Politics

This is not a card game (Volodymyr Zelensky)

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Politics and politicians are on the nose in countries that like to  call themselves democracies.  This is especially so in countries like ours that have adopted a version of the English two party system.  Failings in that system have led to what are called ‘populist’ movements in the U S and U K.  By and large, we have escaped that curse here. 

The main reason may be that we just can’t be bothered, but our failings are different to those in the U S or U K. 

For the non-partisan observer, it is hard to tell what is the difference between the platforms of the Liberal Party and the Labor Party.  Any differences are matters of degree only, and not of kind.  That is unhealthy, because it creates the impression that neither stands for any distinct difference in principle. 

Very few sane people want to pay more tax or get less benefits from government in return.  The trick is to balance the two.  People whose jobs are on the line at each election may not be the best at handling that trick.  What is entirely clear is that the leaders of both parties have been well and truly frightened off taking a stand as a matter of principle. 

But the reaction here has not been the rise of populism.  That embarrassing flash in the pan has been largely contained here, notwithstanding some dropping of the guard by some vote-chasing Liberals.  (It is called ‘dog whistling’.)

We have reacted by electing principled independents.  Who happen to be women.  Who then raise the question – are they just better at this than men?  (In my view, they are.)

In the election just held, I could not bring myself to vote for either major party, because in my view each has been guilty of a moral failing in not responding to the vice of advertising gaming on sport.  Since I am in a safe seat with no independent, and I could not care about the Senate, my time in the booth was as useless as it was short.

Every now and then, the two-party system produces a leader who is prepared to take a position, and fight for it, on an issue of principle.  Margaret Thatcher and Paul Keating come to mind, but not many others – and you need to take care where you drop either name.

It is axiomatic that the two-party system is only as good as the two parties.  A weak opposition will lead to bad government.  We are acutely aware of this in Victoria, and must now look for it federally.

The election just held was a disaster for one party – and therefore the rest of us.  The Liberal Party is now so weak, and seen to be both weak and unprincipled, that it may not be able to discharge its function in opposition of keeping government on the rails.  As Philip Coorey remarked, you cannot engage in soul searching if you have no soul.  We here in Victoria may be just as badly off in federal government as we are in state government.

In my view, the Liberal Party finds itself looking into the void because it has no defined world view, and it has failed to discharge its obligations as the party of His Majesty’s Opposition. 

That fine English historian Dr J M Thompson stated the role of opposition parties as follows:

… an Englishman …. has been trained to exercise his party spirit in the game called the Party System; and among the rules of that game – not always observed [1929] as they should be – are the obligation to sink personal differences in party loyalties, not to criticise your opponent’s policy unless you have a better one that you are prepared to carry out yourself, and in case of national crisis, to help rather than hinder whatever government may be in power.  But party politics in the French Assembly meant a very different thing….so majority legislation might be merely partisan, and minority criticism merely destructive and irresponsible.

You don’t criticize the government until you have a better policy, and you do not get in the way in a time of national crisis.  That is not statesmanship, a word that now dies on our lips.  It is common sense and common courtesy.

We are in a time of national crisis of a kind that some call ‘existential’ with the climate.  The then Leader of the Opposition said he could not comment because he was not a scientist.  That was downright silly, but it did entail that the issue is one to be resolved by scientists, not politicians.  It should never have been a party-political issue – on which the Liberal Party delivered raw tripe, and looked to be in thrall of a very rich lady who has bought a think tank just for herself.

Nor should the treatment of the First Nations have been allowed to degenerate into a demeaning party-political squabble.  It was far too important for that.  The referendum was called as part of government policy carried at election, and the opposition knew that history showed it would fail if they opposed it.  So, they did, and with fear and deception.  The result was in my view disgraceful, and the worst failing of governance in Australia since the Dismissal in 1975.  Those calling it a win remind me of Douglas Jardine on Bodyline.  As the poet said, ‘out went the candle and we were left darkling.’  Round up the usual suspects; as it happens, the same Born to Rule crowd that sends us to war on false premises.

Now they have paid the price.

But it is obvious that we are all worse off.  The Murdoch crowd have form for being bad losers (as of course does their American idol).  They pout and they sulk, and one lady looks like her soul has left her body.  Then she and the booster in chief last night joined hands to proclaim that they had not fought enough culture wars, and that the referendum was one culture war they had won. 

What was really sad is that they did not see this as a confession.  And they forget that the Anglo-Saxon peoples distrust intellectuals and ideology.  (Name one nation that has benefited from either.)

The two-party system of democracy is like our adversarial system of litigation.  It involves a contest, but it is not a game.  And these people do not just fail by treating it as a game, but they play the wrong kind of game – they play poker, when what is needed is the demurer contest of bridge. 

In truth, they have been sucked into what might be called the ‘McConnell Model’ of opposition.  Just oppose everything the government proposes.  Put a spoke in the wheels of government.  And then let the government feel the wrath of the people.  Then it will be our turn again to hand out the goodies, and the folks at home will get what they deserve.  

What could be simpler?  It goes down a treat in Africa.

The independents are alive and well.  The minor parties – the Greens and One Nation – in my view deserve each other and their decline. 

As it seems to me, we are beginning to transition away from the two-party model to the European.  It is hard to see how we could be worse off.

So, what is the answer?  Simple, Mate.  Turn the footy back on, and then go back to sleep.

The United States – Ideology, and a Failure of Governance Since 1776

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Law is a priestly craft…. Societies are not transformed…They evolve…. although abstract thinking matters, it contributes less to the development of societies than instinct and experience.  (Jonathan Sumption, The Challenges of Democracy)

The white people who occupied America were religious zealots who had a covenant with their God.  This enabled them to treat their Promised Land as a source of profit so that their God would never stand between them and the dollar.  It also meant and that they could treat the original inhabitants of the land in the same way those who had first occupied the first Promised Land had been treated in what they called the Holy Land.  The union of God and the dollar was complete from the start.  You see it on their currency.  Then they further debased their humanity by introducing slavery.  They have never recovered.

They revolted when the mother country said they should pay their way.  (It was a spoiler for what the United States now says to Europe.)  The War of Independence was in part a savage civil war that England’s traditional enemy, France, bailed them out of.  (And in so doing, bankrupted themselves and brought on their own revolution in 1789.  It is an open question whether France has ever recovered.)

The issue of slavery led to another civil war, this time one that was far more brutal.  Lincoln saved the Union, but too many white Americans have never accepted the verdict. 

The still divided nation came late into two world wars, but the Great Republic finally found its heroic place in the world by leading its reconstruction after World War II. 

Sadly, it has not won a war since, and a line of mediocre leaders and bruising inequality and racial insecurity has led to a government intent on repudiating most of what was decent in its past.  The United States is withdrawing from the world and forfeiting all trust.

What went wrong?

I Deception and ideology from the start

The Declaration of Independence of the United States was of, by, and for, white men, and not men of any other colour.  Opinions were asserted in 1776 that would find no place in America more than two hundred years later. 

The Indians were written off as savage mass murderers: ‘He [King George III] has incited domestic insurrections amongst us and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.’ 

So, an entire people is dismissed, Old Testament style, by reference to race.  It may remind some of incidents in the Holy Land today, and whatever else might be said of Indian war-making, they did not have the same means for dealing out death that their enemies had – they were for the most part just trying to protect their own people and land; and no one could ever accuse the Indians of genocide.  This, I think, is what psychologists refer to as ‘projection.’

The reference – or, as the Declaration was issued, the lack of reference – to African Americans is no better.  Jefferson had drafted a clause making the fatuous suggestion that the English – well, they said King George III – had instituted a trade of slavery, frustrated attempts to stop it, and then excited the blacks to rise up against ‘us’ – and ‘we’ were by implicit definition white. 

All this is expressed in the most colourful language: ‘He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the person of a distant people who never offended him.’  ‘This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king …. He has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce ….’  And so on.  Mercifully, Congress struck all this nonsense out.  But they left as it was the phrase ‘all men are created equal’ and that statement was, to their certain knowledge, untrue in their minds. 

Well, this evasion, if that is the term, on the subject of slavery might be expected from a slave-owner from the largest slave-owning state.  But what was not to be expected was the lack of candour on the causes of the revolt.

The American Declaration of Independence tracks the form of the English Declaration of Rights.  It records the conduct complained of to justify the termination of the relationship.  (This is what common lawyers call ‘accepting a repudiation’ of a contract.)  The English did so in short, crisp allegations that were for the most part devoid of the oratorical colour that we find in the American Declaration.  (The first draft was prepared by a junior barrister, John Somers – whom no-one has heard of.)

How does the American Declaration of Independence go about this process?  Before it gets to an allegation that the king maintains standing armies, which is a relatively specific charge, it made ten allegations of misconduct that were so general that they would not be permitted to stand today as an allegation of a breach of the law on a conviction for which a person might lose their liberty.  The fourteenth allegation, which is hopeless, but which appears to be an attempt to invoke the English precedent, is that: ‘He [King George III] has abdicated government here.’  (During the English revolution in 1688, James II had fled, throwing the Great Seal into the Thames.) 

Then there is the fifteenth allegation: ‘He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.’  If that allegation of plunder and murder – the old word was ‘rapine’ – had been seriously put, you might have expected to see it before an allegation of abdication – and before every other allegation.  The eighteenth allegation relates to the Indians. The nineteenth was the allegation relating to slavery and which was struck out.  Those drafting the Declaration were not evidently keen to get down to the subject of people of another race.  Or tax.

Let us put to one side that all these allegations are made against the Crown, and not the British government, and that none of these allegations refers to any statute of the British government.  There is no history of the American Revolution that has been written that says that the American colonies revolted from their subjection to the British Crown for any of the reasons that are set out in the eighteen clauses of the Declaration of Independence.  The primary reason that history gives for the revolt of the colonists was the imposition, or purported imposition, of taxes upon them by the British parliament – when those who were being taxed had no direct representation in the parliament levying the tax.  Most divorces are about dollars, and this one was no different. 

But British taxation is only mentioned once in the Declaration of Independence.  That reference is fallacious.  It is against the King.  The Glorious Revolution made it plain that the King could not impose a tax in his own name.  (The only reference to the English legislature comes when those drafting the documents scold the English for ‘attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us’).  Given that the 1688 revolution secured the supremacy of the English parliament over the English Crown, and made it transcendentally clear that only the English parliament could levy a tax on its subjects, it may have seemed a little odd for Jefferson to be suggesting that the American colonies were somehow subject to the English Crown, but not to the English parliament.  ‘Jurisdiction’ is a word that has come to bedevil American jurisprudence, and it looks like the problem may have started very early.

Tax is one price of membership of a commonwealth.  It is inherent in the language of the ‘common weal.’  A childish resentment of that brute fact of life has disfigured the Great Republic since its birth.  And it reached its apogee under Trump and his rich mates.

