bat and ball and go home, as the nation's wealthy seek autonomy from the rest of Bolivia. Money is not the only issue in this instance - the wealthy do not wish to be dominated by 'the Indians'.

The neoliberal policies of yet another US-backed dictatorial stooge, Mubarak, have led to ongoing strikes and protests for months in Egypt, ably reported by this blogger. In addition to strikes, Egypt has recently seen food riots, during which pictures of Mubarak were torn down by protesters. Sadly, free markets do not only provide no guarantee of affordable food, they provide no assurances of a free press: a broadcaster who televised the images of the torn posters is being charged.

In Australia, matters are far less dramatic, but important nonetheless.

In opposition to members, unions, and, most probably, much of NSW, the ALP Government is pushing ahead with plans to privatise electricity. Every ALP leader in the country, and every ALP leader since Hawke has been strongly in favour of neoliberal economic policies, despite the notional displays of support for social democracy brandished on the party's website. Carr and Keating have been vocal in their support of Iemma and the privatisation move. Keating clearly still has a sense of humour, referring to Iemma and Costa as a 'pair of honest souls'.

Meanwhile, in Victoria, the Government is headed for a larger-than-expected budget surplus, of $827.5 million according to George Megalogenis. This is despite a slowing economy, a huge population boom in Melbourne, and the ruinous neglect of the state's public services, which has seen industrial action from nurses, police, teachers, and now disability services workers, in just the last 6 months.

Business as usual, in other words.

Spot the Unfortunate Headline

2008-05-07T11:38:00.001+10:00

Collective Identity and the Left

2008-05-02T02:55:00.007+10:00

It is true that as a black-hearted blogger allegedly of the 'hard left' I sometimes mock some of the more inane right-leaning bloggers in Australia. God knows there are more than a few embarrassments among them. One blogger with whom I will attempt to engage in this post, rather than mock, is Mark R. of Oz Conservative, in this post on collective identity. Mark took issue with a statement of Ted Ballieu's, leader of Victoria's Liberal Opposition, namely that 'our diversity is at the heart of our collective identity - different people, different views, different lifestyles.'

Mark highlights a 'radical element' in Ballieu's position:

Baillieu has no problem using the term "collective identity", but consider carefully what he means by this concept. It is not a "positive" identity, in the sense that it represents a set of positive characteristics shared by a community of people. Instead, it is a negative identity, in which people identify with the absence of shared characteristics.

In this, I agree, on the proviso that, at a philosophical level, at least, we acknowledge that 'identity' always presumes 'difference', in the Spinozan sense that 'Omnis determinatio est negatio' ('All determination is negation').

Mark appears to be arguing that in loosening, or even negativising the definition of that which constitutes 'our' collective identity, 'we' (i.e. Australian society) risk losing that identity altogether. This is important because, according to Mark:

We gain much as individuals from a strong collective identity in which we enjoy a sense of shared history, of a common culture, of closely understood manners and mores, of a widely shared calendar of festivals and celebrations, of a distinct tradition linking generations to each other, and of art and architecture expressing the character of our own community.

Mark correctly (in my view) places Ballieu's statement within the context of a 'liberal position', but condemns it , as we might expect of a conservative, as 'it represents the mindset of the rootless, modernist individual who has become disconnected from his own communal tradition.'

I happen to think the claims of Australia ever having had a 'common culture' to be incorrect. 'Diversity' existed even among Aboriginal peoples. The first settlers, Irish and English, would have had sharp differences in beliefs in many cases (not that there exists an homogeneous 'English' or 'Irish' in the first place), and the amount and degree of intra-societal differences would only have been greater during the many decades of immigration to Australia, by people from all continents. Diversity was always already there with respect to every aspect of identity, and claims of a 'common culture' seem to me a bad fiction, designed to smooth over historical and societal fact.

On the other hand, Mark has a genuine point when he criticises the 'negative identity' implied by Ballieu, and by many other liberals who are lazy when it comes to metaphysics. We appear to see in the Lib leader's statement a kind of ready-made, philistine version of the Derridean-Levinasian coming to grips with the other, with the outcome being defined by absence and lack. For a conservative, therefore, this approach to collective identity seems to lead to a society that, in terms of 'values', at least, is held together by nothing. Liberal individualism would possibly see society as being held together by (liberal) individuals.

Since I insist on the old 19th Century distinction between 'liberals' and 'radicals' (a distinction sometimes lost when political discourse is collapsed into the left-right spectrum), I think it appropriate to ask what this third perspective might have to say about collective identity. On what might this 'identity' be founded?

Let us put aside, for the time being, the arguments from psychoanalysis and social psychology linking 'personal' identity with the cultural sphere. The ego-ideal is, among other things, an insertion of the 'cultural' into the personal, an appropriation by the self of the other, and it derives chiefly from the strictures and injunctions of one's parents. Still, these parents are themselves embedded in a broader cultural context.

If his tags are any guide, Mark seems to hint that national or ethnic identity is the means to securing a stable collective identity. I happen to think this utterly mistaken. For starters, in the case of Australia, the prevailing 'identity' was made possible only on the basis of the most brutal displacement of the Aboriginal people.

The first white settlers in Australia were from Europe's then-power, Britain, and from Europe's oldest colony, Ireland. The two differed in religion and many other respects; as I said above, 'diversity' existed from the beginning. Sure, we can fabricate some kind of collective 'Anglo-Celtic' identity, as distinct from the next major group of European migrants (Greeks and Italians). Following that, we can construct a 'Western European' or 'Christian' identity as opposed to the Chinese and Vietnamese who still followed. We can even incorporate the Asians into our 'collective', and simply posit Muslims as the out-group. The point is, however, that all of these groupings are ultimately arbitrary, do not remove 'diversity', and require or imply a demonised out-group, excluded from the set, but defining the set's very identity. This is not 'social cohesion', this is, in psychoanalytic terms, collective psychosis.

On what then, can identity be founded? Clearly, ethnic and religious groupings are insufficient. I argue that a 'positive' from which a collective identity can arise is the category of worker, that is, one who does not control the means of production. Further to this, I mean a worker who is self-consciously a worker, and who is self-consciously politicised as a worker, that is, a worker who is a member of the proletariat. As Orwell mused (and as his rightist would-be heirs have apparently forgotten), 'If there is hope, it lies in the proles'.

This category, as the French philosopher Badiou says, 'consolidate[s] what is universal in identities', and is capable of uniting mean and women of different ethnic and religious backgrounds. As Badiou puts it in his paper, it is not about me, the individual, abandoning my pre-existing identity for the sake of some authoritarian cultural norm, but rather, of adapting and enlarging my identity, 'in a creative fashion', to the place in which I find myself. As one of the many for whom value accrues by its expropriation from my labour, my place is with the workers. As Badiou said elsewhere, '"militant" is a category without borders'.

Of course, this solution to the problem is no what the conservatives want to hear, and represents a challenge to the muddy arena of 'identity politics' into which liberal individualism often lapses. Sceptics will not doubt scoff at the suggestion that 'proletariat' remains a valid category. The Left is presumed by media pundits not to consist of the working classes, but of 'luvvies' and 'bleeding hearts', with hand-wringing affectations and pet causes, who munch on hilariously ethnic foodstuffs. In other words, popular political discourse in Australia has only conceived of a leftism that is 'left-liberal', not 'radical left', that dismisses the very possibility of a politicised working class.

Does such a class exist, rather than the effete, inner city class caricatured in our press? I answer that it does. Let us take, for example, Melbourne's outer Northern and North-Western suburbs:

Those familiar with Melbourne will recognise that is a 'diverse' area. There is a strong Aboriginal community in the area. There are many Christians, mostly Catholic and Orthodox, as well as several mosques. A Buddhist temple can be found in the suburb of Reservoir, owing to the significant number of Buddhist Asians in the area. Observers will note that this is a genuinely working class area - peak hour traffic is generally earlier here than elsewhere, owing to the types of occupations often done here.

Take the State Electorate of Thomastown for instance. This area encompasses a number of suburbs. The three most common occupations are as a sales worker in retail, and a machine operator/driver or labourer in manufacturing. Workers are unlikely to work in the city, given the heavy industrialisation of the area. Whilst here, as elsewhere, Australian-born people are a majority, there are plenty of others - Italians are next, with large numbers of Greeks, Macedonians, Lebanese, Vietnamese, and even Iraqis. In short, this is the very model of a poor, working-class neighbourhood, with a high proportion of immigrants.

So how does this area vote? At the last State election, the result was a massive 81% to the ALP, on a two-party preferred basis. If we look at this area Federally, we see the ALP with a 70% two-party preferred vote, which is enormous considering the relative wealth and cultural homogeneity in the north-east outskirts of this electorate. No doubt similar such areas can be found throughout the country.

Obviously, Australia's Labor party stands for labour in name only, but the message is clear - the much-despised Howard Haters are not chardonnay-swilling elites. They may well be latte drinkers, if only for the fact that they hail from a country that values coffee in the first place. They are poor, and 'diverse', and they do not vote Tory - it is little wonder that conservatives are scared of them, and are trying to keep them out of the country, or have them radically 'assimilate'. They have all the makings of a politicised working class.

It is these people who are being let down by the ALP, and who, as far as I can see, have failed to be integrated into the Greens. And it is precisely these people who offer a bright future for the Left in this country, and for this country itself, if only that opportunity can be seized.

More Blatant Racism from the Radical Right

2008-05-01T13:28:00.002+10:00

Local zealot on the topic of Islam:

I’m seeing more and more filthy keffiyehs in the streets than ever.

Nice. Had this good Christian lived in 1930s Germany, we would no doubt have read comments about 'filthy yarmulkes'.

Conservatives tend to enjoy a good round of condemn-a-thon, so I'll wait for the moderates to rush over and denounce the above trash.

The Failure of International Law

2008-04-29T07:04:00.002+10:00

Professor Quiggin asks why charges of war crimes cannot be brought against Bush and friends.

This piece of legislation is one reason.

A few thoughts on gangland wars...

2008-04-29T02:56:00.005+10:00

Like just about everybody else who has seen it, (and there are plenty in Victoria), I enjoyed Underbelly. The character of Roberta Williams stole the show, of course. There's nothing more charming than a strong, female character who utters such niceties as 'Suck my toe-jam!'. Many of the backdrops would be familiar to Melbournians, as would many of the characters and events which, among certain crowds, and in certain neighbourhoods, became the stuff of minor myth.

I has some minor quibbles - some of the characters were brilliantly cast, but occasionally I detected a misfire, particularly as regards the police. The lack of 'gentrification' of some of the criminal characters was good to see. Predictably, almost every murder was preceded by scenes of the soon-to-be-victim farewelling loved ones. The Victorian police were portrayed rather fawningly, with scant mention of the entrenched police corruption that allowed the underworld to function in the first place. Yes, there was a single, moustache-wearing villainous cop, but he was promptly caught in order to showcase the virtue of the others. In fairness, I can think of few precedents in Australian drama where police have been portrayed realistically.

