Hicham Yezza is a former student and current employee at Nottingham University in the UK. Presently, he is facing being deported by British authorities to Algeria as early as this weekend, despite having resided in England for the last 13 years. His initial ‘crime’ was to have assisted a fellow student, Rizwaan Sabir, to access research materials related to Al-Qaeda. Sabir and Yezza were arrested on Nottingham campus on May 14 under the Terrorism Act 2000. After six/seven days in detention the pair were released without charge. Subsequently, Yezza was re-arrested and is accused of having ‘visa irregularities’ of such severity that the state is being forced to remove him entirely from the country, and to a destination in which he faces the prospect of further imprisonment and torture. Note that the materials which Sabir was initially arrested and questioned for having in his possession — the so-called “Al Qaeda Training Manual” — is freely available online — at the US Department of Justice, for example (PDF) — and even for sale at Amazon.
Hicham Yezza, a popular, respected and valued former PhD student and current employee of the University of Nottingham faces deportation to Algeria on Sunday 1st June. This follows his unjust arrest under the Terrorism Act 2000 on Wednesday 14th May alongside Rizwaan Sabir and their release without charge six days later.
It has subsequently become clear that these arrests, which the police had claimed related to so-called “radical materials”, involved an Al Qaeda manual downloaded by Sabir as part of his research into political Islam and emailed to Yezza for printing because Sabir couldn’t afford to get it printed himself.
There has been a vocal response from lecturers and students. A petition is being circulated, letters have been sent by academics across the world and a demo is being planned for Wednesday 28th May. This has clearly been deeply embarrassing to a government currently advocating an expansion of anti-terror powers.
On his release Hicham was re-arrested under immigration legislation and, due to confusion over his visa documentation, charged with offences relating to his immigration status. He sought legal advice and representation over these matters whilst in custody. On Friday 23rd May, he was suddenly served with a deportation notice and moved to an immigration detention centre. The deportation is being urgently appealed.
Hicham has been resident in the U.K. for 13 years, during which time he has studied for both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Nottingham. He is an active member of debating societies, a prominent member of an arts and theatre group, and has written for, and edited, Ceasefire, the Nottingham Student Peace Movement magazine for the last five years.
He is well known and popular on campus amongst the university community and has established himself as a voracious reader and an authority on literature and music. An application for British citizenship was underway, and he had been planning to make his yearly trip to Wales for the Hay Festival when he was suddenly arrested.
The authorities are clearly trying to circumvent the criminal justice system and force Hicham out of the country. Normally they would have to wait for criminal proceedings to finish, but here they have managed to convince the prosecution to drop the charges in an attempt to remove him in a quick, covert manner. The desire for justice is clearly not the driving force behind this, as Hicham was happy to stand trial and prove his innocence.
Hicham has a large social network and many of his friends are mobilising to prevent his deportation. Matthew Butcher, 20, a student at the University of Nottingham and member of the 2008-9 Students Union Executive, said, “This is an abhorrent abuse of due process, pursued by a government currently seeking to expand anti-terror powers. Following the debacle of the initial ‘terror’ arrests they now want to brush the whole affair under the carpet by deporting Hicham.”
Supporters have been able to talk with Hicham and he said, “The Home Office operates with a Gestapo mentality. They have no respect for human dignity and human life. They treat foreign nationals as disposable goods – the recklessness and the cavalier approach they have belongs to a totalitarian state. I thank everyone for their support – it’s been extremely heartening and humbling. I’m grateful to everyone who has come to my aid and stood with me in solidarity, from students to Members of Parliament. I think this really reflects the spirit of the generous, inclusive Britain we know – and not the faceless, brutal, draconian tactics of the Home Office.”
One of the more interesting derivations of Marxist thought is contained in the works of CLR James (1901–1989) and Raya Dunayevskaya (1910–1987), aka‘Marxist Humanism’. For a short period, James and Dunayevskaya were members of the (US) Trotskyist Socialist Workers’ Party (Est.1938), but left in 1940 to join the Workers’ Party. Within the WP they formed the Johnson-Forest tendency, his pseudonym being Johnson and Dunayevskaya’s Forest. They were joined in this tendency by Grace Lee Boggs (1915–), and the trio formed its principal theorists. Together they played a crucial role in developing the theory of state capitalism in Soviet Russia, later popularised by Tony Cliff (1917–2000). Aufheben notes:
One state capitalist theory that accepted that ‘profit’ as it appeared on the surface of Soviet society was not profit in a Marxian sense was that developed by Raya Dunayevskaya. In pioneering work in the late 1930s [and] early ’40s, she undertook a functional analysis of the cycle of capital accumulation as it actually took place in the USSR. She saw that the role of the ‘turnover tax’ on consumer goods gave an entirely ‘fictitious profit’ to light industries, but this was “merely the medium through which the state, not the industry siphons off anything ‘extra’ it gave the worker by means of wages.” And this is “why this ‘profit’ attracts neither capital nor the individual agents of capital.” However, as she points out, even in classical capitalism, “the individual agent of capital has at no time realised directly the surplus value extracted in his particular factory. He has participated in the distribution of national surplus value, to the extent that his individual capital was able to exert pressure on this aggregate capital. This pressure in Russia is exerted, not through competition, but state planning.” (Dunayevskaya, ‘The Nature of the Russian Economy’ in The Marxist-Humanist Theory of State-Capitalism (Chicago: News & Letters, 1992)). However, despite this recognition that in terms of ‘profit’ one had to see through the discourse of the Russian economists to the reality, she took their admission in 1943 that the ‘law of value’ did operate in the USSR at face value as, for her, an admission that it was state capitalist. She thus saw no reason to take theoretical analysis of the situation any further.
