Passing Bull 132 – The remarkable Mr Chris Kenny – Part II

18/01/201818/01/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

We were looking at remarks of Mr Kenny in The Weekend Australian of 13-14 January 2018. I need not set out those remarks again as this post will end with former posts that contain quotes from Mr Kenny over the years to the same effect.

When Mr Kenny refers to the ‘love media’, what label does he have in mind for his side, or tribe? All of us are worried about energy prices, but has anyone bettered Mr Kenny’s identification of the real problem when he refers to people who are ‘phlegmatic about alarmist claims on climate’? When he says ‘even business leaders fuel the left side’, does he accept that that entails two propositions (each of which I would regard as at best odd): that we can give some useful meaning to the word ‘left’ in this context; and that in that meaning, it would surprise us if business leaders supported opinions grouped under that label? When Mr Kenny refers to ‘the political/media class’ with such disfavour, what definition can he give of that body that does not show him up as its leading exemplar? For that matter, what ‘elite’ would not have Mr Kenny? And does he really believe that Trump and Farage were ‘mainstream’ candidates? Finally, given that a substantial part of the business model of this newspaper is to report on conflicts fuelled by opinion polls, has Mr Kenny not broken all records for hypocrisy with the sentence: ‘It demands leadership, not opinion poll watching.’

In fairness to the newspaper, I might say that the same edition carried a piece by Caroline Overington about a suicide that followed cyber-bullying that I thought was first class in every way. Now, Ms Overington does appear from time to time with the Anti-Christ, the ABC. Mr Kenny might inquire of Ms Overington how often she gets ‘howled down’ as a ‘heretic’.

Before going to Mr Kenny’s priors, I may report on one of his colleagues in labelling, Jennifer Oriel. Ms Oriel is a cheerleader in the partisan scolding of those awful people called ‘progressives.’ But Ms Oriel has now made confession – of the sin of apostasy. She has outed herself as a former Labor supporter.

And old friend asked why, after years of voting Labor, I left the Left. I considered justifying myself again with the chronology of exodus. But the truth is plain and blunt. Why did I leave the Left? Because two plus two equals four.

Well, there you have it. Mr Kenny explains everything in politics by reference to the facts (which I assume means evidence). Ms Oriel does it with arithmetic. The reference is of course to 1984, but the notion certainty in politics being arrived at mathematically is unsettling. But, then, how many contented and equable lapsed Laborites do you know?

Here, then, are two previous posts that show that Mr Kenny is nothing if not consistent. You will see that we begin with a disclaimer by Mr Kenny of ‘partisan or personal cheerleading.’ It fairly takes your breath away.

Passing Bull 18 – The Dean’s Wake Syndrome (19 October 2015)

....unlike progressives, conservative commentators tend to stand on principle rather than indulge in partisan or personal cheerleading….

Chris Kenny, The Saturday Australian, 17-18 October, 2015.

On any given Saturday you can get about five whoppers like this from that newspaper as the ‘conservatives’ make faces at the ‘progressives’, like little girls to little boys behind the shelter-shed. What was the context?

Rowan Dean, the editor of the Oz Spectator, and the leader of the unattractive pack described in Passing Bull 15, threw a wake for the former PM. We are told that Dean was smarting if not seething. The usual idolaters were there – Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine and Paul Murray (who has been inconsolable on Sky ever since, routinely throwing objects as well as tantrums, and imploring the new PM to be tough on Muslims).

Mr Kenny, another idolater in his time, says he knows how these people feel. He does so in terms that contradict point blank the silly boast set out above, and which show why Australians are revolted by the cabal of politicians and journalists that have dragged us down to our present level, on both sides of politics, and where all except the addicts, or those who profit from or traffic in the addiction, are praying for relief, if not enlightenment from a mix of the Wars of the Roses and a New Dark Age.

After years of sneering at the poll-driven, media-grovelling superficiality of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd Labor years, the Liberals have descended into the same sand-pit.

And with the ABC, Fairfax Media Newspapers, Canberra press gallery, academe and sundry other elements of the love media and political/media class railing against their version of the anti-Christ – a socially conservative prime minister – a great opportunity to prove them all wrong has been frittered away.

Most of us with a view to the structural ebbs and flows of politics could see that despite the antipathy directed at Abbott, some obvious failings and poor poll ratings, the Coalition was most likely to be re-elected next year.

This would have confounded the love media and twittersphere, and confirmed the good sense of mainstream voters.

In Abbott’s favour were strong policy settings (border protection, climate change, and attempted budget repair), the escalating issue of union power and corruption being teased out in the royal commission he established, and how all this had rendered Bill Shorten nigh-on unelectable.

When an impatient Turnbull launched his challenge the week before the Canning by-election he not only robbed Abbott of a chance for recovery but denied many true believers the pleasure of this social-political experiment – this vindication.

It passes belief. If you did not know that you were the victim of an experiment, at least you know it is not one that will be repeated. Here is why politics presently revolt Australians. There is hardly any reference to principle, but just a focus on partisan political cheerleading. And do you know why? The people and their representatives do not know as much as Messrs Kenny or Bolt. They cannot be trusted.

As usual, the crucial partyroom votes were exercised by inexperienced, impressionable and self-interested MPs, many of whom would not have entered parliament if not for Abbott’s campaigning skills and who might have been less than helpful in briefing journalists and voicing disharmony as they fretted over the polls.

In the next post, I will try to spell out this disease of the mind, but Mr Kenny does offer one frightening thought:

I sense the republican cause may be at the heart of much conservative antipathy.

These embittered relics of Plato’s Republic and the Split are not just harmless Looney Tunes. They are intent on not allowing us to break with the Mother Country and become self-governing without support from the Anglican Crown. Bring back 1788 – and the lash. They are Monarchists envenomed. Don’t they know about 1789?

Passing Bull 44 – Outstanding hypocrisy in the Press (26 May 2016)

Politics and politicians are on the nose all around the world. There is a savage reaction in the West against political parties and political elites. Since the system as we know it has been worked by political parties run by elites, the results may be disastrous, if not terminal. Corbyn was bad enough, but Trump is a genuine nightmare.

In Australia there is a very unhappy union between politicians and journalists. There is much to be said for the view that our press is in large part responsible for the awfulness of our politicians. They are far too cliquey and close to their subjects; the worst kinds of would-be journalists are tribal, and feed themselves on hits from other followers of the cult on the Internet. The real disasters are former political staffers who then want to pose as journalists. Instead, they become boring and loaded cheerleaders.

Two of the worst examples are Chris Kenny and Niki Savva. They could not hope to pose as being objective, but they sadly think that that they are intelligent. They live in confined echo chambers quite cut off from the world, just like the politicians in Canberra. They are part of a useless but self-appointed elite that is quite out of touch with what they call the mainstream.

It was therefore quite a surprise to read the following from Chris Kenny in The Australian last Saturday:

There is a great and pernicious divide in Australia. It is not between the eastern seaboard and the western plains, or between the rich and poor, city and country, black and white, or even between established citizens and refugees. The divide is between the political/media class and the mainstream.

There is a gulf between those who consider themselves superior to the masses and want to use the nation’s status to parade their post-material concerns, and those who do the work and raise the families that make the nation what it is.

