Protest

Arguments of Monumental Proportions

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

Our historical memory is a motherland of wishful thinking. Ulrich Raulph

There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind…The opening of the film Gone with the Wind

The past is another country – they thought things differently there; and if the past shapes the present, the present also shapes the past.

With the spread of Black Lives Matter protests around the world, in response to the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, the defacing and destruction of monuments to dead and dubious white men is back in vogue – not that the practice has ever actually gone out of style.

Fallen Idols

There is a certain historical irony that the statue of a 17th century slave trader (and on account of his wealth, philanthropist) Edward Colston has been consigned to the watery depths of Bristol Harbour from whence his ships sailed. He’d built his fortune as an influential member of the Royal African Company, a private company which branded its initials on the chests of some 100,000 men, women and children before shipping them to the Americas and the Caribbean. Thousands never made it, tossed into the ocean after drawing their last breath in the filth below decks. Ted and his fellow slavers have a case to answer. In the hundred years after 1680, some two million slaves were forcible removed from their homes in West Africa to the work camps of the West Indies. By 1750, the numbers of slaves had reached over 270,000 per decade, and by 1793, Liverpool handled three fifths of the slave trade of all Europe.Historian Peter Ackroyd wrote in his History of England: “No more than half of the transported slaves reached their destination; some plunged into the sea and were said to hike up their arms in joy from the brief sensation of liberty before they sank beneath the waves”.

Bristol owed its past prosperity to the slave trade – as did Liverpool. The statue had stood in the city centre for 125 years with a plaque that read: ‘Erected by citizens of Bristol as a memorial of one of the most virtuous and wise sons of their city’. Streets and buildings were also named after Colton though most townsfolk have probably never have heard of him. 

Activists have drawn up a hit list of 60 monuments in the United Kingdom that “celebrate slavery and racism”. London mayor Sadiq Khan paves the way for the legal removal of many of historic statues in the British capital and the changing of street names. Slave owner and West India Docks founder Robert Milligan has already been taken down. On the same day, Belgium’s bloody King Leopold, whose rule of the Congo – it was his private property – became a byword in colonial barbarity, was removed from his plinth in Brussels 

As an Aussie and a Brit of Irish parents, and as a history tragic, I find the long running monuments furore engrossing. Statues of famous and infamous generals, politicians and paragons of this and that grace plazas, esplanades and boulevards the world over, and their names are often given to such thoroughfares. They represent in visual and tangible form the historical memory of a nation, and as such, can generate mixed emotions reflecting the potentially conflicted legacies and loyalties of the citizenry. 

It is about the control of history – and who controls it. We all use history, incorporating perceptions of our national story into lessons that guide or confirm our present actions and outlooks. Our history is written not only in scholarly narratives, but also, in commemorations, in statues, flags and symbols, in the stories that children are taught about their country and their community from their earliest school years, and in the historical figure skating  they are taught to remember and honour. History, it is said, is written mostly by the victors  – but not always. So the inevitable tensions between different versions of the past fosters tension and conflict, and grievance and offense in the present. Particularly in onetime colonialist and settler countries, and the lands these once ruled and exploited.

Juxtaposing controversial British statuary, and those of American Civil War generals, against the empty plinths of the former People’s Republics of Eastern Europe, and the images of the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein, I have always contemplated our own monuments to reputed bad boys past. 

There are statues of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell all over the place in England where his legacy is still debated. He stands authoritatively outside the Houses of Parliament and is remembered as one of the godfathers of that institution. And yet, when he died, and the monarchy he deposed restored, his body was disinterred and hanged. In Ireland, for so long “John Bull’s other island”, however, he is reviled. He did, after all, march through the land with “fire and fury”, to borrow Donald Trump’s hyperbole, and killed quite a number of Irish folk. In my southern Irish mother’s day, people would put his picture upside down, facing the wall. This may be apocryphal, but whatever.

Oliver Cromwell, Parliament Square

A statue of Lord Nelson stood in O’Connell Street, Dublin until March 1966 when the IRA blew him up, celebrated by the Clancies in the song below. The IRA also blew up that other famous English mariner, Lord Louis Mountbatten, inveterate pants-man, victor of the Burma campaign and facilitator of Indian Independence). It wasn’t that Horatio had inflicted anything unpleasant upon the Irish, but rather his renowned Englishness that earned him the TNT. And yet, in the wake of intermittent US monuments barnies, beady British eyes were always focusing on the admirable admiral and his ostensible racism (not a word in use at the turn of the eighteenth century) and support for the slave trade. After Colston’s dip in Bristol harbour, it won’t be long before Horatio is harangued – not that anyone actually believes that Nelsons Column should be evicted from iconic Trafalgar Square, and it would be damn difficult to paint-bomb his myopic visage. The British attachment to Lord Nelson is long and strong. In Birmingham, my hometown, the city centre around the Bullring has been refurbished, redesigned and reconstructed numerous times during my lifetime, but the immortal mariner and his battleship stand still on their plinth of honour – as in the featured picture.

The ongoing controversy in England over statues of Cecil Rhodes, colonialist and capitalist, and ostensibly an early architect of apartheid, still rages with respect to his African legacy, with many demanding that he be demolished. his statue in Cape Town, South Africa, was removed after extensive protests in  2015. as As I write, Cecil may not survive the week. There is a statue in Parliament Square, close to Cromwell and Winston Churchill (who some also abhor), of South African soldier and statesman Jan Smuts. His Boer War (on the enemy’s side) and segregationist sympathies were outweighed by his military and diplomatic record in service of the British Empire, and to date, none has called for his eviction. Perhaps he will be spared as he did not have a pariah state named for him, as it was with Cecil. Nor was he associated with the apartheid regime as it was decades before his time – although this wouldn’t satisfy some iconoclasts. But most likely, he is safe because most folk have never heard of him.  

Cecil Rhodes, Oxford University

Winston Churchill gets a paint-job

I have heard mumblings, however, of doing for General Smuts, and also for his Parliament Square neighbour Sir Winston Churchill, who has now been graffitied. Now, he might have saved Britain from Hitler’s hoards, but he did not like the Irish, nor Indians (and Pakistanis for that matter), and said some gross things about Arabs and Jews. And we Aussies, and Kiwis too, still blame him for the disastrous Dardanelles campaign – although he did give us our indefatigable and untouchable ANZAC legend and a long weekend. And whilst on the subject of the Middle East, an equestrian Richard the Lionheart stands close by. He did dastardly things to tens of thousands  of locals – Muslim, Christian and Jew – during the Third Crusade, almost a millennium ago. Watch out, Dick and Dobbin! 

Richard the Lionhearted

Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of the world scout movement, of which I was a relaxed and comfortable member for half of the sixties, sits on the seafront in Poole, Dorset, under twenty four hour CCTV protection. In a 2007 poll, he was voted the 13th most influential person in the UK in the 20th century. But critics say that he held racist views, and in 2010 declassified MI5 files revealed he was invited to meet Adolf Hitler after holding friendly talks about forming closer ties with the Hitler Youth. If old “bathing towel” as he was once affectionately called by us Boy Scouts, becomes persona non grata, what will become of Baden Powell Park in Coffs Harbour, our regional centre? It sits behind the Dan Murphy’s liquor mart, one of the town’s most popular retail outlets, and provides an opportunity for our discussion to segue DownUnder.

Dark deeds in a sunny land

In this strange, copycat world we live in, politicians and activists call for the removal of statues of our Australian founding fathers for the parts they played in the creation of our nation. In his challenging revisionist history of Australia, Taming of the Great South Land’, William Lines tells us that if we look up the names of the worthies who’ve had statues, squares, streets and highways, building and bridges, parks and promontories, rivers and even mountains named after them, we will uncover a dark history of which few are aware. Try it sometime; you’ll be surprised.

There has inevitably been much fuss about Captain James Cook, the renowned and courageous navigator who “discovered” the place two hundred and fifty years ago (notwithstanding that the Aborigines, Javanese, Dutch, Portuguese, and French had been here first). His “discovery”, many argue, led to genocide and the dispossession of our First Peoples (Columbus no doubt also gets more than pigeons shitting on him!). And also, there’s Lachlan Macquarie, fifth and last of the autocratic governors of New South Wales, who laid the economic and social foundations of the new colony. He is in the cross-hairs as responsible for initiating the ‘frontier wars‘ and for ordering the massacre of Aborigines. 

The captain, his chopsticks and his lunch. James Cook, Whitby, Yorks

Lachlan Macquarie, Hyde Park,Sydney

Inevitably, right-wing politicians, shock-jocks and  commentators, came out swinging, venting against political correctness and identity politics, defending what they see as an assault on our “Australian values”. When Macquarie got a paint job three years back, for a moment it seemed that our intractable history wars” were on again – the “whitewash” brigade versus the “black arm-band” mob. Statues were vandalized, voices raised and steam emitted as opposing sides took to their hyperbolic barricades. But once the graffiti had been removed from the statues of Cook and Macquarie in Sydney, and The Australian got it off its chest with a week of broadsheet history and a swag of indignant opinion pieces by the usual suspects, things appeared to have calmed down. 

But not for long, perhaps.

All sorts of emotions, hopes and fears lie behind our various creation myths. No matter the source of our different “dream-times” we are all correct in one way or another. People wheel out the wise old “blind men and the elephant” story to illustrate how blinkered we are; but in reality, if those blind men were given more time, they would have expanded their explorations and discovered a bigger picture.

For more on our Aussie worthies, see, for example, from The Guardian, on Australia, Statues are not history, and regarding former Soviet monuments, Poles Apart – the bitter conflict over a nation’s history. Below is a review of Alex von Tunzelmann’s recent book Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History

And, in In That Howling Infinite, read also: The Frontier Wars – Australia’s heart of darkness, and America’s Confederate legacy, Rebel Yell 

Fallen Idols: up they went and down they come

Jim Davidson, Weekend Australian, 17 Sept 2021

A statue of Cecil John Rhodes on the slopes of Devil’s Peak, Cape Town, South Africa.

For as long as there have been statues, says Alex von Tunzelmann in this new book, they have been subject to attack. The Egyptian pharaohs regularly disfigured or smashed images of their predecessors. And so, what we have witnessed over the past few years, for all its urgency, in one sense has been a recurrence.

Von Tunzelmann demonstrates this very well by the way she has shaped her new book, Fallen Idols: it may end with the statue of George Washington being pulled down in Portland, Oregon, but its first focus is the statue of George III pulled down by New Yorkers. This occurred immediately after a public reading of the Declaration of Independence.

Attacking statues is as old as the United States itself.

Von Tunzelmann has been fascinated by statues for years. She challenges the notion that statue attacks are aimed at “erasing our past in its entirety” and she is sceptical that a man of his time (for they are nearly always men) can hold, say, racist assumptions, and yet be justified by good works. She says orderly removals are all very well, but the process is protracted and cumbersome: street action is sometimes necessary.

“Statues do not have rights,” she says. “They stand at the pleasure of those who live alongside them.”

The book examines 12 case studies. Each culminates in attack or removal, when statues had functioned as instruments of dominance. The massive Stalin statue that loomed over Budapest – 25 metres high – was partly constructed from melted-down Hungarian ones, and people were enjoined by the Communist Party to go and respectfully converse with it. Friendly little Stalin – and yes, he was in fact quite short, and sensitive about it.

Worse (in some respects) was Rafael Trujillo, who graduated from outright criminality to becoming police chief, supervising an election so that he came to power and stayed there. He employed state terror to rule the Dominican Republic for 31 years, peppering the place with statues and public busts – nearly 2000 of them. Almost certainly a serial rapist, he gloried in what he saw as his virility: a couple of his column-centred monuments were in-your-face phallic. In case people didn’t get the point, at one unveiling his vice-president spoke of Trujillo’s “superior natural gifts”. All these statues came down, with others like them. In India as in Eastern Europe they have been put in special statue parks, where they stand largely neglected. A relatively benign relegation, sometimes leaving behind blank spaces. In one way, the recent attacks are a reversal of the statue-building mania across the Westernised world that accelerated through the 19th century. In 1844, London had 22 statues; by 1910, there were 10 times as many. The attacks are perhaps best seen as part of the reset following through the implications of the collapse of the European colonial empires. Hence the speed with which the Black Lives Matter movement spread: 13 days after George Floyd’s murder in Minnesota, a crowd in Bristol, England pulled down the statue of slave trader Edward Colston and threw it in the harbour.

The book also gives a highly contextualised account of the “Rhodes must Fall” movement. It is shown how deeply – indeed brutally – racist Cecil Rhodes was; how his belief in the superiority of the British race led him to conclude that it had a right to occupy those lands “at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings”.

So the first statue to go, after it had been smeared in excrement, was that at the University of Cape Town. Oxford, where he gazes down at the High Street from the facade of Oriel College, has proved a tougher nut to crack. The college has prevaricated – people threatened to withdraw bequests if it moved to take Rhodes down – so he is still there. But the agitation has led to some improvement in Oxford practice, including the appointment of the first black head of a college.

Toward the end, Von Tunzelmann retreats a little from a generally abolitionist stance when it comes to statues, admitting that she is quite fond of a few. As are the British public, polls show. Certainly, some statues should be statements of what the people who live around them admire, but some are needed to remind us of who we, as people, were, when they went up. There should always be room for that: in the recent frenzy in America, a statue celebrating an antislavery abolitionist was toppled, as was another celebrating women’s rights. For there is a broader problem: the technological imperative has brought with it a flattened sense of the past.

Jim Davidson’s book, Emperors in Lilliput: Clem Christesen of Meanjin and Stephen Murray-Smith of Overland, is to be published by Melbourne University Press next year.

Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History, Alex von Tunzelmann (Headline 2021)

Land of the fearful – home of the heavily armed

Paul 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.

READ MORE :President vows to send in army|Trump faces a dangerous test|Race riots spread after death of unarmed black man|Why the US is in serious trouble

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.

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+15

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.
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

Visualizing the Palestinian Return – the art of Ismail Shammout

Paul Hemphill 6 Comments

The Key and the Return – Palestine as a metaphor

Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish saw Palestine as a homeland but also as a metaphor –  for the loss of Eden, for the sorrows of dispossession and and of exile, for the diminishing power of the Arab world in its relationship with the west (Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine as Metaphor)

Palestinian Australian author and academic Nejmeh Khalil-Habib – and my Arabic teacher for many semesters at the University of Sydney – published a paper in Nebula magazine in 2008 examining how the “Return”  – al ‘awda العودة – a recurring theme in contemporary Arabic literature – has been dealt with in Arabic fiction, and how it depicted those who live the dream of “Return” and those who actually returned to Palestine after the 1967 war or after the Oslo Accords.

She writes: “The concept of “Return” throughout this literature manifests itself in various ways including the spiritual return (as manifested in dreams and aspirations); the literal, physical return; an individual’s return (a “Return” on the basis of family reunions); the “Return” as a result of the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank after the war of 1967; and the “Return” as a result of the peace process after the “Oslo Accords.”

