Discriminating religions

11/09/201511/09/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

At least three factors lie behind the huge earth-moving conflicts that have led to the current refugee crisis. Not necessarily in order, they are the failure of Muslims and Jews to get on with each other; the failure of Muslims to get on with each other; and the collapse of nations or regimes created or supported by map-drawing imperialists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first two grounds might fairly described as religious conflicts – the war against IS looks to be a war between two kinds of Islam. The third was the shameless and heartless arrogance with which almost every nation in Europe raped and dismembered almost every part of Africa in the nineteenth century – after they had stopped mining it for the human gold called slaves – and the failure of Europe properly to divide the Middle East between the wars or after them. The incursions of Europe and the US into the Middle East or Africa since then have on the whole made things worse.

You might therefore hope that a religious leader in the major former imperialist nation would tread carefully and lightly, and not compound the tragedy by discriminating against people on the ground of religion – the failure that underlies the two main grounds of religious conflict.

Lord Carey, a former archbishop of Canterbury, does not agree. After taking a swipe at the Germans, and Angela Merkel in particular, he advocates discriminating in favour of Christians – and, inevitably, against Muslims.

They [the Christians] are the most vulnerable and repeatedly targeted victims of this conflict. Indeed, a hundred years after the Armenian and Assyrian genocide, in which over a million Christians are estimated to have been killed by Ottoman Muslims, the same is happening today in the form of an ethnic cleansing of Christians in the region. Christians have been crucified, beheaded, raped, and subjected to forced conversion. The so-called Islamic State and other radical groups are openly glorifying the slaughter of Christians.

Britain should make Syrian Christians a priority because they are a particularly vulnerable group. Furthermore, we are a Christian nation with an established Church so Syrian Christians will find no challenge to integration. The churches are already well-prepared and eager to offer support and accommodation to those escaping the conflict.

The first thing to say is that this response is a word perfect example of the tendency I quoted a British traveler as seeing in religious conflict in the Balkans – we only notice an atrocity when a Muslim kills a Christian. But for that, we would not be bombing Syria – his lordship refers to ethnic cleansing; our PM has rediscovered his horror of genocide – well, he is after all, the man who says that IS is worse than the Nazis, so they will have to be done for genocide.

Secondly, may I say something about the swipe at Angela Merkel? His lordship says she panicked to bully the rest of Europe to follow suit. It is an unusual conjunction, panicking and bullying, and one that might show other lesions on the psyche of his lordship. The jingoism is full blooded.

Isn’t it a bit rich for the Germans to criticize other nations, including Britain, for failing to accept refugees? For years, our warm-hearted land has consistently accepted more asylum-seekers than Germany.

This rampant nationalist bullshit comes from a man of God. Most would agree with The Economist, probably to the Left of his lordship, that on this issue, Merkel was ‘brave decisive and right.’ She was ahead of her electorate, and will be reeled in, but the prospects of seeing that kind of leadership here or in England are nil, nought, nothing, nix, and zilch. It is disgraceful for a tory peer and prelate to be taking what the NRL calls cheap shots against someone with the courage to be merely decent.

May I then come to the third and main point – that Christians should get priority because they have suffered most and therefore need refuge the most? That raises an issue of fact on which the testimony of this witness is hopelessly biased. It would not be an easy case to make. Common experience suggests that heretics tend to end up worse than unbelievers in religious conflicts, such as one between Sunni and Shia. Kant said this:

Now, when, as usually happens, a church proclaims itself to be the one church universal (even though it is based upon faith in a special revelation which, being historical can never be required of everyone), he who refuses to acknowledge its (peculiar) ecclesiastical faith is called by it ‘an unbeliever’ and is hated wholeheartedly; he who diverges therefrom only in path (in non-essentials) is called ‘heterodox’ and is at least shunned as a source of infection. But he who avows allegiance to this church and; diverges from it on essentials of its faith (namely, regarding the practices connected with it), is called, especially if he spreads abroad his false belief, a ‘heretic’ and, as a rebel, such a man is held more culpable than a foreign foe, is expelled from the church with anathema (like that which the Romans pronounced on him who crossed the Rubicon against the Senate’s will) and is given over to all the gods of hell. Exclusive correctness of belief in matters of ecclesiastical faith claimed by the church’s teachers or heads is called orthodoxy. This could be sub-divided into ‘despotic’ (brutal) or ‘liberal’ orthodoxy.

If someone in what purports to be a Christian country seeks to establish the opposite, as I gather our government proposes, they should expect disbelief and hostility, and not just in Muslim countries. They may also give a propaganda coup to IS – a point I will come back to.

Fourthly, what does his lordship propose? Two things. First, a whip-around after croquet on the lawns at Lambeth.

It is equally right that our compassionate instincts will drive us to fund-raise and campaign for the innocent victims of the conflict.

I am sorry, my lord, but just washing your hands when the natives cut up rough over a religious spat does not get a good press in the books that define your belief. Gideon Rachman – is the Financial Times sound enough, my lord? – said this.

For almost 500 years, European nations dominated, colonized and populated the rest of the world. After 1945, the states of western Europe signed up to a new post-imperial and post-fascist set of values, based on universal human rights and enshrined in documents such as the 1951 UN convention on refugees.

But the desperate and dispossessed of the world were largely kept at a distance, while Europeans continued to enjoy some of the highest living standards in the world.

Faced with distressing images of famines or wars in ‘the third world’, Europeans could salve their consciences by making a donation to charity or attending a benefit concert.

Now the refugee crisis is asking Europeans to live up to their values in ways that are likely to be costly, inconvenient and will accelerate far-reaching social changes.

If I may so, I agree with every word. The chit is being called in on the white man’s burden – and it is bloody big chit. The white man’s nightmare is that he may have no option but to honour it because they now have the numbers.

But his lordship, like our government, favours the stick, as well as the carrot.

There must be renewed military and diplomatic efforts to crush the twin menaces of Islamic State and al-Qaeda once and for all. Make no mistake: this may mean air strikes and other British military assistance to create secure and safe enclaves in Syria.

Some will not like me saying this, but in recent years, there has been too much Muslim mass immigration to Europe. This has resulted in ghettos of Muslim communities living parallel lives to mainstream society, following their own customs and even their own laws.

The second part bears out the testimony of Mr Rachman about the inconvenience of doing the right thing – which is the problem with the Sermon on the Mount. The first part adds sabre-rattling to jingoism and is just plain frightening from a priest. It calls to mind the remarks of Melville in Billy Budd about a chaplain on a man-of-war:

Bluntly put, a chaplain is the minister of the Prince of Peace serving in the host of the God of War – Mars. As such, he is as incongruous as a musket would be on the altar of Christmas. Why then is he there? Because he indirectly subserves the purpose attended by the cannon; because too he lends the sanction of the religion of the meek to that which practically is the abrogation of everything but brute Force.

The fifth point is that it would not be hard for IS to paint this kind of stuff as partaking of a Christian crusade, and becoming a weapon in their hands. One underlying disability of the West is its failure to hold a spiritual alternative to the grizzly absolutes of religious fanatics in the East that enable outrages to be committed in the name of religion. We have no interest at all in reviving memories of the Crusades where unbelievers were worse dealt with than heretics and which led Gibbon to one of his more famous polemics.

… the name and nature of a ‘holy war’ demands a more rigorous scrutiny; nor can we hastily believe that the servants of the Prince of Peace would ensheath the sword of destruction unless the motive were pure, the quarrel legitimate, and the necessity inevitable.

Are we satisfied on those three criteria here? Gibbon attacked the indulgences that fuelled the Crusades with savagery. He then goes on to describe the beginning of the first Crusade.

Some counts and gentlemen, at the head of three thousand horse, attended the motions of the multitude to partake in the spoil, but their genuine leaders (may we credit such folly?) were a goose and a goat, who were carried in the front, and to whom these worthy Christians ascribed an infusion of the divine spirit. Of these, and of other bands of enthusiasts, the first and most easy warfare was against the Jews, the murderers of the Son of God. In the trading cities of the Moselle and the Rhine, their colonies were numerous and rich, and they enjoyed under the protection of the Emperor and the Bishops the free exercise of their religion. At Verdun, Trèves, Metz, Spires, Worms many thousands of that unhappy people were pillaged and massacred, nor had they felt a more bloody stroke since the persecution of Hadrian …. The more obstinate Jews exposed their fanaticism to the fanaticism of the Christians, barricadoed their houses, and precipitating themselves, their families and their wealth into the rivers of the flames, disappointed the malice, or at least the avarice, of their implacable foes.

Gibbon next savages the institution of knighthood and then goes on to describe the taking of the Holy City, Jerusalem.

