history
Diaries of War
As the events of this war unfolded, I reached out to K., a Russia-born Ukrainian journalist in Kyiv, and D., an artist from St. Petersburg. I asked K. and D. if I could interview them to create a visual, weekly diary that would juxtapose their contrasting voices, and that would raise awareness and funds for the victims in Ukraine....
Hong Kong and a tale of three museums
Three museums in Hong Kong help us understand the complexity of Hong Kong’s past and future and highlight the importance of Asia literacy in Australia. On a recent visit to Hong Kong, I was able to see the new M+ Museum of Visual Culture, open at last in the West Kowloon Cultural District even as Continue reading »
The Upside Down: Saint Cuthbert – Wonder Worker
Newsletter offer
Receive our Behind the Headlines email and we'll post a free copy of Byline Times
Three months before my father died, he told me how much he’d enjoyed the novel I’d given him at Christmas. It was called Cuddy by Benjamin Myers, published by Bloomsbury in March, and it has just won the Goldsmiths Prize.
Cuddy is the nickname of Saint Cuthbert, the great saint of north-east England famous for his piety and his miraculous gifts.
For 300 years after his death, his coffin, containing his still undecayed body, went on the run from Viking hordes, carried by successive generations of monks. It was finally interred on a site above a bend in the River Wear. Over him, was raised what became Durham Cathedral, one of the world’s great buildings and the place where my father was ordained in 1968.
It was how he described his response to the book – the last one he finished under his own steam – that has stayed with me.
“I could have been like him,” he told me with childish enthusiasm.
“What, like St Cuthbert?” I laughed.
“Yes,” he said.
“What, living alone on an island surrounded by puffins and terns, eating nothing but raw onions and having your feet warmed by the breath of otters?”
“Why not?” he chuckled.
The exchange reminded me not only of my own admiration for Myers’ brilliant, ambitious novel written, in the author’s own words, “in the long shadow of Saint Cuthbert’s enduring influence”, but of my love for the saint himself – something I shared with my father.
Given the intricate and often frankly unbelievable miracles attributed to many medieval saints, there always seemed something very simple and Christ-like about Cuthbert.
He had started life as a shepherd in the far north of Northumbria and retained a close affinity for nature: he was at his happiest on his island fastness of Inner Farne, where he lived surrounded by thousands of pairs of guillemots, puffins and eider ducks. With his own hands, he built a two-roomed stone house surrounded by a high wall. This meant he could spend much of his time praying outdoors, “with only the sky to look at, so that eyes and thoughts might be kept from wandering and inspired to seek for higher things”.
The Upside Down: Why Our Rituals of Death Need Re-Thinking
John Mitchinson reflects on what he learned about the ‘baffling presence of absence’ when his father died in his arms
John Mitchinson
He was soon inundated by visits from pilgrims. News of the ‘wonder worker of Britain’ had spread and there was a constant stream of visitors asking for healing and counselling. In return, Cuthbert asked only that his uninvited guests respect the local animals and he forbade the hunting of all nesting birds – probably the world’s first piece of wildlife conservation legislation. In his honour, eider ducks are still called ‘Cuddy ducks’.
He was also a remarkably skilful politician.
When he arrived at Lindisfarne in 669, he was given the task of persuading the monks there to accept the authority of Rome, as ordered by the Synod of Whitby in 664. The Synod was a major turning point in the early history of the British church, marking the end of independent Celtic Christianity – a loosely administered, missionary-based religion – introduced into Ireland by St Patrick in the 5th Century and taken to Scotland and northern England by St Columba. Many British monastic institutions (including Lindisfarne) were resistant to the changes.
Cuthbert was the perfect man to make them see the light. He had all the credibility that came from wandering the wilds as a missionary in the Celtic mode but was also a pious and obedient member of a Benedictine monastery, committed to the authority of Rome. The monks deferred to his moral authority and, through his inspiration, the north-east of England became one of Europe’s most influential centres of religious scholarship. The Lindisfarne Gospels, commissioned in his honour, are regarded as the supreme fusion of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic religious art.
Cuthbert spent the last year of his life on his beloved Inner Farne, living on a weekly ration of five raw onions (“whenever my mouth was parched or burned with excessive hunger or thirst I refreshed and cooled myself with these”). This was a return to the simple Celtic faith of his youth and it’s that I think that had so excited my father.
He too had joined a monastic order at 16 and, although by the end of his life, he no longer went to church, that had always been his road less travelled.
I like the idea that reading Cuddy had fired the failing neurons in his brain and connected him with an earlier version of himself. By the end, he didn’t need buildings or music or formal liturgy. He was like Cuthbert, on his own, contemplating an empty sky, feeling the pull of the sea.
As Ben Myers imagines Cuthbert’s final moments:
I am sun and moon and rain.
