“The dead albatross that hangs around our neck is our legacy of arrogance, racism. And we must struggle to atone, to reconstruct, and to create a different historical system.” So wrote the late sociologist and thinker Immanuel Wallerstein in unequivocal tones of repentance on Europe’s legacy, its “oldest disgrace.” Wallerstein was one of those refreshing types in an increasingly restrictive academy, the big picture sort rich with colour, engaged in splashing out portraits of historical development. Dreary minutiae and specialism was not for him even if he could play the game when needed, and his quest in sociology and history…
Author: Dr. Binoy Kampmark
It took gallons and flagons of blood, but it eventuated, a squeeze of history into a parchment of possibility: the Taliban eventually pushed the sole superpower on this expiring earth to a deal of some consequence. (The stress is on the some – the consequence is almost always unknown.) “In principle, on paper, yes we have reached an agreement,” claimed the US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad on the Afghan channel ToloNews. “But it is not final until the president of the United States also agrees to it.” The agreement entails the withdrawal (the public relations feature of the exercise teasingly calls…
The moment the liquid hits the mark, lips on the balloon rim, the hand having swirled the mellow colouring to life, the throat anticipates. It is tenderising, the gentle burn finding its way down to the belly. Most cultures have their tribute of firewater, or hellfire’s brew, but France’s brandy Cognac, in its various incarnations, applies the blow with soft relentlessness. You are drinking a chronicle of pleasure, a full archive of sensations. In France, cognac does not sell. The French tend to avoid it the way Italians avoid their variant of international cuisine (short cuts, adjustments, unforgivable compromises), or…
Cringeworthy, a touch molesting in sentiment: this was the celebratory occasion of the gathering of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison with his East Timorese counterparts. During the course of its history, the state has been pillaged and bombed, its residents massacred and its politicians spied upon. The exposure of that seedy little matter of espionage came in December 2013, when it was revealed that an Australian intelligence officer known as Witness K had spilled the beans on how his masters were attempting to undercut the East Timorese in their 2004 negotiations for a maritime boundary. The Australian delegation had eyes…
The Brexit no deal prospect is engendering an element of lunacy fast seeping into every pore of the British political establishment. As with all steeped in such thinking, some of it made sense. Prime Minister Boris Johnson had been inspired by a mild dictatorial urge, seeking to suspend the UK parliament five weeks out from October 31. This has been described as nothing short of a coup, or, if you are the speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, a “constitutional outrage”. Legal expertise was called upon to answer the question whether Johnson’s proroguing of parliament was, in fact,…
“Morality is a job for priests. Not P.R. men.” Tim Bell, New York Times, Feb 4, 2018 Lord Bell is dead, but his public relations tinkering, with all its gloss gilding and deception, remains. It was Tim Bell who cut his teeth in this dubious field, assisting Margaret Thatcher win the 1979 UK election through a mix of emotive tugging images with varying degrees of accuracy. It was also Bell who elevated public relations in politics from the level of unpolished turd worship to the level of, well, acceptable turd worship. Bell’s own preference was for a urinary image, corporate…
One of the brothers Koch, David, has shuffled off this mortal coil, and the pious few looking at his passing may well think he is making it tough for camels passing through needles. As part of the Brothers Koch, he presided over a corporate empire that did its pinching best to wrest control from the purses of public accountability in the US republic. At his death, he was the eleventh richest person on the planet, on par with his dominant brother, Charles. David K, however, went beyond the narrower spending interests of brother Charles, the one with the sharpest of…
Insentience cannot have intelligence, but the modern public relations revolution would have you think otherwise. Smart phones, smart bombs, and, it follows, Smart Cities (capitalising such terms implies false authority), do not exist in that sense, whatever their cheer squad emissaries in High Tech land claim. They are merely a masterfully daft celebration of tactically deployed cults: there is a fad, a trend, and therefore, it must be smart, a model option to pursue. What does exist is a naming industrial complex, a conniving fraternity that gives them some form of nominal existence: to utter and label is to create. …
Haven’t the critics worked it out yet? US President Donald Trump chugs to the coal of nonsense that may come in the wrapping of some sense. Initial mad-cat comments, when cobbled together, might reveal some pattern in time. Take, for instance, the recent offer to purchase Greenland. Considered laughable, purchasing territories has notable, historical precedent in US foreign policy. Territorial aggrandizement through such means has been something of a US specialty, complementing the usual technique of brutal military conquest. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 was a steal by President Thomas Jefferson, almost doubling the territory of the United States. Alaska…
Britain’s Boris Johnson is driving his country to the cliff face, along the way mouthing and spouting all manner of populist reassurances. Still fresh in the job, he declared that UK preparations for a no-deal Brexit on October 31, when Britain would leave the European Union, would receive a boost – a “turbocharge”, no less. Michael Gove, now chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, has been charged with the task of handling the haphazard effort, having chaired some dozen meetings of the Brexit war cabinet dubbed XO to date. While this hubris bubbles, the Sunday Times article relying on a…
