That was the year that was – don’t stop (thinking about tomorrow)

December 27, 2022December 31, 2022Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

The prophet’s lantern is out
And gone the boundary stone
Cold the heart and cold the stove
Ice condenses on the bone
Winter completes an age
WH Auden, For the Time Being – a Christmas Oratorio, 1941

I considered using a line from the above as the title of this retrospective of 2022. It was written during 1941 and 1942, though published in 1947, when the poet was in self-exile in the United States and viewing the war in Europe from afar – although the long poem from which it has been extracted does not in itself reflect such pessimism. A more fitting title could be taken from another long poem that was published in another (very) long poem published in 1947 – Auden’s often overlooked masterpiece The Age of Anxiety, a meditation on a world between the wreckage of The Second World War and of foreboding for the impending armed peace that we now look back on as the Cold War, with its oft-repeated mantra: “many have perished, and more most surely will”.

The year just gone was indeed a gloomy one, meriting a dismal heading. There are few indications of where it might take us in ‘23 and beyond, and my crystal ball is broken. Pundits reached for convenient comparisons. Some propounded that it was like the 1930s all over again when Europe constantly teetered on the brink of war. Others recalled 1989 with the fall of the aneroid Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But, beware of false analogies. In 2022, things were more confused. The tides of history have often resembled swirling cross-currents.

Things, of course, might have been worse. There are, as I’ve noted in successive posts on my own Facebook page, many qualified “reasons to be cheerful”. The year could have ended with Ukraine under Russian control. An emboldened China might have been encouraged to launch an assault on Taiwan. A red wave in the midterms would have buoyed Trump. And here in Australia, Scott Morrison might have secured another “miracle” election victory. The West could have retreated on all fronts.

Instead, therefore, I have selected a title that hedges its bets, because, to paraphrase the old Chinese adage, and the title of an earlier retrospective, we certainly live in interesting times and in 2023, and a lot of energy will be spent endeavouring to make sense of them – or, to borrow from Bob:

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece
The hollow horn plays wasted words
Proves to warn that he not busy being born
Is busy dying
B Dylan

The year in review

Christine McVie, longtime and founder member of Fleetwood Mac departed the planet on 30th November this year. And contemplating this year’s posts in In That Howling Infinite, I could not help thinking about one her most famous songs. I recalled that it featured on newsreels of the revolution that ousted the Shah of Iran in 1979.

Why not think about times to come?
And not about the things that you’ve done
If your life was bad to you
Just think what tomorrow will do
Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow
Don’t stop, it’ll soon be here
It’ll be better than before
Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone

The song seemed quite apposite as the soundtrack of a revolution that had overthrown one of America’s many friendly autocrats. At the time, no one could predict what would happen, but, as with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it was a time optimistic expectation. And yet its shock waves have reverberated and ricocheted in ways unimagined at the time.

As 2022 ends, with blood flowing on the streets of Iran and in the mullahs’s torture cells as young people rise up against a hypocritically brutal theocratic tyranny, we see again and again how that which goes around comes around.

Women, Freedom, Life

If the malign hand of history has literally reached out and gripped Iran’s young women and girls by their hair, it has also endeavoured to strangle the thousand year old Ukrainian nation in the name of an atavistic irredentism. Russian troops invaded the Ukraine on February 24, causing what has since become the largest conflict in Europe since World War II. Out if the spotlight of the world’s easily distracted attention. intractable conflicts lumbered mercilessly on – in Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia, the Congo and many other “far away places with strange sounding names”.

On the far side of the world, the USA continued to struggle with the reverberations of January 6th 2021. Donald Trump, like Dracula, has not gone away, and whilst his 2024 presidential run is looking increasingly shaky, he continues to poison the atmosphere like radioactive dust. The unfortunate folk of the United Kingdom endured three prime ministers during the year, including the shortest ever in the history of the office, and after two years of pandemic, are facing a bleak economic winter as well as a frigid actual one.

In Australia, it was the year of the teal – at least according to those who study the evolution of language, the year we lost a queen, our long-serving foreign head of state, and a king of spin, the down-fallen and disgraced Scott Morrison. And a sodden La Nina saw incessant rain drown large swathes of eastern Australia, visiting misery on thousands. COVID-19 mutated, the Omicron variant surging from beginning of the year, ensuring no end to the pandemic – today, it seems like everyone we know has had it, including ourselves (and we were soooo careful for a full two years!). As restrictions were cautiously lifted, we as a nation are learning to live with it.

Politically, it’s been a grand year for the Australian Labor Party. With our stunning Federal election win in May and in Victoria in November, the Albanese government’s star is on the ascendant and it’s legislative record in six months has out run nine years of Tory stagnation on climate, integrity and equality – a neglect that saw the rise of a new political force in the shape of a proto-party, the aforementioned “teal”, named for the colour of the candidates’ tee shirts. The opposition has been reduced to a bickering and carping crew, and whilst Labor continues to ride high in the polls, the Coalition bounces along the bottom of the pond.

Lismore, northern NSW, March 2023

Flooded house aflame, Lismore March 2022

Christine McVie was just one of many music icons who checked out this past year. The coal miner’s daughter, Loretta Lynn, crooned her last, as did rock ‘n roll bad boy Jerry Lee Lewis and Ronnie “the Hawk” Hawkins, who gave the boys in The Band their big break. Rock heavyweight (literally) Meatloaf took off like his bat out of hell and keyboard evangelist Vangelis boarded his chariot of fire.

Acclaimed British author Hilary Mantel, whose Wolf Hall trilogy inspired back to back posts in In That Howling Infinite in 2020 found “a place of greater safety”, and French author Dominique Lapierre also joined the choir invisible. I had first learned about Israel’s war of independence and the Palestinians’ al Nakba in his O Jerusalem, and about the bloody tragedy that accompanied the birth of India and Pakistan, in Freedom at Midnight, both books featuring in past posts.

Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis as Tom and Hal

One could argue that the most significant departure was that of Britain’s longest serving monarch. Queen Elizabeth II had been on the throne for almost all of my life, as has the now King Charles III who was born four months before me, and of whom, as a nipper, I was jealous. I recall how I watched the queen’s coronation on a tiny black and white television in the crowded and smokey parlour of the boarding house run by a friend of our family. By happenstance, Netflix served up two over the top regal sagas to binge on: the penultimate season of The Crown, which whilst entertaining, was a disappointment in comparison with earlier seasons, and Harry and Meghan which was whilst excruciatingly cringe-worthy, was nevertheless addictive viewing. The passing of Her Maj reminded me that in my lifetime, I have witnessed three monarchs and eighteen British prime ministers (and incidentally, eighteen Australian prime ministers). The public outpouring of grief for the Queen’s ascent to the choir invisible was unprecedented – the picture below demonstrates what the Poms do best …

The Queue along the Thames to pay respect to Her Maj

There were farewells much closer to home. My mediation colleague, aspiring author and friend John Rosley, and Beau Tindall, the son of my oldest Bellingen friend Warren, took off on the same day in May. Peter Setterington, my oldest friend in England – we first met in 1972 – died suddenly in London in March, and our friend and forest neighbour, the world-famous war photographer Tim Page, in August, after a short but nasty illness. Pete is memorialized in When an Old Cricketer Leave His Crease whilst Journey’s end – Tim Page’s wild ride,is an adaptation of the eulogy I gave for Tim in September, one of many on that sunny afternoon day in Fernmount. It is a coda to Tim Page’s War – a photographer’s Vietnam journey, a story we published a year ago.

Tim Page by Joanne Booker

What we wrote in 2022

The ongoing Ukraine War has dominated our perception of 2022, from the morning (Australian time) we watched it begin on CNN as the first Russian missiles struck Kyiv, to the aerial assault on infrastructure that has left Ukrainians sheltering through a cold, dark winter. Two posts in In That Howling Infinite examined the historical origins of the conflict: Borderlands – Ukraine and the curse of mystical nationalism and The Roots and Fruits of Putin’s Irridentism. “Because of …” Iran’s voice of freedom looks at the song that has become the rising’s anthem. None can predict the outcome – whether it will be a doomed intifada, the Arabic word that literally means a shaking off – historically of oppression – and figuratively, a rising up, like that in Ireland in 1798 and 1916, Warsaw in 1943 and 1945, and Hungary in 1956, or an Inqilab, another Arabic word meaning literally change or transformation, overturning or revolution.

The run up to May’s Australian elections inspired Teal independents – false reality in a fog of moralism.; and Australia votes – the decline and fall of the flimflam man.

More distant history featured in Menzie’s Excellent Suez Adventure, the story of the Suez crisis of 1956 that historians argue augured the end of the British imperium, and the role played therein by longtime Australian prime minister Sir Robert Menzies. Johnny Clegg and the Washing of the Spears is a tribute to the late South African singer, dancer and songwriter, and a brief history of the war that destroyed the great Zulu nation, setting the scene for the modern history of South Africa. And journeying further back in time to sixteenth century Ireland, there is O’Donnell Abú – the Red Earl and history in a song, a discussion of the origins of a famous and favorite rebel song.

Then there are the semi-biographical “micro-histories” in In That Howling Infinite’s Tall tales, small stories, obituaries and epiphanies. In 2023, these included: Folksong Au Lapin Agile, the evening we visited Montmarte’s famous folk cabaret; Ciao Pollo di Soho – the café at the end of the M1, the story of a café that played a minor part in my London days, as described in detail in an earlier travelogue, Song of the Road – my hitchhiking days; Better read than dead – the joy of public libraries; The quiet tea time of the soul, an ode in prose to a favourite beverage; and The work, the working, the working life recalling the many jobs I took on in the sixties to keep myself in music, books, travel and sundry vices.

We cannot pass a year without something literary. We celebrated the centenary of three iconic literary classics in The year that changed literature, and with the release of The Rings of Power, the controversial prequel to The Lord of the Rings, we published a retrospective on the influence of JRR Tolkien. One ring to rule us all – does Tolkien matter? – a personal perspective with an opinion piece by English historian Dominic Sandbrook, an informative and entertaining chronicler of postwar British history and society which featured, in Unherd, an online e-zine that became a “must read” in 2022. A Son Goes To War – the grief of Rudyard Kipling recalls the death in battle on the Western Front in 1917 of the poet’s only son, it’s influence upon his subsequent work, whilst Muzaffar al Nawab, poet of revolutions and sorrow is an obituary for another poet, who seen a lifetime speaking truth to power.

And that was that for what was in so man ways a sad year. Meanwhile, In That Howling Infinite already has several works in progress, including a review of historian Anthony Beevor’s Russia – Revolution and Civil War, what King Herod really thought about the birth of baby Jesus, and the story of a famous and favourite British army marching song.

Best wishes for 2023 …

Death of a Son

That was the year that was – retrospectives

Life in Wartime – images of Ukraine

“Because of …” Iran’s voice of freedom

November 1, 2022November 2, 2022Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom
Maya Angelou

زن زندگی آزادی Zan zandaky āzādy Women freedom life

In our relatively comfortable, free and still democratic countries, it is difficult to put ourselves in the position of people desperate and passionate enough to risk life and limb and to face the terrible consequences of potentially heroic failure. We can but sense, vicariously, the ache and the urge behind Maya Angelous’s poem The caged bird sings of freedom (above) and Lord Byron’s passionate couplet:

Yet, Freedom! thy banner, torn, but flying,
Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind.

The courage of the of the Iranian protesters, and particularly the woman and girls who have been the vanguard of this unprecedented intifada cannot be exaggerated. For brave they are indeed. Having endured long years of a brutal and vengeful, corrupt and misogynistic theocratic regime and its security and paramilitary enforcers, they are fully aware of the consequences of their actions.

Several weeks, the nationwide protests that followed the murder in custody of a young woman arrested by the morality police after wearing her hijab inappropriately, and other young women and also, now, young men, who, officially, have died at their own hand or of pre-existing causes, have mobilized Iranians of all ethnicities, classes, ages and genders. And the security state us reacted predictably, red in tooth and claw. There is torture and death actual and awaiting on the streets of villages, towns and cities throughout the country, and the public trials with their black-garbed and turbaned hanging judges are in place and ready to protect the nation and the revolution in the name of Allah and the legacy of the canonised grey and dour uber-mullah Ayatollah Khomeini.

The perseverance and nihilistic exuberance of the Iranian street has reminded me of an exhilarating song and video created by a young Egyptian and his friends celebrating the demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that precipitated the fall of practically Egyptian president-for-life Hosni Mubarak thirteen years ago last February. Sawt Al Huriya (The Voice of Freedom), went viral on YouTube after its release on 11 February 2011, the day before Mubarak’s departure?

Fast forward to the present, and we examine why the Islamic Republic’s sclerotic theocratic regime is so afraid of another song of revolution, the crowd sourced protest anthem, Baraya, which has become a thorn in the side of the government in Tehran.

Baraye, translated as “because of …” or “for …”, the anthem of Iran’s Woman, Life, Liberty protest movement grew organically from a Twitter hashtag trend in which Iranians expressed their uncountable discontents and their commitment to the protests. It continues to unite Iranians in their opposition to the rules, restriction nd repression of Islamic Republic weeks after it was first released online on an international and social media that the authorities have tried and failed to silence. To paraphrase Canadian songwriter and activist for injustice and the environment in his song Santiago Dawn (see below) to keep millions down “takes more than a strong arm up your sleeve”.

Bareya’s lyrics were created by the Iranians themselves and gathered and set to music , recorded, sung and shared by a young Iranian singer, Shervin Hajipour. Crazy brave, perhaps for predictably, he was detained by security operatives soon after he posted it on his Instagram page and forced to remove it from his feed. But it had already attracted millions of views worldwide and continued to be shared and shared and shared, and it has now been played and performed the world over as people across the glob empathize, identify with, and add to the images verbalised and the emotions these engender. We all have stories to relate of oppression and exclusion, of the abuse of power and privilege and the pervasiveness of prejudice and discrimination. To quote Bruce Cockburn once more about an earlier resistance, “see them matching home, see them rising like grass through cement in the Santiago dawn”.

Baraja gives voice to the voiceless – as Bob Dylan sang in another century, in comparatively straightened times:

For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worseAn’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universeAn’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing

The Recording Academy, which hosts the annual Grammy Awards, announced that in its new merit category for best song for social change, more than 80% of nominations were for Baraye. Below is a video of the world-famous band Cold Play singing the song in Buenos Aires with Iranian actor Goldshifte Farahani.

The genesis of Baraya mirrors the organizational structure of the protests themselves insofar as like these, it is networked and leaderless, Ironically, however, David Patrikarakos editor of the e-zine Unherd wrote recently, this lack of leadership portends the protests’ doom:

“No leader has yet emerged. Instead, the protests are organised by different people or groups in different cities and towns on an almost ad hoc basis.The truth is that if the mullahs were to collapse tomorrow, there are no signs that a democratic movement would sweep to power …It is far more likely that the security state — led by the Revolutionary Guard Corps — would step into the void and make apparent what is already largely a fact: that Iran is no longer a clerical state but is now ruled by a Praetorian Guard …

… In 1979, Iranians held up images of Khomeini. In 2022, they tear them down. They know they want the regime gone but they have no one to hold up in its place. For a revolution to succeed, it’s not enough to be against someone; you have to be for someone else. It’s not enough that Khamenei loses. Someone else must win. Until that time, the mullahs will continue to cling on as murderously and barbarously as they always have, and Iranians will continue to die. For years Palestinians would say they needed a Saladin. They were wrong. What they need is a Ben Gurion. What the Iranian revolutionaries need now more than anything else is a Khomeini. Until that happens, this will only ever be half a revolution”.

At this moment in time, the outcome of that revolution hangs in the balance. The passion of the people for a better world is once again going up against the iron fist of the security state. Sadly, history past and present, in Iran and elsewhere, has shown us that when an irresistible force comes up against an immovable object, no matter how popular, righteous and justified that force may be, the immovable object invariably wins.

Meanwhile, hope springs eternal …

Our weapon was our dreams.
And we could see tomorrow clearly.
We have been waiting for so long.
Searching, and never finding our place.
In every street in my country,
The voice of freedom is calling.
Sawt al Huriya

Baraya … Because of

Because of dancing in the street
Because of fear while kissing
Because of my sister, your sister, our sister
Because of changing rotten minds

Because of shame for moneyless
Because of yearning for an ordinary life
Because of the scavenger kid and his dreams
Because of a command economy

Because of air pollution
Because of ‘Vali Asr’ Avenue, and its dying trees
Because of a cheetah (Pirouz) that may go extinct
Because of innocent, outlawed dogs

Because of the incessant crying
For the image to repeat this moment
Because of the smiling face
For students, for the future
Because of students, for the future

Because of this forced paradise
Because of the imprisoned elites
Because of Afghan kids
Because of all (Because of…) non-repetitive

Because of all these empty slogans
Because of the rubble of fake houses
Because of the feeling of peace
Because of the sun after a long night

Because of the nerve pills and insomnia
Because of man, country, rebuilding
Because of a girl who wished she was a boy
Because of woman, life, freedom

Because of freedom

Because of Mahsa Amini

Why Is Iran’s Regime So Afraid Of This Song?

Nahid Shamdouz, assistant professor of Middle East and Media Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, Foreign Policy, 26th October 2022

Demonstrators sing “Baraye” while holding their phone lights high during a march in support of protests in Iran. Allison Bailey, Reuters. 26th October 2021

“Baraye,” the anthem of Iran’s “Woman, Life, Liberty” protest movement—a song woven together entirely from a Twitter hashtag trend in which Iranians express their investment in the current protests—continues to unite Iranians in their opposition to the Islamic Republic several weeks after it was first released online.

For Iranians in Iran but also for the millions in the diaspora, this is the song of a generation, perfectly expressing this political moment and all that is at stake.

For dancing in the alleyways
Because of the fear you feel when kissing
For my sister, your sister, our sisters
To change the minds that have rotted away
Because of shame, because of being broke
Because of yearning for an ordinary life

What makes this moment different from previous periods of protest is that the wall of acquiescence and pretense that maintained the state’s authority in the public realm has been torn down on a scale not seen since the 1979 revolution. In its recounting of all the painful grievances, “Baraye,” which translates in English to “for” or “because of,” signals the end of patience with the status quo and opens vistas onto a new future with a vocal crescendo that culminates in the word “freedom.”

The song reveals the simple, ordinary nature of the things that Iranians are aching for, asking for, and even dying for. It is radical in revealing on a national level the cruelty of a system that denies such basic demands—exposing the devastating conditions Iranians face under the current regime.

“Baraye” creates national intimacy by citing very specific events that all Iranians have suffered through together, in a palimpsest of collective traumas.

If “Baraye” reflects a different, perhaps unprecedented mood on a national level, it also mirrors the organizational structure of this recent protest movement. If it is networked and leaderless, so is the song. The lyrics were written by Iranians at large and merely set to music and vocalized by the young up-and-coming singer Shervin Hajipour. This explains why security forces detained Hajipour a couple of days after he posted it on his Instagram page, where it had already accrued millions of views. The regime has tried for years to push the apparent and already real aspects of people’s lives out of the public sphere.

On social media, Iranians have created a life that more closely mirrors their inner selves—replete with harsh criticism of leading clerics including Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; female solo vocalists who are otherwise banned singing at the top of their lungs; and the exhibition of private lives that are anything but a reflection of the state’s projected pious paradise. Still, the state has sought to maintain a semblance of its ideology and control in actual public spaces and its media.

“Baraye” has broken that violently imposed wall between the state’s enforced reality and people’s real lives. It forced into the open, in the face of authority, all that people have known for long but were not supposed to express openly on such a national dimension.