Tomorrow’s skeleton swathed in silk.
It is where we are all headed.
Oswald’s Mother
In Episode 40 of Why Now?, Claire Potter chats with journalist Deanne Stillman about her new book, American Confidential: Uncovering the Bizarre Story of Lee Harvey Oswald and His Mother....
The History of U.S. Divorce Laws
In Episode 400, Natalia, Neil, and Niki discuss the history of divorce law in the United States....
Cumberland Hotel/TK Plaza – Bankstown, NSW
There isn’t much call for an old English-style hotel pub in Bankstown these days. This particular part of the city, Old Town Plaza, is especially bereft of watering holes thanks to the enormous Bankstown Sports Club around the corner. Yes, there’s the Bankstown Hotel and the RSL on the other side of the train line, […]
Let’s Take a Stroll Down Memory Lane.
Do you remember this?
If you do, congrats. People have short memories. But, yep, once upon a time, George W. Bush was the butt of everybody’s jokes. For very good reasons too, as you can see.
As a matter of fact, that wasn’t an exclusively American thing. Down Under Dabya was cause of much hilarity.
This clip, however, never made it to a top-10 list of Bushisms:
In part, I suppose, that was because people were not in a laughing mood less than two weeks after 9/11.
But even if the circumstances of the day had not been tragic, I’m sure many in the rich world would not have laughed at that. For him – and them – what drove Al-Qaeda was nothing but hatred for freedom and democracy. And because America embodies those things it was the target of gratuitous hatred.
Bush’s views on that were the accepted wisdom of the day. They remain so today, even among those who, back then, used to laugh at him (they also adopted the so-called Bush doctrine: “You are either with us or against us”).
So, we went full circle back to where we began. As Australia enters into a new Cold War in full “All the Way with the U.S.A.” mode, I’d bet you – whether you are a centrist liberal, liberal/Leftish or third-worldist – can’t remember having ever heard of this. You should.
How Indonesia’s 1965-1966 anti-communist purge remade a nation and the world
Back in 1965, bodies of victims of the anti-communist massacre floated along the Brantas River in Kediri East Java.
Wibowo Djatmiko/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-NC-ND
Asvi Warman Adam, Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI)
Between October 1965 and March 1966, members and supporters of Indonesia’s Communist Party (PKI), the third largest in the world at the time, were hunted down and murdered. Historian Robert Cribb estimates 200,000 to 800,000 people were killed.
The anti-communist violence brought Suharto to power in 1967, replacing the country’s founding president Sukarno. In the midst of the Cold War, the tragedy changed Indonesia from a fiercely independent Asian nation into a pro-Western country.
Below historian Asvi Warman Adam explains what happened and the impact it had on Indonesia and global politics.
Who carried out the killings?
The army, with the help of civilian militias mostly from Islamic groups such as the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), carried out the murders of communists and their supporters.
The army trained the militias in Central and East Java with a directive to eradicate the PKI “down to its roots”. The militias interpreted this directive freely to encompass everything from arrest to murder.
Before the anti-communist crackdown, Muslim clerics and the PKI were already caught in conflict. The PKI and Indonesia Peasants Front (BTI) had been taking land from religious clerks and owners of Islamic boarding schools to be given to the state for land reform. Before October 1965, NU created a youth militia called Banser (an acronym for multi-purpose front).
Black campaigns that fuelled distrust between the two groups were also swirling around. A recent gathering of Syarikat, a youth NU organisation working on truth and reconciliation for 1965 crimes, revealed that people from NU received a list of their names to be killed by PKI and vice versa. Neither side had a clue about the creator and distributor of the hit lists. It is not hard, however, to suspect the culprit.
What triggered the downfall of the PKI?
In Pretext for Mass Murder, historian John Roosa has provided the most comprehensive analysis on the events of 1965.
In the years leading to October 1965, there were three significant powers in Indonesia: Sukarno, the army, and its rival the PKI. A charismatic independence leader, Sukarno held the powers in balance.
The PKI placed fourth out of 172 political parties in the country’s first national election in 1955. They were popular among farmers because of their programs on land reform.
Meanwhile, the army’s political power was also rising following their victory in crushing regional uprisings in 1958. In July 1959, Sukarno released a presidential decree to return to the 1945 Constitution, giving the military seats in the People’s Consultative Assembly.
By 1965, the balance between Sukarno, the army and the PKI became disturbed for three reasons. First, the army and PKI were concerned about Sukarno’s health after he suffered a mild stroke in August 1965.
Second, suspicions about army’s disloyalty grew after a letter allegedly written by British ambassador Andrew Gilchrist surfaced in May 1965. The letter raised the prospect of a joint military intervention in Indonesia with the US that would involve “our local army friends”. Third, there were rumours about a “Generals’ Council”, a group of generals meeting in secret that were planning to stage a coup against Sukarno on October 5, 1965.
