Bertrand Russell & The Life of Brian

Jan 8, 2010 | Australian Values, Democracy, OzPol Values, Racism, Religious Values, Terrorism, Values, War

Bertrand Russell & The Life of Brian

 

 

Bertrand Russell’s grandmother’s favourite Bible verse was this:

“ Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.”
(Exodus 23:2)

We can think of a lot of people we would like to see taking that to heart. The ones with special vests and exploding underpants1, for example. Christian missionaries and evangelists, for instance. This is how it works:

Perhaps these words from Bertrand Russell will enrich and enwisen(!) you as they do Sir Roger.

30 years ago Russell said of the “Palestinian problem”:

“ The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was “given” by a foreign power to another people for the creation of a new state.
The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their numbers increased.

 

How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict.

 

No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled en masse from their own country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate?

 

A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East.

 

We are frequently told that we must sympathise with Israel because of the suffering of the Jews in Europe at the hands of the Nazis. […] What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy.

—Bertrand Russell , 31 January 1970

How quaint! Look how much has changed in the 30 years since Russell made that statement!

… What? …

Yes, so the only thing that has changed is that the problem has become worse. The situation in Palestine now inexorably drives and inflames global politics. 9/11, Afghanistan, the rise of islamic fundamentalism all feed from this one trough. Not any amount of cosmetic or diplomatic pretense, no “negotiated compromise”, no artificial “roadmap to peace” will make any difference at all.

The problem is not on the surface but in the poison in the system that causes the inescapable and constant eruption of the angry, putrid, existential carbuncles that are likely to haunt this century as they have the last 50 years.

The Israelis know this (as do the Americans, of course) but they are willing to watch — no, force — the rest of the world to pay the price for what they believe is their god-given right to their “promised land”.

Religion.

Always a force for good.

Without it we wouldn’t know what was the right thing to do.

 
 

Here’s how Russell summed up his life at the age of 84:

“ Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

 

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy—ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what—at last—I have found.

 

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

 

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

 

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me. 

 
  ¹ Just a question … if a person’s exploding underpants actually do work, are the 72 virgins of any use to him in heaven? Just another question? (Okay, just a few more.) If a suicide bomber is a woman does she get the 72 virgins as well? How does that work? Does she have to fuck 12-year-old muslim boys (given, after all, that only muslims are allowed into heaven)? Does she really want to? If a muslim is male and over 12 and is still a virgin surely he’s gay? Does she have to fuck him? Does she want to? Will he let her? Or do female suicide bombers have to be lesbians? Are there enough muslim virgins in heaven to pass 72 around each suicide bomber? They must be getting younger and younger nowadays. Are the virgins forced to be fucked by suicide bombers? How would that not be rape? Or is rape okay in islam?

Sir Roger’s optimistic feeling about suicide bombers is that the dickheads are doing the rest of the world the favour of removing themselves from the gene pool. It can only get better, right?

Lolcats With a Vengeance

Nov 17, 2009 | Australian Values, Cultural Values, Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Global Warming, Immigration, Lifestyle & Life, Media Values, OzPol Values, Racism, Religious Values, Science Values, Terrorism, USPol, Values, War

Lolcats With a Vengeance

Sir Roger is despondent

 

After all the hard work of so many people Australian politics is looking like Howard Lite, iSuck 2.0 déjà vu all over again. Boat people – “Aaaaarrrggghh! Foreigners! Tough on Queue-jumpers [but not on the causes of queue-jumpers]”.

“Let’s pretend to be doing something about climate change. We have to do something. We have to do something. I know! Let’s play tiddlywinks! That’s “something”. Hey, youse guys, the world is going to burn to a cinder unless we do something about it! So what we’re doing is, we’re playing tiddlywinks. If you don’t play tiddlywinks too, the world is going to burn to a cinder.”

“Okay, well, um … wait on … we don’t believe in tiddlywinks but we’ll play if Johnno and Wayne don’t have to play but you promise they will win.”

“But if Johnno and Wayne don’t play the world will burn to a crisp! No-one will win!”

“Okay, well…well…well get fuckin’ stuffed then! Let the world burn for all we fuckin’ care! … Fuckin’ lower class upstarts! Fuckin’ fairy eggheads!”

Palestine.
Israel.
Obama (what a fucking disappointment).
Russia.
Burma.
Sri Lanka.
China,
Tibet.