A bloody sacrifice was offered by his mistaken votaries [Tancred’s] to the God of the Christians: resistance might provoke, but neither age nor sex could mollify their implacable rage: they indulged themselves three days in a promiscuous massacre; and the infection of the dead bodies produced an epidemical disease. After seventy thousand Moslems had been put to the sword, and the harmless Jews had been burnt in their synagogue, they could still reserve a multitude of captives whom interest or lassitude persuaded them to spare. …. The Holy Sepulchre was now free; and the bloody victors prepared to accomplish their vow. Bare-headed and bare foot, with contrite hearts and in a humble posture, they ascended the hill of Calvary, amidst the loud anthems of the clergy; kissed the stone which had covered the Saviour of the world; and bedewed with tears of joy and penitence the monument of their redemption. This union of the fiercest and most tender passions has been variously considered by two philosophers: by the one, as easy and natural; by the other, as absurd and critical.

The first philosopher referred to is David Hume; the second was Voltaire.

Finally, his lordship acknowledges the possibility that ‘some of what I say sounds harsh or, heaven forbid, a touch unchristian’. I would like to know of the converse. What part of the life or teaching of the Jewish man they called Christ is best evidenced in his lordship’s remarks?

The World’s Worst Headline?

08/09/201508/09/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

AS GOVERNMENT MOVES TO APPROVE STRIKES AGAINST ISLAMIC STATE IN SYRIA, THE PRIME MINISTER PLEDGES

We will provide refuge

‘Fleeing Christians should go to the front of the queue’

The Australian, 8 September, 2015

Put to one side that the number of those fleeing to whom we will provide refuge will as a matter of national pride be determined by our wishes rather than their needs, that this nation fashioned a policy on refugees to stop refugees going to the front of the queue, and that these awful words would have given most offence to the man named Jesus of Nazareth, the man called Christ, whose name is invoked to discriminate against people on the ground of their religion, a proposition that shames all religion if it is not offensive to all religion, what kind of moral bankruptcy do we have here?

A long time ago, an English traveller said this of religious strife in the Balkans.

When a Muslim kills a Muslim, that does not count; when a Christian kills a Muslim, it is a righteous act; when a Christian kills a Christian, it is an error of judgment better not talked about; it is only when a Muslim kills a Christian that we arrive at a full-blown atrocity.

You will not therefore be surprised to learn that that the Archbishop who called for preference to be given in providing refuge to those people who shared his religious beliefs also supported the bombing of those in Syria who do not.

If you see a child being pursued by a killer, and it is within your power to make that child safe from the killer, and you refuse to do so because it does not suit you, what is the difference between you and the killer?

Passing bull 12: Strategic adjancies

07/09/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The great corrupter of thought is prejudice. Tariq Ali, as an old style socialist, would be sympathetic to Greece and the government of Mt Tsipras, and unsympathetic to those who lent Greece money. In The London Review of Books, he acknowledges the awful corruption in Greece. They spent a fortune on tanks in 2009 because the defence minister took huge bribes. But Ali chides the financial press for not noticing that the minister got jail for corruption while the corrupters only got a fine – the quantum of either is not revealed, but it does look like the courts were Greek. Then we get the German spray:

The EU has now succeeded in crushing the political alternative that Syriza represented. The German attitude to Greece, long before the rise of Syriza, was shaped by the discovery that Athens (helped by Goldman Sachs) had cooked its books in order to get into the Eurozone. This is indisputable. But isn’t it dangerous as well as wrong to punish the Greek people – and to carry on doing so even after they have rejected the political parties responsible for the lies?

Put to one side ‘crushing’ and ‘punish’ – does a country cease to be liable for its wrongs or debts just because it has had a change of government? This misconception underlay so much of the Greek response. ‘We are under new management that has a different ‘mandate’’. This was not a doctrine that the Greeks were keen to invoke in their claims against Nazi Germany.

Still, at least Tariq says something. Slavoj Zizek often misses out completely. A recent LRB piece headed Sinicisation started this way:

When Alan Badiou claims that democracy is our fetish, this statement is to be taken in the precise Freudian sense, not just to mean that we elevate democracy into an untouchable Absolute. ‘Democracy’ is the last thing we see before confronting the ‘lack’ constitutive of the social field, the fact that ‘there is no class relationship’, the trauma of social antagonism.

That is pure bullshit.

The Weekend AFT had a commercial challenger. In announcing its results, Telstra said:

Core acquisitions address specific capability gaps in our services, expand into strategic adjacencies and extend capacity and presence in specific geographies.

‘Adjacencies’ is going straight into the pool room. When a bowler went up for a loud appeal for LBW once, the late Richie Benaud quietly said: ‘That looks very adjacent.’

Up Your North Parts III and IV

06/09/201506/09/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

III

I am writing this at 3pm in Derby on the coast of Western Australia. Two guys have just come into the Derby Lodge Motel – an old fashioned motel that is quite adequate for the traveller, with the communal barbecue – lugging a slab on one shoulder and a bagful of shopping in the other hand, and giggling, happily.

You guys sound happy in the service.

We soon bloody well will be, mate.

That sounded like a sensible positive attitude to getting Mozart and Liszt. I heard them offering my host a beer.

What sort have you got, fellers?

Just about every colour under the sun, mate.

Well, there is no point in getting full just to get unhappy or nasty.

Derby is a more blokey, laid back kind of place, with a few degrees of social separation from the more upmarket Broome, where you half expect to pass a Porsche at any corner. It is only about 210 ks from Broome, but the atmosphere is less confected.

As at Broome, there is a very good café on the wharf that Frank had recommended. The food was good – but it was BYO. This might be a symptom of the difference in the two towns, and I have no doubt that they might get choosey about who brings what in. I was to find that liquor restrictions vary greatly all along the way. In Broome, I had asked a copper what time the bottle shops opened – he gave me his best cheesy smile, and said noon. I said that I could probably make it to then, and that I would not leave town on that count alone. I would say that if you want to be a walloper up there, it would help if you had a sense of humour. The same would go for being in hospitality. Running a boozer would be a more trying task. You would require a high degree of mental and physical fibre. A very high degree. Not of the type you collect at university or the city.

Also at Frank’s suggestion, I visited a gallery just outside Derby that belonged to the local indigenous community and specialised in Wanjina paintings that come from this region. I have one at home, a very good one. There is that eerie round face with a kind of striated halo that might remind you of a Russian icon or a figure of Giotto – they have black eyes and no mouths. They partake of what some call primitive art. The gallery is on a reservation that has a sign saying no fighting or drinking. There is a wide range of work as you might expect, and I thought some of it flirted with the Wanjina image, which I had thought was closely guarded. A lot of the work looked a little pricey to me, not least when the secondary market in the South is very soft. Still, I was able to buy two small Wanjina paintings for my daughters at a very good price. Not the least of their charm was that they were painted by children, girls aged about nine and fourteen. I even got a photographic certification of authenticity, although without a photo of the artist.

That morning, I had picked up a backpacker from Prague, a very pleasant and bright young man. We discussed hitching here and in Europe – he had not done it there and it was nearly fifty years since I had. I was learning that backpackers supply a lot of the labour in the tourist industry out there – indeed, almost all of it right up the road. I was coming to terms again with how ridiculously long are the lines of straight road out there as we swapped travel stories. He was about my age when I hitch-hiked around Europe, and I fancied that he was getting as much out of his travels as I did from mine. I had the sense that he was acquiring knowledge as we spoke.

I recalled my one visit to Prague, a city in love with Mozart. I had hired a car and a guide to take me to the airport and then on to a little town called Lidice, which the Germans had wiped out in reprisals for the assassination of that swine Heydrich. I told the guide that Prague was a chocolate box city. ‘Yes – but you have not been out to the industrial estates where the skinheads are killing the gypsies.’ I wondered whether we were showing our underbelly out here.

At the rather too snappy boozer over the road from the motel, I recognised another guest. Dick was my age, but full of interest. Tall, skinny, long-haired with a beard and a soft voice, Dick was a bird-watcher, and a very serious one. He lives in Newcastle but spends a lot of time in the never never. He has surely seen more of Oz than most – the Simpson Desert, the Canning Stock Route and other deserts and parts far too remote for me. He certainly knows a lot about 4WD travel and I was keen to learn. At one time in high grass country, Dick was seated on the bonnet to indicate to the driver which way the track ahead went. That should satisfy most definitions of ‘off-road.’

We discussed how bird-watchers had to learn to hear as well as see. Old Jack had taught me this. Dick had hired a little Hyundai for a couple of days to get out of town a bit in search of one particular bird. Dick is a Subaru fanatic, and he explained how those kinds of vehicles worked – he said that mine should go better in this country because it was higher. That made me feel better. Then he congratulated me on doing it on my own. That made me feel worse. But then I asked him what was the point of having someone sitting beside me if – putting to one side altogether issues of sex – that person was as mechanically deprived and physically frail as me? My only strong suit – navigation, even on compass and contours and ordinance maps – was not an issue, and the only time you might get use out of a GPS was in the bigger towns.

Dick explained to me that what I had been told were eagles around Broome were ospreys, and that I should look out for Peregrine Falcons at Winjana Gorge. They perch on the summit, and I think he said that when they dive, they are as fast as anything else on earth.