Al Muftah, المفتاح, the key is an enduring symbol of al ‘awda. It is present in street art and in signs and posters throughout Palestine and in the refugee camps. It is a symbol, of a memory, of one day returning – to lost homes, villages, suburbs, towns, lives and livelihoods. As Nejmeh writes,“The Return” (Al-Awda) is deeply implanted in the Palestinian collective memory. It is rooted in their conscience like a faith that could not be denied, because denying it would mean uprooting the lynchpin upon which modern Palestinian history and identity depends”.

Al Mufta مفتاح

But for many, it is something more than that. Nejmeh writes: “Whether exile happens voluntarily or under oppressive circumstances, the dream of returning home stays alive in the mind of the exiled person. It flares or fades from person to person and from one circumstance to another; however, the concept of “return” ceases to be about its basic meaning, but comes to be seen as a means of resistance and challenging oppression”.

She notes American-Palestinian author and activist Fawaz Turky assertion that “the right and dream of Return is the rock upon which our nation was established and the social balance that unites the nation in this wretched world”.

It is the dream, the hope that enabled tens of thousands of revues in camps throughout the Levant to perceive their situation as temporary and to resist the allure of assimilation and mainstreaming in their host countries – if this was indeed possible given that most hosts have steadfastly resisted granting Palestinians rights and privileges enjoyed by their own citizens. Whilst being much of the diaspora in the West has accepted inclusion and naturalization, these Palestinians connect with their people and their culture in Palestine, and still celebrate their national holidays.

Between seven and eight hundred Palestinians fled their homes in present day Israel or were expelled during the 1948 war. Many remained in Israel either in their original homes or where they sought refuge. They became Israeli citizens, but even for these, the memories endure and many continue to refer to the towns and villages and localities by the names they had prior to the establishment of the state of Israel.

And yet, al ‘awda, and the Right of Return is a chimera, a dream dangled before their eyes by their leaders like a hypnotist’s show. And UN refugee status, a tired old delusion perpetuated by UNRWA to justify its existence and well-paid salaries, and the Arab League as a fig leaf for their pulsanimity. UNWRA’s definition and establishment was at fault from day one, and whilst creating generational refugeedom, it engendered false hope, unrealisable dreams, and a road-block to subsequent peace efforts  There is indeed a whole economy, a living, a lifestyle devoted to and dependent on managing the conflict and the refugee problem rather than solving it. The exile was unreasonable and unjust, but the past will never be undone – and most certainly never by UN resolutions.

The key, therefore, is a forlorn hope, a closed door that no amount of keys can unlock; and the reality is that of a lock-out, out of politics, out of society, out of the jobs and housing market. The refugees are a minority in Palestine. There are no keys for the new houses and apartments that are going up in and around the cities of the West Bank in a property boom that has been going on for several years now and accessible and affordable only for a growing middle class of employees of the PA and foreign NGOs and young professionals.

But for refugees, all this is paradox. They are locked out of the old Palestine of their parents and grandparent and forebears. But they are also locked out the new Palestine that is struggling to be born.

Poets like Darwish and novelists have internalized and reflected al Nakba and al ‘awda in their work. The dream of al ‘awda is reflected in their writing. As it is also do with to graphic artists – none as powerfully and poignantly as ismail Shammout, born in Lydia, Palestine in 1930. When last In Ramallah, de facto administrative “capital” of that part of the West Bank government by the  Palestinian Authority – Area A (for Abbas, joke the wits) of ththe Oslo dispensation, we visited the cultural centre Dar Zahran, a beautifully restored Ottoman house just south of the city centre (and its central square festooned with images af al Muftah).

By fortunate serendipity, Dar Zahran was hosting a small exhibition of paintings by recall an amazing series of paintings by the late Palestinian artist Ismail Shammout that told the story of al Nakba and of flight and exile.

I have republished below a concise biography of Shammout by the  Palijounrneys blog.

https://www.paljourneys.org/en/biography/9727/ismail-shammut

The Art of Ismail Shammout

Ismail Shammout is remembered and celebrated for his depictions of everyday life in Palestinian villages before the Nakba, for his harrowing portrayal of flight and expulsion of much of Mandate Palestine’s Arab population, and his allegorical tableaux of the ensuing diaspora.

His Palestine is a timeless, almost dreamlike place quite out of time and place with its contemporary reality. Nostalgists and artists and poets of an earlier era would have described it as pastorale with its images of everyday life in the countryside, and its vignettes of young folk and old, men and women, children and babies. There are young couples in traditional costumes, young mothers with babes in arms, farmers in fields, and family groups of many generations. They are in lounges and kitchens, in yards and gardens, fields and orchards, and street markets as buyers and sellers. There are musicians and singers and dancers in myriad social settings – at parties and celebrations, marriages and festivals, parades and and processions.

 

 

And, celebrating the circle of life from cradle to grave and the rhythm of the seasons, there are scenes of harvest time and the gathering of the fruits of the fields and the orchards. There are grains and vegetable, olives, and water melons, apricots and pomegranates, figs and grapes, and the oranges for which Palestine was long famous.

Such bucolic scenes of a gone world – gone for us all, and not just for Shammout’s country folk- are juxtaposed with graphic images of al Nakba, and of exile, of expulsions and dispossession, of conquest and occupation, and of ongoing protest and resistance. And through, it all, are motifs of hope and of peace – flowers, songbirds and doves – and also, of conflict and resistance – flags and banners, rifles and rocks.

These include Shammout’s famous paintings of the Palestinians’ flight and expulsion, and the long hard road of flight on a trail of tears, the hostile sun beating down. His rendering of the heat, hunger, thirst and exhaustion recall of WH Auden’s harrowing poem The Shield of Achilles, with its contrasting and jarring snapshot images of joy and celebration and of bleak, almost monochrome desolation … “a plain without a feature, bare and brown, no blade of grass, not sign of neighbourhood; nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down, but congregated on on its blankness stood an intelligible multitude, a million eyes, a millions boots in line, without expression, waiting for a sign”.

These images, the fair and the foul, reappear within larger paintings that depict the decades that followed, both the immediate – the camps and the scattering – and the contemporary – the occupation, the two Intifadat, ongoing resistance, and the perpetually stuttering  peace process. In the background are the symbols and icons of Palestine past and present – particularly of al Quds, Jerusalem the golden, with the holy places that are so precious to many faiths – its mosques and churches, its monasteries and madrasas, including the Haram al Sharif and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

There are images of refugee camps, the crowded tent-cities where the exiles first settled, of Gulf oil fields where expatriates laboured, and of the professions that expatriates entered into all over the world, from labourers to lab workers. There are school children at their desks and office-workers at computers, and crowds, always crowds of numberless, nameless, almost faceless people. There are  marches and demonstrations, and clashes with anonymous, faceless soldiers. There are youths throwing stones and facing off against armoured cars and troops bearing weapons. And there are political events like the meeting at Camp David between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin facilitated by President Clinton which fired up hopes and expectations rest were never realized.

One painting is a particularly potent and poignant. An elderly woman and her daughter hug their olive tree as a bulldozer approaches. Two young boys endeavour to block its relentless path – a scene that is not at all unusual, as the picture I have paired it with shows. “How shall we find olive branches when all the olive trees are gone?’

               

Ismail Shammout  – a brief biography

Ismail Shammout was born in the town of Lydda on 2 March 1930. His father, Abd al-Qadir Shammout, was a fruit and vegetable merchant. His mother was Aisha al-Hajj Yasin. He had seven siblings: Ibrahim, Kawthar, Jamil, Muyassar, Inam, Jamal, and Tawfiq. His wife was the artist Tamam Arif al-Akhal, who was born in Jaffa in 1935. His children are Yazid, Bashar, and Bilal.

In 1936 he started elementary school, and his artistic talent was spotted at an early age. His teacher, Dawud Zalatimu, took him in charge. Zalatimu served as an art teacher in Lydda from 1930 until 1948, and his drawings of historic events and nature decorated the school walls. Shammut was taught by Zalatimu to draw with pencil and ink, to paint with watercolors, and to sculpt in limestone.

After convincing his religious and conservative father that “art could be a profitable profession,” he started by decorating wedding dresses with flowers and birds and then opened his own shop, which was in fact his first studio. There he painted his first oils depicting natural scenery and portraiture before the Nakba of 1948.

Three days after the fall of Lydda and Ramla to the Zionist forces, on 13 July 1948, Shammout and his family (along with the inhabitants of the two towns) were forced to leave and go on foot to Ramallah and were not allowed to carry water. His young brother Tawfiq died of thirst before they arrived at the village of Nilin, near Ramallah. Shammout documented that march of death, exhaustion, and thirst in several paintings executed in the 1950s.  The family continued to move until it settled in the tents that eventually formed the Khan Yunis refugee camp.

Shammout sold pastry for one year and then volunteered to teach drawing at the refugee schools, which were set up in tents. This allowed him to resume his artistic career and to exhibit his paintings in a room in the Khan Yunis government school in 1950. That same year he joined the Fine Art Academy in Cairo and lived off his earnings, drawing movie posters.

Shammout held his first exhibition in 1953, having accumulated enough paintings for a large exhibition “but did not have enough courage” to hold it in Cairo. So he exhibited at the Employees Club in Gaza city jointly with his brother Jamil. At that exhibition Shammout presented some sixty paintings including his now famous Where to? and A Mouthful of Water. That exhibition was regarded as the first contemporary art exhibition in Palestine’s history by a Palestinian artist on Palestinian soil, as judged by its size, the number of works exhibited, the way it was opened, and the mass attendance.   

In 1954 he held an exhibition in Cairo called The Palestinian Refugee jointly with an art student at the Fine Arts Academy, Tamam al-Akhal, and the Palestinian artist Nuhad Sabasi. This exhibition was under the auspices of Gamal Abdel Nasser, at that time Egypt’s prime minister, and was attended by Palestinian leaders. His earnings from that exhibition encouraged him to travel to Italy where he soon received a scholarship to study at Rome’s Academia di Belle Arti, and he remained there for two years (1954–56).

Following his graduation he moved to live and work in Beirut with his brother Jamil at the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). The brothers set up an office for commercial art and book design; the latter included a pamphlet for the Lebanese army entitled “Human Civic Education.”

In 1959 he married fellow artist Tamam al-Akhal and thereafter they worked closely together, artistically and professionally. They trained art teachers in Beirut, Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip and held joint exhibitions in those localities.

Shammout and al-Akhal followed closely the creation of the PLO at the First Palestine National Congress in Jerusalem in 1964. In 1965 he set up the Artistic Culture Section of the PLO Department of Information and National Guidance (later known as Department of Information and Culture) and directed its activities until 1984. When the offices of the PLO in Jerusalem closed, the couple returned to Beirut in 1966 and resumed work with the PLO there, in addition to their personal work as artists. Shammout completed an innumerable number of posters and literary, political, and traditional projects and with al-Akhal organized tens of political and personal exhibitions in cities around the world, including Gaza, Cairo, Jerusalem, Ramallah, Nablus, Amman, Washington (plus twelve other US cities), Tripoli, Damascus, Kuwait, London, Belgrade, Sofia, Beijing, and Vienna, in addition to murals called The Path in Amman, Ankara, Istanbul, Doha, Sharjah, Dubai, Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo, and Beirut. Among his most notable achievements is the hall called Dar al-Karama in Beirut where seasonal exhibitions by young artists from Palestinian refugee camps were displayed, as were other Arab and international solidarity exhibitions.

In 1969, Shammout and other Palestinian artists founded the first General Union of Palestinian Artists; he remained its secretary-general until 1984. He also participated in founding the General Union of Arab Artists in 1971 and was its first secretary-general, a position he held until 1984.

Following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the departure of the Palestinian resistance and its leaders, and the closing of the PLO offices, Shammout (who had a heart condition that had worsened) was forced to move with his family to Kuwait in 1983, where they lived through the occupation of Kuwait in 1991 and the second Gulf War. After the liberation of Kuwait, the family was again forced to move in 1992, this time to Germany. In 1994, Shammout and al-Akhal finally settled in Amman, Jordan.

Shammout is generally regarded as a pioneer of contemporary Palestinian art. He was a committed artist whose style was realistic with some symbolistic elements. The Palestinian cause dominated his art, some of which was widely distributed in camps and houses and in solidarity with Palestine campaigns in the Arab countries and beyond. Some of his works can be regarded as iconic for the Palestinian people.

Shammout never ceased to depict the Palestinian exodus from Palestine in paintings that carried titles and meanings very much present in people’s minds and in his own experience; an example is  the painting he titled Where to? (1953). His paintings were inspired by camp life (such as Memories and Fire, 1956; We Shall Return, 1954; and Bride and Groom at the Border, 1962) and called for reflection on the meaning of a nation in waiting.

The PLO awarded him the Revolutionary Shield for Arts and Literature, the Jerusalem Medal for Culture, Arts and Literature, and The Palestine Prize for the Arts. The Arab Thought Forum awarded him The Creative Prize for Arab Painting. An annual prize in his name is awarded for excellent Palestinian painting. His works have been acquired by several Arab and international museums.

His heart condition forced him to undergo three critical operations, the third of which was performed in Leipzig, Germany; he died on 3 July 2006 and was buried in Amman.

In addition to his paintings, he wrote histories of Palestinian painting and crafts and produced a number of films, which were influenced by his artistic experiences. These include a film called Memories and Fire (1973), which won the Short Documentary Film Prize at the Leipzig Festival; Urgent Appeal (1973); and On the Road to Palestine (1974). Noura al-Sharif produced a short film called Isma‘il, which dealt with a part of his life during his first period as a refugee in the Khan Yunis camp. A website devoted to his work is available at http://www.ismail-shammout.com

From Palestinian Journeys

Read more about Middle Eastern politics and history in In That Howling Infinite in:  A Middle East Miscellany

Joy فرح

The view from the grassy knoll – the resilience of conspiracy theories

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

Plots he has made, so ingenuous.
Dangerous follies and schemes
For he has stage-managed quite strenuous
Drunken prophecies, libels and dreams.
Lucifer, Paul Hemphill, after Shakespeare’s Richard II

Everybody who was alive when JF Kennedy was assassinated remembers where they were, just as we remember where we were when Neil Armstrong made that “great step for mankind”, and when we’d heard that the Twin Towers had been hit. And there is an almost universal consensus as to how, why and when these events occurred.

But many beg to differ, and cynical or suspicious, curious or just plan mischievous, they say “Ah, but …” and ascribe ulterior motives, describe oblique patterns, and maintain that they possess clear sight whilst the rest of us sport white sticks and dark glasses.

So, it was inevitable that some folk would some how find a link between COVID19, atmospheric chemtrails and the roll-out of the 5G telecommunications network. Before the coronavirus outbreak even began, 5G was being blamed for everything from cancer to infertility. Now, there are hints of deep state” plots and Illuminati plans to control population growth.

