Snippets

Rick Shenkman asks just how stupid and ignorant are his fellow Americans. Whilst Shenkman unveils a few embarrassing stats demonstrating that US citizens are far more knowledgeable about pop culture than world affairs, I suspect his argument doesn't fly. The picture he paints is not clear evidence of ignorance, still less, stupidity, (though frustrated agitators may interpret it as such). Rather, Shenkman seems to depict an abysmal disconnect between representatives and the represented, and a profound disengagement with politics on the part of the populace. These problems are not limited to the US - things differ here in Australia only in terms of degree, and we delude ourselves if we believe otherwise.

Speaking of politics - a majority of people surveyed in the US (and most other countries) believed that their nation should 'not take either side' in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the US, 71% of respondents adopted this position, a result that is hardly indicative of a dullard population in thrall to Christian Zionist lobbyists and other right-wing cranks. Incidentally, most nations apparently believed that both Israelis and Palestinians did themselves no favours in terms of resolving the conflict.

Now this position is not a 'leftist' position per se - for most leftists, it is perfectly clear who is oppressor and who is oppressed in this 'conflict'. Yes, neutrality is inherently conservative, in so far as it supports and rationalises the status quo. Nonetheless, these results show a US population that maintains rather different political perspectives compared to its elite political class. So much for representative democracy (to say nothing of at least $3 billion per annum in aid siphoned off to a militaristic Israel).

Finally, next to the US is a little country much-derided by the world's policeman. Nonetheless, in news you probably won't be reading in the mainstream media, researchers within this country claim to have developed a vaccine for lung cancer. Clinical trials were yet to be complete, but the vaccine itself will be made available to both locals and foreigners.

Collective Identity and the Left

It is true that as a black-hearted blogger allegedly of the 'hard left' I sometimes mock some of the more inane right-leaning bloggers in Australia. God knows there are more than a few embarrassments among them. One blogger with whom I will attempt to engage in this post, rather than mock, is Mark R. of Oz Conservative, in this post on collective identity. Mark took issue with a statement of Ted Ballieu's, leader of Victoria's Liberal Opposition, namely that 'our diversity is at the heart of our collective identity - different people, different views, different lifestyles.'

Mark highlights a 'radical element' in Ballieu's position:

Baillieu has no problem using the term "collective identity", but consider carefully what he means by this concept. It is not a "positive" identity, in the sense that it represents a set of positive characteristics shared by a community of people. Instead, it is a negative identity, in which people identify with the absence of shared characteristics.

In this, I agree, on the proviso that, at a philosophical level, at least, we acknowledge that 'identity' always presumes 'difference', in the Spinozan sense that 'Omnis determinatio est negatio' ('All determination is negation').

Mark appears to be arguing that in loosening, or even negativising the definition of that which constitutes 'our' collective identity, 'we' (i.e. Australian society) risk losing that identity altogether. This is important because, according to Mark:

We gain much as individuals from a strong collective identity in which we enjoy a sense of shared history, of a common culture, of closely understood manners and mores, of a widely shared calendar of festivals and celebrations, of a distinct tradition linking generations to each other, and of art and architecture expressing the character of our own community.

Mark correctly (in my view) places Ballieu's statement within the context of a 'liberal position', but condemns it , as we might expect of a conservative, as 'it represents the mindset of the rootless, modernist individual who has become disconnected from his own communal tradition.'

I happen to think the claims of Australia ever having had a 'common culture' to be incorrect. 'Diversity' existed even among Aboriginal peoples. The first settlers, Irish and English, would have had sharp differences in beliefs in many cases (not that there exists an homogeneous 'English' or 'Irish' in the first place), and the amount and degree of intra-societal differences would only have been greater during the many decades of immigration to Australia, by people from all continents. Diversity was always already there with respect to every aspect of identity, and claims of a 'common culture' seem to me a bad fiction, designed to smooth over historical and societal fact.

On the other hand, Mark has a genuine point when he criticises the 'negative identity' implied by Ballieu, and by many other liberals who are lazy when it comes to metaphysics. We appear to see in the Lib leader's statement a kind of ready-made, philistine version of the Derridean-Levinasian coming to grips with the other, with the outcome being defined by absence and lack. For a conservative, therefore, this approach to collective identity seems to lead to a society that, in terms of 'values', at least, is held together by nothing. Liberal individualism would possibly see society as being held together by (liberal) individuals.