That is a reasonable statement of the problem, even if it comes from one of the worst examples of those who give rise to the problem. And what on earth is a former Liberal staffer – attached to Lord Downer; no wonder his syntax is shot – and employed by The Australian and Sky doing referring to ‘the masses’. Has Mr Kenny ever met one of them? But then it all becomes clear when we get this:

In this election we are seeing the chasm open up, like a parting of the seas, as the media elites and their preferred left-of-centre politicians seek to determine what issues should be decisive. They lecture and hector the mainstream. Worse, they try to dictate what facts can even be discussed. They seek to silence dissent. They have compiled an informal list of unmentionables, facts that should not be outed: the truths whose name we dare not speak.

And then Mr Kenny goes on to ‘lecture and hector’ those poor souls who share his echo chamber, the true believers who know that Satan masquerades as the ABC and the Fairfax press.

This is all as boring and predictable as anything said by Mr Kenny in The Australian or one of those ghastly Sky chat shows that demonstrate that the chattering classes, the former chardonnay socialists, have long ago swapped sides graphically and terminally. We reached a new all-time low recently when Peta Credlin joined Andrew Bolt for a nocturnal tryst on Sky that will be sure to upset at least three dinners a night. It might all be boring, but the hypocrisy of Mr Kenny takes your breath away…..

…..Does any decent Australian give a bugger about the alleged Left/Right divide or any other of those profoundly stupid chat shows called ‘culture wars’? Have they not yet seen that everyone else rejects all this bullshit and all those who want to wallow in it? Does the press just not get that they are an essential part of the package that people are rejecting all around the world?

TERROR AND THE POLICE STATE: CHAPTER 11

15/01/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

[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.]

Denunciation

It is hard to think of any culture in the West that has ever been in favour of informers. If the Old Testament bears the mark of Cain, the New Testament is scarred by the mark of Judas. Judas betrayed his leader, the Son of Man. The very idea of betraying someone close shocks us; the betrayal is wrong, and diabolically wrong, and it cannot be excused by the lure of specious legalism any more than it can be excused by the lure of actual gold. But a police state is a dream come true for informers and grudge-bearers. Such a government offers would-be informers the chance to work off their grudges under maximum security, for maximal returns in the loss and damage to the victim, including death, and with something like carte blanche on the grounds of accusation and the readiness of those in power to accept and act decisively on such accusations. One function of a police state is therefore to bring out the very worst in humanity.

The poison of informing is seen at its worst in the three reigns of terror that we are looking at because the evidence commonly offered by the informer is put forward to support a most general allegation of lack of loyalty. The lack of loyalty that matters is loyalty to the regime, but the allegation is frequently dressed up as a lack of loyalty to the nation, and it is loaded up with an invocation of that weasel word patriotism.

In a book called The Police and the People, Richard Cobb spoke from hard experience from looking at records of what people told authorities under the Jacobins and in the Empire. He said you could formulate at least four rules for reports to authority from informants. The elementary rule is that ‘if you have nothing to say, say it at length’. Never use plain speech – always use riddles or euphemisms. Use two adjectives rather than one. And, always tell your patron something he wants to hear. Cobb said that ‘one can go from one end of France to the other to hear the same long-winded information expressed in the same ponderous prose.’ We find precisely the same behaviour in informants for the NKVD, Gestapo, KGB, and Stasi. People have to say something to avoid being suspect and it needs to be what the police want to hear.

Historians now believe that there were not in fact many officers of the Gestapo on the ground – less than 800 in Berlin, a city of four million, at the end of the war. Only a small part, about ten per cent, of their work came from referrals from orthodox police. Most of their work came on referrals by party officials – such as the Block Wardens – or V-men, or informants from the rest of the population.

V-men were Vertrauens-Mann, ‘persons of trust’, rather like kapos in the concentration camps. A typical candidate was someone that the Gestapo had something over, a person who was compromised politically in some way. He might have had a doubtful political past, such as having been a member of a banned organisation, or he may have been caught offering a bribe. Some may have been in camps and let out on a form of probation which meant a promise to cooperate with the Gestapo and to rat on others. The mere fact of their collaboration with the forces of darkness made them complicit in their secret work, and even more compromised. They became locked in as both victims of and collaborators with a regime that was bent on inflicting pain and loss on any person that got in its way. This would be a pattern that would recur in dealings between the Stasi and informants in the DDR, perhaps the grimmest and most drab police state ever.

Prosecutions under the Malicious Gossip Law came from members of the Party, agents, and the general public. In Saarbrucken nearly 90% of these cases came from innkeepers or people in their bars, work colleagues, passing pedestrians, or members of the family. Even the loathsome Heydrich was worried by the ‘constant expansion of an appalling system of denunciation’. Richard Evans says that party leaders were dismayed that people acted out of malice! This is an example of the kind of moral madness or blindness that descended over these fanatics who were becoming so removed from their own world – they wanted to see denunciation as a sign of loyalty to the regime, a kind of badge of purity, or ascension up the ladder, like those claimed by boy scouts. They did not understand or they had forgotten how hateful the role of an informer is. They had lost touch with humanity.

Pubs were a real trap. Two thirds of defendants in the Frankfurt Special Court were tried under the Malicious Gossip Law after action taken by the innkeeper or other drinkers at a pub. This of course was noticed, and statistics show a sharp decline in reporting from pubs as the regime sterilised yet another part of social life. Men did most of the denouncing and were most of those denounced. The Reich proceeded on the same basis as our ancient law of libel – the greater the truth, the greater the libel. They wanted to strike back at anyone who exposed one of their biggest lies – that the people were massively behind the Leader and the Party and were all so much better off.

Criminologists teach that what deters criminals is the prospect of detection; the Reich worked on another view- it was the randomness, the unpredictability, of denunciation that had such a quietening or chilling effect on the populace. People literally walked in fear. What was known as ‘the German glance’ developed – there would be a nervous look over each shoulder before saying something dangerous.

Schoolteachers may have been the hardest hit. In any school you could expect a couple at least of party fanatics on the staff making the common room a very restrained meeting place. Students denounced teachers they did not like.

It is idle to speculate on how much the actions of the secret police ensured adherence to the Reich. Anyone who has seen close up the dead hand of the secret police of a totalitarian state knows how much it can shut down people’s lives. Their purpose is to extinguish humanity, and even jokes about them could get you a beating and six months.

We see similar trends during the Great Terror in Russia, quite possibly with more sinister and painful consequences because the whole idea of civil rights is yet to take root in Europe’s most difficult neighbour. The priests under the Tsars had informed on their flock.

‘Lenin taught us that every Party member should become an agent of the Cheka, that is, that he should watch and write reports.’ Party members were ordered to inform on their comrades if any private thought or action threatened Party unity. Invitations to denunciation became central to the purge culture of the 1920’s and would reach hellish levels in China much later. No part of the private life was safe – there was no private life.

According to one senior official, every fifth Soviet office worker was an informer for the NKVD. Moscow was heavily policed and there was said to be at least one informer for every six or seven families. There were millions of paid ‘reliables’, and the law said that ‘loyal Soviet citizens’ were expected to report suspicious behaviour or speech – ‘lack of vigilance’ was a punishable offence, and this doubtless caused many people to collaborate, or just gave them an excuse to do so. The Party was a vicious self-policing collective like that in China during the Cultural Revolution.