For the sake of a laughing face
For schoolkids, for the future
Because of this mandatory paradise
For imprisoned intellectuals

Since its release, the song has become the single most covered protest song in Iran’s history. Within a few short weeks after Hajipour composed the music for it, musicians across Iran and beyond its borders have sung it verbatim in their own voices, translated it, and sung it in other languages—and even universalized the lyrics for a more global audience.

Last week, the Iranian rapper Hichkas released a militant hip-hop track referencing “Baraye” through the more casual rap lingo “vase,” enumerating his reasons, starting with “vase Mahsa” (for Mahsa Jina Amini, whose death at the hands of Iran’s morality police sparked the protests) and ending with “for a good day,” in a nod to his own 2009 Green Movement protest song.

Mahsa Amini Protest in Iran

Protesters gather in London on Oct. 1 in solidarity with people protesting across Iran.

Indeed, the expressed concerns wrapped up in the short tweets shown in Hajipour’s video, and in the #Mahsa_Amini hashtag itself, are quite universal—the precarious condition of the planet, drastic inequalities, the desire for a peaceful life—which is why the song has become resonant with so many people around the world as well.

For the garbage-picking kid and her dreams
Because of this command economy
Because of this polluted air …
For a feeling of peace
For the sun after long nights

At the same time, “Baraye” creates national intimacy by citing very specific events that all Iranians have suffered through together, in a palimpsest of collective traumas. Hajipour sings “For the image of this moment repeating again,” drawn from a tweet with a photo of Hamed Esmaeilion and his young daughter relaxing together on a couch reading newspapers. (His wife and 9-year-old daughter were killed when Iran’s Revolutionary Guards mistakenly shot down a Ukrainian airliner leaving Tehran in January 2020, and Esmaeilion has become the face of the grief affecting all those who lost loved ones in the crash.)

This line resonates with Iranians because so many families have been torn apart by the country’s massive brain drain, caused by a closed and corrupt economy that offers few opportunities.

In other lines, Hajipour sings sarcastically “Because of this mandatory paradise,” referring to the theocratic state’s imposed restrictions, justified in the name of achieving an Islamic utopia.

In yet another, he sings of “houses in rubble,” pointing to collapsing buildings caused by the rampant nepotism and corruption that shield state-connected builders from transparency on safety measures. In another, he sings of the “imprisoned intellectuals,” in a nod not just to the hundreds of journalists, human rights lawyers, and filmmakers but even award-winning university students who have been locked up.

The chorus arising from hundreds of tweets is clear: This is a regime that seems to be against life itself, punishing dancing, kissing, and smiling faces.

The song’s singular overnight success is not a small achievement given the long, rich history of protest songs in Iran. Already at the time of Iran’s Constitutional Revolution in 1906, poets created songs about the spilled blood of the youth who agitated for representative government and, not long after, about the Morning Bird breaking the cage of oppression, which many decades later became one of the most intoned protest songs in post-revolutionary Iran.

The trajectory of Iran’s musical history clearly exhibited a century-long struggle for freedom and justice, not yet realized.

Although “Baraye” and other songs of the current protest movement continue this strong tradition, they break with the post-revolutionary legacy on one key point: They no longer call for reforms.

At the time of the last major convulsions in 2009, many activists and musicians of the Green Movement called forth songs from the 1979 revolution to stake a claim to the revolution’s original yet unattained promises. People wore headscarves and wristbands in the green of Imam Hussain and went to their rooftops to shout “Allahu akbar” to invoke God’s help against a corrupt, earthly power.

But this time around, there are no religious signifiers or any demands for reforms. If classical songs are performed, they are not the icon Mohammad Reza Shajarian’s conciliatory song Language of Fire in 2009, when Iranians were still agitating for reforms from within, but his militant 1979 song Night Traveler, (also known as “Give Me My Gun”) in which he calls “sitting in silence” a sin and asks for his gun so he can join the struggle. One of Shajarian’s masterful female protégés posted the song with the hashtag #Mahsa_Amini and swapped “the brother” out of the verses to sing “The sister is an adolescent, the sister is drowning in blood,” in recognition of the teenage girls who have given their lives in the protests.

The state security system instantly understood the significance of “Baraye” as a protest song. Hajipour was forced to take it off his Instagram account; however, not only has his song already been shared widely by other accounts and on other platforms, but the sentiments behind the lyrics are within the millions of people who wrote them.

The chants of “Death to the Dictator” have reverberated from the streets to the universities, from oil refineries to urban rooftops, and from bazaars to school courtyards. And so have the haunting calls for freedom repeatedly intoned at the end of “Baraye,” pouring forth from every corner of the actual and virtual Iranian public sphere.

That song’s reality can no longer be repressed and hidden by force.

Song lyrics in this article are based in part on Zuzanna Olszewska’s translations.

Nahid Siamdoust is an assistant professor of Middle East and Media Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and the author of Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran.

Muzaffar al Nawab, poet of revolutions and sorrow

September 26, 2022September 26, 2022Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

Iraq bade farewell on May 20 2022 to one of its foremost poets, Muzaffar Abdul Majeed Al-Nawab. He passed away in the UAE, where he’d lived in exile, after a long illness at the age of 88. His body was brought back to Iraq, where it was met by the prime minister and other prominent officials, and was buried in the holy Shiite city of Najaf.

He was known in the Arab world as the “revolutionary poet” in recognition of a lifetime of publically opposing and criticizing corrupt Arab regimes, and for which, he spent many, many years in jail or in exile.

He was following a long tradition of writers and intellectuals who have ‘suffered’ for their art. Nearly 175 years ago English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in his Defence of Poetry: “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” In the years since, many poets have taken that role to heart, right up to the present day.

They’ve been rebel-rousers and protesters, revolutionaries and yes, sometimes, lawmakers. Some, like Czech author Václav Havel have become presidents. Poets like Nawab have commented on the events of the day, giving voice to oppressed and downtrodden, condemned tyrants, immortalized rebels, and campaigned for social change. Most chant from the sidelines and the bleachers. Others place themselves in harms way. Many end up in dungeons and torture chambers, and some have perished for their art and articulation. So it was with Spanish poet Garcia Lorca, murdered in 1936 by Generalissimo Franco’s Nationalist soldiery at the beginning of the savage Spanish Civil War. So it was with Chilean folk singer and songwriter Victor Lara, slain in a soccer stadium in September 1973 by Augusto Pinochet’s thugs.

The silencing of singers and poets on account of their words and their voices diminishes our lives and indeed, it diminishes the world in which we live, and in its hatred and nihilism, strikes at the heart of the values we hold most dear. But history has shown that the death of the singer does not kill the song. The dictator perishes but the poet remains.

What is Freedom? – ye can tell
That which slavery is, too well –
For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own.
Shelley The Masque of Anarchy, published posthumously in 1832

Revolution Road

Let the word makers and the revolution singers awake!
Egyptian poet Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati

Al-Nawab was born in Baghdad, Iraq, in 1934, into an aristocratic Shi’ite family of Indian origin that appreciated art, poetry and music, and from an early age, he displayed a talent for poetry . Completing his undergraduate studies at the University of Baghdad he became a teacher, but was expelled for political reasons in 1955 and remained unemployed for three years.

He joined the Iraqi Communist Party while still at college, and was detained and tortured by the Hashemite regime that ruled Iraq at that time. After the Iraqi revolution in 1958 which overthrew the monarchy, he was appointed an inspector at the Ministry of Education. In 1963 he was forced to leave Iraq to neighbouring Iran, after the intensification of competition between the nationalists and the communists who were prosecuted and put under strict observation by the republican regime. He was arrested and tortured by Savak, the Iranian secret police, before being forcibly repatriated to the Iraqi government. An Iraqi court handed down a death sentence against him for one of his poems, but this was later commuted to life imprisonment. He escaped from prison by digging a tunnel and fled to the marshlands, where he joined a communist faction that sought to overthrow the government.

Known for his powerful revolutionary poems and scathing invective against Arab dictators, the first complete Arabic language edition of his works was published in London in 1996 by “Dar Qanbar” He lived in exile in many countries, including Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and Eritrea, where he stayed with the Eritrean rebels, before returning to Iraq in 2011. Before he returned to Iraq, he had been essentially stateless, being able to travel only on Libyan travel documents.

Nawab’s popular and eloquent poetry earned him a prominent position at the forefront of modern Arabic literature. He was known as the “revolutionary poet” for decrying corrupt regimes across the Arab world. His poems were filled with revolutionary fervor, social anger, satire, and rebellion against injustice and corruption by Arab dictators. Syrian writer Aws Daoud Yaqoub described Nawab in a book dedicated to his poetry as the poet of “revolutions and sorrow.”

Nawab was also known as a poet of pop culture as his poems spoke to the Iraqis of all age groups, useing simplified folk language in a frank and sharp way. He sometimes resorted to attacks and obscene words to deliver a specific message. In 2018, he was nominated by the Iraqi Writers Union for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Many of his poems, composed in the spoken dialect, were sung by some of the most renowned Iraqi singers, such as Yas Khoder. These include the poems called “Oh, Basil” [Ya Rihan], “Al-Rayl and Hamad,” and “The Night of Violet.”

Some Arab intellectuals considered him a great poet with sincere revolutionary principles who railed against oppressive regimes, injustice and corruption, using piercing words to expose the defects and deficiencies of the state, society, and poetry and to strip the emperor naked. He called for an end to the traditional practice in Arabic poetry of setting up poets and singers to perform songs of praise to the regime, sultan, or king.

He took extreme hostile positions against the West, Israel and the allies of the United States, such as the Gulf states. In one of his most renowned poems, he described the commanders of these countries as “the pigs of this Gulf” in the poem of this title. He described Arab meetings to solve the Arab issues, especially Palestine, as “lesbian meetings” in the sense that they produce nothing, and mocked the Arab rulers, saying “a pig’s pen is cleaner than the cleanest of you.”

And yet, many criticized him for his selective attitudes towards the tyrannical regimes in the region, and for behaviour that appeared to contradict to his declared principles. For example, the UAE has normalized ties with Israel, which contradicted Nawab’s opposition to both the rulers of the Gulf states and to Israel. His attitude attracted harsh criticism from critics on social media, who lamented the special treatment he received before his death in Gulf state that he had often condemned. Dhafer Al-Ajmi, Executive Director of the Gulf Monitoring Group, tweeted that Nawab was mostly known for decrying Gulf leaders using vulgar language to describe them. “Despite that, he died in a Gulf hospital, where he received treatment at the order of a Gulf Sheikh.” Saudi journalist Ali Al-Quhais noted that Nawab died in the Gulf states after he offended them and their rules, and even insulted Mecca. “The Gulf countries held poetry evenings for him and opened their hospitals to him,” Quhais said, criticizing Nawab for keeping mute when his own country [Iraq] was occupied

Other critics have described him as sectarian and partisan, since he often attacked Arab rulers, the West and Israel, whilst praising Ayatollah Khomeini and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and failed to take any position on the occupation of Iraq, which brought the Shiites to power in that country after American invasion and the fall of Saddamn Hussein.. His poetry also included strong words against sacred Sunni figures such as Abu Sufyan and Amro bin Al-Aas, who are among the Ansar or Companions of the Prophet – and who are are frowned upon by Shiites because of their attitude towards Imam Ali.

.Others, howver, believe Nawab’s positions were not sectarian at all, but rather, expressed his revolutionary left-wing stance against reactionary principles, colonialism and injustice – he referred to himself in his poetry as an Qarmatian, in reference to a social movement which led a revolution against the Abbasid Caliphate between the years 899 -107, and which included non-Arab nationalities, including black-skinned people.

By describing himself thus, he sought to allude to his Indian origins, family having migrated to Iraq during 19th century. This would explains the diverse cultural aspect of his poems, and why he addressed issues like Iraq’s oppressed Iraqi cultural minorities and their long history of persecution under the dominion of the Arab majority.

Iraq was once distinguished by its ethnic, religious and cultural diversity, as it was home to large communities of diverse origins. Today, these communities are on the brink of disappearance, as they were forced to flee the political, security and societal pressures in the absence of the authority of law and the state.

From an obituary published by e-zine al Monitor on 27th May 2022.

For more on Arab poets, in In That Howling Infinite, see: Ghayath al Madhoun – the agony of an exiled poet, and O Beirut – songs for a wounded city (Syrian poet Nizār Tawfīq Qabbānī and Lebanon’s national cultural icon, Fairuz).

Poetry Defeats Authority: Muzaffar al-Nawab

An Iraqi man feeds seagulls on a bridge across the Tigris River in central Baghdad,
December 11, 2020. Ahmad al Rubaye AFP

There are still poets that dare to tell this world about the wrong things that occur. They do that as if they were “Romeo” in Shakespeare’s play “Romeo & Juliet”. However, Arab repression forces them to “praise” rulers, politicians and security apparatus instead of writing for “Juliet”. While doing that, they use a totally very different language to deal with that circle. They curse when hit by batons and spit when tortured. They “pee on this apparatus” when their humanity is killed! The Iraqi poet Muzaffar al-Nawab (1934) managed to develop a unique style to deal with such a thing. He used a language that no other poet can create unless he/she was exiled from an Arab capital or subjugated to physical and psychological torture. Poets even have to face firmly “the beast” in Tehran to develop such a language. There, dozens of flagellants will be waiting to beat the poet with a whip and large boots.

Al-Nawab wrote in one of his poems about that experiment:

“ike two dull houses of ants
Are the eyes of the flagellants’ chief
His nose’s hair was growing like those of a pig
Mucus words were in his mouth
He was dripping them in my ears
He asked me: Who are you?
I was embarrassed to tell him:
I resisted colonization, so my homeland displaced me.
My eyes fainted from torture.

Although his family was an aristocratic one, al-Nawab became a member of the Iraqi Communist Party. After the coup of 1963, he became a fugitive. He fled to Iran and hid in Tehran. He was arrested there and held in prison for 5 months without knowing what was happening in his country. Then, he was sent back from Tehran to Basra in Iraq and afterwards to Baghdad.

His journey of rejection started there. Later rejection turned into a language that Al-Nawab mastered. He produced his first poem of rejection “Acquittal”. This poem became for him the start of being abused and tortured continuously. It was like a monster that kept chasing him.

At that moment, al-Nawab defeated authority for the first time. He uttered his first “no” in public. This refusal costed him 20 years of prison. Writing the aforementioned poem meant also putting him into jail for extra three years. Thus, his journey of rejection started with a “no” and a poem.

The trail was absurd. Al-Nawab stood and they asked him to insult the communist party to claim his acquittal. It wasn’t an easy choice as the poet’s answer would have affected another 120 prisoners by doing what he was asked to do. They said to him: Curse the party. But he said: No. They asked him to curse all parties. He said: No. And he wrote his “Acquittal” poem in a folk Iraqi poetry. While imitating the language of a mother, he wrote the following:

Time crashes your bones for betrayal.
You compromise your wound for meanness
And you have to hide it.
O son, let the wound be cleaned.
Let it bleed.
My son, don’t conceal our honor.
O son, acquittal remains rotten forever.
You know my son with every acquittal,
We rebury each martyr of our people.

Al-Nawab wasn’t using rejection in his poetry alone, but also in each situation of his life. “Semi actions” used to annoy him a lot. In Al Hillah prison, the poet helped in 1965 Hamed Maksood, who was sentenced to death, to escape. Like a painter, he made Hamed back then look like an eighty years old man. He stamped Hamed’s hands with the prison’s stamp to look like a visitor. He also transformed his pillow into a sick sleeping man and the police got deceived by this ruse. After that, Al-Nawab himself escaped from the prison at the beginning of 1967. He got used to escaping with the same way. Meanwhile, his poems were reaching readers and this casted him with homage. He got used to escaping which comes before confrontation and even when he got arrested in Iran, he tried to escape. His second attempt to escape from Al Hillah prison succeeded by digging a tunnel in the prison that 40 prisoners, including Al-Nawab, escaped from. He, then, disappeared in Baghdad before authorities issued an amnesty order for political opponents.

This was his second victory over the authority in poetry and life. These victories were accompanied usually with him being tortured and exiled. He was arrested in 1968 and he met the former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. May be the authority was trying to buy his silence or to direct his speech, but he said about both options: “Why does suppression enter the heart and censorship controls my silence, papers, steps and my mazes? Don’t I have the right to be silent, to speak, to walk outside the official path or to cry? Don’t I have the right to publish and distribute fire for free?”

In an unknown building, Saddam Hussein met him and asked him: “Don’t you trust the central government?” Al-Nawab replied: “I don’t trust you; you can send me back to jail.”

These constant escapes from one place to another have violated Al-Nawab’s humanity. In return, he created linguistic violations by attacking ministers, parliament’s meetings, police, informants and Arab league’s summits. He asks in his poem “The old pub”:

“How can man maintain his dignity while security apparatus hands reach everywhere?”

Al-Nawab was cursing on behalf of a whole nation. He represented hundreds of thousands of the poor who couldn’t curse the ones who deserved being cursed. Through this, he was freeing the anger of a whole nation, speaking to it in a way that he learned by blood. He cursed, with generosity, those who deserved that; those who tortured him, occupied his land, sold him and killed his joy. His curses became inclusive. He utters them from his throat that contains the throats of the silenced nation in an era that he called the urine era as he says:

I pee on the governing police.
It is the era of urine.
I pee on the tables, the parliaments and ministers with no shame
As they fought us with no shame.
The authorities of apes,
The parties of apes,
The apparatus of apes,
No!
The apes’ shit is better than you.

Using these linguistic violations in poetry was a response to abusing and suppressing thousands of people. But one person dared to use it and utter words before batons and torture chairs. That one was Muzaffar al-Nawab.

The poet, whose joy was killed in all Arab capitals, acknowledges the outright defeat and declares that in his poem “Summits”:

Now, I confess before the desert
That I’m filthy like your defeat.
O defeated rulers, defeated parties
Oh loser rulers
O defeated public
How rude we are!
And we deny it, how rude we are!

After the curse that he wrote in the poem: “Son of bitches, I exclude none of you”, he was shot but he survived. He says about this sentence: “They now got used to it” and he laughs.

In the home of foreignness and the collective feeling of alienation, Al-Nawab asks:

Oh, my homeland;
Are you the land of enemies?
O my homeland that is displayed as a morning star in the market

Speaking to God, he says:

Glory to you, I have accepted all things except humiliation.
I was satisfied that my share of life to be like that of a bird.
But glory to you, even birds have homes that they come back to.
And I’m still flying.
This homeland that extends from the sea to the sea
Is like adjacent prisons.
They are like a jailer who arrests another jailer.

Al-Nawab asks after all for forgiveness but tries to maintain his rejection:

Forgive my sadness, wine, outrage and harsh words.
Some of you will say that they were saucy.
Ok!
Show me then a situation that is more insolent
than the one we are now living in!

The Roots and Fruits of Putin’s Irridentism

March 24, 2022March 26, 2022Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

Prologue

The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 was in many ways a seminal event in my own journeying. Until then, I was a political ingenue and a naive communist sympathizer and fellow-traveler, although my evolving perspectives were transforming and expanding as I studied the history and politics of Russia and the Soviet Union, under the tutelage of exiled Hungarian academic Tibor Szamuely. Born in Moscow to a prominent communist family, his father disappeared into the Gulag. Young Tibor served in the Red Army, and he too was arrested and sent to a Labour camp. Rehabilitated, he served as Chancellor of Budapest University encore finally settling in the UK he taught me Russian politics at Reading University. He advised my to study with an open mind and to put off juvenile thinking. He hadn’t been well when I knew him and he died in 1972, a year after I graduated. Under his tuition, I’d resolved to specialize in Soviet Studies – but events intervened and I ended up in the Middle East (see: Tanks for the Memory – how Brezhnev changed my life).

