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Here and there – Reflections on poetry on a bleak day outside Melbourne

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

On a lousy day at Malmsbury at the beginning of what was supposed to be spring, I wrote to friends along the lines set out below.

I read the Oxford edition of King Lear yesterday.  The editor quoted Keats:

Once again the fierce dispute

Betwixt damnation and impassioned clay

Must I burn through; once more humbly assay

The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit.

Keats was in truth a fan.  I wonder how often in his short life Keats read this play – in company, and aloud.  I wonder if he saw it performed. I forget.

My favourite lines – perhaps I should say quotes – were:

so out went the candle and we were left darkling

and

Nero is an angler in the lake of darkness.

Both lines were uttered by fools, actual or pretended, and each is so apt for the foolish darkness all around us now in Australia, England, and America – where the fools are in triumph.  Trump in particular does a fair take on Nero, and he loves nothing more than angling in darkness.  And, Boy, can he put out the candles!

Another phrase that caught my eye was in the press.  ‘Intrinsically disordered’ is apparently a line employed by one church to describe homosexuality.  It’s one of those lines that goes clear out of the back of your head as soon as you have heard it – probably in response to a very healthy defence mechanism.   Himmler may have used that line about the Jews.  We could say a lot about it – including that it is utterly impossible to imagine the holy man whose life and teaching gave rise to this church saying anything like it.

What’s wrong with these people?  A friend of mine is a true and decent follower of the man Einstein called ‘the luminous Nazarene’.  (Kant, too, would never use the name.)  My friend compared the response of the institutional church to marriage equality to the behaviour of the Commonwealth Bank generally.  That’s shockingly sad.

There may not be all that much of a gap between foolish darkness and terminal illness.

You will see, then, that with things as they stand, this Shakespearian fruit is much more bitter for me than sweet.

The reference to Keats, and the weather, sent me back to read for the nth time the letters of Keats from his Scottish tour.  It’s a glorious edition from The Grolier Club, with rough edged handmade paper from the Czech Republic, and a tipped facsimile of a letter (over-written vertically to save on postage) and a portrait and a map.  The portrait is different to that which looks down from my fireplace, but both show the doomed poet with his chin on a hand (although with different hands).  I expect that the portrait shown in the book was done from life; mine was not.

But for two things, the reader may not have thought that the letters came from a poet.  One is that when Keats first saw a waterfall, he spoke ‘if I may say so, [of] the intellect, the countenance of such places.’

The space, the magnitude of mountains, and waterfalls are well imagined before one sees them; but this countenance or intellectual tone must surpass every imagination and defy any remembrance.  I shall learn poetry here and shall henceforth write, more than ever for the abstract endeavour of being able to add a mite to that abstract of beauty which is harvested from these grand materials, and put into ethereal existence for the benefit of one’s fellows.  I cannot think with Hazlitt that these scenes make man appear little.  I never forgot my stature so completely; I live in the eye, and my imagination, surpassed, is at rest.

These thoughts and his well-known piece about ‘negative capability’ suggest to me that Keats had an intellect of singular analytical firepower.  Medical science being what it was then, Keats should have chosen law.  He looks to me to have been a born advocate.

The other thing that alerts us to poetry is that Keats keeps breaking into it.  He says ‘I am sorry I am so indolent as to write such stuff as this – it can’t be helped.’  He climbed the highest mountain.  It nearly killed him. ‘On that account I will never ascend another in this empire.’  Well, he could still write a sonnet ‘on the top of Ben Nevis.’  In it he jotted down or threw off these lines in his windswept exhausted state:

I look into the chasms, and a shroud

Vaprous doth hide them; just so much I wist

Mankind do know of hell: I look o’erhead,

And there is sullen mist: even so much

Mankind can tell of heaven: mist is spread

Before the earth beneath me; even such,

Even so vague is man’s sight of himself.

It’s just not fair!  The poor little bugger just couldn’t help himself.  And to make good the comparison – if I had attempted that climb up Ben Nevis, an emergency call to the  Intensive Care Unit at Fort William or Inverness would have gone out within, say, ten minutes of the start – if Scots wielding straightjackets hadn’t got to my ‘impassioned clay’ first.

Why opera? 7 Puccini

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7

Puccini

Now we come back to the problem of snobbery. In the case of Puccini, I have felt it at Oxford, but the worst culprits tend to come from the acolytes of the Master whom we have just been looking at.  It is, frankly, hard to see why people should feel so superior for worshipping at the same shrine as Adolf Hitler, but some of that Wagner crowd do stick their noses in the air and then hold them when the subject of Puccini comes up.  Well, there is one crowd that is hardly well placed to claim the high moral ground over the other on private life.  Perhaps the problem is that Puccini is and always has been popular.

Now, populism is right on the nose just now for obvious reasons.  But why was Puccini so popular?  He had an eye for drama, a natural sense of theatre, the knack of creating good songs, and the skill in manipulating the emotions of his audience.  Isn’t that essentially the case with Wagner – or any successful composer of opera?  Ah, yes, old boy, but think of the difference in the audiences – the Master did not patronise the gutter.  It is hard to think of a better case of pure snobbery.

In truth I think too many purists get needled by Puccini because he was like The Magnificent Seven – he just knew when to unleash his big guns, and the crowd – the unwashed crowd – specifically including ME – just bloody well loves it and calls out for more.  And, of course, Puccini was Italian, and opera is their invention.

Giacomo Puccini (1858 to 1924) was born into a fine musical family.  He began studies with his father who had studied with Donizetti, and then his uncle.  He then went to the Milan Conservatory and studied with Ponchielli.  His first works flopped, as did Verdi’s, but he had a success with Manon Lescaut in 1893 and a big hit with La Bohème in 1896.  Bernard Shaw then said that he was heir to Verdi.  Tosca and Madam Butterfly were also huge hits and came out at regular intervals.  Then came some hiccups around the time of the premiere of La Fanciulla del West in New York in 1910.  Puccini was working on Turandot when he died.  It premiered in Milan in 1926.

Puccini had become very wealthy and he could indulge himself in fishing and shooting.  His marriage was unhappy, as was his extra-marital life.  Many affairs became public, and one servant was driven to suicide.  Puccini won no friends by calling her ‘a silly girl’.

He did not have the sure conviction of his predecessors, but it might be said that he fused bel canto with verismo.  The Rough Guide’s summary is fair.

It can’t be denied that Puccini has his weaknesses: he often lapses into glutinous sentimentality; there’s more than a hint of misogyny in his preference for helpless heroines dominated by despotic men; and his plots are sometimes feeble or trivial.  But for most audiences, these weaknesses are beside the point, for his operas contain some of the most enjoyable music ever written, carrying into the twentieth century the legacy of Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi.