The American Declaration of Independence is therefore of limited historical value in explaining why the American colonies proceeded as they did, or what values of humanity they proposed to pursue in their future.  The tragic truth is that the barefaced lie about slavery would haunt the young republic until it was thought to have been expunged by the death of more than six hundred thousand Americans in the Civil War, and by the moral courage, intellectual genius, and cool hand of Abraham Lincoln, the one unquestionable gift of the United States to humanity. 

Then, one of the great tragedies of the Union is that the South did not in substance accept the verdict of the Civil War.

The new republic was born under cover of deceit, and a many splendored deceit at that.

2 Failure of responsible government

Australia adopted the Westminster System of government from the English.  As its name suggests, the English invented it.  And the one fundamental of our (Australian) jurisprudence is that the English common law is the source of the authority of the Parliament of Westminster.  The Westminster System was in large part in place by 1776, when the American colonies seceded.  They deliberately declined to follow it – which is not surprising given the lethal enmity between the two sides.

For us, government is seen to come in three parts.  The Parliament makes the laws.  The executive branch carries them into effect.  And the judges rule on any disputes about the working of the laws. 

The king is in theory the head of the executive, but there are four parts of the Westminster System dealing with the working of the executive that are fundamental to our notion of ‘responsible government’.  And an essential part of that is that the de facto head of government, the Prime Minister, and the rest of the Cabinet and ministry, sit in Parliament and are answerable – responsible – to Parliament.  Having the head of government outside Parliament is barely comprehensible to us.  (As would having a CEO of a public company not a member of the board of directors – at least in the way that Australian and British corporations trade.)  The System provides as follows.

First, the king only acts on the advice of his Ministers.

Secondly, those Ministers – some of whom comprise the Cabinet – must have the confidence of the Parliament – and they must resign if they do not.

Thirdly, there is a permanent non-political civil service chosen and trained to give effect to the wishes of government, the members of which are under the supervision of a Minister – the Ministers of course being the members of parliament and who have the confidence of parliament.

Fourthly, the Ministers are responsible to the Parliament for the working of the civil service under them.  If the civil service makes a mistake that cannot be dismissed as trifling, the Minister must account to Parliament for the error – and depending on its gravity, either apologise or resign.

That at least is the theory.  The last is at best wobbly for us now, but you see immediately just how different things are in the U S.  Since this point about responsible government is central to this paper, it may be as well to set out what A V Dicey says:

….it is now well established law that the Crown can only act through Ministers….who not only become morally but legally responsible for the legality of the act…. Hence, indirectly but surely, the action of every servant of the Crown, and therefore in effect of the Crown itself, is brought under the supremacy of the law of the land.

This would cause wild surmise in Washington.  Would it be possible for someone with the history of Donald Trump to head a government in Australia?  Would it be possible for something like the collection that Trump calls its cabinet to be installed in Australia?  Either idea is absurd.

Perhaps because in 1776 the U S was moving away from a monarchical government, its constitution invests much more power in its president than do similar constitutions where the monarchy is retained.  But the Founding Fathers had a taste for ideology that they certainly did not get from the Mother Country.  The English have no taste for theory or doctrine in the common law or governance.  They look only at experience, and ask the simple question: Does it work? 

The English constitution turns on the legislative and political sovereignty of parliament.  The parliament makes laws and ministers must respond in parliament for the formation and execution of policy.  The United States does not share that notion of ministerial responsibility.  Its ministers are answerable to their president not to Congress.  That to us savours not of 1776 but 1576 – when the nobles in the ministry answered not to parliament but to the king.

Something in the air in the last part of the eighteenth century lead the secessionists to think more like the French.  Does our scheme accord with our ideology?  Must we not follow the dogma of Montesquieu and avoid any infringement of the doctrine of the separation of powers?

In the result, the president does not have to answer to Congress in person, but now may be confronted by a hostile Congress which is bad for both the efficiency of government and the faith of its citizens in the workability of government.  McConnell and others ruthlessly exploited this weakness against the first black president, and the U S is now held up to world ridicule on a regular basis by being shut down.  Congress effectively takes strike action – against those who put them there and the institutions they are sworn to uphold.

There is a related problem of the president not being in the parliament – neither is the leader of the opposition, because there is no such office.  This does not conduce to honesty or sense from the party not holding presidential office.  Since neither party is hardly allowed even to mention the word ‘tax’, the result is a sustained divorce from reality that is not healthy and that cannot last. 

As we speak, the absence of a formal Opposition to a president trampling on law and custom poses a direct threat to the U S polity.  We see it as essential to the principle of parliamentary control that ministers sit in parliament and answer to it.  That has never been the case in the United States.  If you said that Trump and his Cabinet were out of control, or simply not responsible, you might be uttering a legal truism.  What, if anything, has Congress done to control President Trump or make him responsible to it?

3 Failure to provide for peace, welfare and well-being

We see our common law coming from England as having started about when the king sought to replace the vendetta with an action to protect the peace of the king.  Instead of leaving it to the family of the victim to extract revenge from the family of the accused, the king proceeds in his own name against the person accused.  He, most usually, was charged with having acted contra pacem regis vi et armis (‘against the peace of the king by force and arms’).  It was now the function of the king to deal with crime.  As steps forward go, this may be on par with the discovery of fire or the invention of the wheel.

Later, the role of government would be extended to providing for the welfare and well-being of the community.  Matters of health, education and age would no longer be left to the family, the church, charity and the community, but to government itself.

If you asked most Australians or Canadians or New Zealanders if they would prefer to live in the U S, your best result may be a funny look.  If you asked them to say what are the grounds of your hostility, you might reply – guns and medicare. 

Then, you might say that the very first sentence of their Constitution reads:

‘We the People of the United States in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common Defence, and general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity ….’

Well, since we the people outside the United States think that they have failed to ensure domestic tranquility by their gun laws, and that they have failed to ensure general welfare by their other laws, or absence of laws, dealing with the poor and health care, what went wrong?

I will not here rehearse my reasons for saying that the relevant rulings about guns of the U S Supreme Court were sadly unsound in history and at law.  Not the least disturbing thing about Heller was the judicial giggling about a national tragedy, and the cavalier rudeness and malice shown by the majority to those of a different mind.  This misbehaviour simply should not be seen or heard in a court of law.  And when it comes to being rude, the ‘conservative’ justices are anything but conservative.

But I must say something about the failure of the United States to provide adequately for the welfare of its citizens. 

When we speak of the kind of the 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. 

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.’  

No, we speak of dignity in the sense of intrinsic worth – a word Kant invoked in discussing his ‘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.

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. 

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.  And the Elizabethans were not driven by ideology, God, or charity.  They were too hardnosed for that.  In Tudor times, unemployment took the form of vagrancy.  The Tudors knew the threat to the peace of the realm (pacem regis) posed by vagabonds.  They could terrorise small farms or villages.  (And just look at how they rose up in France in 1789.) 

To repeat, the ‘commonwealth’ inevitably involved the ‘common weal’.  Under the heading ‘paternalism’, Sir Geoffrey Elton said that the ‘doctrine of the body politic knit together demanded obedience and assistance from the governed and put upon the government the duty of looking after its subjects…..Of necessity, therefore, the state had to accept the responsibility for the failures and victims of society, and the admission and elaboration of this important principle mark the development of the effective poor law from 1536 to the great Elizabethan codifications in 1597 and 1601.’  (My emphasis.)

This concern for welfare was to find its clearest statement 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, Lloyd George, who was aided by Winston Churchill, the son of an American heiress, 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.)

In so acting, the English were following the example of the great Prussian, Count Otto von Bismarck, hardly a darling of the Left.

But even before the twentieth century and the rise of the Labour Party in England, the old-fashioned conservatives – the lords of the manor, or the Tory knights of the shire – showed what Professor Simon Blackburn in The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy called ‘benevolent paternalism’.  That is no mere catch-phrase.  The whole feudal compact depended on the notion that both lords and vassals had obligations as well as rights, andas we haveseen the Tudors accepted their paternal role as essential in their governance of the common weal.  Paternalism had been blessed by the ‘law and order’ party.

This vast ocean between us, England, and most of Europe on one side, and the United States on the other, is too little noticed.  The difference in political worldviews is fundamental. 

And one word will never be applied to the United States of Trump’s America – dignity.  It dies on our lips.  MAGA has left America soiled and in the gutter.

It is sad that a flirtation with theory can become an addiction to ideology that leads to what we see as the disasters in America of their attitudes to violence (and not just in guns) and welfare (health and poverty).  Their whole history dictates traits that we and the U K and Europe could not tolerate.

4 Bill of Rights written into Constitution

It is wrong to say that the English do not have a written constitution.  You can find it in documentary form.  The difference is that it is not is not contained, or mainly contained, in a single document or instrument.  At bottom it stands on the common law, a blend of judicial precedent and ancient statutes, mainly Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus, the Bill of Rights, and the Act of Settlement.  And the British Parliament could legislate about any of those tomorrow.  There is no requirement of a referendum.  Parliament is supreme.  This is the ultimate endorsement of democracy and the U S Founding Fathers did not want much of that kind of democracy.

The Australian Constitution is set out in a schedule to an act of the Imperial Parliament.  It has long been accepted that the English Constitution forms part of the common law.  As such, each is the result of a natural process of evolution.  It follows that it would be at best problematic and at worst misconceived to take a phrase uttered at one point of that process of evolution and try to freeze its meaning and effect as at the time it first surfaced.  It would be wrong to take a notion expressed in the seventeenth century as frozen in time although invoked in the twenty-first century.  It would be wrong because it contradicts the whole notion and process of evolution.  Evolution and revolution are ‘clean’ two different things. 

(In this context, as I have mentioned before, the Supreme Court in Heller did not refer to the statement of Sir William Holdsworth, the leading authority on the history of English law, that the Tudors had prohibited the carrying ‘of certain kinds of arms – such as pistols and handguns’.  On that basis, the English Bill of Rights would never have applied to hand-guns.  The suggestion would have been ridiculous in any event in light of the history of the law relating to the duty as well as the right to bear arms going back to the medieval fyrd.)

In the U K, the law relating to what we call civil liberties comes from the common law as modified by statute.  As such, the Parliament could change it all tomorrow.  We in Australia do not regard legal issues about civil liberties as part of what we call ‘constitutional law,’ and it may be as well to remember that the Bill of Rights was entered into and enacted to settle the state in England after a revolution which, by definition, was outside the law, and of which the great legal historian F W Maitland said ‘we cannot work it into our constitutional law’.  Ultimately any rule of law must derive from an historical source – a brute matter of fact, such as a conquest, or a revolution that leads to the founding documents of a new regime.

The U S mindset is here fundamentally different to the U K and us.  There the civil rights are most set out in amendments to the written constitution and they can only be changed by the procedures there set out.  So, we can put that form of change to one side.

The Bill of Rights inevitably raises political issues for resolution by the U S Supreme Court.  As a result, that body engages in political or ideological debate that can degenerate into personal abuse in a way that would never happen in a higher court sitting in, say, London, Paris, Canberra or Berlin.  The Court is effectively a law-making body because its power to declare the meaning and effect of the Constitution becomes a de facto power to make laws in a body that is not elected, but the members of which are seen to have an agenda.