Whatever the merits of their theory of state capitalism, having first re-joined the SWP in 1947, then leaving again in 1951 to form the Correspondence Publishing Committee, the Tendency soon went its separate ways; in 1955, Dunayevskaya leaving to form News & Letters (still extant); in 1962, Boggs and a number of others splitting with James. James himself started a new organisation called Facing Reality — which continued to do so until 1970, when reality apparently said ‘no’.
Fast forward to 2008, and the News and Letters Committees have undergone a s-p-l-i-t. The splitters have recently announced (May 28) their intention to form a brand spanking new organisation. Oddly, the new mob issued a statement on March 10 announcing their split, but access to it on their new site is currently being denied. Luckily, it remains available via cache (see below). Note that, upon News of the Statement, the remaining members of the N&LC wrote a Letter (Setting the Historic Record Straight, March 14, 2008). Anyway, here’s the statement made by the mutineers:
We are writing to alert all readers and friends of a serious crisis afflicting News and Letters Committees (N&LC) — a crisis that places its very existence in jeopardy.
In response to philosophic disputes within N&LC over the past several years, an organized group within N&LC has usurped control of the organization and is acting in complete disregard of the democratically approved perspectives and principles that have defined it since [its] founding in 1955 as a decentralized, non-hierarchical group based on the unity of worker and intellectual, theory and practice, and philosophy and organization. Those wanting to continue our democratic and humanist heritage have formed the Marxist-Humanist Tendency of N&LC. It constitutes almost half of the membership of N&LC, and we appeal to you to support us in our effort to reverse the crisis that threatens America’s only Marxist-Humanist organization…
Those who have moved away from the need to develop a viable Marxism for the 21st century have acted to prevent N&LC from functioning in such a way that its philosophic perspectives can be promoted, concretized, and developed…
In order to defend and implement the current Perspectives of the organization, democratically approved by an overwhelming majority six months ago, a large number of the members of N&LC have constituted themselves as The Marxist-Humanist Tendency of N&LC…
The intransigence of the opponents of the Marxist-Humanist Tendency, who have refused to listen or take into consideration our views in violation of socialist democratic norms, suggests that they are intent on pushing the members of the Marxist-Humanist Tendency out of N&LC.
In late February they sent a letter to the membership that hints at our expulsion. And they have refused to rule out expulsion as an option they might implement at a Convention that will take place at the end of May, an unprecedented “special Convention” that they called hastily and without any organizational discussion having taken place beforehand…
We are convinced that the important philosophic work that has been accomplished by N&LC in recent years-most of it by those who are now affiliated with the Marxist-Humanist Tendency-provides a firm basis from which the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism can and will be continued. We cannot achieve this, however, without your support.
We are all being tested by this crisis, and it has been tremendously uplifting to see so many of our members and friends, especially those who have contributed in such a major way to our political-philosophic-organizational development in recent years, rise to the occasion by opposing the recent efforts to pull apart the body of ideas of Marxist-Humanis[m] from organization. We cannot allow N&LC to be destroyed for the sake of some private enclaves. We must not allow a clique to undermine two decades of vital theoretic, political, and philosophic work. We must begin anew, and we are determined to do so-not just for the short term but for the long haul…
On a vaguely-related note, Thursday’s addition of The Age carries an article — published in the Business section — on ‘The regiments of left and right now march to market’, penned by a corporate flak from the Institute of Public Affairs. (The print edition carries a great big picture of Marx with a great bid red X over his face.) According to Ken Phillips:
THE left has lost. So say the left! This is not a point-scoring statement from someone from the right but the words of the people from the left themselves. They say that market-based capitalism has proven it works. They no longer hate it.
This may seem simple but it is staggering in its consequences for politics in Australia. It is seminal and all embracing.
The old left-right battle is now no longer primary to understanding the fundamentals of Australian politics. Deeper analysis and deeper meaning must be investigated.
The shift is blunt. The central plank of left politics has always been that the capitalist system necessitated war between two classes; the workers and the bosses.
The bosses (capitalists and managers), would always seek to exploit the workers. The economic system required this and concentrated power with the bosses. Consequently, workers had to bond collectively to prevent being exploited. This inevitability of class warfare is the core of the left’s economic and political world view.
But in the past few years the left has accepted the falsehood of this assumption, particularly as it applies to Australia. That’s a huge step for the left. It recognises and accepts that market-based capitalism clearly delivers sustained economic growth and maximises equitable distribution of wealth. Exploitation is not inherent in market capitalism. The left no longer hates market capitalism. It has embraced it.
It recognises that deprivation is not a consequence of market capitalism but is the product of other human situations; namely family dysfunction, ill health, disability, poor education and substance abuse.
This shift by the left is new and can be identified in fairly recent writings of leading left academics and the repositioning of the Left of the Labor Party. It’s not something they are yelling out loud but it’s a huge political development. It holds huge implications for economic management, business operations, workplace relations and social policy…
A powerful analysis by Phillips, one which has a just a few tiny flaws.
Cate Blanchett joined forces on Tuesday with prominent people in the arts to protest plans by the police to initiate an obscenity prosecution over images by Bill Henson, an eminent photographer, that feature nude 12- and 13-year-olds, Agence France-Presse reported…
2) Garrett maintains idiotic grin; Turnbull and Brown defend Henson.