Now for the operas.  There is for some, including me, a structural problem with La Bohème and Tosca – some feel that the climax comes too soon, or, put differently, that each opera reaches a peak that it never gets back to – or that the end is a bit of a fizzer.  For some that problem is worse in the first opera than the second because the perceived climax comes at the end of the first act – in Tosca, you wait for the end of the second act – and, boy, there you do have a climax.  Some people feel the same about Beethoven’s third symphony, the Eroica.

Poor garret residents in the Latin Quarter are doing it hard – and cold.  Rodolfo falls for a consumptive seamstress, Mimi.  Some past attachments lead to rift which Rodolfo tries to heal too late.  The songs of the lovers in Act I are among the most popular in all opera – ‘Che gelida manina’ and ‘O soave fanciulla’.  The 1952 recording with Bjorling, Victoria de Los Angeles and Robert Merrill was long seen as pre-eminent.  But now we are again spoiled for choice.  For the whole opera, you can go straight to Netrebko with Villazon, or listen to versions conducted by Karajan or Carlos Kleiber, who some good judges thought was one of the best, conducting at La Scala.  The Karajan version was directed by Zeffirelli, but it is fascinating to compare the two orchestral sounds.  At the least, you should listen to the two great songs I referred to.  They are best sellers for good reasons.  Try the 1964 concert version in Russia of Pavarotti – he really had the bullets to fire when the composer unleashed the guns.  That’s what the fans have come for.  Or try the Peruvian Juan Diego Florez, who is hot in bel canto and here.  He reminds me of Di Stefano.

When I was looking at Thomas Allen in the last act of Don Giovanni, and I said that it may have its dramatic equal, I had in mind the second act of Tosca, and one famous version of it in particular.  A painter, Cavaradossi, the lover of Tosca, a jealous opera singer, shields a political prisoner.  The evil head of police, Scarpia, forms a scheme to seduce Tosca while destroying the painter.  Scarpia has him tortured in her presence.  She reveals where the escaped prisoner is and agrees to sleep with Scarpia if he lets Cavaradossi go.  They do a deal which backfires even after Tosca kills Scarpia at the end of Act II.

It is relatively unusual to find a piece for the stage where a central figure is a study in pure evil.  That is very much the case in Billy Budd with John Claggart.  It is so here with Scarpia.  The tenor has two wonderful arias ‘Recondita armonia’ and ‘E lucevan le stella’ and the soprano has ‘Vissi d’arte’.  But the whole show centres on the life and death struggle between Tosca and Scarpia in Act II.  The 1953 recording of Callas with Gobbi was one of the most successful records ever made.

But now you can watch them on screen.  Try the 1964 Covent Garden version directed by Zeffirelli.  The voice of Callas may not have been what it was, although this was not her biggest test vocally.  But just look at the stage presence of each of Callas and Gobbi in a struggle between ineluctable evil and overwhelming innocence by two superstars of the stage in one of the great set pieces of theatre, so well-known that it has its own liturgy.  Just look at their eyes and feel the timing.  I doubt whether many saw intensity like that since the soprano’s ancestors were putting on Orestes and Medea.  The sense of elemental force is physically unsettling.  At Covent Garden, they take curtain calls at the end of the act.  You will see here that the audience does not applaud ‘Vissi d’arte’, and properly so because of the point in the drama, but they can let go at the curtain.  Even from here you can feel the tension – it reminded me in part of the tension on Broadway when Richard Burton loaded up on Hamlet.  And just look at the serene way these two pros take their bows.

Now, we have some wonderful singers now who can act, but I doubt whether the two we have just been looking at will ever matched for raw horse-power on the stage.  If you get nothing else but this act from these notes, you will not have done your money.

Madame Butterfly is another tear jerker.  It is all so inevitable – and for that reason, like Othello (on stage), it is not among my favourites.  You just find yourself bracing for the fall.  An American naval officer marries a young Japanese girl, impregnates her, and dumps her.  When he comes back with a white wife, Madame Butterfly kills herself.  I can’t help thinking that plot might be better placed in a ballet.  It crashed on its first night in the face of concerted attacks on the composer before an audience not as entranced with the orient as the French, but one used to the hard action of verismo.  Then Puccini cleaned it up a bit and it became a hit.  It has always played well for the AO.  I prefer the Tebaldi and Bergonzi version.  You may wish to see Alana Gheorghiu sing ‘Un bel di’ at the Lincoln Centre in New York.  (I saw Carmen there.  At the first break in the action, a guy about four rows back said, with a perfect Brooklyn accent that carried: ‘She’s got great legs, but she can’t (pronounced ‘Kant’) sing!’)

That brings us to another show set in the east.  Turandot is about an evil princess who tempts young blades to their death when they fail to answer her riddles.  She finally succumbs to the hero after the unfolding of a story involving his servant Liu.  It is a show that can stand a big production, and it got it from the AO when it was choreographed by Graeme Murphy, the ballet choreographer.  It now gets featured on Sydney Harbour.  It is a big role for the soprano.  Some think that ‘In questa reggia’ was what broke Callas.  I have a Wagnerian soprano Birgit Nilsson doing it with Bjorling.  You might listen to her doing the opera with Franco Corelli – and then you can listen to two belters.  Another big voice for this aria was the great Leontyne Price.  You can get the famous Sutherland and Pavarotti version.  You should look out for the big aria for the soprano, and a lovely song for the tenor, ‘Non piangere, Liu’.

And yes, you are allowed to take ‘Nessun Dorma’. It comes near the end of the show. Try Jonas Kaufman who is thought by some to the best tenor now going.  You can get him on Last Night at the Proms with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by a woman.  Again we see that assurance.  It’s like being passed by a Bentley – you know he’s got a fair bit left in the tank.  Just watch him at the end before an enraptured English audience.  He knows he’s nailed it.  And he bursts out in laughter.  I mean this – really – when I say that it reminded me of the 2007 NRL Grand Final.  Greg Inglis ran more than half the field, and then while balanced just inside the line, he put on a fend to see him over the try line – he was a freak, and as he touched down, he burst out laughing.  At that level, you are entitled to enjoy your own great talent.  God bless all of them!

I might mention two well-known pieces from other Puccini operas that are popular in the concert hall – ‘Ch’ella mi creda’ from La Fanciulla del West and ‘Donna non vidi mai’ from Manon Lescaut.  Both are on the disk Allegro al dente that we began with.

For completeness we might mention here also the French composer Georges Bizet (1838 to 1875).  You will see that he died too soon.  He of course wrote Carmen and The Pearl Fishers that has the great duet we looked at when we started.  Bizet said: ‘I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, and the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note.’  He was not alone.  For even more completeness, I may say that Tchaikovsky (1840 to 1893) who is famous for his ballets, wrote two operas.  Eugene Onegin is well supported when put on by the AO.

Well, there you have Puccini – a wonderful source of entertainment at the opera and of solace before the fire.  Don’t let any snob tell you anything different.  And remember, he was an Italian – and second in opera only to one other Italian and Mozart.

