Remembering the Peace Makers: What the Armistice Commemorations Forgot
Those in the war industry and the business of commemorating the dead have little time for peace, even as they supposedly celebrate it. For them, peace is the enemy as…
Dr Binoy Kampmark
Mid-Term Divisions: The Trump Take
President Donald J. Trump has a special, strained take on the world. Defeat is simply victory viewed in slanted terms. Victory for the other side is defeat elaborately clothed. Both…
Politicised Victimhood: Ukraine’s Holodomor, Genocide and Intent
The impression hits you immediately. An opening of an exhibition held to commemorate survivors and families of one of the darker atrocities of human experiments; and it features ample food…
Shark Attack: Fearing Monsters in the Whitsundays
It begins with a gruesome account: a tourist, paddleboarding and swimming in an idyllic setting baked by sun – in this case, Cid Harbour in the Whitsundays, Queensland – attacked…
Masquerading Reforms: The Tricks of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
The surgical dismembering of Jamal Khashoggi has sent the military establishments of several countries into a tizz. Arms manufacturers are wondering whether this is an inconvenient blip, a ruffling moral…
Closing Loopholes: Taxing the Digital Giants
The treasurers of various countries seem to be stumbling over each other in the effort, but taxing the digital behemoths has become something of an obsession, the gold standard for…
Losing Users: Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Problems
His detractors and enemies have been waiting some time for this, but it must have given them moments of mild cheer. Facebook, the all-gazing, accumulating system of personal profiles and…
Angela Merkel’s Last Days
Cultural compilations such as James Frazer’s The Golden Bough are rich with these accounts: the high priest or leader of a tribe, whose lengthy tenure is wearing thin, is set…
Moving Right in Brazil: The Rise of Jair Bolsonaro
Moving left has been a Brazilian political tendency for some time, a tendency affirmed through the 1990s and 2000s with the presidential administrations of Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Luiz Inácio…
Julian Assange, Ecuador and the Dangers of Farce
This is the next stage of the Julian Assange chronicles: from the summit of information disclosures and meddlesome revelations on classified state matters, the Australian rabblerouser now finds himself the…
The Arms Behind the Invictus Games
The origins of the Invictus Games (“For our Wounded Warriors,” goes the slogan) lies in war. Wars that crippled and caused depression and despair. The games became a project of…
The Saudi Arabian Model: Blueprints for Murder and Purchasing Arms
It reads like a swaying narrative of retreat. A man’s body is subjected to a gruesome anatomical fate, his parts separated by a specially appointed saw doctor – an expert…
Denials Down Under: Climate Change and Health
Richard Horton’s note in an October 2015 issue of The Lancet was cautiously optimistic. It described the launch of Doctors for Climate Change Action, led by the Royal Australasian College…
Ditching Nuclear Treaties: Trump Withdraws from the INF
President Donald J. Trump has made it his signature move to repudiate the signatures of others, and the latest, promised evacuation from the old US-Soviet pact otherwise known as the…
Wentworth Blues: Another Nail in the Scomo Coffin
A sign of desperation before the firing squad is jitteriness and the desperate sense that history needs revision. You were not the one responsible for the debacles and the cockups;…
Leaking for Change: ASIO, Jakarta, and Australia’s Jerusalem Problem
Politics can, after a time, becomes a myopic exercise of expedient measures and desperate hope. Politics, raw and crude, is at its best at points where survival matters. Conversely, it…
Vanquishing the Republic: Harry and Meghan in Australia
“The establishment of a republic… means insurrectionary war, it means the desolation of a thousand households. When the question shall arise, it will be determined… by balls from cannon and…
Embassy Disappearances: Jamal Khashoggi and the Foreign Policy Web
“Do this outside. You will put me into trouble.” Mohammad al-Otaibi, Saudi consul, to Saudi agents, Istanbul, October 2, 2018 It smells, but anything wedged between the putrefaction of Saudi…
DNA in Trumpland: Elizabeth Warren’s Native American Dance
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) made a fundamental error in chasing the coattails of DNA provenance as a response to the jibes of US President Donald J. Trump. She had been…
The Tyranny of Fashion: Shredding Banksy
The modern art world is filled with pranks and pranksters, the clowns who have decided that play counts for art. Brattish artists foist a range of projects and conceptual themes…