Since I insist on the old 19th Century distinction between 'liberals' and 'radicals' (a distinction sometimes lost when political discourse is collapsed into the left-right spectrum), I think it appropriate to ask what this third perspective might have to say about collective identity. On what might this 'identity' be founded?

Let us put aside, for the time being, the arguments from psychoanalysis and social psychology linking 'personal' identity with the cultural sphere. The ego-ideal is, among other things, an insertion of the 'cultural' into the personal, an appropriation by the self of the other, and it derives chiefly from the strictures and injunctions of one's parents. Still, these parents are themselves embedded in a broader cultural context.

If his tags are any guide, Mark seems to hint that national or ethnic identity is the means to securing a stable collective identity. I happen to think this utterly mistaken. For starters, in the case of Australia, the prevailing 'identity' was made possible only on the basis of the most brutal displacement of the Aboriginal people.

The first white settlers in Australia were from Europe's then-power, Britain, and from Europe's oldest colony, Ireland. The two differed in religion and many other respects; as I said above, 'diversity' existed from the beginning. Sure, we can fabricate some kind of collective 'Anglo-Celtic' identity, as distinct from the next major group of European migrants (Greeks and Italians). Following that, we can construct a 'Western European' or 'Christian' identity as opposed to the Chinese and Vietnamese who still followed. We can even incorporate the Asians into our 'collective', and simply posit Muslims as the out-group. The point is, however, that all of these groupings are ultimately arbitrary, do not remove 'diversity', and require or imply a demonised out-group, excluded from the set, but defining the set's very identity. This is not 'social cohesion', this is, in psychoanalytic terms, collective psychosis.

On what then, can identity be founded? Clearly, ethnic and religious groupings are insufficient. I argue that a 'positive' from which a collective identity can arise is the category of worker, that is, one who does not control the means of production. Further to this, I mean a worker who is self-consciously a worker, and who is self-consciously politicised as a worker, that is, a worker who is a member of the proletariat. As Orwell mused (and as his rightist would-be heirs have apparently forgotten), 'If there is hope, it lies in the proles'.

This category, as the French philosopher Badiou says, 'consolidate[s] what is universal in identities', and is capable of uniting mean and women of different ethnic and religious backgrounds. As Badiou puts it in his paper, it is not about me, the individual, abandoning my pre-existing identity for the sake of some authoritarian cultural norm, but rather, of adapting and enlarging my identity, 'in a creative fashion', to the place in which I find myself. As one of the many for whom value accrues by its expropriation from my labour, my place is with the workers. As Badiou said elsewhere, '"militant" is a category without borders'.

Of course, this solution to the problem is no what the conservatives want to hear, and represents a challenge to the muddy arena of 'identity politics' into which liberal individualism often lapses. Sceptics will not doubt scoff at the suggestion that 'proletariat' remains a valid category. The Left is presumed by media pundits not to consist of the working classes, but of 'luvvies' and 'bleeding hearts', with hand-wringing affectations and pet causes, who munch on hilariously ethnic foodstuffs. In other words, popular political discourse in Australia has only conceived of a leftism that is 'left-liberal', not 'radical left', that dismisses the very possibility of a politicised working class.

Does such a class exist, rather than the effete, inner city class caricatured in our press? I answer that it does. Let us take, for example, Melbourne's outer Northern and North-Western suburbs:

Those familiar with Melbourne will recognise that is a 'diverse' area. There is a strong Aboriginal community in the area. There are many Christians, mostly Catholic and Orthodox, as well as several mosques. A Buddhist temple can be found in the suburb of Reservoir, owing to the significant number of Buddhist Asians in the area. Observers will note that this is a genuinely working class area - peak hour traffic is generally earlier here than elsewhere, owing to the types of occupations often done here.

Take the State Electorate of Thomastown for instance. This area encompasses a number of suburbs. The three most common occupations are as a sales worker in retail, and a machine operator/driver or labourer in manufacturing. Workers are unlikely to work in the city, given the heavy industrialisation of the area. Whilst here, as elsewhere, Australian-born people are a majority, there are plenty of others - Italians are next, with large numbers of Greeks, Macedonians, Lebanese, Vietnamese, and even Iraqis. In short, this is the very model of a poor, working-class neighbourhood, with a high proportion of immigrants.

So how does this area vote? At the last State election, the result was a massive 81% to the ALP, on a two-party preferred basis. If we look at this area Federally, we see the ALP with a 70% two-party preferred vote, which is enormous considering the relative wealth and cultural homogeneity in the north-east outskirts of this electorate. No doubt similar such areas can be found throughout the country.

