The tributes for the late Democratic Senator from California, Dianne Feinstein, heaped up as word got out. Having served as San Francisco mayor and a senator for three decades from what, on paper at least, is meant to be a progressive state, Feinstein proved herself to be an establishment creature of gusto and brass. The tributes have been laudatory in their endorsed, burnished sexism – womanhood heralded as a bulwark for the National Security State (NSS). They do show, on some level, that she could play and scrap on the imperial board along with her male colleagues in ways equally…
Author: Dr. Binoy Kampmark
Things did not go so well this time around. When the worn Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy turned up banging on the doors of Washington’s powerful on September 21, he found fewer open hearts and an increasingly large number of closed wallets. The old ogre of national self-interest seemed to be presiding and was in no mood to look upon the desperate leader with sweet acceptance. Last December, Zelensky and Ukrainian officials did not have to go far in hearing endorsements and encouragement in their efforts battling Moscow’s armies. The visit of the Ukrainian president, as White House Press Secretary Karine…
Suella Braverman has made beastliness a trait in British politics. The UK Home Secretary, fed on the mush and mash of anti-refugee sentiment, has been frantically trying to find her spot in the darkness of inhumanity. Audaciously, and with grinding ignorance, she persists in her rather grisly attempts to kill the central assumptions of international refugee protection, flawed as they might be, elevating the role of the sovereign state to that of tormenter and high judge. In doing so Braverman shows herself to believe in the ultimate prerogative of the state to be decisively cruel rather than consistently humane. The…
No power in history has exercised such global reach. With brutal immediacy, forces from the United States may be dispatched and deployed within hours to combat any designated adversary. From its webbed network of bases official, semi-official and undeclared, Washington’s imperium can exert heft in a number of military domains with a ruthlessness the envy of any of its rivals. In the aftermath of NATO’s attack and destabilisation of Libya in 2011, France and the United States entrenched their military involvement across the Sahel. The French focused on creating G-5 Sahel spanning Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger, including…
It was a short stint, involving a six-member delegation of Australian parliamentarians lobbying members of the US Congress and various relevant officials on one issue: the release of Julian Assange. If extradited to the US from the United Kingdom to face 18 charges, 17 framed with reference to the oppressive, extinguishing Espionage Act of 1917, the Australian founder of WikiLeaks risks a 175-year prison term. Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce, Labor MP Tony Zappia, Greens Senators David Shoebridge and Peter Whish-Wilson, Liberal Senator Alex Antic and the independent member for Kooyong, Dr. Monique Ryan, are to be viewed with respect, their…
One particularly bad habit the news is afflicted by is a tendency to fall into discussions about itself. Its members, some of them at least, used to call it the “Fourth Estate,” an unelected chamber of scribblers supposedly meant to keep an eye on the other three, yet finding itself at times distracted, gossip-driven, and rumour filled by its own exploits. The greatest distraction that weathered province falls is coverage of its own moguls and pop-representatives. When it came to covering, for instance, the wiles and frauds of Robert Maxwell, little could be trusted about the brow-beating bruiser’s exploits. You…
Fighting the Diaspora: India’s Campaign Against Khalistan Diaspora politics can often be testy. While the mother country maintains its own fashioned narrative, governed by domestic considerations, the diaspora may, or may not be in accord with the agreed upon story. While countries such as China and Iran are seen as the conventional bullies in this regard, spying and monitoring the activities of their citizens in various countries, India has remained more closeted and inconspicuous. Of late, that lack of conspicuousness has been challenged. On September 18, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau revealed that there were “credible allegations” that agents in…
During the Cold War, assassinations most foul were entertained as necessary measures to advance the set cause. In Latin America, military regimes were keenly sponsored as reliably brutal antidotes to the Marxist tic, or at the very least the tic in waiting. Any government deemed by Washington to be remotely progressive would become ripe targets for violent overthrow. To this day, the murderers of Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende, (wait, we hear the first apologist mock, he was not murdered but suicided out of choice) along with thousands of innocents continues to receive briefs in their defence. On September 15,…
The broad lament from commentators about global economic growth is that China is not pulling its weight. Not enough is being done to stir the sinews and warm the blood, at least when it comes to the GDP counters. And many such pundits hail from countries, most prominently the United States, which have done everything they can to clip the wings of the Middle Kingdom even as they demand greater strides in its growth. “China’s 40-year boom is over,” declared the Wall Street Journal last month in a tone of some satisfaction. “The economic model that took the country from…
The tear-squeeze remembering those who died in the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington has become an annual event. In the words of US President George W. Bush, it was an attack on “our very freedom”. The US had been targeted because it was “the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.” Five decades ago, that brightest beacon of freedom and opportunity proved instrumental in destroying a democracy in Latin America. (Others before and since followed.) The 1973 coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in favour of General Augusto Pinochet, an…
