Madhouse

Your correspondent spent most of the last week in the wilds of Iceland, blissfully out of Wi-Fi range; as soon as you come back into town, and catch up with the news, you wonder what sort of madhouse your country has become. Kristallnacht in Marrickville? People’s cultural identity being assessed by holding up a bunch of swatches to their skin, to see if they match the décor? And the Prime Minister gives an address named after the most unlikely, un-Australian Labor leader in history to damn a whole political party for not sharing in the “delight of family and nation”?

These three events — Andrew Bolt’s appearance on accusations of racial vilification, the revival of attacks on the Greens as some sort of Nazi party, and Julia Gillard’s strange, strange Whitlam Oration — have all been discussed at length in the past week, but not as the expression of a single process, which they are.

Each in their own way represent a desperate desire not to acknowledge a profoundly changed world, retreating into past fantasy as a substitute for a vision of the future. Throw in Greg Sheridan’s bandwagon-jumping mea culpa on multiculturalism, and you have a picture of a carping and negative political culture, structured that way for obvious reasons.

Mobile Vulgus

...a display of chocolate bunnies was knocked over and had to be put painstakingly back together.

Bunk

Browsing over at Antony Green's blog, after checking to see what the likelihood of Pauline Hanson getting an 8 year sinecure in the NSW Legislative Council was, I ran across this news, which I failed to notice at the time:

26 eminent British historians have fulminated against Britain adopting the Alternative Vote, the preferential voting system that we have happily used in Australia for more than eight decades.

In an open letter to the Times of London, the historians have railed against the terrible injustice of the Alternative Vote.

The historians are Professor David Abulafia, Dr John Adamson, Professor Antony Beevor, Professor Jeremy Black, Professor Michael Burleigh, Professor John Charmley, Professor Jonathan Clark, Dr Robert Crowcroft, Professor Richard J. Evans, David Faber, David Starkey, Professor Niall Ferguson, Dr Amanda Foreman, Dr John Guy, Robert Lacey, Dr Sheila Lawlor, Lord Lexden, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Dr Richard Rex, Dr Andrew Roberts, Professor Richard Shannon, Chris Skidmore, MP, D. R. Thorpe, Alison Weir, Philip Ziegler, Professor Lord Norton.

It's an interesting list, although I am unfamiliar with most of the names on it. Beevor and Black are historians of warfare, and Starkey and Weir seem to concentrate on monarchy, which may explain their confusion on matters electoral; possibly the same is true of historian of the Third Reich, Richard Evans. Unsurprising in the extreme is the presence of the Burleigh-Ferguson-Roberts circle-jerk of rightist empire-lovers. I wonder what the problem with the rest of them is.

Also unsurprising: these signatories aren't arguing that a more democratic system than "AV", like proportional representation, would be better.

Don't Like Tory-Lite? Try Tory!

Watching (disaffected) Labor supporters vote is like watching a particularly stupid blowfly repeatedly banging its head against a closed window.

Let's Get Together and Have Fun

Piers Kelly at Crikey's language blog looks in more detail at the question of what Moomba really means. Apparently the old "up your bum" story might be an urban myth, as these translation stories often are.

Penitentiary

Guy Rundle in Crikey! on the incarceration of Bradley Manning:

Such forms of confinement are unquestionably torture, but they are torture of a very specific kind  —  a sort of paradoxical torture. If the aim of torture per se is to make the prisoner’s body rebel against their soul  —  have animal pain and terror fill the consciousness until any principle, belief, or commitment is undermined  —  then the “supermax” regime is the opposite  —  it dissolves subjectivity by removing all that is most basically human, from diversion to human connection.

This is the point made most famously by Foucault: that the notion that neat antiseptic prison regimes are more humane than physical punishment is the founding conceit of modernity. In many ways they can be worse. Solitary confinement and the microcontrol of a prisoner’s behaviour are designed as a form of total annihilation, because they exert enormous energies in ensuring that the prisoner goes on existing, while depriving him of anything resembling life. That division of existence from purposeful life is effectively a standardised and routinised way of producing despair.

Not surprisingly, it is a particularly American form of human annihilation. The “supermax” prisons, and such total regimes, are the descendants of the first modern prison schemes, the penitentiaries established by the Quakers in Pennsylvania in the 1830s. Where other prisons housed prisoners collectively in squalor as part of their punishment, the Quakers believed that this merely bred criminality. The object was to make a prisoner repent (as the name suggests) by developing a relationship with God — and the only way to do that was to deprive a prisoner of a relationship with anyone else.

Thus, prisoners in the penitentiary were ideally utterly isolated from anyone else  —  they even had separate corridors so they couldn’t see each other. Eventually through their screaming isolation they would seek and find God. The gentle and peaceful Quakers thought that this invention was a force for good; many of those who observed it, such as Charles Dickens, thought it was a horrifying nightmare. But someone who never saw a problem with it was Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America was based on the trip he took to the US to report on this marvellous new prison system, for the French government.

