Racism: the thoughts we have when we aren’t thinking

SOME OF my best friends are racists. Well, to be frank, most of them. If I decided to terminate a friendship every time I met a racist attitude, even in a mild, humorous form, I’d soon enough be talking to the dog & no-one else. Racism is woven into the fabric of who we are & where we’ve come from, as Australian as football, meat pies, kangaroos & double-dipping.

The R-word evokes cartoonish images of angry tattooed skinheads storming through the streets, of Southern lynch mobs or hulking Afrikaaner policemen. Sometimes we think of ugly political apparatchiks like Pauline Hanson, George Wallace, or Enoch Powell. These are easy targets, misleading too. The snarling face of tribal hatred is not the one we should fear. The racists we need to worry about wear suits or overalls, ride on the train with us to work, cheer on the sidelines when our kids play sport, saunter up & down the same supermarket aisles. They look like us, because they are us.

Life in Australia varies widely from State to State: football codes, railway gauges, electoral laws, beers, colloquial speech, judicial & educational systems. The only single thing that unites us (the white ones, at least) is the seemingly innate belief that we are better than other tribes. This doesn’t make us unique, but it does mean that the Land of the Fair Go is a bit more, & a bit less, than its popular depiction.

Social media regulars (at least those on my Friend list) tend to be Left, green feminist, with a few esoterics (vegan, wiccan, anarchist) thrown in for balance. Generally like-minded on many issues, we may often assume naively that people we meet & talk to share similar views. Few of us would admit to judging another person by their skin colour or religious belief, & thus we believe those around think the same way. I suspect this is a serious error. Racism seems to be hard-wired into the human brain, more ancient than belief in gods, as deep in its way as a primitive fear of lightning or eclipses.

When the first tribes stopped wandering & started grouping together into villages, for mutual protection, they’d build houses & organise roads, ensure the water supply, then start building walls. Soon enough they’d be glaring over those walls at neighbours or passing strangers. Welcome was seldom what they had in mind. Very few accounts survive from the Babylonian, Egyptian, Persian, Hebrew , Greek or Roman periods of dominance which include greeting & admitting outsiders, especially if their skin colour happened to be different. Massacre or enslavement were the more likely results. All colonising countries since then have followed the same procedure. The British, who over two centuries managed to turn half the world into their own private market, were by no means the worst colonisers, but at the height of their power they were pretty bloody awful. There is no logical reason to believe their arrogant 18th-century certainties have in any way softened in modern Australia. These convictions arrived with the First Fleet (“small floating nightmares where our world began”, as Les Murray phrased it) & have never seriously been challenged. Belief in the intrinsic superiority of our tribe, our language,our skin, have seeped into the national soil, like some sort of cultural DDT, though much harder to clean up. Will we Australians ever be free of this unthought belief? Personally, I doubt it.

Racism ultimately has as much to do with cultural values as with pigmentation. Colonisers believe military force gives them the right to say “These are our values, our customs; we believe them superior to yours, & these are now the values & customs you must adopt.” The more extreme version reads “… or else we will exterminate you. Either way, we don’t really care.” If you’re curious about finding examples of this process, you don’t really need the resources of a major library, or even Google. What is the Hebrew Old Testament if not a template for subsequent colonisers?

I continue to believe there’s something fundamentally decent at the heart of Australian life. If you didn’t believe that, there wouldn’t be much point going on, would there? This is a special place to live; at their best, its people are pretty special too. Yet it’s foolish to pretend there isn’t some pretty nasty stuff bubbling away not too far from our sunny surface.

Racism is seldom a philosophical position that’s been thought through, but rather its opposite, what happens when we numb ourselves into accepting our own innate superiority. We grow up bombarded with imagery that reinforces this belief; unless at some stage we question these images & their source, we will spend our lives mistrusting other skins, other cultures, other narratives.

Calwell, Howard, Abbott, Morrison, & all the other unpleasant bigots who have made memorable contributions to our sad reputation abroad are not mere figureheads speaking on their own behalf. They get away with preaching racial hatred because so many Australians agree with them, & they know it.

.Racism is not a scourge or an illness, nor even properly speaking a mode of thought. Racism is just one more proof (as though one were needed) of our seemingly limitless human capacity for refusing to use our intelligence on things that matter.

When the State commits murder

When the State commits murder.

When the State commits murder

The Pitman Papers

SOME YEARS ago I worked for an elderly scholar whose CV included a PhD in theology, being a highly trained classical pianist, & the ability to teach half a dozen antique languages, among them Persian, Aramaic, Sanskrit. He had some intriguing views on the document we’ve come to accept as the Old Testament – particularly the Tablets of the Law. Having spent half a lifetime translating slabs of ancient text, his insights were not easily dismissed. Exodus 20: 1-17 originally contained as many as fourteen Commandments, he claimed, many of which also appeared in the legal codes of surrounding cultures such as Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite & Assyrian. The absolutes (‘Thou Shalt’ & ‘Thou Shalt not’) are what distinguish the Hebraic codes from the others. What we now call the Sixth Commandment (thou shalt not kill’) could just as easily be translated as ‘Thou shalt do no murder.’

Modern legal codes recognise the distinction between…

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When the State commits murder

Modern legal codes recognise the distinction between killing & murder. Then, as now, the Hebrews were locked in their fierce isolation, surrounded by tribes that feared & hated them, & history’s lesson was that the good times seldom lasted. Sooner or later they’d be faced once more with a kill-or-be-killed situation. Defending yourself, your family & your country against armed invaders must invariably involve taking life. Killing someone because you’ve planned it is another matter. Most legal systems use terms like ‘manslaughter’, ‘involuntary homicide’ ‘premeditation’ or ‘mens rea’ to stress the distinction: killing in self-defence can sometimes be justified, while killing for any other reason is indefensible.