Here and there – Herman Melville on Evil

15/01/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

In Melville’s final work, Billy Budd, Billy personifies innocence and beauty. John Claggart personifies evil. He cannot stand the sight of Billy.

… The Master-at-Arms was perhaps the only man in the ship intellectually capable of adequately appreciating the moral phenomenon presented in Billy Budd. And the insight but intensified his passion, which assuming various secret forms within him, at times assumed that cynic disdain – disdain of innocence. To be nothing more than innocent! … A nature like Claggart’s surcharged with energy as such natures almost invariably are, what recourse is left to it but to recoil upon itself and like the scorpion for which the Creator alone is responsible act out to the end the part allotted to it.

And then there is this:

The Pharisee is the Guy Fawkes prowling in the hid chambers underlying the Claggarts.

In Moby-Dick, Captain Ahab represents another kind of evil. Ahab is mad to get revenge on the murderous whale that ‘dismasted’ him. W H Auden said that Ahab ‘is a representation, perhaps the greatest in literature of defiant despair.’ Ahab is wilfully beyond comfort because ‘comfort would be the destruction of him’ (a phrase that Auden takes from Kierkegaard).

Captain Ahab personifies the fanatic, and he appeals to the gutter. It was only on reading the novel for the third time – in which serious self-editing is permitted – and on looking again at the luminous book Melville, His World and Work (2005) by Andrew Delbanco – that I realised how relevant this curious novel is to us now. It is a frightening portrait of a manic demagogue. There is another frightful example in the White House as we speak.

Captain Ahab believes that we are all prisoners of our ignorance about the meaning of our suffering. He asks his Chief Mate ‘how can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?’

To me, the white whale [Moby-Dick] is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s nought beyond. But ‘tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white male agent, or be the white male principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.

This is the kind of apocalyptic stuff we get with Carlyle. Delbanco says that with Captain Ahab, ‘Melville struck a note that would resound through modern history in ways he could never have anticipated’:

All that maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.

The usual term is scapegoat. Delbanco refers to another writer who says that ‘every sufferer instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering….a ‘guilty’ agent who is susceptible to pain’ upon whom he can vent his rage and ‘dull by means of some violent emotion his secret tormenting pain.’

For this purpose, Ahab gees up his troops, who are at best an indifferent motley. They happily surrender to the mood of the moment, and to the instinct of the herd. The zeal of each takes on the colour of the rest. Delbanco refers to a critic who called Moby-Dick a ‘prophecy of the essence of fascism’, and to a French critic who in 1928 saw the drift into reactionary nationalism and xenophobia and who said that ‘hatred becomes stronger by becoming more precise.’ He refers to another comment about the ‘intense subjectivism’ with which Hitler ‘repeatedly over-rode the opinions of trained diplomats and the German General Staff, committing blunder after blunder’ that led to the final disaster.

The relevance of all this to the manic demagogues we have now, and their pliant acolytes is obvious. Delbanco concludes:

In Captain Ahab, Melville had invented a suicidal charismatic who denounces as a blasphemer anyone who would deflect him from his purpose – an invention that shows no sign of becoming obsolete any time soon.

Amen. But, at least the whale won that one. And the phrase ‘truth with malice in it’ belongs to the ages.

Passing Bull 131 – The remarkable Mr Chris Kenny

15/01/201815/01/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

On Sydney radio 2GB this week, host Mark Levy was commenting on the hype about Oprah Winfrey running for president. ‘Despite all the doom and gloom around the Trump presidency, what’s he done wrong so far?’ asked Levy. It was an unremarkable reflection that generated no contention and was not intended to do so. For that audience it was a statement of the obvious.

Yet could you imagine such an observation being made on the ABC? Not only is it inconceivable that any ABC host would make such a call, we know that any guest arguing the same would be treated as a heretic. The proposition would be howled down as controversial, partisan and absurd. Despite its charter obligations to objectivity and plurality, the ABC could not entertain such a reasonable point of view…..

Callers [to a 2GB show hosted by the author] are concerned about immigration and poor integration, sceptical about government interventions, worried about energy prices and phlegmatic about alarmist claims on the climate…..But few, if any, of their views are the sort you could ever expect to hear on ABC, SBS or other ‘love media’ staples…..

It is not hard to see which view is right [Someone reported in the Fairfax press had argued that ‘volunteering was counterproductive, undercut paid work and relieved governments of their responsibilities.’] And it is not a matter of opinion. The facts support the case for volunteers.….

The Prime Minister’s energy policy is still beholden to futile Paris targets, despite the U S withdrawing and the international community asking next to nothing of China or India. While he backs Paris at the expense of affordable and reliable energy, he fails to give the mainstream what they really need and want – the cheapest and most reliable electricity.

Our competing narratives can broadly be described as left and right. But we can imagine a series of Venn diagrams where the flanks of the major parties overlap to share and swap members on various issues. Even business leaders fuel the left side of some debates because of corporate posturing, dinner-party imperatives or fear of social-media-driven reputational damage.

Turnbull and the Coalition need to have faith that the numbers are with the mainstream and common sense. Sure the left narrative – with its academic and political/media class support – makes most of the noise and generates its own momentum. But Brexit, Trump and even Tony Abbott circa 2013 demonstrate that voters can flock to mainstream candidates no matter the hectoring and prognostications of the so-called elites. John Howard could never have won a single election unless this were true.

This requires strong advocacy from conviction politicians to give mainstream voters a guiding light through the deceptions of the political/media class. It demands leadership, not opinion poll watching.

Yet this is not a matter of theories, ideology or complex plans. Rather, it is about the facts.

In the issues mentioned earlier, the facts support the mainstream view…..If not for the publicly funded ABC, SBS, subsidised magazines, universities and bureaucratic interventions, the false narratives of the virtue-signallers would be soundly defeated in the open market-place of ideas. Instead their nonsense dominates…..

(The Weekend Australian 13-14 January 2018.)

There is more to the same effect. Before looking at parts of the argument, may I make two general observations?

First, the author likes applying labels, or, if you prefer, he is fond of clichés. That is, Mr Kenny likes to put things in boxes and give them a name – such as, love media, mainstream, left and right, elites, conviction politicians, political/media class, and virtue-signallers. Mr Kenny does not say what he means by any of those terms, and I am not sure what they might entail in the context of his argument – or anywhere else.

Secondly, and relatedly, Mr Kenny sees people as acting and thinking in identifiable groups – or, if you like, he sees people acting tribally. We can see this immediately from the reference to ‘that audience’ in the first paragraph, and ‘we know’ in the second. In the eyes of Mr Kenny the audience of 2GB is very different to that of the ABC – or ‘other ‘love media’ staples.’ They apparently represent different tribes. When it comes to politics, Mr Kenny is like an Arsenal or Collingwood supporter. You are either for us or against us – and with passion – either way. Mr Kenny’s team would seem to come from the ‘mainstream’ or ‘right’ and is apparently opposed by the ‘left’ or ‘elites’ of the ABC and the like. What those groups might stand for is left swinging in the breeze.

Since the original labels have not been explained, there is a serious risk of confusion in putting people to whom those labels may apply into boxes. Unless you are careful, you could wind up with the agony of Procrustes. May I suggest that most of what I see as the faults in Mr Kenny’s argument derive from these tendencies to apply labels to conduct or opinions and to separate people into classes?

