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DGuideavid Flint to Australia Australia and Liberalism: Are They Compatible? Tony Abbott, Peter Costello The Éminence Grise of Vladimir Putin Salvatore babones ANZAC & ITS ENEMIES Democracy versus the Post-Democrats James Kierstead, C.J. Ryan THE HISTORY WAR ON Is the God Delusion a Delusion? AUSTRALIA’S NATIONAL IDENTITY Harry Gelber, Augusto Zimmermann, Simon P. Kennedy Jean Dutourd and the Forgotten France The Anzacs died in vain in an imperialist war and their legend atricia zarias is a reactionary mythology that justifies the class, gender, and racial P A oppression that is tearing Australian society apart. On Amy Schumer James McCann So say the anti-Anzacs led by a former prime minister, influential academics, intellectuals, the ABC and other sections of the media. On Ian Callinan Mark McGinness They are determined to destroy the legend and ruin the Centennial On Rashomon Christopher Heathcote commemorations of Gallipoli and the Great War. On an Australian spy Michael Connor In this book, Mervyn F. Bendle explores the origins of the Anzac legend and exposes the century-long campaign waged against it. I  Photographs © Australian War memorial Poetry Russell Erwin, Margaret Bradstock, Suzanne Edgar, Knute Skinner, Ivan Head, R.J. Stove, Barbara Fisher For you, or AS A gIFT $44.95 Reviews I Robert Murray, Jane Sutton I ONLINE www.quadrant.org.au/store Fiction Sean O’Leary POST Quadrant, 2/5 Rosebery Place, Balmain NSW 2041, Australia Letters I Environment I Science I Literature I Economics I Religion I Media PhONE (03) 8317 8147 FAX (03) 9320 9065 Theatre I Philosophy I film I Society I History I Politics I Education I Health

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Australia’s secret War How Unionists Sabotaged our Troops in worlD war II HAL COLEBATCH’s new book, Australia’s Secret War, tells the shocking, true, but until now largely suppressed and hidden story of the war waged from 1939 to 1945 by a number of key Australian trade unions — against their own society and against the men and women of their own country’s fighting forces during the perils of World War II. Every major Australian warship was targeted by strikes, go-slows and sabotage at home. Australian soldiers fighting in New Guinea and the Pacific went without food, radio equipment and ammunition because of union strikes. Photographs © Australian War Memorial Waterside workers disrupted loading of supplies to the troops and pilfered from ships’ cargoes and soldiers’ personal effects. Other strikes by rail workers, iron workers, coal miners, and even munitions workers and life-raft builders, badly impeded Australia’s war effort. For you, or As a gift $44.95 ONLINE www.quadrant.org.au/store POST Quadrant, Locked Bag 1235, North Melbourne VIC 3051, Australia Phone (03) 8317 8147 FAX (03) 9320 9065 October 2016 No. 530 Volume Lx, Number 10

Letters 2 Felicity St John Moore, Peter Gilet, Rod Moran Chronicle 3 John O’Sullivan ASTRINGENCIES 5 Anthony Daniels history 8 The Six Pillars of Australia David Flint 14 How Islam Saved the West Stephen H. Balch politics 18 Keeping Reform Alive Tony Abbott 21 There’s Nothing Wrong with Democracy James Kierstead 24 Let Us All Have Our Say C.J. Ryan foreign affairs 28 Russian Regret Salvatore Babones 36 Obama’s War Daryl McCann espionage 44 The Spy from Parramatta High Michael Connor correspondent 48 Letter from London: The Great Paedophile Witch Hunt Christie Davies religion 52 Brief Reflections on God, Man and the Universe Harry Gelber 58 Liberalism’s Problem with Christianity Simon P. Kennedy 63 Religious Freedom and Muslim Terrorism Augusto Zimmermann environment 69 Anxious Activists and Nature’s Essential Resilience Gary Furnell language 74 Terrorism and the Battle for Language Peter R. Clyne books 77 Only in Australia edited by William Coleman Peter Costello 80 Belvedere Woman by Ian Callinan Mark McGinness 83 The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo by Amy Schumer James McCann 85 Plevna by Geoff Page Robert Murray 86 White Sands by Geoff Dyer Jane Sutton literature 88 Against the Tide Patricia Azarias film 97 Romeo and Juliet as Film Noir Neil McDonald 99 Japanese War Guilt and Kurosawa’s Rashomon Christopher Heathcote story 104 Ambon Sean O’Leary wrap-up 111 Home and Away Jenny Stewart Poetry 7: The Moon via telescope Margaret Bradstock; 13: The Clock in the Rented Apartment Knute Skinner; 17: Daddy, please don’t go Saxby Pridmore; 23: A Popular Song Suzanne Edgar; 26: At the Side Altar Knute Skinner; 27: Yeats’s Pond; Inside the Watertank Ivan Head; 35: Firelight in the Garden Suzanne Edgar; 39: Chat with the Whitest Cat Alan Gould; 40: Sightings Russell Erwin; 43: A Bird Watcher Suzanne Edgar; 47: The Dead about Us; My Cat Knute Skinner; 50: A Fish Nobody Knew Carolyn Evans Campbell; 51: Thoughts on the Recent Murders of Police Officers R.J. Stove; 57: White Barbara Fisher; 62: Looking for Uncle Max Dan Guenther; 73: At Reedy Creek Suzanne Edgar; 75: Ready or Not Alan Gould; 76: Other Worlds Margaret Bradstock; 87: In a Restaurant in Nova Gorica Knute Skinner; 110: Sydney to Melbourne Barbara Fisher; Avalanche of Oranges Carolyn Evans Campbell Letters has been played using a number of victim cards. Now, however, one “victim” group has appeared with devastating speed and it is any- Editor Apolitical Brides thing but a victim. It is Islam and John O’Sullivan it is steadily gaining control of the [email protected] SIR: I am grateful to Christopher West. Speed on the part of Islam, Liter ary Editor Heathcote for his thorough dis- and of its allies on the Left, is nec- Les Murray missal (March 2016) of attempts essary, because ordinary people are

Deput y Editor by feminist academics and curators also waking up with astonishing George Thomas to reinterpret and politicise Arthur speed themselves. This, I would Boyd’s Bride series. say, is why Muslim migrants are Contributing Editors The Angry Penguins paint- being poured into our countries Books: Peter Coleman ers believed in artistic autonomy. with such urgency. Film: Neil McDonald They were deliberately apolitical, We are therefore faced with a Theatre: Michael Connor partly because they believed that simple choice. We can either let Columnists art transcended politics and partly things take their course and cease Anthony Daniels because of their bitter fight and to be Christians, can become effec- Jenny Stewart narrow victory over the commu- tively slaves in our own lands, or Editor, Qua dr ant Online nist Realists in the Contemporary we can fight. And if we choose to Roger Franklin Art Society who demanded social, fight, we must throw everything [email protected] as opposed to individual and per- we have into our effort and support sonal, “responsibility”. parties who oppose Islam and the ditor in hief E - -C Attempts to politicise the Bride Left, and if we fail to win elections, Keith Windschuttle series serve only to diminish the we can fight in the inevitable civil original vision of Arthur Boyd, war against the Left and Islam. Subscriptions whose creative force came out of Either we saddle up and go on a Phone: (03) 8317 8147 personal experience, including lit- crusade, or Christian civilisation Fax: (03) 9320 9065 erature, the old masters and the will go under and we will become Post: Quadrant Magazine, Bible. slaves in a giant new caliphate. Locked Bag 1235, Peter Gilet North Melbourne VIC 3051 Felicity St John Moore E-mail: quadrantmagazine@ South Yarra, Vic via e-mail data.com.au A New Crusade Correction Publisher SIR: Sometimes as Christians, in Sir: May I make a small correc- Quadrant (ISSN 0033-5002) is published ten times a year by certain exceptional cases, we have tion to my piece carried in the July- Quadrant Magazine Limited, to go to war. A crusade is such a August issue, “A Forensic Footnote Suite 2/5 Rosebery Place, war, when we are not defending to the Forrest River Affair”? In it I Balmain NSW 2041, Australia our borders against an invasion of mistakenly named the legal coun- ACN 133 708 424 the normal kind, but are faced with sel for the two police officers impli- a system of such malignity that we cated in the 1926 Forrest River Production cannot let it flourish anywhere. murder allegations as William Things have, I believe, in our mod- Nairn. In fact, it was Walter Nairn. Design Consultant: Reno Design ern world, now come to such a head Nairn was an interesting fel- Art Director: Graham Rendoth that it is time to go on a crusade. low. He had a legal career in Perth Printer: Ligare Pty Ltd For half a century now our before entering politics, serving 138–152 Bonds Road, leaders in Australia have exercised in the Commonwealth parlia- Riverwood NSW 2210 their duty of care mainly towards ment with both the Nationalist Cover: Colours of Australia a few minority groups. We, the and United Australia parties, ris- “Water Lily” common people, have been stead- ing to be speaker of the House of ily deprived of work, adequate sal- Representatives from 1940 to 1943. www.quadrant.org.au aries, housing, proper health care Rod Moran and education. Yanchep, WA This game of Strip Jack Naked

2 Quadrant October 2016 C h r o n i c l e

John O’Sullivan

ifty-five years ago Angus Maude, at different which he has “come to value so deeply”. He then times a senior British Conservative MP and gives him a Peerage. editor of the Sydney Morning Herald (where he Fwas an early tutor to the young Clive James), wrote David Cameron has not been given a peerage, an article in Quadrant with the title “Cloaking the and having himself given away so many peerages to Dagger”. He also delivered it as a BBC radio talk, so many undeserving recipients, he seemingly places which is where I first came across it in Liverpool little value on them and will not mind. But the during a university vacation. tributes from such former colleagues as ex-Foreign It’s a bracing exercise in high Tory sarcasm which Secretary William Hague have generally conformed deplores the creeping mealy-mouthed terminology to this standard of mild pleasantries. “A truly great of modern life, which Maude describes as a “con- Prime Minister,” wrote Hague, “the most rational spiracy of euphemisms”. One passage describes his person I have ever worked with in government ... encounter with an egg salesman. He complains that made his party fit for a more socially liberal age” the eggs marked “standard” are in fact small. The and so on. salesman agrees. Maude then asks why they’re not Admittedly there has been a small kerfuffle marked “small”. “Because no one would buy them,” mainly among journalists about whether Cameron, replies the salesman. having promised to stay on until the next election, There is much else that is briskly entertaining was breaking his word and being selfish in resign- in this indictment of the soft, evasive and cowardly ing only weeks later. But Cameron’s argument that speaking habits of modern life. But the passage in he doesn’t want to be a “back-seat driver” or a “dis- which Maude’s critical irony really soars is one on traction” for his successor sounds reasonable enough the life of politics in which he was an expert: and, unlike Margaret Thatcher on the Maastricht Treaty after her defenestration, he doesn’t feel that A whole literature of euphemism could be there are any great national issues looming on which compiled from the correspondence attending he simply must speak out. He’s strolling easily away the enforced resignations ... of Ministers who from the political scene, and the other players are had forfeited the confidence of their Premiers. making new calculations that don’t involve him. It is, of course, extremely upsetting for the “It’s almost as if he had never been here,” said one public even to suspect that the management Tory. “Theresa May may succeed or fail, but neither of important Government Departments has result will bring Cameron or Cameronism back. It’s for some time been entrusted to incompetent an entirely new ball-game. It’s slightly eerie.” blockheads. So ministerial changes are made Now, a lot has indeed changed—much of it below to conform to a familiar pattern. The Minister, the surface of the daily headlines. Brexit is the sin- seething with fury and hurt bewilderment, gle most “transformative” development in Britain announces that he has “long felt that it was time in recent times. Like the repeal of the Corn Laws to make way for a younger man”, and that it was that entrenched Britain’s change-over from an agri- “only his sense of public service and his loyalty cultural to an industrial society, Brexit has changed to his leader” that kept him in harness for so Britain from a dissatisfied European province in long. It will be, he adds, with genuine relief that a centralised and tightly-regulated empire to an he gets back to his former job of breeding pigs independent, free-wheeling, commercially-minded, or defending criminals at the Bar. To this the globalised nation. Early signs are that Britain will Prime Minister, who has for months been driven revert to what Andrew Gamble, Emeritus Professor crazy by the stupidity and obstinacy of his of Politics at Cambridge, calls “Anglo-America”— departing colleague, replies that he “accepts the its traditional grand strategy of free trade, free capi- decision with genuine regret” and scarcely knows tal movements, secure property rights, and sound how the Cabinet will get along without the money (though the last may take some time!). “wise counsel and unswerving devotion to duty” That transformation is accompanied by changes

Quadrant October 2016 3 chronicle of long-range political sentiment. A new Opinium in emotional style. poll for the (mildly progressive) Social Market They wanted to change the identity of the Tory Foundation shows that between 50 and 63 per cent party to make it more “caring” and to overcome its of voters place themselves on the political Right reputation as “the nasty party”. They wanted Tories compared to only 24 per cent on the progressive or to adopt a new emotional style of politics following socialist Left. Neither bloc is monolithic. In par- Blair’s exploitation of the “People’s Princess” in his ticular the Right is divided between nationalist and eulogy. They wanted the Dianafication of Toryism. socially conservative working people and a more And they wanted the Tory party to stop “banging liberal middle class that wants a low-tax economy. on” about migration, crime, and above all “Europe”, But both sides of the Right oppose mass immigra- which they thought put off the voters. They stressed tion and are broadly patriotic. And given that they “Green” issues instead. account for more than half of the electorate, they I argued at the time that “party identities, like look like fertile ground for a Tory appeal rooted in a national identities, are not malleable images open to vision of Britain as a successful free-trading nation wholesale transformation. Voters ‘know’ at a fairly out-competing its sluggish corporatist neighbours. deep level that Tory MPs do not ‘care’ as much as Conventional party loyalties are shifting in Labour MPs—just as they ‘know’ that Labour MPs response to these economic and political winds. are not as patriotic as Tory MPs.” The only thing Last year’s election saw the emergence of a five- likely to alter these deeply-rooted perceptions is party system with, in order of declining importance, events in the real world such as Labour winning a the Tories, Labour, UKIP, Liberal Democrats and war or the Tories establishing a massive new welfare the Scottish National Party. Since then Labour entitlement. And those things are hard to arrange— has been wracked by internal divisions and may be especially from the opposition benches. Despite the on the verge of dissolution. But however hard the modernisers’ best efforts, the Tory party did not kaleidoscope is shaken, it’s hard to see that famous become an emotionally incontinent party. “progressive majority” emerging as the pattern after What this attempted Dianafication implied, some future election. Cameron formed a Con-Lib- however, was that Cameronism would never chal- Dem coalition in his first term; moderate leftists lenge the cultural values of the Guardian, the BBC, eternally hope for a Lib-Lab coalition; but the only and the metropolitan liberal intelligentsia. Because coalition that looks likely to command an electoral of that he could never really articulate the cultural majority any time soon is a Con-UKIP coalition— values that appealed to the Tory party’s own sup- especially now that the Tories are Brexiteers too. porters and activists. He therefore became the lib- eral leader of a conservative party, thinking to shift s my Tory friend said, it’s an entirely new his party slightly leftwards to win liberal votes. He ball-game. My interpretation is that Cameron inevitably alienated many Tory voters in the process walkedA away from it without apparent qualms and drove some bedrock Tories to join UKIP. As because he saw on the day after the Brexit vote that the 2010 election approached, he badly needed to the political strategy he had crafted in the early win back those votes—and promptly began “bang- 2000s was no longer relevant to this new world. ing on” about immigration, crime, and so on. He Indeed, he saw that Brexit marked the end of the won a draw electorally (and in 2015 a narrow win) political world that began in 1997 when Tony Blair but he never broke through to the centre ground or won a landslide (the first of three election victories) pushed his party there. and the Tories suffered a nervous breakdown and a It was the same story, though a more dramatic long crisis of political identity. one, with Brexit. Cameron was the Europhile leader It’s odd but true that the Left adapted much of a Eurosceptic party. It was an unstable situation more quickly to post-communism than the Right. that eventually compelled him to hold the Brexit After 1989 social democratic parties won power referendum to keep his party together. But when the throughout the West, apparently against the tide, vote was called, he didn’t have sufficient authority by presenting themselves as more likely than the over his voters to persuade them to vote Remain. capitalist parties to administer capitalism compas- Tories went for Leave by 60 to 40 per cent. sionately. In Britain the Tories over-reacted to their Yet the Brexit vote expressed something still defeat and began wailing that conservatism was more fundamental: Britain was moving rightwards incompatible with a post-modern liberal society and away from the liberal-Left social vision that and that they would never hold power again. So the had been the basis for Cameron’s political strategy “modernisers” proposed a series of prescriptions to after 1997. His resignation may have been a quiet restore their chances of power that were rooted less non-event; but it marked a major change in Britain’s in conventional budgetary and foreign policies than political direction.

4 Quadrant October 2016 a s t r i n g e n c i e s

Anthon y Daniels

can easily understand why someone might suicide was decriminalised, becoming the second want to kill himself and why he might want most common cause of emergency medical (as to kill others; but I find it somewhat harder against surgical) admission to hospital. It is pos- Ito understand why he would want to combine the sible, of course, that this was a coincidence rather two. I suppose that if you really believed that it than causative: that life for adolescents became so would gain you immediate access to the perpetual much more difficult in the 1960s once they had pleasure garden that is the notion of heaven that gained much more freedom. At any rate, one of most contemporary suicide bombers seem to have, Terence Rattigan’s plays of the early 1950s has a it might just explain it; but that only pushes the scene in which the characters stand around dis- problem one stage back, to the question of how it cussing whether the police have to be called after is possible for people truly to believe such a thing. one of them has tried to gas herself. Nowadays, we Until quite recently, of course, Muslims were face a similar dilemma with regard to burglary: the not the champion suicide bombers of the world: police have only to be called if an insurance claim that title, if I may so put it, belonged to the Tamil is involved, there being no other purpose to calling Tigers, who, as atheists, expected no personal them. But, from the point of view of our mores, reward for their sacrifice. But relegated to a small Terence Rattigan might as well have been writing corner of the world, and with a comparatively mod- about 4000 BC as within living memory. est goal in mind, the Tamil Tigers pursued their campaign of self-immolation with comparatively ut to return to the suicide bombers. I don’t gen- little publicity. They posed no threat to the fragile erally read books by psychoanalysts—years of equilibrium of the world. Btalking about themselves in training analysis gen- Most suicide bombers are young, of course: you erally undermines their ability to put themselves can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but the young in their readers’ place, thus destroying utterly their will fall for anything. And one of the characteris- prose style—but I made an exception recently for tics of the young is that they don’t really believe in a book by a French-Tunisian psychoanalyst called death: not in the sense of final earthly extinction. Fethi Benslama. He practises in one of the areas That is because they can’t imagine a world without of Paris most notorious for raising Muslim ter- them. rorists, so he must be presumed to know at least I have examined thousands of young people a little of what he is talking about; and his book who made a gesture in the direction of suicide. In has the attractive title Un furieux désir de sacrifice: many cases they were taking revenge on someone, le surmusulman. usually their parents who did awful things to them With relatively slight resort to psychoanalytical such as asking them to turn their music down. I flim-flam, which has on my mind the effect that noticed something strange in the notes that they the lowering of a steel shutter has on a shop front left behind—where they left any, that is: namely (of course there is a psychoanalytical explanation that they plainly conceived of themselves as hov- for that, as there is for everything else), Professor ering in attenuated form over their own funerals, Benslama writes as any man might who is possessed observing their grieving parents with delicious of experience and common sense. He offers various Schadenfreude. Next time they—the parents— explanatory factors that operate on the would-be would know better. They would henceforth allow bomber or jihadist, particularly those brought up them to play their music at any volume they liked. in the West. The tremendous epidemic of suicidal gestures For Professor Benslama, adolescence (and young among British adolescents was unleashed after adulthood) is not so much the age of idealism as

Quadrant October 2016 5 astringencies of narcissism, self-importance and grandiosity. bombing becomes a little clearer. Whenever I hear a young person say that he wants Among other things, suicide bombing is a to make a difference, my heart sinks: for he is not shortcut out of social nonentity. The desire to mark so much thinking of the minute particulars to oneself out from the great herd of humanity has which William Blake referred when he wrote of become all the more important in the modern world those who would do good, as of the of celebrity culture, in which not to much larger things more suited to be known to millions is to cease his immense capacities. he desire to mark truly to exist; but to mark oneself T out in any worthwhile or positive he young would-be terror- oneself out from way is a slow, effortful and painful ist seeks to soothe, repair and the great herd process that is by no means guar- avengeT his personal grievances by anteed of success. The choice of a identifying with a larger historical of humanity has startling but conceptually easy goal grievance, that of all Muslims, who become all the more is one solution to this problem. feel the impotence of their poli- important in the I came across a prisoner, for ties vis-à-vis the rest of the world example, whose stated goal in life as a supposed injustice (injus- modern world of was to make himself the most dif- tices committed by Muslims are celebrity culture, ficult and feared person in the not felt so deeply, or at all). Thus whole prison system. He was of petty personal grievance—perhaps in which not to be above average intelligence but not even partially justified—becomes known to millions is of sufficient intelligence or talent inflated and takes on a reflected to cease truly to exist. to succeed brilliantly in some more glory of wide significance; self-pity, conventional and worthwhile ambi- the almost universal characteristic tion. His reach exceeded his grasp, of adolescence, is ennobled. Professor Benslama and so he made himself fearsome and feared, just writes: as the jihadist described above did in his own fam- ily. What the man lacked (thank goodness) was any To the young who lack self-esteem, who have kind of religious ideology to allow him to believe the feeling of worthlessness, of “being a piece of he was seeking other than personal ends: for, as rubbish”, as one of them put it to me, [jihadism] Solzhenitsyn pointed out, it is ideology that turns gives not only the recognition of having suffered Macbeth into Hitler. a prejudice, but of being an elect of God, Professor Benslama recognises that there are unbeknown to himself and others. To comply problems inherent in Islam, particularly of the with this destiny as an elect of God, he must Sunni variety, that lead to the creation of what he inspire respect and fear, become a missionary calls the “Supermuslim”, that is to say the Muslim for the cause, a hero before whom the gates of who claims to be more Islamic, more devoted to glory are opened. He can make his own justice, the faith, than all other Muslims who, compared he is authorised to be above the law in the name with him, are mere hypocrites, time-servers and of God’s superior law. The “piece of rubbish” backsliders. There is prestige but no authority in becomes formidable. He must make himself the world of Sunni Islam, hence the possibility of fearsome and feared in his own family. A father the Supermuslim; it is open to anyone to say what, said to me, “My son has become my father, he within quite a wide range of possibilities, is licit lays down the Islamic moral law for me … what and illicit. is more, he takes himself to be God’s father, People all too easily believe that the lengths to wanting to protect him, having first immersed which someone will go are proportionate to the jus- himself in drugs and delinquency.” tice of his cause, which is why they imagine that in a more just world there would be no such phe- Jihadism is the means by which a susceptible nomena as suicide bombing. Psychoanalysts believe young person goes straight from being nothing in many strange things, but Professor Benslama does the eyes of the world to being of the greatest pos- not believe that. sible significance, a person of the type whom pow- erful states spend time, money and energy seeking Anthony Daniels’s latest book is Migration, out and combatting as equal to equal. If this is com- Multiculturalism and its Metaphors: Selected Essays bined with an adolescent’s imperfect grasp of the (Connor Court), published under his nom de plume, finality of his own death, the attraction of suicide Theodore Dalrymple.

