Terror and the Police State – Chapter 3

20/10/201720/10/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

[This is a short version of a book ‘Terror and the Police State; Punishment as a Measure of Despair’, published in 2015. The book focussed on France after 1789, Russia after 1917, and Germany after 1933. The instalments will follow the 21 chapter headings that are as follows: 1 Terms of Engagement; 2 Enduring emergency; 3 Righteousness; 4 Good bye to the law; 5 Instruments of terror; 6 Civil war; 7 Waves of terror; 8 Degradation; 9 Secret police; 10 Surveillance; 11 Denunciation; 12 Fear; 13 Popular courts and show trials; 14 Scapegoats, suspicion and proof; 15 Gulags; 16 Propaganda, religion, and cults; 17 Surrealism and banality; 19 The horror; 20 The meaning?; 21 Justification. The short version is about one quarter the length of the original. Each instalment is about 1200 words.]

Righteousness

Great wrongs are often done to secure what are seen as great rights. If you subscribe to that lethal view that the ends justify the means, then you may invoke righteousness to justify terrorism. Just think of the righteousness of John brown on slavery. The problem then is – how do you distinguish the righteousness of John Wilkes Booth on slavery?

The French Revolution was supported and applauded from the beginning by people like Kant, Beethoven, and Wordsworth – and the majority of the enlightened people and uncrowned or unrobed heads in all Europe. It was a colossal blow against caste and privilege, and an elevating insight into the claims of the rights of man. Macaulay said that the only event to compare to the Reformation was the French Revolution. Both involved people rising up against caste. The Terror and Napoleon would put many off – Napoleon for his imperial throne and his aristocracy as much as for his wars – but the massive sense of liberation would endure. Those championing the revolution claimed the moral high ground at the start, and they have never relinquished it.

Their decision to go to war to defend the revolution was a large part of what produced the Terror, but it did a lot more than merely change the face of war. The old regimes of Europe, with their kings and nobles, would never have armed the people. There was a change in the ideas of change in politics. Professor Doyle said:

In other words, it was a profound cultural transformation. The writers of the Enlightenment, so revered by the intelligentsia who made the Revolution, had always believed it could be done if men dared to seize control of their own destiny. The men of 1789 did so, in a rare moment of courage, altruism, and idealism which took away the breath of educated Europe.

Righteousness is not a term to endear people to those professing to have it, and the moving forces in this revolution were full of it. There was the sense that so many in the nation had suffered too long under a just sense of grievance caused by privilege, and this privilege was the foundation of the inequality against which the revolutionaries were fighting. Being a champion of liberty and equality was to be a moral hero. This is precisely the moral ground claimed today by the champions of civil or human rights, although not as many have to put their lives on the line as the men and women of 1789.

The essential dignity of each of us is the notion that crowns Kant’s moral philosophy. He held that dignity (or worthiness) is beyond price, and that humanity so far as it is capable of morality alone has dignity. A friend of Kant said this of his reaction to the French Revolution: ‘He lived and moved in it; and, in spite of all the terror, he held on to his hopes so much that when he heard the declaration of the republic, he called out with excitement: ‘Now let your servant go in peace to his grave, for I have seen the glory of the world.’’

Then the righteousness of the revolutionaries showed itself in the way that they defended their gains, and their nation. There was of course faction and rebellion and civil war, and foreign nations that were intent on restoring the monarchy and punishing those who had reviled and then killed their king. The French only had to look at what happened to the killers of Charles I in England when Charles II was restored – after an interregnum of almost a generation. So, political idealism became fused with personal courage and love for the nation. True revolutionaries were true patriots – who else could be?

It is hardly surprising that in extremis people took to extreme measures whether they were part of government or not. What we call the Terror was the culmination of those forces. The people of France were going where no one had been before. They were trying to build a system of government after the old one had collapsed under the weight of its own inanity and brutality. They had not had much if any experience of either governing or trying to build government. At the same time, foreign enemies and their supporters within were threatening this young new nation with death and destruction. You cannot just step out and go and buy a text-book that tells you what to do in a case like that.

Arthur Young was a man of birth, property, and position who knew what it meant to farm the land. He was uniquely placed to give a balanced view on the excesses of the revolution.

It is impossible to justify the excesses of the people in their taking up arms; they were certainly guilty of cruelties; it is idle to deny the facts, for they have been proved too clearly to admit of a doubt. But is it really the people to whom we are to impute the whole? – Or to their oppressors who had kept them so long in a state of bondage? He who chooses to be served by slaves, and by ill-treated slaves, must know that he holds both his property and life by a tenure far different from those who prefer the service of well-treated freemen; and he who dines to the music of groaning sufferers must not, in the moment of insurrection, complain that his daughters are ravished and then destroyed, and that his sons’ throats are cut. When such evils happen, they are surely more imputable to the tyranny of the master than to the cruelty of the servant.

The wish to see like cases treated alike underwrites all our notions of justice. If you contend that people are equal, and that they should be treated equally, the old caste system was a very cruel travesty and a very unjust imposition. The hatred of the aristocracy – the owners of the burnt chateaux – was fuelled by the revulsion of privilege, and privilege is by definition in contempt of the rule of law as we know it, since one essential principle is that all people are equal before the law.

There is little point in looking for anything like righteousness behind the police states or terror practised in Germany or Russia. The German nation had a just grievance at the behaviour of the Allies after the Great War. No one stated that grievance better than John Maynard Keynes, but neither Versailles nor anything else could justify the Nazi revolution or terror.

The suffering of the Russian people from oppression at the bottom in about 1917 was probably not significantly less than that of the French people in 1789, but the Bolsheviks (Communists) lived in a moral and political world all of their own. The Russian people would have to pay for the intellectual conceit of Marx in thinking that his mind was powerful enough to dictate logically verifiable answers to the human condition, and the insatiable craving for power of Lenin led him to insist on departing from the blueprint of Marx to suit his own ego and timetable. The Russian police state now seems to us to be an inevitable product of a totalitarian kind of government that Communism prescribed, but the full ghastly flowering of the terror in Russia owed much to the personal insecurity and cruelty of Stalin.

The French would spend the next century in learning that it is hard to legislate ideals into law, but in committing itself to the Rights of Man in 1789, France was adopting as a nation a faith or aspiration that would be utterly contradicted by those regimes that we least admire, such as those of Russia or Germany when they generated their reigns of terror.

Passing Bull 124 – Bull about respect

13/10/201713/10/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

If, having fetched a pale of water, Jack said to Jill ‘I respect you’, what might he mean? The Oxford English Dictionary has for the verb ‘to treat or regard with deference, esteem or honour; to feel or show respect for; to esteem, prize or value a thing’, or person. Jack is saying that he has a good opinion of Jill, or that he thinks well of her.

What if Jack says that he respects the flag? Well, he is not talking about the cloth that is the symbol. He is talking about the people, nation, or political entity for which the flag is a symbol. And all those entities, involving tens of millions of people, all of whom are entitled to their own respect, are far more abstract than the little girl called Jill. And there may be a lot more room to discuss just what are the aspects of, say, the nation that causes Jack to respect it. Jack may not be of the ‘my nation right or wrong’ faction. To use the distinctions of the OED, the question may also arise whether Jack regards the nation with deference, or whether he merely treats it that way; whether Jack feels respect for the nation, or whether he just shows it.

We are talking about a ritual performed before a symbol – like a lawyer bowing in court, or a believer genuflecting in church. There may be many shades of meaning behind the ritual or the belief of the person making it to the ideas of those for whom the symbol represents.

Some American footballers chose a different form of that ritual to protest about one aspect of the governance of the nation. That was their right. Their president claimed the right to abuse them. He wanted them punished by being fired. He did not specify what law or contract had been broken. He would be equally ignorant of both. But he showed his lack of respect for his fellow citizens when he offended and insulted them by the vulgar locker room banter that is his stock in verbal trade. Well, we are used to that with Trump. He is a bad stupid man who thrives on conflict.

But his unctuous vice-president – who, unlike the president, has God, and has Him written all over his face –feigned a tantrum, and staged a walk-out, at God knows what expense to the American taxpayer. Mr Pence said:

I left today’s Colts game because President Trump and I will not dignify any event that disrespects our soldiers, our flag, or our national anthem.