Let us then go to the ‘statement of the obvious’ – ‘to that audience’. The statement was phrased as a question. Mr Kenny therefore sees the question as rhetorical. That is, he saw the 2 GB host as asserting that Mr Trump has not done anything wrong, and he, Mr Kenny, believes that the 2GB audience would regard such a statement as unremarkable, uncontentious, and a statement of the obvious. Those propositions are large, but that is the risk you take when you proceed with this level of generalization – and at this remove from the evidence.

What wrongs might be reasonably alleged against Donald Trump? The charge sheet, or indictment, might read as follows. He has waged open war on two elements of the United States constitutional fabric, the judiciary and the press; he has failed to persuade another element of that fabric, the Congress, to implement key elements in his policy; he has acted against people just because they are of a different colour or race; he has sought to create conflict by making divisive statements to please what is called his ‘base’ rather than to act in the interests of the nation at large –he has acted as if to excite domestic insurrections; he has on any view shown himself to be a compulsive liar; he has consistently acted in an intemperate, illiterate and rude manner that demeans his office and the United States; he has publicly insulted the Secretary of State and Attorney-General, and he has refused to appoint people to fill vacant offices in the State Department; he has acted to alienate most of the allies of the United States and most members of the U N – and he boasts about all these things; he has not built the wall, much less get the Mexicans to pay for it; he has not repealed or replaced Obamacare; what Mr Kenny calls ‘tax reforms’ are a violation of the Republican views on the deficit, and will benefit the rich rather than the poor; he consistently acts against the advice of his ministers, some of whom know what they are doing, for fear of unsettling his ‘base’ or creating a flaw in the image with which he is so much in love – himself; and he has incurred political obligations to unattractive people that obliges him to protect and defend Nazis, and help promulgate their views. There is more to this history of repeated injuries and usurpations.

Trump is the most unpopular president in living memory; in the opinion of those qualified to give one, he is the most unstable and stupid man ever to go to the White House; he has appeared to validate the first such proposition and to prove the second by proclaiming, over his chosen medium, that he is a ‘stable genius.’ And that’s before you recall the evasion of military service; the serial bankruptcies in his businesses, and the $25 million dollar settlement of fraud claims against him that he said he would never settle; the absurd favouring and promotion of his family and his business; his tax evasion and his refusal to show his tax returns; his pussy-grabbing and his failure to fulfil his statement that he would sue his accusers; Puerto Rico; Roy Moore; and the several matters occupying the attention of Mr Robert Mueller III. (One of those appears to be admitted. Of the many inconsistent reasons Trump gave for firing the head of the FBI, one was that Comey’s Russian investigation was annoying him. To an Australian lawyer, that looks like an admission of obstructing the course of justice.)

All those allegations can be and are being made, and not just by the ‘love media’, whoever they are. That being so, many people would regard a statement that Donald Trump has done nothing wrong as at least ‘controversial, partisan and absurd’, to adopt the wording of Mr Kenny. When you look at the evidence – what Mr Kenny calls the ‘facts’ – it is hard to imagine any history better placed to disqualify a person from holding any form of public office, let alone that of President of the United States.

My own personal view? No decent Australian would let that crude lout into their house.

But Mr Kenny allows himself to be boxed into the absurd by the linguistic traits I have referred to – and by his fear and loathing of the ABC. That being so, some taxpayers might be very upset if the ABC were to promote such an odd position as that advanced by Mr Kenny.

May I say three other things on this first point?

The constant harping about the ABC by Mr Kenny and almost everyone else on his newspaper is not only predictable, boring, and unhinged, but it is unprofessional. If you went to a doctor or lawyer and they routinely set aside time to bad mouth others of their profession, you would fire them. Why can’t journalists at this paper conform to professional standards?

Next, one consequence of the tribalism that I referred to is that there is no balance or nuance in Mr Kenny’s presentation. What we get is the ‘me against you’ of Arsenal v Liverpool – all out conflict. This intolerance is blighting our public life, and this piece of Mr Kenny is a very sad example.

What do the arguments of the other side amount to? ‘Their nonsense.’ And ‘their nonsense dominates.’ We get this sense of persecution, of victimhood, two things that this paper inveighs against. And we get the hallmark of the Arsenal tribe – you don’t respond to the premises of the argument; you go straight for the throat of the person who has the gall to ignore plain ‘facts’ and to promote such ‘nonsense.’ It is not surprising that both parts of what Mr Kenny calls the ‘political/media class’ are in such bad odour.

Finally, what drives Mr Kenny to adopt a position on Trump that would strike many, if not most, as delusional? I’m not sure what ‘mainstream’ entails, but no one would call Trump mainstream. (He would be appalled at the suggestion.) Mr Kenny does, I think – like Mr Abbott, at least until 2013 – like to see himself as a ‘conservative.’ That’s another weasel term, but again no one would call Trump conservative. He is a radical out to blow up the Establishment. Some say Trump is a ‘populist’. That’s another watery, limp-wristed phrase, but no meaning of populism equates with any meaning of conservatism.

What then is driving Mr Kenny here? Does he think that either mainstream party in Australia could enhance its chances at the ballot box by championing Donald Trump and proclaiming that he has so far done nothing wrong? Is this the strait to which what Mr Kelly calls ‘the right’ has been reduced in Australia?

Well, that’s enough for now. I will look at the balance of the quoted text later.

Happy new year.

Passing Bull 130 – Religion and nuts

24/12/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / 10 Comments

The Roy Moore fiasco brought the term ‘evangelical’ to a new low, at least in the U S. Sadly, the disease is not limited to the U S. The Murdoch press went into a funk over marriage equality. Here is some vintage bull from Jennifer Oriel. She denounced ‘the Smith bill’ as being too short.

In a two-party system, the left is expected to promote equality while the right prioritises freedom. The freedom of the political right is distinctive. It is not anarchy. It is the form of freedom that provides the spiritual, social, economic and political foundations for the flourishing of Western civilisation…..

The Smith bill represents the worst of conservatism and progressivism; it reserves freedom for the clergy while binding freethinkers under a state regime of political correctness. There is no substantive protection for freedom of speech.

There is no protection against the lawfare used internationally to silence dissenters and purge them from public life. There is no protection from the state forcing people’s speech to conform to central tenets of queer ideology. And this is a bill for queer marriage, not same-sex marriage….

Dear, dear, dear. Just think of all those demons, all those tigers out there with their eyes burning bright in the forest of the night, while the IPA stokes its paranoia about Stalinist queers.

On the same page, Greg Sheridan, who rarely misses a chance to get it wrong, hymned a mate.

Australia is very fortunate that Tony Abbott insisted on a plebiscite.

The paranoia is not confined to the IPA. The Australian reeks of secular antagonism that died half a century ago. In one column, Angela Shanahan said:

The political landscape is verging on chaos because of the ambition of Malcolm Turnbull and his lefty acolytes in the Liberal Party.

In their desire to prop up a failed government and a hubristic Prime Minister who wants to make his mark on history, they have proved, by opposing the amendments for religious liberty in relation to the introduction of same-sex marriage, that they are small political creatures who know no history. They leave conservative voters nowhere to go.

That’s not quite right. There is always Cory Bernardi, and the hard core reactionaries on Sky News and The Australian – not to mention Greg Sheridan’s mate.