6 Quadrant October 2016 The Moon via telescope

1. Annular eclipse of the sun. 29th April, 2014

A thoroughly bizarre eclipse, mostly visible to penguins in Antarctica the blood-red sun sinking between trees the moon a black disk biting in part of its shadow just missing Earth.

2. Occultation of Saturn. 14th May, 2014

It’s at its brightest, all oval-shaped storms and frozen rings, particles of rock and ice whirling forever like a fairground Ferris wheel. From your back veranda focussed on Saturn, racing away from the moon the bent moon rising and rising criss-crossed with black branches its craters visible from here, we feel it. The absence of stars, shifting emptiness of space harks back to the big nothing.

3. In all its phases.

Since Apollo 11 and Armstrong’s moon-walk (and was it a fake after all?) the moon boasts no old man, or even giant rabbits but has its craters, valleys, mountains, seas its Mare Cognitum and Serenitatis. I saw icy wind-carved peaks and down through hidden valleys tumbled shelves of rock, fringed with hanging icicles like long white teeth, ravines so deep and black a wind-eaten bridge of stone, nothing but space on either side, the mountains folding back upon themselves.

Margaret Bradstock

Quadrant October 2016 7 David Flint

The Six Pillars of Australia Things We Don’t Tell Our Children

This is an edited version of a speech Professor Flint Yet record sums of money are being poured delivered to the Order of Australia Association earlier into education, and students are amassing sub- this year. The themes here are developed in Give Us stantial debt even before they work out how they Back Our Country, How to Make the Politicians will acquire the house which was once considered Accountable ... on Every Day, of Every Month, of the birthright of all Australians. Add to that the Every Year, by David Flint and Jai Martinkovits fact that they are the generation who will pay the (Connor Court). increasing interest on increasing government debt and will also be liable for the eventual repayment n addressing you as “ladies and gentlemen” it of that debt. appears I am in breach of the instructions given Australia’s youth are being denied the opportu- to schoolchildren under the Safe Schools pro- nity to know, understand and appreciate their herit- Igram. This decrees that phrases such as “ladies and age. But that is not all. This failure in educational gentlemen” and “boys and girls” should be avoided. administration is, I believe, but another example of That is what is being taught or proposed to be a serious decline in the quality of the governance of taught to our children. Let us go now to what is no this country. longer being taught to our children—our heritage. In 2006 a report about the teaching of history et us examine the failure to educate our chil- in Australian schools found that three-quarters dren about our heritage. Young people are not of school students surveyed did not know why we beingL given the opportunity to understand and celebrated Australia Day. The New South Wales learn from those things which have made Australia Minister for Education argued that, at least in that such an exceptional nation. state, the teaching of history was of the requisite Why has Australia been so successful? Are standard. Asked by a radio presenter why we cel- Australians racially superior? Is it our weather? Is ebrate Australia Day, the minister replied, “Because it geographical? Or is it that we are endowed with that’s the day when it became a nation, the day the such rich natural resources that we could never fail? states joined together.” The latest research, such as that by MIT pro- Whether or not students (and a minister of the fessor Daron Acemoglu, Harvard professor James Crown) know why we celebrate Australia Day, they A. Robinson, and Harvard and Oxford professor have been taught little about that crucial golden Niall Ferguson, concludes that not one of these thread that comes to us through the Magna Carta, factors is definitive. Otherwise, they ask, how can the Glorious Revolution, settlement and what has we explain why Botswana has become one of the transpired since. Even the story of Anzac is under fastest-growing countries in the world, while other attack, according to Mervyn F. Bendle’s account of African nations are mired in poverty and violence? what he describes as “the history war on Australia’s Or why North Korea is a failure and South Korea a national identity”. success? They conclude that political and economic The result is that our children know little about institutions determine economic success or failure. our heritage. The picture appears just as bleak in The truth of their thesis can be illustrated by significant areas of tertiary education, where free recalling that at the time of our federation, Australia speech is under attack, bureaucracy is dominant and Argentina were the world’s richest countries. and too many students are admitted to courses for Argentina did not then engage in the two world which they are unprepared and which are inappro- wars and did not suffer the enormous losses, both in priate for their aspirations. terms of human potential and wealth, that Australia

8 Quadrant October 2016 The Six Pillars of Australia did. So Argentina should have been more successful is not what happens in a gulag. than Australia. But the twentieth-century history There is another aspect of the rule of law which of Argentina was one of instability, periods of bru- is important. This was about slavery. Both Phillip tal dictatorship, and economic decline. and Lord Sydney would have been well aware of a Why is this? As a former minister in Argentina’s celebrated case in 1772 concerning a runaway slave Menem government observed on the ABC’s Four from the American colonies, James Somersett. In a Corners in 2002, there is one important difference case brought by his owner, Lord Mansfield is said to between the two countries: “Australia has British have concluded his judgment with the words, “The institutions. If Argentina had such strong institu- air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe; let tions she would be like Australia in ten or twenty the black go free.” years.” Americans, especially in the South, were appalled by this decision, which freed 15,000 slaves n 1788, Captain Arthur Phillip not only brought and left slave owners who had gone to England with people and provisions—he brought four institu- their slaves without any legal recourse. Worse, they Itions which we have adapted, insti- feared the precedential value of this tutions which are still with us today decision in the colonial courts. The and which, with two others, have lthough Arthur slave owners soon saw the advan- made this nation. A tages of American independence, The first was the English lan- Phillip’s anti- as did those who wished to seize guage. We were extraordinarily slavery declaration lands reserved to the Indians under fortunate that this was the language George III’s Great Proclamation. not only of Britain, but also of its was well known to The mantra “No taxation without successor as the world’s dominant earlier generations representation”, in protest at taxing power, the United States. Only of students, the colonies to help pay for the long those who have lived for long in a war defending them against the foreign country will know the enor- historians today French, was not the only reason for mous advantage we enjoy because rarely mention it. the American revolt. we speak what is without serious Phillip was determined that the challenge the language of the world. American experience should not be The second institution Phillip brought was the repeated in the new land. Before leaving England rule of law. This means two things. First, everyone, he wrote: including and especially the executive arm of gov- ernment, is subject to the law. To understand how The laws of this country will, of course be unique this proposition is, you really have to go back introduced in [New South Wales], and there to at least the Magna Carta. The second aspect of is one that I would wish to take place from the the rule of law is that while citizens may do anything moment His Majesty’s forces take possession of not prohibited by the law, the executive government the country: That there can be no slavery in a may only do those things authorised by the law. free land and consequently no slaves. To describe the colony as a British gulag, as one senior Australian politician has, is completely erro- As Keith Windschuttle observed in 2007, “The neous. Phillip came with a Charter of Justice, which idea that slavery was an affront to humanity that unlike the Soviet Constitution, was actually applied. had no place in a free land was part of the original The very first civil case in Australia can be found in definition of what it meant to be an Australian.” the law reports, Cable v Sinclair. The Court of Civil Although Arthur Phillip’s anti-slavery declara- Jurisdiction sat in Sydney on July 1, 1788, to hear this tion was well known to earlier generations of stu- case, brought by two convicts, Henry and Susannah dents, historians today rarely mention it. School Cable (or Kable). How they met and what brought children are deprived of the pride in knowing that them together is a wonderfully romantic story, one theirs is the only continent in the world that has which is a great tribute to Lord Sydney as the min- never known slavery. ister responsible for establishing the colony. The case The third institution Philip brought was consti- was brought against Duncan Sinclair, who was the tutional government. Although Phillip had consid- master of the Alexander, one of the ships in the First erable powers, the penal colony was only an interim Fleet. It concerned a valuable shipment which had measure. It proved to be extraordinarily successful, been sent from England. Not only did the Judge the world’s most successful experiment in criminal Advocate hear the case, he found for the convicts rehabilitation. Phillip was not a dictator—he was and made a substantial award in their favour. That subject to the law and answerable for his actions.

Quadrant October 2016 9 The Six Pillars of Australia

Phillip brought with him our oldest institution, porting petitions were received than for any other the Crown. But this was not an absolute monarchy, concerning a proposal that the preamble recog- which was by far the dominant model in Europe, nise what one delegate called the “invisible hand where it illustrated the maxim that power cor- of providence”. This is reflected in the preamble in rupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The the Constitution Act, a provision which summa- Crown operated under the separation of powers, rises, succinctly, the very pith and substance of our which Montesquieu identified as uniquely English. federation. This is that the people of each of the Constitutional government, as Phillip knew it, was several states, “humbly relying on the blessing of emerging as the Westminster system we know today. Almighty God, have agreed to unite in one indis- The king was subject to the laws, and the laws could soluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown only be changed by Parliament. It was becoming ... and under the Constitution hereby established”. accepted that the executive government, the minis- try, could only survive if it enjoyed the confidence hese institutions—the English language, the of the House of Commons. Above all, and com- rule of law, constitutional government and civil pletely consistent with the English concept of the Tsociety—Phillip brought to Australia, where they rule of law, people were free to do whatever was not became the first four pillars of our nation. There prohibited by the law. Consequently, government, were to be two more. rather than being absolute, was limited to perform- The fifth pillar of the nation was self-govern- ing what was essential and in particular defending ment under the Westminster system, and within a the realm and maintaining the King’s Peace—that surprisingly short period. The French, the Spanish is, law and order. and the Portuguese did not transmit the parliamen- The fourth institution which Philip brought tary concept to their colonies, as the British did to to Australia was civil society. This consists of all their American colonies long before independence, of those institutions separate from government— and as they did to Australia. above all the family and the church—together with Initially the power of the colonial governor was those values which are essential in a civilised society restricted by the law and carried out under writ- and without which neither constitutional govern- ten instructions from London. This power was tem- ment nor democracy can survive. The values Phillip pered by granting an increasing role to the people, brought can best be described as Judeo-Christian, culminating in legislation in 1850 which empowered and in particular that version which produced the the various colonies to draft their own constitu- great campaign led by Wilberforce to end the insti- tions, although they were still to be approved by the tution of slavery. These values include truth, cour- Colonial Office in London before being presented age and love, and loving your neighbour as yourself. for the Queen’s Assent. The New South Wales and Even with the decline of organised religion, these Victorian Constitutions received Royal Assent on Judeo-Christian values continue today to perme- July 16, 1855. These constitutions were not imposed ate our laws, our language, and our fundamental by London. They were, as Professor Patrick Lane institutions. They are part of our broad Australian put it, “essentially home grown”. culture. To strike down another myth: the bills were This does not mean Australia should not wel- approved in London well before the rebellion at come those from other religions, nor does it mean Eureka Stockade. Whatever Eureka Stockade that there is any obligation for an Australian to achieved, it was not self-government under the belong to any of these religions, or indeed any reli- Westminster system. gion. This openness was stressed in the very first The sixth great pillar of our nation was sermon preached in this land on Sunday, February 3, Federation. This was never inevitable. We could 1788 by the Rev. Richard Johnson. He began: have easily become several countries. In fact when the British first suggested a federation the local I do not address you as Churchmen or politicians were outraged. The assertion by former Dissenters, Roman Catholics or Protestants, as Prime Minister Paul Keating that it was imposed on Jews or Gentiles ... But I speak to you as mortals Australia by the British Foreign Office is manifestly and yet immortal ... The gospel ... proposes a untrue. It was drafted in Australia by Australians free and gracious pardon to the guilty, cleansing and approved by the Australian people. When it to the polluted, healing to the sick, happiness to happened it was different from any other federation. the miserable and even life for the dead. There were no deaths, no violence, no threats of war. Those great Founding Fathers Sir John Quick Over one century later, in the public consulta- and Sir Robert Garran described this great achieve- tions on the draft of our Constitution, more sup- ment this way:

10 Quadrant October 2016 The Six Pillars of Australia

Never before have a group of self-governing, programmed to believe. There is a warning about practically independent communities, without religious belief attributed to G.K. Chesterton, along external pressure or foreign complications of any these lines: “When a man stops believing in God it kind, deliberately chosen of their own free will is not that he believes in nothing. It’s that he will to put aside their provincial jealousies and come believe in anything.” together as one people, from a simple intellectual Putting aside religious belief, if we do not pass and sentimental conviction of the folly of on to the next generation the facts about our herit- disunion and the advantages of nationhood. age, what ideas, what propaganda will be pumped The States of America, or Switzerland, or into their receptive minds? Germany were drawn together under the shadow of war. Even the Canadian provinces were forced argued earlier that the failure in education is just to unite by the neighbourhood of a great foreign one example of a broader problem concerning the power. Iquality of the governance of this country. But the Australian Commonwealth, the Unlike the situation which prevailed when I fifth great Federation of the world, came into was young, university education is almost the sole voluntary being through a deep conviction of responsibility of the federal authorities, who now national unity. also preside over school, pre-school and vocational We may well be proud of the statesmen who education. This entails a vast duplicate bureaucracy constructed a Constitution which—whatever and massive financial resources, an increasing part may be its faults and its shortcomings—has of which is borrowed. proved acceptable to a large majority of the This is manifestly contrary to the carefully consid- people of five great communities scattered over ered constitutional arrangements which the people a continent; and proud of a people who, without approved and under which this country was formed. the compulsion of war or the fear of conquest, We should never forget that the federal Parliament have succeeded in agreeing upon the terms of a is a parliament of limited powers set out in the binding and indissoluble Social Compact. Constitution. All powers not specifically granted by the Constitution to the Commonwealth are saved or hese six pillars are the institutions which have reserved to the states under the Constitution. made Australia an exceptional nation, both There was a time when the people were regularly Tinternally and in our role in the world. According to asked to give more powers to the federal Parliament. the international Human Development Index, our In fact they have been asked to vote to transfer standards of health, wealth and education result in nine powers to the Commonwealth. Three of these our being ranked the second nation in the world, votes have been put to the people on five occasions: very close to the first country, Norway. But with monopolies, corporations and industrial matters. declining educational standards, not telling the All of these proposed transfers were rejected by the young and the newly arrived about our heritage, and people. an inability to control increasing government debt, It is an appalling fact that most of these referen- we are relying on the achievements of earlier times. dums would not need to be repeated today. Through How long will we stay near the top? a re-interpretation of the Constitution by the High As to our role in the world, Australia has been Court of Australia they are no longer necessary. As involved in a remarkable way in defending the free- a result the Commonwealth enjoys powers which dom and liberty of others. In the Second World the people denied it. The High Court has even said War, we were one of a handful of countries that that in the interpretation of the Constitution, they fought from the beginning to the end. As a per- cannot and will not be guided by a previous No vote centage of the population, almost twice as many in a referendum. Australians gave their lives as Americans: 0.57 per The late American judge Antonin Scalia was cent to 0.32 per cent. In the First World War, more cele­brated for proceeding from the commonsense than ten times as many Australians gave their lives view that the Constitution means what reasonable as Americans, 1.25 per cent to 0.11 per cent. people at the time believed that it meant. He held If we do not tell our young people about this that it was not for judges to change this original heritage and how we have achieved it, they will not intention. If there was a need for change, this should appreciate it. Worse, they may succumb to other be achieved by a constitutional amendment, voted theories, fashionable beliefs and new values which by the people. He believed any other approach, for will in no way advance their welfare or that of the example that the Constitution had to be adapted to nation. current values, or that it was a “living document”, The mind is not a vacuum. In my view man is effectively meant the judges were saying that the

Quadrant October 2016 11 The Six Pillars of Australia

Constitution means what they want it to mean. voted with their feet. Within months every other So most of the constitutional barriers to vastly state had abolished this tax and even Canberra fol- increasing the role and function of the federal gov- lowed by abolishing estate duty. We have forgotten ernment have been removed without the people’s this example of how a federation can and should consent. In the meantime, the people are constantly work. told by the establishment that uniformity in almost For some time now, Canberra has been trying every sphere of government is overwhelmingly desir- to take over, at very high cost, areas of government able. This is linked to a second theme: that Canberra for which it is manifestly unsuited. Education is an can be trusted to choose the best system to admin- egregious example. The more the Commonwealth ister any sphere of government which must be made becomes involved in education the more stand- uniform. This is invariably achieved by appointing ards seem to decline. The founding fathers knew expensive consultants who produce a report sup- this. That is why education was neither an exclu- ported by vast amounts of modelling which inevi- sive nor even a concurrent power to be exercised by tably concludes that there is one very expensive the Commonwealth. Yet the Commonwealth has solution to whatever problems the consultants have been able to get away with what is a breach of the discovered. This solution requires a Constitution. vast new Canberra-based bureauc- The founding fathers were racy to administer it. also no doubt aware that if the That, of course, is not how the The founding fathers Commonwealth were to undertake federation is intended to work. It were no doubt tasks best left to the states, it would is contrary to the experience and aware that if the neglect and mismanage those tasks wisdom of all those who have lived which were the very reasons why under successful federal systems. It Commonwealth were we federated. Take for example, is contrary to the proposition first to undertake tasks the defence of the Commonwealth, established by the American found- including the protection and main- ing fathers that a large country can best left to the states, tenance of our borders. The acquisi- only be successful as a free democ- it would neglect and tion of the Collins-class submarine racy if government is devolved to fleet and now its replacement repre- the lowest possible level. mismanage those sents one of the most appalling and We federated on the basis that tasks which were continuing failures in government the new federal entity would have the very reasons administration in our history. And limited powers, with other pow- remember, there is no more impor- ers being reserved to the states. why we federated. tant role for the federal government The states were to be principally than defence. (This means the gov- dependent on their own sources of ernment should be concerned about income. They would be responsible to the people of the true defence of the Commonwealth and not be their state for the spending of that income. distracted by such peripheral issues as the provision The federation would thus encourage competi- of advice on Islamic matters to the navy, and gender tion between the states. People would then see when fluidity in the armed forces.) one state does something well, for example with We see a similar problem at the state level. This its hospitals or its roads, and another state does it is probably the result of the states being converted badly. People would, for example, say, “I have been into clients of the Commonwealth and forced to to South Australia and they do this so much better exercise too many of their powers under the tutelage than in New South Wales.” and direction of Canberra. The much maligned former Premier of Probably the most important function of any Queensland, Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, demon- state government is protecting us against crime. strated this. In 1977, against the strong objections There was a time when the states were effective in of his Treasurer, he abolished death duties, a move exercising this power. But in 2005, in the Sir Ninian that cost his state $30 million in revenue. As a young Stephen Lecture, New South Wales’s prominent articled clerk I had seen what an evil tax death duties Crown prosecutor Margaret Cunneen said some- were, imposing heavy and inequitable burdens on thing no one else at her level would say but some- farming and small business families, precisely when thing which in lay terms was being repeated over they were in no position to respond adequately. The and over in the lounge rooms and in the pubs of the result of Queensland’s abolition of death duties was nation: “Perhaps it is time for us to consider whether that vast numbers of Australians from other states, public confidence in the courts is now being eroded especially the elderly, moved to Queensland. They by the perception that the pendulum has swung

12 Quadrant October 2016 The Six Pillars of Australia rather too far in the direction of the protection of the people. the rights of the accused person.” It is time for a convention to be held to con- sider the reform of government in this country and here is a continuing decline in the delivery of to make recommendations to the people. After all, government in this country. The solution, I that was the only way we could have achieved fed- believe,T lies in making politicians more account- eration. Such a move would not involve turning able. We see in the United States a magnificent our backs on the federation or pulling it down but example of democracy in action in choosing the instead building upon it. candidates of each of the parties for election. This We should not only recall those wise words operates not only at the level of the President but at of the great Irish statesman Edmund Burke, we every level of government. The contrast in Australia should apply them: is dramatic. With exceptions, it is hard to imagine a more closed system, one which ensures candidates It is with infinite caution that any man ought are chosen not so much on their merits as on their to venture upon pulling down an edifice which allegiance to some faceless powerbroker. In return has answered in any tolerable degree for ages for the cornucopia of legal and financial and brand- the common purposes of society, or on building ing privileges which the parties enjoy, they should it up again, without having models and patterns at least be required by law to be open, transparent of approved utility before his eyes. and democratic. Society is indeed a contract ... It is a We should be looking to other countries for partnership between those who are living, ways in which we can make our democracy more those who are dead, and those who are to be accountable and more responsive to the wishes of born.

The Clock in the Rented Apartment Betanja, Slovenia, April 2012

A cat, an assemblage of circles, lies on a cushioned chair, eyes closed. A pot beside the chair, bowl-shaped, contains ten circles of pink petals in a cluster of almond-shaped leaves Both table and lamp look down that look like pieces of hard green candy. on a brown woven basket. The basket holds a profusion of yellow petals Stage right, at the far edge, in a cluster of almond-shaped leaves the spindly legs of a small black table that look like pieces of hard green candy. curl up to a circular plane on which stands an egg-shaped lamp A yellow, wide-brimmed hat supporting a round red shade. between the basket and the pot lies centre stage on the floor, the head that belongs inside it nowhere in sight. And up above all these a second hand twitches from point to point, from one Roman numeral to another, passing the hand it will imperceptibly nudge from two forty-five to two forty-six and beyond.