What would Jack and Jill know about the concluding trinity? It’s hard to say something good about a nation that seeks to cast out anyone who does not think well of it. It’s just as hard to think of anything good to say of a leader of such a nation who turns his back on someone who does not think well of it. They are marks of regimes that we least respect.

We are having this discussion while looking at a massive lack of respect in the best known industry of the U S – Hollywood. Mr Weinstein sounds evil to the core. He reminds me of Mr Strauss-Kahn. Their vice is identical. They are predatory bullies who abuse their power to exploit those beneath them in pursuit of their own self-gratification.

So does Donald Trump. He shows no respect for those beneath him. He shows no respect for what the flag or anthem stand for – the Constitution, Congress, the judiciary, or the office of President. The President has no idea about the Bill of Rights, except for the current fallacies about guns. He is a true abuser of power, and not just because of his celebrated curbside opinion about pussy-grabbing. The difference between Trump and people like Strauss-Kahn and Weinstein is one of degree.

These thoughts came up as I read an article in the Financial Times. It referred to an article entitled Why the assholes are winning. Its author, a Stanford professor, said that leaders who create ‘toxic and hellish work environments’ are often admired nonetheless: ‘It seemingly doesn’t matter what an individual or a company does … as long as they are sufficiently rich and successful.’

The Financial Times went on:

In ‘Down and Dirty Pictures’, his book about Miramax, Peter Biskind described the Weinstein brothers’ reputation ‘for brilliance but also for malice and brutality’.

Another study of the traits of dominant people noted that greater power triggers ‘disinhibited behaviour’. In other words, leaders who are allowed to do whatever they want can end up behaving very badly. The powerful ‘more frequently act on their desires in a socially inappropriate way’, the authors concluded.

Over-eating, over-aggression and predatory sexual behaviour were among syndromes they described for ‘high status, powerful individuals’ whose moods swing from irritability into mania. When personal patronage is the surest route from obscurity to glamour, danger lurks.

The references to ‘disinhibited behaviour’ and ‘personal patronage’ may or may not reflect what happens in the Murdoch empire, but the whole piece looks to describe the current white House – word for word. Leaders who get away with doing what they want end up behaving badly – very badly.

Poet of the Month

Andy’s gone with cattle

Our Andy’s gone to battle now

‘Gainst Drought, the red marauder;

Our Andy’s gone with cattle now

Across the Queensland border.

He’s left us in dejection now;

Our hearts with him are roving.

It’s dull on this selection now,

Since Andy went a-droving.

Who now shall wear the cheerful face

In times when things are slackest?

And who shall whistle round the place

When Fortune frowns her blackest?

Oh, who shall cheek the squatter now

When he comes round us snarling?

His tongue is growing hotter now

Since Andy cross’d the Darling. T

he gates are out of order now,

In storms the `riders’ rattle;

For far across the border now Our Andy’s gone with cattle.

Poor Aunty’s looking thin and white;

And Uncle’s cross with worry;

And poor old Blucher howls all night

Since Andy left Macquarie.

Oh, may the showers in torrents fall,

And all the tanks run over;

And may the grass grow green and tall

In pathways of the drover;

And may good angels send the rain

On desert stretches sandy;

And when the summer comes again

God grant ’twill bring us Andy.

Terror and the Police State: II

13/10/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Enduring Emergency

During the seventh century before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, at a time of economic strife and depression, Solon was appointed arbiter and given the job of restructuring the constitution of Athens. He annulled debts, but he could not ban envy or greed. Those primal emotions translate into faction in politics. A man called Peisistratus had been a friend of Solon. He organised a faction of the Hill, mostly poorer people and others who had lost out under Solon, although Peisistratus himself was aristocratic. Peisistratus wanted to take over as the ruler of Athens, to become what we call a tyrant. Peisistratus made himself tyrant of Athens by a stunt that might fairly be called textbook. It is described by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus as follows.

Gathering together a band of partisans, and giving himself out for the protector of the Highlanders, he contrived the following stratagem. He wounded himself and his mules, and then drove his chariot into the market-place, professing just to have escaped an attack of his enemies, who had attempted his life as he was on his way to the country. He besought the people to assign him a guard to protect his person … The Athenians, deceived by his story, appointed him a band of citizens to serve as a guard who were to carry clubs instead of spears, and to accompany him wherever he went. So strengthened, Peisistratus broke into revolt and seized the citadel. In this way, he acquired the sovereignty of Athens …

There in microcosm you see the rise of many later tyrants, such as Mussolini and Hitler – an exaggerated threat; an ‘emergency’ response; and the seizure of power, which is not relinquished. The notion of emergency or crisis or threat to personal or general security that was so glibly exploited more than two thousand five hundred years ago is close to the centre of the reigns of terror in France, Russia, and Germany.

The sense of emergency was real throughout the five years in France from July 1789 to July 1794. A lot happened during this time, but three things did not happen: France did not achieve a settled constitution; France did not establish a settled and adequate food supply for all her people; and France was never freed of the threat from inside and out from people who wanted to deprive France of the benefits of the revolution so far. For the most part, people were living in anarchy, and many of them lived in constant fear and hunger. We have to bear these things steadily in mind as we watch the nation descend into a cycle of violence and vendetta, and then a degradation of the human spirit that may come when all legal order is gone, and the lid is lifted off to reveal all of the worst that humanity can show or do.

The fall of the Bastille was followed by the Great Fear – the whole nation lived in dark fear of robbers and brigands as the violence of the uprising launched the French people into the political unknown. The foreign reactions soon began to harden. Aristocrats plotted from abroad. The Pope condemned the reorganisation of the French church. Then the king and his family tried to escape, and were brought back to Paris, effectively as prisoners. In 1792, the National Assembly issued a declaration, ‘La Patrie est en dangère’. A state of emergency was proclaimed. All Frenchmen capable of bearing arms were called up for national service. This emergency was real.

Europe threatened the ‘total destruction’ of Paris if the royal family were not respected and protected. Five hundred patriots marched from Marseilles to Paris. They sang a song written for the army of the Rhine by a man called Rouget de Lisle. This is probably the best known anthem in the world, but not many people know just how ferocious the lyrics are. The danger facing France was the reason for the ferocity. In August 1792, there was a further revolution, when the commune of Paris was set up. The king was not deposed but merely suspended. Government was fragmented even further. The sense that the patrie was really en dangère – which risks the heads of those found on the wrong side – led to the ghastly eruptions known as the September Massacres. The Paris mob gave a frightening glimpse of Hell.

In March 1793, the Revolutionary Tribunal and the Committee of Public Safety were set up. The period from then to July 1794 when Robespierre fell is generally seen as the time of the Terror in France.

In short, for the whole of the time of the main events of what we call the French Revolution, France went from one violent episode to another while it had no effective central government and when it was entering into wars which would when extended under Napoleon consume Europe for a generation. There was a general and continuing sense of crisis and emergency before Napoleon; he pacified France and then he detonated the world.

Government under the Tsars had broken down, but after the revolution in 1917, there was worse anarchy and civil war than even France had experienced. Stalin was in power for decades. The party had the machinery for a police state from the beginning, and one that might be structured on lines that some might call scientific, but for the most part the Terror under Stalin was not practised in any sense of crisis or emergency, but because some very cruel people had never been educated to see any other way. Stalin and his aides were also morally empty.

Hitler would be another emperor-like figure for whom war would be eternal, but the process to get to that result was very different. The reign of Terror was commenced in France when those leading and defending the revolution had good reason to fear for the survival of the political results that had been obtained, and the freedom that had been earned, and many of them had fear for their very lives if the Monarchists returned. The existence of the nation itself was threatened. This was never the case for the Nazis.

Hitler and the Nazis never got fifty per cent of the vote. They came to power in 1933 by a combination of terror, deceit, and seduction. The terror came at first with the rough-house bullying of the Brownshirts which when they got into power would become the lethal brutality of the Blackshirts – the Gestapo and the SS. The steps between Kristallnacht and Auschwitz were not that great or steep. The deception did not come in holding back on their long term aims. Hitler in Mein Kampf was open about his intention of eliminating the Jews and enslaving the Poles and the Russians, even if he had a confused way of saying things, and a manner that would put any sane person off reading the book – or, perhaps, taking it seriously.