Many of the people spreading such theories are the same that share unfounded warnings about the dangers of vaccinations.​ indeed, folk who grasp conspiracy theories tend to go for the buy one, get five free deal – and the rest! Antivax, chem trails, JFK, 9/11, Apollo II, climate change, Illuminati, deep state, white replacement, the Rothschilds, George Soros, Satanic cults, black helicopters, Freemasons, Jews … Yes, it always come back to the Jews …

Although many common conspiracy theories flourished – some would say festered – in back streets and bedsits, the advent of social media has energized and amplified them. Facebook groups that act as petri dishes for new viral rumours to spread can be easily found by searching for ‘5G’ or ‘coronavirus’ on the social network.

Opportunistic political groups stir the pot, often for subversive and strategic ends. For example, RT, the Kremlin-backed broadcaster, has given a platform for 5G conspiracy theories long before coronavirus existed. The New York Times recently suggested that consistently reporting the “5G apocalypse” through its foreign media channels could all be part of a ploy to slow the roll-out of the technology so that Russia won’t be left behind.

Fear, suspicion, insecurity, resentment, powerlessness and a feeling that things are out of our control have much to do with it, rendering people of a bitter, misanthropic or nihilistic disposition – or a compendium of such traits – susceptible to unproven facts, untethered rumours, and in some cases, outright fantasy, and subscribing to alternative narratives, histories and universes.

In Contagion, a 2011 film about a deadly worldwide pandemic that has killed seventy million, a public health official retorts to a conspiracy theorist: “In order to get scared, all you have to do is come into contact with a rumour”.

Below, In That Howling Infinite provides links to three recent articles that endeavour to cast a light into the shadowy world of conspiracy theories and its inhabitants. But first, the irrepressible Sybil Fawlty’s excruciating exposition on fear and loathing:

“Old people are wonderful when they have so much life, aren’t they? Gives us all hope, doesn’t it? My mother on the other hand is a little bit of a trial, really. You know, it’s alright when they have the life force but Mother – well she’s got more of the death force really. She’s a worrier. She has these, well, morbid fears they are, really. Vans is one. Rats. Doorknobs. Birds. Heights. Open spaces. Confined spaces. It’s very difficult getting the space right for her really, you know. Footballs. Bicycles. Cows. And she’s always on about men following her, I don’t know what she thinks they’re going to do to her. Vomit on her, Basil says”.

Lies travel faster than facts

“Lies travel faster than facts and, perversely, efforts to debunk a conspiracy theory can end up reinforcing it …  Increasingly, authorities treat such misinformation contagion like their biological equivalent – proactively pushing out the right facts to inoculate people against unfounded theories or encouraging good information hygiene (such as checking sources) … such theories more as symptoms of a bigger problem, whether it be lack of transparency or a failure of communication … For most people, the more consistent and clear the messaging is from the people higher up, the better – even if that information is “we don’t know yet”.

How conspiracy theories about COVID-19 went viral, The Sydney Morning Herald

Never let the facts get in the way of a good story

“Conspiracy theories aren’t fueled by facts; they are fueled by attention. Twitter in particular, as the platform of choice for many national journalists as well as Trump, has become the perfect vehicle for conspiracy theories, misinformation and racist screeds to find massive audiences; messages grow from a few viral tweets, to a trending topic, to news coverage … When you ask experts about ways to limit the reach of racism and conspiracy theories on platforms such as Twitter, they’ll tell you to watch how it’s amplified: Sharing a meme to condemn it is still a share. Retweeting a racist tweet to shame its writer still gives the tweet more eyeballs … Even though many journalists and media organisations have gotten better at realizing that trending hashtags are often more representative of the weaponization of attention rather than a reflection of popular opinion, trending hashtags are still an effective tactic for courting news coverage of fringe ideas – even if that coverage is intended to debunk it”.

A dangerous cycle of conspiracy theories circulate around Donald Trump, The Sydney Morning Herald

The internet’s dark spaces

Christopher French, a professor of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London explains in a Scientific American article. “As a species, one of our greatest strengths is our ability to find meaningful patterns in the world around us and to make causal inferences. We sometimes, however, see patterns and causal connections that are not there, especially when we feel that events are beyond our control.”

Voting for Brexit and Trump was found to be associated with a wide range of conspiratorial beliefs, with researchers uncovering that these groups are more likely to believe climate change is a hoax, vaccines are harmful, and that Illuminati-style groups rule the world. They also found that 33 percent of British and French people believe their governments are obscuring the truth about immigration and that many also supported a theory known as “the great replacement” which posits that Muslim immigration is part of a plan to make Muslims the global majority …

… As is the case with the Holocaust and the Second World War, as time passes, truth and fact often become distorted and replaced with myth and alternative stories to support new, disruptive thought. Although many common conspiracy theories flourished – some would say festered – in back streets and bedsits, the advent of social media has energized and amplified them. In the dark recesses of the Internet, all amplified by the likes of QAnon and 8chan which are only loosely tethered to reality, and para-State organs like RT which have more subversive and strategic motives.

How moon landing conspiracy theories influenced the far-right, The Independent

Read other posts about politics in In That Howling Infinite: A Political World – Thoughts and Themes

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

Paul 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”.

See also: We got them Australia Day Blues;  and Down Under – Australian History and Politics

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? 

Australia Bushfires: Tourism fire effects

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.

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. 

 

Illustration: Simon Letch

Illustration: Simon Letch

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 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 recognised for its misogyny).

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).

How the ‘Lucky Country’ lost its mojo

Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

A simple explanation  of seventeenth century physicist Robert Boyle’s Law is: the greater the external pressure, the greater the quantity of hot air. 

And none more so than in contemporary Australian politics. Commenting on the shameless political posturing and finger-pointing inflicted on us by our inadequate leaders during this fiery week, Australian journalist  Jacqueline Maley nailed it:

“Politicians like to talk sentimentally about how much Australians pull together in a crisis, putting aside differences to help out their neighbours. And of course they have during these bushfires. We always do, when it comes to natural disasters. It was the politicians who failed to. And they keep failing. Increasingly it feels the government, so keen to invoke its “quiet Australians”, is using the phrase as a gag on debate. “Quiet Australians” is a genius political term – mystical and impossible to disprove. If you self-nominate as one, you ain’t one. Strangely the quiet Australians’ biggest boosters in the media tend to be the loudest, un-drown-outable voices”.”

We know the system is broke. But how to fix it?

Author and onetime publisher Steve Harris offers some directions as he recalls the genesis of two seminal books on Australian history, politics and culture and examines their continuing relevance. It is a scathing commentary on the sad state of politics and governance in Australia today and of the wit and wisdom of our elected rulers in addressing the myriad problems confronting our country and indeed the wider world.

“Many who use the terms “lucky country” or “tyranny of distance” have probably not even read the books or understand their original context or meaning. If they read the books today, they might see that almost every form of our personal, community, national and global interests still involves “distance” as much as ever, and that notions of “the lucky country” ­remain ironic.”

Harris writes of our need for a better understanding of our past, present and future We are “led”, he observes, by nine parliaments, 800 federal and state politicians, 500 councils and an estimated 6000 local councilors, hundreds of bureaucracies and agencies, standing commissions and committees, and continuous reviews, papers, inquiries, royal commissions, consultancies, conferences and consultancies; and concludes that we have “so much “government”, so little­ good governance’.

“Attention too often on the urgent rather than the important, the short-term quick gain rather than long-term betterment. Debates that are just re-runs and meaningless point-scoring. Parties that cannot even be sure their candidates are legal and honest, and are geniuses in calling from opposition benches for ambition and results that they failed to adequately address in government. Delivery too often poorly managed or funded, incompetent or even corrupt. Rarely do we see a harnessing of all the available strengths, leadership and resources across government, business, makers, sellers, investors, funders, networkers, teachers, influencers, enablers, consumers, with good governance, transparency and accountability”.

The result, he laments, is a re-run of issues revisited but not ­resolved, opportunities not seized, and challenges not confronted … “it is no surprise that the distance ­between word and deed on so many fronts, and so often, has created its own climate change, one of a collective vacuum or vacuousness. An environment where it is too easy to become disinterested, or be distracted by, or attracted to, those offering an “answer”, even if it is often more volume, ideology, self-interest, simplicity, hype and nonsense than validity, ideas, public­ interest, substance, hope and common sense. A 24/7 connected world where we drown in words and information but thirst for bona fide truth, knowledge and understanding, and more disconnectedness and disengagement”.

On 16 the November, the Sydney Morning Herald’s economic commentator Jessica Irvine reported on the malaise described by Harris, quoting John Roskam, the director of conservative think tank The Institute of Public Affairs “Public policy in Australia is often made on the run, built on shabby foundations, motivated by short term political gain, and consequently having mediocre outcomes.”

On the same day, the Herald’s  political editor Peter Hartcher voiced similar sentiment. He was referring specifically to the politicians’ inability to unite to face a common foe – the devastating bush-fires raging through New South Wales and Queensland – but his diagnosis is much wider than this:

“Now we have to ask if we’re entering a new phase of over-politicization. Where each party is so intent on its own internal politics that they are incapable of coming together to deal with a parched country, running out of water, and burning as never before. This might be premature. The so-called leaders might yet discover leadership. Real leadership would bring the major parties, and governments federal and state, together to soberly deal with a national crisis. There is a much broader agenda than climate change alone, but it’s also hard to pretend that climate change is irrelevant.

And yet, he concludes, “The omens aren’t good. The Prime Minister refuses to meet former fire chiefs who’ve been seeking a meeting since April to warn of fire catastrophe. Refusing expert advice on a national crisis because it might not exactly suit your existing policies is hardly the stuff of leadership. Politics at its best is problem-solving. Guys, it’s your job. Don’t tell us “not now”.”

Veteran journalist Laura Tingle has summed up a widely felt frustration with our leaders: “For so many people, and so many communities, there have been days and nights of sleeplessness, exhausting anxiety, and fear of monstrous firestorms; and for some, the destruction they have caused. And now the oppressive knowledge that it is likely that this could go on for months. It has also been a week of catastrophic failure of our political dialogue. It’s easy to just express exasperation at the sniping of some of the statements made by politicians this week as they have tried to fight a culture war about climate change in the midst of such disastrous scenes. But there is actually something much more alarming going on here. If our political conversation really is at a point when these cultural weapons can’t be downed in the face of a crisis, we really are in a lot of trouble”.

When commentators and opinion-makers on all sides – even conservative platforms like The Australian and the IPA – are lamenting the (sclerotic?) condition of our body politic and the (toxic?) quality of much public debate, I am reminded of what an old Greek once said (or maybe didn’t say it quite like this): those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first render stupid.

For more on Australian history and politics in In That Howling Infinite, see: Down Under

Bare Dinkum

A failure to create our own luck results in new tyranny

Steve Harris, The Weekend Australian, 2nd November 2019

Albert Tucker, The Lucky Country, 1964

Albert Tucker, The Lucky Country, 1964

Dragon years are especially significant in the Chinese zodiac, the dragon being the only animal born of imagination, and dragons seen to be the world’s best leaders because of their traits of ambition, courage, tenacity, intelligence and risk-taking. And so it was in the dragon year of 1964, when the ­storyline of China was challenged by its own leadership and the ­storyline of Australia was challenged by three men with a different perspective.

In 1964, China exploded an atom bomb and Mao Zedong made his famous “China will take a giant stride forward” speech, declaring­ the country had to “not just follow the beaten track traversed by other countries … and trail behind them at a snail’s pace” but be unstoppable in showing that the East could best the West.

And three Australians took some bold strides: a young Rupert Murdoch bravely launched The Australian to start a global reshaping of media. A former newsboy and young historian, Geoffrey Blainey, accepted a commission that became The Tyranny of ­Distance, a bold and fresh perspective on the story of Australia. And journalist-editor Donald Horne wrote The Lucky Country, a ­courageous and challenging crit­ique of Australia’s capabilities.

In their own way, Mao, Murdoch, Blainey and Horne understood Nobel laureate William Faulkner’s sentiment of the 1950s, one Barack Obama also adapted in 2008 in his landmark “A more powerful union” speech that set him on the path to the presidency: “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” All understood this, and ­wanted to impact our knowledge of the arc of history and its consequen­ces, and the capacity to bend it.

The three Australians reflected a view that conventional wisdom is more conventional than wisdom­, that status quo can be code for “not good enough”. Today The Australian is an integ­ral part of the ­national lexicon, so too ­“tyranny of distance” and “the lucky country”, and half a century on the ­potency of their thinking remains very alive.

In the final chapter of his study of Australia in the 1960s, Horne lamented that his country had ridden­ for too long the “luck” of its natural resources, weather, British ­antecedents and distance from problems elsewhere in the world. It had become manacled to its past, bogged in mediocrity and lacked imagination. “Australia is a lucky country run mainly by ­second rate people who share its luck. Although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curios­ity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise.”

Blainey ambitiously elevated his commission to write a slim volume on the history of transport in Australia into a deeper explor­ation and explanation of how Australia’s remoteness and distance from the British “mother country”, and the enormous size of the continent, shaped so much of Australia’s history and thinking. He originally had two equal halves, The Tyranny of Distance and The Taming of Distance, and his first choice for the title was Distance and Destiny.

Blainey was somewhat hesitant about The Tyranny of Distance as the chosen title, and it did not initially sell well, stirring critics and resentment as much as Horne’s Lucky Country. But then the launch of new satellites transmitting images between hemispheres and the first reigning pope visit saw people boasting of a conquering of the “tyranny of ­distance”. It featured in the Split Enz masterpiece, Six Months in a Leaky Boat, and now, as perhaps the ultimate modernist cred, is the name of a vegan restaurant in Melbourne.

Many who use the terms “lucky country” or “tyranny of distance” have probably not even read the books or understand their original context or meaning. If they read the books today, they might see that almost every form of our personal, community, national­ and global interests still involves “distance” as much as ever, and that notions of “the lucky country” ­remain ironic.

A 2020 publisher might commission new versions called The Mucky Country and The Tyranny of Distraction, recognising that while Australia has come a good distance and been “lucky” in many respects, we have not made the most of our “lucky” assets and have “mucked about” on too many fronts.

Yes, we have seen notable examples of national ­ambition and outcomes but they are the ­exception. And, yes, there has been some taming of distance with the global transformation of transport, trade, communications and economics but it has also brought us closer to world forces of nationalism, terrorism, crime, social ­unrest, civil rights, people movement, pandemics and the environment.

Such authors might argue that we still have a poor understanding of the many forms, the tyrannies, of “distance”, that distance and proximity can swing between positive and negative. And that “luck” is a fragile companion. They might see new and different tyrannies of distance and more ­reportage evidencing a country limping along the same beaten tracks, unable to take “giant ­strides. They might challenge us to think whether it is due to a “she’ll be right” lethargy, insou­ciance and detachment. Or distraction. Or lack of imagination, ambition or competence.