Many societies now regard capital punishment as nothing more or less than judicial murder. One by one the nations of Europe have taken away the State’s right to execute prisoners. Most colonies have followed – though not, alarmingly, the biggest of them all. The United States, self-styled defender of freedom, executes more prisoners each year than all the other Christian countries of the world combined. The Whitlam Government removed capital punishment from the Statutes in 1973. Yet the primal urge for vengeance still lurks. Among Australia’s conservatives I suspect more than a few devoted Old Testament Christians would like to see the hangman back in action, though this is now electorally unacceptable.

As Messrs Sukumaran & Chan have discovered, these old-fashioned Fundamentalists are quite happy to let other countries do the job for them. The disturbing thing is that many Australians seem to feel the same way.

Ours is a bizarre species. So many of our beliefs are mired in paradox. We fight most savagely for beliefs where complete knowledge is impossible. Nobody picks up a weapon to defend the Table of Elements or the propositions of Euclid. Yet anti-abortionists regularly bomb, burn & stab those whose opinions they abhor, even though science has yet to reach agreement on precisely when in the gestation period a foetus may be said to be ‘alive’. Something similar happens with euthanasia. In many parts of the world taking part in assisted suicide can lead to prosecution for murder, & potentially a death sentence. Yet this is a logical absurdity. No one person can ever experience another’s pain, so that we can never say what level of suffering another person can tolerate. States that regularly deny other people the right to end their own lives are most likely to be the sort of States quite willing to take those lives as & when it suits them.

It has yet to be proven that killing a handful of citizens can improve the behaviour of the rest of the community. Communities favouring the death penalty tend to be places where violence is common, the citizens often armed, unemployment & poverty endemic. When your own lives are going down the toilet, it’s natural to let your rulers find scapegoats. Mandatory sentencing, three-strikes legislation, laws about what sort of clothing groups can & cannot wear, & ultimately the death penalty, are different manifestations of the same nasty urge.

In my time I’ve known many rapists & murderers. I covered dozens of trials as a young reporter, even interviewed at some length an old rogue who’d been sentenced to death in 1928 for the attempted shooting of a police sergeant. In the course of an admittedly vagabond life I’ve also spent far too much time in the company of gamblers & poolplayers, men to whom violence comes naturally. Not one person has ever said that being aware of a death penalty would have made them act any differently. Not one. Most crimes of extreme violence happen in an atmosphere of extreme rage, when legal penalties are the last thing anyone’s worried about. In the case of premeditated crimes like professional hits, or the clinical smuggling of drugs, everyone knows what the penalties are, & so they take pains not to get caught.

Putting condemned prisoners to death does not stop these crimes from being committed over & over again. All it does is make some of the community feel a little better, their urge for revenge having been sated.

Whether this need for vengeance is embedded too deeply in the human psyche to be removed is a question nobody can answer. I suspect it is not, but we’ve persuaded ourselves it’s an integral part of human thinking. Giving in to the insatiable crocodile each of has lurking inside our amygdala seems so much easier than trying to control it. All three Abrahamic codes place great stress on punishment & revenge. Only the Greek-inspired doctrines of Jesus, involving compassion & forgiveness, provide any respite. Men like Bush, Blair, Howard & Abbott call themselves Christians, claim moral superiority over the barbaric behaviour of, say, Saudi Arabia. Are they really any different?

The war on drugs is ultimately as phoney & deceitful as the War on Terror. Neither makes any attempt to deal with the root cause of the problem, mostly because that’s the last thing our rulers really want. Killing Saddam & Osama has not stopped a billion Muslims from loathing the Great Satan, & why should we be surprised if quite a few of them are prepared to do something bloody & violent to express that hatred? Major players like Bush & Cheney have vastly increased their personal wealth & that of their friends as a result of the Iraq & Afghanistan invasions. Nor has the judicial murder of those two rather unpleasant Australian citizens stopped the flow of heroin into our cities. A report in The Age recently noted that the man who financed organised the Bali Nine in their ill-fated trip was alive & thriving in Sydney, having providentially won a rather large sum in the lottery & retired from the drug business. Generals get to live out their days in luxury, while soldiers are slaughtered to discourage the others.

There’s much we might have done to persuade our Indonesian buddies to spare two lives. We might have withdrawn our Ambassador; refused to allow air traffic to & from the archipelago landing rights in Australia; frozen all Indonesian funds in Australian banks; suspended all Defence cooperation & financial aid; rounded up & deported every Indonesian student or guest worker in Australia. We did none of these. What we produced was a collective shrug & a torrent of clichetic scapegoats from the likes of Julie Bishop.

There’s blood deep beneath the pores of Johnnie Howard’s grubby little Calvinist mitts. The AFP, though known for its cowboy attitude, would never have gone ahead & alerted the Indonesian authorities without Canberra’s approval. The Bali Nine might just as easily have been arrested on Australian soil, served their time, by now been out on bail & trying to do something better with the rest of their lives. There’d be nothing in writing, of course. Creatures like Howard are far too cunning for that. Yet the little man was forever bleating on about ‘sending a message.’ He certainly managed to send one, though it’s not the message he thought it was. The world has been reminded that white Christians can be just as barbaric as dark-skinned Muslims. As though we needed reminding.

For brevity’s sake I leave to one side the issue of whether these two foolish young men might have received more support had they been blue-eyed public school lads with Anglo surnames. I suspect we all know the answer to that one. Sometimes, as Patrick White noted, Australia is a country you can be homesick for without ever leaving it.