Passing Bull 113 – Bleating from the banks

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

New taxes on banks, both federal and state, have caused outrage. My paper, the AFR, got itself into a right tizz, and went into a leaden, clichéd overdrive.

First Canberra held up the banks because the politicians couldn’t control their spending, and the banks were both profitable and unpopular. Now that the Feds have broken into the banks’ vaults, other levels of government are joining in the looting of private stakeholders’ money. What we are witnessing is nothing less than the debauchery of the political system.

In yesterday’s budget, South Australian Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis announced that his state was going to follow Scott Morrison’s lead and whack the big four banks plus Macquarie with a 0.015 per cent tax on the South Australian share of their liabilities. Whereas Morrison said the banks could afford to ‘‘pony up’’ because ‘‘no one likes you anyway’’ and it was just a ‘‘fair additional contribution’’, Mr Koutsantonis said ’’we know they are making super profits’’ and that ‘‘even if every other state follows, they’d still be under-taxed’’. Sound familiar? Oh, and it will raise $370 million for the mendicant state whose disastrous renewable energy policy means they can barely keep the lights on, just as Morrison’s version is expected to raise $6.2 billion federally.

As we editorialised after the May budget, this is the Willie Sutton school of budget management: robbing the banks because that’s where the money is. Strapped governments simply reach around for cash wherever it can be found. Morrison’s Liberal Party, ostensibly the party of fiscal discipline, thought this was a great idea. Why shouldn’t the states follow suit? Yet this is serious, and may be the thin end of the wedge if other cash-strapped states choose to follow South Australia’s lead.

Dear, dear, dear – looting!  ‘Of private stakeholders’ money’ – in a public company?  Should we be looking for reds under the bed?

Then they published what lawyers call a plea from Ian Narev of the CBA (in which I hold shares).

The providers of the capital that fuels our economy are international pension funds, just like the Australian super funds looking after our retirement savings. These funds place high importance on strong banks. But they also place high importance on strong, predictable government policy. Providers of capital hate surprises. Surprises undermine their confidence to invest. They wonder where surprises will end. And in a world where they have abundant choices for investment, surprises ultimately lead them to take their capital – the capital we need to build businesses and create jobs – elsewhere.

Unpredictability of government policy has a clear label: sovereign risk. Ask global investors about their view of Australia, and most will point to significantly elevated levels of sovereign risk.

It is in this context that we should view the South Australian government’s unprincipled and reckless tax grab as it walked through the gate the federal government left open. Despite the fact that almost every Australian has an economic stake in the banks, and that banks directly and indirectly create jobs and wage growth, the Federal and South Australian Governments revel in saying how easy it will be to gain support even for populist policies that have no basis in sound economics.

They may be right. But they miss the big point. Under their watch, sovereign risk in Australia is rising exponentially. That won’t show up in short term opinion polls. It will show up over the longer term in reduced investment and higher costs of capital. And the community may take a different view when, in time, the consequences of these ill-considered policies become obvious, and can’t be explained away by slogans.

What that means, I think, is that Mr Narev fears that he may now have to pay more for his money.  Poor fellow – quel domage!  The business of banking is simple.  You take money in through the left window at X% and let it out through the right window at X+Y% and you pocket the difference.  Mr Narev is here worrying about the left widow – X may grow a bit.  But what got the silly buggers into trouble was the right window – they found that in their greed they could not get their money back.  You should watch The Big Short at the cinema and listen to the audience sigh and groan at the galahs that nearly sent us down.

The banks may have a ground of objection in economics.  I wouldn’t know – but I do know that I am suspicious about economists.  Where were these gurus when we needed them in the lead up to the GFC?  Why could some whizz kids working in a U S garage see what was coming when no practising economist could?  I’m even more suspicious when an appeal is made to the knowledge of business insiders.  ‘Trust me, I’m a banker’ does not wash – to the certain knowledge of ‘I the banker.’

What about the politics then?  A home run against the banks.  How many people are in favour of cutting taxes paid by large profitable companies and reducing support for the young, the sick, the unemployed, and the aged? (Disclaimer – I may qualify under three of those headings.)

The federal government was crude – as is its wont – in saying that they could be cavalier with the banks because banks are unloved.  But we do have a kind of democracy, and that is a form of government that should reflect the thinking and feelings of the people at large.  It’s just tripe to dismiss that fact of life as ‘populism.’  If the people as a whole are angry with the banks – and they are – then it is natural that the government reflects this anger in their laws.  That’s just what we have here.

For my part, I see no substance in the Commonwealth’s criticism of the state of South Australia. The people of that state have a government of a different political colour to that of the Commonwealth.  For reasons I understand, people there are angry with both the Commonwealth and the banks, and that anger too will be reflected in their laws.

Of course there is a risk that these taxes will expand.  That’s a risk with any tax and with just about any law.  Income tax started as an emergency wartime measure to stop Napoleon.  The government just got hooked on it, just as our governments got hooked on gambling revenues.

The banks were on the nose before the GFC.  Someone like Mr Narev gets paid about one hundred times what Peggy Sue the bank teller gets.  One of his main functions – one of his ‘drivers’ – is to sack as many Peggy Sues as he can and to  leave me dangling on the line to the bowels of Bengal.

In their defence of their obscene pay levels, the banks refer to market forces.  But their embrace of these forces dissolves into the ether when those forces don’t suit them.  When market forces threatened the very existence of the banks, they came running to Daddy and Mummy for their dummy.  They want me to stand behind them, whether I like it or not.  They need us to guarantee them.  So much for market forces, and those reactionaries who fulminate against government funded bodies like the ABC.  At least the ABC acknowledges that it’s there to serve us – and don’t even think of asking which people trust more, Aunty or the banks.

With our help, the banks rode out the GFC.  That crisis had been brought on by criminal greed and profit-driven ineptitude.  We picked up the tab.  The bankers trousered their bonuses.  Almost no one went to jail.  But people kept losing their jobs.  Those left in work saw their wages stall, while their bosses were rolling in it.  The banks sat pretty on our backs.

And they didn’t bother to support the government or even decently liaise with it.  Instead they gave it the bird by appointing someone from the other team to lead their defence.

The banks behave with this lordly insouciance in an industry that doesn’t just need what politicians call a ‘social licence’ – they must have a legal licence to open their doors, just as I need a licence to drive a car.  Well, they have got used to being callous with their staff, and rude to me – but can’t they see the sense of getting on with their government, or, if you prefer, their sovereign?

And in cataloguing some of the reasons why people don’t like or trust banks, I have not mentioned that the top pay levels are often set by criteria that encourage bank officers to cut corners with the law and decency.  The word for that is ‘corrupt’.

What about sovereign risk?  This is a protean term.  I would think that people dealing with a bank may have to account for the chance that the government behind it may default on its debts or other obligations or that it might legislate against the banks.  The greatest risk, as it looks to me, is that the government might repudiate its guarantee of the banks or fail to honour it.  It’s not in Mr Narev’s interest to mention that risk in this context.

