Here and there – Evil á la mode; and Iago

24/10/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Last year Fox News, a part of the Murdoch Empire and an aider and abettor of Donald Trump, paid out huge amounts of money to settle sexual harassment claims against their CEO – and to settle with him. Such is the evil of our times that, as I recall, both settlements ran to tens of millions of dollars. Earlier this year, Fox News was forced by public opinion to sack its number one attraction, and Trump’s biggest fan and supporter, Bill O’Reilly. He, too, was a serial abuser, and the undisputed world champion of hypocrisy. He too handed over many millions of dollars to the victims of his abuse. Such is the contempt for truth now in public life that O’Reilly was suffered to say that there was no truth in the allegations against him – he was just paying out all those millions to protect his children from bad publicity that had no foundation. I don’t know whether O’Reilly, too, employs the lie ‘fake news.’

On the weekend, The New York Times reported that O’Reilly had agreed to pay one of the victims of his abuse more than $30,000,000. That was the cost of her silence – but someone has ratted. And now it gets worse. With knowledge of that deal, the Murdoch family offered O’Reilly a renewal of contract at $25,000,000 a year. Does anyone get to say grace at the start of these lucre-shovelling sessions?

There is evil all around here. We have monopoly money figures that of themselves corrupt the recipients. Just look at the spectacle that our bankers have made of themselves. But there is a vicious disparity in status as well as wealth and income. The case of that rutting pig Weinstein shows just how corrupted these people can become, and how moguls get to believe that they are untouchable.

But it also showed how vulnerable to predators are those at the bottom. It’s as if we were reinstituting serfdom of a quite medieval kind – a form of rightlessness deriving not from contract but from status.

As I see it, this is evil, very evil. And it is just these rents in our communal fabric that lead to cancers like Hanson, Farage, and Trump, so that they can spread their own kind of evil. It’s all very depressing, and it prompts reflection on the nature of evil.

Roger Scruton – Sir Roger if you go in for that kind of thing – is an English philosopher who gets up people’s noses big time on some issues. He calls it as he sees it, and tact or social nous may not be his strong suits. He is however an urbane man with wide interests who is capable of speaking plain English. I think that he subscribes to the Church of England, and I know that he is an opera fan, and that he wrote a book called I Drink, Therefore I Am. It’s hard to dislike such a bloke, and he represents a full blooded defence of religion that both God and we badly need.

Scruton’s book On Human Nature has a lot of university type language, but there are some insights there for people who are not familiar with the ontological argument for the existence of God, or Kant’s celebrated refutation of that argument. (Yes, of course – existence is not a predicate.)

The book is a revolt against the notion that we humans can be defined biologically, genetically, or even, I think, scientifically. It may even be a reaction against Bryan Cox.

Wait a minute: science is not the only way to pursue knowledge. There is moral knowledge too, which is the province of practical reason; there is emotional knowledge, which is the province of art, literature, and music. And just possibly there is transcendental knowledge, which is the province of religion. Why privilege science, just because it sets out to explain the world? Why not give weight to the disciplines that interpret the world and so help us to be at home in it?

Scruton seeks to explain our humanity by looking at our capacity to reflect on ourselves. He refers to an Islamic teacher, al Fārābī, who offers us the insight that ‘the truths furnished to the intellect by philosophy are made available to the imagination by religious faith.’ Scruton’s opening lecture on ‘Human Kind’ has a ringing finale:

Take away religion, however, take away philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways in which they can represent their apartness. Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead. Biological reductionism nurtures this ‘living down’, which is why people so readily fall for it. It makes cynicism respectable, and degeneracy chic. It abolishes our kind – and with it our kindness.

It’s been quite some time since anything like that was taught at university under the heading of Philosophy.