I am recalling Tibor Szamuely today because he would always impress upon me the historical and political continuity of what he called The Russian Tradition – the title of his one and only book, published shortly before his death. He believed that the bloodstained drama of 1917 and the years that followed largely obscured the underlying consistency of Russian history. It is this basic pattern, circular and repetitive, that has seen the frequent turmoils that have overtaken this vast continent have in their various ways made changes that were essentially superficial, leading in the end to the intensification, under new forms, of the old authoritarian structure. From medieval times, autocracy has coexisted with a revolutionary traditionalism – a contradiction in terms as only Russia could sustain, a unique Russian capacity to seek revolution and discover regression, to invoke liberty merely to reinforce repression. if he were with us today, Szamuely would explain that the Soviet Union under Lenin and his successors and the Russia of Vladimir Putin bears so disconcertingly close a resemblance to Russia under the most savage of its tsars.

It is a theme echoed recently by Russian scholar and historian Simon Sebag Montefiore who wrote recently about how on 17th March, Putin appeared to threaten his people with a revival of Stalin’s Great Terror that began in 1937 and in which 1 million people were shot over two-and-a-half years:

“He’s dog-whistling 1937, so that’s pretty scary and the reason he’s doing it is because he realises there’s opposition in the elite and among the populace.He used all these keywords: ‘traitors,’ ‘enemy of the people,’ ‘scum,’ ‘bastards,’ all of which were from the thirties, which a Russian would know he’s threatening massive repression in Russia. He’s literally putting the fear, an ancestral, terrifying fear into these people. People who would have heard of these stories from their old parents, and grandparents and great-grandparents about the time when people didn’t sleep at night, they kept a bag packed in case they were deported. People were never seen again. It was a terrifying speech in only a way the Russians would know.”

One nation under an Orthodox god

In That Howling Infinite’s last post, Borderlands – Ukraine and the curse of mystical nationalism, we wrote:

‘Observing Putin’s mystical nationalism, his idea of Ukraine as part of Russia’s “spiritual space” … American historian Victoria Smolkin argues that his imagination of Ukraine is a fantasy of a fallen empire, a fever dream of imperial restoration. “Undoubtedly, many still harbour fantasies of such imperial restoration. But fantasy is not history, and it’s not politics. One can lament – as Putin does – that Soviet politics was not “cleansed” of the “odious” and “Utopian” fancies “inspired by the revolution,” which, in part, made possible the existence of contemporary Ukraine. But that is the burden of History – it is full of laments”.’

By his own account, Putin sees himself not as the heir to the Soviets but as a champion of Russian civilization and Moscow’s Eurasian empire, whose roots extend back to a much earlier Vladimir—St. Vladimir, the Grand Prince of Kyiv from about 980 to 1015. St. Vladimir was ruler of what the Russians consider their first empire, the Slavic state known as Kievan Rus—based, of course, in Kyiv, the capital of what is now Ukraine. St. Vladimir’s conversion to Christianity in 988 later gave rise to the idea that Russia would be the “third Rome”—the heir to the fallen Roman and Byzantine Empires following the surrender of Constantinople to the Ottomans. It is why, like Putin, many Russians refer to Kievan Rus as “the cradle of Russian civilization” and Kyiv as “the mother of Russian cities.”

He didn’t realize that even most of the Russian-language speakers in eastern Ukraine see themselves now as Ukrainian—that over the past 30 years, the Ukrainians had formed their own country. He didn’t realize that their sense of identity had changed,”

Fortress Russia This attitude also has profound roots in Russian history, especially the Russian belief that Orthodox Christianity is superior to the West’s liberalized Christianity, which Putin and other conservative Russians view as corrupted by Enlightenment ideas. In the early 19th century, the Russian answer to the French Revolution’s Enlightenment creed, “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité (Freedom, Equality, Fraternity), was “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality”—which Sergey Uvarov, minister of public education to Tsar Nikolai I, formulated as the conceptual foundation of the Russian Empire. This tripartite credo isn’t mentioned in Putin’s speeches and writings—he still likes to pretend Russia is a democracy—but it has been invoked by the far-right thinkers said to influence Putin, including Aleksandr Dugin, Lev Gumilev, Ivan Ilyin, Konstantin Leontiev, Sergei Petrovich Trubetskoy, and others dating back 200 years.

It is a sense that goes back centuries: In order to survive, you need strategic depth, so you need to push borders out as far away from the heartland as possible—not so much physical as geopolitical barriers. You just push until you meet something that can resist you.”

It is little understood by many Westerners that Russian literary figures they revere, such as Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, were also devotees of this idea of a “greater Russia” under an absolute autocrat. Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author best known for writings that exposed the horrors of the Soviet gulag, later became one of Putin’s favorite intellectuals. Before his 2008 death, Solzhenitsyn wrote in an essay: “All the talk of a separate Ukrainian people existing since something like the ninth century and possessing its own non-Russian language is recently invented falsehood.” Shortly before his death in 1881, Dostoevsky wrote: “To the people the Czar is the incarnation of themselves, their whole ideology, their hopes and beliefs.”

Many commentators on left and right are now pondering what they see as the inevitability of what is happening today in Ukraine, and several of them point to the malign influence of the man people are calling “Putin’s brain”, the nationalist ideologue Aleksandr Dugin -a latter day Rasputin, indeed, although Vladimir Putin is not as naive and dependent as the doomed Tsar Nikolai II, he is seemingly appearing to be as isolated – he is nobody’s puppet. David von Drehle wrote recently in the Washington Post: “A product of late-period Soviet decline, Dugin belongs to the long, dismal line of political theorists who invent a strong and glorious past — infused with mysticism and obedient to authority — to explain a failed present. The future lies in reclaiming this past from the liberal, commercial, cosmopolitan present (often represented by the Jewish people). Such thinkers had a heyday a century ago, in the European wreckage of World War I: Julius Evola, the mad monk of Italian fascism; Charles Maurras, the reactionary French nationalist; Charles Coughlin, the American radio ranter; and even the author of a German book called “Mein Kampf.”

Greg Sheridan, Foreign Editor of The Australian and a committed Roman Catholic, wrote a very good piece not just discussing Dugin, but also, the long arm of Russian history and the depth of Russian culture, including not only those icons of the Russian literary cannon, but also, what he describes as the “self-obsessed and self-regarding Russian Orthodox Christianity”. It is, he says, “ a treasure of spiritual depth and theological insight. But it’s view if the rest if Christianity is tied up in its tangles relationship with Russian nationalism”. Russia, he writes, considers itself as the third Rome, the true heir and successor to Rome and Byzantium, and the chaplain to the tsars.

I republish Sheridan’s article below, along with a piece from the eZine Foreign Policy by Michael Hersh, Putins Thousand Year War, which follows a similar historical track although with more emphasis on its present day geopolitical implications.

Both lead us back to Tibor Szamuely’s perspective that in Russia, there is indeed nothing new under the sun.

Posts in In That Howling Infinite, about Eastern Europe: Borderlands – Ukraine and the curse of mystical nationalism; Ghosts of the Gulag, The Death of Stalin is no laughing matter, Tanks for the memory – how Brezhnev changed my life, 2nd September 1939 – the rape of Poland (1), 17th September 1939 – the rape of Poland (2)

Inside the twisted mind of Vladimir Putin

Greg Sheridan, Foreign Editor, The Australian, 12th March 2022

Putin sees Ukraine and Belarus as the absolute minimum he must reclaim for Russia.

Ukraine and Belarus are the absolute minimum Putin must reclaim for Russia

Is Vladimir Putin out of his mind? As their savage invasion of Ukraine began a third week, Russian forces deliberately bombed a maternity and children’s hospital in the southern city of Mariupol. Last week, they attacked a nuclear power plant. The Ukrainian government accuses Moscow of using illegal thermobaric bombs, vacuum bombs, which suck the oxygen even out of people’s lungs.

Evacuation routes for civilians fleeing the heavy fighting in Mariupol have been repeatedly agreed, then shelled when terrified women and children try to escape.

International sanctions have crippled the Russian economy, crashed the rouble, caused a flight of capital. Russian oligarchs have lost tens of billions of dollars. Civilised nations won’t let Russian planes enter their air space. Moscow has created the biggest European refugee crisis since World War II. US intelligence thinks Putin might be about to use chemical weapons.

On the battlefield, Russia’s forces have been humiliated by a much smaller, less well-equipped Ukrainian military enjoying overwhelming civilian support.

But Putin cannot afford to lose. In Russian history, losing a war normally leads to government collapse and often the ruler’s assassination. The Russian government is now a one-man show. All power resides in Putin, the most comprehensive personal dictatorship since Josef Stalin. Only Xi Jinping of China wields a similar degree of absolute control in a big nation.

Putin has re-established not the Cold War, but the pre-Cold War norm that major powers invade other nations for conquest and territory, and population. Putin has even threatened the use of nuclear weapons.

US senator Marco Rubio thinks Putin is deranged. Former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, who met him many times, thinks he has changed. Previously, Putin was cool and calculated; now he’s erratic and delusional.

The televised kabuki performance Putin had his national security council put on, in which they all advised him to be tougher, from across a vast room (like Xi and Donald Trump, Putin is a germaphobe), not only looked weird but seemed false and clumsy, unlike most of Putin’s theatricality.

But this analysis is surely overdone. Putin has miscalculated in Ukraine. He thought his military stronger, Ukraine weaker, and the West more divided. But these are mistakes leaders, especially dictators who seldom get disagreeable advice, sometimes make. There is no reason to think Putin mad, even unbalanced. He’s always been a gambler. The next few weeks could be terrible, as the main military tactic left is simply to bomb and shell Ukrainian cities, repeatedly if not relentlessly, to cut off food, water and power, and effectively starve and murder the population into submission.

While Putin cannot afford to lose, perhaps he can compromise, using that word loosely, to describe a situation where he keeps a chunk of Ukraine but stops fighting. Putin is intensely unpredictable but he is not irrational and the Ukraine campaign lies at the very heart of his long-held ideological world view. It was predictable, and he himself often predicted it.

That world view is very particular and sees Russia as the centre of a Eurasian empire. It relies on a theory called Traditionalism, which rejects modernism and every aspect of Western liberalism, especially the West itself. This ideology is most clearly expressed in the writings of Aleksandr Dugin, who has prospered as a public sage under Putin. Dugin’s exotic views have earned him the label of Putin’s Rasputin (a mad mystic whose influence on the family of the last tsar, Nicholas II, was wholly baleful).

More of Dugin below, but Putin of course is nobody’s puppet and embodies many distinctive influences. Putin, now 69, was born in St Petersburg, studied law and went into the KGB. He rose to lieutenant-colonel and served in East Germany.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Putin became active in St Petersburg politics. He has said the chief lesson he learnt there was that if there’s going to be a fight, make sure you hit first.

Russian ultra-nationalist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin.

He was briefly in charge of intelligence services, then rose like a rocket to become prime minister, then president. He has been the boss of Russia for 20 years. That brings its own psychological baggage. Democratic leaders have told me they think people go a bit mad if they stay in the top job too long. That’s particularly so for dictators. As they grow older they seek a special place in history and become ever more paranoid. Numerous tsars were killed by ambitious rivals. Putin has no obvious succession plan. He has two daughters and may have a couple of sons, but none is involved in Russian politics or public life.

Putin is careful to look after his personal security detail. A number have become very wealthy. But the isolation, the gnawing paranoia, the eschatological date with history, these are the dark and lonely reaches of absolute power, which no human being is meant for.

Putin has said the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. He was an orthodox communist, but this expresses nostalgia not for communism, which Putin routinely criticises or dismisses these days, but rather for the Russian empire embodied in the Soviet Union.

Dugin is an important expression of the dominant ideology of the Putin era, but Putin emerges out of a much broader tradition. That is the long history, the dark forest, of Russian nationalism and cultural hubris.

Russia is a paradox because it is indeed one of the greatest cultures. Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy were perhaps the supreme novelists in any language. Life could not be complete without the melancholy sweetness of Tchaikovsky’s music. The Thief, a film made in Russia’s brief post-communist freedom, surely rates among the finest of all films.

But this culture is also self-obsessed and self-regarding. Russian Orthodox Christianity is a treasure of spiritual depth and theological insight. But its view of the rest of Christianity is tied up in its tangled relationship with Russian nationalism.

It considers itself the third Rome, and the true Rome. After the fall of Rome, in this view, Christianity was carried on in the Byzantine Empire. Constantinople (Istanbul) was the second Rome. Now Moscow is Byzantine’s rightful heir, the third Rome, the true Rome. Yet the Russian Orthodox Church has also always been the tsar’s chaplain.

Putin is much more a modern tsar than a modern communist like China’s Xi.

The tsars themselves, both the occasional liberal reformers and the aloof autocrats, resided at the heart of Russian cultural self-obsession and hostility to the West.

Dostoevsky was the supreme Christian novelist of the 19th century. His Christian vision was transcendent, at times sublime. The most Christ-like character in all Dostoevsky’s novels, Prince Myshkin, surely gives expression to Dostoevsky’s own views when he declares: “Our Christ must shine forth in opposition to the West … Catholicism is no more than an unchristian faith, it is not a faith but a continuation of the Holy Roman Empire.”

That last is an astonishing comment, given that the Holy Roman Empire hadn’t by then (1869) been powerful for hundreds of years. But that paranoid style, retaining grievance over hundreds of years, seeing enemies where none exist, that is characteristic of Russian culture both at the elite and the popular levels.

These qualities animate the mind of Vladimir Putin. He must have espoused atheism when a KGB colonel, but since ruling Russia he funds the Russian Orthodox Church and is happy to be filmed participating in its services on feast days.

Putin is said to own luxury yachts and enjoy living very well. But the Russian population never sees any debauchery from him. He is proud of his physical fitness and his private life is entirely private.

Putin may or may not hold any religious belief himself but he is in many ways a traditional tsarist leader. This tradition pays no lip service to Western liberalism.

I attended a lunch with Putin at the Sydney APEC summit in 2007. He told a long, and it must be said very funny, joke about what a fool Alexander Kerensky was. Kerensky was the social democrat leader the Russian communists deposed in 1917. Kerensky lived for a time in Brisbane in the 1940s. What Putin thought bizarre was that he formed a romantic liaison with a journalist. Putin thought this contemptible, grotesque, in any political leader. Putin went on and on about it. At the time it seemed funny enough, but odd. Looking back, I can’t imagine any other leader behaving that way.

Most dictators would ignore the press, democrats would celebrate it or josh it or whinge about it. Dictators pretending to be democrats would pretend to tolerate the media. Putin was none of those things. In expressing contempt for the press, in this case humorously, he was giving an early sign of the contempt in which he held all the norms of Western liberalism.

There is no better insight into the strategic mind of Putin than the book (which admittedly has a pretty wordy title): The American Empire Should be Destroyed – Aleksandr Dugin and the Perils of Immanentized Eschatology, by James Heiser, a Lutheran bishop in the US.

Dugin is a Russian political activist, university professor, prolific author and public commentator of great note. He has been a formal and informal adviser to several figures in the Russian leadership. Some of the things he says are truly bizarre and Putin doesn’t repeat those. But there is a deep continuity and overlap between Dugin’s writings and Putin’s recent long essay on why Russia and Ukraine are the one people, the one “spiritual space”.

There is no way Dugin could be as prominent as he is if Putin didn’t approve, and there is ample evidence that Putin, whom Dugin supports with wild enthusiasm, takes Dugin very seriously.

Dugin has written many books, but changed his fundamental views little over the years. A typical Dugin passage reads: “When there is only one power which decides who is right and who is wrong, and who should be punished and who not, we have a form of global dictatorship. This is not acceptable. Therefore, we should fight against it. If someone deprives us of our freedom, we have to react. And we will react. The American Empire should be destroyed. And at one point, it will be. Spiritually, globalisation is the creation of a grand parody, the kingdom of the Antichrist. And the United States is the centre of its expansion.”

For a time, Dugin was an anti-communist but he came to support the Soviet Union not long before it collapsed. He also sees good in Nazism, especially its paganism and its rejection of modernity, though of course he condemns its wildest excesses and certainly its war against Russia. Like many Nazis, he is obsessed with the occult.

People walk past a stencil painting depicting Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky on a building in downtown Podgorica. Picture: AFP

People walk past a stencil painting of President Volodymyr Zelensky in Podgorica. AFP

He believes Russia is protected by a specific good angel, that every nation has its assigned angel. Russia’s angel is at war with the West’s angel.

Dugin is a member of the Russian Orthodox Church but has a very eccentric view of Christianity. He embraces Traditionalism, which he holds shows that traditional human life, which is decent and good, comes from primordial traditions which pre-date modernism, which is evil. He has a pretty arbitrary selection of some religions as OK – Russian Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and a few others – and some as fraudulent and twisted, especially Catholicism and Protestantism.

He believes the good religions can all live side-by-side. More than that, he thinks all Russians are automatically Russian Orthodox. It doesn’t matter whether they go to church or not. The church is a kind of accompanying minor theme in the symphony of Russian nationalism. This ideology is immensely chauvinist, but not exactly racist. A nation is defined by cultural unity rather than race.

One of the things Dugin hates most about the West is its stress on individual rights. Peoples have rights, in Dugin’s view, but individual people do not. The society has rights; individuals do not have rights.

Dugin glorifies violence and the violent assertion of culture and national destiny.

Dugin also espouses the long-held Russian doctrine of Eurasianism. He sees the Eurasian culture as land-based, wholesome and good, and the Atlantic culture as sea-based, decadent and corrupt. He erects an enormous theological and philosophical sub-structure behind all this, but the bottom line is that Moscow should rule a Eurasian empire running from Western Europe all the way through central Asia and beyond.

The aftermath of Russian army bombardment on a children hospital in Mariupol, southeastern Ukraine.

The aftermath of Russian bombardment on a children hospital in Mariupol

Putin, following Dugin but also of course interpreting him freely, sees Ukraine and Belarus as the absolute minimum he must reclaim for Russia. Their addition would make Russia a nation of 200 million, and an even more vast geographical behemoth. Putin sometimes calls his opponents Nazis, as he grotesquely labels the Jewish President of Ukraine, but Putin has himself become a hero for the far right in the West. The right is always inclined to fall for a strongman leader. Putin funds, and thereby compromises and corrupts, the Russian Orthodox Church. He despises Western liberalism, the failings of which also distress Western conservatives. Putin promotes traditional values, as Dugin also claims to do within his bizarre world view. So before invading Ukraine, Putin had a lot of fans on the far right.

Dugin’s writings are a rich and weird compendium of often frightening conspiracies and speculations and they certainly exist at the extremes of Russian nationalism. There are countless milder versions than Dugin.

But the final element of Dugin’s theories which ought to give concern is his conviction that these are the “end days” and that a mighty battle between Russian Eurasia and the vile West is at hand. Putin is much smarter and more practical than Dugin. But this ideological impulse – to hate the West, to see anti-Russian conspiracies everywhere, to reclaim territory for Russia and favour violence – are all evident in the mind and actions of the Russian leader.

As Dugin says, chaos can think.

Putin’s Thousand-Year War

Michael Hersh, Foreign Policy, March 12th 2022.

Whether or not Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine ends any time soon, what is certain to continue is the Russian president’s abiding hatred and mistrust of the United States and other Western powers, which he believes left him no choice but to launch an unprovoked war.

It’s not just Putin. These views are shared by the many Russian elites who have supported him for two decades. They have also been a chief reason for Putin’s domestic popularity—at least until recently, when his invasion ran into fierce resistance—even as he has turned himself into a dictator and Russia into a nearly totalitarian state reminiscent of the Soviet Union at its worst. It is an enmity worth probing in depth, if only to understand why Washington and the West almost certainly face another “long twilight struggle” with Moscow—in former U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s words—rivaling the 45-year Cold War.