Dick was leaving early the next morning – on the tide! – on a catamaran to go up the coast. There were to be ten on board for ten nights. They would dine on board but sleep ashore under canvas. It was fearfully expensive – I think $8K – but I could understand its appeal – especially for bird-lovers, and Dick was on a quest for one rare bird. I hope he found it. I have not met that many bird-lovers, but I have not met a bad one. They look to me to be people at peace with themselves and the world. It might be a useful indicator of character – how do I think that person might go as a bird-watcher?

Wherever you travel around the world, there is – obviously – always something more to come, something else to discover and come to grips with. I felt this all the time when I first travelled around Europe and the centre of Australia. This conversation with Dick, and the young man from Prague, reminded me what it is to be keen to learn. Both those men were good sharers.

When I walked into the bottle shop a little earlier, a blackfella was trying to buy a bottle of plonk. He was asked politely to show his car keys, but he had none, so the sale was declined. I had seen signs to this effect in a grog shop in Broome, and I was getting to the parts where, like in at least parts of Nevada and Arizona you either pay up front for petrol or leave your licence before the pump is activated. Although the conversation was as polite as it was short, the lack of comprehension at either end was clear. A lot of them do not understand us, and not many of us understand them.

From Derby (pronounced durby) it is about 270ks to Fitzroy Crossing if you go via Winjana Gorge and Tunnel Creek, and you go into Geicke Gorge. Only about 100 of that is sealed. The parts of the Gibb River Road and the tourist road that you go on are tricky and bone-shaking – and car-wrecking. This was one of the three parts of the trip where I needed the best kind of 4WD under me. There is about four to five hours driving, but a lot of it calls for maximum concentration, and by the end you are ready for beer – and a massage.

When they say Slow Down, it is a good idea to do just that. There was a big sign to that effect in the door of the Tourist Information Office at Derby. I read that sign carefully, but I still came off some bitumen a bit too fast in one area, and nearly lost the vehicle. I could remember having covered a lot of this territory before in a 4WD people-carrier driven by a woman, a professional guide, who impressed with the great care and patience that she took to modulate her speed. She slowed right down for dips and changes of surface or gradient, and rarely increased her speed where I, being ignorant, would have thought that it was safe to do so – and she was not frightened to floor it on bitumen.

The signs at both ends of my route said that the roads were ‘open to all vehicles.’ I would not have tried it unless I had at least an AWD, and I cannot recall seeing any orthodox 2WD. I used 4WD for all the unsealed part, but only had to engage, or thought I should engage, the Low 4WD once. I only had to traverse one deep floodway. I would never have attempted it with an orthodox vehicle, and I would have been even more nervous in a vehicle that was not as high as mine, or that did not have the snorkel to allow the vehicle to breathe under water – and I saw plenty of them on the route.

There are different types of terrain, and about four different types of road surface. You have to be careful to adjust to the change. The snaky parts have dusty spikes. You can lose it across those, or in the dips.

Another reason for caution is that speed increases the risk of blowing tyres. I would have great difficulty changing a tyre on this vehicle. The spare wheel and tyre looks very heavy. And they had sent me out in a vehicle that had lost its instruction manual. I had by then also discovered that the reserve tank was dry. When I had checked it, it had taken $55 of diesel in the reserve tank. It must have been bone dry. In this country, that could be manslaughter. And later on the road, I would meet a guy with his wife who had blown two tyres on one trip to Jim Jim Falls.

In the course of the morning – I left early with Dick to try to beat the heat – I did not pass much traffic. You may just be able to recognise the ones who are as serious as you – they wave back. It felt like a kind of communal self-congratulation. When I stopped and got out, I told the first bloke I ran into that I doubted whether all this might be called fun. He said that he felt rooted, a proposition that was rather tersely endorsed by his wife. It took me two Oscar Peterson CDs to get to the Winjana Turn-off from the Gibb River Road (on which you pass a sign saying that the next amenity is 300ks up the road) and the first and sixth symphonies of Beethoven (conducted by Klemperer) to get from Tunnel Creek to the main highway.

I had been there before, but Winjana Gorge is majestic. This country reminds me very much of our Grampians as seen from Victoria Valley. It is real blackfella country. The rock faces, colours, and trees – gum or boab – are what people come here for. It is somehow Australian. If you were born or just live in Australia, and you do not feel like that you belong here, you might face what are called issues. This is about as close to God’s country as we get.

The sign at the gate helpfully says that the pythons are not venomous, but that it is not a good idea to upset the crocodiles. These are freshwater crocs and relatively small, although one looked about two meters, and they are not man-eaters, having a different mouth structure to the salty killers. They also look decidedly lazy, but it is best not to get them between you and the water – or, I would suggest, to descend to their level. Winjana Gorge was my first real ‘sight’, and it was a blinder.

Tunnel Creek was the scene of an uprising. There were montages about it that put the blackfellas in white hats and the whitefellas in black hats – to the point of appearing to condone the shooting of a white copper. I wondered what government put those signs up.

Geicke Gorge is not far from Fitzroy Crossing. You can do boat tours and see plenty of crocs there. You can certainly take tours into there from Fitzroy Crossing. I doubt whether they would go into Winjana. You can certainly cover those spots on three day tours out of Broome – or, at least, I did that fifteen years ago, when I spent one night at Fitzroy Crossing.

It is not much more than a staging post, but I was interested to see for the first time black men and women being served beer at the bar. I do not think I ever saw a blackfella behind the bar. A black lady came into reception, obviously deputed by her husband, to ask reception for half an hour on the Internet. He then joined her, and they had to ask the staff to start them off, and later correct an error – as they would have had to do for me. The black people were not much younger than me, and God only knows what blackfellas of that age make of the Internet – although it is common to see them nursing iphones as determinedly as young white people.

I visited two service stations in each of Derby and Fitzroy Crossing – all the staff were either of Asian extraction or European birth. The backpackers do supply the labour, and the Irish emigration is very evident all around here. It is a real mix, and an attractive one.

While I was having a beer and a decent pie for lunch, while unwinding after a grinding drive, a big tour bus pulled up, and disgorged its withered contents. It was described as a Seniors’ Tour. In the name of God, I am a senior, and was just then a grey nomad, but please God, not that kind of tour for me – not now; not ever. It must be like a mobile jail, or daytime TV – that some idiot thought should play in the bar I was eating in. That way madness lies.

If I could offer some advice, it would be not to leave it too late to come out here. I have been going to Europe or the States each year, having at the back of my mind the notion that I could leave this kind of thing to my dotage. I was dead wrong, for more than one reason.

Character, big-noters, and motherhood

03/09/201503/09/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

There is a show on SBS from PBS in the US. It is a news service started by Jim Lehrer and another. It features a weekly news analysis by Mark Shields and David Brooks. I have been a big fan of this segment for about fifteen years. There is nothing like it here or in England. Mark Shields is with The Boston Globe and has a Democrat leaning (and had been an enlisted man, as had Jim Lehrer) and David Brooks is at The New York Times, and has a Republican leaning. What they do not know about politics does not matter, but more importantly each is a gentleman and a man of compassion – and intellect.

David Brooks has just written another book, The Road to Character, which I have just started to read. He says that there are CV virtues – what you have achieved, and eulogy virtues – your character. The trick is to get the balance in favour of what counts – character.

But we are getting it wrong. We are in the age of the BIG ME. Brooks has an anecdote. While driving home, he listened to a radio program Command Performance. It was broadcast the day after VJ day. All the big hitters like Sinatra, Dietrich and Cary Grant were there. What struck Brooks was the prevailing mood of self-effacement. Bing Crosby – and they did not come any bigger than him – summed up the mood. ‘Today, though, our deep-down feeling is one of humility.’

Brooks sat and listened to the end of the program and then went inside. He turned on the TV. A wide-receiver was tackled for a two yard gain. The defence went into a self-puffing victory dance. ‘It occurred to me that I had just watched more self-celebration after a two-yard gain than I had heard after the United States won World War II.’

It is a great story. I wrote a book called The Humility of Knowledge, but we do not speak of humility any more. If you said someone was humble, he might belt you. People do not do humility – especially big-noters or big-hitters. So, instead of saying that someone is humble, which might get you something between a leer and a sneer, we just say that they are not a big-noter. Just compare Rod Laver to any current Oz tennis player.

On pages 8 and 9, as far as I have got, we get the following. ‘Humility is freedom from the need to prove that you are superior all the time, but egotism is a ravenous hunger in a small space – self-concerned, competitive, and distinction-hungry.’ He quotes an Archbishop of Canterbury, and a psychologist who referred to an ‘almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.’ (I do not know whether he cited Socrates.) Montaigne said: ‘We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom.’ That should be in neon lights in all professional and government rooms in this country. Brooks says:

That’s because wisdom isn’t a body of information. It’s the moral quality of knowing what you don’t know and figuring out a way to handle your ignorance, uncertainty, and limitation.

That, if I may say so, is wisdom.

Brooks gives some scary indicators of the BIG ME. Middle school girls were asked who they would most like to have dinner with. Jesus Christ came second – between Jennifer Lopez and Paris Hilton. That is enough to make anyone sick.