It is the subject of evil that is of interest to us now. Bad people, Scruton says, are like you or me, but evil people are visitors from another sphere, incarnations of the Devil. ‘Even their charm – and it is a recognised fact that evil people are often charming – is only further proof of their Otherness. They are, in some sense, the negation of humanity, wholly and unnaturally at ease with the thing that they seek to destroy.’

That seems to be about right. Scruton reminds us that Goethe gives to Mephistopheles the line: ‘I am the spirit that forever negates.’ We’re not just talking of the person who sucks the oxygen out of a room. Bad people tend to ignore others because they are guided by self-interest – just look at Trump – but the evil person ‘is profoundly interested in others, has almost selfless designs on them.’

The aim is not to use them, as Faust uses Gretchen, but to rob them of themselves. Mephistopheles hopes to steal and destroy Faust’s soul and, en route to that end, to destroy the soul of Gretchen. Nowadays we might use the word ‘self’ instead of ‘soul’, in order to avoid religious connotations. But this word is only another name for the same metaphysical mystery around which our lives are built – the mystery of the subjective viewpoint. Evil people are not necessarily threats to your body; but they are threats to yourself.

The relevance of all this to Iago is obvious and Scruton makes the link himself. In watching the play, we are quickly shocked to find that Iago really intends to destroy Othello.

Peering into Iago’s soul we find a void, a nothingness; like Mephistopheles, he is a great negation, a soul composed of anti-spirit, as a body might be composed of antimatter. The evil person is like a fracture in our human world, through which we catch glimpses of the void.

These insights, which are strong, lead Scruton to refer to ‘the banality of evil’ that Hannah Arendt saw in the bureaucratic mindset of Adolf Eichmann. And he powerfully reminds us that concentration camps ‘were designed not merely to destroy human beings, but also to deprive them of their humanity.’ He then goes on to refer to what he sees as the ‘paradigm of evil – namely, the attempt or desire to destroy the soul of another so that his or her value and meaning are rubbed out.’

The book concludes with some comments on faith, and the notion that religion ‘is a dedication of one’s being’ and concludes with a reference ‘ to the two great works of art that have attempted to show what redemption means for us, in the world of modern scepticism: Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and Wagner’s Parsifal. In the wake of these two great aesthetic achievements, it seems to me, the perspective of philosophy is of no great significance.’

Would that others of us could be so modest (even if he lost me on Parsifal). But as ever, we needn’t press the labels or categories too hard. (George Bush Senior said that ‘labels are what you put on soup cans.’) Nor should we forget another remark of Hannah Arendt.

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.

This may be hard to square with Scruton, but people who choose to demonise Stalin and Hitler want to run away from history and they demean their victims.

Iago has these lines:

… If Cassio do remain,

He hath a daily beauty in his life

That makes me ugly… (5.1.18-20)

There is a primal, Garden of Evil, feeling about that type of envy, and it calls to mind the visceral description by the same writer of the type of person who sucks the air out of a room, the common garden smiling assassin.

Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;

He thinks too much: such men are dangerous…

…..He reads much,

He is a great observer and he looks

Quite through the deeds of men …

Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort

As if he mocked himself, and scorned his spirit

That could be moved to smile at anything.

Such men as he be never at heart’s ease

Whilst they behold a greater than themselves.

And therefore are they very dangerous.

(Julius Caesar, 1.2.200-215)

You would not want to stake your house on spotting the difference between the badness of Cassius and the evil of Iago – or, for that matter, what category you might reserve for Eichmann. It may be best to leave all that stuff to God. Those issues are certainly way above my pay level.

But let us go back to Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, and Bill O’Reilly. A friend of mine – as it happens, the one who attends mass in a cathedral – astutely observed of the problems of Fox that ‘a large part of tabloid journalism involves the exploitation of human misery’ – or at least, I may add, misfortune. It is therefore ironic that O’Reilly lies that he is paying out protection money just to avoid exploitation from the gutter. The exploitation of the gutter is the business model of Fox News, and the modus operandi of President Donald Trump.