Fucking arrogant, corrupt and criminally-incompetent Indonesian politicians, bureaucrats, police and judges.

Walls everywhere.
Hatred.
Religious madmen in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Somalia.

And the United States, which is terminally fucked in the collective head.

Democracy movements being crushed everywhere.

Freedoms, rights and privacy being shredded even – especially – by the good old Brits, eh, what?

Stupid global refusal to listen, based on creaking, long-ago-discredited, Industrial-Revolution-era social-political-religious theories that date back – even in their most recent versions – more than 200 years in the West, and on 4000-year-old, crazy, murderous, hate-filled, tribalist, racist, desert-engendered cruel religious fantasies in the rest of the world.

The hopes of “peace and love” from the last five decades crumbling like the naïve hallucinations they so pitiably were.

Young people who will “look after” things in a few years unable to think or care about anything but how some fake and shallow, talentless celebrity flashed her cunt, and what eyeshadow to wear …

And the people who actually care. the people with answers, who could possibly do something about it all, are sneered at and ridiculed.

It’s enough to make you want to just give up and forget it all and look at some funny cat video.

 

Heads They Win, Tails You Lose

Aug 25, 2009 | Australian Values, Democracy, Media Values, Terrorism, USPol, Values, War

Heads They Win, Tails You Lose

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first send mad — Euripides

 

In 2007  we pleaded

 … tell me that America isn’t completely barmy, batty, berserk, bonkers, cracked, crazed, cuckoo, crazy, demented, deranged, dippy, flipped out, fruity, haywire, insane, loony, lunatic, mad, maniacal, manic, mental, nuts, nutty, out of their minds, potty, psycho, screw loose, screwy, unbalanced, unglued, unhinged, unzipped and whacko.

It is truer today than it was then.

As Glenn Greenwald says this week at Salon,

“ There’s little question that when people look back at this period in American history, it will be difficult to comprehend what happened in the Bush era — and especially how we blithely started a devastating war over complete fiction, while simultaneously instituting a criminal torture regime and breaking whatever laws we wanted. But far more remarkable still will be the fact that, other than a handful of low-level sacrificial lambs, those responsible — both in politics and the establishment media — not only suffered no consequences, but continued to wield exactly the same power, with exactly the same level of pompous self-regard, as they did before all of that happened. Looking back several decades or more from now, who will possibly be able to understand how that happened: the almost perfect inverse relationship between one’s culpability and the price they paid for what they unleashed?

He’s talking about the amazing revelations this week by Tom Ridge, the first head of the US Department of Homeland Security, that he had been pressured for political reasons to raise the terror threat level just before the 2004 elections.

“ [Ridge] wasn’t keen on writing a tell-all. But in ‘The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege…and How We Can Be Safe Again’, out September 1, Ridge says he wants to shake “public complacency” over security. And to do that, well, he needs to tell all. Especially about the infighting he saw that frustrated his attempts to build a smooth-running department. Among the headlines promoted by publisher Thomas Dunne Books: Ridge was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings; was “blindsided” by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him; found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored; and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush’s re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.

What is extraordinary but not surprising is that those on the US right, now told categorically that they were wrong when they said the government wouldn’t do something like that and that the left were loony conspiracy theorists, take a position something like, “Yes but we were right to be wrong and the left were wrong to be right because, you know, we respected Our President but the left were just Bush Haters.”

Greenwald addressed this craziness in his Salon column this week

“ Ambinder’s belief that there is nothing other than blind “Bush hatred” that could have justified such a belief — and his accompanying self-defense that journalists like him had no way of knowing any of this — is patently false. [A] 2006 Time column by Josh Marshall … details the ample empirical evidence suggesting that “that the Bush Administration orchestrates its terror alerts and arrests to goose the GOP’s poll numbers.”

And [t]here is an exhaustive and lengthy (17 minutes) segment from Keith Olbermann early last year that “weaves from each revelation of an intelligence failure or a Democratic political victory to an almost immediate orange alert or ‘new threat’ from al Qaeda.”

Olbermann’s conclusion after examining all the evidence: “what we were told about terror, and not told, for security reasons, has overlapped considerably with what we were told about terror, and not told, for political reasons” (Olbermann had been raising the same suspicion for many years).