I read that just before lunch, during which I read in the AFR about Marissa Mayer. She is on any view a big hitter and a big noter. She is the CEO of Yahoo and collects about $60 million US a year. The article says that ‘she blazed a trail in the US in 2012 by giving birth while holding the top job.’ She is now expecting twin girls at the age of 40. She said: ‘I plan to approach the pregnancy and delivery as I did with my son three years ago….and will be working throughout.’ She will not take Yahoo’s 16 weeks paid maternity leave.

I brought up two girls with their mother and it is the hardest thing I’ve done.

Do you think Marissa Mayer would understand the word ‘humility’? Do you think that her daughters will be glad that she puts CV character so far above eulogy character?

UP YOUR NORTH Parts 1 and 2

02/09/201502/09/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

UP YOUR NORTH

THE KIMBERLEY AND KAKADU

Broome to Darwin in 14 days by 4WD

[These are the first two of eleven parts of a small book on this subject.]

But things may not be so bad after all at an airport hotel – God knows that they charge enough in this country – and you find that the staff are more cosmopolitan than the guests. Far more. I did not realise then that this would be a recurring theme on this trip.

And I was offered a lamb shank for dinner – and it was decently cooked and served. I gathered from glancing about that mashed potato is in vogue at this level of accommodation, and of course there were the dreaded microwave greens, but they both happened to be right for the shank. There should be a law requiring airport hotels – or those serving footy crowds – to serve shanks, or ox-tail, or osso bucco, or fore-quarter – meat on the bone – with mashed potato. I recalled the time I went down to the café in the Beverly Wilshire after enduring three hours in a queue for immigration at L A and feeling a wave of blessing when my eye fell on the special for the night – meat loaf and gravy with mashed potato, truly a meal offered as a balm to the soul.

The staff at this unostentatious but over-priced hotel (a Holiday Inn) were at least trained a bit and they seemed keen to participate. We have during the second half of my life changed a lot for the better in businesses meant to serve people – we now follow the American rather than the Russian model.

The crowd was desultory and white, except for four guys who came in well after me. The looked both relaxed and assured, and of very mixed backgrounds, but of a common calling – one of them of colour had something like a tea-cosy on his head. They were courteous, if casually dishevelled, but they were not on the grog. I surmised that they worked on rigs or were perhaps itinerant (fly-in) miners. Two other guys in the lift confirmed this when I said that the others looked like they were feeding up for a year. These guys said that the food on the rigs was good – I bet it is – but that these people would feed up big because it was on the ticket. That had a ring of truth, but these guys, who were being picked up by helicopter at 6 am, did not look to me to be spongers. Nor did they look to me to be likely to have any trouble with the girls – even putting to one side their doubtless astronomical incomes.

There was a different kind of itinerant worker at breakfast the next morning, but I will come back to that in my discussion at Broome on the subject of bogans.

I had forgotten how red the earth gets up here. It is a kind of earthy ochre – it is so often balanced by the grey-green of spinifex. This is a very Australian palette. It looks permanent, but perhaps forgotten. As had been my 4WD reservation.

The laid-back approach of the outback started the moment I got off the plain at Broome, in a temperature about 20 degrees higher than the one I had left. They took their own sweet time getting the luggage off the plane, and almost immediately the conveyor belt seized up. No one said anything – or appeared to be doing anything, except for a man whose title was Quarantine Officer, who was desperately trying to look relevant – and failing. It eventually started and after about twenty minutes – Qantas would shatter this record on my return flight – it got going.

By the time I reached the taxi queue, there was not a taxi in sight, but some rather anxious resort seekers a little curious about what they might be in for. We tried to join forces but it is hard when you do not know the lay-out of the town. Eventually a very nice man from Pakistan drove me to the address of the 4WD agent. (My host at the Ochre Moon B & B that night, Frank, thought he may have been a Timorese posing as Pakistani, but he was well acquainted with the hill-towns of the Raj, as was the Rajasthani cab driver who would drive me home two weeks later from Tullamarine.) When we got to the address I had been given, I could not see a sign for my company Australian 4WD so I asked the driver to wait

G’day, I gave to pick up a car.

Not from us mate.

Are you not Australian 4WD?

Shit no. They haven’t been here for months. They are right over the other side of town.

That’s a bit of a bugger.

You’d better take it up with them, mate.

If I had been told of a change of address, it certainly had not come to mind – I was going by the contract. So the Pakistani and I resumed our discussion about the Raj while I took a Cook’s tour to refresh my memory of the lay-out of Broome – at, of course, some expense.

When we made it to the new address, I could see no sign, but there was a Nissan Patrol with the name Australian 4 WD stamped on it. As a precaution, I again asked my Pakistani mate, who was of a genial and philosophical disposition, to wait. I thought I was picking up a Toyota Land Cruiser or the like, which I had formed a high opinion of in a trip into the desert from Dubai.

G’day, mate. Have you got a 4WD drive for me?

No, but I have one for some guy tomorrow.

Shit, mate, we had better do something about this – otherwise it could get ugly. At least I have now found the correct address.

I went with Graeme, who was from Vancouver, into what might be called an office, and Lo!, there on the computer was an email which had come in just then saying that I was to have the Nissan outside. This was done after Graeme – I am not sure of the spelling – had rung his boss – not the HQ of Australian 4WD. He began stripping the vehicle of camping gear and jerry cans that I did not need. He said that opinions varied on Toyota Large 4WD against Nissan.

Graeme was extremely affable. He and his girlfriend were working their way around Australia after he had done an exchange course in Cairns and fallen in love with the place. He was right into American football, and we discussed the differences with ours’. He had heard of Jared Hayne, the NRL guy trying out for the 49ers, and was keen to see him in action. Graeme was keen to make up for the bugger-up at HQ, but I fear that he may have been better informed on gridiron than the Nissan Patrol. Graeme did demonstrate to me how to engage 4WD and put it into Low 4WD, something he said I would only use very rarely. I scribbled some notes on a scrap of a brochure – subsequently, I found the basics of the 4WD transmission on the back of the sun visor.

I had frankly expected and sought a lot more instruction on driving in the outback – across desert tracks and fording creeks – because although I had driven a small 4WD in Kakadu before, I had not been exposed to the big 4WD in what I saw as the extreme conditions I was now heading into. Graeme had not taken long to get laid back in the outback. He said that he was not completely au fait with this vehicle, but that if something went wrong on the road, there would be plenty of people about who knew a lot more about this vehicle than he did and who could help. If something went really wrong, I should just ring the company – in which my confidence was fast ebbing. Their number was on the door. The assumption of course was that I had a phone that would be in range all the way – which was not the case. If my phone did not work, I suppose I should just have to wait for some bastard to arrive with one that did.

This was unsettling. Surely these companies have a commercial interest, as well as a humanitarian if not legal duty, in instructing people about the controls of the vehicle, which they are charging out at $200 a day, and its use in conditions that most city folk have not experienced before. As I set off, I got Graeme to note on the contract that the tank was only one quarter full. The reserve tank was reading empty, but in my uninstructed state, I thought that may because it was not switched on. I was wrong there, too. The problem was that Graeme was not ready because of some glitch at HQ.

I navigated my way to the Ochre Moon without a prang, and was glad to get out and get the low-down on the town and the area from Frank. When he referred to issues with the indigenous people, he did so with that slight downward glance and inflection that people get when they are feeling their way on an issue that their audience might find sensitive.

At Frank’s suggestion, I drove down to the Divers’ Tavern that I had patronised about fifteen years beforehand. I went to get a meal, and to buy some wine. As I pulled into the drive-in bottle-shop, there was a blackfella as full as a state school, nursing three bottles of grog precariously in a paper bag who began to scratch at my driver’s window. This is confronting when you have been away from it for a while. You get this kind of in your face meeting with the bottom of the human pile at Calcutta or Mumbai – where the beggars are not pissed – but in a first world country? God only knows what the answer is – it is not, I expect, to put them in funds to get the next three bottles of grog.

It is either me or the girls, or both, but the girls behind the bar at the Divers’ seemed a lot more leggy than I remembered them. And they were sent out very smartly and cheerily in sinfully hot pants. Broome was starting to remind me of the snowfields here fifty years ago as a collecting place for people from other lands. The leggy girl behind the bar was from South East London. I picked her accent. I was fairly confident that the one who brought the meal to the beer garden was from Northern Ireland – until she said she came from Munich, Germany. When I got back to Frank’s, I met guests from Milan – at least they were tourists.

Because I was still on Melbourne time, I went to the Divers’ early, at about five thirty. In the course of my taxi tour, I had seen what were described as eagles landing on the road. In the forty-five minutes I was at the Divers’, I saw another horde descend for feeding – the fabled grey nomads, of whom I was one for that day and the following. They came in a bit of a rush, as if on a cruise. For some reason, I found it a little unsettling – would these polite ageing folk be up to helping me out if I broke down in the middle of nowhere? Could they lift the wheel and tire when I could not? I was also a little unsettled by what looked like some subservience on the part of the male of the species. Some of them looked fatigued and downtrodden. They looked like they were there to carry the bags and order the food and grog, and accept instructions on the well-being of themselves and others. Travelling on your own may have its benefits.