Are we then tip-toeing ever closer to the rim of the volcano that we have always sensed lies below us?

Why did the Roman Empire fall? Edward Gibbon, the great historian, said:

The rise of a city, which swelled into an empire, may deserve, as a singular prodigy, the reflection of a philosophic mind. But the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of its immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it subsisted so long. The victorious legions, who, in distant wars, acquired the vices of strangers and mercenaries, first oppressed the freedom of the republic, and afterwards violated the majesty of the purple. The emperors, anxious for their personal safety and public peace, were reduced to the base expedient of corrupting the discipline which rendered them alike formidable to their sovereign and to the enemy; the vigour of the military government was relaxed and finally dissolved by the partial institutions of Constantine; and the Roman world was overwhelmed by a deluge of barbarians.

The United States is not there yet – but Gibbon looks to me to have diagnosed precisely the condition of the actual decline and coming fall of the Murdoch Empire.

Passing Bull 125 – The collapse of restraint

21/10/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / 5 Comments

A mate of mine is a Catholic who likes to attend Mass in a Cathedral. When I passed on to him a note by David Marr about the bishops’ going quiet about their attitude to homosexuality – are they doomed to burn in hell? – he said that the Church had lost credibility on issues like marriage equality, and that he thought that that was a shame because they may have had something useful to say about easing the passing. Well, they haven’t. They have shot their bolt. They showed a lack of restraint, and, rightly or wrongly, they sounded as dishonest as they sounded mean, with this libertarian nonsense about freedom of conscience.

I am afraid that I take a very old fashioned view about religious people seeking to impose their views on others. I think all that went out the window with Henry VIII and the Act of Supremacy. I’m sure I would be supported on that point if the proposal was to set up Sharia Law in Australia of for us to follow Myanmar and build a bridge of bones against Islam.

If you publish a weekly bullshit column, The Weekend Australian becomes tax deductible. Our failure to get a decent conservative paper here is very sad. The lack of restraint we see in the contemporary political discussion was on full show today. Paul Kelly began his piece:

This is a sad and profoundly worrying moment for our country. The virtues and ethics that bind families and loved ones have been disrupted by a misguided Victorian lower house.

An Australian jurisdiction is close to crossing a threshold that constitutes a fundamental departure in our attitudes to human life – and has acted under the misguided logic that safeguards can be effective.

There you have it – one policy shift, and the end of the world is nigh – and announced like by the village elder patronising eight year olds. Sorry, kids, but you got it wrong. That happens in childhood. You get it demonstrably wrong.

With Janet Albrechtsen, you get a mixture of a preppy undergraduate tone and Apocalypse Now.

This intellectual regression has its roots in postmodernism, and identity politics has become its political arm. Under the dishonest rubric of ‘progressive’ politics, postmodernism cemented into universities the notion that history and language are corrupted by those who hold power. Ergo, history needs to be told through the lens of oppression and language needs to be proscribed to protect victims of the oppressors……

Determined to police words and speech, proponents of identity politics label opponents as racists, sexists, misogynists, homophobes and Nazis…..

And let’s not mince words. When the heritage of Western civilisation is devalued in Australian schools and university history departments, debased by our political parties and human rights bureaucracies, and snubbed by sections of the media, too, it becomes a numbers game. I joined the IPA years ago because the voices of freedom need critical mass so that the virtues of freedom can be nurtured, defended and passed on to the next generation to do the same. The way forward is to instil in each generation an understanding that our great inheritance comes from the story of Western civilisation. That’s why Roskam and his team at the IPA are engaged in this critical contest of ideas that must not be dismantled by the self-loathing politics of identity.

Do you think that Janet may have found her vocation better in the Salvo’s? It’s all just a game of shadow-boxing by tribes and labels; the white hats against the black hats; with not even a nod to restraint. It’s as if they have never left university.