We have the world’s oldest civilisation yet have not learned much from its people’s practices and powerful sense of “country” or “mob”. And still not closed the ­distance to full connectedness and acceptance.

On the driest continent on the planet, we still struggle to have ­national policies on how to optim­ally trap, maintain and use our rainwater and rivers. Government departments insist we are on “the leading edge” of water policy, yet urban rain and water flows into the sea, we recycle almost anything except water for drinking, our rivers have become ill-used and ill-managed, and we have a mirage of national drought, clim­ate, energy and environmental policies. Dorothy Mackellar’s “sunburnt country” has not seen us become a world technology epicentre.

A scheme that took 25 years, 100,000 people from all over the world to build 10 townships and 1600km of road and track in rough terrain to divert water for farms and energy sounds like a heroic engineering tale from 19th-century America or 21st-century China. Or a pipe dream in modern Australia. But this was the Snowy Mountains scheme just 70 years ago. Forget such ambition and commitment today: we muck around with decisions, let alone de­livery, of even modest ­infrastructure.

Australia’s colonies united in part to end rivalry and ineffic­iency. But it didn’t prevent passengers from Perth to Brisbane having to travel in six trains and Sydney-Melbourne passengers changing trains at Albury. A century on, we still have inefficient and disconnected systems in and between cities and towns.

We salute the self-sacrifice of so many of our military, the ethos of “mateship”, and ride on the shoulders and self-sacrifices of our parents and grandparents. We have talked about “a fair go” for our soldiers, young, aged, ­disadvantaged and ill since Federation, and every election features words about “the battlers” and “the forgotten”.

Yet today we have unresolved wounds among our vets and in Veterans Affairs management. An estimated 700,000-plus children live in poverty, 30 years after Bob Hawke’s prepared speech ­declared that “by 1990 no child need live in poverty”. About 600 children under the age of 14 are incarcerated­ and frequently held in solitary confinement, despite its condemnation as a form of mental torture. Our age of criminal ­responsibility remains at 10. Suicide is the leading cause of death among those aged 15-24.

We see more intergenerational disadvantage, with diminished prospects and ambitions, more uncertain paths through education to meaningful employment. The “fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay” mantra, job security and training-skill balance are victims of globalisation, outsourcing, casualisation, contracting, ageism and wage theft.

A royal commission is demonstrating that our entire aged-care system, despite numerous past ­reviews, is on the point of collapse, yet there is no sense of urgency or action. Health systems are struggling and one’s wellbeing can depend on a postcode. Inquiries into corporate and financial malfeasance do not seem to preven­t new sins.

After decades of prosperity, the dream of home ownership has ­become unaffordable to many, and we build houses and apartment complexes that are unsafe and unsound in engineering and environmental terms. We celebrate our story as a ­nation of immigrants, and bristle at any charge of being racist.

Yet 70 years after the post-World War II rallying cry to “populate or perish” in the pursuit of econo­mic and military security, and despite­ all the economic and cultur­al up­sides of immigration and living in one of the most diverse­ populations in the world, with ­almost half the population being born overseas or having at least one parent born overseas, we lack meaningful policies and strategies on population and immigration. Half a century after the Whitlam government dismantled “White Australia” laws, we have not ­buried latent racism, inequal­ity and bigotry.

Colonial Irish and Catholic settlers­ were demonised, their ­religious leaders pressed to disown any troublesome members and avow “loyalty” to Australia. We now have multiple faiths but still slide into moral panic and ­demonisation when “different” religious and ethnic groups are seen to be threatening or un-Australian “them” rather than “us”.

The Cold War 1960s and “yellow­ peril” fear has been overtaken by the “luck” of our natural ­resources being fuel for China’s great strides, and the dollars from fee-paying students and tourists. Now we fret over China’s Belt and Road Initiative economic and military influence across the globe, including our South Pacific backyard.

We don’t know how Brexit and Trump nationalism will impact­ our longest-standing allies and alliances­. Closer to home, outside trade and economic pragmatism and holidays in Bali and South ­Pacific, few ­Australians could honestly say they have a real understanding of and/or trust with many of our nearest neighbours other than New Zealand.

Australia’s 43 universities ought to be unambiguously at the heart of curating our past and present knowledge and understanding, and underpinning ­nation-building. But too many pursue fee-paying students even if it means compromising standards and results; send conflicting signals­ about academic freedom and assaults on free speech, science­ and reason; opportunist­ically offer populist and profitable courses while reducing crucial ­engagement in Australian history, culture and literature.

The national need for a better understanding of our past, present and future is not for lack of government, reviews and regulations. Or perhaps the need is greater ­because of it. We are “led” by nine parliaments, 800 federal and state politicians, 500 councils and an estimated 6000 local councillors, hundreds of bureaucracies and agencies, standing commissions and committees, and continuous reviews, papers, inquiries, royal commissions, consultancies, conferences and consultancies.

So much “government”, so little­ good governance. Attention too often on the urgent rather than the important, the short-term quick gain rather than long-term betterment. Debates that are just re-runs and meaningless pointscoring. Parties that cannot even be sure their candidates are legal and honest, and are geniuses in calling from opposition benches for ambition and results that they failed to adequately address in government.

Delivery too often poorly managed or funded, incompetent or even corrupt. Rarely do we see a harnessing of all the available strengths, leadership and resources across government, business, makers, sellers, investors, funders, networkers, teachers, influencers, enablers, con­sumers, with good governance, transparency and accountability.

The result, predictably, is a re-run of issues revisited but not ­resolved, opportunities not seized, challenges not confronted. And it is no surprise that the distance ­between word and deed on so many fronts, and so often, has created its own climate change, one of a collective vacuum or vacuousness. An environment where it is too easy to become disinterested, or be distracted by, or attracted to, those offering an “answer”, even if it is often more volume, ideology, self-interest, simplicity, hype and nonsense than validity, ideas, public­ interest, substance, hope and common sense. A 24/7 connected world where we drown in words and information but thirst for bona fide truth, knowledge and understanding, and more disconnectedness and disengagement.

There is something amiss in the national storyline when we have long had many more assets and opportunities than billions of others in the world, yet we have reached a point in our story where many Australians see too many tyrannies of distance in their lives, too many doubts about future “luck” and prosperity.

If we do not better see and ­respond to needs and opportunities then current distances will ­become greater, risking whether our destiny is one of our own ambition. One hopes we don’t have a future historian challenging us with a critique of a place called Lostralia, a land where “distance” and “luck” slayed the dragons.

Steve Harris is a former publisher and editor-in-chief of The Age and Herald Sun, and author of three books on Australian history. His latest book is The Lost Boys of Mr Dickens, How the British Empire turned artful dodgers into child killers (Melbourne Books).

Living off the sheep’s back

 

 

 

 

Lebanon’s WhatApp intifada

Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

We know more or less what constitutes Lebanon, but we don’t know how it works. If we had to send into space a country capable of containing the world, Lebanon would fit the bill. If we had to send one that did not contain what is needed to make a real country, Lebanon would also be the answer.   Lebanese author Dominique Eddé

The sparks which that lit the fire of the current protests in Lebanon were an increase in the price of using the WhatApp messaging, which many Lebanese preferred to the high rates charged by private telcos, and destructive wildfires on the iconic Chouf mountains which could not be tamed because the authorities had grounded the firefighting helicopters for want of routine maintenance. But the root of Lebanon’s autumn of discontent go much deeper.

Almost thirty years of stagnation characterized by high unemployment, particularly among the youth, increasing inequality, limited opportunities, rampant corruption, meagre infrastructural reform, and decaying administrative, social, and educational institutions, are bringing young and old from across Lebanon’s many confessional fault lines and clan and party loyalties (often the same thing) onto the streets of major major towns all over this tiny but divided country. They accuse the government being preoccupied with enriching its members and their supporters and neglecting the needs of ordinary Lebanese. See longtime Beirut resident Robert Fisk’s article in The Independent: I don’t blame the Lebanese rioters setting Beirut alight – they are hungry, poor and furious; and Beiruti journalist Samah Hadid’s piece: The protests in Lebanon have bridged social divides – now everyone is fighting against the corrupt elite.

There are many left-wing social media tropes that are blinkered by an obsession with theories of US, Saudi and Israeli conspiracy, accusing them of manipulating the Lebanese street to bring down the Hariri government. They are letting Lebanon’s corrupt and dysfunctional sectarian political establishment off the hook.

Other media are talking excitedly about this being Lebanon’s version of the 2011 Arab Spring – as illustrated by our featured image and the lass sporting the word thawra or ’revolution’’ on her tee shirt – a sure way of drawing the invidious “evil eye’ to the the Lebanese’ peaceful (so far) and convivial (again, so far) intifada, for we all know how the Arab Spring ended. And none have yet allocated this putative revolution a colour like those that popped up from Kiev to Kazakhstan in the early years of this century (the ‘Cedar Revolution’, anyone?). Which is probably wise, because we all should have learned by now to avoid the trap of false analogies.

The party atmosphere and the images of unity among Lebanese of all classes, clans and confessions can be deceptive. Three decades since the end of a brutal civil war, which left over 120,000 propel dead, and tens of thousands “disappeared”, and almost eighty years since the National Pact of 1943 laid the foundations for Lebanon’s shaky and perennially challenged multi-faith political dispensation, divisions run deep. Not only traditional clan and sectarian lines, and the inequitable distribution of power and wealth, but also, the deliberately indeterminate status of upwards of 170,000 Palestinians (the refugees of the 1948 war and their descendants), and upwards of 1.5 million increasingly unwelcome Syrian refugees.

There are many amongst the party faithful and their never quite disarmed militias who at a signal from above, could let lose the dogs of violence with infiltrated provocateurs or strategically placed snipers – we’ve seen this before, in Sarajevo and Kyiv, in Tahrir Square, and in Syria in 2011 when demonstrations had yet to morph into violence and civil war. This it is already happening in Iraq, where security forces and lone wolves affiliated with Iranian interests are alleged to have fired on protesters.

The Lebanese National Army and police force have been ordered to disperse the protesters, but as yet, are merely holding the line. Many on the streets are no doubt anxious about the role the powerful Shia Hezbollah will chose to play in the coming days. Its reclusive but undisputed leader Hasan Nasrallah has declared that the status quo should stand, that the government should hold firm because it would taken too long to form a new one, thus delaying the reforms that the demonstrators are demanding. Hezbollah, with thirteen seats in the parliament and three cabinet posts, is the most powerful political and military and an army stronger than the national army, and whilst bankrolled by Iran, is itself part of the establishment that the protesters and one of the parties that many protesters are demonstrating against – as part of the problem and not of the solution.

Calling for a non-confessional government of technocrats appointed on the basis of experience and not patronage and clan connections, the protesters paint Hezbollah with the same brush as the the Christian Phalange, the Shia Amal, and other self serving confessional parties – quite apart from its constant provocation of what many see as needless confrontation with Israel (and its western backers), and its deep involvement in the Syrian civil war.  Whilst there is no doubt a traditional prejudice towards the country’s Shia minority, many Lebanese resent Hezbollah for exposing their country to potential destruction at the hands of Israel, and for dragging it into the conflict in Syria, a country and a regime for which for which they retain bad memories and harbour little affection.

Meanwhile, there have been indications that Hezbollah’s hitherto uncritical mass following in the south is fraying somewhat as economic hardship bites, tarnishing even Hezbollah’s credentials as a provider of social and educational services. But there are now reports from Beirut of Hezbollah supporters attacking protesters. Dressed in black and wielding batons, they are chanting that their boss is not like the others, whilst he has declared that the protests are being fomented by his enemies (it’s all about him!) and that it could reignite the fifteen year long civil war that ended in 1990. There is also talk of supporters of Hsiang part Amal and of Hezbollah coming to break up the demonstrations. Ominously, they are being called ‘shabiya’, Arabic for ‘ghosts’, and also the name of the murderous Alawi militias unleashed by the regime in Syria. 

There is also talk of supporters of Hsiang part Amal and of Hezbollah coming to break up the demonstrations. Ominously, they are being called ‘shabiya’, Arabic for ‘ghosts’, and also the name of the murderous Alawi militias unleashed by the regime in Syria. 

As I watch from afar, I am reminded of the words of celebrated Lebanon’s national poet Khalil Gibran: “Pity the nation that raises not its voice save when it walks in a funeral, boasts not except among its ruins, and will rebel not save when its neck is laid between the sword and the block”.

 © Paul Hemphill 2019.  All rights reserved

For more on the Lebanese civil war, and the full text of Gibran’s poem, see In That Howling Infinites Pity the Nation

For other posts about the Middle East, see: A Middle East Miscellany

Afterword:  Lebanon’s  huge smallness

In a fascinating article in the New York Review of Books, The Compatibility of Opposites, Lebanese author and novelist Dominique Eddé  writes one of the most profound and insightful descriptions of her homeland, that you could ever read  – a portrait of what I would describe as Lebanon’s  huge smallness (after Walt Whitman’s  “I am small, I contain multitudes”):

“Every Lebanese invents a personal Lebanon for a country that does not exist”.
A Lebanese author writes … Lebanon is both the center of the world and a dead end. The broken little village of a planet that is sick. Chaotic, polluted, and corrupt beyond belief, this is a country where beauty and human warmth constantly find ways to break through” …All extremes and all clumped together. It is like a magician’s trick handkerchief: you simply unfold one end and it will stretch ad infinitum. Individual memories are rich and compelling while the collective memory is nowhere to be found, impossible to recount”.

She continues: “It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that in Lebanon, everything can be explained and nothing can be understood. All the decisions made for this country are made behind its back, and all that happens here epitomizes the rest of the world: the mix of populations, the vulnerability of borders, political lying at its worst, building the present by destroying the past, an utter lack of perspective … “With a total population of 4 to 5 million, Lebanon is home to 1.5 million refugees. Between a quarter and a third of the population is foreign: Palestinians displaced by the wars of 1948 and 1967, Syrians and Palestinians fleeing repression and the war in Syria that began in 2011, Iraqis displaced by the two Gulf wars. Lebanon’s degree of absorption and hospitality is almost proportional to its degree of intolerance. Ambivalence is everywhere, in everything”.

Postscript – the autumn of our discontent 

Last Sunday, a million people marched in London, demanding a second people’s vote on Brexit. In Britain and in Australia environmental protesters are disrupting city centres and enraging commuters. The “law and order brigade” in parliaments, press and social media have called down fire and brimstone upon climate activists’ heads, one television host going so far as suggesting that they should be used as speed bumps.

But in far-away places around the globe, popular protests are far from peaceful.