The Russian president’s enduring antagonism toward the West is a complex tale, one compounded of Putin’s 69-year-old personal history as a child of World War II and career Soviet spy as well as the tangled, thousand-year history of Russia itself—or at least Putin’s reading of it. At the bottom, Putin and the many right-leaning Russian officials, elites, and scholars who support him not only don’t want to be part of the West and its postwar liberal value system but believe their country’s destiny is to be a great-power bulwark against it.

Even if Putin is somehow ousted from power, the generals and security mandarins who surround him are just as vested in his aggression as he is. And already, Russia is almost as isolated economically as it was during the Soviet era.

Indeed, Putin may have been preparing for this moment longer than people realize: After the Russian leader annexed Crimea in 2014, the Kremlin’s longtime ideologist, Vladislav Surkov, wrote that it would mark “the end of Russia’s epic journey to the West, the cessation of repeated and fruitless attempts to become a part of Western civilization.” Surkov predicted that Russia would exist in geopolitical solitude for at least the next hundred years.

“Putin has no path back,” said Anna Ohanyan, a political scientist at Stonehill College and the author of several books on Russia. Like other Russia experts, Ohanyan believed at one point during Putin’s 20 years in power that he was seeking a way to wield Russian influence within the institutions of the international system while trying to build new, countervailing ones, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Now most of those initiatives have turned to ashes. “By challenging territorial norms, he’s throwing out the prospect of the path he’s been building,” she said.

Biden administration officials are still grappling with the implications of the new long-term struggle. To do so, they have already delayed publishing their new national security strategy slated for the spring. While the administration expects to maintain its Indo-Pacific focus, officials say Putin’s aggression is leading to much more intensive effort to pursue what was already one of U.S. President Joe Biden’s key goals: the revitalization of NATO and the Western alliance, especially the new militarization of major European Union nations such as Germany, which hitherto had been reluctant to play a leading defense role.

Ukraine became the touchstone of Putin’s anti-Western attitudes in large part because the Russian leader and his supporters saw their historical brother nation as the last red line in a long series of Western humiliations. Putin, in his speeches, has repeatedly called this the West’s “anti-Russia project.” These perceived humiliations go back a long, long way—not just in the 30 years since the Cold War ended, nor even in the 100 years since the Soviet Union was formed in 1922. They reach all the way back to the European Enlightenment of more than three centuries ago, which gave rise to liberty, democracy, and human rights. To Russian nationalists like Putin, these developments have gradually come to eclipse Russia’s distinct character as a civilization.

Some scholars believe this obsession with long-ago history is why Putin, who during his two decades in power was often thought to be a wily and restrained tactician, made the biggest miscalculation of his career in invading Ukraine. In doing so, he united, in one reckless move, the Ukrainians and the Europeans as well as the rest of the world against him. “He didn’t realize that even most of the Russian-language speakers in eastern Ukraine see themselves now as Ukrainian—that over the past 30 years, the Ukrainians had formed their own country. He didn’t realize that their sense of identity had changed,” said Peter Eltsov, a professor at National Defense University and author of the new book The Long Telegram 2.0: A Neo-Kennanite Approach to Russia. “He also killed all the progress he was making in dividing Europe. Even Finland and Sweden, which had been neutral, are now talking about joining NATO. He achieved the 100 percent opposite result of what he wanted.”

Statue of Archangel Michael on the Lach Gates at Kyiv’s Independence Square

That was that was year that was – It’s like déjà vu all over again

December 23, 2021December 26, 2021Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

The best thing one can say about 2021 is that it is not 2020. i guess we’ll all be glad when twenty one is done.

There were no bushfires to entertain us like last year, but the pandemic hung like a dark cloud over our everyday lives. In this, the second year of the pandemic, economies continue to struggle, livelihoods continue threatened or destroyed, many borders remain closed, and cities, towns and homes continue to be locked-down and isolated, and restrictions and precautions are ever-present.

There’s a sense that time has stood still, as if nothing much has really happened since the pandemic struck and that we’ve been treading water, awaiting wake if not rescue, them at least, release.

Things have changed, of course. The affairs of gods and men carry on above it all. But in our personal lives, there have been changes too – our behaviour and the nature of our interactions with others and the outside world, have indeed changed utterly. And our outlook on life, the universe and everything has changed too.

Most of all, we’re all feeling tired. Burnt out. Disengaged. Cynical.

I noticed it during the recent local government election when otherwise astute and active folk could not summon up the energy and interest to involve themselves with the issues at stake. The elections had been cancelled twice due to COVID19, and many had just lost interest. “When is the election again?” they’d ask apathetically.

A year ago almost to the day, we wrote in our our review of 2020, A year of living dangerously: “Time during 2020 has been elastic and confused. On 21st December, The Guardian asked readers to sum up how they felt about 2020 in one word – and likewise their feelings for 2021. As of Xmas Eve, the standout words were respectively (a) shit, fucked and challenging and (b) hopeful and better. My poll responses were “fascinating” and “unpredictable”.

And a year hence, I would give much the same response. Compared to other folk here in Australia and overseas, we’ve had a “good” Covid – if that indeed is the most appropriate descriptor. We don’t have to earn a living and we live on a beautiful rural acreage that is totally stand-alone and off-grid – there couldn’t be a more congenial spot to self-isolate. But we’d love to be able to escape the padded cell – to exit the Australian bubble for a while, to visit friends and relatives in England and to reconnect with the history and geography that we love in the world outside. Perhaps in 2022, we’ll have that opportunity.

The title of this review is borrowed from the famous American baseball coach Yogi Berra. As we leave 2021, here’s another:

“Predictions are always very hard, especially when they’re about the future”

The World in review

It was for us personally the saddest of years. Our close friend, neighbour and forest warrior, Annette, departed our planet mid-year after what seemed like short, aggressive illness – although in retrospect, we know that it was a slow train coming for a long while. I wrote Farewell to a Tarkeeth Tiger in tribute to her. And in September, our beautiful, talented, wise friend and soul sister Krishna Sundari.

As for the world at large, COVID19 continues to dominate the news, with more contagious variants popping up all over the place lake a game of “whack a mole”. As does the ongoing struggle to reach global consensus on the need to confront climate change. Tackling both looks a little like the story of Sisyphus, the Greek King of old who was condemned by Zeus to spend eternity rolling a huge boulder to the top of a hill only to have it roll back down as soon as he reached the top.

for a second time, and the Biden administration sought to calm America’s troubled waters, the Orange One haunts The US’ fractious and paralyzed politics and the prospect of a second Trump term is not beyond imagination.

Trump’s bestie, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest serving Prime’s minister, also got the push in the wake of the third election in just over a year. The unique coalition that emerged from torturous negotiations spanned the political, social and religious spectrum – left and right, secular and orthodox, Arab and Jew, and promised little more than maintaining the unsatisfactory status quo, that pertaining to the occupation and the settlements, illegal migrants, and the disproportionate influence the Haredim, none of which are morally, politically, socially or economically sustainable.

China under would-be emperor Xi Jinping continues to aggressively build its military and economic power, determined to take its rightful and long overdue place at the top of the geopolitical ladder, causing consternation among its neighbours and also other powers and fears of war in our time. With Xinjiang’s Uighurs and Hong Kong firmly under its autocratic boot, it continues to expand its nautical footprint in the South China Sea and signals loudly that Taiwan’s days as a liberal democracy are numbered. Its belligerency is increasingly meeting blow-back as other nations react in various ways to what they perceive as clear and present danger. What happens next is anybody’s guess.

Russia under would-be czar Vladimir Putin continues to aggressively rebuild its military power and influence, determined to revive the glory days of the defunct Soviet Union, whist channeling memories of its former imperial glory. Whilst in no way as powerful as China, it is taking advantage of the the world’s preoccupation with the ascendancy of the Celestial Kingdom Redux to reassert its influence in its own backyard – including the veiled threat to reconquer Ukraine – and also in the world, particularly in Syria and through the use of shadowy proxies and mercenaries, in Africa. What happens next is anybody’s guess.

Turkey under would-be Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan continues to aggressively pull its self away from the west and towards some concept of a leadership role in the Muslim world.Its economy, meanwhile, is in free-fall, with unemployment and food prices rising and the lira tanking. At the heart of the problem is Erdogan’s attempt to take a sophisticated globalized economy and run it as an emirate does, replacing state institutions with personalized rule. You cannot run a sophisticated, modern economy on conspiracy theories and doctrines from the 7th century. But President Erdogan, having rigged the electoral system and cornered the religious and nationalist vote, and with no rivals in sight, isn’t gong anywhere soon.

America finally ended its “endless war” in Afghanistan, in a chaotic, deadly scramble that left that country’s forever unfortunate people in the hands of a resurgent and apparently unreformed and unrepentant Taliban. It’s over a 100 days since the last evacuation plane took off in scenes of chaos and misery, leaving behind thousands of employees and others at risk of retribution, and the new regime has yet to establish a working government. Meanwhile professionals, human rights workers, officials of the former regime, members if the old government’s security forces, and especially women and girls wait, many in hiding, for the worst. Meanwhile, winter is coming and the country is broke and on the brink of of starvation. A major humanitarian crisis is imminent. What happens next, everybody does indeed know. As St. Leonard said, “We have seen the future and it’s murder!”

Whilst the war in Afghanistan ended, there are still plenty to go around for the weapons manufacturers and arms dealers, the mercenaries and the proxies. The year began well for Azerbaijan when it emerged victorious from a vicious 44 day drone and missile war against Armenia for control of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave that saw Turkish and Syrian proxies engaged each side of the conflict. An old War was rekindled in Ethiopia as a Nobel Peace Prize winner sent his troops to rake pillage and conquer a fractious province which turned the tables and is now poses to seize his capital. Hubris extremis? Meanwhile, war went on in the usual places – Syria, Libya, Yemen, Mali, the Central African Republic, and places too obscure to mention.

Meanwhile, back home DownUnder, the story that dominated political news – apart from COVID19 and the shmozzle of the vaccine roll-out, was the delinquent behaviour of politicians and their staffers in Parliament House – commentators have likened the goings-on in there to a school yard or frat house, and more bluntly, to a Roman orgy, with tales of bullying and sexual harassment, drunken parties, mutual masturbation sessions, and even rape. The prime minister huffed and puffed and asked his wife how he should deal with the situation; commissions of inquiries were set up; and reports handed down. The motto is “we must do better – and we shall!” But as with most things these days, nobody believes what politicians say anymore.

And not just here in Australia, but all over the world. Trust is in short supply, and indeed, people’s faith in democratic traditions and processes is shaking as populism and a taste for autocracy spreads like … well, a coronavirus. The US was recently named a “backsliding democracy” by a Swedish based think-tank, an assessment based on the attempted Capitol coup and restrictions on voting rights in Red states. In the bizarro conspiracy universe, American right-wing commentators and rabble-rousers are urging their freedom-loving myrmidons to rescue Australia from totalitarianism. Apparently we have established covid concentration camps and are forcible vaccinating indigenous people.

In early December, US President Joe Biden held a summit for democracy, and yet his administration are still determined to bring Julian Assange to trial, a case that, if it succeeds, will limit freedom of speech. The conduct of the trial also poses a threat to the US’s reputation because it could refocus attention on the ugly incidents during the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were exposed by WikiLeaks. There is a strong humanitarian and pragmatic case to look for a way out of Assange’s Kafkaesque nightmare, but the bastions of freedom, America, Britain and Australia show no interest in doing so notwithstanding the harm it does to their democratic credentials.

I chose these invigorating times to stand as a Labor candidate for Bellingen Shire Council in those elections I referred to at the beginning of this review. What we thought would be a short, sharp two month campaign extended to an exhausting five month slog as the Delta variant necessitated delaying the elections for a second time.

Few in the Shire can remember the last time Labor candidate stood for council, so we began with a very low public recognition, but we ran a good, honest campaign and raised our profile.

But alas, we were outgunned, outspent and outnumbered by the well-funded, professionally organised chamber of commerce independents coordinated, advised and directed by the National Party, who played to a disengaged and cynical electorate by gas-lighting us with the claim that we were “infiltrators” from mainstream political parties, bankrolled by big party money, and dictated to by Macquarie Street (the NSW Parliament), and thence, with no entitlement to represent the Shire – even though we were long-standing residents well-known in the community. Progressives on council are now but two against five, and the Nationals have reclaimed the Shire for business, development and traditional values. Back to the future. There will be buyer’s remorse for many ho voted for them without checking their credentials. And meanwhile, I’m quite happy not to have to sit in the council chamber with a bunch of neo-Thatcherites.

And finally, on a bright note, in the arts world, there was Taylor Swift. Fresh from her Grammy award for the sublime Folklore, she released her re-recorded version of her copyright-purloined album Red. How can anyone improve on the fabulous original? Swift does! It’s brighter, shinier, sharper, bigger, beatier and bouncier (I stole the last alliterations from the Who album of yonks ago), and her mature voice is a pleasure. Released just over nine years ago, when she was 22, it feels as fresh today, and for all the gossip and innuendo that surrounded its conception and reception and endure to this day, even in the hallowed habitats of the New York Times, the Washington Post and Rolling Stone (the Economist hasn’t weighed in yet), I find it refreshing and encouraging to listen to an artist so articulate and audacious, precocious and prodigious for one so young. Tay Tay also delivered one of the pop culture moments of the year, beguiling us all with the adventures of her old scarf. It out that not only did actor Jake Gyllenhall take her innocence, but he nicked her scarf too, and for one weekend in November all the internet cared about was its whereabouts. Safe to say it was a bad 48 hours to be Gyllenhaal.

Our year in review …

True to its mission statement, In That Howling Infinite reflected the events of the year with an eclectic collection. But, curiously, deliberately or by mere circumstance, we published nothing about the plague that had dominated our lives.

In a year when the treatment of women dominated the Australian news, and Grace Tame and Brittany Hughes became household names, we look at the status of women and girls in less fortunate parts of the world. Facing the Music – no dance parties in Palestine tells the story of a young Palestinian DJ and her confrontation with social conservatism and religious orthodoxy. In Educate a girl and you educate a community – exclude her and you impoverish it, we discus how countries who exclude women from political, social and economic life are the worse for it.

Inevitably, a decade on, we revisit the events in Egypt in January and February of 2011: Sawt al Huriya (The Voice of Freedom) – remembering the Arab Spring. Tangled 2 – Libya’s bloody circus rolls on examines the torturous dynamics of one of the many conflicts that emerged from the Arab Spring, whilst the humiliating and chaotic end of America’s “endless war” in Afghanistan in Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow – coda in Kabul. One of the many consequences of the unravelling of the Middle East was the wave of refugees that sept into Europe. Ghayath al Madhoun – the agony of an exiled poet looks as the life and work of a Syrian-Palestinian poet now living in Sweden, whilst Exit West – a hejira of hope reviews a work magical realism that charts the refugees’ journey.

As always, this blog has a strong history focus. I spent a lot of time conversing with our friend and forest neighbours, acclaimed photographer Tim Page about his adventures in Indochina during the Vietnam War. I’d edited his unpublished autobiography, and written a forward to open it. It ended up in Tim Page’s War – a photographer’s Vietnam journey. This was accompanied by a story told by Ken Burns in his excellent documentary The Vietnam War about a young man who went to war and did not return: The Ballad of Denton Crocker – a Vietnam elegy. Part memoir, part memory lane, i recall the story of my own youthful travels in Song of the Road – my hitchhiking days

A Celtic heartbeat inspired Over the Sea to Skye, the story of the famous folk song and of Bonnie Prince Charlie and Flora MacDonald, whilst a continuing interest in The Middle East saw the completion of a log-standing piece, a contemplation on the Crusade: Al Tarikh al Salabin – the Crusader’s Trail. Our Israeli friend and guide Shmuel Browns explored the Anzac Trail in the Negev Desert and discovered a forgotten battle that had a direct connection to our own neighbourhood and the ever-evolving story of Chris Fell of Twin Pines: Tel al Sabi’ – Tarkeeth’s Anzac Story.

Our own Kalang River was the subject of the latest in the Small Stories series, Crossing the South Arm – how that wide river was first spanned back in the day. On Christmas Eve last year, a koala took up residence on our property and stayed for several weeks – the only koala we have actually seen in forty years (we do hear them often). This led to a historical and contemporary commentary on the parlous predicament of our much-loved marsupial: The Agony and Extinction of Blinky Bill. Last year, we exposed the alarming reality that Tarkeeth Forest wood was being chipped and used to generate electricity. Our earlier The Bonfire of the Insanities- the Biomass Greenwash was followed by The Bonfire of the Insanities 2 – the EU’s Biomass Dilemma.

And finally to poetry and song. In Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land – a poet’s memorial to a forgotten crime, we looked at “the great Australian silence – what historian Henry Reynolds called “this whispering in the bottom of our hearts” in the context of a famous poem by Judith Wright and the almost forgotten secrets of our own hinterland here on the “holiday coast”. On a brighter note, we revisit the history and legacy of Banjo Paterson’s iconic poem Waltzing Matilda with Banjo’s not to jolly swagman – Australia’s could’ve been anthem.

In Rhiannon the Revelator – in the dark times, will there be singing?, we present an uplifting song of defiance from American folk and roots diva Rhiannon Giddens. And finally, I was delighted to discover an amazing song by Bob Dylan that I’d never heard before even though it was some four decades old: Cross the Green Mountain – Bob Dylan’s Americana.

Goodbye the old year – welcome the next!

Read reviews of previous years: 2020; 2019, 2018; 2017; 2016; 2015

David Kilcullen’s 2021 wrap up – a weak US emboldens its rivals

December 20, 2021December 20, 2021Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

Commentator and counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen is always worth reading – and below is his latest piece for The Australian.

As the time of the year would have it, I read his review of 2021 as I was completing my own for publication in the That Was The Year That Was series. Here is mine. Kilcullen’s follows.

The year kicked off to a fine start with the January 6th Insurrection in Washington DC as Donald Trump endeavoured to cling on to office by inciting his supporters and sundry militias to storm the Capitol to stop the count of electoral votes that would cede the presidency to Joe Biden. Though he failed, and was impeached for a second time, and the Biden administration sought to calm America’s troubled waters, the Orange One haunts The US’ fractious and paralyzed politics and the prospect of a second Trump term is not beyond imagination.

China under would-be emperor Xi Jinping continues to aggressively build its military and economic power, determined to take its rightful and long overdue place at the top of the geopolitical ladder, causing consternation among its neighbours and also other powers and fears of war in our time. With Xinxiang’s Uighurs and Hong Kong firmly under its autocratic boot, it continues to expand its nautical footprint in the South China Sea and signals loudly that Taiwan’s days as a liberal democracy are numbered. It’s belligerency is increasingly meeting blow-back as other nations react in various ways to what they perceive as clear and present danger. What happens next is anybody’s guess.

Russia under would-be czar Vladimir Putin continues to aggressively rebuild its military power and influence, determined to revive the glory days of the defunct Soviet Union, whist channeling memories of its former imperial glory. Whilst in no way as powerful as China, it is taking advantage of the the world’s preoccupation with the ascendancy of the Celestial Kingdom Redux to reassert its influence in its own backyard – including the veiled threat to reconquer Ukraine – and also in the world, particularly in Syria and also, through the use of shadowy proxies and mercenaries, in Africa. What happens next is anybody’s guess.

