Bowling for Illidan

Cairns and the Daintree (August 07)

2007-11-28T11:30:00.000+11:00

Far North Queensland is the closest you'll get to another country without leaving Australia. The first thing you notice are the local endangered species.

Cairns aspires to the full range of urban pretensions, like this art gallery behind the beachfront string of backpacker dens. No original Picasso here, though there's one on Magnetic Island down south.

Once you've sampled the culture, you can get on to the town's strengths...

The Woolshed is the backpacker sink of the backpacker capital of Australia. Incidentally every hostel in Cairns gives out meal vouchers for them. Still, it's a rare independent traveller who turns down a $10 steak with sides.

The Kuranda cablecar is the local novelty trip, taking you up into the hills inland. The view's not great on rainy days, but they have their charms.

Advertised as a 'rainforest village', Kuranda greets you with waves of suffocating Australiana. Fight past the Japanese vendors and hordes of squalling kids though and the town has its share of attractions, with tourist-friendly signage.

Scorpions naturally glow in the dark, you're assured by the 18 year-old guide. The snake collection speaks for itself, with placards detailing the tens of thousands of mice slain with one bite. This place also has Queensland's equivalent of a Memphis shrine.

Kuranda also boasts the world's largest butterfly house. Be sure to wear white.

Most return to Cairns by the 'scenic railway', an overgrown logging track with occasional three-second photo opportunities. Other than the stop at Barron Falls, that is.

Further down the Barron there's white water rafting. The guides are the usual cast of 20-something males from everywhere but Queensland, under orders to tip you out at the last rapid if you haven't yet fallen off. Point your feet downstream and you'll be fine...

Back in town, you slip seamlessly into the floating population of the young and underemployed. Cairns is Australia's gateway for the youthful legions who come to spend a year boozing their way round the country or pretending to learn English.

You can't visit Cairns without hitting the Reef, even if you did that eight months before. Don't pick a choppy day though, or you'll get a 3 hour lesson in hating catamarans (and another on the way back). Once there I chose the one scuba group that the photographer missed, so there's no picture of me feigning cheerfulness 30 feet under water. But each trip has its silver lining.

Port Douglas is a famous haunt of Hollywood bigwigs. The current tourist draws are Hanks and Spielberg, filming the Pacific equivalent of Band of Brothers in the vicinity. With the talk of backpackers getting bit parts, I was tempted to find the recruitment office and enlist as Japanese Soldier #753. One take of me being shot by US Marines wouldn't have thrown out the itinerary.

Nestled in cane country is sleepy Mossman, whose main attraction is 2 hours' walk out of town under the Queensland sun. But since the road only goes to one place, hitchiking is an option even for the single Asian male.

Mossman Gorge is an outlier of the Daintree, which means it hasn't changed much since the Cretaceous. It evokes contemplation, mostly on why you spent money seeing 'rainforest' attractions around Cairns.

Civilisation , defined by a power grid and mobile phone coverage, ends at the Daintree River. Across lies the world's oldest rainforest, with a sprinkling of rugged freeholders, cashed-up tourists and backpkacker proletariat.

Night walks in the Daintree are good fun, with a decent guide. If you're in Cow Bay look up 'Possum', originally from Geelong but gone convincingly native. He does marvels finding the animals, given pouring rain and 30 tourists with flashlights blundering in tow.

If you won't splurge for a hirecar, the resorts rent pushbikes at proportionally extortionate rates. Even in August it's sweaty work, but an icecream pitstop gets you by. That, and the views.

Coopers Creek is the spot for a mangrove cruise, perhaps the only one in the world with a mountain backdrop. The boat leaves every 2 hours, but don't wait by the water's edge...

The only guaranteed croc sightings are at Harvey's Crocodile Farm down the road, but mid-afternoon there's a fair chance of finding one hauled up the bank, sunning itself and ignoring the tourists. If you're really lucky you'll see one swimming - hope for the big male that found its way back after being relocated to the far side of Cape York.

Every resort in the Daintree bills itself as a 'jungle village', but Crocodylus is the closest they get. It's a set of huts in the forest, with the added comforts of a restaurant, swimming pool and $2/minute broadband. After a day out you're grateful for such a bastion of civilisation, since the rainforest can go quickly from holiday entertainment to Rivera's Green Hell.

A must-visit is the Daintree Discovery Centre, which lets you see the forest at every level. Audio-guides and numbered placards bring you up to speed on 40,000 years of rainforest lore. The forest-floor paths are frequented by cassowaries, which sounds charming till you hear about one ripping out a tourist's stomach at Mission Beach last year.

Between the 4-star resorts, this is a very DIY holiday destination.

Jungle surfing is the term coined by an enterprising local for pushing tourists out of trees and charging for the privilege. Like most Queensland adventure sports, it seems to have no age limit.

One of the Daintree's quirks is how the rainforest comes right down to the sea. A stroll down Cape Trib beach reminds you why you came as far as sealed roads go in this country.

The laissez-faire approach to tourist safety is alarming at first. But you soon cease to think about it, beyond pondering whether to buy one of those 'I survived Cape Trib' t-shirts.

Lethal fauna aside, this is the closest Australia gets to tropical paradise: white sand, velvet sunsets, German med students.

The best patches in the Daintree (i.e. those that escaped the logging companies' attentions) are private land. Of the guided walks I'd recommend the trek up Noah Valley, allegedly the oldest bit of forest on the planet.

Besides the billy tea and scotch fingers, our akubra hat-wearing guide carries artefacts on loan from local aboriginal elders, like this granite pestel with thumbprints worn by generations of the Kuku Yalanji. The whole area being Sacred Women's Place, a dress code applies.

A rainforest swim tops it off, for those who don't mind needle-cold water and sharp rocks. Best visit during the dry season, so you can cut yourself without fear of being a walking laboratory the next morning.

snapshots

2007-11-28T10:14:00.000+11:00

Graduations are a family affair...

so don't wait for nephews

now why did I change jobs??

how to look old at 25

Canberra has its charms - for two weeks in September

But people still need convincing

Still, there's bushwalking...

... overpriced ANU colleges ...

... and sleazy O'Connor bars

Scrapbook: Feel the Thunder Downunder!

2007-03-25T23:02:00.000+10:00

Got my geek rush down at Avalon on Saturday. Standing for 7 hours in wind and rain with a $2 umbrella before heading to laser wars with the kung fu club isn't everyone's idea of a good time, but it has its kicks.

Fun for all the family

After all, it's a birthday party

Aother act pushing the line between 'cool' and 'insane'

Old soldiers never die...

...they just flame away

Good things come in twos

Strategic lift then...

... and now...

Good Copy

2007-02-25T21:43:00.000+11:00

If there's a greater military sin than reinforcing defeat, it's starting another war by the side. Small wonder that the thought of George 'Warrior' Bush stoushing off with Iran even as he pours more troops into the black-hole of Baghdad has set off rumblings in the Pentagon. If his plane makes it back to the US in one piece, Dick Cheney can look foward to recalcitrant generals who also consider 'all options on the table'. Fortunately for Cheney, in America this means that they resign, showing a better grasp of the rules in a democracy than the current White House crowd.

Tehran for its part has been busy joining the 500-mile high club, starting its own reverse-Temptation Island and cultivating powerful friends. On the last point, there's a new book out on the long tradition of Sino-Iranian relations - which includes Persian rulers bolting to China after a thrashing by foreign invaders - catering for the post-9/11 history-as-politics vogue. Witness the latest effort by a right-wing politician to beat the War on Terror into an ill-conceived analogy. Of course we can't expect them to canvass the possibility that perhaps, just maybe, this shouldn't be thought of as a war at all.

Closer to home, the pundits are still trying to convince us that Kevin Rudd is too smart for his own good. Rudd has perhaps been a bit too 'full of himself' these past two weeks, giving Howard an opening for the sort of ad hominem battle in which he floored the last two opposition leaders. But I stick by my optimism that the voting public will judge their alternative leader on his policies before his poindexter looks.

Gongxi, gongxi, gongxi ni...

2007-02-18T23:03:00.000+11:00

Chinese New Year has come and gone with the usual cultural significance - tossing noodles in a bowl and playing SuperMario Strikers with the cousins. Plus the plagearised gif from China History Forum (tradition is tradition).

And no, BFI isn't ending its days as another sterile travel blog. Redundant current affairs commentary will be back shortly...

Reflections

2007-01-31T20:54:00.000+11:00

I've never been punctual with holiday memoirs. But three-plus weeks chained to a Melbourne desk is good motivation to sketch some thoughts on my fortnight in the Whitsundays and Townsville/Magnetic Island.

North Queensland is where frontier meets tourism. An economy that revolves round monied city-slickers is run by men who have spent their lives on farms or boats. My Airlie Beach hosts have lost four dogs on their property over the years: one to a snake, one to a poisonous tick and two to feral dogs, which tried to grab a third pet under Rosalind's nose as she sat with it on the porch. She herself has twice been bitten by paralysis ticks, while in the month before my arrival Magnetic Island saw two near-fatal encounters with a death adder and a jellyfish respectively. You have to don a stinger suit just to get in the water - saltwater that is, since the fresh stuff has crocodiles in it.

The greatest health threat is the ferocious sun. The locals are deep-tanned, no soap opera buff but a tough, leathery quality. Tour guides claim without humour that their soft-skinned charges are the best insect repellant, and a fortnight of watching mosquitoes and march flies pick out Europeans inclines one to believe them. In those two weeks I witnessed two cases of heatstroke, and went so brown myself that dad nearly drove past me at the airport. The Townsville ferry terminal runs ads on loop exhorting you to stay in shade between 10 and 3.

It's a great place to be aware of human frailty before nature, whether you're swimming against a current on the endless Reef or halfway through a bushwalk in 30 degree heat. You get a sense of nature encoraching on humanity rather than the other way round; island resorts have wallabies bounding down their lanes in the middle of the morning, while the regional metropolis recently had to remove a crocodile from its beachfront. The rhythm of daily life, human or otherwise, is dictated by the merciless sun. Townsville, a city of a 150,000, is practically a ghosttown before 5pm. This languid pace carries into the hours of darkness, when the heat retreats but the humidity stays; Townsville's main shopping street is deserted before eight on a weeknight. Half the bus routes don't run on Sundays.

If it's starting to sound like a poor holiday destination, be assured that North Queensland pays in spades for the discomfort. Jump into the ocean almost anywhere and there's coral, with everything from clownfish to turtles swimming in front of your nose. An hour's hiking may take you through a half-dozen types of forest, with a postcard view of green islands and blue sea round every corner. It's a place that rewards the adventurous, with a cast of colourful characters to boot. The New Zealander who led our kayak tour did water safety for Lord of the Rings and Baywatch. The first mate on our yacht claimed to have worked in every Irish pub in Amsterdam. The closest thing Airlie has to a museum belongs to a guy who hauls 15-foot sharks onto motorboats for a living.

There's a whole culture in motion on the Queensland coast, comprised of 20-somethings from across the First World following the backpacker route down from Cairns or up towards it. Most are on a 12-month working holiday visa or the nearest thing they could get to one. Many are travelling alone, but the trail is so well defined that familiar faces drift in and out of an existence marked by communal transport and zero-privacy resorts. Over two weeks I managed to chat with English, Irish, French, Germans, Swiss, Swedes, Belgians, Mexicans, Norwegians, Canadians, Japanese, Koreans and (most common) Kiwis. The hospitality industry sometimes seems run by foreigners, for foreigners: boat crews, waiters and desk jockeys speak in a kaleidescope of accents.

All in all, the Deep North makes a great trip for the energetic, and for those keen to glimpse what a wide and fascinating continent this really is. Don't take my word for it though, have a look for yourself (travel link below), or on flickr.

Homeward Bound (Jan 7)

2007-01-13T23:17:00.000+11:00

Maggie is the land that time forgot

Save for travel schedules

What fool leaves paradise...

... for civilisation?

Sundays are roaring in Townsville

Closeups of the RAAF base are easy to get

If you look more like a Japanese tourist than a terrorist

All good things must come to an end

And in Queensland, it's a quiet one

Walks and Wildlife (Jan 6)

2007-01-13T22:34:00.001+11:00

Accommodation at Base is... basic

On Maggie, one takes the bus...

... to walk.

You'll see skinks...

... more skinks...

... and curious flying hoppers

Don't take a wrong turn

Unless you really like the company

Koalas are less exciting in the flesh

The reptiles are more personable

If you can find them

And if you can stand them

With birds, you're lucky if you get this close

Koala country (Jan 5)

2007-01-13T22:34:00.000+11:00

"There's a nice picnic spot!"

Seek...

And ye shall find...

The wildlife varies, from narcoleptic marsupials...

... to Japanese models...

... to foolhardy Melburnians

It's a good place to sit and think

Or try to spot your house

And discover jungle ruins

D-Day came late to Magnetic Island

Though from the state of the defences, you wouldn't know it

Ah, so that's why it's called Horseshoe Bay

Walking's fun, but you're thankful for the bus

And for a place to cool off

The Deep North (Jan 3)

2007-01-13T22:33:00.000+11:00

It's rushhour in Bowen

Tourist attractions are thin on the ground

The past hangs heavy in country towns

Still, old and new can coexist

Townsville is a little busier on the eye

But still the ghost-town of the tropics

The wildlife has been tamed, mostly

And the museum is worth a look

Especially for history nerds

Though it's a hobby with a touch of sadness

And harrowing for the participants

They're proud of their Cook in Townsville

And keep nice gardens

To give rest to the fallen

Magnetic Island beckons

Though swimming there isn't advised

In North Queensland, late-night shopping isn't even a concept

Bringing in the New Year (Jan 1)

2007-01-13T22:30:00.000+11:00

Eight hours into 2007 and already we're racing

Though it's not much work for passengers

Mexicanos and Gringos, plus one

It's good to be back on dry land

Especially when you know what's out there

And what you think is out there

Though you should never take people's word for it

Sometimes you need to sit back

And appreciate the natural things

Silence is golden

But company's good too

To the Reef and Back (31 Dec)

2007-01-13T22:00:00.001+11:00

Morning swims are more interesting on the Great Barrier Reef

Even if you need a lecture before you get in the water

Feeding time is like a scene from Finding Nemo

It really is fish city down there

The Tokyo 0f fish cities

Though the real thing is less colourful...

... it still takes your breath away

Especially when you're diving with a snorkel

You think you can swim forever

But eventually, you'll be glad to see this

Sometimes it's lonely out at sea

Sometimes you enjoy the solitude

And if it's New Year's eve, well...

More coming

2007-01-06T22:56:00.000+11:00

I did take photos after 30 December, which will go up once I have somewhere more comfy to work than a backpackers' internet cafe. Since my holiday ends tomorrow, that won't be long.

Meanwhile there's good news from the Year 3000-something...

All at sea (30 Dec)

2006-12-29T14:55:00.000+11:00

Travelling third-class isn't advised

But the stops make it worthwhile

Such as the finest beach in the world

If you can quash your ego...

... and stick to wildlife-spotting...

... you'll be well rewarded

You meet a nice crowd on Whitsunday cruises

Of course, they take all comers

And you're not told about the Flying Dutchman

Meanwhile, my brother was turning 21.
The password is "happyfeet". It says so on his myspace account.

Rainy Day (28 Dec)

2006-12-29T14:38:00.000+11:00

Flickr'd.

Much to tourist chagrin, it isn't always sunny in the Whitsundays

Though the wet has its own charm

And an air of mystery

Long Island, WS (26-7 Dec)

2006-12-27T18:36:00.000+11:00

Flickr'd.

Long Island has the full accommodation range

From brand-name resorts...

...to budget town...

...which in its favour is peaceful

The locals don't stir during the day

But as for madmen and tourists...

A Whitsunday Christmas (25 Dec)

2006-12-25T16:12:00.000+11:00

On the first day of Christmas Santa brought to me...

... a four-week old pony

Cedar Creek Falls are less impressive in December

But there's no shortage of water in the area

In the Whitsundays, it seems you can see forever from anywhere

If you're scared of a dip...

... there's always croc-spotting...

... or rainforest walks

They grow them big in northern Queensland

And live in style

A sight for sore feet

Because as any sensible creature knows...

... there's no place like home

Home on the range (24 Dec)

2006-12-24T19:08:00.000+11:00

Day 3 and I'm already picking up backpackers

Welcome to the one lettuce farm in the Whitsundays

Married, with children

In the Whitsundays, even lettuce is called 'green coral'

It's called hydroponic because it involves water

"Yes, I support sanctions, but consider the Iranians' perspective..."

Arrival (22-23 Dec)

2006-12-23T23:00:00.000+11:00

Hamilton Island airport remains under construction...

... but who can blame them?

74 islands, out of the blue

Still, always read the fine print

Bushwalking with a difference

Up Dent Passage...

... a Daydream stopover...

... and then Abel Point

A bit more crowded than Cook found it

For those who missed the first sign

The local fauna gets more alarming

Fortunately, there are options for the less adventurous

Airlie is a backpacker's town...

... with all the conveniences

The Whitsundays - a new angle on life

More desktop confessions - I've joined the herd and put these on flickr as well...

'Tis the Season

2006-12-21T23:11:00.000+11:00

Working life and blogging mix poorly, and then you throw in Christmas holidays...

Actually the posts may start flowing again once I'm in the Whitsundays and have happy-snaps to stick up, instead of pretentious commentary on some issue you've already read about.

If they don't, well, back in the New Year.

And the winner is...

2006-12-04T21:30:00.000+11:00

(c) The Age

... the Boy from Brisbane, as anyone with the slightest nose for the electoral winds would have predicted. Of course, one would have backed the rookie this time three years ago on the same basis, and we all know how that experiment panned out. Coming a week-plus after the Baillieu flameout, I'm getting queasy from the deja-vu.

Watching Rudd on tonight's 7:30 Report, it was the man's presentational flaws that came across first. He lets his intellect block his personality and has a habit of dodging questions with policy statements, important though those may be. And for a guy who did unscripted theatre, his lines seem awfully rehearsed. But the more I listen to him and read about him, the more substance I find to this maverick in Australian politics - a man who chose a different party from his parents and has some experience of the outside world.

I was annoyed to see Kerry O'Brien stoop to the harping on Rudd's perceived nerdiness. It's a patronising attitude towards Australian voters, who it's assumed won't elect an otherwise qualified man simply because he lacks rugby shoulders or isn't seen at the cricket. What I see is a hard-headed social democrat with a career outside the Labor Party and a truer foreign policy lodestone than anyone on the other side of the House, including the incumbent minister. In short, just what the country needs right now.

He still has to be a leader, though. Rudd's talking tough - in his clipped intellectual fashion - but one needs more than talk to handle a government that fights bare-knuckle and a caucus stuffed with factional prima donnas. He'll have to break some bones if he's going to be more than Latham with a nice disposition and some years in the diplomatic corp.

For Kim Beazley, learning of his brother's death after being dumped by the party he served for 26 years, it's been what the media has with trademark sensitivity dubbed Black Monday. Condolences, Kim. I think it was the right outcome, but still a darned hard way to go.

Today in History - Bombs Away!

2006-11-30T23:08:00.000+11:00

Another one for your bizarro history scrapbook. In a war full of hare-brained schemes, the idea of breaking Japanese morale by dropping the ashes of their slain youth on their heads takes the cracker. Credit where it's due though for a chivalrous gesture, making up for the later decision to roast their civilians by the hundred thousand.