The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 has been justified by Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “special military operation” with a few barbed purposes, among them cleaning the country’s stables of Nazis. As with so many instances of history, it was not entirely untrue, though particularly convenient for Moscow. At the core of many a nationalist movement beats a reactionary heart, and the trauma-strewn stretch that is Ukrainian history is no exception. A central figure in this drama remains Stepan Bandera, whose influence during the Second World War have etched him into the annals of Ukrainian history. …
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi really wanted to make an impression for his guests and dignitaries, and coarse realities would simply not do. The occasion of the G20 summit presented him with a chance to give the city an aggressive touch-up, touching up a good number of its residents along the way, not to mention the city’s animal life as well. As for those remaining nasties, these could be dressed up, covered, and ignored. Elements of the Potemkin Village formulae – give the impression the peasants are well-fed, for instance – could be used when needed. One Delhi resident, Saroaj…
It all tallies. War, investments and returns. The dividends, solid, though the effort expended – at least by others – awful and bloody. While a certain narrative in US politics continues in the vein of traditional cant and hustling ceremony regarding the Ukraine War – “noble freedom fighters, we salute you!” twinned with “Russian aggressors will be defeated” – there are the inadvertently honest ones let things slip. A subsidised war pays, especially when it is fought by others. The latter narrative has been something of a retort, an attempt to deter a growing wobbling sentiment in the US about…
They really are a brutal lot. While the Queensland Labor Government croons on matters regarding rights, liberties and, it should be said, the plight of the First Nations Peoples, its policy, notably on youth detention, is a contradictory abomination. This situation finds itself repeated across the country, though the Sunshine State, as it is sometimes called, does it better than most. In Australia, jurisdictions have persistently refused to raise the age of criminal responsibility. Down under, troubled children are treated as threatening ogres, monsters to cage rather than educate. Legislatures and lawmakers have taken fiendish pleasure in using more stick…
On August 1, protesters against the Burrup Hub expansion in Western Australia, a project of one of Australia’s most ruthless fossil fuel companies, took to the Perth home of its CEO, Meg O’Neill. The CEO of Woodside was not impressed. In fact, she seemed rather distressed. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a member of the business community, in professional athletics, or just a school kid… everybody has the right to feel safe in their own home,” she subsequently told a breakfast event. “What happened Tuesday has left me shaken, fearful, and distressed.” In distress, opportunities for revenge grow. Members of…
Ambrose Bierce, whose cynicism supplies a hygienic cold wash, suggested that politics was always a matter of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. It involved conducting public affairs for private advantage. How right he was. One way of justifying such an effort is through using such words as the “national interest” or “public interest” in justifying government policies, from the erroneous to the criminal. They become weasel-like terms, soiling and spoiling language. In various large-scale industries, companies can find themselves in the pink with governments keen to underwrite their losses during times of crisis while taking a soft approach…
Australia experienced this in February 2021. Facebook had gotten nastily stroppy, wishing to dictate public policy to the Commonwealth government. To teach Canberra mandarins a lesson, it literally unfriended the entire country, scrubbing all news platforms of content and making any posted links through the platform inaccessible. It mattered not that the content involved the tawdry details of celebrity love affairs gone wrong or advice on how to respond to a cyclone. The users of an entire country had been cancelled. For a time, a blissful blackhole had appeared at the centre of Australia’s information scape. Facebook’s parent company Meta…
In 2022, the US Army selected Bell Textron’s tiltrotor V280 as its Black Hawk replacement. This caused more than a few eyebrows to rise in consternation. The V-22 Osprey tiltrotor, flown by the Marine Corps and Special Operations Command, has had what can only be euphemistically regarded as a patchy record. It has been singularly odd in terms of the procurement and acquisition process, topped off by a tendency for killing its users while continuing to maintain a keen following. To date, no one has been held to account for what would, in any other policy context, be deemed criminally…
Whitewashing Down Under The Vietnam War tormented and tore the societies who saw fit to participate in it. It defined a generation culturally and politically in terms creative and fractious. And it showed up the rulers to be ignorant rather than bright; blundering fools rather than sages secure in their preaching. Five decades on, the political classes in the United States and Australia are still seeking to find reasons for intervening in a country they scant understood, with a fanatic’s persuasion, and ideologue’s conviction, a moralist’s certainty. Old errors die hard. Leaders are left the legacy of having to…
We know what the regime is like. Starving a country, bombing its hospitals and strafing its schools has been minor fare for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The population of Yemen has found this out to their colossal cost. Add to this the killing of dissident journalists, the enthusiastic employment of capital punishment, and an assortment of other merry brutalities, the House of Saud comes across as a fine specimen of barbaric endeavour. At least, as many of their supporters will say, they like international sporting events, and are willing to throw money at, if not completely purchase, full events.…