It was predictably ugly: in tone, in regret, and, in some ways, disgust. Australia emerged from the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting isolated, the true spoiler of the party which saw 17 states facing the obstinacy of one. It had taken place on Tuvalu, some two hours flight north of Fiji. The capital Funafuti is located on vanishing land; the island state is facing coastal erosion, the pressing issue of salinity, the very crisis of its existence. Pacific Island leaders were already wise to the accounting cosmetics of Canberra’s accountants prior to the Forum. It reeked, for instance,…
Australia has always nursed a contradictory, repressive relationship with its Pacific neighbors. Being a satrap of great powers, it has performed the role of gate keeper and monitor of regional instability, a condescending, often paternalistic agent. At stages, it has also entertained more direct colonial interests. For almost seven decades, Australia controlled Papua New Guinea, assuming power over the former British colony of Papua in 1906. The conclusion of the First World War saw Australia draw in more former colonial territories once under German control, including German New Guinea. In Papua, stiff British tradition prevailed under the guidance of Hubert…
It was a time for Australian conservatives to be boring and bore each other. CPAC, otherwise known as the Conservative Political Action Conference, had arrived in Sydney. The real entertainment bill was to be supplied by such figures as Brexiter supremo Nigel Farage and former editor-in-chief of Breitbart News London, Raheem Kassam. The rest was poor filling, the tired, cranky Fox and Sky News set. CPAC 2019 was described in the usual, fun-filled way on the organisation’s website. “The American Conservative Union and LibertyWorks are proud to bring CPAC to Australia for the first time!” Participate, went the message; the “shy voters” might have…
Within minutes of news about his death in a Manhattan jail cell Saturday morning, theories spread with pestilential vigour. Was Jeffrey Epstein murdered? Accepting the premise without qualification, the next question followed: Who did it? MSNBC host Joe Scarborough was not giving anyone time to wonder. “A guy who had information that would have destroyed rich and powerful men’s lives end up dead in his jail cell. How predictably…Russian.” There had been a potential trigger: the unsealing of documents by a Federal court from a lawsuit by one of Epstein’s accusers directed against socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, the woman behind the…
The blinkered security establishment is standard fare in politics. From Washington to Manila, we hear of terrors and concerns which tend to more spectral than not. Legitimate concerns such as catastrophic environmental failure, or a nuclear accident, are treated with a sigh, its warners doomsday advocates rather than reasoned citizens. It is the unseen demon that preoccupies. One such blinkered devotee is Andrew Hastie, an Australian member of parliament who prides himself as something of a security sage. (Suffice to say that experience serving as a member of the Special Air Services Regiment does not necessarily qualify you as an…
It is clear that the United Kingdom could not have thought this through. Was it a touch of the Suez jitters, the haunting syndrome of 1956 leaving a false impression that the Old Empire still had it? To taunt a power already under the watchful and punitive eye of the United States was never a recipe for equanimity and calm repose. But taunt they did, using 30 Royal Marines to detain an Iranian tanker Grace I in Gibraltar last month. The official justification was unconvincing: the need to enforce European Union sanctions against the regime of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. The…
US President Donald Trump is a master of the withdrawal method. That said, it is often forgotten that the United States remains that most fickle of creatures, joining, or abandoning international regimes that might be seen to jar with the national interest. Initial preparations for such global arrangements tend to be initially optimistic, even rosy. Eager to draft a suitable document, say, the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court, diligent diplomats give the work a made-in-America feel. They are then told ratification will be impossible in the Senate. Uncle Sam duly becomes a unilateralist jingo. The difference from what…
It was something of a shrug moment. One of the world’s largest digital platforms had been fined $5 billion for privacy violations by the Federal Trade Commission, claiming it had violated its 2012 order. The FTC order also requires the company “to restructure its approach to privacy from the corporate board-level down, establishing strong new mechanisms to ensure that Facebook executives are accountable for the decisions they make about privacy, and that those decisions are subject to meaningful oversight.” On a certain level, being fined $5 billion seems astonishing. It is two hundred times more than next ranked fine ever…
It may well be a finding of some implication should Julian Assange find his way into the beastly glory that is the US justice system. In its efforts to rope in President Donald Trump’s election campaign, Wikileaks, Assange and the Russian Federation for hacking the computers of the Democratic National Committee in 2016, the DNC case was found wanting. The case presented in the United States District Court of the Southern District of New York was never convincing but remains as aspect of a broader effort to inculpate WikiLeaks and Julian Assange in assisting the Trump campaign triumph. One allegation…
The show is pompous, condescending and shallow. It was designed to mock the lowly non-cook, the ignorant, and, from high culinary summitry, grace the winner after munching, gratis, what was promoted. The winner would then be nurtured, cared for in an entrepreneurial way. Little master chefs would, in turn, become big ones, owning restaurants, starting a line of cookery books and wind up with face, cooking implements and all, on television. The MasterChef idea, unsurprisingly born in a country where grub takes precedence over cuisine, was always an obscene way of stirring the lowly heart. The plebs want their fare…
