The People

08/09/2026 / Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

A great American had a vision of democracy in America. He called it government ‘of the people, by the people, for the people.’ I, and millions of others, have gazed with awe at those words chiseled on the walls of the Lincoln Memorial. It comes to us from an age which now looks so distant and so strange. What happened to that vision of Abraham Lincoln?

We understand the references to ‘the people’, but have we, or they, given enough weight to the prepositions – of, by, and for? Especially by the people.

Well then, it obviously all turns on the people. They created the system; it exists for their benefit; and it is up to them to sustain it and keep it running as it should. So, when people complain about their government, they might reflect that in the end, it is all down to them.

Having thought about it for sixty years or so, the best I can offer is that the whole shebang turns on the state of mind of the people. Some nations are fortunate enough to have people with the necessary state of mind. Most are not so fortunate. The fortunate are in Western Europe and the UK and its former colonies. What about the United States?

All our governance in what we call democracy turns on our subscription to the rule of law. We elect people to make laws and we appoint people as jurors to decide whether someone has broken them.

We understand the rule of law to stand for the following. All people are equal under the law. Those who are elected or appointed to take part in governance hold positions of trust. They are there to serve us and not themselves. The government can only deprive anyone of us of any right by due process of law. It follows that any decision of government adverse to one of us – such as imprisonment for a crime – can only be taken pursuant to a decision of a judge who is independent of government or a group of people on a jury that represents the people as a whole. Caprice is anathema.

In the old days, the judges used to refer issues of fact ‘to the country,’ and an accused pleading not guilty would be said ‘to have put himself on the country, which country you are.’ That was a great way to put it.

So, when we come to look at how government is of, by, and for the people, it is not just about how much people are prepared to tolerate from their government. It is about the trouble we take to appoint people to positions of trust who look to be worthy of that appointment, and the means we put in place to check that they are duly discharging their duties. In our democracy, communal effort is essential to keep the wheels of government on track – and not just by voting at elections or sitting on a jury. That is not just a matter of ‘checks and balances’. It extends to the formation and conduct of political parties, an acceptance of the importance of conventions, and a recognition of the need for tolerance and restraint. And then there is that old maxim for caution – all power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.

There is nothing new or tricky about any of that. So, we have those precepts in mind when we look at events in Europe a century ago. Then nations of great substance succumbed to an abandonment of even a pretense to subscribing to the rule of law, and gave power to cruel and selfish dictators.

Angela Merkel, whom I greatly admire, thought deeply about freedom. In 2003, she gave a speech Quo Vadis Deutschland?

Freedom is the joy of achievement, the flourishing of the individual, the celebration of difference, the rejection of mediocrity, personal responsibility…. If we are able to live in justice and solidarity again, freedom must be restored to our hierarchy of values, written clearly on every line.

In 2010, Merkel awarded a media prize to the artist who drew the cartoons of Mohammed. The title of the speech was ‘The Secret of Freedom is Courage.’ If the secret of freedom is courage, ‘courage begins with overcoming our own despondency.’ (There is an echo here of Kant.) The benefit of listening to Frau Merkel on freedom is that she knows what it is to live without it, and what might be required to win it – or to lose it.

Again from Frau Merkel:

Sometimes my greatest fear is that we have somehow lost the inner strength to stand up for our way of life. To which we can only say: if we have lost that, then we might also lose our prosperity and success.

We are getting this in translation, but ‘inner strength’ catches the eye. A man called Sebastian Haffner lived through the twenties and thirties and the rise of Hitler. He described the failure of Germany in very simple terms as a kind of nervous breakdown that flowed from the want of a ‘solid inner kernel.’

The only thing that is missing is what in animals is called ‘breeding’. This is a solid inner kernel that cannot be shaken by external pressures and forces, something noble and steely, a reserve of pride, principle and dignity to be drawn on in the hour of trial…. At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and limply collapsed. They yielded and capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown…. The Kammergericht [superior court] toed the line. No Frederick the Great was needed, not even Hitler had to intervene. All that was required was a few Amtsgerichtsrats [judges] with a deficient knowledge of the law.

In a history of the twentieth century, I said:

What might be described as the failure of the better people of Italy has been described by a biographer of Mussolini in terms that could be transposed word for word to the Germans and Hitler.

Mussolini still needed their [the moderates’] help, for most of the liberal parliamentarians would look to them for a lead. He also took careful note that chaos had been caused in Russia when representatives of the old order were defenestrated en masse during the revolution: fascism could hardly have survived if the police, the magistrates, the army leaders and the civil service had not continued to work just as before, and the complicity of these older politicians was eagerly sought and helped to preserve the important illusion that nothing had changed.

The liberals failed to use the leverage afforded by his need for their approbation. Most of them saw some good in fascism as a way of defending social order and thought Italians too intelligent and civilised to permit the establishment of a complete dictatorship. Above all, there was the very persuasive argument that the only alternative was to return to the anarchy and parliamentary stalemate they remembered…. Mussolini had convincingly proved that he was the most effective politician of them all: he alone could have asked parliament for full powers and been given what he asked; he alone provided a defence against, and an alternative to, socialism. And of course, the old parliamentarians still hoped to capture and absorb him into their own system in the long run; their optimism was encouraged by the fact that his fascist collaborators were so second-rate.

Does that not seem to be word for word a correct rendition of how decent Germans probably reacted to Hitler?

Still today you will find Christian apologists for Franco, and not just in Spain, who say that his fascism was preferable to republican socialism. Mussolini had the other advantage that for reasons we now regard as obvious, no one outside Italy could take Mussolini seriously. As his biographer reminds us, Mussolini was, rather like Berlusconi, seen as an ‘absurd little man’, a ‘second-rate cinema actor and someone who could not continue in power for long’, a ‘César de carnaval’, a ‘braggart and an actor’, and possibly ‘slightly off his head.’ Churchill always took Hitler seriously; he could never do that with that Italian buffoon. The Fuhrer would betray his nation and kill himself and his mistress; the Italians would revolt from and then murder their Duce and his mistress, and hang them upside down in public.

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

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

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

Franco took the salute at this march past from a large tribune.

What, then, does all this tell us of the current governance of the United States?

I referred earlier to the need to respect conventions. People who conduct themselves solely by reference to the law are not to be trusted. I am not referring to the very English notion of the ‘spirit of cricket’, but to the proposition that people who have no respect for the rules of the game will ruin it unless they are curbed or removed.

An article in The New York Times referred to a biography of Trump by Tim O’Brien.

The Constitution was built on this idea that the president would have enough decency and morality that they just wouldn’t run around exploiting the gaps…. And for Trump, it’s like red meat. This idea that Trump’s mentor was Roy Cohn was profoundly wrong. Donald Trump’s mentor was Fred from day one. His father showed him how to exploit the government system, the legal system and business. His whole worldview is built around the idea that you exploit systems for personal gain, and there’s nothing wrong with doing that, because the world’s populated by sharks and you just have to be the biggest shark.

That sounds spot on for Trump. The predator spots the weak point of his prey in the law of the jungle. He is the eternal spoiled child who throws toys out of his cot, and daily seeks personal vengeance against those who stood in his way. The first aim of government is to keep the peace and end vendettas. Trump’s whole life is a contradiction of the promise of ‘Tranquillity’ and ‘general Welfare’ referred to in the Constitution.

Here are some failures of governance in the U S that could not in my view occur here in Australia, or in the UK, Canada or New Zealand – or I think the major countries in Western Europe.

First, it is common ground that Trump avoided military service and paying tax. It is absurd to suggest a person with that record could be elected to parliament here – a requirement for someone wishing to lead the government.

Secondly, Trump is not just an incontinent liar. He appears to have no notion of, let alone respect for, truth. On a daily basis, he is guilty of misconduct that would see the CEO of a public company sacked immediately. He is unfit for any form of public office – such as running a chook raffle. If by some chance, he got into parliament, he would not last a day. Misleading parliament is a sackable offence. Possibly his worst misconduct is to talk down the United States by his attacks on his predecessor that are nauseating and show gross disloyalty to the nation. This is another instance of conduct that would be unthinkable in a decent entity. Imagine – ‘Germany was going down under Frau Merkel, but I intervened to save it.’

Thirdly, nothing remotely resembling ICE would be tolerated here. Rien. The U S Brownshirts. Government licensed thugs.

Fourthly, his claimed faith in God and the Bible insults both, and does religion great harm. Religion plays almost no part in politics here or in the U K.

Fifthly, his obsession with marking his presence and name in the most grotesque bad taste – rather like Il Caudillo would of itself convince the people – remember them? – that he is at best dangerously unhinged.

Sixthly, he broke his promise and was driven by his ego, and against advice, to embark on yet another failed, endless war.

Seventhly, he has creamed millions off the people of America by putting personal profit above his duty to the people. The word ‘brazen’ dies on our lips. And the people cannot complain that he never told them that he thought he could flout the law and convention – and then settle for an ovation, while turning around with that banal grin at the grinning goons behind him. For that he relies on the Mussolini gambit – who could take such a clown seriously?

Eighthly, and this list is far from complete, the result is that the U S barely has one friend in the world. It has nervy allies, but not one friend. He has shattered the standing in the world that the U S built after World War II. He makes up to killers like Putin and Kim, while Xi beams at him gratefully, and the erstwhile friends of the Great Republic realise that the commitments of the U S are written in pencil – and they have accepted that if they do not haver a seat on the table, they are on the menu.

Ninthly, he surrounded himself with idiots who create mayhem with almost everything they touch.

Tenthly, he relishes the long history of Tammany Hall and gerrymandering in U S elections. A decision of the Supreme Court licensed corporations to spend millions upon millions to secure a seat in a manner that would be seen as obscene here or in Europe. This is to us corruption – Texas is seen as a very ‘dear’ state. The English in the eighteenth century referred to ‘patronage’, and Sir Lewis Namier remarked that ‘Bribery, to be really effective, has to be widespread and open’.

Finally, most of the so-called checks and balances have been powerless to stop the rot, and those in Congress or the Supreme Court guilty of this failure should be ashamed of themselves. Their children will have to live with the question: ‘And just what did your folk do during the Dark Age?’

Now, we have our problems here. We have let the Westminster System die by attrition. The two-party system is at its best shaky. The quality of people being put up for election goes down as does the quality of the people who run those parties. ‘Populism’ is bearing its ugly teeth here and in the U K as people turn their backs on established parties. We are threatened with a pervasive sense of helplessness.