Whilst the local detail is no doubt interesting to Victorians, the show has found popularity Australia-wide. This is not entirely surprising, given the success of the gangster genre. Like the most successful gangster flicks, Underbelly combined depictions of the criminal underworld with psychological explorations (extremely brief, in this case, but to be expected) and family scenes. This is a tried-and -true formula in this genre: consider the fact that The Godfather begins with a wedding, The Godfather II begins with a first communion, and Goodfellas focuses at length on the downward spiral of Liotta and Bracco's marriage.

There is thus a sense of universality depicted, even among these extreme characters. Perhaps, in the po-mo era, the brutal violence of the gangster genre is the closest thing we have to tragedy.

Two powerful (and sometimes, controversial) means of analysing some of these universalities in drama and literature come in the form of what can be broadly termed psychoanalytic and Marxist criticism.

Psychoanalytic themes are in abundance in Underbelly. We see characters with ever-shifting allegiances and identifications, we see primal fathers and Oedipal sons, the swapping of women, and the desperate, narcissistic need to confirm to a violent ideal ego, spurred on by an equally violent superego. Nonetheless, in this post, I'll restrict my comments to a few of the political themes of Underbelly.

All of the characters form part of what Marx termed the Lumpenproletariat, a class that is both excluded, and reactionary. The essence of Melbourne's infamous gangland wars, as depicted here, revolves around a dispute between two factions within the criminal wing of this class. One is an impoverished but 'up-and-coming' class, led by the character of Carl Williams, and ably revealed in the crass, vengeful consumerism of his Lady Macbeth, Roberta. The other faction consists of wealthy 'establishment' criminal criminals, the irony being that these characters were themselves once the impoverished sons of (mostly) Italian and Irish immigrants, with origins in the notorious Painters and Dockers Union. The complacency of this latter group, who live in gentrified neighbourhoods, drive expensive cars, and send their children to private schools, eventually explodes into violence when their supremacy is challenged by the up-and-comers.

In the actions of Williams and his crew, we see in microcosm what we have witnessed on the world stage for many years. The twin pillars of capitalism and imperialism are seen in Underbelly in miniature, and Williams and his proxies kill to maintain strategic supremacy, their control of trade, and, rather like the US, their 'prestige'.

Toward the end of the series, we see Williams' disingenuous attempts to exonerate his role in the gangland wars. When we see him tell a media scrum that he an innocent, a 'business man', merely defending the interests of his family, we hear an echo of Bush's justifications for the ongoing war on terror, and for pre-emptive strikes. When Williams callously dismisses the trauma of the children witnessing a murder he has commissioned against their fathers ('They'll get over it'), we are reminded of Rumsfeld's famous bon mot regarding Iraq ('Stuff happens').

After all, all capitalism is, at bottom, 'gangster capitalism'. A shadow market ruled by underworld figures is not an anomaly within a consumer capitalist society, but its logical extension. A worker, a sole individual, can never 'take on' an industry or state in the manner in which these entities can do to the former. And, in the last resort, these entities have force at their disposal, in order to prosecute laws and industrial edicts. (Flouting unfair laws has, however, brought at least one recent success). We need only see how entrenched, and how easily accommodated gangsterism is in some societies (such as Southern Italy, for one) to see how coextensive are the two worlds of legitimate and illegitimate business.

When we see this imperialism played out in dramas on the screen, we recognise it as crime. When we see it unfold on the daily news, we dignify it with the name of 'war', or, even more euphemistically, as 'peace-keeping' or 'nation-building'. It is as if relieving a long-suffering gangster's moll of her husband, by way of a few bullet wounds is a 'humanitarian liberation'. After all, our leaders are just good businessmen, protecting the interests of their (elite) families.

The Politics of Imbecility in Blogging

2008-04-29T02:08:00.008+10:00

I thought this would be a good time to lay to rest the ongoing dispute between myself and Hall, at least on this blog. No doubt a veteran cyber-stalker like himself will continue his vendetta, but I don't intend to waste any space on my blog on low-lifes like him.

As a final laugh, I thought it would be amusing to take a brief look at his attempt at a kind of 'not guilty' plea, with respect to his own actions. It can be found on his blog of shame here. Rather than issue a mea culpa for his most recent acts of stalking, as well as his newest attack blogs, Hall continues to drive his Noddy Car down the road of no return.

Hall points out that there are many different bloggers in the world - 'All are to be found when you brose the blogs that are out there'. He tries to persuade us that, for ethical reasons, those who blog under their own name have more 'gravitas' than those who use a pseudonym:

Put simply If an author is willing to affix their name to their opinion they have to be honest and truthful because there are penalties if they are not.

Hall omits any mention of the fact that, being unemployed (and possibly unemployable), there are precisely no consequences for him to be hosting the most virulent bigots on his site, or using his time stalking other bloggers. This is not the case for those with employers. Hall himself knows that vulnerable position that working bloggers face, which is precisely why he has tried (or threatened) to contact the employers of at least three bloggers with whom he disagrees.

Hall then drivels on for a bit about the evils of anonymous bloggers with different political beliefs to his own. Disagreement, and legitimate mockery are rebaptised as 'character assassination' in Hall's deluded dramaturgy. So what's a deranged blogger with wounded pride to do?

A blogger, who writes in their own name, who has been the subject of such behaviour, has no real recourse unless they can discover the identity of their attackers.

A blogger could always respond to the mockery with counter-mockery, or construct decent sentences (and better yet, arguments) in retaliation. Since, for Hall, these are not options, stalking and 'outing' is the only 'real recourse'.

Hall complains that slander and libel laws are not enforced on the blogosphere, but is unable to cite a single instance of where these laws might ever have applied to him. Different political opinions, and spirited criticism are not, after all, illegal. Hall continues to attempt to justify his profound contempt for others' privacy and, by extension, free speech:

Write about politics, religion or current events and you have to be just as ruthless as the anonymous attackers that will inevitably take you on and you have to find a currency that they will respect.

In Hallworld, this currency involves bribing individuals for information that may lead to the 'outing' of an enemy blogger. How very ethical of our respected conservative. He continues:

Once their name is known they will have to carry the chains that they have forged and those chains will clank about their person forever. Then again there are individuals who genuinely realise the error of their ways and take a real shot at redemption I for one am happy to forgive those that admit their error and apologise to those that they have wronged.

Hall himself has never once apologised for his own 'errors', and they are many, and great. These include 'outing' a blogger in 2006 who had made no personal attacks against him. This 'outing' extended to Hall spamming random blogs with his perceived enemy's details. By his own standards, redemption is a long, long distance away for Hall.

Rather helpfully, Hall has compiled a list of rules that he thinks all bloggers should follow, pseudonymous or not:

1. Always write about others as if you were known to them, even if you are using a pseudonym .

For Hall, this includes telling another blogger that he should have a 'hot shot' (i.e. overdose on heroin).

2. Be generous to those you debate with in blogs and respect the blog owner as if you are a guest in their home.

This includes telling a blogger with depression that he is just a 'sad lefty', at his own site, no less.

3. Always remember that the persons you are talking to are real people even if they have the most bizarre pseudonyms they can be offended and hurt by things that are said about them, just as much as you can be hurt.

Hall has created fake blogs under his enemies' pseudonyms, and tried to smear them with such charming labels as 'stinking pieces of shit' and 'lesbian nazis'. Then there is this piece of brilliance:

If you do have a dispute with a fellow blogger, in the first instance try to settle your differences privately via email (if they have one available) because once your dispute is being played out in public all sorts of malicious non-entities will try to butt into the argument often making a settlement all but impossible. But if that fails, be happy to walk away. There are millions of bloggers out there and you can’t expect a warm reception from all of them.

This is possibly the funniest thing Hall has ever written, and this from a man who once said that 'This is a woeful idea , mainly because UHT milk always tastes so bad. Not it is impossible to drink this stuff bad, but burnt and very processed bad'.

Firstly, Hall has spammed various left-leaning bloggers with unsolicited emails, and has invariably published any responses on one of his 78 blogs.

Secondly, Hall is yet to walk away from a single major dispute. He still writes regularly about people he agreed to leave alone, and who have long-since forgotten his demented blog of shame.

Clearly, Hall knows what the 'right thing' is when it comes to internet etiquette. It is just as evident that Hall himself refuses to abide by this etiquette, as he continues to be the saddest, creepiest and most deluded blogger in Australia. Hoisted by his own petard, Hall is, by his own criteria, the most contemptible of hypocrites. Not that this is news to anyone sufficiently unfortunate to have read his semi-literate drivel.

In the spirit of bloggerly goodwill, however, I am very happy to recommend Hall to a suitable psychiatric service in his area and cease to mock him again, upon production of an apology, a withdrawal of his hate-blogs, and verification of his bona fides. He lives to stalk, so I'm not holding my breath.

UPDATE: I don't know who wrote this, but here is another view on the matter. Oh where oh where is Mr Bourbon?

Why Wingnuts and Philosophy Don't Mix...

2008-04-27T02:49:00.004+10:00

I know I should resist the temptation to see how the other half lives (or mouth-breathes, as it were). But some habits are hard to break, and I've relapsed from time to time.

I tried, at least, not to make these relapses public. To that end, I resisted the urge to ridicule this 'world government' conspiracy theory, of the sort embraced by anti-Semitic bigots and cranks:

The same crowd also believe that 'reptilian bloodlines' rule the world. I figured that the authors of this stuff couldn't possibly believe in all of it.

My resolve was then sorely tested when I saw this post claiming that intellectuals were more or less part of a treasonous alliance between Marxism and Islam. It's nutty, and the author doesn't forward a shred of evidence to support his ridiculous claims, but it's not vastly different to the drivel peddled by more skilled propagandists.

I even bit my tongue when I saw this shameless attempt to besmirch an apparent detractor of Winston Churchill, a great hero to some conservatives. Naturally, the post doesn't deal with some of the many factual criticisms that one might extend to Churchill. This is the same Churchill, Nobel Laureate, who gave us such pearls of wisdom as:

“I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes. The moral effect should be good… and it would spread a lively terror…”

And:

"I do not admit... that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia... by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race... has come in and taken its place."

Unsurprisingly, he championed Zionism, as opposed to 'the schemes of the International Jews' (i.e. Bolshevism). He was not altogether unsympathetic to fascism, either. To quote a comrade blogger, who supplied the above references:

Benito Mussolini had "rendered a service to the whole world", showing "a way to combat subversive forces". Even Hitler received some Churchillian approbation: "One may dislike Hitler's system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as admirable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations."

All this I passed by, politely as it were, thinking it unworthy to bring facts to bear against deranged wingnuts. Being stupid, ignorant, or plain delusional is not a moral flaw, however irritating (or unintentionally hilarious) the consequences.

Dishonesty, on the other hand, is a different matter, so I simply couldn't resist this woefully inaccurate, and thoroughly mendacious attack on the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (whose name, incidentally, is misspelled for most of the post).

The author claims that Nietzsche was 'Hitler's hero'. Whilst Hitler read and admired Nietzsche (Nietzsche's sister had edited a posthumous volume of his writings, removing references that condemned Germany's rising anti-Semitism) Hitler had plenty of 'heroes'. Among them were Schopenhauer, for instance, and plenty of other perfectly respectable and bourgeois figures within the West's literary, musical and artistic canon.