But in another column, Ms Shanahan showed her grasp of history. The Reformation was a serious mistake.

Christendom, which had existed beyond and above the state, was no more. Kings, who like all baptised people great or small had been subject to the teaching and law of the church and part of the body of Christ, elevated themselves as the ultimate authority…..

The so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 was really a product of religious antagonism to see a Catholic off the throne and remove Catholics from public life……

Freedom of religion – of thought, of conscience – must be based on an informed conscience, which is not just for the elite….Today, ironically, it is threatened by the secularism sparked by that Reformation.

It reminds you of the time a guest and psychiatrist looked Basil Fawlty right in the eye and said ‘We could devote a whole seminar to you.’

To the extent that you can see something that Jennifer Oriel calls ‘Western civilisation,’ it depends in large part on the separation of Church and State. The English got there largely through the Reformation and the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689, both of which Ms Shanahan regrets. The French got there by more messy means. The Americans thought they had got there, but Roy Moore and Donald Trump show that they have missed.

We are many centuries past the time where the State could be viewed as ‘subject to the teaching and law of the church and part of the body of Christ.’ Such an idea now could best be described as madness.

We are also well passed the time when a religion can claim a veto over either the parliament or the people. If the plebiscite celebrated by Greg Sheridan established anything, it showed that a clear majority of Australian regard the separation of Church and State as fundamental to our way of life. The suggested issue about religious freedom was always a furphy from the start. The issue was always about the power of the Church to stick its nose in where it doesn’t belong – the way we make our laws and govern ourselves.

You might expect that those of a reactionary cast of thought might understand all this. The opposite result – where religion remains paramount, or at least claims a right of veto – is that which obtains in nations subject to their ultimate bête noire – Islam.

On another point about religion, one correspondent to The Sunday Age reminded us that the infant Jesus spent time as a refugee in Egypt. How would his parents have got on if they had knocked on the door of Mr Morrison, who is bewailing the ill treatment of Christians in this country, or Mr Dutton?

Anyway, to the extent that a God-fearing lapsed Prot has any standing to say so – have a very happy Christmas and all best wishes for the New Year.

Here and there – The Third Man and Shakespeare

24/12/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

A few weeks ago, on a desultory whim, I watched The Third Man for the nth time. I realised I had never read the book, so I ordered a copy. Graham Greene wrote the screenplay too, but there are some differences in the two versions. The cuckoo clock didn’t get a look-in in the book, but the book’s account of the lecture given to the British reading group in Vienna is different and hilarious – and loaded.

You will recall that Rollo Martins (Joseph Cotton) is a bashed up American writer of cheap westerns. He is in Vienna to check up on his mate Harry Lime (Orson Welles). A member of the British Council named Crabbin thinks that Martins is the distinguished novelist named B Dexter. Crabbin invites Martins to address a meeting of the local British literati. When Martins is more under the weather than usual, he gets picked up and delivered to the meeting. He is very sore and terse. But after a while, he realises that he is making ‘an enormous impression’, least of all when he said that he had never heard of James Joyce. Graham Greene was having a lot of fun, and settling some old scores.

A kind-faced woman in a hand-knitted jumper said wistfully, ‘Don’t you agree, Mr Dexter, that no one, no one has written about feelings so poetically as Virginia Woolf? In prose, I mean.’

Crabbin whispered, ‘You might say something about the stream of consciousness.’

‘Stream of what?’

\A note of despair came into Crabbin’s voice……

Martins ends up signing books by Dexter ‘From B Dexter, author of The Lone Rider of Santa Fe.’ He is trying to make his escape via the dunny when Sergeant Paine patiently collects him to have a word with Colonel Calloway (Trevor Howard).

As condescension goes, Mr Crabbin is a direct descendant of Mr Collins and Lady Catherine de Bourgh. For many, the highlight of the night, which was not in the film, had come as follows.

‘Mr Dexter, could you tell us what author has chiefly influenced you?’

Martins, without thinking, said, ‘Grey.’ He meant of course the author of ‘Riders of the Purple Sage’, and he was pleased to find his reply gave general satisfaction – to all save an elderly Austrian who asked ‘Grey. What Grey? I do not know the name.’

Martins felt he was safe now and said, ‘Zane Grey – I don’t know any other,’ and was mystified at the low subservient laughter from the English colony.

Crabbin interposed quickly for the sake of the Austrians, ‘That is a little joke of Mr Dexter’s. He meant the poet Gray – a gentle, mild, subtle genius – one can see the affinity.’

‘And is he called Zane Grey?’

‘That was Mr Dexter’s joke. Zane Grey wrote what we call Westerns – cheap popular novelettes about bandits and cowboys.’

‘He is not a great writer?’

‘No, no. Far from it,’ Mr Crabbin said. ‘In the strict sense I would not call him a writer at all.’ Martins told me that he felt the first stirrings of revolt at that statement. He had never regarded himself before as a writer, but Crabbin’s self-confidence irritated him – even the way the light flashed back from Crabbin’s spectacles was another cause of vexation. Crabbin said, ‘He was just a popular entertainer.’

‘Why the hell not?’ Martins said fiercely.

‘Oh, well, I merely meant – ’

‘What was Shakespeare?’

Somebody said with great daring ‘A poet.’

Now, all this is hilarious and beyond price. It is a Falstaffian swipe at the snobs of the literary establishment who want to turn the popular entertainer called Shakespeare into a god, who helped to propel poor John Keats into the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, and who still so meanly and sadly turns up their noses at the wonderful writing of Graham Greene. Off the top of your head, what writer wrote novels that people enjoy reading more than those of Graham Greene?

It’s as if Greene foresaw his doom. The establishment wouldn’t give him a Nobel Prize – but they would give one to Bob Dylan. Well, at least there’s no bloody doubt about his being a popular entertainer.

It’s idle to compare artists, and it is arrogant to purport to rank them, but this extract from The Third Man suggests to me that Greene may have had one thing in common with Shakespeare – just, say, in the wistful remark of the kind-faced woman in the hand-knitted jumper. You get the impression that it’s just a matter of waiting for some bastard to pull the plug out – and down it all comes. It’s as if, somehow, God gets in on the act. Either way, we have been blessed.

TERROR AND THE POLICE STATE: CHAPTER 10

21/12/201721/12/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

Surveillance

The proposition ‘Big Brother Is Watching You’ has become justly famous since the luminous mind and the graphic pen of George Orwell depicted the totalitarian state in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is an essential part of that sense of entrapment, powerlessness, enclosedeness, inevitability and hopelessness which, together with the prevalence of informers and denouncers, and a feeling of randomness, leaves mere objects of a police state feeling utterly helpless – and that is in large part the object of the exercise – to sterilise the individual.

We have seen that the Nazi regime did not just threaten those in a minority – this colossal machine rose up and brooded over every single person in the Reich. The threat of arrest and detention, and dismissal and disgrace, hung over everyone except the Leader, and no one knew when it might come or how it might fall. The collective fear within the nation left in a kind of submission or acquiescence those who had not been seduced by the glitter and the lies – and the successes, at home, and across borders.

