It was a frustrating year, an exasperating year, and at year’s end, and DownUnder, a fiery one. We had an election that saw the so-called “quiet Australians” opt for a stultifying, uninspiring and potentially disappointing status quo. The warring houses of the US government drove themselves into an impeachment cul de sac, and we or may not see Donald Trump re-elected next November. The British electorate, exhausted with three years of Brexit convolutions thought “enough already” and, in a Monty Python Meaning of Life capitulation, cried “craven” and surrendered their. All in all, the ordinary folks who so demonstrably rejected the establishment in 2016, had by year’s end 2019, welcomed them back as to the manor born. That which goes around comes around ad Infinitum.

Australia managed a rare moment of national pride when in October, the ban on climbing Uluru was made official. To sweeten the moment, Pauline Hanson – still a racist and a dim-witted menace in the Senate – fell down trying to climb it. And yet we found ourselves unable to advance constitutional recognition of our first People’s and an indigenous voice to parliament.

Climate change concentrated many people’s minds here and elsewhere in the developed world, but talkfests, backsliders and contrarians generated more hot air than action. Young Greta Thunberg was beatified by the young and the environmentally committed but was demonized by powerful grumpy old white men and women. Australia’s nationwide end of year bushfire crisis provided an  ironic, powerful and perfect coda.

The media in the Anglosphere and its opinionistas waged their culture wars over disparate and disputed “national values” whilst partisans traded accusations and recriminations that predictably blamed political correctness, identity politics, value signalling, ‘wokeness’, and other slings and arrows of contemporary new-speak.

This weekend, as the media farewelled the old decade and welcomed the new, the message from both the News Corp masthead The Australian, taking its cue from the UK’s conservative Spectator, and its ostensibly opposed Sydney Morning Herald was that despite all the doom and gloom, the talk of dystopia and all, in we’ve never had it so good. In statistical terms, that is. Matt Ridley writes:

“Let nobody tell you that the second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 per cent when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline. Little of this made the news, because good news is no news”.

A Sydney Morning Herald editorial wrote optimistically of the upcoming twenties: “A great deal of our confidence comes from a belief in the power of science and technology to make people’s lives better. Just look at the past decade. Poverty levels in Asia and Africa have mostly fallen. Life expectancy has risen in most countries, including Australia, where at birth we can expect to live a year longer than a decade ago”. But others, like Nicole Hemmer in the Herald failed to differ.

Some may see the ‘twenteens’ as halcyon day, but outside our occidental comfort zones and our social media bubbles, things were pretty crappy with few signs of improvement in the coming years.,

We can look fondly back upon the forlorn Arab Spring and the re-ascendancy of the autocrats, the destruction of beautiful Syria, Europe’s refugee crisis and its populist backlash, Fukushima, Brexit, Donald Trump, the exposure of child abuse and sexual predation  in the affluent, democratic and Christian “west”, the rise and fall of ISIS – and its metastasizing across t weary and war torn parts of our planet, and today,  the sound of marching feet and chanting voices in towns and cities as far flung as Paris, London and Sydney, Delhi and Hong Kong, Caracas, La Paz and Santiago, Algiers, Beirut and Baghdad, and many other places in between.

Tarkeeth Sunrise

In the wider world it is business as usual in the scattered killing grounds as a bewildering array of outsiders continue to wage their proxy wars in Syria, Libya and Yemen. Bombs still explode in Afghanistan and Somalia, whilst Islamists terrorize the countries of the Sahel, and even distant Mozambique, Warlords are still raping and pillaging across Africa, The convoys of spanking new Toyota Hi-lux utilities that once used to feature in ISIS propaganda videos are now parading along the dusty highways of Libya in the service of yet another warlord, rogue Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar.

And 2019  was a veritable “year of revolutions”.

For six months, the people of Hong Kong have been telling President Xi Jinping that they don’t want to go to his Party. The youth of Lebanon and Iraq have told the sectarian elites that have misgoverned and misappropriated for years, and the foreign powers that have called the literal and figurative shots to, well, fuck off! Kulkum ya’ni kullkum  – all of you means all of you! A similar chant has been taken up in Iraq, Algeria and Sudan, and across the Atlantic in Chile, Bolivia and Colombia. Poeple of all ages, genders, religions and social background are protesting about growing impoverishment and inequality, demanding work and justice, and calling on the self-entitled elites and their foreign masters to hand the country back to its people

The elite, the establishment, the Old Guard – call it what you will – will not let go of their ill-gotten gains without a fight; they possess the final sanction, and there’s a high chance there’ll be tears and bloodshed before bedtime.  It’s big boys” rules out there, as Jamal Kashoggi discovered when he went up against thuggish Saudi wunderkind, as did Julian Assange, alone in his Bellmarsh cell, the fall guy for America’s opportunistic, muddled and failed realpolitik.