The deception came because Hitler and his aides were morally empty. They had no principles or decency, none at all. They could not be taken at their word, or trusted in anything. The Terror was with Hitler and his Nazis from the beginning to the end. The only contribution to a sense of emergency from outside came with the burning down of the Reichstag which led to a propaganda extravaganza which is still exercising historians and scholars. It was this incident that gave the Nazis the pretext to scrap what was left of the rule of law and turn Germany, which fifty years ago had been the foremost liberal democracy on the planet, into a police state that was far more powerful and horrific than anything seen before.

Passing Bull 123 – Freedom and guns

09/10/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

To most people outside the U S, it sounds at best silly to say that the failure of the U S to make sane laws about guns is a necessary incident of freedom. . Thousands die each year in America, including thousands of veterans, because of this ideological glitch. It is fed by the corruption of the NRA, the gullibility of its supporters, a Hollywood view of America’s attachment to violence, and an American preference for self-help over sensible government intervention.

In the result, you get bullshit like this from the disgraced Bill O’Reilly, late of Fox News.

Once again, the big downside of American freedom is on gruesome display. A psychotic gunman in Las Vegas has committed the worst mass murder in US history. Public safety demands logical gun laws but the issue is so polarising and emotional that little will be accomplished as there is no common ground. The NRA and its supporters want easy access to weapons, while the left wants them banned. This is the price of freedom. Violent nuts are allowed to roam free until they do damage, no matter how threatening they are.

For us, that is odious rubbish. But the NRA parrots it. They said some of their members were shot and killed in Las Vegas.

Any law affects our freedom. To oppose a law on the ground that it limits our freedom is to miss the point. We have laws prohibiting your using a gun to hurt or threaten someone. We have laws prohibiting carrying guns in public. It would be absurd to oppose those laws on the ground that they limit our freedom. To repeat, all laws affect our freedom. The issue is whether that inevitable result is warranted in the public interest. Do the benefits of these laws warrant their restrictions on our freedom? Who wants to be free to walk up Collins Street with a rifle that can kill someone at the MCG? If there are some people who feel aggrieved at this loss of ‘freedom’, that’s their bad luck, because the numbers are squarely against them.

Clearly, then, we are not ‘free’ to aim bullets at people to hurt them. Should we be free to aim words at people to hurt them? Some people object to these laws on the ground that they limit our freedom. For the reasons given, that does not advance the discussion at all.

Take a law that prohibits one person from publicly insulting another person on the ground of their race. That law was made to stop people inflicting one form of harm on other people, and because the prohibited behaviour can lead to a breach of the peace – which the law is there to protect. Those are valid considerations in the public interest. What ‘freedom’ does this law limit? The freedom to publicly insult another person on the ground of their race.

Again, if there are some people who feel aggrieved at this loss of ‘freedom’, that’s their bad luck, because the numbers are squarely against them.

But in either case, it’s just bullshit to complain that the law affects our freedoms.

Poet of the month: Emily Dickinson

How fits his Umber Coat

The Tailor of the Nut?

Combined without a seam

Like Raiment of a Dream –

Who spun the Auburn Cloth?

Computed how the girth?

The Chestnut aged grows

In those primeval Clothes –

We know that we are wise –

Accomplished in Surprise –

Yet by this Countryman –

This nature – how undone!

Terror and the Police State 1

07/10/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

TERROR AND THE POLICE STATE

[This is a short version of a book ‘Terror and the Police State; Punishment as a Measure of Despair’, published in 2015. The book focussed on France after 1789, Russia after 1917, and Germany after 1933. The instalments will follow the 21 chapter headings which are as follows: 1 Terms of Engagement; 2 Enduring emergency; 3 Righteousness; 4 Good bye to the law; 5 Instruments of terror; 6 Civil war; 7 Waves of terror; 8 Degradation; 9 Secret police; 10 Surveillance; 11 Denunciation; 12 Fear; 13 Popular courts and show trials; 14 Scapegoats, suspicion and proof; 15 Gulags; 16 Propaganda, religion, and cults; 17 Surrealism and banality; 19 The horror; 20 The meaning?; 21 Justification. The short version is about one quarter the length of the original. Each instalment is about 1200 words.]

Terms of engagement

What is terror? Terror is extreme fear. If I feel terror, I feel an intense form of fear. When we talk of ‘the reign of terror’, we speak of a government that engages in terrorism – it pursues terror (or extreme fear) – for political purposes. Some people think that terrorism has only recently become a big issue. They are dead wrong. It is as old as humanity. The book of Genesis is full of it, with God taking an active part in many forms of terror and with terrifying results, as you would expect from a being that is all powerful. The Oxford English Dictionary says that terrorism is ‘government by intimidation’ and a ‘policy intended to strike with terror those against whom it is adopted’. The first instance of terrorist in the Oxford is ‘applied to the Jacobins and their agents and partisans in the French Revolution’. All the terrorists we look at were in government.

Except for a limited form in a black hole like North Korea, we do not see terrorism much in government now, at least not in a form that governments own up to. We still plainly see terrorism in those who try to bring governments down and in religious fanatics who want to achieve either that objective or some religious purpose. At the time of writing – in mid‑2014 – some fanatics under the label IS are pursuing terrorism to create an Islamic state. One of their ways of inducing extreme fear is by cutting people’s heads off in public. This was the preferred mode of terrorism employed by the Jacobin government in France just a few years after the white people from England set up their first colony here as a jail.

What we see now is people who kill for a belief. These beliefs confer total certainty and demand total obedience. These killers kill for a belief that excludes tolerance for any contrary belief and any diversion or softening on other moral grounds. ‘I believe – therefore I kill’. Credo ergo caedo. Credo killers are prepared to kill and die for a belief because that belief means more to them than life itself – or at least this life. The promise of eternal life is a real killer. How do you deal with a religious fanatic who wants to die and who gets worse in prison?

What is a police state? It is a nation or state in which government claims the right to control all aspects of public and private life. The government is all powerful – there is no rule of law to check it. The executive makes law by its actions. Any purported legislature or judiciary is sad and toothless. The most feared arm is the secret police. Sparta was the ancient model. 1984 is the fictional model. The Deutsche Democratische Republik was one of its most fearful modern examples.

What is a revolution? We are here talking of revolutions in government. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a political ‘revolution’ as ‘a complete overthrow of the establishment in any country or state by those who were previously subject to it; a forcible substitution of a new ruler or form of government’. The short definition for our purposes is a ‘forcible substitution of a new form of government’. When we speak of a coup d’état (‘a blow at the State’) we are usually referring to a forcible change in the personnel at the top of the government, and not in the system of government itself.

Historians have been reluctant to describe the accession to power in Germany by the Nazis as a ‘revolution’. There is, however, no doubt that force, both applied and threatened, was an essential part of their winning of power, and that the consequences were on any view revolutionary, in at least the popular sense of that term.

Revolutions like wars have two sides. What the revolutionary process looks like will depend on what side you are on. Nelson Mandela was once a terrorist, but since his side won, we are allowed to accept him, and properly so, as one of the most revered statesmen of the world. The terrorists of Northern Ireland did not win and are still seen by many as terrorists. One man’s insurgent or terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, liberator, servant of God, or martyr. Which side the Taliban or IS may come down on will turn on the results of their wars and from what side you are looking at them.

Since a police state violates what we know as the rule of law, we should say what we mean by that term. The English jurist A.V. Dicey identified three elements. The first element of the rule of law was the absolute supremacy of regular law over arbitrary power. This was the supremacy of law over people. The second aspect was equality before the law, or the equal subjection of all classes to the ordinary laws of the land. The third part is characteristic of what we call the common law. Those brought up in the English tradition of laws being derived from precedents found in previous cases – the common law – see the constitution as resulting from that process that has made the ordinary law of the land. The constitution is not the source, but the consequence, of the rights of individuals. The constitution is itself part of the common law. The Europeans tend to see it the other way around – they see private rights deriving from public institutions.

You can see how offensive a police state is to someone brought up in the Anglo-American tradition. A police state is a living violation of the rule of law that underwrites western civilisation, and we will see that the first thing to be done by those wishing to set up a police state is to scrap the rule of law. The stakes are unbelievably high. The police state is the ultimate threat to the dignity of the individual. Russia and two of Europe’s most civilised nations at one time lapsed into a rule of terror in a police state. They were then anything but civilised. Immanuel Kant said:

Something that relates to our needs or wants has a market price; something that meets our taste or whim has a fancy price; but a quality that is the only basis of that which is an end in itself has more than a relative worth or price – it has intrinsic worth, that is, it has dignity … Morality, and mankind as capable of it, is the only thing which has dignity.