Well, all that is down to us, the people. But it is nothing like the dreadful and frightening failure of governance in the United States.

Abraham Lincoln asked whether any nation so conceived could long endure. Who knows? But if you ask who is responsible, is it not ‘We the People?’

New Books Extracts

11/08/2026 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The War against Humanity

Some apply the term liberalism to this bundle of values. The Americans spoke of inalienable rights to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’. Others might prefer the more emphatic statement of the Germans at the start of their Constitution. ‘Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.’

When we speak of the kind of community that we want to live in here in Australia, we tend to mention notions like a belief in human worth or dignity, universal rights, the prospect of each of us being able to flourish, the government needing our consent to act against us, and a subscription to the notion of the rule of law that gives us reasonable prospects of protecting those rights.

The English philosopher John Locke went mostly unread outside universities in England, but he had great influence in the revolutions in America and France. He said that those in government hold power on trust for the people, and that the people would judge whether their trust has been respected.

You can source the emphasis on respecting the worth or dignity of each of us in either the teaching of the Jewish or Christian faiths, or in their secular statement by people in that phase of European history known as the Enlightenment.

Immanuel Kant was the most famous thinker (or philosopher) of the Enlightenment. Kant said dignity (or worth) was part of our humanity.

In the kingdom of ends, everything has a price or a dignity. … Skill and diligence in work have a market price; wit, lively imagination and humour have a fancy price; on the other hand, fidelity in promises and benevolence from basic principles (not from instinct) have an inner worth… Hence morality, and humanity, insofar as it is capable of morality, is that which alone has dignity.

You might be uneasy at the seeming loftiness of some of this, but we are not talking about the dignity of the mayoral robes of office or of the imposing personage at the head of the long table in the BHP boardroom.

No, we speak of dignity in the sense of intrinsic worth – a word Kant invoked in discussing this ‘principle of humanity’. The first meaning of dignity in the Oxford English Dictionary is ‘the quality of being worthy…worth…desert’. We speak of that worth being intrinsic because we see it as deriving from the fact that we are human – and nothing more.

Perhaps we don’t give enough attention to the fact that we are humans, not animals. To take just one example – mature reflection on the fact that we should not behave like animals would lead to an immediate improvement in behaviour in question time in federal parliament.

But in one way, ‘dignity’ may be a little like an elephant. We may have trouble defining it, but we know one when we see one. And we certainly know it when we see the flat opposite – as we do in, say, in governance in Russia or China or Iran. Very few of us could live comfortably in any such regime. It would be a nightmare for many reasons, but at base because they show no respect for you or me – respect that we are owed just because we are human.

Indeed, you can find respectable authority that, under Roman law, ‘any affront to the dignity of the individual was actionable’. Our common law never got close to that position, but the Americans are committed to the proposition that ‘all men are created equal’ – as Lincoln observed at Gettysburg.

There is another way in which we recognise dignity. If we think that a person treats us with respect, we tend to respond in kind. And the opposite applies – if they don’t act as if we are worth their time or respect, we give it straight back to them. You see it on TV with those hard-nosed hit-merchants who do not bother to hide the leer, jeer or sneer when confronting their adversary – someone from the ‘other side’ – like a Democrat brave or mad enough to go on Fox News. And so, confrontation promotes confrontation, and our public life continues its descent in a way that is beyond mere gorillas.

But there is more to our basic notions of communal life than notions of dignity or worth. Together with the sentiments that some address as liberalism, there is something else that matters to us here in Australia and those nations that we respect – except for the United States. We may have a sense of compassion for those not doing so well – like the sick, the aged, or the unemployed – but we go further and recognise that it is a function of government to look after such people. We think that they deserve more than just our sympathy, and that they need and that they should get help from us through our government.

The English had accepted that view about the responsibility of government for looking after the poor from at least the time of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603). That was a long time ago, but it never took hold in the New World over the water. That nation was founded by stern Puritans who saw both success and failure as coming from God. The Puritans were gladly ushered out of England, but they had the numbers in America. What is sometimes called the Welfare State is an essential part of our governance. It is in practice irremovable here. That has never been so in the U S.

It is worth pausing on this huge chasm between us and America. In the sixteenth century, before white people had even seen America, the English people had assumed obligations for their poor that would have been abhorrent to their Puritans back then, and which still look at best alien to Americans today. By 1563, the English had made a law for the compulsory levy for the maintenance of ‘impotent, aged and needy persons’. The Oxford History of England records that the English accepted that the poor were ‘a charge on public benevolence’ and that ‘responsibility in the matter could not be left to the conscience of the individual, but must be enforced by law upon everyone’. The distance from this very old English position to that in America now is as deep as the Atlantic.

The concern for welfare found one of its earlier and clearest statements when two future prime ministers of England presented what would be called the People’s Budget in 1908. In June of that year, Lloyd George, the son of a Welsh cobbler, introduced a bill for an old age pension to the House of Commons. In doing so, he stated the premise of what came to be called New Liberalism.

These problems of the sick, the infirm, of the men who cannot find a means of earning a livelihood … are problems with which it is the business of the State to deal. They are problems which the State has neglected for too long. (Emphasis added.)

Lloyd George was joined in what became a bitter and nation-defining campaign by Winston Churchill. Both were members of the Liberal Party, although Churchill had been a member of and would return to the Conservative Party. They were at least in part following the example of Bismarck in Germany – a Prussian Junker who has never been hailed as ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’. But those statements would be seen as heresy today by many if not most in government in the USA. The poor are part of ‘the business of the State’? Tell that to the Trump family and the MAGA crowd.

So, we are not talking about values held universally. And that history also shows how inept if not useless today are terms like ‘socialism,’ ‘left’ or ‘right’, ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’.

The Pursuit of Happiness

What is a profession?

In a tax case that I heard at the Victorian AAT a long time ago, I referred to the Oxford dictionary of a profession – ‘a vocation in which a professional knowledge of some department of learning is used in its application to the affairs of others, or in the practice of an art founded upon it.’ That seems about right, and I was happy to find that nurses come well within the term, a proposition that I embrace every time I receive their attention.

I will only refer to my profession, although I think it has a lot in common with medicine. Other areas may now be fraught, and the old standing of both law and medicine as an independent profession has altered fundamentally in my lifetime as government has taken over to a large extent the regulation of each.

It is as well to recall that we are speaking about human beings. By definition, they are fallible, and the punters will draw their shares of idiots and ratbags. The public think we charge too much, and often they are right. But within the time of about one generation, professional earnings have been dwarfed by the telephone numbers handed out to the leaders of business – as often as not to people with little skin in the game, a scanty tertiary education, and minimal risk.

Oddly enough, that imbalance may serve to reinforce the old professional values. Or it may propel us to the dustbin of greed. The great American judge and jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had stopped three bullets during the Civil war, posed this question: ‘How can the laborious study of a dry and technical system, the greedy watch for clients and practice of shopkeeper’s arts, the mannerless conflicts over often sordid interests, make out a life?’

Let us look at the main ingredients of a profession.

Calling

The word ‘vocation’ is not so often invoked now. And the quota systems for law and medicine at our universities now obscure the issue. At least in law, many appear now to take the course not to practise law, but to put it in their C V for politics or merchant banking. And when you look at the major accounting and advisory firms, it is difficult to see ‘calling’ having much play – except for the trolls responding to the siren call of the dollar.

But I know of very few lawyers who appear to have been motivated solely by the prospect of high earnings – and I know of no decent or successful lawyer in that category.

I would be surprised if the position were different in medicine. It would I think be very difficult to succeed in either if you did not feel a real pull to get down to it, and feel the richness of some expertise in a worthy endeavour that has its own cherished hierarchy and history. It’s not like going into a monastery, or even the Freemasons, but there is a lot more to it than Avon calling, or signing up with Twiggy Forrest or Rupert Murdoch.

Learning

In the two major professions, you are usually looking at a minimum of five years at university – followed by training on the job. The universities leave it to others to take off the nappies. That can be messy, and disappointing – at either end – but I enjoyed it – with six readers at the Bar and countless articled clerks. I now enjoy a luncheon coterie with judges and King’s Counsel that serve as juristic god-children – and faithful friends and supporters. I still enjoy mentoring students, just as I enjoyed introducing wide eyed graduates to the facts of life in or out of the forensic gutter.

You only get where you want to go by experience. That is the way of the common law (the case law developed by the judges by applying the doctrine of precedent). The countries that follow Roman law and the codes tend to embrace the rational rather than the empirical approach. We favoured trial by jury in the adversarial mode. The Europeans favoured the inquisitorial mode before a judge alone.

Our drift in that direction unsettles old-timers like me. Too few people see the vast difference in cast of thought between England and Europe. The Roman law derived from codes and codification is its preferred mode of growth. Roman lawyers look for formal elegance. The Code Napoléon is a good example. The common law eschews theory, grand designs, and codification. It arrived, as if by accident, over a period of time – the product of trial and error in applying the doctrine of precedent to events that unguided chance throws up.

One is the rationalist view of the world. The other is the empirical. Ultimately that philosophical divide is reflected in the logical divide between deductive and inductive reasoning. From our point of view – that of the common law – there is a lot of truth in the well-known statement of Oliver Wendell Holmes that the ‘life of the law has not been logic, but experience.’ Jonathan Bate in The Genius of Shakespeare sawa similar divide in literature. ‘The Shakespearian temperament was seen to match the English temperament: empirical, sceptical, unsystematic, ironic.’ That is spot on.

We speak of art and craft rather than science. We will leave it to AI to reduce us all to algorithms. We don’t trust high theory – or intellectuals. We have too much respect for what Kant called ‘the crooked timber of humanity.’ The result is that we only learn from practice. Judi Dench spoke of a drama teacher who told her students that she could not teach them how to act, but that she could teach them how to learn to act.

In one episode of The Human Universe, Bryan Cox showed a Japanese sword-maker at work. His family has been doing it for centuries. It takes months for one sword to emerge in this age-old process. In one episode, the maker appears to shake as he holds the blade to the fire. He is, we are told, infusing the blade with his soul. That is called alchemy.

When I heard old jurists like Justice Cardozo talk about alchemy in the law, I used to dismiss it as romance. I don’t now. I saw it one day forty years ago when Neil McPhee, QC cross-examined a witness in a way that escaped both the witness and his counsel. They were dead meat served bland. You can’t teach cross-examination – let alone finesse like that. I sat there mesmerised.

