Émile Zola

Jun 14, 2012 | Australian Values, Cultural Values, Democracy, Legal, Media Values, OzPol Values, Racism, Religious Values, Science Values, Values

Émile Zola

 

“ It is a crime to lie to the public ”

 

So in the Cimitière Montmartre Sir Roger found one of his heroes.

Émile Zola

That is to say, he found the memorial. He (Zola that is) is interred at the Panthéon.

Why a hero? Amongst his many writings Émile Zola wrote this, which is as relevant today in our political discourse and climate as it was on the cusp of the 20ième siècle, almost exactly — and only — 50 years before Sir Roger’s birth:

“ Ah, what a cesspool of folly and foolishness, what preposterous fantasies, what corrupt police tactics, what inquisitorial, tyrannical practices! What petty whims of a few higher-ups trampling the nation under their boots, ramming back down their throats the people’s cries for truth and justice, with the travesty of state security as a pretext.

 

It is a crime that those people who wish to see a generous France take her place as leader of all the free and just nations are being accused of fomenting turmoil in the country, denounced by the very plotters who are conniving so shamelessly to foist this miscarriage of justice on the entire world. It is a crime to lie to the public, to twist public opinion to insane lengths in the service of the vilest death-dealing machinations. It is a crime to poison the minds of the meek and the humble, to stoke the passions of reactionism and intolerance, by appealing to that odious anti-Semitism that, unchecked, will destroy the freedom-loving France of the Rights of Man. It is a crime to exploit patriotism in the service of hatred, and it is, finally, a crime to ensconce the sword as the modern god, whereas all science is toiling to achieve the coming era of truth and justice.

 

Truth and justice, so ardently longed for! How terrible it is to see them trampled, unrecognized and ignored!
[ … ]
I said it before and I repeat it now: when truth is buried underground, it grows and it builds up so much force that the day it explodes it blasts everything with it. We shall see whether we have been setting ourselves up for the most resounding of disasters, yet to come.

Just insert, for example, Abbott, or Howard, or Liberal Party, or Hockey, or Jones, or Bolt; strike out anti-semitism and replace it with asylum seekers, or global warming, or in earlier days Iraq, wherever they seem appropriate to you.

The French, Sir Roger is convinced, are serious about and cherish and are vigilant about their hard-won democracy, their Rights of Man, their “liberté, égalité, fraternité”.

Do Australians, in contrast, tend to think “she’ll be right”?

Will she?

On War: Notes For My Son

May 27, 2012 | Arts, Australian Values, Capital Punishment, Corruption, Democracy, OzPol Values, Values, War

On War: Notes For My Son

 

…and for yours, and for all of us.

 

Sir Roger is currently in the land of the poppy (the other one) but not near Flanders fields. Yet there are poppies here in the South of France and the whiff of war and bloody conflict is inescapably, faintly, background to all.

And so it was a cold and brassy wind which blew through Sir Roger’s eye sockets and resonated in his skull and rattled the bones of his skeleton when Les recited this poem, perhaps the angriest, truest, most biting and chilling verse of war Sir Roger has ever heard.

  

Notes for My Son

~  Alex Comfort

Remember when you hear them beginning to say Freedom
Look carefully – see who it is that they want you to butcher.

Remember, when you say that the old trick would not have
fooled you for a moment
That every time it is the trick which seems new.

Remember that you will have to put in irons
Your better nature, if it will desert to them.

Remember, remember their faces–watch them carefully:
For every step you take is on somebody’s body.

And every cherry you plant for them is a gibbet
And every furrow you turn for them is a grave

Remember, the smell of burning will not sicken you
If they persuade you that it will thaw the world

Beware. The blood of a child does not smell so bitter
If you have shed it with a high moral purpose.

So that because the woodcutter disobeyed
they will not burn her today or any day

So that for lack of a joiner’s obedience
The crucifixion will not now take place

So that when they come to sell you their bloody corruption
You will gather the spit of your chest
And plant it in their faces.

  

Afghanistan Photos

Apr 19, 2012 | Australian Values, Corruption, Cultural Values, Democracy, Media Values, OzPol Values, USPol, Values, War

Afghanistan Photos

Bad Apples?

or Bad Apple Tree?

 

When will they get it? Or do they get it and try to hide the truth about the Afghanistan photos before anyone notices they’ve got it?
First the disclaimer: To gloatingly photograph yourself with a slain enemy (whether self-slaughtered or not) is obscene.