America finally ended its “endless war” in Afghanistan, in a chaotic, deadly scramble that left that country’s forever unfortunate people in the hands of a resurgent and apparently unreformed and unrepentant Taliban. It’s over a 100 days since the last evacuation plane took off in scenes of chaos and misery, leaving behind thousands of employees and others at risk of retribution, and the new regime has yet to establish a working government. Meanwhile professionals, human rights workers, officials of the former regime, members if the old government’s security forces, and especially women and girls wait, many in hiding, for the worst. Meanwhile, winter is coming and th country is broke and on the brink of of starvation. A major humanitarian crisis is imminent. What happens next, everybody does indeed know. As St. Leonard said, “We have seen the future and it’s murder!”

Whilst the war in Afghanistan ended, there are still plenty to go around for the weapons manufacturers and arms dealers, the mercenaries and the proxies. The year began well for Azerbaijan when it emerged victorious from a vicious 44 day drone and missile war against Armenia for control of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave that saw Turkish and Syrian proxies engaged each side of the conflict. An old War was rekindled in Ethiopia as a Nobel Peace Prize winner sent his troops to rake pillage and conquer a fractious province which turned the tables and is now poses to seize his capital. Hubris extremis? Meanwhile, war went on in the usual places – Syria, Libya, Mali, the Central African Republic, and places too obscure to mention.

Meanwhile, back home DownUnder, the story that dominated political news – apart from COVID19 and the total fuck-up of the vaccine roll-out, was the delinquent behaviour of politicians and their staffers in Parliament House – commentators have likened the goings-on in there to a school yard or frat house, and more bluntly, to a Roman orgy, with tales of bullying and sexual harassment, drunken parties, mutual masturbation sessions, and even rape. The prime minister huffed and puffed and asked his wife how he should deal with the situation; commissions of inquiries were set up; and reports handed down. The motto is “we must do better – and we shall!” But as with most things these days, nobody believes what politicians say anymore.

And not just here in Australia, but all over the world. Trust is in short supply, and indeed, people’s faith in democratic traditions and processes is shaking as populism and a taste for autocracy spreads like … well, a coronavirus. The US was recently named a “backsliding democracy” by a Swedish based think-tank, an assessment based on the attempted Capitol coup and restrictions on voting rights in Red states. In the bizarro conspiracy universe, American right wing commentators and rabble-rousers are urging their freedom-loving myrmidons to rescue Australia from totalitarianism. Apparently we have established Covid concentration camps and are forcible vaccinating indigenous people.

Uncustomary for him – it must be the season of goodwill – Kilcullen ends his review on a note of cautious optimism:

“Given the events of 2021, all this suggests that in 2022, despite the darkening international threat picture, a more independent, self-reliant, resilient and capable Australia, stepping up to confront the challenges of great-power competition – amid a rising threat from China, declining US influence and an increasingly complex and dangerous security environment – will be necessary and achievable. We should all hope for a sense of urgency and commitment in the face of the new environment’.

I am more sanguine. To quote the famous American coach Yogi Berra. As we leave 2021:

“Predictions are always very hard, especially when they’re about the future”

Other articles by David Kilcullen featured in In That Howling Infinite: : One, two, three, what are we fighting for?; The Man with the Plan; and Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow – judgement in KabuL

Over to David Kilcullen …

.Weak US emboldens China, Russia and Iran

The security picture for Australia has never been darker or more complex. But several key events this year offer clues into the challenges we’ll be facing in the year ahead.

David KilCullen, Weekend Australian 18th December 2021

Afghans struggle to reach the foreign forces to show their credentials to flee the country outside the Hamid Karzai International Airport, in Kabul.

Afghans struggle to reach the foreign forces Hamid Karzai International Airport,Kabul.

As we look forward into next year, the geostrategic and security picture for Australia has never been more complex and rarely more challenging. In security terms, this year was one of American weakness, Afghan betrayal, rising Russia-NATO tension and the emergence of space warfare and advanced technologies as domains in a new Sino-American Cold War.

But it was also the year of AUKUS and the year Australia found its feet despite increasingly belligerent bullying from Beijing. Several key events shaped 2021, and these in turn give us a clue as to how things might develop next year.

US weakness

The year began in chaos as Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the US Capitol, seeking to stop what they saw as a stolen election. Belief that an election has been stolen is one of the most well-documented triggers for revolutionary unrest.

Many Republicans, independents and even some Democrats still see the election as rigged – and, by extension, the Biden administration as illegitimate – boding ill for US stability into next year. The unrest that peaked during deadly riots in 200 US cities and all 50 states through the summer of 2020 seems to have subsided. But this is an illusion, since last year’s tension was stoked by the media and anti-Trump politicians.

Now back in charge, establishment institutions have an interest in damping dissent and, as a result, media amplification of unrest has been more subdued this year. But the underlying issues remain: riots continue in places such as Portland and Seattle, racially charged trials have triggered deadly protests, extremists are active on left and right, and murder rates are at levels not seen for 30 years. All of this is likely to come to a head next year around the US midterm elections. The worst inflation in four decades, supply-chain disruptions, labour disputes, retail shortages, soaring fuel prices, persistent Covid-19 restrictions (800,000 Americans have now died during the pandemic) and the most illegal border crossings since records began in 1960 complete the picture of a superpower in decline whose domestic weakness encourages its international adversaries.

Afghanistan: a triple betrayal

US feebleness was evident in August when, without bothering to consult his allies, President Joe Biden insisted on the rampantly incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan that prompted apocalyptic scenes at Kabul airport. The botched evacuation was not only a betrayal of our Afghan partners – in whom the international community, at Washington’s urging, had invested unprecedented effort since 2001 – but also a betrayal by Biden of NATO and non-NATO allies, including Australia.

Afghans climb atop a plane at the Kabul airport in Kabul,lAugust 16, 2021,

It was a defeat on the scale of Saigon in 1975, though the comparison is unfair to that withdrawal, which was more professional and less self-inflicted than this one. The resulting contempt in coalition capitals (and military headquarters) has been quietly intense, even as Americans’ trust in the armed forces plummeted to its lowest level this century, reflecting the military’s recent inability to win wars and its failure to hold anyone accountable when it loses.

It was a triple betrayal: Afghan leaders from president Ashraf Ghani down abandoned their people in the moment of truth, fleeing to safety while leaving them to the Taliban and the prospect of famine. The UN estimates that more than 20 million Afghans are at risk of starvation this winter, meaning 2022 may well turn out to be an even worse year for Afghans than 2021. Even while many of us continue working frantically to help evacuate his people, Ghani is calmly writing a book in Abu Dhabi – perhaps a sequel to his well-received Fixing Failed States – while his henchmen live large on money squirrelled away in advance of the collapse or carried with them as they fled. Some, such as the leaders of the National Resistance Front, Amrullah Saleh and Ahmad Massoud, fight on, while others (including former president Hamid Karzai) proved courageous in the crisis. But with these few exceptions, never was a people so ill-served by their own leaders or so badly left in the lurch by their self-styled friends.

Russia: playing a poor hand well

America’s enemies, and not only the terrorists emboldened by the Taliban victory, have noticed its weakness. Vladimir Putin moved quickly to fill the vacuum in Afghanistan’s Central Asian borderland, partnering with China on several military and economic initiatives, deploying troops to the Afghan-Tajik border and signing a weapons deal with India, a move that parallels his efforts to win Turkish support through arms sales. In the Pacific, Indian, Atlantic and Arctic oceans Russian ships, submarines and aircraft are more active than at any time since the fall of the Soviet Union 30 years ago next week.

Putin always has been brilliant at playing a weak hand well, and this year has been no exception. In the early months of 2021, with Biden distracted after the Capitol riot, and congress impeaching Trump for the second time, Russian forces pressured Ukraine with a troop build-up and threatening deployments on its border. The result was a conciliatory summit meeting between Putin and Biden in June, seen in Europe as mostly benefiting the Russan side.

President of Russia Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping toast with vodka during a signing ceremony in Shanghai, China.

Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping toast with vodka during a signing ceremony in Shanghai

After the Afghan fiasco, Russian activity in the Baltic States and Ukraine ramped up, and Russia’s ally Belarus tested the frontier defences of Poland and Lithuania with a manipulated flood of refugees, copying a Russian technique pioneered in Norway in 2015 and repeated several times since. Now Russian forces, including missile, tank and artillery units – perhaps 175,000 troops in all – are again massing within striking distance of the Ukrainian border, prompting urgent concern in Kiev.

Again, the US response reeked of appeasement, with Biden allegedly urging Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to offer formal autonomy to the eastern region of his country that has been under de facto Russian occupation since 2014, while assuring Russia and NATO that the US has no plans to fight for Ukraine’s freedom. These assurances were given the same week Biden hosted the Summit for Democracy, posing as leader of the free world. Neither Ukraine’s elected leaders nor Afghan parliamentarians – now on the run for their lives – commented, though Russia and China issued stinging critiques.

With winter approaching, Russian energy exports remain essential for Europe, while Russia – as a side effect of US policies targeting domestic energy production in pursuit of the Green New Deal – is the second largest source of US petroleum imports, giving Putin yet another card to play. The northern hemisphere winter of 2021-22 is thus likely to see Russia making use of its “energy weapon” within a broader suite of coercive tools.

China’s uneasy rise

If Russia played a weak hand well this year, China continued strengthening its hand. Beijing’s navy is growing at an astonishingly rapid pace while the modernisation and professionalisation of its land, air, cyber and rocket forces continue. The regime’s nuclear arsenal is undergoing substantial expansion, with hundreds of new missile silos discovered in remote desert areas. Cyber attacks, economic coercion and diplomatic bullying remain core elements of the Chinese repertoire, even as Western business leaders and sports stars (again with honourable exceptions) turn a blind eye to its crackdown in Hong Kong, bullying of Taiwan and oppression of the Uighurs.

China’s completion last year of its BeiDou satellite constellation, equivalent to the US Global Positioning System, threatened the dominance of GPS for the first time since 1993, with implications for every aspect of Western society, from EFTPOS transactions to infrastructure and transportation. Then in mid-October China tested a fractional orbital bombardment system, a shuttle-like spacecraft moving at hypersonic speed, able to evade missile defences and deliver a nuclear warhead anywhere in the world with limited chance of interception.

The Chinese test demonstrated how far US technology is lagging in this area, while marking the emergence of space warfare as a domain of conflict. Russia’s demonstration of a counter-space capability, destroying one of its own satellites in orbit (and creating a debris cloud that threatened the International Space Station) showed China is not the only adversary in space. Moscow and Beijing have announced joint plans for a permanent moon base, while China’s space station appears to include military modules.

More broadly, hypersonic technology – missiles moving at more than five times the speed of sound that can manoeuvre to avoid defences – are proliferating.

The so-called tech war among the superpowers includes these technologies alongside directed-energy weapons, robotics, nanotechnologies, bioweapons, quantum computing and human performance enhancements. These are among the most important areas of competition in the new cold war, along with the contest to control commodities (rare earth metals, copper, cobalt, lithium and uranium) and assets such as silicon and gallium nitride semiconductors that sustain them.

The first big event for China next year will be the Winter Olympics in February. Australia has joined a US-led diplomatic boycott of the Games, with Britain, Canada, Japan, New Zealand and Lithuania. Others may follow, but a diplomatic boycott – where athletes still participate – will have limited impact.

The Olympics are important for another reason: Admiral John Aquilino, newly appointed chief of US Indo-Pacific Command, has argued that Beijing is holding back on any move against Taiwan until the Games are over, meaning that from next March the risk of war in the Taiwan Strait may rise significantly.

Reservists of the Ukrainian Territorial Defence Forces line up during military exercises at a training ground outside Kharkiv, Ukraine December 11, 2021.

Reservists of the Ukrainian Territorial Defence Forces Kharkiv, Ukraine, December 11, 2021.

Beijing may be emboldened towards any future conflict by US failure in Afghanistan, of which China is the biggest beneficiary. China’s control of mineral resources in the country (and its de facto recognition of the Taliban) gives it leverage, while Beijing’s alliance with Islamabad allows the currently dominant Taliban faction in Kabul, which is heavily influenced by Pakistan’s intelligence service, to draw on Chinese support to consolidate control.

Indirectly, the failure of two decades of intervention in Afghanistan is seen as discrediting Western attempts to meddle in the internal affairs of other countries, vindicating China’s transactional approach.

Beijing’s 25-year strategic co-operation agreement with Tehran, signed in March, lets China import oil directly from Iran, helping to draw Afghanistan into a Chinese-dominated regional economic and security order.

It also reduces China’s reliance on seaborne petroleum imports through the Malacca Strait and South China Sea, making it less vulnerable to US action in the Pacific.

Iran: further than ever from a nuclear deal

For its part, Tehran has made great strides in developing its nuclear capability since 2018, when Trump suspended US participation in the multilateral deal signed by Barack Obama in 2015. This prompted severe concern about Iranian nuclear weapons in Israel and in the Sunni Arab states of the Middle East, while European diplomats warn the 2015 deal will soon be beyond saving. Iran suspended its involvement in talks to rescue the deal, conducting an internal review after its presidential election in June. Though talks have resumed, and Tehran seems willing to co-operate with UN monitoring, a return to the previous deal appears further away than ever. The fact Iran is revising its stance largely because of pressure from Russia and China, rather than in response to US sanctions, underlines American impotence and Sino-Russian influence, even as the two US rivals meet this week to discuss joint responses to what they describe as increasingly aggressive US rhetoric and sanctions threats.

Iran’s dominance in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon (and Lebanon’s ongoing humanitarian and security crisis) has helped cement Tehran’s influence across the Middle East and Levant while reinforcing the regional role of Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, and the Russia-Iran and China-Iran partnerships that made that position possible. This will persist next year. After the Afghan withdrawal it is hard for Washington to justify its troop presence in Iraq (where the anti-ISIS combat mission has officially ended) or eastern Syria, where US forces are deployed without approval from congress or any clear mission or end state. Something to watch in the coming year will be whether progress towards any resumption of the nuclear agreement coincides with further US withdrawals across the region.

AUKUS: doubling down on a weak partner?

As this overview shows, Australia’s environment this year has been more threatening and less predictable than at any time since the 1930s, as recognised in last year’s strategic update and cyber-security strategy, and underlined by the AUKUS agreement in September. Much has been made of the nuclear-powered submarines to be acquired under the agreement, a truly transformational move for Australian naval capability, though one that will take a long time to implement. Much sooner, indeed starting next year, long-range strike capabilities including Tomahawk and JASSM-ER missiles for the navy and air force, Apache attack helicopters for the army, and self-propelled artillery (under a separate deal with South Korea) will represent an immediate step up in Australia’s military posture. A new national critical technologies strategy, part of the broader technological component of AUKUS, is another important element of the new, more assertive stance.

As 2022 unfolds, AUKUS will represent an important indicator of the way ahead. If the agreement becomes a broadbased framework on which to build expanded co-operation with like-minded players – particularly Britain, which is rediscovering a role East of Suez and partnering with Australia on more issues than ever – then it will strengthen our leverage in the face of this new era of conflict.

If, on the other hand, AUKUS becomes another way to double down on the US relationship, increasing our reliance on a declining partner, the agreement could quickly become a net negative.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison announces the AUKUS pact with the President of the United States Joe Biden and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Boris Johnson in Canberra. Picture: Newswire/Gary Ramage

Scott Morrison announces the AUKUS pact oe Biden and Boris Johnson

The alienation of France (given that the French have more citizens and more capable military forces than any other European power in the Pacific) carries significant risks, as the South Pacific increasingly looks like a new theatre of conflict with China. Likewise, as India’s recent weapons deal with Russia illustrates, AUKUS can neither replace the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue – the informal partnership between the US, Japan, India and Australia – nor should it.

Encouragingly, 2021 seems to have been the year Australia found its feet despite bullying by Beijing since Canberra’s call for accountability on Covid-19 last year. China’s diplomatic high-handedness, shrill anti-Australian propaganda, economic coercion, cyber attacks, political interference and aggressive deployment of intelligence assets near our coastline were designed to teach us a lesson and show every Western-allied power what happens to those who step out of line. This backfired badly, pushing Australia into closer relations with allies, helping Australia’s economy diversify away from a damaging dependence on China, and prompting a sharp decline in Australians’ perceptions of China.

As a global energy shortage began to bite in late 2021, and China’s growth slowed, Chinese dependence on Australian iron and coal revealed itself as a key aspect of economic leverage – naturally prompting Beijing to threaten Australia over it.

Given the events of 2021, all this suggests that in 2022, despite the darkening international threat picture, a more independent, self-reliant, resilient and capable Australia, stepping up to confront the challenges of great-power competition – amid a rising threat from China, declining US influence and an increasingly complex and dangerous security environment – will be necessary and achievable. We should all hope for a sense of urgency and commitment in the face of the new environment.

Educate a girl and you educate a community – exclude her and you impoverish it

December 15, 2021December 15, 2021Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

Educate a boy, you educate an individual. Educate a girl and you educate a community. An educated mother will help educate her sons. But throughout the world, patriarchy’s big fear is that if we educate girls, when they grow up, it will lose control over a large swathe of an impoverished, illiterate and ignorant society. Muslims and others should remember that The Prophet’s wife was an educated woman.

The 12th century Andalusian polymath Ibn Rushd, latinised as Averroes, like Plato, whom he regarded highly called for women to share with men in the administration of the state, including participating as soldiers, philosophers and rulers. He regretted that Muslim societies limited the public role of women; he says this limitation is harmful to the state’s well-being.

Excluding women makes a society poorer and less stable

According to The Economist’ this is the finding of recent studies on the costs of misogyny: societies that treat women badly are poorer and less stable, and oppressing women not only hurts women – it also hurts men ans it makes societies poorer and less stable. It stands to reason that if over half of a country’s population is excluded from meaningful participation in politics, society and economy, half of that country’s productive potential is lost

According to Valerie Hudson of Texas University and Donna Lee Bowen and Perpetua Lynne Nielsen of Brigham Young University, is not just the Middle East that has a problem with women and girls,.

The authors also found evidence that patriarchy and poverty go hand in hand. The syndrome explained four-fifths of the variation in food security, and four-fifths of the variation in scores on the United Nation’s Human Development Index, which measures such things as lifespan, health and education. They conclude “It seems as if the surest way to curse one’s nation is to subordinate its women”.

Here are some of the key points:

Patrilineality is sustained by property rules that favour men. To keep assets within the patriline, many societies make it hard for women to own or inherit property, Several studies have shown that women who own land have more bargaining power at home and are less likely to suffer domestic violence.
Early marriage means girls are more likely to drop out of school, and less able to stand up to an abusive husband. And the male respect to abuse is often inherited. If boys see their fathers bully their mothers, they learn to bully their future wives. They may also internalize the idea that might makes right, and apply it in the public sphere. Ms Hudson argues that if women are subject to autocracy and terror in their homes, society is also more vulnerable to these ills.
Thanks to sex-selective abortion and the neglect of girl children, at least 130 million girls are missing from the world’s population. This means many men are doomed to remain single; and frustrated single men can be dangerous.
Lena Edlund of Columbia University and her co-authors found that in China, for every 1% rise in the ratio of men to women, violent and property crime rose by 3.7%. Parts of India with more surplus men also have more violence against women. The insurgency in Kashmir has political roots, but it cannot help that the state has one of most skewed sex ratios in India.
It is not just the ratios. The tradition of bride price can make marriage affordable for men. This is compounded by youth high unemployment in many countries in the south. If a young man cannot find paid employment, he cannot afford to marry, afford a home, and raise a family
Sexual frustration on the party of males with few prospects often leads to sexual violence. as manifested in the midst of the crowds that flocked to Tahrir Squire in Cairo during the protests that brought down log-time autocrat Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Across the world, insurgent groups exploit male frustration to recruit. Islamic State gave its fighters sex slaves. Boko Haram offers its troops the chance to kidnap girls. Some Taliban are reportedly knocking on doors and demanding that families surrender single women to “wed” them.

