Author: Dr. Binoy Kampmark

While the mass slaughtering of, and slaughter by, soldiers, is always a touchy subject of commemoration, a tension has existed between those who did the fighting, and those who ordered it.  Comfortably secure in furnished rooms and battle props, planners would, as they still do, draw up the blueprints, concoct the strategy, and give the orders. In Australia, politicians should have every reason to stay out of the grief and suffering they contributed to by sending their citizenry (wait, subjects – for the State remains a constitutional monarchy) to countries they could barely spell.  But the bosom and milk of…

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The recently concluded LIV Tournament in Adelaide was a matter of bread, circuses and golf. It was something of a triumph for the chief sponsor: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and, more notably, the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Critics, and criticism about the regime and the blood spattered House of Saud, were generally forgotten. This vulgar display of denial and indulgence was typified by the face of Australian golf, Greg Norman. After three days of competition at The Grange, The Advertiser ran with the painful headline: “LIV-ing the dream: Golf’s boom weekend for SA.” The South Australian Premier Peter…

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He was always a step ahead, his mind geared not only for the next move, but the next sequence. He also smelt it, anticipated the audience reaction, shaped the prejudice in context for consumption. He created an antipodean version of dada art. He confused, baffled and enraged audiences with his polymathic, panoramic reach. The genius of the late Barry Humphries first took root in Britain, along with a flowing of other Australian expatriates who had made Blighty their home. It became evident in Britain’s most famous, remorseless panner of reputation and issue, the satirical magazine Private Eye, that weedkiller of…

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Cometh the new platform, cometh new actions in law, the fragile litigant ever ready to dash off a writ to those with (preferably) deep pockets. And so, it transpires that artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, for all the genius behind their creation, are up for legal scrutiny and judicial redress. Certainly, some private citizens are getting rather ticked off about what such bots as ChatGPT are generating about them. Some of this is indulgent, narcissistic craving – you deserve what you get if you plug your name into an AI generator, hoping for sweet things to be said about you. Things…

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If anyone was expecting a new tilt, a shine of novelty, a flash of independence from Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s address to the National Press Club on April 17, they were bound to be disappointed.  The anti-China hawks, talons polished, got their fill.  The US State Department would not be disturbed.  The Pentagon could rest easy.  The toadyish musings of the Canberra establishment would continue to circulate in reliable staleness. In reading (and hearing) Wong’s speech, one must always assume the opposite, or something close to it.  Whatever is said about strategic balance, don’t believe a word of it;…

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Emmanuel Macron’s recent visit to China did not quite go according to plan, though much depends on what was planned to begin with.  In one sense, the French President was consistent, riding the hobbyhorse of Europe’s strategic autonomy, one hived off from the US imperium and free of Chinese influence. Europe’s third-way autonomy would be a mighty thing for the Elysée Palace, especially given French pretensions in steering it.  After all, Frau “Mutti” Merkel is no longer de facto European chief, presiding over the bloc with matronly care.  Her successor, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, is finding himself caught in undergrowth, a…

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For years, US intelligence officials could hold their allies, notably the British, in contempt for leaking like sinking vessels and harbouring such espionage luminaries as the Cambridge Five.  The whirligig of time has returned the favour with the latest leak from the US Department of Defense.  They pose a question pregnant with relevance: Do Washington’s allies have any reason to trust their own secure channels of sharing defence information?  The answer: probably not. The spray of Pentagon documents began appearing on such platforms as Twitter, 4chan, Telegram and a Discord server that hosts video games.  (How odd, go the folks…

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Films featuring animals as screen filled protagonists, often in an imperfect, callous human world, have been made before.  There was Robert Bresson’s 1966 Au Hasard Balthazar, which introduced audiences to a saintly donkey subject to the terrible things human beings are so often prone to inflict. In recent times, the documentary black-and-white film Gunda, directed by Viktor Kossakovsky (executive producer Joaquin Phoenix), stripped of human dialogue, featured the farm life of an impressively large sow and her piglets.  To their lives were added cows and a chicken with one leg.  In such a film, livestock are seen as breathing, living…

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Here they go. Vice-chancellors, university managers, and creatures with titles unmentionable and meaningless (deputies, semi-deputies, sub-deputies), a whole cavalcade of parasitic creatures in need of neutering, keen to pursue another daft idea. Australian universities do not want to miss out on the military-industrial-education complex, whatever its imperilling dangers. With the war inspired AUKUS security pact, which promises the stripping of the Australian budget to the tune of $AUD 368 billion over the course of three decades, a corrupt establishment promises to get worse. The AUKUS distraction could not have come at a better time. The tertiary sector in Australia is…

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Succeeding administrations have a chronic habit of blaming their predecessors. The Biden administration has been most particular on the issue, taking every chance to attack former President Donald Trump for the ills of his tenure. But the effort to almost exclusively lay blame at Trump’s door for the US fiasco in Afghanistan was a rich one indeed, given the failings of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations in that historically doomed theatre of conflict. Revolutions, Leon Trotsky remarked, are always verbose. But so are failed wars, military campaigns and invasions. The greater the failure, the weightier the verbosity from…