Agents of Chaos: Trump, the Federal Reserve and Andrew Jackson
“It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.” President Andrew Jackson, Washington, July 10, 1832 They are…
Evacuating Nauru: Médecins Sans Frontières and Australia’s Refugee Dilemma
It is an organisation not without its problems. Conceived in the heat of idealism, and promoted as the vanguard of medical rescue and human rights advocacy, Médecins Sans Frontières has…
The Sessional Curse: Universities and the Casual Work Force
Universities have become bastions of sessional torment, feeding grounds for despair. The term “sessional” is merely a euphemised way of describing an academic employee who has no ongoing employment other…
Orson Welles, Broadcasts and Fake News
Orson Welles’ spectral return to the screen, ingeniously in posthumous mode, should have come as a comfort to the magicians skilled in the arts of trickery. Beyond the grave, he…
Barely Breathing: May’s Gasping Premiership
The Boris Johnson storm, beating away at the British Prime Minister’s doors with an ancient fury, has been stayed for the moment in the wake of the Conservative Party Conference…
Australian Complicity: Nauru and Silencing Journalism
Journalism is getting something of a battering in Australia. At the parliamentary level, laws have passed that would be inimical to any tradition versed in the bill of rights. (Australia,…
Limiting Israel: Russia’s Deploys the S-300 to Syria
Relations between Russia and Israel have been those of an estranged couple punctuated by occasional breakouts of tense understanding. As with other such couples, a public row does not necessarily…
Nostalgia and Sunshine: Bruce Beresford’s Ladies in Black
This effort seems to be a bit of camping out on the part of director Bruce Beresford, whose list of cinematic achievements include Driving Miss Daisy and Breaker Morant. There…
Tortured Solutions: Ecuador, the UK and Julian Assange’s Fate
The pulse of negotiations, a flurry of communications, and the person central to this is one who threatens to go nowhere – for the moment. But go somewhere these parties…
Augmenting Brains: Google Turns Twenty
“Eventually you’ll have the implant, where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you an answer.” Larry Page, co-founder of Google The Verge starts with a…
Feeding Militarism: The US Imperial Consensus
The US military industrial complex reigns like a ravenous ruler in search of new funding prospects. It has done well this year, with the Trump administration pushing the sale that…
Parasitic and Irrelevant: The University Vice Chancellor
They are some of the most remunerated officials of one of Australia’s most importantly lucrative sectors, drawing huge “packages”, as they are termed, for little more than ribbon cutting, attending…
Casting Kavanaugh: The Trump Supreme Court Drama
Stage set Washington. Object: adulterating power. The arm of government: the judiciary. That particular group of high ranking paladins remains up in the air as US Supreme Court appointee Judge…
The Pathology of Mass Surveillance: The UK, Bulk Interception and the European Court of Human Rights
It’s fitting that the same society that produced George Orwell with his warnings of a totalitarian dystopia stacked with all-prying monitors, surveillance and paranoia should yield up some of the…
Deplatforming Germaine Greer
The flexibility of English, and thriving sign that it is not a dead language, permits repeated atrocities to be committed in the name of new terms. We are told that…
Needled Strawberries: Food Terrorism Down Under
There is something peculiar doing the rounds in Australian food circles. The land down under, considered something of a nirvana of fruit and vegetable production despite horrendous droughts and calamitous…
The Woes of Climate Change States
As Australia’s tattered yet new government, led by the increasingly oafish and amateurish Scott Morrison trundled into its post-climate phase, states which see their existence as dependent on the cutting…
A Traditional Right: Jimmie Åkesson and the Sweden Democrats
Sweden’s elections are normally dull affairs. The same political arrangements have been in place for decades, featuring mild oscillations around the centre between the green-red bloc (Social Democrats, the Greens…
Doctrines of Impunity: John Bolton and the ICC
The Trump administration’s national security advisor John Bolton has never been a fan of international law, a concept he has found, at best, rubbery. Any institution supposedly guided by its…
The Natural Enemy: Serena Williams and the Sporting Umpire
Should it matter this much? A wealthy, successful individual expressed fury at the most popular object of vitriol in any sport. The umpire or referee is only ever neutral in…
Tory Kafuffles: Boris Johnson, Brexit and Suicide Vests