In Lebanon, Iraq, Ecuador and Chile, people of all ages, genders and political affiliations are on the streets. There are many common themes, including demands for education and employment, and an end to the incompetence, self-interest and corruption of ruling elites. Bolivians are on th streets protesting the ruction of its president. In Spain, Catalans protest jail sentences handed down to their separatist parliamentary leaders. And in Hong Kong, there is no let up to months of demonstrations against China’s relentless chipping away at the city’s tenuous autonomy. Young Indonesians have been on the streets of Jakarta protesting new laws that undermine civil rights and endemic corruption amongst elites, and in Indonesian-occupied Papua, calls for independence have been met with predictable brutality.
In most of these each these outbreaks of popular outrage and protest, the authorities are responding with heavy handed police tactics, tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannon, and mass arrests, and in some instances, deadly live fire.
See The Washington Post’s  The Common Factor Uniting Protesters … ; an Patrick Cockburn’s insightful analysis of the changing nature of the Middle East’s many ethnic and sectarian conflicts: Mass protests against corruption and deprivation are replacing an era of sectarian civil wars. 

Sawt al Hurriya – Egypt’s slow-burning fuse

Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

Déjà vu

Last month saw the death in exile of former Tunisian strongman, dictator and kleptocrat Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, and the resurgence on 20th September of Friday street protests in Cairo and smaller Egyptian towns – and around the world – against the corruption and oppression of Egyptian strongman Abd al Fattah al Sisi and his military cronies. Predictably, some three thousand people have been arrested – protesters, prominent activists, journalists, lawyers and politicians, including Islamist and leftists alike and dissenters in general. These have now been added to the tens of thousands that have already been incarcerated on conspiracy and terrorism charges, largely without trial.

it appears to be an indiscriminate backlash, The Independent’s Bel True writes: “… according to rights groups and people I’ve interviewed, among those haphazardly rounded up are children who were out buying school uniform, tourists holidaying in Cairo, human rights lawyers going to court to represent clients, confused bystanders, young men popping out for evening strolls, visiting foreign students and street vendors. All are now swallowed up in Egypt’s notoriously opaque justice system”.

The protests have for the moment been contained, but with a third of Egypt’s population below the poverty line (and that’s a government figure – it’s very likely much higher), about one-third of the total under age 14 and sixty percent under 30, one can’t help feeling a hint of déjà vu. It is hard to keep one hundred million people down with just a strong arm up your sleeve.

Meeting with al Sisi in New York, US President Donald Trump praised him for restoring order to Egypt. At this year’s G7 summit in Biarritz, Trump had referred to the Egyptian president  as his “favourite dictator”, a comment that was met with stunned silence from American and Egyptian officials. Boris Johnson has likewise found a friend in Al Sisi. Tru quotes a British-Egyptian filmmaker: “There is a misconception that Sisi is a partner in stability which allows governments, particularly in Europe, to turn a blind eye to his behaviour: as long he keeps buying weapons and submarines and power stations”.

The Voice of Freedom

In our relatively comfortable, free and 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 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 Egyptian protesters – for brave they are indeed For having experienced six years of brutal and vengeful military regime, they are fully aware of the consequences of their actions – 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 president-for-life Hosni Mubarak eight 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.

Bur first, let us revisit those heady days and the doleful years that followed.

Remembering Tahrir Square

The self-immolation in December 20111 of young Tunisian Muhammed Bouazizi was the catalyst for the pent-up popular outrage that led to the heady days of January and February 2011, with the green of the Arab Spring fresh sprung from the soil of the economic and political bankruptcy of the Arab Middle East.

The fall of longtime dictators Zine el Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, was precipitated by the yearning of their oppressed and impoverished people, and particularly the young, for freedom, justice, dignity and employment, and an end to endemic corruption, nepotism and brutality; for a society in which there were jobs and a decent living, where you could save up enough money to get married, where you didn’t have to bribe corrupt officials for everything from traffic fines to court decisions to business permits to jobs, where you could be arbitrarily arrested and/or beaten up or worse for speaking out against the government, the system, or just…speaking out.

Egypt had only known a handful of military rulers until Mubarak was ousted in February 2011, following weeks of protests centred around Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

When elections were held a year later, Mohammed Morsi, standing for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, emerged as president. After decades of repression of the Muslim Brotherhood under Egypt’s military rulers, Morsi promised a moderate agenda that would deliver an “Egyptian renaissance with an Islamic foundation”.

A year later, he was gone, replaced by Abd al Fatah al Sisi, his own defense minister, who threw him in jail and cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood, putting hundreds of its members in front of courts that sentenced them to death in mass trials. 

His year in office was turbulent, however, as Egypt’s competing forces struggled over the direction the country should go in. Opponents had accused him of trying to impose an Islamist agenda on the country and mass protests began on the anniversary of his election. After more than a week of spreading protests and violence and talks with Sisi in which Morsi reportedly was prepared to make concessions to the opposition, the army announced it had removed Morsi and taken control on 3rd July 2013.

Morsi’s supporters had gathered in Cairo’s Rabaa Square before he was toppled, and there they remained, demanding he be reinstated. On 13th August, the army moved in, clearing the square by force. More than a thousand people are believed to have been killed in the worst massacre of peaceful demonstrators since China’s Tienanmen Square in 1999.

Whereas Hosni Mubarak died in pampered confinement, Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s only elected president, was held in solitary confinement for six years, and died in June 2019 after collapsing in a courtroom, the place where his face has been seen most often, behind metal bars, since he was removed from power. See: Nowhere Man – the lonesome death of Mohamed Morsi 

Morsi’s fall led to a military regime more brutal and corrupt than any that preceded it, and with full support from the US and it’s European allies, and of the Egyptian elites, has consolidated the rise and rise of the new pharoah. Al Sisi and other US supporterd and armed Arab autocrats have transformed an already volatile Middle East into a powder keg. 

Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s only elected president died  in June 2019 after collapsing in a courtroom, the place where his face has been seen most often, behind metal bars, since he was removed from power in 2013

The Arab Spring failed because its youthful vanguard were not prepared for the next stage. In reality, it only occurred in Tunisia and in Egypt. Like the Occupy movement in the west, it lacked coherent leadership and purpose, and in the end, unity against the forces of the establishment that were mobilized against them. But the young, inexperienced idealists were no match for the experienced activists of the Muslim brotherhood, the apparatchiks of the established political parties, and the cadres of the mukhabarat, the military, and the “deep state” that were able to hijack and subvert the revolution.

The Arab Spring was effectively over once the Tunisian and Egyptian dictators had departed and the counterrevolution had already begun – in Egypt particularly with the electoral success and later putsch of the Ikhwan, and finally the “tamarrud” or “rising” of the fearful and conservative middle classes that ushered in military rule.

 The great unravelling

The Tunisian and Egyptian risings were followed rapidly by the outbreak of insurrections in Bahrain, Syria, Libya, and Yemen. These were more sectarian and tribal based, with less reliance on social media, and while media chose to consider them as part of the Arab Spring, in reality, they were not.

This was transformed into a long, hard and bloody winter., and eight years on, the wars of the Arab Dissolution have dragged the world into its vortex. Great Power politics and proxy wars are taxing intellectual and actual imaginations.

And they led to the virtual destruction and disintegration of these countries, the ongoing dismantling of Iraq, and an expanding arc of violence, bloodshed and repression from Morocco to Pakistan, extending southwards across Africa into Mali, Nigeria, Somalia and the Sudans, and their unfortunate neighbours.

Tunisia alone has held on to some of the gains of its “Spring”, but there it is often a case of two steps forward one step back. Nevertheless, the country is holding ostensibly free and fair elections as I write. Elsewhere, the misnamed Arab Spring entered into a cycle of protest and repression little different from earlier unrest, and also, as in the past, foreign intervention. And the story has still a long way to run…

Civil war and economic desperation propelled millions of refugees across the Mediterranean and the Aegean into Europe, threatening the unity and stability of the European Union. Islamic fundamentalism filled the vacuum created by crumbling dictatorships and vanishing borders, unleashing atavistic, uncompromising and vicious Jihadis against their own people and coreligionists, and onto the streets of cities as far apart as Paris, Istanbul, Beirut, Djakarta, and Mogadishu. In Syria particularly, but also in Iraq, Libya and Yemen, outsiders intervened to further complicate the chaos, rendering an early end to these wars a forlorn hope.

All is, as Kent lamented in King Lear, “cheerless, dark and deadly”.

See also in In That Howling Infinite, A Middle East Miscellany

 The voice of freedom

Against this a back-drop of the revolution despoiled, hijacked, and betrayed, I share the song created by Seed Mostafa Fahmy and his friends and the video they shot in Tahrir Square during the demonstrations. “In every street in my country, the voice of Freedom is calling!”

Sawt al Hurriya

I  went (to go protest), vowing not to turn back.
I wrote, in my blood, on every street.
We raised our voices, until those who had not heard us could.
We broke down all barriers.

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.

We raised our heads high into the sky.
And hunger no longer mattered to us.
Most important are our rights,
And that with our blood we write our history.

If you are one of us,
Stop your chattering,
Stop telling us to leave and abandon our dream.
Stop saying the word, “I”.

In every street in my country,
The voice of freedom is calling.

Brown Egyptian hands
Are outstretched amidst the roars (of the crowd)
Breaking barriers.

Our innovative youth
Have turned autumn into spring.

They have achieved the miraculous.
They have resurrected the dead,
Saying: “Kill me,
But my death will not resurrect YOUR country.
I am writing, with my blood,
A new life for my nation.
Is this my blood, or is it spring?
In color, they are both green.”

I do not know whether I smile from happiness,
Or from my sadnesses.
In every street in my country,

The voice of freedom is calling.

(Translated by Egyptian Seed Mariam Bazeed.)

Sout al-Hurriya
صوت الحرية

Nezelt We qolt ana mesh rage3
نزلت وقلت انا مش راجع
I went out and said I would not return

we katabt bedamy fe kol share3
وكتبت بدمي في كل شارع
And I wrote on each street with my blood

Sama3na elli makansh same3
سمعنا اللي ما كمش سامع
We heard what was not heard

we etkasaret kol el mawane3
واتكسرت كل الموانع
And all the barriers were broken

sela7na kan a7lamna
سلحنا كان احلامنا
Our weapon was our dreams

we bokra wade7 odamna
وبكره واضح قدمنا
And tomorrow was clear ahead of us

men zaman benestana
من زمان بنستني
We’ve been waiting a long time

bendawar mesh la2een makkanna
بندور مش لاقيين مكانا
Seeking but not finding our place

fe kol share3 fe beladi
في كل شارع في بلادي
In every street of my country

sout el houriya beynadi
صوت الحريه بينادي
the voice of freedom is calling
……………….
rafa3na rasna fe elsama
رفعنا رسنا في السما
We lifted our heads high (in the sky)

we elgo3 maba2ash beyhemna
والجوع مبقاش بيهمنا
And hunger no longer bothered us

aham 7aga 7a2ena
اهم حاجه حقنا
What’s most important are our rights

wenekteb tarekhna be damena
ونكتب تاريخنا بدمنا
And to write our history with our blood

law kont wa7ed mnena
لو كنت واحد مننا
If you were really one of us

balash terghi we t2ol lena
بلاش ترغي وتقولنا
don’t blather and telling us

nemshy we neseeb &elmna
نمشي ونسيب حلمنا
To leave and abandon our dream

we batal te2ol kelmt ana
وبطل تقول كلمه انا
And stop saying the word “I”

fe kol share3 fe beladi
في كل شارع في بلادي
In every street of my country

Sout El-7ouria beynadi
صوت الحريه بينادي
the sound of freedom is calling
……………..
spoken poetry at 2:14:
ايادي مصريه سمره
Dark Egyptian arms
ليها في التمييز
knows how to characterize (against discrimination)
ممدوده وسط الذئير
reached out through the roar
بتكسر البراويز
breaking the frams
طلع الشباب البديع
the creative youth came out
قلبوا خريفها ربيع
turned it’s fall into spring
وحققوا المعجزه
and achieved the miracle
صحوا القتيل من القتل
awakinging the murdered from death
اقتلني , اقتلني
kill me , kill me
قتلي ما هايقيم دولتك تاني
killing me is not going to build up you regime again
بكتب بدمي حياه تانيه لوطاني
I am writing with my blood another life for my country
دمي ده ولا الربيع
is this my blood or the spring
اللي اتنين بلون اخضر
both seem green
وببتسم من سعادتي ولا أحزاني
am i smiling from my happiness or my sadness
في كل شارع في بلادي
In every street of my country
صوت الحريه بينادي
the sound of freedom is calling
في كل شارع في بلادي
In every street of my country
صوت الحريه بينادي
the sound of freedom is calling

 

 

 

Free Derry and the battle of the Bogside

Paul Hemphill 2 Comments
There was a checkpoint Charlie
He didn’t crack a smile
But it’s no laughing party
When you’ve been on the murder mile
Only takes one itchy trigger
One more widow, one less white nigger
Oliver’s army is here to stay
Oliver’s army are on their way
And I would rather be anywhere else
But here today
Elvis Costello 1979

As Britain and the European Union agonise and argue over the terms of the Brexit divorce and “the Irish backstop”, we recall the fiftieth anniversary of “the battle of the Bogside”.

Historical memory is like a sieve. Give it a good shake and only the big chunks are left, and as Patrick Cockburn and other British commentators note with anguish, for many on mainland Britain, mired in the Brexit morass, Ireland is not one of these. These commentators, who often possess Irish roots or connections and are veteran correspondents with decades of experience in the volatile Middle East, lament how many people in mainland Britain are ignorant of, or worse, indifferent to Northern Ireland and to the centuries-old conflict that burst into fierce flames half a century ago.

The conflict was never primarily about the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, but about the civil and economic rights of the Roman Catholic minority in the north in relation to the Protestant majority. Had the Ulster Protestants shared power and privilege equitably with the Catholics, things might have turned out much differently.

Though nationalism and religion had been irrevocably and often violently intertwined for hundreds of years, Britain and Ireland’s entry into the EU arguably provided a catalyst for peaceful political change which led in time to the Good Friday Peace Agreement of April 1998.

It might seem unthinkable that anyone should willfully reignite a conflict never that was never really extinguished but merely reduced to a simmer. And yet, recent events in Derry – failed bombings and the New IRA’s murder of Lyra McKee, a working-class Catholic journalist and LGBT activist (during a riot that was apparently staged for a TV crew,), and political paralysis in Westminster over Brexit, including the controversial “backstop” to prevent the re-imposition of a “hard border”, have sparked fears that the centuries only Irish Question was not dead but only sleeping.

The problem of Ireland had never gone away – or was it, rather, the problem of England?

In 1921, Winston Churchill asked Parliament: “How is it that (Ireland) sways our councils, shakes our parties, and infects us with her bitterness, convulses our passions, and deranges our action? How is it she has forced generation after generation to stop the whole traffic of the British Empire, in order to debate her domestic affairs? …  Whence does this mysterious power of Ireland come?”

He forgot – or never realized – that the reason for all of this Irish “bitterness” and “passion” was his country’s brutal legacy of colonialism beginning several hundred years prior, stretching at least as far back as the mid-1500s conquest of Ireland by King Henry VIII and the 1606 plantation colonization) of Ulster by King James I (whence the ancient town of Derry got its ‘London’ prefix – history can be reckless with place names), and all the way through Oliver Cromwell’s pogroms, the the ‘98, An Gorta Mór, and Padraic Pearse’s doomed intifada at Eastertide in 1916 and the Crown’s execution of the rebel leaders.