Hannah Arendt said:

The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled it has begun to destroy the essence of man. Yet to turn our backs on the destructive forces of the century is of little avail …. We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain.

Here and there – The politics of identity and identity politics

01/10/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The German nationalist party AfD pledged to ‘take back our country and our people.’ Who might ‘our people’ be? The party did very well in Saxony – that had been part of East Germany. Many young people left there for jobs in the west. A Dresden observer said that in the east, the church wasn’t strong, and families had splintered. The state was not seen to represent these people. By saying that it will take back these people, AfD was giving them a sense of identity.

Giving people a sense of identity is the traditional model for all nationalist parties. Their supporters feel neglected if not rejected. The party offers them self-respect by allowing them to identify with the nation. Symbols like the flag and the anthem become not just more valued, but sacred. Citizenship means so much to these people. It’s their most cherished asset. So, they are fiercely opposed to diluting it by offering it to others.

It’s a curious word, ‘identity.’ The OED relevantly has the ‘quality or condition of being the same’ and ‘individuality, personality, individual existence.’ Your identity is what enables others to identify you – say who you are. You don’t want to be taken for someone else, or, worse, not be identified at all. Being not identified is tragically close to being not recognised.

Political parties like One Nation and AfD say that they fear that their nation is losing its identity. For both, the main threats come from immigration and Islam. These parties talk a lot about ‘sovereignty’ and national pride. They are against any foreign relations that may diminish either. It was exactly the same with both Farage and Trump. They went head to head in exploiting popular prejudice against Muslims.

One Nation is full of nonsense about what it stands for, like:

Australian values include honesty and speaking openly, directly and respectfully with complete freedom of speech and expression to ensure integrity and accountability.

But the party is very open about the fact that it appeals to life’s losers and victims:

We believe that our country’s future wealth and the prosperity of all Australians can be assured only through listening and then caring enough to openly address the problems that Liberal-Labor-Nationals-Greens created politically and continue to make. We listen and we care enough to speak for the voiceless and the powerless.

One Nation is not just against Islam, but embarrassingly for many Christians, the party claims to stand for a Christian nation.

We are a Christian country with one law for all…..

One Nation supports the refugee programme, but we must have a say in who comes in. We must be mindful of taking people that are Christian, and genuine refugees.

If a nation is in some unspecified way a Christian nation, where does that leave Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and atheists? Or Muslims?

The AfD is, like One Nation, against Islam.

Islam does not belong to Germany. Its expansion and the ever-increasing number of Muslims in the country are viewed by the AfD as a danger to our state, our society, and our values.

Naturally, both these parties believe that climate change is a myth.

It’s curious that people like Hanson, Farage and Trump are so preoccupied with religion, and saying that they want to protect their nation from one faith in particular, when nothing about their history, demeanour or conduct suggests that they have ever had more than passing contact with anything even remotely resembling God, and they do this in nations that purport to cherish religious freedom and neutrality. This is another facet of the sad fact that nationalist parties inevitably, it seems, provoke conflict in their nations.

Now, all parties target groups – analysts speak of ‘focus groups’ – but nationalists specifically target those who feel ‘voiceless and powerless.’ It’s the same for Farage and Trump, as well as Hanson. They trade on resentment and jealousy. The cliché is ‘politics of envy.’ They are big on attack but rotten at building. (Farage didn’t even bother to hang around to try to build. His job was done with the detonation.) In discussing the collapse of the Republican Party, Bret Stephens referred to ‘fury factories’ like Fox and Breitbart, and said:

Opinion journalism is meant to influence and inflame, and it does. Especially in an age in which civics is taught poorly (and, increasingly, rarely), people are politically suggestible. Bill O’Reilly is now the right’s historian, Mark Levin its go-to legal expert, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham its moral conscience. These are not ideas guys. They’re anger guys. Their specialty is the communication of rage to an audience prone to histrionics. It can feel awfully good to be awfully mad.

People who aren’t familiar with Fox News or Sky don’t know how vicious and predatory they can be. The ‘fury factories’ share and incite anger. The problem is that feeling ‘awfully mad’ does not of itself get ‘politically suggestible’ people anywhere. Nor does it get them representatives who have the training or patience to negotiate laws that will work for their supporters.

So, nationalists take aim at groups within the community. You might, if you were that way disposed, say that they were engaging in ‘identity politics’. But that term is one of abuse for those in Australia who admire Trump or Farage. They get very worked up when people agitate politically based on common interests held by people of a particular sex, sexuality, faith, colour, class, or age. I have had some trouble understanding why in a free country it is not good for people to seek to advance their common interests. Was it wrong for the Quakers to campaign against slavery?

Well people on Sky or at The Australian get very worked up about ‘identity politics.’ Steve Bannon said he could crush the Democrats if they persisted with identity politics. But that is just how Trump and Farage and Hanson operate. What is the difference between people coming together to say bad things about Muslims and to seek to hold them back, and people coming to say good things about Lesbian women or married men and seeking to move them forward?

All this suggests that we could drop the word ‘identity’ from politics either as an appeal or as a rebuke. It’s another instance of our intellectual wooliness.

Here and there – Who’s in the crowd?

28/09/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

One reason why the word ‘populist’ is so dodgy is that people get coy about saying who makes up the ‘populus’ – or who are in the crowd? Everyone standing for election in a democracy appeals to the people. All candidates are therefore in some sense ‘populist’, unless you whittle down the reach of that term.

You get a similar puzzle with another weasel word – the ‘elite’. In a representative democracy, the people are governed by those elected or appointed for that purpose – the chosen, or the elect, or the elite. If you seek election because you are opposed to the ‘elite’, what happens when you join the elite? This is a real question for at least one faith. How do you establish a church on the life and teaching of a man whose whole mission was to blow the establishment to kingdom come?

To be a true ‘populist’, then, you can only appeal to some of the people. Hanson, Farage, and Trump are popularly described as ‘populists’. What sorts of the people do they appeal to?

Well, if we look at the people who attend Trump’s rallies, we may get some idea. It’s a fair inference that Trump appeals to them and that they appeal to him. He basks in their adulation and he gets that smarmy beatific smile that may remind older readers of Liberace on the other side of the candelabra on the grand piano.

The first question is why is the president holding rallies at all while he is in office? Why isn’t he governing the country? Why is he more interested in kneeling footballers than the misery of people on Puerto Rico? (Well, he did take time to Tweet that they would have to repay Wall Street. That was sensible and kind of him.) The answer is that Trump holds these rallies because he is only in the job for what he can get out if it, and not for what he can do for his country. His ego needs stroking. He could not pass a Kelvinator without opening the door to feel the light shine upon him. He has to feed the Fox.

And he is lazy and weak. He much prefers the safety of his faithful to doing the hard work needed to implement hard decisions. He is so obviously a spoiled child that it’s embarrassing. Chuck and Nancy know that they only have to drop in for a bite, and their president will roll over like a sated schnauzer. Someone remarked that Trump’s book may have to be renamed – The art of lying down. When Trump fails, which he does nearly all the time now, he just picks up his bat and ball and retires behind the moat of his appalling Fifth Avenue castle.

Assuming that people who attend these rallies of Trump are of average intelligence, they must understand all this. The first thing to say about them, therefore, is that they are prepared to go along with a charade to boost or sedate their president.

The next thing is that they are keen – ever so keen – to get in on the show. They look like they love being part of this exalted form of live TV show. They giggle all the time. They can’t wait to tell the folks at home. They are integral to the entertainment – and the sustenance of their leader. Their role is to follow him devoutly, if not blindly. They look like they have been worked up beforehand. (Stephen Miller had that gig during the campaign.) They cheer and clap when they should. They growl and boo on cue.

They clearly want to believe. Anyone who believed Trump’s promise to build the wall and get Mexico to pay for it is at best credulous. (The other word is ‘gullible’, for which the OED has ‘easily duped.’) Most people turn off snake oil salesmen, but those who don’t are evidently willing to take what’s on offer – with no intervention from any critical faculty. If someone bought the house next door to you, and said that they would build a great wall but get you to pay for it – who would you consult first, your lawyer or your shrink?