The PKI politburo, collaborating with officers from the presidential guard, decided to carry out a pre-emptive move by kidnapping members of the so-called “Generals’ Council”. But the operation went horribly wrong. Instead of arresting the generals to be brought to Sukarno, they killed the generals and dumped the bodies in an unused well.
The operation – the “30th September Movement” – was easily crushed in a matter of hours by Suharto, the commander of the army’s strategic reserve, who proceeded to carry out a witch-hunt against communists and left-leaning groups.
Where was Sukarno?
Sukarno did not exactly know what happened on the night of the 30th September. On his way to the presidential palace from the residence of one of his wives, Dewi Sukarno, he saw unknown troops. Presidential guards decided to bring the president to Halim airbase. According to standard operational procedure, in emergency situations the president should be safeguarded to either an airbase or seaport.
President Sukarno.
Wikimedia Commons
At Halim airbase, Brigadier General Soeparjo, an officer that was part of the 30th September Movement, told the president about the movement that aimed to save Sukarno from a military coup. Soeparjo also told him that some of the kidnapped generals were shot. Upon hearing the report, Sukarno ordered the movement to stop.
Sukarno was aware of the anti-communist killings and condemned them. Between October and December 1965, he called for the killings to end. However, the army by then controlled the media and his speeches were no longer published in newspapers. He was still allowed to give speeches from October 1965 to February 1967. He was banned from giving speeches from then on until his death in 1970.
What was international community’s role in the killings?
In 1965, Western countries saw communists as their enemy. They knew of the mass murders but considered them a necessary evil. The Soviet Union mildly condemned the killings. Japan knew but kept silent.
Declassified US files show that the US supported the anti-communist operations in Indonesia by providing funds and radio devices. The US also gave a list of names of PKI members to the army to be killed.
The UK and Australia were also complicit. Declassified files from the UK showed that UK and Australia carried out covert operations to spread false, “black propaganda” to encourage hostility against the PKI. The UK had an intelligence office in Singapore that they use to launch an anti-communism campaign.
How did the violence change Indonesia and the world?
The mass murder became a watershed moment for Indonesia. It transformed the country’s politics, economy and intellectual culture.
After the anti-communist massacre, Indonesia became very pro-Western. Previously it was an active player in the non-Aligned movement. Western and Japanese capital flowed into Indonesia, replacing economic co-operation with Eastern European countries.
Indonesia’s intellectual culture became uniform. During the era of Sukarno’s leadership there were many public debates between left- and right-wing intellectuals. In contrast, Suharto did not allow criticism and suppressed any dissent.
The destruction of communism in Indonesia benefited capitalist countries such as the United States and Japan. If the communists had come to power in Indonesia, the US forces in South Vietnam would have been surrounded by communist countries in Southeast Asia.
Japanese investment entered Indonesia after the crushing of the communist party in Indonesia.
Reuters/Beawiharta
Prior to 1965, Japan, which occupied Indonesia in the second world war, had very little investment in Indonesia. But after the anti-communist massacre, it became the biggest foreign investor in Indonesia.
Will there be justice for the victims?
Indonesia’s National Human Rights Commission released a report in 2012 declaring the military responsible in gross human rights violation in 1965. There has yet to be a criminal inquiry.
However, there has been gradual progress in the political will of Indonesian leaders to resolving the 1965 tragedy.
In his election manifesto, Indonesian President Joko Widodo promised to solve past human rights abuses. He has incorporated this in his administration’s medium-term plan.
In his national address on August 2015, Widodo called for a national reconciliation. This is a step forward from his predecessor Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. But how reconciliation will be carried out is yet to be seen.
Asvi Warman Adam, Researcher, Centre for Political Studies, Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI)
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Explaining the Russo-Ukrainian War.
.jpg/640px-Destruction_of_Russian_tanks_by_Ukrainian_troops_in_Mariupol_(4).jpg)
Choose one:
“Destruction of Ukranian w:BMP-3 IFV by Russian troops in Mariupol” or
“A destroyed Russian BMP-3 near Mariupol, 7 March 2022”. [A]
You know the conventional wisdom about the Ukrainian war: it’s all entirely Putin’s fault. That story is easy to understand, isn’t it? Politicians and journos and pundits for hire never cease to drive home the message.
It has its weaknesses though. One of them is that it needs Putin – who on top of having Parkinson’s disease and at least two different flavours of terminal cancer – to be both bad and kooky … never mind that madness precludes responsibility. Depending on who you hear, the bloke is a Machiavellian master manipulator … or an inept tin pot dictator. Incidentally, the same applies to the Russian military, at times described as a serious and imminent threat to the security of Europe, at times lambasted as useless, clumsy, incompetent and corrupted – sometimes by the same people, at the same time.