Just like the recent flare-ups in Kashmir over India’s unilateral rescission of its autonomy, and citizens in Hong Kong resisting tighter controls from China, the messy legacy of Britain’s colonial past continues to play out around the world.

Fifty years ago last October, a civil rights march in the historic city of Derry, the second largest city on Northern Ireland, was brutally attacked by police in front of the television cameras. It was the crucial moment in the rise of peaceful opposition to the one-party unionist state. When this failed to achieve its ends, the door was opened to violence and the rise of the Provisional IRA. It sparked widespread disorder and rioting across Northern Ireland.

For many, this is the moment thirty years of violent conflict euphemistically known as The Troubles began.

By the end of the year, various ‘no-go’ areas had been established and walls built dividing major cities. Large population movement began that saw once mixed areas become exclusively one faith or another, polarizing not only people, but also opinions and attitudes. On both sides, paramilitary groups began to re-emerge, gaining in strength and status as widespread civil disorder quickly escalated into a bloody conflict that would last for nearly thirty years. With the police unable to cope with the scope and scale of the disturbances, the government decided to send in the British Army to restore order – the only ever peacetime deployment of British troops on British soil in modern times.

Increasing degrees of violence culminated in January 1969 when, in the aftermath of a march from Belfast to Derry, the Royal Ulster Constabulary rioted in the Bogside, assaulting Catholics in the streets and in their homes. Residents put up barricades and declared themselves citizens of Free Derry and outside the authority of the police.

In August, a much larger riot – the “Battle of the Bogside” – saw the police expelled from Free Derry by locals throwing petrol bombs, and nationalists and loyalists fighting hand-to-hand in the streets of the city they shared.

Just like flare-ups in Kashmir this week over autonomy and citizens in Hong Kong resisting tighter controls from China, the messy legacy of Britain’s colonial past continues to play out around the world.o, as nationalism and sectarianism dealt a coup de grace to Tito’s Yugoslavia; and in Baghdad as the ancient city sundered into confessional cantons.

Derry’s trials culminated in Bloody Sunday on January 30, 1972 when soldiers of the Parachute Regiment shot twenty eight unarmed civilians during a protest march against internment. Fourteen Catholics died: thirteen were killed outright, while the death of another man four months later was attributed to his injuries. Many were shot while fleeing from the soldiers, and some, while trying to help the wounded.

These were but a few of nearly four thousand people killed during the conflict, including some five hundred British soldiers, and some fifty thousand injured in ulster and on the British mainland in protests and firefights, executions and assassinations, beatings and bombings. 

I republish below poignant and gripping feature by Australian journalist and author Mark Dapin about that day. It is a timely reminder that Northern Ireland is a knot that refuses to be untangled, and that for the families of the victims of the conflict, the wounds have never closed let alone healed.

Author’s Note

Whilst I do not have skin in the Ulster game, I do have a connection. My father was a protestant from the town of Castlederg, County Tyrone, just south of Derry and east of the Irish border. He married a catholic from Enniscorthy, County Wexford, and I was born and baptized catholic in Birmingham, England – neutral territory. I used to sing the Clancys’ The Orange and the Green back in my old folkie days, and loved The Old Orange Flute. Serendipitously, a good friend and tradesman of choice in in our small Australian country town is from Castlederg, from a large catholic family. He learnt his trade on the building sites of Belfast and experienced the latter years of The Troubles first hand, including the dangers of working on protestant-only worksites. Another acquaintance on our coast is a protestant from Belfast. He too has many stories of those dangerous time, including how he would visit an actively paramilitary friend who had been banged up in the notorious Maze prison (where catholic and protestant prisoners would be segregated into separate wings.

Derry 2019

Read also in In That Howling Infinite: Mo Ghile Mear – Irish myth and melody; and The Boys of Wexford – memory and memoir 

The Battle of the Bogside was 50 years ago – so why are the same mistakes being made right now?

Patrick Cockburn, The Independent 9th August 2019.

Fifty years ago, the Battle of the Bogside in Derry between Catholics and police, combined with the attacks on Catholic areas of Belfast by Protestants, led to two crucial developments that were to define the political landscape for decades: the arrival of the British army and the creation of the Provisional IRA.

An eruption in Northern Ireland was always likely after half a century of undiluted Protestant and unionist party hegemony over the Catholics. But its extreme militarisation and length was largely determined by what happened in August 1969.

An exact rerun of this violent past is improbable, but the next few months could be equally decisive in determining the political direction of Northern Ireland. The Brexit crisis is reopening all the old questions about the balance of power between Catholics and Protestants and relations with Britain and the Irish Republic that the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) of 1998 had provided answers with which everybody could live.

The occasion which led to the battle of the Bogside came on 12 August when the Apprentice Boys, a fraternity memorialising the successful Protestant defence of Derry against Catholic besiegers in the 17th century, held their annual march. Tensions were already high in Derry and Belfast because the unionist government and its overwhelmingly Protestant police force was trying to reassert its authority, battered and under threat since the first civil rights marches in 1968.

What followed was closer to an unarmed uprising than a riot as the people of the Bogside barricaded their streets and threw stones and petrol bombs to drive back attacks by hundreds of policemen using batons and CS gas. In 48 hours of fighting, a thousand rioters were treated for injuries and the police suffered unsustainable casualties, but they had failed to gain control of the Bogside.

Its defenders called for protests in other parts of the North to show solidarity with their struggle and to overstretch the depleted Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). In Belfast, Protestants stormed into the main Catholic enclave in the west of the city, burning houses and forcing Catholics to flee. The RUC stood by or actively aided the attacks. The local MP Paddy Devlin estimated that 650 families were burned out in a single night, many taking refuge in the Irish Republic

I was in Bombay Street, where all the houses were burned on the night of 14-15 August, earlier this year. The street was long ago rebuilt but still has a feeling of abnormality and menace because it is only a few feet from the “peace line” with its high wall and higher wire mesh to stop missiles being thrown over the top from the Protestant district next door.

The most striking feature of Bombay Street is the large memorial garden, though it is more like a religious shrine, to martyrs both military and civilian from the district who have been killed by political violence since 1916. A high proportion of these were members of the Provisional IRA who died in the fighting during the 30 years of warfare after Bombay Street was burned.

The memorial is a reminder of the connection between what many local people see as an anti-Catholic pogrom in 1969 and the rise of the Provisional IRA. It split away from what became known as the official IRA because the latter had failed to defend Catholic districts.

Pictures of the ruins of Bombay Street on the morning of 15 August show local people giving British soldiers cups of tea. But this brief amity was never going to last because the unionist government in Stormont had asked the prime minister of day, Harold Wilson, to send in the troops not to defend Catholics but to reinforce its authority.

It was the role the British army were to play in one way or another for the next 30 years. It was one which was bound not only to fail but to be counterproductive. So long as the soldiers were there in support of a Protestant and unionist political and military establishment, the IRA were always going to have enough popular support to stay in business.

British governments at the time never got a grip on the political realities of the North. Soon after the troops were first sent there, the cabinet minister Richard Crossman blithely recorded in his diary that “we have now got ourselves into something which we can hardly mismanage”. But mismanage it they did and on a grotesque scale. The Provisionals were initially thin on the ground, but army raids and arrests acted as their constant recruiting sergeant. Internment without trial introduced on 9 August 1971, the anniversary of which falls today, was another boost as were the hunger strikes of 1981 which turned Sinn Fein into a significant political force.

What are the similarities between the situation today and 50 years ago? In many respects, it is transformed because there is no Protestant unionist state backed by the British army. The Provisional IRA no longer exists. The GFA has worked astonishingly well in allowing Protestants and Catholics to have their separate identities and, on occasion though less effectively, to share power.

Brexit and the Conservative Party dependence on the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) for its parliamentary majority since 2017 has thrown all these gains into the air. DUP activists admit privately that they want a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic because they have never liked the GFA and would like to gut it. Sinn Fein, which gets about 70 per cent of the Catholic/nationalist vote these days, is pleased that the partition of Ireland is once again at the top of the political agenda.

“I am grappling with the idea of a hard border which I would call a Second Partition of Ireland,” Tom Hartley, a Sinn Fein veteran and former lord mayor of Belfast, told me. He is baffled by British actions that appear so much against their interests, saying that “they had parked the Irish problem, but now Ireland has moved once again into the centre of British politics”.

Would Boris Johnson’s enthusiasm to get rid of “the backstop” evaporate if he wins or loses a general election and the Conservatives are no longer dependent on the DUP for their majority? Possibly, but his right-wing government has plenty of members who never liked the GFA and their speeches show them to be even more ignorant about Northern Ireland politics than their predecessors in Harold Wilson’s cabinet half a century ago.

Ireland is not to blame for the disaster of Brexit

An example of this is their oft-declared belief that some magical gadget will be found to monitor the border by remote means. But any such device will be rapidly torn down and smashed where the border runs through nationalist majority parts of the border.

Northern Ireland may be at peace, but in a border area like strongly Republican South Armagh, the police only move in convoys of three vehicles and carry rifles, even if they are only delivering a parking ticket.

Catholics are no longer the victims of economic discrimination, though Derry still has the highest unemployment of any city in the UK. There has been levelling down as well as levelling up: Harland and Wolff, the great shipyard that once employed much of the population of Protestant east Belfast, went into administration this week.

Irish unity is being discussed as a practical, though highly polarising, proposition once again. Political and economic turmoil is back in a deeply divided and fragile society in which the binds holding it together are easily unstitched

The Troubles revisited: ‘I have a hatred for what the Paras did on Bloody Sunday‘

Mark Dapin, Sydney Morning Herald, 3rd August 2019

Every week of every month of every year, Paul Doherty takes tourists on a journey around the death of his father, who was killed by the British Parachute Regiment (“the Paras”) on Bloody Sunday in Derry, the second-largest city in Northern Ireland, on January 30, 1972.

But this year, things are different. This month, Doherty hopes, a murderer will at last be held to account. He has already looked into the eyes of his father’s killer, and he hates him.

“I have a hatred for what the Paras did on Bloody Sunday,” says Doherty, 55, “and also a hatred for the individual soldier.”

He knows he’s not supposed to say that (and he also hates the British Army officers and British government of the day) but Derry is built on the banks of the River Foyle, one of the fastest flowing rivers in Europe, and the torrent of Doherty’s conversation far outpaces the waterway. He speaks like two people, one interrupting to annotate the other – “They do a good pint of Guinness in there, aye” – and push him to clarify his opinion in the rare moments he might seem guarded or vague. Doherty says his tour is “political” but not “politically correct”.

Derry is officially called Londonderry, although the “London” has been spray-painted out of many road signs (just as the “no” has disappeared from no-smoking signs). London has rarely been popular in a place where three-quarters of the population are Catholic, most of them republicans who would rather see their home part of the Republic of Ireland than the United Kingdom. After the Bloody Sunday massacre, Derry saw 26 years of concentrated shootings and bombings, until the Good Friday Agreement of April 1998 began to draw the euphemistically named “Troubles” to a close with its newly codified recognition of both British and Irish interests in Northern Ireland. The Provisional IRA and the Ulster Volunteer Force, among other militia, eventually decommissioned their weapons – but in Derry there were always a handful of hardmen who wanted to keep killing for a united Ireland.

Some of these “dissident republicans” had already helped to form the so-called New IRA, which has admitted responsibility for the death in April this year of the young journalist Lyra McKee, who was shot by a sniper during an apparently staged-for-TV riot in Derry. Doherty has a bit to say about that, too.

When Patrick Doherty was shot from behind by a British soldier on Bloody Sunday, Paddy Walsh bravely stayed in the open with him.
When Patrick Doherty was shot from behind by a British soldier on Bloody Sunday, Paddy Walsh bravely stayed in the open with him.CREDIT:GILES PERESS/MAGNUM PHOTOS/SNAPPER IMAGES

Paul Doherty is a cheery man. He’s thickset and stocky and likes to make jokes – can’t help himself, really – and runs perhaps the least romantically named travel business in the world, Bogside History Tours. It takes a surprisingly large number of visitors (between two and 40 per tour) on twice-daily guided walks through Derry to the Bogside, a neighbourhood in the city’s west, where the ghosts of Bloody Sunday’s dead still march alongside his father, on murals the size of houses.

Paul’s younger brother, Gleann Doherty, is leading the walk on the morning I arrive, and Paul offers me a more exclusive “taxi tour”. It begins with an eccentric industrial history of Derry, whose docks were established before the famous shipyards of Belfast, where the passenger liner RMS Titanic was constructed by a largely Protestant workforce.

“The most celebrated ship in the world, the Titanic, never completed a journey,” says Doherty. “People say, ‘Why did it never complete a journey?’

“I don’t know,” he continues, “but people suspect it was because it was built by Protestants. There were very few Catholics building the Titanic. Someone asked me the other day, ‘What were the Catholics doing?’ I said, ‘We were building icebergs.’”

Doherty talks about the 17th-century Plantation of Ulster, in which Protestants from England and Scotland, who were loyal to the British Crown (“loyalists”) were settled in the north of Catholic Ireland, usurping Irish landowners and ultimately exercising political power through gerrymandered voting and a system which, until 1968, allowed (largely Protestant) business owners an extra vote in local elections while (often Catholic) renters had no local vote at all.

We drive over Craigavon Bridge, named for James Craig, the first PM of Northern Ireland and founder in 1912 of the Ulster Volunteer Force – “A modern-day terrorist and drug-racketeering operation; beside that, they’re okay,” says Doherty – to a lookout over a walled city of cathedral spires, council houses and dozens of boxy, repurposed shirt factories. We motor down from the hills and back into town, where Doherty’s taxi cruises the close, stony streets, stopping at corners that paid witness to the events that led to the death of his father: the rise of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) whose demands included an end to anti-Catholic discrimination; one man, one vote; and the reform of the heavily Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), the country’s then police force.

Peaceful civil rights demonstrations were attacked by loyalists and the RUC with increasing degrees of violence until January 1969 when, in the aftermath of a march from Belfast to Derry, the RUC rioted in the Bogside, assaulting Catholics in the streets and in their homes. Residents put up barricades and declared themselves citizens of Free Derry and outside the authority of the police. In August, a much larger riot – the “Battle of the Bogside” – saw the police expelled from Free Derry by locals throwing petrol bombs, and nationalists and loyalists fighting hand-to-hand in the streets of the city they shared.

An end-terrace house, which had become famous internationally when its side wall was painted with the slogan “You are now entering Free Derry”, still stands as Free Derry Corner in the Bogside, although the other homes in the terrace have been demolished. “They were gonna redevelop the Bogside and build a roadway,” says Doherty. “They were gonna move the [Free Derry] wall and take the wall away, but the negotiations were very skilful: ‘Touch the wall and you’re gonna be disappeared yourself.’ So that was the end of that.”