And I’m never quite sure what ‘identity politics’ is, except that I believe that nationalists like Trump and Farage are in it up to their necks – and that Janet Albrechtsen and others at the IPA are disposed to cosy up to people like Trump and Farage.

Well, I suppose the IPA has done something for the bishops in our public life – they provide another sounding board for bullshit that we don’t need. And notwithstanding the self-assurance – to use the soft phrase – with which they all hand down their tablets of the laws, you do get the impression that the IPA and the bishops want to cast themselves a s victims. Do they have a name for that kind of political gambit?

The truth is that we don’t go for ideology. For that matter, I’m not sure what post-modernism is – although I did smile when someone at Oxford said it was like playing tennis with the net down. That sounded about right to me.

Poet of the month: Henry Lawson

After all

The brooding ghosts of Australian night have gone from the bush and town;

My spirit revives in the morning breeze, though it died when the sun went down;

The river is high and the stream is strong, and the grass is green and tall,

And I fain would think that this world of ours is a good world after all.

The light of passion in dreamy eyes, and a page of truth well read,

The glorious thrill in a heart grown cold of the spirit I thought was dead,

A song that goes to a comrade’s heart, and a tear of pride let fall —

And my soul is strong! and the world to me is a grand world after all!

Let our enemies go by their old dull tracks, and theirs be the fault or shame

(The man is bitter against the world who has only himself to blame);

Let the darkest side of the past be dark, and only the good recall;

For I must believe that the world, my dear, is a kind world after all. It well may be that I saw too plain, and it may be I was blind;

But I’ll keep my face to the dawning light, though the devil may stand behind!

Though the devil may stand behind my back, I’ll not see his shadow fall,

But read the signs in the morning stars of a good world after all.

Rest, for your eyes are weary, girl — you have driven the worst away –

The ghost of the man that I might have been is gone from my heart to-day;

We’ll live for life and the best it brings till our twilight shadows fall;

My heart grows brave, and the world, my girl, is a good world after all.

Terror and the Police State – Chapter 3

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

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

Righteousness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here and there – Getting a fright – and feeling desperately mortal

17/10/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

The wonderful film Dunkirk shows young men knowing real fear. They may be shot and wounded or killed. They may be shot in the worst possible way. In the back –retreating. So that if they get back home, it will be as part of defeated army. (We know about that here in Australia. This movie is at its most moving when it shows some men getting back home and fearing their rejection as losers.) We see young men dying – it’s all down to chance. Randomness is all about them. Their fate is out of their hands. There is a sense of helplessness. Is this the ultimate insult to our human dignity – that we become powerless in the hands of others?

Last Saturday morning, I was working here at this desk in the way I am now – typing and looking out over meadows and gumtrees. I had experienced some shortness of breath that morning and the previous morning, but nothing much. (This is about my condition of emphysema, not lung cancer.) At about 11.20, I started, to feel a chill. Then I felt aches in the legs. Then I got short of breath changing rooms. I felt even chillier and suspected an onset of flue. When I went to put a large log on the fire, I fell to one knee, and seemed to lose my breathing completely. This all happened so fast.

At about 11.45, I rang the clinic at Kyneton and said I was very distressed and on my way. I cannot recall thinking about ringing 000 then. I do recall thinking the trip to Kyneton – about ten k’s on the freeway – might be tricky for me, but that if I had collapsed, I could have rung 000 from there. It’s hard reconstructing these things after the event. The trouble is that you feel like you are running out of time – but you don’t know how much time is left. It’s like being on time-on in the last quarter.

I made it to the clinic. I just presented my bedraggled self and was soon on oxygen. I can recall the fever was so bad that when they pulled a sleeve up, I pulled it down again because the chill to the exposed skin was physically painful. (Is this what Don Giovanni felt at the end? )I was looked after by a young doctor who is an extremely competent professional person. The nursing staff acted on my instructions to get some good neighbours to look after Wolf. I was taken by ambulance to Bendigo. The paramedics were also very professional and kind.