Obviously, Australia's Labor party stands for labour in name only, but the message is clear - the much-despised Howard Haters are not chardonnay-swilling elites. They may well be latte drinkers, if only for the fact that they hail from a country that values coffee in the first place. They are poor, and 'diverse', and they do not vote Tory - it is little wonder that conservatives are scared of them, and are trying to keep them out of the country, or have them radically 'assimilate'. They have all the makings of a politicised working class.

It is these people who are being let down by the ALP, and who, as far as I can see, have failed to be integrated into the Greens. And it is precisely these people who offer a bright future for the Left in this country, and for this country itself, if only that opportunity can be seized.

A few thoughts on gangland wars...

Like just about everybody else who has seen it, (and there are plenty in Victoria), I enjoyed Underbelly. The character of Roberta Williams stole the show, of course. There's nothing more charming than a strong, female character who utters such niceties as 'Suck my toe-jam!'. Many of the backdrops would be familiar to Melbournians, as would many of the characters and events which, among certain crowds, and in certain neighbourhoods, became the stuff of minor myth.

I has some minor quibbles - some of the characters were brilliantly cast, but occasionally I detected a misfire, particularly as regards the police. The lack of 'gentrification' of some of the criminal characters was good to see. Predictably, almost every murder was preceded by scenes of the soon-to-be-victim farewelling loved ones. The Victorian police were portrayed rather fawningly, with scant mention of the entrenched police corruption that allowed the underworld to function in the first place. Yes, there was a single, moustache-wearing villainous cop, but he was promptly caught in order to showcase the virtue of the others. In fairness, I can think of few precedents in Australian drama where police have been portrayed realistically.

Whilst the local detail is no doubt interesting to Victorians, the show has found popularity Australia-wide. This is not entirely surprising, given the success of the gangster genre. Like the most successful gangster flicks, Underbelly combined depictions of the criminal underworld with psychological explorations (extremely brief, in this case, but to be expected) and family scenes. This is a tried-and -true formula in this genre: consider the fact that The Godfather begins with a wedding, The Godfather II begins with a first communion, and Goodfellas focuses at length on the downward spiral of Liotta and Bracco's marriage.

There is thus a sense of universality depicted, even among these extreme characters. Perhaps, in the po-mo era, the brutal violence of the gangster genre is the closest thing we have to tragedy.

Two powerful (and sometimes, controversial) means of analysing some of these universalities in drama and literature come in the form of what can be broadly termed psychoanalytic and Marxist criticism.

Psychoanalytic themes are in abundance in Underbelly. We see characters with ever-shifting allegiances and identifications, we see primal fathers and Oedipal sons, the swapping of women, and the desperate, narcissistic need to confirm to a violent ideal ego, spurred on by an equally violent superego. Nonetheless, in this post, I'll restrict my comments to a few of the political themes of Underbelly.

All of the characters form part of what Marx termed the Lumpenproletariat, a class that is both excluded, and reactionary. The essence of Melbourne's infamous gangland wars, as depicted here, revolves around a dispute between two factions within the criminal wing of this class. One is an impoverished but 'up-and-coming' class, led by the character of Carl Williams, and ably revealed in the crass, vengeful consumerism of his Lady Macbeth, Roberta. The other faction consists of wealthy 'establishment' criminal criminals, the irony being that these characters were themselves once the impoverished sons of (mostly) Italian and Irish immigrants, with origins in the notorious Painters and Dockers Union. The complacency of this latter group, who live in gentrified neighbourhoods, drive expensive cars, and send their children to private schools, eventually explodes into violence when their supremacy is challenged by the up-and-comers.

In the actions of Williams and his crew, we see in microcosm what we have witnessed on the world stage for many years. The twin pillars of capitalism and imperialism are seen in Underbelly in miniature, and Williams and his proxies kill to maintain strategic supremacy, their control of trade, and, rather like the US, their 'prestige'.

Toward the end of the series, we see Williams' disingenuous attempts to exonerate his role in the gangland wars. When we see him tell a media scrum that he an innocent, a 'business man', merely defending the interests of his family, we hear an echo of Bush's justifications for the ongoing war on terror, and for pre-emptive strikes. When Williams callously dismisses the trauma of the children witnessing a murder he has commissioned against their fathers ('They'll get over it'), we are reminded of Rumsfeld's famous bon mot regarding Iraq ('Stuff happens').

