Julian Assange continues to ripple and roam as a cipher through the political and media scape of the world. Detained in Belmarsh maximum security prison, the sort of stately abode only reserved for the most dangerous of criminals, many with indeterminate sentences, he electrifies and concerns. The US political classes continue to simmer with an obsession that has gone feral. Some moderation can be found in the efforts of Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky), who is seeking a bartering solution. “I think he should be given immunity from prosecution in exchange for coming to the United States and testifying.” The question…
Author: Dr. Binoy Kampmark
“But no matter the destruction, the spirit of what it means to be a cathedral can and does survive such catastrophes.” Becky Clark, Church of England director of cathedrals and church buildings, April 17, 2019 The destruction of the sacred will engender moving responses. But the scope, and the particularity of that response varies. The conflagration affecting Notre-Dame de Paris, located on the Île de la Cité, has become a twenty-four-hour saturation phenomenon. Thirteen million annual visitors, a geographical pride of place at the centre of Paris, and vast repository of France in all matters religious, cultural and political, would…
The modern UN Refugee Convention is now so flea-bitten it’s been put out to the garbage tip of history. At least the enthusiastic fleas think so, given their conduct as political representatives across a range of parliaments keen on barbed wired borders and impenetrable defences. Across Europe, the issue of refugees arriving by sea – in this case, the Mediterranean – has become a matter of games and deflection. Lacking any coherence whatsoever, the approach to certain, designated arrivals is to push them on to the next port in fits of cruel deflection, hoping that the next recipient will give…
“Your honour, I represent the United States government”. The Westminster Magistrates Court had been left with little doubt by the opening words of the legal team marshalled against the face of WikiLeaks. Julian Assange was being targeted by the imperium itself, an effort now only garnished by the issue of skipping bail in 2012. Would the case on his extradition to the US centre on the matter of free speech and the vital scrutinising role of the press? Thomas Jefferson, who had his moments of venomous tetchiness against the press outlets of his day, was clear about the role of…
From time to time, celebrities recoil and, in anger, seek to march for a change to the status quo. Much of is never intended to alter much, but they can count their names among the indignant luminaries and say they tried to do something. The recent imposition of Syariah law in the Kingdom of Brunei, a tiny speck of territory wedged between Sabah and Sarawak, was enough to enrage George Clooney, Sir Elton John, and a few others concerned that their moral credentials might be hurt by the move. In incensed words penned for Deadline, Clooney’s moral advisory noted that,…
Political asylum is an accepted if often ignored right. It is also at the mercy of those interests that grant it. Ecuador’s repeated insistence on conditioning Julian Assange’s stay in its London abode is tantamount to corroding the idea of asylum to vacuity. You are granted asylum as a political dissident, but political dissident you shall not be, especially when it comes to exposing the secrets of your landlord. Assange has ventured to test the onerous limits on his conduct that have been imposed by embassy protocols, taking the matter to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. His argument has…
Any measure of annexation is based on the extension of a military’s boots. Diplomats tend to be silenced before the noise of tanks, weaponry and garrisons. Countries may claim to possess territory but can only dream in the absence of military weight. When it came to the issue of negotiating the post-World War II agreements, Generalissimo Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union had a clear sense of this in charting out Soviet influence in east European states. Israel also bullied its way into recognition, making sure that it acquired, at various stages, the Sinai (since relinquished), the West Bank, Gaza…
The comedian Dave Chappelle put it like this: why were accusations of inappropriate conduct directed at Michael Jackson always so superbly timed? “Listen Michael,” goes Chappelle’s mock white executive voice, “we need you to jerk off another child.” (Chappelle is also prudent enough to append a qualifying note: he might have done it, but who knows?) Jackson could always be relied upon to provide distractive, and mad fodder, for social angst and voyeuristic sickness. Murders, atrocities and falling markets might be troubling, but a fit of moral hysteria would always be a reliable distraction. From the dream confection of Neverland,…