Hitler's 'philosophy', if it could even be called as much, does not resemble Nietzsche's in any significant respect. There are innumerable passages in Nietzsche's work that condemn 'mob rule', that condemn German (and other) nationalism, that oppose anti-Semitism, and that attack politics of all stripes: conservative, liberal, and radical. It is perfectly clear that our wingnut author here hasn't read a page of Nietzsche, still less understood any of his philosophy, when she blathers:

The views of Hitler, and his idol, Neitzsche, could be seen as a revealing forerunner for today’s globalizing, centralizing European government as a whole. Neitzsche espoused some views which could come straight out of any Rhodes school or Common Purpose training camp.

Actually, 'globalisation' is the fruit of neoliberal capitalism, and it's difficult to see Nietzsche rallying to its cause. Anybody with even a passing familiarity with Nietzsche's views would know he wouldn't waste his spittle on a 'Rhodes school' or 'Common Purpose training camp'.

So why do we see this wilfully dishonest attempt to smear mad Freddy, rather than to come to terms with his philosophy? So that the author can reach this equally disingenuous conclusion about Hitler:

Adolf was, in actuality, an internationalist and a globalist.

Really? Nothing about Hitler's invasion of other European nations, or persecution of Jews, Gypsies, and communists demonstrated an 'internationalist' perspective. The author concludes:

Neitzsche has been the darling of the Left for decades now. In the current age of globalism and internationalism, is there going to be a surge in Nazism whether overt or tacit? I would say, the surge has already started.

Nietzsche has been the 'darling' of a lot of people, from all sides of politics, and with no discernible political views at all. In many respects (and I am not a technical philosopher), I would have thought Nietzsche's influence was starting to wane. The Nietzschean impetus behind 'deconstruction' (Derrida) or the unravelling of power and discourse (Foucault) is decades-old now, and many of the more prominent Continental philosophers are not Nietzschean in the least. So when our good author warns us of a 'surge', once can only assume she is referring to a growth is crude propaganda, wilful ignorance, and deliberate and blatant lying.

A poster I once saw...

2008-04-23T04:57:00.003+10:00

Politics, propaganda and posters have a long history of being bedfellows. See here for a Soviet example. Other countries have their own examples - maybe somebody out there has some old Australian wartime posters.
In any case, fellow blogger Toaf posted about anti-Beijing posters, of the sort that may be useful for a protest. This is one that I snapped on my travels a couple of years ago:

The Lukewarm Contented Revolutionary

2008-04-21T22:25:00.005+10:00

Due to incessant personal attacks, I may have to give blogging away.

In the meantime, however, I thought I'd share some revolutionary recipes! There are some things rural QLD just doesn't have. Taste is one such thing.

This recipe is ubiquitous throughout Southern Italy. Southern Italians rarely eat out, but when they do, it's pretty good. They'll tend to have multiple courses, and if you're in Sicily, Calabria, or Naples, in particular, you can bet that this will be one of the courses. It involves mussels, which I know many of you are scared of, but they cost only $5 a kilo (at the Queen Vic market), are tasty, and dead easy to cook.

Zuppa di Cozze

You need:

200g ripe tomatoes
1 kg black mussels
Olive oil
40g Butter
I leek, finely chopped (white part only!)
3 cloves garlic (crushed)
Saffron
Flat-leafed parsley
1 Small fresh chili, finely chopped
2/3 cup dry white wine (cask wine will suffice)

1. Score a cross in the base of each tomato. Place in a bowl, and cover with boiling water for 30 seconds. Drain, and peel away from the cross. Cut tomatoes in half, remove seeds (if possible - they won't kill you, but purists insist on removing them) and finely chop.

2. Scrub the mussels with a scrubbing brush or old toothbrush. Remove the hairy bits - these will be pretty obvious. Discard broken mussels.

3. Heat a little oil and the butter in a large saucepan, and cook leek and garlic over low heat until the leek is soft and not brown. (If unused to leek - it's like a real fancy, damn sexy onion, so use onion as a guide). Add saffron and parsley and chili, and cook whilst stirring for 1-2 minutes. Increase the heat and add the wine. Bring to the boil and cook for 1-2 minutes, then add the chopped tomato and 1 cup of water. Cover and simmer for 20 minutes.

4. Add the mussels to the pot and cook, covered, until open. After 4-5 minutes, discard any unopened mussels. If the soup is too crowded with shells, remove about one third of the remaining mussels, and take the mussel meat from the shell and place it back in the pot. Season to tase with salt and pepper, and consider some crusty bread.

This is a very easy to prepare meal, and is reasonably healthy. It has almost no carbs, so the Atkinsonians shouldn't complain. Buon apetito!

This song is political...

2008-04-19T01:30:00.006+10:00

Moral Exceptionalism

2008-04-19T00:17:00.004+10:00

Hey! We all know it.

And on relativism...

Free Markets and Families - A Look at Anne Manne

2008-04-18T11:19:00.003+10:00

In the latest edition of the Quarterly Essay, Anne Manne has written a provocative piece entitled 'Love & Money'. When the latest polling from around the world informs us the unpopularity of free market solutions to social problems, Manne argues that the invisible hand is failing us when it comes to raising children.

In a nutshell, Manne's thesis is as follows. Australia's population, like that of many other developed nations, is rapidly aging. To the extent that the aged require various kinds of support, it is essential that Australia's women produce offspring, to both provide this support, and to contribute indirectly by way of income tax.

In contrast to this, however, politicians of various stripes, both in Australia and elsewhere, have argued that it is essential for women to be part of the workforce as much as possible, and the value and productivity of women has tended to be linked to their employment, and consumption and spending power, rather than for motherhood.

Manne argues that policy-makers have attempted to reconcile this contradiction by way of a largely market-based solution: child-care. Yet the forms of child-care that have tended to prosper have been cheap and corporate, and Manne cites some reasonable evidence to suggest that their use is not necessarily in a child's best interests. In other countries, particularly in Northern Europe, the solution to this problem has been to amplify welfare state measures, such as providing relatively generous packages of maternal (and even paternal) leave. When given the option, Manne argues that parents would rather stay at home than be forced to participate in the workforce, and place children in care.

The net effect of this, according to Manne, is that motherhood has been devalued, in some cases quite explicitly. Fertility rates are too low, and financial pressures are compelling women to either delay or forgo motherhood. It should be noted that Manne is strictly not attempting to villify those parents who place children in child-care. Nonetheless, maternal love has been reduced to a salable commodity, namely, 'care'. But, as Manne puts it:

Commercialising care cannot always ensure loving attentiveness, which is embedded in particularity and a shared history. Turning care over to the market - commodifying it - has inherent problems. To begin with, all the assumptions about the well-informed purchaser who can withdraw patronage from inadequate services fall down in the case of caregiving services. If people don't thrive in care, it can be difficult to find an alternative. Care services may be in such short supply, or so expensive, that the purchaser settles out of panic on the first, rather poor option they can find. Since services are always labour-intensive, any attempt to lift the quality of care raises the cost. (p. 65).

In short, Manne argues that there exists a 'shadow economy' consisting of (mostly female) carers tending to the needs of the aged, sick, children, and disabled, whose labour is necessary in order for the productive consumers to work extended hours in paid employment. Whilst John Howard told Australians that, economically speaking, they have never had it better, the fact remains that Australians work longer hours than ever, and are up to their eyeballs in debt. Manne concludes with a range of recommendations to address these issues, mainly involving increased Government support for parents who wish to stay at home.

I largely agree with Manne's sentiments, with one major quibble. In an otherwise excellent essay in The Monthly, Manne discussed the pornification of our culture but again, as with 'Love & Money', she situated this phenomenon largely within the context of feminism having taken a wrong turn somewhere along the line. Whilst it is perfectly true that there are feminist apologists for 'raunch culture', as well as feminists who attack motherhood, it is surely more pertinent to point out that capitalism has very successfully co-opted various elements of feminism. When the likes of Peter Costello, or, indeed, Tony Blair, have exhorted women to return to the workplace, it is most definitely not in the name of feminism that they speak. Again, when manufacturers market g-strings for tweens, it is in the service of capitalism, not feminism.

This is one of the chief contradictions of much of today's conservatism in Australia - whilst phenomena such as the devaluing of motherhood, and the rise of raunch culture are deplored, and whilst feminism is scapegoated for this, conservatives fail to see how the pervasive influence of neo-liberal policy has contributed to the situation. Whilst the neo-liberals attempt, with some success, to dismantle Australia's welfare state, it is the role of leftists to continually point out these contradictions, to challenge such a dismantling, and to highlight the the growing evidence that demonstrates that it is unfettered capitalism and 'market solutions' that are chiefly responsible for a range of social problems, and not, as in this case, some feminists on the fringe of public discourse.

I don't know much about art...

2008-04-15T13:35:00.002+10:00

But I know what I like:

Image courtesy of this guy.

Non molto bene...

2008-04-15T12:20:00.002+10:00

Sadly, Silvio Berlusconi is set to once again become PM of Italy, with what is called his 'centre-right coalition' coming first in the recent election. For those who don't know, Berlusconi is the country's wealthiest man, and he controls much of the nation's media.

Part of Berlusconi's coalition consisted of the Northern League and the People of Freedom, some of whose members openly declare their fascist leanings. (See, fascism belongs to the right after all). Whilst trade unionism and, indeed, communism remain potent political forces in Italy, Berlusconi continues to denigrate left-leaning voters. Recently, Francesco Totti (nemesis of the Socceroos), who has supported a left-leaning mayor in Rome was derided as 'not all there'.

In that vein, and in sympathy with Italians everywhere, here are some Berlusconi pearlers (taken from here):

At a rally during the 2006 election campaign:

"Read The Black Book of Communism and you will discover that in the China of Mao, they did not eat children, but had them boiled to fertilise the fields."

To German MEP Martin Schulz, at start of Italy's EU presidency in July 2003:

"I know that in Italy there is a man producing a film on Nazi concentration camps - I shall put you forward for the role of Kapo (guard chosen from among the prisoners) - you would be perfect."

On Mussolini:

"Mussolini never killed anyone. Mussolini used to send people on vacation in internal exile."

On his alleged conflict of interest as prime minister and one of Italy's biggest tycoons, with major media holdings:

"If I, taking care of everyone's interests, also take care of my own, you can't talk about a conflict of interest."

On a proposal to base an EU food standards agency in Finland, rather than the Italian city of Parma:

"Parma is synonymous with good cuisine. The Finns don't even know what prosciutto is. I cannot accept this."

On himself:

"The best political leader in Europe and in the world."

"There is no-one on the world stage who can compete with me."

Legal threats to comrade @ndy.

2008-04-13T21:55:00.003+10:00

Following the lead of Machine.gun.keyboard, we at The Partisan are hosting a post by @ndy of Slackbastard fame. @ndy is an anarchist who has done much excellent work in exposing the nascent fascist/neo-Nazis of Australia and NZ.