Nobody comes out of this squalid bloodstained mess smelling too pleasant. Every Australian is involved in the deaths of these two men. The question is, What do we do to make sure it never happens again?

— dan moody

When ideas live too long: coal & syphilis

FOR MORE than a century Western medical science treated patients diagnosed with syphilis by injecting a solution of mercuric chloride into their veins. Medicine had long been fascinated by the uses & effects of mercury, which is, among other things, the most toxic non-radioactive substance on the planet. Doctors had noted that rubbing mercury around the edges of syphilitic chancres seemed to stop the sores from spreading. Hardly surprising, given that it killed all the cells, but no matter. Doctors kept on experimenting, until some bright spark in 1830s Vienna came up with the idea of injecting the stuff.

What followed was the arrival of one of history’s most horrible illnesses, General Paralysis of the Insane (GPI). Nobody was ever cured of the pox, though millions died in agony. GPI was often mistaken for epilepsy, at least in its early stages. Sufferers lost feeling in their extremities, eventually becoming partly or completely paralysed in toes & fingers. Seizures were common, as were tics, tremors, frothing. The mind itself dissolved in a hideous fashion. The weird symbiosis of mercury, blood, the syphilis spirochete & the human brain produced something never seen before, or since.

Once penicillin appeared in the 1930s, GPI numbers began diminishing. By 1950 no new cases were being recorded. Syphilis, which had been the 19th century’s major public health problem, much as malaria was in the century that followed, was being steadily defeated, having been woefully mistreated for 100 years because nobody thought to question established practice. Syphilis was by no means confined to the poorer classes. Among those killed by GPI were Nietzche, Baudelaire, Schubert, the Duke of Clarence, & Randolph Churchill, Winnie’s father. My own grandfather, a Melbourne lawyer who died in 1920, having terrorised his wife & five kids for decades, was a GPI victim, according to his death certificate. We’d always been told in hushed tones that Claude Moody was a violent man who died of the pox, not much more being known about him. It was curiosity about his death that led me into the library to find out what I could about this disease. Half an hour’s research will always trump half a century of gossip, at least in some quarters.

Ideas have their time of being useful, before they are superseded by better ideas. That gloomy old sod in Ecclesiastes had it wrong: there are new things under the sun, human ingenuity & curiosity being what they are. Thus sail gives way to steam; the horse is replaced by the car & the tractor; the piano in the parlour becomes the Victrola, then the radio, finally the TV; the typewriter yields its place to the computer, & so on. Ours is an energetic & restless species, forever thinking up new things to do, & better ways to do them. The only time bad ideas manage to linger (and most would agree mercury was a very, very bad idea) is when people or classes of people have a financial interest in hanging on to them.

The use of coal to generate electric power is in my view one such idea. Coal is organic matter, compacted under colossal pressures over many millions of years. In the process of its formation other materials leach into it. These include metals such as iron, lead, mercury. When you burn coal on a small scale, as our Mesopotamian ancestors did while teaching themselves metallurgy, this may not matter too much. On an industrial scale, it does. Antiquity records no cases of Down’s Syndrome, which earlier times called Mongolism. The first cases noted occur in clusters around four principal locations in mid-19th century England : London, Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle. (For some reason our primary school teachers, when they were instructing us about the wonders of the Industrial Revolution, neglected to mention this.) Advocates of unrestricted growth may dismiss facts like these as mere coincidence; modern epidemiology does not. Coal has always been helpful & necessary in small, local usage, but has proved disastrous when burned on a large scale. Coal is good for humanity in much the same way as phythosphora infestans was good for it in 1840s Ireland. A handful of wealthy landowners suddenly found their fields free of people so that they could begin more profitably grazing sheep & cattle. A million Irish men & women died, millions more fled to the New World, but this, in the Conservative view, was a small price to pay.

Australia has sunlight the way the Arabs have sand, or the Canadians water. We should not be burning a single gramme of coal to produce electricity; should in fact have stopped this silly habit decades ago. We have the scientists, we have the manufacturing capacity, we have a huge & growing pool of unemployed needing something useful to do with their lives. Every building in this country should by now be solar-powered. We could also be building up an export market, shipping this technology to parts of the world where electric power could make a huge difference. All it takes is political will & a new degree of honesty among the leaders of the major parties.

Instead, our grandchildren will remember us as those fools who kept pumping poison into the planet’s veins & arteries. Not only to we continue to cling to an idea whose time has long passed, we’re not even very good at it, our electric power being among the developed world’s most expensive. A pox on all their houses!

— d.p. moody

1948, by George Orwell

EARLY IN 1949 the English writer George Orwell received a nasty surprise in the mail. His long-time publishers Faber & Faber had rejected his latest offering, a novel entitled 1948. Author of Animal Farm, Burmese Days , Homage to Catalonia, & hundreds of essays & columns, Orwell was probably England’s best-known writer . His publishers informed him : “It is felt that such a work with such a title, published at such a time , might give offence to certain of our allies.”

The book found its way into print later that year under the Secker & Warburg imprint as Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is how we all know it. Few novels of the 20th century have been more widely read, taught, analysed, discussed. Alongside Huxley’s Brave New World it is held to be one of the century’s defining documents, a terrifying warning, a nightmarish dystopian vision of a future where certain unhealthy political trends present in daily life at the time of writing have been allowed to mushroom cancerously out of control. Perhaps – but is this what Orwell actually wrote?