Then you get the ultimate irony – and ideological heresy.  People vote for the President, the head of the executive, so that he can appoint well sounding candidates to the judiciary, who will then stand in place of the legislature to make laws about abortion.  But only after they have stone-walled at the inquisition conducted by the real or lawful lawmakers.

That for us is an abomination.

The Australian Constitution is a remarkably prosaic affair that has little to do with what we call civil liberties.  Its one indulgence of the transcendental – trade between the states shall be ‘absolutely free’ – caused heartburn to our High Court justices for ninety years, before their Honours announced that having looked at the debates that produced the Constitution, they could identify the purpose and narrow reach of this law – and normal business was resumed.  That is that the court deals with these issues legalistically, and as apolitically as possible.

In 1942, Sir Owen Dixon, our greatest jurist, said this to the American Bar Association:

…. our constitution makers refused to adopt any part of the Bill of Rights of 1791, and a fortiori, they refused to adopt the Fourteenth Amendment.  It may surprise you to learn that in Australia, one view held was that these checks on legislative action was undemocratic, because to adopt them argued a want of confidence in the will of the people. 

Another way of saying that is that those who framed our constitution did not want to produce a document by which the political aspirations of the people could be frustrated by a claque of nitpicking village elders erstwhile clad in ermine.

It is not surprising, then, that polls give the U S Supreme Court low approval ratings.  I am not aware of any such process for our High Court or the UK Supreme Court.  The question of political alignment in those courts simply does not arise – except beyond the fringe.  And no-one would ask what is the breakdown of religious beliefs in members of our highest court.  (The closest we get to prurience is when we ask how many of them had a private school education.)

Then, by chance, the three Justices appointed by Trump got the chance to do what they were appointed to do – and they changed the law on abortion.  As I read the reports in the press, five of the six justices who voted for the change were Catholic, and the sixth was raised as a Catholic. 

It is hardly surprising that in a contest for loyalty between the nation and God, God won.  Uncle Sam (now called POTUS) is potent.  God is omnipotent.  And depending on which version you choose, He might cause you agony for eternity if you let Him down.  It was to be expected, then, that the altar would prevail over the bench.

And in reversing their law on abortion, the justices used the same kind of strident language that they had used on guns – including the epithet ‘grotesque’ for those of a different mind.  Instead of a reasoned resolution of a legal issue, we get the impassioned assertion or defence of a position.  Judges are not there to take sides.

Haven’t these judges learned the first lesson of judging?  The most important person in the courtroom is the loser.  And the time for fighting cases stopped when they left the bar.  They are there to quell conflict, not provoke it.  You say what you have to say in order to determine the case, and no more – and then you call on the next case.  All we ask is that you do your job – and that’s it.

Well, if the Americans are about three hundred years behind the English on guns, their position is worse with the Germans – well over two thousand years worse.  In his history On Germany, Tacitus said of the Germans before the birth of Christ that ‘it is repugnant to their custom for any man to use arms, before the community has attested his capacity to wield them’.  It is impossible to imagine a state of the U S trying to pass a law to that effect. 

As I recall it, Gibbon said the Romans did not subscribe to the ‘barbarous practice’ of wearing arms in the midst of peace and commented that he ‘who considers this circumstance as the test of civilisation would disdain the barbarism of a European court.’

There are two other differences between us and the U S in our approach to the law.  We follow the English tradition that you learn the practice of the law on the job – and we do not have much time for law schools or universities.  The Americans tend to lionise law schools and their products – especially from the ivy league.  That looks unreal to us – and downright snooty. 

We also follow England in having a separate bar.  We see that as essential to a solid and independent bar and judiciary – both of which were fundamental in the history of the common law and the constitution.  Europe knew nothing like it. 

The response of the legal profession in America to Trump has been at best wobbly.  And that is very worrying.

5 Bad electoral laws

When I was about sixteen, I studied nineteenth century English history – the Age of Reform.  One reform was to legislate for a secret ballot at election polls – so that people could vote free of pressure.  I never understood the argument against it. 

Nor have I ever understood the argument against making voting in elections compulsory.  That process is fundamental to our whole process of government, just as stopping at red lights is fundamental to our road traffic regulation.  We do not make that process voluntary – nor do we make jury service, another pillar of our democracy, voluntary. 

There is every reason to think that the U S would not find itself in the mess that it is in now if voting was compulsory.  This is I suspect another case of common sense being trumped by ideology – and party loyalty.  Which looks to be the case with appointing judges for life in the U S.  Why do to the nation what you would not allow people to do to each other?

And that is before you get to gerrymandering and rigging the vote – corruption at the level of eighteenth-century England or nineteenth century Tammany Hall.

This aspect of U S democracy looks to be irredeemably soiled.

6 Failure to deal with God

In England, the Lord Chancellor was a member of the legislature, judiciary and the executive.  Doctrinal anathema.  The head of state was and is the head of the state church – and liable to be deposed if he ceases to be in communion with the Church.  Worse than anathema!  Heresy!  Yet, the influence of religion on the governance in England is so slight as to be invisible.

Not many U S presidents believed in God.  But they could not be heard to say so.  Atheism was verboten, so most of them danced a minuet.  Freedom of speech is a tricky phrase, but no sane person could suggest that the present incumbent believes in God – at least in any way that may impede his ego.

The 1641 revolution in England may be called the Puritan Revolution, but after the death of Cromwell, the Puritan influence in Britain fell, and the Puritans there had trouble keeping up their status as Dissenters. 

It was different in America – the Puritans were in the majority and they had their own way.  It still shows.  As we have seen,the upshot of this continuing impact of the Puritan and frontier influences is what the rest of the western world sees as a cold indifference to the fate of those who are less fortunate – a reluctance to legislate for the welfare of the citizens of the United States. 

And the one shot that was heard around the world came in 1831 when the British Parliament outlawed slavery.  That very significant act of political and moral courage was brought about after an inspired campaign to change and direct public opinion in Britain that was organised and directed by the established church, the Church of England, and a group of religious fanatics who had been hardly done by in America, the Quakers.

Otherwise, although the Founding Fathers sought to sterilise the impact of religion in the republic, at least by banning any state church, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the impact of religion on the U S has been as sinister as it was pervasive.  And that would be unthinkable here or in the common Mother Country.

There is not much point speculating which presidents may have been communicant Christians.  Gary Scott Smith devoted years of study to the subject and published the results in Faith & the Presidency, a work of 400 pages and a North American quota of footnotes of half as many pages again.  Its conclusions contain the following remarkable propositions.

The belief that God has especially blessed the United States and selected it for a special mission in the world is biblically suspect.  It has inspired Americans to fight injustice at home and abroad, but it has also contributed to simplistic moralizing, overlooking national flaws, a lack of awareness of moral ambiguity, and an understandable hatred abroad of American hubris.  (My emphasis.)

The author is obviously a deeply religious man, but he agrees with a scholar who spoke of the ‘rhetoric of empire’: ‘The assumption that the United States is morally superior to other nations, the assertion that it must redeem the world by spreading popular government’, and ‘faith in the nation’s divinely ordained destiny to fulfil this mission.’  The ‘rhetoric of empire’ is a lot worse than the Napoleon complex – that cost more than five million lives in European wars fought so that Europe might know the blessing of French republican liberty – and Napoleon did not even claim to be sent by God.

This kind of talk is terrifying to those outside America.  And all of that was written many years before the arrival of Donald Trump.

Finally, the twin American indulgences in violence and fake religion came together shockingly in the Ku Klux Klan, an evil group of men more frankly vicious than the Nazis – and with a similar level of representation in the community.  It is a fearful blot on their history that Americans are not handling anywhere nearly as well as the Germans. 

Millions and millions of ‘ordinary’ Americans in the heartlands, for the love of God and the hatred of race, indulged in orgies of violence and loathing that make the torch-lit parades of the Nazis look like Sunday School picnics.  The personal inclination to rape of the Grand Dragon of the Evil Empire would have appalled Heydrich and Himmler, and the rampant credulity and cowardly anonymity of the robed gutter-rats prefigured the banality of evil of Eichmann. 

If you read a book like Timothy Egan’s A Fever in the Heartland, you might blanch if you ever have to fly over states like Indiana or Oklahoma again.  Not the least revolting aspect of the Klan was that it became more popular as it brushed with an unavailing law, and its leaders were shown to be anything but ordinary Americans.  The failures of the nation found salvation as the victims of those who kept it down.  The whole history of the Klan was the reaching after a mythical past that left no room for the Civil War or Abraham Lincoln.  The losers erected statues of losers.  On what then could the republic stand?

If you have survived a diagnosis of terminal cancer, you wonder what poison may be left in your blood, and whether it might come back.  We have had, and still have issues of race in Australia, but we have been spared the vicious combination of race hate, raw cruelty, and fake religion that still haunts and disfigures America. 

In 1925, the Klan had more than six million members who paraded grandly in major cities to warm applause.  Their savage cruelty went back to medieval or Roman times.  The journal of their fake religion was The Fiery Cross. 

The Klan and MAGA have something in common – they see themselves as victims – a proposition that would be hilarious in Myanmar, Rwanda, or Venezuela – who have been appointed as champions of other victims.  They are characterised by hatred and contempt for those they regard as inferior – even if only because they are different.  People who are content with their lot in life do not join outfits like the Klan or MAGA.

In April 2025, the federal Attorney-General of the United States said she would call for the death penalty for a man charged with murder pursuant to instructions from the President to Make America Safe Again.  A life for a life.  The victim was a totem of capitalism, and his alleged killer was the subject of broad support among the people.  It is very hard to avoid the conclusion that there is something rotten in the state of America.  And 10 April 2025 sees the hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby, the novel about ‘careless people’ that blew to Kingdom Come the myth of the American Dream.

7 Conclusions

The above look to me to be some of the ways the Americans find themselves in their current decline.  And so much of it comes from their failure to follow the English, or Anglo-Saxon, model of preferring the empirical call of experience to the intellectual call for theory. 

Sir Owen Dixon thought that the United States’ adoption of the separation of powers was ‘a curious and surprising departure from, indeed violation of, British constitutional practice and theory.’  His Honour was not, then, pulling punches.

The failure of the doctrine of separation of the powers of government to achieve a full legal operation here is probably fortunate.  Its failure to do so may be ascribed perhaps to mere judicial incredulity…. Legal symmetry gave way to common sense.

Sense before style or theory is the way of the common law.

In 1921, the great American jurist Roscoe Pound published his majestic treatise, The Spirit of the Common Law.  It contains juristic learning of the kind that we do not see today.  Pound was the Professor of Jurisprudence at Harvard, but he did not have a law degree.  He got that learning the hard way at the bar table before Nebraskan juries.  (Perhaps for that reason, the book of 224 pages does not contain one footnote.) 