High-profile Opposition frontbencher Malcolm Turnbull has spoken out in defence of artistic freedom after revealing that he owns works by controversial photographer Bill Henson… Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has described the photographs as “absolutely revolting” but Greens Senator Bob Brown says Mr Rudd does not understand art… Arts Minister Peter Garrett says artists have a right to confront audiences but must operate within the law.
…The Henson affair has thrown the limelight on some important issues, such as the role of art in society and the nature of effective child protection. These questions need political resolutions, not the intervention of the judiciary. Public officials who made the call to press charges against Bill Henson deserve to be roundly criticised for their actions.
A GIRL who was 13 when she posed nude for Bill Henson photographs has been identified but has declined to speak to police investigators…
Peter Garrett, Minister for The Yartz, ‘The Politics of Art’, Keynote address APRA/AMCOS Song Summit, April 3, 2008:
…finally I stand in front of you as your representative in the national government, as a Cabinet Minister responsible for arts and culture in this country- a tremendous opportunity which I take very seriously…
The argument in favour of the arts is evolving, as it must. No longer can we, or should we, merely argue arts for arts’ sake. I have no hesitation in standing here, as a former practicing artist, and say the arts are inherently valuable; they are a public good.
As innovation becomes increasingly central to growing new and sustainable economies, there is amplified recognition of the role that creativity and the arts plays as a key driver of innovation. At the last election we took a detailed set of arts policies to the people underpinned by the principles of access, equity, education, excellence and innovation…
I began this keynote speech by saying I stood before you as someone who has been in the place where some of you now are but who was able and lucky enough, to ride a sweaty twenty five plus year wave with five others and together, make music which meant something to us, which we ended up sharing with lots of people.
Along the way we brought our political values into the frame, sometimes through songs, sometimes through actions. As musicians it was the music that came first and it was our “reason for being” in a band. But we were also citizens of this country, and toured across the world and in time we wanted to react to and be involved with issues confronting us. Some people call it politics; I’d also call it life.
Sorry Bill: that’s life. And life wasn’t meant to be easy.
Recently, the National Archive has released into the wilds of disinterested public opinion a few 30-year-old bits of paper regarding ASIO. Jeff Sparrow has written some thoughts on the released documents for Crikey. By way of introduction, this 1994 documentary:
ASIO’s weird, incompetent little cold war
Jeff Sparrow
Crikey
May 28, 2008
In 1950, a year after ASIO’s formation, its head, one Brigadier Sir Charles Spry, began compiling lists of individuals to be detained in army camps should war break out. Spry’s sinister document eventually contained some 7000 people.
That’s the context in which new material from Justice Hope’s 1978 report on ASIO, just released under the thirty year rule, should be read.
As the ABC notes, the documents show that fears that ASIO “was doing the political dirty work of the Liberal Party” were “well-grounded” since the organisation was “passing scurrilous gossip onto the Menzies government” which was then used under parliamentary privilege.
Mind you, ASIO’s tight relationship with the Liberals was never much of a secret. As David McKnight argued a few years ago, the public parts of the Hope inquiry made clear that “ASIO had been largely unaccountable and had been used as a political tool during the long reign of the Liberal-Country Party coalition from 1949 to 1972”.
In particular, Justice Hope documented ASIO’s “Special Projects” section, a body that prepared material for “covert spoiling activities” and “counter-propaganda”. As an example of its handiwork, he noted that Robert Mayne, a SMH journalist, had been approached by Liberal politician Peter Coleman about establishing a magazine called Analysis to attack the Australian Left. A few days later, as an indication of the kind of dirt the new project could expect to dish, Mayne was handed the ASIO files on a number of leading Left-wingers.
Many of the newspaper reports today focus on Hope’s suggestion that ASIO’s preoccupation with domestic radicalism allowed its penetration by foreign spies.
But it should also be remembered that Hope’s inquiry was partly prompted by ASIO’s relationship with the Croatian fascist group, the Ustasha. In the late sixties and early seventies, the Ustasha conducted the most serious terrorist campaign in Australian history, with bombings in Sydney in 1967, 1969 and 1972, Canberra in 1969, and Melbourne in 1970 and 1972. Ustasha activities were discussed openly in the Croatian press but ASIO, while monitoring even the most mild-mannered activists of the Left, took no action whatsoever against these fully-fledged terrorists.
Most obviously, the Ustasha was an anti-Communist body, attacking Communist Yugoslavia’s consulates and local Left-wingers. Many ASIO agents were, in all probability, sympathetic to its aims.
Secondly, ASIO knew that Yugoslav secret agents were monitoring the Ustasha. Accordingly, it allowed the bombers free rein, so that Australian agencies could study the techniques of their Yugoslav counterparts. In the Byzantine world of the security services, low-level violence, mostly directed against foreigners, paled beside an opportunity to garner information against rival spies.
Today, The Australian‘s editorial page leaps to ASIO’s defence.
ASIO and other security forces would have had no option but to keep close tabs on Communist Party members and sympathisers in Australia. […] Much as he was loathed by the Left for his arguments, the late Bob Santamaria was correct about the Communist Party of Australia’s determination to infiltrate Australia’s trade unions. […] The 100 million people killed by communism underlined its danger and why it was the top priority of our spooks.