Much of Democracy in America was devoted to trying work out what the problems of the new American society might be. He never realised that the answer was the very thing he was sent to study  —  the penitentiary was the other side of American depthlessness, an indifference to the full humanity of others hidden from oneself by following correct procedure and affirming goodness of heart.

The penitentiary is bad enough when it’s part of a God-centred culture; when part of one  —  even the US  —  where God is a shaky notion, then it’s a literal Hell. Its deeply anti-human nature does achieve what the Quakers sought, since many prisoners become believers out of the sheer need for someone to talk to, but it’s a counterfeit conversion, won through psychological warfare.

With 2 million Americans in prison, many of them in semi-penitentiary style incarceration, the prison system mirrors key aspects of American life  —  in particular the substantial atomisation and isolation of everyday life.

Allegiance

In other news, fish still don't live in trees:

Note that Goldsmith isn't merely pointing out that American journalists are "patriotic" or "jingoistic" as individuals. He's saying that these allegiances shape their editorial judgments. And "patriotism" to Goldsmith doesn't merely mean some vague type of "love of country," but much more: this "sense of attachment" creates a desire to advance "U.S. national security interests," however the reporter perceives of those.

Leave aside just for the moment the question of whether it's good or bad for American journalists to allow such nationalistic allegiances to mold their journalism. One key point is that allowing such loyalties to determine what one reports or conceals is a very clear case of bias and subjectivity: exactly what most reporters vehemently deny they possess. Many establishment journalists love to tout their own objectivity -- insisting that what distinguishes them from bloggers, opinionists and others is that they simply report the facts, free of any biases or policy preferences. But if Goldsmith is right -- and does anyone doubt that he is? -- then it means that "the American press" generally and "senior American national security journalists" in particular operate with a glaring, overwhelming bias that determines what they do and do not report: namely, the desire to advance U.S. interests.

Burnishers

At Politico (via Mr Seymour):

One of the more unlikely figures to have advised a firm which has worked to burnish Libya's image and grow its economy is not registered with the Justice Department. Prominent neoconservative Richard Perle, the former Reagan-era Defense Department official and George W. Bush-era chairman of the Defense Policy Board, traveled to Libya twice in 2006 to meet with Qadhafi, and afterward briefed Vice President Dick Cheney on his visits, according to documents released by a Libyan opposition group in 2009.

Perle traveled to Libya as a paid adviser to the Monitor Group, a prestigious Boston-based consulting firm with close ties to leading professors at the Harvard Business School. The firm named Perle a senior adviser in 2006.

The Monitor Group described Perle’s travel to Libya and the recruitment of several other prominent thinkers and former officials to burnish Libya’s and Qadhafi’s image in a series of documents obtained and released by a Libyan opposition group, the National Conference of the Libyan Opposition, in 2009.

...

A 2007 Monitor memo named among the prominent figures it had recruited to travel to Libya and meet with Qadhafi “as part of the Project to Enhance the Profile of Libya and Muammar Qadhafi” Perle, historian Francis Fukuyama, Princeton Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis, famous Nixon interviewer David Frost, and MIT media lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, the brother of former deputy secretary of state and director of national intelligence John Negroponte.

...

Monitor is not listed with the Justice Department as a lobbyist for Libya, as it explained in a 2006 letter to its Libyan client:

“Monitor is not a lobbying organization,” its CEO Mark Fuller and Director Rajeev Singh-Molares wrote to their Libyan client in July 2006. “Our ability to introduce important, influential visitors to Libya’s advantage depends on our experience, prestige, networks and reputation for independence. We are deeply committed to helping you with this program.”

The memo also mentions popularist of the "Third Way" Anthony Giddens, and says of David Frost:

Frost has repeatedly requested the opportunity to interview Qadhafi, in a program that would be broadcast to a global television audience. A date has not yet been agreed.

Better get a wriggle on.

Tinkering

The more interesting the world gets, the less I have to say. So instead I added a bunch of stuff to the blogroll: Things Magazine; Inside Story; Salon.com's War Room; the Verso, LRB, FAIR and Overland blogs; Talking Squid; Pink Tentacle; Greg Palast; Neil Gaiman and Drawn!

I think I'll call it the Alps.

Auld Lang Syne

Robert Dreyfuss finally gets around to penning the piece on the Muslim Brotherhood he promised here. It's a useful overview of the Brotherhood's history, influence, and possible mellowing. Since the January 25 rebellion started, almost everything on the net about the Brotherhood has cheerfully ignored their off-and-on history as clients of the US (and the British), part of imperial policies designed to marginalise Third World leftists and nationalists by abetting the Religious Right. Mr Dreyfuss includes this history - unsurprisingly, as it was a major strand of the thesis of his good-book-with-a-silly-title Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. More comprehensive coverage is supplied in the linked article by Ian Johnson. Both Mr Dreyfuss and Mr Johnson can't resist including the photograph of Brotherhood leader Said Ramadan meeting that radical leftist and coiner of the phrase "the military-industrial complex" Dwight Eisenhower.

Well, Well

What a remarkably interesting year this is shaping up to be.

Niche

In other news, Tom Switzer, Awful Pundit, Is Awful.