The first rush of enthusiasm on looking at this is clear: a high-achieving swimmer on the circuit – the Australian Mack Horton – decides to take a stance. It’s not about refugees, Donald Trump or climate change. Unlike other sportspeople of history, his opposition is directed at his sport, his spear of indignation sharpened against a target closer to home (or pool). He will not share a podium with others who have won medals, taking what he no doubts regards as a principled position. He has nabbed the silver in the 400m freestyle, but it is clear who Mr Gold…
The BBC World Service took its listeners to the English cathedral town of Ely, set in picturesque Cambridgeshire, during the course of a hot July 23 in an effort to take the pulse of the country. Well, at least that particular, erratic pulse. It found, for the most part, a certain enthusiasm for Boris Johnson, the fop-haired, bumbling wonder of the Conservatives, a quite literally inventive journalist, former magazine editor and Mayor of London who has become the new prime minister of Britain. One word kept cropping up in discussions like an endangered species searching for a bullet: enthusiasm. Plain,…
The Fourth Estate, that historical unelected grouping of society’s scrutineers, has become something of a rabble, and, as a confederacy of strewn dunces and the ongoing compromised, is ripe for analysis. An essential premise in the work of WikiLeaks was demonstrating, to a good, stone-throwing degree, how media figures and practitioners had been bought by the state or the corporate sector, unwittingly or otherwise. At the very least, the traditionalists had swallowed their reservations and preferred to proclaim, rather unconvincingly, that they were operating with freedom to scrutinise and question, facing down the rebels from the WikiLeaks set. The Fourth…
Anniversaries are occasions to distort records. The intoxicated recounting of the past faces a record in need of correction. Couples long married hide their differences before guests. Creases are covered; the make-up is applied generously. Defects become virtues, if, indeed they were ever there to begin with. In historical commemoration, the same is true. The moon landing anniversary his weekend was given a vigorous clean-up, with the Cold War finding a back seat when it was, in fact, the main driver. The moon project was a fundamental political poke, soaked by competitive drives. The science was the instrumental ballast and…
Twitter has become policy. It is platform, direction and determination. It has served one particular person well, a hazy mechanism to fog up the lenses of law makers. When President Donald Trump needs an air-wave filling distraction, a bilious splurge of interest in the blogosphere, he is always happy to lob a grenade of 280 characters or so. His targets and recipients oblige in an unsettling dance. Speeches are made, press galleries filled and resolutions submitted to Congress. Trump’s last round of fired remarks found their targets in Representatives Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley…
History’s scope for the absurd and tragic is infinite. Like Sisyphus engaged in permanent labours pushing a boulder up a slope, the effort of making sense of such scope is likewise, absurdly infinite. To see images of an exhausted and world-weary Julian Assange attempting to dodge the all-eye surveillance operation that he would complain about is to wade in the insensibility of it all. But it could hardly have surprised those who have watched WikiLeaks’ battles with the Security Establishment over the years. Assange is not merely an exceptional figure but a figure of the exception. Despite being granted asylum…
Anyone willing to consult the international law book on the subject of free speech will find it heavy with protections for free speech. The UN Declaration of Human Rights features, in its preamble, the ideal that “human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want”, nothing less than “the highest aspiration of the common people”. Article 19 re-emphasises the point that everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression including the “freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of…
Rarely do ambassadors resign after an intense self-assessment of worth. Diplomatic immunity does not merely extend to protecting the official from the reach of local laws; it encourages a degree of freedom in engaging as a country’s representative. Sir Kim Darroch, as UK ambassador to the United States, felt that any freedom afforded him in that capacity had ended. “The current situation is making it impossible for me to carry out my role as I would have liked.” The storm between Darroch’s good offices and the Trump administration was precipitated by the publication in the Mail on Sunday of content…
Australian society relishes secrecy and surveillance. Forget the laid-back, relaxed demeanor that remains the great fiction of a conflicted identity; like all such creations, the trace should not be mistaken as the tendency. The political culture of Australia remains shaped by penal paranoia and an indifference to transparency. The citizen is not to be trusted; rather, the subject is to be policed and regulated into apathetic submission. The statute books of the federal parliament are larded with provisions of secrecy that make doing credible journalism in the country nigh impossible. Journalists are left to their own devices, inventive as these…
The antipodes has had a fraught relationship with the nuclear option. At the distant ends of the earth, New Zealand took a stand against the death complex, assuming the forefront of restricting the deployment of nuclear assets in its proximity. This drove Australia bonkers with moral envy and strategic fury. The New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament and Arms Control Act 1987 made the country a nuclear and biological weapons-free area. It was a thumbing, defiant gesture against the United States, but what is sometimes forgotten is that it was also a statement to other powers – including France –…