And that is why hot-shots who come in just to make money usually come a gutser – very publicly.

The Adversarial Trial

Controlling the hearing

While a great amount of court time is spent on directions for steps to be taken before the hearing, not much time is spent at the hearing in controlling and expediting the process. The trouble is that nearly every direction that a court gives before the hearing requires a party to do something, and that means that the lawyers have to work, and that means that the bill keeps going up. But we rarely see the court giving directions that are designed to reduce the bill.

Most lawyers work on a meter – on an hourly or daily rate. The more hours or days they spend on a job, the more they get paid. It is not in their financial interests to do their work so as to reduce as far as possible the time that they spend on the job. Two or more generations ago, this was done not by paying them for time spent but by paying them a lump sum. They were not paid to read the brief or to prepare for the hearing – they got a fee for the whole brief to appear. It was called a brief fee, and if, say, that was enough to cover a couple of days in court, counsel would not be minded to take much longer. You could rely on them for that.

The courts therefore have an interest in controlling the time that counsel take to conduct the trial. They have more than an interest in doing so, because their main job is to provide a fair hearing, and they do not do that if they allow the hearing to get of hand so that one or both parties cannot afford to go on. Indeed, it is sometimes hard to avoid the conclusion that some judges just sit there blandly in the God-given hope that eventually the combatants will run out of steam and surrender – at which point the judge most graciously congratulates them on their wisdom. And delay usually hurts the weak more than the strong.

It was perhaps inevitable that parliaments would relieve tribunals from being obliged to follow the rules of evidence, because undue technicality could frustrate their doing their jobs, and because not many understand the rules. But most of the law of evidence just applies logic or common sense or basic notions of fairness. Unless you apply some notion of relevance, you may never finish. If one side is going to say that a witness for the other side is mistaken or lying on a point, that should be put to that witness while they are in the box so that they can deal with it. If one party can call a witness about what happened, but does not, they are open to the comment that the inference is that the witness would not help them. These are all matters of common sense that any tribunal should apply.

And if it has any sense, it should apply the rule that says that if an answer is given to a question that is not related to a fact in issue but merely goes to credit, then that answer is final. The other party cannot call evidence to contradict it. Otherwise, you are exposed to an infinite regress. The failure to observe this rule is one reason why cross-examination takes so long. Another reason is the delusion held by so many at the bar that cross-examination is a no-fly zone for the laws of evidence. There is a general miasma about this which I think has contributed greatly to the length of hearings.

Not many people now can cross-examine. They don’t get enough practice. Rather, they get together a large pile of documents, which it has cost the parties a fortune to assemble, and let the witness know that he or she is going to be invited on a long and painful journey. Tabbed court books of documents and computer files have contributed to this deterioration. So far as I know, it is still the law that if you call on the other side to produce a document, you can be compelled to tender it. In our paper-crazed condition, that law is barely heard of now or even remembered.

So, one way to control the hearing is by applying rules of logic and sense. Another way is by fixing time limits. If we got through, say, half a dozen witnesses between 10 am and 11.45, I could apportion the time remaining until lunch between counsel for their addresses. They might want to go on after 1 pm, but gastric juices then play their part. Nor did I hesitate to tell counsel that cross-examination was too long, going nowhere, or just plain unhelpful. ‘How will this questioning assist this process?’

I do not know how judges can just sit there while cross-examination goes on for hours or days in an apparent attempt to revive trial by ordeal. If counsel have not scored a real hit in an hour, it is time to intervene. It is your job to provide a fair and sensible trial: to put people out of pain, not to extend it.

Judges are properly wary of quotes for time given by barristers – especially if their chance of getting a start improves with a low quote. For your own purposes, you might double the quote. For their purposes, you might halve it.

I chaired a public inquiry in a very sensitive and much publicised matter. I had four lay people around me who had full-time jobs and little time to spare. (One was the late Ron Casey of Channel 7 and World of Sport.) Senior counsel for both sides gave a considered estimate of four months for a hearing to start much further down the track. We told them we would start shortly, and that they could have four days – and we held them to it.

Sometimes you have to put your foot down. No organ of government has unlimited means, and every organ of government bears some responsibility for dealing with its cost. The great Lord Mansfield recognised that lawyers are the main cause of delay – together with litigants without merit.

Before leaving the discussion of the hearing, I might mention another issue that may affect the nature and the length of the hearing. You would think that the questions was he negligent or was he honest would attract the same kind of inquiry as the questions was he in a position of confidence or did he act unconscionably? But because of our history of common law and equity, that may not be so.

Sarah Jenyns, who was born in 1865, ‘conducted a matriarchal business in corsets and surgical appliances.’ The business was hugely successful and involved her seven children. In 1946, she transferred the business to a company, but she did not ensure that each child took shares, ‘and thereby [she] planted the seeds to this litigation’.

A subsequent transfer to one son was attacked. He was said to have been in a position of confidence when she was vulnerable. The trial in Queensland had to be before a jury and it ran for 28 days. The evidence revealed that Mrs Jenyns had her foibles – she could have walked straight out of a novel by Patrick White. She claimed to be in touch with the Almighty; she fell into periods of silence when she would only communicate in paper; and she had developed a taste for rum, whisky, and opiates. She was a living land-mine for litigation. As the joint judgment of the High Court (Dixon, CJ, and McTiernan, and Kitto, JJ) said:

There were conflicts of expert and other evidence characteristic of such issues, but doubtless the root cause of this controversy lay in the unusual nature of Mrs. Jenyns’ personality and the complex and inconsistent psychological elements forming it. In a woman of proved business capacity, and considerable practical experience, possessing a peculiar understanding of her specialized trade and its profitable exercise, never separating her business and family life and always striving to dominate in both, and yet long accustomed to profess that her actions were guided by direct communications from a divine source, lacking all sense of the incongruous in the purposes for which she vouched heaven as her authority, temperamental in many of her attitudes and judgments, uninhibited either by a sense of humour or a fear of ridicule, it must have been difficult as she advanced in age to distinguish in her what was merely temperamental or perhaps histrionic from what was irrational, and difficult to judge whether her less rational expressions and ideas had any bearing on her business instinct and understanding and how far family predilections competed in her judgment with practical considerations affecting her own business advantage. One curious feature of the case is that at the trial Mrs. Jenyns was still living and might have been called as a witness.

The Queensland Supreme Court set aside the transfer of shares that was attacked. The High Court allowed the appeal on the merits. The High Court commented on the obvious difficulty in running a case like this before a jury, and in in the kind of language that we associate with that Court, it said:

The jurisdiction of a court of equity to set aside a gift or other disposition of property as, actually or presumptively, resulting from undue influence, abuse of confidence or other circumstances affecting the conscience of the donee is governed by principles the application of which calls for a precise examination of the particular facts, a scrutiny of the exact relations established between the parties and a consideration of the mental capacities, processes and idiosyncrasies of the donor. Such cases do not depend upon legal categories susceptible of clear definition and giving rise to definite issues of fact readily formulated which, when found, automatically determine the validity of the disposition.

Their honours referred to the remarks of an English equity judge made not long after the Battle of Waterloo: ‘A court of law works its way to short issues, and confines its views to them. A court of equity takes a more comprehensive view, and looks to every connected circumstance that ought to influence its determination upon the real justice of the case.’

For better or for worse, that difference in the trial process may still be with us every day – even in humble statutory tribunals.

The other worrying thing about this case is that apart from allowing the appeal on the merits, the High Court held that the whole action was outside the powers of the statutory officer who sued, and that the action should have been dismissed on this ground alone. It looks like the point was not noticed until the parties got to the High Court. The conversations between the parties and their lawyers might then have become a little strained.

Moral Cowardice

29/07/2026 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The French people were convulsed by violence on 14 July 1789 and during the years following. Perhaps the worst came in 1792 in what are called the September massacres. Panic seized the people and they held mock trials to massacre hordes of people in the jails. There was a display of mad violence and slaughter that would have amazed and terrified a Zulu or Hottentot.

In a book called Events in France 1789 to 1794, I said:

The fear of enemies, within and without, preyed on Hébert and Marat and others. The sense that the patrie really was en dangère – which puts at risk the heads of those found on the wrong side – led to the ghastly eruptions known as the September Massacres. ‘Let the blood of the traitors flow. That is the only way to save the country’, croaked Marat. People in prisons were seen to be enemies of the people, no matter what their crime had been. The fear was that they would be liberated by any army that reached Paris. At various prisons men broke in to slaughter the inmates. From about a thousand to fifteen hundred people, mainly ordinary criminals, were killed.

It was common to set up a cruel mockery of a hearing where the suspect could be examined while listening to his or her predecessor being slaughtered behind the door. One survivor of the Abbaye recalled that they used to watch the butchery so as to try to learn how to die with the least pain when their turn came. ‘Man after man is cut down; the sabres need sharpening; the killers refresh themselves from wine-jugs. Onward and onward is the butchery; the loud yells wearying into base growls. A sombre-faced, shifting multitude looks on; in dull approval; in dull approval or dull disapproval; in dull recognition that it is a Necessity.’

Danton, the Minister for Justice, does nothing to stop what might be called the first terror. What can we now say or do except to reflect: ‘Of such stuff are we all made; on such powder-mines of bottomless guilt and criminality – if God restrain not as is well said – does the purest of us walk’?

The September massacres of 1792 are not just a case of inmates of gaols being no worse than their gaolers, or what might happen when power is given to those who are least to be trusted with power. Nor is it just a case of venomous force of envy and the cruelty of the revenge of the dispossessed. Nor is it just a case of the danger of rule by the people – it is a case of the danger of rule by people. The mainstay of the rule of law is that we are ruled by laws, not men and women. The September Massacres are the jurists’ final nightmare – lynch mobs licensed by a failed state.

I shall come back to the horror of the French nightmare, but here is a comment on the massacres by the great Dutch historian Professor Pieter Geyl, in a paper written in 1954 about the famous French historian, Jules Michelet. (It is in Debates with Historians that I have referred to before – a book of great beauty and learning.)

The worst, however, was that the event had demonstrated the impotence of the Convention. To me the way in which that assembly allowed itself to be tyrannized over by the Paris Commune (in which the lowest elements now had the upper hand, as Michelet admits) seems an undeniable proof of moral cowardice, dishonouring the revolution.