Knute Skinner

Quadrant October 2016 13 Stephen H. Balch

How Islam Saved the West The Benefits of the Absence of Empire

slam gave the West a gift—its liberty. It was long distances, they are not generally systems in not a direct gift, nor deliberately bestowed, nor which commerce is most valued or offered a share understood for what it was when given. Yet it in governance; hierarchical power and martial glory Iwas quite real. usually earn top honours and drive policy. What’s Islam made this gift not by what it produced but more, like dissidents, commerce also loses the ready by what it prevented: the emergence of “comprehen- ability to migrate from less favourable to more sive empire” in the Western world. favourable environments, an important deterrent Empires uniting enormous tracts of territory have against fiscal exploitation. dominated the history of most regions of the civi- Most states have been run by tax-extracting lised world. The most striking case, East Asia, has elites, few by actual producers of goods and services. experienced imperial rule for approximately 1600 And the exceptions have seldom been territorially of the past 2200 years. The Middle East—today’s large, a fact which represented the greatest chal- Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq—has lenge to the founders of America’s “extended repub- been within the bounds of one or another empire lic”. Ancient republics, like Athens and early Rome, for about 1500 of the last 2600 years. India (or, more in which ordinary people could aspire to voice and precisely, its core Gangetic Plain) has been part leadership, were usually quite diminutive. In pre- of an empire for about 1600 out of last 2300 years. modern times common people most effectively Western and Mediterranean Europe, by contrast, exerted power through numerical concentration, has been ruled this way for only approximately 500 which small-scale polities, via assemblies, demon- of the past 2200 years, and not since, memorably, strations, or riots, facilitated. The absence of wide- 476. Russia aside, the rest of Europe has lived under spread hinterlands also limited the development comprehensive empire almost not at all.1 of “latifundia”, vast estates whose resources could Empires have their merits. Once they’ve reached be tapped by elites and despots to solidify rule. In their “natural frontiers”, they can be bringers of larger states land usually outweighs people. peace, creators of common markets, and authors of While empires can be built on a variety of geo- lasting cultural, legal, moral and religious commu- graphical foundations, the most secure are those in nity. To the West’s one significant empire, Rome, regions that allow widespread resource aggregation. we owe foundational law codes, a great tradition of In pre-industrial times this was generally a matter public works, and Christendom. of water transport, usually riverine. Armies most But there is also a big imperial downside. Most often marched or rode, but it was over water that of the great pre-modern empires have not, for exam- most long-distance trade occurred, particularly ple, been especially friendly to liberty, political rep- with respect to vital bulk commodities like grain resentation, or restraints on power. Even the Roman or rice. Communications also benefited. The larg- empire, though ruled through law, was not ruled by it est pre-modern empires were thus typically based when that most counted. At the highest levels, life on great river systems like the Nile, the Tigris and or death, war or peace, freedom or slavery, impris- Euphrates, the Indus, the Ganges, the Huang Ho onment or exile, were determined by realpolitik, not and the Yangtze. the content of statutes or rules of procedure. Other Western republicanism was facilitated in its empires have been far worse. Empire’s long arm also earliest days by the opposite circumstance, geo- makes it physically easier to squelch intellectual dis- graphic miniaturisation. Greece’s rough topography, sent, foreign asylum being beyond easy reach. indented coast and short rivers produced patchwork And though empires can safeguard trade over clusterings of people and resources. Italy’s terrain,

14 Quadrant October 2016 How Islam Saved the West somewhat similar, also encouraged the emergence towards unprecedented levels of political freedom of city states in both antiquity and the Middle Ages. and economic prosperity—its social heterogeneity Moreover, western and central European river engendering massive creative strength. valleys were generally of modest length, only the Danube being comparable to the earth’s other great estern Europe’s one great enduring empire rivers in the area it drains.2 Moderately long river was not founded on a river system but on an systems separated, as they frequently are in Europe, inlandW sea—the Mediterranean. Only after mare by mountains, or located on peninsulas and islands, nostrum, as the Romans meaningfully called it, had helped generate a patchwork multi-state system, been closed to hostile fleets could the empire feel whose members, if not necessarily dwarfish, were secure. It’s no accident that the final act in the ascent usually of no more than middling size. This, in turn, of Augustus was his defeat of the Egyptian navy at favoured political equipoise, no principality large Actium. Constantine’s fourth-century movement of enough to gain hegemony over the others, with the empire’s capital to the head of the Bosporus also each offset by the power of neighbours. Operating reflected Rome’s concern over Mediterranean con- across the European map, this equipoise also cre- trol. Fifty years earlier the Goths had penetrated the ated a large number of interstitial spaces between straits to ransack much of Greece and Asia Minor. A (or even within) regimes of the usual aristocratic and fortified capital at the waterway’s entrance reduced militarist type; spaces, like chartered towns and city the likelihood of recurrence. states, wherein commerce could reach for political Rome’s fall looms as large as it does in Western power via the establishment of constitutional order. history because no comprehensive empire ever arose The Western world’s take-off from agrarian to take its place. But as the history of imperial res- semi-stasis to commercial, technological and con- toration elsewhere demonstrates, there was no inevi- stitutional dynamism was centred on two such con- tability about this. Attempts at resurrection were, in stitutionalised polities that would not likely have fact, repeatedly made—two, shortly after 476, with preserved their independence in the face of com- near success. prehensive empire—the United Provinces of the After becoming ruler of Italy in 493, Theodoric Netherlands, and England. Both were able to employ the Ostrogoth was able to add to his collection the fluid mechanics of European multipolarity to of dominions Visigothic Spain and, as tributary sustain themselves—indeed, they collaborated to states, Vandalic North Africa and the Burgundian resist a succession of attempts to destroy their liber- Kingdom of the Rhone valley; that is, except for ties by the two most threatening European powers the rest of Gaul and Britain, just about all of the of their times, Philip II’s Spain, and Louis XIV’s old West Roman patrimony. Documents suggest France. that at this point he contemplated assuming the Spain’s assaults on the Netherlands were hobbled title Augustus. Had he done so, and had his title by simultaneous conflicts with England, France and been recognised in the east, the empire would have the Ottomans, while England was able to combine been formally restored. But Theodoric died before with the Dutch and Austrians to frustrate the univer- he could close his grip. sal designs of the Sun King—ultimately organising A generation later it was the eastern empire’s its foreign policy self-consciously around preserving turn. In 533 the Emperor Justinian reconquered a European balance. A bit later, the West’s third North Africa, and in 536 launched a war that, after great mercantile nation, the United States, was able decades of fighting, brought Italy back into the to make good its freedom by expertly exploiting the imperial fold. A large portion of the Spanish coast same divisions.3 was also for a time reoccupied, once more giving The sheer degree of their successes made the the Mediterranean the semblance of a Roman lake. Netherlands, Britain and America outliers, but they Full consolidation of the Italian reconquest was pre- were certainly not the only places where Western vented only by the untimely appearance upon the fragmentation nurtured flowers of liberty. Before Danube of the Avars, fit successors of the Huns, 1789 many European kingdoms had representative whose predations pushed new waves of German bodies, municipal freedoms, and notions of rights tribesmen into Italy while simultaneously menac- under law. The achievements of the Netherlands, ing the Balkans. Despite this, a number of sizeable Britain and America, together with the great revo- and lucrative western footholds were retained by the lutionary upheaval in France, had wide European eastern empire including Rome itself, many other impact only because there were many other major Italian towns, and the great granaries of Sicily European locales which had pluralist traditions and North Africa. similar to their own. Until the lights went out in Just as the memories of the first imperial dynas- 1914, the continent was moving along a broad front ties of China—the Qin and the Han—never ceased

Quadrant October 2016 15 How Islam Saved the West to mesmerise subsequent generations of East Asians, by two civilisations whose mutually exclusive reli- so too did that of Rome fascinate later Europeans: its gious claims left them incorrigibly at loggerheads. titles, symbols, personal names, architectural styles, Given the passionate nature of their rivalry, com- law, language, calendrical systems and religion get- plete conquest of one by the other had a very high ting appropriated by such disparate claimants as hurdle to surmount. the rulers of Germany, Russia and the Holy See. Of the two sides the Muslim was long the All that was wanted was a natural platform from stronger, possessing the rich Nile and Mesopotamian which this mystique could be feasibly translated into valley systems and blocking Christians from easy a project of reunification. trade access to the riches of the Indies and China. In China these platforms were to be found in one This meant that if a universal West-Eurasian empire or the other of the two great rivers that crossed the was to be re-established during the post-prophet Confucian world from east to west. The first three but pre-industrial period, it was most likely to be reunifications, under the Sui and Tang, the Sung, accomplished by Muslims. Twice they came close. and the Yuan, first consolidated themselves in the Had Constantinople fallen to the Arabs, or had the Huang Ho valley and then proceeded south. The Franks been overrun, Islam might have reunified last, the Ming, started in the Yangtze and moved the Mediterranean during its initial burst of expan- north, the centre of Chinese wealth sion. A second, much later attempt and population having by the four- was made by the Ottomans, though teenth century transferred itself to he absence of given the intellectual and technolog- the semi-tropics. T ical advantages which by that time The natural centre of enduring empire, had accumulated in Christendom, Mediterranean Christendom lay in contrary to the its prospects were never very great. its east, a place of rich and popu- Playing a much weaker material lous cities, Jesus’s passion, the great experience of most of hand, post-Islamic, pre-industrial breadbasket of Egypt, and the the civilised world, Western efforts at recreating empire, almost impregnably walled “New inscribed competition even when they were just confined Rome” of Constantinople. By the to the rump of Christendom, were end of the sixth century this region much more deeply far feebler. The Frankish attempt, was largely united culturally—by into the “cultural held together by little more than identity “Roman”, by language the skill and grit of three succes- mainly Greek, and by religion genes” of the West sive warrior chieftains, collapsed mostly Orthodox Christian. This than anywhere else. soon after Charlemagne’s death. constituted a power base much more The Ottonian, a century later, was formidable than that possessed by even more ephemeral. The Papacy’s any contemporary western Christian regime, all of required a priestly dynamism few pontiffs in fact which were relatively rude, loosely organised and possessed. Not until the resources of the New World lacking the symbolic status of the eastern empire. were added to the Habsburg realms did reviving Reconquest, even in the wake of Justinian’s short- universal Western empire again seem a realistic fall, was probably less a matter of “if” than “when”. prospect, and even in that case Europe’s entrenched That this never happened was due to a disruption fragmentation defeated it. in the Mediterranean ecumene far more profound than anything that could have been accomplished n an alternative European history, one following by mere barbarian intrusion. With the stunning a cyclical pattern of imperial collapse and resto- sweep of Islam over Syria, Egypt, North Africa and ration,I each reassembly of Romanitas, like the suc- Spain in the seventh and early eighth centuries, the cessive dynasties of China, would have certainly political heartland of Mediterranean Christendom differed from its predecessors, just as the Roman was irrevocably destroyed. empire of the fourth and fifth centuries was quite The catchment area over which an empire assem- distinct from that of the Twelve Caesars. Still, the bles resources usually needs to be infused with a Chinese cycles from Qin to Qing resulted in much substantial degree of cultural unity, reinforcing (or less change than, over the same course of time, sometimes emerging out of) its riverine or mari- happened in the West—where kaleidoscopic rough time integration. Hellenism and then Christianity and tumble kept standing-pat from being a viable provided this for Rome, Confucianism for China, option. The remnant of the empire that did survive, Hinduism and (eventually) Islam for many of the Byzantium—centralised, bureaucratised, caesaropa- empires in between. By contrast, the resources of pist and classicising—was also a much more cultur- the post-Islamic Mediterranean came to be divided ally sterile place than medieval Italy, Germany or

16 Quadrant October 2016 How Islam Saved the West

France, doing less with its great archive of ancient Notes Greek texts than did the squabbling Latins. It was 1. The later Napoleonic, Nazi and Soviet imperial also less commercially dynamic, relying increasingly projects, though belonging to very different world on the Venetians and Genoese to mediate its trade. orders, also collapsed, as may the European Union. If comprehensive empire had become the And the thalassocracies of eighteenth-, nineteenth- European norm, this Byzantine stasis might well and twentieth-century Britain, and of nineteenth- have been writ large, bolstered, as in China, by a and twentieth-century France, failed to carry over master-of-all-one-surveys regime complacency. into encompassing European empire. Under these very different circumstances the nine- 2. So why did the Danube never breed a European- teenth-century West’s most notable figures might wide empire? Perhaps because empires already not have been industrialists, financiers and scien- established can limit new empire-building efforts tists, but magistrates, landowners and churchmen nearby. For the Mediterranean-centred Romans the lovingly steeped in stale antiquarian learning. Danube constituted a northern imperial frontier, and History doesn’t follow neat laws. Perhaps long- they sought to break up any power concentrations lasting empire would not have drastically dimmed that developed along it. Later the Danube region was the West’s lights. But if there’s one generalisation exposed to periodic invasions by nomadic peoples, that has real scope of historical application, it is, whose power centres were often a good deal further I believe, that competition is a good thing. The east. The Habsburgs would eventually establish a absence of enduring empire, contrary to the experi- Danube-based empire but it was far from taking in ence of most of the civilised world, inscribed com- Europe as a whole. petition much more deeply into the “cultural genes” 3. All these commercial nations also had some purely of the West than anywhere else. geographic advantages, England being an island, The possibility of European empire largely America safely across the Atlantic, and even feature- revolved around control of the Mediterranean basin less Holland capable, when desperate, of opening its where Rome had built its domain. By dividing that dikes before invaders. sea into two antagonistic spheres, Islam broke its unifying power and gave Western competitiveness Stephen H. Balch is the Director of the Texas Tech its chance. However we today may view the religion Institute for the Study of Western Civilization in of Mohammed, we should at least be pleased with Lubbock, Texas. He wrote “Cognoscendancy: The New this unintended consequence of its achievement. Tyranny of the Talkers” in the April issue.

Daddy, please don’t go

Daddy, please don’t go I’m sorry I was bad

Daddy, please don’t go I promise I’ll be behave

Daddy, please don’t go I’m really, really scared

Daddy, please don’t go You might get hurt out there

Daddy, please don’t go I don’t like Mummy’s boyfriend

Saxby Pridmore

Quadrant October 2016 17 Tony Abbott

Keeping Reform Alive Even in the Midst of Our Present Discontents

The Hon. Tony Abbott, MHR for Warringah, delivered law. At its worst, it limits free speech merely to pre- this speech to the Samuel Griffith Society’s 2016 vent hurt feelings. John Howard opposed it when Conference in Adelaide in August. He wrote a series Paul Keating introduced it, but didn’t repeal it in of assessments of his government’s achievements and government. failures in the March, April and May issues this year. After the successful prosecution of Andrew Bolt, I promised to “repeal it in its current form” but y first task tonight is to congratulate the reneged after fierce criticism from Liberal premiers Samuel Griffith Society for its unflinch- and a wall of opposition in the Senate. As well, ing commitment to upholding our con- I was seeking ways to limit jihadi hate preachers Mstitution and to safeguarding our legal traditions. and worried about the appearance of double stand- You are, if I may say so, a thoroughly conservative ards. Perhaps the cause of free speech would have body—not in any partisan sense but in your respect fared better if my government’s initial bid had been for what has shaped us and in your determination to merely to drop “offend” and “insult” while leaving build on the best features of the past. prohibitions on the more serious harms. Although Sir Samuel Griffith led a nineteenth- Still, as things stand, there’s no real prospect of century Queensland version of the Liberal Party, change—even though several young Queenslanders there were occasions, he believed, when “the com- are now facing official persecution merely for ques- fort of the individual must yield to the good of the tioning reverse discrimination on social media and public”. He had a strong social conscience but no the Race Discrimination Commissioner is now sympathy for those “who endeavour to bring about itching to prosecute our best-known cartoonist. reforms by crime and violence”. He opposed inden- The decency and fair-mindedness of the tured labour, but was more inclined to phase it out Australian people will always be a better defence than to ban it. And he was, of course, the principal against hate speech than a law administered by author of the first draft of our Constitution; which ideological partisans—yet our parliament prefers has turned out to be a splendidly serviceable rule to tolerate over-the-top prosecutions than to upset book for a practical people. thin-skinned activists. Although he once claimed no inconsistency what- Take another issue dear to adherents of the soever between any of his innumerable speeches on Samuel Griffith Society: the restoration of a a huge range of topics, he was more pragmatist than better-functioning federation—a federation that ideologue. His was a pragmatism based on values: more faithfully reflects the letter and spirit of our sympathy for the underdog, respect for institutions Constitution—by allowing the different levels that have stood the test of time, and a preference for of government to be more sovereign in their own freedom. spheres. In the 2014 budget, Joe Hockey and I imple- y second task is to confront a regrettable truth: mented our election pledge to limit the Rudd– these are vexing times for conservatives— Gillard school and hospital cash splash to the 2013 Mlegal conservatives no less than political ones—and forward estimates. We reduced Commonwealth we need to ask “Why?” if better times are to come. support for the states from the unsustainable, Take an issue that’s quite rightly exercised many beyond-the-out-years, pie-in-the-sky promises of here: section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act the previous government, to CPI plus population that prohibits what might “offend, insult, humiliate growth in the fourth year of the budget projections. or intimidate” on racial grounds. This is a troubling Our idea was the constitutionally correct

18 Quadrant October 2016 Keeping Reform Alive one: to have the states and territories take more tional families the Coalition most wanted to help, responsibility for funding the public schools and they also helped to rein in an increasingly out-of- public hospitals. The public would then know better control budget deficit. whom to blame when things went wrong. Again led Unquestionably, we were right to oppose the car- by Liberal premiers, the response was a fusillade of bon tax, which was not just a broken promise but the criticism along the lines of “cruel cuts” and “broken antithesis of the former government’s 2010 election promises”. commitment. We were right to oppose the min- Along with a modest Medicare co-payment for ing tax which destroyed investment, cost jobs, and otherwise bulk-billed GP visits, reductions in stay- boosted red tape without raising serious revenue. at-home-mum payments once the youngest child We were right to oppose the over-priced school halls was at school, indexation for pensions based on the program, and the combustible roof batts program, consumer price index rather than male total aver- and the live cattle ban that threatened Indonesia’s age weekly earnings, and insisting on learning-or- food security—because these were all bad policies earning for school leavers rather than going straight incompetently implemented. on the dole, these reductions in the rate of increases I wonder, though, about the former govern- to spending were sabotaged in the Senate. ment’s people swap with Malaysia. The 800 boat So, as things stand, rather than reform a dys- people that could have been sent to Malaysia was functional federation, the states would rather blame less than a month’s intake, even then. I doubt it federal funding than address the would have worked. Still, letting it shortcomings in their schools and stand would have been an acknowl- hospitals; while the Commonwealth he contention, even edgment of the government-of- won’t risk a scare campaign by con- T the-day’s mandate to do the best it sidering real change. now, that there’s no could, by its own lights, to meet our There’s much that my govern- better country to live nation’s challenges. It would have ment achieved in two short years: been a step back from the hyper- abolishing taxes, stopping the boats, in ought to be self- partisanship that now poisons our finalising free-trade agreements, evident. Cultural public life. boosting small business, starting In the last parliament, I could big projects like Sydney’s second self-confidence: that’s invariably count on Bill Shorten’s airport, keeping our country safe— what’s missing; and support on national security issues. and not shirking budget repair. that’s what’s required On deploying the armed forces Still, I have to take responsibility or strengthening anti-terror laws, for our inability to reform section for more of our debates there were cabinet ministers harder 18C and to deliver the beginnings to tilt the right way. to persuade than the Leader of the of federation reform. Opposition! Free speech is worth the risk The challenge for the new par- of giving offence. The Commonwealth can’t be the liament will be to be as sensible about economic states’ ATM if our federation is to work. Government security as the old one was about national security; can’t continue to live beyond its means. because we can’t keep pretending that economic I did make these points but not often enough or growth on its own will take care of debt and deficit. persuasively enough to bring about the changes I Of course, Labor’s instinct is for more tax and sought; the changes, I suspect, that you wanted too. the Coalition’s preference is for less spending—but Hence the need for all of us to ponder how these if Labor wants spending legacies such as the NDIS good causes and other good causes might better to survive, it should be prepared to work with the prosper in the future. government in dealing with the spending overhang You won’t be surprised to hear that I have been that it created. reflecting on my time as opposition leader, as well After an election where the government all but as prime minister. Interestingly, while less than 50 lost its majority, yet the opposition recorded its third- per cent of the current government’s legislation has worst vote in seventy years, the sensible centre needs passed the parliament, almost 90 per cent of the to focus even more intently on what really matters former Labor government’s legislation passed with- to middle-of-the-road voters. All of us need to dwell out a division. less on what divides us and more on what unites us, I think the Abbott opposition was right not and to have an open mind for good ideas—as the to oppose means-testing family tax benefits and Howard opposition did with the economic reforms means-testing the private health insurance rebate; of the Hawke government. because, although these measures hit the aspira- We’re much more likely to rebuild trust by telling

Quadrant October 2016 19 Keeping Reform Alive the truth than by running away from hard decisions. and justice on the imperative to treat others as you’d We have to keep reform alive because the reforms have them treat you; or to love your neighbour as of today create the prosperity of tomorrow. Budget you love yourself. repair, federation reform, productivity reform and The subsequent questions, I have to say, focused tax reform can’t stay in the too-hard basket for the on the alleged cruelty of the Abbott government’s whole term of this parliament. border protection policies, the inadequacy of its Of course, all significant change has costs that climate change policies, and the insensitivity of its need to be taken into account. And it’s easy to make approach to same-sex marriage! And why wouldn’t a bad situation worse with ill-considered change. these be students’ concerns, given teachers’ preoc- Yet often enough we must change merely to keep cupations with multiculturalism, reconciliation and what we have. global warming? At least the Safe Schools program We are free because we’re strong. We are fair isn’t yet mandatory at Catholic schools in New because we can afford to be. But every day we must South Wales. ask how we can be better, smarter, stronger—and But there’s hope; one Year Nine student I ques- adjust as circumstances require. This isn’t ideology; tioned the other day, from a different school, vol- it’s common sense. It shouldn’t be a crisis that forces unteered that our biggest national problem was the parliament to face facts: everything has to be paid budget deficit. It turned out that during the election for; every dollar government spends comes ulti- he’d been exposed to a heavy dose of Sky News! mately from taxpayers; and taxpayers are also vot- There wouldn’t be a person in this room ers with a vested interest in getting value for their tonight—not one of you—who would say that our money. civilisation is more secure today than it was five, ten or twenty years ago. The new tribalism, the loss y job tonight, though, is less to address the of civility, and reality-television politics are taking challenges of government, than to address their toll across the Western world. Yet for all our Mthe challenges facing those who wish to build incre- present discontents, there’d hardly be anyone here mentally on our constitutional and legal heritage. unconvinced that Western civilisation, especially The main problem is that fewer and fewer people its English-speaking version, is mankind’s greatest actually know what that heritage is. achievement. Some years ago, after John Howard had ques- To be an Australian is to have won first prize in tioned the state of history teaching in our schools, I the lottery of life. A culture which welcomes diver- quizzed my teenage daughters about some of the big sity, which values women, which offers respect to events in Australia’s past. “We haven’t been taught everyone; with universal social security, with politi- that,” one responded. Her history study had been cal and social and economic opportunity; which ancient Egypt: “pharaohs and stuff”, she told me, encourages people to look out for each other, which “and the Rosetta Stone”. urges everyone to be his or her best self and which If people don’t know the Bible and gospel sto- is always looking for ways to improve, deserves to be ries; if they haven’t read Shakespeare or Dickens; if much better thought of. Yet what’s readily extended they haven’t heard about ancient Greece and Rome; to other cultures is only grudgingly extended to our if they haven’t studied the political evolution of own: credit where it’s due. An appreciation of our England; if they know little of the Great War and society’s strengths, as well as its weaknesses, is miss- the struggles against Nazism and communism— ing from the public discourse, making consideration how can they fully appreciate the society they live of so many issues so contentious. in, or understand Australian democracy, let alone I won’t try to persuade you that there’s never been the subtleties of the relationships between the dif- a better time to be an Australian—for cultural con- ferent branches and levels of government? servatives there are too many frustrations for that— With less common knowledge, shared under- but surely the contention, even now, that there’s no standings become more difficult. Without moor- better country to live in ought to be self-evident. ings and without maps, inevitably, we are adrift Cultural self-confidence: that’s what’s missing; and and directionless. What’s deep and lasting becomes that’s what’s required for more of our debates to tilt harder to distinguish from the ephemeral, and we the right way. end up taking sport more seriously than religion. You appreciate what more of us should: that our A few weeks back, I addressed my old school and national story has far more to celebrate than apolo- spoke briefly about the debt that the modern world gise for. The challenge for all of us who seek a bet- owed to Christianity: how democracy rested on an ter Australia is rarely to throw things out and start appreciation of the innate dignity of every person; again, but to build on the great strengths we have.