The suspension of the critical faculty is fundamental. You don’t go to one of these spruikers to get analytical. You go because you like the show the spruiker puts on. It’s all a big show, but you remain part of a cause. Your attachment to that cause is emotional, not intellectual. You have no interest at all in a detached consideration of evidence that may lead to what other people outside your circle call truth.

These followers mostly get their news filtered for them by Facebook, that vast mind-numbing ogre. The Internet usually spares them from material critical of their leader. His slogan of ‘fake news’- any news he doesn’t like – is silly enough, but for his loyal followers, his close cadre, it perfectly sums up any source that disparages their leader – and that includes all the mainstream press – except that State Owned Television called Fox. ‘Truth’ isn’t just relative. It’s dead.

The people who rally to Trump are big on boxes and labels and classes. In their eyes, the problems of the world are simply sourced. The world is split in two. Us v Them. Good Guys v Bad Guys. You’re with us or you’re against us. Conflict and division are central to the world view of these people. You can hear it in the cheering and booing of the mob at the rallies. This mob makes George W Bush look like a contemplative intellectual.

Now the rally starts to go from being just silly to being plain ugly. Trump embraces and embodies this division and conflict. Someone pleasingly called him a social pyromaniac. He channels the fears and hopes of the crowd. And he exploits them. He is a walking incendiary when he is priming what is called his ‘base’.

People who resort to snake oil salesmen are not generally among life’s winners. The winners don’t have to stoop, intellectually or morally, to find some form of uplift in their lives. The losers feel like they need to do just that. They in some ways resemble dying cancer victims. They will pledge their faith in any course, however strange or derided, that offers them any prospect at all of getting better.

Trump says that he understands the concerns of his base. He persuades his followers that their resentment – this chip on their communal shoulder that evokes your memory of flying over the Grand Canyon – is justified. He tells them that their grievances are real; that he can identify the causes of those grievances; and that he will eliminate those causes of their ills. He then banishes all thought by wrapping up these messianic promises in preposterous nostrums – like drain the swamp, build the wall, and make America great again. And the faithful show their faith by parroting this nonsense.

Now, this is where the rally gets really nasty. When people like Trump say that they have found the source of unhappiness of their followers, what they are doing is getting ready to put out their scapegoats. Trump knows very little history, but even he knows the central role of scapegoats of the leading populists of the twentieth century. A scapegoat is a person who is blamed for the wrongs or mistakes of others. The process is usually intellectually inane and morally vicious.

Scapegoats are no different for Trump, except that he uses a scattergun. A key feature of his mode of operation is his immoderation. He knows neither moderation nor shame, and he is in your face like a terrorist. It’s his main shock tactic – after his divorce from truth and reality. This man has no conscience and he does not know shame. It’s all there in his upbringing.

Trump’s scapegoats include – every previous government, but especially President Obama; all the security services, especially the CIA, FBI and James Comey; as of recently, most of the Congress; all the ‘mainstream media’ (again except Fox); immigrants; Latinos; China; international trade and treaties; and any form of internationalism.

Trump also believes that African Americans are inferior. He is a little cagier about how he shows this, but it is there. For example, he was so struck by the grace of the writing of Obama’s memoire that he said that Obama couldn’t have written it. He had to pin it on a white man. That was of course a lie. Just like all his nonsense about Obama’s birth. By contrast, the man who did write The Art of the Deal said Trump did not write one word of it.

I omitted Muslims from that list of scapegoats. Trump was not all coy about his disdain for Muslims. You can say the same for Farage and Hanson, but the brash vulgarity of Trump will do him no good in court on this issue.

Can anyone point to a decent leader who leaned so heavily on scapegoats?

If this picture is fair, it is certainly not pretty. The truth is that these Trump rallies are frightening. The rant after Charlottesville was terrifying. Even less pretty is the way the Murdoch press and Fox and Sky TV both feed and manipulate this mob.

There was a very sad instance of just how nasty this mob can be at a rally the other day. Trump resembles medieval kings in that he believes that he can do no wrong. This means that he has to find new scapegoats all the time. His latest attempt to disempower if not kill off the poor came with the latest attempt to kill the loathed Obama’s affordable health care – something that the rest of the West takes for granted.

Again John McCain was like the boy who stood on the burning deck. He therefore was responsible for frustrating Trump. He therefore had to be the latest scapegoat. So Trump gave the mob their cue and they booed John McCain. At the invitation of their leader, who has given every proof that he is utterly unfit for this office, this cruel and ugly crowd booed a decent Republican senator; an American who had fought for his country in Vietnam (for which he was publicly insulted by this president, who had evaded such service); John McCain is a man visibly fighting cancer in the brain; and as it happens, he is about the last man standing between this president and the members of this mob losing their rights to affordable health care. When the mob gets this nasty, they resemble the Klan – an evil group that this president thought contained ‘some very fine people’.

If these are the sorts of people that support ‘populists’, what good could ever come of it? It’s sad melange of inanity, greed, jealousy and malice. There is an obvious resemblance to other grotesque ‘populists’ in the past, but what good ever came from any of them? For that matter, what good ever came from any nationalist – apart, perhaps, from Boadicea and Joan of Arc?

It’s much the same with Hanson and Farage. Their scapegoating of Muslims is overt; their promises could most politely be described as promiscuous; and those who follow them cling to the narrowest possible definition of citizenship. It’s as if their nationalism is all that they have in life.

And if you even dare to hint that those who follow these people may be stupid, you will immediately be branded as one of the – yes, you guessed it – ‘elite’. This preoccupation with those people who are qualified to run a country is truly wondrous. If someone is serious about getting rid of all those who know how to run a country and its institutions, they should have the courage of the Red Guards. They insisted that they should run the maternity ward rather than trained nurses. The cruelty and misery were beyond description.

Here is a bar room poser for you. Out of Hanson, Farage and Trump, who is the more personally revolting? My choice would be Farage. Trump is an overblown spoiled child who is a mindless bully divorced from truth. Hanson may just believe some of what she says, and at least she has come up the hard way. The other two come from backgrounds of unimaginable privilege, which just makes their hypocrisy so much more nauseating.

But the deceptions of Farage look to me to be far more calculated. He loves toying with minds. It’s the only thing he’s ever succeeded in. He recently endorsed the AfD in Germany and introduced Steve Bannon as the leading political thinker in the western hemisphere. (Who would be his main challengers in the East?) Farage took off as soon as his horse crossed the line, and he left it to the others to do the hard part.

In AFL terms, Farage could parachute out of a worm’s bum. If there is such a thing as a ‘populist’ politician, Farage is its Platonic idea. I can’t work out why some people are happy that some other people believe in Farage. But, then again, you can turn on Sky TV most nights and find some commentators who claim to admire Donald Trump. How did it ever come to this?

Passing Bull 122 – All the President’s sportsmen

26/09/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Most of the wording of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is downright silly. The suggestion that ‘No refuge could save the hireling and slave’ still makes many people nervous, but everyone knows of ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’. Sadly, the President of the United States gets angry when brave Americans use their freedom to seek to make their land a better home.

At major sporting events in the U S, it is customary for players and spectators to stand during the national anthem. Some players have kneeled to protest against crimes allegedly committed by government agents against African Americans. President Trump says that these people are not respecting the flag, the anthem, or the nation. He goes further and he says – in typically coarse and disrespectful terms – that the protesters should be fired. Trump’s supporters – who love these live TV shows – lapped it all up. So, of course, did Trump.

Now, you don’t disrespect or insult a flag or an anthem –one’s a piece of cloth, and the other is a song. A nation is a group of people. You don’t disrespect or insult a whole group of people by failing to adhere to one of their customs of courtesy – unless those people are mightily sensitive. What Mr Trump must be saying is that by making this gesture, these players are disrespecting or insulting what America stands for. Turning your back, say, on the anthem may be like burning the flag.

What, then, does America stand for? It is stated in terms engraved on many hearts, and not just in America.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The question then is: are these players showing disrespect or insulting what America stands for by exercising a constitutional right to protest against those in government in an effort to make America better for ‘Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness’? The very idea is surely absurd.