In my book referred to above, I said:

The events that occurred in France between 1789 and 1794 are commonly put under a heading or label of ‘the French Revolution’. There was of course no such thing. A lot happened in France during those years – and there is no agreement on the relevant span of years. Some people stop applying the label in 1794; some when Napoleon became Emperor in 1804; some when Europe was finally rid of him in 1815. There is no doubt that one form of government in France had been removed by violence – by definition, a revolution had occurred. But if the process of revolution continues until a new form of government is installed that is as stable as the last, then you will get a whole range of answers.

That conclusion seems to me to be inevitable. And you can say the same about the references to ‘the people’. Whole libraries have been filled with arguments about what kind of person, or class of people, did what to whom in what is called the French Revolution. It follows that a reference to what ‘the people’ did in ‘the Revolution’ will be at best sloppy. To English philosophers in 1954, any such statement would be nonsensical.

But Michelet gloried in both. While things were going well. But when it comes to the September massacres, it is not ‘the people,’ but ‘three or four hundred drunks.’ Or those ratbags in England and Pitt’s gold. ‘The French people and the Revolution were guiltless.’

That is a fair summation by Geyl, but you will see from his reference to ‘dishonouring the revolution’ that he is caught in the same snare. How do you dishonour a process? And while some celebrated the revolt, others, such as Marie Antoinette, did not. Whose side would you be on? And if history is written by the winners, who won? Looked at, say, from the scene of the bloodbath at Waterloo in 1815 – or the succession of bloodbaths that disfigured France throughout the nineteenth century, and which led to disasters like Sedan and Dreyfus – and Pétain?

Michelet gloried in ‘the people’, but for Geyl, Michelet shows in his ‘sentimentality about the bloody maniacs of 1793/4, moved by the new revelation of eternal truths, but also by hatred and fear, something positively repulsive’. Geyl then goes on to refer to ‘national self-conceit’ and the Jacobins ‘and the crushing self-confidence with which, no doubt against the large majority of the French people, they upheld the General Will.’

Then: ‘Can the use of that term the people in the interests of a minority dictatorship more patently betray itself for the juggling trick it is?’ He later refers to ‘necessity the tyrant’s plea’ and the statement of Michelet that France undertook for the rest of the world the war ‘which between 1792 and 1815 cost her ten millions of her children’. Geyl coolly remarks that in saying that, Michelet ‘credits the account of France with the wars of Napoleon, in whom he saw a despot, but who is nevertheless supposed to have fought for the liberties of mankind. Indeed, he cannot at any time mention Waterloo without the bitterest resentment.’

Here was the historian who, Geyl says, referred to the Church as ‘the wily seducer of the stupid crowd’.

I feel impelled to ask whether in order to enjoy ‘moral freedom’, one should not be on one’s guard against making a fetish of unity; ought not conceited chauvinism to be regarded as a snare; and taking a more general view, should not one disdain to spare one’s illusions the touch of rational criticism?

This is wonderful analysis and writing. And it matters on at least three grounds.

First, we may look like Hottentots dancing around the rim of a live volcano that may at any time claim us. Carlyle – I will not say how often I have read his account – saw all this.

One other thing, or rather two other things, we will still mention, and no more: the blond perukes; the Tannery at Meudon. Great talkers of these Perruques Blondes: O reader, they are made from the Heads of Guillotined Women; the locks of a Duchess, in this way, may come to cover the scalp of a cordwainer, her blonde German Frankism his black Gaelic poll, if it be bald. Or they may be work affectionately, as relics, rendering one suspect? Citizens use them, not without mockery; of a rather cannibal sort. …. Still deeper into one’s heart goes that Tannery at Meudon; … ‘There was a tannery of Human Skins; such of the Guillotine as seem worthy flaying: of which perfectly good wash-leather was made; for bleaches and other uses. The skin of the men, he remarks, was superior in toughness (consistance) and quality of shamoy; that of the women was good for almost nothing, being so soft in texture …’ Alas, then, is man’s civilisation only a wrappage, through which the savage nature in him can still burst, infernal as ever? Nature still makes him: and has an Infernal in her as well as a Celestial.

All that was beyond Michelet – and is now ignored by most of France. Only the numbers would have surprised Carlyle, or Geyl, a sometime prisoner of the Nazis, about Auschwitz.

Secondly, the west is experiencing a pestilence of politicians claiming to speak for ‘the people’ The politest term for them is charlatan or mountebank, and one thing we do learn from history is that in the violence of a revolution, scum rises to the surface.

Thirdly, the moral outrage expressed by Geyl, especially at ‘moral cowardice’, is a reminder that we should call things for what they are – not least at the moral cowardice shown by those one-time pillars of the Washington community in failing to do their duty in curtailing a common criminal and sometime dictator who preposterously claims to stand for ‘the people’.

Why do they fail? They are scared, and they are ‘tyrannised over’ by a false leader and his henchman. Even Michelet asked if the Convention was ‘an assembly of cowards’.

If Michelet could ask that of the French, the good people of the United States can ask it of themselves.

The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

Trump and the Bible – and the Law

03/07/2026 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away. Matthew 25:29

That looks to me to be just right for Trump and family.

If someone put a gun to your head and extracted money from you by force, you would not be impressed if the criminal said this was not robbery because he was being frank and open about it. Yet that seems to be the response of Trump to complaints about his deriving undreamed-of millions as a consequence of his being elected President – when he correctly believed that the alternative would have been imprisonment.

That of course is in the US. Let me put three propositions about what I understand about our law here.

People in public office hold positions of trust. (The legal epithet is ‘fiduciary’.)
As such, they are liable to account, in a forensic sense, for any profit they derive as a result of holding that office of trust.
This liability does not depend on fraud or bad faith (want of bona fides) – it arises from the mere fact that a profit was made.

The leading case was English. A trading company incorporated a subsidiary in order to expand the business. For this purpose, the directors had to put in extra capital. When the shares in the subsidiary were sold, the directors stood to gain – they made a profit. When they were replaced, the company said that they had to account to it for that profit. Although there had been no dishonesty at all, the action succeeded. The courts held that it did not matter whether the company had been damaged or had benefited from the transaction. However honest or well meaning, the profiteer could not escape the risk of being called to account. As a leading text comments (Law for Directors, Gibson, Federation Press, 2003, 48), ‘Directors who stand to gain directly and personally from contracts with companies of which they are directors can expect to meet this stern response.’

Now, something like this would be unlikely to happen in Australia for many reasons. I suspect that in the U S, there would be an issue of ‘standing’ – about which they get very worked up over there. But if it arose here, I know what side I would want to be on – the side of the angels – before a judge with teeth gleaming in eager anticipation.

And I wonder how a neutral court might respond if, after a change of government, the United States sued Trump to account for the billion or so dollars he derived from his holding of public office. At least his accountants have relieved such a court of an inquiry into quantum. There would be plenty to go around, in this wonderful new Golden Age, so splendidly revealed in an acrid swamp in the beating heart of the Capitol.

And it would not take much ingenuity to deploy the law about aiding breach of trust to join the sons. I knew people who tapped a bank for millions for allowing a crooked partner to rip out cash from a law firm’s trust account. And then the attorneys at the other end would know that they might forfeit their professional indemnity insurance if they let one client get within fifty miles of the witness box.

Happy Fourth!

An English tragedy

23/06/2026 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

In the short time they have been on this land, the white people, migrants all, have shown a taste for political tragedy. Good solid prospects just go bad and fizzle out down here. We have no national political hero, and the last generation has seen an uncomely parade of seriously flawed prime ministers. (Two of them lost their own seats.) The view to the rear is bleak, and there are few grounds for hope in the future. A maudlin mediocrity, as ever, hangs over us.

The rise and fall of Sir Keir Starmer in England therefore looks eerily familiar to us. He did his nation a profound service by making his party one that functioned well enough to get elected – when it had been unelectable, and as a result, England had been badly governed for too long. (And that is just what the State of Victoria is suffering from now.) But he has failed as Prime Minister and lost the confidence of his party. He therefore had to go.

It is not easy to spell out the reasons for his failure. We all make mistakes, but if you are looking for a Shakespearian flaw of character that leads to tragedy, you might settle for Cordelia in King Lear. Her failing was her refusal to play the family game and, as we say, feed the chooks.

Starmer was not flexible or negotiable enough. (It would be going too far, and it would inflame the victims of caste, to suggest that he was too decent.) He just looked out of place, and he was unable to connect with those who handed him the chalice. So, he had to quit driving the bus, even if his exit was less painful and consequential than that of Cordelia. (‘Out went the candle, and we were left darkling.’)

England, too, has had a sad parade of failed prime ministers. One difference to us is that it has occurred there over a period of time characterized by one continuing source of friction and pain – the decision to leave Europe.

But one thing we have in common with England is the breakdown of the Westminster System. They have not degraded their civil service to the extent that we have, but they have had at least as much trouble in the foundation of the parliamentary democracy, which they invented – the two-party system.

In both England and Australia, people want to retain government intervention in their lives, but they do not want to have to pay for it. There is not much squabble room there – hence our inherited flat rejection of ideology (unless you are paid to boost a loony tune on the fringe).

Traditionally, one party has faith in government and wants to encourage government intervention in their lives. The other party has less faith in government and seeks to have people look after their own affairs.

In both countries, the first group is often associated with people who might be called ‘workers,’ and those bodies that represent them, while the other tends to stand for the drivers of business, and those who are willing and able to acquire sufficient wealth to look after themselves – and God help any ideologue who threatens to interfere with carve-outs that they extracted from government in a different age.

Just as people find it hard to get government to drop or reduce a tax, so government finds it hard to take back a benefit or exemption it has granted to those on whose goodwill they depend. The result is irrational, but inevitable – in a democracy. And we continue to spend more than we have earned the right to spend. Tomorrow is another day. That is another risk in a democracy – an inability to plan for the future.

As it happens, the pathways to political power are better defined in the party associated with labour, as are its tribal or historical roots. But care must be taken in dealing with the industrial base, and if one of the Comrades has seen the inside of an elite school, it is not considered proper to mention that in polite company.

The result is a problem for those in politics who stand for the status quo, a problem that some in the press might call ‘existential’. What does the party stand for? What is its reason for being – its raison d’être? Put to one side, if you can, what are called ‘identity politics.’ If you want to be part of a political party, you have to stand for something.