And there's another intriguing reflection on today's politics -

in spite of the fact that Australia recognises herself as the 49th state of America... Kawai told Japanese newspapers [in 1942].

Four More Years

2006-11-26T20:50:00.000+11:00

There are two ways for people who care about state elections to spend polling night. You can watch the numbers roll on TV while blogging, trying to beat the professionals to some unique insight on the unfolding drama. Or you can watch them in a pub drinking beer with fellow politics wonks. Going with option 2 proved an inspired choice, since it helped break the blogging drought I've had since the last legislative horse-race. So here I am, competing with a hundred other desktop psephologists to dissect Victoria's Choice.

It's not the thrilling stuff of US mid-terms. Granted, 'modest swing to the Liberals' doesn't have the same ring as 'Republicans get their asses handed to them on a plate'. But I'd hoped for something more than a mirror image of the 2004 federal election, with the opposition kept two cycles from a realistic bid and the incumbents left with a wafer-thin majority in the upper house. The foretold Day of the Minor Parties was a non-starter, with the Greens failing to come through, the Democrats consigned to oblivion and People Power nowhere in sight. Family First's relatively respectable polling just shows that other groups are waking up to the 'values' niche that Howard has been working for a decade. All told, the LegCo results were an uninspired outcome for the biggest constitutional shakeup in the state's history. Instead this election's 'historic' character was pinned to it being the second time Victorian Labor has won three consecutive terms. My heart beats faster...

More noteworthy was Labor's ability to hold regional Victoria, or rather the Libs' inability to gain traction there. It's the latest instance of a much-remarked trend that sees country voters drifting from the traditional conservative parties, while battling suburbia becomes Liberal heartland. The driving factor? Reaction against change - neoliberal economics on one side, multiculturalism and 'political correctness' on the other. You want tariffs and subsidised services? Don't vote Coalition. You want government that will roll back black-armband history and lock up the Muslims? Then do.

Taking this further, perhaps the state-federal divide really is hardening into a fixed feature of the nation's political landscape. The major parties have staked out their territory, and a party trying to climb the other hill has to struggle either against urban masses fearful of their identity and lifestyle being eaten away by globalisation, or a hinterland resentful at being cut adrift by coastal metropolises increasingly linked to the outside world. It can't be coincidence that in the face of the Bracks' government's failures, country Victorians confirmed their 1999 decision to throw out the party which sank tax dollars into Melbourne landmarks pitched at city sophisticates and tourists.

Admittedly the parties aren't helping themselves, with their penchant for eleventh-hour dumpings of seasoned leaders in favour of glamorous neophytes (think Quinn-Flegg and Beazley-Latham). Yet another lesson driven home on Saturday; Baillieu's song-and-dance routine was fun for a while, but it proved what US Republicans learned earlier this month - dominating the campaign doesn't translate into votes. It certainly can't blot out this litany of errors:

- Refusing to shave your share portfolio, when your nickname is already the Toff from Toorak.
- Refusing to discuss a coalition that your party needs to govern.
- Promising to scrap the state's renewable energy scheme while the federal Libs scramble to deal, or be seen to deal, with global warming.
- Promising a river-killing dam, in lieu of said renewable energy scheme.
- Promising free public transport for the age-group that is so pleasant to be around on trains and trams.
- Trying to outbid an incumbent, in-surplus government on tax cuts.
- $285 million costing holes.
etc.

The Libs definitely seem to be getting the worse of the talent drought, having turned over management in 7 of 8 states and territories within the past half-year (all 8, if you go back a full year). Coming so soon after the Queensland rout, Saturday's outcome and the Bracks-Costello sniping that followed shows what to expect from Australian politics over the next decade, assuming that Canberra and the High Court don't bludgeon the states into irrelevance: federal-state jousting as a substitute for policy differentiation. It might be a healthy balance, but for COAG's inability to get work done on health, water or indeed anything.

Small wonder that the only cheering in the James Squire on Saturday night was for 'Four More Beers!'.

Like Sheep Among Wolves

2006-11-05T23:55:00.000+11:00

The GOP ascendancy has spawned an anthropological smorgasboard on the strange creatures who populate the American right. The latest offering is Andrew Denton's God On My Side, in which Australia's least-flappable journalist tours an NRB convention to discover how these infamous Evangelicals really think. After sitting through this 90-minute parade of nice people explaining with absolute conviction that we're living in the End Times, that Islam is the devil's counterfeit and that separation of Church and State is not part of America's constitutional heritage, born-and-bred progressives may think that Denton has done Al Gore one better on the 'scariest film you'll see this year'.

Having been raised in an offshoot of this culture, I didn't learn much from Denton's suave but somewhat bland feature-doc. I would have liked to see more time spent on the relationship between faith and politics, which is what really concerns those who aren't offended by what evangelicals believe per se but do care once it starts affecting the rest of us. Australians haven't yet had to deal with drives to bring creationism into classrooms or amend state constitutions to ban gay marriage. But with federal money earmarked for chaplains in state schools and a church-based party holding the senate's balance of power, we ought to start thinking about the use of worldly power to advance God's Kingdom.

It's surprising that Denton didn't push his subjects on this question, given the mounting evidence that faith and politics haven't mixed well under the evangelical presidency. David Kuo's expose of the GOP party machine's real attitude towards its Christian base has been followed by scandal upon scandal among the leaders pledged to bring morality back into government. Throw in the run-of-the-mill misgovernance that has pissed off the non faith-based community, and one would expect a hint of disillusionment on the religious right with the Bush administration and the Republican congress.

Indeed, one can discern in the polls a growing sense among 'moral conservatives' that they've been led by the nose - that the Republicans of '94 and the 'Compassionate Conservative' of 2000 have proved devoted to nothing more than the political (occasionally sexual) bottomline. Concerns have been raised that Christ's elect have gone sheeplike into the wolf-infested den of politics without heeding His caveat, viz. to be shrewd as snakes while doing so (Matthew 10:16 - as said, I was raised on the Word). We're now hearing the old refrain that the Church's lack of spiritual grounding has led it to follow wolves in sheep's clothing, who talk the talk of values while walking the political lowroad, which currently involves painting Democrats as pro-paedophile or as miscegenating Playboys.

So the average Republican strategist has reason to fear David Kuo's call for Christians to take a 'sabbatical from politics'. One can picture their party's base walking out through the various -Gates (Abramoff, Foley, Haggard) that have opened in the GOP edifice over the past year. The danger is not that these people will morph into Democrats on Tuesday but that they won't turn out to vote Republican, at least not in the numbers that clinched victory in 2000 and 2004.

And yet, 48 hours out from D-Day, word has it that the Master Strategist sleeps soundly. You don't have to be Karl Rove, or to indulge in conspiracy theories about his perfidy, to understand why the GOP can still depend on the constituency that Bush staffers reportedly mock with four-letter expletives. It's fun to watch partisans of the 'moral majority' tie themselves in knots defending each new impropriety - to the point of extolling hypocrisy as a virtue - but at the end of the day the values crowd is unlikely to accept the alternative, whatever the intellectual arguments. The tribal character of US politics is what got the GOP into power and it's the only thing, under current circumstances, that will keep them there. Just listen to the House Speaker, he of the cybersex-coverup:

"If I fold up my tent and leave," Dennis Hastert [said], "then where does that leave us? If the Democrats sweep, then we'd have no ability to fight back and get our message out."

It's depressing that this bankrupt, purely partisan appeal may underpin another Republican victory. But that's the only way by which America's evangelicals will stem the tide of other-people's-choices threatening their self-conception, and fight their war against the judiciary and sundry other organs of atheistic government, notwithstanding all those Biblical verses about obeying authorities that the Lord puts over you and rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's. To paraphrase the elderly Texan speaking to a polite but mystified Andrew Denton, they know what they know what they know, and no number of scandals or mismanaged wars is going to change that.

So while half of America will treat Tuesday's vote as a referendum on Iraq, the other half is likely to view it as just another battle for the soul of God's own country (did you think that was New Zealand?). With the row over Family First preferences still smouldering, Australians could observe and learn a thing or two. But in true national character, most of us will be watching the races instead.

Postscript

Of course, not everyone approves of how we Aussies spend the first Tuesday in November.

We interrupt this blog due to technical difficulties...

2006-10-31T21:31:00.000+11:00

Blogger is having some issues with publishing and image-uploading. So no more pretty pictures/potential copyright infringements for the time being.

Let the Universe Burn!

2006-10-29T20:34:00.000+11:00

Welcome to heaven, all you SF-reading, internet-dwelling cryptofascists.

Iraq: Old Wars and New

2006-10-23T22:07:00.000+10:00

Judging from the Baghdad bodycount, we politics nerds aren't the only ones getting excited over the US mid-terms. Some are calling this Iraq's equivalent of the Tet Offensive, as insurgents ratchet up the violence with the imputed goal of spooking US voters into putting the screws on their government to withdraw troops. Left and Right have summoned the ghosts of 1968 to trade insults and offer more proof that historical analogies best convince people who don't read history. Perhaps the only thing Vietnam references are good for is highlighting how high the stakes are today compared to 1975, a claim for which I'll cite no less authority than Henry Kissinger.

Well, that's not quite true; they show how little attention we give to history, even when it's constantly rubbed in our faces. Want to know what happens when you focus on bodycounts rather than institution-building as a measure of success? Or how gratuitous use of violence can galvanise opposition and hurt your cause more than all the bombs of the enemy? Forget the news, you can watch any grainy documentary on the Vietnam tragedy and wonder at how zealously we repeat mistakes.

At least the leaders of that era were prepared to call policy failure what it was and develop an exit-containment strategy, albeit after dropping more bombs on Indochina than were expended in the entire Second World War. The leaders who got us into today's god-awful mess seem like deer caught in the headlights, too transfixed by the Iraq catastrophe to do anything but shout down naysayers and beg the electorate to stand fast on quicksand. By this point though, the Freudian slips are coming thick and fast:

"If [Beazley] wants to see civil war then all of the international troops should move out of Iraq and you'll certainly see civil war on a grander scale if that happens."

Oh, so there already is a civil war?

Still, one has to feel a little sorry for the Coalition of the Dithering. This time there are no clean solutions, the 'troops-out' and 'stay-the-course' options both being political chimeras. So much we've been told by those participating in the first concerted effort to think Iraq through beyond the tactical level. The Iraq Study Group's co-chair has warned that there will be no silver bullet, but are western publics ready to be told there are only bad and worse options, all of which promise ongoing political pain?

If only, four years back, we'd got Mary Kaldor's memo on the 'new wars' of the post-Cold War world. There will be no more clear battle lines, no more signatures on the decks of warships to bring things to a close. Instead there will be embittered ethnic groups and networks of tech-savvy fanatics fighting over the wreckage of failed nation-states, left by the hand of overmighty nation-states and exploited by rogue nation-states - all beamed into your living room 24 hours a day.

So four decades from now, the archives of the 'Iraq War' won't close with footage of the last chopper leaving the roof of the US embassy. All there will be is endless scenes of suffering people and the long, slow death of Baghdad, which hasn't swum in this much blood since Timur decorated it with pyramids of severed heads.

To blog or not to blog...

2006-10-22T22:46:00.000+10:00

This has been my longest blogging drought since BFI started. Stick around though, inspiration is coming.

Enemy at the Woodward-Gate

2006-10-02T23:07:00.000+10:00

It's a rare journalist who can claim credit for two national scandals, the second of which carries his name. Five weeks out from Mid-Terms and with the ink on the leaked NIE barely dry, Hurricane Woodward is shaking the administration to its roots, despite the Bush PR team's best efforts to look blase and spin furiously at the same time. The book has already sold a million copies on the promise of insider gossip, some of it old meat (George believes in himself more than good advice), some red (everyone from the generals to Laura wanted Rumsfeld fired). With Baghdad under lockdown and Condi asking the Saudis for help, Bush needs some inspiration from the last successful Republican war president, or at least a stoic quip - 'if there is a place worse than Hell, I am in it'.

The difference between Bush and Lincoln in hell, of course, is that Bush put himself there. As far as one can tell from media blitz on a yet-unpublished book, State of Denial confirms what I've suggested is Bush's flaw as president -

John McCain was asked whether Mr Bush had ever asked him for his views on Iraq. "No, no, he hasn't... As a matter of fact, he's not intellectually curious.'

It's bad enough that the US is being run by a man convinced his job is to lead and not think, at least not when things start going wrong. But when he creates an institutional culture in which no one else wants to think, you end up with self-muzzling, dysfunctional government. No one in this 'MBA presidency' seems to do anything under delegation, whether managing hurricane relief or the War On Terror. Perhaps the most disturbing of Woodward's insights is into how the generals running the mightiest military machine in history ended up too cowed to do their jobs -

Abizaid's old friends were worried sick that another Vietnam or anything that looked like Vietnam would be the end of the volunteer army. What's the strategy for winning? they pressed him.

"That's not my job," Abizaid said.

No, it is part of your job, they insisted.

No, Abizaid said. Articulating strategy belonged to others.

Put these tidbits with a raft of other anectodal evidence - like Eric Shinseki's treatment - and you're left with an eerie image of Stalin purging independent-minded generals from the Red Army before June 1941. Stalin took about six months to recognise his errors, twelve to put his house in order and another thirty or so to win the war. Bush is approaching the same length of time and hasn't yet resolved to sack the guy whom everyone in the know seems to blame for Iraq.

Inevitably, a book that shows Bush improvising war and dissembling to the public has brought out the lynch mob. When Woodward wrote nice things about the White House, he was feted by everyone right of Ted Kennedy and Atrios. Now he has an 'agenda', just like the 'agenda' to leak the NIE and the 'agenda' of the ex-Bush officials whom Woodward interviewed. At the next press conference, someone should ask Tony Snow how many ex-Clinton officials have come forward to denounce their administration's incompetence. Not that it would make much difference. By this point, I doubt the Bush cheersquad will ever accept that smoke means fire and not just a reason to close your eyes.

After all, the administration has been coming clean over Iraq, albeit by lowering the bar for communication -

Since late last year, Bush has spoken more openly and directly about the nature of the enemy in Iraq and the scale of the challenge in building a peaceful and democratic nation. Snow himself quoted Bush at length at a press conference in Chicago in July saying, “We’ve lost obviously a lot of lives here in the homeland, and we lost lives overseas.” Snow added that Bush had been telling the American people that “it’s a war that’s going to outlive his presidency.”

Well, that makes it all better.

Down under, the Cole Inquiry's final day was another victory for truth in government, with our new Trade Minister leaping into his portfolio and contracting an instant case of AWB-related amnesia. In fairness to Warren Truss, a bribe-greased trade policy review was the least of the day's misdemeanours, if you thought concentration-camp jokes were reserved for South Park -

the extent of the scandal was revealed in the email by executive Daryl Borlase, who said Iraq wanted to build 2000 concrete bunkers, ostensibly to store grain, but "the bunkers will have cement walls and floors so they are actually designed for burying the Kurds -- under the cement?"

"They intend to build them with fumigation capability so the mind boggles as to whether they are fumigating insects or any other pest that pisses them off," the email says.

It continued: "On a serious note, they will have cement flooring ..."

Saddam is currently on trial in Iraq for the genocide of 182,000 people in a 1987-88 campaign against the Kurds.

And if you remained an optimist through that choice revelation, you would have been treated to the sight of AWB's (ex)MD crying in the witness box.

As they say, the truth ain't pretty...

Addendum

Tim Dunlop has an interesting take on the media's cognitive dissonance over politicians.

The Book of Jihad (no, it's not the Koran)

2006-09-23T13:44:00.000+10:00

Update

What inspires people to stick up political rants on low-traffic blogs with no relation to or sympathy for the subject matter? It's happened to me, and now to a friend who unwarily used the phrase 'Pope and Islam' in a post title. At least my guy had a case to make about discrimination in Malaysia, even if he did it on a post about our club barbecue. Jeremy's visitor managed to mention the Pope, but only once amidst the screeching about oil independence from "Islamonazis" (are those like "commie-nazis"?).

Flatten the world, and you get the lowest common denominator...

Update 2

See what I mean?
_________________________

Ever since the Pope put Islam and violence together, the media has been awash with religious men commenting on what other religius men had to say about other religions. Some, like the Anglican vicar given a 2500-word column in today's Australian, have some interesting points to make. The only one I'd take issue with is his (unsubstantiated) assertion that the medieval Catholic doctrine of holy war derived from jihad. Cultures are quite capable of cooking up fanatical ideas independently, as I hope comes across in this piece dashed off for my Crusades subject a couple of years ago.

Personally I'm more interested in what al-Sulami had to say about the Franks - an 'existential threat' to society from within, against which people have to be roused from complacency to defend themselves, and with whom no compromise is possible. Now where have I heard that before?...

________________

Al-Sulami’s Kitab al-Jihad ('Book of Jihad') is the first extant call for a Muslim military response to the Crusades. Delivered as an oral sermon in the Great Mosque at Damascus six years after Jerusalem’s capture by the Franks, its’ immediate context is the establishment of the Crusader states in the face of the Muslim world’s continued apathy. The Kitab al-Jihad is therefore a key text for study of the evolution of Islamic responses to the Crusades, although its value to the historian is vitiated by the fact that its two surviving manuscripts are incomplete. More specifically, al-Sulami’s qualifications as a religious scholar make his text valuable to understanding the construction of the Islamic ‘holy war’ concept; to this end, it provides more insights than the accounts of Arab historians or political leaders more familiar to historians of the Crusades.

The Kitab al-Jihad is clearly intended to mobilise a pan-Islamic military campaign against the Franks. Al-Sulami draws his listeners’ attention to the invasion and occupation of Islamic territory, and exhorts them to express Muslim solidarity through an armed response; his Damascene audience is told that the Franks’ assault on Palestine and the cities of the Mediterranean coast constitutes an ‘attack on your country’, and that a counteroffensive is a matter of the ‘defence of yourselves and others of your brotherhood’. While certain references in the text indicate that al-Sulami’s message was delivered to a high-ranking audience - men with the authority and resources to mobilise the country for war – it is addressed to Muslims as a community, in the same sense that Pope Urban’s sermon at Clermont was preached to a noble audience but addressed to Latin Christendom. Al-Sulami cites Islamic history and the hadith (sayings attributed to the Prophet Mohammed) to demonstrate that jihad is the collective duty of all the faithful. This goes against the then-prevalent view of the Frankish intrusion as a regional affair, a matter concerning the local emirs or at most the Seljuk rulers. Al-Sulami’s rebuke to his audience for continuing to rebel against their punishment may be a direct reference to the absence at that time of any substantial Muslim response to the fall of Jerusalem.

Indeed, al-Sulami’s emphasis on a collective Muslim duty to fight the Crusaders stems from his perception of this phenomenon’s peculiar nature. To him it represents no ordinary trial, but ‘a punishment the like of which [God] did not warn you [Muslims] with before … a matter of serious vengeance, destructive extermination and removal’. Allowing for rhetorical hyperbole, this message still contrasts sharply with other contemporary Muslim writers’ characterisation of Frankish aggression as mere banditry or revenge-seeking. Al-Sulami was apparently alone among his contemporaries in recognising that the Franks were waging a religious war against Islam. He actually uses the Arabic term jihad to describe the Crusaders’ behaviour. They are not a passing menace, but a fundamental threat to the integrity of the Muslim world that must expunged by armed force.