My little super fund holds a significant part of its shares in banks.  I did that on advice from a mate who is a broker.  He said that the conduct of the banks that made them jerks to their staff or me may make them more profitable and enable them to maintain their flow of dividends.  He also advised that I look for markets that are tightly controlled and looked after by governments. (I can’t recall if he used the word ‘cosseted’.)

These new taxes may lead to a reduction in my dividends.  I doubt that – I certainly don’t fear my being ‘looted’.  But it will all be worthwhile if this little démarche leads to an improvement in the banks’ manners.  I am sick of their arrogance, posturing, and bleating.  Frankly, I’m even sicker of looking at people making twenty times what I made at my top with little of the learning and none of the risk.

Poet of the month: Homer, Iliad, Book 1.

The Greeks in shouts their joint assent declare, 

The priest to reverence, and release the fair. 

Not so Atrides; he, with kingly pride, 

Repulsed the sacred sire, and thus replied:

‘Hence on thy life, and fly these hostile plains, 

Nor ask, presumptuous, what the king detains 

Hence, with thy laurel crown, and golden rod, 

Nor trust too far those ensigns of thy god. 

Mine is thy daughter, priest, and shall remain; 

And prayers, and tears, and bribes, shall plead in vain; 

Till time shall rifle every youthful grace, 

And age dismiss her from my cold embrace, 

In daily labours of the loom employ’d, 

Or doom’d to deck the bed she once enjoy’d 

Hence then; to Argos shall the maid retire, 

Far from her native soil and weeping sire.’

Passing Bull 81  –  A Portrait of an Idiot

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

In a book soon to be published called Language, Meaning, and Truth, you will find something like what follows.

Unfortunately, and notwithstanding the obvious problems we have just referred to, labelling is not just common but mandatory in far too much political discussion in the press, and certainly for shock jocks and those who make a career out of working TV chat shows.  While some people naturally thrive on conflict – Napoleon and Hitler are two bad cases – some people in the press engage in conflict for a living.  These people rarely have a financial motive to respond reasonably, much less to resolve the conflict.  To the contrary, they have a direct financial interest in keeping the conflict as explosive as possible.  It is notorious that controversy feeds ratings and that bad news sells newspapers.

If you put up an argument to one of these people who live of the earnings of conflict, the response will very commonly involve two limbs – a personal attack  on you (the Latin tag for which is ad hominem), followed by some labels, which are never meant as compliments.  So, for example if someone, were to query the rigour of the policies of the government toward refugees, a predictable response would be ‘What else would you expect from someone who subscribes to the ABC?  How would you like these people to move in next door?’  There is no argument – just vulgar abuse.

The CIA reported that Russia had intervened in the US presidential election.  That report did not please Donald Trump.  In trashing his own intelligence community, the president elect gave a text- book example of the response referred to above – a personal attack followed by some labels – no argument – just vulgar abuse.

These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again.’

This is what we must expect as we go from a president of intellect and integrity to a buffoon and bully who has neither.  This is the reaction of an uneducated spoiled child – which is what Trump is.

Poet of the Month: Vergil (Eclogues)

Need I mention him who, having sown the seed,

follows closely, and flattens the heaps of barren sand,

then diverts the stream and its accompanying brooks to his crops,

and see, when the scorched land burns, the grasses withering,

he draws water, in channels, from the brow of the hill.

Or him who grazes his luxuriant crop in the tender shoot,

as soon as the new corn’s level with the furrow,

lest the stalks bend down with over-heavy ears.

Or him who soaks out a marsh’s gathered water with thirsty sand,

especially in changeable seasons when rivers overflow

and cover everything far and wide with a coat of mud,

so the hollow ditches exude steamy vapours?

Passing Bull 75 – Two words to avoid

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

In the last four or five months, some people called ‘the elite’ have been held to be responsible for quite a lot, including political earthquakes in England and America.   Apparently, they have not cared enough about those who are on the wrong end of the inequality stakes.  The people who make this claim are often in the media, which is a principal target of those who have missed out.  The elite are those who are chosen.  It should mean the cream.  It is hard to see the press in general, or the Murdoch press in particular, as the cream.  But it is harder to see just who the elite are here.  In truth, it is just a distracting label for an indeterminate body of people, and a gateway to bullshit.

Another problem word for us now is ‘conservative’.  A conservative political party is one that seeks to keep things as they are and to minimise government action.   The Tories in England claim to be such a party.  Until recently, the Republicans did also in America.  For many reasons, we have never had a real conservative party in Australia.  We are just too reliant on government to allow that to happen.  And we don’t like ideologues.

But now the word ‘conservative’ is claimed by some politicians, such as Abbott or Bernardi, and commentators, such as Bolt.   As best I can see, the ingredients of their beliefs are as follows.  They are concerned about ‘border protection’ – they think it is in order to hold indefinitely people who sought to enter this country by boat in order to deter people they call ‘people smugglers.’  They think that what we call ‘climate change’ is either bullshit or over-rated; they get very worked up over ‘renewables’.  They also get worked up over laws about insulting and offensive words.  They say that a law against insulting or offending people on the ground of race limits their freedom of speech.  Of course it does – the question is why they want to be free to insult and offend people on the ground of race, and how that freedom might benefit them or us.  They are mostly monarchists; Abbott’s mania about this was instrumental in his losing office.  And most of them claim to be close to God – obnoxiously so to those who prefer to see religion kept out of politics – no matter what the faith may be.

I hold the opposite view on each, but it is hard to see how these views qualify for the label conservative.  This is especially so with the views on hate speech and climate change.  I don’t see how the rejection of science or laws needed to maintain public order makes someone a ‘conservative.’  And, if it matters, both look to be pure bullshit – and to be the subject of quite manic pogroms in the Murdoch press.

I saw four exemplars of this weird faction on Sky the other night.  Going from left to right around a bemused and sensible chair they were – Bronwyn Bishop, Mark Latham, Ross Cameron, and Rowan Dean.  I don’t know how much alcohol was involved, but they were like pigs in a trough.  They were bucketing Obama and chortling about Trump.  It was like Animal Farm crossed with Lord of the Flies.  It was seriously scary and nauseating.  Dean may be the most revolting person in public life here, but that night he had three challengers.

This faction is in my view in large part responsible for Shorten being tipped to win the next election by the length of the straight.

That’s all now – I’m being worked over by Telstra again.  I know what it feels like to be rejected – but here the ‘elite’ are certainly not involved.

 

Poet of the month:  Rosemary Dobson

On Christina Stead

I sit beside the bed where she lies dreaming
Of pyrrhic victories and sharp words said,
She will annihilate the hospital …
Suppose her smouldering thoughts break out in flame,
Not to consume bed, nightdress, flesh and hair
But the mind, the working and the making mind
That built these towers the world applauds …
I have dreamt her nightmare for her. She wakes up
And turns to smile with quick complicity.
”I wasn’t asleep. I watched you sitting there.”