It may not by now be possible to read this 100,000-word text without preconceptions, but if we can manage to try, we’ll find something we might not have noticed. The only futuristic feature of the novel is the two-way TV screen. Everything else – the rationing, the scarcity of food, the bombed-out decaying cityscape, the shoddiness of mass-produced entertainment & consumer goods,, the poor diet & health of the populace, the monotony of most work, the bitter winter of 1948 which was accompanied by brown-outs & coal shortages, the State censorship & control of language – was what Orwell saw as everyday life in postwar London. He’s not writing about some ghastly imagined future thirty or forty years down the track, warning what might happen if people didn’t start paying attention. He’s saying it had already happened.

Big Brother, it will be argued, of course was broad-featured & heavily moustached, making it easy for most people to identify him with Joe Stalin. Yet Chamberlain also had a thick caterpillar on his upper lip, as did Hitler, Clemenceau, Kitchener, Gorki, Mark Twain & many other public figures of the era. The BB image came to Orwell from the display ads for the Bennett Correspondence College, which first featured the avuncular Bennett the elder saying ‘Let me be your father’, then began using Bennett junior, a rather tougher-looking character whose slogan was LET ME BE YOUR BIG BROTHER. Hardly a reader in England would have been unaware of these ads, even if subliminally. Orwell’s authenticating notions were drawn from the everyday world around him, not from the dim abyss of creative dreaming.

What an author intends to write, what he actually produces, what he says he’s written, & how readers interpret the finished work, are not necessarily the same thing. They may not even be logically connected. Yeats set out to write a poem mourning the slaughter of the Romanov family & produced ‘The Second Coming’, which only one reader in a hundred would now connect with the Tsar & his sad family. Marxist critics claim Frank Baum’s 1900 classic The Wizard of Oz is not a children’s book but an allegory about the gold standard & currency reform, with the Lion representing William Jennings Bryan, the Wicked Witch the big rail & steel barons, and so on. Baum didn’t talk much about this during his short unhappy life, but he certainly didn’t deny the book’s allegorical structure. does it matter? Similarly, did A.B. Paterson or Francis Scott Key sit down to pour out impassioned poetry in response to important current events, or did they say “Oh, must be time for me to write a national anthem, the sort of thing people will love to sing.”

The uses to which a work of creative fiction are put have nothing to do with the author’s intentions – if such things could ever be known. Yet I believe no-one would have been more horrified than Orwell at the way his book has been turned into a weapon of the Cold War. During his lifetime he was hated by Conservatives & Communists alike. How easily we forget.

George Orwell was a Socialist before he was anything else. His essays & journalism tell us as much, not to mention the fact that he fought on the Republican side in Spain’s Civil War, copping a rifle bullet in the throat for his trouble (see Homage to Catalonia). He was a man who believed the world was organised unfairly, by ruling classes who were universally & at all periods of history cruel, selfish, dishonest incompetent. If you want his views on the ethics of Empire, read ‘On Shooting an Elephant’ or ‘A Hanging’. Few harsher critiques of capitalism than The Road to Wigan Pier or Down and Out in Paris & London have ever been written. Animal Farm was less an attack on socialism than an essay on the ways in which power attracts the wrong sort of rulers, who then use that power to become even worse. The reason extremists of all stripes detested Orwell was that he refused to accept orthodoxy & insisted on pointing out holes in official logic.

Nineteen Eighty Four is not the only example of an important text being hijacked by a ruling class bent on solidifying its own position. Some of the most appalling butchery in human history has been carried out by Christians, who seem to forget the teachings of Jesus & let themselves be guided by what Koestler called ‘the vicious desert God of the Hebrews.’ Much of the Koran is mystical, quite gentle & inspiring, if a mite Euphuistic for modern tastes. Yet that baffling text also contains the Hadiths of the Sword, full of threat & bloodshed. Guess which parts of the Book have been taken over by extremists? The Second Amendment to the US Constitution, adopted in 1791 , was quite specific in its reference to ‘a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State’. The lawyers who added these amendments could remember the way Washington’s rabble of fishermen, farmers, shopkeepers & sailors were always ready to grab their weapons & head off to the fight. The Second amendment referred to a new nation struggling for survival in a time of war. Now the US has 32,000 gun deaths a year (roughly 90 a day, the same number as deaths by car) because lawyers & the gun lobby they represent have hijacked the founding Fathers’ cautious idea & turned it into something else.

Many of Orwell’s phrases have entered ordinary speech & will be used as long as the English language survives. Room 101. We are the damned. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever. Orwell believed these horrors were taking place in the England of his day. If he was even half right, they’ve been going on around the world ever since. Few books can really tell us how to live, but quite a few have the capacity to show us where we might be going wrong. Letting our rulers tell us how such books should be read is a habit the human race is going to have to get over. People who insist on telling you how a text should be read will soon enough be telling you what you can & can’t read.

Does the frenzy of Muslim-bashing about to envelop the globe in the wake of the Hebdo shootings remind you of Orwell’s Hate Week? I suggest it should.

Why do They need us to hate Islam?

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

— Robert Frost, ‘Mending Wall’

SHOULD YOU decide to join in the general frenzy of Muslim-bashing & start bullying women in Islamic dress at bus-stations or supermarket queues, be aware that other, more important, things are taking place at the same time. First, you are helping to make Australia a nastier place for all of us than it already is. Second, you will make your victim and her family ten times more determined to embrace their faith than they might have been, and ten times more hostile and suspicious towards anyone who doesn’t. Third, far from celebrating your own power and national identity, you will be revealing yourself and your culture as even more impotent than you might have feared. Fourth, you will be doing exactly what our rulers want you to do. You might believe your actions bold and original, but in fact you will merely be following a script, and a very old script it is too.