That’s the first point. The next point is that these players and their employers will be legally bound by contracts that are probably much longer than the U S Constitution. Those contracts may or may not give rights of termination for some kinds of ‘conduct unbecoming.’

I don’t know, and I don’t know what prospect there would be of an American judge or jury holding that dropping a knee in protest during the national anthem constitutes a breach of contract. And I don’t know if such a court might hold that such a breach might entitle the employer to terminate the contract and deprive the player of his livelihood. I would be surprised, but I don’t know. Nor does the President.

As matters stand, then, the President may well be guilty of attempting to induce a breach of contract. Presidents shouldn’t do that. And quite apart from the law, there may be a real question about how much football got to be played in the weeks after an employer fired one of these players for bending his knee.

Then, some nations make it an offence against the law to insult the nation. Examples are Turkey, Thailand, Indonesia, or – God help us – North Korea. They are not regimes that we admire. Could the U S ever do this? Never – America, you will recall, is ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’.

Some of these difficulties were apparent in the weird White House scattergun defence of the President. There is a First Amendment right of free speech, but the White House has said variously that the players can’t exercise it at a place of public entertainment, such as a football game, and that they can be fired for exercising that right.

Finally, we again see this President of the United States hell-bent on causing disunity among Americans. For whatever reason, he is addicted to conflict, and, so sadly, to conflict with Americans that he manifestly regards as inferior to himself. He is assisted in this course by his accomplices in the media who live of the earnings of conflict. They couldn’t give a hoot about matters of principle. They are just there for the dollar. Trump couldn’t care less either, because he is just there for Trump.

The worrying thing is that as we go from outrage to outrage, and Trump keeps finding it impossible to do something positive, he looks more and more desperate – and more and more at home with his own desperation. Have things ever been worse in ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’?

This isn’t just bullshit. It is venom.

Poet of the month: Emily Dickinson

How firm Eternity must look

To crumbling men like me

The only Adamant Estate In all Identity –

How mighty to the insecure

Thy Physiognomy

To whom not any Face cohere –

Unless concealed in thee.

Here and there – Lawless, grasping villains

21/09/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The phrase ‘freedom of speech’ can be as vacuous as the word ‘censor’. Musos may not have been dying in the gutter, but they were going badly because big tech companies were robbing them of their royalties. Congress was moved to act. A bill for the Stop Online Piracy Act got bi-partisan support. The right people were onside. Then in 2012 Google flexed its market-honed muscles. In place of its logo on its search page, it put in a black rectangle: ‘Tell Congress: Please don’t censor the web!’ The resulting traffic overwhelmed the congressional websites. The cowards went to water, and the bill sank. Google put out a lie and wiped Congress off like a dirty bum.

Many Australians fear that Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon are getting uglier and more threatening by the day. A new book, World Without Mind, The Existential Threat of Big Tech, by Franklin Foer tells why in a crisp, informed and persuasive fashion. Here are some of the main points.

Power corrupts

We ought to be afraid of these massive concentrations of wealth and power – and masters of dark technology that most of us neither trust nor understand. Whatever views we might have of the whizz kids who started these outfits, not one of them looks to be equipped to withstand the force of the truth of the maxim that all power corrupts.

It’s not just the power over markets, it’s the power over people, and their minds. At least three of these corporations look to be de facto monopolies. Capitalism was built on competition. These giants of capitalism want to bury it. One of their champions says competition is a ‘relic of history.’

Google has acquired more than 200 companies. If you go against these giants you get crushed or bought. One third of Amazon purchases come from its algorithm derived recommendations. That shows the power over our minds. At least this way, we can be conscious of that power in operation. Amazon sells 65% of e-books and 40% of all books. Its power over publishing generally is terrifying. Bricks and mortar shops of all kinds are under threat – just look at Toys R Us.

These people can be brutally predatory. Bezos said his team should approach small publishers ‘the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.’ Charming. Could Reinhardt Heydrich have improved on that? ‘Team Amazon’ punished the New Republic for publishing an article that was disrespectful. The big techs are committed to freedom of speech, unless they are offended, in which case they retaliate to wound if not to kill. They remind me very much of the Gestapo or the NKVD. They are like laws unto themselves.

Zuckerberg said: ‘In a lot of ways, Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. We have this large community of people, and more than any other technology companies, we’re really setting policies.’ The Russians used Facebook in manipulating the American election. All the big tech companies were used for fake news. Facebook boasted about how it could manipulate voter turnout. Foer says:

No other company has so precisely boasted about its ability to shape democracy like this – and for good reason. It’s too much power to entrust to a corporation.

And, as we have just seen, Zuckerberg thought Facebook was more like a government than a traditional company.

Facebook has no qualms about performing experiments on its users. (There we see the Third Reich again.) Humans are after all just data, and if Facebook manipulates its users, this will relieve them of the burden of choice. It was George Bernard Shaw who said that freedom means responsibility – that is why most men fear it. Foer offers this gloomy judgment.

Donald Trump is the culmination of the era. He understood how, more than at any other moment in recent history, media needed to give the public what it wants, a circus that exploits subconscious tendencies and biases. Even if media disdained Trump’s outrages, they built him up as a character and a plausible candidate. For years, media pumped Trump’s theories about President Obama’s foreign birth into circulation, even though they were built on dunes of crap. It gave endless attention to his initial smears of immigrants, even though media surely understood how those provocations stoked an atmosphere of paranoia and hate. Once Trump became a plausible candidate, media had no choice but to cover him. But media had carried him to that point. Stories about Trump yielded the sort of traffic that pleased the Gods of data and benefited the bottom line. Trump began as Cecil the Lion, and then ended up president of the United States.

That is very well said. The world is looking very dangerous because clever manipulators preyed on vacant minds in angry people. There again is the analogy with Adolf Hitler.

Degrading knowledge

Apart from tax, that we will come to, these 800 pound gorillas show their contempt for the law in many areas, not least on laws made to protect the rights to property of others – especially intellectual property. To what extent are these outfits – like YouTube – based on misappropriation of property, that is, theft? They don’t generate knowledge. They process it. They then traffic in the ideas of others. Government is there to preserve the value of knowledge by granting short term monopolies in the form of patents and copyright. But Xerox, VCR’s and cassettes made copying, and piracy, the done thing. Someone said: ‘We can’t stop copying on the Internet because the Internet is a copying machine’. The Huffington Post picked the eyes out of news stories and gave grudging links to the source. Google scanned every book it could lay its hands on. Apple said: ‘Rip, Mix, Burn. After all, it’s your music.’ Steve Jobs decried digital thievery while enabling piracy.

Foer says that the big techs are presiding over the collapse of the economic value of knowledge, and that by collapsing the value of knowledge, they have diminished its quality. When newspapers charge readers, Google and Facebook seek to bury them. They of course don’t pay for any of their stuff. Foer says:

It’s galling to watch Zuckerberg walk away from the catastrophic collapse of the news business and the degradation of American civic culture, because his site has played such a seminal role in both. Though Zuckerberg denies it, the process of guiding the public to information is a source of tremendous cultural and political power.

And it has produced the disaster of Trump and his family, and ‘the degradation of American civic culture.’

Silicon Valley is waging war on professional writers. They attack copyright laws that seek to allow authors to make a living from writing. This is another instance of what Foer refers to as Silicon Valley’s ‘fake populism’. (Although, when you look at Trump and Farage, not to mention Mussolini and Hitler, you wonder what ‘authentic populism’ might look like.)

They are like lawless cowboys in the badlands. Google’s lead lawyer said: ‘Google’s leadership doesn’t care terribly much about precedent or law.’ Foer is to the point. ‘Google had plotted an intellectual heist of historic proportions.’

The triumphant herd

The author does not deal with the misery that people inflict on each other on Facebook and the like when the herd instinct reaches its logical conclusion. The lynch mob is the downside of empowering the crowd. But a recurring theme in the book is the way the big techs operate to destroy the individual. If you believe that respect for the worth of each one of us is fundamental to what we call civilisation, then organised and mechanised attempts to undermine the individual are attempts to undermine our civilisation. In the process, they are destroying the very idea of privacy. So are their addicts, inflicting their iPhone conversations on anyone else on the train or in the café. Courtesy as well as privacy goes straight out the window. The assaults on our civilisation look to be succeeding.