(Rationality and consistency, you see, are too much to ask from simplistic speculative accounts, mixing in equal parts wishful thinking, virtue signalling and ignorance. To those basic ingredients, they only need to add a pinch of contempt for our intelligence, and personal dishonesty to taste and ta-da! Bon appétit!)
What you may not know, because politicians and journos and pundits for hire relentlessly do their best to hide it, is that there is a better, smarter explanation, advanced not by fringe conspiracy theorists or Putin puppets, but by bona fide academics and practitioners. It’s particularly good, because it shows how we got into this mess. Who would have thought that history actually matters?
It has a drawback though: it’s more complex than the dominant good-and-evil morality tale.
The good news is that a basic understanding can be gained, with little effort, thanks to serious academics:
Ukraine war follows decades of warnings that NATO expansion into Eastern Europe could provoke Russia
On Feb. 24, Russian tanks moving into Ukraine.
Sergei Malgavko\TASS via Getty Images)
Ronald Suny, University of Michigan
As fighting rages across Ukraine, two versions of reality that underlie the conflict stare across a deep divide, neither conceding any truth to the other.
The more widespread and familiar view in the West, particularly in the United States, is that Russia is and has always been an expansionist state, and its current president, Vladimir Putin, is the embodiment of that essential Russian ambition: to build a new Russian empire.
“This was … always about naked aggression, about Putin’s desire for empire by any means necessary,” President Joe Biden said on Feb. 24, 2022.
The opposing view argues that Russia’s security concerns are in fact genuine, and that NATO expansion eastward is seen by Russians as directed against their country. Putin has been clear for many years that if continued, the expansion would likely be met with serious resistance by the Russians, even with military action.
That perspective isn’t held just by Russians; some influential American foreign policy experts have subscribed to it as well.
Among others, Biden’s CIA director, William J. Burns, has been warning about the provocative effect of NATO expansion on Russia since 1995. That’s when Burns, then a political officer in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, reported to Washington that “hostility to early NATO expansion is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here.”
NATO edging toward Russia
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, is a military alliance that was formed by the U.S., Canada and several European nations in 1949 to contain the USSR and the spread of communism.
Now, the view in the West is that it is no longer an anti-Russian alliance but is instead a kind of collective security agreement aimed at protecting its members from outside aggression and promoting peaceful mediation of conflicts within the alliance.
Recognizing the sovereignty of all states and their right to ally with whatever state they wish, NATO acceded over time to the requests of European democracies to join the alliance. Former members of the Soviet-established Warsaw Pact, which was a Soviet version of NATO, were also brought into NATO in the 1990s, along with three former Soviet republics – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – in 2004.
The Western view is that the Kremlin is supposed to understand and accept that the alliance’s activities, among them war games replete with American tanks staged in nearby Baltic states and rockets stationed in Poland and Romania – which the U.S. says are aimed at Iran – in no way present a threat to Russian security.
Georgian troops joined large-scale joint military exercises with NATO forces outside Tbilisi, Georgia, on Aug. 1, 2018, on the 10th anniversary of its war with Russia, which strongly opposes Tbilisi’s NATO membership bid.
Vano Shlamov/AFP via Getty Images
Many warnings about Russia’s reaction
Russian elite and broad public opinion have both long been opposed to such expansion, the placement of American rockets in Poland and Romania and the arming of Ukraine with Western weaponry.
When President Bill Clinton’s administration moved to bring Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into NATO, Burns wrote that the decision was “premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst.”
He continued, “As Russians stewed in their grievance and sense of disadvantage, a gathering storm of ‘stab in the back’ theories slowly swirled, leaving a mark on Russia’s relations with the West that would linger for decades.”
In June 1997, 50 prominent foreign policy experts signed an open letter to Clinton, saying, “We believe that the current U.S. led effort to expand NATO … is a policy error of historic proportions” that would “unsettle European stability.”
In 2008, Burns, then the American ambassador to Moscow, wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks in Moscow on Feb. 14, 2008, sparking NATO’s anger by threatening to target missiles at former Soviet bloc countries that host bases from the military alliance or a U.S. missile defense shield.
Alexander Memenov/AFP via Getty Images
Responding to Russia’s insecurity
There are different outcomes to the current crisis depending on whether you see its cause as Russian imperialism or NATO expansionism.
If you think the war in Ukraine is the work of a determined imperialist, any actions short of defeating the Russians will look like 1938 Munich-style appeasement and Joe Biden becomes the reviled Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who acceded to Hitler’s demands for territory in Czechoslovakia only to find himself deceived as the Nazis steadily marched to war.
If, however, you believe that Russia has legitimate concerns about NATO expansion, then the door is open to discussion, negotiation, compromise and concessions.
