Overland literary journal

Occupy Melbourne: the return

If it achieves nothing else, by locking out all its staff, Qantas has shown why the Occupy movement matters.

Naturally, the usual performing seals will bark and clap their fins in the Murdoch press about how Alan Joyce had no option. He had to crush the union, you see – it’s that old Vietnam logic about destroying the village to save it.

But, if you pardon the obvious pun, that’s not gonna fly with most Australians.

Joyce has, after all, just awarded himself a pay rise of 71 per cent, bringing his remuneration up from $2.9 million to – cough! – more than $5 million a year.

No, it’s not a coincidence, nor just a matter of poor timing. You get the big bucks as a CEO precisely because you’re prepared to push through this kind of bastardy.

That’s how the system works, in Australia as in the US. It’s a feature and not a bug, and it’s why the occupy slogan resonates. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 29-10-2011, 12 user comments

Occupy Melbourne: some initial thoughts

The Melbourne City Square was once a public space before the various private bars and hotels and restaurants that now dominate the area claimed it for their own. In that respect, it provided a fitting venue for Occupy Melbourne to reclaim.

By my count, there were about a thousand people in the square today: a thousand people talking with each other about politics and social change.

This is unequivocally a good thing.

There’s been a lot of criticism of the Occupy Oz protests, most of it remarkably vapid.

Yes, everyone knows that, as every pundit tediously repeated last week, the situation here’s not the same as the US: the economy’s more stable and unemployment’s lower. But so what? ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 15-10-2011, 60 user comments

‘No nation can liberate another nation’

Malalai Joya's talks at the Melbourne Writers' Festival presented the war in Afghanistan quite differently to how it's normally discussed here.

Whereas Australians are told that, without NATO, Afghanistan would descend into civil war, Joya explained that civil war is already raging; where we're assured that foreign intervention protects Afghans from the Taliban, Joya says that the Taliban are, in essence, already in power, since the warlords and fundamentalists aligned with the Karzai regime share all the Taliban's most reactionary attitudes. She explains more in her interview with Overland, which is now online. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 5-09-2011, 1 user comment

Jay Rosen: ‘Don’t you think that’s a little strange?’

The text of Jay Rosen’s Big Idea presentation from the MWF is available in full. There’s lots to like in it: his instinctive revulsion at a TV program called Insiders on which journalists interview journalists, his dissection of the ‘cult of saviness’, his argument about the cult of innocence that plays out in ‘he said, she said’ journalism. Here, for instance, is his analysis of a recent (and, as he says, not especially obnoxious) piece on the Labor Party and gay marriage:

The insiders are worried about how their conference is going to “play” in the media. They are trying to make the story come out a certain way. Reporters grant them anonymity so these struggles can be publicized. But if today’s media report about politics is about how the media will be reporting a political event tomorrow, there’s obviously something circular in that. And this is how it begins to make sense to call the journalists “insiders.” Everyone is engaged in the production of media narratives. Journalists and politicians are both “inside” the story making machinery.

... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 28-08-2011, 2 user comments

Occupy online special

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 26-08-2011, Comments Off

The Left, the Right and the New Atheism: a response to PZ Myers

Given the interest in my recent New Matilda article, I’d already planned to write more on the New Atheism. Now that PZ Myers, a speaker at the 2012 Melbourne conference, has replied to that piece, it seems appropriate to continue the discussion as a response to him.

Myers provides the following summation of my critique of the New Atheists: I argue, he says, that they are ‘all goose-stepping fascists come to destroy liberal and progressive dreams with [their] “very, very right wing” atheistical fanaticism.’

Actually, I didn't argue anything of the kind. The problem with the New Atheism is not its fanaticism, a word I did not use; I do not think that the New Atheists are fascists, and nowhere did I say that they are. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 14-06-2011, 136 user comments

The great carbon hypocrisy

Hypocrisy is embedded in the DNA of the Liberal Party, particularly since the turn from patrician conservatism to a right-wing populism that, by its nature, upholds well-salaried blowhards as the ordained representatives of the common folk. In response to Barnaby Joyce’s attack upon Cate Blanchett as rich and out of touch, it’s easy to point to Abbott’s enthusiasm for billionaire mining magnates, whose anti-carbon tax rally surely represented one of the more grotesque mobilisations in Australian political history: a cabal of wealthy parasites wrapping themselves in the banners of the oppressed, just to lower their tax threshold. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 30-05-2011, 9 user comments

Death of bin Laden

So Osama bin Laden has been killed. Ok. Now what?