The next morning I had a swim at Cable Beach for old time’s sake – it is quite a sight, the scene of sunsets and camel tours – and visited some other sights of note. That night at Frank’s, there was a young guy of Chinese extraction – I think called Wai: I am not sure of the spelling – who was working for a South African guy who was trying to get going with a small company working in the tailings of mines. He was most interesting on the mining industry in W A. Neither Wai nor Frank had any time for riggers. Frank’s definition of a bogan was someone who wears his sun glasses on top of the cap. These were the dudes who had turned up breakfast at the airport hotel that morning. I never liked the word bogan, but I now think it may have some use. It is snobbish, but there may be occasions when it is fair to look down at some conduct – especially when they turn the cap back to front before putting up the sunnies – and then the coup de grace – putting the hoodie over the lot, black gray and white camo over Adidas trackies, and shot sneakers without laces.

Frank, who with his wife runs a first class B & B, was interesting about one company, Woodside, in which I hold some shares. He said they went of their way to instruct their workers on the kind of behaviour that they expected. He had seen a manager shirtfront a bogan making a pest of himself with an attractive woman by telling him that unless he pulled his head in, he would go back where he came from on the next plane, even if it was full, and that by the time the plane landed, this idiot would be unemployable in this industry in this country. I was enormously impressed by this good conduct on the part of one of my companies. Here was a time when the notion of brand could actually do some good. Thanks, Frank.

How an Oxford man went into journalism and became a Tory PM – and learned to play dirty

02/09/201502/09/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

While touring in the north of this land, I read Salisbury, Victorian Titan, by Andrew Roberts. At 850 pages, not all of which I have read, it is at least twice as long as it should be. That is a shame, because if you stay with it, and use an editorial discretion about what might interest you, you might get an insight into the problems of being a conservative or Tory politician today. Their people hold themselves up as the maintainers of standards and decency. They are fond of saying that the safest way to proceed is by adhering to precedent. Conventions for them really count. But common sense suggests, and history confirms, that that when pushed they will get down and dirty as quickly as the rest, and possibly more viciously, because they are traditionally more capable of pulling levers of power and covering up when they do so, or just bluffing their way through in the manner in the manner exclusively owned by those who see themselves as born to rule.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil was born in 1830 the second son of a Marquess. The Cecils had been prominent in serving Queen Elizabeth. The boy went to Eton, which he hated, and Oxford. When he married for love, to the daughter of Baron Alderson, his father cut him off because he thought his son should have got a better match – at least financially. . To get by, young Cecil became a journalist. He was prolific, even after he got into politics, but he mostly wrote incognito. He eventually became Lord Salisbury, and after serving under Disraeli, he became Prime Minister on three separate occasions, being in large part opposed by Gladstone, whose Liberal Party split over Home Rule for Ireland. Salisbury was a very large man, of studied common sense, who became a very effective party political man and leader of a cabinet. He was not troubled in making decisions, and although he is not nearly as well-known as Gladstone or Disraeli, he is frequently held out as the model Tory PM or leader. He looks to have been a model family man as well as party man.

I shall look later at how the upbringing of Salisbury affected his politics, but I now wish to look at some occasions where he played dirty – or tried to. His daughter Gwendolen idolised him, and wrote a four volume biography of him. She said that ‘he was essentially a fighting animal’ driven by ‘hostility to Radicalism, incessant, implacable sincerity.’ One of his Cabinet said ‘he never likes to keep the sword it its sheath….He is like the King of Hungary on his coronation who rides to all eminences and brandishes his sword to the four corners of the globe.’

Ireland is the great blot on England’s history. The contempt of the English for the Irish was racist. They regarded the Irish as an inferior race. Even when that racism had got masked in the more liberal nineteenth century, someone like Salisbury could get into trouble by referring to Hottentots in the same breath. But when Gladstone sought to grant Home Rule, all the gloves came off – right up to the top. Queen Victoria said: ‘We must agitate. I do not like agitation, but we must agitate every place small as well as large and make people understand.’ To that end the Queen started to pass on to Salisbury, then in opposition, letters from her PM, Gladstone, whom she loathed. Even a cloistered queen must have known that these letters were utterly confidential, and that she was in breach of so many conventions about the monarch acting on the advice of her elected PM. Salisbury for his part kept the Queen informed of his political machinations. Rogers says this:

Salisbury has been criticised for not having referred the Queen sternly to her new Prime Minister, but to expect such a course is to misunderstand the man for whom the ends of defeating Home Rule easily justified the unconstitutional means involved.

If that is put in extenuation, it is also available to Adolf Hitler and others. If a member pulled a similar stunt at a golf club, he would the thrown out.

Another case involved Parnell, the fated leader of the Irish cause in England, and the lover of Kitty O’Shea. The Times published sensational allegations connecting Parnell and his party with terrorism. How could Salisbury and the Tories capitalise on this? Why, it is obvious – appoint an inquiry, and let the shit hit the fan. Rogers says this:

Was it legitimate political calculation, or outrageous cynicism, or, as Winston Churchill believed, naïve foolishness that led Salisbury to act?…..With three carefully appointed judges reporting to Parliament, this was neither a Parliamentary Select Committee nor a court of law. In effect it was a state conspiracy trial without a jury…..To tar the Parnellite party with the suspicion of criminality, even at one step removed would be well worth the embarrassment…..It was crucial, therefore that the Commission’s inquiries should range freely over the whole question of Irish crime, and not be restricted to the specific issue….The only other person who stuck by Salisbury throughout his persecution of Parnell, besides Chamberlain, was the Queen herself….

The Irish had the same effect on the English ruling class as trade unions do on the Australian ruling class. It sends them off their heads and allows them to play dirty.

Salisbury consulted an eminent lawyer to help defeat the next Home Rule attempt. He even looked carefully at something the English know nothing of – a referendum! The great lawyer A V Dicey, truly a name to conjure with, referred him to a learned article that had the convenient truth that a referendum was ‘at once distinctively and undeniably democratic, and in practice Conservative.’ Salisbury was in warm agreement that this was the only way to end the differences in the Parliament.

And so it goes. As the author of Ecclesiastes says ‘All is vanity….there is nothing new under the sun.’ And Salisbury was bright – he did not have the excuse of our King of Hungary, who is dead-set stupid.

Poets in prose; and the First Fleet – Tony and Betty! Rope and Pulley!

17/08/201517/08/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Keats had to die before Shelley really stood up for him, but when Shelley did, he did so with passion and venom.

It may well be said that these wretched men know not what they do. They scatter their insults and their slanders without heed as to whether the poisoned shaft lands on a heart made callous by many blows, or one like Keats’s composed of more penetrable stuff….What gnat did they strain at here, after having swallowed all those camels? Against what woman taken in adultery dares the foremost of these literary prostitutes to cast his opprobrious stone? Miserable man! you one of the meanest have wantonly defaced one of the noblest specimens of the workmanship of God. Nor shall it be your excuse that, murderer as you are, you have spoken daggers but used none.

It is I suppose a kind of curse upon all critics. They might at least have this curse in mind when they go to shaft someone who has tried to create something for others, and not just prey or trade on the creations of others. This would, I fear, be too much to ask of the gnats straining after the Essendon coach.

In a foreword to one collection of his poems, W H Auden offered a gradation of his work that may I think have very general application.

In the eyes of every author, I fancy, his own past work falls into four classes. First, the pure rubbish which he regrets ever having conceived; second – for him the most painful – the good ideas which his incompetence or impatience prevented from coming to much…; third, the pieces he has nothing against except their lack of importance; these must inevitably form the bulk of any collection, since were he to limit it to the first class alone, to those poems for which he is honestly grateful, his volume would be too depressingly thin.

This could apply to what passes for my golf, fly-fishing, shooting (only at paper targets with the 30.06 Steyr from the top of the Benz – the Wolf goes tropo over the big bangs; he is threatening to consult Slaters over industrial deafness), drawing, or oil pastels – but best of all to my cooking: where the second category really comes into its own.

A propos of anything but poetry, I have been reading a book called The First Fleet. Some things caught my eye. When the whitefellas landed at Botany Bay, the blackfellas were as amazed as we would be by a visit from Martians – but the question that concerned them most was what sex the visitors were, and one Pom had to drop his strides so that they could see for themselves. (The author does not inform us whether the Pom’s equipment was such that it may have commended itself to Senator Lambie.) The French turned up at Botany Bay only five days after the Brits – our Anglo-Saxon brand of white heritage may have been a very close run thing. The whites could not get over the sound of the kookaburras – I still can’t. The Governor named Manly Cove after the manly bearing of the natives, but they left no-one in doubt that they were horrified and terrified by sharks that were everywhere near there – and a Mr Fanning will now be happy to corroborate them.

When the women convicts were finally landed, there were scenes of unspeakable depravity and lust that not even a vicious tropical storm could still – for all I know, the participants may have thought that the thunder and lightning were all just part of the general effect. Just imagine the racket if they slaked their lust while in irons – they could have put the kookas to flight.