In Nazi Germany, every group of houses had a ‘Block Warden.’ These were at the bottom of the hierarchy, neither respected nor loved. Every local branch of the Party had an average of eight cells with about fifty households in each. The Blockwart was responsible for what might be called the political supervision of about fifty households. He was in charge of seeing that flags and bunting were put out, and that his people ‘voluntarily’ attended parades, but he was also an access point for informers, and a source of information in his own right. He was commonly a very minor party functionary, doubtless with the social scars to prove it, and he was concerned with both propaganda and the maintenance of order. Those who had been bombed out or who had issues with ration cards would go to him first, but he was also a reporting post.

Like any good German, he had to report dangerous or suspicious behaviour, and when he did, the suspect could expect a visit from the Gestapo. He was therefore what might be called an ‘officious bystander’, and he was loathed accordingly. In many cases, he was called simply der Braune, ‘the brown one’, after the brownshirt that many of his ilk commonly wore. They were also called Political Leaders, and by 1935, there were perhaps 200,000 of them. Richard Evans makes the remarkable assertion that ‘including their helpers there were almost two million Block Wardens by the beginning of the war.’ They must have been like a sinister and all pervasive Dad’s Army, and since a majority were middle class, they may have been even more unpopular in working class areas.

Professor Evans describes this level of surveillance as follows: ‘They were often the first port of call for denouncers, and they exercised close surveillance over known dissenters, Jews and those who made contact with them, and ‘politically unreliable’ people, usually former opponents of the Nazis. Known derisively as ‘golden pheasants’ from their brown-gold uniforms with their red collar epaulettes, they were required to report ‘rumour-mongers’ and anyone who failed to conform to the district Party organisation, which would pass on their names and misdemeanours to the Gestapo. Those who fell foul of the Block Wardens could also be denied state benefits and welfare payments….. In factories and work places, officials of the Labour Front, the employers, the foremen and the Nazi Security Service took over the functions of the Block Warden. Those workers who did not toe the line were singled out for discriminatory treatment, denial of promotion, transfer to less congenial duties, or even dismissal. ‘You couldn’t say anything,’ recalled one worker in the Krupp engineering factory later: ‘the foreman was always standing behind you, nobody could risk it.’’

During the time of the French Terror, France was hardly a police state, at least in the sense that we understand the term now. But, in and from March 1793, France found itself facing mortal threats from within and without, and to help it to survive those threats, it passed a series of emergency measures, such as the creation of the Committee of Public Safety and the Declaration of Revolutionary Government (in October), that were bona fide emergency measures. It was time to take the gloves off, and what we know as surveillance was an essential part of the package, and one that would see those at the bottom – the sans-culottes – given direct power to control events in the revolution. This would be, for better or worse, people power in action.

On 21 March 1793, the National Convention made a law to set up Surveillance or Watch Committees. The recital said that the Convention considered that ‘at a time when the allied despots threaten the Republic still more by the efforts of their intrigues than by the success of their arms, it is its duty to prevent liberticide plots.’ Propaganda is rarely either pretty or sensible, but every commune, and each section in a larger commune, was to have a committee of twelve citizens elected by ballot – former priests and nobles were excluded. They were to take ‘declarations’ from foreigners in each arrondissement, but their work came to be directed against all suspected persons, French as well as foreign. They came to be known as ‘revolutionary committees’ in the Parisian sections. They had a role of general surveillance that was utterly inhibited by forms and equally uninhibited by legality. These committees would be in charge of ‘Civic Certificates’ or ‘Civic Cards’, certificats de civisme. These attested to the patriotism of the bearer, and would be essential to anyone wishing to move around France if they were not to be treated as suspect where they arrived. Every citizen was required to certify before the commune or the committee his place of birth, his means of livelihood, and ‘the performance of his civic duties.’ This gave ordinary people the chance to terrify other ordinary people. In parts of Paris there was a concerted effort to spread the sans-culotte zeal into less ardent arrondissements. Anyone with any experience of politics at the most local or grass-roots level will understand the power that bodies like these would possess, not least in a revolutionary state at war.

In September, the Paris Commune set out even broader grounds on which Civic Cards might be refused, some of which might now afford grounds to smile to those who struggle with the concept of patriotism at the best of times – ‘Those who pity the farmers and the greedy merchants against whom the law is obliged to take measures, … those who in assemblies of the people arrest their energy by crafty discourses, turbulent cries and threats, … those who speak mysteriously of the misfortunes of the Republic, are full of pity for the lot of the people, and are always ready to spread the bad news with an affected grief, … those who received the republican constitution with indifference and have given credence to false fears concerning its establishment and duration…’ What might fairly be described as the clincher was, ‘Those who having done nothing against liberty but have also done nothing for it.’

It is in its way a telling list of demons, but it would have been difficult to have opened your mouth without risking what may even then have been described as political incorrectness. What we do know is that the more insecure a regime is, the more it wants to know everything that you do and the more that it worries about anything you do that is somehow different. It is for that reason hostile to any reasonable conception of personal freedom. You could not afford to deviate, or even to be seen to combine, since, as Saint-Just said, ‘Any faction is criminal, since it tends to divide the citizens.’

12/12/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

Here and there – Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln is not just admired. He is revered. He was decent, shrewd and sensible. He had immense moral and intellectual courage. Out of the humblest origins, he schooled himself on the King James Bible and Shakespeare, and then the law, and he carved out in marble his written understanding of his nation. He was a consummate politician while remaining a decent human being – something we sadly find it hard to comprehend now. He may be the only known exception to the rule that all power corrupts. He held the United States together by the force of his being. It would be neither silly nor blasphemous to see in his life and death a replay of the redemption story. Lincoln gave his life to redeem his people from the original sin of slavery.

Historical novels are not my scene. I prefer one or the other, and not an ersatz combination of both. An exception is Lincoln by Gore Vidal. I have just read it for the third time. I was first referred to it thirty years ago by a friend in politics. He said that this book precisely captures the factional strife of party politics. He was surely dead right. Some of the plots and conspiracies would make Le Carré jealous and make Yes Minister look tame. Vidal precisely pictures not just Lincoln, but each member of his cabinet – none of whom thought he was up to the job when he started, and most of whom would plot against him. It required political genius of the highest order for Lincoln to survive the incompetence if not cowardice of his generals, and the disloyalty or corruption of his cabinet.

The book starts with Lincoln travelling secretly to Washington for what would be his first inauguration. At the same time, the novel starts to track those would be involved in his assassination. The issue of the war remains apparently open until near the end.

Here is a scene about halfway through the book. It is before the battle of Gettysburg, and the emergence of the two generals that would bring Lincoln home, Grant and Sherman. (Sherman said that he looked after Grant when he was drunk, and that Grant looked after him when he was mad.) Lincoln goes to the front. He passes what he is a told is a facility for southern boys who have been wounded. Over the protests of security, Lincoln insists on going in to see these young men. Any one of them would have been proud to have killed Lincoln in cold blood. The sight and stench, even the sounds, inside the tent would have been unbearable to anyone reading this note. Remember that Lincoln’s portrait was on the greenback.

When the colonel started to call the men to attention, the President stopped him with a gesture. Then Lincoln walked the length of the room, very slowly, looking to left and right, with his dreamy smile. At the end of the room, he turned and faced the wounded men; then, slowly, he removed his hat. All eyes that could see now saw him, and recognised him.