After the Battle of the Bogside, British troops – including Paras – were dispatched from the mainland to restore law and order. The soldiers were widely seen to favour the loyalists and quickly became targets for a resurgent IRA, an organisation whose glory days were thought to have ended in the 1920s. The republicans particularly feared the Paras, the shock troops of the British Army, a death that falls from the sky.

I grew up in England in the 1970s, near the base of the Parachute Regiment. When I arrived in Northern Ireland recently, I was puzzled to see what looked like the regiment’s flag flying in parts of Belfast. I thought the outspread wings must stand for something else on this side of the Irish Sea. They don’t. Doherty says the flag was also raised a few weeks ago in The Fountain estate, a loyalist enclave near the heart of Derry, “in support of Soldier F”. (Soldier F is the man who shot Doherty’s father.)

Murals in Derry’s Bogside depict the victims of the British soldiers’ rampage.
Murals in Derry’s Bogside depict the victims of the British soldiers’ rampage.CREDIT:AAP

“The people who want to do it must have sick minds,” he says. “In 2019, 400 yards [370 metres] from where the massacre of Bloody Sunday happened, these people feel the need to fly the flag of the Parachute Regiment, celebrating the murder of 14 innocent people in the Bogside in 1972.” To Doherty, it’s as if his neighbours are celebrating the killing. “There’s negotiations at the minute to bring [the flag] down,” he says. “The negotiations were begun by ourselves – the [Bloody Sunday] families – through our member of parliament and the loyalist terror and paramilitary groups here. They don’t seem to be working. So if you hear it was taken down in the middle of the night, by some guy on a ladder, it’ll be me that did it. And I mean that sincerely.”

It’s a very short drive to The Fountain, where every lamppost is painted red, white and blue, and the Paras’ flag hangs limp on a windless morning. Doherty scowls. “That’s hurtful,” he says. “It’s wrong. It degrades this community. So I’m just going to see what type of ladder we’ll need.” Mentally, he measures the distance between the banner and the ground. “We’ll need a 16- or 18-foot ladder,” he decides, eventually. “We’ll go up and get that down.”

Doherty does not believe anyone could truly support Soldier F, if they knew the facts. “I’ll tell you what Soldier F did in the Bogside …”

On Sunday January 30, 1972, the NICRA held a march through Derry, even though all marches and parades had been banned. In the month before, two RUC had been killed in Derry, and the British Army believed the planned demonstration would provide cover for the IRA. The 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment was brought in to Derry to police the demonstration and arrest rioters. They ended up shooting 28 Catholic civilians, of whom 14 were killed, 13 on the day and one later. A British tribunal set up in the immediate aftermath of the killings found that the Paras had been fired upon first, and largely accepted claims that the dead marchers were gunmen and nail bombers. The families of the dead refused to accept the findings and for decades argued that peaceful protesters had been massacred.

In 1998, in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement, the British government established the Saville Inquiry, which culminated 12 years later with a 10-volume, 5000-page report. Saville found that the Paras had shot first and without warning; their victims had been all but unarmed and helpless, and posed no significant threat; that the IRA had maintained only a small, shadowy presence and loosed off a few ineffective shots; and that the Paras had lied.

It is this story, more or less, that Doherty tells at the Creggan estate among the heavily muralised roads around Free Derry Corner. While the area remains a working-class Catholic republican stronghold, the streetscape has changed: buildings have been demolished, whole blocks torn down. Doherty reaches into the past, to point to where things used to be, as he describes the last moments in the life of his father, Patrick Doherty, a 31-year-old plumber’s mate and member of NICRA, who joined the march from the Creggan.

The protesters set off mid-afternoon and were diverted from their chosen route by army barricades. Angry youths threw stones at the soldiers, who replied with tear gas and water cannons. The march organisers redirected the rally towards Free Derry Corner, and a group of soldiers fired live rounds in the direction of the rioters. Wounded men began to fall. Two civilians were knocked down by armoured cars. Soldiers broke through their own barriers to arrest the stone-throwers.

As the firing continued, the marchers ran for cover. There were already seven dead when Patrick Doherty sought safety around a small square named Glenfada Park, where today stand his son, Paul, and I. As the death toll mounted, the Paras’ brigade headquarters ordered the soldiers to cease fire. A radio operator – now dubbed Soldier 027 – passed on the order to men known at the Saville Inquiry as Soldiers E, F, G and H, but they ignored the command and set about hunting down and killing Catholics. “In here,” says Doherty, “in Glenfada Park they murdered four.”

He knows the ground where each man fell. “William McKinney was in a crowd running from here, across here,” says Doherty. “He was trying to escape right over here. And Soldier F, disobeying orders, went up that street, and he murdered William McKinney about here. Willy was shot in the back. The bullet raced through his body and went into the body of a teenager called Joseph Mahon. Joseph Mahon played dead when Soldier F touched him with a rifle to his head. Soldier F walked away thinking he’d killed him, and he shot Jim Wray in the back. Jim Wray hit the ground with such force that he didn’t get his hands in front of him.

“Soldier G walks towards him,” he continues. “Jim Wray was shouting, ‘Somebody help me! I can’t move my legs! Somebody help me!’ and G shoots him in the back again, executes him, then turns to his friend and says, ‘There, I got another one.’

“And F came out,” says Doherty, “knelt down at that lamppost right there and murdered my dad.”

Patrick Doherty was shot from behind as he tried to crawl away. A bullet drove into his buttock and ripped out of his chest. On its way through his body, it lacerated his aorta, diaphragm and left lung, tore his colon and bowel attachments, and fractured two of his ribs. “Soldier F knelt down there,” says Doherty, “observed by hundreds of people, killing my dad, and then very clearly watching a man walking towards him with a white handkerchief in his hand. Barney [Bernard] McGuigan said to him, ‘Don’t shoot’ and Soldier F shot him.”

There were six children in the Doherty family. Paul was eight years old. “We were home,” he says. “With my brother and my friends, we were all outside playing marbles. Our home suddenly filled up with people, and then a young guy came up and joined in with the marbles for about 10 minutes and said, ‘Oh, by the way, your dad’s dead. I seen him get taken into an ambulance over here.’ And my mum then came and told us he was killed.”

I have to ask Doherty how their lives changed, although I know it’s a stupid question. “It is,” he agrees, as is his way. “The death of a parent’s one thing, the murder of a parent’s another thing. I wouldn’t like to relive that in the heart of a child. We sort of individualised ourselves as a family. My mum was on medication. My sister had to really look after the two [youngest] children. And we all had to adapt to a different type of life. My dad was very regimentist [sic]. We had to do certain chores every morning: somebody had to do the dishes and somebody had to shine the shoes. It was a good way of being brought up. The discipline – that all went out the window. Education went out the window as well.”

Their loss affected them each in different ways. Doherty’s older brother, Tony, joined the IRA and spent four years in prison. Today, Tony’s the author of two well-received, lyrical memoirs. There was turmoil for all the children but, “We’re all very successful in what we’re doing now,” says Doherty.

Most of the Saville Inquiry’s hearings were held in Derry but certain witnesses, including Soldier F, were permitted to testify in London. Doherty travelled to London with his family and watched Soldier F on the stand. What was it like, ask I – the master of the dullard’s query – to be in the same room as his father’s killer? “Aye, it was strange,” says Doherty. “I can’t describe it. It just put a face to an armed thug who had no care for himself or his community he came from, and he came into this community and just shot it to bits.”

Soldier F confessed to nothing but a poor memory. Five hundred and seventy times, according to Doherty, he answered questions with “I can’t recall”. But Soldier 027 – speaking from behind a screen to protect him from being identified – said the soldiers had killed innocent people for no operational reason, and called their actions “unspeakable”. Soldier 027 had been trying to confess for years. “We were getting telephone calls in the late 1980s from a soldier who was crying down the phone,” says Doherty. “He left the Army, hit the drink, and then he told the truth.” As for Soldier F, “If there was any kind of remorse, you would have to deal with that, but there was no remorse at all. And, again, forgiveness – you can’t forgive anybody who doesn’t ask for it. They shouldn’t get it.”

Did Soldier F know who Doherty was? “He would’ve been made aware of who we were,” says Doherty. “I’m not sure if he would’ve individualised us. We gave him a wee stare every time he went past us, so he probably would have. He was 53, he’s got a tan, athletic, small, stocky. He looked like he looked after himself. He has a very light-spoken voice. But obviously he had killing in his DNA.”

Saville found Soldier F had shot dead Patrick Doherty and Bernard McGuigan – but, under the terms of the inquiry, any evidence heard was inadmissible in any subsequent prosecution. A separate police investigation led to Soldier F being charged in May only with the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of four others.

The families are bitter that only one man, Soldier F – a lance corporal – will be charged over Bloody Sunday. In the years since the massacre, Soldiers E and G have died, and the Northern Ireland Public Prosecution Service has said there is insufficient admissible evidence to provide a reasonable prospect of convicting other soldiers: dead bodies are not enough.

“We’ve heard since that the Public Prosecution Service were split on whether they should charge anybody,” says Doherty. “So we think they gave us a token. We wanted the remaining soldiers charged in a joint enterprise. We wanted the officers – some of whom are still alive – but you don’t get that.”

The case is scheduled to begin this month in the imposing, neoclassical Bishop Street courthouse, which Doherty identifies as the most bombed building in Derry. In January, Doherty pointed this out to four young Dutch women on a taxi tour. “And the next thing, it was blown up by the New IRA,” says Doherty. “I met them down the street, and I said, ‘Aye, it was blown up last night.’ ”

The most recent bomb caused little damage, and the New IRA are seen by many republicans as bumbling clowns who cannot even blow up a courthouse. But the joke turned acrid, as Irish jokes are wont to do, when a New IRA sniper shot dead the highly regarded Lyra McKee, a working-class Catholic journalist and LGBT activist, during a riot that Doherty says was staged for a TV crew. Apparently, McKee was not targeted as a journalist. She was simply standing too close to a police van. The New IRA admitted responsibility and apologised.

“The statement that they came out with then, trying to defend this, was adding insult to injury: that the girl was ‘standing behind enemy lines’ and ‘ground forces’ and this. That’s a relic from the past. They will say, ‘Well, the IRA did this type of thing as well.’ Well, we can’t argue that for ever and ever. Sometimes you’ve got to say, ‘There was a time for war and a time for peace.’ But the dissidents have no support, they’ve got no strategy, they won’t debate with anybody, they won’t talk to anyone, and they get young guys into the ranks of their organisation and tell them they could be heroes for Ireland.

“Well,” says Doherty, “the heroes for Ireland are all lined up in the cemetery.”

Police have arrested four suspects for the shooting of McKee, including a 15-year-old boy.

Paul Doherty (centre, holding a picture of Bernard McGuigan, with his niece, Caitlin, to his right) on a protest march for justice for Bloody Sunday victims.
Paul Doherty (centre, holding a picture of Bernard McGuigan, with his niece, Caitlin, to his right) on a protest march for justice for Bloody Sunday victims.CREDIT:GETTY IMAGES

The demonstrators who died on Bloody Sunday were never forgotten. In some ways, their memory has grown larger over the years. Huge murals in the Creggan, painted between 1996 and 2008, bear their portraits and those of the men who braved bullets to rush to help them. “These people were heroes,” says Doherty, “because they could’ve jumped over them, ran away, but they didn’t. They stayed with them. They comforted them until they died. The guy who helped my dad until he died was called Paddy Walsh – he crawled out to my dad, the bullets were flying over his head as he stayed with him.”

On display in the nearby Museum of Free Derry is a famous photograph of Paddy Walsh crawling over to the corpse of Patrick Doherty. It looks as if Walsh has lent his own head to Doherty’s broken body. A simple monument and garden dedicated to the victims of Bloody Sunday stands close to the museum.

“The garden was paid for by lawyers and barristers for the families,” says Doherty. “We asked them for money – and they were making plenty of money – so they gave us the money to do this garden. It’s lovely. Mostly old neighbours used to look after it, but most of them are dead now, so now and then we come over ourselves and do a bit of weeding.”

This isn’t my story – far from it. I’m just a journalist who asks stupid questions, tramples on hearts, trespasses on grief. But I went to school in Aldershot, England, the home of the British Army and – in those days – the base of the Parachute Regiment. We moved to the town because it was cheap, because nobody wanted to live alongside the Army. It was in Aldershot that the IRA planned to extract revenge for Bloody Sunday with a bomb attack on the officers’ mess of 16 Parachute Brigade. The attack was supposed to kill and maim the men – or perhaps just the kind of men – who ordered their troops to open fire in the Bogside.

Instead, a time bomb in a stolen car exploded outside the building at 12.40pm on February 22, 1972 and tore apart the bodies of a Catholic British Army chaplain, a civilian gardener, and five local women variously described as kitchen workers, waitresses and cleaners. One of the women was the mother of a boy who was eight years old – the same age as Paul Doherty on Bloody Sunday. There was so little left of her that she could not immediately be recognised from her remains. Eventually, she was identified by a tattoo.

I moved to Aldershot three years after that attack. The disappeared woman’s son was in the year below me at school. I knew him very slightly. I never knowingly met any of the families of the other victims, but another boy whose mother was murdered that day – Karl Bosley – signed up with the Paras (“with anger and hatred in my heart,” he said later) – just as Tony Doherty joined the IRA. Apparently, Bosley was not permitted to serve with the regiment in Northern Ireland.

The Troubles in Northern Ireland continued throughout my schooling, and the Paras were a fierce and terrible presence in the town. They departed for tours of the province and returned with fury in their eyes, prowling the streets like the jungle cats tattooed on their hamhock forearms, at war with the world. And, of course, some of them never made it back. In an ambush near Warrenpoint in County Down in August 1979, the IRA killed 18 British soldiers, 16 of them Paras.

In Aldershot, the survivors policed their own pubs. Most of the town centre was a no-go area for civilians, and the Paras’ pubs around the high street were “airborne” only. Even other soldiers – “crap hats” – copped a kicking if they walked into the Pegasus, the Queen or the Trafalgar. You wouldn’t send the Paras overseas to police a demonstration. You’d dispatch them to destroy it. There are no pictures of the body of the eight-year-old’s mum, because there was nothing left to photograph. A small memorial at the site of the bombing is hardly visited by people outside the families, and when I went back to Aldershot a couple of years ago, I couldn’t even find it. Apparently, the area is going to be redeveloped, and the new houses will look down upon a memorial garden.

While the Irish may have long memories, it sometimes seems as if the English remember nothing at all. There are no tours to retrace the last journeys of the cleaners, as they came from the council estates to the garrison to work for a wage. And there is fierce feeling in England today that men like Soldier F should be left alone, that the post-Good Friday justice system let many imprisoned IRA “volunteers” off the hook and the same courtesy should be due to every British soldier – although the provisions of the agreement specifically excluded the perpetrators of crimes that had not yet been prosecuted.