Facebook claims to advance the transparency of each of us. ‘Transparency’ is a weasel word, but what I think it means here is that Facebook wants to look straight through us. Well, we know what that means. It is at best demeaning. ‘The theory holds that the sunshine of sharing our intimate details will disinfect the moral mess of our lives.’ To the extent that that proposition is not pure bullshit, it is as dangerous as it is disingenuous.

When you see people unable to leave their iPhones alone, even while walking against a red light, you wonder what life may hold for them. They look like addicts and they act like addicts. And, like Coke and McDonalds, the big techs target kids, especially the spoiled kids.

‘The tech companies are destroying something precious, which is the possibility of contemplation.’ The author quotes Hampshire on Turing – he had ‘a gift for solitary thinking.’ Pascal said: ‘All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.’ If he was right, we are in big trouble.

Facebook celebrates the crowd – or the herd, or the mob, or the populus. They have, or affect to have, a ‘faith in the wisdom of crowds.’ Silicon Valley came to power on the basis of its anti-elitism….Silicon Valley views its role in history as that of the disruptive agent that shatters the grip of the sclerotic, self-perpetuating mediocrity that constitutes the American elite.’ That is of course bullshit, but the link with Trump is plain, and the author makes it. ‘With not quite the same furore as our current president, Silicon Valley came to power on the basis of its anti-elitism.’

‘Elites had a chokehold on the country that prevented the masses from expressing their creativity.’ That’s even worse bullshit, as the blog phenomenon sinks fast. But some people fell for it, and they elected Trump – whose principal helper was a Judas of the elect, an officer in the navy, a Harvard MBA, and a partner of Goldman Sachs. This side of heaven, it’s hard to get much more elect than that.

Goodbye to truth

If the stuff they put out is stolen or just second-hand, and people are silly enough to take their ‘news’ from it, what chance does truth have? The sulky herd just drifts along with whatever is ‘trending.’ ‘Facebook and Google have created a world where old boundaries between fact and falsehood have eroded, where misinformation spreads virally.’ The result, with the help of Facebook and Russia, was Trump – the ultimate threat to truth.

Community spirit

Tax? They don’t pay it. Don’t be so silly. They’re takers, not givers. The year Facebook went public they recorded $1.1 billion in American profits. They did not pay one cent of income tax. They claimed one deduction, the unkindest cut of all. Facebook wrote off the stock options it had given to the spoiled brats who were its executives. These cowboys make Gordon Gecko look like a Methodist lay preacher.

Well, it’s not pretty is it? I gather you will get much of the same from another book, Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things. According to a review, Mr Taplin says that Google is ‘in the extraction industry.’ Its business is ‘to extract as much personal data from as many people in the world at the lowest possible price and to resell that data to as many companies as possible at the highest possible price.’

There were straws in the wind. About eight years ago I listened to an expert at Oxford University say that the BBC employed four people to see that its name came up on top on Google. Why would a government entity need to do that? About four years ago, I started publishing books on Amazon and Apple. I was feeling fine until I sampled the wares of some recommended cover designers – they were all into Mills and Boon with heavy breathing (‘bodice-ripping’ is I think the phrase), and third rate science fiction.

There have been some pluses. Microsoft was brought down when the lies of Bill Gates were revealed by his emails. The blogosphere should hold no threat to the press – it’s there for authorial wannabes and political nuts. Quality papers like The New York Times have been given a boost by the disaster called Trump. The printed page is making a big comeback at least in books. Sensible people understand the need for our government to answer to a decent press and not just nuts on the Net. Only the ideologically bereft would seek to undermine government bodies like the ABC or SBS in this challenged climate.

But these other greedy parasites remain, a sinister version of Big Brother, draining our youth, minds, and manners in ways that we can’t detect. The E U looks to be the only power on earth capable of standing up to the big techs. Knowing that their propaganda firepower is unlimited, I suggest that we start by installing these big techs as Public Enemies Number One in place of Telstra and the big banks. We need to get the best minds in the world to work out how to deal with this threat before its various tumours become inoperable.

PS. Amazon has just sent me a monthly royalty notification. A bumper month! $4.26. US $, old boy!

Passing Bull 121 – God, sex and marriage

19/09/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

Sometimes you may ask a court to review a government decision that goes against you. You can do so if you can show that the relevant government agency had no jurisdiction (in general language, power) to make the decision. And you may be able to do that if you can show that the agency asked itself the wrong question. You might think that this would be a cheeky way to allow unelected judges to second-guess agents responsible to an elected government, but it doesn’t take long to see the merit in the suggestion. For example, a power to answer questions on health is not a power to answer questions about morals or business – and vice versa. Say that the AFL asks a panel of doctors to advise if its rules should be changed to improve the safety of the players. The panel says that in their opinion the rules should be changed to make the game safer, but that they advise the AFL not to so do so, as such a change would make the game less entertaining and would therefore be bad for business. The most polite response of the AFL would be – who asked you? You have asked yourself the wrong question.

English judges have spent about 900 years formulating rules for issues to be decided or questions to be answered in forensic contests. We don’t have any such rules for public debate – as the British are finding in their Brexit debates. We are now facing that problem in our debate about the role of religion in the discussion about marriage equality. It may help to look at some of the questions that may arise.

What is marriage?

Marriage is a union between two people who intend the union to be binding and which confers, as a matter of law, rights on the parties. Marriage confers status on a union between two people, just as the grant of citizenship confers status on one person. Putting God to one side for the moment, on what moral or political ground could heterosexual people deny the conferral of that legal status to homosexual people? If we deny that status to homosexual people, are we not saying that they are not entitled to all of the benefits of citizenship? Would we not then be marking homosexual people as second class citizens? If we say they cannot enjoy equal status with the rest of the community, how do we avoid the conclusion that they are inferior in status?

This first question – about a kind of legal status – leads to another. Why do we ask or worry about what people of faith may have to say on this issue? They don’t have any special rights or interest in how much tax we pay, what kind of submarine we build, or whether we should sell Blue Poles. Why is there such a fuss about their views on the legal definition of marriage? I don’t know – for reasons that I will try to give – but many of the questions discussed here overlap.

Is homosexuality against the word of a Christian God?

It’s not my faith, but parts of the bible say that it’s wrong for a man to lie with a man in the same way as he would with a woman. The penalty is death – by stoning, as I recall. Well, we couldn’t have that. Even Daesh might draw the line at death by stoning, whatever the offence. But, then, how much of the bible should we have? And, just as importantly, who says so – both for the members of the relevant church, and for the rest of us?

On that or some other ground, should people of the Christian faith decline to recognise or participate in same sex marriages?

It’s rare now for people to seek to impose their religious views on others – or to exclude from their company those people who have different religious views. A person who says ‘I will not tolerate a person whose views on religion are different to mine’ is a definitively intolerant person – a bigot.

Some religious people seek to avoid this conclusion on the issue of abortion by invoking the category of ‘murder’, and saying that ‘murder’ is non-negotiable in any moral code. But putting to one side the various defences to acts of homicide, those on the other side say that this mode of labelling is a cheap debating device. They also wonder about the sincerity of those accusing others of murder if they are content to remain in a community that allows if not promotes this crime.

To what extent, if any, should leaders or elders of that faith seek to impart their views to others of their faith or the world at large?

This question suggests that there are two other questions anterior to those I have put so far.

What business does religion have with sexuality?

That’s a very real question. And the bigger one may be: who gives the answer?

The Inquisition went after Galileo because his proven views on astronomy contradicted the bible. So they did. So what? Galileo took the view that the bible answered questions about religion, not astronomy. Should we still subscribe to the literal truth of the book of Genesis? Of course not.

Many people are very angry with one part of the Christian church. They say that the views of that church on contraception are causing untold misery around the world. Why is any church allowed to dictate to anyone – anyone – on any issue of sexuality? Is it not the case that the church is there to answer questions about religion – and not questions about sexuality? Put differently, why should we pay any more attention to what a church says about sexuality than we do for what a church says about astronomy?

What business does religion have with marriage?

Well, most religions have something to say about marriage. There may I think be various models within Christianity, let alone the many other faiths followed in Australia. But there are also purely civil non-religious forms of marriage. The Christians can have their model, and the Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists can have their models. And the secular people can have their model. What gives one group the right to claim the supremacy of their model – or to deny the right of others to their own model?