The reason journalists such as Ambinder saw no such evidence wasn’t because it didn’t exist. It existed in abundance; you had to suffer from some form of moral, intellectual or emotional blindness not to see it. It’s because they didn’t want to see it, because — as Ambinder said — they trusted the Bush administration as good and decent people who might err but would never do anything truly dishonest.

It’s because only loser Leftist ideologues distrusted Bush officials and the overriding goal of establishment journalists is to prove that they are not like them, that they’re much more serious and responsible and thus would never attribute bad motives to government leaders such as those who ran the Bush administration.

Putting Greenwald’s piece together with the insanity and ignorance of the US health insurance debate it is quite clear that the US is in mental, moral and political free fall. It is thrashing and flailing about for something to hold onto, not knowing where it is going. And it is going into a very dark pit.

 

The Whoredom of Philip Ruddock

Aug 22, 2009 | Australian Values, Border Security, Cultural Values, Democracy, Immigration, Legal, OzPol Values, Terrorism, USPol, Values

The Whoredom of Philip Ruddock

An Unfinished Canvas

“ They had, as it seemed, unending life, yet life became unendurable to them…

Between rim and robe naught was there to see, save only a deadly gleam of eyes…

And they became forever invisible and they entered into the realm of shadows.

The Nazgûl were they, the Ringwraiths, the Ulairi, the Enemy’s most terrible servants; darkness went with them, and they cried with the voices of death…

The Nazgûl came again like vultures that expect their fill of doomed men’s flesh. Out of sight and shot they flew, and yet were ever present, and their deadly voices rent the air. More unbearable they became, not less, at each new cry.

At length even the stout-hearted would fling themselves to the ground as the hidden menace passed over them, or they would stand, letting their weapons fall from nerveless hands while into their minds a blackness came, and they thought no more of war, but only of hiding and of crawling, and of death.

Is there a more obnoxious, more simply awful creature than this Nazgûl, Philip Ruddock, whose entire career has been to suck the life out of all around him? In a recent outing he supported the Rudd government’s changes to terrorism legislation like this:

“ … the man who drafted the existing suite of laws, former Attorney-General Philip Ruddock, indicated in-principle support for the Rudd government’s changes: “I always saw counter-terrorist laws as an unfinished canvas.”

It is one thing to be a cold and heartless bastard in whose presence blood congeals, water freezes, the sun dims and flowers wither and die; to be a wraith who sucks the breath out of the mouths of babies and who, when he speaks, makes the sound of sand being breathed into his lungs, or of your brain being sucked out of your skull through your ears.

It is another thing to be what many might consider a traitor, if a traitor is someone who is advocates selling or giving away his country’s sovereignty to another.

Everyone can recall, with a shudder, his tenure as the “cold, callous and outrageous” Minister for Immigration, and his equally inhumane, life-sucking time as Attorney General. You may not have heard of “Mr T”, a Vietnamese Australian suffering from mental illness, who was detained three times by Immigration and whom the Nagûl blamed for the horrors that Ruddock and the dark forces of his department visited upon him.

“ In order to excuse himself of any accountability, Mr Ruddock referred to ‘contributory negligence’ and said problems of identification lie when people did not properly identify themselves.

 

“Mr T was well known to the Department of Immigration having been asked to verify his identity on a number of occasions,” said Mr Burke.

 

“When Mr T was detained for the first time in 1999 despite ‘appearing confused’ and displaying signs of mental health problems, he managed to tell the Department of Immigration his full name – with the first two names transposed -, his correct date of birth, his correct address and his sister’s correct phone number. He was identified and released after five days in detention.

 

“Mr Ruddock was the Minister responsible when Mr T was wrongfully placed, yet again, in Villawood for 242 consecutive days in 2003. He was also the Minister responsible when on 22 January, five days into this period of detention, Mr T identified himself as an Australian citizen. Mr T also provided his correct date of birth.” ‘

Ruddock has acted consistently against the rights and interests of Australian citizens. It was Ruddock who was Attorney General when the Howard Government agreed to allow Indonesia to determine Australia’s policy on West Papuan refugees.

It was Ruddock who was one of the loudest cheerleaders for allowing the – at that time – corrupt United States Justice Department, and the Pentagon, and the State Department, and the White House, to determine Australia’s policy on the detention of David Hicks.

It was Ruddock who, as the highest legal officer in the nation, through his terrorism legislation willingly buried the essential concept – and one of Australia’s hardcore values – of innocence until guilt is tested and proven, not to mention habeas corpus, for reasons that can only be guessed but probably include vanity, ambition, pride, arrogance, self-righteousness, cringing Uriah Heepish sycophancy, and just basic total bastardry. Ever so ‘umble.

