(Passing Bull 414)

The greatest lawyer this country has known said that experience in forensic contests suggests that one story is good until the other side is told.  That obvious truth underlies a large part of our law of civil rights (the Bill of Rights in the United States). 

After a few weeks at the bar in 1971, I turned up at Coburg Petty Sessions with a brief for the respondent husband in a marital maintenance claim.  I spoke to my bloke and then with counsel for the wife.  ‘My bloke says your lady has turned off the sex.’  ‘Only after the night of the razor blade, Mate’.  ‘Bugger. I had better have a chat with him.’  He was less than convincing, and we settled the amount of the maintenance in about an hour. 

Another small notch in the tree of learning.  As in most forms of conflict, the outcome of litigation is a lottery, and you take with a grain of salt what the combatants say.

If you ask about a Collingwood v Carlton game, you will get different responses from each side – sometimes leaving you wondering whether they were at the same game.  The same happens with wars.  (I put to one side the war in Ukraine.  I have not heard any rational defence of the invasion by Russia which looks to me to be a war crime.) 

Take the war in Gaza.  There is obviously a long history, centuries if not millennia, in the world’s most contentious hot spot.  God is involved on both sides, and religious wars are notoriously savage.  So are tribal or ethnic differences that cannot be ignored.  Tribal wars are brutal person to person.  And in Australia, each side has a diaspora, although one has much more power and influence here than the other.  And politicians on both sides in the political arena – if there are still two – are ready to stir the pot for their own political purposes.

That is a frightful cocktail, and it is burning our insides.  The politicians who are seeking to capitalize on the misery of others should be ashamed of themselves.

It is not therefore surprising that prejudice glares straight at us in so much of the commentary.  The violations of logic are dreadful.  Conclusions are asserted that have no basis in their premises.  The Latin term is non sequitur.  If after a collision, one car has damage to the front, it does not follow that the conclusion is that it drove into the back of the other.  It may have been the other way around.  The logicians say the conclusion is not entailed by the premises.  (The OED says of entail – ‘involve something as an unavoidable part or consequence’.)

Well, all that is common experience.  But one fallacy has become endemic.  The war in Gaza provokes wide ranging analyses of causation – as does the recent terrorist atrocity here.  (One question will be – are there any links between the two?)  It is impossible for any fair-minded commentary to canvas all reasonable arguments or theories about causation of either of these human tragedies.

But if one commentator chooses to concentrate on one issue rather than others, it does not follow that that commentator has similarly loaded views on any of the other.  That is plainly a fallacy, and its only function is to remind us of the pervasive risk of prejudice when we mere mortals look at the affairs of the world.  It is as if those offended want to project their passion on to others.  What if the commentator is dispassionate and has no religious, ethnic, or political axe to grind?  Or have we surrendered to the robots and think that no such person exists?

Public emotion is fine and necessary, but it is not decisive, and decisions taken too soon are at best unhelpful.

Australia is said to be, and is, a migrant nation, but most of us have no credal or tribal connection with the combatants in the war in the Middle East.  It would help if those who do have such connection can engage in such a way that we do not face the risk of abuse for what we do not say as much as for what we do say. 

They may also wish to recall that since 1945, the year of my birth, we in Australia have been involved in many foreign wars, and that every one of them was a disaster – for us and others.  Each of those disasters was brought to us by those claiming to lead us – the same people who are now seeking to make party political gain from the most horrendous human misery we can imagine. 

And if the objective of the terrorists is to create division in Australia, those who are here engaged in doing just that might ask just on whose bloody side they are on – because they are not on mine.