Leaving aside the bizarre suggestion that Australian trade unionists had any connection to the deaths of millions people, ASIO’s close ties with Bob Santamaria’s NCC epitomized the very worst aspects of its work. As Richard Hall [1937–2003] notes in his book The Secret State [Cassell Australia, 1978], “one ex-NCC man recalls that the main thing ASIO men in the trade union area seemed to want was sexual gossip – who was sleeping with whom.”
You can get a sense of the combined malice and paranoia that dominated ASIO’s operations by looking at some of its files now available under the thirty-year rule.
Here’s a couple digitalized from a dossier on the women’s liberation movement.
From the first one, we learn that ASIO casually opened files on any phone number connected with the new feminist movement. Dulcie Bethune had the temerity to use her number as a contact for a women’s liberation group. There’s no suggestion that she broke any law or did anything wrong but she duly became file VPF 22378, something that would have had real consequences on her ability to work in the public service.
The second image is of interest mostly because of the subject’s subsequent career. Today, Helen Garner is one of Australia’s most acclaimed authors. Back in 1972, she was a prominent feminist – and so ASIO kept tabs on her. Again, she seems to have done nothing other than put her phone number down on a list.
In The Australian today, Patrick Walters assures us that ASIO today is a beast of a different nature.
“More than 30 years later ASIO has changed completely. It is treble the size and a sizeable proportion of its intelligence officers are women. Its relations with its close allies are in good repair.”
But one wonders. If you substitute the word “Muslim” for “communist” and “terrorism” for “subversion”, the political climate post-911 doesn’t seem utterly unlike the Cold War.
Besides, in his reflections on the Hope Royal Commission, its former secretary George Brownbill concluded that, in fact, Australians were protected from ASIO only because the agency stuffed up so regularly.
“It would,” he said, “have been much more serious if the ASIO operatives had been more competent.”
In that light, ASIO’s new size and new efficiency does not seem particularly reassuring.
(Jeff Sparrow is the editor of Overland magazine.)
Frank Cain is the author of a number of books and essays which examine ASIO and the history of political surveillance in Australia. SeeASIO: An Unofficial History, Frank Cass, London, 1994; The Wobblies at War: A History of the IWW and the Great War in Australia, Spectrum, Melbourne, 1993; The Origins of Political Surveillance in Australia, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1983. Also Jenny Hocking, Terror Laws: Asio, Counter-Terrorism and the Threat to Democracy, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2003.
Introducing the artist formerly known as the Leninist Party Faction…
The Revolutionary Socialist Party!
The Leninist Party Faction, a dissident minority expelled from the Democratic Socialist Perspective on May 13, and Direct Action, an organisation established by former DSP members in Melbourne and Geelong after they left the DSP in June 2006, have united to launch a new party, the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), with members in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Perth, Geelong, Adelaide, Newcastle and Cairns, and others currently residing overseas.
This is a principled unification of our two organisations. Both the LPF and Direct Action support the Program of the Democratic Socialist Party, a program that the DSP remains formally committed to but which it is abandoning in practice. Together, LPF and Direct Action members waged a common struggle against the degeneration of the DSP until June 2006, when six LPF members decided to leave the DSP to establish Direct Action.
Both the LPF and DA seek to preserve the continuity of the revolutionary tradition of the DSP prior to its political and organisational degeneration in recent years, culminating in the wholesale purge of the LPF on May 13. The LPF and Direct Action share not only basic programmatic agreement, but also agreement on the main tasks and perspectives for regrouping and rebuilding the revolutionary Marxist current once embodied in the DSP and its predecessor, the Socialist Workers Party, founded in 1972. The RSP’s strategic aim is to build a mass revolutionary workers party capable of leading the Australian working class and its allies to overthrow capitalism and, together with the working people of other countries, to build socialism, a global society of shared wealth and democratic planning to meet social needs. We recognise that we are not the only revolutionary socialist organisation in Australia, and that a future mass revolutionary socialist party will not be achieved solely through the incremental growth of any one of the existing far-left organisations.
Building towards the future mass revolutionary workers party will require a variety of tactics, among them efforts to unify the existing far-left organisations. But in today’s conditions of continuing working class retreat, the creation of a broad left party of anti-capitalist resistance is simply not on the agenda. The necessary partners for such a party — substantial new class-struggle forces and leaders — do not yet exist, and will not come into existence until there is a sustained mass upsurge of working class resistance. The Socialist Alliance is not such a broad left party or even a modest step torwards such a party, but a front for the DSP. The RSP rejects any such sectarian attempt to masquerade as a broad left party. Rather, we seek to collaborate with all left and progressive organisations and individuals to achieve the maximum unity in action where we have agreement.
The RSP’s ongoing campaign priority is to help build a broadly based solidarity movement with the Latin American socialist revolutions in Venezuela and Cuba. Building solidarity with the Venezuelan and Cuban peoples is the duty of revolutionaries everywhere, especially in an imperialist country closely allied with US imperialism. Moreover, the inspiration of these living socialist revolutions is key to winning a wider hearing for revolutionary socialist ideas among working people in Australia. The RSP seeks to build the Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Network as a democratically functioning national network of affiliated solidarity groups and individual solidarity activists.
Next week the RSP will launch a new monthly radical left publication, Direct Action. This new publication, and its associated website, will present the views of the RSP as well as encouraging constructive debate on the left and will seek contributions from a broad range of radical commentators, activists and organisations. The RSP will hold a delegated founding congress in early 2009.