Al-Sulami’s analysis is significant not only for its novelty and perceptiveness, but for its implications for Muslim behaviour towards the Franks. At the turn of the 12^th century the Muslim Levant was a political patchwork created by the erosion of Seljuk authority. The wider Islamic world seems initially to have been prepared to accept the Franks as a new element in this mix, albeit a novel and unusually violent one. Christians had after all coexisted with Muslims for centuries in the Holy Land (though in a subordinate position and forbidden to bear arms). It is only once the Franks are constructed as a religious aggressor that expelling them becomes imperative. Al-Sulami brands them as ‘enemies of God’ and ‘blasphemers’, thus elevating them from ignorant savages into active enemies of the Faith, who cannot be bargained with or simply ignored. Our knowledge of the evolution of Frankish-Muslim relations would be further improved if we could study how al-Sulami developed views so distinct from those of his contemporaries, but we are unfortunately ignorant of his sources of information.

Having constructed the Frankish presence as a matter of holy war, al-Sulami’s sermon is necessarily underpinned by a religious theme. The Crusaders are a ‘warning from God’, a punishment for Muslim sin and complacency. At the same time they represent a test, a chance to repent by obeying God’s rulings as set out in the Qur’an – specifically by conducting jihad against the Crusaders. However, waging war against the infidel is not in itself enough; if one does not ‘desire God’s face’ by an act then it is hypocritical, and impliedly no better than the behaviour which attracted divine wrath in the first place. Therefore practice of the internal jihad – ‘rooting out’ bad qualities, submitting oneself to God’s will – is a prerequisite for success in the external jihad against the Franks. The spiritual state of the individual jihadists will determine whether God grants victory or whether ‘He will make you fall into the hands of your enemy’.

There are repeated and striking parallels between this elaboration of holy war and the Crusading idea preached by contemporary Popes: the attribution of catastrophe to divine judgment, the calls for religious solidarity, the emphasis on personal piety as integral to the military endeavour. These similarities become more intriguing when one considers that the concepts of jihad and crusade developed independently of each other. It is highly unlikely that al-Sulami was familiar with the content of Pope Urban’s sermon at Clermont, if he knew of it at all; conversely the Crusaders (initially, at least) knew nothing of the centuries-old Muslim doctrine of jihad. The kitab al-jihad provides a useful basis for a comparative study of the two holy war traditions, aiding critical analysis of their main features.

Take for instance the common approach of caricaturing the enemy, whether by railing at the ‘great tyranny’ of the Franks or by conjuring images of Turks defiling Christian altars and murdering Christian babiess. Another means of dehumanising the religious foe is by stripping them of autonomous motives or capacities: ‘(the Franks) acted as they did because of (you Muslims’) blame of God’ (sic), and it is God who ‘increases them in great tyranny’ (i.e. gives them victory). Portraying the enemy as nothing more than an instrument of God’s chastisement undermines attempts to understand or interact with them as fellow human beings. The fact that such interaction did occur – take for instance the arrangements reached between the Templars and various Muslim factions, or the chivalrous exchanges between Richard I and Saladin – highlights a gap between the theory and practice of holy war that is easy to overlook from a 21^st century viewpoint.

Comparative analysis is also useful for placing religiously-defined war within its sociopolitical context. Al-Sulami’s message went unheeded for over a decade; it produced .no fruit until it encountered fertile political ground, specifically when Muslim rulers (Zengi, Nur ad-Din, Saladin) found jihad a useful concept to support empire-building agendas. This is not to deny that these leaders may have been motivated by genuine religious conviction, but the timing does provide insights into the influence of extra-religious factors on the practice of ‘holy war’. At first glance, the immediate and dramatic response to the Clermont sermon might seem to be a contrasting experience. However, by drawing attention to the sociopolitical context of late 11^th century Western Europe – overpopulation, a drive to expand Papal influence, the closing of domestic outlets for knightly aggression – al-Sulami’s example helps us appreciate the role of these extrinsic factors in the crusading concept’s development.

Comparative analysis does show up some differences between Christian and Muslim holy war traditions. For instance al-Sulami uses the image of ‘sleep’ to rebuke his Muslim audience, whereas papal criticisms of Latin Christendom’s were generally focused on its internecine warfare. Another point to note is that al-Sulami’s God is a more prominent and vengeful character than the deity featuring in crusading sermons. The differences are however certainly less remarkable than the similarities. As one writer has observed, the great value of al-Sulami’s text is that it shows how certain basic ideas associated with holy war were common to medieval Christendom and Islam, so often considered alien cultures in the context of crusades studies.

Pontifex Tactlessness

2006-09-17T13:10:00.000+10:00

The latest uproar over a perceived slight to Islam isn't going quietly into the night. One week on it's spawned its own wikipedia entry, a slew of rants throughout the wingnut blogosphere and obssessive mainstream media coverage. A speedy resolution hasn't been helped by Muslims round the the world again deciding that the appropriate response to barbs about their faith's peacefulness is to bomb churches and issue death threats.

Nor by the fact that this time the offending observations came not from a Danish newspaper but rather the head of the Catholic Church, albeit wrapped in a theology lecture (full text here). It's unfortunate that the Pope couldn't make a point about faith and reason without a reference to jihad. And he couldn't even do that without quoting that bosom buddy of medieval Catholicism, the Byzantine emperor -

Naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur'an, concerning holy war... [he] addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached". The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable.

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature... But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.

This passage amounts to the following claims: a) spreading faith through violence is irrational; b) Islam teaches violent conversion; c) Islam teaches an irrational approach to faith. The Pope's speech has to be read as tacit endorsement of all these propositions. You don't use quotes to illustrate a point unless you believe the quotes to be true in substance, even if you find their expression 'startlingly brusque'. And you can't seal yourself off from controversial assertions by putting them in the mouths of medieval monarchs, or by protesting that the statements were tangential to your main point.

The issue here is not whether the claims about Islam are true. The Pope is an official figure and as such doesn't have the freedom that he enjoyed as Joseph Ratzinger, Professor of Theology, to comment on the teachings of other religions. He has the right to say what he wants, but also responsibility for the consequences, especially when pointed observations about the religion in question have a history of generating violence. This isn't 'political correctness', it's political common sense. The pontiff can no more wash his hands of this than politicians who accuse foreigners of stealing jobs can divorce themselves from a xenophobic backlash in the electorate.

Pope Benedict would have done better citing the example rather than the ideas of the said Byzantine emperor. Manuel II may have argued that Islam is disposed to violence, but he and his Muslim interlocutor were debating the issue with words rather than swords (not that Manuel had much choice, at a time when the Turks were tightening the noose round his beleagured 'empire'). One might have expected some progress on interfaith relations over the intervening six centuries. Instead they seem to be heading back to an era captured by the opening scene of Alan Savage's Ottoman, in which Manuel II's son is presented with the severed, uncircumcised penis of a Hungarian knight as proof of the fate of the last crusade.

Postscript

For firebreathing secularists, the natural response to this sort of thing is a pox-on-both-your-houses. I stick by my angle: the trouble isn't with religion per se, but with trying simultaneously to be a theologian and a politician.

Today in History - well, you know...

2006-09-11T23:59:00.000+10:00

With every blogger in the world posting their opinion about the significance of September 11, I doubt I have anything to add. At least, nothing I can think through in the five minutes before I hit the sack. I might put up some links to the less self-important, more perspicacious assessments I come across these few days.

Thirty Years On

2006-09-11T23:12:00.000+10:00

The 30th annivesary of Mao Zedong's death has come and gone in China much as the 40th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution did four months ago - with a deafening silence, at least from the organs of state. But politics aside, perhaps we really don't yet have the distance for a discriminating appraisal; as one of Maos' colleagues remarked about the consequences of the French Revolution, it's too soon to tell. And as for any historical giant, a just verdict would require a book, preferably in several volumes. So here I'll just sketch some thoughts on the man whose face will always dominate 20th century China.

Westerners, accustomed to think of Mao in terms of a totalitarian trilogy with Hitler and Stalin, are baffled by the status that he still commands within China. We resort to conventional social science explanations - China's lack of anything comparable to the 'de-Stalinisation' that the USSR went through under Kruschev, nostalgia for the simpler and less unequal society that Mao supposedly presided over, etc. It's easier than conceding that, beneath the official bombast about kicking out the imperialists and allowing China to stand up, there flows a stream of genuine emotion. Foreigners still don't grasp the depth of humiliation and suffering inflicted on China during the century 1840-1949, and the credit accrued by the Communist Party and Mao specifically in bringing that century to an end.

Despite what was said above about hindsight, Mao was clearly the man for the hour. Steeped in traditional education and raised in the hinterland - barring one short trip to Moscow, he never left China in his entire life - Mao had an empathy with the country that the foreign-educated Sun Zhongshan and Jiang Jieshi seemed to lack. As a young man he was scholar enough to disdain the unwashed masses, but he matured to tap what's been called the deep-seated chiliastic impulse of the Chinese peasantry: that fiery underground river ready to burst forth and consume the old order. All it needs is a messiah, and in Mao it found one par excellence, a man who said that the People could achieve anything and who sought continuous revolution until the promised earthly paradise was achieved.

Small wonder that two and a half decades after his cult was officially disowned, Mao has been inducted into the folk pantheon that still flourishes at the roots of society (despite the best efforts of Communism). Mao built his political philosophy on social contradictions, yet was himself a contradiction, a product of the 'feudal culture' he spent his life trying to destroy; a man who quoted Chinese history and literature as much as Lenin or Marx, and spent his last bedridden days poring over the Chinese equivalent to Pride and Prejudice.

In material terms, Mao's record was less benighted than popular myth holds. His aversion to Soviet-style centralism preserved China from the worst of the economic distortions that brought down its superpower neighbour. Collectivisation and the Great Leap Foward were unmitigated disasters, but a balanced assessment must note that a) there is a dearth of evidence to prove the scale of mortality, in particular textbook claims about the 'worst famine in history'; b) the experiment coincided with some of the worst natural disasters of the century; c) the degree of economic damage is ambiguous, especially given that it's unlikely any strategy could have maintained growth in China's circumstances in the late 1950's. Nor should the overall failure of Maoist developmentalism obscure its achievements, such as the vast improvements in general health or the creation of an industrial base from virtually nothing.

It's safe to say that Mao had no small opinion of himself or his place in history, as apparent in this oft-quoted poem from his Yanan years:

But alas! Qin Shihuang and Han Wudi
Were lacking in literary grace,
And Tang Taizong and Song Taizu
Had little poetry in their souls;
That proud son of Heaven,
Genghis Khan,
Knew only shooting eagles, bow outstretched.
All are past and gone!
For truly great men
Look to this age alone.

Thus he came to commit the deadly sin of conflating his personal vision with the good of those he governed, or (worse) with the shape of history. This exagerrated sense of self led Mao to inflict greater misery on the laobaixing than any god-potentate of old. It led him to destroy men of greater integrity than himself, or who had at least as much legitimacy as Mao did - Peng Dehuai, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping come to mind - and to strip millions of their humanity on the basis of arbitrarily-defined 'class'. It led ultimately to the apocalypse of the Cultural Revolution, tearing apart China's social fabric while the Americans were putting men on the moon.

For very large numbers of Chinese for the foreseeable future, Mao will remain a flawed hero. But for me at least, the final judgment on the Great Helmsman must be that he steered China onto the rocks.

Today in History - the Eye of Goliath

2006-09-03T02:02:00.000+10:00

Some may question the politics of a blogger who profiles two Muslim victories in two weeks, but the Battle of Ayn Jalud is one of those rare events that can be called a pivot of history. What the Chinese failed to do with gunpowder, flamethrowers and repeating crossbows, the slave-soldiers of Islam achieved: halting the greatest conquerors the world has seen. Historians still argue over the merits of the Mamluk victory - Wellington would have called it a 'damned close-run thing' - but they did it again a year later at Homs, ensuring that the Mongol frontier stayed in Syria rather than ending up in Egypt or France.

These days, it's hard to imagine an age in which Muslim warriors routed a foe who cut western armies to pieces. Small wonder that the memory of Ayn Jalud had Saddam Hussein proclaiming, even as Desert Storm II was gathering over his head, that the Americans would find a conquest of Baghdad the sort of Pyrhhic victory that Hulagu Khan did eight centuries before. The battle freed the Mamluks to mop up the remants of the Crusader states, but it also put them between Christendom and the yellow peril, ensuring that the Pope would avoid the fate of the last Caliph (rolled in a carpet and run over with a few hundred horses). One wonders if young men in Baghdad today, taking on the might of the US military with RPGs and homemade bombs, ever pause to consider that Western Civilisation may have been saved by Muslims.

Today in History: Le Roi Soleil

2006-09-01T23:45:00.000+10:00

Death is a great leveller. As he lay wasting away from gangrene, it's doubtful that Louis XIV took comfort from the fact that history would remember him as the Sun King. More likely he was contemplating the ruins of his bid for European hegemony, joining a list of despots who failed to mix iron and clay into a New Roman Empire. Where the strongmen failed, democracy and markets have succeeded, which might encourage one to see some upward progress in human history. Unless, of course, you believe that the twin rebirths of Israel and the godless European Union herald the coming of the Antichrist...

Having failed to shift France's borders despite haemmorhaging the country's blood and treasure for seven decades, Louis earned his epithet by making his court a byword for extravagant consumption and sycophancy. Towards the end, perhaps, he took a look at all the insects hovering round his great light at Versailles and wondered what was the point. It would have been a profound insight, since for all the Sun King's glory, today no one really gives a s_t. Be warned before you spend your life accumulating fame and power: once you're dead, the only people who will care are history-addicted bloggers (and possibly their readers). And the only immortality lies in satirical cartoons.

If you do like historical conjunctions, Louis certainly chose to exit in style, expiring on the first day of spring, a few days before his birthday and a few years ahead of another long-reigned absolutist monarch, at the opposite end of the Eurasian landmass. 1715 was also the year that the would-be assassin of Louis's great-grandson (Louis XV) was born. Robert-Francois Damiens failed to make the regicide list, but at least earned the distinction of being the last person in France to be drawn and quartered, a privilege retained by Freeborn Englishmen a few decades longer.

And this happens to be the day that World War Two started...

'A' is for Appeasement - and Absurd Analogies

2006-08-27T20:05:00.000+10:00

For a paper that champions the integrity of history-teaching, The Australian plays fast with the past. Last Monday, the Age published a long-overdue piece on how the War on Terror has sent abuse of historical analogies into overdrive. Right on cue, the Oz devoted nearly 1200 words in its Friday editorial to tarring former ambassador to Israel Ross Burns as a new Chamberlain, eager to sacrifice Israel to "anti-semitic fascists" for the sake of Indonesian goodwill. It joins a long list of right-leaning broadsheets competing to prove that Godwin's Law applies to the print media as well as the internet.

So why is thinking twice about bombing Muslim populations equivalent to offering up Czechoskolovakia on a plate? You wouldn't know from the Oz editorial, which seesaws from the usual waffle about 'appeasement' to Iran's nuclear program and then back to the Nazis. Like them, Iran and its Hezbollah clients hate Jews and preach violence, so our response must be the same. Never mind that the Hitlerite threat was confined to a nation-state and its military assets, while the Islamist one spreads like a virus through neutral populations. We know there's no room for moral ambiguity or tactical subtlety with either, because they both won support from - wait for it - 'progressives', 'elites' and 'the Left', or so The Australian tells us.

And we haven't even got to Mr Burns' argument, supposedly the subject of the editorial. It's hard to make out amidst the ad honimem attacks beloved of the Murdoch press (apparently Mr Burns' diplomatic career has been "undistinguished", so we needn't respect his opinions). You might wonder why this paper's editors think they can convince readers that they're more qualified to analyse Middle East politics than a man who was ambassador to both Syria and Israel, until you realise you're not supposed to think when reading it. But since the Oz is such a fan of telling the past As It Was, let's have a look at what Mr Burns actually said on the 7:30 report -

'it's been a very common and most prominent theme in government responses for some years now... the first reaction is to say, "Well, doesn't this represent Israel's legitimate right to defend itself?" When I think there are many other complexities in the situation.'

'[There] should be more to our policy than just simply one of uncritical defence of Israel... we 're only emphasising a very small range of points, most of which are very much echoing points made by Israeli politicians and they don't see us as trying to maintain a more balanced attitude to a crisis...'

'...the Indonesians are not necessarily going to be impressed that we have such an uncritical attitude towards Israel and... in particular, at the very great challenge to the future viability of Lebanon, which has been posed by events in recent weeks.'

'the debate is impoverished... it's getting to a point now where our whole standing in the wider context of the Middle East, including the Arab world, is starting to suffer... we identify with one side and that stops us being able to play a more constructive role when and hopefully if such a context develops in the future.'

Ah, now I see how Burns is "offering up Israel to Hezbollah"; how he wants to see "Australia turn its back on a Kadima government"; how he's really trying to aid the terrorists.

How blind I was...

Update

Ross Burns' character assassination has been drowned out by the hysteria over 'Jihad Jack' Thomas, with our favourite right-wing rag again leading the charge.

Meanwhile, the Herald Sun has revived another cause celebre of local 'conservatives' - valourising the two pastors panned for preaching a Muslim conspiracy to take over Australia, by completely misrepresenting what they (and the judge who ruled against them) said. You can listen to Andrew Bolt, or if you're the thinking type, you can read this dissection by a friend of mine over at Boltwatch.

Today in History: White Sun Over China

2006-08-25T22:37:00.000+10:00

These days it takes a diplomatic gaffe for the world to remember the Republic of China. But the anniversary of the Kuomintang's birth amidst the death throes of Imperial China is a good point for historical reflection, at a time when the US is struggling to plant democracy in another ancient cradle of civilisation. The twelve-rayed sun stood for the era of progress that the party would usher in to replace the ancien regime, based on parliamentary constitutionalism. Instead China got a bloody mess, in which the KMT survived and came out on top by reinventing itself as a Leninist party prepared to crush every obstacle to power. Having made itself the state and put the country under 'political tutelage' in the name of building a better China, it ended up as a reactionary kleptocracy that lost out to a more efficient Leninist party. This party in turn made itself the state...

The KMT and CCP are still too much alive for us to call history's judgment, but the verdict may well be that they managed between them to make 20th-century China an object lesson in how revolutions devour their own children. Or, more precisely, are devoured by new revolutions.

Today in History: The Sword of Allah

2006-08-20T13:06:00.000+10:00

Fields of glory may not be a pretty sight, but they make good history. Today's bloodbath is the Battle of the Yarmouk, in which Khalid ibn Walid's ragtag army tore apart the Roman legions and laid the ground for all the grief of the Middle East thirteen centuries later. Few images can inspire today's young jihadists more than that of the Caliph Omar riding into Jerusalem in conqueror's fashion (on camelback). The Byzantine authorities had long since scurried, taking with them the True Cross, won back in blood from the Persians and carried personally by the Emperor down the Via Dolorosa just seven years before.

Yarmouk opened by the floodgates to the Islamic tide, which reached its highwater mark over a century later with another infidel rout. It would have been small consolation to the Emperor Heraclius that his Persian enemies suffered the same fate in a near-contemporaneous battle, one so valourised in Arab mythology that the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980's is still known as Saddam's Qaddisiyah. More proof that in the Middle East, history is now.

Further reading - a step-by-step guide to the Battle of Yarmouk.

Today in History: Long Tan

2006-08-18T22:06:00.000+10:00

Working a six-day week tends to push posting out of the daily schedule. I'm compensating by launching my 'Today in History' series, which will spruik anniversaries I think noteworthy or which happen to fall on days when I can't find time to write something original.