Having spent decades studying Russian history and politics, I believe that in foreign policy, Putin has usually acted as a realist, unsentimentally and amorally taking stock of the power dynamics among states. He looks for possible allies ready to consider Russia’s interests – recently he found such an ally in China – and is willing to resort to armed force when he believes Russia is threatened.
But at times he has also acted on the basis of his ideological predilections, which include his fabricated histories of Russia. Occasionally, he’s acted impulsively, as in seizing Crimea in 2014, and rashly, as in his disastrous decision to invade Ukraine. Annexing Crimea after Ukraine’s pro-democracy Maidan revolution in 2014 combined both a strategic imperative to hold onto the Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol and a nationalist justification, after the fact, to bring the imagined cradle of Russian Christianity and a historic conquest of the czars back into the fold of the “motherland.”
Putin’s sense of Russia’s insecurity vis-à-vis a much more powerful NATO is genuine, but during the current impasse over Ukraine, his recent statements have become more fevered and even paranoid.
Usually a rationalist, Putin now appears to have lost patience and is driven by his emotions.
Putin knows enough history to recognize that Russia did not expand in the 20th century – losing parts of Poland, Ukraine, Finland and eastern Turkey after the 1917 revolution – except for a brief period before and after World War II when Stalin annexed the Baltic republics and pieces of Finland, and united lands from interwar Poland with Soviet Ukraine.
Putin himself was traumatized by the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, the loss of one-third of its former territory and half of its population. In an instant, the USSR disappeared, and Russia found itself much weaker and more vulnerable to rival great powers.
Many Russians agree with Putin and feel resentment and humiliation, along with anxiety about the future. But overwhelmingly they do not want war, Russian pollsters and political analysts say.
Leaders like Putin who feel cornered and ignored may strike out. He has already threatened “military and political consequences” if the currently neutral Finland and Sweden attempt to join NATO. Paradoxically, NATO has endangered small countries on the border of Russia, as Georgia learned in 2008, that aspire to join the alliance.
One wonders – as did the American diplomat George F. Kennan, the father of the Cold War containment doctrine who warned against NATO expansion in 1998 – whether the advancement of NATO eastward has increased the security of European states or made them more vulnerable.
[Understand key political developments, each week. Subscribe to The Conversation’s politics newsletter.]
Ronald Suny, Professor of History and Political Science, University of Michigan
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Image Credits
[A] Choose one of them:
“Destruction of Ukranian w:BMP-3 IFV by Russian troops in Mariupol” or
“A destroyed Russian BMP-3 near Mariupol, 7 March 2022”.
Author: mvs.gov.ua. file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution
4.0 International license.
Source: WikiMedia. Nobody endorses me or the use I make of this file.
Robodebt: the Week that Was.
Sometimes the do-gooder/bleeding heart image can be an asset.
Surprising? Not really. It’s been one of Labor’s traditional selling points: voters perceive Labor as “caring” about fairness.
(source])
There is a historical reason for that perception. Although the term “welfare state” is no longer fashionable, the Australian Labor Party was key in its adoption here, and its governments established its general institutions, including public health (under Medicare). They also created the main welfare payments. The age pension, for example, dates to 1908, during the Fisher Government; the unemployment benefits (currently called JobSeeker) was product of the Chifley Government in 1945. More recently, in 2013, it was under the Gillard Government that the National Disability Insurance Scheme was created.
So, unsurprisingly the Albanese Government launched the Robodebt Royal Commission last year.
----------
A brief background of the Robodebt scheme is in order.
As Minister for Social Services, Scott Morrison (Liberal Party of Australia, main COALition partner) established Robodebt in 2015. The idea was to “recoup” $1.5 billion from social welfare payments recipients. They – top decision-makers alleged – were often overpaid (often too as a result of their deliberate defrauding the government). It considered welfare payments ranging from those to students to those to age pensioners, but its main targets were JobSeeker and its recipients.
It was evidently absurd. Using fairness as a pretext, those payments, without exception, are highly targeted to ensure that those who don’t need them are excluded (they all are “means tested”, meaning not that they depend on applicants’ net wealth – as could be reasonable – but on their assets, regardless of liabilities – which is not). They are also highly regulated, with ever-changing rules and procedures and requirements (including so-called “mutual obligations”).
The Government has unlimited access to – and closely spies on – the financial transactions of recipients.
On top, as a rule, those payments in general aren’t generous.
(source)
Let’s focus on JobSeeker and compare Australia with other rich nations. Luxembourgers, for example, losing their non-qualified, minimum wage jobs get unemployment benefits of between 80% and 90% their wages. Aussies get a miserly 26% – if they actually get anything, after all the bureaucratic hassle they need to go through[*]. Only Poms and Kiwis, among workers in OECD countries, get slightly less than Aussies. Most OECD workers get between 50% and 80%.
And, by the way, to call JobSeeker miserly is no exaggeration:
(source)
(You see that spike around 2020? We’ll come back to that in a moment.)