The best book I ever read about Nazi Germany didn’t mention Hitler by name, or the National Socialists except generally, until the last 20 or so of its 400-odd meticulously researched pages. I refer to The Pursuit of the Millenium, Norman S. Cohen’s account of witch-hunting in the Middle Ages. I was lucky enough to hear Professor Cohen give a visiting lecture at Queen’s, my Canadian alma mater, and his knowledge of history, languages & people was simply overwhelming. This quiet, white-haired old scholar was as much of a Nazi-hunter in his own way as Simon Wiesenthal; he simply used a different starting-point to get to his topic.

Dredging through five centuries in every major European tongue, with many of his sources pre-dating print, Cohen follows the burning of witches, gypsies and Jews all across Europe from the 12th century onward. In Germany, Italy, France, Hungary , Spain, England, the Low Countries, Poland and England, the same bizarre tale recurs. Plague, famine, flood, war beset the land. Cattle miscarry, crops fail, peasants are driven off their land. Omens and portents abound. Comets are seen, blood-red moons abound, eclipses terrify the masses, fear of Armageddon is everywhere. At such point a leader mysteriously arises. Some are soldiers, some priests, some peasants; all have mystical auras and alarming rhetorical skills; several are plainly mad, but this doesn’t seem to signify. A popular movement builds up. Demands are made, revolt brews, rulers begin to feel nervous. Soon enough a scapegoat is sought. Witches can’t always be found, and gypsies by their nature are elusive. But you can always find a Jew –

Not until you’ve read a dozen or so such narratives does the penny drop; then, because you’ve had to make the effort of puzzling out the book’s thesis, it strikes home all that much more forcefully. Cohen is saying two terrifying things. First, that the horrors of the mid-20th century cannot simply be explained away as a German problem, the product of one demonic individual being somehow able to hypnotise 100 million people into following him down into Hell. Cohen wants us to look at what happened as a Christian Holocaust, an event for which Europe had been rehearsing for 1000 years. Second, he wants us to understand history not as a matter of kings and emperors, generals and statesmen, but as a continuous struggle between competing economic forces. When those forces are in turmoil, he warns, unscrupulous people will always emerge to turn other people’s misery and confusion to their own profit.

The Nazis out there swaggering in their black uniforms aren’t the ones we have to worry about – it’s the Nazi in all of us that allows such things to happen. “We have met the enemy, and he is us”, as the man said in ‘Pogo’ back in the 60s. Hitler and Goebbels didn’t personally pull the trigger or turn on the Zyklon B jets six million times – they had willing helpers, a continent full of them. Demagogues know they can always count on bigotry and anger to do their dirty work for them.

In our time the West has judged it expedient to demonize Islam, and for our citizens to hate and fear individual Muslims. It matters little that the people we armed and financed yesterday (Saddam, Osama, ISIS) turn out to be today’s AntiChrist. What then are we really saying when we criticize Islam?

Muslims in Western countries, like the Jews in Europe’s shtetls and ghettoes, seem to go out of their way to make it impossible for the locals to like them. Their clothing, customs, speech and lifestyles set them apart. They are clannish, breed almost entirely among themselves, show no interest in integrating. They avoid eye contact, and when it is made the looks they exchange are often hostile. They often speak in their own native language, or mangle the local lingo if they’ve bothered to learn it. They are obviously other, and as such summon forth the nastier elements of our basic tribalism.

Opinion is free, knowledge sacred. Before you launch into a debate about those bloody Muslims and their bloody burkhas, ask yourself whether the person you are talking or listening to actually knows anything worth hearing. Pubs and clubs, football grounds and commercial radio stations are full of people telling you what they think. People telling you what they know are much harder to find. What, for instance, do the words Islam and Muslim mean? What are the principal duties of a Muslim? How many times a day are they required to pray, and when? What are the principal differences between Shia & Sunni? What do these words refer to? How many of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims are Caucasian? Is Islam the only religion that assigns a secondary role to women? What do the Koran’s teachings owe to the Bible? To the Hammurabic Code? Why are Islam, Christianity and Zoroastrianism the only major faiths to insist on the existence of the Devil? What do the words burka, niqab, hijab refer to? Are they interchangeable ?And so on – if the person you are talking to has a reasonable idea about most of these issues, a reasonable discussion may well ensue. If not, why bother?

In my view fear of Islam is a racial issue more than a theological one. You can’t really claim to criticize a body of belief if you know nothing of it. Not only do followers of Mohammad dress differently from the rest of us, they almost always have darker skins. Since hatred for non-Caucasians is intrinsic to much of Australian life, & always has been, the nastier side of our national character can be given free rein by referring to ‘Christian values’ or the defence of our traditional way of life – whatever that means.

My contempt for organised religion is well-documented, visceral, lifelong. The men and women I’ve known whose adherence to this or that faith was a quietly personal matter have often been brilliant, honourable souls. But once faith becomes vocal, once the need to belief transmutes into the need to impose, we meet some seriously creepy people. I hesitate to universalise, here as elsewhere, but it’s been my experience that the more loudly a person proclaims his or her religion, using that religion as a shield or banner to defend and justify actions, the more likely that person is to be dishonest, vicious, vengeful, dangerous. Nixon was a Quaker, Abbott and Stalin seminarians. Blair, George Dubya, Howard, Morrison – need I go on?

The horrible events in Martin Place this week have released both the best & the worst aspects of Australian life. Calls for more handguns, or for the bail system to be used as a weapon of vengeance, are predictable, and dismal. Yet the ‘I’ll Ride with You’ movement should give the fair-minded among us hope that there is something worth saving in this muddled old country after all. Before you launch into another hate-filled rant about Islam, ask yourself which particular aspects of Christianity you think are being attacked, or defended.