Today that happens to be the Battle of Long Tan, which with Gallipoli and Kokoda makes up the ANZAC holy trinity. One could argue Long Tan was a less exceptional engagement than its fellows, being a typical case of Vietcong assaults chewed up by allied firepower. It is remarkable for Hanoi's tolerance of westerners arriving on its soil to commemorate a communist rout, so long as they bring foreign currency. Some Aussie veterans are even choosing to settle there, as an exotic and presumably more friendly alternative to Queensland.

On a less cynical note, the recognition that Long Tan is giving vets both here and in Vietnam shines brightly at a time when war commemoration is overshadowed by geopolitics, or by the far Left mantra that soldiering is inherently reprehensible. And, in a rare case of history trumping politics, Aussie vets will get to fly the old South Vietnamese flag over war memorials and get federal funding for it too.

Scrapbook: You think you're a fan?

2006-08-10T23:14:00.000+10:00

This just goes to show, there's always someone out there more hardcore than you...

In more good news for nerds, Futurama reruns have bumped Channel Ten's latest reality TV disaster. But don't hope too much - they're still out-rated by Big Brother.

1421 and All That

2006-08-07T14:50:00.000+10:00

Australia's history wars may take on a whole new dimension. While the education minister was writing her speech about bringing Captain Cook back into our classrooms, Four Corners was busy exploring the claim that the Chinese got here first. Last Monday's program was nothing new to afficionados of 15th century history, but for most viewers it would have been a startling introduction to Gavin Menzies and his notorious book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World.

Not that it's first time this revisionist tsunami has hit the local news. Hu Jintao's announcement to federal parliament during his 2003 visit that Australia was discovered by his people didn't escape notice. More recently, Melbourne University's decision to fete Menzies in April drew a fair amount of comment. Overall though it's provoked surprisingly little discussion for a theory that, if accepted, explodes the traditional narrative of antipodean history (as usual it's fallen to New Zealand to take the lead). Especially given that Menzies' claims go beyond discovery to encompass Chinese colonies from Port Philip Bay to Darwin and miscegenation of the Aboriginal population.

It's these sort of assertions that have sent experts worldwide into apoplexy, in one case to the point of dragging Menzies' publisher before the UK's Consumer Complaints body for marketing the book as 'non-fiction'. Menzies' Melbourne lecture featured an extraordinary tirade from the head of the university's history department, reading from a prepared list of points to show that the man is a fraud (the MC cut him off after number one). Four Corners tactfully declined to broadcast that part, but they did interview the professor in question as the local rep in a string of academics striving to outdo each other in disdain for Menzies' theories and, in most cases, for the man himself.

Both lecture and program gave salutary insights into why academics often lose in the court of public opinion. At the lecture, Professor Wheatcroft's bluster fared badly against Menzies' poise and the array of presentation technology used to make his case. But that's why we have investigative journalism, which probes through the stage management with which Menzies has (by his own admission) cloaked this pseudo-academic enterprise.

Four Corners revealed the dapper ex-Royal Navy commander as a charlatan, who conveniently forgets blackmail threats against his critics, admits that he doesn't check evidence and defends himself by citing the number of books he's sold. The program was denounced by Menzies as a hachet-job, an accusation that may sting with the stench of Forest-Gate still in the air. But given the chance to defend himself, Menzies managed to appear not merely a crank but a fraud and a white-collar thug, traits born out by his tactics against critics and presence on the English vexatious litigant list. Any hope that he makes up for this with academic rigour is dispelled by a visit the official 1421 website. 'Sophomoric' is a generous description; it would certainly never have passed my VCE history class.

I knew that both Menzies' claims and his academic method were dubious, but to see the man himself articulate them on Four Corners was surreal. I think he lost me with the claim that the Chinese fleet sailed up the Thames and presented Henry V with a set of underwear, an event that has left no surviving records (at least, none discovered yet). Or maybe it was when he waxed lyrical about Marco Polo touring Hudson's Bay in the 1200's. Or maybe it was one of his converts enthusing about the remains of 45 junks washed up on the New Zealand coast by a tsunami, itself caused by a meteor. The same meteor that wiped out Chinese settlements around the New World, leaving it free for the Europeans to colonise a century later.

Four Corners pertinently observed that since 1421's publication the claims have steadily ratcheted up, from the 'discovery' of the Liu Gang map early this year through to the Henry V and Marco Polo revelations. Not surprising, since by Menzies' own admission this has been a marketing exercise from day one.

"[I] hoped that there would be lots of critics there, and they'd all lambast it, and it would make excellent publicity. And therefore, I'd be able to clinch a sale for my book. So, really, it was a public relations exercise on my part, to hopefully create a lot of controversy and sell literary rights."

Of course there's nothing wrong with hypingrevisionist history, so long as it's not bunkum. But the fact that Menzies' case is an academic sieve raises serious ethical questions about his PR spin, especially given the lengths that his publisher went to in bolstering his credentials to write on Chinese maritime achievements (like incorrectly claiming on the dust jacket that Menzies was born in China).

The irony is that this marketing blitz targets the very demographic that ought to be most sceptical, and with great success. I knew about the criticisms of Menzies and his book before I bought it, but priding myself as a world history buff I felt a need to have it on my shelf. In other words, my intellectual ego drove me to subsidise the quack history that I've been denouncing in this post. Lest I be further hoist by my own petard, I should stop wasting time on things like blogging and sit down to dissect Menzies' 'evidence' for myself. I've yet to get past the book's third chapter, despite the army of editors provided by Bantam Press to make his manuscript readable.

Further pontificating -
1421 Exposed
Debunking Gavin Menzies
China History Forum
Salon

Conscience of a Conservative

2006-07-28T23:04:00.000+10:00

It's a strange age in which the battles of the Middle East become a battle for the soul of Anglo-American conservatism. The drive to enlist conservative support for the ongoing pulverisation of Lebanon has crystallised a long-brewing debate about what exactly conservatism means in the post-9/11 world. When a leading conservative pundit calls neoconservatism a "spectacularly misnamed radicalism," it signals some major internal stresses.

The source isn't hard to pinpoint. 'Conservatism' has become fused with a foreign policy project built on its philosophical antithesis - radical social change. If conservatism means anything, it means valuing and preserving traditional social structures. The Anglo-American tradition rounds this out by taking the individual rather than the group as the political subject, which means being concerned with one's own affairs rather than those of others and restricting the power of the state. Yet today there is relentless presure to define 'conservatism' by commitment to forcing radical change in foreign societies, judging people by groups and accommodating state power over the individual.

That's how we end up in a situation where to be 'conservative' means to endorse the invasion and social engineering of other countries. Or to acquiesce without question every time the government strips away civil liberties in the name of fighting terror. Or most lately, to take sides in an intractable and morally ambiguous foreign conflict. Israel is comprehensively justified and Lebanon must pay the price until various third-party 'evildoers' - the US president's phrase, not mine - are brought to destruction. Today, conservatism means certainty - in the purity of one's cause, the wickedness of one's enemies and the acceptability of any damage inflicted along the way. This is sometimes called 'unilateralism', but the term is usually avoided so as to obscure how a social philosophy has been hijacked by an extreme school of foreign policy.

The problem is that the world is not black and white - a lesson that one lays on top of earlier lessons about distinguishing right and wrong, in the process of reaching maturity. The existence of evil does not justify arbitrary destruction to stamp it out - something that true conservatives understand well and all the 'vanguard parties' of the 20th century did not. Since today's claimants to the conservative mantle have lost this insight, they ought to be called 'postconservatives' rather than 'neoconservatives', as the latter term implies that they've added to the sum total of human wisdom rather than drained it.

The local 'postconservative' mouthpiece is The Australian, which has swapped roles with its foreign affairs editor since AWB was in the news - now Sheridan has some perspective while the editorial pushes a morally blinkered and intellectually obtuse argument. 'Argument' is a generous term for the string of unsubstantiated or simply brainless comments that I've extracted below, with an explanation for why each would be crossed through with red ink if it was in a first-year undergraduate essay rather than a newspaper opinion column.

Not the UN, who in deploying a largely useless peacekeeping mission alongside Hezbollah installations in southern Lebanon made their own soldiers the accidental targets of an Israeli missile and created the strong impression that the international body has taken sides.

One would expect Australia's leading newspaper to explain what the UN was doing in the warzone before calling it useless. Or what the UN hoped to gain by making Israeli targets out of peacekeepers, who are not 'UN' soldiers but the military personnel of various countries. Not that it matters, because it's the UN. One gains a strong impression that The Australian has taken sides...

It only makes sense for Israel to pressure the Government in Beirut to do what it should have been doing all along – kick Hezbollah and its Syrian and Iranian masters out of the country – if you accept the legitimacy of that Government.

Let's rephrase this - 'Israel will get action from the Lebanese government by destroying its infrastructure and displaying Beirut's powerlessness to defend its people. This is the logical outcome of recognising that government's legitimacy'. The same logic that said undermining the Palestinian Authority would help combat groups like Hamas.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad regularly declares his desire to destroy Israel while pursuing a nuclear weapons program that many Western leftists – especially in Europe – see as a useful moral and military counterbalance to the Jewish state.

It would have been nice for the editors to buttress this claim by citing all the rallies, opinion pieces and diplomatic maneuvers in support of Iran's nuclear program. But what do you know - there aren't any. Of course as an Australian postconservative you don't need evidence, when you know exactly how 'leftists' and Europeans think...

In the meantime, Israel must make sure that even as it attacks Hezbollah it does not alienate other foes of the organisation.

I struggle to find any redeeming feature in this sentence. At least it gives the Lebanese credit for the same forebearance that Australians would show, were the US military to bomb our country for weeks to get at terrorists in our midst.

Doubtless The Australian's editors, with their focus on the big picture, would consider all these shortcomings superfluous. What matters is that they stand solidly behind Israel as it blasts the shoots of democracy in Lebanon, thus guaranteeing its security for generations to come. It must be hard for people like George Will to watch conservatism bastardised into the sort of 'greater good' mentality that led Marxism down into the pit. On the other hand, it's easy being a postconservative - no matter how much destruction is wreaked, the world will thank you in the end.

Model Minority

2006-07-23T02:38:00.000+10:00

Breaking news from the University of British Columbia: the entertainment industry stereotypes Asians. Actually this is news, since we're talking not TV or Hollywood but PC games, the supposed strutting ground of the under-30 Asian male. Specifically, four best-selling desktop titles have been surveyed by a sociology honours candidate and found to reek of subliminal racism.

Parungao, an avid gamer, says the games feature evil gangsters, all of them non-white, who "function as narrative obstacles to be overcome, mastered or ultimately blown to smithereens by the white hero".

I'll accept that Asians get shoddy treatment in GTA, Shadow Warrior and Kung Fu, incidentally those three out of the four that I don't happen to play myself. But Warcraft 3? How exactly are we degraded by a talking alcholic panda? Even if you don't play the game, see which of the two characters below you warm to and which comes across as a complete stiff.

I bring Panda-monium!

Let me face the peril!

Of course the point is that the Asian-accented panda provides comic relief, and that granite-jawed Uther there is the 'norm' around which players are supposed to orient themselves in the Warcaft universe. Ironically the Panderan hero was - rumour has it - introduced in response to complaints that Blizzard had created yet another fantasy world where the humans are all white. Parungao might have noted that it's also a world where the females are all luscious sorceresses or bikini-wearing amazons, but racial pigeonholing would have given him more than enough material for his honours thesis.

It's a strange fact that in the US, Australia and Canada, East Asians are still lampooned to lengths that wouldn't be tolerated for any other minority, as anyone who's seen a Cornetto, Marsbar or Kan-Tong commercial in the last year can attest. At the same time we're burdened by positive stereotypes ranging from industriousness (no affirmative action needed for this model minority) to mathematical competence (I've personally borne that cross everywhere from cadet platoons to history classes). Western societies have a sort of cultural schizophrenia towards East Asians, one with deep historical roots; since Marco Polo set pen to paper, European visions of the Orient have oscillated between earthly paradise and earthly hell, as surveyed by one sinologist.

For other minorities - Hispanics in the US, Muslims in Australia - political debates are about alleged refusal to assimilate. With East Asians it seems no amount of assimilation is enough, not even becoming a US congressman. Instead the problem is getting the white mainstream to defetishise Asians as objects of mockery, mystery or fear. Even as shelves of books are being written about 'the Asian century' and schools scramble to introduce mandarin language courses, Asians remain fodder for everything from condiment ads to gratuitously offensive animated sitcoms.

Yeah, he's an Asian chubby-chaser! Ohh, him so hor-neh! Soooo horrrnnnyyyy!

Coming back to video games, Parungao still has to show that racial stereotyping translates into behaviour, something that's never been conclusively done in the context of game violence (which has brought at least one of his four titles into the public glare before). But he does make an interesting obervation about the industry's social progressiveness vis-a-vis other pillars of the entertainment media -

“Film and television come under greater critical scrutiny so civil rights and minority groups can voice their concerns and effect some change,” [Pangurao] explains. “But video games have generally been seen as kids’ toys. There aren’t the same mechanisms or critical forums to encourage game designers to evolve.”

Parungao may have been a shade generous to film and television. Just how much progress has been made in evolving screen roles for Asian males beyond 'geek', 'triad' or 'martial arts expert', and for Asian females beyond 'exotic sex object'? Rather than continuing to beat the political-correctness drum, I'll let readers judge for themselves from this sample of prominent Asian-American/Australian entertainers. You may notice a trend...

Lucy Liu

Kelly Hu

Kathleen de Leon

Grace Park

Amy Wong

Ming-Na Wen

Mulan

Linda Park

Michelle Ang

Dichen Lachman

Bradley Wong

Update

I emailed Rob Parungao about his perceptions of racial stereotyping in Warcraft 3. Turns out I missed the obvious candidate -

I found that Asians have been repeatedly been typecasted in a sterotypical way (for example, the honorable warrior, the kung fu fighter, or triad gang member). Warcaft 3 was used as an example where 'Asian-ness' in games is sometimes subtle - that is the Orc Blademaster isn't physically Asian (he's big and green) but he is inferentailly Asian. While not overt, racial sterotypes still persist in WC3. For example the Blademaster's bad accent or the framing of him as an honor bound samurai-esque warrior. Pandarians too follow in the same fashion with the large rice hat and again heavy accented. Since WC3 was put out quite recently, I used it to illustrates the fact that many of perceptions of Asians we find in early video games and early film (like Hollywood movies of the 1920s and 1930s) are still still being reproduced today.

That's an extract from a lengthy explanation Rob prepared for a concerned Blizzard employee (possibly from their PR department). The other side of the coin is that the blademaster is arguably the most versatile hero in the game, a fact I suspect Rob left out of his thesis. Good at many things and good-for-a-laugh - that's what it means to be Asian...

Tasta Mah Blade!

Update No.2

More discussion at China History Forum, which may seem a strange site for it if you know nothing about people who spend spare time talking history online.

Happy Birthday BFI!

2006-07-22T02:32:00.000+10:00

This blog is one year old today. Looking back at the initial post, it's played out more or less as expected - a place to indulge my hobbies, exercise the intellect and rant about whatever most irked me in the week's news, with the subject of discussion one click away. It's become my own corner of Mr. Friedman's flattened world; a little patch of cybercommons that I hope to chew on for many years to come.

A selection of BFI's more memorable moments to date -

Iraq: Quo Vadis? - it didn't seem that things could get worse, but they did.

Race and Power: Tales of the South Seas - the first time this blog pissed someone off, at least that I'm aware of.

Diaried and Found Wanting - my take on Mark Latham's crash-and-burn.

White Australia Redux - Andrew Fraser gets the best comeuppance I can muster.

Death in the Lion City - social commentary from the week before Van Nguyen's execution.

Mission: Beheading Action - up close and personal with the Chen Yonglin affair

Out of the Closet: The Dark Side of Narnia - standing up for the Inklings.

The Torture Question - inspired by a PBS documentary.

Of Wheat and Weasel Words - the state of the debate in an early phase of the AWB saga.

Sam the Meat Man - Eat red meat. Because Sam Neill says it's good for you.

ANZAC Day, Australia Day - this isn't the 'Australiana' piece picked up by Crikey, but it's the one I like more.

The Red Shadow of the Past - China's history gets the red carpet treatment. Swept under, that is.

Stay tuned

2006-07-19T23:33:00.000+10:00

Have been out of the blogging loop for a while, what with helping out at the family business, getting my own job and catching the flu. BFI's random stream of cultural and political commentary will resume shortly...

The War That Never Ended

2006-07-10T22:15:00.000+10:00

Like the Chen Yonglin scandal, April's row over MIT's online publishing of century-old woodblock prints was a localised affair. But they make for an illuminating comparison.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has taken down a history course Web page after a 19th century wood-print image of Japanese soldiers beheading Chinese prisoners sparked complaints from Chinese students and led to an apology from one of the course's professors. The "Visualizing Cultures" course, which uses images from the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, was spotlighted Sunday on MIT's home page. It was pulled late Tuesday afternoon, and the school hosted a forum Wednesday for students, particularly those in MIT's Chinese community, to voice concerns. (AP)

John Dower took full responsibility for selecting the images and writing the commentary, explaining that to present propaganda images for educational use was not to condone their message... But the students could not grasp this point. Blinded by passion, they shouted that Dower and Miyagawa had been insensitive to the tremendous suffering of the Chinese people at the hands of Japanese militarism. One student undertook to edify Prof. Dower on the finer points of Japanese history by proudly presenting him with a copy of a popular book on the Nanjing massacre! Written demands circulated at the meeting included shutting down the site permanently, demands that MIT officially apologize to the offended “Chinese community,” and cancellation of academic workshops related to the site. (Perdue)

By this point an online hate campaign was under way against the two history professors involved, one of whom had the misfortune to be of Japanese ancestry. The MIT establishment was mystified as to where this outrage was coming from; it's not like images of graphic violence are hard to find on the internet, even those involving Japanese soldiers beheading Chinese victims. One group at the heart of the controversy sought to elaborate -

The MIT Chinese Student and Scholar Association, in a letter to MIT President Susan Hockfield, called for "proper historical context" at the top of the page, and asked for a posted warning that the images are graphic and racist.

"We do understand the historical significance of these wood prints, and respect the authors' academic freedom to pursue this study," the letter stated. "However, we are appalled at the lack of accessible explanations and the proper historical context that ought to accompany these images." (AP)

So what was the 'historical context' provided on the original webpage?

Dower’s text describes one such print, entitled “Illustration of the Decapitation of Violent Chinese Soldiers,” which depicted Japanese soldiers executing helpless Chinese prisoners of war, as “an unusually frightful scene.” ... He continues, “Even today, over a century later, this contempt remains shocking. Simply as racial stereotyping alone, it was as disdainful of the Chinese as anything that can be found in anti-“Oriental” racism in the United States and Europe at the time – as if the process of “Westernization” had entailed, for Japanese, adopting the white man’s imagery while excluding themselves from it. This poisonous seed, already planted in violence in 1894-95, would burst into full atrocious flower four decades later, when the emperor’s soldiers and sailors once again launched war against China.” (Perdue)

Most would read this as a mundane condemnation of Japanese imperialism, as well as context-setting for subsequent East Asian history. But evidently a great number of Chinese people read it as a national insult and dismissal of China's historical grievances. Perhaps it was the use of the adjective 'violent' for the hapless Chinese soldiers, thoughthe description might be justified given that Chinese soldiers did commit atrocities in the 1894-5 war. But had that word been absent, chances are the reaction would have been the same - on trend.