Times of crisis can be glorious for some. The Great Depression bred its share of wealthy profiteers. The First and Second World Wars fostered many a multimillionaire. Over the bodies of millions, the returns for armaments companies were unparalleled. And during the current “cost of living crisis,” as it is so often dubbed, there are companies beaming at their profit margins even as they affect false modesty. In the United Kingdom, for instance, earnings for household energy suppliers are booming, despite crushing bills. British Gas reported a staggering nine-fold increase in profits, from £98 million in 2022 to £969 million…
What happens when the looters are looted? Perhaps that strange sense of satisfaction called justice, an offence cancelled by another. One therefore greets the realisation that the British Museum has been suffering a number of such cases with some smugness. What makes them even more striking is the inability of staff to have picked up on the matter in the first place. When they did come to light, the habitual tendency to bury, or deny matters as best as possible, also found form. On August 16, the British Museum stated in a press release that an independent review into its…
Australia’s funding priorities have been utterly muddled of late. At the Commonwealth level, there is cash to be found in every conceivable place to support every absurd military venture, as long as it targets those hideous authoritarians in Beijing. It seemed utterly absurd that, even as the Australian federal government announced its purchase of over 200 tomahawk cruise missiles – because that is exactly what the country needs – there are moves afoot to prune and cut projects conducted by the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD). On July 10, an email sent to all staff by the head of division, Emma…
Climate change litigation is falling into pressing fashion. In Australia, the 2021 case of Sharma, despite eventually failing before three judges in the Federal Court in 2022, suggested that ministers had been put on notice regarding a potential duty of care regarding the consequences of approving fossil fuel projects. The lower court decision had shaken the fossil fuel industry with its finding in favour of the eight children and their litigation guardian, an octogenarian nun. Justice Bromberg found that considering the potential harm arising from carbon dioxide emissions was a mandatory consideration of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.…
The atomic bomb created the conditions of contingent catastrophe, forever placing the world on the precipice of existential doom. But in doing so, it created a philosophy of acceptable cruelty, worthy extinction, legitimate extermination. The scenarios for such programs of existential realisation proved endless. Entire departments, schools of thought, and think tanks were dedicated to the absurdly criminal notion that atomic warfare could be tenable for the mere reason that someone (or some people) might survive. Despite the relentless march of civil society against nuclear weapons, such insidious thinking persists with a certain obstinate lunacy. It only takes a brief…
It was a shallow affair. Reputed to have exceptionally poor hairdo, the figure who became one of Europe’s, and indeed one of the globe’s most lasting and influential politicians, inspired memes aplenty for what she sported on her bonce. The teases, the parodying, the satire, began to bite. Stylists were sought in an attempt to do away with the soup bowl severity of her hair, all part of the rebrand in running against Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in 2005. There was Udo Walz, whose clients included Chancellor Schröder himself, and such celebrity terrorists such as Ulrike Meinhof. Former world hairdressing champion,…
FIFA is a funny organisation. Mafia-run, obscenely corrupt, it governs the most popular game on the planet with a shameless, muscular vigour that must make other criminal enterprises green with envy. But even its members must find the curious limitations to viewing matches of the 2023 Women’s World Cup being held in Australia and New Zealand odd, especially given the organisation’s efforts to promote the appeal of the game. Billed as the most popular women’s tournament ever, Australians have been rationed in their share of viewable matches. A mere 15 matches are available from the free-to-air service on Channel Seven. …
In May last year, the Washington Post ran a fairly typical piece about what the paper perceives as an unjustified conservative mania regarding President Joe Biden’s son. While those in the US worried “about such things as inflation and the war in Ukraine, the top concerns of congressional Republicans can be ranked roughly as follows: 1) Hunter Biden; 2) Hunter Biden; 3) Hunter Biden; 4) Hunter Biden.” None of this can get away from the fact that Hunter Biden is an inkblot for his father and the Democrats. What matters is how big that blot is, and how far the…
In January 2010, the then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, doing what she does best, grasped a platitude and ran with it in launching, of all things, an institution called the Newseum. “Information freedom,” she declared, “supports the peace and security that provide a foundation for global progress.” The same figure has encouraged the prosecution of such information spear carriers as Julian Assange, who dared give the game away by publishing, among other things, documents from the State Department and emails from Clinton’s own presidential campaign in 2016 that cast her in a rather dim light. Information freedom is…
“X” marks the spot. For the modern advertiser, this is problematic. It breathes pornographic escape, self-denial, elusive treasure, irresistible capture, compelling lasciviousness. And now Elon Musk has decided to impose himself upon a brand he loved as a plaything of juvenile ecstasy. Farewell the bird of Twitter; welcome the X of Musk. The company rebrand is certainly all Muskian in manner, part of his monomaniac obsession with the letter. In 1999, he created the online bank X.com, which eventually merged with PayPal the following year. Just shy of two decades later, Musk reacquired the X.com site from PayPal. Over time,…