May 28, 2008
* * *
The RSP has set up a website, where the party’s documents and political positions will be progressively uploaded. The RSP’s initial Perspectives Resolution is available there, as well as the RSP’s program and constitution… For further background on the political debate in the DSP see the article by Allen Myers, “The Political and Organisational Degeneration of the DSP” on the LPF website.
The RSP has established a National Office in Sydney at Suite 72/65 Myrtle St, Chippendale 2008. For further information contact John Percy 0419 989 720, Marce Cameron 0413 158 480 or Doug Lorimer 0434 209 342, or email nationaloffice[at]rsp[dot]org[dot]au.
The Bad News: RIP Direct Action and LPF. Nevertheless, one must maintain the
Party spirit
25. We must strive to cultivate the spirit of revolutionary comradeship in the RSP. We need a party spirit that can sustain us through the ups and downs of the struggle, that takes from each of us all that we are capable of giving and that gives each of us, in return, something infinitely precious and beautiful – a tiny glimpse of the communist future of humanity.
“Blogging may help people feel happier and more satisfied with their friends, according to Melbourne researchers.” ~ Bloggers ‘feel more connected’, Chee Chee Leung, Science Reporter, The Age, March 4, 2008
“News, commentary, resources, advice and discussion about Australian blogging, bloggers, the .AU blogosphere, blogebrities, blog networks, blog wars, blog search, blogging law, blog crushes, blog hosts… well generally it will contain everything to do with weblogs.”
Weird shit. The Hack & Caz is dedicated to two bloggers, ‘The Hack’ (Jamie Duncan) and ‘Caz’ (Caroline Hamilton). Apparently, Jamie and Caroline were responsible for a now-defunct blog called ‘The Spin Starts Here’ (originally titled ‘The spin starts here darl’), established in October 2002 and ceasing publication in April 2007. The blog’s authors are rather um, ‘critical’ of Jamie and Clive’s blogging activities, claiming that TSSH was responsible for all kinds of scurrilous and damaging attacks upon other bloggers whom the pair happened to dislike.
“Boudist is Daniel Boud’s personal website. He lives in Sydney, takes the occasional photo and loves the rock’n’roll music.” Daniel recently took a photo of a rock’n’roll band in Sydney: Juliette Lewis & The Licks. For my money, Juliette Lewis is one of the most disturbing-looking individuals every to grace Hollywood celluloid. Every time I see her, I wince. Why is that? I dunno. Same goes for Chloë Sevigny. *shudder* But anyway, Daniel’s blog is ace, and his photos are grouse.
Main Entry:
whim·si·cal Listen to the pronunciation of whimsical
Pronunciation:
\ˈhwim-zi-kəl, ˈwim-\
Function:
adjective
Etymology:
whimsy
Date:
1653
1: full of, actuated by, or exhibiting whims2 a: resulting from or characterized by whim or caprice; especially : lightly fanciful b: subject to erratic behavior or unpredictable change
— whim·si·cal·i·ty Listen to the pronunciation of whimsicality \ˌhwim-zə-ˈka-lə-tē, ˌwim-\ noun
— whim·si·cal·ly Listen to the pronunciation of whimsically \ˈhwim-zi-k(ə-)lē, ˈwim-\ adverb
— whim·si·cal·ness Listen to the pronunciation of whimsicalness \-kəl-nəs\ noun
David Burchell is (was?) a Senior Lecturer in Humanities at the University of Western Sydney. He is the author of Western Horizon: Sydney’s Heartland and the Future of Australian Politics (Scribe, 2003). He was the co-editor, with Andrew Leigh, of The Prince’s New Clothes: Why do Australians Dislike their Politicians? (UNSW Press, 2002).
For some years the editor of Australian Left Review [1966–1993] he currently chairs the board of Australian Universities Review, and is an associate editor at Australian Policy Online. He researches and pubishes in areas of public policy, ethics and citizenship, and has a specific research interest in current debates around multiculturalism, religion and ethnicity.
David Burchell flogs “the generation of May 1968” with a wet lettuce:
Barristers beat the bureaucrats
David Burchell The Australian
May 26, 2008
RECENTLY I’ve found my leisure moments dominated by two troubling sets of thoughts, which seem to churn over in my head like unmatched socks in a washing machine.
The first is the seemingly endless outpouring of sentiment in the international media for the generation of May 1968. The sickly-sweet, self-justifying character of these memoirs, I confess, only reduces me to weary distaste.
I’m talking about people, now in their greying years, who seem perpetually suspended in the spirit of childlike exultation and Oedipal frenzy that characterised the student revolts of that year. Reading this stuff is like being a spectator at a Reichian psychoanalysis session.
The second is the phenomenon I’ve come to think of as the great shrinking of our public life. We live in an era in which we seem fated to be governed – with a few honourable exceptions – by an increasingly bloodless and enervated cast of public individuals. Our public life seems to have become a limited-budget B-movie, with all the real stars occupied elsewhere.
George Megalogenis may have been unkind when he described Kevin Rudd as our “first national premier”. But there’s little doubt that, with a few notable exceptions, the federal cabinet eerily resembles a state cabinet of an older generation, right down to the fact that almost everybody seems to be a former party official. And as for the federal Opposition…
Then the disquieting thought occurred to me, like a light bulb popping above Wile E. Coyote’s head in an old Warner Bros cartoon, that my two worries were perhaps related.
The 68ers have claimed all sorts of things for themselves over the years: the invention of free love, personal self-expression, even politics itself. Most of these claims are pure jeu d’esprit, as the French would say. Mere whimsy.