Expressing political positions through violence (verbal or otherwise) is hardly unique to Chinese people; a good many freedom-loving, rule-of-law-respecting Americans have sent death threats to everyone from the Dixie Chicks to justices of the Supreme Court. But given the series of riots touched off over the past eight years by the Belgrade embassy bombing, soccer defeats by Japan and the Japanese government's approval of questionable history textbooks, a foreign observer might feel justified in making systemic conclusions about the 'New China'. Particularly if they're aware of unedifying local incidents like this one and Chen Yonglin's reception at Melbourne University last year, which occurred not merely outside China but within western universities, the institutional embodiment of free expression.

The last thing China needs is an image as a country of nationalist psychotics, who use past wrongs as an excuse to flout norms of civilised behaviour. Indeed the 'China Threat' lobby, which has long cast the Beijing regime as antisocial, has switched to painting the whole of Chinese society in these terms - a sort of high-tech Nazi Germany with a billion people. Still, it doesn't seem too much to expect respect from Chinese nationals for free speech, at least in other countries. It's not a hard concept - no one is obliged to tailor published material to others' sensitivities, short of hate speech or slander. And people express disagreement through reason, not insult and intimidation.

This should be doubly so in the case of academic enquiry. Stumbling across the MIT affair on China History Forum brought to mind an essay I wrote for a Japanese history subject a few years back on the 1894-5 war, including analysis of these same woodblock prints. Extracts follow -

'... foreigners were looking at the war not as an ordinary (i.e. European) great power conflict, but as a contest between two Oriental peoples. Japan's achievement was seen in contrast with the staggering corruption and incompetence of the Chinese 'war effort', if it can be called such. Japanese professionalism was cast in glaring profile by the benighted state of the Chinese soldiery, which in the absence of proper training and armament relied on superstitions such as carrying lucky chickens into battle or eating ground tiger bone to induce courage. Mutilation of prisoners, pillage of the civilian population and medieval practices like offering rewards for Japanese heas completed the image of a confrontation between modern civilisation and barbarity

'[in] contemporary woodblock prints... with their western uniforms and equipage, dignified poise and orderly dispositions, the Japanese soldiers in these pictures personify modernity. By contrast the Chinese, with their anachronistic display of colours and polearms, appear in a continuous state of chaos and defeat. The prints illustrate the triumph of modern substance over antiquated display...'

My essay was for a Japanese history subject, so it's written from a Japanese perspective. I felt no need to qualify it by listing Japanese atrocities against the Chinese people, by explaining that the Qing armies' dismal performance was not typical of Chinese history, by acknowledging that Japan borrowed its writing system, architecture and form of government from China etc. Yet had this been on the MIT website, I might have received the same treatment as Professors Dower and Miyawaga. Indeed being Chinese, I could have expected additional epithets revolving around 'race traitor'.

Remembrance and justice are one thing, hatred is another. These outbursts don't help China's civil society, Japanese attitudes or East Asia's political environment, which seems to be getting more corrosive by the year. Sometimes it seems to students of the region that nothing has really changed since Japan smashed the old order a hundred-plus years ago, failing to put something constructive in its place. And where better to reflect on that momentous war than MIT's online exhibition, which remains up and running - with a few modifications.

Non sequitur

The scheme by Japan's foreign minister to rope foreign ambassadors into a World War II commemoration has fallen through, apparently after Taro Aso realised they weren't going to grace an official function led by a man who refuses to acknowledge that his daddy worked Allied POWs to death.

And Greg Sheridan, who nearly self-immolated over the AWB affair, has utterly redeemed himself in my eyes with this piece on that other fractious Asian relationship (Australia-Indonesia). Not one line in that article I disagree with.

Gitmo Story

2006-07-02T10:51:00.000+10:00

The sorry saga of Guantanamo turned a big corner last week, as Hamdan's case finally ground its' way through the Supreme Court. In 185 pages the judges said that denying America's captives the protections of America's courts is not the president's prerogative, but that of Congress. And amid the histrionics about 'activist judges' and 'robed high priests' undermining the War on Terror, that's where GOP lawmakers and the beleagured administration are mounting their counterattack. A more eloquent leader might have called it the "end of the beginning", rather than the beginning of the end. Bush got by with a flustered "to the extent that there is latitude to work with Congress… we will do so".

That the Court slapped down an executive attempt to excise captured terrorist suspects from the writ of the federal judiciary is no surprise to anyone familiar with apex courts ruling on their jurisidiction. In any case the administration got a red warning light with Hamdi's case two years back; last Friday the justices didn't even bother with new metaphors, merely recycling O'Connor's message that a 'state of war is not a blank check for the President'. Or as Andrew Sullivan put it -

the president's first task is to protect the Constitution, not violate it. He does not have, as this president argued, one accountability moment every four years. He is continually accountable to a constitution applicable to everyone.

The white noise over the separation-of-powers issue has almost submerged the court's other key finding - that detainees must receive the minimum protections provided in a wartime context by the Geneva Conventions. Since the first inmate landed at Guantanmo, the administration has argued that these people are 'unlawful combatants' who have placed themselves entirely outside the laws of war. But this term merely denotes a lack of entitlement to engage in hostilities; it does not exclude the basic protections afforded by the Conventions. The proposition that 'unlawful combatants' lack status under under the laws of war has no basis in international law, domestic law or state practice, including that of the United States.

The proper classification for a terrorist under the laws of war is that of 'civilian'. This may seem absurd and morally offensive, but consider the practical results. Civilians who directly participate in hostilities become legitimate targets. Civilians may be interned where necessary for an occupying power's security, for as long as that power deems necessary. Civilians do not qualify for POW status and so have no right to repatriation or to withhold information from their captors, subject to requirements of humane treatment imposed by domestic and international law.

In other words, treating terrorists as 'civilians' would satisfy all the justifications advanced for slotting them in the legal category - invented by the Bush administration - of 'unlawful combatant'. The fact that the administration is still digging its heels in proves that those jusitifications don't go to the core of what Guantanamo is about. As I've argued before, what they're really claiming is authority to strip non-US citizens of rights in the name of national security. Whether the individuals concerned are in fact terrorists is besides the point.

The core issue is whether people should be denied rights afforded them by both American and international law at the US executive's discretion. We're not talking about rights to freedom of movement or communication here. We're talking about fundamental human rights like freedom from torture and from an unfair trial. We don't know exactly what the people held in Camp X-Ray have done; many have been released on the US authorities' admission that they didn't merit incarceration in the first place. And even if they do, humane standards of treatment shouldn't vary with a person's character. That's the principle on which international human rights law and the American system of government are based.

It'll be a sad day for that tradition when the concept of separating powers and the presumption of innocence drown in blather about an 'existential threat' to western civilisation, as if a few thousand fanatics had the capacity to destroy the United States or any other developed country. So we should give the benefit of the doubt not to the executive, with its responsibility for national security and mountains of information about potential threats, but to the octogenarians who wrote the Supreme Court's majority judgment. As one commentator summed it up:

"They challenged the global notion that there's war and that there's law - and that war trumps law."

So Why Did That Chicken Cross the Road? - Uncut

2006-06-29T23:24:00.000+10:00

I'm still summoning the motivation for a return to substantial posting. Meanwhile, here's a chicken-joke special I did for last year's summer edition of AAP - that quality journal of political commentary - including those that failed to escape the editor's space-saving buzzsaw. Some of them are a little dated by now, but not too much.

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Philosophy major: To get to the other side.

Adam Smith: The comparative advantage of chickens lies in crossing roads.

John Kerry: The chicken crossed because this President was fighting the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time.

Swift Boat Veteran for Truth: I was there and I can assure you, that chicken did not cross that road.

Steve Bracks: The impact of the chicken’s road-crossing on the state's finances meant the Government had to make a difficult decision. The decision to fund the road by a toll was not made lightly, but it is the responsible decision for the future.

John Howard: In a world where chickens cross roads, who do you trust to manage the economy and keep interest rates low?

Lee Kuan Yew: The chicken’s behaviour illustrates the moral breakdown of western society.

John Stuart Mill: So long as the chicken’s action does not harm others, it is at liberty to cross roads.

Michel Foucault: This was the chicken’s journey of self-actualisation, an act of mapping its own external reality in resistance to the hidden normative. By crossing the road the chicken shows how power is socially constructed, bottom-up and inherently diffuse.

Ralph Nader: Our two-party system left the chicken no other choice.

Phillip Ruddock: Given the suspicious circumstances of the chicken’s crossing, the Americans were quite justified in locking it up for three years without charge.

Dan Rather: After extensive additional interviews, I no longer have the confidence in the fact of this chicken crossing the road that would allow us to continue vouching for it journalistically.

Deng Xiaoping: Black chicken, white chicken – if it crosses the road it’s a good chicken.

Thucydides: What made the crossing inevitable was the growth of the farmer’s power and the fear which this caused in the chicken.

Noam Chomsky: The chicken’s action is another step in the expansion of the US hegemonic system.

Rush Limbaugh: I mean, before we even get a proper report about this chicken, naturally America is already the guilty party!!

Franklin Graham: I believe that road-crossing is a very evil and wicked religion. I don’t believe chickens are evil because they cross roads – I personally have many friends who are chickens – but I decry the evil that has been done in the name of road-crossing.

Osama bin Laden: It is a sacred duty of all Muslims to kill chickens that cross roads.

Thomas Hobbes: Because life for chickens is nasty, brutish and short.

Mark Latham: Chickens cross roads because they don’t have a ladder of opportunity. There are two types of chicken on this road, slackers and hard workers, and we need to ease the squeeze on them and practice democracy in the raw.

Pentagon spokesman: We can neither confirm nor deny that a chicken crossed the road.

Donald Rumsfeld (1): It’s a misunderstanding to see that image over and over, of a chicken crossing the road, and say ‘You didn’t have a plan’. Freedom’s untidy, and that chicken is free to make mistakes and cross roads.

Donald Rumsfeld (2): The Army leadership is sensitive to the fact that not every road is as clear of chickens as would be desirable, but you go to war with the Army you have. It’s essentially a matter of physics.

Lenin: Any act of the chicken was justified, if it advances the revolution.

Homer Simpson: Mmmmm, chicken.

Chinese Communist: This chicken was clearly taking the capitalist road, as part of a hypocritical imperialist effort to split the sovereign Chinese nation. The Chinese People will never bow to such blatant aggression but will resolutely pursue the Four Modernisations along the scientific materalist path of socialist spiritual civilisation, adhering steadfastly to the Four Cardinal Principles and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence while fortifying their minds with the unshakeable dictates of Marxist-Leninist-MaoZedong Thought!

Team America, World Police: Who gives a f--k? Let’s f-----n blow the G-dd-mn sh-t out of it!

Italy 1, Australia heartbreak

2006-06-27T03:54:00.000+10:00

The Age

The gods of football turned their face against Australia today. The only thing harder than watching the Soccerroos' World Cup bid ended by a controversial penalty kick in the last 30 seconds of overtime is doing so at 3am (Melbourne time) in an inner-city pub surrounded by stunned supporters. We didn't talk much as we left.

I'm not the type to give the ref advice, but surely the right response to such an ambiguous foul would have been to let the teams duke it out in extra time, rather than virtually handing the game to Italy on a plate. A trip's not a trip for penalty purposes when the fouled player falls over someone already on the ground...

The Future Is Here!

2006-06-23T23:50:00.000+10:00

Good things come to those who wait. Futurama fans were prepared to wait a thousand years for the show's return, but it took just 27 months for Fox to greenlight direct-to-DVD movies. And now it turns out that Comedy Central's bid for the rerun rights came with a sweetener - a minimum 13 new episodes, to start airing 2008. So strap yourselves in for more adventures with the one-eyed babe, the red-haired idiot and the chain-smoking, whore-mongering, kleptomaniac robot.

Which Broadcaster?

2006-06-20T21:25:00.000+10:00

Keith Windschuttle's appointment to the ABC board has kicked off a new round of vituperation in Melbourne's respectable journals of opinion. Some selections from the right-hand side of the debate -

This point of view is never given fair coverage in ABC treatments of the subject. It is shouted down or airily dismissed. There is a similar refusal to accept rational debate of most other political and social matters in Australia that do not accord with the prevalent progressivist view.

Or this, from my old politics tutor -

Those who most vigorously pursue the cause of the "independence" of the ABC can't appreciate that most of the time the ABC only ever gives coverage to one side of politics. If government is truly to be "held to account", why is it that the ABC only attacks governments (Labor and Liberal) from a left-wing perspective?

Quite frankly, which station are the ABC's critics watching (or listening to)? Try sifting the ABC website to pick out the current affairs coverage - it takes longer than you expect, because there's not much. Then sit down and watch these programs on a regular basis, keeping an eye out for 'progressive bias'. What you're left with is Tony Jones or Kerry O'Brien grilling ministers and right-wing pundits with a shade more energy than they give other interviewees, and Media Watch playing up each new revelation of government or corporate manipulation.

If that's considered shutting down national debate, then 'mainstream Australia' is less secure than its self-appointed advocates would have us believe. Do the people who sit in the offices of Quadrant and the Murdoch papers - always ready to accuse the left of paternalism - think that viewers can't tell when an interviewer like Jones is skewing the issues? Are they afraid the public will start getting its opinions at the oracle of the ABC?

And how exactly does the ABC qualify as 'Marxist'? The way the right's culture warriors throw this term around makes you wonder whether they've ever met a Marxist (even Windschuttle, who once professed to be one). The only group on the Australian political scene that fits the description is the Socialist Alternative, whose activities these days are confined to competing for poster space on university campuses. Really, the only thing 'red' about Kerry O'Brien is his hair, and that not very much.

One might give the ABC's critics credit for standing on principle: a taxpayer-funded broacaster should not tolerate systemic bias among its news presenters, however mild or restricted. But the same hysterical guns are turned on the Fairfax press and the 'intelligentsia', that amorphous group whose main occupation is subverting the government and denigrating 'ordinary Australians' (another Herald Sun speak-think). Honestly, only a paranoiac could see The Age as some kind of socialist rag. Its commentary is so toothless that even viewed from the far-right shore it's nothing more than - to quote a genuine Marxist - a 'paper tiger'. There are Melbourne papers that use their op-ed pages to slander whole social groups (notably teachers, judges and academics) and undermine one of the major political parties, but they're not Fairfax-owned.

This campaign against the ABC is just another case of the right using sledgehammers against walnuts that offend their sensibilities. Like spending billions on missile defence against the chance of a North Korean rocket hitting Alaska, while the polar ice caps melt and the world runs out of drinking water. Or lobbying to get homosexuals kicked out of the US military while the wheels are coming off in Iraq. Threats should draw responses based on their magnitude, not their ideological component. But it seems that 'conservative' opinion-makers get more intellectual satisfaction from shadow-boxing with terrorist-sympathising, latte-sipping, Australia-hating postmodernists.

Shrub: He's No Superman (part one)

2006-06-18T16:09:00.000+10:00

A few more days and I'll be back to regular posting, doubtless to the joy of my thousands of readers out there. Until then here's another instalment from my 'better essays' box, this one a piece on George W. Bush's job performance. It was written in early 2004, and a lot of water has flowed through the Potomac (and the Tigris) since then. But I don't think the Iraqi insurgency, immigration-gate or any of the other landmarks of Dubya's second term have hurt my thesis too much.

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John Kennedy described the presidency as ‘the vortex into which all the elements of national decision are irresistibly drawn’. The decentralized nature of American government creates a natural lethargy that can only be overcome by active presidential leadership. But the presidency is more than the country’s coordinating executive institution; it holds a symbolic, almost shamanistic significance for the American nation. As such the office places unique demands of character, intellect and emotion upon incumbents. This essay will not consider the legitimacy of George Bush’s first election. With the end of his first term in the White House approaching, the more pertinent question is whether he has demonstrated the qualities to merit a second one.

The extent to which an incumbent's personality shapes the presidential office rather than vice-versa is debatable. Nevertheless, it seems common sense that some degree of personal engagement and job satisfaction is needed for what is possibly the most demanding executive position in the world. Bush has been labeled a ‘reluctant president’, placed there by his family’s dynastic ambition rather than his own drive, and in public he often gives the impression of impersonating the role instead of engaging with it. This contrasts however with personal impressions of the man, which emphasise his focus, personal discipline and sense of his responsibilities. Since historically personality has not proved an accurate index of presidential success, we should look to more quantifiable criteria to assess Bush’s capacity for the role.

The ability to articulate a political vision for the country is arguably a president’s most powerful tool for asserting national leadership. The presidency’s central and symbolic status in the political system gives incumbents an unrivalled ‘bully pulpit’ from which to promote their message about what the government should be doing. On arriving in office George W. Bush did not apparently have a vision; his election creed of ‘compassionate conservatism’ proved a political chimera, and the new president lacked the intellectual confidence to take clear positions on particular issues. September 11 however cleared the stage for the relentless focus on one primary issue at which Bush excels. His unrefined convictions and ‘big picture’ conception of issues (“you are either with us or against us”) equipped him ideally to advance the single-minded purpose that the nation desired after the attacks.

While he alone can articulate ea political vision for America, the president cannot by himself sustain it or translate it into action. The fragmentation of political power in the United States makes coalition-building the essence of the presidential job. Great presidents did not stand above politics; they bargained, with their party, Congress, interest groups, bureaucrats and so on, to build a political foundation for their grand designs. Bush manifestly does not have the ‘power of persuasion’ needed for this kind of work; he convinces only those who already share his political convictions. His leadership style is built around reliance on those he knows and trusts, not on the risk-taking and qui pro quos needed to effect lasting political change. Unsurprisingly Bush has proved unable to maintain the political consensus generated by September 11. Despite the unifying advantages of an ongoing ‘war’, he now presides over the bitterest divide in recent American political history, one that will undermine his projects even should be obtain reelection.

The Bush administration exhibits, by presidential standards, an impressive coherence and sense of direction. Far form being his ‘natural enemies’, Bush’s cabinet members – selected for common political views and (in several cases) long-term association with the Bush family – function both as a team and as a presidential resource, providing the wealth of knowledge and political experience that Bush himself conspicuously lacks. The White House staff is well-disciplined and organised, a tribute to Bush’s personal discipline and people skills. Such a system facilitates Bush’s ‘decide and delegate’ approach to executive leadership, with the president making big picture decisions and others seeing to their implementation.

The problem with this arrangement is that administrative support comes to substitute for active leadership. While first-hand observers agree that Bush is in charge of his administration, its intellectual and political impetus clearly comes from the eminent brains around him. Leaving aside allegations of a ‘cabal’ using a quiescent presidency to push through right-wing agendas, any team as ideologically homogenous as the Bush one is prone to a ‘groupthink’ that produces dangerously one-dimensional approaches to complex problems. Take for instance the absence of qualifying voices (excepting Colin Powell’s) in the decision to invade Iraq, the consequences of which are only now becoming evident.

Bush himself is not well equipped to compensate for such deficits of political insight. His shortcoming appears to be neither intelligence nor self-awareness, but rather a basic intellectual laziness. He relies on his advisers to present him information in a digestible form, and then on his political instincts and core moral convictions to make decisions.* Bush supporters contend that this allows him to focus on fundamentals and overall strategy, instead of becoming encumbered in detail and producing a morass of ‘tactical’ decisions. The more probable outcome is that Bush makes decisions without adequate knowledge, either of the issues or of the political context in which his orders will be carried out. A preference for faith and instinct over facts is simply not sufficient for the numerous and complex decisions demanded of modern presidents. While incumbents should have guiding convictions, they must concern themselves enough with detail to gain some understanding of the subject matter and the difficulties of implementing the relevant policy.