The oldest idea of history; the perennial problem of station: education. Get the child as far as possible so that he or she can be propelled, as if from a trebuchet across the ramparts of life. Nasty obstacles – one being a lack of intellect – will be cleared, and the wretched genetic issue will find itself in sinecures, positions of influence and sat upon the comfortable chairs of the establishment. Universities should be places of educational exultation. In practice, they have become creatures of the state, friends of various industrial complexes, and complicit in some of the darker tendencies…
He has sent so many cliques and groups into titters of anger, and the indignant have attempted to turn on him. The university environment should be the last place where dangerous ideas, and views, are stifled and stomped upon. In actual fact, we are seeing the reverse; from students unions to middle- and upper-managerial parasites and administrators, the contrarian idea must be boxed, the controversial speaker silenced and sent beyond the pale. Dissent and disagreement are lethal toxin to such affected notions as “diversity” and “inclusiveness”. It should be very clear that meaningless terms such as diversity and inclusiveness do…
Never let a bloody and opportune crisis pass. In New Zealand, there is talk about gun reform after attacks on two Christchurch mosques left fifty dead. There have been remarks made in parliament about unchecked white supremacy growing with enthusiastic violent urge in Australasia. In Turkey, the approach has shifted into another gear: the canny, even menacing exploitation by Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The election campaign is in full swing. Spending his time, as he often does, whipping up audiences at rallies into feverish states, the sometimes shrill leader hits form when he dons the gear of the fully…
Children’s crusades do not necessarily end well. During the years of armed missions to the Holy Land, when Jerusalem meant something to the sacredly inclined in Europe, children were encouraged to take to the rough and dangerous road as it wound its way towards Palestine. In 1212, a boy of 12 is said to have begun preaching at Saint-Denis in France. God had supposedly taken some time to communicate a pressing wish: Christian children were to head to the Holy Land and liberate it from the Infidel. How they would do so was not clear. They subsequently starved, suffered deprivation,…
The argument that the Christchurch shooter, suspect Brenton Tarrant, or the views of Australia’s Senator Fraser Anning, seemingly holding a lone torch, are somehow not representative of the broader whole, be it Australia or New Zealand, is a self-deflecting exercise. They are the uncomfortable mirrors of ruin, actual and perceived. They are the voices of people who can either be marginalised and confined or addressed. Tarrant’s views sizzle with clenching anxiety, shot through the desire to recover what has been lost and what has been taken. It is deprivation, and it is not so much nostalgia as castration and insufficiency. …
Five weapons were said to have been used, all inscribed with symbols, numbers and insignia. The individual charged with the shootings at two Christchurch mosques that left 49 dead was an Australian with, it is alleged, a simple purpose: inflict death, and on specific communities in worship. Even as the carnage became clear, Christchurch was already the epicentre of twenty-four hour news television, supplying a ghoulish spectacle. Saturation coverage followed, and continues to do so, a point that will warm the attacker’s blood (his entire effort was streamed on live video on Facebook). The alleged perpetrator, one Brenton Harrison Tarrant,…
Lobbies, powerful interests and financial matters are usually the first things that come to mind when the aircraft industry is considered. Safety, while deemed of foremost importance, is a superficial formality, sometimes observed in the breach. To see the camera footage of the wreckage from the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 was to be shocked by a certain irony: cameras was found lingering over an inflight safety cards on what to do in the event of an emergency. For those on board that doomed flight, it was irrelevant. The deaths of all 157 individuals on board the flight en…
“Trudeau came out and asked for strong women, and he got them.” Michelle Rempel, Conservative Party MP, The Atlantic, Mar 12, 2019 The gods have various roles, and most of them are intrusively irritating. They select humans, and drive them mad. They select them for special missions, praise them and drive them to death. They also select them to, if the time comes, commit foolish suicide. The going might be good for a time, but they shall utterly be vanquished, mortal snots that they are. The situation with Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will either ensure his survival for some…