On the second page, the author set out his stall:

For the strength of the common law is in its treatment of concrete controversies, as the strength of its rival, the modern Roman law, is in its logical development of abstract questions.

Elsewhere Pound summed it up with the crispness of a botanist:

The doctrine of precedents means that causes are to be judged by principles reached inductively from the judicial experience of the past, not by the deduction from rules established arbitrarily by the sovereign will… The common law doctrine is one of reason applied to experience. 

The latter follows a very well-known statement of Justice Holmes, but at times the United States prefers logic to experience.  We stick with Sir Owen Dixon when he said that conceptions derived from theory may be ‘too transcendental for a working lawyer’.

As I see it, ultimately our whole commitment to the rule of law rests on a certain state of mind that comes from a very long history that goes back to the forests of Germany in the time of Tacitus.  When I refer to a ‘state of mind’, I mean that when the time to decide finally comes, we are likely to be moved unconsciously, perhaps, by what Sir Owen Dixon referred to as ‘instinctive assumptions’ or ‘tacit assumptions’.  Montesquieu said that what mattered was the spirit of the laws, De L ’Esprit des Lois.  It got tricky when others sought to apply his teaching by the letter.  The Founding Fathers preferred the dogma of France to their inheritance from the history of England.

I have tried to set out how I see the relevant state of mind in America as being very different to that which prevails here and in the U K.  We have touched on three ways in which England tended to differ from those across the Chanel. 

First, in thinking – philosophy – they much preferred the empirical to the rationalist or metaphysical.  They disdained theory and were at best uncomfortable with intellectuals. 

Secondly, this mindset is reflected in the distinction between the common law and its preference for experience and Roman or civil law and its preference for codes and formal elegance.  That in turn is mirrored in the distinction between the adversarial and inquisitorial modes of trial and the English reliance on the jury. 

Thirdly, the governance of England has since the Middle Ages involved paternalism toward those not so well off – such that the word ‘socialism’ becomes more fraught than ever.

The deviations of the United States since 1776 look to veer toward the European rather than the English model – and in ways that have no appeal for us.

As we speak, we can see the very fabric of the United States being torn apart by a president elected by a people who were on full notice of his propensity to do just that, having tried and failed to rebel against a duly elected government. 

And in the dark time just before dawn, they and we may have to deal with the unthinkable, and wonder if the nation of the United States has the fibre to go on.  This is how Sebastian Haffner saw the collapse of one of the most civilised nations on earth.

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. 

I have no idea what the answer may be.  But I cannot see that we or anyone else with a similar history would seek to follow the lead of Uncle Sam.  Rather, in the words of their musical from their one Golden Age, ‘we’re going to wash that man right outa our hair – and send him on his way.’

Notes

Dicey on responsible government: A V Dicey, The Law of the Constitution, Macmillan & Co, 1885, 332.

Presence of Ministers in Parliament: W E Hearn, The Government of England, Longmans, 1897, 236.  (Sir Owen Dixon was a great admirer of this work.)

Prior remarks on gun laws: I refer to District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008) and Gibson, The Dragon in the Cave, published in Looking Down the Well, Papers on Legal History, Amazon, 2015. 

Sources on welfare in U S: What follows draws on Gibson, The War against Humanity, The Decline of Courtesy and the Fall of Dignity in Government and Business, yet to be published.  The remarks on governance also drew on it.

Kant on dignity and principle of humanity: Edited extracts from Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals 4.431 – 4.435; Practical Philosophy, Kant, Cambridge University Press 1996, 81-84.

Elizabethan property laws: Black, J B, The Reign of Elizabeth 1558-1603, being Volume XIII of The Oxford History of England, Clarendon Press (2nd ed, 1959) 265.   

Elton on paternalism:  England Under the Tudors, Folio, 1997, 183ff.  

Lloyd George and New Liberalism: cited in Gibson, History Essays, The Last Two Samurai, Amazon, 2018.

Bismarck:The role of Germany, and Bismarck in particular, in the introduction of what we call the Welfare State is not generally known here.  In 1883 and 1889, Bismarck pushed through legislation for accident insurance for workers and then old age and disability insurance.  For the first, the German government said it had put an end ‘to all those attempts to make health insurance a private matter …and asserts the role of the state’: see Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck, A Life, Oxford, 2011, 417. 

Blackburn on paternalism: Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, O U P, (2d Ed), 2005, 75.

Maitland on historic foundations: Constitutional History of England, Cambridge, 1963, 285.

Dixon on Bill of Rights: Jesting Pilate, Law Book Co, 1965, 102.

Change in abortion law: Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022). 

Tacitus on Germany: Germania, 13.  But it is repugnant to their custom for any man to use arms before the community has attested his capacity to wield them.  Upon such testimonial…. some kinsmen dignify the young man in the midst of the assembly with the shield and javelin.  This among them is the manly robe, this first degree of honour conferred upon their youth.  Before this, they seem no more than part of a private family, but thenceforward part of the Commonweal.  That looks very advanced beside the United States in 2025.

Gibbon on Germans’ wearing arms: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Folio, 1987, Vol 5, 294.

Religion of U S: Scott Smith, Faith and the Presidency, OUP, 2006, 423.

Dixon on separation of powers: Jesting Pilate, above, 52.

Pound on common law; The Spirit of the Common Law, Marshall Jones, 1921, 2, 182-183.

Dixon on the transcendental: The Common Law as an Ultimate Constitutional Foundation, Jesting Pilate, above, 207.

Dixon on assumptions: Jesting Pilate, above, 38,106.

Haffner: Defying Hitler, 2002, 110.

The musical: South Pacific, Rogers and Hammerstein.

Two Dictators

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Each views the existing dispensation with contempt, and looks back on a mainly imaginary past, and a wholly imaginary future.

Each counts himself and his nation as a victim.

Each has suffered a crushing loss either personally or by the nation.  ‘Never again.’  Each reacts by denying the loss or inventing reasons for which it must be avenged.  In one sense, each wants to replay events leading to the downfall to produce a different result. 

Both can look at their lives as a struggle against the forces of darkness.  Each is therefore the archetype of a hero.  If either knew who Tolkien was, he would have asked that myth maker to write his story.

Each claims the power to diagnose the cause of his suffering and that of his nation. 

Each claims to have the answer.

Neither has any time for middle ground.

Those they accuse are enemies of the nation.

Each brings a self-righteousness that is nauseating to others.

A savage and vengeful bully lies close to the front of each that sometimes drops.  His whole life is a charade.

Neither has any sense of shame.  Each is shameless.

Each bully has no trouble in finding a weak minority to beat up as scapegoat.

Each claims that by taking revenge on the enemy, he can restore the nation to its greatness.   But both are addicted to and feed off conflict in a way that reminds others of Napoleon’s addiction to la guerre éternelle.  They look like Ponzi schemes of conquest.

Each exploits the envy felt by those who have not done so well for those who have.  Envy, as Othello learned, is a killer. 

And God help any minority whose members are seen to do better than the locals, and who threaten to challenge the established order.  Some are left with only their bare civic standing to barter with, and to lose that is to lose all.

The revenge of each is very personal.

Each is capable of cruelty for its own sake.

The character of each is fixed early, and his upbringing left no capacity for honest inquiry of himself.

Although hungry for power and acceptance, each fears inferiority and resorts to fantasy – a denial of reality.

Each is a showman – is there anything else? – but the Internet carries more clout than a torch-lit parade.

Each has an unerring feel for the parochial and the nativist – the gutter.

Each brings to his followers the ultimate gift of deliverance from the insecurity of doubt.

Each therefore raises a serious question about the upbringing or education of his followers – although it is very unwise for others to raise this issue.

Neither has any friends.  Their ego leaves no room in their psyche for friends.  When the end comes, they may stand alone.

God is obviously quite out of the question.

For similar reasons, neither marries well.  Love is not in the vocabulary.

Because neither cares for other people, each gambles recklessly with the lives of others.  If he goes down, he will take as many with him as possible.  (His Grace the Duke of Wellington correctly identified Napoleon as being guilty of this failing.)

But although each gambles with the lives of others, each is terrified of failing – and refuses to acknowledge it when it happens.

Each has had brushes with the law that he seeks to paint in his favour.  The prevailing faith in the community was premised on the life and teaching of a man subjected to the most gruesome form of capital punishment.  He was a humble man who crossed the old regime. 

Neither could ever be accused of humility.  Each subscribes to his own cult.

Each has devoted cult like followers, but the rest of the nation has trouble taking most of it seriously.  They regard the message and the messenger as fantasy – and banal fantasy at that.

Each is surrounded by toadies who from fear or ambition or both are too scared to contradict their leader.  They betray their obligation to the nation, and they feed the already enlarged ego of the man appointed by destiny.

The press of course is brought to heel, and the judges are too.  They get stacked or sacked in any event.

Each understands that the dictator must make all those around him complicit in what the regime is doing. 

Their loyalty is personal to him – not to the nation.  This is fundamental, and commonly fatal to the nation – and to those who pledge their civic faith.

Each sees the world as he wants to see it.  Each shows all the signs of having been spoiled and pampered as a child,  And that is another ground for saying the claim of victimhood is moonshine.

Each knows that if you are going to lie, and you most certainly are, you lie greatly.

Each relishes chaos – he remains the center of attention.  If he happens to drop from view, he behaves like a baby throwing toys out of the cot. 

Neither can accept being left in a room alone.

Each loves the sound of his own voice.

Each has many fronts, but is capable of an arrogant humility.

The result is that those who oppose the dictators do not understand them and are reviled by them.  The new man is treated with disbelief and scorn, but that only fires up him and his supporters.  (And what, in any event, is ‘reality’?  What did reality ever do for you?)

Each claims to be a patriot, but each also ruthlessly attacks the nation insofar as it was or is outside his power.  L’état c’est moi.  This is just one of those spellbinding contradictions in terms in which he revels. 

Neither has had the time or inclination to acquire any real learning – or taste.  Each is utterly tasteless, and civilized people would be uncomfortable having them in their home.

Each has low intelligence and no conscience.  Each is a moral cripple.

But that want of general intelligence does not prevent either from sensing the taste of the gutter, or an instinct for the weak spots of their enemy.  Someone said of that instinct that it was a handy gift for a politician, but ‘had less in common with the eye of the eagle than with the nose of the vulture.’

Only one is a coward.

In the end, the old regime starts to fall apart, and the center cannot hold.  As Yeats further said, the best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity.  Chaos takes the place of fantasy, and each dictator trades on chaos.

What is essential is that neither lives in this world.  There is more to this than egomania.  Each lives in a world of his own.  As someone remarked of one of them: ‘He does not really exist – he is only the noise he makes.’

But his raison d’être is simple.  He is the hero who will save the nation and raise it to its rightful triumph.

Above all, each is heartless.  I am myself alone.  Et praeteria nihil.  (And in addition, nothing.)

Well, then, both the fantasy and the chaos in their worlds seem to us so banal.  We might look at what that observation entails.