In “The First Political Order: How Sex Shapes Governance and National Security Worldwide”, Ms Hudson, Ms Bowen and Ms Nielsen rank 176 countries on a scale of 0 to 16 for what they call the “patrilineal/fraternal syndrome”. This is a composite of such things as unequal treatment of women in family law and property rights, early marriage for girls, patrilocal marriage, polygamy, bride price, son preference, violence against women and social attitudes towards it (for example, is rape seen as a property crime against men?).

Rich democracies do well; Australia, Sweden and Switzerland all manage the best-possible score of zero. Iraq scores a woeful 15, level with Nigeria, Yemen and (pre-Taliban) Afghanistan. Only South Sudan does worse. Dismal scores are not limited to poor countries (Saudi Arabia and Qatar do terribly), nor to Muslim ones (India and most of sub-Saharan Africa do badly, too). Overall, the authors estimate that 120 countries are still to some degree swayed by this syndrome.

Grounds for cautious optimism?

But, the scholars argue, there are grounds for cautious optimism.

Globally, patrilineal culture is in retreat. The selective abortion of girls is declining. The male-to-female ratio at birth peaked in China and India and has fallen since. Child marriage is falling, too. Polygyny is less common than it was, and often unpopular even where it is widespread, because of the harm it does to women and non-elite men.

Other trends that help include urbanization and pensions. When women move to cities, they earn higher wages and increase their clout at home. Their clan ties tend to loosen, too, since they live surrounded by non-members.When the state provides pensions, old people no longer depend so completely on their children to support them. This weakens the logic of patrilineality. If parents do not need a son to take care of them, they may not desire one so fervently, or insist so forcefully that he and his wife live with them. They may even feel less reticent about having a daughters.

And in a globalized, changing world, attitudes inevitably change. It becomes a unacceptable for a man to beat his wife.

The full article is republished below. An opinion piece by UK prime minister Boris Johnson follows – it is worth reading..

Read about the trials and tribulations of a young female DJ in Palestine in Facing the music – no dance parties in Palestine ; and the story of a fiery Palestinian teenage in Ahed Tamimi – A Family Affair

For other articles about the Middle East in In That Howling Infinite, see: A Middle East Miscellany

The cost of misogyny – societies that treat women badly are poorer and less stable

The Economist, Sep 11th 2021

The sheikh is a decorous host. He seats his guests on fine carpets, in a hall that offers shade from the desert sun. He bids his son serve them strong, bitter coffee from a shared cup. He wears a covid face-mask.

Yet the code he espouses is brutal. And one aim of that brutality is to enable men to control women’s fertility. A daughter must accept the husband her father picks. If she dallies with another man, her male kin are honour-bound to kill them both.

Women mostly stay indoors. Your correspondent visited three Shia tribes in southern Iraq in June, and wandered through their villages. He did not see a single post-pubescent woman.

Some Iraqi cities are quite liberal by Middle Eastern standards, but much of the rural hinterland is patriarchal in the strict sense of the word. The social order is built around male kinship groups. The leaders are all men. At home, women are expected to obey husbands, fathers or brothers. At tribal meetings, they are absent. “I’ll be clear: according to tribal custom, a woman does not have freedom of expression,” says Mr Manshad.

The male kinship group has been the basic unit of many, if not most, societies for much of history. It evolved as a self-defence mechanism. Men who were related to each other were more likely to unite against external enemies.

If they married outside the group, it was the women who moved to join their husbands. (This is called “patrilocal” marriage, and is still common in most of Asia, Africa and the Middle East.) The bloodline was deemed to pass from father to son (this arrangement is called “patrilineal”). Property and leadership roles also passed down the male line. Daughters were valued for their ability to give birth to sons. Strict rules were devised to ensure women’s chastity.

Such rules were designed for a world without modern states to keep order, or modern contraception. In rich, liberal countries, the idea of the male kinship group as the building block of society faded long ago. Elsewhere, it is surprisingly common. As a group that champions an extreme version of it has just seized power in Afghanistan, it is worth looking at how such societies work.

Rich democracies do well; Australia, Sweden and Switzerland all manage the best-possible score of zero (see chart). Iraq scores a woeful 15, level with Nigeria, Yemen and (pre-Taliban) Afghanistan. Only South Sudan does worse. Dismal scores are not limited to poor countries (Saudi Arabia and Qatar do terribly), nor to Muslim ones (India and most of sub-Saharan Africa do badly, too). Overall, the authors estimate that 120 countries are still to some degree swayed by this syndrome.

As a patriarch, Mr Manshad is expected to resolve problems his tribesmen bring to him. Many involve bloodshed. “Yesterday,” he says, he had to sort out a land dispute. Men from another tribe were digging up sand to make cement on a patch of land that both they and Mr Manshad’s tribe claim. Shooting broke out. A man was hit in the thigh. A truce was called to discuss compensation, mediated by a third tribe. In a separate incident five days ago, three men were killed in a quarrel over a truck. We have “many problems like this”, sighs the sheikh.

The Iraqi police are reluctant to intervene in tribal murders. The culprit is probably armed. If he dies resisting arrest, his male relatives will feel a moral duty to kill the officer who fired the shot or, failing that, one of his colleagues. Few cops want to pick such a fight. It is far easier to let the tribes sort out their own disputes.

The upshot is that old codes of honour often trump Iraqi law (and also, whisper it, Islamic scripture, which is usually milder). Cycles of vengeance can spiral out of control. “Innocent bystanders are being killed,” complains Muhammed al-Zadyn, who advises the governor of Basra, a southern city, on tribal affairs. “The last gun battle was the day before yesterday,” he says. The previous month he had helped resolve a different quarrel, which dated back to a murder in 1995 and had involved tit-for-tat killings ever since. Mr Zadyn has two bullet wounds in his head, inflicted after he decried tribal shakedowns of oil firms.

His phone rings; another feud needs mediation. A woman was accused of having sex outside marriage. So far, seven people have been killed over it, and five wounded in the past few days. Because two of the slain were elders, their kin say they must kill ten of the other tribe to make it even. Mr Zadyn has a busy night ahead.

And when the state is seen as a source of loot, people fight over it. Iraq saw five coups between independence in 1932 and Saddam Hussein’s takeover in 1979; since then it has invaded two neighbours, been invaded by the United States, seen jihadists set up a caliphate, Kurds in effect secede and Shia militias, some backed by Iran, become nearly as powerful as the government. Clearly, not all this can be blamed on patriarchal clans. But it cannot all be blamed on foreigners, either.

Ms Hudson and her co-authors tested the relationship between their patrilineal syndrome and violent political instability. They ran various regressions on their 176 countries, controlling for other things that might foster conflict, such as ethnic and religious strife, colonial history and broad cultural categories such as Muslim, Western and Hindu.

They did not prove that the syndrome caused instability—that would require either longitudinal data that have not yet been collected or natural experiments that are virtually impossible with whole countries. But they found a strong statistical link. The syndrome explained three-quarters of the variation in a country’s score on the Fragile States index compiled by the Fund for Peace, a think-tank in Washington. It was thus a better predictor of violent instability than income, urbanisation or a World Bank measure of good governance.

The authors also found evidence that patriarchy and poverty go hand in hand. The syndrome explained four-fifths of the variation in food security, and four-fifths of the variation in scores on the un’s Human Development Index, which measures such things as lifespan, health and education. “It seems as if the surest way to curse one’s nation is to subordinate its women,” they conclude.

Sexism starts at home

The obstacles females face begin in the womb. Families that prefer sons may abort daughters. This has been especially common in China, India and the post-Soviet Caucasus region. Thanks to sex-selective abortion and the neglect of girl children, at least 130 million girls are missing from the world’s population, by one estimate.

That means many men are doomed to remain single; and frustrated single men can be dangerous. Lena Edlund of Columbia University and her co-authors found that in China, for every 1% rise in the ratio of men to women, violent and property crime rose by 3.7%. Parts of India with more surplus men also have more violence against women. The insurgency in Kashmir has political roots, but it cannot help that the state has one of most skewed sex ratios in India.

Family norms vary widely. Perhaps the most socially destabilising is polygamy (or, more precisely, polygyny, where a man marries more than one woman). Only about 2% of people live in polygamous households. But in the most unstable places it is rife. In war-racked Mali, Burkina Faso and South Sudan, the figure is more than a third. In the north-east of Nigeria, where the jihadists of Boko Haram control large swathes of territory, 44% of women aged 15-49 are in polygynous unions.

If the richest 10% of men have four wives each, the bottom 30% will have none. This gives them a powerful incentive to kill other men and steal their goods. They can either form groups of bandits with their cousins, as in north-western Nigeria, or join rebel armies, as in the Sahel. In Guinea, where soldiers carried out a coup on September 5th, 42% of married women aged 15-49 have co-wives.

Bride price, a more widespread practice, is also destabilising. In half of countries, marriage commonly entails money or goods changing hands. Most patrilineal cultures insist on it. Usually the resources pass from the groom’s family to the bride’s, though in South Asia it is typically the other way round (known as dowry).

The sums involved are often large. In Tororo district in Uganda, a groom is expected to pay his bride’s family five cows, five goats and a bit of cash, which are shared out among her male relatives. As a consequence, “some men will say: ‘you are my property, so I have the right to beat you,’” says Mary Asili, who runs a local branch of Mifumi, a women’s group.

Bride price encourages early marriage for girls, and later marriage for men. If a man’s daughters marry at 15 and his sons at 25, he has on average ten years to milk and breed the cows he receives for his daughters before he must pay up for his sons’ nuptials. In Uganda, 34% of women are married before the age of 18 and 7% before the age of 15. Early marriage means girls are more likely to drop out of school, and less able to stand up to an abusive husband.

A story from Tororo is typical. Nyadoi (not her real name) waited 32 years to leave her husband, though he once threatened to cut off her head with a hoe. He was “the kind of man who marries today, tomorrow and everyday.” She was the first wife. When he added a third, her husband sold the iron sheets that Nyadoi had bought to make a new roof. Perhaps he needed the cash for his new wife.

Bride price can make marriage unaffordable for men. Mr Manshad in Iraq complains: “Many young men can’t get married. It can cost $10,000.” Asked if his tribe’s recent lethal disputes over sand and vehicles might have been motivated by the desire to raise such a sum, he shrugs: “It is a basic necessity in life to get married.”

Insurgent groups exploit male frustration to recruit. Islamic State gave its fighters sex slaves. Boko Haram offers its troops the chance to kidnap girls. Some Taliban are reportedly knocking on doors and demanding that families surrender single women to “wed” them.

You don’t own me

Patrilineality is sustained by property rules that favour men. To keep assets within the patriline, many societies make it hard for women to own or inherit property. Written laws are often fairer, but custom may trump them. In India, only 13% of land is held by women. Several studies have shown that women who own land have more bargaining power at home and are less likely to suffer domestic violence.

Nyadoi tried to build a small house on the land of her deceased parents, but her cousins told her she could not, because she was a woman. Only when staff from Mifumi interceded at a clan meeting and laid out her rights under Ugandan law did her relatives let her have a small patch of land. She now lives there, away from her husband. She sobs as she recalls “all the suffering for so many years…fighting, beatings, cuttings, being chased away.”

Home matters. If boys see their fathers bully their mothers, they learn to bully their future wives. They may also internalise the idea that might makes right, and apply it in the public sphere. Ms Hudson argues that if women are subject to autocracy and terror in their homes, society is also more vulnerable to these ills.

Yet there are reasons for optimism. Globally, patrilineal culture is in retreat. The selective abortion of girls is declining. The male-to-female ratio at birth peaked in China and India and has fallen since. In South Korea, Georgia and Tunisia, which used to have highly skewed sex ratios, it has fallen back to roughly the natural rate.

Child marriage is falling, too. Since 2000 more than 50 countries have raised the legal minimum age of marriage to 18. Globally, 19% of women aged 20-24 were married by 18 and 5% by 15, according to Unicef, the un’s children’s fund, but that is down from 31% and more than 10% in 2000. Polygyny is less common than it was, and often unpopular even where it is widespread, because of the harm it does to women and non-elite men. Women’s groups have pushed for bans in countries such as India, Uganda, Egypt and Nigeria.

Other trends that help include urbanisation and pensions. When women move to cities, they earn higher wages and increase their clout at home. Their clan ties tend to loosen, too, since they live surrounded by non-members.

When the state provides pensions, old people no longer depend so completely on their children to support them. This weakens the logic of patrilineality. If parents do not need a son to take care of them, they may not desire one so fervently, or insist so forcefully that he and his wife live with them. They may even feel sanguine about having a daughter.

That is what happened in South Korea, the country that in modern times has most rapidly dismantled a patrilineal system. In 1991 it equalised male and female inheritance rights, and ended a husband’s automatic right to custody of the children after divorce. In 2005 the legal notion of a single (usually male) “head of household” was abolished. In 2009 a court found marital rape unconstitutional. Meanwhile, increased state pensions sharply reduced the share of old Koreans who lived with, and depended on, their sons. And among parents, one of the world’s strongest preferences for male babies switched within a generation to a slight preference for girls.

The change was so fast that it prompted a backlash among bewildered men. By comparison, it took ages for patrilineal culture to wither in the West, though it started much earlier, when the Catholic church forbade polygamy, forced and cousin marriage and the disinheritance of widows in the seventh century.

Individual attitudes can evolve. In Uganda, which has seen five violent changes of government since independence and invaded most of its neighbours, 49% of women and 41% of men tell pollsters that it is sometimes acceptable for a man to beat his wife. But this rate is in decline.

In the northern district of Lira, which is still recovering from a long war against rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army, domestic violence is rampant, says Molly Alwedo, a social worker. But it is falling. She credits the real Fathers Initiative, a project designed by Save the Children, a charity, and the Institute for Reproductive Health at Georgetown University. It offers older male mentors to young fathers to improve their parenting and relationship skills.

Gary Barker of Promundo, an ngo that promotes such mentoring globally, says: “There’s always a cohort of men who say, wait a minute, I don’t believe in these [sexist] norms. [They see the] consequences for their mums and their sisters.” It is local dissidents, rather than parachuting Westerners, who make the best messengers. Mentors do not tell young men their attitudes are toxic. They get them to talk; about what happens in their homes and whether it is fair. Peers swap tips on how to control their anger.

It doesn’t work everywhere. But a randomised controlled trial with 1,200 Ugandan fathers found that such efforts resulted in a drop in domestic violence. Emmanuel Ekom, a real Fathers graduate, used to come home drunk and quarrel until morning, says his wife, Brenda Akong. Now he does jobs he once scorned as women’s work, such as collecting firewood and water. One day she came home and discovered him cooking dinner.

This article appeared in the International section of the print edition under the headline “The cost of oppressing women“

It’s time to end global injustice towards women

Boris Johnson, Telegraph, London October 9, 2018 — 3.03pm

Women shout slogans during a protest against sexual abuse in Pamplona, northern Spain. — Women protest against sexual abuse in Pamplona, northern Spain (AP)

That is roughly how it feels today as we watch these extraordinary feminist movements like #MeToo, and the frenzy surrounding the nomination of Judge Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court. We have a sense of the welling emotion behind these phenomena. We feel the rage at decades, centuries, millennia of complacency and injustice. We see women and men uniting to call for a change of attitudes, for a new and progressive sensibility.

It is a new call for one of the oldest and simplest and most powerful of all political ideas – the straightforward equality of all human beings in dignity and rights. And yes, we find some people looking with alarm at these boiling waters and the dam wall buckling; and some people – men and women in the comfortable bourgeois West – wonder what it means, and what harmless practices and conventions will be swept away, and whether frankly it is all a bit much, and where will it end, and what about their sons, and so on.

But to all those who worry, to all those who wonder if it might – just might – be a teensy bit unfair on the male sex, I say forget it. Put a sock in it, pal. We need that feminist rage. We need that dam to burst, and when it does we need the waters of righteous anger to sweep away the global injustice to the female sex.

82 women have climbed the steps of the Palais des Festivals at the Cannes Film Festival in an unprecedented red-carpet protest to press for improved gender equality in the film industry.

It is almost two and a half millennia since the chorus of Euripides’s Medea announced that honour was coming to the race of women – and look at the utterly miserable gender imbalance today. Across the planet we have millions of women who are trafficked, sold into slavery, raped in conflict, whose suffering is systematically connived in by the men who still command the overwhelming share of political power.

There are 200 million women who have been victims of female genital mutilation. There are a further 70 million young girls – the most vulnerable age is just five years old – who are at risk of this vile and barbaric practice. Not only do the victims sometimes bleed to death; there could be no more powerful way of showing a young girl that she is a lesser person – a chattel – than in attacking this fundamental part of her identity.

So bring on that tide of holy feminist rage and let it wash this horror away. Let the dam burst, and end the injustice to women that I am afraid in some parts of the world is actually growing. Look at the figures for female illiteracy and you see a vast arc of shame – from Africa, to the Middle East and to South Asia.

You don’t have the figures? Let me give you a selection, in ascending order of cruelty. In Egypt, 33 per cent of the female population cannot read or write; in India, it is 35 per cent; Congo, 44 per cent; Yemen, 45 per cent; Nigeria, 50 per cent; Pakistan, 58 per cent; Liberia, 68 per cent; Burkina Faso, 70 per cent; Benin, 73 per cent; Central African Republic, 75 per cent; Afghanistan, 75 per cent.

In every one of these countries these illiterate women are prevented from achieving their potential, and in every one it is the male children who get the care, the attention and the investment – with the result that there is a massive gender imbalance. In each of them male literacy is about 20 or sometimes 30 points ahead. It is time to end this bigotry, and sweep away the casual and blasé assumptions of the preponderantly male politicians who allow this injustice to go on.

Of course, you will occasionally hear the argument that there are now many Western countries (such as our own) where the gender imbalance is in the other direction, where women outnumber men in higher education. That is true – though there are still plenty of disparities in favour of the male sex, not least on pay.

But, in a way, that relative female success, in prosperous developed democracies, helps to make my central point. Look at the countries that struggle to contain the growth of their populations; the places that face environmental disaster of every kind – from desertification to the loss of habitat for flora and fauna. Think of the places where children die youngest, where unemployment is highest, where disease is most likely to take hold. Think about the world’s greatest breeding grounds for civil war, terrorism, corruption, radicalisation and the general alienation of young men. What do they have in common? They are all – almost without exception – the places where women face the greatest discrimination, and where society is most blatantly sexist in its distribution of education.

That is why I am utterly convinced that there is one policy that can help to address every single one of these problems, and that is to ensure that every girl in the world gets 12 years of quality education. Give a girl an education and she can contribute to the economy; she can control her fertility; above all, she can bring up her sons not to see her daughters as somehow inferior.

If you want to solve the problems of the developing world, be a feminist. And if you want to be a feminist, do it by educating girls.

Boris Johnson is a British politician, contemporary historian and journalist. Telegraph, London

That was the year that was – a year of living dangerously

December 29, 2020December 29, 2020Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

Last December, when we wrote our review of the year that was ending, fires were ravaging Eastern Australia, and civil unrest had broken out across the world, from Hong to Chile, Beirut to Bolivia. Calling it The End of the Beginning, we wrote:

“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”.

As they say, “be careful what you wish for”, or more prosaically, when men make plans, god laughs.

This was a year unlike any other in my, dare I say it and invite the evil eye, long lifetime. It started so well with the abatement of our smoky, fiery Black Summer, and then the rains came. This was the year optimists hoped would be one of 20/20 vision: progress on tackling climate change, perhaps, and end to the entertaining but scary presidency of Donald Trump, a cure for … well everything.