@ndy writes:

As a result of technical issues, slackbastard @ anarchobase is moving… In brief, my previous blog was subjected to legal threats by the ‘anonymous’ owners of mathaba.net, who viewed the contents of the post below as being in some way ‘defamatory’. More details later. By the way, my email isn’t working, my computer is a piece of shit, and I’m a Luddite. In the meantime:

Having read a recent missive from “Media Alert Transmission Hub Advanced Broadcast Application” (MATHABA)* on the subject of its having documented a revisionist conference in Sydney on the subject of 9/11;

Having bugger-all response to a previous post [temporarily unavailable] on this issue; having a few hours to kill, maim and torture; I thought I might as well scribble a little more on local neo-Nazi Welf Herfurth’s media outlet of choice: mathaba.net.

“My name is Louis Istvan Szondy, I am a British and Australian citizen. I was born on 8th March 1963 in London from a Hungarian father and British/Australian mother.”

To begin with, mathaba.net founder Adam (Musa) King apparently used to be known as Louis Istvan Szondy, having changed his name in 1990. In terms of the political perspective which he brings to mathaba.net — and which might explain why fascists such as Welf Herfurth and other anti-Semites are included among its few dozen correspondents — in 2003 King (Szondy) won a libel case against The Sunday Telegraph, which accused him of being a terrorist and accomplice of al-Qaeda. An extract from the text of a subsequent failed appeal (May 18, 2004) by the Telegraph (against some parts of the decision in favour of Szondy) provides the context for these libellous allegations:

It appears that the defendants’ [that is, the Telegraph’s] interest in the claimant [that is, King/Szondy] was aroused when the police visited their offices on Friday 19th October 2001 (shortly after the destruction by terrorists of the World Trade Centre in New York) and accidentally left there a list of the names of 24 people into whom the Anti-Terrorist Branch was conducting an official investigation. Most of the names on the list were obviously Islamic, but the list contained the name of “Adam Moussa” and at least one other person with an English sounding name. On the following Sunday, 21st October, the defendants published in the Sunday Telegraph the first of the two articles of which complaint is made in this action. It was headed “Two white suspects in Bin Laden probe” and it read as follows: “Detectives are investigating two white people in Britain who they suspect of aiding Osama bin Laden’s terror network. Secret Scotland Yard documents, obtained by The Sunday Telegraph, name two men – one of whom is understood to be a computer expert – as assisting al-Qaeda’s network in this country. It is the first time since September 11 that white non-Muslims have been accused of involvement in Islamic extremism. The documents reveal that a special unit has been established at the Yard to carry out ‘Operation Full Circle’, to monitor the two white men and 22 other suspects. All are being investigated to establish whether they have committed terrorist offences. The Sunday Telegraph cannot name the two for legal and operational reasons. One of the two white men on the list, the computer expert, is believed to have assisted bin Laden operatives with website activities. He is named in the document as also being linked to Francis Etim, who has been charged under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Etim, who lived in Greenwich, south-east London, was born in Britain and converted to Islam at marriage and changed his name to Sulayman Zain-Ul-Abidin. Also on the list is a white man with a French name. Little is known of him, except that he has adopted several aliases. He is believed to be wanted in connection with Algerian plots to attack France.”

(For further discussion of the legal and political ramifications of the King case, see Jessica Hodgson, ‘Newpapers falling prey to legal eagles’, The Observer, September 28, 2003.) Prior to mathaba.net, Szondy was also responsible for establishing the International Green Charter. In other words, Szondy was once an advocate on behalf of the ideas contained in “Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution” / “Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Arab Libyan Popular and Socialist Jamahirya” Muammar al-Gaddafi’s 1975 magnum opus the three-volume Green Book. In fact, Szondy remains a fan; as recently as June 2007, he describes the contents of the Book as constituting “the scientific and natural historical principles of the Third Universal Theory, the truth” (’Founder of Green Charter International CallsCell-Phone-Services-for-Travelers Mar-4-2008 For Serious Study of The Green Book’, mathaba.net, June 2007). But what exactly is the International Green Charter?

Inspired by the Proclamation of the Great Green Charter for Human Rights on 12th June, 1988, the first Human Rights Charter to be issued by the people gathered in popular congresses, signalling the end of the era of the republics and the dawn of the era of themasses, as well as a new advancement in the definition of human rights; Motivated by the Green Book, a guide for the total deliverance from the power of individuals, classes, clans, tribes or parties, and the path towards the establishment of a civil society where all human beings are free and equal in the exercise of power and in the possession of wealth and arms; Convinced that the rights of Man, vicegerent of God on earth, cannot be the gift of a person nor exist in societies where exploitation and tyranny are practised, and can only be achieved by the victory of the people over their oppressors and the disappearance of regimes which annihilate freedom;

Et cetera et cetera et cetera.

al-Gaddafi, incidentally, is awesome. In addition to being Libya’s head of state and an inspiration to Szondy, Muammar has a bodyguardcomposed entirely of chicks. They wear blue uniforms, have black belts in karate, and were most recently seen in France when al-G popped in to visit fellow Brotherly Leader Monsieur Sarkozy (Ian Sparks, ‘Five planes, a camel, a tent and 30 female virgin bodyguards… Libyan leader Gaddafi arrives in Paris with his entourage’, The Daily Mail, December 11, 2007).
On a spotterly note, during the 1980s the Libyan Gub’mint sponsored visits to Libya by members of the Trotskyist SWP (now known as the DSP) under the auspices of a local neo-Nazi turned Islamic convert named Robert Pash (see Raiders of the Left Ark, January 13, 2006). According to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity, NYU Press, 2002, p.292) in the late 1970s Pash was the Australian contact for the US-based Aryan Nations, and also distroed KKK propaganda. In the ’80s, Pash distroed al-Gaddafi’s Green Book, and later helped establish the Australian People’s Congress, an organisation which I first encountered via newspaper advertisements around the time of the first Gulf War. At one point in 1987, according to The Australia/Israel Review (April 10–May 1, 1998):

…then Hawke Minister Clyde Holding revealed to Parliament that Pash’s outfit advocated the “biological integrity of the white race through a complete geographic and political separation of the races and thus the maintenance of international white unity”. Holding told Parliament that Pash was an “anti-Semitic right wing racist political loony in the tradition of Goebbels and Hitler,” and then tabled
Queensland Police reports which showed that Mr Pash had been under investigation following death threats to Queensland’s Jewish community by the organisation, The Sword of Islam, for which of course Mr Pash was the spokesman.

Curiously, in April 1987, Libya hosted the second conference of its World Center Against Imperialism, Zionism and Racism (MATABA), in Tripoli. Pash led an Australian delegation which included, notoriously, Aboriginal activists Michael Mansell (‘Desperate Times’, ABC Message Stick, May 14, 2004) and Yaluritja Clarrie Isaacs. In the ’90s, Pash popped up as the “Australian Association for the Study of the Juche Idea”; this being another term for the state ideology of North Korea / Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). It was in this capacity that in 1998 ‘Rashid Robert Pash’ was given the opportunity to tour the country of the illustrious Korean President Kim Il Sung and the Great Leader Comrade Kim Jong Il. As for mathaba.net, as a result of his recent reconciliation with the Jewish-dominated Western powers — the UK and the US in particular, but including, of course, France’s Sarkozy — al-Gaddafi has broken poor little Szondy’s heart. This is why al-Gaddafi is regularly criticised by mathaba.net, while the contents of his little Green Book — and its strange amalgam of pan-Arabism, Islam and state socialism — remains an attractive property for the likes of Louis. And, of course, Herfurth & Co.. For further discussion on ‘Third Positionism’, see Chip Berlet, Racial Nationalism, the Third Position and Ethnoviolence (Including a Discussion of Possible Connections Between Militant Islamic Fundamentalists and the U.S. Extreme Right); on the Green Book and its diminishing funding and influence, see teh Interwebs, especially Craig S. Smith, ‘In Libya, pages fade in once-touted Green Book’, International Herald Tribune, January 5, 2005, which documents the manner in which the Gaddafi regime no longer plows dinars into promoting The Leader’s vision, and why folks like Pash turned to Juche thought for (financial) sustenance (”Tucked away in a whitewashed, Italian-colonial building set in a quiet compound on the edge of Tripoli, the largely forgotten World Center for Green Book Studies is looking for a little respect…”); The Washington Post has just published (March 29, 2008) an editorial, ‘Not Quite Free’, on Gaddafi, Libya and its relations with Western powers which is worth reading (”The turning point came in 2003, when Mr. Gaddafi renounced terrorism and agreed to dismantle his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs. At the time, many attributed Mr. Gaddafi’s shift to his fear of meeting the same fate as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. It also reflected his desire to lure U.S. and other Western companies to redevelop Libya’s vast oil reserves.”). And on a final spotterly note, sometime anarchist and boy lover Hakim Bey (aka Peter Lamborn Wilson) recounts his experience addressing a conference in Libya on the subject of the Green Book in ‘Jihad Revisited’, June 5, 2004: “The conference in Tripoli turned out to be a curious circus of “lost causes,” including two anarchists from New York (we were cheered as heroes for defying the “travel ban”), countless African liberation fronts, the interesting French “New Right” philospher Alain de Benoist and some Australian Red/Brown types, two charming Turkish Greens, a Slovenian anarchist, a clique of Parisian Maoists, etc., and a phalanx of hospitable Libyans, all fuelled by excessive coffee intake. A German doctor gave a paper on depleted uranium in Iraq, the first time most of us had heard of such a thing. A New Zealand delegate told horror stories about privatization of water; ditto…”

*Al Mathaba Al-AlamiaAl Mathaba (meaning center) is the Libyan center for anti-imperialist propaganda which has funded third world guerilla groups. The Anti-Imperialism Center (AIC) - also known as Mathaba - is used by Gaddafi to support terrorist networks and thus plays an important role in Gaddafi’s terrorism strategy.Al-Mathaba was established in 1982 to support “liberation and revolutionary groups”, Al-Mathaba has sponsored a number of stridently anti-Western conferences in Tripoli. At the same time, its mission is to identify and recruit revolutionaries for ideological and military training in Libya. During their training in Libyans camps, individuals are selected for advanced training, including in weapons and explosives, and indoctrination. With representatives in many Libyan embassies worldwide, Al-Mathaba runs its own independent clandestine operations and disburses payments to terrorist, insurgent, and subversive groups.As of 1992 Al-Mathaba was headed by Musa Kusa, a Gaddafi confidant who was also Libya’s Deputy Foreign Minister. As of late 1995 Musa Kusa was the head of the Libyan External Security Agency, and was also the head of Al Mathaba International. Al Mathaba is more a concept than an organization. Its origins are Libyan and its objective anti-imperialist. Libya’s international activity is considerable. Some see it everywhere, behind every armed, or even radical, group. It was in 1982 that Libya took the initiative of organizing an international organization essentially based on the third world: Al Mathaba. By calling the 3rd Al Mathaba Congress in August 2000, to mark the 30th anniversary of its revolution, with the participation of many representatives, particularly from Africa and Latin America, Libya no doubt hoped to affirm for itself an active international role, far beyond its small size. Judging by the level of participation, its plan was particularly well received, reflecting the high degree of sympathy Libya enjoys in the anti-imperialist world — the result of the continuity of its efforts over a period of time. Once an organization that backed morally, financially and physically the liberation movements seeking to overthrow oppressive regimes — often times through armed struggle — Col. Gaddafi said that “after restructuring, (Mathaba) must confront the concept of globalization.” Many heads of state were present: Sam Nujoma (Namibia), Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe), Yoweri Kaguta Musaveni (Uganda), Blaise Campraore (Burkina Faso), Alpha Oumar Konare (Mali), Yahya Jammeh (Gambia), Idris Deby (Chad), Abdou Diouf (Senegal), and the President of Guinea Bissao. Progressive political forces, communists and revolutionaries were there as well: the Cuban CP, Shaffik Handal (FMLN, San Salvador), the Guatemalan URNG, Tomas Borge and Daniel Ortega of the FSLN (Nicaragua), Raul Reyes (FARC, Columbia), a personal representative of Hugo Chavezfla-bank-meeting-to-focus-on-biofuels Apr-3-2008 (Venezuela), Lula, of the Brazilian Labour Party, Gladys Marin, General Secretary of the Chilean CP, Marina Arismendi, General Secretary of the Uruguayan CP. From Europe there was a very varied Italian delegation, with the Refoundation Communist Party in particular, and a Spanish delegation from the United Left (José Cabo) and from OSPAAAL. ~ Al Mathaba / Anti-Imperialism Center

Legal threats are familiar to many of us bloggers. A certain ;;; comes to mind...