And yet, if we are indeed so glaringly light-on for talent in our public leadership and administration, might not the 1960s kids for once truly be the cause of it? What if, after 40 years of monotonous incantations, the nation’s best and brightest have truly imbibed the old ’60s mantra that public service is purely for the short-back-and-sides set, the button-down shirt brigade? And, contrariwise, that all the really interesting experiences in life – all the things that get you genuinely in touch with yourself, man – are to be found elsewhere?
When in younger days I moonlighted as a doctoral candidate, one of my brightest colleagues declared (in something like a coming-out moment) that he felt called to pursue his social ideals among the ranks of the federal public service. (Today he’s a division head in an important federal department.) Among the friends in attendance, there was a moment of dazed silence, as if somebody had died. How could an outbreak of social idealism cause you to want to join the bureaucracy? How could you shape the world closer to your dreams in a collar and tie, in a partitioned office, bundying on and off? And even if you could, where was the poetry in it?
In order to understand how politics and public service have come to seem so ineffably uncool, it helps to recall the fears and horrors that seized the children of the old professional middle class in the epoch-changing decades after World WarII. These were societies in which mass democratic politics had finally come to maturity.
The old working classes, once pitied objects of solicitation, had got their hands on property and security, and had succeeded in imprinting their cultural tastes on national life. And the children of the old cultural elites, whose ancestors had basked among servants, aspidistras and string quartets, were increasingly corralled into a world of salaried office jobs with airconditioning and too-bright fluorescent lights.
Behind all the bombast and wild imaginings of the 68ers lay the simple primal fear (which kept them awake at night) of taking their place as mere salarymen, cogs in the machine. This was not what their schooling, or their gene pool, had trained them for.
All the shouting, chaos and confusion amounted merely to this declaration: no, we won’t be battened down. Instead, like the romantic free spirits before us, we’ll go our own way. We’ll create our own new professions and para-professions, with suitably informal work regimes and dress rules. And we’ll craft our own loftier global morality (which we’ll choose to call our politics, on the ground that everything is political, except what they call politics).
Indeed, if you look at the political romantics of today – the heirs of 1968 – you’ll see that in surprising measure they still occupy independent niches in the professions, and they still spend a good part of their time protecting the masses from themselves. Successful barristers present themselves as guardians of the nation’s human rights, against the supposed predations of lying politicians and craven public servants (mere salarymen, all). And medical specialists become the special protectors of what they present as indigenous interests, resisting on principle any intervention by politicians and the state on their sacred turf.
Mind you, as the former 68er Paul Berman has observed [A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968, WW Norton, 1997], that era also produced a more honourable species of survivor. These are the old activists who cast off their errors, rescued the useful experiences and then moved on. And so, first Joschka Fischer in Germany and now Bernard Kouchner in France evolved from the ultra politics of 1968 to the foreign ministries of their respective countries, where they’ve espoused idealistic versions of liberal internationalism in Kosovo, Iraq and elsewhere. It goes without saying that they now find themselves denounced by the 68er wannabes of today as traitors and imperialist lapdogs. Why, they’re working for the Man.
When Fischer resigned from public office in Germany in 2005, he is said to have commented: “After 20 years of power, I want my freedom back.” Would that more of his kind could sublimate that restless quest for personal freedom to the rigours of power for 20 years. Our public life might be a healthier, brighter place.
Speaking of ‘1968’, Mick Armstrong of local Trotskyist group Socialist Alternative has apparently just completed a speaking tour on the subject with fellow Italian Marxist Yurii Colombo. Bob Gould attended the presentation in Sydney and, perhaps not unexpectedly, was not impressed. Which is unfortunate, as Mick and Bob were certainly able to reach agreement on the G20 protest in Melbourne in 2006. Bob wrote:
The old movie, Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment, starring a very young Vanessa Redgrave, is one of my personal all-time favourite movies. The penultimate scene, with the whole world chasing Morgan in his monkey suit all over London, is very funny indeed.
One Morgan is okay, but a hundred or so southern-hemisphere Black Bloc wannabes trashing police vehicles at an otherwise peaceful but relatively small Melbourne demonstration, in the current reactionary Australian political climate, is something essentially quite different to Morgan’s monkey suit.
The essential question [sic] is the fact that these irresponsible political adventurers disguise their faces. I agree strongly with Mick Armstrong’s post on this matter on Leftwrites, and I defer to his knowledge, based on his investigation as to who these people were [viz, crazy, ultra-violent, exploitative, hostile, contemptuous, abusive, ultra-sectarian, anarchist provocateurs and wreckers from New Zealand, Sweden, Germany, England and interstate]. The very act of people from outside a city invading a demonstration in another city with the clear intention of launching a semi-military attack on the cops, with their faces covered, irrespective of the consequences for the rest of the demonstrators, is a calculated political act directed against the bulk of the demonstrators.