Robodebt, in other words, was an overreaction to an essentially non-existing problem. But it was much worse than that.
First, with Robodebt it was the alleged debtor who had to prove that no debt existed: it shifted the burden of the proof, from the accuser to the accused. The Government could and did make up debts; it was those the Government harassed as deadbeats who had to prove the Government wrong. If there was a cheater and a rorter, it was the Government.
Second: the timing. It targeted people when they were under constant pressure to find a non-existing job opening (in the process, lowering the wages of those actually employed: “So, you ain’t happy with yah job? That’s the dough-ah. There’s plenty who won it”), pestered by never-ending paperwork, while struggling to live on the pittance the Government deigned to throw at them.
Third: the people targeted. By design, JobSeeker recipients are near destitution and are frequently uneducated and unable to argue their own case.
Fourth: macroeconomic policy creates the same unemployed (as even RBA Governor Phil Lowe has admitted in public) that Centrelink persecutes.
Fifth, Robodebt was defended in public by ministers, top ranking bureaucrats and footsoldiers at every Centrelink office, even as repeated public challenges against its lawfulness were launched and judicially upheld and internal doubts were vox populi among the bureaucrats.
Sixth, in a touch of demonic malice and cruel irony, the Government assigned a law enforcement agency, the Australian Federal Police, to enforce their unlawful scheme.
(source)
5 years the democratically elected, legitimate COALition Government of democratic Australia lied to the public, extorted money, persecuted, threatened, slandered, humiliated and mocked over 400 thousand Australians with that unlawful abomination. At least two youngsters took their own lives while harassed by Robodebt.
----------
Last Friday the Commission released its report. Commentators say it was scathing. Among other things, it referred some as yet undisclosed individuals – potentially ranging from ex prime ministers to top ranking bureaucrats – to the Australian Federal Police (delightful irony!). Commissioner Catherine Holmes said Robodebt was an extraordinary saga of “venality, incompetence and cowardice”.
I can be blunter. This hellish bureaucratic nightmare was the product of a monstrous, immoral abuse of power, concocted by evil bastards and enabled by inept, cowardly and corrupted bureaucrats, including cops who, lacking a commitment to justice, follow the laws.
----------
Why did this happen? Why didn’t we see torches and pitchforks as a response to Robodebt? Those are the questions one hears repeated by talking show hosts and panelists.
They are good questions, but they deserve better answer than the usual “it’s all about the culture”.
I’m sorry, folks, but “cult-cha” is not a good answer because it doesn’t explain where “cult-cha” came from and why it endures. If culture explains everything in general, it explains nothing in particular.
Robodebt happened because the unemployed and the marginalised are living, tangible, concrete, visible warnings to the employed: “Be grateful for what little you may have. Accept your situation. Keep your head down and behave, because you could be them”.
This is not how unemployment benefits began or how they were sold as policy. And as international comparisons (and COVID, btw) show it doesn’t have to be this way. But soon enough politicians realised that is how it works and it’s functional for capitalism in Australia.
----------
To his credit, PM Albanese called for this Royal Commission.
But, sorry Albo, that is not good enough. To see why let’s go back to the spike in Prof. Mitchell’s chart. Remember?
During the pandemic the Morrison Government, out of fear of what could have been the mother of all recessions, renamed the until then NewStart Allowance as JobSeeker and lifted it above the poverty line. Just like that, for a few months hundreds of thousands of Australians were lifted from abject misery.
That is the clearest possible demonstration that when there is political will, the money appears. It’s not a matter of magic. There’s no “how are you gonna pay for that?” Financially, the difference between lifting the JobSeeker rate and paying for the piece of shit nuclear subs is that nobody really gives a rat’s ass about people on JobSeeker: the decision to spend or not comes first, the question “where’s the money coming from?” comes later, only to justify the negative.
Morrison’s unprecedented generosity towards the unemployed didn’t last. As soon as the recession was essentially averted by the spending, the Government decided they could no longer spend. And just like that, the unemployed were thrown again back into poverty.
But now we have a Labor Government. Will it do much better? Call me pessimistic, but I doubt it.
I’ll give it a try anyway. Instead of following in Morrison’s footsteps, instead of adding another nail in the coffin of the welfare state Labor created, walk your talk, Albo. Prove me wrong. And make sure some heads actually roll.
Notes:
[*] Adding insult to injury, the 2021 minimum wage in Luxembourg (equivalent to AUD15.55 per hour) was higher than its Aussie equivalent at the time (AUD14.21).
The Pot and the Kettle: the Iraq War.
People living in Western liberal democracies have short memories. That makes them self-righteous. Perhaps a stroll down memory lane is due.
This week was the twentieth anniversary of the Iraqi War. Use your memory, my friend.