20 Quadrant October 2016 James Kierstead

There’s Nothing Wrong with Democracy

ew people nowadays will admit that they dis- emocracy,” according to Robertson, “has like democracy. But the Brexit result, and never meant the tyranny of the simple major- the reactions to it in the press and on social “ity.”D This assertion is falsified by one of the world’s media,F have finally convinced me of something I earliest democracies, classical Athens. Citizens made had long suspected. Democracy, even in countries decisions by a simple majority vote in an assembly where the practice is long-established, is not as whose authority was supreme—for the duration of popular as it seems. the fifth century, at least. One or two friends of mine have openly admit- If not all democracies vested as much power in ted that they are having doubts about democratic a citizen assembly as Athens did, several put major- government. They tell me that democracy is all ity decision-making at the centre of their systems. very well in small doses, but that it is dangerous to The historian Egon Flaig, in his recent book on give everyone the vote, which should, perhaps, be the practice, finds evidence for decision-making by reserved for people with a certain level of education. simple majority in a number of past societies, from Few commentators have been so courageous, or ancient India to medieval Iceland. so clear-eyed about their own views. Rather than As the political scientist Melissa Schwartzberg admit that they have doubts about democracy, most shows in her book Counting the Many, there are good critics of the Brexit vote have preferred to argue reasons for sticking to voting by simple majority. that the referendum was not really democratic at The simplest one is that voting by super-majorities all. is the only alternative, and super-majorities fail to How do they reach that conclusion? A few respect the principle of political equality by favour- arguments turn up time and again. Democracy ing the status quo. is not really about majority voting. Democracy is Both Robertson and Joffe point out that several less about the sovereignty of the people than about contemporary democracies (the US, Australia and checks and balances. Democracy has less to do Germany) require some sort of super-majority for with the people expressing its will than with the constitutional change. Britain has no written con- deliberation of elected representatives. And this is stitution, but there is a broader point here. all to the good, it is implied, because if democracy In the states mentioned above, laws that are was really about the direct rule of the majority, our part of the constitution get special protection from states would be run by ignorant people rather than the majority will. Who grants them that protec- by experts—with predictably disastrous results. tion? The small number of people who drew up the All of these arguments feature in a prominent constitution! article in the Guardian by the senior lawyer Geoffrey Obviously, there are some things that need to be Robertson. They also have a central place in a recent protected simply to keep democracy in operation. front-page opinion piece in Die Zeit, published For example, a democracy should not be allowed to under the lurid headline “Diktatur des Volkes”, by take a vote on its own existence. This has happened the veteran journalist and academic Josef Joffe. too many times already, from classical Athens to These arguments have been influential, but they Weimar Germany. We might also want to protect are misguided. To see how, we need to look in more certain rights, such as freedom of speech, on the detail at their recent uses by Robertson and Joffe. grounds that political equality would be meaning­ And we will also need to look at the long history less without giving everyone an equal right to of democracy, going right back to its originators in contribute to debates. But decisions about whether ancient Greece. to belong to a particular international organisation

Quadrant October 2016 21 There’s Nothing Wrong with Democracy hardly pose an existential threat to democracy. There considerations on its side. In a large nation-state is therefore no reason to give them constitutional without the technology for remote voting (like the protection—no more reason, that is, than for any eighteenth-century US), representation may have other controversial political issue. been the only option. But the idea that representa- This brings us to the question of checks and tion is more democratic than the direct rule of the balances. For Robertson, democracy involves gov- people is an odd one. The Greek word demokratia, ernments that are “subject to certain checks and bal- after all, means “the power of the people”. And ances such as the common law and the courts, and Greek democracies always featured an assembly in an executive ultimately responsible to parliament”. which citizens voted directly on issues facing their Joffe appeals to James Madison’s contributions to city-state. The Federalist Papers. It is hard to say whether Robertson and Joffe Where Robertson and Joffe go wrong is in really think representation is more democratic than thinking that they are describing democratic sys- referendums, or whether they simply think it pro- tems rather than republican ones. In particular, duces better results. Certainly, they do not argue, they are advocating what ancient authors such as as some have, that the kind of reasonable discussion Polybius called the “mixed” or “balanced” consti- that tends to happen in small groups of debaters— tution. Madison found this type of system par- deliberation—is a good in itself. ticularly appealing, mainly because his reading of Instead they appeal to the value of expertise, an other ancient authors (such as the aristocratic his- idea emphasised by Joffe in particular. He begins torian Thucydides) had convinced his article by quoting Richard him of the perils of unrestrained Dawkins, who said that Brexit was democracy. olitical questions “much too difficult and detailed” an The checks and balances that P issue “to be left to voters”. Dawkins’s Robertson and Joffe find so attrac- are not chiefly argument is an enticing one, and it tive—and so democratic—were concerned with what has a fine pedigree. But we should added to the US Constitution in firmly reject it. order to make it less democratic, not will happen, or more. This explains some peculiari- how it will happen. he opinion expressed by ties of that system, such as the elec- Rather, they are Dawkins is a version of Plato’s toral college that takes the final vote centralT argument against democ- on the presidency. about what we think racy—that it puts political power Madison believed that the views should happen. into the hands of people who are not of the people should be “filtered” qualified to exercise it. The point is through the views of more enlight- by no means a silly one. After all, I ened statesmen. To their credit, Americans have would hardly entrust my health to someone who had over the years steadily moved their Constitution in no training in medicine, so why should I entrust my a more democratic direction (so that members of the country to people who have no training in politics? electoral college almost always cast their votes in One possible response is to say that a nation vot- accordance with the will of the people, for example). ing on an issue is a very different matter from some- This would have dismayed Madison. And it has led body chosing a doctor. In particular, when a whole to a confusion about what democracy is. Americans country votes in a referendum, those who happen to have continued to honour their Constitution just have a high level of training in politics or economics as they have grown increasingly democratic. As a are not excluded. result the Constitution is now seen as a model for To that extent, Plato has presented us with a false democracy. But it was meant as a structure within dichotomy. The question is not so much “experts or which the will of the people might be restrained— the masses” as “experts plus the masses, or experts or, at least, refined. on their own”. Some political scientists—Hélène This was, of course, what Madison saw as the Landemore, for example—argue that groups includ- proper role of representation—“to refine and enlarge ing experts outperform the experts on their own in the public views by passing them through the terms of the quality of the decisions they make. This medium of a chosen body of citizens”. Robertson is debatable. And in any case it misses the key point. concurs, emphasising the centrality to the British This was glimpsed by the philosopher Protagoras, system of parliament, whose members can vote on who (according to Plato) argued that questions of issues “according to conscience and common sense”. morality and politics simply do not admit of expert Having representatives of the people vote on knowledge in the way that medicine does. behalf of the people may have certain practical The question of Britain’s vote to leave the EU

22 Quadrant October 2016 There’s Nothing Wrong with Democracy is a case in point. Obviously there are plenty of aggregated people’s preferences. To some, this is an considerations relevant to that decision that admit- indictment of the process, not an endorsement. The ted of expert knowledge. One of these, of course, referendum, they might complain, simply added up was how Brexit would affect the economy. And people’s opinions without checking whether they the experts duly weighed in. What is important to were rational or not. notice, though, is that the experts’ opinion on this This, in fact, is a central aspect of why voting is point did not have the power to end the debate. The democratic. By giving each person one vote—and experts’ opinion on how the economy might fare in by counting them equally—we grant everyone an the event of Brexit could not compel assent in the equal voice in the decision-making process. And we way that a mathematical proof might have. do so without privileging anyone’s ideas about what Political problems are nothing like the prob- is true or false, reasonable or unreasonable, good or lems of mathematics, or of any of the sciences. They bad. are rarely even empirical questions. Referendums When it comes to decisions about what we should never ask the people to vote on Pythagoras’s theo- do, this is exactly how we should conduct ourselves. rem, or on whether the economy of Japan is larger When it comes to questions of ethics and politics, than that of Mexico. This unsurprising fact con- there is rarely one right answer. And there is even tains an important truth. Political questions are not more rarely any way of checking what the right chiefly concerned with what will happen, or how it answer is. will happen. Rather, they are about what we think In such circumstances—the circumstances in should happen. which groups of humans have always found them- And there is another reason why we might want selves—there is no firm ground for claims to special to decide what we think should happen collectively authority to be built on. We can pretend that there (besides the fact that nobody is an expert in ethics is, or we can give everyone an equal say in collective in quite the same way as a doctor is an expert in decisions, as democrats. medicine). This is because a vote about some ques- On June 23, the people of Britain made a deci- tion of ethics or politics need not be seen as a way sion on a question of great importance by a simple of coming to the right answer about it. majority vote. Ancient Greek democrats would have The vote about Brexit, for instance, can also heartily approved. And so should we. be seen as a way of gauging how people felt about Britain’s involvement in the EU, whether or not James Kierstead is a Lecturer in Classics at Victoria we think they had good reasons for feeling as they University of Wellington. He has published a number did. To use political science jargon, the referendum of academic articles on ancient Greek democracy.

A Popular Song, 1930s for K.E. White

Back then, no boys made passes at girls in glasses & never at those who wore boots. When other girls wore pointy shoes cut low to show their ankles off her twisted feet were locked in boots After a surgeon’s knife on bone, buttoned down on both sides. pain, and the wait for brand new shoes: sensible lace-ups, “nigger brown”. As she limped about, the butt of smirks, No sling-backs or peep-toes, but real shoes. a popular song burned her ears: “Boots, Boots, Boots, Boots, Today she’d have the last laugh Movin’ up and down again!” as carefree girls in high-heeled boots of patent leather and sexy suede teeter down the busy streets. Suzanne Edgar

Quadrant October 2016 23 C.J. Ryan

Let Us All Have Our Say

he thought of voting in a plebiscite to deter- as pointless. I see it as fruitful. It offers the only mine whether or not Australia amends the opportunity to expose ourselves to exactly what we Marriage Act warms my soul like a cup of as a country truly want. soupT on a rainy winter’s morning. It’s invigorating. Proponents of change such as Australian There is something captivating about democracy in Marriage Equality routinely cite innumerable polls motion, to witness the wheels churn down the road declaring up to 64 per cent of Australians sup- of change, reaching a bifurcation and moving down port an amendment to the Marriage Act to allow the path we, the people, decide. And the thought same-sex couples the right to wed. They say it’s of losing inspires an equal rapture as the thought of senseless to vote on the issue because the result is winning. As with anything worth having or keep- already decided; we would only be corroborating ing, the prospect of losing should always be kept what is obvious. “If not now, then eventually,” they in mind. It fortifies our character and develops our say. Well, if that’s the case, we may as well never coping mechanisms to deal with what, especially if vote—for anything. Perhaps we could allow opinion you have a sociology degree in gender studies, will polls to decide who forms government. After all, likely be a lifetime filled with more failures than we’re all far too busy to give up twenty minutes on victories. a Saturday every three years. Let the few thousand After a rancorous decade of Australians demand- who are unfortunate enough to be polled over the ing the right to decide for themselves whether the phone during dinnertime decide. institution of marriage should be redefined to per- Limited and skewed sample sizes aside, just mit the inclusion of same-sex couples, it seemed we because survey results suggest 64 per cent of were on the cusp of achieving this democratic right. Australians support amendments to the Marriage The decision wouldn’t be left to an elitist group of Act now, does not mean these results will be lobbyists or washed-up celebrities looking to rein- reflected on voting day. Look at Brexit for instance. vigorate their careers, nor to politicians whom the In September 2015 the Remain campaign held a 14 majority routinely make obvious they neither trust per cent lead over Leave, with 11 per cent unde- nor endorse, but rather the decision would befall our cided. Nine months later Britain voted to leave the very selves; we would build the pillars of our democ- EU. Even if all of the 11 per cent decided to leave, racy to support what we supported. Like Ireland according to the polls that still would have left a 3 only a few years before us, we had the opportunity per cent victory margin for the Remain camp. So to decide for ourselves what we wanted. why did Britain vote to leave the EU with a 4 per But after years of toiling away for this very cent margin? opportunity, suddenly the pro-amendment lobby Because things change. People change, and so discarded this privilege when we gave it to them do their opinions. Time and time again, predicted and instead demanded a less inclusive one: legislate political landslide victories end up being far closer change without consulting us. than expected. Because when it comes time to vote, Now, I am not advocating either support or you aren’t answering a polling officer on the phone, opposition to the change. Frankly, I see the change you aren’t answering the person handing out fliers as inevitable. But I would prefer to maintain the on the street, you don’t even have to answer your rights of all to have a say in our country’s decision- friends or family. You answer to yourself. making process than to concede to inevitabilities. And this is why a vote is paramount to ensuring To do otherwise would be pouring water down a the voices of all Australians are heard: so they can slippery slope that serves only to erode our liberty say what they want, free from persecution. I am not and freedom of choice. But despite this inevitabil- arguing that those who oppose gay marriage have in ity, unlike the Left lobby, I don’t view the plebiscite any way historically suffered the same persecution as

24 Quadrant October 2016 Let Us All Have Our Say gay people, but the current paradigm of online lib- to belittle and degrade a portion of the community. eralist elitism does foster scorn towards those hold- But most of those who oppose the change have ing different opinions, which is often why those who proved more than capable of arguing their point oppose issues extolled by the social-justice-warrior with decorum and due consideration. The debate class choose to remain silent, or feel pressured into need not be cruel. On the other hand, though they agreeing publicly with things they patently do not. view themselves as too “progressive” to admit it, the However, I’ll leave the Left’s totalitarianism for largely Left twitterati are far more likely to person- another time. ally attack their opposition and drag the debate into But on the day of the plebiscite, when you stand the gutter. at that booth with pencil (an instrument emblematic There are those such as comedian Hannah of the possibility of change) in hand, surrounded Gadsby who wrote an impassioned plea on social by cardboard partitions that ensure the anonymity media about the harmful debate over the legalisa- and secrecy of your vote, you can vote exactly as you tion of homosexuality in Tasmania between 1994 want without justification. You won’t be threatened and 1997 and the impact the conversation had on with being labelled a bigot. You won’t be ostracised. her self-esteem. She, along with others, believes a You won’t be hung out to dry by the media. And plebiscite would do more harm than good: that it afterwards you can say you voted the other way and may “dehumanise” the gay community further. nobody will be able to prove otherwise. Would there be adverse comments from both sides of the argument? Likely, yes. To the same fter such a prolonged fight for changes to the extent as the aforementioned Tasmanian debates? Marriage Act, the extremist bandwagon Left Almost certainly not. For times have changed since A(not to be confused with their more consistent Left then with the advent of the internet activist. peers) with hair as bright and variegated as lights Few now would oppose so virulently an amend- on a Christmas tree, having got ment to allow same-sex couples the what they wanted all along, must right to marry, let alone callously have for the first time thought his is why a vote chastise individuals for being gay. about the implications of a popular T People are crucified for much less vote and concluded: we might lose. is paramount to these days. Whenever anything has Especially after the fractious fall- ensuring the voices the possibility of being taken out of out over the Safe Schools program context, accusations of hate speech demonstrated that it had many of all Australians are by the outrage industry are so ram- detractors, not singular acclaim as heard: so they can say pant that most who have misgivings had once been supposed. Suddenly about the progressive agenda feel the twitterati were presented with what they want, free scared or forced into silence. One the idea that all they support was from persecution. only has to look at the tiny numbers not universal, that they might have of Sonia Kruger’s public support- a fight on their hands after all. ers a few weeks ago to realise this. This fear of losing and of having to do some- Which is why I believe Gadsby’s fear of “an open thing to achieve what they want caused them to season for hate” is largely unfounded. Few would be abandon all rational thought and willingness for willing to risk it. Those that were would effectively debate and instead give in to puerility. Rather than be tying a noose around their own necks. calmly advocate reasons for the masses to support If it does surface, however, a few in both the their view, many fell back on that all-too-familiar gay community and the religious community will crutch: labelling all those opposing them as bigoted. likely fling their own soiled invective at each other People do change their minds. After all, Labor’s and, briefly, increase the divide between opposing Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, Penny schools of thought; but that moment will pass and Wong, who identifies as gay, opposed changes to soon be looked back on as childish. And gays would the Marriage Act in July 2010, only to change her not be the only victims of hatred. Those who thrive stance later. Did that make her bigoted for the first on creating victims will suddenly have them on each forty-one years and eight months of her life? side, since calling a gay youth a “vile faggot” and a I agree that the plebiscite has the possibility of young Catholic a “child-raping bible-basher” will be being harmful. Unfortunately at present almost hurtful to both. every debate on any issue attracts derision and However, all things considered, surely we are grandstanding from both unknown and prominent collectively smart and tough enough to ignore the figures. And it is possible that some opportunistic more incendiary opinions and keep the dirt outside media commentators might relish the opportunity from muddying our thoughts.

Quadrant October 2016 25 Let Us All Have Our Say

ill the pro-amendment community have a had the chance to step inside the ring. fight on their hands? Absolutely—as will A plebiscite is the only way to galvanise true Wthose opposed. But nothing worth having comes change and extinguish the alleged flames of hatred without a struggle. And it is only appropriate that towards the gay community, or douse the concerns all Australians, and not a select few who represent of the few so fearful of it, because if, and likely them, handle this fight. It’s the only way to sort the when, the amendment passes, though a few will damn thing out honestly. For it is regressive, not voice their evanescent concern, the majority who progressive, to silence those we disagree with. voted against the change, no doubt disappointed, Yet, if we venture down the other path and allow will shrug their shoulders, let out a sigh, and say, a parliamentary vote to affirm or deny the amend- “Well, I guess that’s that then. We lost,” and move ment of the Marriage Act, it is naive to assume that on with maturity—a maturity I doubt the Left those more vocal will sit down and take it lightly. will demonstrate if the result isn’t in their favour The pro-amendment community will blame the (perhaps they’ll whine and demand a second vote factional divides within the major parties and the like the credulous youths of the Remain brigade). influence of right-wing think-tanks for pulling As John Muscat noted in Quadrant, by allowing a strings in the shadows. Those opposing the change plebiscite, “at least a vigorous ‘No’ campaign will will always believe they had been let down by poli- expose the public to a range of arguments they ticians who compromised their principles and gave haven’t considered”. in to the grievance lobby to boost their approval But if you deny this right to those who oppose ratings, which will only fortify their belief—rightly the change, there will always be a smouldering or wrongly—that the majority of Australians were resentment among them. And the flames may one in their corner. In this case whoever loses will feel day flare up again. hard done by and will not accept the change— because it’s hard to accept losing a fight if you never C.J. Ryan is a Melbourne journalism graduate.

At the Side Altar

I walk over to a side altar. Temporary scaffolding blocks the view of a good half of an Annunciation; as for the rest, the dark pigment is lost in the dim light. Even so, I take a seat on the hard bench as if the scene held some absorbing interest. I check my watch, and I bide my time. Behind me, tourists come and go. Their attentions focus, reasonably, on the Tintoretto, or else their necks crane to the stained glass. Their guarded whispers and careful feet attest It’s God’s joke on me if they are right, to the respect that tourists assume but perhaps they are. they should assume. Perhaps some day I will stand at the foremost altar, sickened with recollection. But for now, I’m here as planned, trying not to look at my watch, trying not to slip my hand into my satchel.

Knute Skinner

26 Quadrant October 2016 Yeats’s Pond When he sat by the pond, He noticed how unhurried it all was And at what slow pace time passed, And felt drawn into that. If truth be told He was drawn in before he noticed, Since he himself Inside the Watertank Had slowed The most dangerous thing This was in the fountain’s gift. Was to lift the hatch Some rings in the meniscus appeared On the elevated watertank When Water Beetles flicked up to surface. High up on its brick legs, Fish he’d thought eaten by birds Creeper and moss covered, On that hottest summer day, Emerged for a moment Immerse myself within that silent womb, From their brick alleyways Out of the way, unseen in Beneath the Waterlily pots The quietness of undisturbed water And surprised him. Mosquitoes hovered at ping pitch and And realising how quietly silent Font-like it was to pause A sawn oak log going around this small world, And let the water wash away weeks, months, Having dried out a year in the Sun, years, Slowly resoaked, floating lower and lower Then wonder if I would be found across the month. If old electric wires were wrong, Now at the dense point of sinking. If I never made my way back to ground It was more solid wooden submarine. And I dissolved to bones— “The Journey of the Log” Having told no one He thought and watched I would check the failed reticulation The tadpole sucking on its bark On the rare off chance As tranquil passenger. A miss hit tennis ball had got into the valve Birds came by frequently and the algal bloom As once had happened years ago had vanished. To the gully roof on St Cuthbert’s The fountain Cambuslang. Splashed and splashed, But I knew I would be found Disturbing any water-poised quest of Since the stink would have been profound. The long-legged fly. Stupid man. His mind was in it in some way. Ivan Head Three days later it all came back to him When he heard the counter-tenor on the radio And a beautiful voice Held onto the upper note in the upper register. He began to wonder whether He could in one single tether Co-intuit the named things he was seeing And their transcendental ground in being.