Passing Bull 69 – Secrecy and Camps

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

In The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939 (2005), Richard Evans says of concentration camps in the Reich that officers and guards were banned from talking about their work:

Communication between inmates and their relatives or friends was restricted; officers and guards were banned from talking about their work to outsiders.  What happened in the camps was meant to be shrouded in mystery.  Attempts by the regular police and prosecution authorities to investigate murders that took place there in the early years were generally rebuffed.  By 1936, the concentration camps had become institutions beyond the law.  On the other hand, however, the regime made no secret at all of the basic fact of their existence.  The opening of Dachau in 1933 was widely reported in the press, and further stories told how Communist, and Reichsbanner and ‘Marxist’ functionaries who endangered state security were being sent there; how numbers of inmates grew rapidly into the hundreds; how they were being set to work; and how lurid atrocity stories of what went on inside were incorrect.  The fact that people were publicly warned in the press not to try and peer into the camp, and would be shot if they tried to climb the walls, only served to increase the general fear and apprehension that these stories must have spread.  What happened in the camps was a nameless horror that was all the more potent because its reality could only be guessed at from the broken bodies and spirits of inmates when they were released.  There could be few more frightening indications of what would happen to people who engaged in political opposition or expressed political dissent, or, by 1938 – 9, deviated from the norms of behaviour to which the citizen of the Third  Reich was supposed to adhere. 

Well, that kind of evil madness could only happen in a totalitarian state like Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s USSR, could it not?  No.  It is happening here.  The Australian Border Force Act 2015 is presumably part of what Tony Abbott calls his legacy.  S 42 provides for secrecy in terms that Stalin and Hitler would have gazed on in wonder.

Secrecy

             (1)  A person commits an offence if:

                     (a)  the person is, or has been, an entrusted person; and

                     (b)  the person makes a record of, or discloses, information; and

                     (c)  the information is protected information.

Penalty:  Imprisonment for 2 years.

Exception

             (2)  Subsection (1) does not apply if:

                     (a)  the making of the record or disclosure is authorised by section 43, 44, 45, 47, 48 or 49; or

                     (b)  the making of the record or disclosure is in the course of the person’s employment or service as an entrusted person; or

                     (c)  the making of the record or disclosure is required or authorised by or under a law of the Commonwealth, a State or a Territory; or

                     (d)  the making of the record or disclosure is required by an order or direction of a court or tribunal.

Note:          A defendant bears an evidential burden in relation to a matter in subsection (2) (see subsection 13.3(3) of the Criminal Code).

The relevant terms are of course defined in cascading rainbows or snow jobs, but doing the best I can to apply this law – which like most contemporary legislation is just about indecipherable – a person employed in one of our offshore camps would breach this law if she told her husband that a colleague at work had broken wind after biting into a bad mandarin.

This law is a confession of our shame at the highest and most formal level.  No wonder people look on us so darkly in Europe.  We should all be ashamed.  Instead, we just shoot the messenger.

Poet of the Month: Verlaine

Through Interminable Land…

Through interminable land

Ennui of the plain,

Vague snow once again

Gleams like sand.

The sky is copper

Devoid of any light,

You might almost gather

The moon had lived and died.

Floating clouds

Grey oak-trees lift

In near-by woods

Among the mists.

The sky is copper

Devoid of any light,

You might almost gather

The moon had lived and died.

Wheezing crow

You gaunt wolves too,

When north winds blow

How do you do?

Through interminable land

Ennui of the plain,

Vague snow once again

Gleams like sand.

Passing bull 51 – Addition

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

 

Since John Howard says that he was right in 2003, perhaps I might be forgiven for making the same claim.  In a note about Howard in 2003, I said the following.

Take foreign policy.  I was balloted out of Vietnam.  I did not go.  Nor did any member of this Government go.  Although I did not go, I learned a big lesson – about believing my government or following someone else’s.  I did not think that at least one of those lessons would be forgotten, but it apparently has been.  We have gone back to fighting the wars of our master.  How many of its young does a nation have to lose before its government learns? Mr. Howard is ready to follow the U S in a war that will demonstrate to the Muslim world that the U S can mount a unilateral crusade in the name of God against a Muslim state to overturn its government and to Asia that we are the sheep-dog of the U S, and a very well disciplined one at that. How would we like it if a Muslim nation unilaterally started a war to change the government of a Christian nation or the Jewish nation? We might be leaving a legacy of poison that outlives my grandchildren. That is our best result even if every man Mr. Howard sends comes back – and all because of the felt need of Mr. Howard to fawn on someone who has been too much fawned upon already.  As for our posturing of military or diplomatic significance, I am reminded of the local paper in Launceston which, in the 1850s, shortly before the Crimean war, said at the start of its editorial, “This newspaper warns the Czar of Russia.”

I append, for those who are interested, the whole note.  It does show, I think, why our faith in our politicians has ebbed away so much.

JOHN WINSTON HOWARD

In his last speech to the House of Commons, Winston Churchill wondered what would happen “if God wearied of mankind.” In responding to the extracts of the Quadrant paper published in The Australian of 10 January 2003 (“All Hail the Unlikely Savior”) by my friend Peter Ryan, I want to suggest that the answer is that if God had wearied of mankind, God would have given John Winston Howard to Australia. In my view, Mr. Howard was given to Australia to bring out the worst in Australians, and he is at his heart’s ease when he is doing just that.

Take our refusal to apologise to the aborigines.  There is, apparently, some debate in this country about the level or incidence of genocide (as there is in Turkey and Israel about the mass deaths of Armenians). Personally I prefer the evidence of the aborigines not to mention the circumstantial evidence – to the advocacy of the Europeans. But some things are clear. The aborigines did not invite the Europeans to take over the country. The Europeans did so. As a result, countless aborigines died and their people are immeasurably worse off, at least in their eyes. If a gentlemen’s club found itself in a similar case, it – its present members – would apologise. Courtesy would call for nothing else.

But it goes further than that for us. Australia as a nation has to accept responsibility for what happened when it was being built. Just as we celebrate the Anzacs at Gallipoli and Bradman at Lords – all generations before most living Australians – so we have to accept that others of our forebears behaved with revolting inhumanity in dispossessing the aborigines to make possible the development of Australia as we know it.

Australians used to be smug about the racist attitudes that prevailed in Germany and South Africa. We should not be. They are way ahead of us in truth and reconciliation for their racist histories. As Hannah Arendt made clear (on the final page of Eichmann in Jerusalem) it has nothing to do with collective guilt.

“Every government assumes political responsibility for the deeds and misdeeds of its predecessors and every nation for the deeds and misdeeds of the past.”