But it was to be the year of the virus. By year’s end nearly eight million people will have been infected and almost two million will have perished, with the US recording more than any other country – by New Years Day, its death-toll will very likely exceed its dead in World War II. Economies have been shattered, livelihoods threatened or destroyed, borders closed, cities, towns and homes closed, locked-down and isolated.

In its turbulent and divisive election year, the death of George Floyd at the hands of – or more specifically under the knee of a policeman, painted a brutal portrait of the implacable indifference to black life that defines American policing. It reopened America’s long-festering wounds of racial and social injustice, white racism and vigilante violence. Rather than douse the flames with water and retardant, The White House reached for a can of petrol. The Black Lives Matter Movement, like #MeToo in recent years, an incendiary spark ignited protests around the world, showing that police violence, injustice and inequality do not belong to the USA alone.

Armed protesters on the steps of the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing, demanding the reopening of businesses

Whilst most of the world had entered into a kind of limbo, awaiting the vaccine that will end our travails and reopen our countries and indeed, the wide world, others dropped down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories that alternatively deny that the pandemic exists or that it had been deliberately created and spread by mysterious and malevolent cabal that seeks total control, like some villain from an old James Bond film or an Avengers movie. Social media has enabled a veritable eBay of ideas and explanations where the isolated and excluded who do their own research and follow the breadcrumbs into the Matrix can buy one and get four free.

On a saner but nonetheless destabilizing level, denizens of the so-called “cancel culture” had a field day exercising its democratic right to be easily offended by demanding the deplatforming, defenestration and demolition of persons, ideas, careers, and monuments. Long-dead slavers, imperialists and generals bit the dust; JK Rowling and Nick Cave got a serve, the latter for devaluing that “cancel culture’s refusal to engage with uncomfortable ideas has an asphyxiating effect on the creative soul of a society”; and an episode of Fawlty Towers was temporarily committed to the naughty corner.

In the cold-blooded, brutal real world, there was no abatement in the wars and insurgencies that have been grinding on years now in Africa and the Middle East, whilst an old conflict over blood and soil broke out anew between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. Donald Trump’s much touted “deal of the century” that would reconcile Israelis and Palestinians was revealed to be no more than a shifty and shitty bribe, whilst US-brokered “peace” deals with a bunch of autocracies who had never gone to war against Israel are but smoke and mirrors that like Kushner’s Peace to Prosperity plan throw the unfortunate Palestinians under the bus. It is as if there is, beyond the planets COVID, Conspiracy and Cancel, a parallel universe of misery and carnage, power games and proxy wars.

Meanwhile, China, or more precisely, the Chinese Communist Party, having let loose the virus, has taken advantage of the world’s distraction and confusion by pressing forward in its quest its political, military and economic predominance. Uighurs, Mongolians and Tibetans face cultural extinction whilst in Hong Kong, the flame of freedom flickered and went out. Sooner or later, something is going to give – what some pundits perceive as President Xi’s impatient recklessness will be followed by a reckoning.

Michelle Griffin, World Editor with the Sydney Morning Herald provides a brief but excellent run down of 2020: The 2020 Pandemic – our year of living dangerously. And on 2020 as the year of “cancel culture”, the reflex response of the easily offended, here is 2020, the year we finally broke our culture. Both are well worth a read.

Time during 2020 has been elastic and confused. On 21st December, The Guardian asked readers to sum up how they felt about 2020 in one word – and likewise their feelings for 2021. As of Xmas Eve, the standout words were respectively (a) shit, fucked and challenging and (b) hopeful and better. My poll responses were “fascinating” and “unpredictable”.

The year ahead?

Our year in review

And so to our review of what In That Howling Infinite published during the plague year. Curiously, deliberately or by mere circumstances, nothing about the plague.

The year began with the fires and smoke abating here on our Mid North Coast, though raging still in southern New South Wales and eastern Victoria. Inspired by an early Cat Stevens song, we opened with a light, nostalgic history of the first the schools of the Tarkeeth, where we live.

Before we knew it, Australian Day was upon us. Normally, the weeks preceding our national day see social and mainstream media, posturing politicians and personalities and cultural warriors of all our tribes caught up in argument and invective about its meaning and significance. This year, however, things are unseasonably quiet. As a nation and a community, we were perhaps too preoccupied with Australia’s unprecedented bush-fire crisis to wage our customary wars of words. Elizabeth Farrelly asked what it means to be Australian: “As the fires rage on, bringing little but anti-green and pro-coal propaganda from our governments, we have a choice. We can go on pretending that exploitation is a sustainable way of life. We can pursue this culture of denial, where truths about nature, climate, women and Indigenous peoples are held in contempt. Or we can smarten up” … It was Australia’s choice – survive by respect or die by stupid.

February saw the first of several cynical and futile attempts by the international community to resolve the morass of the Libyan civil war. In Tangled – a cynic’s guide to alliances in the Middle East, we pointed out that Libya was not the only quagmire of outside powers and their local proxies. Then there the Trump administration’s “deal of the century”. Intended to end half a century of conflict between Israel and Palestine, it was the beginning, dead in the water: Clouded Vision – no peace, no plan, no Palestine, no point.

The unfortunate Palestinians were viewed more sympathetically in a retrospective of the life and work of one of Palestine’s most celebrated artists: Visualizing the Palestinian Return – The art of Ismail Shammout.

The ominous drumbeats of the novel coronavirus we now know as COVID19 drew close and closer during January and February, and by mid March, it was all on for young and old. A tiny but loud minority protested that all a cod. It was to misapply Bob Dylan, “just a dream, babe, a vacuum, a scheme babe that sucks you into feeling like this”. With enough being written about the pandemic on mainstream and social media, we took the pasty now very well traveled with The view from the grassy knoll – the resilience of conspiracy theories.

The onward March of the “Conspiratualists” merged by midyear with anti-lockdown protests in otherwise rational western democracies, the violence on America’s streets following the death of George Floyd, and the anticipation of open war between rival militia in the Land of the fearful – home of the heavily armed. As the US descended into a social and political division as contagious as the coronavirus, the calls to right historical wrongs led to the demands that statues of morally dubious long-dead white be torn down led to Arguments of a Monumental Proportions.

It was time for In That Howling Infinite to retreat into history, with The Bard in the Badlands 2 – America’s Shakespearean dreaming, a sequel to an earlier piece on America’s historical fascination with William Shakespeare. The lockdowns and self-isolation of the pandemic’s first wave saw people going out less, homeschooling, drinking more (and sadly, in many instances, beating each other up more. But many of us were also avidly FaceBooking, Tweeting and Zooming; and also binge-watching Netflix and Scandi-noir and reading large books.

In Bad Company – how Britain conquered India, we reviewed The Anarchy, the latest in a long list of excellent histories of the sub-continent by Scottish scholar and longtime resident of India, William Dalrymple – the daunting and depressing story of the rise and fall of the British East India Company, a quasi-military industrial complex that earned the misleading sobriquet The Honourable Company.

Flashman in the Great Game

Just in time for the lock-down, Hilary Mantel gave us the finale of her magisterial and magnificent Wolf Hall trilogy – The Light and the Mirror. In That Howling Infinite took up two themes that threaded through all three books. We know how the story ends, but are fascinated with how Mantel takes us there. Taking as it theme the golden bird-boy flying too close to the sun, Beyond Wolf Hall (2) – Icarus ascending asks the question “could Thomas Cromwell have avoided his doom?” Beyond Wolf Hall (1) – Revolution Road reviews Cromwell’s legacy, the Protestant Reformation that changed the course of English (and British) history.

Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis as Tom and Hal

Fast forward from the life and dangerous times of Henry VIII to the present, and Netflix’ release in November of the third season of The Crown, a sumptuous soap that beguiles even ardent republicans. The latest serve, highlighting the rise and fall of Margaret Thatcher and the salacious pas de trois of Charles, Diana and Camilla, is deliciously seditious. And there was an entertaining Australian interlude, as described in The Crown – the view from Down Under – even if it was actually filmed in Spain.

In August 2020, the largest man-made explosion since Hiroshima and Nagasaki rippled the heart out of Lebanon’s capital. Over two thousand tons of illegal, combustible, unstable, and almost forgotten ammonium nitrate went up in a fireball that resembled an atomic blast. Social media shared memes and messages, hearts and flags, and “we are all Lebanese” profiles. Expatriates and others wrote and spoke about the country’s present turmoil and fears of a return to the bad old days. Many shared videos of songs by Lebanon’s national cultural icon, Fairuz – most particularly, her poignant Li Beirut, which she wrote during the civil war as a tribute to the city’s timeless beauty and the suffering of its people people. O Beirut – songs for a wounded city presents Fairuz’ songs, and also Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani’s famous O Beirut, Mistress of the World, and Khalil Gibran’s iconic Pity the Nation.

And finally, as this strangest of years was ending, we published a frolic that has been several years a’making. A cowboy key – how the west was sung takes us on a leisurely jaunt through some of those grand old songs, films and musicals that have shaped our more pleasant perceptions of America.

Happy New Year.

Our reviews of previous years: 2019, 2018; 2017; 2016; 2015

Androids Dolores and Teddy enjoy the Westworld view

Land of the fearful – home of the heavily armed

June 10, 2020June 9, 2020Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

Vladimir Lenin once remarked that “there are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen”. As the leader of the Russian revolution, he was a bit of an expert on sudden upheavals following long stasis. We are living through such weeks now. The worldwide reaction to the death of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer has all the hallmarks of one of those momentous weeks.

Predicatively, such outbursts of outage, where peaceful protests are often accompanied by mayhem and wanton destruction, are a magnet for opportunists of all persuasions. It’s a revolutionist’s dream. Lenin called moments like this a “revolutionary situation”. Most self-respecting Bolsheviks and Nazis never let such volatile circumstances go to waste. One mob’s crisis was always some other mob’s opportunity – I’m talking in the Aussie vernacular here, by the way, a ‘mob’ is a bunch of folks, or livestock, sheep or roos, mainly – and not necessarily a Pythonesque “wabble of wowdy webels ” – although the featured photograph would suggest this this might indeed be so. The smiling chappie with the brolly looks like he was doing a Hong Kong “umbrella revolution”. Maybe He was just an accidental tourist caught in the camera’s gaze. But his nonchalance belies the seriousness of America’s turmoil.

David Kilcullen, Australian author, strategist and counterinsurgency expert refers to these agents provocateurs as ‘accelerationists’. In the following article, He writes of how the rise of militias and armed protesters across the US is sometimes seen as a fringe right-wing issue, but argues that it is much broader. Armed groups have formed across the political spectrum, reflecting divisions in American society that the coronavirus and it’s social and economic impacts have exacerbated. There are, he says, “already hundreds militias of varying political complexions across the country. Donald Trump is as much a symptom as a cause of America’s toxic polarization. Thus, far from being a purely right-wing phenomenon, rifts within US society that are most stressed by the coronavirus — urban versus rural interests, racial and class tensions, state overreach versus anti-government militancy, far left against alt-right, “collectivist” coastal elites versus rugged individualists in “flyover country” – align with pre-existing grievances. And heavily armed actors across the spectrum are poised to exploit them’.

Kilcullen writes: “One reason for the overemphasis on right-wing extremism is that analysts often characterized armed actors as “hate groups”. It is absolutely true that the intense hatred from right-wing extremists dwarfs most other groups. But the focus on hate is a misunderstanding of what drives violence in internal conflicts … the worst atrocities are driven not by hate but by fear. Fear of other groups, encroachment of those groups into one’s territory and collapse of confidence in government’s ability to impartially keep the peace are the key factors that provoke communal violence. Hate follows and rationalizes fear, not the other way around. And fear of the coronavirus, alongside the demonstrable inability of government to keep people safe, is driving today’s growth in armed militancy”.

Commentators on the left and right have for a long time now been discussing the the prospects of a second American civil war; and its has been particularly talked up during the reign of the incendiarist in chief. in the White House. but Kilcullen begs to differs, suggesting a less dystopian but nonetheless disturbing outcome:

“In ‘contested areas’ – where the territories of left and right-wing militants overlap – we can expect violence irrespective of the outcome. Whether it spreads will depend on level-headed political leadership – and today’s hyper-partisan coronavirus debate offers little hope of that. If violence does spread, it will not be a re-run of the American Civil War. Rather, given the multiplicity of groups involved, their geographical overlap and loose structure, we can expect something much more diffuse”.

In the land of the fearful, the home of the heavily armed, matters can very easily spiral out of control get out of hand. Conflict resolution expert and mediator Lawrence Susskind encapsulated it thus: when two sides are locked into an apparently intractable conflict, “you must engage the constructive middle. When you lose the constructive middle, extremists on all sides are empowered” (from 51 Days at Waco, Paul Hemphill September 2003 – see below ). When the going gets tough, the mild get going. As the indestructible but fictitious Agent Jack Bauer, said between 11 and 11.14 am in the turn of the millennium series 24:

“If you bring in the CTU (Counter terrorism Unit), they could screw up and there’d be another Waco”.

See also, Salon’s piece on the subject of America’s militias, Soldiers of the Boogaloo -the far rights plans for a new civil war and the Washington Post’s What is antifa and Why does Donald Trump want to blame if for the violence in the US?

For other posts on world politics in In That Howling Infinite, including several articles by David Kilcullen, see: Political World – thoughts and themes.

Home of the hateful, fearful and heavily armed

David Kilcullen, The Australian, 30th May 2020

The rise of militias and armed protesters across the US is sometimes seen as a fringe right-wing issue, but it is much broader. Armed groups have formed across the political spectrum, worsening divisions the coronavirus has exposed in American society.

Protesters, some heavily armed, are out in force to demand reopening of the economy. The husband of one leader posted a Facebook video this week expressing his readiness to take up arms against the government to prevent a “new world order” being imposed through lockdowns.

Protesters in Lansing, Michigan, during a rally earlier this month organised by Michigan United for Liberty to condemn coronavirus pandemic stay-at-home orders. Picture: AFP — Protesters in Lansing during a rally earlier this month organised by
Michigan United for Liberty to condemn coronavirus pandemic stay-at-home orders. AFP

As I write, there are 1.7 million coronavirus cases in the US and more than 100,000 deaths. The little county where I live — only a half-million people, in a part-urban, part-wilderness area of the Rocky Mountains — has a death toll higher than Australia and New Zealand combined. And this is one of the safe places, positively benign compared with hot spots such as New York or New Jersey with deaths in the tens of thousands.

Second to its health impact, the economic crisis wrought by government-imposed lockdowns has grabbed the most attention: 40 million Americans were forced on to the dole in the past 10 weeks. The job market, strong until mid-March, has fallen off a cliff. A flood of bankruptcies is sweeping US business; analysts expect a wave of municipal bankruptcies as tax revenue collapses. Congress has committed $US2 trillion ($3 trillion) in crisis spending, even as public debt nears $US30 trillion, or roughly 120 per cent of gross domestic product. If the first wave of the coronavirus tsunami was its health effect, the second — economic devastation — may be worse. But there is a third wave coming: the possibility of armed conflict towards the end of this year, when the combined health and economic impacts of the crisis will peak amid the most violently contested presidential election in memory.

There were already many militias of varying political complexions across America — one pro-militia website lists 361 groups across all 50 states. Membership surged after the 2008 financial crisis, then accelerated as thugs from both political extremes fought each other with baseball bats, bicycle chains and pepper spray in the streets of Washington, DC, Seattle, Portland and Detroit. The deadly “Unite the Right” rally in the normally sleepy university town of Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 brought the danger home to many Americans, but the trend was longstanding.

Rioting among groups such as Antifa (on the anarchist left), Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys (on the alt-right) and mass demonstrations by issue-motivated groups such as Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion and the Women’s March kicked into high gear after Donald Trump’s election.

Far-left militias such as Redneck Revolt and the John Brown Gun Club emerged, copying the methods and military-style weapons of right-wing militias while opposing their politics. Both far-right and far-left armed groups were at Charlottesville, with cadres of gun-carrying militants guarding protesters on both sides and a third-party “constitutionalist” militia, the Oath Keepers — composed mainly of military and law-enforcement veterans — standing by as self-appointed umpires.

In the west, a separate rural militia movement had already coalesced around “sovereign citizen” groups that rejected federal authority. Despite media portrayals of its leaders as racially motivated, in fact the sovereign citizen ideology is neither left nor right in a traditional sense — it might better be described as a form of militant libertarianism with roots in the self-reliant cowboy culture of the old west. In April 2014, a dispute over grazing rights in Nevada triggered an armed stand-off between militia and federal agencies including the Bureau of Land Management and the FBI. This dispute — over federal attempts to impound the cattle of a rancher named Cliven Bundy — brought hundreds of militia members from across the country to Nevada where they surrounded federal agents, trained weapons on them and forced them to back down.

The 2014 stand-off ended in a bloodless militia victory, but almost two years later Bundy’s son Ammon led an armed occupation of the headquarters of a federal wildlife refuge in southeastern Oregon. This time, things went the other way. The occupation prompted a six-week siege by federal and state agencies in January-February 2016. It resulted in the death of LaVoy Finicum, a charismatic Arizona rancher whose killing, captured on government aerial-camera footage that appears to show him with hands raised in surrender before being shot, made him a martyr.

Though Trump is as much a symptom as a cause of America’s toxic polarisation, the passions he inspires among friend and foe alike have exacerbated it: during the 2016 election campaign, Arizona militias mounted armed patrols to support his border wall. In response, Redneck Revolt held a heavily armed show of force in Phoenix, Arizona, later posting a YouTube video showing members shooting semiautomatic rifles at targets displaying alt-right symbols. A few months later, Antifa convened an “anti-colonial anti-fascist community defence gathering” near Flagstaff, Arizona, that included weapons training and coaching in anti-police tactics. Today, far-left and far-right groups operate within close striking distance of each other in several border states and in “contested zones” including the Pacific Northwest, parts of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia and the Carolinas.

A Youtube still of Neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division training outside Seattle.

The pandemic — and the grievances inspired by heavy-handed responses to it — have brought these tensions to a head. Camouflage-clad militia sporting semiautomatic rifles and body armour and riding in military-surplus trucks joined an armed protest against the governor of Pennsylvania in April. Similar protests took place in Ohio and North Dakota. A week later demonstrators, some carrying AK-47 rifles, swarmed into the state capital in Lansing, Michigan, to confront politicians.

A racial edge also emerged: a week after the Lansing incident a group of African-Americans, armed with AR-15 rifles and automatic pistols, mounted a show of force outside the Michigan State Capitol building to support a black member of the legislature. Class inequities, which track closely with racial disparities here, have prompted socialist groups — notably Antifa but also traditionally nonviolent Trotskyist and anarchist networks — to arm themselves for an incipient revolutionary moment.

Mass protests on the rise

Minneapolis Police Death Los Angeles Protest

US-UNREST-MILITIA-PROTEST-AFP PICTURES OF THE YEAR 2016

In Minneapolis, the killing by white police officers of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, brought thousands of protesters on to the streets for several nights of rioting, with multiple buildings and cars burned and shopping malls and restaurants looted. By Thursday, militarised police were on the streets firing tear gas and rubber bullets against vociferous opposition. At least one person has been killed in the riots and the Minnesota National Guard is expected to join the police in attempting to restore order.

Thus, far from being a purely right-wing phenomenon, rifts within US society that are most stressed by the coronavirus — urban versus rural interests, racial and class tensions, state overreach versus anti-government militancy, far left against alt-right, “collectivist” coastal elites versus rugged individualists in “flyover country” — align with pre-existing grievances. And heavily armed actors across the spectrum are poised to exploit them.

One reason for the overemphasis on right-wing extremism, I believe, is that analysts often mischaracterise armed actors as “hate groups”. It is absolutely true that the intense hatred from right-wing extremists dwarfs most other groups. But the focus on hate is a misunderstanding of what drives violence in internal conflicts.