After about four hours in casualty – monitored to the hilt – I was cleared of influenza, X-rayed, and told I wasn’t go to die – at least from this infection of the lung. After a long delay caused by a bus crash outside Ballarat, I was taken to St John of God. I had a long discussion with Lilly, a 48 year old Malaysian lady, about cooking and climate. (‘It’s bloody hot there all the time, Mate.’) I had similarly diverting discussion with many members of a dedicated staff, and after only minimal untruths, I secured my release after two nights. The kind neighbour who looks after my garden had looked after Wolf. She collected me and drove me back with him. I’m determinedly resilient one day later.

But for about thirty minutes on Saturday, I knew real fear. It was that sense of randomness of helplessness, that fear of the unknown, and loss of dignity. The image that came to mind was of a fly on its back heading in diminishing oval slurries to the bath plug hole. There does after all obviously have to be an end sometime. Timing is all.

I think I can say that death itself doesn’t worry me. What’s the point? It has to happen. Wittgenstein taught me years ago that you don’t live to see your own death. That is axiomatic. (Someone at Oxford told me a Greek had said just this 2,500 years ago.) Descartes started modern philosophy by saying ‘I think, therefore I am.’ At about 4.30 this morning I thought for the first time of a kind of obverse. ‘I’m dead, therefore I don’t think.’ (If you think that’s silly, it may suggest a problem in the first proposition.)

When the lights go out, that’s it. There are no replays or appeals to the third umpire. But we may wish to have some say in how the lights get turned off.

I hadn’t thought I had ever been so scared. But when I thought about it, I recalled one time in the ‘60s. During each vacation I worked with a small outfit called C & I Cleaning. (That stood for ‘Commercial and Industrial’ – you can imagine the men’s version.) The work was dirty and often dangerous. Employers got away with things that would now draw jail time – big jail time. There was no union involved. It was never even discussed. I used to think about it, but instinctively felt I would not have a job if I did anything about it. More importantly, the permanents had families to support, and they were not interested.

We used to do jobs that these people were not qualified to do. We did a job cleaning the outside of what was the Graham Hotel in Swanston Street between Flinders Street and Collins Street. We did our own rigging of what were called needles, that is, girders, over the top of the building from which to suspend the slings, called painters’ slings. These needles went over the parapet under a steel fence and then had concrete davits holding them down. The whole arrangement looked to me to be amateurish. I was involved in setting it up. You may as well have asked me to do surgery. There was no Department of Labour and Industry inspection. In truth, the needles were wrongly set.

At about midnight, we started winching up the slings. There were three of us on each of two slings. I was winching one, at the end nearest the Town Hall. The site beside me was vacant and there was a north wind giving a bit of a sway to the sling as we went up. About every ten feet or so my ratchet would give a slight click and just drop. It was very, very unnerving. It was also damned hard work.

We got to the top of the sixth floor and the little click became a run and the thing went down so that we were sort of hanging there with the sling at a 60 degree angle. Someone or others of us were shaking so much that the whole sling was shaking. It was seven minutes to four in the morning according to the Town Hall clock. I can remember saying to Dickie Roberts that we were up a bit. Dickie was an Englishman (who lived with a hooker who did interesting things with Cadbury’s chocolates). I liked Dickie. He said ‘You don’t fucking bounce’ in an accent that was thick for more than one reason.

A young night porter came to the window and turned white. He said he could not handle the window. We told him to kick the fucking thing in – and the air conditioner as well. We made our escape at about 4am. About seven minutes of swaying terror. When I first read Measure for Measure, years later I thought I knew just what Shakespeare meant by the phrase ‘desperately mortal’.

Someone gave me a brandy. It was a huge balloon glass. I drained it and did not feel a thing. I was blind with anger. I wanted to get my hands on those management bastards who had been standing down there looking up hopefully with their feet on the ground. When we got to them they asked if we would go up on the other sling. Looking back on it, I think it may have been as well if one or another of us had hit one of them. Dickie could have been just the boy for the job – he was brawny and he had pictures and I was sure he had been inside. It is not so much that those men were greedy – it was that they did not care: they were worse than careless. They were in truth bloody dangerous.