After all, all capitalism is, at bottom, 'gangster capitalism'. A shadow market ruled by underworld figures is not an anomaly within a consumer capitalist society, but its logical extension. A worker, a sole individual, can never 'take on' an industry or state in the manner in which these entities can do to the former. And, in the last resort, these entities have force at their disposal, in order to prosecute laws and industrial edicts. (Flouting unfair laws has, however, brought at least one recent success). We need only see how entrenched, and how easily accommodated gangsterism is in some societies (such as Southern Italy, for one) to see how coextensive are the two worlds of legitimate and illegitimate business.

When we see this imperialism played out in dramas on the screen, we recognise it as crime. When we see it unfold on the daily news, we dignify it with the name of 'war', or, even more euphemistically, as 'peace-keeping' or 'nation-building'. It is as if relieving a long-suffering gangster's moll of her husband, by way of a few bullet wounds is a 'humanitarian liberation'. After all, our leaders are just good businessmen, protecting the interests of their (elite) families.

Hang the Intellectuals

The weekend rag had an opinion piece by Chris Middendorp, asking why the works of Australia's greatest novelist, Patrick White, were more or less ignored by mainstream Australia. Middendorp attributes this phenomenon to 'cultural cringe'.

Clearly, Australians have much to cringe about, but most of our cringeworthy objects these days are not cultural, but political. We might ask some other questions about why a writer such as White is ignored, and ignored precisely by our good nationalists in the media.

To be sure, White is a 'difficult' writer, but no more so than any number of other modernists. We should find it striking that this era of cultural whitewashing, where Australia's racism is routinely re-branded as patriotism (or, in the cases of racism directed at Aborigines, as a 'goodwill' intervention), is precisely the era where Australians of international significance among the intelligentsia are either ignored (Patrick White), maligned (Germaine Greer) or co-opted (I'll refrain from citing examples for this last category).

It is no coincidence, of course, that during the past 10 years of Howard's rule, and subsequent cultural warfare, intellectuals have been a source of considerable angst to conservatives. It is also no coincidence that Patrick White, an avowed Whitlamite, homosexual, and Republican, is one such intellectual. As a Nobel Laureate, he is too well-regarded to be susceptible to an Andrew Bolt or Christopher Pearson smear-piece (though White's biographer is not so fortunate). Nonetheless, White is simply sidestepped, while the NewsCorp hacks and Liberal politicians (such as George Brandis, last week) aim at smaller targets.

It should be clear by now that, after years of 'intellectual' or 'elite' being used as terms of abuse, that conservative politicians, and a pliant media, have attempted, as much as possible, to push an anti-intellectual, anti-cultural agenda, except where the latter targets are sufficiently fairy floss-like to be considered no threat to the 'evil, Howard-hating elites' narrative.

In this vein, News Ltd. Political Hack-in-Chief Paul Kelly appeared on last Friday's Lateline, in an attempt to debate LaTrobe University historian Robert Manne. The debate topic revolved around the culture wars, and a recent essay by Kelly purporting to demonstrate that Australia has cultivated a clique of 'public intellectuals' concerned solely with Howard-hating polemic, who ignore the Liberal Governments policy 'success'.

Never mind that this 'success' is far from agreed-upon. Sure, the economy has not collapsed, and has been very generous (for some Australians only - but this topic can wait for another post). On every other front, however, there has been policy failure.

Good quality, affordable healthcare and education has become more difficult to obtain. Workers' long-held rights have been abolished. The sentiments of race-rioters are more or less echoed, repeatedly, by our Governing politicians.

Robert Manne, a long-time conservative who remains conservative (though not slavishly in awe of the Howard Government) made these points to Kelly, and noted that he, Raymond Gaita, David Marr, and Julian Burnside are all 'elites' who are systematically demonised by the News Ltd crew. Manne took Kelly to task successfully:

I don't dispute there is a large group of us who think the Howard
Government has on balance done a lot of harm to Australia in the area of
culture, not the economy, but there are only three people mentioned. I want to
say just one thing about that.

The three people mentioned are very distinguished
people, not second rate in any way. Paul might disagree with them, might think
they are too moralistic about Howard and so on. One has written a superb
biography of Patrick White, David Marr. The other, Raymond Gaita, is probably
the best known philosopher of Australia except for Peter Singer, maybe. And
Julian Burnside is not a public intellectual so much as a humane and extremely
fine barrister who's had major success.