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What is going to be done with Clarence Thomas, that darling reactionary among reactionaries on the US Supreme Court?  Evidently, the justice seems to assume that being bribed, paid off or bought by a billionaire over the course of 20 years is a perfectly appropriate practice, reconcilable with the role of his office in handing down judgments affecting the lives of millions. A ProPublica investigation has found that the Supreme Court justice received gifts from the billionaire real estate magnate and Republican donor Harlan Crow for two decades.  It opens with a description of one of those gifts: flying on…

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In politics, the once in century tag is virtually unheard of. Miracles can take place in a matter of weeks if not months, but there is always an allotment of certainty that some things will never change, affixed in reliably sturdy stone. In the context of the Australian federal seat of Aston, located in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, that tag rose with menace from the history books and chronicles, revealing that most unusual of phenomena: a swing of votes to the government of the day. Usually, little can be made about by-elections. The electors can be a cranky lot. Given that…

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The decision to go to war should be as burdensome as possible.  The more impediments to such folly, the better.  Such a state of affairs does not characterise the Westminster system of government.  It certainly does not apply to Australia, which is all the more troubling given a string of disastrous military interventions led by a slavish, ignoramus complex. As things stand, the National Security Committee, comprising inner cabinet members including the Prime Minister, determines whether Australia goes to war.  It replicates the British monarchical traditions of old, and speaks against, rather than in favour, of a Parliamentary voice. Attempts…

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“Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.” I.F. Stone The US Congress and Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, have what can only be regarded as a testy relationship.  Its various members have advocated and condoned his farcical prosecution, demanded his lifelong incarceration, even assassination, taking issue with his appetite for publishing unsavoury, classified details about the US imperium.  He who gives the game away on cant will be punished. One shrill voice, touching on delirium, was Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, former Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman.  His response to the Cablegate release was…

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Collateral damage? Deserving and worthy of their punishment? The exclusion and banishment of Russian and Belarusian athletes has become the acceptable prejudice of many governments and a slew of sporting bodies. After the invasion of Ukraine in February last year, a number banded together to find ways to punish Russia, and those of its ally, Belarus. Pitifully, and weakly, athletes were considered fair game, ironically enough by those obsessed by the idea of fairness in sport. Initially, the International Olympic Committee felt that an athlete ban was in order. Its directive of February 28, 2022 was, according to IOC President…

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The sham that is the Assange affair, a scandal of monumental proportions connived in by the AUKUS powers, shows no signs of abating. Prior to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese assuming office in Australia, he insisted that the matter dealing with the WikiLeaks publisher would be finally resolved. It had, he asserted, been going on for too long. Since then, it is very clear, as with all matters regarding US policy, that Australia will, if not agree outright with Washington, adopt a constipated, non-committal position. “Quiet diplomacy” is the official line taken by Albanese and Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, a…

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Being the scapegoat of tribal lore cast out with the heavy weight of sins remains a popular political motif.  Supposedly noble soldiers, by way of example, are punished for not adhering to the rules of war.  In breaching the codes of killing and the protocols of acceptable murder, they are banished from a realm supposedly wrapped in law.  In doing so, commanding officers, policy makers and politicians are left, purified, their dirt shed. In the context of war crimes, the subordinate and the minion often take centre stage, heaped upon with sins like a tribal scapegoat and sent out into…

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Should they be taking them?  Ukraine is desperate for any bit of warring materiel its armed forces can lay their hands on, but depleted uranium shells would surely not be a model example of use.  And yet, the UK, in an act of killing with kindness, is happy to fork them out to aid the cause against the Russians, despite the scandals, the alleged illnesses, and environmental harms. An outline of the measure was provided by Minister of state for defence Baroness Annabel Goldie’s written answer to a question posed by Lord Hylton: “Alongside our granting of a squadron of…

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It was a sight to behold and took the wind out of the bellicose sails of the AUKUS cheer squad. Here, at the National Press Club in the Australian capital, was a Labor luminary, former Prime Minister of Australia and statesman, keen to weigh in with characteristic sharpness and dripping venom. Paul Keating’s target: the militaristic lunacy that has characterised Australia’s participation in the US-led security pact that promises hellish returns and pangs of insecurity. In his March 15 address to a Canberra press gallery bewitched by the magic of nuclear-propelled submarines and the China bogeyman, Keating was unsparing about…

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What a coup.  Nakedly amoral but utterly self-serving in its saccharine minted glory.  India’s showman Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who otherwise appears to have clerkish, desk-bound qualities, had what he wanted: an accommodating, possibly clueless guest in the form of the Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese; a common interest in India’s national sport cricket, and a show illuminating him as supreme Hindu leader presiding over a new age of politics.  For Albanese, this was ill-fitting and disturbing but all in keeping with the occasion. This month, Albanese, who has been held to the bosom of great powers of late, found…