Quadrant October 2016 27 Salvatore Babones

Russian Regret Alexander Dugin and the Ends of History

t is inevitable that a reviewer would be attracted might have come from any of his works. to a book carrying the deliciously direct title For example, Dugin’s analysis of Eurasian geo- “The American Empire Should Be Destroyed” politics, Last War of the World-Island, concludes (quotationI marks in the title). When that book is with the prophecy that “Russia will take the lead in only 126 pages long, written by a Texan evangeli- building a multipolar world ... aimed at undermin- cal Lutheran bishop, and published by an obscure ing American hegemony, and Russia will emerge religious publishing house in a small town of under anew as a planetary power”, and Dugin’s collection 200 people just north of Waco (most famous as of essays Eurasian Mission features such nuggets as, the home of Baylor football, Dr Pepper, and the “It is no exaggeration to say that the United States Branch Davidian doomsday cult), the attraction is is ... a visible embodiment and progenitor of all the irresistible. evil that plagues humanity today ... the empire of It’s not the author, James D. Heiser, who wants absolute evil.” to destroy the American empire. It’s his protagonist It comes as no surprise that an American evan- (or perhaps one should say antagonist), the Russian gelical minister would find Dugin’s point of view political philosopher Alexander Dugin. Dugin is unappealing (to say the least) but it is something of the favourite Russian bugbear of Western political a surprise that he knew (and cared) enough about analysts left, right and centre. As the quotation in Dugin to write a book warning the world about Heiser’s title suggests, Alexander Dugin is no fan the peril he poses. The key to this mystery is hid- of the United States of America. The quotation is den in that unappetising subtitle. “Immanentized taken from the concluding chapter of Dugin’s major eschatology” is Greco-Roman for “the end is near”: political statement, The Fourth Political Theory, but it the end of the world as described in the Book of Revelation. When Dugin says that the United States is the embodiment of evil, Heiser takes him The Fourth Political Theory at his word. In Heiser’s view, when a man with the by Alexander Dugin ear of the Kremlin “proclaims that ‘the American Arktos, 2012, 214 pages, £18.50 empire must be destroyed’ because it is at the center of the expansion of the ‘kingdom of the Antichrist’” Eurasian Mission: An Introduction to the world should take notice. After all, Russia still Neo-Eurasianism has enough nuclear weapons to literally put an end by Alexander Dugin to history. Arktos, 2014, 180 pages, £14 And in fact Heiser does imagine Dugin to be the mastermind of a kind of Russian doomsday cult, a Last War of the World-Island: The Geopolitics of “gnostic mass movement” whose “intended goal” Contemporary Eurasia is to bring about “the End of the World”. Heiser by Alexander Dugin is an expert on the Hermetic cults of the Italian Arktos, 2015, 166 pages, £12.95 Renaissance, a religious movement straight out of a Dan Brown novel. An historian of theology and “The American Empire Should Be Destroyed”: a practising pastor, Heiser is perhaps predisposed Aleksander Dugin and the Perils of Immanentized to take Dugin’s religious metaphors a little too Eschatology literally. But here Heiser is not alone: he marshals by James D. Heiser extensive excerpts from Western political analysts Repristination Press, 2014, 126 pages, US$12.95 who, like him, see in Dugin a master of the occult.

28 Quadrant October 2016 Russian Regret

In reality Dugin is a well-grounded intellectual retical work available in English. His starting point with a penchant for spiritual imagery, no more an is an analysis of the three warring political ide- occultist than Ronald Reagan or Martin Luther ologies of the twentieth century: liberalism, com- King, Jr. But he does have interesting friends. munism and fascism. Here Dugin follows in the Heiser’s philippic against Dugin is well sourced tradition of the influential Austro-Hungarian intel- and brings together valuable background infor- lectuals Friedrich Hayek and Karl Polanyi in iden- mation on Dugin’s biography, Dugin’s critics and tifying liberalism as the core ideology of modernity Dugin’s works. But it is riddled with exaggerations, that was challenged first by communism and seemingly wilful misreadings, and (especially) then by fascism, ultimately without success. Both implications of guilt by association. Excerpted in Hayek (the Austrian on the Right) and Polanyi (the isolation, Dugin’s florid language can be men- Hungarian on the Left) published their magnum acingly quotable, often amusingly so. Placed in opuses in 1944, in the heat of the Second World context, Dugin’s viewpoints are extreme but not War. Polanyi focused on fascism as the great enemy ridiculous. Thus when Dugin the social conserva- of freedom while Hayek suggested that commu- tive says “postmodernity ... is easily recognized as nism posed an even greater threat. Enemies until ‘the kingdom of the Antichrist’ ... the fact of the the end, Hayek and Polanyi both ended up in the Apocalypse” many American conservatives might United States after the war, their work supported by agree—and, like Dugin, might imagine that the US big American corporate foundations. federal government (if not the United States itself) Dugin does not reference the Hayek–Polanyi is the evil force behind it. debate, but it is not his purpose to wade into the All in all, “The American Empire Should Be worldly morass of arguments over economic policy, Destroyed” is a surprisingly readable tour de force government regulation of business, social safety of (somewhat credible) conspiracy theory. Heiser’s nets, and the like. For Dugin, the illiberal chal- writing is highly intelligent, in places even erudite. lenges of the twentieth century are dead and buried. But perhaps a small-town theologian of the occult is Liberalism has won, decisively so; the free-market not the best person to be writing the definitive book capitalism of Hayek and the embedded capitalism of on a Russian intellectual whose work is steeped in Polanyi are equally liberal and equally repugnant to the traditions of European continental philosophy him. Liberalism was the first political theory of the and contemporary postmodern thought. Dugin modern age, but with the passing of its twentieth- may be self-educated, but he is a self-educated pub- century rivals communism and fascism, “liberalism lic intellectual, not a self-educated lunatic blogger. ceases to be the first political theory and becomes Heiser and the many Western academics, journal- the only post-political practice”: ists and political analysts he cites are perhaps out of their depth when it comes to understanding the When liberalism transforms from being an intellectual force of nature that is Alexander Dugin. ideological arrangement to the only content of our extant social and technological existence, then it is no longer an “ideology”, Putin’s Rasputin or political fool? but an existential fact, an objective order of he alarmist tone adopted by Heiser and most things. It also causes any attempt to challenge other Western “Duginists” is driven by a its supremacy as being not only difficult, but Tshared vision of Dugin as contemporary Russia’s also foolish. ideologue-in-chief, a fantasy of Dugin as the latter- day Rasputin to Putin the latter-day Tsar. It doesn’t Critics who call Dugin a neo-fascist or a neo- hurt that the long-bearded Dugin bears more than communist miss this point, his very starting point. a passing resemblance to the much-mythologised He has nothing but ridicule for fascists (“every monk. He also shares Rasputin’s interest in tran- declared fascist after 1945 is a simulacrum”) and scendental religion. But Dugin is no mere mystic. communists (“there remains a plaster-cast imita- He is a deep-thinking (if perhaps somewhat popu- tion, a harmless Che Guevara, advertising mobile list) twenty-first-century political philosopher. His telephones or adorning the shirts of idle and com- works ooze intelligence as they ooze resentment of fortable petty-bourgeoisie youth”. Dugin is neither the inevitability of American power. Dugin may a fascist nor a communist, neo- or otherwise. He is dislike the United States, and even more dislike the a self-described postmodern fool. crass materialism that passes for a national identity He is a fool because even though he recognises at the heart of the American project, but the reasons the impossibility of challenging the final victory of for his hatred are thoroughly thought through. liberalism, he wants to do just that. And he must. The Fourth Political Theory is Dugin’s major theo- As a Russian nationalist (the one Western label

Quadrant October 2016 29 Russian Regret that can unquestionably be attached to Dugin, stakes struggle for survival. Ethnic separatism, fro- even though he rejects it) he correctly identifies the zen conflicts and real shooting wars abound. Dugin global victory of Western liberalism as “a matter himself was personally targeted by US economic of life or death” for the Russian nation. Correctly, sanctions in March 2015. Where Strauss’s romanti- because liberalism with its exaltation of the indi- cism is the romanticism of the armchair academic, vidual means the death of all traditional cultures, Dugin’s romanticism is the romanticism of the not just Russia’s. Polanyi and even (in his own way) lost cause—in his case, the lost cause of Russian Hayek saw this as well. They would also agree with greatness. Dugin that communism and fascism “have already Russia is perennially dying. Like England it has failed and proven themselves unequal to the chal- lost an empire but unlike England it has not found lenge of opposing liberalism, to say nothing of the a role. Nor has it found wealth, stability, democracy, moral costs of totalitarianism”. But where Polanyi freedom, or even security. It faces Nato in the west, wanted to domesticate liberalism China in the east, and a band of and Hayek wanted to unchain it, failing or failed states in between. Dugin wants to dethrone it. If Vladimir Putin is paranoid that For Dugin, there is only one If Vladimir Putin Western-funded NGOs are plot- way to rescue traditional societies is paranoid that ting to overthrow his govern- from the predations of globalism, Western-funded ment, it is because Western-funded and that is with a “Fourth Political NGOs are plotting to overthrow Theory”. Communism and fas- NGOs are plotting his government. Russia truly is sur- cism are equally unacceptable and to overthrow his rounded by enemies, many of them liberalism, with its “consumerism, of its own making, to be sure, but individualism, and a postmodern government, it is enemies nonetheless. manifestation of the fragmented because Western- Dugin the political fool wants to and sub-political being” is anath- revitalise Russia, to rejuvenate it. In ema. The liberal world is too com- funded NGOs are language that American politicians fortable for Dugin, a traditional plotting to overthrow ought to understand, he wants to Spartan in a postmodern world his government. make Russia great again. It is use- of Athenians. The liberal world less to suggest to Dugin that Russia seduces suspicious natives with Russia truly is might “find a role” as a “partner for an irresistible bargain: give up surrounded by peace” in an American-dominated your nations, your traditions, your liberal world order. Dugin’s Russia very identities in exchange for enemies, many of them needs its own world order, and worldly conveniences: “The wash- of its own making. for that it needs its own ideology, ing machine is the absolute argu- an indigenous political theory. ment of the supporters of progress.” Opposing liberalism and eschew- Like any good Spartan, Dugin would rather be ing communism and fascism, Russia must cre- filthy but proud than filthy rich. Echoing Friedrich ate a Fourth Political Theory. Not to do so would Nietzsche’s supermen, Dugin longs for the com- threaten the survival of Russia as a distinct civi- ing of “political soldiers” who are willing to (quot- lisation. Somewhat ironically, it all boils down to ing Nietzsche) “carry heroism into the search for Shakespeare: knowledge and wage wars for the sake of thoughts and their consequences”. Dugin here resembles no “to be or not to be”, in terms of Hamlet’s eternal one more than the American conservative political question. If Russia chooses “to be”, then it will philosopher Leo Strauss. automatically bring about the creation of a The key to understanding Dugin is the same Fourth Political Theory. Otherwise, for Russia as the key to understanding Strauss: they are both there remains only the choice “not to be”, which romantics. The difference is that Strauss, who will mean to quietly leave the historical and inspired the neoconservative movement in the world stage, dissolving into a global order which United States, was a denationalised romantic living is not created or governed by us. in comfortable post-war America. Strauss longed for a life of great deeds in heroic times; his main argument against post-war postmodernity was that Of being and nothingness it was boring to be comfortable. Dugin does not ugin is a great reader of German philoso- have the luxury of longing for past days of glory, phy, and though Nietzsche is his sentimental when every day in contemporary Russia is a high- Dfavourite, Martin Heidegger is his true intellectual

30 Quadrant October 2016 Russian Regret guide. Dugin identifies the “subject” of the Fourth empires and kingdoms”; Dugin wants to preserve Political Theory with Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, them; more than that, to breathe new life into them which he leaves in German, untranslated. Dugin’s and bring them back. He wants “a global crusade explication (one hesitates to call it simply an expla- against the US, the West, globalization, and their nation) of Dasein is not for the philosophically faint political-ideological expression, liberalism”, and he of heart: “Dasein can be recovered by the refinement wants it now. of the existential truth derived from the ontologi- Dugin does not advance any particular alterna- cal superstructure of society”. More literally, Dasein tive to liberalism because he embraces (nearly) all means “there-being” or “beingness”. of them. Dugin’s Dasein is—must be—an empty When it is used as an ordinary German word container because: Dasein is customarily translated as “existence”. It is used in philosophy to discuss the existence of indi- The elaboration of the ideology of this Crusader vidual people (or of God), but in principle it can be campaign, undoubtedly, is a matter for Russia applied to the existence of anything. Dugin applies not to pursue alone, but together with all the it to whole societies, as the “final and localized world powers, who, in one way or another, being of man”. In this context, Dasein might more oppose “the American century”. accurately be translated as “essence”: the essence of what Dugin considers an “authentic” culture or Foremost among his candidates for partnership civilization. in this campaign are “China, Russia, Iran, and It should go without saying that Dugin does not India ... [and] many South American and Islamic consider Western civilisation “authentic”, and per- states”. The problem is that “Generally speaking, haps he is right. The whole point of Western lib- these states lack an alternative vision of the future eralism—and the secret of its universal appeal—is international system or world order, and certainly that there is no one “authentic” cultural tradition in do not have a unified or common vision.” Western civilisation. There are the Greeks and the Dugin’s vision for them is Dasein: to each its Romans, to be sure, but there is no faster way to own Dasein. Dugin reasons (correctly) that Russia be dismissed as an old Whig than to start banging cannot defeat American-led Western liberalism on on about the Greeks and the Romans. Lecturing its own, nor can any other country. All face “the students about “Judeo-Christian values” can get a inevitable loss of their sovereignty”. Some adapt to tenured philosophy professor fired for proselytising. their reduced status in the world, others co-operate In his famous 1989 essay on “The End of History” with the United States, a few like China and Russia the political scientist Francis Fukuyama described try to allow in only certain aspects of Western cul- Western civilisation triumphant in the shallow- ture, and a few rogue states try to maintain full est terms possible as merely “liberal democracy ... independence. But unless all of them act together to combined with easy access to VCRs and stereos”. resist American dominance, all of them are doomed. Western civilisation has absorbed the traditions of The answer is for them to band together, separately. the world as no other civilisation ever has before. Dugin’s Dasein is not one essence but many national Western science, art and philosophy are simply sci- essences. My enemy’s enemy is my friend, and since ence, art and philosophy. In China, “Western” food (in Dugin’s world) everyone’s enemy is the United includes hamburgers, pizza, steak frites and tacos. States, everyone can be friends. No one ever claims to stare deeply into the Western Dugin pairs this plan for multiple, complementary soul. national Daseine with the call for a multinational Dugin would not be the first philosopher to “conservative revolution”. He mocks fundamentalist find the dark hole of nothingness at the centre of conservatives for wanting to turn back the clock Western civilisation, and his identification of alien- and liberal conservatives for merely wanting to slow ation as the existential ill of Western politics would it down: all they would do is restore their countries be taken for granted in most Western social sci- to a time when Western liberalism had degraded ence classrooms. What makes Dugin’s criticism of their societies a little less than it has today. What Western liberalism sting is, first, it is written by a the world needs are conservative revolutionaries Russian nationalist, not a denationalised Western who “despise the actual to such a degree that professor, and second, he proposes to do something they are not content to oppose it merely with the about it. Dugin wants to revive Russia by rediscov- past” but are prepared instead to reconstruct their ering Russia’s Dasein and using it to motivate “polit- national Daseine for the postmodern age. The ical soldiers” who can confront the “rotten liberal resulting reborn national Daseine will presumably post-human” that is Western Man. The West has draw on different traditions in every country, with repudiated “God, tradition, community, ethnicity, different results. For Russia, the tradition Dugin

Quadrant October 2016 31 Russian Regret is most sympathetic to is a “National Bolshevism” squad. He wants people to make the “right” choices that combines traditional nationalism with socialist (his choices) of their own free will. Thus his appeal welfare policies, but Russia’s actually existing to Dasein. He is not asking the peoples of the world national bolshevik party “alas, degenerated at the to adopt National Bolshevism or any other specific end of the 1990s into hooliganism”. fourth political theory. He is asking them to look “National Bolshevism” is not a label designed to to their own national Daseine for inspiration. The appeal to liberal Westerners. Nor is the popular flag English might find their own Dasein in UKIP, and of the National Bolshevik Front, the Russian politi- the Americans in Donald Trump. UKIP and Trump cal organisation with which Dugin was briefly asso- are far from conservative socialists, but they are ciated. Imagine a Nazi flag, but replace the black illiberal, which is all that Dugin requires. He wants swastika in the middle with a black Soviet hammer allies—including Anglo-American ones—who are and sickle and you get the idea. Dugin disavows any eager to join the fight against the global disintegra- connection to the (banned) political movement and tion of society that is postmodern liberalism. it is unknown whether he ever had any connection Like national conservatives the world over, to its clearly Nazi-inspired unofficial flag, though Dugin is often accused of racism. Donald Trump Western character assassins delight in picturing him and Nigel Farage are no exception. In The Fourth alongside it. Political Theory Dugin is explicit that “we must reject In any case it should be obvious that Dugin all forms of racism” and this seems to be no mere pro has no interest in appealing to Western liberals forma declaration (as if Dugin showed any signs of with his endorsement of National caring about political correctness). Bolshevism as a political philosophy. He devotes six pages to a reasoned He merely uses the label to describe rejection of racism in favour of a a kind of political program that is What makes Dugin’s pluralistic ethnocentrism in which common in Europe but unknown criticism of Western each human community explores in America or the Anglo-American liberalism sting is, and develops its own equally valid world: a social conservatism that Dasein. The concept of ethnic essen- is also a conservative socialism. first, it is written by tialism may be anathema to liber- Ironically, the party in the Anglo- a Russian nationalist, als the world over, but it is widely Saxon world that has come closest accepted by non-liberals, and non- to this point of view was the late not a denationalised liberals still form by far the majority Liberal Party of Asquith, Churchill Western professor, and of the world’s population. The Arab and Lloyd George. The inherent second, he proposes to League is nothing if not an ethno- ideological tensions tore the party essentialist organisation; India is apart. do something about it. ruled by a Hindu nationalist party; Social conservatives—people in China every imported dogma who embrace religion, family and must be indigenised with the quali- tradition—do not make natural socialists. The fier “with Chinese characteristics”; even America has reason is that conservatism looks to reinforce the its much-maligned but firmly-entrenched Manifest power of social institutions while socialism (some- Destiny. Ethnic essentialism can be found every- what ironically) is ultimately about the empower- where, not just in Dugin. ment of individuals. These two goals are compatible But identifying the ethnos at the centre of Russia’s only so long as individuals themselves embrace ethnocentrism is a challenge. Who are the Russians? established social institutions. The conservative That may be an impossible question to answer. socialist puts power in people’s hands and then Dugin does not identify one single ethnos for all must simply hope that those people use their new- Russians to share, but he does identify an episteme found power for social ends. In the absence of reli- or system of knowledge and belief. Dugin’s episteme able methods of mind control, that hope is bound for Russia is Eurasianism, a kind of blend of Russian to be disappointed. That’s why Dugin’s second and traditions with those of the peoples Russia histori- third political theories both turned to totalitarian- cally developed among. Dugin uses Eurasianism as ism: people stubbornly refused to choose to be Nazis a kind of fudge for Great Russianness, reserving or Bolsheviks, so they had to be compelled to be Nazis and Bolsheviks. Even ubiquitous propaganda the Eurasianist episteme for Russian couldn’t win people over. The gulag and the firing civilization, the Chinese for the Chinese, the squad were required to ensure that people made the Islamic for Islam, the Indian for the Indian, “right” choices. and so on. And only on these foundations, Dugin desires neither the gulag nor the firing cleansed of Western-mandated epistemes,