And anyway, prosecution will only open old wounds, claim those who cannot understand that in Derry – and in Aldershot – for the families of the murder victims, those wounds never for a moment closed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVlbenGJ8u0

Paradise Regained – back to nature in Queensland

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

Good news come in twos.

Last November, The Brisbane Times reported a landmark $3.5 million  agreement by a conservation group, Noosa Shire Council and the Queensland government to buy out almost 2400 hectares of koala habitat has been saved from a pine plantation near Tewantin (read the full story below),

The Queensland government is now considering a radical proposal to cease logging pine plantations across 21,000ha of Imbil State Forest on the Sunshine Coast so they can regenerate as rainforest.  The plan would restore the first extensive reserves of subtropical lowland rainforest, giving plants and animals that struggle to survive in its dwindling remnants a second chance. It would be the first time in Australia that commercial timber plantations were converted on a large scale to native forest.

From time to time, I republish articles by News Ltd commentators that I believe worth sharing with those who cannot scale the News paywall. This is one such. it reports on a project that state and local government and environment groups ought to take good note of.

Botanists, ecologists and zoologists are backing the proposal. The timber industry is predictably lukewarm, but open to discussion, yet environmentalists are divided.

Some argue that native forest once cleared and reforested as plantation cannot cannot develop a forest ecology and life-cycle that can attract and sustain the flora and flora that once inhabited them. According to conventional wisdom, native wildlife is not supposed to inhabit monoculture plantations, comprising a single tree species. Such places are considered environmental wastelands, not far removed from cotton farms or inner-city suburbia, and that once an area is modified by either farmland or plantation, it has no potential for providing environmental solutions, and therefore, is not worth defending or protecting.

The concept behind the Inbal initiative is not new.  In New South Wales, scores of landholders are replanting rainforest in parts of what was known as the Big Scrub; 99 per cent of the 75,000ha rainforest was cleared for dairying at the end of the 19th century. These measures will retain or restore, at best, small patches, mostly less than 100ha.

Converting large areas of the Imbil hoop pine plantation to rainforest, however is a much more ambitious project. and it could set an important precedent . If the rainforest is restored, it could be added to the adjoining 35,658ha Conondale National Park, increasing its size by more than 50 per cent. Furthermore, it could be a model for other areas in other states.

It demonstrates that protecting endangered plants and animals and restoring habitat does not necessarily require locking up vast areas as national park or wilderness.

Hoop pine is particularly suited to such rainforest regeneration. It is a native and one of the dominant trees in natural lowland rainforest. If hoop pine plantations are left unlogged, they are quickly invaded by native vines, palms and other plants from adjoining remnant forest patches. The plantations soon resemble rainforest. Wildlife, such as the masked owl and many mammals and reptiles will inhabit them. In time the plantations would revert to what they once were: subtropical lowland rainforest.

Leading Queensland zoologist Glen Ingram describes the destruction of subtropical lowland rainforest as a being an environmental disaster. “It was a mindless series of mistakes and the impact on our flora and fauna was devastating,. The return of the Imbil forests would be an important step towards rectifying those mistakes.”

Author’s Note

The featured picture shows the famous hoop pines at Twin Pines in the Tarkeeth Forest. There are many small hoop pines close to their parents, and larger ones eastwards along the road towards the new bridge over the Kalang, and on private property on the south side of the Fernmount Range. Nature never sleeps. see A Tale of Twin Pines. Hoop Pines grow well in Bellingen Shire. There is a stand of very large trees at the riverside end of Church Street, the town’s cafe strip, casting their seeds far and wide

See other matters environmental  in In That Howling Infinite:

Getting back to nature

Greg Roberts, The Weekend Australian 17th August 2019

BirdLife Australia Sunshine Coast convener Ken Cross, centre, with James Lee and Alicia France in Imbil State Forest. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

BirdLife Australia Sunshine Coast’s Ken Cross, w James Lee & Alicia France in Imbil State Forest

A still winter night in Queensland’s Sunshine Coast hinterland is shattered by an unearthly, raspy scream. It’s the call of a masked owl as it feasts on a small possum it has caught. A rare and secretive bird, the owl is not in a forest or woodland, as might be expected, but deep inside a plantation of pine trees in Imbil State Forest.

According to conventional wisdom, native wildlife is not supposed to inhabit monocultural plantations, comprising a single tree species. Such places are considered environmental wastelands, not far removed from cotton farms or inner-city suburbia.

Try telling that to the masked owls and a host of native plants and animals that are thriving in the hoop pine plantations of Imbil.

The plantations grow on what was once subtropical lowland rainforest, which in its natural state is unparalleled in Australia as a habitat for its rich biodiversity. The rainforest once occurred across a large area extending from Maryborough in Queensland south to Grafton in NSW.

Most of the forest was bulldozed in the 19th century for agriculture. Large areas in Queensland later were cleared for hoop pine plantations.

Today just tiny fragments of the forest remain; subtropical lowland rainforest was listed federally in 2011 as critically endangered. No other native vegetation type in Australia has been depleted so comprehensively.

That could now change. The Queensland government is considering a radical proposal to stop logging pine plantations across 21,000ha of Imbil State Forest so the plantations can regenerate as rainforest. Similar moves could follow in other areas.

The plan would create the first extensive reserves of subtropical lowland rainforest, giving the many plants and animals that struggle to survive in its dwindling remnants a second chance.

It would be the first time in Australia that commercial timber plantations were converted on a large scale to native forest. Botanists, ecologists and zoologists are backing the proposal.

The timber industry is lukewarm, though open to discussion. Environmentalists are divided, with some arguing that plantations are man-made and therefore not worthy of protection.

The proposal submitted to the Palaszczuk Labor government this week argues that human modification of the landscape should not be a barrier to environmental protection.

Protecting endangered plants and animals does not necessarily require locking up vast areas as national park or wilderness.

Logging hoop pine in Imbil State Forest.
Logging hoop pine in Imbil State Forest

The Imbil plan requires a simple change of leasehold tenure in a relatively well-populated part of the country to secure solutions to what ecologists have long described as an environmental catastrophe. A key problem in the country’s environmental decision-making processes is a misplaced view that once natural landscapes have been altered substantially by human intervention, they are beyond redemption.

For some rainforest inhabitants, it is too late. The brightly coloured Coxen’s fig-parrot once nested in the Imbil area; flocks were seen in many parts of southeast Queensland and northeast NSW. The bird has not been recorded reliably since the 1980s and is likely extinct — the second bird species on mainland Australia (the other is the paradise parrot) to meet this fate.

Many endangered plants and animals, such as the giant barred frog and the black-breasted buttonquail, struggle to survive in the small lowland rainforest patches that remain.

In Queensland, land care groups work tirelessly to try to stop the forest remnants being overrun by vines and other weeds introduced from overseas.

In NSW, scores of landholders are replanting rainforest in parts of what was known as the Big Scrub; 99 per cent of the 75,000ha rainforest was cleared for dairying at the end of the 19th century.

These worthy measures will retain or restore, at best, small patches, mostly less than 100ha. Converting large areas of hoop pine plantation to rainforest is a much more ambitious project.

Much of the surviving rainforest in Queensland is on steep slopes or in gullies wedged between hoop pine plantations in places such as Imbil.

Hoop pine is a native plant and one of the dominant trees in natural lowland rainforest. If plantations are left unlogged, they are quickly invaded by native vines, palms and other plants from adjoining remnant forest patches.

The plantations soon resemble rainforest. Wildlife, such as the masked owl and many mammals and reptiles, will inhabit them. In time the plantations would revert to what they once were: subtropical lowland rainforest.

Queensland botanist Michael Olsen has no doubt the plantations would readily regenerate as rainforest if left alone. “The plantations have increasing biodiversity with age after being planted or logged,” says Olsen, an environmental consultant. “This is most apparent where they are located on former rainforest sites embedded in, or contiguous to, remnant rainforest. This is the case with the Imbil plantations … The protection of such a depleted biodiverse community should be a priority.”

Peter Stanton, a highly regarded landscape ecologist, agrees. “This is a great idea and its aims are quite achievable.”

Large areas of rainforest are protected in reserves such as Lamington National Park in Queensland and Border Ranges National Park in NSW. However, this is highland rainforest, quite unlike the threatened lowland forest and with a much less diverse range of plants and animals.

Conservationists have been content to secure these highland rainforest reserves while believing that little can be done to bring back lowland rainforest. Pine plantations, managed intensively as a commercial resource, previously have not been considered as having any potential to provide environmental solutions.

Not far from Imbil, governments did nothing to prevent the Yandina Creek Wetland on the Sunshine Coast being drained in 2015 because it was not considered to be suitably “natural”. The Yandina Creek area was natural wetland before being drained for sugar cane farms in the 1920s. Farming stopped at the start of this century when a sugar mill closed. Cane land was inundated when farm floodgates collapsed and the wetland returned. The restored wetland became a waterbird sanctuary of international significance but was drained again to allow it to be replanted with cane.

The general view was that since the area was modified for farmland, it wasn’t worth protecting. However, following intervention by BirdLife Australia and others, and coverage by The Weekend Australian, the land was acquired by Unitywater, a statutory authority. It is being restored again as a thriving wetland, and surveys this week confirmed that large numbers of waterbirds have returned.

The proposal to stop logging at Imbil involves declaring the state forest a conservation park and scrapping grazing leases, as well as a government buyback or cancellation of logging leases.

Herds of cattle are trampling the remnant rainforest patches as a consequence of a decision by the former Campbell Newman-led Liberal National government to open up state forests to grazing, which Labor has declined to reverse in government.

The Imbil plantations were the first to be established in Queensland, in the early 1900s. They are logged by HQ Plantations, comprising a small proportion of the 330,000ha of pine plantation in Queensland under lease to the company. (Unlike hoop pine, most commercial plantations in Australia consist of introduced pine trees of no environmental value.)

Losing logging access to less than 5 per cent of Queensland’s state forests would have little impact commercially and could be compensated for by enhanced opportunities for eco-tourism.

Imbil State Forest is an important recreational attraction. It includes Charlie Moreland, the most popular bush camping ground in the Sunshine Coast region. The surrounding area is a mosaic of pine plantation, rainforest remnants and eucalypt forest typical of the state forest more broadly.

It has long been regarded as one of eastern Australia’s primary wildlife-viewing hot spots.

David West, group manager stewardships with HQ Plantations, says the company is open to discussion but needs further information. West declines to put a value on the Imbil leases or speculate on whether the company would welcome a buyback of leases. Timber Queensland, the state’s peak timber industry body, declined to comment.

If the rainforest is restored, the area could be added to the adjoining 35,658ha Conondale National Park, increasing its size by more than 50 per cent.

But conservationists are divided, with some believing that only pristine forests should be protected. Several groups are campaigning for another plan that would link Conondale National Park to Wrattens National Park by adding 20,000ha of natural forest patches to create a newly named Yabba National Park; no pine plantations would be included.

Sunshine Coast Hinterland Bush Links co-ordinator Susie Duncan says plantations in Imbil and other state forests were traded off against natural forests that were earmarked to become national park under an agreement disbanded by the former Liberal National government.

“Given the complexity of a buyback of HQ Plantation leases, we don’t want to throw that into the mix of the Yabba proposal and risk losing the traction we have to date,” Duncan says.

But BirdLife Australia Sunshine Coast convener Ken Cross is enthusiastic about the plantation plan. “We have lost too much of this habitat already and it may not be good enough in the long term just to protect the area that is left,” Cross says.

Former Queensland environment minister Pat Comben also backs the proposal. Comben was largely responsible for the doubling of the state’s national park area by the Goss Labor government in the early 1990s. “We protected areas such as the Mitchell Grass Downs and mulga lands,” he says. “Now the challenge is to ensure the biodiversity of southeast Queensland is similarly protected before it is too late.”

Leading Queensland zoologist Glen Ingram describes the destruction of subtropical lowland rainforest as a being an environmental disaster. “It was a mindless series of mistakes and the impact on our flora and fauna was devastating,” Ingram says. “The return of the Imbil forests would be an important step towards rectifying those mistakes.”

Greg Roberts is a Sunshine Coast-based journalist and naturalist who authored a submission to the Queensland government on the Imbil State Forest

Sunshine Coast koala habitat protected in $3.5 million land buy

It is a progressive move in a week where serious questions were asked about the viability of shifting koalas for development. In this move near Tewantin, koalas are invited back to their own forests.

Volunteer conservation group Noosa Parks Association, Noosa Shire Council and the Queensland government each contributed $1.2 million to buy out Hancock’s HQ pine plantation behind Tewantin. Overall, the three groups bought out the pine plantation and remaining forest near Ringtail National Park.

Michael Gloster's 20-year dream to turn a pine plantation into a park to protect koalas is being realised.

Michael Gloster’s dream of turning pine plantation into park to protect koalas is being realised

When the pine plantation stops in five years and is replanted it will mean a huge corridor of natural forest between Noosa and Cooloola National Park.

The man with the 20-year dream to build a new national park from forestry land is long-serving Noosa Parks Association president Michael Gloster.  He first raised his dream with then-Beattie government environment minister Rod Welford in 1998.

Plantation timber near Tewantin.

Plantation timber near Tewantin

On Wednesday, he signed an agreement marking the start of a five-year wind-up of Hancock’s 99-year lease on the land with current Environment Minister Leeanne Enoch. “In order for us to be able to conserve these pine plantations and turn them into national park, we had to buy out their assets … Hancock’s said if you pay us $3.5 million we will happily leave these forests.”

Mr Gloster said the forests, which were home to 25 threatened and three nearly-threatened species including the Mary River cod, the giant barred frog and the Richmond birdwing butterfly, still contained viable populations of koalas.

“The state government’s research shows that this area from Tewantin through to Coolum was key before it was chopped up for pine plantations … We are confident they will eventually come back into pockets of it. If koalas are going to survive in the south-east Queensland area, this is probably their best bet.”

Noosa mayor Tony Wellington said the move would establish a “scientific sink” for south-east Queensland. “Not just in terms of measuring our conservation efforts, but also in terms of providing a very, very large area which can be used for a range of scientific purposes and research,” he said.

Ms Enoch praised the local conservationists who were “making history” on Wednesday: “We have seen a group of local people absolutely committing themselves to this over decades,”

She said Queensland’s conservation efforts would learn a lot from the Tewantin efforts, before it was used as a readymade model for action. “I think we need to find out how this works first, before others might join in on this new movement across Queensland.”

Ms Enoch said questions posed this week about the survival of koalas relocated to allow for the Coomera Town Centre to be developed were now being investigated.  “That is a really good question and an important one today, I expect that the new Koala Council that is developing the new koala conservation strategy will look closely at the issues of koala relocation. We will see some results from that.”

Hancock’s Timber plantation general manager Michael Robinson said there were no jobs lost and natural timber productivity had been boosted at other plantations around Queensland: “We will more than offset the loss of long-term productivity on this land here.”