One party in that position in Australia, the Liberal Party as it is here called, is struggling to find the answer. It is dissolving before our eyes at both state and federal levels. In my state, Victoria, the Labor government is as inept, unpopular and sackable as that of Liz Truss in England. The result in each case came from a failure of the two-party system. Members of the Liberal Party, that unhappy few, feel wedged between some very bright women on one flank, and a most dreadful specimen on the other. (From this distance, the Tories look to face a similar quandary, and the successor to Sir Keir looks like the fixer from the party machine, so that the English can expect a return to business as usual in the back room.)

As it seems to me, the very unhappy position that people find themselves in both here and in England shows that our political engine has completely broken down. We the people blame the politicians. But when you look at the dreadful ratbags standing up on the fringes to profit from the winter of our discontent, and at the collapse of all decency, if not sanity, on all sides in the United States, then it is not enough just to blame those who happen to be in charge of the ship as it goes down.

There is after all some truth in the truism that we get the government that we deserve. Indeed, an ideologue would say that the basal premise of democracy – government of the people, by the people, for the people – requires no less.

So, I was moved as I watched the very dignified speech of Sir Keir Starmer live on English Sky. When they wheel out the lectern at Number 10 Downing street now, it might remind some of the unveiling of the guillotine on the Place de la Concorde. Neither of the Sky ladies in any way resembles Madame Defarge, but when they sadly reflected on the brutality of politics, they called to my mind the dreadful blood ‘sport’ that the President of the United States put on at the White House in the now defiled city of Washington. How could anything decent come out of that ghastly mélange?

Still, it is no comfort that others are doing it worse or harder than us, and I have no idea what the answer may be. I do not envy those who seek to find the answer for my grandchildren. Do you know anyone who would want to use that route to gain entry to the Chairman’s Lounge?

English Cricket

10/06/2026 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

When David Warner was involved in a public scandal, involving tampering with ball, there was an outcry around the world. Warner was disqualified for life from becoming captain of Australia. I thought then, and I continue to think, that this was a vicious over-reaction by those in authority protecting their own backs for their responsibility for a failed team culture.

It also looked illogical. How can you be trusted to represent your country, but not captain others doing the same? But it did not help that Warner had a reputation for being rude and aggressive – at a time when Australian cricketers tended to behave that way. (We have since changed for the better under Pat Cummins and mature coaches.)

To put it softly, Ben Stokes has form for his latest misconduct. It is a dreadful breach of trust for him to breach his team’s rules about public behavior and stay out beyond a curfew.

The game finished, I gather, at lunchtime. The incident occurred after midnight. Those involved were not sipping tea all those hours. According to the press, Stokes was on rum and coke when an incident occurred – a rugby player at a night spot went to hit an English bowler and took out his bodyguard instead. (The victim required stitches. The press say the Police were not called.)

The fact that a body guard was present indicates that there was an element of what lawyers call ‘voluntary assumption of risk’. Stokes is reported to have said that the English players were thrilled at their win – against a nation with a population of little more than half that of London.

Why on earth do those in charge – in their leather lounges at the M C C – just not ban all drinking in public during or straight after a game? These people just cannot be trusted. And do the scions at Lord’s not recall the outrageous jostling of Usman Khawaja, the living standard of civility?

Well, Stokes will have to stand down as captain – and be replaced by someone with form for similar misconduct. But the question will then remain – how can he be trusted to represent his country, but not to lead it?

Some will say this would be hard on Stokes – who had been a real national hero. Well, our High Court has ruled that when it comes to enforcing professional standards, the quality of mercy becomes strained of necessity. People in positions of trust have to live up to expectations – or just drop out.

And the last people who can bleat about fairness to public drunks are those members of the London Establishment who jeered at David Warner and roughed up Usman Khawaja.

They deserve to cop it – right down their bloody Jermyn Street fronts.

Populists

17/05/2026 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Two major sources of bad thinking and communal strife are our tendency to resort to labels and the herd instinct. I set below what I wrote about these vices in a book written with Chris Wallace-Crabbe (What’s Wrong?) The extracts are long, but the issue is serious. This was the most important part of the book.

The vice of labelling

Some years ago, a woman at Oxford, en route from the reading room to the dining room for breakfast, was heard to say: ‘I have just been described as a typical Guardian reader, and I’m trying to work out whether I should feel insulted.’ A discussion about the meaning of the word ‘presumptuous’ then followed.

There is no law or custom that says we should apply a label to people – or put them in boxes, or in a file, or give them a codename. There is also no law that we should not. But most of us can’t help ourselves. So what?

Well, most of us don’t like being put into boxes. That is how we tend to see governments or Telstra or a big bank behaving toward us. Nor do most of us want to be typed. When someone says that an opinion or act of yours is ‘typical’ of you or your like, they are very rarely trying to be pleasant.

Most of us just want to be what we are. You don’t have to have a university degree specialising in the philosophy of Kant to believe that each of us has his or her own dignity, merely because we are human. We are not in the same league as camels or gnats. If I am singled out as a Muslim, a Jew or an Aboriginal, what does that label add to or take away from my humanity? What good can come from subtracting from my humanity by labelling me in that way?

So, the first problem with labelling is that it is likely to be demeaning to the target, and presumptuous on the part of the labeller. In labelling, we are detracting from a person’s dignity. We put registration numbers on dog collars, and we brand cattle, but we should afford humans the courtesy – no, the dignity – of their own humanity.

The second problem with labelling is that it is both loose and lazy. If you say of someone that they are a typical Conservative or Tory, that immediately raises two questions. What do the labels ‘Conservative’ and ‘Tory’ mean? What are the characteristics of the target that might warrant the application of the label?

In this country, at the moment, the terms ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ hardly mean anything at all – except as terms of abuse – which is how ‘Tory’ and ‘Whig’ started in England. These terms are now generally only applied by one side to the other. Not many people are happy to apply either of those labels to themselves. The categories are just too plastic and fluid.

Similarly, in Australia the labels ‘Liberal’ and ‘Labor’ hardly stand for any difference in principle any more. At the time of writing, on any of the major issues in Australian politics, what were the differences in the policies of those parties that derived from their platform? The old forms of name calling between Liberal and Labor mean nothing to our children – absolutely nothing. These old ways are as outmoded as name calling between Catholics and Protestants. And there is some common ground in the two shifts: very many people have lost faith in both religion and politics. The old tensions or rivalries just seem no longer to matter.

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

If you put up an argument to one of these people who live off the earnings of conflict, the response will very commonly involve two limbs – a personal attack on you (the Latin tag for which is ad hominem), followed by some labels, which are never meant as compliments. For example, if someone dared to query the rigour of the government’s policies toward refugees, a predictable response would be ‘What else would you expect from someone who subscribes to the ABC? How would you like these people to move in next door?’ There is no argument – just vulgar abuse. The disintegration of thought is palpable, but a lot of people are making a handy living out of it – and not in ways that do the rest of us any good.

There is commonly a third problem with labelling: it generally tells you a lot more about the labeller – some would say the sniper – than the target, and the answer is rarely pretty. And if you pile cliché upon label, and venom upon petulance, the result is as sad as it is predictable. You disappear up your own bum.

Let us take one label that became prominent in 2016 right across the Western world. There has been a lot of chatter, or white noise, about ‘populists’. Who are they?

One of the problems with this word is that people who use it rarely say what they mean by it. If you search the internet, you will find references to ordinary or regular or common people against political insiders or a wealthy elite. These vague terms don’t help – to the contrary. What do they mean? Is dividing people into classes a good idea in Australia now – or anywhere, at any time? If it is simply a matter of the common people wresting control from a wealthy elite, who could decently object? Is this not just democracy triumphing over oligarchy?

Populus is the Latin word for ‘people’, with pretty much the same connotations as that word in English. Do populists, therefore, appeal to the people for their vote? Well, anyone standing for office in a democracy does just that. The most famous political speech in history concludes with the words ‘of the people, for the people, by the people’.

But ‘populist’ is not used to describe everyone standing for office. It is used to refer to only some of those, and the difference seems to be in the kinds of people who are appealed to and the way in which that appeal is made.

So, what kind of public do populists appeal to? Those who use this word say that the people appealed to are anything but the ‘elite’ – those who have got on well in life because of their background or education, or both. In both the United Kingdom and the United States this feeling about the elite – which might look like simple envy to some – is linked to a suspicion of or contempt for ‘experts’. People do, however, tend to get choosy about which experts they reject. (This rejection does not extend to experts who may save their life in the surgery, or at 30,000 feet, or their liberty; but it may explain the curious intellectual lesion that many people of a reactionary turn of mind have about science and the environment.)

Another attribute of the public appealed to by populists is that they have often missed out on the increase in wealth brought about by free trade around the world and by advances in technology. These movements obviously have cost people jobs and are thought by some experts to be likely to cost another 40 per cent over the next ten years.

A third attribute of those appealed to by populists is said to be that, in their reduced condition, they value their citizenship above all else, and they are not willing to share it. They are therefore against taking refugees or people whose faith or colour threatens the idea of their national identity.

Now, if folk who use the word populist are describing politicians who appeal to people with those attributes, they may want to be careful about where they say so. The picture that emerges is one of a backward, angry and mean chauvinist failure. That picture is seriously derogatory. If that is what people mean when they refer to populists, then it is just a loose label that unfairly smears a large part of the population. The term does then itself suffer from the vice of labelling that we have identified.

So, we would leave labels with George Bush Senior, who said that labels are what you put on soup cans.

Tribalism

We started this chapter on the subject of prejudice as the main corrupter of thought, and near the end of it we come to a common source of prejudice. You might call it tribalism or clannishness, or just the herd instinct. It is a human tendency to surrender judgment, and therefore dignity, to the crowd, or the mob. In its most terrifying form, the mob is the lynch mob, to which the French were subjected on a national scale during the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, a period of state-sanctioned violence and mass executions. The surrender was more complete, and the consequences were more financially severe, during the 1929 stock market crash, but we see it all round us every day, and as often as not we don’t notice when we have switched into the mode of group control.

A harmless form is the one‑eyed Collingwood supporter. Indeed, one reason why people enjoy that part of the entertainment industry called sport is that this is just the area, either in the stands or on the terraces or around the office coffee machine, where independent judgment can be suspended and blind prejudice masquerading as loyalty can be safely put on show. (You might, from time to time, graciously applaud someone from the other side, but you may want to watch who you do that in front of.) You can even blow the ref a raspberry without going to the slammer.