While the president carries final responsibility for almost all executive functions, decentralized government disperses actual power and authority among many different entities which can potentially frustrate presidential policy at various stages of implementation. This problem is compounded by the size of the staff now needed to handle the presidential workload. Presidents thus need to take a hands-on, administrative approach to policy execution, for which George Bush’s formal training and his innate lack of initiative have not prepared him. A case in point is the administration’s failure to respond to the threat posed by al-Qaeda before September 11. Bush’s passive dependence on a national security and foreign policy team trained for the Cold War produced no action, despite clear warnings of an impending attack. The president should have taken the initiative to form his own opinion on the primary threat to American security and then to cajole his staff, the military and the intelligence agencies to respond to it.

Presidents cannot simply frame policy and expect it to be carried out; they must involve themselves in the messy reality of execution. Nor can a president’s cabinet and advisers collectively substitute for his own ‘strategic sense’ – the ability to identify what is important and devise a plan to achieve it. Bush’s flaw is not so much his lack of political experience and intellectual equipment as his proven disinclination to acquire them. He simply does not have the ‘quality of mind’ required in a president of the United States.

* This has been described as the ‘one page memo’ approach to making policy. For example, where Bill Clinton reportedly spent twenty-five hours preparing his budget for Congress, Bush spent five.

Ancient Trip

2006-06-13T12:54:00.000+10:00

As a sucker for big-budget period flicks, I used to feel that I'd been born a generation too late. In the 90's the age of Charlton Heston and the Shaw Brothers seemed gone with the wind, excepting the odd hobby project of cash-flush actor-directors (think Braveheart and Dances with Wolves). But like so many other cultural spheres, cinema has seen the secular tide of the late 20th century turn, with Hollywood churning out a string of sword-and-musket dramas: Gladiator, Saving Private Ryan, Enemy at the Gates, Count of Monte Cristo, Master and Commander, Troy, Alexander, The Last Samurai, The Passion, The New World, Apocalypto.

Chinese (Hong Kong, Taiwanese) cinema has never really gone off the historical theme; 3500-odd years of unbroken tradition weighs heavy on the national consciousness. But it was only in 2002 that Chinese period drama broke into the western mainstream with Zhang Yimou's Hero, which I was rewatching last night. Four years on is a bit late for a film review, but I just realised why I like this movie so much.

It's not for the plot, a creative but unconvincing take on the scheme to bump off the King of Qin before he unified China; so creative in fact that this film can't qualify as historical fiction but needs a new genre, 'historical fantasy'. What message comes through has propagandistic undertones: both Jet Li and the King are true heroes because they put China's unity first (cough, *Taiwan*, cough). Excessively cynical perhaps, but I can understand why some critics claim that Hero plays the outwardly opulent but spiritually impoverished cousin to Chen Kaige's Emperor and the Assassin, which covers the same historical subject matter.

No, Hero wins through wholly on its aesthetic credentials. From beginning to end, it's a riot of colour and composition that leaves the viewer too breathless to question the point of it all. Leave it to Zhang Yimou to prove that - given an all-star cast and a decent musical score - eyecandy can a classy film make.

It's this visual and audial accomplishment that explains why, for me at least, the film isn't spiritually impoverished at all. Hero veritably channels ancient China: not the sweltering coastlands my ancestors come from, but the northern plain and the loess highlands in their severe grandeur, the heartland of Han civilisation. For many nations, physical geography is a key component of national identity, and Hero stunningly evokes the natural and manmade landscape of antique China. Though I was born in Malaysia and raised in Australia, it ignites my connection with a culture that was old when Jesus was born.

Maybe I'm just an atavist, but if so why is the movie industry increasingly catering to tastes like mine? Perhaps we do live in a soulless consumer age - an age in which historical reenacting is a growth industry, political discourse resounds with the clash of civilisations and religious conversion is on the rise - that's turning people back to their cultural roots; trying to relate to the present through the prism of the past. With British admirals warning that we're about to relive the fall of the Roman Empire and the Barbary pirates, anything seems possible...

Knights of Christ (part two)

2006-06-11T17:45:00.000+10:00

Better viewed in firefox, as always.

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Given the efforts they made on Latin Christendom’s behalf, the amount of criticism attracted by the military orders seems incongruous. Partly it stemmed from the ‘perceptions gap’ referred to above, which led European-based commentators to undervalue the orders’ contributions in the Holy Land. The orders may also have suffered from lingering doubts about their conceptual legitimacy. The merging of a secular institution (knighthood) with a spiritual one (monasticism) that seemed diametrically opposed to it raised initial misgivings, which were sufficiently widespread to provoke the writing of a letter of encouragement to the Templar brethren in 1128; several years later, the Templars felt obliged to commission one of the day’s leading theological commentators to write a defence of their new institution. Circumstantial evidence scattered over the next two centuries, including several writings explicitly or implicitly questioning the orders’ calling as well as spurious assertions by the Hospitallers of an existence in biblical times, suggests that the feeling there was something ‘unnatural’ about fighting monks never completely died out.

In general however it was Christendom’s embrace, not rejection, of the military orders that magnified their shortcomings and created a tendency to overlook their achievements. The orders were the institutional embodiment of the crusading idea, and their advent during the period of this idea’s ascendancy (the early twelfth century) ensured them not just an enthusiastic reception but a largely uncritical one. The Templars and Hospitallers were accepted literally as a ‘Holy Knighthood’, who would fight not men’s battles but God’s; their monastic and international character represented their transcendence of worldly ties in the direct service of Christ, a calling which dictated spiritual as well as soldierly excellence. In short, they were expected to be both faultless and victorious. By its nature, the crusading concept on which the orders were based precluded objective explanations for defeat; military failure had to be explained by spiritual failure rather than external circumstances, since the latter were clearly no obstacle to those fighting as the ‘right arm of God’. The orders thus came to carry vicarious guilt for Frankish setbacks in the East, a trend exemplified by the readiness to blame them for specific defeats despite the fact that they were only one contingent in crusader armies.

Unrealistic expectations also drew excessive attention to the institutional blemishes that inevitably emerged. To begin with, the privileges heaped by papal and royal decree on the two major orders soon became incongruous with their ascetic vocation. Ranging from tax exemptions to immunity from suit in royal courts, these rights became a widespread source of resentment against both the Templars and Hospitallers, particularly as the orders were seen to be abusing and fraudulently extending them. External manifestations of piety were central to the crusading ideal and the orders, whose original austerity had been much praised, quickly amassed unseemly wealth through privilege and through public donations, the latter often made in the belief that they were more virtuous than ‘traditional’ monastic orders. Lay criticism of the military orders focused on their concern with money, which seemed inappropriate for organisations devoted to fighting the enemies of Christendom. The extent of the orders’ assets throughout Europe also supported the view that their continual appeals for aid for the Holy Land, which increased in proportion with Frankish defeats, had to indicate some kind of fraud. This was partly a function of the ‘perceptions gap’ that dogged the orders’ public relations; the Levant’s distance and fluid politics meant that the information they sent to Europe in support of aid requests often proved out of date, giving rise to cynicism about the orders’ motives. Critics also rarely appreciated the cost of maintaining castles and knights in the numbers required by Outremer, or the amount of revenues soaked up in maintaining the orders’ European chapters and non-combatant brethren.

Avarice was a standard criticism of monastic orders by the twelfth century, but to this vice the military orders added pride, a sin associated with the knightly class. Thus while the orders’ hybrid character may not in itself have been a significant problem, it did expose them to dual criticism. That the orders were proud is beyond doubt; it is attested by complaints from all segments of society, as well as by admonishments in the orders’ own internal documents. Pride allegedly led the orders to put their own interests before those of Christendom, the defence of which was their original raison d’etre. By virtue of their wealth and military importance the Templars and Hospitallers inevitably became involved in Outremer’s politics, in which they proved willing to make alliances with Muslim rulers and to takes sides against fellow Christians, even to the point of armed force; their partisanship in the extended papal-imperial contest of the early thirteenth century drew particular ire from commentators. The murder by the Templars in 1173 of an Assassin ambassador travelling under the King of Jerusalem’s protection was cited by contemporaries as evidence of fanaticism, greed (for lost tribute revenue from the Assassins) or contempt for legitimate authority, all of which jeopardised the crusader states’ wider interests. On balance however the orders played a subsidiary rather than a dominating role in Outremer’s politics, at least before the collapse of feudal authority in the thirteenth century, by which point the demise of the crusader states was only a matter of time.

Certain institutional traits rendered the military orders an easy political target. Perhaps most important was their lack of social roots in either Europe or Outremer; recruiting mainly from the minor nobility (often younger sons) and common knights, the orders lacked connections and influence with other powerful social institutions such as the secular clergy or the upper nobility. This was one reason for their dependence on Papal patronage, which inevitably bred resentment among the clergy and suspicion among secular authorities. The military orders were, in one historian’s succinct phrase, ‘out of the mainstream of circumstance’; their interests were international, and as such they constituted a quasi-alien element in the body politic. Initially this was not a problem, but as the orders’ wealth and power expanded their independence began to be perceived as a threat by monarchs trying to centralise authority in their own hands. The lacklustre response of the orders to these political challenges can also be partly explained by their social recruitment base, which produced a low level of education among the brethren and even among the orders' leaders.

Ultimately the orders’ political fortunes, like their military ones, fluctuated with the wider environment. The impact of specific events like their clashes with the Emperor Frederick II has already been noted, but more importantly long-term trends within Christendom proved unfavourable to the military orders. A general decline in monasticism’s prestige and expansion in monarchical power was less significant than the waning of the crusading idea itself, of which the orders had been both supreme expression and beneficiary. As the crusading ethos was overexploited and debased by political expediency, and as the Frankish presence in the Holy Land withered away, the military orders effectively became obsolete, carrying on only through a sort of ‘historical momentum’ derived from their power and prestige. As this ran out they had to adapt to new political realities (as did the Hospitallers and the Teutonic Order) or face extinction (the fate of the Templars).

Scrapbook: What's in a Name?

2006-06-07T16:31:00.000+10:00

Had C. S. Lewis had more Muslim friends, he might have chosen a different name for his heathen-smiting alternative Jesus...

Knights of Christ (part one)

2006-06-04T00:22:00.000+10:00

Exam season is here, so I'll be recycling essays for a week or two. With the Da Vinci Code playing in theatres I'm getting a bit sick of people going on about the Knights Templar, so to dispel the romance here's the first half of a piece I did for my crusades subject last year.

Footnotes removed for the usual reason - because IE can't handle them.

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Once established, the military orders quickly came to play a central role in Frankish military operations in the Latin East. The Templars and Hospitallers were able to draw recruits and revenues throughout Christendom, in contrast to Outremer’s feudal lords whose military capacity was limited by their lands’ modest resources and in particular by a chronic shortage of Frankish manpower. From the mid-twelfth century the two major orders each maintained around three hundred knights in the Kingdom of Jerusalem alone, making their joint contingent comparable in size to the Kingdom’s feudal levy. As time progressed, Outremer’s feudal system proved unable to cope with the perpetual military readiness dictated by the crusader states’ position, and increasingly yielded the burden to institutions designed for continual war against the infidel. Thus the military orders began from an early stage to receive control of strongholds that the secular nobility could not afford to maintain or garrison; by 1180 the Hospitallers alone were responsible for twenty-five castles in the Latin East. The orders built fortresses of their own and waged an ongoing frontier war with Islam, as well as fulfilling the Templars’ original role of protecting pilgrims. As the resources of the feudal lords declined with the loss of territory to the Muslims, the orders’ importance increased till by the mid-thirteenth century Outremer’s defence rested primarily upon them.

The orders also provided the most effective troops available to the Franks in the Latin East. Western European battlefield tactics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries relied on the heavy cavalry charge, a manoeuvre ill-suited to countering the light cavalry tactics employed by the Muslims. Successful use of the charge in this context required a level of experience and discipline that was lacking in knights newly arrived from Europe, where battles were infrequent and governed by the chivalric imperative to seek individual glory. By contrast the military orders benefited from the experience gained by individual members through extended service against the infidel, as well as from an accumulated knowledge of warfare in the East that was codified in each order’s statutes. Discipline was imposed on individual knights through their vow of obedience to the order, supplemented by severe punishments for disobedience or cowardice on the battlefield. The orders’ troops could furthermore be relied on to remain in the field for as long as their commanders ordered, being free from the political and economic constraints that hamstrung feudal armies and in particular crusading expeditions from Europe. The brethren of the military orders were in short the first professional soldiers that the west had produced since the fall of Rome, and their qualities soon came perforce to be acknowledged within the hierarchies of Outremer. From the mid-twelfth century onwards, the Templars and Hospitallers were involved as a matter of course in military operations and discussions of military policy in the Latin East. On campaign their troops were typically assigned to the army’s rearguard and vanguard (the positions most exposed to attack), were given responsibility for defence of the army’s encampment at night and escorted the True Cross.

The best known aspect of the orders’ military prowess, however, was their heedless courage in battle irrespective of circumstances. The bravery of the warrior monks was universally recognised, and their reputation reached legendary proportions. Nor was it merely theatrics; on many occasions it won the day for the Franks, for instance at Damietta in 1219, or at Montgisard in 1177, where a charge by the outnumbered Templars scattered the enemy and almost captured Saladin. The Muslims considered the brethren of the military orders to be the Franks’ most formidable troops, courageous to the point of fanaticism. Muslim chroniclers described the Templars as ‘demons’ and likened the orders’ castles to impregnable lairs of wild beasts, ‘a bone in the throat of Islam’. Saladin, a leader noted for his magnanimity, reportedly vowed to ‘cleanse the land of these two impure orders’ and routinely executed captured Templars and Hospitallers.

For some critics, bravery merged with pride - the military orders’ other universally acknowledged trait - to become foolhardiness, compromising military outcomes. At the siege of Ascalon in 1153, for instance, the Templars allegedly caused an assault to fail by preventing their fellow Christians following them through a breach in the walls, desiring the glory for themselves. As a rule, however, claims of recklessness by the orders are ambiguous or associated with a particular individual rather than systemic traits. The Ascalon story derives from a single account written years after the event and inconsistent with the reports of eyewitnesses.Similarly, the alleged role of the Templar Grand Master Gerard de Ridefort in the disaster at Hattin is based on one potentially biased source and receives no mention in other contemporary accounts of the battle. Even if true, the irresponsibility displayed on this occasion and earlier the same year at Cresson (where a hundred Templars charged fifteen hundred Muslims and were wiped out almost to a man) reflects on de Ridefort’s leadership rather than on the Templars as an institution.

In any case, a degree of aggressiveness was essential to the reputation that drew the orders recruits and revenues from all over Christendom; they could not be seen as reluctant to fight when their prestige stemmed from an image of holy warriors smiting the infidel. It was failure to meet this paradigm, rather than a perceived excess of zeal, that underpinned most allegations of military incompetence made against the orders. Generally speaking the orders’ leaders had a sound understanding of the current military situation, which rarely favoured the Franks; they were thus inclined towards a prudent approach that often put them at odds with crusaders from Europe, for instance at Damascus in 1148, Mansurah in 1250 and during the Third Crusade. The crusader states’ distance and unfamiliar political environment meant that westerners had little understanding of the situation ‘on the ground’, and of the practical problems that the orders faced in maintaining Outremer’s long-term viability. Cultivation of relations with the Muslims, for example, made strategic sense but seemed to compromise the orders’ first principles and gave rise to accusations that they were in league with the infidel. Similarly, criticism that the orders’ brethren tended to hide in their castles during Muslim invasions and frequently surrendered fortresses without resistance reflects lack of knowledge of Outremer’s defence system. Castle garrisons were only expected to delay an invader until the field army had been mustered, and a castellan without hope of relief was well advised to surrender his fortress in exchange for safe passage and so preserve his garrison for the crusader states’ scarce manpower.

Not all of the orders’ shortcomings were mere matters of perception. Contemporaries noted the disparity between their resources and the forces they actually deployed in Outremer, and some degree of underutilisation did probably exist, though this is better explained by administrative deficiencies rather than indifference. Throughout nearly two centuries of residence in the Holy Land, the orders never developed a novel approach to warfare against the Muslims. The rivalry between the two major orders and their independence from secular authority undermined concerted Frankish action against the infidel, more significantly as the Templars and Hospitallers became dominant political powers in Outremer during the thirteenth century.

In the final analysis however the military orders should not be judged too harshly; they failed because they had undertaken an impossible task. The crusader states were strategically untenable; their survival depended ultimately on the political condition of the surrounding Muslim powers, and internal factors such as the orders’ performance could only delay catastrophe. To achieve anything more would have required sustained support from the west, but this was never forthcoming; Frankish immigration to the Levant was never more than a trickle, while crusades from Europe were sporadic, ephemeral and dissipated across too many fronts. The military orders, by contrast, never wavered in their commitment to Outremer. Their conduct in the hopeless defence in 1291 of Acre, the last Frankish foothold in the Holy Land, provides a fitting epitaph for their role in a crusading enterprise that was doomed from the outset. We should be inclined to accept the judgment of King Amalric of Jerusalem, who by the mid-twelfth century had already concluded that ‘if we can achieve anything, it is through them [the military orders] that we are able to do it’.

The Taiwan Strait War, 2013

2006-05-30T23:38:00.000+10:00

Fast-forward to June, 2013. Consider the following sequence of events -

The Republic of China's president, a DPP independence hawk with a legislative majority, announces his intention to seek a constitutional amendment changing the island's name to the Republic of Taiwan. Despite PRC warnings, the US government's response is watered down to 'non-support', in the face of overwhelming sympathy for Taiwan from Congress and the American public.

Amidst mounting rhetoric from Beijing, two US carrier battlegroups are despatched to the waters east of Taiwan. The ROC government unveils its constitutional changes, which - in another unpleasant surprise for Washington - exclude any part of mainland China from the new republic, amounting to irrevocable rejection of the 'One China' principle. The PLA is mobilised.

With the American media howling 'appeasement', the US president reiterates that an attack on Taiwan is a matter of grave concern for the United States. All Washington's regional allies declare neutrality; Japan and South Korea even deny the US use of military bases on their soil. China's central bank floods the market with US treasuries, sending Wall Street and the US dollar into tailspin. Congress passes a landslide resolution pledging to defend Taiwan.

The PLA occupies Jinmen and Matsu, and in response the two US carriers enter the Strait. China announces a blockade and fires a hundred missiles into Taiwan; the ROC airforce hits back at mainland targets. The penny drops when US and Chinese forces engage. Who shot first remains in doubt, but the Chinese simultaneously launch an electronic warfare offensive, cancelling the traditional US information dominance of the battlefield.

A US carrier goes to the bottom, with almost all hands. The American public cries for blood and US planes join the ROC airforce to plaster targets along China's southeast coast. Both Washington and Beijing put their strategic nuclear forces on maximum alert. Urged to send the B2's against Beijing and Shanghai, the US president blinks at armageddon and calls his Chinese counterpart, who's also getting cold feet. China lifts the blockade and withdraws its forces on a number of conditions, including the resignation of Taiwan's president and the opening of reunification talks. Faced with a threatened US withdrawal, Taipei buckles.