Stripping away these foundational values of our nation was in our view nothing short of treachery, stupidity, ignorance and a dried and shrivelled morality.

Now Ruddock has formed the grisly view that amounts to this: Australia should allow China to determine Australia’s foreign policy.

If we give away who we are and what we stand for, if we give away the very values that make us Australian, the values that make it worth being an Australian and make being Australian so exceptional, for fear that China might take its money and go home, then Australia is a whore, owned by anyone with enough money and pimped by a politician. A politician, of course, knows exactly what this is all about. The heart of a politician’s art is to say what people want to hear, especially what their masters want to hear. Doing whatever China wants would install China as our master and we would no longer be a free people.

We would no longer be a sovereign people and to agitate for such a condition is to be a traitor to the country and its people.

Well, as a whore, why don’t we go the whole way? China’s politburo seems to define anyone – especially downtrodden minorities – who disagrees with its brutal, inhumane, anti-democratic, racist, butchering regime, Orwell’s ‘boot stamping on a human face – forever’, as a “Terrorist”. So why don’t we do as the Nazgûl advises and just tell the Chinese that we agree with them, that we’re not really all that fussed about “democracy” (until they’re ready to let us have it). Why don’t we take their lists of “terrorist organisations” and make them our own, round up Chinese and Chinese-born Australian citizens (same thing to the Chinese) who fit China’s “Terrorist” profile, bulldoze their homes and businesses as the Chinese do and send them back to China for a bullet in the back of the head?

But Ruddock’s not a whore. Whores have feelings.

…and now he was come again, bringing ruin, turning hope to despair, and victory to death.

 

Keelty

May 10, 2009 | Australian Values, Border Security, Citizenship, Corruption, Cultural Values, Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Immigration, Legal, OzPol Values, Terrorism, Values

Keelty

 

Gone at long last

 

How much time should one spend on this slug?
We don’t even feel like woo-hoo. Just “at last” and “good riddance” and “what took you so long”.

One of the things we really dislike about (not exclusively-) Australian culture is the way we rail against awful people and the moment they die or resign we politely say ever such nice things about them. It’s hypocritical and weak and cowardly. We think. We have no such qualms. Keelty in our view was a bad man, morally weak, a disastrous Commissioner who willingly ran over the basics of human rights and legal traditions like habeas corpus in order to pursue a flawed and misguided agenda.

He was a willing and irretrievably politicised Liberal Party stooge, and concerned more with appearance than with the truth.


His most egregious failures are well-known – the obscene treatment of young Australians in the Bali Nine affair, Haneef, the onanistic display of muscle at APEC, and the Ul-Haque farce.

Speaking of Ul-Haque we once asked,

“ Justice Adams said ASIO officers ‘committed the criminal offences of false imprisonment and kidnapping.’ When do they go to prison? Have they been arrested and charged yet? Where are they being detained? Are they being pursued and prosecuted by the AFP with the same vigour and determination that it showed against…oh, I don’t know…Mohamed Haneef, say?”

Good question still.

Elsewhere we said:

“ It’s time for Mick Keelty to resign. Or be sacked. Keelty has to go because of how he thinks about the law. He has to go because everything points to his being utterly politicised and his making decisions on political, not legal, grounds as directed by his [then] masters, the Howard ministry. Keelty made, cleverly he probably thought, a Faustian pact with the Devil of Realpolitik. Now he’s been caught out yet again and so we say, yet again:

Do the decent thing at long last, Mick.

And we said this:

“ Sack [him] for misfeasance. Malfeasance. Non-feasance. Abuse of power by a public official. Criminal stupidity. Any of those will do.
Federal Police yesterday released a statement saying the former Gold Coast doctor [Haneef] is no longer a person of interest to them, and they have found there are no grounds to proceed against him. [SBS News]

Well fuck me dead – I’m Foreskin Fred! Yes, after all this time. After all the waste. After all the harm. After all the stupidity and incompetence. After Scotland Yard laughed at the AFP; months after the Queensland Police Service and ASIO both said there were no grounds. After all the subversion of democracy, the courts and the rule of law.

Sack them.