Twenty years ago your TV screen was showing that or something very much like it.
As a consequence of that war, the whole Arab world, from the Tigris River in the east, to the Atlantic Ocean in the west, was destabilised. Already poor countries lost valuable infrastructure. Millions of people were displaced or left disabled, orphaned or destitute.
But let’s talk about deaths only. Nobody knows how many people died in that war. The lowest partial death estimates range from some 100 thousand to 113 thousand civilians killed between 2003 and 2021. A higher estimate shows some 600 thousand civilians and combatants killed between March 2003 and June 2006 alone (roughly two thirds of them, civilians, including women and children).
----------
Let’s go back in time a little earlier, to the beginning of the War on Terror.
“Rescue workers climb over and dig through piles of rubble
from the destroyed World Trade Center as the American flag
billows over the debris.” [A]
The 9/11 terrorist attacks were a powerful motivator. After them, the US was riding an understandable wave of international solidarity. The American Bush II Administration didn’t need to argue their case: images spoke for themselves. The UN Security Council’s recognition of the US’s right to self-defence (UN SC Resolution 1368, September 12) was proof of that: the PRC and Russia could have vetoed it, but didn’t.
The US also demanded from the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership – all very reasonable and entirely within their rights. In short, the American Government was ostensibly acting within international laws and a peaceful, civilised solution to the crisis seemed possible.
The Taliban, however, refused thereby giving the US Government additional justification for a direct military intervention. The result was Operation Enduring Freedom. It started less than a month after 9/11, initially as a bombing campaign.
Days later, with bombs raining over Afghan soil, the Taliban relented and offered Bin Laden. It was the Americans’ turn to refuse. That was a lot less reasonable, but charitably one could say that emotions were running too high on the American side. Regardless, ground operations began.
Canadian and Australian troops joined the Anglo-American forces already deployed. Soon many others followed.
This table below shows the countries contributing combat troops:
It shows more than that. It shows that the invasion of Afghanistan was not a purely American thing: many took their side. Together with Resolution 1368 that made the invasion a legitimate matter. Think of it this way: if you wanted to argue the American President launched a war of aggression, you’d need to argue all those heads of state/government also launched a war of aggression.
In a matter of weeks the Taliban regime collapsed. This was no surprise. At one hand, Taliban fighters were little more than glorified brigands having no foreign support. On the other hand, this was in all but name the first extra-European NATO war. Although the US did by far the heavy lifting, virtually all NATO members as of 2001 (plus overseas partners) sent troops. That’s saying a lot: as Australian Army Major General (ret.) Mick Ryan loves to remind us, those are the world’s most professional militaries, led by the most competent officers – extremely expensive, too, I’d add.
However, by 2003 la crème de la crème of militaries had failed to achieve their stated goal: the original targets of the invasion – Bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leadership, and the Taliban chieftains were neither captured and brought to justice, nor killed.
Worse still: the Taliban had suffered terrible losses, but were still fighting.
----------
By 2003 the Bush Administration decided to take advantage of Islamophobia’s demonstrated motivating power.
Enter Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Against usual recollections, the American case against Iraq was based on three allegations:
- The Iraqi regime was linked to al-Qaeda (“Saddam had an established relationship with al-Qaeda, providing training to al-Qaeda members in the areas of poisons, gases, making conventional weapons” – Vice President Dick Cheney, October 2003).
- The most remembered rationale: they had developed and stockpiled weapons of mass destruction (“Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised” – President George W. Bush, March 17; “We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more” – Secretary of State Colin Powell, February 5) and they or the terrorists they sponsored were ready to unleash them against the Western world.
- Saddam Hussein was a bastard, so Iraqis would welcome his ousting, no matter what (“Of course there is no doubt that Iraq, the region and the whole world would be better off without Saddam” – UK PM Tony Blair, September 24, 2001).
The first allegation was outrageously absurd: Hussein and Bin Laden may have been evil bastards, but evil bastards who despised and feared each other. This may come as a shock to Western talking heads, but there’s no universal brotherhood of evil men. Their mutual loathing was founded: the former was a sexually promiscuous atheist, drunk, and thief, the latter was an ascetic religious fanatic hellbent on imposing a medieval morality on others. Nonsensical as this allegation was, it was a transparently deliberate attempt at exploiting Islamophobia. After all, that worked brilliantly two years earlier, it was worth a try now, I suppose.
The second one was only a little less absurd. It was easier to falsify in real life though: the UN WMDs inspection team, led by Hans Blix, had left no stone unturned and no evidence of WMDs was found. Nada.
Of the three allegations the third was the most plausible: Iraqis would be glad to see Saddam Hussein’s back. It was also the least compelling: okay, Iraqis despise Saddam, so it follows that Western powers should spare no effort to remove him? Seriously?