People with covered faces who attack the cops, unless they are rather unlucky and their covering falls off, are very dangerous to everybody else at the demonstrations, and quite possibly include fascists and agents provocateur… real agents provocateur certainly do exist, and organised contingents with covered faces clearly facilitate the [activities] of real agents provocateur…
But that was then and this is now, and despite their unanimous condemnation of the scum who spoilt G20, Bob and Mick certainly don’t agree on ‘1968’, nor on how a public meeting to discuss the subject should be conducted. After noting that the meeting “kicked off with a report for a minute or two by a rather gloomy looking bloke”, a teacher, on a teachers’ dispute, “the Italian speaker went on for about 40 minutes, which was a bit on the painful side, as he wasn’t very fluent in English and his political conclusions seemed pretty obscure. At the end of his speech he got dutiful explosive applause, led from the platform. Then Mick spoke, also for about 40 minutes.” Writes Bob (Mick Armstrong’s prayer meeting about May 1968, Ozleft, May 28, 2008):
His speech was reasonably rousing, although pretty general, and he didn’t really make any serious observations about the strategic and tactical issues for Australia posed by the events of May 1968 and 1969, other than very general ones.
Mick himself is a rather unlikely candidate for the role of cult leader, but in a way he has clearly become one, which has got me beat a bit. He got uproarious applause.
Then the chair of the meeting gave a little package of Socialist Alternative books to the Italian comrade as a memento and the meeting was closed.
To say the least, I was gobsmacked. That was partly personal irritation, being the only person present who had been a reasonably significant participant in the events of that time in Australia, but the personal insult was not the most important point. What got under my skin politically was the graphic way, demonstrated at that meeting, a propaganda group actually operates in the rounded way that Mick theorises in his recent pamphlet.
A discussion of May 1968, which was a rolling, global revolutionary event, marked by popular assemblies, and an enormous clash of ideas, strategic conceptions and a whole ferment of argument and debate, can’t be reduced to a totally ritualised formulaic meeting.
Socialist Alternative is turning into a political replica of the Hillsong Church. It is propagandism gone totally loopy – a hermetically sealed world from which serious argument appears to be excluded…
Despite the fact that I’m writing this in a mood of exasperation and irritation, I’m also rather glad that I attended the meeting because I have the very distinct feeling that I got an very good view of the kind of protracted moment that Socialist Alternative is going through as it transforms from a socialist group into a kind of cult with a most unlikely cult leader…
Cruel perhaps, but fair? Fair and cruel: Still at it: Labor’s $100,000 lunches (Andrew West, The Sydney Morning Herald, May 26, 2008): “THE Iemma Government is still selling access to its most senior ministers for more than $100,000, despite a pledge by the Premier to clean up the state’s controversial election funding system”.
Note that the English, German and Swedish “football hooligans who travel the world looking for violence” (according to Eagle-Eye Armstrong) appear to have slipped through the police net, and only one Kiwi, not 10 or 20 or 30 or 40, has been arrested so far in connection to the G20 protests. Further, that of the 28 so far charged, Akin Sari — a (former) Monash student and political refugee from Turkey — has been banged up, while ten others — university students, plus a barman, child-care worker and a couple of unemployed (average age 24) — pleaded guilty to charges of riot, affray and assault, and were given non-custodial sentences. Four minors and fourteen adults are yet to go to trial.
I know it’s been quiet on the blog the past couple of days. However, it has not been quiet at home: I’ve been putting together an Open Letter in Support of Bill Henson from a number of the Creative Stream representatives at the Australia 2020 Summit. The letter has just gone out to media outlets, and runs as follows:
PRESS RELEASE: MAY 27, 2008
Open Letter in support of Bill Henson
From Creative Australia 2020 Summit representatives
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
As members of the Creative Stream of the Australia 2020 Summit, we wish to express our dismay at the police raid on Bill Henson’s recent Sydney exhibition, the allegations that he is a child pornographer, and the subsequent reports that he and others may be charged with obscenity.
The potential prosecution of one of our most respected artists is no way to build a Creative Australia, and does untold damage to our cultural reputation.
The public debate prompted by the Henson exhibition is welcome and important. We need to discuss the ethics of art and the issues that it raises. That is one of the things art is for: it is valuable because it gives rise to such debate and difference, because it raises difficult, sometimes unanswerable, questions about who we are, as individuals and as members of society. However, this on-going discussion, which is crucial to the healthy functioning of our democracy, cannot take place in a court of law.
We invite the Prime Minister, Mr Rudd, and the NSW Premier, Mr Iemma, to rethink their public comments about Mr Henson’s work. We understand that they were made in the context of deep community concern about the sexual exploitation of children. We understand and respect also that they have every right to their personal opinions. However, as political leaders they are influential in forming public opinion, and we believe their words should be well considered.
We also call on the Minister for Environment Heritage and the Arts, Mr Garrett, to stand up for artists against a trend of encroaching censorship which has recently resulted in the closure of this and other exhibitions.
We wish to make absolutely clear that none of us endorses, in any way, the abuse of children. Mr Henson’s work has nothing to do with child pornography and, according to the judgment of some of the most respected curators and critics in the world, it is certainly art. We ask for the following points to be fairly considered:
1. Mr Henson is a highly distinguished artist. His work is held in all major Australian collections including the Art Gallery of NSW, Art Gallery of SA, Art Gallery of WA, National Gallery of Victoria and the National Gallery of Australia.
Among international collections, his work is held in the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Denver Art Museum; the Houston Museum of Fine Art; 21C Museum, Louisville; the Montreal Museum of Fine Art; Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; the DG Bank Collection in Frankfurt and the Sammlung Volpinum and the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna.
Major retrospectives of Mr Henson’s work at the Art Galleries of NSW and Victoria attracted more than 115,000 people, and produced not one complaint of obscenity. His work has also been studied widely in schools for many years.
2. Mr Henson has been photographing young models for more than 15 years. Until now, there has been no suggestion by any of his subjects or their families of any abusive practices. On the contrary, his models have strongly defended his practice and the feeling of safety generated in his process, and have expressed pride in his work.