Since there is no generational statute of limitations for offences against humanity, this is what we expect from the German nation for what Germans of past generations did to another race. It is what others expect from the Australian nation for what Australians of past generations did to another race. Does the Australian government seriously suggest that the Australian survivors of the Burma Road or Changi, or their families, are now out of time to ask for acknowledgment from the government of Japan, the nation in whose name the relevant offences against humanity were committed? Do we say that since the changing of the guard the German nation is home scot free from Auschwitz? Does anyone who does say that at the risk  of being  called  morally insane – state our moral claim to possession of the Ashes  in terms of the exploits  of the present generation of Australian cricketers and nothing more?

Why does Mr. Howard insist on being so mean and petty about squaring off with these other Australians?

Take the republic. We are talking about the future now, not the past.  Did the Prime Minister show leadership? Did the Prime Minister show vision? No – all we got was mere politicking designed to preserve the status quo. It was in truth a filibuster­ designed to last a lifetime.  Here was an opportunity to reformulate the nation when it and its world had changed completely since we received our current dispensation in a schedule to an act of Queen Victoria and the Imperial Parliament. Instead we have to tell Asia and our other trading partners that we cannot carry on our affairs without intervention from the English royal family.  Our standing in Asia as a colonial relic has been reinstated, and at a time when we are winning back our reputation as racists.  Australian judges, not our most radical group, began cutting loose from the authority of British courts two generations ago. It was part of our growing up.  What is it with this fetish of Mr. Howard with the British?

All this takes place against the most public and tawdry dissolution of the royal family. There is apparently some convention that we should not mix family and political matters. Why not? That is just what a monarchy does. The top job is hereditary.  It stays in the family. This family is no longer up to it. The heir and his chosen queen have shown that they cannot maintain the most basic oath of fidelity – and yet people on this side of the world are expected to honour oaths of allegiance to them.  Is this the best that we can leave our children?

Take the flag. I would like my country to have its own.  I have been to Gallipoli, the Somme and Ypres. I have grieved at each. I have grieved not just because of the Australians who died there, but because of the heartlessness and mindlessness of those who caused the carnage – for the most part, not Australians.  I would have thought that each of these memorials is a powerful lesson about being too attached to a flag.  No sane person dies for a flag – but each of these places is now part of Australia’s heritage. It is natural to carry the flag there. I would rather do so with Australia’s own flag and not one dominated by the flag of the imperial power responsible for these losses en masse. The standing of that power was not increased by the moral failure of Mr. Jardine, the physical failure of Singapore, or the absorption of Great Britain into Europe.

It is one thing to celebrate a history in terms of loss or failure; we love that here; it is altogether a different thing to venerate those responsible, foreigners or not.  To continue to insist on the maintenance of relics is not to respect the fallen but to refuse their gift.  We may proceed on the footing that they died that Australia might live, not that it might be mummified.

There is some irony in our devotion to a flag that is said to reflect our history. Those who are most fervently for the current flag because of its history are often those most fervently against accepting responsibility for other things that happened in that history. In truth, the flag is a political issue and both sides might usefully consider not invoking Australian dead on their side, if for no other reason than that it is vulgar.  In any event, I cannot believe that my father’s father fought in Flanders so that his grandchildren might be subjected to claptrap about saluting the Union Jack.

Take refugees.  None of that “huddled masses” or “wretched refuse” jazz for us.  We are committed to fight them on the beaches.  Churchill sat there with Dad’s Army waiting for the whole might of the Wehrmacht to be unleashed.  We sent our elite SAS to storm a boat full of unarmed Afghans.  People seeking shelter from Australia are offered a choice – they can be held in some slophouse of the Pacific eager to turn a coin in this trade in human misery, or we can jail them indefinitely in a concentration camp in the desert.  Try jailing an Australian indefinitely on the mere say-so of a copper or a politician. All this came to a head in an election campaign in which it is now clear that senior members of the Australian government suborned senior officers of the armed forces.  We as a nation have acquired the ethics of the tobacco companies.  First you harm people, then you lie about it, and then you deal with the evidence to put yourself beyond the reach of the judges -the electorate, or the courts, as the case may be – and if the system goes to plan, you have a sporting chance of getting away with it.

Take foreign policy.  I was balloted out of Vietnam.  I did not go.  Nor did any member of this Government go.  Although I did not go, I learned a big lesson – about believing my government or following someone else’s.  I did not think that at least one of those lessons would be forgotten, but it apparently has been.  We have gone back to fighting the wars of our master.  How many of its young does a nation have to lose before its government learns? Mr. Howard is ready to follow the US in a war that will demonstrate to the Muslim world that the U S can mount a unilateral crusade in the name of God against a Muslim state to overturn its government and to Asia that we are the sheep-dog of the U S, and a very well disciplined one at that. How would we like it if a Muslim nation unilaterally started a war to change the government of a Christian nation or the Jewish nation? We might be leaving a legacy of poison that outlives my grandchildren. That is our best result even if every man Mr. Howard sends comes back – and all because of the felt need of Mr. Howard to fawn on someone who has been too much fawned upon already.  As for our posturing of military or diplomatic significance, I am reminded of the local paper in Launceston which, in the 1850s, shortly before the Crimean war, said at the start of its editorial, “This newspaper warns the Czar of Russia.”

What do these things say about our government?  It is mean.  It has no imagination.  It does not lead.  If there is any vision, it is bleak. I have seen Australian governments arouse serious hostility, but I cannot recall one making so many Australians feel ashamed to be Australian.  A nation that finished the last century trying to get rid of its mean, timid, colonial, white Australia streak, is reinventing itself in the first part of this century: a country not just of the triumph, but the triumphalism of mediocrity.  While this is the antithesis of the conservatism of Disraeli or Churchill, a comparison with other conservatives may be misleading and unfair. Disraeli had to deal with Bismarck; Churchill had to deal with Hitler and Stalin; Mr. Howard has to deal, on a daily basis, with Gary Morgan, John Laws, and Jana Wendt.  Not for us “those broad sunlit uplands”; we have to stick with the irredeemably prosaic.

Two appointments show a personal animus of Mr. Howard behind these flaws.  The Archbishop of the Church of England – not the Church of Thailand or the Church of Iran; one does not play those chaps at cricket – was appointed Governor-General when it was apparent that there were likely to be problems. Trouble did follow the Archbishop to the detriment of the office of Governor-General. He is, however, still there, although irrelevant and an embarrassment to everyone. Mr. Howard has remained obdurate. We have gone from a man who could unite the nation, and who was respected, to one who reminds many of its cruelest moments, and who is not trusted.