Two of those who got together on that memorable night were memorably named – Anthony Rope and Elizabeth Pulley. I am glad to report that the lovers were married before the birth of the child conceived on that night, and that they were later granted their freedom and given some land. Ropes Creek near St Marys is named after them.

I dislike Australia Day – to put it mildly – but in future I will raise a glass to our true white forebears – the refuse of the far-away slammer – Tony and Betty! Rope and Pulley! (Perhaps we might start a Rope and Pulley Dining Club.)

But the part that really got me was not this great step for mankind when the whites arrived, but the little hiccup before they left England. The commodore and future governor weighed anchor and signalled to the fleet to set sail after him. Then Captain Phillip had to pause. Two ships weren’t moving. The reason? Yes, you guessed it – their crews were Mozart and Liszt. Adrian Quist. As full as state schools. Bliss was it not that day to be alive. Well, my brothers and sisters, my comrades, say a long and fond hullo to the upcoming arsehole of the world, and the Land of the Eternal Long Weekend.

And God bless the convict shaggers of Sydney Cove, our own Australian Adam and Eve!

Passing bull 11 Franco was not a fascist

16/08/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Political labels are generally used to brand people or ideas rather than to excuse them, but people who have firm views about politics or religion tend to cling to them. People who have firm views about both are very prone to label-abuse – and they also have a curious penchant for denialism.

Phillip Adams interviewed Gerard Henderson – an occasion of mutual discomfort. Henderson said that Franco was not a fascist. The military leader of a totalitarian state who got Mussolini and Hitler to help him bomb Guernica – just for practice – was not a fascist? Just what more do you need to be a fascist? (Franco and the church said that Guernica had been burnt down by the reds.) But what does it matter what label you apply to this religious fanatic who was a cruel and murderous little shit, a part of the refuse of mankind?

I have written something on this that might bear on this discussion (in the final volume of a history of the west). It reflects on the tendency of churches to line up with the army and the money.

Francisco Franco (1892 – 1975)

The Spanish Inquisition with its informers and bonfires of the auto da fe prefigured the totalitarian states of Stalin and Hitler to a degree that is frightening. The conduct of the Church was no better under Generalissimo Franco. The dedication to repression and oppression was indeed religious. A major step on the road to the most frightful civil war came when Cardinal Pedro Segura, the primate of Spain, issued a pastoral denouncing the intention of the republic to establish freedom of worship and to separate church and state. Both Hitler and Mussolini, who each had a Concordat with the Vatican, intervened in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the fascists.

Francisco Franco was born in a family with long links to the Spanish Navy. He went into the army because the navy was in decline. He fought in the Spanish protectorate of Morocco and then served in the Spanish Foreign Legion. He developed the kind of perverted ideology then prevalent that held that the problems of the world were caused by Jews, atheists, Freemasons, and Leftists, not necessarily in that order, but certainly in a conspiracy.

The monarchy fell in 1931. It was then the church against the barbarians and the republicans were lumped with the communists. In 1936, Franco and others in the army sought to overthrow the elected government of the Popular Front. This led to the Spanish Civil War, and to foreign fascist intervention.

Franco ruled as a dictator – Il Caudillo – for nearly forty years. His weapons of repression included the death penalty, concentration camps, forced labour, and heavy censorship. He got back into favour with the U S during the Cold War when they had a common enemy in Communism. In the 1950’s, a cabinet of Opus Dei technocrats convinced him to move toward a market economy. After his death, Spain moved toward democracy. A Pact of Forgetting was introduced to encourage reconciliation. Socialists and Conservatives now clash over how to deal with that bleak past

If we go back to Il Caudillo in power, on 19 May 1939 there was a grand victory parade along the Castellana, renamed the Avenida del Generalissimo. The Caudillo would not be coming to town on a donkey to receive his Hosannas. Antony Beevor says:

A huge construction of wood and cardboard had been erected to form a triumphal arch on which the word ‘Victory’ was displayed. On each side the name ‘FRANCO’ was repeated three times, and linked with the heraldic arms of the Catholic monarchs.

Franco took the salute at this march past from a large tribune. He wore the uniform of captain-general, but the dark blue collar of a Falangist [fascist] shirt could be seen underneath and on his head the red beret of the Carlists [royalists]. Below him in front of the stand his personal bodyguard of Moroccan cavalry was drawn up.

More than 120,000 soldiers, including Germans and Portuguese, took part.

The next day cardinal Goma, primate of Spain, gave Franco the wooden cross to kiss at the door of the church of Santa Barbara, where the Caudillo entered under a canopy, as the kings of Spain used to do. In the middle of a solemn ceremony, imbued with heavy medieval imagery, Franco laid his victorious sword in front of the miraculous Christ of Lepanto, brought especially from Barcelona for the occasion.

This may remind you a little of the coronation of Napoleon at Rheims, but at least Napoleon had the decency to crown himself. Two days after Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer gave an address on the subject of ‘the leader’ (the Fuhrer, Duce, or Caudillo) that the Nazis cut off. Bonhoeffer said that a leader who allowed himself to be idolized was a misleader and that ‘leaders who set themselves up as gods mock God.’ It is hard to imagine a better case of a leader mocking God than that pompous little Spanish soldier called Franco. Beevor goes on:

All the trappings and incantations represented the sentiments and self-image of the crusading conqueror. In his struggle to defeat the Marxist hydra, Franco had been fighting against the past as well as the present: against the nineteenth century poisoned by liberalism; against the eighteenth century which had produced the Enlightenment and Freemasonry; and against the defeats of the seventeenth century. Only in an earlier period could the Caudillo find the roots of a great and united Spain, the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella.

If Franco had gone back even further to when the Moors ruled Spain, he may or may not have found a similar attitude of rejecting the present that we see so often now in Islam.

Did the Generalissimo show Christian charity to the vanquished?

The Caudillo used to read through the sentences of death when taking his coffee after a meal, often in the presence of his personal priest, Jose Maria Bulart. He would write an ‘E’ against those he decided should be executed, and a ‘C’ when commuting the sentence. For those he considered needed to be made a conspicuous example, he wrote ‘garrote y prensa’ (garrotting and press coverage). After coffee, his aide would send off the sentences to be passed to the military governor of each region of each province, who would communicate them by telegram to the head of the prison. The sentences would then be read out in the central gallery of the prison. Some officials enjoyed reading out the first name, such as Jose or Juan, to strike fear into all those who bore it, before adding the family name. In the woman’s prison of Amorebieta one of the nuns who acted as warders would perform this duty.

That there are still churches standing in Spain might promote faith in miracles in this European nation that styles itself as civilized. When it comes to mass killers like Himmler and Franco, can we that are left discern any moral difference in their evil or is it just a matter of arithmetic? Did Eichmann ever do anything as obscene or as offensive to God as settling his death list for the next day while taking coffee with his personal priest?

The English historian Maitland said that when England turned its face against the inquisitorial process, it escaped the ‘everlasting bonfire.’ When you read about Franco, you might think that Maitland was right, although it may well be that the liberation of England from allegiance or subjection or vassalage of any kind to a foreign power was just as important in allowing it to escape the totalitarian cataclysms that engulfed those nations in Europe that had not been liberated.

Maitland compared the accusatory, contradictory and public process of a trial at common law to the secret inquisitorial process in Europe where torture was used. He said:

Our new procedure seems to hesitate for a while at the meeting of two roads. A small external impulse might have sent it down that too easy path which the church chose and which led to the everlasting bonfire.

The footnote refers to a book written by an English jurist before the Spanish Inquisition. In De Laudibus, Sir John Fortescue condemned the use of torture in Europe (France). The part quoted by Maitland is ‘Semita ipsa est ad Gehannam.’ ‘This is the very path to perdition.’ Gehanna is a valley outside Jerusalem that was said to be cursed. It is frequently rendered as hell, or unquenchable fire (Mark 9:43) or, here, the ‘eternal bonfire.’ Fortescue commented on the wrack that ‘the execution of the sentence of the law is a task fit only for little villains to perform, picked out from amongst the refuse of mankind…’ There again we have a useful description of the little Spanish Generalissimo.

There must be people in Spain feeling betrayed by the church. It is not just that the clergy so often seem to line up with those who want to hold on to power – it is that so many find it hard to suppress a sneer at that part of the sermon that says that the meek shall inherit the earth. The sense of betrayal is even greater there because of the identity of the betrayed. It is as if a common affinity of the clergy and politicians for ritual, ceremony, costume, hierarchy and incantation, together with a dread of change and a reverence for a largely imagined past and wholly imagined heroes leads some people to share a common affinity with repression and oppression in government that is loosely associated with the term ‘the Right.’ Certainly, you do not often see the clergy lining up to support the opposite team – ‘the Left.’

This is, to put it softly, very frustrating to those who admire the example of the young holy man who came to bury the Establishment and not to praise it, and who rode into town on a donkey for that purpose, and who then took to the money people with a lash, and in so doing signed his own death warrant. There truly was leader whom we have mocked. Can we get comfort from the words of Yeats?

