Flirting With Nuclear Energy Down Under
It was a policy that was bound to send a shiver through the policymaking community. The issue of nuclear energy in Australia has always been a contentious one. Currently, the…
Dr Binoy Kampmark
A Flawed and Dangerous Presence: US Troops in Syria
Despite a focus on boxing China in the Indo-Pacific, US involvement in the Middle East continues to be widespread and problematic. While Israel is given its regular steroid diet of…
Censoring Israeli Violence: Western Media Outlets Capitulate
The cathedral of censorship is a vast, airy one. In its embrace, texts are abridged, images removed, ideas scrubbed. Historical inconveniences are filed and rendered inaccessible. The only sermons tolerated…
The View from Washington: Let the Killing in Gaza Continue
Bloodletting as form; murder as fashion. The ongoing campaign in Gaza by Israel’s Defence Forces continues without stalling and restriction. But the burgeoning number of corpses is starting to become…
Accidents of Eccentricity: Israel’s Pacific Hold
Cunning, subtle, understated. Israeli policy in the Pacific has seen United Nations votes cast in its favour, the foreign policies of certain countries adjusted, and favours switched. While China may…
COP28: Where Fossil Fuel Industries Go to Gloat
The sequence of COP meetings, ostensibly a United Nations forum to discuss dramatic climate change measures in the face of galloping emissions, has now been shown for what it is:…
Refreshing the Camelot School: Kennedy Hagiography at Sixty
Camelot, the sweetly sentimental shorthand for a shortened US presidency, has generated a mythopoetry so rich it turns the stomach, clogs the intestines, and soils the historical record. With its…
Banished from Pakistan: Islamabad Moves on Afghan Refugees
Across the globe, refugees, always treated as the pox of public policy, continue to feature in news reports describing anguish, despair and persistent persecution. If they are not facing barbed…
Henry Kissinger: Snake Oil Salesman of Gangster Realism
“‘He’ll have ye smilin’,” an old Irish saying goes, “while he takes the gold out of your teeth’.” Charles Glass, London Review of Books, Oct 20, 2022 The obituaries of…
Sovereignty Surrendered: Subordinating Australia’s Defence Industry
One could earn a tidy sum the number of times the word “sovereignty” has been uttered or mentioned in public statements and briefings by the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese. …
Pallywood Tactics: Al-Shifa Hospital and Israel’s Propaganda Effort
It resembles a chronology of desperation, shifting narratives, and schoolboy howlers. From the outset, the mass lethality of Israeli strikes against Gaza and the collective punishment of its populace needed…
Eco-Camouflage and the Fossil Fuel Lobby: The War against Wind Farms
The fossil fuel lobby has had a busy year on the eco-camouflage front. Earlier this year, interest started to rumble and rage against the stranding of humpback whales on the…
A Duty to Obey: David McBride, Whistleblowing and Following Orders
The unpardonable, outrageous trial of Australian whistleblower David McBride was a brief affair. On November 13, it did not take long for the brutal power of the Commonwealth to become…
The Politics of Indefinite Detention in Australia
The High Court of Australia is not known for its zealotry in protecting human rights, and certainly not when considering the persuasive pull of international law and conventions. The Australian…
Sunak’s Dad’s Army Option: David Cameron Returns
Openly ignored by his incendiary, now ex-Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was left with few options. Retaining her would continue a process of blighting his already…
The Militarised University: Where Secrecy Goes to Thrive
For anyone wishing to bury secrets, especially of the unsavoury sort, there is one forum that stands out. Call it a higher education institution. Call it a university. Even better,…
Unintended Ironies: Condemning the Armistice Day Marches
Armistice Day is one of those disturbing occasions of the year when humanity’s folly is laid bare. It should be an occasion to remind said humanity about the stupid waste…
Foolish Exclusions: China and the Bletchley Declaration on AI
At the conclusion of the Second World War, debates raged on how best to regulate the destructive power of the atom. Splitting it had been used most savagely against the…
Showboating for War: Johnson and Morrison in Israel
Banished Prime Ministers are an irritation. They clog the airwaves of punditry with their views about how things were and how things should be. But even there, degrees of severity…
Taking the Refugee Hysteria off Ice
There are many reasons why Australian foreign policy can be viewed from the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe. For one, it is largely dictated, in terms of security, by…