In the aftermath, the US severs diplomatic ties with China and slaps a total ban on commercial intercourse. The US and the world economy suffer, but not as much as China, which for a while looks ready to descend into chaos. But the Communist Party clings on and settles in for a new cold war across the Pacific, which three decades later is still going strong. After a decade of talks, Taiwan joins China in a loose confederation.

At this point I should confess that this cheerful scenario isn't my own work, but a summary of the second chapter in America's Coming War with China. It does happen to tally almost exactly with an essay I wrote last year on the ominous trends in the 'Taiwan problem'. Unless some serious political lifting is done, we're more likely than not to have a war in the Strait within the next ten years.

That lifting needs to come from both sides of the Pacific. At a general level the whole power structure of the Asia-Pacific needs a makeover, as I argued a while back on this blog, if Sino-US conflict is to be averted. On Taiwan specifically, the US needs to junk 'strategic ambiguity' in favour of a tougher stance towards the governments on both sides of the Strait. The key elements of the above scenario are Beijing's readiness to attack Taiwan upon a decisive bid for independence, and Washington's failure to preempt such a bid or squash it the moment it happens (as happened to Taipei's nuclear program). A clearer US commitment to the status quo wouldn't guarantee against this situation, but it would help.

It's high time that someone with foreign policy credentials spotlighted this issue, in the form of an accessible read. So kudos to America's Coming War With China, even if in other bits it shows up the incapacity of Western commentators to get basic China facts straight. Memo to Mr. Carpenter: it wasn't the Ming dynasty which occupied Taiwan in 1661.

The BBC reports on Taiwan's new acquisition - 'Jimnen', not to be confused with Jinmen

Scoff at this scenario if you like, but recall that September 11 was unthinkable before it happened. (Whether some people foresaw the use of passenger jets as weapons of terrorism is besides the point). By contrast, analysts have been warning for the better part of a decade - Carpenter's book was published in 2001 - that the 'Taiwan problem' is heading towards a violent resolution. We even had a dress rehearsal in the form of the 1996 Straits Crisis, which played out along similar lines to Carpenter's scenario. Since then the PRC's military position has strengthened, vis-a-vis the US and especially the Republic of China, which has elected a president who rejects the basic principle underpinning Beijing's approach to the problem.

And yet we're sill waiting for some creative thinking in Washington about management of the Taiwan issue and relations with the PRC more generally. Instead we've got a 'China Threat' literary industry, long on hysteria and short on knowledge of contemporary China, let alone the country's history and long-term prospects. At the official level we now have a US strategy for 'full-spectrum dominance' and the cleansing of terrorism from the earth, into which China is expected to fit meekly. The issue of Taiwan's independence gets once sentence, and it doesn't offer concessions to Beijing.

Next to the potential consequences of this war, the threat posed by Islamic extremism pales into insignificance.

The Forgotten POWs

2006-05-26T16:42:00.000+10:00

The recent visit by Japan's Foreign Minister to Australia generated some embarrassing publicity about his family company's wartime 'employment' of Australian POWs. Taro Aso now plans to pay his respects at the shrine commemorating Allied prisoners who died in labour camps within Japan. It's certainly a change in gear from his visits to the infamous Yasukuni shrine, whose relics include an engine from the Thai-Burma railroad, the construction of which cost the lives of 2,815 Australians.

A cynic might say that Aso - one of the frontrunners for the Prime Minister's job when Koizumi vacates it this year - is trying to distance himself from a career-full of gratuitous comments on Japan's expansionist past. Perhaps the time spent hobnobbing with Alexander Downer, whose father was interned at Changi, has reminded Aso that China and South Korea aren't the only countries Japan has historical issues with. And perhaps the rise of Chinese power has something to do with Japan's Foreign Minister visiting a temple dedicated to the victims rather than the agents of Japanese imperialism, with the ambassadors of Tokyo's allies invited to observe the change of heart. There's no sign that Aso Cement will join the list of German and Japanese companies - notably Siemens and Mitsubishi - fighting lawsuits over their use of slave labour during World War Two.

At least the poor souls whose ashes rest within the Juganji Temple are getting their smidgen of honour. The final tragedy of World War Two was how the memory of so many victims was buried in the new politics of the Cold War, a problem compounded by countries' selectivity in honouring their wartime dead. So let's not begrudge this moment of recognition for men who perished toiling for a worthless cause, forgotten then and forgotten now.

The Red Shadow of the Past

2006-05-19T12:10:00.000+10:00

The Communist Party of China is big on anniversaries. When I visited Bejing in 1999, half the city was locked down after 7pm to allow dress rehearsals for the PRC's golden jubilee. China's tumultous history for the first half of the 20th century provides lots of nation-building material - the May Fourth Movement, the Nanchang Uprising, the Liberation itself - all suitably commemorated with flag-waving children, goosestepping soldiers and overdecorated floats.

After 1949, the anniversaries stop. So this Thursday is likely to pass quietly, notwithstanding that it marks forty years to the day when a Peking University lecturer kicked off the Cultural Revolution. Nie Yuanzi was a radical forty-five year old when she stuck up her 'big character poster' denouncing the university authorities. She's now a pensionless eighty-five year old who shares a borrowed apartment with her pet cats and her memories, sharpened by seventeen years in prison; a victim of the monster she helped unleash.

Nie Yuanzi's dazibao

China must have a dialogue about the Cultural Revolution, says Nie, who was one of the Five Leading Red Guards but fell from grace when the political winds shifted in 1968. The reason is less therapeutic than prescriptive, to avoid a repeat catastrophe springing from a flawed understanding of history. One gets the impression that those scarred personally are past the need for reconciliation; the scattered but growing number of voices calling for a national debate talk about the future, as much as the past.

Certainly the responses one gets from people who lived through the "Ten Years of Chaos" remain laconic, even casual. Like a tutor of mine recounting how as a child she watched her father (a university lecturer) paraded through the streets in a dunce cap past baying mobs. Or a friend's father making off-hand references to his years as a teenage 'barefoot doctor' in one of the hundreds of rural counties that the Red Guard generation was exiled to from 1969, in an attempt to expiate the madness.

On top of the human cost, there's a need to confront the most comprehensive effort yet seen to destroy a nation's cultural heritage. I remember admiring the coffin of an Empress at the Ming tombs outside Beijing, complete with an apologetic sign explaining that it's a replica, the original having received the attention of axe-wielding Red Guards during the swinging sixties. Left-leaning western college students may still find the mass mobilisation and ideological fervour inspiring; Chinese intellectuals view it the same way that cultured Germans view the Nazi rallies at Munich.

But within China itself, the subject remains taboo. As far as the Party's concerned the matter was closed on June 27, 1981, with the Central Committee resolution pinning the blame on Chairman Mao and the counterrevolutionary clique behind him. Nie's is one of the few voices to penerate the blanket of censorship that still lies across the country, smothering even the one private museum dedicated to the Cultural Revolution.

The Cultural Revolution Museum outside Shantou

The root problem is that reevaluating the Cultural Revolution means reevaluating the role of Mao Zedong - and by extension that of the Communist Party - in the nation's history. China has yet to go through an equivalent of Russia's de-Stalinisation process. Instead the verdict on the Great Helmsman remains frozen in Deng Xiaoping's 70-30 formula: 70 per cent right, 30 per cent wrong. An honest discussion about the historical black hole from 1966-76 would open a political pandora's box, one that the Party has tried to keep shut with the weight of economic growth.

So this is just another instance of the CCP's propensity to sweep its problems under the carpet of history, if necessary by waiting for the main protagonists to die. Last year saw the exit of both Zhao Ziyang and Zhang Chunqiao, the last survivor of the Gang of Four. Neither the baggage of the Cultural Revolution nor that from the June 4th Incident seems to have impeded China's headlong rush to modernity; one of Zhao's proteges has even made it to Premier, while the memorabilia of Mao's personality cult now furnishes trendy cafes. But faced with the mounting contradictions of marketisation within the framework of a Party-State, China's leaders may eventually find that the cherished goal of national stability requires them to use history as a mirror, a lesson they readily dispense to China's neighbours.

As was observed about another national cataclysm, one that festered for a hundred years after the violence ceased:
"The past isn't dead. It's not even past".

Addendum

In case anyone's wondering about the slogan on the title picture:
"The Chinese People's Liberation Army is the Great School of Mao Zedong Thought"

Mission: Improbable

2006-05-13T13:25:00.000+10:00

The best way to spoil a movie is to watch a TV drama with the same material the night before. So watching Threat Matrix on Thursday (it's on after Scrubs) may have jaundiced my opinion of Mission Impossible 3. Then again, one can only spin so much from the worn threads of spy gadgets, undercover agents and evil European arms-dealers.

Numerous Spoiler Warnings

The first question to ask when making a movie is whether you want the audience to take it seriously. If the answer is 'yes', then you should avoid scenes with special agents wise-cracking and discussing their engagement plans en mision. Or helicopers flying between the blades of wind turbines while the hero performs defibrillation on board. Or people sticking nitroglycerin bombs up other people's noses for no reason, other than 'because we can, and we're sadistic bastards.'

MI3 has all these things and still expects us to suspend our well-paid-for disbelief. How a film with scenes of torture and executions got a PG-13 rating I'll never know, but it works hard to achieve a grim realism. Villain (#1) talks up a DaVinciCode-style conspiracy - "you have no idea what you're dealing with, do you?" - that involves a doomsday weapon innocuously called the 'Rabbit's Foot'. Villain (#2) provides the now-mandatory reference to contemporary politics, through a half-boiled scheme to sell the Rabbit's Foot to Middle Eastern jihadists and then send in the US military to clean up: "democracy wins".

The material's stale, but I might still have cared had it led somewhere. Intead it's been cobbled into a circular plot with more leaks than a boatfull of asylum seekers. If Davian's so confident about the Rabbit's Foot, why does he need Hunt to steal it? If Musgrave wants it, why didn't he just send Hunt? What's the point of having faux-Julia shot after Hunt provides the Rabbit's Foot? For that matter what's the point of any of this, seeing as we're never told where the Rabbit's Foot comes from or even what it is?

Denied a coherent story, the film's left to hang the explosions and gadgetry on a parade of undeveloped characters. Phillip Seymour Hoffman doesn't quite pull off the transition from Capote to sadistic, English-accented criminal mastermind. Billy Crudup might have made an adequate backup villain had he revealed himself before the last 15 minutes of the film, and been given one more scene before losing a pistol duel with Hunt's gun-innocent wife. Only the acid-tongued Laurence Fishburne stirs some interest, until we find out that he's not the bad guy after all.

None of this need disappoint if you paid to see Tom Cruise running, driving or falling for half the movie, preferably against exotic backdrops (German windfarms, the Vatican, Shanghai). Agent Farris may need an adrenalin shot to get her going, but not Ethan Hunt, who goes from blasting predator drones out of the sky with an assault rifle to being zapped with a nerve-agent to breaking out of IMF headquarters with a penknife, without so much as a catnap. This superhuman resilience doesn't leave Cruise many opportunities to act. Among these precious moments, the more convincing ones are not those with Julia but Hunt's flashbacks about Farris, and his internal conflict over having sent a young agent to her death. But even this gets submerged in the pointlessness of the whole exercise.

MI3 has the rush and the effects; it just lacks creativity, a convincing story or characters that the audience cares about. I enjoyed the fact that Hunt's agency is called the 'IMF' (Impossible Missions Force) and the bit where Hunt's crew confound ex-PLA contractors with a tennis-ball machine. Maybe if I hadn't been up till 1:00am that morning watching another show about American secret agents saving the world, I would have been more charitable.

Or maybe not.

Food for Thought

2006-05-10T23:09:00.000+10:00

This venerable receptacle is the biscuit tin of the Political Interest Society. It's present at weekly meetings and has its own section in the club constitution. It also has the names of past presidents engraved on the inside of the lid, to which 'John Lee' will be added once I find time to visit the key-carving shop in Union House. Having passed my responsibilities into the capable hands of David Fettling, the tin will follow next Wednesday, when the committee elected at today's AGM get their tin-oriented inaugural.

When I arrived at Melbourne Uni five-plus years ago, I took next to no interest in politics. So the prospect of running a club dedicated to talking about politics - or spending varying chunks of my week sticking up opinions on the internet - didn't cross my mind. But to paraphrase a wise Hollywood character, you never know what you'll pick from life's chocolate box, especially when the box is a large and cosmopolitan university. That PIS is the only one of the thirteen-odd clubs I joined in O-week which I've remained involved in is the best testimony I can give to the society. I hope that future aspirants to the chattering class enjoy it as much as I have.

As we say, more than an unfortunate acronym.

For the Emperor!

2006-05-08T19:30:00.000+10:00

This blog's been a little short on the 'fantasy' bit in its title. So here are some screenshots from that game I waste time on, when I'm not organising club AGMs or having tea with the Queen.

Click for larger images.

It's hammer time!

They just keep coming back for more...

Taking the fight to the enemy

Roadkill on the information superhighway

The Battle of Serendah

2006-05-01T21:50:00.000+10:00

All this fuss about Kokoda has rekindled interest in my own family's brush with the Great Pacific War. That, and I haven't had time for an original post. So here's a piece I wrote for my VCE English class seven years ago, about the Battle that Didn't Save Malaya.

____________________________________________________

Our flight touched down after dark, at Kuala Lumpur's gleaming Sepang Airport, which doubles as a Formula One racing track. Visiting grandparents is routine familiar to every Chinese family. Much of our three days in the Malaysian capital is spent seeing friends, but one is set aside.

The North-South Highway shimmers in the heat, symbol of Malaysia's progress. We speed along in a rented Proton, the air conditioner set on high. One cannot look around at the surrounding country without shades: not that there is much to see. After passing the ubiquitous green-roofed tollgates, it is jungle or rubber plantation the whole way.

Serendah, once a tin-mining town, is now a jumble of housing estates, commissioned to line the pockets of some Chinese tycoon. The place is a bath of heat. We trundle down uncovered lanes and round blind corners, products of shoddy building regulations: symptoms of too-rapid development. The houses are typical Malaysian homes, one-story link structures sharing a common wall on each side, each with its own small paved yard in front. Chinese households are marked by the red altars standing in the front yards, or by blackened joss sticks stuck in the grass outside.

Serendah has not changed in sixty years. Kuala Lumpur is a city dominated by the Petronas Twin Towers, and sporting all the trappings of a First World capital, if not the cleanliness. My friends there frequent air-conditioned shopping centers and internet cafes. Here, bare-foot children play alongside open storm drains. In the restaurants, their walls plastered with Chinese lunar calendars and Guinness posters, old men sit at tables dotted with flies, staring at the wall-mounted TV between draws on their cigarettes.

The house, all tiles and bare walls, is surprisingly cool. The entrance leads into the living room, some four metres by three. A fan is suspended from the ceiling, its blades turning lazily. The sole evidence of the Nineties is a small TV and VCR in the corner. On top of the TV sits a photo of my family, six years past. One top of the VCR is a video tape of my one-year old cousin in Wantirna.

My mother converses with her parents in a string of Cantonese, smattered with English. My grandfather, hale for his seventy-seven years, reclines in a striped deckchair, cigarette in hand. His eyes, framed by prominent cheekbones and whip-combed hair, study me inscrutably. Koong (his Chinese title) grew up in this town, and like most venerable men loves to tell stories of his childhood. His favourite is that of the battle fought here sixty years ago, when the Japanese swept the British out of Malaya.

On this occasion, he asks if I would like to see the sites I have heard about so often in a Melbourne living room. With no other prospects for the next hour and a half, I readily agree. We don hats against the ferocious tropical sun, step outside and into his old Datsun, the interior musty and humid despite the shade.

We inch down the town’s main street, a solid mass of trucks, motorcyclists and the odd Proton. There are no traffic lights, much less regulations; the whole scene is awash with noise and heat, not to mention pollution from two-stroke engines. This was once the main trunk road from the north, down which the Japanese came, also riding on bicycles. Then, as now, it was overlooked by the ubiquitous Chinese shop signs, their characters splashed in red or black, with the absence of the small KFC. Finally, we are beyond the crush and driving alone along the outskirts. Grass tall as a man lines each side of the dirt road; the jungle has long since disappeared from this place. The land, once cleared for the endless rubber plantations, will likely soon be the site of some new development monstrosity.

Serendah, never a town of note, has one distinction to its name. Here, sixty years ago, was formed the first unit of the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army, the MPAJA; a force run by the Malayan Communist Party. The Malayan campaign was not going well. The outnumbered Japanese were driving the British and Indians down the peninsula at frightening speed. In desperation, the British recognized the Communists and gave them arms. Later, these would be used against the British themselves, in the postwar struggle for Malaya’s independence. At the time however, all the colonial masters cared about was halting the Rising Sun, for even a few days.

No local boys joined – my grandfather never contemplated it. The Communists recruited from the Chinese middle schools in the cities: smooth-faced youths, their minds opened by education and seeking a cause. Before them were dangled the twin prospects of a crusade against the hated Japanese, and the inevitable victory of Communism. ‘The East is Red’ was a slogan taken seriously in those days.

A cul-de-sac leads us to the river itself. Sungai Serendah is a sluggish creek, wandering beneath high banks crammed with jungle foliage. It is hard to imagine these slow brown waters being an obstacle to anyone, let alone a battle-tested army.

There is no bridge now, in place of the parallel structures of sixty years ago, one road and one rail. Both were dynamited by the British, as they arrived in retreat from the north. The British proceeded to fortify the line of the river, setting up four or five antitank rifles along the banks, with three artillery pieces in the town. They hoped to fight a delaying action, nothing more.

The Chinese population, meanwhile, had abandoned the town for the relative safety of the jungle fringe. The behaviour of Japanese troops in China was well known, and the fear of the Japanese Army preceded it. Koong and a few other youngsters, however, sneaked back out of curiosity. The town was being looted – even the Indian soldiers were breaking into shophouses in search of liquor. People were in no doubt as to which way the campaign was going. Already, survival was the priority. As Koong and his colleagues left, arms filled with as much as they could carry, the hills echoed to the crump of the British artillery, bombarding the Japanese concentration north of the river.

The fighting commenced just before dawn, the favourite hour for Japanese assaults – a fact the British had by now worked out. With typical disregard for personal safety, the Japanese tried to force a crossing in the face of withering machine gun fire. After clogging the river with the bodies of their soldiers, they withdrew and tried another way.

A drive past the derelict tin mine takes us out of town, to the Chinese cemetery by the river. The graves sprawl across the slope with a total lack of order, the size of each denoting its occupant’s affluence. The grass grows wild, save where a dutiful family has cleared a patch round their deceased.

The hill overlooks both town and river, and had been chosen by the fledgling MPAJA as their headquarters. It was occupied by about a hundred middle school students, boys with guns. One was on sentry duty when a Japanese patrol appeared and crossed the river. In panic he fired on them, and the Japanese fired back – but their mission was reconnaissance, not battle. The young guerillas hurriedly retreated to the mountains. ON their way, they passed through the refugee camp, telling everyone of their great clash with the invaders.

The Japanese had done what they did throughout the campaign – outflanked the defenders. Now Japanese fighters appeared to strafe the British positions. There was not an Allied plane in sight. By afternoon, the British had withdrawn. Kuala Lumpur, forty kilometers to the south, fell two days later. The Japanese chased them all the way down to Singapore, and what Churchill would label ‘the greatest disaster in British military history’.