There is a particular question here. If some Christians want to say that marriage should be confined by law to a union between a man and a woman, where do they get the right to claim a nation-wide monopoly of their kind of marriage? That is a large question. It is even larger in a nation that has the following in its Constitution.

The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.

It does seem curious that in a nation that outlaws establishing a religion, its people have to endure the efforts of one religion to impose its will and establish its definition on an issue as important to that people as marriage.

The no-sayers have of course gone further than that. They have deterred our members of parliament from doing what we elect them to do. And here we may as well identify the rhinoceros in the wine cellar. But for the Catholic Church, and some of its older, uglier and angrier votaries, we would not be having this discussion, and we would not have had to endure the tawdry farce of this plebiscite. (And do you remember that hilarious occasion when a former Prime Minister, while still in opposition, said that he would not let his strong Catholic faith interfere with policy choices? Not even the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount, Tony?)

There is an issue of substance here. We live in a nation that believes firmly in the separation of church and state. Why do some members of one church want to cross the line and impose their will on their secular brothers and sisters?

But to go back to the question that led to these digressions, it’s a matter for the leaders or elders of a faith to say how they should deal with their own faithful. The rest of us, however, have a say in how they should deal with us. And the most polite way of putting it is – don’t.

We are not talking about the legal entitlement of a group of religious people seeking to tie the civil law to their religious view of the world. We are talking about the moral worth and political decency of their attempting to do that when they know that their actions will divide their community and bring pain and suffering to other members of their community. It’s one thing to say that religious people have the legal right to try to have their religious view of the world become part of the law of the land. It’s altogether a different thing to say that in doing so they are acting as decent and responsible members of the community.

There is one very simple way to justify our resistance to people seeking to impose their faith on others as they are doing in the case of marriage equality. We are for the most part talking about some but not all Christians seeking to impose their faith on others on the subject of marriage. Can you conceive of the howls of outrage – and from the very same people – if we were talking about Muslims seeking to impose their faith on others on the subject of Sharia Law – or, say, the unilateral divorce pronounced by the husband? You would be very lucky to escape with a straight-jacket. Or you might get a group trying to promote polygamy; or the people into Voodoo might have some novel ideas. Why should we give in to the views of any one faith? Put differently, it’s fine for religious people to make their leap of faith – but how can they decently ask others to join in the beliefs they hold after they have made that leap?

The philosophical answer was given by Kant, to my mind unanswerably.

We have noted that a church dispenses with the most important mark of truth, namely, a rightful claim to universality, when it bases itself upon a revealed faith. For such a faith, being historical (even though it be far more widely disseminated and more completely secured for remotest posterity through the agency of Scripture) can never be universally communicated so as to produce conviction.

To return to the theme that we started with, it is the role of the church to answer questions about marriages made within that church, and not about marriage outside that church. If a church claims the latter right, is it not plainly going outside its power or jurisdiction?

Is it appropriate for people of one faith to seek to impose the consequences of their dogma on the world at large when that faith represents only a part of the community?

I have largely given my answer, and that of Immanuel Kant, to this question. Church-going Christians represent only a small proportion of Australians. To describe Australia as a ‘Christian nation’ is in my view as insulting and dangerous as it is absurd. But there are those who make that claim, and they just make it all the more desirable for the rest of us to resist having people trying to ram their religion down our throats and to create some form of de facto established religion.

Does it make good sense ‘politically’ for members of one faith to agitate about a change in the law if that agitation will bring bad odour on that faith and its followers?

This, too, is a matter for people of faith. But it must be obvious that there may be heavy price to pay for associating with people like Abbott and Bernardi and those people in the Murdoch press and Sky television who rely on the intolerance of their audience and who live off the earnings of conflict, and who seek to hold back yesterday by denying equality to a minority of their fellow citizens.

And the no-sayers should at least dissociate themselves from some of the more dishonest posturing about religious freedom. To the extent that some of the faithful are alarmed that the Commonwealth might use the occasion to make a law for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, they are expressing alarm over the possibility of a law banned by the constitution. It is, I suppose, par for the Australian political course for a group of people to have us submit to a process that most Australians object to and then assert that they should not give the answer sought by most Australians – because their government has not told them enough!

To my mind, these crab-walkers are saying that we can’t trust this government. I agree with them entirely, but it just doesn’t lie in their mouth to say so. That is particularly the case for that little master of dog-whistling and obfuscation – John Howard – who now wants to do to marriage equality what he so squalidly did to the republic. He has a genius for negative mediocrity. And no one pretends that this is anything but a doomed holding exercise principally brought about to appease the followers of one fading religion.

Is the answer to that question different because it is asked in a nation that insists on the separation of religion from politics and which has very bad memories of people of one sect infecting its politics?

My answer will be apparent from what I have said. We may not be as strong as the French on keeping religion out of politics, but this shabby little exercise shows why we should not relax our vigilance.

Is the answer to that question different where opinion within a faith is split on this issue on reasonable grounds?

We are just weeks away from the 500^th anniversary of the start of the great schism in Christianity. For half a millennium each side has challenged the other’s integrity and accused the other of heresy. It’s morbidly ironic that some of them now can come together and stand shoulder to shoulder for the purpose of denying the aspirations of others within their community. Their unity on this issue leads to division within the wider community. What drives these people to do this? If the answer is that they are driven to that course by the religious beliefs that they hold, then that answer might give pause to those on all sides.

As I understand it, there is no uniform view on the issue either within Christianity or Judaism. I may be wrong, but I think that only the Catholic Church has the machinery to set forth a binding view – and that’s not a model that other religious sects are keen to follow. Some clergy (including rabbis) welcome the possibility of marriage equality and are keen to participate. Others reject the notion and will opt out. A Presbyterian minister has just broken the world land speed record for intolerance by refusing to marry a straight couple who were in favour of marriage equality. This split among the faithful hardly helps the cause of religion on this issue. If the faithful are split on the question, it’s not one to go to the stake for. Why then do the rest of us have to be put to this ignominious trouble and expense?

Doesn’t it just come to this? Religious people should look after religious marriages and allow secular people to look after secular marriages. In other words, the people of faith should be a bit more careful in framing the question that they are fit to answer. As matters stand, they look to me to resemble the hypothetical panel of doctors giving gratuitous commercial advice to the AFL. It’s just none of their bloody business.

And is it not so sad to see the name of the man Einstein called ‘the luminous Nazarene’ being invoked in aid of that cancer of mankind that we call exclusion? It’s even sadder than watching bishops or the odd cardinal take their breakfast at the Melbourne Club.

When I drive from Malmsbury to Ballarat, I pass many unused churches, stuck on hills in the middle of nowhere. It’s very sad; they are like sullen artefacts to a lost way of life. But for better or for worse, those churches had nothing to say to most Australians – that’s why they died. Our world has changed greatly and it will of course keep on changing. I suppose that I have a bias as a lapsed straight Protestant, and an admirer of Spinoza and Kant (both of whom were sharply rebuked by their orthodox faithful), but on looking back at how I would answer the questions set out above, I simply can’t understand what all the bloody fuss is about. And, for the removal of doubt, I’m bloody furious that we have been put to this demeaning and hurtful farce because our members of parliament have allowed a small religious claque to stop them doing their duty. They should all be deeply ashamed of themselves.

At my age, and with my disposition, it’s very unlikely that I will marry again. It’s even more unlikely that I would choose to marry a bloke. But if I did, I would expect my country to honour my right to equality before the law uninfected by the dogma of a faith that even the faithful can’t agree on. Is that too much to ask for in Australia in the year of Our Lord 2017?

Poet of the month: Emily Dickinson

How far is it to Heaven?

As far as Death this way—

Of River or of Ridge beyond

Was no discovery.

How far is it to Hell?

As far as Death this way—

How far left hand the

Sepulchre Defies Topography.

With Compliments

Geoffrey Gibson

Politics

Terror and the Police State – Chapter 3

Passing Bull 124 – Bull about respect

Terror and the Police State: II

Passing Bull 123 – Freedom and guns

Terror and the Police State 1

Here and there – The politics of identity and identity politics

Here and there – Who’s in the crowd?

Passing Bull 122 – All the President’s sportsmen

Here and there – Lawless, grasping villains

Passing Bull 121 – God, sex and marriage