Rishi Sunak’s AI Pitch: The Bletchley Declaration
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak looks as much a deep fake projection as a thin, superficial representation of reality. His robotic, risible awkwardness makes a previous occupant of his office,…
NATO Provoked Putin: Stoltenberg Comes Clean on the Ukraine War
For years, John J. Mearsheimer, that seemingly ageless, if somewhat chilly presence at the University of Chicago, has been a thorn of irritation to certain establishment ideas. With his pugnacious…
Muddled Interventions: Haiti, the UN and Resolution 2699
A country broken by constant foreign interventions, its tyrannical regimes propped up by the back brace of the United States (when it wasn’t intervening to adjust it), marred by appalling…
Biden’s Bungles over Gaza
The main press stable was keen to see the scrappy benefits of the 31-hour visit to Israel by US President Joe Biden. On National Public Radio (NPR), Scott Neuman expressed…
The Day Guterres Became Relevant
The relevance given to a UN Secretary-General is often judged by the degree of controversy caused. In history, the most relevant are usually targeted. Dag Hammarskjöld, refusing to remain a…
Justifying Collective Punishment: Israel’s Assault on Gaza
“Erroneous doctrines are current in the world, which declare a man culpable and responsible merely because he is a member or part of a determined country, without taking the trouble…
Cultural Cover-Up: The Sydney Opera House Turns 50
Commemorative occasions are often draped in fatty platitudes. Within such platitudes lie excuses and apologies. People are celebrated after the fact, not for their faults but for their virtues. It’s…
Rambo’s Pacific Peace Zone
There has always been something impressive, if slightly idiosyncratic, about political ideas emanating from Pacific states. In recent years, on the world’s largest body of water, the various island states…
Fruitless Gestures: Victoria Bans the Nazi Salute
It took place with hardly any debate, though it interested some parliamentary members at the committee stage. The Australian state of Victoria now faces laws that will lock a person…
A Losing Voice: The Fall of an Indigenous Referendum Measure
Even before October 14, The Voice, or, to describe in full, the Referendum on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament, was in dire straits. Referenda proposals are…
Violence Against Human Animals: Images from the Israel-Hamas War
With the body count rising in this latest, and particularly bloody Israel-Hamas War, the narrative of Israel the wounded, Israel the desperate, has now been annexed to Israel the just…
Indecency’s Conspiracy of Silence: Hamas, Israel and the Use of Force
Shock and horror. But to and for whom? At 6.30 am on October 7, the State of Israel was certainly in shock. From the south, its citizens faced attacks by,…
Nuclear-Powered Fixations: The Trump-Pratt Disclosures
In April 2021, the Australian billionaire Anthony Pratt had a meeting with Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club. According to an ABC News report, “Pratt told Trump he believed Australia…
Modi’s Cricket Ploy: Hindutva as Twelfth Man
This week, the International Cricket Council’s One Day International tournament will commence in India. The man who will take centre stage during the occasion will be Indian Prime Minister, Narendra…
Flagging Support: Zelenskyy Loses Favour in Washington
Things did not go so well this time around. When the worn Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy turned up banging on the doors of Washington’s powerful on September 21, he found…
Cruel Prerogatives: Braverman on Refugees at the AEI
Suella Braverman has made beastliness a trait in British politics. The UK Home Secretary, fed on the mush and mash of anti-refugee sentiment, has been frantically trying to find her…
Imperial Footprints in Africa: The Dismal Role of AFRICOM
No power in history has exercised such global reach. With brutal immediacy, forces from the United States may be dispatched and deployed within hours to combat any designated adversary. From…
Mission to Free Assange: Australian Parliamentarians in Washington
It was a short stint, involving a six-member delegation of Australian parliamentarians lobbying members of the US Congress and various relevant officials on one issue: the release of Julian Assange. …
The Angertainer Steps Down: Rupert Murdoch’s Non-Retirement
One particularly bad habit the news is afflicted by is a tendency to fall into discussions about itself. Its members, some of them at least, used to call it the…
Fighting the Diaspora: India’s Campaign Against Khalistan
Diaspora politics can often be testy. While the mother country maintains its own fashioned narrative, governed by domestic considerations, the diaspora may, or may not be in accord with the…
Brief for Murder: Pinochet’s Apologists Five Decades On
