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The politics of paranoia

decision_points_gerogewbushIn his scathing review of George W. Bush’s account of his Presidency, Decision Points, at the LRB, Eliot Weinberger suggests that the most likely Republican candidate for the US presidency in 2012, is Jeb Bush. The fact that we might find ourselves heaving a covert sigh of relief at this news, that at least Jeb Bush isn’t Sarah Palin, shows how much our sense of what is mad and what is dangerous have been elided in the past few years. Of brother George, Weinberger writes: ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 25-01-2011, 10 user comments

After the elections

On 2 November, the United States of America went to the polling booths for their midterms. Five days later, Burma had its first election since 1990. In Afghanistan, citizens are still waiting for the results of an election they held two months ago.

And as I write, Victorians are marching off to our own cardboard constructs to post paper and elect the next state government. Billions of ballots, ink-stained fingers, ticks in boxes. Uncountable words in print, hours and days of self-congratulatory screen and airtime.

Voting Melbourne, 2007 ... read more

Written by Ruby J Murray on 27-11-2010, 2 user comments

Frago 242

I used to think of the Iraq-Afghanistan Wars as somewhat Orwellian: the braying voices of politicians committing us to endless war against unseen enemies, the constant lies and the clumsy but barefaced covering up of those lies, the imprisonment of mildly dissenting citizens for crimes the state decides the nature of in secret and at their discretion and the presentation of the inciters of war as homely, steadfast and moral guardians of the social good.

Now, after the latest WikiLeaks release, it’s Dante that comes to mind. I need some metaphor to help with the visceral response to the revelation of Fragmentary Order 242. I’m not fond of using literary shibboleths to give me a way of coping with human suffering, but reaching for Orwell or the Inferno or both seems meaningful in this instance, as in others. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 25-10-2010, 12 user comments

Don’t mention the war[s]

Gillard & Abbott

Although it is reasonable to expect any election campaign to focus predominantly on domestic issues, it is nevertheless somewhat disappointing that matters of foreign policy have been put on the backburner in this unfulfilling 2010 Labor/Liberal contest. Aside, that is, from the essentially meaningless Tony Abbott mantra ‘turning back the boats,’ and both sides affirming an Australian military presence in Afghanistan. Surely there must be more going on in the wor

Written by Dan Bigna on 20-08-2010, 19 user comments

Thinking about democracy

It is odd, how we think of democracy these days – as something ordinary, inherent to the West, something to strive for yet something taken for granted, also. It is a concept that has plagued the politically vexed mind since time immemorial, well, at least since our ancient forebears. Aristotle envisioned it, Plato feared it (‘Democracy passes into despotism’), as did Mill, and Machiavelli idealised it, believing that the majority would preclude oppression, which was preferable to the tyranny of the few, who would always look to subjugation to maintain control and order. It used to be a radical concept: tyrannical or feudal systems didn’t benefit the majority and were subject to the whims and natures of the privileged minority.

If we were to ask a passerby in the street, ‘How do you define democracy?’ it’s impossible to predict, based on recent observations of democracy in action in Australia, in the Unites States, in Israel, in the outbreak of democracy across the free world, what their definition would look like. George Orwell alluded to this when he wrote, ‘It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.’ ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 29-07-2010, 17 user comments

The passing of Generation Kill

Julian Assange said dryly, on the release of what he called the Afghan War Diaries, that war is just one damn thing after another, which is a somewhat polite way of putting it, and makes him sound a bit like Biggles. Perhaps ‘one fucking atrocity after another’ would have been more to the point.

The day before the WikiLeaks documents were released, I finished reading Evan Wright’s Generation Kill, a book I’d been meaning to get around to reading but life, etc. Generation Kill has become something of a celebrity book now. It’s Wright’s account of being embedded for two months with a company of marines of the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion spearheading the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Wright, who cut his reporting teeth – if that’s the word – writing porn reviews for Hustler, where he seems to have learned something about misogyny, has gained something of a reputation as a sort of latter day Hunter S. Thompson. A Thompson he isn’t, but he is a fine observer and takes full advantage of his role as an embedded journo. We won’t get an Australian equivalent as the ADF controls its info on its operations with an obsessive po-faced secrecy that borders on the ludicrous, and a compliant media ensures that the Afghanistan and Iraq wars are events we are not going to be asked to think about too much. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 28-07-2010, 50 user comments

Daniel Ellsberg: The Most Dangerous Man in America

Most kids experience an amount of emotional turbulence on the way to adulthood, and I was no exception. And although there were aspects of my adolescence that make me cringe to this day, I could always be certain that at the end of the school day, I had a home to return to with my own bedroom, a dinner table, heating in winter and a backyard to assist in the fantasy of one day playing for the Australian cricket team.