Crikey on Class

2008-04-07T15:39:00.002+10:00

Online mag Crikey has had a couple of interesting articles recently, both of which are worth bookmarking for future reference.

The first is by Jeff Sparrow, editor of the Overland journal, who argues that US forces are colluding with Shi'ite elites against the nationalist Iraqi resistance, composed largely of the underclass:

According to George Bush, "Iraqi security forces are waging a tough battle against militia fighters and criminals in Basra, many of whom have received arms and training and funding from Iran." But hang on a minute. In that "tough battle", isn’t the US providing air support for an organization called the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq? Wasn’t the SCIRI (more recently known as the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq) founded 25 years ago as an Iranian proxy? Didn’t, until May last year, the SCIRI/ICI explicitly take its spiritual direction from Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei?

I've seen this theme elsewhere of some of the left-leaning blogosphere, and I'd be interested to hear from anybody who knows more. Anybody who still believes that the Iraq War was an emancipatory project should be disabused of their illusions upon learning that private security firm Blackwater has had its contract in Iraq renewed, in spite of allegations of civilian massacres, and in spite of the wishes of the Iraqi people.

Closer to home, Crikey has published an article examining the disparities in wealth between Australians, and puts paid to the Howardian myth of unparalleled economic prosperity:

St. Vincent de Paul assisted over 2.1 million Australians in 2006. An estimated 100,000 Australians are currently homeless. The percentage of the population living in poverty increased in 10 years (1994 to 2004) from 7.6% to 9.9%. Australia ranks unfavourably against most OECD nations on poverty.

It's good to see such issues receive a bit of attention, when the rest of the media is focusing on Wayne Carey's foibles, and newsreaders coming out of the closet. Traditional leftist considerations of class, and the analysis of struggles between classes are still essential is a supposedly post-Marxist, postmodern world.

Action and Reaction/ Reality and Perception

2008-04-04T11:41:00.004+11:00

I have little interest in engaging in the pseudo-debate over Dutch filmmaker Geert Wilder's Fitna. As far as I can see, it is the cinematic equivalent of street graffito saying 'Go home, Lebs'.

Nonetheless, certain sections of the media and blogosphere were falling over themselves in Australia and the US in their rush to tell us how necessary this film was to disabuse us of our illusions about Islam. Apparently, Islam is not a secret mission (arm-in-arm with the 'politically correct' crowd, you see) to take over the world, beginning with Europe. As Melbourne's resident cherry-picker, Andrew Bolt put it:

If Geert Wilders was very wrong about Islam, his film would not cause such panic...If Wilders is so wrong, people wouldn’t be so terrified as to try to ban his film, which does virtually nothing but quote the Koran and Muslim leaders, and show without comment the work of some Muslim groups. (source)

It is therefore heartening to see an article in the Israeli press that elaborates on this supposed panic, and the nature of the Islamic menace in Holland:

Dutch Jews are more outspoken than local Muslims in their criticism of the newly released anti-Islam film by rightist legislator Geert Wilders, says Dr. Ronny Naftaniel, head of the pro-Zionist Center for Information and Documentation (CIDI).

"They [the Muslim community] are afraid. They have been told by the Dutch government to keep quiet and be wise about this issue, and that's what they want to do," Naftaniel told Haaretz on Monday in CIDI's four-story headquarters near the American embassy.

"I was surprised by the silence of the local Muslim leaders," Naftaniel added. "If I were a Muslim, I would speak out and I would blame Wilders for this film. I wouldn't stop shouting about it. I don't understand their silence, I really don't. I think they are scared."

"We are never afraid to speak out in the harshest of terms against what we think is wrong, be it against Muslim extremism here in the Netherlands, or the Dutch or Israeli governments," he said. "But this movie portrays all Muslims as The Enemy. And this is just not true."

So much for panic on the streets of Amsterdam.

A Salvo Against Cruise-Missile 'Liberals'

2008-04-03T12:38:00.004+11:00

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in light of 9/11 and the ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories, a number of self-identified leftists or liberals underwent a period of colonoscopic self-examination. Many emerged from the process as supporters of US, British, and, more locally, Australian imperialism. Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, Pamela Bone, the Eustonites - collectively these people are known as the 'Decent Left'.

A rather indecent comrade, who happens to be arguably the best solo blogger on the intertubes, has just published a book looking at this very subject:

It's published by the excellent Verso, who also provide a good deal of other indecent stuff, such as anti-imperialist tomes, and exegeses on Lacan. Pre-order the book, comrades, and tell your Decent friends to return to their colonoscopic self-examination!

In the meantime, if you'd like a shorter rebuttal of Decentism, you could do much worse than this hilarious rejoinder.

Whack-A-Mole

2008-03-27T10:28:00.002+11:00

Many of the unctuous half-wits on the right-side of the blogosphere appear to be concerned with pursuing a kind of cultural hegemony. You can see this in those few who, having well and truly lost the argument, continue to bleat about the beauty and goodness of US invasions of Vietnam and Iraq, for instance.

Another commonplace is the notion that fascism generally, and Hitler, specifically, are somehow 'socialist' or 'leftist'. Unsurprisingly, whenever this claim is made, little evidence is offered in its defence, other than some guilt-by-association remarks about former Democrats (who are neither leftist nor socialist in any case), and some vague statements that Hitler controlled the German economy in a 'socialist' fashion. A young, intellectually-challenged boy illustrated this with some recent comments on my blog:

Hitler was a Socialist at heart. The Nazis controlled the economy and told the companies what to produce, they just didn't sieze them. Hitler was NOT ALL Right-Wing.

It is curious that rightists attack the Nazis on economic grounds, given that this was the only area in which they were somewhat 'successful', and considering that it is for war and genocide, not economic tinkering, that we revile them today.
Furthermore, if economic intervention by governments is definitional of either fascism or socialism, then virtually every post-war Western government must fall into one of the latter categories. Free markets, after all, do not exist except in textbooks (and certain third-world dictatorships, such as Colombia, or Egypt). The Bush administration 'controlled' the economy by contracting the likes of Haliburton and Blackwell to perform various tasks that formerly would have been the domain of the state. In this, the Bush presidency meets the rightard criteria for Hitlerism/socialism on economic grounds, to say nothing of the curtailing of civil liberties, or histrionic 'patriotism'.

We should also remember that, at the time of Hitler, informed leftists were bitterly opposed to fascism, on economic and other grounds. This is clearly demonstrated on the anti-fascist writings of Trotsky, Benjamin, Adorno and others around the time of Hitler's ascendancy. In both Italy and Germany, fascists came to power by way of alliances with a conservative coalition, the aim of both groups being to keep out the socialist left.

Finally, let us look at what an actual historian (Robert Paxton), rather than partisan pundit, has to say about fascism and the economy:

Fascism was not the first choice of most businessmen, but most of them preferred it to the alternatives that seemed likely in the special conditions of 1922 and 1933-socialism or a dysfunctional market system. So they mostly acquiesced in the formation of a fascist regime and accommodated to its requirements of removing Jews from management and accepting onerous economic controls. In time, most German and Italian businessmen adapted well to working with fascist regimes, at least those gratified by the fruits of rearmament and labor discipline and the considerable role given to them in economic management. Mussolini's famous corporatist economic organization, in particular, was run in practice by leading businessmen.

Peter Hayes puts it succinctly: the Nazi regime and business had "converging but not identical interests." Areas of agreement included disciplining workers, lucrative armaments contracts, and job-creation stimuli. (p. 145)

Fascist regimes functioned like an epoxy: an amalgam of two very different agents, fascist dynamism and conservative order, bonded by shared enmity toward liberalism and the Left, and a shared willingness to stop at nothing to destroy their common enemies. (p. 147) (source)

I'm sure that the shameless dissembling of the right will continue, on this topic as on others, but in keeping with the carnival spirit that inhabits this blog, I encourage everybody to continue playing whack-a-mole as often as is necessary.

Victoria, the Surveillance State

2008-02-27T00:48:00.002+11:00

Some of this information has been provided to me via a couple of sources, and is not widely known.

The State Government of Victoria funds, administers, and oversees a sizeable portion of the state’s ‘services’, from hospitals to housing. These welfare state services are spread across a number of Ministerial portfolios, as well as a number of ‘Departments’. As much as the libertarians may complain about it, when things go wrong in Australia, the locals tend to expect the relevant government to do something about it.

In addition to those services directly overseen by the State Government, we also have the so-called Non Government Agencies (NGAs), who are private firms to whom state services are outsourced and sub-contracted. This takes place by way of a competitive tendering process and much red tape, though I suspect some of the state’s more ardent capitalists might question precisely how ‘competitive’ the whole process is. In welfare-related industries, the NGAs in Victoria are auspiced almost entirely by one Christian church/religious group or another. The services themselves are secular, but the infrastructure and so forth are provided by the agency and funded by the Government. The same agencies will often have a fundraising component or some other means of diverting cash into less secular activities.

In short, this means that there are hundreds of thousands of Victorians who will come into these services, in one capacity or another. Not unreasonably, we might expect each particular industry to maintain a database for a range of purposes – to facilitate better ‘service delivery’, communicate, for legal reasons, etc. After all, in Victoria we have legislation governing the privacy of individual’s personal information, and the limits to which such information can be used.

What is less reasonable is that there should be a centralised point at which all this information converges. Such a point has been constructed in the form of a computer program, known variously as CRIS or CRISP (as well as a couple of other acronymic monikers). This program was commissioned by the Victorian Government some years ago, and built by a private programming firm. My information now tells me that the Government has since bought out the program, owns it outright, and intends to market and sell it to other states and countries.