But then, if the entire situation is obscene . . .  ?

The American political-military establishment — not to mention the Australian and the European/NATO war departments — once again insists that “this is not us”, “this behavior does not reflect our values.”

“This is not who we are,” says Leon Panetta.

“[The Afghanistan photos] don’t in anyway represent the principles and values that are the basis for our mission in Afghanistan,” says Anders Fogh Rasmussen who also said this was “an isolated event.”

Yes, it’s the case of the ‘bad apples.’

The question is, how did these apples pop fully formed – armed and in uniform – into existence? Was it by a miracle of birth, more miraculous than immaculate conception — because apparently they had neither father nor mother nor even country or past?

Of course not. These “bad apples” carry the social DNA of their apple tree: their country, their nation, their society, the situation they have been shoe-horned into by a military establishment that is more concerned with the politics of the game and the public perception of the state of the game than with the human realities of the way war inflicts itself on cannon-fodder.

And the Generals and diplomats¹ think they can sweep the results of their ugly game under the carpet by disclaiming all knowledge and responsibility – while, of course, those who carry the most obscenity and culpability, those who have most truly lost their moral compass, are the ones who initiate, or who endorse, or who neatly fold up their moral sensibility in a shroud and place it carefully out of sight and hearing, in a hole in a dark and hidden corner of their mind.

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL.

What a difference in attitude by the American military/political conglomerate compared to its response to Julian Assange!

With Assange and Bradley Manning the biggest beef was that they had put Americans “in harm’s way”. But we know that they scrupulously had not. As far as we know not a single hair on an American head has been put out of place as a result of the Wikileaks release.

In contrast, the release of the photos by the LA Times is almost certain to cause yet more aggression against Americans and their allies, not just by the Taliban but by others worldwide.

Not that the LA Times should not have shared what it knew — that is in a way its sacred duty.

But that no-one in political/military circles in the US has sworn by hook or by crook to get LA Times staff for publishing the Afghanistan photos, offered their opinion that someone should kill them by contract or “accident”, which numerous high-profile Americans (and a Canadian…oh, and the Alaskan) did about Assange, well, the difference is stark and striking and, frankly, rank hypocrisy and jingoism.

Is Sir Roger the only one to notice this?

 

 

¹So plain the advantages of machination
It constitutes a moral obligation,
And honest wolves who think upon’t with loathing
Feel bound to don the sheep’s deceptive clothing.
So prospers still the diplomatic art,
And Satan bows, with hand upon his heart.
– R.S.K.

Diplomacy: The patriotic art of lying for one’s country.
~  The Devil’s Dictionary

 

Sir Roger: Archived in Perpetuity

Feb 26, 2012 | Arts, Australian Values, Citizenship, Cultural Values, Fame, Freedom of Speech, Media Values, OzPol Values, Values

Sir Roger: Archived in Perpetuity

 

Fame of a Sort?

 

Can Lordship be far behind . . . 

 

Sir Roger has just received a request from Canberra saying that the National Library of Australia wished permission to include ValuesAustralia.com in the PANDORA Archive of Australian websites.

So … Sir Roger … archived in perpetuity . . .

That’s a kind of immortality.

Although, as Woody Allen said,

“ I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.”

Its fame of a sort, one supposes.

It’s better than not being archived, certainly.

So that’s nice.

  

[Sir Roger said yes.]

Is Labor Finished?

Jan 2, 2012 | Australian Values, Cultural Values, Democracy, Economic Values, Legal, Lifestyle & Life, OzPol Values, Values

Is Labor Finished?

 

“A Realm of Despicably Effortless Incompetence”

 

Sir Roger Migently is not angry. He is over it.
According to Friday’s ABC 7.30 Report:

“ The Government is pushing ahead with its demand that dozens of dentists repay $20 million claimed under Medicare for treating people with chronic diseases.

Here’s how it is: Few people can afford dental service, not even preventive.

Just to open your mouth for a dentist will set you back over $70. To have any work done will cost you a lot more.

People who have low-paying jobs or none at all, especially if they have, for example, parental responsibilities, simply can’t afford to go to a private dentist.

They can go to the Dental Hospital (if they happen to live in a capital city) and wait for two or three years in some cases to complete a series of consultations.

Meanwhile, people with missing teeth can lose jobs, miss promotions or, if unemployed, find it extremely difficult to find employment. This is especially serious for people whose work involves standing up in front of people, or managing them: trainers, coaches, teachers, actors, etc. etc. etc.