32 Quadrant October 2016 Russian Regret

must long-term sociopolitical, cultural and which one is a kind of Greater Russia spanning the economic projects be built. Eurasian landmass. In deference to the sensibilities of the other nations of Eurasia, he carefully avoids In Dugin’s analysis, if Russia wants a National the loaded term “Greater Russia”. But he does call Bolshevik or any other political theory, it must be for the simultaneous formation of a “Moscow– built on Russia’s essential Eurasianism. But post- Tehran axis” (“The whole process of integration Tsarist, post-Soviet Russia is no longer cotermin- depends on the successful establishment of a strate- ous with Eurasia. And what of the other peoples gic middle- and long-term partnership with Iran”), of contemporary Eurasia? Are they to follow their a “Moscow–Delhi axis” and a “Moscow–Ankara own epistemes, to discover their own Daseine, or axis”. The orientation of all axes back to Moscow is it Russia’s Eurasian mission to lead them? Much leaves no doubt as to which country is at the centre of the controversy over Dugin (including his nam- of this system. The very symbol of Dugin’s Eurasia ing on the US sanctions list) stems from just this movement, printed on the cover of the book, is a problem. Ukraine and Georgia may not be Russian, starburst of eight arrows pointing out from a com- but they are clearly Eurasian. What is their place in mon centre; Eurasian Mission leaves no doubt that Dugin’s intellectual system? this centre is Moscow and that the Eurasian mis- sion in question is Russia’s. Unfortunately for Dugin and the Eurasianists, Dugin’s Eurasian mission Iran has signed a deal to end American economic f Dugin were merely a Russian nationalist pur- sanctions, India is deepening defence co-operation suing a political renaissance inside Russia it is with the United States, and Turkey recently shot Iunlikely that he would have become a favourite down a Russian warplane. The prospects for the bugbear of American religious conservatives and rest of Russian Eurasia aren’t any brighter. Dugin European liberal intellectuals alike. Dugin pops up argues that the “Moscow–Astana–Kiev geopoliti- on Western radar (and television) screens primarily cal triangle is a frame that will be able to guar- because of the implications of his brand of Russian antee the stability of the Eurasian Union, which nationalism for Russia’s neighbours. To the extent is why negotiations with Kiev are urgent”. Urgent that he is (rightly or wrongly) perceived to be Putin’s indeed. Ukraine is now lost to Dugin’s Eurasia, and Rasputin, there is an added layer of hyped-up fear Kazakhstan is increasingly seduced by China’s no- that Dugin’s prescriptions are instantly trans- strings-attached economic diplomacy. If, as Dugin lated into Russia’s policies. The seeming opacity believes, “Georgia is a major threat and is capable of of Russian policy-making only feeds this Western sabotaging the very process of Eurasian integration” anxiety. If Dugin advocates a position (for example, then there is not much chance for Eurasian integra- the creation of a Eurasian Union) that Putin later tion. Dugin’s Eurasian project seems stillborn. puts into practice, to Dugin’s public applause, the Yet Dugin the romantic is not content with a natural tendency among many analysts is to credit Little Russia existing inside its own internation- Dugin with both policy and practice. This is to give ally recognised borders. Like all romantics, Dugin Dugin both too much credit and too little. lives in a teleological world. He reasons (correctly) If Dugin is correct that Eurasianism is the that a Little Russia would ultimately be unable to essence of the Russian Dasein—the position he maintain its essence (its Russian soul, if you will) in argues at book length in Eurasian Mission—then a fully globalised, American-led, liberal order. He one can hardly expect Dugin to be the only Russian further reasons that today’s Little Russia could not to be attracted to the idea. It would be like say- realistically face America alone. A world in which ing that Joseph Nye is Hillary Clinton’s Rasputin the distinctive Russian essence survives must there- because Clinton believes in the global promotion fore be a multipolar world, in which many national of democracy, a position advocated by Nye. The essences (Daseine) survive and flourish. Europe weak link in this chain of reasoning is obvious in and China are the world’s most important centres the transparent American context: nearly every of power and legitimacy after the United States. American political leader believes in the global pro- Therefore three poles of the required multipolar motion of democracy. Less visibly but nonetheless world are obvious: the United States, the European true, nearly every Russian political leader believes Union, and China. It is left to Russia, of course, to in Russia’s manifest destiny to lead (if not necessar- organise the fourth pole: Eurasia. ily rule) Eurasia. Dugin’s four geopolitical “meridian zones” thus Eurasian Mission is Dugin’s practical plan for arise out of his teleological need for a multipolar turning that aspiration into reality. Dugin divides world that has a place in it for Russian greatness. the world into four geopolitical “meridian zones”, of For:

Quadrant October 2016 33 Russian Regret

Russia is an original civilization. She is called traditionalists resent American influence in the not only to counter the West in order to world (foremost among them Islamic State), none safeguard its own path, but also to stand at the of them seem to want to co-operate with Russia vanguard of the other peoples and countries of in throwing off that influence (least of all Islamic the Earth in order to defend their freedom as State). Dugin is right that his war is a postmod- civilizations. ern war for people’s hearts and souls. Unfortunately for Dugin, that is a war that Russia has no hope of Russia is no Lithuania, a one-time continental winning. empire now resigned to submersion in an expand- ing European civilisation. Not for Russia a quiet but increasingly prosperous future governed by The jig is up Eurocrats in Brussels. That would be persistence, Therefore, geopolitically, it is unfounded and not existence. Vladimir Putin’s image of a “Greater empty to hope that Russia will be able to Europe stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok” is preserve itself in the reduced and regional form only acceptable to Dugin (and, it must be added, to in which it now exists ... this is the meaning of Russian intellectuals more generally) if it is governed the entirely fitting formula, “Russia will either from its physical and metaphysical centre: Moscow. be great or will not be at all.” Russia fought and won the war against rule from (Last War of the World-Island) Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century; it fought and won the war against rule from Berlin ow did Russia reach this dire state? As Dugin in the first half of the twentieth century; if neces- admits in the conclusion to Last War of the sary, it will fight the war against rule from Brussels World-IslandH , “We cannot rule out the disappear- (or Washington) in the first half of the twenty-first ance of our country from the map.” The problem, century. But Dugin recognises that the only way it as so often, is the internal enemy: “In Russia itself, can win this war is if others fight, too. American a hidden confrontation occurs among the political liberalism is a much more dangerous and capable foe elite between the new Westernism (Atlanticism) than either Napoleon or Hitler. and gravitation toward the constants of Russian “When it is left to only one authority to decide history.” In Last War Dugin identifies “Atlanticist” what is right and what is wrong, and who should be (read: Anglo-American) “agents” (read: intellectu- punished, this is a global dictatorship”, the dictator- als and NGOs) as the main threat to Russia ter- ship of the United States. Dugin’s dictatorship of ritorial and cultural integrity in the post-Soviet era, the United States is not a mere geopolitical power, and once again he is right. The challenge in reading or even primarily worldly in essence. It is existen- Dugin is not following his reasoning. The challenge tial. “We insist that maintaining one’s identity is is understanding his point of view. the highest value, which no one has the right to Just as Dugin asserts, Mikhail Gorbachev and encroach upon”, but “Liberalism has accomplished the other liberalisers of the late USSR were (in a the overcoming of God and the victory of pure meaningful way) Atlanticist agents of Western lib- nothingness”. This time the existential threats to the eralism. They were Atlanticist in that they looked Russian nation are neither Napoleon’s cannons nor to the Anglo-American West for intellectual inspi- Hitler’s tanks, but Facebook and Angry Birds. ration, and Western liberalism was the inspira- Dugin angrily acknowledges that “in the fields tion they found. They did not turn to the Russian of the military, finance, technology, economics, Orthodox Church, or German social democracy, or and aggressive cultural expansion, the US is now even French national revivalism for social models. the undisputed leader of the world in all aspects”. It They turned to the United States, and to many of can only be defeated by a “global revolutionary alli- the most liberal organisations in America at that. ance” that unites traditionalists everywhere against The dual meaning of the term “foreign agent” the onslaught of American-style liberal consumer- may give authoritarian rulers far too much wiggle ism. And he is right. But the fact that only a global room for repression, but organisations funded by revolutionary alliance could defeat the United States American money did flourish in Russia after the fall does not imply that a global revolutionary alliance of the Soviet Union. Dugin’s language may be a bit will arise to defeat the United States. grandiose, but the picture he paints of Russia in the As the crisis in Ukraine has shown, most peo- 1990s is broadly accurate: ple would rather dissolve their traditional national Daseine into an expanding liberal world than strug- Russia was transformed from a pole of the gle to live an independent, sanctions-ridden exist- bipolar world and the civilization of Land [as ence outside it. And though many non-Russian opposed to Anglo-America’s control of the sea],

34 Quadrant October 2016 Russian Regret

spreading its influence over half the planet into the re-running of history in which Yeltsin’s Russia [a] corrupt, disintegrating, second-rate state, stands in for Weimar Germany, Putin plays the swiftly losing its authority in the international pre-Holocaust Hitler of the 1930s, a figure widely arena and verging on collapse. admired by many then-respectable nationalists in the West—he has dangerous ideas, but he saved the Russia lost its global ideological war with nation, and he gets things done. America, and with it its claim to be a great global Russia is not Germany, Putin is not Hitler, and civilisation. At least when Germany and Japan the occupation of Crimea is neither the invasion had lost their wars with America they had had the of Czechoslovakia nor the annexation of Austria. dignity of losing actual wars and the promise of Poland is not “next”. Russia does not have the capacity cleaner governments and more prosperous societies and Putin does not have the desire to fight the Third to look forward to. The diseased pre-war identities World War. And Alexander Dugin is not a latter- of Germany and Japan were completely obliterated, day prophet of doom. When Francis Fukuyama leaving clear spaces for the construction of healthy wrote about the “end of history” no one suggested post-war identities. There are no despised German that the United States was about to bring about a and Japanese minority populations stranded among literal nuclear Armageddon—even though it had hostile neighbouring states. Germany and Japanese the capacity to do so. When the Russian nationalist industries were not hastily sold off to post-war Alexander Dugin writes that “The American empire profiteers. Post-war Germany and Japan were not should be destroyed” and “at one point, it will be” he put through sovereign default proceedings. Germany certainly means it, argues for it, and hopes for it with and Japan, having been defeated absolutely, accepted all his might. But when the unstoppable intellectual with good grace the opportunity to become America’s force that is Alexander Dugin meets the immovable friends and (junior) partners for the future. object of American power, or indeed indifference, The situation with Russia after 1991 is more the debate ends there. The third millennium looks analogous to that of Germany after the First World set to be an American millennium, and for all the War. Germany was defeated absolutely, but it reasons Dugin so eloquently lays bare. Much to surrendered and was not occupied. Despised German Dugin’s regret. minority populations were left stranded among hostile neighbouring states, German industries Salvatore Babones is Associate Professor in were sold off to post-war profiteers, and Germany the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the defaulted on its sovereign debt. National Socialists University of Sydney. His most recent book is came to power promising to provide social benefits Sixteen for ’16: A Progressive Agenda for a Better and restore Germany to glory. It’s no wonder that America (2015). A version of this article with page Dugin is avowedly sympathetic to the small number references appears at Quadrant Online. of anti-Hitler Nazis who wanted more socialism and Mervyn F. Bendle also wrote on Alexander Dugin less racism than Hitler was willing to give them. In in the September 2014 Quadrant.

Firelight in the Garden

The fireplace in the garden is now a sacred site. but the frugal little fireplace still feeds the family’s feasts. It was built here by my father, under sheltering gums— Sizzling racks of lamb with a billy boiled for tea (fallen twigs and branches build our autumn fires.) makes fine sustaining food on crisp and starry nights Its bricks are loose and leaning as if they crave the warmth while smoky in the shadows drifts a ghost whose gift it was.

Suzanne Edgar

Quadrant October 2016 35 Daryl McCann

Obama’s War On Declaring Victory While Surrendering

he language of Barack Obama’s 2009 have funnelled money, and large numbers of imams Inaugural Address contained passages that and teachers, into the country”, causing the exten- were distinctly Churchillian: “Our nation is sive adoption in Indonesia of “the fundamentalist Tat war against a far-reaching network of violence version of Islam favoured by the Saudi ruling fam- and hatred.” President Obama, nevertheless, prom- ily”. When the apparently uninformed Turnbull ised victory against the dark forces: appeared confused by this revelation—“Aren’t the Saudis your friends?”—Obama responded with a And to those who seek to advance their aims by knowing smile: “It’s complicated.” inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we Barack Obama, then, is cognisant of the fact say to you now that our spirit is stronger and that a growing number of Islam’s 1.2 or 1.4 billion cannot be broken—you cannot outlast us, and adherents have undergone a transformation during we will defeat you. [Applause] recent times. For instance, the “syncretistic”—that is, reconciliatory and blending—Islam he experi- The promise of victory has long vanished from enced first-hand during his childhood in Indonesia Barack Obama’s agenda. Still, earlier this year, has been challenged by “political Islam”, a strain of President Obama made a case for the success of the Islam that is both separatist and supremacist and, Obama Doctrine in a series of lengthy interviews almost by definition, less amenable to Western- with Jeffrey Goldberg for the Atlantic magazine. style notions of secular democracy. Goldberg’s Although the world had turned out to be a “compli- “The Obama Doctrine”, (Atlantic, April 2016), cated, messy, mean place”, the President reasoned, makes it clear—or, at any rate, Barack Obama he had mostly got the balance right between “big- wishes to make it clear—that Islamic illiberalism hearted” and “hard-headed”—mission, of a sort, is problematic. accomplished. The President insists that precisely because According to Goldberg’s White House inter- of such problematic developments the Obama view and background briefings, Barack Obama has Doctrine works better than any alternative strategy always had reservations about Islamic revivalism for handling a complex, chaotic and callous world. and the deleterious effect of exported Saudi-style This is despite his regrettable embrace of Egypt’s Salafism (Wahhabism): Muslim Brotherhood, his rash endorsement of the Arab Spring in its early stages, his epic setbacks In a meeting during APEC with Malcolm in Afghanistan, his discreditable alliance with Turnbull, the [then] new prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, his disastrous interfer- of Australia, Obama described how he has ence in Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, his negligent watched Indonesia gradually move from relationship with Iraq’s Nouri al-Maliki and now a relaxed, syncretistic Islam to a more Haider al-Abadi, his inattention during the genesis fundamentalist, unforgiving interpretation; and emergence of the Islamic State and, no less large numbers of Indonesian women, he ruinous, his futile attempt at rapprochement with observed, have now adopted the hijab, the the Islamic Republic of Iran. The latter includes Muslim head covering. the July 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which provides the wherewithal for Iran to obtain nuclear-weapons As Obama tells it, Turnbull then asked why this capability within the next ten to fifteen years. might be the case, and Obama explained that since That said, no disaster or scandal has been too the 1990s “the Saudis and the other Gulf Arabs big for President Obama and his apologists to

36 Quadrant October 2016 Obama’s War shrug off. In August came the revelation that the them as “brothers in doctrine”. United States paid Iran $400 million to secure the Barack Obama’s fundamental misconception release of American hostages held in Iran. Andrew of the problem has resulted in one mistake after C. McCarthy, writing in the National Review, another, and yet none of this seems to engender a argued that the US government had violated the mea culpa. He attributes the “disaster”—the word law in numerous ways by its action. President he uses in Goldberg’s report—of post-Gaddafi Obama, with the compliance of the mainstream Libya to David Cameron taking his eyes off the media, casually dismissed the payment as “old ball; Vladimir Putin is “not completely stupid” but news” which was, in any case, unrelated to the a small man ruling a large country; Recep Tayyip release of the hostages. Subsequent disclosures, Erdogan he condemns as “a failure and an authori- however, revealed that the airliner containing the tarian”; the Saudis export their narrow-minded US prisoners was not permitted to make its depar- interpretation of Islam; King Abdullah II behaves ture from Iran until an unmarked American cargo duplicitously and so on. plane carrying the $400 million landed on the run- President Obama’s Gulliver-like condescen- way. The State Department explained that while sion can be observed in an anecdote that recounts the money did not constitute a “ransom payment”, a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli the prisoner release was “contingent” on it. Prime Minister, in the midst of an exposition on The $400 million “contingent” payment to the dangerous and brutal entities threatening his Tehran typifies so much about the Obama admin- country, is cut short by the President: istration’s penchant for dissembling, not the least example being the Bowe Bergdahl exchange. Why I’m the African American son of a single did Obama’s national security adviser, back in mother, and I live here, in this house. I live in 2014, go on Sunday morning television programs the White House. I managed to get elected to dishonestly declare that Sergeant Bergdahl had president of the United States. You think I served the United States with “honour and distinc- don’t understand what you’re talking about, tion”? Why would the White House press secretary but I do. at the time claim that the release of the Taliban’s five-man Dream Team from Guantanamo—as a Here we see the fatal flaw of modern-day left- trade for Bergdahl—was “not a security threat to ist theory, of which President Obama must be the the United States”? Moreover, why was it that in most prominent disseminator. The driving force of a speech to the United Nations, a full two weeks global politics is not the push-and-pull of arbitrar- after the Benghazi embassy attack of September ily defined tolerance and intolerance: it is ideologi- 11, 2012, President Obama stated, “There’s no video cal and global as much as it is clannish and local. that justifies an attack on an embassy.” Why the Thus, Israeli and European Jews—similar to endless obfuscation? the Jewish population of the Third Reich—are threatened by something more alarming than e must begin with the fact that the Obama prejudice and tribal intolerance. Bigotry was not Doctrine configures the world through the the actuating mechanism of the Holocaust but a prismW of the President’s supposedly transcendent totalitarian ideology with exterminationist anti- identity. Barack Obama, son of a Kenyan anti- Semitism at its core. Likewise, intolerance does colonial socialist and stepson of a syncretistic not begin to explain the attitude of the Islamic Muslim, originally set himself the messianic mis- Resistance Movement (Hamas) and the Islamic sion of “ushering in a new era of peace”. Although Jihad Movement, or the Islamic State and virtu- his transcendent identity—“It is literally in my ally every other Salafist entity on the planet, to the DNA to be suspicious of tribalism”—has not, alas, “Jewish problem”. For Barack Obama to conflate been the stimulus for world peace, it nevertheless any of this with the discrimination he experienced allows him to reflect, from a great height, on the as an African-American—so discriminatory that narrow-mindedness and perennial prejudices of the American people twice elected him to the those who thwart his vision splendid. The intoler- presidency—approaches narcissism and a chronic ance of the tribal instinct, in the opinion of Obama, failure of imagination. provides “the larger ecosystem” in which politics of In the case of Islamic revivalism, then, we are violence thrives, no more so than in the Middle not confronting a minor change from somewhat East. While President Obama acknowledges the tolerant to somewhat intolerant but the evolution of apocalyptic dimension of the Islamic State and Al Islamic jihadist ideology as outlined in Sebastian Qaeda, he refuses to recognise that Wahhabism Gorka’s Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War (2016). and the Muslim Brotherhood exist in tandem with The threat to the freedom-loving peoples of the

Quadrant October 2016 37 Obama’s War world is a supremacist belief system that has on the ground backed by US airpower as it did its genesis in Saudi-style Wahhabism and the with the power of anti-Islamist ideology. The analogous innovations of Muslim Brotherhood SDF, an alliance of Kurdish and Arab secularists, forerunners such as Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid is Enemy Number One for IS because of its rejec- Qutb. A parallel—albeit Shi’a—form of radicalism tion of Salafism and sharia law. Relevantly, the has been the official dogma of the Islamic SDF—especially its anarcho-libertarian Kurdish Republic of Iran since 1979. It is in this context contingent—is also Enemy Number One for that President Obama’s attempted reconciliation President Erdogan, a devotee of Turkey’s version with the powers-that-be in Iran, as per the July of the Muslim Brotherhood. The fall of Manbij left 2015 nuclear deal, needs to be evaluated. As if to Erdogan fearful that IS-held Jarabulus might be make the point, Tehran recently permitted a state- next on the SDF’s list, and so ensued Operation sponsored television channel to run a program Euphrates, Turkey’s invasion of northern Syria in mocking President Obama’s $400 million ransom— concert with various Salafi-jihadist militias. The apologies, contingent—payment. Furthermore, in occupation of Jarabulus by the Turkish Armed September 2015 Iran’s Supreme Leader announced Forces coincided—to the surprise of few—with that the “Zionist Entity” would the peaceable relocation of the IS cease to exist within twenty-five group’s militia out of harm’s way. years. Benjamin Netanyahu was he hubristic President Obama’s ready acces- entirely correct to characterise T sion to Operation Euphrates is yet the ruling ideology of the Islamic idea that all is another indication of his failure to Republic—in the manner of his “bending in the confront the reality that our world 2015 United Nations address—as is threatened not by “intolerance” an existential threat to Israel. direction of justice” and petty tribalism but by a global In his official memoirs, doubt- further explains Islamic jihad. Sultan Erdogan is less, President Obama will lam- President Obama’s not “a failure and an authoritarian” bast Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for but something far more disturb- spending the vast influx of cash refusal to address ing, a fact many liberal-minded arising from the nuclear deal (esti- the genuine threat Turks, not to mention Kurds in the mated to be as much as $150 billion) south-east of the country, under- on pursuing Iranian hegemony to the West from stand only too well. Instead of in the neighbourhood. Instead of Islamic revivalism. defending the interests of Syrian using the windfall and attendant Kurds (or Rojavans) and their sec- US munificence to lessen tension ularist and non-sectarian allies in with its regional rivals, as envisioned by Obama, northern Syria, President Obama has yielded to Iran continues to flood Iraq, Syria, Yemen and the bullying of the Islamist despot in Ankara; a elsewhere with its weapons and irregular forces. fellow who would betray Nato with anyone from Khamenei’s radical creed is both opportunistic and Vladimir Putin to Iran and IS if it suited his neo- millennialist: Washington’s largesse, as Netanyahu Ottoman fantasies. As the security analyst Michael warned, did not produce a give-and-take concili- Horowitz has noted, for America to acquiesce with atory posture on the part of Tehran but, instead, Operation Euphrates risks losing “the faith and amplified an already belligerent and triumphalist trust of the only partner it has not let down … yet.” foreign policy. In August, as one instance, we wit- Michael Ruben cautions in Dancing with the nessed the increased harassment of the US navy Devil: The Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes (2014) in the Strait of Hormuz by high-speed vessels that accommodating the “declared grievances” of belonging to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard rogues and fanatics is a proven a recipe for disas- Corps. In the eyes of the Iranian theocracy, the ter. Barack Obama, as disclosed in the Goldberg United States remains, as ever, the Great Satan. article this year, claimed that he saw through Erdogan’s masquerade as “some kind of moder- he one indisputably positive aspect about ate Muslim”—and that was before the Tribune of America’s intervention in the Middle East has Anatolia’s bloody crackdown in the wake of the Tbeen its support of the Kurdish militia in northern would-be July coup d’état. Yet Obama has persisted Iraq (the Peshmerga) and in northern Syria (Syrian with the belief that it is in America’s—and the Democratic Forces). In the case of the latter, lib- world’s—long-term interests to appease a regime erating Kobanî (January 2015), Tel Abyad (June ruled by a paranoid zealot. Can anyone honestly 2015) and Manbij (August 2016) from IS control say that the Obama Doctrine has left the world a had as much to do with SDF military proficiency better and safer place than it was in January 2009?

38 Quadrant October 2016 Obama’s War

The networks of violence and hatred have only falls in bathtubs do”. grown, and it is high time for a new plan. Obama’s war, in essence, is not mission accom- President Obama, according to Goldberg, plished so much as mission aborted. Endorsement once soothed a White House staffer alarmed by of Egypt’s short-lived Muslim Brotherhood gov- the Islamic State with this assurance: “They’re ernment, the Bowe Bergdahl exchange, the Iran not coming here to chop off our heads.” A prom- deal, planeloads of cash to Tehran, compliance ise delivered, of course, before the June 12, 2016, with Operation Euphrates and on and on are not Orlando nightclub massacre. To overplay—or, let’s the price of appeasement. They are a down pay- face it, even define—the challenge of Islamic ter- ment on surrender. rorism would, in the considered opinion of Barack Obama, trigger bigotry and hysteria in the home- Daryl McCann contributed “Obama the Great land for the sake of something that “takes far fewer Divider” in the September issue. He has a blog at lives in America than handguns, car accidents, and http://darylmccann.blogspot.com.au.