The word ‘banal’ comes from France – curiously, a banalité was one of those feudal obligations that led the peasants to burn down chateaux during the French Revolution.  The dictionary says that ‘banal’ means ‘trite, trivial, or commonplace’, but there is often a suggestion of emptiness or hollowness behind feigned or usurped importance that is pejorative.  This may have been behind the observation in Fowler’sModern English Usage that ‘we should confine banal and banality, since we cannot get rid of them, to occasions when we want to express a contempt deeper than any of the English words can convey.’

Hannah Arendt had as penetrating an intellect as I know of in the realm of political philosophy.  She wrote a book called Eichmann in Jerusalem, A Report on the Banality of Evil.  She explained the sub-title as follows:

When I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to the phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial.  Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing could have been further from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain’.  Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all.  And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post.  He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realised what he was doing……He was not stupid.  It was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no means identical with stupidity – that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.  And if this is ‘banal’, and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace.

These observations derive from intellectual integrity, and they are of great moment.  Arendt had previously said to the same effect: ‘The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were and still are terribly and terrifyingly normal.’ 

Eichmann was no devil or demon; he was just human, and the trouble for us is that he was ‘terribly and terrifyingly normal’.  Those who do not accept that Eichmann was just human, and that there is a little of Eichmann in all of us, are seeking to impose some kind of grid or cattle pen over humanity and are at risk of falling into the error that fed the derangement of people like Stalin or Franco or Mussolini.

We might here note the matter of fact assessment of the American historian R R Palmer on Carrier, the man who drowned priests by the boat load in the Vendée during the Revolution, and after being at first applauded, was later guillotined for what we would now describe as war crimes.

Carrier, it may safely be said, was a normal man with average sensibilities, with no unusual intelligence or strength of character, driven wild by opposition, turning ruthless because ruthlessness seemed to be the easiest way of solving a difficult problem.

As Arendt said of Eichmann, ‘it was sheer thoughtlessness…that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.’

It is in the French Revolution more than under twentieth century dictators that we see people with little or no prior experience of government trying both to govern and to lay down a system of government, each of which tasks was beyond most if not all of them. 

These tasks require more than a lifetime of experience – they require generations of history and experience, centuries even.  It is here in France during the revolution that we see ordinary people placed in a whole new world doing their best in good faith to stare down chaos and the void, and just getting slowly more out of their depth until they run out air. 

We see this all the time.  If you have any experience with what we now call risk management, you will know that your biggest worry is the functionary who is getting out of their depth and either does not see that, or is incapable of admitting it.

In any revolution, you can normally back three horses.  First, jealousy fairly shrieks its venom.  Secondly, the scum rises to the surface, as if by an iron law of motion.  (The world’s losers are the most vengeful.)  Thirdly, self-interest usually prevails.  And those at the bottom live in terror of the heavyweights leaving them to hang out and dry when the carousel comes to a stop – as it must.  Their ultimate fear is replacement. 

These are simple, obvious facts of life, but historians tend to forget that most humans are just that – ordinary human beings – when they consider how some of them reacted when the volcano that was France erupted.  When looking back on how events unfolded, with the curse of ignorance and the false hope of hindsight, we may not be surprised to see that some ordinary people did some things that they would do very differently if they had their time again.  There was no procedure or manual telling Robespierre how he might react: the script had not been written because no one had seen anything remotely like it before.  And we might also remember that if the French could at least look back on the experiences of both England and America in their revolutions, the Russians had the benefit of the lot, and made a worse mess than anyone.

There is another term that is useful in dealing with people who are sleight of hand.  Here is Brewer on mountebank:

A vendor of quack medicines at fairs…who attracts the crowd by his tricks and antics; hence any charlatan or self-advertising pretender.  The bank, or bench, was the counter on which traders displayed their goods, and street vendors used to mount on their bank to patter to the public.

There is a big gap in time between Commedia dell’arte and Mussolini, but they have so much in common.  And it is all there in MAGA.

Well, in my lifetime, the Germans and the world learned lessons from Hell.  We have no idea what may unfold as the United States falls apart before our eyes.  Who can say?  Who in the name of God could have predicted that in my lifetime, thousands of Jewish people would choose to live in Germany rather than Israel?

Two Dictators

Each views the existing dispensation with contempt, and looks back on a mainly imaginary past, and a wholly imaginary future.

Each counts himself and his nation as a victim.

Each has suffered a crushing loss either personally or by the nation.  ‘Never again.’  Each reacts by denying the loss or inventing reasons for which it must be avenged.  In one sense, each wants to replay events leading to the downfall to produce a different result. 

Both can look at their lives as a struggle against the forces of darkness.  Each is therefore the archetype of a hero.  If either knew who Tolkien was, he would have asked that myth maker to write his story.

Each claims the power to diagnose the cause of his suffering and that of his nation. 

Each claims to have the answer.

Neither has any time for middle ground.

Those they accuse are enemies of the nation.

Each brings a self-righteousness that is nauseating to others.

A savage and vengeful bully lies close to the front of each that sometimes drops.  His whole life is a charade.

Neither has any sense of shame.  Each is shameless.

Each bully has no trouble in finding a weak minority to beat up as scapegoat.

Each claims that by taking revenge on the enemy, he can restore the nation to its greatness.   But both are addicted to and feed off conflict in a way that reminds others of Napoleon’s addiction to la guerre éternelle.  They look like Ponzi schemes of conquest.

Each exploits the envy felt by those who have not done so well for those who have.  Envy, as Othello learned, is a killer. 

And God help any minority whose members are seen to do better than the locals, and who threaten to challenge the established order.  Some are left with only their bare civic standing to barter with, and to lose that is to lose all.

The revenge of each is very personal.

Each is capable of cruelty for its own sake.

The character of each is fixed early, and his upbringing left no capacity for honest inquiry of himself.

Although hungry for power and acceptance, each fears inferiority and resorts to fantasy – a denial of reality.

Each is a showman – is there anything else? – but the Internet carries more clout than a torch-lit parade.

Each has an unerring feel for the parochial and the nativist – the gutter.

Each brings to his followers the ultimate gift of deliverance from the insecurity of doubt.

Each therefore raises a serious question about the upbringing or education of his followers – although it is very unwise for others to raise this issue.

Neither has any friends.  Their ego leaves no room in their psyche for friends.  When the end comes, they may stand alone.

God is obviously quite out of the question.

For similar reasons, neither marries well.  Love is not in the vocabulary.

Because neither cares for other people, each gambles recklessly with the lives of others.  If he goes down, he will take as many with him as possible.  (His Grace the Duke of Wellington correctly identified Napoleon as being guilty of this failing.)

But although each gambles with the lives of others, each is terrified of failing – and refuses to acknowledge it when it happens.

Each has had brushes with the law that he seeks to paint in his favour.  The prevailing faith in the community was premised on the life and teaching of a man subjected to the most gruesome form of capital punishment.  He was a humble man who crossed the old regime. 

Neither could ever be accused of humility.  Each subscribes to his own cult.

Each has devoted cult like followers, but the rest of the nation has trouble taking most of it seriously.  They regard the message and the messenger as fantasy – and banal fantasy at that.

Each is surrounded by toadies who from fear or ambition or both are too scared to contradict their leader.  They betray their obligation to the nation, and they feed the already enlarged ego of the man appointed by destiny.

The press of course is brought to heel, and the judges are too.  They get stacked or sacked in any event.

Each understands that the dictator must make all those around him complicit in what the regime is doing. 

Their loyalty is personal to him – not to the nation.  This is fundamental, and commonly fatal to the nation – and to those who pledge their civic faith.

Each sees the world as he wants to see it.  Each shows all the signs of having been spoiled and pampered as a child,  And that is another ground for saying the claim of victimhood is moonshine.

Each knows that if you are going to lie, and you most certainly are, you lie greatly.

Each relishes chaos – he remains the center of attention.  If he happens to drop from view, he behaves like a baby throwing toys out of the cot. 

Neither can accept being left in a room alone.

Each loves the sound of his own voice.

Each has many fronts, but is capable of an arrogant humility.

The result is that those who oppose the dictators do not understand them and are reviled by them.  The new man is treated with disbelief and scorn, but that only fires up him and his supporters.  (And what, in any event, is ‘reality’?  What did reality ever do for you?)

Each claims to be a patriot, but each also ruthlessly attacks the nation insofar as it was or is outside his power.  L’état c’est moi.  This is just one of those spellbinding contradictions in terms in which he revels. 

Neither has had the time or inclination to acquire any real learning – or taste.  Each is utterly tasteless, and civilized people would be uncomfortable having them in their home.

Each has low intelligence and no conscience.  Each is a moral cripple.

But that want of general intelligence does not prevent either from sensing the taste of the gutter, or an instinct for the weak spots of their enemy.  Someone said of that instinct that it was a handy gift for a politician, but ‘had less in common with the eye of the eagle than with the nose of the vulture.’

Only one is a coward.

In the end, the old regime starts to fall apart, and the center cannot hold.  As Yeats further said, the best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity.  Chaos takes the place of fantasy, and each dictator trades on chaos.

What is essential is that neither lives in this world.  There is more to this than egomania.  Each lives in a world of his own.  As someone remarked of one of them: ‘He does not really exist – he is only the noise he makes.’

But his raison d’être is simple.  He is the hero who will save the nation and raise it to its rightful triumph.

Above all, each is heartless.  I am myself alone.  Et praeteria nihil.  (And in addition, nothing.)

Well, then, both the fantasy and the chaos in their worlds seem to us so banal.  We might look at what that observation entails.

The word ‘banal’ comes from France – curiously, a banalité was one of those feudal obligations that led the peasants to burn down chateaux during the French Revolution.  The dictionary says that ‘banal’ means ‘trite, trivial, or commonplace’, but there is often a suggestion of emptiness or hollowness behind feigned or usurped importance that is pejorative.  This may have been behind the observation in Fowler’sModern English Usage that ‘we should confine banal and banality, since we cannot get rid of them, to occasions when we want to express a contempt deeper than any of the English words can convey.’

Hannah Arendt had as penetrating an intellect as I know of in the realm of political philosophy.  She wrote a book called Eichmann in Jerusalem, A Report on the Banality of Evil.  She explained the sub-title as follows:

When I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to the phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial.  Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing could have been further from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain’.  Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all.  And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post.  He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realised what he was doing……He was not stupid.  It was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no means identical with stupidity – that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.  And if this is ‘banal’, and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace.

These observations derive from intellectual integrity, and they are of great moment.  Arendt had previously said to the same effect: ‘The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were and still are terribly and terrifyingly normal.’ 

Eichmann was no devil or demon; he was just human, and the trouble for us is that he was ‘terribly and terrifyingly normal’.  Those who do not accept that Eichmann was just human, and that there is a little of Eichmann in all of us, are seeking to impose some kind of grid or cattle pen over humanity and are at risk of falling into the error that fed the derangement of people like Stalin or Franco or Mussolini.

We might here note the matter of fact assessment of the American historian R R Palmer on Carrier, the man who drowned priests by the boat load in the Vendée during the Revolution, and after being at first applauded, was later guillotined for what we would now describe as war crimes.