Everything about the carriage of the Haneef affair by the AFP and the government suggests that it never was about public safety; that it always was a political stunt; that it was in fact a considered and calculated decision by the AFP to use the Haneef matter for political ends. As we know from another case, the AFP sought every possible opportunity to test the envelope of the terrorism laws. Keelty, in particular, clearly operates a political agenda, having capitulated under pressure from John Howard years ago. He learned his lesson well and in the Haneef case hung his hat on the re-election of the Howard government. This means that he has lost sight of his actual role, his constitutional – and certainly his moral – obligation to the people of Australia and the democracy they own.

Nothing has happened to cause us to resile from these opinions. Keelty appalls us because he respects neither democracy nor the rule of law, the law being not a tool for repression and control but a safeguard of a vibrant civil society.

Keelty cheerfully acquiesced in the subversion of such safeguards.

  

Even Worse Than Terrorism

Feb 8, 2009 | Australian Values, Democracy, OzPol Values, Terrorism, USPol, Values, War

Even Worse Than Terrorism

“The supreme international crime”

  

Definitions of terrorism in western countries are remarkably similar. According to Chomsky, writing in 2006, official definitions include that terrorism is

“ the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature…through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear,” typically targeting civilians. The British government’s definition is about the same: “Terrorism is the use, or threat, of action which is violent, damaging or disrupting, and is intended to influence the government or intimidate the public and is for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, or ideological cause.”

In Australia’s Crimes Act

“ terrorist act means an action or threat of action where: … the action is done or the threat is made with the intention of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause; and … the action is done or the threat is made with the intention of … (i) coercing, or influencing by intimidation, the government of the Commonwealth or a State, Territory or foreign country, or of part of a State, Territory or foreign country; or (ii) intimidating the public or a section of the public.”

As Chomsky continues,

“ These definitions seem fairly clear and close to ordinary usage. There also seems to be general agreement that they are appropriate when discussing the terrorism of enemies.

But a problem at once arises. These definitions yield an entirely unacceptable consequence: it follows that the US is a leading terrorist state, dramatically so during the Reaganite war on terror. Merely to take the most uncontroversial case, Reagan’s state-directed terrorist war against Nicaragua was condemned by the World Court, backed by two Security Council resolutions (vetoed by the US, with Britain politely abstaining). Another completely clear case is Cuba, where the record by now is voluminous, and not controversial. And there is a long list beyond them.”

This is all very well. But, Chomsky points out, there is an act which is perceived by international courts, beginning at least as early as Nuremberg, as being even worse than terrorism and that is the much higher crime of Aggression.

“ The concept of aggression was defined clearly enough by Justice Jackson at Nuremberg in terms that were basically reiterated in an authoritative General Assembly resolution. An “aggressor”, Jackson proposed to the Tribunal, is a state that is the first to commit such actions as “Invasion of its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the territory of another State,” or “Provision of support to armed bands formed in the territory of another State, or refusal, notwithstanding the request of the invaded State, to take in its own territory, all the measures in its power to deprive those bands of all assistance or protection.” The first provision unambiguously applies to the US-UK invasion of Iraq. The second, just as clearly, applies to the US war against Nicaragua. However, we might give the current incumbents in Washington and their mentors the benefit of the doubt, considering them guilty only of the lesser crime of international terrorism, on a huge and unprecedented scale.

 

It may also be recalled that aggression was defined at Nuremberg as “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” – all the evil in the tortured land of Iraq that flowed from the US-UK invasion, for example, and in Nicaragua too, if the charge is not reduced to international terrorism. And in Lebanon, and all too many other victims who are easily dismissed on grounds of wrong agency – right to the present.

So this definition of aggression takes in the US, the UK and Australia in the invasion of Iraq. The government of the day, in Australia’s case the Howard government, is therefore guilty of the highest war crime of Aggression. No, I don’t think Howard and his mates are about to be sent a summons to this effect. Note, however, that the high-minded definition of Aggression, under which he would be found guilty if tried, was formulated by a US judge, Justice Jackson, Chief of Counsel for the United States, who, sentencing Germans to death at Nuremberg, said,

“ If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us….We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.”

Under this definition Israel would be guilty of Aggression for its recent invasion of Gaza. So could Hamas be guilty of “refusal … to take in its own territory, all the measures in its power to deprive those bands [of rocket-launching militants] of all assistance or protection” and so would Iran for “provision of support to armed bands formed in the territory of another State”.

 

Time to powder up the wigs?