I mention this because the foremost image remaining with me after a viewing of The Most Dangerous Man in America – a compelling documentary on Daniel Ellsberg who leaked a comprehensive RAND Corporation study officially titled United States-Vietnam Relations 1945-1967, otherwise known as the Pentagon Papers, to the New York Times in 1971 – is of a young Vietnamese girl in obvious distress as US marines burn her village to the ground. Such images help explain why Ellsberg sacrificed a promising Government career to inform the American public that the Vietnam War had been packaged and sold as containment of the Communist threat, when in fact the historical record, as recorded in the Pentagon Papers, illuminated fervent imperial ambition across successive US administrations. ... read more

Written by Dan Bigna on 13-07-2010, 3 user comments

War = Dead children

One of the things about working with very young children for a long time is that when another 21st-century catastrophe is revealed to us, the first thing one tends to visualise is the actual concrete effect on children. And the thing about these catastrophes – wars, economic meltdowns, terrorist attacks, illegal occupations and so on – is that children are always affected, are, in fact, usually in the middle of what’s talking place – underneath the missile strike, in front of the tanks and bulldozers, in the middle of the family with the suddenly unemployed parents, walking to the shops past the wired-up suicide bomber, riding in the backseat of the family car as it approaches a US army checkpoint. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 9-06-2010, 21 user comments

The price tag for the forever war

At the Emerging Writers’ Festival on Sunday, I mentioned that the US had spent 900 billion dollars on its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As it happens, my information was out of date. Actually, the bill now stands at a round trillion dollars.

Yep. A trillion. That’s a one and then twelve zeroes.

To put that in perspective, the cost of ending world hunger comes in at approximately $30 billion per year. In other words, for the money already spent, the US could have wiped out starvation across the planet for the next thirty-three years.

What did the money go on instead?

Well, here’s Wiki’s tabulation of the various casualty estimates from Iraq. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 31-05-2010, 10 user comments

The WikiLeaks war


In early April, when WikiLeaks released the video of two US Apache gunships machine-gunning civilians in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad in July 2007, anybody who watched it would have perhaps been moved by two things. Firstly, the appalling, terrifying, gut-wrenching tension in watching the endless circling of the two Apache’s as they agitate for the order to open fire (‘C’mon! Let us shoot!’). Secondly, the US soldier on the ground whose voice you strain desperately to listen for amid the radio chatter. Who pulls an unconscious and seriously wounded child out of the shot-up van, and attempts to get her and her brother to medical aid, requesting assistance to get the children to an American military hospital, a request that was refused. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 11-05-2010, 28 user comments

This is what the war looks like

Wikileaks has just released this footage from a US Apache helicopter killing a group of civilians in Baghdad in 2007. The clip shows the crew strafing the men from the air and then returning to kill the occupants of a van attempting to collect the wounded. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 6-04-2010, 30 user comments

105 000 tattoos

While we’re on politics and art and setting things on fire, Iraqi American artist Wafaa Bilal is trying to grapple with the enormity of the death toll in Iraq. In this video, courtesy of Democracy Now, he discusses his latest project, …and Counting – a 24-hour live tattooing performance. He also talks about his previous projects, what drives him, the death of his brother and life in Iraq.

Art does not have to be confined to a physical space, the gallery or museums, but now we have the power of the internet, when we could enter people’s homes and offices and engage them in the dialogue. Art is not only there to educate. Art is there to agitate, as well.

... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 11-03-2010, No comments

How blogging and hip-hop are undermining the US military from within

‘I bet you never stop-loss nobody no more.’

Iraq veteran Marc Hall, aka hip-hop artist Marc Watercus, is currently in pre-trial confinement awaiting court-martial in Georgia. He was jailed on 11 December because he wrote and performed a song called ‘Stop-loss’ – which he then sent to the Pentagon after learning that they were sending him on a second deployment to Iraq.

Stop-loss, an initiative of the Bush Administration, is a policy that ensures there are enough troops to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan by keeping soldiers active after their contracts have ended. Aka: ‘involuntary servitude’.

According to the Pentagon, ‘the policy has affected 120,000 soldiers since 2001, with 13,000 American soldiers currently serving under stop-loss’. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 2-02-2010, 2 user comments

This is what a war crime looks like

Actually, no. This is what a civilian massacre by Blackwater contractors in Iraq looks like.

... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 30-01-2010, 2 user comments

video of US military trainers at work in Iraq

The mentality of modern day colonialism, captured in a five minute Youtube clip.

... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 26-12-2009, No comments