When Lincoln spoke, the famous trumpet-voice was muted; even intimate. ‘I am Abraham Lincoln.’ There was a long collective sigh of wonder and of tension and of…..? Washburne [a Congressman and friend] had never heard a sound quite like it. ‘I know that you have fought gallantly for what you believe in, and for that I honour you, and for your wounds so honourably gained. I feel no anger in my heart toward you; and trust you feel none for me. That is why I am here. That is why I am willing to take the hand, in friendship, of any man among you.’

The same long sigh, like a rising wind, began, and still no one spoke. Then a man on crutches approached the President and, in perfect silence, shook his hand. Others came forward, one by one; and each took Lincoln’s hand; and to each he murmured something that the man alone could hear.

At the end, as Lincoln made his way between the beds, stopping to talk to those who could not move, half of the men were in tears, as was Washburne himself.

In the last bed by the door, a young officer turned his back on the President, who touched his shoulder and murmured, ‘My son, we shall all be the same at the end.’ Then the President was gone.

Now, that passage might stand for the dilemma of the historical novel. How do we know this happened? Is it true of Lincoln? Having read the replies of Vidal to his critics, I am confident of the answer to each question. The book was scrupulously sourced, and vetted by one of Lincoln’s best biographers, and this incident is consistent with all we know of Lincoln.

It’s also consistent with our experience. We know that some people – some heroes – are of such obviously strong character, and such proven fine history, that their mere physical presence can have an effect on total strangers that is as unreal as it is uplifting. I have seen this with my own eyes with people touched by merely being in the presence of Muhammad Ali, in a mysterious way that they thought might change their lives. I have heard about from those who were in the presence of Nelson Mandela. Some people, a very tiny few, have this magical power. Some of them, like Joan of Arc and Martin Luther King, would pay the ultimate price for challenging the status quo.

So, in a way, did Lincoln. His story is one of the great epics of mankind, and in my view it is wonderfully unfolded in this book by Gore Vidal.

Curiously, the attractive power of innocence was explored by Herman Melville in his novella called Billy Budd. The hero embodies innocence. Claggart, the villain, embodies evil. The book is another redemption story. Melville began his story by describing how sailors when they went ashore gathered around one who was the ‘Handsome Sailor’. ‘With no perceptible trace of the vainglorious about him, rather with the off-hand unaffectedness of natural regality, he seemed to accept the spontaneous homage of his shipmates.’ That is a reasonable description of Lincoln and his government – when they got to know him.

Here is my note on Lincoln from another publication (Men of Genius).

Lincoln

1809-1865

The problem of slavery was resolved by force of arms and the effect of what might be seen as a failed revolution was stated in terms that still today can produce a tremble in the bottom lip of people who have never even set foot in America.

Abraham Lincoln did not come from the middle class or higher. He was born in the backblocks in a log cabin in Kentucky. He learned his law lying on his back with his feet up a tree. This largely self-taught lawyer practised in Illinois and rode on horseback on circuit when he slept fully clothed head to toe with opposing counsel.

He had one supreme advantage over most of us. He was better educated. He was brought up on the King James Bible and Shakespeare, and his young mind was unsullied by tripe or trivia. Lincoln may well be the most consummate politician who has ever lived, and he may also be one of the very few in all history who was not corrupted by power. He had, of course, no time for political theory. It was by the force of his character that the union that we know as the United States of America was held together and then defined afresh. Without Abraham Lincoln, our world in the West would be very different. He is the supreme political genius in the history of the world.

To go a little out of order, Lincoln in his second inaugural address left no doubt that the Union was redeeming itself in the course of the Civil War. He said that at the start of the war, one eighth of the population were coloured slaves. He went on with some very direct statements about religion:

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and prayed to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in bringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered – that of neither has been answered fully.

Lincoln then went on to say that the ‘scourge of war’ would ‘continue until all of the wealth piled up by the bondsmen’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and every drop of blood drawn with a lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword …’ The nation that started with the Puritans was therefore redeeming itself from the sin of slavery with its own blood. Lincoln concluded that inaugural address with the famous passage that begins: ‘With malice toward none ….’

Less than four months before his re-inauguration, Abraham Lincoln had stated his vision for his nation at the dedication of a cemetery at the site of a three-day battle, one of the bloodiest of a very bloody war, the battle of Gettysburg. People who have seen the TV documentary, The Civil War, may recall that the late Shelby Foote said that after Lincoln had read his address ‘in his thin piping voice,’ he was worried about it. He said that it did not ‘scour’. For good reason, that address is now chiselled into the Lincoln Memorial at Washington, D.C., and it is an essential part of the fabric not just of the American nation, but of western civilization.

Lincoln had a well-oiled logical machine in his mind. He would as a matter of course build the premises of his argument into the structure of his prose. There is just one thing to note about that process here. He starts by referring to ‘a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal’. We know that statement was false when it was first made. Lincoln goes on immediately to say that the Civil War is to test ‘whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure’. The Civil War was therefore being fought to make good the original declaration of equality. It is the same redemptive vision, almost a biblical redemptive vision. The great republic would redeem its original sin with its own blood.

Here then is how the great Abraham Lincoln defined his vision of the free republic of the United States:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow – this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we may say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us –that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

TERROR AND THE POLICE STATE: CHAPTER 9

08/12/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

Secret police

Police are people employed by government to enforce the law. Secret police are police whose work and identities are kept as secret as possible. They might sometimes be described as ‘under cover.’ The word Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei, the Secret State Police) is now used throughout the world to signify the most terrifying form of secret police. The word Stasi, from the DDR, is less well known, but stands for a police that is forbidding, intrusive, repressive, and everywhere.

The ‘police’ at large in the French Revolution played a very minor part in the Terror compared to the part played by secret police in Communist (or Bolshevik) Russia and Nazi Germany. Those two regimes are models of the police state and the totalitarian state, and it is not surprising then that their police agencies, especially the secret police, were at the very top of the pyramid of power, second only to the dictator. In France, there was no police force as we understand that term during the revolution, and we only get to see police operating at anything like that level under Fouché and Napoleon.

Fouché survived the revolution and Napoleon, and he showed amazing versatility to do so – Napoleon made Fouché his chief of police and later ennobled him, but he never trusted him. Fouché, like Talleyrand, betrayed Napoleon and lived. Like Talleyrand, he had a rat cunning bordering on greatness. Georges Lefebvre says that ‘what really put an end to the attempts on his [Napoleon’s] life was the terror and the perfection of police surveillance.’

Stalin and Hitler ran totalitarian states – everything is controlled by the state. Power comes from the force realised by channelling numbers. Stalin saw all government as a ‘transmission belt connecting the party with the people.’ He believed that Soviet greatness came from the ‘cadres’ of the party – the police. The secret police were the elite of the Party and they were only drawn from the ranks of the party. Hitler said that sixty thousand men ‘have outwardly become almost a unit, that actually these men are uniform not only in ideas, but that even the facial expression is almost the same. Look at these laughing eyes, this fanatical enthusiasm and you will discover…..how a hundred thousand men in a movement become a single type.’ This is a horrifying glimpse of the SS, and Hitler only committed suicide after he concluded that the SS had failed him and could no longer be relied on – the ‘best’ of them were blowing their brains out all around him.

