Passing Bull 375 – Nonsense about a cricketer

Where we live here in Australia, it is not unlawful to say something that is unreasonable, unhinged, or likely to offend someone.  It is different in Iran, Russia, or Turkey. 

But an Australian cricketer, Usman Khawaja, as decent a national representative as we are likely to see, is being roundly castigated for making what are called ‘motherhood’ statements.  Among other things, it is said that in the context of a dreadful war, the statements are ‘political’. 

To the extent that you can give any meaning to that kind of weasel proposition, it is bloody dangerous.  The last form of speech you want to shut down is ‘political’ speech.  That is why people who want to undermine decency in public life move to stop people speaking out against them.  And war being the scourge of humanity, it is vital that people are free to say so.  The greatest crimes against humanity have been committed by people who so terrified others that they kept silent in the face of the crimes of their government.

There are two paintings that are monuments not just to Spanish art but to civilisation – and not just western civilisation.  They are The Third of May 1808 by Goya, and Guernica by Picasso.  They are and have been admired and revered throughput the world.  They are protests against, and denunciations of, the horrors of war by two of the greatest painters we have known.  And each artist obviously invested what might be called his soul into the painting.  And, if you wanted to, you might say that each painting involved a statement that might be called moral, or political, or worse – propaganda.  (For example, Guernica makes clear that the main victims of the bombing were women and children.)

Any such statement about either painting being ‘political’ would add precisely nothing to our understanding of the world, but I have not heard it said that Goya should also have also put forward the views of Napoleon and the Vatican on his subject, or that Picasso should have also put forward the views of Hitler, Franco, Mussolini and the Vatican on his subject.  (Franco saw himself as standing for Christendom and engaged the clergy in his missions of death.)

Sadly, there are times when the level of what passes for debate about the current war in the Middle East fails to rise above a squabble between seven-year-olds behind the State School shelter shed and the universal riposte – ‘Well – you started it!’ 

In the name of Heaven, you can be scolded for suggesting that people should stop killing each other – at least for a while.  The word ‘ceasefire’ is apparently fraught – very fraught.

And may I come back to art and politics or morals?  Have you ever felt like me at a place like the Uffizi Gallery – ‘If I see just one more half-naked bloke dying in agony of open wounds, I will throw up on the bloody spot, and get out of this chamber horrors forever’?  When you look at the art of what we call the Renaissance, all that stuff that Kenneth Clark moons over, how much of it was not full-on propaganda for what was then in the process of ceasing to be the one universal church?

Blessings for Christmas – if I may be permitted either of those terms.

Khawaja – Gaza - freedom of speech – offensive language,