For the people of Serendah, those two days transformed their world forever. The whole prewar order collapsed before an invader who was absolutely merciless. For the next three years the population eked out a precarious existence, between their occupiers and the growing prospect of famine. Koong supported the family by cycling forty miles to Kuala Selangor to buy tapioca, then bringing it back to sell to the starving Indian plantation workers. The Japanese were finally expelled in 1945, but they had shattered colonial prestige forever. The British returned to a population no longer prepared to obey them. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya was born. My mother was two years old.

I sit another hour in my grandparents’ house, listening to Koong and my father debate the merits of the Mahathir government. When I was small there was an Indian hawker on the street outside, whose pisang goreng (banana fritters) provided some relief from the monotony. But she is gone now; perhaps gone to the city to seek a better fortune. Serendah, like a hundred similar towns across Malaysia, is withering in the wake of the national boom. Already elderly folk like Koong and Po make up much of the population.

It is time to go. We say our farewells, getting into the baking Proton. Again I promise Koong that, one day, I will get around to writing our family history. The question is how far back it will go. It is something to ponder, as we board our flight to Shanghai.

ANZAC Day, Australia Day

2006-04-25T14:45:00.000+10:00

Update 26 April

The lynchmob has been out these two days for Steve Barton and his effort to debunk the claim that Kokoda was 'the battle that saved Australia'. Barton's certainly dug pits for himself with his rant about an ALP agenda and other gratuitous political grenades - e.g. that a Japanese occupation of Queensland would have been tolerable (in view of ultimate allied victory), or that the diggers in New Guinea weren't fighting in defence of Australia's liberty. But the heat his basic argument has received does suggest that the 'ANZAC legend' has become a sacred cow in Australian cultural life.

See these threads at Larvatus Prodeo and John Quiggin.

_________________________________________________

ANZAC Day, as the media constantly reminds us, is the closest to a national day that Australia gets. The salience of overseas military endeavours and Gallipoli in particular in our national mythology is unique, and quite beyond the imaginings of the young men who stormed ashore at the Dardanelles a hundred-plus years ago looking for the 'soft underbelly' of the Central Powers. They didn't find it, but a lot of men died in the process, on which point it's worth noting that Australian dead were outnumbered by Brits (2:1) and even 'Frenchmen' (i.e. conscripted Algerians), not to mention Ottoman troops (10:1).

It appears that this wastage of human life is what most impresses those who make the Gallipoli pilgrimage, or indeed anyone who tries genuinely to tap the spiritual significance of the ANZAC heritage (as opposed to just using it for beating up on ethnics). Claims that ANZAC Day 'glorifies war' are reductionist and distract from more pertinent critiques of its cultural symbolism. One is that it indulges Australian chauvinism, most obviously by asserting an Australian monopoly on such virtues as self-sacrifice and 'mateship' through the vehicle of the ANZAC soldier. On the other hand, there is growing recognition of the other side's story in any given conflict; with Gallipoli for example it's now common - more so among ordinary folks than politicians - to discuss the Turkish contribution and in particular that of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), one of history's underrated statesmen.

Another stock complaint is that Australian military commemoration sets up a 'hierarchy of sacrifice', a constant bugbear for veterans of less popular conflicts: Korea, Vietnam, the postwar occupation of Japan. But most significant is the charge that ANZAC remembrance has become an anachronistic touchstone of national identity.

My sense is that Anzac Day has grown in appeal in inverse proportion to confidence about our common identity, future prosperity and national security.

History ... perpetuates collective self-awareness. The Anzac legend offers a comfortably prescriptive notion of who we once were.

The irony here is that Gallipoli marked a break in Australian self-awareness, not immediate but fundamental: the end of Empire and the sense of a separate nation making its own way in the world. Arguably this would have occurred without the experience of having the flower of the country's youth sacrificed on the map-tables of Whitehall, but that's what happened and, as they say, the rest is history. The contemporary issue is whether the ANZAC legacy can be converted into a tradition of general service to the world community, as attempted by today's Australian editorial, or will become the foundation of an oppositional and exclusivist definition of Australian identity.

It can't be coincidence that the swelling youth interest in ANZAC history has occured against a backdrop of globalisation, the growing prominence of 'Asia' and (more recently) a political discourse of clashing civilisations. One can argue over what role the Howard government's promotion of an authentic and monistic national identity has played, but on one point the Prime Minister is definitely wrong. The ANZAC story, like the broader Australian one, is not a closed book but a work in progress.

No new Epoch in US-China relations

2006-04-21T13:39:00.000+10:00

(c) AP

When not handing out propaganda at Melbourne's train stations, the Epoch Times folks keep busy heckling the Chinese president. It was shaping up as a bad day for Hu Jintao, what with being snubbed dinner at the White House and the MC announcing "the national anthem of the Republic of China." But official visits don't get much worse than being told "your days are numbered" before the world media, by an advocate of a sect your country persecutes, while standing next to the President of the United States.

Nor was it a great moment for the hosts. The Bush administration got things off on the wrong foot by not according this the status of a 'state visit', as Clinton did for Hu's predecessor. Then there was the small matter of confusing one's guests with their archenemies across the Taiwan Strait. But the ultimate gaffe was to let a Falungong practitioner not only slip security but abuse Hu for three minutes before the secret service hustled her off, leaving bureaucrats and thinktanks around the country to stress about how those inscrutable orientals will react (inside word says they're not happy).

(c) AP

Whoever was giving out press passes obviously didn't do their homework on the Epoch Times, a Falungong-linked paper with a prophecy fetish and a big chip on their shoulder called the Chinese Communist Party. The ET has disowned Dr Wang's actions, but the fact that she heckled Jiang Zemin in Malta five years ago should have tipped someone off. The State Department's woes didn't end there, however, with Bush and Hu later trying to hold dialogue over the chants of the Free-Tibet crowd across South Lawn. Clearly the event planners didn't watch how the Brits handled Hu's London trip last year, either.

Hu stayed all smiles, but used the occasion to teach Bush a lesson about negotiating with the Chinese that American businessmen learned long ago: expect much gilded language, but no progress unless you hand over something first. Faced with the high expectations held of this 'official' (not 'state') visit by a swathe of US lobbies, George also resorted to the fine art of using many words to say nothing, in which he is of course well practiced.

Bush said, "We would hope there would be more appreciation'' in allowing the currency to rise with market forces.

[Regarding Iran] the United States and China are in a position to ''work on tactics'' to achieve that goal, Bush said.

"We don't agree on everything but we are able to discuss our disagreements in friendship and cooperation,'' Bush told reporters.

So the bottom line is that noone's happy, least of all Hu Jintao. Having finally clawed his way to the top of the Fourth Generation leadership last year, when he eased Jiang out of the old man's last bastion in the state CMC, Hu doubtless felt entitled to 'state visit' recognition and a black-tie dinner at the White House. Instead he got a luncheon of halibut and dumplings to the strains of the Nashville Bluegrass band, after half an hour watching soldiers prance past in Continental Army uniforms.

No visiting head-of-state can have been this disappointed since the secret service ruled out Kruschev's trip to Disneyland.

Non Sequitur

I never thought I'd see an American columnist arguing the US would be better off under a parliamentary system. But then I, like Thomas Friedman, never thought I'd see a US administration determined to jump from an Iraqi frying pan into an Iranian fire.

To Get Rich Is Glorious

2006-04-13T13:12:00.000+10:00

Chris Berg, one of our guest speakers at Pub Politics a few weeks back, was on this week's Insight program defending materialism as a road to happiness. Good libertarian that he is, his cumulative minute and a half of airtime can be picked out by the keywords 'choice', 'preference' and 'capacity'. Indulge yourself - read the transcript...

(cross-posted at club blog)

Sam the Meat Man

2006-04-10T20:03:00.000+10:00

"Hi, I'm Sam Neill. You may remember me from such films as 'The Zookeeper' and 'Monster Lizards Send Humans Down the Foodchain'. As I'm clearly qualified to talk about animals and food, I' m here to tell you that red meat is good for you. At least that's what Meat and Livestock Australia are paying me to say, and no one knows their product better than they do!

"You see, eating red meat has made us what we are today. Or so some anthropologists and archaeologists and nutritionists think. It's all thanks to red meat that we came down from the trees and evolved from repulsive apes into the fine specimen of Anglo-Saxon manhood you see before you. Allow me to demonstrate...

"Since we started on meat two million years ago, our brains have tripled in size. Just take it from a regular bloke like me. I may be a celebrity, but look, I'm having dinner with this wholesome suburban family. And I'm wearing jeans and other hard-yakka gear, as all real men do. Not like those loony left-wing celebrities, such as this ditzy young singer here. They're not evil, just ignorant and misguided. Because they don't eat red meat.

"So remember, boys and girls: red meat makes you feel good. After all, isn't that what living is all about?"

Footnote 1

Those who still don't believe truth is stranger than fiction, see if you can tell which of the following quotes is from referenced-Simpsons episode and which is 'real' -

"Don't kid yourself, Jimmy. If a cow ever got the chance, he'd eat you and everyone you care about!"

"Who in the name of all things holy and unholy is Missy Higgins, and does she realize that her little porcine friend would kill her when it's fully grown?"

The real one comes from VeryAntiPETA, another website devoted to beating up on non-conformists.

Footnote 2

When not busy helping out primary producers, Sam's been reading scripts for Jurassic Park IV. Steven Spielberg says it'll be so good, he wishes it were the third movie and not the fourth one. Oh, and he won't be directing it...

Footnote 3 (11 April)

Flicked on Channel Ten at six tonight and what did I see? Troy McClure smiling back at me. Call it coincidence that Lisa the Vegetarian screens the day after this post, if you like. I'm taking it as an omen...

The Universality of Human Rights

2006-03-24T17:27:00.000+11:00

Following up the 'Asian values' debate at the last PIS meeting, here's a not-so-old essay of mine - minus footnotes, introduction and conclusion - on drawing the line between human rights and culture. This issue happens to be getting the media glare right now, with the impending execution of an Afghan citizen for converting from Islam to Christianity.

I'll try to follow this up with something more specific on 'Asian values', assuming I have any energy left to think after homework, job applications and LSS tutes.

Cross-posted at the club blog.

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Human rights must have legitimacy if they are to be realised within a given community. The widespread perception in Muslim countries that human rights are ‘un-Islamic’ or a tool of western imperialism, for example, makes it difficult for governments to implement human right or for rights advocates to gain social and political traction. In developed states like the US, opposition to judicial enforcement of economic and social rights stems more from perceptions that they are not bona fide ‘rights’ than from persuasive separation-of-powers arguments. Attempts to give human rights an objective basis, for instance by linking them to economic development, have met little success; implementation of human rights depends on a cultural choice by the community in question, a choice that can only spring from cultural legitimacy.

The basic problem faced by the global human rights movement is that the very concept of human rights, defined as inalienable claims by an abstract individual upon society, lacks legitimacy outside the western world. If one attempts to ground human rights in religion or moral philosophy, they appear as a western cultural construct. Even accepting that numerous belief systems recognise the inherent human dignity on which human rights are founded, many manifest practices that are inconsistent with ‘international’ human rights norms; certain principles in Islamic jurisprudence, for example, conflict directly with the rights to freedom of belief, freedom of speech and equality before the law. A strong argument can be made that other key concepts underpinning human rights – the individual’s autonomy from society and the cosmos, for instance – are specifically western cultural developments. As such, their introduction into non-western societies presupposes that these societies are either culturally deficient or on an evolutionary path that will turn them into facsimiles of the contemporary west.

Nor have positivist approaches to human rights given non-western peoples the sense of cultural ownership that grounds legitimacy. The core of international human rights, expressed in the Universal Declaration, was articulated by western states in the context of the ideological struggle with communism. On an ongoing basis, Western states are perceived to serve vested commercial interests by promoting civil and political rights over economic and social ones, abandoning even the former when inconvenient (take Australia’s reservations to the ICCPR regarding federal implementation and juvenile detention). Non-western governments stand accused of using communitarian conceptions of human rights to justify internal repression. In this context, the non-western world at large has unsurprisingly developed a cynical understanding of human rights.

Yet despite the rhetoric of cultural distinctiveness from their elites, non-western societies are taking an evolutionary path similar in many respects to that of the west: industrialising, evolving powerful bureaucracies, developing market economies. In this changing social context, human rights are necessary to shield ‘authentic human life’ – whatever cultural expression that life may take – from the corrosive effects of modernity. Freedom of speech and association, for example, may be needed to protect traditional social structures or cultural practices from exploitative employers, corrupt bureaucrats and callous state policies.

Critiques of human rights as exclusively ‘western’ also employ an excessively static notion of culture. Muslim rights advocates have argued that the Shari’a provisions referenced above are a historically contingent interpretation of Islamic texts, which should be reinterpreted consistently with contemporary conditions. Torture and poverty were once considered legitimate by virtually all societies (including western ones) but are now widely rejected, at least in theory. These are instances of a global cultural evolution towards recognition that certain practices and conditions diminish human personality in any cultural context. Critics of the universal rights discourse correctly assert that ‘personality’ is culturally defined, but miss the point that it attaches to a universal ‘individual’ who is the subject of human rights. If the individual’s integrity is compromised, for instance through torture or poverty, personality cannot be fully realised. Pace Douzinas, the ‘human’ in human rights signifies a physical and mental core on which all cultures operate.

Human rights thus have a universal moral basis, notwithstanding their initial conception in the west, and as such are universally applicable. The global human rights machinery serves a legitimate role in monitoring adherence to human rights within all states, including their western progenitors; consider the Human Rights Committee’s (HRC’s) declaration of a US reservation to ICCPR subordinating that treaty to the US constitution as invalid, or the UN High Commissioner’s finding in 2002 that Australia had breached the ICCPR and the ICESCR. However, the precise content and means of enforcement of human rights must correspond to social organisation and conditions, which differ between nations and cultures. The right to freedom from arbitrary interference with privacy or family, for instance, may need to countenance traditional forms of community supervision and authority (for example the role of village elders in regulating social relationships).

Implementation of human rights should therefore take place as locally as practicable, for instance through national or regional human rights commissions, rather than via international treaty mechanisms such as the HRC’s individual complaints mechanism. Localised implementation avoids the charge of western cultural imposition, and allows rights to become ‘foundations for actions and policy’ rather than meaningless abstractions. It is only through such ‘concretisation in the [local] context’ that human rights will acquire the legitimacy needed to take root in a particular community.

Lei Feng: The Next Generation

2006-03-18T20:48:00.000+11:00

Your parents, assuming they grew up in China, were told to "learn from Lei Feng". Now you too should study this model revolutionary, because he represents the next thing in online gaming.

Learning From Comrade Lei Feng is the wholesome alternative to the bloodthirsty offerings that dominate the net-savvy, socially challenged young-adult male market. Try something new, you jaded gamers, and enter a world where success is measured by good deeds rather than bodycounts. Admonish spitters, volunteer on building sites and help old people cross the street, in exchange for poorer clothes and (ultimately) the chance to meet Chariman Mao. Not that you violence-addicts will need to go cold turkey: you get to battle hidden agents and other counterrevolutionaries.

It looks like giving his life for socialism wasn't enough for Lei, who's been summoned with other ghosts of China's past - like Zheng He - to battle the wave of moral decay swamping China's present.

Canute, I hear the tide coming in...

Which game to play... hmmm... thinking...

Footnote: Lei Feng's been rolled out of his grave for some time now. See this three-year old post at Peking Duck comparing him with Horst Wessel (not an analogy I endorse).

Of the SAS, Iraq and Untermenschen

2006-03-13T07:47:00.000+11:00

Forty years ago, the archetypal conscientious objector was someone who burnt a draft card that was going to get him sent to Vietnam. Today, he's a military or intelligence officer disgruntled with some aspect of the Iraq fiasco. Ben Griffin joins the growing legion of insiders who have seen the 'enemy' and concluded that he is us - or at least the Bush administration. As an SAS trooper Griffin was paid to risk his scalp for his country, but he won't do it for US foreign policy:

"As far as the Americans were concerned, the Iraqi people were sub-human, untermenschen. You could almost split the Americans into two groups: ones who were complete crusaders, intent on killing Iraqis, and the others who were in Iraq because the Army was going to pay their college fees. They had no understanding or interest in the Arab culture... There might be one or two enlightened officers who understood the situation a bit better but on the whole that was their general attitude. Their attitude fuelled the insurgency. I think the Iraqis detested them."

The term Untermenschen will repel many as moral equivalence, being Nazi jargon for Jews, Slavs and other vermin earmarked for extermination. But it's accurate to the extent that it captures the ideological nature of this conflict, and how this conditions the way US troops relate to the people placed under them. Ideology is and always has been the basis for US action in Iraq. Not WMD proliferation, not counterterrorism, not even preemptive military doctrine per se.

I don't mean an ideological struggle between liberal democracy and 'Islamofascism', to use that ridiculous term from the neocon lexicon. I mean an ideology that asserts one country's right to achieve political change in other countries according to its own design, regardless of consequences for the inhabitants. That engenders a mindset which treats Iraqis as so much cannon fodder in a Project for a New American Century. If this is how the leaders think, is it any wonder the troops behave accordingly?

"I saw a lot of things in Baghdad that were illegal or just wrong. I knew, so others must have known, that this was not the way to conduct operations if you wanted to win the hearts and minds of the local population... because these people were a different colour or a different religion, they didn't count as much. You can not invade a country pretending to promote democracy and behave like that."

Regime change in Iraq was one step in a grand scheme that treats the rest of the world as objects, to be moved around by an American subject; the evidence shows clearly that the decision for war was made in line with this thinking, independently of the WMD argument. With the WMD prop gone and the outcome failing to fit the grand design, all that's left to justify the mess is a felicific calculus. 'Yes, many have died, and the country's going to hell in a handcart, but there've been elections, there's a constitution, we got rid of an evil dictator...'

Politicians and pundits are learning the hard way that it's not for them to decide who should die in the name of freedom. Hence the stream of self-justifying mea culpas from the conservative commentariat (Tim Dunlop has done a neat roundup at his blog, to which I'd add Andrew Sullivan and Victor Davis Hanson). But rather than checking first principles, they blame the variables - an unforeseeable insurgency, the craziness of those Arabs, etcetera ad infinitum. They can't or won't see what Hugh White put so lucidly in this morning's Age:

"The failure in Iraq is not a failure of execution; it's a failure of conception. The occupation and political reconstruction of Iraq was not a good idea badly implemented. It was a bad idea that no amount of administrative skill, political savvy, cultural sensitivity or military firepower could have made work."

Forget the reams of pre-invasion warnings by US government agencies. Forget the Vietnam experience. The lesson should have been learnt back in the days of Napoleon, who pumped 180,000 soldiers - about the number of Coalition troops currently committed to Iraq - into occupied Spain, ostensibly to bring that country the benefits of the Enlightenment and the Revolution on the points of French bayonets. Instead he got a six-year war that bled his army, cramped him strategically and produced all manner of humanitarian horrors. And finished with the Bourbons back in power, and Spain's development set back half a century. Deja vu...

Unfortunately, it seems that ideology is all many in the pro-war camp know. Far from questioning their own worldview, they claim the war isn't being fought ideologically enough. The current round of soul-searching looks more and more like a means of dumping Iraq in the trashbin of conflicts where America (or 'The West') didn't try hard enough, leaving them free to blame leftists, pacifists and the other usual traitors for everything wrong with the world. Next time - and the way the Iranian nuke affair's going, that may not be long - they'll do things right.

A smart man defined madness as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results...

CIA: Ministry of Truth

2006-03-11T17:47:00.000+11:00

Yet another case of truth surpassing fiction.