Carrier, it may safely be said, was a normal man with average sensibilities, with no unusual intelligence or strength of character, driven wild by opposition, turning ruthless because ruthlessness seemed to be the easiest way of solving a difficult problem.

As Arendt said of Eichmann, ‘it was sheer thoughtlessness…that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.’

It is in the French Revolution more than under twentieth century dictators that we see people with little or no prior experience of government trying both to govern and to lay down a system of government, each of which tasks was beyond most if not all of them. 

These tasks require more than a lifetime of experience – they require generations of history and experience, centuries even.  It is here in France during the revolution that we see ordinary people placed in a whole new world doing their best in good faith to stare down chaos and the void, and just getting slowly more out of their depth until they run out air. 

We see this all the time.  If you have any experience with what we now call risk management, you will know that your biggest worry is the functionary who is getting out of their depth and either does not see that, or is incapable of admitting it.

In any revolution, you can normally back three horses.  First, jealousy fairly shrieks its venom.  Secondly, the scum rises to the surface, as if by an iron law of motion.  (The world’s losers are the most vengeful.)  Thirdly, self-interest usually prevails.  And those at the bottom live in terror of the heavyweights leaving them to hang out and dry when the carousel comes to a stop – as it must.  Their ultimate fear is replacement. 

These are simple, obvious facts of life, but historians tend to forget that most humans are just that – ordinary human beings – when they consider how some of them reacted when the volcano that was France erupted.  When looking back on how events unfolded, with the curse of ignorance and the false hope of hindsight, we may not be surprised to see that some ordinary people did some things that they would do very differently if they had their time again.  There was no procedure or manual telling Robespierre how he might react: the script had not been written because no one had seen anything remotely like it before.  And we might also remember that if the French could at least look back on the experiences of both England and America in their revolutions, the Russians had the benefit of the lot, and made a worse mess than anyone.

There is another term that is useful in dealing with people who are sleight of hand.  Here is Brewer on mountebank:

A vendor of quack medicines at fairs…who attracts the crowd by his tricks and antics; hence any charlatan or self-advertising pretender.  The bank, or bench, was the counter on which traders displayed their goods, and street vendors used to mount on their bank to patter to the public.

There is a big gap in time between Commedia dell’arte and Mussolini, but they have so much in common.  And it is all there in MAGA.

Well, in my lifetime, the Germans and the world learned lessons from Hell.  We have no idea what may unfold as the United States falls apart before our eyes.  Who can say?  Who in the name of God could have predicted that in my lifetime, thousands of Jewish people would choose to live in Germany rather than Israel?

Dealing with nobody

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

If you study philosophy at university, you will soon come to Descartes – Cogito, ergo sum.  I think, therefore I am.  It may take some time for you to grapple with this.  (A Japanese T-shirt maker has come up with a variant: ‘I do not think.  Therefore, I do not exist.’  That appeals to me greatly.  As it should to a lot of our politicians.) 

You will have even more trouble with the Ontological Argument for the existence of God, and Kant’s celebrated refutation of it – ‘existence is not a predicate’. 

But you will not have to worry about any of this if someone asks you to deal with someone who does not exist.  They must be mad.

As I understand it, Russia by Putin denies the right of Ukraine to exist as a separate nation.  The Russians have invaded the territory called Ukraine on the footing that the nation of Ukraine is a fiction.  How can they negotiate with an entity that does not in their eyes exist?  More, how can the US ask Russia to negotiate with something that does not exist?

And more again, how can the US purport to negotiate with Russia behind the back of Ukraine – by denying the right of Ukraine to be present at the negotiation?

Are we at the position where there may be a vacancy at either end of the table?

Gaza does not exist as a separate nation according to international law.  Hamas claims to represent its people by means beyond my understanding.  But Hamas denies the right of the State of Israel to exist.  Those factors obviously constrain Israel in any dealings with Hamas.  Israel is certainly right to say that Gaza has no standing as a national polity.

Imagine the following.  The U S tells Netanyahu that Israel must negotiate with Hamas about Gaza.  And then tells him that if he does not bend to their will, they will negotiate with Hamas, and Israel will not be a party to the negotiations.

There is a song from my childhood that keeps coming back to me.  ‘A wise man builds his house upon the rock.’  The others are fools – at best.

Comparative grievances

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Donald Trump may be the most aggrieved person in the world – although you may think that is par for the course for a spoiled child and lousy golfer who cannot get his way.  Trump thinks Putin is another victim – Vladimir, he says, went through hell, too.  It is curious that two of the most powerful and loathed people on the planet are so insecure.

Take two sorts of person who have been reviled down the centuries – gays and gypsies (who all came under notice with the Nazis).  Which has suffered more?  The question is absurd and unanswerable.  You may as well ask whether Bradman was as good as Babe Ruth, or whether Carlton is as strong a football club as Collingwood.  Even God might draw the line at answering that question.

Yet, a very fine article by Waleed Aly in The Age says some people prominent in our public life, such as it is, are happy to compare the suffering of Jews with that of Muslims arising from racism.

Liberal senator Dave Sharma in December: “Any time any senior minister mentioned antisemitism in the last 12 months, they also mentioned a fictitious Islamophobia which was not going on.”  Lest that be dismissed as an isolated stance, here’s his colleague, Sarah Henderson: “Frankly, there is no issue with Islamophobia”, before adding later, “I really reject any argument that there is some sort of equivalence between antisemitism and any other form of racism, including Islamophobia, at the moment on Australian university campuses, because that is simply not the case.”  This as Muslim and Palestinian students were reporting instances of verbal and physical assault to the Register.  Or here’s Nationals senator Bridget McKenzie: “[The government] seem[s] to think there’s a moral equivalence between Islamophobia and antisemitism [but] there absolutely isn’t. And it needs to be called out.”

The result according to Aly is:

The consequence is the conviction, now deeply entrenched in Muslim Australia, that the country simply doesn’t care about anything that happens to them. That Australia recognises them only as perpetrators, but never as victims.

If Aly is correct in this, those involved, in government or opposition, who have led to this should be deeply ashamed of themselves.

And the frightful irony of their fault is that it shares the vice that is at the bottom of this malady of racism that has marred the earth since the time of the origin of man.  That vice is that it is in order to treat every member of a group that is said to be distinct by breed or faith as marked by a common attribute merely because of events in their shared history.  People are like branded cattle.  This dogma calls to mind that ghastly exceptionalism of the Americans.  ‘My country right or wrong.’

It is a flat denial of the principle of humanity – that each of us has our own worth or dignity arising merely from the fact that we are human.  And you do not have to resort to faith in the supernatural to build a moral code on that principle.

It is trite to say that Australia is a migrant country – our First Nations people would see all white and Asian people here as migrants, and very recent ones at that.  But we have Australians who have connections on both sides of the war in Gaza. 

The tension is not helped by a singular imbalance of political and social clout between them here.  Sir Isaac Isaacs was made Governor-General of Australia in 1931.  We are a long way from seeing a Muslim Australian head of state.  (Of course, under the English constitution, neither could be appointed as the Crown.  At least in that sense they are equal.)

People on both sides are prone to dismiss pleas from those against them as propaganda or, worse, bigotry.  (They might bear in mind that in that infamous Oval Office brawl, Vance accused Zelensky of taking people on ‘propaganda’ tours – of the victims of Putin’ s war crimes.)  Insular vision of imported conflict is a problem for the rest of us.  Two one-eyed people do not make one whole person. 

Most Australians do not care about which God is the more saleable, or which tribal history is the more pathetic.  But we may remind the warriors of the true faith or blood on either side that the more they go to war against each other, the more they court the venom and disease of which they justly complain.

Haffner on Hitler

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

Hitler embodied evil.  It is therefore as well to note some symptoms.  The following observations come from The Meaning of Hitler by Sebastian Haffner that is the subject of the note below.

There is no development, no maturing of Hitler’s character and personality.  His character was fixed at an early age – perhaps a better word would be ‘arrested’ – and remains astonishingly consistent; nothing was added to it.  It was not an attractive character.  All soft lovable reconciling traits are missing…. His positive characteristics – resolution, boldness, courage, perseverance – lie all on the ‘hard’ side.  The negative ones even more so: ruthlessness, vindictiveness, faithlessness and cruelty…. a total lack of capacity for self-criticism.  Hitler was all his life exceedingly full of himself and from his earliest to his last days tended to self-conceit……

He did not wish to be the first servant of the state but …. an absolute master.  And he perceived correctly that absolute rule was not possible in an intact state mech anism but only amidst controlled chaos….and he knew how to control it…. A close study of him reveals a trait in him that one might describe as a horror of committing himself, or… anything final.  It seems as though something within him caused him to recoil not only by way of a state system, but also his will by way of a firm set of goals…. As a star performer Hitler probably ranks higher than Napoleon.  But one thing he never was – a statesman….

Of course he was no democrat but he was a populist, a man who based his power on the masses, not on the elite, and in a sense a people’s tribune risen to absolute power.  His principal means of rule was demagogy, and his instrument of government was not a structured hierarchy but a chaotic bundle of uncoordinated mass organisations merely held together by his own person.  All these are ‘leftist’ rather than ‘rightest’ features…

Nothing is more misleading than to call Hitler a fascist.  Fascism is upper class rule, buttressed by artificially manufactured mass enthusiasm, but never in order to buttress an upper class.  He was a class politician, and his National Socialism was anything but fascism….

…. There is no denying the voluntarist trait in Hitler’s view of the world; he saw the world as he wanted to see it.  The world is imperfect, full of conflict, hardship and suffering …. he does not state these things with the sad courageous earnestness with which Luther calmly faced what he called original sin, or Bismarck what he called earthly imperfection, but with that frenzied voice with which Nietzsche, for instance, so often hailed what was deplorable.  To Hitler, the emergency was the norm, the state was there in order to wage war.

Three things.  Haffner may have added the frenzy of Wagner, Hitler’s pin-up boy.  The poet said, or meant to say, that comparisons are odious, but the whole fabric of our law turns on learning from the past. 

Finally, fans of the poet, and Coriolanus, will love the reference to a people’s tribune risen to absolute power.  In the hands of a genius, you don’t know who is more dangerous – the hero, or the jealous tribunes claiming to stand for that fiction called the people.

THE MEANING OF HITLER

Sebastian Haffner

Folio Society, 2011.  Translated by Ewald Osers and introduced by Mark Roseman. Illustrated.

The author was born in Berlin in 1907 as Raimund Pretzel.  He therefore came of age under the Nazis.  He qualified as a lawyer, but he left Germany in 1938 because of his relationship with a Jewish woman.  Before leaving, he wrote a manuscript of a book that would be published posthumously only in 1992 under the title Defying Hitler.  He was in a law library when the brown shirts came in to round up the Jews.  He joined the staff of the Observer in 1942 and began writing for publication. 