One worrying form of clannishness is the tendency of some groups to form their own language and retreat behind it when they come under attack, when they feel insecure or when they just feel like being pompous. Doctors and lawyers used to be notorious for this, but both have improved. It is no longer smart or clever to be obscure; the contrary is the case.

A clannish corruption of thought is dangerous because it obscures meaning – it makes the author harder to pin down – and it masks a crude self‑interest in protecting the relevant group as the proper or even the sole repository of truth. This is very worrying when the author is unable to spell out a verifiable meaning for the benefit of the uninitiated. Secular thinkers for many centuries have accused priests of doing just this – of denying ordinary people access to the truth – or, if you prefer, the light – by refusing to give them the keys to the codes. You might recall that, before the Reformation, you could be burnt at the stake in England if you dared to translate the Bible into the native language of the believers. That must be the ultimate example of people being asked to take articles of faith on trust.

We see examples of this form of clannish or tribal protectionism, and the consequent mutilation of logic and language, in the newer social sciences (which some think is a phrase that contradicts itself), in marketing, among ideologues (especially think tanks and their acolytes, political advisers) and also in some parts of academia.

We tend to see the problem at its worst with the political ideologues – the advisers tend to be hard‑headed people who hardly believe anything, whereas the ideologues bring commitment and passion, and so are likely to invoke that most dangerous ingredient in rational discussion: sincerity.

The problem now is that you are dealing with people with a position and with a patch to defend (people Helen Garner referred to as those ‘who have an agenda’). You are dealing with someone who subscribes to articles of faith, and they may not realise or accept that articles of faith lie outside the borders of rational debate. You might therefore be talking to a zealot. Zealots are people whose zeal has infected their judgment. They become like one‑eyed Collingwood supporters – but much, much worse, because they believe that the stakes are so big. In the language of the stock market, they have their own skin in the game. Unable to see the world from the other person’s point of view, they are very likely to think they have uncovered the logical answer – that is, the answer, and there can only be one of those. They become progressively less able to see that reasonable people might differ on almost any question relating to human behaviour or belief. That is to say, they get less and less tolerant, and intolerance is the cancer of sensible discussion.

Agenda bearers tend to look on disputes not as debates about ideas, but as conflicts between the kinds of people who hold various ideas. They become emotionally attached to their own side and emotionally opposed to the others. We saw that the writer in The Australian who is obsessed with ‘political correctness’ said it was unfair that ‘we’ did not have the same remedies as her adversaries.With agenda bearers, judgment goes clean out the window. They are ready to argue about things they know little or nothing about, and that must end up in bullshit. They then get ready to attack almost anything said by the other side, and to defend almost anything that has come out of their side. They become driven by, and to, conflict. They therefore pick fights that they do not have to pick, and so they ignore the first rule of advocacy: If you have a good point, make it, and don’t bugger it up with a dud; if you don’t have a good point, shut up.

Agenda bearers are heavily into mockery, and into nodding and winking among themselves. They are not beyond leering or even jeering, and they may have an obsession about sneering: one of those cases where they project their own feelings and reactions onto their opponents. They often accuse others of being dogmatic or feeling morally or intellectually superior because they have right on their side.

They disdain experts, but they are long on conspiracies, especially when it comes to the newspapers or television consulted by the other side. Indeed, they stereotype people by reference to their chosen media – readers of Fairfax or viewers of the ABC must be like readers of The New York Times or The Guardian and must oppose the Murdoch press or Fox News. (Would you be insulted if described as a typical Age reader or an adherent to Fox News? Or would you just think that the author of the remark was both thick and presumptuous?)

If you are not into these nuances, a word that people known as culture warriors may be fond of, you are not part of the game. Indeed, there are times when they seem unable to choose their cheerleader – the Famous Five or Kim, Enid Blyton or Rudyard Kipling.

Ideologues are defensive about their own culture or faith – words broad enough to mean or contain just what they want them to mean or contain – and very suspicious of those who want to share the good life or who threaten to change its underlying fabric. For this purpose, they may allow a shock jock or some other gutter rat to put up kites for them, but the sensible ones always preserve deniability and a distance from the overtly vulgar.

Their arguments are mainly aimed at the man, in part because of the innate or acquired hostility of those advancing the arguments, in part because they tend not to play by the rules, and in part again because they have lost control of their moral or intellectual compass. They always accuse the other side of hypocrisy, of which they are World’s Best Practice exponents, and of utter indifference to the consequences of their ideology – which they are past noticing in themselves. Even when they set out their own contradictions in black and white, they cannot see them for what they are. They are not just biased or unbalanced; they are wilfully beyond persuasion. In ordinary terms, they are crippled by the chips on their shoulders.

You will recognise here many of the attributes of a bush lawyer and of far too many of our politicians. It will only get worse – as people subscribe to internet sites for the true believers, commune in language‑killing terms on what are preposterously described as social media settings, and banish the anxiety that comes with uncertainty by cocooning themselves in their own echo chambers.

***

I have set out those observations at that length because they bear on so much of what passes nowadays for political discussion – especially as it is applied to people grouped together under a label – such as Catholics, gypsies, Collingwood supporters, boat people, the Irish, academics, or just plain old fashioned bludgers. And by segmenting the people around us, we are of necessity speaking of minorities.

The cancer comes in two phases. First, something in the history of those in a group leads to people being referred to, or identified as, members of that group. Secondly, it is thought appropriate to attribute to every member of that group some attribute or characteristic.

That is a form of branding, and it detracts from the worth or dignity of every human being to whom it is applied. I do not subscribe to any doctrine of Original Sin, but if I did, this would be my prime candidate. And it may start when people are content or proud to place themselves in a box and claim to share one common attribute as a result.

What do I care about my skin colour, faith, or ancestry? What difference does any of them make? In the name of Heaven, in the bad old days we believed – we were taught – that Catholics were somehow different to Protestants.

In my view, Sir Henry Maine was spot on when he said in Ancient Law that the whole course of legal history saw the movement from status to contract. What matters in life is not what I do with what I landed here with from my ancestors, but what I do with other people while I am here. The contrary view dooms us to lie low under the weight of the past.

Let me just look again at two labels. ‘Elite.’ According to my Compact OED, this is ‘a group of people regarded as the best in a particular society or organisation.’ Is there a problem? Do we repudiate our best people? Can you think of anyone going to a medical clinic or law firm saying – ‘Don’t give me your best – just the mediocre’? Or saying to our Test selectors – ‘Don’t send the best to England – just the run of the mill journeymen’?

‘Populists’. There is an obvious difficulty in applying this term to those seeking office in a democracy, when that is achieved by appealing to people to support you. (Shakespeare wrote a play about it – Coriolanus.)

Three examples are Trump, Farage, and Hanson. Each has indeed one thing in common for me. None would be welcome in my home. The vices and charms of the first two are well known.

The Australian presents as a scheming, heartless and venomous bigot who is unfit to hold any form of public office in Australia. She has none of the élan of Trump or Farage, or those vicious mountebanks who broke Europe and the world in the last century. If that statement sounds large, what do you think might be the response of our Muslim brothers and sisters? Or have they not been here long enough to touch our conscience?

The Royal Commission into the Bondi massacre will have to navigate waters like these, and I don’t envy them. There are obvious difficulties in conducting any form of forensic process to what the Letters Patent refer to as ‘religious and ideologically motivated extremism and radicalisation’.

The Commission will hear of the most dreadful behavior to members of our Jewish community. There is one thing they will not hear of. That is of a sitting member of the Australian Parliament saying ‘There is no such thing as a good Jew.’

That statement by Hanson looks to me like a textbook case of ‘religious and ideologically motivated extremism and radicalisation’. The difference is that she is not facing jail for hate speech. On the contrary. She shouts it out loud and infects Parliament by insulting faith – and takes off in the polls as a reward, and is saluted by uncomely goons in dark places who don’t know any better.

And the lucky country stands indicted. And on a bad day we might feel with Milton that earth felt the wound.

Well, the categories of evil are never closed, even if, as someone said, there is nothing new under the sun. Perhaps the old French proverb stands vindicated – the more things change, the more they stay the same.

We are not as free of the primal slime as we would wish to be. We do after all live in a country where you can step into your garden paradise and die from the venom of a brown snake taking its repose in your bed of roses.

Populists

The vice of labelling

Let us take one label that became prominent in 2016 right across the Western world. There has been a lot of chatter, or white noise, about ‘populists’. Who are they?

So, we would leave labels with George Bush Senior, who said that labels are what you put on soup cans.

Tribalism

***

Three examples are Trump, Farage, and Hanson. Each has indeed one thing in common for me. None would be welcome in my home. The vices and charms of the first two are well known.

And the lucky country stands indicted. And on a bad day we might feel with Milton that earth felt the wound.

Berlin at War

29/04/2026 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The post below sets out my attitude to the Germans. As it happens, I gather that Ian Buruma, in his latest book, Stay Alive, Berlin 1935-1945, has come to a similar conclusion. It concludes: ‘The city itself is a monument, not only to man’s blackest depravity, but to its capacity to be reborn and to live again.’ On the previous page, he had referred to ‘the way the scars of its worst crimes are openly on display.’

While I had heard favourably of him, I had not read any of the work of this writer before. He has been prolific and successful. He can afford good research assistants, and he is a master of composition – something so often lacking north of Mexico. He is also engagingly humane. He understands that people make history and that it is a collection of biographies. This book is a string of anecdotes. What kind of evidence is not anecdotal? They are strung together artfully and seamlessly throughout. Mr Buruma is, I think, a natural.

The story of Berlin at the end of the war – not long before I was born – is as close to a picture of Hell on earth as I can imagine. It is certainly beyond my comprehension.

I was completely engaged from the first page to the last, and I commend the book to your attention. It is not often now that I am so sorry to put a book down.

And this is on a subject – the capacity for evil in all of us – that we have an abiding moral obligation to confront head on.

The Germans and I

What is it about the Germans that attracts me?

When I left school in 1963, they gave me a copy of Alan Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. When we got to 1934, I was shocked to read that in some churches they replaced the crucifix with a sword and the bible with Mein Kampf. In a perverse way, that had as much impact on me as the mass murders. How could a people that gave the world Bach, Mozart, Kant, Beethoven and Goethe have murdered millions of people and taken us all back to the primal slime?