I think the category - the three people
included, if he thinks they're second rate, he should look to the cast of
journalists in Australia. I think there is a real argument and I think it's a
left-right argument, as you said. And I think it's about those intellectuals
like myself and like Ray Gaita and like David Marr and many others like Julian,
who think the Howard Government in many ways has done great damage to this
country and the question of how angry we should be or what the right moral
temper is for all of that is an important and right issue. If I could start by
something. It we look at this week, we've had, for example, a defamatory attack
on a group of academics who happen to disagree with what the Government would
like us to believe on WorkChoices. I don't know what Paul thinks about this, but
we've had an attack on the entire character of a continent - Africans. I feel
really upset about it and I don't think sort of worldly calm, as Paul seems to
think, is the right response to an attack on an entire group of people. I think
it is racism, I have to say.

And therein is revealed the intellectual bankruptcy of present-day conservatism. Preoccupied with idiotic left-right cultural flaming, they cannot assert any coherent, positive position, or even identify who 'the left' actually are. For instance, as Manne correctly noted, Kelly's targets are not rabid socialists.

For instance, Gaita is a signed-up member of the execrable Euston crowd. Burnside is concerned primarily with human rights and due legal process, and is not a polemicist. Marr is a polemicist, but of a self-described 'soft-left' variety. Whilst his criticisms of the Howard Government are frequent, and articulate, they are hardly militant.

The stupidity continued today in the Government Gazette when the far-right News Ltd hack, and board member of 'our' ABC, Imre Salusinszky, opined that the 'intellectuals have gone too far'.

Last week, the Government's 'avuncular' Minister for Serfdom, Joe Hockey, attacked an academic report that demonstrated that the Government's Workchoices legislation left workers worse off. Always more 'idiot' than 'savant', Salusinszky continued Hockey's anti-intellectual smearing by way of Murdoch's megaphone:

A quick scan, using the internet, of research centres at universities
reveals that many are structured around the "softie Left" world view that former
Media Watch host David Marr memorably nominated as the primary qualification for
entry into Australian journalism.

One can accept the above statement as true, provided one excludes the actual content of 90% of what passes for Australian 'journalism'. Only one newspaper in the country is even vaguely to the 'left', and there is no television program that could be considered particularly progressive.

Salusinszky targets that author of the industrial relations study in particular, with this obtuse broadside:

And perhaps there is no reason to be concerned that, in the era during
which the mainstream political class has come to accept the logic of the market,
an academic paid to conduct research into the Australian labour market still
describes himself as a socialist.

This statement demonstrates Salusinszky's remove from the 'mainstream', as well as his sycophantic sloganeering. Who in 'mainstream' Australia has come to accept 'the logic' of the market, other than the HR Nicholls society and a few fundamentalists? Not the many Australians who opposed the sale of Telstra, and who oppose the increasing privatisation of every aspect of society. Not the majority of Australians who despise the Government's supposed 'deregulation' of industrial relations laws. Not the farmers, who are slated to receive significant subsidies or generous retirement handouts from the Government, in order to shore up votes in rural electorates. Imre's gripe, that a labour-market researcher describes himself as 'socialist', is likewise misguided. The Australian Labor Party still describes itself as 'socialist' (with the necessary qualifiers), and remains Australia's oldest, and single-most popular party.

Salusinzsky's most comical moment, however, comes at the end of his piece, where he cites is colleague and fellow-culture warrior, Paul Kelly:

"A healthy democracy will see a healthy gulf between its politicians and
its intellectuals. But this gulf in Australia is a chasm that demands serious
attention."

That the GG could even try to publish such material, without irony, and not intended as satire, suggests that some grave intellectual deficiencies exist either among Murdoch's staff, or his readers. That, or we need to hang a few 'intellectuals'.

Engage in a bit of self-harm.

This is old news, but still worth a cheap laugh or two.



A magazine called, rather touchingly, Human Events, (described by Wiki as a 'weekly conservative magazine'), regularly puts out a series of 'Top Ten' lists, written with the US far-right agenda firmly in mind.