Chat with the Whitest Cat

Béyaz, you Mùscovite, bliss to your fùrs, sprawled at our hearth with its coral chaleurs. Cat, are you dreamy where dreams are rehearsals Of cats in their snowdrifts all famished for morsels. Cat, are your manners unique or sub-lunary? You taproot in murder then tongue at your finery. What’s season for cats? Can cattishness tremor in catkins of springtime and catspaws of summer? There’s brass in a samovar, brass in your manner, I call you my pussy yet know you’re a loner to trot in late summer when paddocks are stubble, when evening has cherried the sun to a bauble, and small birds must gossip while looting the orchard, enigma that tears them—deep down are you wretched? Is heaven of sentience triggered by glimmer, not prey in its doombox, but prey-and-its tremor? Behind your shut eyes are there cats will connect with all that is white and a-flicker and licked. Béyaz, you snowfield, here’s bliss to your pelt, most white of your cosmos, both dealer and dealt.

Alan Gould

Quadrant October 2016 39 Sightings: Around, About, Among

i. Currawongs—so much this country —that despite its yellow eye, the sense all is judged, calculated by scales hard and undeviating, it is the lingering, incongruous syrup of their call early evening, among pines, out of mist drifting up the escarpment, like a curfew, saying the lonely sea of the dark is here, it is now cold, and this is no place for you.

ii. Of mist: out of the threads of it, like a tatty shuttle, back into it, its scrawny tail trailing as if combed, a lyrebird skitters across the road as we ascend, back into the silence from which come leaves of sound, voices of worlds and words not its own.

iii. I can only speak of it as a thing fugitive, always spearing its bill like a missile away from wherever I am, a Japanese snipe, flecked in the tones of a rice-paper screen.

iv. My son when small, carried a stick, scything it about and shouting loudly as he entered a paddock tall with phalaris, so as not to be alarmed when quail burst, exploding small guncrackers at his feet.

v. A sea eagle in one long low swoop slices the glass water of the lagoon and breaking the surface strikes a fish and carries it with its mirror image to a tree and beyond this morning.

40 Quadrant October 2016 vi. Mount Alexandra, Mittagong Among pegs, plastic milk-tops in his grass and bracken thatch he attends not like a fisherman but more a petitioner, his desire beggaring him while she inspects. What does she want? He waits. Traffic from the town rumbles up to us here on Mount Alexandra. Lights go on in the street. In the morning I find the pegs pearled with dew like toys left out in the rain, the work torn down. vii. Little Eagle That day, this autumn, ploughing for winter forage, suddenly above me, circling, so near I could see its markings, and unperturbed it swooped low and close to the tractor a number of times, then satisfied, swum leisurely off to a stand of timber nearby and I knew then that distance which keeps all things in awe or fear. viii. Once, inspecting the lambing paddock strange like a weathered root newly there, then closer, I’d say haughty but not really, just staking its claim with one feathered trouser, it heraldic and refusing to be intimidated, a wedgetail on a lamb. Its eye held me till I left the paddock. Fair exchange I thought. ix. Tonight, after a dry season, rain and Bogong moths are dusting the screen, their eyes iridescent as they surface to the light. Then there is a thwacking or a swatting, a sudden flaring of wings the spread of them like a shirt hung out—an owl coming out of the dark for an instant bares its barred chest, falls away, then comes again and then again.

Quadrant October 2016 41 x. Within view of my window a grape vine which hardly bears fruit, when it does has berries, small, bitter and big-seeded. In the yellowing leaves one autumn after a season when all things had done well a ruffling unusual for little things such as wrens. Noisy, greedy possibly, unconcerned that there would be any danger, as gold as Yeats’ gold enamelling a golden oriole emerged and perched for a moment— never seen before or since, held there among a mosaic of those leaves and the bitter-sweet fruit of that vine.

xi. Yellow-Rumped Thornbills Not wind-blown but spread like a net flung into it, collapsing this midge-cloud, like one who having forgotten remembers, turns suddenly, it becomes yellow florets of chirruping and squeaks among the leptospermum becomes one mind, like the wind.

xii. Plumage Which? The Brett Whiteley-cadmium white cockatoo, —donned completely like an acolyte, an ascetic’s purest sensuality; if they were not so raucously common the delicacy of their roseate-pink, rising from a doona-soft grey, these galahs wheeling against the sunset and settling would be like calm the spirit needs or as Gang-Gangs, their more striking cousins in Kings’ School uniform, alert, confident, their red bonnets defiant of a Canberra winter; a sudden brilliance—a sacred kingfisher flashes, too quick, all that colour, its name so apt—sacred, like incense quickening the senses; but most this, the finest cross hatchings of olive, blue-black-touched, and rufous too, all velvet to a brooch—an eye ringed clear as honesty, sure in its name —silver-eye.

42 Quadrant October 2016 xiii. Funereal Cockatoos Rain coming! Pleased as prophets, they cry. In sorties, like Lancaster bombers they pass over as if in complete command of the air then knowing my Hakeas settle there stripping branches, you can hear them cracking nuts, at ease like bikies who’ve taken over a pub, as more slow beat, slow beat, slide into a feast. xiv. The Grey Shrike-Thrush Of all I want to sing as Stewart did of his bush robin, of you who nest each year in a tea chest in my garage, whose song is spring to me, whose plumage, soft-grey is such as a chorister wears, so as not to detract from the joy of your liquid praise filling life after winter’s silence.

Russell Erwin

A Bird Watcher

The early river, with rising mist: a pelican skims along the surface and flocks of wood ducks swoon to pools making a pattern with formal grace. Free at last from the frost of night, robins cling to the sides of trees and scan for worms in the soil below then pounce and grab with practised ease. The river belongs to them and to me, squatting down by a rutted track; no cars, no men on motorbikes, just the bush, and sun on my back.

Suzanne Edgar

Quadrant October 2016 43 Michael Connor

The Spy from Parramatta High

hen “Sally” met “John” she was wearing a Sydney suburb of Redfern on January 31, 1914. green headscarf and her shoes, European Frances was the second daughter of James and size 36, were new. Carefully positioned, Julie (as they were known in Australia) Metianen, W“on the left hand side of the bosom”, was a white an émigré Russian family who arrived in Australia brooch. The place was Eighth Avenue, New York, before the revolution and returned to the Soviet in late August 1943. The first words they exchanged Union in the 1930s, straight into Stalin’s mincing were passwords, crafted for them in Moscow. She machine. was an illegal, a spy about to begin living in New Interesting as it is, the Venona spy story is only York as an American citizen. He was her contact a part of an extraordinary family story. with the Soviet Naval GRU, or military intelli- gence, based in Washington. Since the previous etianen’s parents had arrived in Sydney on December coded cables, planning her voyage from a Japanese liner from Nagasaki with their Moscow to Vladivostok, then to San Francisco and two-year-old-sonM Victor in May 1912. Her elder onwards to the “Big Town”, had been volleying sister Leonore (Lena) was born the following year, back and forth between Washington and Moscow. though there does not appear to be an Australian The American-based operatives asked her shoe size birth certificate, and was followed by Frances in so that she could be outfitted with suitable local 1914. At the time of her birth, James claimed to footwear. In the cables, tantalising parts of which have been born in St Petersburg in 1886 and mar- were decoded in the Venona project, she was called ried in Siberia in 1906. In the years they lived in “the Australian Woman” and “Sally”. Australia none of the family appears to have taken Behind the two cover names the Venona inves- out Australian citizenship. When they left the tigators found an Australian-born Soviet woman. country in the 1930s they probably travelled on Her real name, they suggested, was Francia laissez-passers without the return visas which may Yakil’nilna Mitynen—“exact spelling not verified”. have offered some slight protection against the FBI information claimed she had been known Stalin purges, or not. as Edna Margaret Patterson and had remained James was employed as a fitter in the Eveleigh in America until she disappeared in 1956. In the railway workshops. Perhaps there had been a cables there is no indication of what her operational political motive for leaving Russia, for after the objectives had been. Until the highly secret Venona 1917 revolution and coup he actively supported transcripts were made public, few outside the intel- the Bolshevik dictatorship. On a Sunday in 1919, ligence world had known that the Soviets operated amidst the public speakers in Sydney’s Domain, a Naval GRU. At that point the story generally he was arrested for selling an illegal communist comes to a stop. Suggesting an unsuccessful search newspaper, the Brisbane-published Knowledge and by ASIO, a security file, now in the National Unity. He was sentenced to a fine of five pounds, Archives of Australia, has the Venona spelling of or one month imprisonment. Presumably he paid her name on the cover, but she is not mentioned in the fine. the few pages it holds. In 1923 the headline “Russians in Court” The reason for the lack of progress in the returned him to the attention of newspaper read- Australian search may simply be in the confusion ers. If the Russian Civil War had ended, bat- of the spellings of her family name. It is highly tling Russian neighbours kept the tradition alive likely that “the Australian Woman” was Frances in Sydney. Suggesting a volatile nature, James Metianen, born at 85½ Morehead Street in the had a more than an unfriendly relationship with

44 Quadrant October 2016 The Spy from Parramatta High his neighbour, whose wife he was in the habit of become a tailoress. Very probably, the marriage was calling a prostitute and letting it be known that timed to integrate with their plan to quit Australia. their mortgage payments were being funded by In March, four months later, Victor and Coral her particular form of home duties. The situation joined a group of Australian communists travel- was already tense before the neighbour’s ducks got ling to Russia as a workers’ delegation for the May through a hole in the fence and into his garden. Day celebrations. The expedition was organised by Despite his Bolshevik convictions James was a prole the local branch of a communist front organisation, with kulak ambitions, growing fruit and vegetables the Friends of the Soviet Union, and it may have to sell. There was a heated confrontation and the been James’s influence that got the young couple following night after work, when the two men met included as one-way travellers. on the way home from the local railway station, On sailing day at Woolloomooloo a banner read- they fought. James was hit and retaliated with a ing “Greetings to the workers of the Soviet from length of wood. When his neighbour fled James the Australian Workers” was unfurled on the deck directed his assault towards the man’s abandoned of the departing liner. Some 150 communist sym- bicycle. Both men went to law, both wives were pathisers came to farewell them and, as departure called to give evidence, and happily both won their time approached, they began singing revolutionary cases. The neighbour was fined for songs. Counter-revolution broke hitting James, and James was fined out on an upper deck. The “anti- for breaking his bicycle. everal of the Reds”, led by an elderly woman During the 1920s Metianen S waving strips of red, white and financially supported, with small delegates remained to blue farewell streamers, sang back donations, a local communist work in the USSR, with patriotic songs. In retaliation newspaper, the Workers’ Weekly, and a sweating communist mounted was secretary of the Australasian as they had planned. a bollard and began swinging his Association for Economic In at least one case arms to mark time for his flock: Advancement of the USSR. the “work” done in “The strains of ‘Rule Britannia’, Activities for the latter organi- ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ became sation included the holding of a Moscow may have hopelessly mixed with that of the Grand Bazaar at the Communist had something to do ‘Red Flag’ and other revolution- Hall for “forty orphans who are ary songs.” The duel of songs broke being educated in a Trades School with later espionage out each time the vessel left the in Russia”. matters in Australia. ports of Melbourne, Adelaide and There are some mentions of Perth. Overall it was a pleasant the three children in their local trip for the pilgrims, apart from suburban newspaper, and these suggest ordinary the time in Colombo when a drunk comrade from Australian lives. In 1928 the two girls, Frances Melbourne picked the pocket of a drunk comrade and Lena, students at Parramatta Intermediate from Sydney. High School, were photographed among smiling Though the Australian banner from the ship flut- sports-day winners. Victor appears in team lists tered in Red Square on May Day, Victor and Coral of local cricketers. Among his team-mates was a missed seeing it. They left the ship in Marseille and young English migrant, Donald Sutcliffe. Probably then travelled to Berlin en route to Moscow. When through this connection he met Sutcliffe’s older the English secretary of the Friends of the Soviet sister Coral, who he married in November 1931. Union’s Berlin office saw the Jewish and Russian, Reflecting Metianen family political principles the Polish, and British-born delegates he asked where non-church marriage took place in the Parramatta the Australians were. In Berlin it was found that Court House. The witnesses were Victor’s father not all the delegates were included in the official and Coral’s mother and brother. lists to enter the Soviet Union and the young cou- As the depression cut into the lives of the ple were delayed several weeks before the proper Australian working class the couple were plan- authorisations were completed. Later the Sydney ning on permanently leaving Australia for the Friends of the Soviet Union received a strong com- Soviet Union, and their marriage certificate reads plaint from Berlin for their handling of the travel- like a job reference. Victor, aged twenty-one, born ling delegation. The angry writer pointed to the in Leningrad and probably unemployed, gave his case of Victor and Coral who, if they had not been occupation as “cotton expert”. From a working-class helped, would have been left destitute in Europe. family, Coral had been an assistant baker when she Several of the delegates remained to work in the arrived in Australia and now, aged twenty-five, had USSR, as they had planned. The others returned to

Quadrant October 2016 45 The Spy from Parramatta High

Australia to report in fanciful terms on the work- ger-brown accessories”. The couple crossed Sydney ers’ paradise they had seen. In at least one case the to honeymoon on the shores of the Pacific in sub- “work” done in Moscow may have had something urban Cronulla. to do with later espionage matters in Australia. The Soviets were fighting the battle of Stalingrad as naval military intelligence was planning to place ver the next few years Victor and Coral found the Australian Woman in the US—their military jobs and a room, and had a daughter, Kaola ally. Urgent messages were exchanged between Victoriana,O in 1934. On a touching family photo, Washington and Moscow to prepare for her arrival. taken not long before they were arrested, Coral Discussions dealt with the official papers she would spells her daughter’s name Koala. need and what details they held, instructions on These were not good Soviet years. With hind- buying a train ticket to travel across the country, sight, their fates seem as certain as a Greek tragedy. and even how she would have to be dressed in order Soviet actress Vera Shulz was arrested in to fit in: Moscow in 1938, the last year of the Great Terror. Taken first to the overcrowded Lubyanka, she was In clothing and appearance, our women moved to Taganka prison for interrogation and [serving] on ships are clearly distinguishable sentencing. After the brutal formalities and the from the local women. This is because of their awarding of a five-year sentence she was moved to stockings, their berets (American women wear another cell to await transportation to her place of hats), their handbags and their untidiness. They exile in Kazakhstan. Here she met Coral, her fel- do not take any trouble over their hair or their low prisoner: make-up. Suits or overcoats of medium quality differ little from the American ones. the most profound encounter of my entire prison life. My eye was drawn to a boyish figure Her cover story needed full details from Seattle, of a fair-haired, highly intelligent-looking where she had supposedly lived, of the name of the young woman with a cunning glint in her principal of Ballard High School, the place where bright green eyes … What faith she had in the her father had worked from 1910 to 1929 (the begin- infallibility of our great country! … I never for ning of the depression), photos of the houses and a moment doubted her sincerity, and told myself streets that made up her cover story. that her incomprehension of so much evil was By April the Australian Woman’s departure the result of living in a foreign country, with a from the Soviet Union was planned for May. Once strange language and very few friends. landed in San Francisco she would have to be met and prepared for travelling on to Big Town (pre- Some of the detail given by Shulz is inaccurate, sumably New York) to meet her new controller, for communication between them was difficult: “John”. She would take a taxi from the port to “My English was poor, as was her Russian, so we Hotel Bellevue in downtown San Francisco and communicated in a strange and passionate mixture use her Seattle cover story when filling out her res- of the two.” One day the guards ordered Coral “to ervation details. When booking her train ticket for get her things”, presumably for her onward trans- her “onward transmission” she would use the hotel fer into the Gulag, and the two women never met address in completing the booking. In New York again. she, and not the man who was meeting her, would If Coral had endured a similar story of arrest, book a hotel room. interrogation and sentencing, perhaps she was also As time passed and the cables passed backwards arrested in 1938. It is unknown when Victor was and forwards without action being taken Moscow taken away. In 1937-38 about 335,000 Soviets with expressed displeasure: foreign contacts were arrested. With both parents gone away, Kaola appears to have been looked after You have had eight months to prepare for Sally’s by family members. Presumably the Metianen fam- reception at the port of disembarkation and ily had already entered the USSR. Victor did not when, moreover, you have so many people of survive imprisonment and the details of his fate are your own, you should be ashamed to turn to the unknown; just another victim of Stalin. Neighbours [KGB or GRU] for help. In 1938 Australian lives were being lived rather Sally is leaving Moscow on 10 June. Report differently. Early that year Donald Sutcliffe, Coral’s urgently whether, using your people, it is in brother and Victor’s cricketing team-mate, married your capacity to organise by the end of July: in the Wentworthville Church of England. His The completion of her equipment. bride wore “a nigger-brown cartwheel hat with nig- The obtaining of a ticket or assistance to her

46 Quadrant October 2016 The Spy from Parramatta High

in obtaining a ticket herself. death of Stalin, she was again in touch with her The exchange of 900 American dollars (the family and met some visitors from abroad. Itzhak money has been given to her at the Centre Gust, who had travelled with her from Australia, [Moscow] and it is necessary to exchange it for met her in Moscow in August 1960 and reported local bank notes). that Victor “died during the war”. She had had another child, a son, but Gust does not mention The immediate, perhaps frightened response him or her possible second husband. Surprisingly was an assurance that matters would be handled she was allowed to leave the Soviet Union in 1965 by the Naval GRU’s own people and the writer and visited her English family members, bringing provided details of the New York contact which vodka and caviar. When she returned to the Soviet had been arranged. Things began moving and Union she was a sick woman, and she died in an Sally arrived in San Francisco on the Sevastopol Odessa sanatorium on August 25, 1966. on August 13. Washington reported that she was Spy story, family story and incredible story. “feeling all right” and then she vanishes from the decoded documents. Apart from the FBI sugges- Michael Connor adds: In relation to the story of tion of the name she used in America and that she Coral and Victor I am grateful to Dr John Helliwell disappeared in 1956 nothing is presently known of for sharing his family research, and photos. her activities. A footnoted version of this article appears at Coral came out of the Gulag alive. After the Quadrant Online.

The Dead About Us

Is it long now? Not as long as it might be but long enough. We have that in mind as we set our work aside, telling ourselves that it can wait for again. My Cat For a time, the restless air My cat is all that moves us. isn’t like your cat And then we begin to notice whatever else. or any other cat I know. The dead about us for one thing, He won’t sit on your lap their presence known as the moon falls or on anyone else’s across the enclosures and purr. and known again as the stones begin standing out. He’s not going to lie on his back and twist one way or the other Is it long now? and look cute. It’s long, no question about it. Although our work remains, He may seem harmless enough the dead are very well able as he turns your way, to abide the time. but watch out, he’s ready to spring. Black, he thinks he’s a panther.

Knute Skinner

Quadrant October 2016 47 Christie Davies

The Great Paedophile Witch Hunt The Wrongly Accused Are the Real Victims

he great paedophile witch hunt against doubt buried under political memoranda. Over the Conservative politicians and establishment next year and more the Wiltshire police are going to figures in England continues in ever more spend millions of pounds paying civilians to trawl Tbizarre ways. The attempts by the police to accuse through his uncatalogued papers in the hope of ex-Home Secretary Sir Leon Brittan and the former finding some incriminating snippet. head of the army, Field Marshal Lord Bramall, of It is a pity the job could not have been given to molestation ended in grotesque failure and grovel- a trained historian who could tell us exactly why in ling apologies by the police. It is now quite clear that the 1970s Prime Minister Heath sold out his country the complainants on whose accusations the inves- to what was to become the European Union. Only tigations were based had been liars and fantasists now with Brexit will Britain emerge from the dis- and that the police had naively and stupidly believed aster that followed from Heath’s pig-headed will- them. Indeed it later emerged that it had been police ingness to subordinate Britain to an alien power. policy to believe anyone who claimed to be a victim Finding the answer to this question is far more of a sexual assault: political correctness gone mad. important than the investigation of the wild and Only after the humiliating collapse of these high- dubious sex claims against him. The latest of these is profile cases on which hundreds of thousands of that Heath, an accomplished yachtsman, would reg- pounds had been spent and utterly innocent men ularly sail to Jersey in the Channel Islands to collect pilloried, have the police admitted that complain- boys from a children’s home, now known to have ants in sex cases can be untruthful and unreliable. been a centre of child abuse. Sir Edward would then The feminists are enraged at this admission, even head for the open seas, where the boys would be though a high proportion of those who have made buggered, killed and thrown overboard to the fish. false accusations are male. It would seem that boys So obsessive are the Wiltshire police that they have and former boys have been made honorary women set constables with truncheons to guard his former and as such are always to be believed. home in Salisbury round the clock, presumably lest It is curious how many of the historic allegations someone smuggle out the bones of a murdered lad are made by men, given that the proportion of gay before the police can find them. men in the population is less than 2 per cent. Either Sir Edward was long rumoured to be gay. The gays are much more likely to chase after under-age British satirical magazine Private Eye, the one boys than straight men are to pursue young girls, or where the celebrated Barry McKenzie first appeared else they have more opportunity, or there is some in a cartoon strip, once issued a record containing third explanation such as that the allegations exag- the song, “Grocer Heath, Tell the Truth, Admit to gerate actual abuse. If a lusty fellow were to tell a Us That You’re a Poof”. “The Grocer” was Private youth organisation that he felt he had a calling to Eye’s nickname for Heath. The use of the opprobri- introduce fifteen-year-old girls to the joys of the ous slang term poof fitted their outlook at the time open-air life by sharing a tent with them he would and they probably thought it rhymed with truth. Yet not get very far. there was never any evidence that Heath was gay. Out in the rural wilderness of Wiltshire the rus- He certainly had an aversion to women, but those tic police are still in hot pursuit of the long-dead who knew him well describe him as sexless. Some Sir Edward Heath, who had made his final home people are, and it is disgraceful that they have not there. When he died, Sir Edward left his archive, been given their own special tick-box in politically consisting of 4500 boxes of unsorted papers, to correct surveys. Equality for the sexless now! Oxford University’s Bodleian Library. Somewhere It is all a grotesque waste of public money. When in the boxes are his diaries and personal letters, no asked about it, the police reply that all allegations