None of this came to me last Saturday. The two cases are very different – not least because of my age. But there was the same sense of randomness and helplessness – and fear of the unknown.

At least three things are clear to me after two trips to casualty by ambulance.

First, while we have mostly lost the old independent civil service we used to know, we are very well provided for by our doctors, nurses and paramedics. I spent a lot time in the last few days talking to many of them, including many trainees and Latrobe students. All of them – all of them – impressed me by their professionalism. If you spend time in casualty, and see what life’s like at the bottom, you know that these people are not there for the money. This is vocation, and God bless them.

And God bless their variety. The last nurse I spoke to was a student from Zimbabwe called Lana. She had the natural dignity of tall African women, and speaking to her, I realised the advantage that black women have over whites – their eyes flash naturally.

Secondly, there is another group who should spend time in casualty in a public hospital. Those vicious idiots who want to loosen our gun laws should listen to people screaming obscene hate in public – whether through drugs, including alcohol, or dementia – in hospitals that now employ permanent security staff, and where PA’s announce impending mayhem by ‘Code Grey’, and their end by ‘Stand down.’ It is straight out of Nineteen Eighty-four. It is worse than madness to suggest that we should loosen gun laws in pursuit of a vane mantra about ‘freedom.’ We will have to learn better how to deal with these nasty, cruel, cranks – I’m talking about the ratbag politicians, not the poor bastards in casualty.

Thirdly, I don’t want to go into labels about dying, but I may have to look again at some of the issues. The trick, as it seems to me, is to be allowed to go out with as much dignity as possible and as little pain to those close to you. Can we not manage to set up such a regime? The issue looks to me a bit like that of marriage equality. People should be left free to do as they decently want to as long as they don’t hurt others. Isn’t that what we are supposed to be about?

Let me then go back to Dunkirk. I hardly saw any TV at St John of God. But I turned on SBS to watch their Sunday news. I got the end of the Battle of Jutland. This was the great naval battle of the Great War. It was at best a draw. Neither side risked its whole fleet. It is still very controversial. But many ships went down and thousands died. The horror came as some British ships limped home – to be met by people heaving coal at them from bridges. The fearfully uninformed were abusing their servicemen for cowardice. This is sickening to see. Have ever men been worse treated? As I said, we know all about that here. In the name of God, we are such awkward boxes of good and bad.

Passing Bull 124 – Bull about respect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Financial Times went on:

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

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

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

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

Poet of the Month

Andy’s gone with cattle

Our Andy’s gone to battle now

‘Gainst Drought, the red marauder;

Our Andy’s gone with cattle now

Across the Queensland border.

He’s left us in dejection now;

Our hearts with him are roving.

It’s dull on this selection now,

Since Andy went a-droving.

Who now shall wear the cheerful face

In times when things are slackest?

And who shall whistle round the place

When Fortune frowns her blackest?

Oh, who shall cheek the squatter now

When he comes round us snarling?

His tongue is growing hotter now

Since Andy cross’d the Darling. T

he gates are out of order now,

In storms the `riders’ rattle;

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

Poor Aunty’s looking thin and white;

And Uncle’s cross with worry;

And poor old Blucher howls all night

Since Andy left Macquarie.

Oh, may the showers in torrents fall,

And all the tanks run over;

And may the grass grow green and tall

In pathways of the drover;

And may good angels send the rain

On desert stretches sandy;

And when the summer comes again

God grant ’twill bring us Andy.

Terror and the Police State: II

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

Enduring Emergency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here and there – Is any nation civilised?