Several of them are chuckle-worthy, but one that I found quite revealing of a particular mindset was entitled 'Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries'. Let's see if we can catch a glimpse of America's finest 'conservative' reasoning at work - the list of modern literature's most diabolical creations is as follows:



1. The Communist Manifesto (Marx & Engels)
This one is no surprise. After all, everybody knows that it's only right-wing evangelical Christians who are the revolutionary class these days. They describe Engels as 'the original limousine leftist'. I guess these days, we Australian would simply call him a 'latte leftist', or 'chardonnay socialist'. Topping the list by a long way, this little book:

(E)nvisions history as a class struggle between oppressed workers and
oppressive owners, calling for a workers’ revolution so property, family and
nation-states can be abolished and a proletarian Utopia established. The Evil
Empire of the Soviet Union put the Manifesto into practice.

Actually, the 'Evil Empire' didn't, but that's history for you.

2. Mein Kampf (Hitler)
I haven't actually read this one, in fairness, and I doubt it has anything of value in it. I doubt history would have altered one iota had Hitler not published, given that I've heard it described as 'turgid' and 'vacuous'. Still, budding Nazis used to hand copies of this out as wedding gifts (what happened to coffee makers?), and I'd be surprised if it wasn't filled with all kinds of racist, anti-democratic, anti-leftist ranting. One for the Alan Jones set, I suppose.

3. Quotations from Chairman Mao
As the fundies put it:

Aided by compulsory distribution in China, billions were printed. Western
leftists were enamored with its Marxist anti-Americanism. “It is the task of the
people of the whole world to put an end to the aggression and oppression
perpetrated by imperialism, and chiefly by U.S. imperialism,” wrote Mao.

Billions? China's a populous place, but I hope you're not exaggerating there, guys. And so what if Mao spoke out against 'US imperialism'? It obviously didn't work.

4. The Kinsey Report
From a psychoanalytic perspective, I can't think of anything worse than sitting down to read some 'sexologists' bloated musings on sexual behaviour, backed up by half-arsed statisticising. Still, calling it harmful is a bit of a stretch. The Righteous explain the source of their concern:

“Kinsey’s initial report, released in 1948 . . . stunned the nation by
saying that American men were so sexually wild that 95% of them could be accused
of some kind of sexual offense under 1940s laws,” the Washington Times reported
last year when a movie on Kinsey was released.

Apart from the fact that the newspaper report about the book, rather than the book itself, is examined by the rightards, I think the above quote tells us that there's more wrong with America's 1940s laws than with Kinsey's report.

5. Democracy and Education (Dewey)
Think of evil, and I'm guessing that for most people, philosopher and education reformer John Dewey isn't the first name that comes to mind. Then again, Human Events tells us that 'He signed the Humanist Manifesto and rejected traditional religion and moral absolutes'. Yep, those damned Humanists, with their cross-burnings, and wars and...I mean, with their manifestos, and books, and with the signings, and such.

His views had great influence on the direction of American
education--particularly in public schools--and helped nurture the Clinton
generation.

Gasp! Not Clinton! The semi-competent president who was marginally less conservative than Reagan and the Bushes! If only he had offered Lewinsky a cigar instead of a harmful book...

6. Das Kapital (Marx)
Very impressive Karl - you've got two gongs already. If that's not a glowing reference, I don't know what is. But isn't Das Kapital a bit too wordy and philosophical to be truly harmful? Not according to Human Events, because this book is about:

portraying capitalism as an ugly phase in the development of human society
in which capitalists inevitably and amorally exploit labor by paying the
cheapest possible wages to earn the greatest possible profits.

This is obviously false, when capitalism is really about fairness and bunny rabbits, and capitalists are generous, and Kris Kringle-like. Just ask free-market Colombia, or capitalist paradise Djibouti.

Marx theorized that the inevitable eventual outcome would be global proletarian
revolution.

Er, not in any of the four volumes of Das Kapital, he didn't.

He could not have predicted 21st Century America: a free, affluent society
based on capitalism and representative government that people the world over
envy and seek to emulate.

Ha ha ha! Great satire, guys!

7. The Feminine Mystique (Friedan)
Here, feminism rears its ugly, equality-demanding head. Our brilliant authors at Human Events manage, in a showcase of brevity and wit, to sum up Friedan's life work:

Her original vocation, tellingly, was not stay-at-home motherhood but
left-wing journalism.

Enough said.


8. The Course of Positive Philosophy (Comte)
We've had feminists, communists, and humanists, so, for the sake of completeness, we needed at least on French philosopher on the list. Unfortunately, these guys seemed to have picked the one French philosopher unlikely to be read by anybody outside of a Sorbonne philosophy course, with a major in obscurantism.