Take the appointment of the successor to Justice Gaudron. It would not have taken much to have made an appointment that would not have told half the country that they are not up to it.  No, Justice Heydon was appointed with the ludicrous statement that the appointment was apolitical.  Of course it was political. The government wanted a dead-set conservative it thought it could rely on. (It was presumably this ideology that underlay the gruesome kamikaze attack on “the gadfly” (Justice Kirby) by Mr. Howard’s friend.)  Extensive interviews were conducted to ensure compatibility.  Justice Heydon revealed his thinking on the High Court in what might fairly be described as a polemic.  It is apparently to be published in Quadrant.  Peter Ryan, also  a contributor to Quadrant, is well pleased that “that august tribunal will finally resume its former status of universal esteem” (unless, I suppose, the person forming the estimation is a woman, or an admirer of Justice Gaudron, or had views about income  tax becoming optional under the Barwick court).  Heaven knows the country needs a respectable intelligentsia of the right, but an appointment to the High Court of a conservative lawyer by a conservative government is hardly a seemly occasion for a congratulatory confraternity of contributors to Quadrant.  Just think what the stink would have been like if a couple of the true believers had got one of their own up, and had skited about it in one of their journals. (Who could forget the reaction at the Melbourne Bar when the late Justice Murphy was appointed?  Some wanted to cancel courtesy and boycott the welcome, at a time when the Court was wilfully distorting the law to suit the supporters of the parties that had appointed every other member of the Court.)  In the end, we have lost an Australian success story for the drab uniformity of seven pin-striped eggheads.  This was indeed a signature appointment by Mr. Howard.

Can’t say sorry to the aborigines.  Can’t say goodbye to the British.  Can’t say no to the Americans. A hemisphere out of place; a century out of date; and not a principle to be seen. The spiritual heir of the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, Mr. Howard, is a relic lost among the cobwebs of the colony he cannot escape from. 

Do these attitudes of the Prime Minister have something in common? There is the visceral insecurity of the kind you associate with a serial loser.  There is obviously a belief that Australia as a nation cannot stand on its own two feet – it is not grown up yet.  We have in this Prime Minister a natural retardant.  More worryingly, there is a distrust of the ordinary Australian which has for too long been the inarticulate premise of what passes for the conservative side of politics in this country. As a result, while there is not much on the left, there is even less on the right.  We have arrived at bleakness visible, and at least one generation of Australians is about ready to give up.

Remembrance of Things Past – and not Past

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

As I follow it (from Prehistory by Colin Renfrew, or Professor Lord Renfrew), the current thinking of historians and scientists is that human evolution from the apes became complete about 200,000 years ago in Africa and that the main dispersal of humanity out of Africa took place about 60,000 years ago. All of us human beings are ultimately descended not from Adam and Eve but from our African ancestors in or about the area that we now call Ethiopia who were living about 200,000 years ago. They in turn had evolved over a much longer period of millions of years from the apes.

Human beings arrived in Europe and Australia about 40,000 years ago – well after they had reached the Middle East.

Any physical differences between peoples – if you must, racial or ethnic groups – follow after the dispersal from Africa. They are not genetic – they are socially or culturally induced. A child born today would be very little different in its DNA from one born, say, 60,000 years ago.  There is no reason why they could not do as well as our kids with the same upbringing.

The two big events in moving away from the Stone Age were the development of agriculture and the formation of towns. These in turn led to gods, writing, and laws. They also led to inequality. Religions tended to sanctify central power – the pharaoh, emperor or king had a divinely ordered status. Historians think that they can now trace phases of the development of the mind that ultimately became human over millions of years. Those phases bear some resemblance to the phases of legal development that our ancestors went through that were identified by Sir Henry Maine in his book Ancient Law.

Lord Renfrew makes a comment that does not surprise us.  ‘The key to inequality lies in worldly goods…..the adoption of a money economy marked the end of prehistory in so many parts of the world that we could take it as the best indicator of the dawn of history.’

Some landmarks may help with scale.  Our predecessors used a form of hand-axe before they had become what we would call human. The first jewellery and decoration appears to come from South Africa about 75,000 years ago. There are bone flutes and drawings of lions in France that are about 32,000 years old. Some of our Aboriginal rock art is at least 28,000 years old. There is a sculpted stone in Turkey that is about 11,000 years old. There are traces of permanent settlement around Jericho going back to about 9000 BC – we trace what we call the ‘agricultural revolution’ to that period. The idea that gold had some value emerged in Bulgaria around 4500 BC. Stonehenge was created between 3000 and 2000 BC and represents about 30 million work hours. Moses was born about 1400 BC. Coins were first introduced in Turkey after 1000 BC.

What we see as civilisation started in Athens in the fifth century BC. It took us more than 2000 years after that to establish that the earth was not the centre of the universe.  A lot of people who believed in Aristotle or God were horrified – much as they would later be horrified by Darwin.

If the Genesis account were applied to our creation, the earth was created not millions of years ago, but about 6000 years ago, and mankind was created, full-blown, at the same time. Science has proved that to be impossible.

If this account is correct, all human beings come from the one common stock, and any differences that some may wish to characterise as ethnic or racial are not genetic. They have come about because people have lived different lives. My humanity is the same as the humanity of the blackfella. Any differences between us come only from the way in which our ancestors have lived.

I find that view to be immensely comforting. It puts a big dent in the views of those who want to say that people are intrinsically different. At least genetically, all humans are born equal.

All this makes it hard for us humans to be sanely racist. It makes it hard for God, too.

In the last century and a half or so, we have made big discoveries in the way that we see ourselves and the universe. I regard all those discoveries as being neutral on the question of whether God exists.  God is no more or less of a mystery to me than the Big Bang, or our evolution from the apes over millions of years, or a universe that goes for millions of light years.  We can put all those terms into grammatically correct and apparently logically sound sentences, but in the end we have no real idea what is entailed by these ungovernable notions.

But the discoveries and proofs of mankind are not neutral on the history of any such God that we may choose to believe in. We now know that God could not have done what the Bible says that he did. And we now know that the people that the Bible says that he chose to make a covenant with did not have the history – that is, they were not the people – that the Bible says that they had; they were not the people that the Bible said they were.  They had come out of Africa, and down not from Adam and Eve, just over the hill, and not so long ago, and with a traceable ancestry.

You would not want to go to a bank and ask for money on the basis of a security whose title rested on a covenant given by a God that did not exist to a people that did not exist.  Or at least where the root of title of your documentary security seriously misrepresented the parties to the relevant covenant and was out of whack in its historical timing to the tune of 200,000 years or so.

Lord Renfrew quotes from a distinguished anthropologist who wanted to give a definition of religion that avoided any mention of the supernatural. He came up with this definition: ‘a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating concepts of a general order of existence and clothing these concepts were such an aura of flexibility that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.’ As the learned author remarks, a frivolous reader could see in this definition not so much a description of ‘religion’ as ‘of another powerful and ubiquitous presence in our society,’ that is, money.  Our movement from the apes has in truth had its ups and downs.

There is probably enough there for some people to digest without passing on the suggestion that our evolution from the apes was finally induced by climate change in the Great Rift Valley in Ethiopia.  That might be the last straw for some of our Republican brothers and sisters over the Pacific, or for readers of The Australian Spectator.

Speaking of remembering times past, I wish you a happy new year, although I am myself coming to prefer the Chinese model.