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For some time, Washington has been losing its spunk in the Pacific.  When it comes to the Pacific Islands, a number have not fallen – at least entirely – for the rhetoric that Beijing is there to take, consume, and dominate all.  Nor have such countries been entirely blind to their own sharpened interests.  This largely aqueous region, which promises to submerge them in the rising waters of climate change, has become furiously busy. A number of officials are keen to push the line that Washington’s policy towards the Pacific is clearly back where it should be.  It’s all part…

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When will this hate-filled nonsense stop?  Surveillance balloons treated like evocations of Satan and his card-carrying followers; other innumerable unidentified phenomena that, nonetheless, remain attributable in origin, despite their designation; and then the issue of spying cranes.  In the meantime, there has been much finger pointing on the culprit of COVID-19 and the global pandemic.  Behold the China Threat, the Sino Monster, the Yellow Terror. In this atmosphere, the hawkish disposition of media outlets in a number of countries in shrieking for war is becoming palpable.  The Fairfax press in Australia gave a less than admirable example of this in…

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The arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for Russian President Vladimir Putin came at an opportune moment.  It was, if nothing else, a feeble distraction over the misdeeds and crimes of other leaders current and former.  Russia, not being an ICC member country, does not acknowledge that court’s jurisdiction.  Nor, for that matter, does the United States, despite the evident chortling from US President Joe Biden. Twenty years on, former US President George W. Bush, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Australia’s own John Howard, the troika most to blame for not just the criminal invasion of a…

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When Australia – vassal be thy name – assumed responsibilities for not only throwing money at both US and British shipbuilders, lending up territory and naval facilities for war like a gambling drunk, and essentially asking its officials to commit seppuku for the Imperium, another task was given. While the ditzy and dunderheaded wonders in Canberra would be acquiring submarines with nuclear propulsion technology, there would be that rather problematic issue of what to do with the waste. “Yes,” said the obliging Australians, “we will deal with it.” The Australian Defence Department has published a fact sheet on the matter,…

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He was standing before a lectern at Downing Street.  The words on the support looked eerily similar to those used by the politicians of another country.  According to UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Stop the Boats was the way to go.  It harked back to the same approach used by Australia’s Tony Abbott, who won the 2013 election on precisely that platform. The UK Illegal Migration Bill is fabulously own-goaled, bankrupt and unprincipled.  For one thing, it certainly is a labour of love in terms of the illegal, as the title suggests.  In time, the courts may well also find…

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History is filled with failed planners and plans, threats thought of that did not eventuate, and threats unthought of that found their way into the books.  The AUKUS agreement is an attempt to inflate a threat by developing a number of fictional capabilities in an effort to combat an inflated adversary. The checklist of imminent failure for this security pact between the United States, the UK and Australia is impressive and comically grotesque.  In terms of the nuclear-powered submarine component, there are issues of expertise, infrastructure, hurdles of technology transfer, the hobbling feature of domestic politics, and national considerations.  There…

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Before the financial collapse come the aggressive anti-regulation lobbyists.  These are often of the same ilk: loathing anything resembling oversight, restriction, reporting and monitoring.  They are incarnations of the frontier, symbolically toting guns and slaying the natives, seeking wealth beyond paper jottings, compliance and bureaucratic tedium. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), for a period of time the preferred bank for start-ups, is the bitter fruit of that harvest.  Three days prior to the second-largest failure of a US financial institution since the implosion of Washington Mutual (Wamu) in 2008, lobbyists for the banking sector had reason to gloat. …

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Writing festivals are often tired, stilted affairs, but the 38th Adelaide Writers’ Week did not promise to be that run-of-the-mill gathering of yawn-inducing, life draining sessions.  For one thing, social media vultures and public relations experts, awaiting the next freely explosive remark or unguarded comment, were at hand to stir the pot and exhort cancel culture. The fuss began with the festival organisers’ invitation of two Palestinian authors, Susan Abulhawa and Mohammed El-Kurd.  Abulhawa was specifically targeted for critical comments on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, notably regarding NATO membership, and for being a mouthpiece of “Russian propaganda”, while El-Kurd has…

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Ever so rarely, the human species can reach accord and agreement on some topic seemingly contentious and divergent.  Such occasions tend to be rarer than hen’s teeth, but the UN High Seas Treaty was one of them.  It took over two decades of agonising, stuttering negotiations to draft an agreement and went someway to suggest that the “common heritage of mankind”, a concept pioneered in the 1960s, has retained some force. Debates about the sea have rarely lost their sting.  The Dutch legal scholar Hugo Grotius, in his 1609 work Mare Liberum (The Free Sea), laboured over such concepts as…

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Diligently, obediently and with a degree of dangerous imbecility, a number of Australian media outlets are manufacturing a consensus for war with a country that has never been a natural, historical enemy, nor sought to be.  But as Australia remains the satellite of a Sino-suspicious US imperium, its officials and their dutiful advocates in the press seem obligated to pave the way for conflict. The latest example of this came in articles run in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age of Melbourne.  The premise is already clear from the columnists, Peter Hartcher and Matthew Knott.  Australia faces a “Red…

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