That question has stayed with me since, and it is behind almost everything I have read or written of history.

In 1967, I hitch-hiked the length and breadth of the nation. I found people trying to answer the same question. I went to Dachau, which was not a death camp, and I wept in the snow for what its inmates had suffered.

But I went to Berlin and saw the Wall keeping out a new form of soulless barbarism. (I did not know then that Stalin’s murders probably exceeded those of Hitler.)

When I returned to Berlin in the 80’s, I was transfixed by the progress of reconstruction and the richness of its cultural life. I was falling in love with the city. I made a point of going to Dresden twice to see the site of the maximum suffering of the Germans. I do not regret one bomb. When a resident said that that raid was late, I had to bite my tongue – it was only months later that some of the ovens were turned off. A nation that stands behind a government that created the SS Death’s Head Division, and waged a war of aggression against Europe, the USSR, and the United Sates, a nation that buried its doubts about that war or its government when they thought they were winning, simply has no standing to complain if the nations that it has attacked respond with attacks of their own to the last fibre of their being.

And some forget that the failure of the Allies to finish the job in 1918 led to the result that General Pershing predicted and made it imperative for the Allies to demand unconditional surrender on this occasion. Both Germany and Japan were reduced to ashes because they were led by manic war criminals who could not bring themselves to surrender.

Later I went to Wannsee and Sachsenhausen. Then after the Wall came down, and the country was reunited, the Germans had to come to grips with the horror – that is the word – of the Stasi, and the misery inflicted on so many Germans by so many other Germans.

Lawyers at a high-level conference descended into the heart of darkness and mile after mile of files in the Stasi HQ at Normanenstrasse. Later I would compare the agony of those taken there by the Stasi to that suffered by those taken to the HQ of the Gestapo at Prinz Albertstrasse (corner of Wilhemstrasse). The new Jewish Museum is the only building I have been in that feels to me like a work of art.

All the while, I was penetrating the history of the common law that might fairly be said to have crossed over to England from the forests of Germany – one American jurist said that the laws of America were more German than those of Germany itself.

I have visited Berlin and New York on about six occasions. They have about them a kind of in-your-face cosmopolitan directness that makes me want to laugh out loud when I step outside. I have so many happy memories from both.

There is a pub at the top of Friedrichstrasse where I was once recognised as some kind of local. That’s where I ate the most outrageously large pork knuckle and drank the biggest glass of beer I have ever seen. It’s not far from a guest house named after one of my absolute heroes, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

It became a ritual for me to buy a Picasso or Chagall lithograph from Bridget, the flamboyantly displayed owner of an art gallery on Dorotheenstrasse. I toured the canals with my German friend Gudrun and saw how moved she was at the remnants of the Wall that had divided her nation’s capital.

Berlin has the best transport system and museums in the world, and at least until recently, it was the one city in Europe where I did not feel like I was being suffocated by traffic and tourists.

Angela Merkel is head and shoulders above any other statesman in the world, but the Germans do not aspire to leadership, and they get nervy if they see too many flags out.

I have long wrestled with the fact that the beauty of the music in the Ring Cycle was given to us by a jerk who was so egocentric that he had to write his own libretti (as Gough Whitlam said), but if we cut out art created by unattractive people, we would miss an awful lot.

When I started to follow Formula I, Michael Schumacher was way ahead of the rest. He did some bad things. So did Ayrton Senna – worse, in truth. But we were told that with Senna, it was Brazilian flair; with Schumacher, it was ruthless Teutonic efficiency. Stereotyping shows a very bad state of mind.

In fine, I am very fond of Germany and the Germans. And one thing I do know. The evil and misery created by the Gestapo and the Stasi did not come from a German weakness. It came from our human weakness. Those who believe otherwise risk treading in the footsteps of Stalin and Hitler.

The Iran Fiasco

21/04/2026 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The Vietnam War was a tragic mistake and disaster for the U S. As a result, in 1984, the U S government announced what is called the Weinberger Doctrine.

The United States should not commit forces to combat unless the vital national interests of the United States or its allies are involved.
U.S. troops should only be committed wholeheartedly and with the clear intention of winning. Otherwise, troops should not be committed.
U.S. combat troops should be committed only with clearly defined political and military objectives and with the capacity to accomplish those objectives.
The relationship between the objectives and the size and composition of the forces committed should be continually reassessed and adjusted if necessary.
U.S. troops should not be committed to battle without a ‘reasonable assurance’ of the support of U.S. public opinion and Congress.
The commitment of U.S. troops should be considered only as a last resort.

It is difficult to see any of those criteria being met in the war commenced by Donald Trump in Iran. (He is not allowed to declare war.) One result is described in the following insightful article.

Wall Street Journal Article on the Fears of Trump

It seemed like Donald Trump’s appetite for risk had run out, and his fears were ramping up.

It was Good Friday afternoon in a nearly empty West Wing soon after the president learned that an American jet had been shot down in Iran, with two airmen missing. Trump screamed at aides for hours. The Europeans aren’t helping, he said repeatedly. Gas prices averaged $4.09. Images of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis—one of the biggest international policy failures of a presidency in recent times—had been looming large in his mind, people who have spoken to him said.

“If you look at what happened with Jimmy Carter…with the helicopters and the hostages, it cost them the election,” Trump had said in March. “What a mess.”

Trump demanded that the military go get them immediately. But the U.S. hadn’t been on the ground in Iran since the government overthrow that led to the hostage crisis, and they needed to figure out how to get into treacherous Iranian terrain and avoid Tehran’s own military. Aides kept the president out of the room as they got minute-by-minute updates because they believed his impatience wouldn’t be helpful, instead updating him at meaningful moments, a senior administration official said.

An image posted on Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps official Telegram channel appears to show a U.S. transport plane and two helicopters destroyed during a rescue mission to locate one of the U.S. airmen.

One airman was recovered quickly, but it wasn’t until late Saturday that Trump received word that the second airman had been rescued in a high-stakes extraction. What could’ve turned into the lowest point in Trump’s two terms, wouldn’t. After 2 a.m., Trump, too, went to bed.

Six hours later, the chest-thumping president was back with another audacious gamble to loosen Iran’s grip on its most powerful point of leverage, the Strait of Hormuz. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell,” he blasted on social media Easter morning from the White House residence, adding an Islamic prayer to the post.

A president who thrives on drama is bringing an even more intense version of his unorthodox, maximalist approach to a new situation—fighting a war. He is veering between belligerent and conciliatory approaches and grappling behind the scenes with just how badly things could go wrong.

At the same time, the president sometimes loses focus, spending time on the details of his plans for the White House ballroom or on midterm fundraisers—and telling advisers he wants to shift to other topics.

Trump is dealing with his own fear about ordering troops into harm’s way where some will be injured and some not return home, similar to other presidents who have been at war, people familiar with the matter said.

Trump has resisted sending American soldiers to take Kharg Island, for example, the launch point for 90% of Iran’s oil exports. While he was told the mission would succeed, and the territory’s capture would give the U.S. access to the strait, he worried there would be unacceptably high American casualties, the people said. They’ll be sitting ducks, the president said.

Still, he has made risky pronouncements without input from his national security team—including his post about plans to destroy the Iranian civilization—saying seeming unstable could help spur the Iranians to negotiate.

At one point he even mused he should award himself the nation’s highest military honor, the Medal of Honor.

Trump campaigned on ending foreign wars but wagered that he could solve, with American air and naval power, a national security problem that had bedeviled seven previous presidents. Now, a cease-fire is in doubt, a critical trade route has been closed for weeks and Iran’s regime has been replaced with radical new leaders, all threatening to lengthen an operation that Trump has repeatedly said would only last six weeks—a deadline already missed since the war began Feb. 28.

White House officials said they believe a breakthrough in negotiations with Iran could be reached in coming days, and they are eyeing more talks in Pakistan.

The president’s impulsive style has never before been tested during a sustained military conflict. Unlike the successful operation in Venezuela, which buoyed his confidence, Trump is confronting a more intractable foe in Iran, which is so far unwilling to bend to his demands.

“We are witnessing astonishing military successes that do not add up to victory and that is squarely on the president and how he’s chosen to do his job—lack of attention to detail and lack of planning,” said Kori Schake, a senior fellow at the right-leaning think tank American Enterprise Institute who served on former President George W. Bush’s National Security Council.

Robespierre and Iran

14/03/2026 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The tomb of Napoleon is a Paris landmark and tourist attraction. You will not find anything remotely like it for Robespierre – and Napoleon was not even French. Such are the ways of memory and history – and the voice of the people. And the Marseillaise so righteously intoned by Paul Henried in Casablanca.

Maximilien Robespierre was a little-known French provincial lawyer. As a consequence of a series of events that we label as ‘the French Revolution’, Napoleon became the Emperor of France, with more power than any Bourbon king ever held, and sought to become ruler of the world. The battle of Waterloo was, in the words of his Grace, the Duke of Wellington, a ‘damned nice thing – the closest thing you ever saw in your life’. But it was enough to see off the Corsican, who died in the exile generously allowed him by the Allies.

The images of Napoleon are many and consistent – and they fit nicely into the flowering of the Romantic movement, and the celebration – salutation, even – of the ego.

This has never been so with Robespierre, a shy man born to serve a cause. He was the definitive French ideologue and bearer of the gospel of Jean Jaques Rousseau. Through his dedication and transparent commitment to the revolution, Robespierre rose above the herd to become the de facto leader of the French nation.

Nothing in his life, or that of any other person, could have equipped Robespierre to deal with the issues facing someone in his position. He had served as a part time judicial officer, but he had given up that when he had had to sentence a man to death. Was he cut out for high office – let alone leadership of a nation in chaos?

The French nation was simply not ready for the nation-shattering changes that followed in the five years after the fall of the Bastille. To secure those kinds of changes, the English had spent about six hundred years house training their kings, nobles and priests.

France under Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety was surrounded by life threatening enemies from within and without. Its response was the Terror, and the guillotine, and horrors that prefigured the worst of those in Europe of the following century.

We can see ourselves as Hottentots dancing round the rim of a live volcano – and no mere human has found a way to avoid the risk of falling in. The canvas is masterfully painted by Thomas Carlyle, at times in terms that prefigure the horrors of Nazi Germany.