The darkness drops again, but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

Il Caudillo was not as evil as the Fuhrer, or as downright ridiculous as Il Duce, but he was far worse than a serial pest. He and his fascist fellow travellers held Spain back. It and Greece were at risk, to put it at its lowest, of becoming backwaters on the edge of if not outside Europe because of their political immaturity. The sad or violent history of Spain for most of the twentieth century is at least one indication of why it is one of those states at what is called the periphery that is in trouble keeping up with the north of Europe.

Dyson and Rupert again

14/08/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Yes, I hate it, too, when someone says that I told you so, so I can only ask forgiveness for setting out below parts of a post about Dyson Heydon and Rupert Murdoch in December 2014. Eighteen months and, say, $40 million or so ago.

Dyson Heydon has now in my opinion made a fool of himself with remarks about two Labor leaders.

The dinner address farce does not prove the point – it just illustrates it. If you want to know the full extent of the poison for our judges, just look at the beginning of the piece on the front page of The Australian by one of Abbott’s closest supporters, Dennis Shanahan:

Tony Abbott’s sharpest weapon against Bill Shorten has been blunted. Any findings of the trade union royal commission which reflect badly on the Opposition Leader’s behaviour while running the AWU have been tainted.

If you missed the point, you have the headline on page 6:

Bad judgment leaves the PM shooting blanks.

The sheer vulgarity and nastiness of it all defies belief. And I cannot see why there is all the fuss about a fundraiser. Is it not enough that he is accepting invitations from the political party that got him to shaft the political party opposite them? The Attorney as usual got it all wrong. He has some experience here. He presented the address in 2010. And billed us $1000 expenses for the privilege.

So what next?

Easy.

Bomb more Muslems – bomb Syria. That should take us out of ourselves.

(If you want to know what the PM thinks about foreign policy, go to Greg Sheridan:

The PM has a strong inclination to confront and defeat Islamic State, but he also has a deeper strategic purpose. That is to stiffen the resolve of the Americans. This is a common strategic view among Western leaders, that the Americans need to do more and be more decisive, but that they cannot be easily persuaded to do more.

So, that is what our leader seeks to achieve by bombing Muslems – to put some steel into Uncle Sam. This is pure Alice in Wonderland.)

And now we see another reason why Heydon should not have got involved in this political hit job. He might get sued. While conducting various proceedings over nearly thirty years, I have been sued in most courts in the land – I am not talking of appeals but of being taken to court to get my process stopped – and it is water off a duck’s back. But I have never had the backing of the Act of Settlement, and I have never worn ermine. If I go down, I do so alone.

That is not the case here. The government is still trumpeting Heydon’s High Court credentials. Well, there are plenty out there with standing to sue him. For all I know, Heydon presently has before him a letter alleging bias and asking for an undertaking that proceedings before the Commission will cease until the issue has been determined by the courts – including, perhaps, the High Court. Heydon is one name that you would not want mention up there just now.

The nature of the problem, that is way over the pay level of this government, is further discussed below.

When Dyson met Rupert – and the High Court of Australia beheld the gutter

29/12/2014 / GEOFFREY GIBSON / EDIT

It is not likely that Mr John Setka of the CFMEU has ever felt the need to tell a journalist that that he has often felt the need to express his dissent in the minutes of the union because he did not like the writing style of the other organizers and officers of the union – that he does, for example, have a real aversion to split infinitives, dangling participles, or a perceptible but unwarranted variation in the number of a noun that some others tolerate to avoid treading on the toes of those who get exercised over what is called sexism. These are some of the things that Mr Dyson Heydon, QC discussed on the ABC when reflecting on his time as a justice of the High Court of Australia. That court is our highest court, and by and large its members have served us well. It is a reputation devoutly to be preserved.

There was always going to be a problem in Mr Heydon continuing to do just that when he accepted the invitation of the current Prime Minister to go down into the world of Mr Setka and the phantoms of the enemies of Julia Gillard, the outgoing PM, and our first woman PM. Julia Gillard had been targeted by members of the press, especially the Murdoch press, about allegations of what had passed between her as a solicitor and a boyfriend twenty years ago. Yes, you heard – twenty years ago; more than three times longer than the standard limitation period fixed by the law for permitting civil claims to be raised.

The employees of Mr Murdoch, and their unattractive political sponsors like Senators Abetz and Brandis, to this day put their hands on their heart and say that they have pursued this issue in the public interest because what Julia Gillard did twenty years ago reflects on her fitness to hold office as Prime Minister. Well, if they are prepared to say that with a straight face, they will also be the shrillest in objecting to any suggestion that this kind of personal denigration could only have been wrought on a woman. However that may be, the attack on Julia Gillard, especially after she had lost office, appeared to many Australians to reach new lows, even by our standards, of partisan political bitchiness and moral vacuity in Canberra.

The CFMEU is what is called a militant trade union. It has succeeded to the position of the BLF as the Aunt Sally of choice for hardened and unlovely champions of the class war like Senators Abetz and Brandis. The public inquiry headed by Mr Heydon, and named after him, was predictably branded as a witch hunt, and we have no problem in imagining what the reprisals will be like, but it was always hard to see how anyone like Mr Heydon could get down into this gutter and come out with a reputation enhanced, or even preserved.

Mr Heydon has impeccable credentials as a member of the Establishment, or at least as close as Sydney can get to any such thing. He was educated at Shore School before going on to win the University Medal at Sydney University. He was a Rhodes Scholar – well the whole nation is coming to terms with the fool’s gold that that distinction may hide – but his winning the Vinerian Prize at Oxford is a good sign of a very bright and concentrated academic mind, if not a driven one.

Whether that can translate into good judgment and common sense is another question, especially when those early academic prizes are followed by the active pursuit of an academic career. Mr Heydon was a Fellow of Keble College Oxford before becoming a professor in Sydney and the Dean of the Law School. He is the author of works in the wantonly superior and acerbic style that some elevated lawyers in Sydney appear to find satisfying. He never sat as a trial judge, being appointed straight to a court of appeal and then to the High Court. I do not know if he ever appeared in a criminal trial or before a jury.

Mr Heydon was happy to tell those listening to the ABC that he wears as a badge of honour the title of conservative black letter lawyer. He acknowledged that others regard that term as an insult. Mr Heydon is not therefore averse to taking sides, and being seen to do so. South of the Murray, the Sydney black letter lawyers, the ‘whisperers’, are thought to have tickets on themselves and to be too brittle for their own good. Some of the sniping that they engage in looks downright bitchy, and you can see it in print, and in works that assert claims to scholarly merit. They can engage in behaviour that looks anything but conservative.

…….

By the time his time on High Court had expired, Justice Heydon had become a compulsive dissenter, and he could express his views in language that was at best curious. In the case about packaging cigarettes, his Honour said:

After a ‘great’ constitutional case, the tumult and the shouting dies. The captains and the kings depart. Or at least the captains do; the Queen in Parliament remains forever. Solicitors-General go. New Solicitors-General come. This world is transitory. But some things never change. The flame of the Commonwealth’s hatred for that beneficial constitutional guarantee, s. 51 (xxxi) , may flicker, but it will not die. That is why it is eternally important to ensure that that flame does not start a destructive blaze.

Putting to one side the imputation to a polity of a visceral emotion, which would have entertained medieval Schoolmen, is this what we expect from the justices in our ultimate constitutional court – to speak of the hatred of the Commonwealth of a part of the Commonwealth Constitution? What do these people do to each other up there is that bleak suburban fastness of Canberra? What sort of masonry lies buried here? Where is the calm repose of the dispassionate jurist?

Mr Heydon was appointed to the High Court by Prime Minister John Howard, who is the mentor of the Prime Minister who appointed him to conduct this royal commission. This could be called keeping it in the family, although few Australians will reflect with equanimity on the suggestion of Mr Abbott that he is the political love child of John Howard and Bronwyn Bishop.

The government was aware that its bona fides were in issue – to put it softly – in this royal commission. They had to find a safe pair of hands, a man beyond reproach. How could you do better and more safely than with a former High Court judge who glories in his black letter conservatism? All that would have been enough for a government that puts slogans where thinking should be, and which puts political advantage over principle.

Well, it was never likely that Mr Heydon would, like Sir Garfield Barwick, be described as the hit man of the Establishment, but there were obvious difficulties in his appointment to this political task. With the best will in the world, Mr Heydon would have no idea of the world of people like Mr John Setka or Ms Kathy Jackson of the Health Services Union. You do not learn about them at Shore or Keble College, Oxford. You might as well ask Mr Setka to give advice to Mr Heydon’s club in Sydney, the Australian Club, on the etiquette surrounding the inviting of ladies to lunch at that club. (You don’t.) It is not as if Mr Heydon has spent time knocking back beers at a South Sydney boozer talking to people with pictures on their arms and with a bit of previous in their cupboards about the contribution of the blackfellas to the latest flag of the Bunnies. This is one factor in appearances when appearances count. It rather savours of two of the chaps from Oxford getting together to advance the interests of those who share their view of the world over the interests of those who are not so well off. Put differently, what member of the CFMEU or any other union target could give a bugger what somebody like Dyson Heydon, QC said about them? This is not just class that we speak of – it is caste.

