“Fascism rears its head.” That was the caption the Commonwealth Security Service (CSS) – the precursor to ASIO – placed on a clipping from Smith’s Weekly dated 27 March 1943. The article discussed the Institute of Public Affairs, recently convened by leaders of business and industry and underwritten by the Collins House group of mining companies.
We live in a winter of disconnect. As the permafrost melts and global warming accelerates, bringing us to the cusp of catastrophic environmental changes, governments and corporations continue their campaign of denial.
Earlier this year, the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) announced plans for a porn site intended to highlight animal cruelty. Overland asked Katrina Fox and Stephanie Honor Convery for their thoughts on the relationship between sexualised imagery and political advocacy.
Michael Brull makes two key claims that lead him to confusing issues of principle and strategy for a Left forced to deal with political Islam’s influence. First, he argues that while ‘[p]olitical Islam can take many different forms’, it is not anti-imperialism, it is not feminism, and it is not socialism – and he backs this with examples of reactionary policies and betrayals by various Islamist formations.
The wave of revolutions sweeping the Arab world represents a sharp break from almost a decade of defensive struggle against triumphant neoliberalism and neo–conservatism. Philosopher Peter Hallward calls it an opportunity to break the pattern of TINA (the notion that ‘there is no alternative’ to the relentless assault by ruling elites on their peoples), while Slavoj Žižek celebrates the revolution’s appeal to the ‘eternal idea of freedom, justice and dignity’.34
Read 'Michael Brull versus Tad Tietze, ′That political Islam is not a friend of the Left′'
There’s nothing rational about the death of someone being the moment for discussing a whole era – indeed it can be absolutely distorting (obscuring in this case, the degree to which Thatcher was the front-person for a phalanx of interconnected ideological-interest forces). But there’s no way out of it. The whole culture is replaying thirty years worth of battles over ten days.
Continue reading 'Is Richard Dawkins responsible for Thatcherism?' 9
Here, richly, with ridiculous display,
The Politician’s corpse was laid away.
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged
I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.
I’ve generally considered the amusement some leftists take from Gerard Henderson’s blog to be slightly distasteful, an echo of the nineteenth-century fashion for visiting London’s asylum to giggle at the Bedlamites as they grimaced and drooled and tugged at themselves.
Sydney Anglican Archbishop Peter Jensen made a truly revealing comment on ABC’s Q&A last night. It wasn’t when he came out in support of Jim Wallace (and echoed the logic of Todd Akin), stating that a lot of people have told him that homosexuality is bad for your health, and that there’s a lot of literature to support the claim.
One of the founders of the German Greens, Jutta Ditfurth, left her party in the early 1990s. She formulated the expression ‘neoliberals on bikes’ to highlight that the German Greens did not stand in opposition to the destructive and inequitable logic of laissez faire capitalism – in fact, they were often embracing of it.
Right-wing even for Likud, he objected to the peace treaty with Egypt, resisted any concessions to Palestinians, was foreign minister during the Sabra and Chatila massacres, prime minister during the First Intifada, and categorically opposed the Oslo agreements and Netanyahu’s imaginary devotion to them.
The ‘asylum seeker debate’ in Australia is not really a debate. In fact, it’s not really directly about asylum seekers.
What happens when the disengagement of the populace from political life gets thoroughly normalised? In such circumstances, the political class and its agents seem, almost by definition, able to perform feats that ordinary people simply cannot. That seems to me the context for the new hegemony of superheroes. The genre no longer presents as wish-fulfillment so much as a kind of realism – an accurate depiction of the way society works. We are, in other words, already living in a comic book.
I have long been meaning to write about atheism and the Left. The Q&A with Dawkins and Pell, and Jeff Sparrow’s long and thoughtful essay are as good an opportunity as any.