We suggest that the media sensationalism and the criminalisation of laying charges against Mr Henson, his gallery and the parents of the young people depicted in his work, would be far more traumatic for the young people concerned than anything Mr Henson has done.
3. The work itself is not pornographic, even though it includes depictions of naked human beings. It is more justly seen in a tradition of the nude in art that stretches back to the ancient Greeks, and which includes painters such as Caravaggio and Michelangelo. Many of Henson’s controversial images are not in fact sexual at all. Others depict the sexuality of young people, but in ways that are fundamentally different from how naked bodies are depicted in pornography. The intention of the art is not to titillate or to gratify perverse sexual desires, but rather to make the viewer consider the fragility, beauty, mystery and inviolabilty of the human body.
In contrast, the defining essence of pornography is that it endorses, condones or encourages abusive sexual practice. We respectfully suggest that Henson’s work, even when it is disturbing, does nothing of the sort. I would personally argue that, in its respect for the autonomy of its subjects, the work is a counter-argument to the exploitation and commodification of young people in both commercial media and in pornographic images.
Many of us have children of our own. The sexual abuse and exploitation of children fills us all with abhorrence. But it is equally damaging to deny the obvious fact that adolescents are sexual beings. This very denial contributes to abusive behaviour, because it is part of the denial of the personhood of the young. In my opinion, Mr Henson’s work shows the delicacy of the transition from childhood to adulthood, its troubledness and its beauty, in ways which do not violate the essential innocence of his subjects. It can be confronting, but that does not mean that it is pornography.
Legal opinion is that if charges were laid against Mr Henson, he would be unlikely to be found guilty. The seizure of the photographs, and the possible prosecution of Mr Henson, the Rosyln Oxley9 Gallery or the parents of Henson’s subjects, takes up valuable police and court time that would be much better spent pursuing those who actually do abuse children.
4. Perhaps the most distressing aspect of the trial-by-media to which Mr Henson and his work has been subject over the past few days, is how his art has been diminished and corrupted. The allegations that he is making child pornography have done more to promote his work to possible paedophiles than any art gallery, where the work is seen in its proper, contemplative context. It is notable that the attacks on Mr Henson’s work have, almost without exception, come from those who are unfamiliar with the photographs, or who have seen them in mutilated or reduced images on the internet.
If an example is made of Bill Henson, one of Australia’s most prominent artists, it is hard to believe that those who have sought to bring these charges will stop with him. Rather, this action will encourage a repressive climate of hysterical condemnation, backed by the threat of prosecution.
We are already seeing troubling signs in the pre-emptive self-censorship of some galleries. This is not the hallmark of an open democracy nor of a decent and civilised society. We should remember that an important index of social freedom, in earlier times or in repressive regimes elsewhere in the world, is how artists and art are treated by the state.
We urge our political leaders to follow the example of Neville Wran, when in 1982 a similar outcry greeted paintings by Juan Davila. At that time, Mr Wran said: “I do not believe that art has anything to do with the vice squad”. With Mr Wran, we believe the proper place for debate is outside the courts of law.
Alison Croggon
Writer
Signatories:
Louise Adler, CEO & Publisher-in-Chief, Melbourne University Publishing
Geoffery Atherden, Writer
Stephen Armstrong, Executive Producer, Malthouse Theatre
James Baker, Tax advisor and accountant
Geraldine Barlow, Curator
Larissa Behrendt, Professor of Law, University of Technology Sydney
Cate Blanchett, Actor
Daryl Buckley, Musician
Leticia Cacares, Theatre Director
Karen Casey, Visual Artist
Kate Champion, Choreographer, Artistic Director Force Majeure
Rachel Dixon, New media developer
Phoebe Dunn, Chief Executive Officer, Australian Commercial Galleries Association
Jo Dyer, Executive Producer, Sydney Theatre Company
Kristy Edmunds, Artistic Director, Melbourne International Festival of the Arts
Saul Eslake, Economist
Richard Gill, Artistic Director, Victorian Opera
Peter Goldsworthy, Writer
Marieke Hardy, Writer and broadcaster
Sam Haren, Artistic Director, The Border Project
Frank Howarth
Cathy Hunt, Creative consultant
Nicholas Jose, Writer
Andrew Kay, Producer
Ana Kokkinos, Film maker
Sandra Levy
Matthew Lutton, Theatre director
Nick Marchand, Artistic Director, Griffin Theatre
Sue Maslin, Producer, Film Art Doco Pty Ltd
Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, Director, Museum of Contemporary Art
Callum Morton, Visual Artist
Rosemary Myers, Artistic Director, Windmill Performing Arts
Rachel Healy, Director Performing Arts, Sydney Opera House
Liza Lim, Composer
Jan Minchin, Director, Tolarno Galleries
Helen O’Neil, Executive producer
Charles Parkinson, Artistic Director, Tasmanian Theatre Company
David Pledger, Theatre director
Marion Potts, Theatre Director
Katrina Sedgwick, Festival Director, Adelaide Film Festival
Additional signatories:
The following support the appeal contained in this letter without necessarily endorsing the detailed argument:
John Coetzee, Novelist
Ramona Koval, Writer and broadcaster
Julianne Schultz, Academic
Two Greek anarchists are making molotov cocktails. One says to the other: "So who will we throw these at then?" The other replies: "What are you, some kind of fucking intellectual?"