12/10/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

If you read Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, you will probably find more references to Italy than any other nation. He was not talking about what some call the glory of ancient Rome. Clark started after the fall of Rome. But he dwelt lovingly on Italy, which did not then exist as nation, in the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation – even if governance in Italy stank and governance in the Church of Rome was so bad that it led to the unending schism. There would be general agreement that Italy is a civilised nation, or at least as much entitled to make that claim as others. Who wouldn’t say that of a people that gave the world Dante, Raphael, Da Vinci, and Verdi?

In 2012, the Italians unveiled a monument built with public money on a picturesque village near Rome. The monument was to a general, Rodolfo Graziani. Well, the nation that gave us Michelangelo and Bernini may wish to celebrate one of its heroes. But to a general of Mussolini, such a stupid and cruel duce that the Italians killed and hung upside down? Well, some might see here an error of taste or judgment, but hardly evidence in itself of a failure of civilisation.

General Graziani was a dedicated fascist and a lifelong supporter of Mussolini. He commanded some of the Italian troops who invaded Ethiopia after 1935 under the reported slogan ‘Il Duce will have Ethiopia, with or without the Ethiopians.’ He became the Viceroy of Ethiopia in Mussolini’s pathetic attempt to create an empire. What follows is mostly taken from a review in The Economist of the book The Addis Ababa Massacre: Italy’s National Shame, by Ian Campbell.

The Ethiopians did not wish to be invaded. Few people do. One of them tried to kill the leader of the invasion. The bloody revenge of the Blackshirts lasted three days. Mussolini’s paramilitaries were officially given carta blanca. They were joined by regular soldiers, carabinieri, and the local Italian community. In this frightful massacre, witnesses reported crushed babies, disembowelled pregnant women and the burning of whole families. Graziani became known as ‘the butcher.’ Mr Campbell says 20,000 may have died. Italy puts the figure at 600 to 2000. Ethiopia says 30,000 died. On any view, it makes the German annihilation of Lidice, in response to the assassination of Heydrich, look meek. Doubtless most of the murderers saw themselves as good Christian inheritors of the civilisation of the West.

Mr Campbell says Graziani was personally responsible and that he was seeking to eliminate the Ethiopian nobility and intelligentsia. The term is ethnic cleansing. Two of the many black holes in Africa, Ethiopia and Libya, are the products of Mussolini’s mindless imperialism. Italy has a lot to answer for.

What say the Italians? This was no more than a typical European colonial atrocity – no worse than the British slaughter at Amritsar. Few historians have looked at it. Those who did were denounced as unpatriotic. The film Lion in the Desert was banned for ‘damaging the honour of the Italian army.’ It had no honour, and this stupid pretense goes to the heart of the problem. School children are not taught of the massacre.

Graziani evaded prosecution for war crimes. They were blocked by Italy and, I’m sorry to say, England. An Italian court sentenced him to 19 years for collaborating with the Nazis, but in the best traditions of Italian justice and governance, he served only four months. Some say his lawyers said he had ‘received orders.’ Haven’t the Italians heard of the precedent set at Nuremberg? No, the butcher now has his own monument.

Germany has come to terms with its past. Italy, Japan, and Turkey have not. The cancer of fascism is still alive in Italy. While it remains so, and while Italy stays blind to its crimes, Italy may claim some mantle from its past of civilisation, but it is hard to see it as either a mature or decent nation.

Passing Bull 123 – Freedom and guns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poet of the month: Emily Dickinson

How fits his Umber Coat

The Tailor of the Nut?

Combined without a seam

Like Raiment of a Dream –

Who spun the Auburn Cloth?

Computed how the girth?

The Chestnut aged grows

In those primeval Clothes –

We know that we are wise –

Accomplished in Surprise –

Yet by this Countryman –

This nature – how undone!

Terror and the Police State 1

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

TERROR AND THE POLICE STATE

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

Terms of engagement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hannah Arendt said:

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

Here and there – The politics of identity and identity politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The AfD is, like One Nation, against Islam.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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