During the Cold War, assassinations most foul were entertained as necessary measures to advance the set cause. In Latin America, military regimes were keenly sponsored as reliably brutal antidotes to…
A Daft Policy: The US Economic Strangulation of China
The broad lament from commentators about global economic growth is that China is not pulling its weight. Not enough is being done to stir the sinews and warm the blood,…
Destroying Chilean Democracy: Australia’s Covert Role Five Decades On
The tear-squeeze remembering those who died in the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington has become an annual event. In the words of US President George W.…
Ukraine’s Bandera Itch
The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 has been justified by Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “special military operation” with a few barbed purposes, among them cleaning…
G20 Aesthetics: Modi’s Brutal Delhi Facelift
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi really wanted to make an impression for his guests and dignitaries, and coarse realities would simply not do. The occasion of the G20 summit presented…
“A Good Investment”: The Ukraine War and the US Arms Racket
It all tallies. War, investments and returns. The dividends, solid, though the effort expended – at least by others – awful and bloody. While a certain narrative in US politics…
Children in Police Watch Houses: A Nasty Queensland Experiment
They really are a brutal lot. While the Queensland Labor Government croons on matters regarding rights, liberties and, it should be said, the plight of the First Nations Peoples, its…
Educating the US Imperium: Australia’s Mission for Assange
An odder political bunch you could not find, at least when it comes to pursuing a single goal. Given that the goal is the release of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange…
Criminalising Activism: Woodside, Protest and Climate Change
On August 1, protesters against the Burrup Hub expansion in Western Australia, a project of one of Australia’s most ruthless fossil fuel companies, took to the Perth home of its…
Defriending Canada: Natural Disasters and Facebook’s Information Scrub
Australia experienced this in February 2021. Facebook had gotten nastily stroppy, wishing to dictate public policy to the Commonwealth government. To teach Canberra mandarins a lesson, it literally unfriended the…
Whitewashing Down Under: The Vietnam War Fifty Years On
The Vietnam War tormented and tore the societies who saw fit to participate in it. It defined a generation culturally and politically in terms creative and fractious. And it showed…
Border Massacres: The Saudi Ethiopian Migrant Killings
We know what the regime is like. Starving a country, bombing its hospitals and strafing its schools has been minor fare for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The population of…
The Profiteering Motive
Times of crisis can be glorious for some. The Great Depression bred its share of wealthy profiteers. The First and Second World Wars fostered many a multimillionaire. Over the bodies…
Looting the Looters: Theft at the British Museum
What happens when the looters are looted? Perhaps that strange sense of satisfaction called justice, an offence cancelled by another. One therefore greets the realisation that the British Museum has…
Cutting Climate Change Research: Cuts at the Australian Antarctic Division
Australia’s funding priorities have been utterly muddled of late. At the Commonwealth level, there is cash to be found in every conceivable place to support every absurd military venture, as…
Climate Change Litigation: The Montana Precedent
Climate change litigation is falling into pressing fashion. In Australia, the 2021 case of Sharma, despite eventually failing before three judges in the Federal Court in 2022, suggested that ministers…
The Oppenheimer Imperative: Normalising Atomic Terror
The atomic bomb created the conditions of contingent catastrophe, forever placing the world on the precipice of existential doom. But in doing so, it created a philosophy of acceptable cruelty,…
Assange Be Wary: The Dangers of a US Plea Deal
At every stage of its proceedings against Julian Assange, the US Imperium has shown little by way of tempering its vengeful impulses. The WikiLeaks publisher, in uncovering the sordid, operational…
Peter Pan Man: Elon Musk’s Rebranding of Twitter
“X” marks the spot. For the modern advertiser, this is problematic. It breathes pornographic escape, self-denial, elusive treasure, irresistible capture, compelling lasciviousness. And now Elon Musk has decided to impose…
Water Wars: Cooling the Data Centres
Water. Data centres. The continuous, pressing need to cool the latter, which houses servers to store and process data, with the former, which is becoming ever more precious in the…
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