Robespierre, the ‘sea green incorruptible’, was sanctified, and then hardened, and then, like Macbeth, rendered devoid of his humanity. It was kill or be killed – and the others through blind fear finally found enough nerve to get him. The unkillable Fouché, who survived to serve Napoleon, whispered in their ears that their leader had delusions of godliness – and a list. ‘Is your name on it, Citizen?’

Robespierre died by the guillotine, and he comes down to us now as the archetypal terrorist. He was a decent young man who got crushed in an earthquake. ‘O unhappiest Advocate of Arras, wert thou worse than other Advocates? …A man fitted in some luckier settled age to have become one of those incorruptible, barren Pattern-Figures, and have had marble tablets and funeral sermons……May God be merciful to him and to us!’ (Carlyle).

By the time Robespierre was killed, his naïve obsession with ideology and the Supreme Being were as childlike as his sky-blue jacket. His cat-like features did not mask his capacity to inspire dread, and his conviction of the infallibility of his faith was at best dangerous when he preached about ‘virtue’ and ‘terror’ to a politically naïve audience. He had no mates. Dr J M Thompson said:

No one was so admired by his fellow citizens, no one so little loved…. he was too small-minded to forgive, and yet powerful enough to punish. But punishment is a measure of despair. It may cause conformity; it cannot produce conviction…. So, he failed and fell – the victim of men who had no convictions, and who were in most respects worse than himself.

As ever with that teacher, there is much wisdom. Punishment as ‘a measure of despair’ may be seen as the dilemma underlying our whole criminal justice system.

You will not, therefore, find in Paris, or even Arras, a great monument to the person seen as the author of that lethal cancer called the Terror. But that does not make it any easier to deal with the lingering wistful charm of the Corsican, who wanted to conquer and rule Europe, India, and the world.

Robespierre and Napoleon were very different men. Not least in the number of those who died as a result of their acts of governance. With Robespierre, the number runs into thousands. With Napoleon, the number runs into millions.

These numbers pass all understanding and would only be matched by monsters like Hitler, Stalin and Mao. And it was Stalin who had that most shocking insight: ‘The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic’.

But Robespierre had an insight into people and history, and the sense and courage to espouse the lessons of history, that are not sufficiently remembered.

At the beginning of 1792, the French were discovering that it was very hard to translate the glory days of 1789 into a body of government that worked. The nation was simply not politically mature enough. But the French knew that they were surrounded by foreign and internal forces that would punish them and restore the old regime.

Having declared war on the Crown, the Nobility, and the Church, the fledgling government embarked on a war against Europe. France declared war on Austria in April 1792. In hindsight, some kind of showdown looks to have been inevitable, but declaring war was another thing.

The war party was led by Brissot and Vergniaud. The king went along with it. He and Lafayette thought that one way or another, a war might assist the cause of the king, win or lose.

Their motives were very different. The people’s war party had this fixed idea that their revolutionary principles had universal application. Brissot, a later victim of the Terror, got carried away. He called for another crusade, ‘whose name is nobler and holier, a crusade on behalf of universal liberty.’

Well, if that sounds like moonshine that would warm the hearts of Shelley or Byron, it was also the kind of guff spread later by Napoleon and his disciples. Nor have the French entirely dropped this noble aspiration from their world view.

Since France hardly had an executive government, the war was voted on by the Assembly. The Declaration said that it followed a formal proposal of the king and that ‘the Court of Vienna, in contempt of treaties, has continued to grant open protection to French rebels; that it has instigated and formed a concert with several European powers against the independence and security of the French nation.’ The thinking was that a war would pull together a nation that was dividing. That was true – but at what cost?

Robespierre was almost on his own in opposition. He showed real fibre, and he was nothing if not consistent. ‘The source of the evil is not in Coblenz – it is among you, it is in your midst.’

There was some dreadful pride on show. Brissot wrote to his general saying they should not act like ministers of the Old Regime: ‘How can their petty schemes compare to the uprisings of the whole planet and the momentous revolutions that we are now called upon to lead’. He thought they would be marching into Berlin next year. Vergniaud spoke in terms that are revoltingly familiar: ‘Men have died in the recent fighting. But it is so that no one will ever die again. I swear to you in the name of the universal fraternity which you are creating, that each battle will be a step towards peace, humanity, and happiness for all peoples.’

They really thought they had the answer for the liberation of all Europe. They thought that when they crossed the Rhine, they would be greeted with acclimation by the oppressed peoples of Germany. (Before they started the war that ended so badly at Sedan, and scarred the French psyche permanently, they all bought Baedeker Guides for touring and sight-seeing in Berlin!) On the eve of war, people go off their heads.

The decision to go to war became fundamental to the way that what we call the Revolution unfolded, and to the implementation of what we know as the Terror. And it was taken over the vigorous, sustained, and courageous protest of the young and highly principled provincial lawyer from Arras, who was also opposed to capital punishment on moral grounds. This says a lot for the true character – the character devant le déluge – of the young avocat from Arras.

Robespierre said the king hoped to use the war to restore the old regime; Brissot wanted to set up a bourgeois republic – but the kind of bourgeois a little above Robespierre and his followers in the social scale; and Lafayette wanted war to help set up a military dictator ship. These were not charges of small change.

Robespierre expressed his opposition in terms that might usefully be etched into the front door of both the White House and 10 Downing Street, and even at Canberra.

The most extravagant idea that can arise in the mind of a politician is the belief that a people need only make an armed incursion into the territory of a foreign people, to make it adopt its laws and its constitution. No one likes armed missionaries; and the first counsel given by nature and prudence is to repel them as enemies.

‘No one likes armed missionaries.’ How on earth could any sane person suggest otherwise? Well, George Bush, Tony Blair, and John Howard did with Iraq. Do you remember all that nonsense about a ‘beacon of democracy’ or a ‘freedom deficit’?

If you are being bayoneted or raped, or you are watching your husband or children being tortured, do you stop to inquire into the political bona fides or ideological driver of the leader of the invading army?

It is not just that the Americans saw this in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan – they had seen it all at home it in their own war of independence. That conflict had its own ghastly brand of civil war. Appalling crimes were committed on both sides, especially in the civil war in the south between the Patriots and Loyalists. There were, Churchill said, ‘atrocities such as we have known in our day in Ireland.’ Professor Gordon S Wood said that the ‘war in the lower south became a series of bloody guerrilla skirmishes with atrocities on both sides.’

There is one other thing to say of Robespierre and his role in the governance of France from 1789 until his death in 1794. He did not seek or obtain any position or power by force or falsehood. (That very humane English historian, J M Thompson, said Robespierre was impervious ‘to any bribe except flattery.’)

Let us look back, not with the eye of eternity, but with hindsight. We now know that the French people suffered breakdowns and agonies for about a century after the apocalypse of 1789. It is not a matter for a mere mortal to compare the various infamies suffered by and in France in that time, but it may allow us to get a clearer view of the position of Robespierre if we look at five critical factors that dominated the period of time traditionally labelled ‘the French Revolution’ and continued to give rise to instability, pain, and war for about 100 years.

Those five factors are: the uselessness and desertion of the royals and the nobility; the outbreak of a state of war with the Church; the declarations of war by and against Europe; the betrayal of the French nation by the king and his family and by leading generals; and the rise to power of man of military genius the like of which we had not seen.

Nevertheless, the resistance to invasion – by ‘armed missionaries’ or whoever – remains constant. It is part of the human condition – part, if you like, of la comédie humaine.

But it is with us yet again. In the current war involving Iran, what armed force would repel the people of Iran more – that commanded by Donald Trump, or that commanded by Benjamin Netanyahu? Could your average Iranian imagine any person on earth more Satanic than either of those two people?

When I visited Moscow in 1988, I took a tour of the Kremlin. When we climbed to a spot that gave an aerial view, our guide got very emotional. ‘That is the gate he came in by – and that is the gate that he left by.’

He was not referring to Hitler – who had not learned the lesson of the defeat of Napoleon by winter and the peoples of Russia.

But it is Napoleon who gets the monument.

We refuse to learn.

Robespierre and Iran

The images of Napoleon are many and consistent – and they fit nicely into the flowering of the Romantic movement, and the celebration – salutation, even – of the ego.

As ever with that teacher, there is much wisdom. Punishment as ‘a measure of despair’ may be seen as the dilemma underlying our whole criminal justice system.

Robespierre and Napoleon were very different men. Not least in the number of those who died as a result of their acts of governance. With Robespierre, the number runs into thousands. With Napoleon, the number runs into millions.

These numbers pass all understanding and would only be matched by monsters like Hitler, Stalin and Mao. And it was Stalin who had that most shocking insight: ‘The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic’.

But Robespierre had an insight into people and history, and the sense and courage to espouse the lessons of history, that are not sufficiently remembered.

The war party was led by Brissot and Vergniaud. The king went along with it. He and Lafayette thought that one way or another, a war might assist the cause of the king, win or lose.

Robespierre was almost on his own in opposition. He showed real fibre, and he was nothing if not consistent. ‘The source of the evil is not in Coblenz – it is among you, it is in your midst.’

Robespierre expressed his opposition in terms that might usefully be etched into the front door of both the White House and 10 Downing Street, and even at Canberra.

Nevertheless, the resistance to invasion – by ‘armed missionaries’ or whoever – remains constant. It is part of the human condition – part, if you like, of la comédie humaine.

He was not referring to Hitler – who had not learned the lesson of the defeat of Napoleon by winter and the peoples of Russia.

But it is Napoleon who gets the monument.

We refuse to learn.

With Compliments

Geoffrey Gibson

Politics

The People

New Books Extracts

Moral Cowardice

Trump and the Bible – and the Law

An English tragedy

English Cricket

Populists

Berlin at War

The Iran Fiasco

Robespierre and Iran

Robespierre and Napoleon were very different men. Not least in the number of those who died as a result of their acts of governance. With Robespierre, the number runs into thousands. With Napoleon, the number runs into millions.

These numbers pass all understanding and would only be matched by monsters like Hitler, Stalin and Mao. And it was Stalin who had that most shocking insight: ‘The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic’.

Robespierre and Napoleon were very different men. Not least in the number of those who died as a result of their acts of governance. With Robespierre, the number runs into thousands. With Napoleon, the number runs into millions.

These numbers pass all understanding and would only be matched by monsters like Hitler, Stalin and Mao. And it was Stalin who had that most shocking insight: ‘The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic’.