Comte's shtick ('Love as a principle and order as the basis; Progress as the goal') was to abandon organised religion in favour of science. This was only mildly racy in 19th Century France, but is apparently harmful to 21st Century America, because whilst Comte espoused universal principles of reason:

He did so while theorizing that the human mind had developed beyond
“theology” (a belief that there is a God who governs the universe), through
“metaphysics” (in this case defined as the French revolutionaries’ reliance on
abstract assertions of “rights” without a God), to “positivism,” in which man
alone, through scientific observation, could determine the way things ought to
be.

Ah, those pesky metaphysicians, wasting their time on 'abstract assertions' of human rights 'without a God'. No wonder the UN doesn't work!

For the record, I think that positivism is crap. Still, it looks pretty smart when compared to 'Intelligent Design'.

9. Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche)
One of my favourites, the authors offer little in the way of reasons to consider Nietzsche 'harmful', except for this quote from the text:

“Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the
strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one’s own forms,
incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation,” he wrote.

Nietzsche is possibly quite wrong here, and could have been corrected if 'life' was replaced with 'consumer capitalism'...The authors point out, correctly, that the Nazis were fans of Nietzsche. They failed to point out that the Nazis could only produce a sympathetic reading of Nietzsche by cherry-picking through his quotes in a grotesquely self-serving manner, and omitting vast amounts of his work. A bit like the way a conservative 'reads' the Bible: Christ apparently was, after all, a homophobe, who, um, drank little wine, and who may not really have saved the alleged adulteress from death by stoning.

10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Keynes)
One of the more ghastly of the evil tomes, this one advocates, (wait for it!), government intervention in the economy! Obviously, only the most reckless of parents would allow their innocent children to read something like this.

A number of other books got 'honourable mentions' from the conservatives. Here is a round up of the highlights:

What Is To Be Done by V.I. Lenin: What! They don't like Lenin...

Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno: He wasn't that big on capitalism. Or authoritarians.

On Liberty by John Stuart Mill: The title is reason enough to avoid this subversive trash.

The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: Down with biology.

Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault: How is this harmful? He's French; case closed.

Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader: He's a consumer advocate, and not a Republican. Pure villainy and scum, in other words.

Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir: More feminist claptrap. Every fundie knows that women are not the second sex, but the third. After mules.

Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci: God only knows what a communist would get up to in prison.


Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon: You stand up for the third world, you deserve to be called harmful.

Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud: Whoops, with all the Marx, Nietzsche, and now Freud, I've been triple-harmed. But let's face it, the Three Essays on Sexuality are much saucier.

The Greening of America by Charles Reich: A dirty hippie. Decadent society. If books of this sort continue, we will inevitably see a social revolution, like women smoking unaccompanied at the opera. Or Woodstock.

Descent of Man by Charles Darwin: That's two for Darwin. Sure, the guy was a big Anglican. But we all know, the only 'descent' in Darwin's work was his descent into immorality and science.

That's the list done - I bet their top ten 'most helpful' books would make for an enlightening read...But that's enough for conservatives on literature - time for a shower.

'They're not racist, but...'

It is a commonplace of the co-called 'Culture Wars' that right-wing ideologues reject any notion that Australia is populated with racists. Racism is written out of history (except in history's 'Black Armband' guises), and is attributed only to fringe elements. Some go even further, and cite the progressives as emblematic of a kind of racism, or claim that those who criticise their country are 'self-haters' or bordering on the treasonous. Obviously, these clowns give little thought to how it might serve the ends of a conservative authoritarian government to construct a range of external and internal enemies.

With this in mind, Media Watch had some interesting examples of clearly racist behaviour on the blogosphere. The program looked at the News Ltd blogs in particular, as well as the private blog of Tim Blair, who is a News Ltd hack in any case. Some of the more egregious examples of racism were taken from the Daily Telegraph and Tim Blair:

Hey Mundine, go and eat some Coon Cheese and run it off around Nigger Brown
Oval.

Dogs make Muslim “men” horny, because dogs can be cross dressed as goats or
donkeys.

Of course, those who publish such comments justify them in the name of 'freedom of speech'. (Ironically, Melbourne's Herald Sun, hardly the shiniest beacon on enlightenment, refuses to publish racist comments from bloggers). Irrespective of whether this freedom of speech is legitimate or not, what is noteworthy here is that these comments are not simply to be found on the websites of some lunatic right-wing fringe, such as AWH or Stormfront (to whom I will not link), but are part of a popular mainstream discourse. The News Ltd blogs are hardly constructed by fanatics writing from Unabomber-style shacks, and Tim Blair's little hate-site is supposedly the most visited blog in Australia.