As a further sign of America’s retreat from glory, it failed to effect regime change in Venezuela, blustered powerlessly at Iran, and be betrayed it’s Kurdish allies in Syria, whilst President Trump continue to kowtow to his favourite autocrats, including Egyptian pharaoh  Abdel Fattah al Sisi, rogue Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, and POTUS’  new bestie wannabe Turkish sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Tens of thousands of unfortunates in Yemen, Egypt, eastern Ukraine, and in the Syrian districts of Afrin, Rojava and Idlib suffer as a consequence.

Meanwhile, from Central America to the Donbas, from Sudan to the Congo,  tens of millions are on the road. Never in modern times – since the Second World War – have there been so many refugees. There are over sixty nine million people around the world on the move today – people who have been forcibly displaced from their homes and are fleeing from persecution or conflict. Forty million people have been internally displaced within their own countries – including six million Syrians. Over 25 million are refugees in neighbouring countries and further afield – 25% of them are in Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, Pakistan, and Uganda. five million are Syrians. These figures are of those registered by the UNHCR. The real numbers are much higher.  See In That Howling Infinite’s No Going Home.

We enter a new decade with an American election that will focus our attention; Britain’s  long farewell to Europe; an end, maybe, to Syria’s agony(accompanied by renewed repression and victor’s revenge); the rise and rise of China and the geopolitical challenge it presents to the  senescent “Old World”. And that is just a few things we have to look forward to.

I’d very much like to see what happens next. But looking back on the great, the good and the groovy, and my less illustrious nearest and dearest, have slipped off this mortal coil over the last decade. I observed with just a wisp of melancholy how so many had reached three score and ten, and were not to travel much further. I and mine are now in that danger zone.

Our year in review

In That Howling Infinite addressed many of these matters and more in an eclectic swag of messages from the forest.

In retrospect, much of our focus this year has been upon the Middle East, ranging from Cairo to Kashmir. We reviewed the historical and actual travails and betrayals of the Kurds of Syria and Iraq in Rojava and this Kurdish Conundrum, Afghanistan’s ongoing agony in The Ghosts of Gandamak, India’s apparently ham-fisted endeavour to resolve one of the most intractable issues outstanding from its bloody partition in Paradise Lost – Kashmir’s bitter legacy, and The US equally ham-fisted attempt to bring Iran to heel in Messing with the mullahs – America’s phony war.

Lebanon’s WhatApp Intifada examines the resurgence of the Arab street, as does Sawt al Hurriya  – Egypt’s slow-burning fuse. The latter casts a glance back to the heady days of January and February 2011, whilst Nowhere Man – the lonesome death of Mohammed Morsi and The tears of Zenobia – will Palmyra rise again? recall its destructive denouement.

We dissected the folly of the US taking on a proud but oppressed nation that has seen many empires come and go, and reported from partitioned Hebron and its conflicted Children of Abraham. We asked if Jarred Kushner’s Deal of the Century is designed to fail, and countered that with our own solution to the intractable Israeli-Palestinian Question with Bob Dylan’s 116th Dream – a Jerusalem reverie. As Yasser Arafat once said, it’s not a sin to dream!

2019 saw many anniversaries of significant historical events. We were moved to recall the first days of the Second World War – Germany’s invasion of Poland in 2nd September 1939 – The rape of Poland (1), and the Soviet Union’s reciprocal invasion a fortnight later in 17th September 1939 – The rape of Poland (2). 1939 also saw the end of the bloody Spanish Civil War. This and the impending removal of the body of Generalissimo Francisco Franco from his triumphalist sepulchre inspired Las Trece Rosas – Spain’s Unquiet Graves.

As the Brexit negotiations were deadlocked on the matter of the Irish border, we revisited the dark days of “The Troubles”: Free Derry and the battle of the Bogside.  As Britain headed in slo-mo to  its decisive December  election, the Labour Party was mired in accusations of anti-Semitism. Little Sir Hugh and Old England’s Jewish Question reminds us that in reality, it is the devil that never dies.

In the midst of many gloomy commemorations, there were some delights, and we chose to celebrate America’s glorious national bard with I hear America Singing – happy birthday Walt Whitman.

In That Howling Infinite did not neglect its own turf.

The Agony of Julian Assange addressed the ongoing trials and tribulations, and the ostensible abandonment by his mother country of our own though expatriate techo wide boy.  We discussed the apparent deterioration in our national, political, cultural and moral fabric in How the “Lucky Country” lost its mojo, a modern riff on the old and ironic tag. Back in 1964, Donald Horne put it thus: “Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people’s ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise”. Nothing, it seems, has really changed. This is also the leitmotif running thought our other posts, dealing with the destruction of our natural environment – the folly of the Bonfire of the Insanities – the biofuel greenwash, the optimism of Paradise Regained – back to nature in Queensland, our immediate and proximate Clear and present danger – Australia’s unfolding bushfire drama  – and our apparent unwillingness to take further and meaningful steps towards reconciliation with our original owners: We oughtn’t to fear an Indigenous Voice – but we do, and Frontier Wars – Australia’s heart of darkness.

Happy New Year. See you on the other side.

Our reviews of previous years: 2018; 2017; 2016; 2015