His visit struck a sour note. The Australian prime minister Scott Morrison was making an effort to show he cared: about those intangible things called borders, secure firm and shut to the unwanted human matter coming by sea. The distant Australian territory of Christmas Island was selected to assist in coping with arrivals from Manus and Nauru Island needing medical treatment. Having lost the vote in parliament on preventing the move, the Morrison government has does its best to ensure that a cruel element remains. During the visit, Morrison rationalised the re-opening as the fault of the opposition. “As Prime…
The powerful have always had defenders. Power seeps into the system, corrupts, controls and, ultimately, assumes an authority that does wonders to destroy an appraisal of fairness. To be there is to assume that matters are natural, a habit. As David Hume made clear, such an instance creates the basis of error: because it has been accepted for generations and through precedent does not make it a law or an acceptable practice. To be fair is, in a sense, to relinquish the advantages of power and accept the levelling nature of balance. To be fair is to understand power as…
They could not hold on. A small – and in the scheme of things negligible group – split from the British Labour mothership last month in an effort to salvage some self-described form of credibility. In truth, they were the original sceptics of Jeremy Corbyn, the pro-New Labour grouping indifferent, even disbelieving, about the predations made by Tony Blair during his reign. Thinking that he would remain on both backbench and in museum, a historical relic of Labour values supposedly done away with under Blair’s rule of spinning and cunning, some even put Corbyn up for the Labour leadership. As…
Yorgos Lanthimos likes his subjects deranged and troubled. He likes seeing queens in the slap, servants in the lurch, and women in mud. But that is just one side. The Favourite is a film of exotic, exorbitant bitchery, filmed with aesthetic relish. It has been dubbed by Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian “punk Restoration romp”. It is women seeking to main, kill and attain positions at court. And he, for the most part, pulls it off. The subject matter was promising, given the lack of gravitas Queen Anne exerts in the history books. The result is a portrait of women…
In March 2008, one Michael Horvath of the US Army Counterintelligence Center within the Cyber Intelligence Assessments Branch considered the risks posed by WikiLeaks in a 32 page document. Created under the auspices of the Department of Defence’s Intelligence Analysis Program. The overview suggests, importantly, the interest shown in Assange by the defence wing of the United States at the time it was starting to make more than a generous ripple across the pond of information discourse. Importantly, it suggests a direct interest of the military industrial complex in the activities of a guerrilla (read radical transparency) group. The question…
The world of conservation has thrown up various voices of tenacity. There was Aldo Leopold, a vital figure behind establishing the first wilderness area of the United States when he convinced the Forest Service to protect some five hundred thousand acres of New Mexico’s Gila National Forest. There was Robert Marshall, the founder of The Wilderness Society. There was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), a solidly aimed blow at the use of DDT and its environmental effects. Then there are the savvy showmen, the exploiters few short of a scruple, and manipulators keen on lining pockets. The animal kingdom, for…
Overly reliant economies are dangerously fragile things. As it takes two parties, often more, to play the game, the absence of interest, or its withdrawal by one, can spell doom. The Australian economy has been talked up – by Australian economists and those more inclined to look at policy through the wrong end of a drain pipe – as becoming more diverse and capable of withstanding shock. In truth, it remains a commodity driven entity, vulnerable to the shocks of demand. Think Australia, think of looting the earth. Such carefree, plundering optimism lays bare the jarring fact that Australia remains…
New year occasions, given the pleasant fiction it entails, are times to change. Resolutions are made by that delightful species Homo sapiens, hope packaged for quick delivery to those who promise change. The weak will become stronger; the strong will show humility. The venal, well, they just might change. Human nature suggests the opposite, and 2019 has begun with an unsurprisingly consistent thud from the White House. The House Democrats have barricaded themselves on one side; President Donald Trump mans the opposing positions. A partial government shutdown has been in effect for almost three weeks. But the new year tidings…