Happy Christmas to all those crooks out there

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

People at FIFA could not spell the word ethics.  They have suspended two high ranking officers for eight years for a ‘disloyal transaction’ where one paid millions to the other.  I gather that ‘disloyal’ means dishonest or a payment made in breach of trust in or breach of fiduciary duty.  That is, money from a fund was not applied properly for the purposes of the fund, but to suit the private interests of the parties.  The function of an ethics committee is to police ethical standards to protect members and the public.  Once a finding of dishonesty at that level in the hierarchy and in that amount of money is made, the only possible remedy is life bans.

The question is: can these people be trusted in their office after this finding of dishonesty against them?  The answer is obviously no.  And it obviously will not become yes after a holiday, even a long one.  This committee has misconceived its function completely.  You can tell that by the fines, which presuppose that these people have been enriching themselves mercilessly, but which for these people represent a parking ticket.

And why are not these crooks being prosecuted by the law for the dishonest use of the money of others?  Even on their hilarious version, they would get life bans here from acting as directors of public companies.

We are in no position to smirk.  There was an unhealthy difference of opinion at Westpac when the company agreed to ‘treat’ accounting procedures in a way that financially benefited directors – there was great unhappiness among shareholders.  Accounting issues in the debt of Glencore may have led to a valuation of its worth being bloated by billions of dollars.  Innocent investors may have been wiped out by misstatements.  Worrying disclosures are now being made about the extent to which spoiled egomaniacs posturing as sponsors of charity are just lining their pockets and boosting their egos while quietly burying their consciences.  Now we see the market worth of the business of law firm that went public going through the floor over arguments over the real worth of a major acquisition – although, it is a little hard to feel too sorry for investors who put such a huge valuation on the business of a law firm that made its name from acting for people who could not afford to pay lawyers.

It is worrying when accountants say they will ‘treat’ a transaction in a different way.  This is especially so if you can only change the label you apply, or the box you put a transaction into, if the facts are different.  There are problems in saying that cat is a dog, or that a transaction that we said occurred on 1 July, did in fact occur on 30 June.  If you make a false statement for material gain, you are in the territory of the crime called theft.  It is like American politicians saying that they ‘miss-spoke’: they are either lying now or they were lying before.

It is time that the law caught up with people who flirt with the truth and ruin others.  In parts of this country, we throw blackfellas into jail for the equivalent of stealing loaf of bread because it is their third offence.  We do not see people going to jail for allowing their greed to give us the Global Financial Crisis or by filling their own pockets while misleading shareholders.  I am very far from saying that such a comment applies to any of the corporate examples that I have referred to above, but it would certainly apply to the officers of FIFA, and I have no doubt many shifty corporate operators here.

Speaking as a taxpayer, I would be happy to put quite a few such crooks up at my and the public’s expense for a number of Christmases.  Such a course would be good for moral at large and help a lot of people to a happier Christmas.

Religious extremism

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

 

According to the Fairfax press, a firebomb attack in a village on the West Bank in July this year is thought to have been carried out by people described as ‘ nationalist far–right extremists’.  A group of people known as ‘The Revolt’ are intent on creating a Jewish kingdom.  According to Shlomo Fischer of the Jewish People Policy Institute, these people believe that they are acting on the ‘voice of God’. Their goals are to ‘create chaos and undermine the ability of the government to rule and set up a revolutionary redemptive state.  They want to replace the current State of Israel with something else – their main animosity, just like al-Qaeda directing their animosity to the non -jihadist Muslim regimes, is against the government of Israel. They are aware of the fact that they will be treated with kid gloves because they are Jewish – that has been the precedent until now.’

This far-right group sees the existence of this new state as an integral part of redemption, which is said to relate to the liberation of Jews from exile. There is another body call Hilltop Youth.  It shares these views and regards the ‘disengagement’ by the Sharon government in 2005 from the Gaza Strip as a huge blow. For them, the disengagement involved the state turning its back on the redemption process and many settlers thought that they had to work harder to continue the fight. The Hilltop Youth says that the redemption will happen even if the State of Israel is not there.

A party associated with the peace movement in the area said: ‘the settlements are based on discrimination – the fact that you raise children a place where you as an Israeli Jew have rights and Palestinians do not have rights and are instead living under military law; this raises people to believe that they are more than the others.’

The same article says that two members of this far right group of religious extremists have been arrested and subjected to detention under laws passed to deal with terrorists. One of these is a dual Australian Israeli citizen named Evyatar Slonim.  It is said that Israel holds hundreds of Palestinians in administrative detention under these laws. The parents of Slonim said that they were absolutely horrified that in a democratic country their son has been imprisoned without a trial.  Slonim’s lawyer said that Israeli intelligence authorities have taken the gloves off since the July attack.  The lawyer gets paid, according to Fairfax, by a ‘right-wing legal centre.’

These terrorists commonly use a calling card with fire-bombs thrown into homes with people in them.  The July raid killed three.  The word ‘Revenge’ appeared with the Star of David.  According to a manifesto of The Revolt, ‘burning tyres can be placed at the entrance of the house to remove the possibility of escape.’

This sort of terrorism is a mix of madness and evil, of religion and nationalism.  It is light years away from the evil of IS.  But although Israelis as a whole utterly reject this evil, they do not as a whole or as a nation utterly reject the continuing settlements.  And the problem is that those settlements draw on the same scripture as the do the terrorists.  Is it possible to have any peace in the Middle East if the settlement issue is not resolved?

People who do not have God – such as me – get sceptical, to put it softly, when people of one God take it on themselves to tell people of another God how to manage their affairs or what kind of reformation or enlightenment that they should undertake.  It gets even worse when you have a complete idiot, like Tony Abbott, boasting that his culture under his God is superior to that of others who follow a lesser God.

We might be just as sceptical about people of one God telling people of another God to keep God out of politics if we recall that God is in politics in the State of Israel up to his neck – spiritually, morally, and geographically.  And we might also recall that the promise in the Israel Declaration of Independence of ‘complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion race or sex’ holds about as much water as the promise of equality in another Declaration of Independence at the same point in its history.  Sweet Fanny Adams.

Finally, people here worry that the debate about religious extremism here is being stifled.  I have a lot of sympathy with that view.  If you seek to debate the actions of the State of Israel here, you very quickly get spoken to firmly – not by the Jewish community, but by our far right.

Religious extremism is unsettling anywhere and everywhere.  Those who have God think that some believers are not as odd as others; for the unbelievers, they are all much of a muchness.  Infighting between believers is unedifying.  I am yet to meet a person who says that their brand of God is inferior to that of others.  I am yet to meet a person who concedes that other Gods may even be equal to theirs.  I don’t think they are allowed to say anything like that.  They know that most must be wrong but say that they are the only ones who have it right.  None of them is spotless and all are forms of extremism.  .  It is enough to put you off religion full stop.