In the short term, an orgy of ghoulish US nationalism, as the media drools over the bloodied corpse,  a body that, we're told, the US now has in its possession, to be (no doubt) lovingly displayed at some future date.

Bin Laden was a mass murderer and no friend of the Left. Still, what does it say about our era that that the decade's biggest news story centres not on a new scientific discovery nor a medical breakthrough nor the extension of healthcare nor the provision of public housing but rather on the celebrations attendant upon a public enemy being gunned to death?

Will the wars come to an end? Of course not. Bin Laden never played any role in Iraq nor in the Afghan insurgency. As for the new quagmire in Libya, well, that's a pretty good example of how the the killing can continue without any reference to al-Qaeda whatsoever -- Gaddafi is to that war what bin Laden was to the other two. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 2-05-2011, 7 user comments

Bread and circuses, bread and roses

The royal family is an institutional codification of your worthlessness. No matter how you slice and dice it, an aristocracy, by definition, rests on the brute fact that they are royal and you are common, and that, therefore, their DNA entitles them to privileges and honours from which you will always and forever be excluded. The rest of the anti-democratic trappings (the innate sexism, the official sectarianism, etc) flows, more or less inexorably, from the unbridgeable chasm between a hereditary nobility and any form of democratic governance. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 29-04-2011, 11 user comments

Parallel lives

Regular readers  might remember an extraordinary interview in Overland 196 with a man called Thomas Shepherd, who had been an undercover agent for ASIO inside various left-wing organisations for over fifteen years. Shepherd kept his identity secret from his closest associates, even embarking upon a relationship with someone who knew nothing of his secret life. Before his eventual exposure, he grew sympathetic to the ideals of those he was spying upon. The whole experience left him with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, for which he was  seeking compensation.

A few days ago, the British Guardian published a remarkably similar piece, a feature on a man called Mark Kennedy. Kennedy had spent seven years as an undercover police agent infiltrating the British environmental movement. He, too, became romantically involved with some of those he was investigating and adopted their ideals -- indeed, at one point in the interview, he criticises the movement for not being radical enough.  And like Shepherd, Kennedy now suffers from PTSD. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 28-03-2011, 3 user comments

After a nuclear event

We don’t know yet how serious the nuclear crisis in Japan will be. With luck, the leaks will be contained soon. God knows, the Japanese people have suffered enough. But what’s happened so far highlights the fundamental problem with nuclear energy.

The case against atomic power is – and has always been – very straightforward.

Nuclear reactors produce substances that are astonishingly deadly. Those substances stay toxic for tens of thousands of years. No-one has yet developed an adequate means of disposing of nuclear waste, something that the boosters of atomic energy rarely like to mention. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 15-03-2011, 14 user comments

Decision Points: a review

George W Bush comes, he says, from ‘a family of bestselling authors’. His mother and father wrote books, as did his sister, his wife and his daughter. Even his parents’ dogs, C. Fred and Millie, ‘authored their own works’.

Well, if Millie can do it, W can, too – and, one presumes, using much the same technique.

The real author of Decision Points seems to be speechwriter Christopher Michel, a twenty something wunderkind, who has tweaked Bush’s notes into the bland but serviceable prose of a corporate press release. As the title suggests, the book’s neither a memoir nor a biography but an account of those moments when the man who called himself the Decider did his best deciding. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 21-02-2011, 4 user comments

Australia, anything to say to Mubarak?

On 11 December 2010, Australian foreign minister Kevin Rudd met with the Egyptian dictator Mubarak. At a press conference with his Egyptian counterpart, Rudd said:

[C]ould I begin by again affirming the strength of this important bilateral relationship. A 60th anniversary celebration is important because it causes us to reflect on what we have done together and what we resolve to do together in the future.

DFAT gives more details on the relationship between Australia and Egypt:

Australia has friendly and positive relations with Egypt, underpinned by strong people-to-people links. Trade, particularly in agriculture and resources, has long been an important aspect of the bilateral relationship. Australia works constructively with Egypt on international security issues including counter-terrorism, disarmament and the prevention of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 29-01-2011, 10 user comments

Tunisia and the zombification of war

At the recent joint meeting between Australian and British foreign and defense secretaries, Britain’s Liam Fox made an astonishing confession. ‘In terms of having adequate manning, in terms of having adequate equipment,’ he said, ‘we’ve really only been in Afghanistan for the last year.’

Get that? The previous nine years (nine years!) had been, according to Fox, so thoroughly mismanaged that they may as well have not happened at all. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 20-01-2011, 6 user comments