As Stathis Kalyvas demonstrated a decade ago in The Logic of Violence in Civil War, the worst atrocities are driven not by hate but by fear. Fear of other groups, encroachment of those groups into one’s territory and collapse of confidence in government’s ability to impartially keep the peace are the key factors that provoke communal violence. Hate follows and rationalises fear, not the other way around. And fear of the coronavirus, alongside the demonstrable inability of government to keep people safe, is driving today’s growth in armed militancy.

Like Iraq, like Somalia

To me, current conditions feel disturbingly similar to things I have seen in Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Colombia. Indeed, the theory of guerrilla and unconventional warfare fits today’s situation all too well.

If we visualise an armed movement as a pyramid, then the thousands of protesters on the street (and the tens of thousands who support and sympathise with them but stay home) represent the mass base. A smaller group of organisers and support networks (physical and virtual) plays an auxiliary role further up the pyramid. The armed, gun-toting element is smaller still, but higher in skill, weaponry, organisation and motivation. It’s worth remembering that almost three million Americans served in Iraq and Afghanistan, coming home familiar with urban and rural guerrilla warfare to a country where 41 per cent of people own a gun or live with someone who does.

A militia group with no political affiliation from Michigan stands in front of the Governor’s office after protesters occupied the state capitol building on April 30. — A militia group with no political affiliation from Michigan stands in front of the
Governor’s office after protesters occupied the state capitol building on April 30.

The US has no national firearms register, so only estimates are possible, but analysts believe around 100 million firearms are in private hands in the US, and hundreds of billions of rounds of ammunition. Given widespread combat experience from the war on terror, this reservoir of military potential sets the US apart from any other Western democracy.

The pandemic has seen a surge in gun purchases, with background checks spiking to their highest number. Many of these are first-time buyers from the progressive end of politics, who traditionally shun firearms and have little knowledge of weapon safety.

Racial war, class war

More worrying, on left and right, are underground groups including so-called “accelerationists”. These tend to be small, secretive and far more violent than the militias or mass movements. They follow a decentralised command-and-control philosophy known as “leaderless resistance” that was pioneered by far-right groups in the 1980s but has since been taken up by terrorists across the political spectrum, including jihadists. Their goal is to accelerate the collapse of a social order they see as doomed, by bringing on a racial war, a class war or both.

Underground networks operate using a clandestine cell structure, and communicate via the deep web and tools such as Telegram or RocketChat, secure-messaging apps that have become havens for extremists as more open channels, including chat rooms such as the neo-Nazi forum Iron March, have been shut down.

Language policing on social media has not only pushed accelerationist groups underground; it has created a whole new language.

The term “Boogaloo” is widely used for the coming civil war. Variants — coined to avoid Twitter censors — include “The Big Igloo” or “The Big Luau”, the last explaining why Hawaiian shirts are popular among militias. Memes from television (“Winter is Coming”, “Cowabunga”) are popular, as are meme-based references such as “Spicy Time” or acronyms such as BAMN (“by any means necessary”) and BFYTW (“because f..k you, that’s why”). Some call the urban guerrilla aspect of the Boogaloo “Minecrafting”: Twitter threads seeming to discuss the game may actually refer to the coming conflict — context is everything. Some discussion hides in plain sight on social media: more open, practical and gruesome conversations are left to the deep web, Telegram or neo-Nazi sites such as Daily Stormer, which resides on the orphaned former Soviet “.su” internet domain as a way to avoid censorship. Doctoral dissertations could be written on the kaleidoscope of visual symbols used by groups, left and right, to signal allegiances.

Accelerationism has a long history on the Marxist left and among environmental activists such as Earth Liberation Front or Earth First! It has since been embraced by right-wing extremists including 2019 Christchurch killer Brenton Tarrant, whose manifesto included environmentalist ideology and was celebrated by neo-Nazi ecoterrorist group Green Brigade.

Other right-wing accelerationist groups include Atomwaffen Division (which has a presence in Australia) and The Base, a white-supremacist group founded in mid-2018 whose name is a play on al-Qa’ida (“the base” in Arabic). FBI agents targeted The Base after its members allegedly sought to attack a massive pro-gun rally outside the Virginia State Capitol building in Richmond in January. In a classic accelerationist move, they planned to infiltrate the rally, start shooting both protesters and law enforcement officers, provoke a massacre and thereby convert a peaceful (albeit armed) demonstration into a militant uprising.

A heavily-armed young man poses for a photo with his assault rifle during the protest at the State Capitol in Salem, Oregon on May 2. — A heavily-armed young man poses for a photo with his assault rifle
during the protest at the State Capitol in Salem, Oregon on May 2.

The group’s leader, until recently known by his nom de guerre “Norman Spear”, was unmasked in January as Rinaldo Nazzaro, a New Jersey native based in St Petersburg, Russia, from where he directed cells in Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey. There is no public evidence of any relationship between Nazzaro and Russian intelligence, though his presence in Russia triggered speculation in the media and within The Base itself. But this highlights another risk factor for 2020: the possibility of foreign interference astride the upcoming presidential election.

A new cold war

The US and China are fast descending into a new cold war, as recriminations over the pandemic heighten conflicts that were already acute. Each is seeking to improve its military position against the other: the Chinese navy has ramped up activity in the South China Sea, for example, while US forces mounted more incursions into the area in the past three months than in all of last year. China’s history of sponsoring agents of influence in the US and other Western countries (including Australia) and its track record of cyber-espionage and technology theft make it a reasonable assumption that some (with or without official backing) may be considering ways to exploit America’s internal tensions. Indeed, it would be intelligence malpractice if they were not.

Likewise, Iran — which lost Qassem Soleimani, head of its Revolutionary Guards covert action arm, the Quds Force, to a US drone strike in January — has been on a path of military confrontation with the US for years. A series of incidents in the Middle East and the increasing pain of US economic sanctions motivate Tehran to create internal distractions for the US, relieving pressure on itself. The regime has a history of sponsoring lethal covert action inside the US — most recently in 2011, when Quds Force members recruited a criminal gang in an attempt to assassinate the Saudi ambassador by bombing an upscale Washington, DC, restaurant.

Again, there is no public evidence of such activity at present, but Iranian operatives watching the US today would be remiss not to consider it.

If interference does occur, US armed groups probably would not know it. Just as members of The Base were dismayed to discover their leader living in Russia, militant groups in the US — many of which are patriotic, albeit opposed to the current character of government — would likely spurn any overt foreign approach. But anonymous funding, amplification of online messaging, offers of training or equipment through “cut-outs” such as tactical training companies or non-government organisations, or “false flag” operations (where agents of one organisation pretend to belong to another) would allow hostile foreign actors to inflame tensions.

It is, of course, impossible to say with certainty whether significant violence will occur this year. All we can conclude from the available evidence is that the risk is real and growing. We can also make some judgments about where and when violence might break out and what form it might take.

Given the pandemic health crisis, widespread economic disruption over the northern summer, then a predicted second wave of infection in October-November, peak compound impact — when the combined health, economic and security effects of the coronavirus will be at their worst — will likely run from late October until March-April next year, astride the next election and transition to the next presidential term.

Even without the virus, the election was already set to be a flashpoint; the combined health, economic and security effects of the pandemic could make it far worse. If Trump is re-elected, mass protests are a given, while factions within the militant left might undertake what they term “direct action”. As The Base’s targeting of January’s Richmond rally showed, street protests are fertile ground for provocations. If Trump is defeated, elements of the militia movement or street protesters might also engage in violence.

In “contested areas” — where the territories of left and right-wing militants overlap — we can expect violence irrespective of the outcome. Whether it spreads will depend on level-headed political leadership — and today’s hyper-partisan coronavirus debate offers little hope of that. If violence does spread, it will not be a re-run of the American Civil War. Rather, given the multiplicity of groups involved, their geographical overlap and loose structure, we can expect something much more diffuse.

Remember Colombia

Perhaps the best analogy is Colombia, which saw 10 years of amorphous conflict from 1948 to 1958, a decade known as La Violencia. Starting as rioting in Bogota — driven by pre-existing urban-rural, left-right, class and racial divisions — violence spread to the countryside as the two main political parties, the Colombian Liberal Party and the Conservative Party, mobilised rural supporters to attack each other’s communities. Local governments weaponised police to kill or expel political opponents. Extremists joined in and “conflict entrepreneurs” emerged to prolong and profit from the violence. In the end 200,000 people were killed, two million were displaced and the Colombian Army — after initially staying out of the conflict — eventually stepped in to end the violence, seizing control in a coup in 1953. External actors, including the Cold War superpowers, also interfered.

Colombia is not the only precedent. Last month marked the 25th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in US history. The bomber, Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh, claimed to be enraged by government overreactions at Ruby Ridge (1992) and Waco, Texas (1993), which between them saw law enforcement kill 78 civilians including 26 children. He bombed a building that housed the federal agencies he blamed, along with a childcare centre. His comment after his trial — that the 19 children killed, of 168 dead and 680 injured, were “collateral damage” — highlighted his military mindset and intent to trigger an anti-government uprising. There was indeed a huge rise in militia activity. But the callousness of McVeigh’s attack made most militias condemn him, and — by tarnishing the self-perceived righteousness of their anti-government cause — undermined the movement he hoped to inspire. He was executed a few months before 9/11.

Protestors try to enter the Michigan House of Representative chamber.

In retrospect, the risk that Ruby Ridge and Waco would trigger a terrorist backlash seems obvious. Analysts warned this year that extremism poses as much risk today as it did in 1995. Ahead of time, McVeigh’s attack was far harder to foresee and its specifics impossible to predict. But far from a fringe issue of neo-Nazi nut cases, the pandemic has made the risk of violence in 2020 far more widespread, larger in scale and more militarily serious than we might imagine. America may well be in a “pre-McVeigh moment”.

https://howlinginfinite.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/51-days-at-waco.pdf

Australia’s choice – survive by respect or die by stupid

January 26, 2020January 26, 2020Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

Normally, the weeks preceding our national day see social and mainstream media, posturing politicians and personalities and cultural warriors of all our tribes caught up in argument and invective about its meaning and significance. And then, it’s all over. Calm is restored as summer winds down, the kids return to school, and the working year starts in earnest – until the next national shibboleth lumbers into view – Anzac Day in late April.

This year, however, things are unseasonably quiet. As a nation and a community, we are too preoccupied with Australia’s unprecedented bush-fire crisis to wage our customary wars of words.

The fires have dominated the media space, with harrowing photographs and video footage of their impact on people, property, and wildlife, stories of heroism and resilience, and circular debates and divisions, political posturing and finger-pointing. They have crowded out others news and reportage from around Australia and overseas where much is happening, be it the US’ assassination of Iran’s foremost general, ongoing protests in Beirut and Baghdad, the continued pounding on tons and villages in Syria’s beleaguered Idlib province, devastating floods in Indonesia, and volcano eruptions in the Philippines and and Zealand – and, less catastrophic but infinitely entertaining, Britain’s imminent retreat from Europe, and Harry and Meghan’s divorce from the royal family.

The fires have also crowded out the predictable argy-bargy over our national identity. It’s as if the partisans and opinionistas right across our political spectrum have holstered their weapons in deference to our collective pyro-purgatory.

There is one piece, however, that I deem worthy of republishing in In That Howling Infinite insofar as it encapsulates perfectly a cognitive and cultural dissonance at the heart of our national identity that I touched upon recently in How the ‘Lucky Country’ lost its mojo.

Sydney journalist Elizabeth Farrelly is always worth reading for her perspective on our identity, our culture and our natural and built environment. On this Australia Day 2020, she asks the perennial rhetorical question: what does it mean to be Australian? Her observations are illuminating. Here is my summary – you can read it in full below.

“As the fires rage on, bringing little but anti-green and pro-coal propaganda from our governments, we have a choice. We can go on pretending that exploitation is a sustainable way of life. We can pursue this culture of denial, where truths about nature, climate, women and Indigenous peoples are held in contempt. Or we can smarten up …

Australian culture has always relied on easy exploitation. From the moment white people arrived, we’ve been kidding ourselves that arrogance and theft add up to a lifestyle with a future. We dig stuff up and flog it, no value added, no questions asked. We grow food in the most destructive possible manner – clear-felling, mono-culturing, irrigating and overgrazing; destroying soil, desertifying land and belching carbon. We crowd to the edge of the continent, gazing out to sea, chucking our trash over our shoulders, pretending it won’t come back to bite.

Even now, our Indigenous peoples are being displaced three and four times over. Last year we extinguished native title for Adani’s foreign coal-mining interests, making the Wangan and Jagalingou people trespassers on their own land. We relentlessly export such coal, helping drive temperatures in central Australia beyond the habitable, exiling people for a second time from their ancestral homelands. Then, should anyone dare critique this mindlessness, as Bruce Pascoe obliquely has, we label them non-Indigenous and set the federal police onto determining their ancestry.

And we apply this domineering denialism, this refusal to listen, across the board. In agriculture it says, we don’t care what naturally grows here. We’re going to poison the insects, suck the water from ancient caverns and nuke the living daylights out of the soil with petroleum-based fertilizers. We’re going to burn oil and coal, and if we get fires that destroy our townships, we’ll clear the forests too.

In politics and at home it says, if our women are troublesome, we’ll ridicule, intimidate and beat them into submission (with one woman murdered every week by her current or former partner and our political sphere internationally recognized for its misogyny).

In sport, it says it’s fine if our cricketers – so long as they don’t get caught. And in social relations, if people insist on different hierarchies – if they demand gender fluidity, or optional pronouns, or same-sex marriage or voluntary race-identity or anything else that questions our superiority we’ll come down on them like a ton of bricks.

It’s the arrogance we came with, two centuries back, but it’s getting worse, not better … God gave us white guys dominion and we’ve weaponized it. We’ll show this country who’s boss.

Forget the Aussie flag, the flag of dominion.

This we should carve on our hearts: there is no economy without ecology”.

Survival-by-respect or death-by-stupid: your choice Straya

Elizabeth Farrrelly, Sydney Morning Herald 26th January 2020

It’s invasion day again only, this time, the eyes of the world are upon us. Under headlines like “Australia shows us the road to hell“, the world is wondering if our economy isn’t every bit as fragile as the landscape it routinely exploits. It’s wondering about our tourism, with massive cancellations already from China and a US travel warning putting Australia on par with Gaza and PNG. It’s asking how long Australia will be habitable. But beneath those questions lies another. What, at this crossroads, does it mean to be Australian?

The first three are questions of both fact and perception. As such they may be partly addressed by Scott Morrison’s $76m commitment to beef-up Australia as a brand. But the last is a question for us. Who are we, as a nation, and who do we wish to be going forward?

The tourism industry has lost some $4.5 billion as overseas visitors cancel trips over bushfires.

As the fires rage on, bringing little but anti-green and pro-coal propaganda from our governments, we have a choice. We can go on pretending that exploitation is a sustainable way of life. We can pursue this culture of denial, where truths about nature, climate, women and Indigenous peoples are held in contempt. Or we can dust off our angel wings and smarten up.

And sure, to some extent, that’s just colonialism. Colonialism is inherently macho, and inherently denialist. But it should be transitional. Now, as the NY Times argues, our political denialism is “scarier than the fires”. Smarten up? It’s time we grew up.

This is Australia’s moment of reckoning. It’s time we lost the attitude. Time we made a clear, rational and collective choice between survival-by-respect and death-by-stupid.

On top of Auckland’s Maungakiekie, the volcanic Māori pa also known as One Tree Hill, stands an obelisk. The land was bequeathed to the city in the mid-19th century by the beloved Scot Sir John Logan Campbell, who designed the obelisk as a permanent record “of his admiration for the achievements and character of the great Maori people”. That was then – now, New Zealand has Jacinda. And yes, these dots are connected.

Australia has shown no such reverence. Indeed, unable even to express genuine remorse for our repeated attempts at genocide and erasure-by-other-means, we’re still doing arrogant displacement. And we, as a result, have Scott Morrison, who must live with the disparaging epithet concocted by the lads at the Betoota Advocate – Scotty from marketing – because many Australians believe there is a ring of truth to it.

Morrison who responds to bushfires by wanting to clear more land. Who thinks hazard reduction is climate action and more advertising can persuade them back to a charred continent. Death by stupid.

It’s the arrogance we came with, two centuries back, but it’s getting worse, not better. Even now, our Indigenous peoples are being displaced three and four times over.

Last year we extinguished native title for Adani’s filthy foreign coal-mining interests, making the Wangan and Jagalingou people trespassers on their own land. We relentlessly export such coal, helping drive temperatures in central Australia beyond the habitable (Alice had 55 days above 40 degrees last year, and recorded street-surface temperatures between 61 and 68 degrees celsius), exiling people for a second time from their ancestral homelands. Then, should anyone dare critique this mindlessness, as Bruce Pascoe obliquely has, we label them non-Indigenous and set the federal police onto determining their ancestry.

As if that very ancestry, those very records, hadn’t been, for two centuries, the subject of our energetic erasure. As if being Indigenous had always yielded some special right to speak, instead of the precise opposite. As if the speaker’s genetic makeup validated or invalidated his speech. What?

And we apply this domineering denialism, this refusal to listen, across the board. In agriculture it says, we don’t care what naturally grows here. We’re going to poison the insects, suck the water from ancient caverns and nuke the living daylights out of the soil with petroleum-based fertilisers. We’re going to burn oil and coal, and if we get fires that destroy our townships, we’ll clear the forests too. That’ll show them.

In sport, it says it’s fine if our cricketers cheat – so long as they don’t get caught. And in social relations, if people insist on different hierarchies – if they demand gender fluidity, or optional pronouns, or same-sex marriage or voluntary race-identity or anything else that questions our superiority we’ll come down on them like a ton of bricks.

God gave us white guys dominion and we’ve weaponised it. By golly we’ll show this country who’s boss. Then if things get really rough, we’ll pop to heaven. Let’s hear it. A recent street poster picturing Morrison declaring Pentecostals for a Warmer Planet! may seem extreme, but Meritus Professor of Religious Thought, Philip C. Almond, explains why Morrison’s faith means “reducing carbon emissions … may have little intellectual purchase with the PM” – because world’s end means the second coming and, for the chosen, salvation. It’s also why Morrison’s beloved Hillsong church can happily advertise its coming conference, called Breathe Again, with Bishop T D Jakes saying “it’s amazing how God can strike a match in Australia and the whole world catches on fire”. As if the fires were God given.

That’s choice A, Scott Morrison’s choice. Business as usual but with extra cheesy advertising. Choice B, survival-by-respect, recognizes that even cheese can’t sell a pile of ash.

Survival-by-respect means just that: respect for Indigenous peoples, for nature and for women. It means knowing that listening is no weakness, but a path to greater strength.

On the ground, the shift would be dramatic but not impossible. Zero carbon cities would become an immediate priority: solar vehicles, green roads, every surface productive of food or energy. It would mean ending coal production. Investing in renewables. Creating whole new industries.

This would mean listening to people who’ve spent 60,000 years here. Not copying, necessarily, listening. And listening, above all, to nature, heeding the fires’ overwhelming lesson. Forget the Aussie flag, the flag of dominion. This we should carve on our hearts: there is no economy without ecology.

Sure, we can stick with lazy old Plan A. We can bow to Brand Australia and trust our grandchildren’s futures to the Rapture Hypothesis. Good luck with that, and happy Straya Day!

Bare Dinkum

Elizabeth Farrelly is a Sydney-based columnist and author who holds a PhD in architecture and several international writing awards. She is a former editor and Sydney City Councilor. Her books include ‘Glenn Murcutt: Three Houses’, ‘Blubberland; the dangers of happiness’ and ‘Caro Was Here’, crime fiction for children (2014).

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