What can they do?

Until some time ago if you had rotting or broken teeth you could go to your GP and make a case that your dental condition was life-threatening – which it can be because, for example, of gum disease which can be linked to heart disease. Your GP could create a Patient Management Plan which included dental work.

Dentists could, with this Plan, provide their services under Medicare. The problem was that they could claim only one item at a time. Therefore some dentists, if they had to do two extractions in a sitting, chose to space them over more than one date. They weren’t claiming or being paid for work they were not doing.

And even then, if a prosthesis was needed – false teeth – only the prosthetist’s services were covered. The false teeth themselves could cost $2000, which is a lot for an unemployed person.

Older (especially pre-fluoride), less-well-paid Australians often have dreadful dentition. This scheme was the only possible way to stay in the employment game, not to mention to cling onto some sort of quality of life, self-esteem and respect.

It was, frankly a crappy scheme put together by the Coalition years ago. It was, in conscience, the least they could do. And they did the very least they could.

Now the Labor Party thinks even that was too much and wants to junk it.

And on top of that they are punishing dentists with fines for making it possible for that scheme to work.

The most likely reason Health Minister Plibersek has taken this action is as part of a larger strategy to claw back outgoings so that Treasurer Swan can announce his surplus in 2012. This surplus is supposed to prove his economic management credentials (and to poke his tongue out at Fatty Joe Hockey who said Labor would “never deliver a surplus”). But that Labor might win the next election, surplus or not, is a vain hope.

For Sir Roger, this action is the last straw.

With this there is no policy area remaining in which Labor can claim moral or political superiority over the coalition.

On every important issue Labor is in a panicked race to the ethics-free bottom to appease narrow-minded, ignorant, cashed-up bogans who are already, not rusted-on, but welded-on to the coalition.

Gillard today announces a tax-benefit bribe to low-income families with teenage children.

Labor has been in power for three and a half years. They could have done this years ago. Why didn’t they?

They’re in panic.

Do you think immediately, as I did, of Gillard and Abbott (not to mention almost their entire front benches) when you read this from the final chapter of Kevin Dutton’s Flipnosis?

“ If experience teaches us anything, it’s this:
behind the façade of assiduous, fumbling accomplishment there shimmers a realm of despicably effortless incompetence. An imperishable array of faux-pas, cock-ups and howlers that clunks into mortal existence at the whim of the cognitively challenged.”

So who is left to vote for? Who is left with the moral authority to manage a country for the welfare of its people? Not the Coalition ptui! ptui! who lost their moral compass years ago – so who is left who might keep them both honest?

 

Bugger.

Assessment of Current Australian Politics

Sep 18, 2011 | Australian Values, Democracy, Immigration, OzPol Values, Racism, Religious Values, Terrorism, Values

Assessment of Current Australian Politics

 

Executive Summary 

  

Sir Roger has been absent from his adoring public. He has been busy, of course, and apologises from the bottom of what is left of his heart; from what is left of Australian politics by the Australian politicians who have mercilessly and inexorably broken it.

Sir Roger has made a deep study of the state of Australian politics over the last few weeks and the Executive Summary of his report is one line:

Bastards, cunts and ferals.

All of the politicians making public statements in Australia now are liars and dissemblers, desperately competing to be the first to dig Australian politics to the bottom of the political sewer.

They are weak, gutless, fear-driven cowards.

And they all seem to be trembling with terror in front of the toxic opinions of the deranged, ignorant, selfish, self-loathing, self-soul-saving, racist, hate-mongering, xenophobic Christians of Sydney’s west and Melbourne’s army of lip-service christian bogans.

Perhaps Judy Davis said much better (and more kindly) on the 7.30 Report on Thursday night:

“ I just wish that the politicians would have the courage to say what they believed was right, and if necessary walk away, just walk away from all the glory of office for the sake of what they believe is true. And I think that’s what the public wants.

Yes of course it’s exactly what the public wants. But they’re not going to get it.

Are our politicians really the best we can get? Do we really deserve this bunch of cheats and liars, dick measurers and gutless wonders? Are these bastards, cunts and ferals really a true reflection of who we are as a nation? Is this today’s high point of Australian politics?

And now Sir Roger needs to lie down with Johnny, or Jim and try to forget.

 

 

END OF: Assessment of Current Australian Politics