The next blow in Boris Johnson’s chapter of political suicide has been made: a piece in the Mail on Sunday which supplied him ample room to take yet another shot…
Traditional Fantasies: US designs on Venezuela
The irresistible allure of invasion and interference has never been far from US law makers. The imperium needs its regular feed and what a feed it has been over the…
Fraser Anning and the Smugness of Australian “Values”
Be wary of the self-satisfied and morally soothed. The complacent have a habit of giving the game away, glorifying themselves in satisfied satiation. Australia’s parliament seemed to be very self-congratulatory…
Battling Contamination: Erin Brockovich Down Under
The Australian press have been in a state of drooling ecstasy. Part of it is because Australia can be relevant, however negative it might be, to their monster cousin, defender…
The Carnival of Homelessness: How the Filthy Rich React
An aggressive sign of an affluent society can usually be gauged by its invidious misuse of its privilege. Poverty is deemed necessary, and the rich must try to understand it. …
Banning Chelsea Manning: The Dubious Tests of Character
National security advocates have been crotchety ever since the release of Chelsea Manning for a sentence they hoped would go the full, crushing 35 years. Her sins were intimately tied…
Repudiating the Global Commons: Trump’s Militarisation of Space
In international law, a category regarded by certain legal philosophers as non-existent (there being no overarching sovereign to police it), aspirations reign like obstinate fantasies. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty…
John McCain’s Imperial Complex
Obituaries are not the best places to identify faults unless they assume the form of a hatchet job. The opposite is more often the case: worshipful and respectful to the…
Sodding the Australian Voter: Accidental Prime Ministers and Political Indulgence
It is a continuation of Malcolm Turnbull by other means. The new Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison and his freshly appointed Deputy, Josh Frydenberg have ensured that the “insurgents”,…
Cultures of Death: Pope Francis, Apology and Child Abuse
It was long overdue, but Pope Francis’s letter of condemnation and apology regarding the abuse of children by Catholic priests did sent a few ripples of comfort and reckoning. He…
Prime Ministerial Chaos: Turnbull’s Last Days
No one is in charge in Australia. Monday’s leadership challenge by Home Affairs minister, the potato-headed former police officer Peter Dutton, was cutting enough to leave Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull…
Charisma and Banality: Kofi Annan and the UN
Being the head of a creature essentially without spine, and, even more to the point, with vague form, must be something of a challenge. Part of the failing of the…
Readying Knives: The Mortality of Australian Prime Ministers
The opinion poll prime ministership is a modern Australian disease. Not only does it suggest an ailing in the Westminster system, but a profound contempt for the democratic sensibility on…
Finding Fault and Faulty Infrastructure: Genoa’s Morandi Bridge Disaster
Bridges are the great symbols of human connection. They suggest a certain animal pride in the human race, a technological capacity to trick, and even subordinate nature. Across ravines, rivers…
Great Barrier Reef Politics
Australia’s environment has been in precarious hands since European settlement found its lengthy and persistent way to the continent. It has been mined, mauled, drained, farmed, deforested and despoiled at…
Meaningless Titles and Liveable Cities: Melbourne loses to Vienna
The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) has gone about its annual business of releasing its World’s Most Liveable City index, the sort of flotsam that matters less to urban planners than…
Using the Burka: Boris Johnson’s Bid for Popularity
Comedy, Boris Johnson, and the Tories – these three share a certain comforting, if chaotic affinity, lobbed together in some nightmarish union that risks consuming itself. But times are serious…
Authoritarian Revocations: Australia, Terrorism and Citizenship
Contrary to any popular perceptions of Australia’s legal system, a dislike of rights reigns with pious conviction on both sides of the political aisle. Rights are the stuff of nonsense…
Banning Alex Jones and Infowars
He is treated as the bogeyman of conspiracy entertainment, and Alex Jones has become a prominent figure for advancing a host of unsavoury views. High on his list of incendiaries…
The Non-University and the Manager
We have been seeing over the last few decades the birth of the non-university, an institution hollowed out of its seminal functions: teaching and scholarship. …
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