The present book was first published in 1978.  Haffner chose the name ‘Sebastian,’ because it was Bach’s middle name, and ‘Haffner’ after a Mozart sonata.  His writing style is pithy and laconic, and the book was written before the works of Ian Kershaw and Richard Evans were published.

Defying Hitler caused a sensation when it came out.  Here was direct eye witness evidence of the Terror before the Holocaust began – and by someone so well qualified to comment.  It caused me to see a lot of things differently.  In it, Haffner said:

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. 

We might pause to note what a biographer of Mussolini had to say as it applies to Hitler word for word.

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. 

In the present work, Haffner says of Hitler (in the second page):

His life lacked – before and after – everything that normally lends warmth, weight and dignity to a human life: education, occupation, love and friendship, marriage, parenthood.  Apart from politics and political passion, his was an empty life and hence one which was certainly not happy, was strangely lightweight, and lightly discarded.  A continuous readiness for suicide accompanied Hitler throughout his political career.  And, at its end, almost as a matter of course, stood real suicide….Hitler had no friends.  He enjoyed sitting for hours on end with subordinate staff  – drivers, bodyguards, secretaries – but he alone did all the talking….His character was fixed at an early age – perhaps a better word would be arrested – and remains astonishingly consistent…His positive characteristics – resolution, boldness, courage, perseverance – lie all on the ‘hard’ side.  The negative ones even more so: ruthlessness, vindictiveness, faithlessness and cruelty.  Added to these, moreover, from the very start was a total lack of capacity for self-criticism.

Here, then, is a writer who gets to the heart of the matter.  Hitler relied on charisma and terror, hope and fear, the populist trademark.

That ability for mass hypnotism was Hitler’s first, and for a long time his only, political capital……On the whole, the management and dosage of terror during the first years must be described as a masterly psychological achievement by Hitler.

Or again:

Hitlerism has at least one thing in common with Marxism – the claim to be able to explain the whole of world history from a single point of view….For there is no denying the voluntarist trait in Hitler’s view of the world: he saw the world as he wanted to see it….To Hitler, the emergency was the norm; the state was there in order to wage war.  And that is where he was wrong.

As a cartographer of evil, Haffner is in my view up there with Hannah Arendt.  This book ends this way.

For German history does not end with Hitler.  Anyone believing that it does, and possibly even rejoicing at it, does not realise just how much he is thereby fulfilling Hitler’s last will and testament.

A mugging in Washington

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Three men are involved in conflicts that affect the whole world – Putin, Netanyahu, and Trump.  They look to me to have one thing in common – a contempt for humanity, or at least some parts of it.  It is impossible to believe that any of them accepts what Kant said – that every human being has his or her worth or dignity, which derives merely from the fact that each of us is human – and not some animal.  Each of them is happy to treat humans they regard as different as being inferior.

Russia began a brutal war against Ukraine.  This is not the first act of Russian aggression here, and Russia has defaulted on previous attempts to bring peace.  Putin denies that Ukraine exists as a distinct national entity.

Those who claim to be in charge of Gaza (Hamas) launched a brutal attack on Israel.  Gaza has a long and painful history – as does the whole of the Holy Land going back to prehistory.  Hamas wants to destroy the state of Israel.  Israel stands in the way of Gaza acquiring statehood.

In the course of its attack on Israel, Hamas took hostages – about 250, I think.  In the course of its war against Ukraine, Russia has forcibly kidnapped children – a war crime perpetrated by the Nazis.  (Bear in mind that Russia refuses to acknowledge that there is a war.)  Estimates of the number of childhood victims vary – but there is no doubt that thousands have been taken, up to say, 20,000. 

There is inevitably something heartless about this exercise in statistics about the denial of human worth.  That dedicated mass murderer called Stalin knew this.  The death of one person is a tragedy.  The death of a million is a statistic.  Shakespeare of course had seen this.

I am in blood
Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er.  (Macbeth) 3.4.142–144)

(When his wife chided him, Macbeth replied: ‘We are but young in deed.’  Murdering, it would seem, is like making millions – it gets easier as you go.)

We here in Australia stand outside these calamities.  The discussion of the Gaza war is here coloured by the fact that we have here people who identify with either side – it is difficult to imagine any Australian taking the side of Russia.  Or wanting to have anything to do with a nation perpetrating war crimes like those of Hitler and the Nazis.  What decent human being would want to do anything like that?  And we are speaking of a war crime predicated on race, or perhaps worse, caste.

And here it looks like we are all complicit in a denial of the principle of humanity.  International news programs are full of live accounts of the return of hostages in Gaza staged in a manner that is as bizarre as it is brutal.  But we do not hear that much about the deaths of people in either war, and we get next to nothing about the fate of thousands of children who have been kidnapped.

Put the numbers to one side.  Let’s say that there are only 250 children kidnapped.  (Does not the word ‘only’ chill the blood?)  No, let’s say just a dozen, or even a pair, or just one child is involved.  Would the conversation be the same if that one child was a citizen of the US or Israel?

Of course not – and we are all complicit in this denial of universal humanity.  We should be ashamed of ourselves, but the whole history of the world is full of stories of otherwise decent people just lying down before dictators.

That brings me to that recent dreadful scene in the White House.  There was obviously no time to refer to the fate of children there.  It is hard to know what is worse – the conduct of those at the time, or the nonsense offered by sycophants later.

We might look at three words.  Lindsey Graham, the archetypal poodle, said Zelensky should not have taken the ‘bait’.  A bait is something you offer to someone to induce them to act to their detriment.  Why would people negotiating in good faith want to do that to Zelensky?  Well, they were just there to complete a shakedown of a man and a nation on their knees.  They were making an offer they thought Zelensky could not refuse.  I cannot recall any public international conduct as disgraceful as that.  It makes me feel sick.

Many say Vance led the attack.  But Trump commented on the attire of Zelensky immediately he arrived, and one of his goons from the press he favours began the press conference by asking Zelensky why he was not wearing a suit. 

Here again is one of those moments from the Marx Brothers.  The goon said many Americans thought Zelensky showed a lack of respect in turning up like that.  Trump was not surprised by the question and looked mildly quizzical about the answer.  The offended Americans don’t spend most nights in a bomb shelter.  And the goon looks like a drunk out of luck whose idea of decorum is to wear tan sneakers under a suit of the revolting blue favoured by Trump, a man notorious for his lack of taste.  And then of course there is his mate Elon, who turns up at the Oval Office with a silly hat on his head, and a child on his shoulders.  Groucho Marx may have looked cross-eyed at the whole lot of them.

Then there is the issue of ‘respect’.  Some Americans have actually asked Zelensky to apologise for his lack of respect.  According to my Compact OED above this desk, the two primary meanings of that term are ‘a feeling of admiration for someone or something because of their qualities or achievements’ and ‘consideration for the feelings or rights of others.’  You can decide who showed a lack of respect to whom in either sense.  Even at Fox News, does anyone outside the boondocks respect either Trump or Vance?

Finally, Vance, who had once compared his leader to Hitler, deployed his zeal as a convert to bad mouth previous presidents of the U S.  That is appalling misconduct in public, and Vance has never been to the Ukraine – he prefers his laptop.  In his gushing premeditated arrogance, Vance decided to offer his guest a patronising lecture on diplomacy.  According to the same dictionary, ‘diplomacy’ means ‘the profession, activity or skill of managing international relations’ or ‘skill and tact in dealing with people.’  Vance and his boss know nothing of either.  It is impossible to imagine a greater failure of diplomacy.

So, putting to one side the contribution of US armaments to the rubble in Gaza, a one-time New York property developer, now an illiterate convict and the President of the United States, wants to drive out the residents of Gaza and engage in a property development, and then extract wealth from the Ukraine when it has been brought to its knees by his mate and fellow victim of a witch hunt, Vladimir Putin. 

And then, like Richard III, he can say ‘I am myself alone.’ 

And the people of America would be advised to stay home.  They have not a friend in the world.

These were some reflections when in horror yesterday I wrote the following.

Two things seem clear enough.

  1. Trump is aligned with Putin and if necessary will drop Ukraine and NATO.  Either Putin has something over Trump, or they have a common view on the world order.  We are looking at a Trump/Putin axis.
  2. Neither we nor anyone else can ever take the US at its word again.  Trump has the morals of a Mafia don and the US has lost all respect and trust.

We kept saying all this the first time Trump was President, but it is hard to see the U S sinking any lower. 

And the whole nation will have to accept full political responsibility – something they have not been good at since the Puritans arrived and set about cleansing the land of the Indians.  And then offering thanks to their God.  Then they bought slaves.  Then they lied about that in their Declaration. Then the losers in the Civil War did not accept the judgment.  They have not cleared themselves of the stain of slavery.  But then they behaved heroically by rebuilding world order after Hiroshima.  But they have not won a war since.

Now, worst of all, the old Uncle Sam is back in all his arrogance – and, in the full sense of that term, with a ‘vengeance.’

Only someone with an intellect as tortured as that of Vance could think that any of his position is compatible with the teaching of the Jewish Hasid who said we should suffer the little children to come unto him.

Passing Bull 400 – A president on causation

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

We are back in familiar territory.  Is it possible for Donald Trump to get any worse, or to sink even lower? 

If an English, Canadian or Australian prime minister responded to a national tragedy in the way that Trump just did, he or she would be run out of town – it was so gross and offensive and bigoted and stupid and cruel that the culprit could not survive politically. 

What is it about the United States that allows a president to get away with being so utterly unpresidential?  Why do Americans tolerate what no other civilized nation would tolerate?

For reasons I can understand, U S psychiatrists agreed not to debate the mental health of the most powerful man on the planet.  But you do not need medical training to see that this man’s ego is so dominant, that there is little or no room for compassion, or even feelings, for others – or even conscience.  Trump would not know the meaning of the word ‘empathy.’  We should not be bullied or conned from stating the obvious.  This conduct of Trump was an affront to humanity at large.

Trump is in it for Trump – and those who toe his line.  He is not in it for all Americans.  If you are a grieving parent or child in Wichita, but a Democrat – bad luck.  You picked the wrong horse, and you are a loser.  You are in truth the enemy.

A two-party system cannot survive that moral blindness.  In thirty years of hearing cases against the government, I endeavored to recall the maxim that the most important person in the room was the loser – and that I at least had to try to be fair to both sides – even the bloody government!  Sane politicians recognize just that on election night.  Not Trump.

And now we have a new justification for bigotry against people who do not conform – ‘common sense’.  Why not?  It is a perfectly natural reaction to seek scapegoats.  It all started with Eve and the snake, and neither has had a good press since.  Just ask people of colour or queers or migrants or religious minorities.  Or cripples.

But we have a justified hope that people in high office can rise above the gutter – not least when the prejudice is magnified by the complete absence of evidence to support the abuse of the chosen culprit.

Trump is now boasting about how much time he gives the press.  This is because he loves the sound of his own voice.  He embodies the insight of Blaise Pascal:

I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber. 