The axe inside the fascist bundle

ON ANY given day, in social media & the Letters pages of newspapers, we might find a dozen or more references to Abbott & his cronies as fascist. We rejoiced to chant the same vile word about Menzies, LBJ & Gorton as we marched through Sydney streets in the ’60s. Mal Fraser inherited the description in the 70s, as did Mulroney & Reagan during my time in ’80s North America. It’s an omnibus term on the Left, meaning roughly ‘anyone in power who wants to take away things we need & transfer their ownership to a few cronies who already have more than they’ll ever need.’ The Right uses the word communist in much the same way to refer to anyone who believes the state should exact higher taxes on the wealthy & concern itself with issues like free healthcare or education.

Both terms are thus part of the everyday lexicon of political debate, which in our country is more often than not based on abusing your opponent with the nearest available slogan. A pity, really, if inevitable. Both words have precise historical meanings & are wasted by being converted to slogans, in much the same way as words like tragic, horror, icon, or devastate have become meaningless through over-use. I believe the word fascist needs a closer examination if we want to understand why Australia has become such a nasty place over the past twelvemonth.

Fasces (L, sg. fascis) were bundles of wooden rods enclosing an axe. In classical Rome they symbolised the law’s authority & were carried ahead of magistrates by officials known as lictors. My elderly Funk & Wagnalls continues: “The rods were symbolic of the power of punishment; the axe of the power of life and death. The axe was withdrawn when the fasces was to be carried through the city of Rome, because there Romans under sentence of death were entitled to an appeal to the people. In fasces carried before a dictator, however, the axe was never removed.”

When in 1921 Benito Mussolini marshalled his mobs of demobilised soldiers & unemployed youths into a national organisation, he quite carefully chose the name Fascist for his new party. The promise of being part of recapturing the glories of the Roman Empire was a pretty good recruiting technique. (Like Churchill, he was a journalist before going into politics, & thus knew the value of a good headline.) Italy’s is still the model for all subsequent attempts at a Fascist state. You might recognise some of the conditions (listed in a recent meme from the English website ‘The People’s Voice’) that usually apply to a country before we think of calling it fascist:

Extreme nationalism; disdain for human rights; supremacy of the military; sexism; control of all mass media; obsession with national security; the interests of Church & State intertwined; free reign given to large corporations, who also work hand-in-glove with the State’; a crushing of the working class & the elimination of trade unions; disdain for science, the arts, any form of intellectual activity; an obsession with law & order, with the military often taking over police work; widespread corruption, cronyism, patronage.

Many Western countries feature quite a few of these repressive, dishonest measures & have done so for a long time, especially since 9/11. Yet I don’t believe we’ve ever seen them all being put in place at the same time in the way they are now being put in place in Abbott’s Australia.

In the popular imagination the word fascist conjures up images of granite-jawed men in black uniforms & polished knee-boots, doing Silly Walks in unison, or firing off Silly Salutes as they pass a podium. We might think of Il Duce swaggering on a gigantic granite balcony alongside the Fuhrer (a man he detested) or swinging upside down from a lamp-post, battered beyond recognition & lathered in the mob’s spittle. The images are larger than life & always in grainy black & white. Does this gigantic figure really have much in common with pygmy Abbott?

The question of influence should not be overlooked. Most conservatives before the year 2000 had at least partly been motivated to join the Liberal side of things by the example of Sir Robert Menzies. Ming, though not the right-wing monster my leftie parents painted him as, was certainly a man determined to resist change. As long as people knew their place on the Great Chain of Being, as long as the northern hemisphere needed our wool & wheat, as long as we had near-full employment & gentle annual rises in population & productivity, the Menzies style worked, unless you happened to be black, gay, disabled or poor. If you read his famous ‘forgotten People’ speech or any of the statements he made in the House about the Old Age pension or State support for universal education, you realise Menzies is a totally different breed of Tory from today’s gangsters. He may have had contempt or patronising scorn for poor folk, but he gave no evidence of hating them.

Abbott’s spiritual mentor in Australia was not Menzies or any other old-time Liberal, but a man named B.A. Santamaria, a Melbourne Catholic who led the split which helped keep Labor out of office for decades. Younger readers may need to Google; older hands will remember Santa’s bitter, twisted rants every Sunday afternoon on his Channel 9 showcase ‘This I Believe’. The man oozed hatred. Often he became so angry in the course of his diatribe that small bubbles of spittle formed in the corners of his tiny axe-wound of a mouth. Who’d want to be a make-up artist, or a cameraman, I used to wonder.Some of the things he believed would make Alan Jones, Pauline Hanson & Eric Abetz look like moderates; and of course Santa thought Mussolini one of history’s most misjudged statesmen.

Fascism in the textbook definition is classically European, specifically Italian. It’s not too hard to imagine men like Abbott, Cormann, Brandis or Abetz enjoying life as warrior-priests in uniform, ruling over a totalitarian state. This is because deep down, though they have pieces of paper giving them citizenship, we know they’re not real Aussies. With Our Tone it’s all a question of tone. He doesn’t quite get it, & never will. Blokiness, bullying, misogyny, anti-intellectualism & physical aggressiveness have all been part of Australian public life since whenever. When Hawkie or Warnie behave in this fashion (and they do, repeatedly) we shrug, smile, look the other way, say Aw well, they’re just Aussie blokes after all. When Abbott does it, it feels sleazy. At heart he’s a Pom, with all the English class bitterness stitched into his soul. We can never get the sense, as we might with Hawke or Keating, for all their rudeness, that deep down such a man is driven by a sense of the fair go, of egalitarianism.