It was plain to see – even at the time – the whole thing was out-and-out baloney.
But even many unwilling to dismiss outright the whole case still opposed the new American adventure on other grounds. For example, because the most professional militaries in the world were already in deep doodoo, stuck in the Afghan quagmire. In short, it was inconvenient from a military standpoint.
There were other misgivings. ONA intelligence analyst and former Australian Army Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Wilkie (currently independent MP for Clark):
“I think that invading Iraq at this time would be wrong. For a start, Iraq does not pose a security threat to any other country at this point in time. Its military is very weak, it's a fraction of the size of the military at the time of the invasion of Kuwait. Its weapons of mass destruction program is very disjointed and contained by the regime that's been in place since the last Gulf War. And there is no hard intelligence linking the Iraqi regime to al-Qaeda in any substantial or worrisome way.” – March 12.
To recreate the universal support Americans enjoyed for the invasion of Afghanistan was now impossible.
Unsurprisingly, unlike two years earlier, the UN Security Council did not pass the resolution the US wanted, authorising their invasion of Iraq. Worse, France – an important ally of the US, indeed, their first ally – joined Russia and Choina voting against the resolution.
Resistance against the pro-war Borg was futile, however. Either out of stupidity or dishonesty, or both, Australia’s then COALition Government stubbornly parroted their American masters’ cheat sheets:
“Iraq’s continued defiance of the UN and its possession of CBW (chemical and biological weapons) and its pursuit of a nuclear capability poses a real and unacceptable threat to the stability and security of our world.” – Prime Minister John Howard, March 3.
“Possession of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons by terrorists would constitute a direct, undeniable and lethal threat to Australia and its people.” – PM Howard, March 18.
“Saddam Hussein does have proven links to terrorism. The combination of his weapons of mass destruction and the determination of terrorists to acquire them is for this government an unacceptable threat.” – Minister for Foreign Affairs Alexander Downer, March 18.
In spite of the hawks, this time few countries sided with the Yanks:
Eventually Denmark, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Czech Republic, South Korea, and Japan were persuaded to also contribute in a way or another. Compare the list of attendants to the Iraq “party” and the list of those attending the Afghanistan one. Quite a difference, uh?
Clearly that difference means something, but what exactly?
ABC agenda-pushers in foreign affairs have become very fond of the words “humiliation” and “isolation”. Well, that list says both, humiliation and isolation: the invasion of Iraq was to be an American thing. Unlike the UK, Australia and Poland, even moderately decent and civilised governments would not take part in that war.
It says more than that. That made of the invasion of Iraq, waged without the approval of the UN Security Council, an illegal war. To be blunt: it was a war of aggression, a war crime in itself.
Don’t take my word for that. Ask the then UN Secretary General:
Koffi Annan, UN Secretary General (source)
Or ask Geoffrey Robertson, KC.
Twenty years after America’s Iraqi adventure started – twenty two after NATO’s Afghan one – the elite of the world’s militaries saw their highly professional, magnificently equipped and trained, expertly led and expensive asses kicked by a bunch of quasi illiterate, lousy half gangsters/half medieval anti-crusaders, untrained, undisciplined, lacking any support from overseas and equipped with whatever museum pieces they could lay their dirty hands on. Twice, in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Aussie soldier poses with 1880 rifle seized from Taliban (source)
Australian talking heads – like the ABC’s John Lyons – never mention it, but what you saw on your TV screen 20 years ago was the beginning of a war of aggression. The Australian Government enthusiastically joined in that enterprise. Perhaps that explains those people’s reluctance.
To use the words willingly amnesiac Aussie pollies love (I’m looking at you, Albo): the governments of the UK, Australia, and Poland were America’s main accomplices in that unprovoked, brutal, criminal war of choice. Those, Albo, were not autocracies, but four Western liberal democracies (if you can call Poland, a nation ruled by bigots, xenophobes, racists, homophobes and woman-haters – equivalently, fundamentalist Catholic religious fanatics – a liberal democracy).
When it comes to the Iraq invasion, two evil autocracies were on the side of the angels. And a select group of Western liberal democracies, with their mighty militaries, were on the opposing side; on top, they were the losers. I don’t know about you, but that makes me see the arch-villains of today – Russia and Choina – in a more charitable light.
----------
Three of those four Western liberal democracies subscribed to the Rome Convention and fall, therefore, under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. In particular, Australia and the UK, where John Howard and Tony Blair live, did sign the Rome Convention.
Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones. That is something Aussies, particularly politicians and journalists, should keep in mind. Get off your high horse, mate.
Image Credits:
[A] “Rescue workers climb over and dig through piles of rubble from the destroyed World Trade Center as the American flag billows over the debris.”. Author: Andrea Booher/ FEMA News Photo. Source: WikiMedia. File in the public domain. Nobody endorses me or my use of the file.