Trump was followed by two toadies whose own position is so precarious that they must just play follow the leader at all costs – Hegseth and Vance.  They both saluted – dutifully and mindlessly – and revoltingly.  As if in a cabinet presided over by Kim Jong Un – just as it was in 2016.  (Do you remember Kim?  The mad murderer that Trump ‘fell in love’ with – probably just to spite the other murderer Trump admires, Vladimir Putin.)

Go back over a century or so and ask when a government succeeded by being presided over by a greedy illiterate convict surrounded by mindless and gutless sycophants.

It passes all understanding that a nation like the United States could have sunk so low, so fast. 

And there are worrying symptoms that the disease may spread – even to our shores.  We should therefore watch out for people – yes, especially men – who have an affinity for authority, division, and conflict, and who come from an area on the fringe that specialises in festering chips on the shoulder.

The Men Who Killed the News

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

This book by Eric Beecher is long -or it seems long – and it may not tell us much that is new – but we should read it.  I may have missed it, but the subtitle could be the aphorism ‘Power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot through the ages.’

We get all the moguls.  They are devoid or style and humanity.  They are in it for power – bought with money.  The main villain is of course Rupert Murdoch – and the book makes it clear that he could not give a bugger. 

It also makes it clear that things could get worse under the presently nominated successor, Lachlan Murdoch.  If his action against Crikey is any indication, Lachlan has no judgment at all.  In a lifetime in the law, much of it involving the press, I have never seen anything like it.

His sad case raises another point.  None of these moguls shows any sign of contentment.  If life involves the pursuit of happiness, each is a pathetic failure.  And that goes for those who kowtow to them.  I have no idea what it may have been like to work in an Ottoman harem, or Oriental knock shop under the Red Guards, but that is how the well-paid tributaries of Rupert and Sons look to me. 

Rupert is just frankly vicious.  He knows no other way.  And he doesn’t even look like leaving us soon.  He may have time to claim the record of Henry VIII as a retail terminator of his wives – although not even Harry – what an awful rock to build a church on – could do so by email.  When Rupert goes, there will be a massive funeral, but not one mourner.  The damage he has wrought to the governance of Australia and the U S is beyond assessment.

As is the damage he has done to the profession of journalism – that he has devoted his life to perverting.  People in a profession do so as a vocation that serves a public purpose.  The public need for the functions of journalists is as clear as that for doctors and lawyers.  All of them have to put food on the table, but when money becomes paramount, as it does in the Murdoch world, professionalism goes clean out the window, and you are left with tits, lies, and downright hit jobs.

One chapter is called ‘Give ‘em what they want.’  There is a remarkable resemblance between the moguls and people like Trump, Boris, Farage, and now Musk.  They know how to fish the gutter – the contents of which they regard with contempt.  And the people so hooked think it is Christmas – so that the working people of the U S thought they may be better off under a government of billionaire egomaniacs.

All this is so cold that Michael Corleone could have blushed when he replayed the primal sin of murdering a brother.  Rupert sacked the guy who published the Hitler diaries after he, Rupert, had personally ordered their publication – the sort of thing Hitler avoided – and as the truth came out, said ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained – after all, we are in the entertainment business.’  (The German victim at Stern said ‘I couldn’t believe that anyone would have gone to the trouble of forging something so banal.’  That brought to mind Hannah Arendt, and my reaction to scammers posing as bankers – they were so banal, they had to be real.)

And when Rupert said ‘this is the most humble day of my life’, he butchered the language, but he was humiliated because he was caught with his hands in the till.  As was everyone at Fox when they were caught despising Trump.

And in the course of my legal practice, I have seen with my own eyes people very high up in the Melbourne community quail at the prospect of Rupert coming after them.

Mr Beecher quotes a remark of Edmund Burke I could not recall- ‘the world is governed by go-betweens’.  That is so true – and so many wheedling ratbags.  And the press is forever in danger of joining the swill.  It is very sad, because public trust is evaporating in almost every aspect of our communal life. 

Possibly the most potent quote comes at the start – from Janet Malcolm, who is about as respectable as you can get on this subject.

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows what he is doing is morally indefensible.  He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust, and betraying them without remorse. 

Mr Beecham says: Journalism is by nature an exercise in manipulation. 

Well, so in some ways are those who practise medicine or the law.  But the problem for journalists is that they have to spend so much time in dealing with people in politicsor business who are on the make.  And manipulators work on manipulators and whole industries evolve to murder the very idea of truth and to salute evasion.  And they do for lucre, the potential pollutant of every profession.

And then along came AI.  Can anyone trust anyone now?  Mr Beecher concludes by saying that ‘he never imagined that the intervention of machines, controlled by another group of human beings behaving badly, could usurp the moguls and make things worse.’

Perhaps I should insert a form of disclaimer.  In my time in the law I acted for and against the press and have a settled view on where the power lies, but in dealing with journalists on a daily basis about issues I was involved in, I had hardly ever any complaint about dealing with them in confidence.  Which is more than I could say for my lot.

Finally.  I have very much enjoyed many summer schools at Oxford and Cambridge, but those drongoes at Oxford who established the Rupert Murdoch Chair in Communications should be utterly ashamed of themselves.  Alan Bennett said: ‘If the University thinks it’s appropriate to take Rupert Murdoch’s money, perhaps they ought to approach Saddam Hussein to found a chair in peace studies.’ 

Or they could cross the channel to see the sluts in white boots at Pigalle.

Racism at home and abroad

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

In discussing the Voice, I said:

, , , ,

‘Racism’ or ‘racist’ are not terms that I use.  They are too broad in their reach, and they are too often applied as unfair and unwarranted labels of abuse.

But as I understand it, ‘racism’, at least in its pejorative sense,  involves more than a recognition that people can be in some way classified according to race.  It entails a belief that people of some racial backgrounds are in some way inferior to others, or may be discriminated against, on the ground of their race.  And history is replete with stories of the misery that this vice has led to.

Such beliefs are irrational on the part of those holding them  – such people are described as ‘prejudiced’ – and hurtful to the objects of such beliefs.  Those holding such beliefs are open to the accusation that they are not seeing the dignity of other  people that arises merely because they are human.

‘Prejudice’ is almost irrational by definition.  It is irrational to hold that all people of the same tribe or colour have the same character.

But it is equally irrational to hold that reasoned criticism of some in a group evidences a prejudice against members of that group generally.  Those expressing such a view are often trying make themselves out as victims and get sympathy or support that way.

And where two groups are in conflict, people on both sides will tend to be irrational  – prejudiced – in assessing the conduct of either  side.  Their side cannot do wrong.  The other side cannot do anything right.

You can see all this in the history of Ireland.

The English regarded the natives of Ireland with a contempt greater than that with which they greeted the natives of Australia five centuries later.  The Statutes of Kilkenny of 1366 put most of the natives ‘beyond the pale’.  It was apartheid that resembled the Spartan treatment of helots – to the discomfort of Oxbridge. 

You could still find this racist contempt in polite circles much later.  The sometime historian J H Round in 1899 in The Commune of London said:

We went to Ireland because her people were engaged in cutting one another’s throats; we are there now because if we left, they would all be breaking one another’ s heads….The leaders of the Irish people have not so greatly changed since the days when ‘King’ McDonnchadh blinded ‘King’ Dermot’s son, and when Dermot, in return, relieved his feelings by gnawing the nose of his butchered foe.  Claiming  to govern a people when they cannot even govern themselves, they clamor like the baboo of Bengal against that pax Britannica, by the presence of which alone they are preserved from mutual destruction.  No doubt… .they would rather be governed badly by themselves than well by anyone else.  But England also has a voice in the matter; and she cannot  allow the creation of a Pandemonium at her doors.

The white man’s burden – you could not beat that even by crossing Hitler with Kipling.

So, the Irish arrived in Australia with centuries of history of being victims of racism.  To which was now added discrimination against Catholics.  Those two factors led to raw prejudice on their part.  And that led to bitter division in Australia – right through to the end of my childhood.

Ned Kelly was taught ‘Death to any Judas Iscariot who betrays an Irishman to an English  policeman.’  Kelly was a cold-blooded murderer, but many in the Irish diaspora – including otherwise sane lawyers in my lifetime  – treated him as a champion of the dispossessed against the Protestant dominated Philistine society of Melbourne.  It went beyond the Irish.  Manning Clark said: ‘Yet Ned lived on as a hero, as a man through whom Australians were helped to discover our national identity.’   It was another sad instance of our saluting losers.

Daniel Mannix came from Ireland to be Archbishop of Melbourne.  Just as the conscription issue got going here in the First World War, he launched an appeal for victims of the Easter Rising.  He was righteously vehement in his  opposition to the government and conscription.  To whom did he and Irish Catholics owe allegiance – Ireland, Rome, or Australia?   Part of this quandary had plagued England since Becket ran into Henry II.  Australia was dangerously, and venomously, split by Mannix and his followers.  Manning Clark said:

He was the mystic who saw in the face of the Irish peasant the image of Christ.  He was the Irish patriot nursing a grudge against those guilty of that ancient wrong against the Irish people…. For him, any reflection on his people and their reputation was like the sin against the Holy Ghost – something which could never be forgiven.  In Catholic countries, legend had it that when a person committed mortal sin fell across the face of the Virgin.  For Daniel Mannix, any slur on his faith by or on his own people by the eternal enemies of the Irish caused a shadow to pass over his face.

All that proved a fierce cocktail of imported division in the brand-new Commonwealth.  You can see that the fear and loathing felt by Mannix for the English and Protestant establishments, more than matched that felt by the English against the Irish five or so centuries before.   And then you get to the phase where the ultimate insult is for the conduct of your team to be compared with that of the other.  The inarticulate premise is of course that the members of the other team are inferior.  Which takes us back to where we started.

Then, after the next war, Catholics were, fairly or otherwise, seen to be the drivers of the ‘Split’ – the breakdown of the Labor Party that effectively left Australian as a one-party state for a generation. 

It is a notorious fact of history that religious conflicts are the worst of the lot.  And that conflicts within one faith – say Sunni and Shiite, or Protestant and Catholic – are the worst of those.  The stakes are so high.  Which is worse – treason, or heresy?

Well, all this comes to you from a lapsed Prot who now looks askance at most religion (and who could not give a hoot about the schism in Christianity) .  I have no doubt those brought up as Catholics, whether Irish or not, may well see things very differently – and possibly say so; possibly, vehemently. 

It is both natural and inevitable that people will associate with others of the same tribe and faith.  It is equally natural and inevitable that such associations will affect the way we think, frequently with results that bespeak raw prejudice.    It is not a good idea in Melbourne to engage your cab driver in discussion about the governance of Kosovo, Lebanon, or India.

But the few instances mentioned here, which reflect wrongs wrought on people over centuries,  and which fed bad tensions here over generations, show that we must be wary of those whose interest in foreign conflicts leads them to seek to interfere with our own domestic politics here in Australia.  Such people are dangerous.

Racism – Logic – Diasporas – Ireland – Gaza – Kosovo – Balkans – India.