Many of the repressive conditions listed above, particularly those meant to keep unions, women & the universities in their place, have always been part of Australian life. There’s no shortage of men on Labor’s Catholic Right who’d gladly outlaw abortion, for example. The chances of our turning into a military state are probably fairly small. As a tribe we’re a bit too indolent for that sort of stuff, & most of the time it’s too bloody hot. Unfair or repressive laws tend to stick around for a while, then be watered down the next time government changes hands. The axe in the fascist bundle doesn’t presage bloodshed, as it might in many European countries where they tend to take their politics much more seriously.

Whether you want to call Abbott a Fascist, a Neo-Con, a Friedmanite, a Thatcherite or simply an obsessive little tosser is a matter of choice. The label doesn’t really matter. The paradox of men like Abbott is that, while they yearn for a strong state with control over many aspects of its citizens’ lives, they don’t like the idea of that state making profit which private speculators could well be making. I can see three things vanishing from Australian life if this man & his crew of suited ferals is given another term of office: the ABC, Medicare, & the Old Age pension. Each of these is ripe for speculators; each could be turned into cash cows for media & finance giants; none of them, once dismantled, can ever be put back in place. Abbott’s Axe will remove not heads, but futures.

Is Abbott then a soul-mate of Mussolini’s? Idle speculation, really, & not something we should worry too much about if it means we stop paying attention to the genuine dangers ahead. One thing’s certain. Our Tone can dress up in uniform & swagger about in polished boots for the rest of his days, but he won’t be able to make the trains run on time. Nobody in this country ever has.

The Asbestos Queen & the Law

SOCIAL media users, as opposed to those folk who get their view of the world from tabloids & the small screen, have enormously divergent backgrounds, qualifications, interests, points of view. Some are inspirational, many are original, a few barking mad. Democracy works best with a ‘delete’ button. One topic on which almost universal agreement can be found is the character of Ms Julie Bishop, Mr Abbott’s stylish Foreign Minister. She is hated, no other verb for it. Much of the contumely sprayed her way relates to her years as a lawyer, in particular her attempts to delay settlement of asbestos victims’ claims. This was a hateful, criminal business, in which very rich people got away with murder, not once but over a long period. Bishop’s part in it is not pretty. But I believe attacking the woman she is now on the basis of things she did as a lawyer back in the day is a secondary issue; in fact I’m not sure it’s a valid issue at all.

I find myself in the curious position of having to defend on principle a person whose very existence fills me with loathing. A week or two spent inside our legal system might help doubters understand what it is I’m driving at.

Justice is about trying to find out what has happened, while the law is about persuading the court to accept your client’s version of what has happened. Lawyers represent crooks every day, every week, every month, in every criminal & civil court in the land. Hardly anyone ever tells the truth in a court of law. The victors are usually those whose advocates can stitch together the most believable version of the disputed event or incident. It doesn’t have to be true, just acceptable in terms of evidence.

If people always did the right thing & everyone told the truth, we would need neither courts nor lawyers. Yet the fact is that we do.

As a young tabloid reporter in Sydney & Newcastle I saw dozens of extremely nasty men walk free – usually from charges involving serious physical or sexual violence, including rape – because they’d been able to afford the services of a Bellanto, a Traill, a Crittle. These days celebrity crims keep Chris Murphy’s number on speed dial. Up the road in Queen’s Square in those days, where Supreme & District Courts dealt with fiscal matters, Hughes & Porter were doing the same. Margaret Whitlam’s father Mr Justice Dovey ran the Divorce Courts with an iron fist & a monocle; nobody but the private detectives could be believed there either, & that only because they had to provide photographic evidence. Whoever could afford a QC usually wound up owning the farm.

It was all theatre; it was all dishonest, & only the naïve believed otherwise; it was & is the system we have; & to paraphrase Churchill, it’s an appalling & unjust system, the worst imaginable system, apart from all the other ones that have been tried.

Some will say “Well that just proves it – the system sucks!” I wouldn’t dream of arguing. Alternatives are the Code Napoleonique, Sharia law, or those wonderful People’s Courts organised by Messrs Stalin, Hitler or Mao. Unless & until someone comes up with a better system this is the one we have, & it seems to me better to try to understand how it works than to stand around shouting slogans.

I’ve seen lawyers in rape cases do a lot worse than anything Bishop did, back in the days when harassment of female defendants was still kosher, when magistrates & barristers often had a beer together & went through the racing form together after t he day’s labour. The Hardie group has managed to shift its assets offshore & will probably wind up avoiding most of its legal responsibilities; a Labor government was in power while this was happening, & for all the good they did in preventing this they might as well have stayed home. Is Labor’s legal team more or less guilty of dodgy conduct than Ms Bishop? From the point of view of victims & their families, does it really matter?

The asbestos issue was an inflammatory one. Even those of us who’d never heard of mesothelioma were galvanised by images of Bernie Bantock, chained to his oxygen supply, wheezing out challenges & defiance. Bernie represented the battler in all of us, the little person who feels ignored & trampled by government & big biz. This doesn’t mean that everything he said was true, or that everything Hardie’s & their legal team said was untrue. Personally, I believed every word he said – but this, being my own pre-theoretical intuition based on what I’ve learned over time about companies like Hardie’s, & about the way governments scramble to cover things up before they do anything else, doesn’t make it logically necessary, or true.