My understanding is that, functionally speaking, the above computer program was a turd. The Government spent ever-increasing amounts of cash to salvage the project, running up a bill that is somewhere in the order of $53 million.

The software itself applies to a range of Government programs, such as housing, disability services, youth justice, child protection, and the various NGA appendages attached to these services.

Now, a NGA worker cannot read the file of a housing worker, who in turn cannot read the file of a youth justice worker, even though each uses the same program, and may be dealing with the same individual. We can safely conclude that this program has nothing to do with improving communication or information sharing.

Secondly, the program is functionally inferior to its predecessors – slower, more prone to bugs, and tends to significantly increase the administrative burden of workers. The implementation of this program therefore must have nothing to do with ‘efficiency’, unless it was designed by half-wits.

The only reasons that I can see for foisting this software onto thousands of workers, and, by extension, hundreds of thousands of members of the public (as the software does not merely take details for individuals, but also for their associates) are firstly, that this information is siphoned back to the central branch of these Government agencies. In effect, a massive database has been created, including information about hundreds of thousands of Victorians. Given the ‘welfare’ orientation of most of these agencies, one can readily appreciate that much of the information is sensitive in nature. What does the Government intend to do with all this information? – I have no idea.

The second reason is much more entrepreneurial. I’m told that the program will be marketed and sold to other states (and possibly countries) on the basis of its promised ‘efficiencies’.

In the meantime, tens of millions of Victorian dollars have been blown on a useless piece of software, whose only virtue is being able to keep masses of people under a kind of surveillance. As I wrote earlier, few know of this nasty piece of work, possibly because the Vic Government is among the country’s more secretive. Who knows, this may even unite libertarians and Foucauldians or, more likely, it will simply allow the screws of Governmental control to turn a little tighter.

So spread the word, comrades, and do anything you can to fight this little tyranny, though it be of a petty, and bureaucratic form.

Some religions are plain authoritarian...

2008-02-23T04:30:00.002+11:00

An Italian judge was sentenced to a year in prison for refusing to sit in a courtroom with a crucifix on the wall, his lawyer said...Crucifixes have been present in Italian courtrooms since a 1926 justice ministry directive under the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini that has never been repealed in mainly Catholic Italy. (source)

Benito who? I suspect there will one day be a generation who, nourished on propaganda, will have never heard the term 'fascism' without the epithet 'Islamo-' thrown in front of it.

Lies or Stupidity?

2008-02-22T01:18:00.002+11:00

The tinfoil Rightists of the blogosphere frequently complain about 'left wing bias' in Universities. Supposing this bias to exist - is it any wonder, given the cretinism and dissembling that our Rightard friends exhibit when trying to argue a point?

The example, in this case, is a piece of 'research' by Joan Martin, on behalf of the proto-fascist British National Party, known for their criminal violence, anti-Semitism, and other niceties.

Naturally, this garbage is not only lapped up by the usual credulous bigots, but is then, without shame, passed off as gospel truth. It's not clear to me how this research, an attempted critique of Marxist influence on society, could be taken seriously by anybody, much less grown adults. Are the brazen liars, or merely drooling half-wits? Let's have a look at some of the rotten fruits of this research, and see:

A WORLD COUP d’ ETAT IS PLANNED TO BRING ABOUT WORLD GOVERNMENT
The time-line explained:
KARL MARX.1818-1883
Marx was a German Jew with radical views.

At least they got that bit right.

In 1842 he became a member of the Hegelians an anti-religious, radical group with Satanic interests.

And thus the blithering idiocy begins. Hegel was actually conservative in almost all of his opinions, and was an advocate of Protestantism. He also exhibited the typical conservative subservience to traditional authority figures. Neither Hegel, nor any of his followers whose names are known to history, have any demonstrable link to 'Satanic interests'.
Furthermore, following Hegel's death, there tended to be two groups of students influences by him: the Right Hegelians (conservatives, obviously) and the 'Young' (Left) Hegelians. Marx, in his early days, was associated by the latter. What they took from Hegel was not conservative opinion on Church and State, etc, but rather, Hegel's dialectical method of philosophy. Perhaps this is superfluous, since I see no evidence that our resident rightards have read a page of Marx or Hegel.

In 1843 he left Germany and went to Paris where he met Engels who helped him financially.
In 1845 he was expelled from Paris.
In 1848 went to live in Brussels were he wrote the Communist Manifesto.
In 1849 Marx moved to London and lived there for the rest of his life.

Back on track, but hardly an exposé.

THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO INCLUDES.
The Abolition of Private Property
The Abolition of the Family.
The Abolition of Countries and Nationalities.
The Abolition of all Religions, morality and Religious Liberty, this shows the Hegelians Idealism.
The Abolition of Freedom of conscience. In a Democracy people believe in the freedom to choose.
The word Communist covers anyone who aspires to World Government.
Marxism works towards achieving World Government and World Dictatorship.

The Manifesto includes a few other things, too, such as calls for universal education, and the abolition of child labour. You can see why the free marketeers would oppose it. Fundamentally, however, Marx and Engels used this text to argue in favour of a stateless and classless society, not a 'world dictatorship'. At the time of the Manifesto, only one nation in Continental Europe was a democracy (France), and even that brutalised its citizens, and even that only became democratic through revolutionary force.
Of course, the Manifesto has nothing to do with the abolition of religion or 'freedom of conscience', though Marx did point out the unholy alliances formed between religious powerbrokers and earthly rulers. Still less did this text have anything to do with 'Hegelian idealism', since Marx considered himself to be the precise opposite of an 'idealist' (i.e. he was a 'materialist'). The strident internationalism of the Manifesto cannot be understated, and it is on this point, as on many others, that Marxism is the precise opposite of fascism/Nazism, despite the dissembling of Rightards.

In any case, there is no excuse for the constant black propaganda against Marx, when all of his works are readily available for free.

Marx and his friends Engles and Balunin (sic) received their ideas from Moses Hess the founder of the German Social Democrat Party. Moses Hess taught that to gain a World State it could only be brought about by a revolution using class and racial hatred. He said race struggle is primary, class struggle is secondary.”
Mikhail Balunin said “That what ever the name or label of those who aspire to world government they must be prepared to awake the devil in people and stir their passions for them to act.” Passion as with football hooligans, vandals and various peace groups and the race groups.

Or perhaps 'passion' as seen by today's bigots, such as the BNP, or the Cronulla rioters, or some of our rightard bloggers.
Notably, no attempt is made to cite a single instance of 'racial hatred' by Marx, let alone demonstrate that is was 'primary' in his struggle. For what it's worth, Marx was influenced by Hess only in the relatively early days of his career, and he later disagreed with much of his work. In any case, Hess was a proto-Zionist, and therefore hardly an enemy of the rightards (must bring on the Rapture!).

Marx wrote three requirements for those who wished to join the fight for World Government.
1 To read the Communist and Revolutionary teachings of Marx and associates and work accordingly.
2 To work to destabilise nations both morally and financially.
3 To work to gain political control of the MONEY supply and the ASSETS of each Nation and put them BEYOND the REACH and CONTROL of each Government by ensuring that nations become INTER-DEPENDANT on each other for FOOD, MACHINERY and through LOANS.

Marx didn't actually set up a school or club of 'Marxists'. Naturally, one would expect anybody calling themselves Marxist to have read at least some of his works, just as we would with a Freudian, Newtonian, or whatever.
Point 2 is most interesting - it allows our conspiracy-minded tinfoilers the opportunity to interpret any perceived 'instability', new fad, crisis, or change in the wind as a MARXIST PLOY FOR WORLD DOMINATION!!!

Marx also said, “Steps should be taken to provide a master race to produce Leaders and Dictators”

Did he now? This slanderous claim is rather easily proven false. Significantly, the scum who produced this libel did not bother to attribute the quote, perhaps knowing that their half-witted audience would devour it anyway.

Based on this inauspicious beginnings, the rightards purport to demonstrate that a Marxist world government is about to take over any day now:

Capitalism was infiltrated and attacked from within in order to destroy its reputation and Hollywood was implemented to break down the image of the man who financially supports his family and to help create the romantic image of the ‘activist’ (who, when stripped of this fallacious image, is nothing more than an instrument to destroy what we had).
As globalist Marxists reach the zenith of their power, we small band of resisters face the prospect of seeing the true face of this beast unleash its vengeance upon us. It will have its day, the Bible predicts this. But that day will be cut short. We will need to be salt and light to this planet while we can. When we are gone, there will be nothing left.

How embarrassing. This is real fish-in-a-barrel stuff, and easily dismissed. Woe unto the next generation of half-educated youngsters, who may be so unfortunate as to take the above claims seriously, or to think that Hitler was really a socialist, or that Hillary Clinton is a communist and Obama a fascist. The ideas of Marx are there to be discussed and debated, but I can't see any attempt to do that in the above passage, which is being circulated as holy writ by our holy fools. As long as such flagrant smear tactics and peddling of untruths passes for Rightist 'research', we can expect, much to the chagrin of bigots, that genuine scholarship and academia will remain firmly outside of their grasp. But what can one expect from clowns whose highest philosophical achievement is (snicker) reading Ayn Rand?

Why the Frankfurt School is Hated

2008-02-01T17:15:00.000+11:00

1. A cartel of German professors (and one Italian) are responsible, according to Pat Buchanan, William S. Lind, and other members of the dribbling idiot-right, for the 'cultural Marxism' that has infected the American mind. '[T]hose who love freedom should consider these besieged institutions — the family, traditional religion, [Helleno-Christian] morality — as “layers of strength” that have remarkable resiliency and must be restored. But the work of restoration cannot be effective unless a sufficient number of (people who care) come to understand the conspiratorial origins of our culture war.'

2. 'Frankfurt school' is an anti-Semite codeword for 'Jew'.

3. 'Newspapers and magazines of the radical Right constantly stir up indignation against what is unnatural, over-intellectual, morbid and decadent: they know their readers. The insights of social psychology into the authoritarian personality confirm them. The basic features of this type include conformism, respect for a petrified facade of opinion and society, and resistance to impulses that disturb its order or evoke inner elements of the unconscious that cannot be admitted...The Nazis were already using the term 'cultural bolshevism' under the Weimar Republic, and hatred of what it refers to has survived the epoch of Hitler, when it was institutionalised.' - Adorno, 'Commitment'.

Before the Last Word...

2008-02-01T15:58:00.000+11:00

I know that the recently departed Suharto, like all heroes of free market capitalism, will soon be re-baptised, and his atrocities will be forgotten (by all but the Indonesians). Thus it was for Augusto ('Sure he was a bastard, but he was good for the economy') Pinochet. So too, for Yeltsin - known in the West merely as a drunken buffoon, rather than as the man who foreclosed the possibility of a democratic Russia, all the while selling off his country's resources to KGB stooges, and Party cadres.

Naomi Klein has an excellent site that elaborates upon her equally fine book, The Shock Doctrine. Despite many dismissive reviews, I'm yet to see a serious refutation of her theses.