But it was not just the sheltered, cloistered upbringing of Mr Heydon that made this appointment inappropriate – it was his lack of experience as a trial judge. Royal commissioners are not judges and they do not exercise a judicial function. They are part-time public servants conducting an inquiry and they are anything but independent of those who give them the job. But it is useful in many contentious inquiries to appoint someone who has judicial or at least forensic experience in determining issues of fact arising from conflicts between witnesses, and to do so with a person who is as distant from the fray as possible. Neither of those ends was achieved here.

Nor would Mr Heydon have the faintest idea of what might be involved in running the office of a solicitor, which was at the heart of the query about Julia Gillard and her boyfriend. Had Mr Heydon ever practised as a solicitor, it is inherently unlikely that a firm of which he was a member would have acted for a union, let alone one as punchy as the CFMEU. But even if he had acted as a solicitor for the big end of town, he would have been able to smile in a more informed way on some of the more banal suggestions about the conduct of Julia Gillard as a solicitor. They were and are being made by people who do not know what they are talking about.

When judges are sitting in court, they observe a fiction that says that they are not affected by what they read in newspapers, but it must have been apparent to Mr Heydon that the job he was being asked to do had more wrinkles than my aging kelpy cross. Most Australian lawyers know the kind of juristic mayhem that can flow when the industrial and criminal laws combine. There are two words that cause veils to descend over people’s eyes when they are mentioned in an Australian court – one is tax; the other is industrial.

The BLF kept fighting lawyers (including me) in feed for more than a generation. A rogue outfit like the BLF pushes the legal system beyond its snapping point. Judges find themselves saying things that they instantly regret, but they feel provoked and pushed. The BLF provoked a Labor government to pass a law of proscription and annihilation that would have made Adolf Hitler blush. But what appeared to be the case to someone who had got to act on both sides of a long running kind of civil war was that the more that governments lashed out at those in charge of these outfits, the more thoroughly were their members locked in behind them. You get a similar reaction if you say something rude about the Collingwood Football Club. Class and faith (bigotry) are as thick as blood.

And was there not something just downright bloody unseemly about getting a former High Court judge to inquire into the conduct of a former Prime Minister as a solicitor more than twenty years ago, and after her time in office had expired? Is this really all that the people of Australia can expect from those who claim the right to run this bloody country?

……

A royal commission, as the name suggests, is a manifestation of royal power. Her Majesty, through her advisers and officers, good monarchists all down here, is proceeding against her Australian subjects, named or otherwise, to achieve a political objective. The Domesday Book was a good case. The Queen is in a way going against or sending against some of her subjects. All of her ancestors have promised not to do that ‘except by lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land’ since clause 39 appeared in Magna Carta in 1215, but ancient rights must give way to current grubby political imperatives.

So, the Vinerian Scholar entered into this royal commission and into territory that would be less familiar to him than Mars – or the home of the South Sydney bunnies. He also came with a propensity to pedantic dissent from the mainstream, and a capacity to say things that put your teeth on edge. He looks like an unsettling nerd out of sync with the rest of us, a flat white made flesh, the lone Ranger sans Tonto, more of a protected species than a living national treasure.

And the main attack failed; the pursuit of Julia Gillard has been finally pronounced to have been what all but the bent or demented always believed it to have been. Mr Heydon said:

Findings are made that Julia Gillard did not commit any crime and was not aware of any criminality on the part of these union officials.

There was a time when a good trial judge would have just stopped there because he or she had just disposed of the relevant issue. But Mr Heydon went on to opine that part of her legal work ‘must be regarded as a lapse of professional judgment, but nothing more sinister.’

The introduction of the degree of comparison might suggest that in the opinion of the author, the error of judgment was in itself ‘sinister’. If you look that word up, you will get ‘prejudicial, unfavourable, darkly suspicious.’ Mr Heydon also used the lesser epithet of ‘questionable.’ Could it be that this long quest would just end with a question? How would it have gone down if a lesser lawyer, say a solicitor, had dared to question, en passant, Mr Heydon’s professional judgment as a barrister or judge?

……..

Now all that kind of stuff is the staple of what passes for politics and journalism in this country – a less than elevating rough and ready blow by blow account of a shit fight. But that ugliness has been fed here by the lack of experience of this commissioner in trying controverted issues of fact. Mr Heydon is quoted in the press as saying:

Normally cross-examination of a non-expert witness is a contest between a professional expert who is familiar with every detail of the case and a relatively unwary member of the public who is not. But Julia Gillard had twenty years’ knowledge of the case and immense determination to vindicate her position. She was, so to speak, a professional expert on her own case.

Two reports in The Age quoted the same words, as if there was something wrong about them. There was. Mr Heydon, that is not how trial courts work. It may look that way to those in the proverbial ivory tower of Keble College Oxford or the High Court of Australia, but it is not what happens day to grinding day in any court in the land. The mystique of cross-examination is grossly over-rated, and as an artful technique it is nearly dead. You grope your way hoping not to get smacked or ambushed. The days when you are ‘familiar with every detail of the case’ do not happen often, if at all. If you have to listen to others do it, you try to help them reach the point, and sometimes just watch as people go over the precipice; you have to help them reach the point, because other litigants are waiting their chance to get this job done so that they can get on with their lives. Sir John Starke was the leading cross-examiner of his day, and he told me, more than once, that he always felt relief if when he sat down he was no worse off than when he started.

All that, apparently, has not been the experience of Mr Heydon, QC. We are not talking about what some call the sporting theory of justice. Rather, Mr Heydon looks on cross-examination as a kind of dressage contest where points are awarded for form, deportment, and style. The problem with treating the witness box as the scene of sport or even a contest is that the white hats may not do as well as the black hats. The black hats normally have the money behind them.

What Mr Heydon appears to be talking about is not cross-examination but the ghastly ersatz routine that is killing it. Counsel charge a fortune to read anything they can lay their hands on. They then bring their computer or wheelbarrow to court, smile wanly at the witness, and say; ‘Now, Sunshine, you and I are going on a little journey.’ They then proceed to circumnavigate the world, mostly to no effect, except to enhance their bank balance. Documents are flagged or tabbed to act as prompts or cues, and you neither see nor hear any real cross-examination at all. The process is tailor-made for the novice at one end and the truth-dodger and game-player at the other. We saw it all on live TV at the Leveson Inquiry. It was a boring as it was fruitless. I wonder if in truth Mr Heydon has ever seen a witness cross-examined at all.

I have tried to set out the reasons why I do not think that Mr Heydon was the right lawyer to conduct this inquiry, quite apart from his previous position as a High Court judge. He is too remote from the world and he has not had enough experience in resolving issues at first hand. These reasons were apparent to those advising the government, but they nevertheless went ahead, and Mr Heydon, perhaps from a misplaced sense of noblesse oblige, acceded to their request. It is difficult to avoid the inference that the government chose to go ahead with the appointment in spite of all the difficulties because they were set upon giving to their inquiry the gloss of the seal – the cachet, if you prefer – of the High Court of Australia – and there you have the whole bloody problem. We have drawn the courts, and our best one, into the political gutter.

A distinguished English judge was the late Lord Devlin. (He was also considered to be the Rolls Royce of trial judges, and it was said that he retired early because he was sick of the dry sodality of appellate work.) Lord Devlin once made a remark to the effect that English governments forever showed the very high regard that they and the English people had for their judges by their so frequent attempts to impose upon the judges to help them out of a political spot by giving their name and office to the conduct of a sensitive public inquiry*. This is why sensible and decent courts forbid that practice. That ban should extend to retired judges because the danger of communal reputational damage is just the same.

It would be tart to say that mistakes of professional judgment have been made here, and of a quite sinister kind, but is not the ordinary Australian, perhaps if you like ‘the relatively unwary member of the public’, not just a little ashamed at what is going on here? An Australian, as it happens a woman, has reached the highest form of electoral office that this nation can bestow; she is then made the subject of a sustained scheme by one of the world’s most powerful press head-kickers to blacken her name and run her out of office; she then has to face the indignity of being subjected to a public trial and humiliation at the instance of political opponents whose want of principle and character, and commitment to our basic political tenets, are becoming daily more apparent; and then their nominated inquisitor acquits her of the charges gainst her, but just gives her a backhander to go on with? Why would any sane Australian tell their children or grandchildren to do anything other than stay as far away from that cess-pit as possible? What can we say to these people, apart from what that now famous Boston attorney said to Senator McCarthy: ‘Have you no sense of decency, Sir, at long last?’

What did we Australians do to deserve this smutty little fiasco; more signally, what have we done to deserve these truly awful people who so truly believe that they are our ruling class?

*The actual words of Lord Devlin (The Judge, OUP, 1979, 9) were: ‘In our own country, the reputation of the judiciary for independence and impartiality is a national asset of such richness that one government after another tries to plunder it. This is a danger about which the judiciary itself has been too easy-going.’

With Compliments

Geoffrey Gibson

Author: Geoffrey Gibson