All of this clearly refutes the notion that Australia's racism exists solely on the margins, if such refutation was even needed in the era of Hansonism, Cronulla, and Howard's dog-whistling. Whilst Australia is not, and never has been Nazi Germany, racism has a long and ignominious history, beginning with the Aborigines, then the Irish, and the Chinese, and culminating with anti-Islamic sentiments today. If you take a trip to Melbourne's Immigration museum, you can find examples of anti-Semitic sentiment also.

Naturally, the right-wingers who are confronted with this sort of evidence will try to justify it by saying that some Asians really do form 'ghettos', some Muslims really are 'anti-Western'. Even if these things were true (and by and large, they are not - I am yet to be made aware of Asian 'ghettos' in Ipswich, of all places) they would still be examples of racism by their adherents.

Once again, there is a Žižekian point here. In analysing the rise of vicious anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, would we find it acceptable to examine what the Jews were 'really' like? Would anti-Semitism be okay if it were found that some Jews indeed conform to anti-Semitic stereotypes and caricatures, that some really are money-lenders, or, are indeed 'crafty'? Obviously, we can see that anti-Semitic racism is a product of the racist, not his or her 'object, and thus it remains the case of Australia's fanatics and ideologues today, who are numerable in the 'mainstream'.

I realise that none of this will convince the dedicated and avowed racist. Futility notwithstanding, I think it gives some hope that, as the Howard and Bush eras draw to their close, the Culture Wars will be won by those who have intellectual substance to add to mere ideological barracking, and the victors will not be either Blair, or his fellow gibbons from News Ltd. This does not mean that the battle has been won yet.

The Hysteria of Everyday Media

Anyone sufficiently unfortunate to have come into contact with the Murdoch media in recent times will have observed a distinctly histrionic, anti-Labor agenda.

GrodsCorp has noted that Rudd is Bolt's newest whipping boy. The Australian no longer even bothers with a pretence of fair and balanced reporting or editorialising.

Given that Rudd is probably Labor's most conservative leader in recent memory, and given that virtually all progressive aspects of Labor's politics are being kept off the public relations agenda, one has to wonder what all the fuss is about.

All of the topics that were 'at issue' in 2004 are still at issue in 2007 - Hicks, the environment, interest rates, Iraq. On none of these issues are Rudd or Labor threatening to do anything radical. The key difference between the two elections is that industrial relations has since become a major issue, but even on this topic, Rudd is promising a watering-down of Howard's laws, rather than a wholesale overthrow. Labor is hardly signalling a return to protectionism or industrial domination by so-called 'union bosses', the ludicrous claims of Shanahan and co. not withstanding.

The past 11 years has seen Ugly Australia come to the fore. The Prime Minister has demonstrated amply that he is content with the misogyny, homophobia, and racism of the likes of Heffernan, Laws, and Jones. The Liberals feared the Rise of Pauline Hanson not because of her ideology, but because she pinched some of their votes. The Australia of Patrick White and Sidney Nolan has been effectively suppressed. Muslims are routinely mocked and demonised in the press and blogosphere, in a manner not unlike Jews in pre-WWII Austria and France. The words 'inner-city' and 'intellectual' are habitually used by the commentariat as terms of abuse. The cosmopolitanism of our great cities has continued in relative silence, amidst the hysterical din of our far-right politicians and media.

There is some hope, albeit meagre, for those hoping for the more equitable and progressive elements within Australian politics to emerge. If the Liberals win the next election, they should do so far with a greatly reduced majority, and with Howard likely to step aside as leader. There are few senior Liberals vying for leadership who would be as conservative as Howard. Both Costello and Turnbull are progressive when compared to our sadly backward-looking current leader. (Abbott has no chance at Liberal leadership - he is the Liberal equivalent of Mark Latham, and even less electable). Alternatively, should Rudd win, we will see a very similar Australian government, but at least Workchoices will be made history. Labor may spout its 'democratic socialist' credentials on its website, but we will not see anything remotely 'socialist' in Labor's politics. I would imagine the focus would be on a managerial, fiscally conservative Labor government, somewhat similar to Bracks in Victoria.
In short, rather than being brazenly shafted by our federal politicians I suspect we will merely be slapped around, a velvet glove mediating the iron fist. Small mercies, I suppose, though in such times, one takes what one can get.