In any case, some interesting material on Indonesia is to be found there.

Indonesia had the biggest Communist Party in the world, with the exception of China. Ex-CIA operatives tell of the part played by the US in eliminating thousands of 'communists', from the highest offical, to village organisers.

The Indonesian economy was guided by advisors from Berkeley. The advice was unpopular amongst the people but then, I suppose that's what massacres are for.

Finally, a 1965 article from Time discusses how Muslims were armed, incited and trained by the Indonesian army and government to kill suspected communists and their families, 'by the thousands'.

Such are the costs of the 'free' market.

KPI's Missed

2008-02-01T15:42:00.000+11:00

Does anybody still remember Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 2006? Ostensibly an invasion to liberate soldiers being held prisoner, the war appeared to have been planned for some time prior to this. In addition, despite worldwide condemnation of the inevitable human rights abuses that would follow an Israeli invasion, the US ensured that any 'peace talks' were delayed long enough for large parts of Lebanon to be destroyed, thus allowing Israel's hawks to meet their KPI's.

When all of this was reported upon by the Western press and blogosphere, we were told that such views were based on propaganda, lies, or worse, anti-Semitism.

I was interested, then, to read the following report recently:

A key report into Israel's 2006 war on Lebanon has listed a series of major failings by the Jewish state but said Prime Minister Ehud Olmert acted in good faith.

"Overall, we regard the second Lebanon war as a serious missed opportunity," the head of a government-appointed commission into the conflict, Eliyahu Winograd, said according to an official English translation of his remarks. (source)

A missed opportunity? One opportunity that wasn't missed was the opportunity to target Lebanon's civilian population with cluster bombs (pictured above), for what is sometimes called 'collective punishment'.

"The army should re-examine the conditions for the use of cluster bombs... especially given the need to reduce losses among the civilian population after a complete halt to fighting," the Winograd Commission said.

"The use of these bombs should be restricted to military objectives that justify their use," it said in the 630-page report which was initially released on Wednesday.

Cluster munitions spread bomblets over a wide area from a single device. The bomblets often do not explode on impact, but can do so later at the slightest touch, making them as deadly as anti-personnel landmines.

At least 38 people have been killed and 217 wounded by cluster bombs in the region since the end of the conflict, according to the United Nations.

During the war which raged from July 12 until August 14, 2006, Hezbollah militants whose capture of two Israeli soldiers sparked the war fired more than 4,000 rockets at northern Israel. (source)

Since cluster bombs function more as less as mine-spreading devices, they are the gift that keeps on giving. I won't link to pictures of the sorts of damage these devices do, but images are readily available on Google.

Of course, Hezbollah did fire 4,000 rockets into Northern Israel, according to the above report. I suppose my critics would suggest that would justify some form of measured retaliation, self-defense and all:

"What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs," the head of an IDF rocket unit in Lebanon said regarding the use of cluster bombs and phosphorous shells during the war.

Quoting his battalion commander, the rocket unit head stated that the IDF fired around 1,800 cluster bombs, containing over 1.2 million cluster bomblets. (source)

This comes from the mainstream Israeli press, I might add, not the Green Left Weekly. A ratio of four thousand bombs to 1.2 million seems reasonable. Can't imagine why anybody might have wished to criticise Israeli foreign policy. A missed opportunity, indeed.

John Ray Redux

2008-01-31T10:50:00.000+11:00

Back in October 2007, I wrote this post on AWH blogger John Ray (among others). My contention was primarily that Ray used a range of means to piggyback blatant racism onto more acceptable discourses (such as 'science', mainstream conservatism, libertarianism, 'anarcho-capitalism', and whatever else the guy hides behind).

In addition to this argument, there were, on my part, some ad hom attacks. These occurred in the context of Ray using mostly slurs to prop up his otherwise sloppy reasoning and impoverished arguments. They also occurred in the context of AWH being one of the most personally abusive sites on the Oz blogosphere, a site whose muppets call for violence against any who dare to disagree with their outlandish views.

I was therefore surprised, therefore, to find our sensitive soul, poor old Ray, engaged in special pleading. He makes virtually no attempt to refute any substantive points about his racism, preferring instead to focus solely on the ad hom remarks, as if they disqualified the broader thesis. Let us have a look at his pathetic attempts at rebuttal.

Within the last couple of days, I have been attacked by TWO Leftist bloggers! And note that they attacked ME, not any of the facts and arguments that I have put forward...They hate the truths that I have highlighted but they were so unable to refute those truths that all they could manage was an attempt to shoot the messenger.

Ray is not in possession of facts, much less 'truths'. As we shall see, he is hardly averse to 'shooting the messenger' himself.

And it is therefore MOST amusing that one of my recent Leftist critics had obviously trawled at great length through my autobiographical data looking for "dirt" and was able to come up with? Can you guess? Can you guess what he found to criticize? He criticized my POETRY!! What a good laugh I had about that! I doubt that any of my readers here would have been aware that in my long-lost teens I did write a bit of poetry. I put the poetry concerned online with the note that "I don't think much of it now" so criticisms of it leave me supremely unmoved.

If the poetry was trivial, and merely a byproduct of adolescent indulgence, why publish it in the first place? In any case, criticism of the poetry was not conducted on the basis of Ray's literary technique (which, incidentally, is poor), but rather, on his flabby and pompous self-importance, on the one hand, and his preoccupation with (ahem) racial purity on the other.

Ray then attempts to critique my original post. He commences inauspiciously, confining himself to picking up a spelling error. He goes on:

He then goes on to talk about my "hilariously unpublishable articles"! Wow! So how come over 200 of them did get published in mainstream academic journals? He is however not short of mental "agility". He then goes on to QUOTE from some of my published academic journal articles!

Frankly, I am surprised that anyone, anywhere, would publish Ray's rubbish. In any case, Ray is trying here to use the corollary of the ad hom argument, namely, the argument form authority. Furthermore, Ray's posts are hilariously unpublishable - his screeds on the 'psychopathy' of leftists, for instance, would not be admitted into scientific literature, and not, as Ray claims, because of some global communist conspiracy.

Ray, like a fat asthmatic boy trying to outrun a doberman, subsequently attempts to refute the charge of racism:

I DO quite happily make statements about race and racism that are of a kind that would have been regarded as perfectly normal thoughout all of human history -- but which have just in the last few decades become furiously excoriated.

Lot's of things in the 'last few decades' have become 'furiously excoriated'. Smallpox is one. Racism is another. That Ray assures us that his comments would have been perfectly acceptable in 19th Century Alabama, or 18th Century England, does not, in fact, mean that they are not racist.

The only reasonable definition of racism that I can see is something along the lines of "harming a person solely because of his race" but to a modern-day Leftist, just discussing race is "racism".

Constructing arguments along the lines of racial purity, condemning whole swathes of people for the supposedly 'racial' basis of their purported inferiority, and calling for violence against other races all look like 'harming a person' to me. Plenty of people discuss 'race' and 'racism', as well as genetics - few object to this. If anything, it is Ray's fellow-travellers who deride attempts to discuss race and racism. We have long seen how the rightist media attack the humanities departments in which these topics are given scholarly consideration. Obviously, Ray's ludicrous generalisations here are not substantiated.

And in the simple-minded theology of the Left, a racist would definitely have to be an antisemite so how to explain my unwavering support for Israel? Most of my blogs actually display an Israeli flag -- yet I am not Jewish.

I can't think of any 'leftist' who equates racism solely with anti-Semitism. Ray's retort here is of almost unbelievable stupidity. It is entirely possible to be pro-Israel, and nonetheless violently oppose the emancipation of other racial, religious and national groups. It is obvious that many members of the radical right have, ostensibly, a pro-Jewish, pro-Israel attitude - this in no way diminishes their contempt for Muslims, Africans, inter alia. If anything, the radical rightists and lunatic Christian Zionists like Ray are bigots precisely in their attitude to Israel, insofar as Jews as a category escape vilification only when they can be instrumentalised to the rightist's cause. This is a topic I shall expand upon at some later date.

Ray continues to ramble, as he slides into senescence, about how Hitler and fascism were 'leftist'. He is not alone in this folly - see the 'Hillary is fascist' crowd - but this proves only that imbecility is often practised in company.

Most amusingly, Ray claims to have 'comprehensively' refuted all allegations of racism, and he links to a rebuttal of an article cited in my original post, be a chap named Mehler. The article rightly points to Ray's love of enjoining others to embrace racism, and notes his obsession with racial categories, his contempt for various racial and religious groups, and his history of joining neo-Nazi groups. Ray attempts to respond:

To a Leftist, just mentioning the word "race" makes you immediately suspect. And I have never hesitated to say that I believe that race is real and that it does make a difference. And that is one reason why I have never bothered to reply to that specific article until now.

Has anybody seriously denied that race is real, or that it makes a difference? And is this what Ray has actually argued, given his posts include praise for Apartheid (based on the latter's 'benefits' for blacks) and endorsements of racism as 'normal' and 'beneficial'?

Ray spends a paragraph trying to use the word 'leftist' as a term of ad hom abuse. The Mehler article noted, correctly, that when radical rightists such as Ray invoke names such as 'Adorno', or the Frankfurt School, this is actually a mere codeword for 'Jewish'. Ray himself draws explicit attention to this. When called on his own racial obsessions, Ray attempts to wriggle free of the net by way of his own laughably inept ad homs:

[Mehler] also seems to find some awful significance in the fact that I referred to the Adorno group as "Jewish". He is perfectly right that one would not normally refer to the ethnicity of an academic author unless it was particularly relevant in some way. But in this case it IS relevant.

Ah, I see. Adorno = Jewish, therefore Adorno, in Ray's words, cannot 'be objective about Nazism'. Nice. Wonderful supporter of Jews.

[Mehler] also says that I write "approvingly" of people who use mocking names for Jews. That tends to suggest that I approve of such names. I do not. But I do find that many of the people who use such names are normal and non-psychopathological.

Ray here employs typical rightist tactics - diversion, obfuscation, and impugning of motives. The 'psychopathology' of those who employ racial slurs was never at issue, at least, not in this discussion. The racism of these epithets, apparently endorsed by Ray, stands, irrespective of where such phenomena sit in the DSM-IV. This is yet another distinction that our great scholar fails to grasp.

Rather charmingly, Ray responds to claims that he joined Nazi groups by conceding them, but adding, 'It was only for research!'. I suspect that Hugh Grant must once have used the same excuse to Liz Hurley, when caught with Divine Brown.

Finally, in his attempted defence of himself, Ray once again reiterates his delusional position on leftism and fascism, and concludes with a series of addenda, almost all of which are mere personal attacks on others:

It will be apparent from what I have written above that I regard Billig's criticisms of me as being no more than cheap shots. I am amused therefore to note that "Billig" is an Ashkenazi name which in fact means "cheap".

And this cretin has the audacity to cry - 'But they pick on me!'.