We need to make sure we separate what men & women have to do in the course of their professional conduct from what they are as human beings. Take my old mate Noni Hazlehurst, who was incandescent in the 1982 film based on Helen Garner’s book Monkey Grip. Though author & director would deny it, this grim movie glamorised the heroin lifestyle, at least to the gloomy Gothic sensibility of many hormonally miserable teenagers. Do we then claim Noni should never be employed by the ABC or have anything to do with children’s television, just because of a role she played?

Harry Seidler was involved in much legal controversy, including a famed defamation case, during his long architectural career. He won more awards than Bradman, but critics claimed he designed buildings so cold, functional & sterile as to be almost unliveable. I once spent a year or two knocking around Blues Point Towers, and yes, it was a bloody uncomfortable box of a place, the sort of building that wins prizes & depresses occupants. Does that entitle us to hate the man, to deny him his fame?

We’ve just buried the greatest Australian of my era, E.G. Whitlam. His polar opposite was Kerry Packer, who devoted his life to keeping Australians stupid, greedy, aggressive. Packer survived massive coronary failure, lived an extra decade thanks to the intervention of Dr Victor Chang. How many Australians might not have become addicted to gambling, moron-fodder TV, pointless lifestyles, alcohol or other drugs, had Chang not performed his miracle surgery? Does a doctor have a responsibility to his patient, or to the rest of the planet? Do we sniff at Dr Chang’s memory just because he gave a predatory monster an extra few years of life?

What people do in the course of their professional lives is not always who they are. Everything about Ms Bishop fills me with loathing; every word she says makes my flesh crawl. I know crystal meth dealers with more compassion, gamblers with healthier personal deontologies. Go ahead & hate her if you wish. But make your assessment based on the human being she is here & now, not on what court reporters claimed she said two or three decades ago. There’s usually more to a person than their job.

— d.p. moody

Bill Posters wasn’t always innocent

NEWSPAPER posters are a vanishing art form. Our grandchildren will know less about them & the role they played than they will about black & white TV, Betamax, or full-time employment. I’ve been having a little fun lately lobbing extreme examples from the NT News onto my FB page (VOMITING MAN STICKS TO WINDSCREEN or the tasteful CATNAPPERS SHAVED MY PUSSY). Readers from other States seem frankly incredulous that such things are still being published ; in the Top End they do things a little differently & doubtless always will. Posters & their screaming shorthand urgency are a leftover from the days when daily papers had seven or eight editions, & most big cities had two or more sheets competing for the advertising dollar. Electronic & now social media have all but taken over. Will our lives be better & simpler without bellowing news vendors & posters on every corner?

Some countries manage without them very nicely. I don’t recall seeing any during my five years in Canada. This gap in the streetscape, along with the absence of TAB agencies & advertising billboards in the countryside, made the place somehow less intrusive, calmer. A confession: I’ve written thousands of headlines & posters myself, many of them every bit as silly & misleading as the NT examples cited above. But that was years ago, & besides the wench is dead —

Newspaper posters will doubtless puzzle archaeologists. They are a culture-specific, encoded form of language, as mysterious to outsiders as the Rosetta Stone. What would a European visitor make of GAI’s HOT TIP FOR THE SLIPPER or OUR NIC’s SECRET SORROW? You need to have been raised within a specific culture & subjected incessantly to all its tabloid messages to have a chance of deciphering such arcana.

Yet they served their purpose, in their time, in their way. My favourite poster was one I never saw. Only a handful of people ever did, yet every journalist in Australia heard about it. In 1971 Prime Minister William McMahon led an increasingly shaky coalition government, an ageing collection of private school monarchists & scotch-soaked Cold Warriors which history tells us led the Liberal & Country Parties into opposition after 23 years of conservative rule in Australia. The PM was spending a week at home in Bellevue Hills, where his wife Sonia was expecting their third child. One of his neighbours (indeed a boon comrade, patron & protector) was the Daily Telegraph owner Sir Frank Packer, also on his last legs. It had been a big day for Sir Frank at the races.

(My Dad worked for Sir Frank from 1937-63, for half a dozen of those years as editor of the Sunday Telegraph. If the boss’s horse had won, or if he’d collected from the bookies, Castlereagh Street would rock until the small hours. If Sir Frank had dropped a bundle, nightmare was inevitable. He’d storm drunkenly around his building, all 6’6″ of him, demanding the paper be remade, firing terrified copyboys & reporters for looking at him the wrong way, generally behaving as only mad millionaires can.)

On this night Sir Frank brought a large wobbly entourage of frock-coated fops back from the Members’ Enclosure & the drink flowed freely. At some stage the News Editor informed the boss that Sonia McMahon had been taken to hospital. Sir Frank, doubtless chortling maniacally, rounded up a Ludlow operator & had a one-off poster made –

LIBERAL

LEADER’S

WIFE IN

LABOUR

This was duly wrapped around a copy of the Sunday Tele’s first edition, secured with an elastic band, & gently placed on the McMahon front porch, probably around one AM. When Billy Big-Ears came out in dressing -gown & size 5 slippers to collect the milk & paper he damn near had a coronary. His chauffeur was quickly roused, given a wad of cash, told to race around to every newsagent in the Eastern Suburbs & buy back every copy of the offending poster. The penny finally dropped. He’d been had.

If people think this sort of thing could happen only back in the Dark Ages, before the Internet & collateral damage, they’ve probably not been paying attention. It doesn’t matter if you’re insane, syphilitic, alcoholic, violent – if you own a large media empire you have the sort of power others can only dream about, & ordinary constraints of law & decency simply don’t apply. Sometimes Bill Posters can get away with blue bloody murder.

— d.p.moody