The object of the secret police is to eliminate the enemies of the state. All dictators rely on their secret services and for that reason they may be vulnerable to them, as was the case with the Roman Emperors and the Praetorian Guard. Himmler’s position as Reichsfuhrer-SS and head of German police effectively put the police in the hands of the SS and achieved some kind of unity of party and state. The SS was the new Praetorian Guard, and the sole armed branch of the party, the elite from which the future leadership would be drawn. Totalitarian dictatorships invariably become police states.

Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism distinguished between suspects – those who are suspected of breaking the law or of being an actual threat to the regime – and ‘objective enemies’. People come within the class of objective enemies not because they want to overthrow the regime, but because of a policy of the government to exclude or condemn them simply because they are members of a class – like kulaks for Stalin, or Jews or Gypsies or homosexuals for Hitler.

These targets are not individuals whose dangerous thoughts might be provoked or whose individual histories warrants suspicion, but members of a class who are like ‘carriers of tendencies’, like a carrier of a disease. The Nazis frequently invoked the analogy of disease when speaking of Jews or Gypsies. Hans Frank distinguished between those ‘dangerous to the state’ and those ‘hostile to the state.’ A lawyer who went over to the SS said in an obituary of Heydrich that he regarded his opponents not ‘as individuals but as carriers of tendencies endangering the state and therefore beyond the pale of the national community.’ Hannah Arendt expressed this mordant view: ‘Practically speaking, the totalitarian ruler proceeds like a man who persistently insults another man until everybody knows that the latter is his enemy, so that he can, with some plausibility, go and kill him in self-defence. This certainly is a little crude, but it works – as everybody will know whoever watched how certain successful careerists eliminate competitors’.

A French historian of the Tsarist Okhrana said that provocation was ‘the foundation stone’ of the secret police. After 1848 in Europe it may be hard to find much anti-government action for some time that was not inspired, or provoked, by the secret police. But they hardly have to resort to provocation if they can put people away on suspicion. And what happens if the agents eliminate any apparent threats and then look like they may have disposed of the objective enemies?

Most civil servants are seasoned at concealing any basis for suggesting that they are superfluous. Secret police, like arms manufacturers, find ways to generate demand for their services, but the secret police may become entirely dependent on government to identify sufficient targets to keep them in work. It looks like Hitler was thinking of turning on Germans who were not physically good enough, and that Stalin was looking to turn on the Jews, perhaps as a comradely gesture to his satellites who were predisposed in that direction.

Fouché was if nothing else flexible and financially adept, and during his time and later, secret police would seek to profit from their victims. A simple way would be to go into partnership in illegal activities like prostitution and gambling. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, cadres of ‘chastity commissars’ lived off the earnings of blackmail. The NKVD lived off the exploitation of slave labour: the labour in the gulag paid for the apparatus that got people inside in the first place. Himmler first financed his SS through the confiscation of Jewish property. The SS raised funds the way political parties and cultural institutions do – people who became ‘Friends of the SS’ might ‘volunteer’ donations in return for benefits that might not be so easily defined – perhaps what we call a ‘get out of jail card.’

Stalin’s need for purges extended to the secret police. People got improved positions when others got shot. Informers are offered incentives. Each jobholder becomes complicit in the system, a conscious accomplice of Stalin. This is likely to turn them into more ardent supporters of the regime. The wielders of the highest power get to understand the nature of caprice and arbitrariness, and this in no way abates their professional inhumanity and dedicated cruelty. It is just this randomness that tears away by the roots the very humanity of both the oppressor and the oppressed.

Yet the all-embracing secrecy leaves people with a capacity for denial. They all know that people disappear, and that they do not come back, and they suspect many of these may be ‘innocent’, if there is such a thing, but they also know that the one way to end up the same is by talking about this kind of thing. The one thing that you do not talk about is anything that is ‘secret’. Even a child knows that.

Passing Bull 129 – Fake conservatives

05/12/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The word ‘conservative’ has had its political ups and downs, but of late it has been debauched if not hijacked. Conservatism found its most classical expression in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. The English preferred evolution to revolution. They relished their history and traditions; they revelled in their own mystique. They suspected change. Burke said that their ‘opposed and conflicting interests…interpose a salutary check to all precipitate resolutions; they render deliberation a matter not of choice, but of necessity; they make all change a subject of compromise, which naturally begets moderation; they produce temperaments, preventing the sore evil of harsh, crude, unqualified reformations…’ And the French? ‘You set up your trade without…capital.’

Now, that is very English. Our state of mind comes from our experience of history. ‘Our oldest reformation is that of Magna Charta.’ And the big reformation secured the separation of Church and State in a typically perverse English fashion. All this was in aid of ‘liberty’ – ‘Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself.’

An American legal scholar W D Guthrie expressed Burk’s thought on the 700^th anniversary of Magna Carta.

…..everything which has power to win the obedience and respect of men must have its roots deep in the past, and the more slowly institutions have grown, so much the more enduring are they likely to prove.

Guthrie later spoke of ‘the rare and difficult sentiment’ of ‘constitutional morality.’ Its essence is ‘self -imposed restraint’. Its antithesis is ‘the most fallacious and dangerous doctrine that has ever appeared among men, that the people are infallible and can do no wrong.’ A ‘populist’ and a ‘conservative’ are two clean different things.

These views flow naturally from the Anglo-American legal tradition. We are looking at a certain type or cast of legal or political thought. How, then, would a ‘conservative’, so described look at some of our main political issues?

Take our handling of refugees. History is not a good guide. Historically, Australians have not acted well toward people of a different faith or colour, and the present government recently flirted with one of the more obnoxious disguises used in the White Australia policy. But putting to one side plain human decency, our treatment of refugees flouts Magna Carta and legal obligations undertaken to the world community. To that extent, a conservative must condemn our policy.

Take marriage equality. A conservative would argue that allowing same sex marriage expands the notion of liberty that underlies our whole dispensation. There are problems with that contention, but there are more problems with the very idea that the proposal might be opposed on the ground of religion. Our separation of church and state is recognised in our constitution in a way that is the direct opposite of the English version.

Yes, marriage has been between a man and a woman since Biblical times, but while antiquity may appeal to conservatives, it cannot rule them. Slavery has a history as long as that of marriage. As Burke said: ‘A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.’ That in my view is the real lesson of the French Revolution, but of one thing we may be sure – Burke would have been horrified and Disraeli would have been mortified by the suggestion that the Parliament refer the issue to the plebs. That to them would have been a fatal abdication. Labels have limits – Burke was a conservative Whig and Disraeli was a radical Tory.

Take our reaction to climate change. It’s now common ground that we have made a mess of it, and fools of ourselves. It’s hard to see how the issue could have become political, much less ideological. It would be tart, but not ridiculous, to suggest that the first job of a conservative is to conserve the planet, but you struggle to find any principle to the opposition to the findings of science. All you get are populist diversions about the price or reliability of power. It’s what we used to call the ‘hip-pocket nerve.’

Now, you will know that some in parliament and in the Murdoch press who call themselves ‘conservatives’ hold views opposite to those set out above. Some do it out of malice; others do it for money. Either way, it’s hard to see any underlying political principle. But it’s easy to see a surrender to the mob. What you don’t see is anything like the compromise, moderation or temperaments described by Burke or the self-restraint described by Guthrie. None of these parliamentarians is temperamentally given to compromise, moderation or self-restraint.

What you have is a repudiation of conservatism. It’s time these people were called out. They are not of the right sort of mind.