Ray and many (though not all) of his cronies are thorough-going racists, and they continue to peddle hatred on ethnic and religious grounds. Just the other day, his comrade was linking to a well-known white supremacist site, claiming it as authoritative on the topic of Muslims. Furthermore, Ray and his sycophants continue to sockpuppet me, attributing to me comments on their site that I have not written. I have written to them about this, and have suggested that use my ISP to verify my identity, but they refuse to respond in any way, other than to continue the sockpuppeting.

How sad, for one's arguments to be so woefully inept that you need to create opponents simple enough to leave them unscathed. And for ad hom king Ray to bitch and moan about his opponents at all merely ensures that he can add the title of hypocrite to his well-earned moniker of half-wit.

UPDATE: I see that another blogger has come up with a response to Ray, very similar to mine. It's hilarious that Ray and his fellow defenders of Der Vaterland allege, with a straight face, that it is the 'liberals' who are fascist. In addition, I've seen that the AWH bigots continue to call explicitly for genocide against Muslims, and continue to employ the sockpuppet. I guess there's little more than one can expect from these freaks - after all, there are no 'moderate' fascists.

Fact and Fiction in Indonesia

2008-01-29T16:18:00.000+11:00

Shameless revisionism and dead, politically rightist, economically neo-liberal dictators seem to go hand in hand.

When Pinochet met his maker a year ago, the likes of Andrew Bolt (in Australia) or the Wall Street Journal (in the US) were falling over themselves to assure readers of Chile's economic prosperity, attributed to Pincohet's bloody rule. The deaths, torture, exile and disappearances of thousands were ignored as the apologists clamoured to give us a 'balanced' account of the tyrant's legacy.

It is difficult to imagine any mainstream media outlet eulogising a Castro or Khomeini in similar terms, despite comparable 'achievements', acquired with considerably less slaughter.

The MSM are not the only culprits when it comes to craven deference to elite opinion. Since at least Whitlam, it is arguably on foreign policy that the ALP is at its most repugnant, and this is particularly true in relation to Indonesia.

In light of the silence across one half of the political blogosphere, let us peruse a few examples:

Australia's Attorney-General Robert McClelland and former prime minister Paul Keating have made a flying visit to Indonesia to pay their respects at the funeral of former Indonesian dictator Suharto...The pair attended the funeral with Australia's Ambassador to Indonesia Bill Farmer.
"It respects the office that he held and effectively confirms the Rudd government commitment to an ongoing, strong and supportive relationship with Indonesia."
"We recognise also his achievements ... he brought Indonesia from a country that was subsistence to one with a developing economy...and a nation of significance in the world."
He said the government also recognised the "issues of controversy" with Suharto's rule. (source)

'Issues of controversy'? So delicately put!

Similar delicacy could be found in Wolfowitz, former US ambassador to Suharto:

"This ambassador didn't speak out about human rights here. He was perceived by the public as being close to the Suharto government," said Abdul Hakim Garuda Nusantara, who headed Indonesia's legal aid foundation and now chairs the National Human Rights Commission.
Nusantara said Wolfowitz appeared to ignore abuses committed by Indonesian security forces, which were fighting separatist insurgencies in the provinces of Aceh and Papua. Nor did he raise public concerns about East Timor, which had been invaded by the Indonesian military a decade earlier. Wolfowitz also remained silent about the mounting corruption within Suharto's family and inner circle, Nusantara asserted. (source)

Downer, Australia's former foreign affairs minister, viewed Suharto in similar terms to Keating and Rudd:
"He certainly took a rather regal and, if you like, patronising view of Australia but on the other hand he did understand it was important to have a constructive relationship with Australia," Mr Downer told ABC Radio.
"He wasn't a bad thing for Australia in a lot of ways." (source)

The WSJ, as might be expected, did not hold back in its praise for the newly departed:
Suharto was guilty of hubris when he styled himself Bapak Pembangunan Indonesia, or father of Indonesia's development, and even had this title printed along with his portrait on the 50,000 rupiah note. But that is a pretty accurate summary of his legacy. Like Deng Xiaoping, he rescued his country from totalitarianism and poverty, and put it on the path to prosperity and a large measure of personal freedoms. For all his flaws, Suharto deserves to be remembered as one of Asia's greatest leaders. (source)

One of Asia's greatest leaders?

Hiding out in the dense, humid jungle, Markus Talam watched Indonesian soldiers herd manacled prisoners from trucks, line them up and mow them down with round after round of automatic weapons fire.
"They gunned them down and dumped their bodies in a mass grave dug by other prisoners. I remember the sound of the guns clearly: tat-tat, tat-tat, tat-tat ... over and over again," said Talam, 68, who was later jailed for 10 years after being named a leftist sympathizer.
Estimates for the number killed during his bloody rise to power — from 1965 to 1968 — range from a government figure of 78,000 to 1 million cited by U.S. historians Barbara Harff and Ted Robert Gurr, who have published books on Indonesia's history. It was the worst mass slaughter in Southeast Asia's modern history after the Khmer Rouge killing fields in Cambodia.
The CIA provided lists of thousands of leftists, including trade union members, intellectuals and schoolteachers, many of whom were executed or sent to remote prisons. (source)

Score one for the CIA in another Cold War triumph.

Australia's ALP also had no problems in turning a blind eye to the regime's 'issues of controversy':

A political tempest...erupted in Australia over leaked official documents showing that the leaders of the former Labor government covered up casualty figures from the 1991 massacre carried out by Indonesian troops in the East Timorese capital of Dili.
The facts are that more than 200 people, mostly pro-independence demonstrators, were slaughtered in Dili in November 1991. The then Labor government supported claims by an inquiry set up by the Suharto regime that only about 50 were killed and that the deaths were the responsibility of a few individual officers and soldiers.
The truth is that the Labor leaders had compelling reasons of both "national interest" and "party political interest" for whitewashing the Dili massacre, and every other bloody crime carried out by the Suharto regime. For "national interest" read the profit interests of Australian big business.
In the case of East Timor, the Labor leaders backed the regime's repressive grip over the former Portuguese colony in order to provide BHP and other oil companies with guaranteed access to the immense resources of the Timor Gap--estimated to hold up to 1 billion barrels of crude oil. Just two years before the Dili massacre, Evans and his Indonesian counterpart, Ali Alatas, signed the Timor Gap Treaty in a champagne drinking ceremony as they flew over the Timor Sea, making Australia the only country in the world to legally recognise the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. (source)

Naomi Klein, in her latest outing, also spent some time discussing Suharto's Indonesia, and its wonderful economic prosperity:

Since the Second World War, the country [Indonesia] had been led by President Sukarno, the Hugo Chavez of his day (though minus Chavez's appetite for elections). Sukarno enraged the rich countries by protecting Indonesia's economy, redistributing wealth, and throwing out the International Monetary Fund and The World Bank, which he accused of being facades for the interests of Western multinationals. While Sukarno was a nationalist, not a Communist, he worked closely with the Communist Party, which had 3 million active members. The U.S. and British governments were determined to end Sukarno's rule, and declassified documents show that the CIA had received high-level directions to "liquidate President Sukarno, depending upon the situation and available opportunities."
After several false starts, the opportunity came in October 1965, when General Suharto, backed by the CIA, began the process of seizing power and eradicating the left. The CIA had been quietly compiling a list of the country's leading leftists, a document that fell into Suharto's hands, while the Pentagon helped out by supplying extra weapons and field radios so Indonesian forces could communicate in the remotest parts of the archipelago. Suharto then sent out his soldiers to hunt down the four to five thousand leftists on his "shooting lists," as the CIA referred to them; the U.S. embassy received regular reports on t heir progress. As the information came in, the CIA crossed names off their lists until they were satisfied that the Indonesia left had been annihilated. One of the people involved in the operation was Robert J. Martens, who worked for the U.S. embassy in Jakarta. "It really was a big help to the army," he told the journalist Kathy Kadane twenty-five years later. "They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad [my emphasis]. There's a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment." (source)

Indeed, Indonesia's leftists, secular democrats and trade unionists were all 'struck hard', leaving the Islamists, organising through one of the few non-banned institutions (the mosque), to resist. It is an inconvenient truth for the ruling elites that Islamic extremism emerges from the same globalised milieu as 'free trade' corporate rule.

So vale, Suharto. Te futueo et caballum tuum.

Birds of a Feather...

2008-01-28T12:38:00.000+11:00

Is anyone actually surprised that, ahem, 'conservative' blogger, the Crusading Rodent, is linking to erm, 'white nationalist' groups? When will we see a shout-out for Stormfront? Or a post claiming that the KKK were simply misunderstood?

Tactful, Charming, and most of all, Christian

2008-01-24T20:23:00.000+11:00

Members of Westboro Baptist Church, known for picketing the funeral of US soldiers who died in Iraq — arguing homosexuals are the cause of the war, said Ledger is now in hell, OK! magazine reports.
"Heath Ledger thought it was great fun defying God Almighty and His plain word; to wit; God Hates Fags! & Fag-Enablers!" the church said in a statement. (source)

I trust all conservative Christians out there will follow the lead of this young lady, and rebuke these freaks.

Obviously, logic is not a strong-point for these guys. (Presumably they're not Catholic - Catholic theology at least has some λογος in it, however wacky).

By the same 'reasoning', we might well assert that 9/11 was Allah's punishment for US religious infidelity. Such an assertion would create an outcry.

Funniest Post Ever

2008-01-08T06:41:00.000+11:00

Or thereabouts. This oldie, but goodie, can be found here.

Polls in Iraq

2008-01-07T04:41:00.000+11:00

I noted on a far-right blog the other day that, when describing the ongoing war in Iraq, the word occupation was continually used with quotation marks. Perhaps the authors of this blog think that Coalition troops are merely holidaying in the Gulf state.

In any case, the opinions of the Iraqis themselves count for far more than those of fundamentalist bloviators, and a good summary of Iraqi opinion polls can be found here.

A sample of the results follows:

A May 2004 poll sponsored by the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority found that roughly 80 percent of Iraqis had "no confidence" in US-led forces to improve security and that most "would feel safer if Coalition forces left immediately."

A year later, in August 2005, a secret poll conducted for the British Defense Ministry found that "less than one per cent [sic] of the population believes coalition forces are responsible for any improvement in security."

January 2006: A poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) found that around two-thirds of respondents agreed that "'day to day security for ordinary Iraqis' would increase," that "violent attacks would decrease," and that "the amount of interethnic violence will decrease" if the United States withdrew by the summer of 2006.

March 2007: A poll sponsored by US, British, and German news agencies found that "[m]ore than seven in 10 Shiites-and nearly all Sunni Arabs-think the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq is making security worse.

August 2007: A poll sponsored by news agencies in the US, UK, and Germany found that around 70 percent of Iraqis "believe security has deteriorated in the area covered by the US military 'surge' of the past six months" Moreover, 67-70 percent "believe the surge has hampered conditions for political dialogue, reconstruction and economic development."

The result most favourable to the Coalition was a poll that showed 12% of Iraqis 'had at least some confidence in the Multi-National Force to protect their families against threats'.

Oh well. If the Iraqis aren't enjoying US militarist neoconservatism, perhaps they'd prefer US economic neoliberalism. After all, who wouldn't want to be a sub-sub-sub contractor in a war zone.