48 Quadrant October 2016 The Great Paedophile Witch Hunt of sexual abuse have to be investigated thoroughly. on BBC news would have done well enough—and Why? Investigations cost money. Heath is dead. He how much did that helicopter cost? The first that cannot be prosecuted. He cannot be asked to give Sir Cliff knew about the raid was when he saw it on his version of events. Even if something were uncov- live television, which he was watching in Portugal. ered, it would anyway not justify the huge resources Nothing was found at his home, but no doubt the devoted to the project. Every pound spent on this usual level of chaos and damage was achieved. silly investigation is a pound diverted from other Sir Cliff is now thinking of selling his Berkshire more important police duties, such as pursuing cur- home, the home polluted by the boots of the South rently active sex offenders. If the police budget is Yorkshire police and its association with the false increased to pursue historic offenders, the resources accusations. Indeed, the raid probably produced will have to be taken away from further false accusations, just as the health or education or national police intended. In Cliff Richard’s defence, all of which are far more t is a measure of the own words, he had been “hung out as important. I live bait”. All those dodgy middle- It is no good saying that it is a gullibility of the police aged men who wanted a moment’s matter of justice. Justice is not of that they were even fame as a former boy victim or who infinite worth as politicised law- could sniff the scent of compensa- yers claim. It is a commodity that willing to listen to one tion from a subsequent civil action has to be paid for and the econo- fantasist who claimed no doubt now turned up with ficti- mists’ terms such as “rate of return” that Sir Cliff had tious stories of long-ago groping. If and “marginal cost” apply to it. As such a case were ever to go to court, the former Conservative Prime chased him how could the accused get a fair Minister Arthur Balfour said in down the street on trial, given that the alleged events another context: the trouble with happened decades ago, there is no justice is that there is never enough roller-skates, assaulted corroboration, and the complain- to go round. In any case justice has him in a shop and ants have every incentive to lie? to be biased on the side of not blam- The police proudly announced ing the guiltless. If you really believe then frantically that their investigation had in justice then it is time to prosecute roller-skated away. “increased significantly in size”. It those who make false accusations is a measure of their gullibility that and to reveal their identities so as to they were even willing to listen to leave them open to being sued in a civil case. And one fantasist who claimed that Sir Cliff had chased finally, what reason is there for picking on Heath him down the street on roller-skates, assaulted him in the first place, other than that he was a senior in a shop and then frantically roller-skated away. Conservative figure? This complainant had obtained the idea from a filmed item posted on the internet in which Sir Cliff qually bizarre has been the lurid investigation had sung when wearing roller-skates. Why has he into Sir Cliff Richard by the South Yorkshire not been prosecuted for perjury or at the very least Epolice concerning an alleged sexual offence against for wasting police time? It does not seem to have a boy at a Christian rally in Sheffield organised by occurred to anyone in the police that roller-skates the American evangelist Billy Graham in 1985. are not a very reliable mode of transport for a sex- The investigation has lasted for two years and cost ual predator. In their search of Sir Cliff’s home the £800,000 of taxpayers’ money. The South Yorkshire police do not seem to have located the roller-skates. police have behaved disgracefully throughout and have been condemned by the Home Office Select hat links Sir Cliff to the various establishment Committee of the British parliament. grandees whom the police had earlier The condemnation was triggered by a police raid Wpursued is that he is a conservative evangelical on Sir Cliff’s home in Berkshire while he was away Christian. It should be remembered that the South in Portugal. To guarantee surprise, plain-clothes Yorkshire police are the same force who for reasons police officers travelled the length of the country of political correctness had refrained for several from Yorkshire to his home near London in a con- years from investigating and arresting gangs of voy of unmarked police cars. To make sure there Muslim sexual predators exploiting under-age girls was plenty of publicity for the raid they tipped the in Rotherham. Today the perpetrators are in jail, BBC off that they were coming. The BBC crew were but for years the police looked the other way. By able to film from a helicopter as the heroic officers contrast, evangelical Christians are an easy target, went storming in. A simple verbal report on the raid since they lack the protection of the politically

Quadrant October 2016 49 The Great Paedophile Witch Hunt correct classes who make policy. Indeed, evangelical disaster of 1989, when ninety-six football fans were Christians are seen as an enemy by the proponents trampled to death as a result of incompetent crowd of multiculturalism, for they are an unpleasant control by that force. This year, after twenty-seven reminder of Britain’s former history of uniformity, years of lies and forgeries by members of the South solidarity and respectability. Yorkshire force trying to cover up their responsibil- This is also why the BBC was so keen to give the ity for these deaths, an inquest jury has brought in a case publicity and besmirch Sir Cliff. A raid on the verdict of unlawful killing and firmly put the blame home of an ageing pop star in his mid-seventies is on the police. It is manslaughter through gross neg- hardly the kind of news item to which you would ligence, and it is possible that some of the officers expect a high-minded public broadcaster to give who dealt with the crowd will now be prosecuted. priority, not even one as utterly dumbed-down and Such are the troubles of the South Yorkshire police crassly lacking in crucial foreign news coverage as that the chief constable has just been sacked. the main BBC television channel. But Sir Cliff was The South Yorkshire police have put far more time a committed Christian and one who took his faith and effort into hounding the committed Christian sufficiently seriously as to have performed at charity Sir Cliff Richard than they did into investigating concerts in apartheid-era South Africa, something the sexual abuse of well over a thousand under-age that will have damned him for ever in the eyes of girls by the Muslims of Rotherham including the bigoted Left-liberals. He was a marked man, so rape of girls as young as eleven. The disproportion when the chance came, the atheists and progressives tells you everything you need to know about the rot- in the BBC went after him. ten state, not just of South Yorkshire but of modern Meanwhile, back in South Yorkshire, an inept, Britain. worthless and corrupt police force needed a high- profile case to distract attention from their appalling Dr Christie Davies is the author of, among record and not just in regard to the vicious Muslim many titles, Wrongful Imprisonment: Mistaken sex gangs of Rotherham. The same South Yorkshire Convictions and Their Consequences and The police force was responsible for the Hillsborough Strange Death of Moral Britain.

A Fish Nobody Knew

Fish tail, black and oily as feathers in a slick, drapes over the rosebud rim of a Havilland plate. A gold tined fork rests there, a shiny warrior under a sunny chandelier. An escaped pea and a squeezed lemon witness the carnage— a comb of fine bones hooked to a spine embracing a void of new oxygen, all flesh gone, swimming now in another brine on the stained white plain, scattered eyes, foil fragments, bits of pale bone and a smile picked clean.

Carolyn Evans Campbell

50 Quadrant October 2016 Thoughts on the Recent Murders of Police Officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge “Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he [the terrorist] has severed every link with the social order and the civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose: to destroy it.” —Sergei Nechayev, nineteenth-century Russian pamphleteer, blackmailer and catechist of exterminationism “Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” —John Adams

I love the First Amendment! My daily teenage spasms Of hip post-Christian anarchy Comprise my sole orgasms. My bible’s Charlie Hebdo, My sacral sense baptized By pix of masturbating nuns And Jesus sodomized. Anthropoid rap’s my playlist. “F**k tha police”, they screamed. But of Baton Rouge and Dallas Libido dominandi I scarcely even dreamed. Is now my middle name, In creedal terms, I’m “Catholic.” And not to be corrupted Or “Protestant.” Or “Jew.” Is the filthy fascist shame. But always I’m Nechayev, Though I’ve not read a single book, For ethics make me spew. I’ve mastered modish chatter, My brain’s an open cesspit. Forever joining rent-a-mobs I never had a soul. And shrieking “Black Lives Matter.” Where surgeons think my heart is, But not for me the sniper’s task. They’ll find a gaping hole. I’m far too scared for that. The sinking ship of Washington Will never join this rat. The First Amendment is my god, And talking heads my whores. Today, I rule America. Screwtape’s my name. What’s yours?

R.J. Stove

Quadrant October 2016 51 Harry Gelber

,Brief Reflections on God Man and the Universe

peculations about God (or gods), the visible only universe, we are the only self-conscious and universe and the place of human beings in these intelligent beings in it, or whether our continuing creations has been with thoughtful people exploration of space will in time lead us to accept Ssince long before the days of the Assyrian empires. that other, and perhaps even more intelligent, life It is surely no surprise that they have become much forms exist or have existed. We do not even know more acute in recent centuries, perhaps especially whether the present physical appearance, constitu- with the Abrahamic religions, following the dra- tion and methods of human thought and action will matic progress of modern and especially Western eventually prove to be the end point of humanity’s sciences. evolutionary path. In engaging with some of the enormous ques- What we do know is that from the point of ori- tions raised by the resulting compendium of issues, gin of the universe to the present, the universe, and a good way to start might be to begin with several the small planet on which humans have evolved, separate but interrelated matters: what science has appear to have developed in ways that do not sug- so far told us about the origins and growth of the gest mere randomness, but rather an enormous and universe; the history, as far as we know it, of the ever-growing complexity. If that is so, it seems more evolution of Homo sapiens and the prospects for likely than not that the “Big Bang” itself was pro- his further development; the great gaps that have duced, or caused, by a mind that is inconceivably appeared—and seem to be growing—between the more powerful, subtle and complex than any human beliefs of all three Abrahamic religions, and those of mind could approach or deal with. It is hard not to major non-Abrahamic ones; and the changing forms accept that we might well think of such a mind, and of life and work in the major, scientifically-based, such power, as “God”. works of the contemporary world. Put in this form, belief in a god or gods is itself What science has so far told us, of course, is that a notable deviation from the beliefs of more primi- the universe originated, several billion years ago, tive societies of earlier times. For untold centuries, from a “Big Bang”, an “explosion”, of an originating men thought of gods as beings living in groups and “singularity”. That apparently simple fact produces equipped with magical powers. But we also know a number of critical consequences. As the universe about the beginnings of belief in the single, sole emerged from the moment of creation, it was com- God, at first especially for the Jews. The writings pletely featureless and symmetrical. As it cooled of Tacitus and the Jewish historian Josephus explain towards lower and lower temperatures it broke one that when Roman troops entered the Holy of Holies of its constituent symmetries after another and in the Temple at Jerusalem as recently as 63 BC they allowed more and more diversity of structure to were puzzled to find it entirely empty. As Josephus come into existence including, at some point, the puts it, “in the sanctuary stood nothing whatever” phenomenon of life. since, for Jews, the nature of the one God could These developments present human beings with not be captured in any image. We also know that currently unanswerable questions. It is, for instance, early Christians often found themselves accused of quite unclear whether ours is the only universe or being atheists since they did not believe in any gods whether, as some have argued, other universes, per- as normally understood. As Etienne Gilson put it: haps answering to other physical and scientific rules, “God is not a being, he is being.” Or, as God is said might not exist or be in the process of being created. to have told Moses: “I am who I am.” It is also, in the present state of human knowledge, That concept itself creates, from the outset, some uncertain whether, even assuming that this is the major and mutually incompatible possibilities. First,

52 Quadrant October 2016 Brief Reflections on God, Man and the Universe if the creative intelligence we think of as “God” is on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo) indeed the creator of our universe, did He also cre- has become utterly incredible. But even here, allow- ate the initial singularity? Second, was it created in ances must be made. The Christian churches of the such a way that all subsequent developments in the eleventh to fifteenth centuries, which gave us such universe, and its creatures—including humans and pictures, were largely dealing with an illiterate or their actions—were foreseen, anticipated and pre- barely literate priesthood, not to mention ignorant determined by Him? Or has the Mind felt it neces- peasant masses; and the need to convey lessons, sary to guide and direct the subsequent processes of beliefs and even passions in pictures has in any evolution and the development of all forms of life, case fully survived into the television and compu- whether plant or animal or human? Or, indeed, the ter world of the twenty-first century. Furthermore, development of the earth itself, as it and its life- there is no inherent and overriding impossibility in forms continue in the form of a “heavenly” body the idea that the governing Mind should choose to and as a (or the) carrier of life? Or there are alterna- reveal itself in the form of a human being appearing tive notions like those of “Socinianism”, which has in a particular time and place, preaching love and argued that God is actually neither omnipotent nor kindness while continuing to render unto Caesar all-knowing. He rather learns, grows and re-directs the things that are Caesar’s. as the universe develops. On the other hand it also seems possible, even In considering these issues, several thoughts sug- likely, that our current belief systems will not gest themselves. One is that, if the first option is survive—at least not in their present forms—any correct, the very idea of man’s free will—let alone future discovery of life, let alone of intelligent life, the idea of an “elect” person or group—is an illu- in other and hitherto unsuspected regions or bodies sion. If so, that must mean that all notions of indi- in other parts of the universe. After all, not only is vidual responsibility, of virtue or vice, of human the universe, as Emil Wiechert once pointed out, goodness or evil, have never really existed and must “infinite in all directions” but, as we now know, it fall away. So must any idea of human initiative in is constantly expanding. At minimum, there is no the creation or development of living things on reason to suppose that humanity is God’s final crea- our planet. Similarly, humans would surely have tion. And time-span is surely critical. We already to accept that the story of Jesus Christ can only be know that there is no obvious reason to suppose relevant to one sector of the stories of Abrahamic that the physical and mental make-up of human religions on this single planet. That all seems rather beings will persist in their present form. After all, unlikely (even allowing for the importance of theses humans themselves developed from humanoids to like Charles Darwin’s “survival of the fittest”) given Homo erectus before developing into Homo sapiens. the long-standing and continuing growth or disap- It is not clear, therefore, that the physical makeup pearance in the sheer variety of all living things. of humans, let alone our brain development, will Indeed, Darwinian theories themselves may well persist in anything like their present forms. Even in be the result of thinking and invention going far the relatively shorter term, there has been a secular beyond the mind that created them. Which might decline in ageing, let alone in morbidity and mortal- suggest a continuing divine interest and care not just ity that has contributed to quite important changes for human beings but for other living things on our in human physiology in recent centuries. Indeed, earth. the synergy between technological and physiologi- It is therefore not surprising that the teachings cal improvements has produced a form of human of all major religions, whether Protestant, Catholic, evolution that has been much more rapid than Jewish, Islamic or, in somewhat different ways Darwin’s natural selection and has involved both Hindu or Buddhist, show that God, or the Divine, physiological and thermodynamic aspects of eco- takes an intense interest not just in the behaviour of nomic growth. humanity but in the fate of individual human beings. Societies, cities and even organisations appear, like he advance of the physical sciences generally has nations, to be quite secondary. It even seems that been remarkable and shows no signs of slowing modern religion and science both oppose any kind Tdown. By the 1920s three species of elementary par- of selfish nationalism and accept that major human ticles were known to exist; by the 1980s that number achievements, whether in arts or sciences, let alone had grown to sixty-one. Instead of three states of religion, have very little to do with nationalist sepa- matter—liquid, gas and solid—there are nine. For ration between societies. modern physicists, there can in any case be no such None of this is to avoid the point that the inher- thing as an objective world of space, time and mat- ited Christian belief in God as a majestic old man ter independent of human thought; “matter” is just with a long white beard (as painted so magnificently the way particles behave when large numbers of

Quadrant October 2016 53 Brief Reflections on God, Man and the Universe them have been put together. Which is why mat- of life to other possible worlds. Freeman Dyson, ter is an active and unpredictable agent in modern for one, has already argued that such a transfer is experiments. likely to be a “natural way to package biological That brings us into the fields of ecology. As that and genetic information for rapid transit over major scholar Edward O. Wilson has put it: interstellar distances”. It is pointless to speculate on the likely speed of such transformations since, ecology is now seen as not just a biological but of the several major transformations already taking a human science. The future of our species place in our society (though not necessarily in our depends on how well we understand that physical development), none is more subtle nor more extension and employ it in the wise management explosive than the much-heralded megashift from of our natural resources. We live both by a an industrial to an information society. market economy—necessary for our welfare on There are, of course, other and much narrower a day-to-day basis—and by a natural economy, explanations in terms only of the physical sciences. necessary for our welfare (indeed, our very Two such views, which deny any need to believe existence) in the long term. It is equally true in God, come from Professor Richard Dawkins at that the pursuit of public health is largely an Oxford and Jacques Monod, a French biologist and application of ecology. None of this should be winner of the Nobel Prize for Physiology. surprising. We are, after all, a species in an Dawkins’s view, in his book The God Delusion, is ecosystem, exactly adapted to the conditions that ideas about God are mere hypotheses result- peculiar to the surface of this planet, and subject ing from quasi-mystical and pantheistic references to the same principles of ecology as all other to God in the work of physicists like Albert Einstein species. and Stephen Hawking. He describes such panthe- ism as “sexed-up atheism” and maintains that the Also, it is by now common knowledge that some existence or non-existence of God is a scientific fact 96 per cent of the human body is made up of its about the universe which is discoverable in princi- chief elements, which are carbon, hydrogen, nitro- ple, if not in practice: “The temptation to attribute gen and oxygen. The rest is made up of twenty other the appearance of design to actual design itself is a elements. Each element is composed of atoms that, false one, because the designer hypothesis imme- in turn, are composed of protons (a particle with diately raises the larger problem of who designed a positive electric charge), an electron (which has the designer.” What is needed is a hypothesis, with a negative charge) and a neutron (with a neutral supporting theories, that explains how, from simple charge). All atoms are electrically neutral because origins and principles, something more complex can the number of protons and electrons in each atom emerge. And the alternative to the designer hypoth- is equal. Even so, considerable progress towards esis is not chance, but natural selection. changing elements of human physical composition Dawkins does not claim to disprove the existence has already been made in recent times and more of God with absolute certainty. Instead, he suggests seems in prospect. For instance, there is the business as a general principle that simpler explanations are of human genomes. The Nobel Prize winner J.D. preferable, while any omniscient or omnipotent Watson had this to say about the human genome God must be extremely complex. He goes on to project in his article “The Human Genome Project: argue that it is in any case logically impossible for a Past, Present and Future” in 1990: God to be simultaneously omniscient and omnipo- tent. Even something as central as human morality A more important set of instructions will does not require assumptions about a God. Instead, never be found by human beings. When finally our morality has a Darwinian explanation: altruism interpreted, the genetic messages encoded allegedly embodied in genes, selected through the within our DNA molecules will provide the process of evolution, giving people natural empathy. ultimate answers to the chemical underpinnings Monod has a more positive and clear-cut view. of human existence. He argues that the origin of life is solely a matter of chance. Not only that but: And there are already groups of scientists and technologists, not to mention industrialists, who mutations constitute the only possible source believe that in not too many decades from now men of modifications in the genetic text, itself the and women will not only travel to other objects sole repository of the organism’s hereditary in space but will even be superseded by artificial structures. It necessarily follows that chance “people” with artificially created brains. Other alone is at the source of every innovation, of all possibilities may include the transfer of “spores” creation in the biosphere.

54 Quadrant October 2016 Brief Reflections on God, Man and the Universe

Pure chance, then, absolutely free but blind, is Regensburg he said baldly that questions as pro- at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolu- found and far-reaching as whether God exists and, tion: this central concept of modern biology (except if so, what God’s purposes and intentions might be, that we now know cancers are due to a virus) is no cannot possibly be resolved solely, or even mainly, on longer one among other possible or even conceiv- the basis of physical nature as understood by mod- able hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable ern science. In fact, Benedict insists on the essential hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed relationship between religion, philosophy as properly and tested fact. And nothing warrants the supposi- understood, and the notions of the physical sciences. tion—or the hope—that on this score our position Modern scientific, philosophic and related religious is likely ever to be revised. Indeed, a living being’s ideas stem ultimately from ancient Greece; but there structure “results from a ... process ... that owes has been, especially in Europe, a process of want- almost nothing to the action of outside forces, but ing to “bring Christianity back into harmony with everything, from its overall shape down to its tini- modern reason”, so that theology tends to be “some- est detail, to ‘morphogenetic’ interactions within the thing essentially historical and therefore strictly sci- object itself”. entific”. But in that limited modern sense, “working in everything on the basis of a single rationality” hese views have attracted intense interest, in the will not do. For faith (which is born of the soul, not general public as well as in the scientific com- the body) “seeks to correlate with reason as a whole”. Tmunity. Nevertheless, science is by no means united Given this sense of broad coherence within the uni- on the subject of atheism. On the contrary, some verse of reason, it is reasonable to raise the question of the most distinguished scientists have wrestled of God by using reason, for it is contrary to God’s with the relationship between science and religion own nature not to act in accordance with reason. and most of them have come up with a non-atheistic Indeed, there continues to be a close link between answer. Albert Einstein, arguably the most famous faith and the original Greek forms of inquiry, for “in scientist of the twentieth century, had this to say: the beginning was the logos (meaning both reason and word) and the logos is God”. [This] interpretation of religion ... implies There is more. In the modern scientific view, a dependence of science on the religious only the certainties resulting from mathematics and attitude, a relation which, in our predominantly empirical evidence can be considered scientific—as materialistic age, is only too easily overlooked. apparently confirmed by the successes of modern While it is true that scientific results are technology. That excludes human sciences such as entirely independent from religious or moral psychology, history, sociology and even philosophy. considerations, those individuals to whom But such a “scientific” approach must exclude the we owe the great creative achievements of question of God; with human questions about ori- science were all of them imbued with the truly gin and destiny having no place in “science” thus religious conviction that this universe of ours is understood. The sole arbiter of what is “ethical” then something perfect and susceptible to the rational becomes the personal and subjective conscience. To striving for knowledge. If this conviction return to this wider “dialogue of cultures” should had not been a strongly emotional one ... and be one of the major tasks of the modern university. inspired by Spinoza’s “Amor Dei Intellectualis”, they would hardly have been capable of that o far so good. But if Christ not only represented, untiring devotion which alone enables man to but partook of, the Godhead in ways and sto- attain his greatest achievements. Sries that could be understood by the illiterates of Europe and the Near East a millennium ago, can Very similar views were expressed by the physi- those same ways and stories still satisfy minds with cists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr and by the an entirely different perspective on the world and Institute of Medicine of the US National Academy the universe? In fact, Benedict XVI’s approach to of Sciences, which declared that “Science and reli- theology and questions about God is reflected in a gion are based on different aspects of human expe- good many other views that question not only the rience ... [they] are separate and address aspects of division between religious faith and modern science human understanding in different ways ...” but that between modern sciences as practised in A different, and in some ways perhaps more most modern societies and universities. sophisticated, view comes from Pope Benedict Many modern opinions appear to be altogether XVI, who argues that the purely scientific explana- less sophisticated than Benedict’s. From the days of tions are not so much wrong as inadequate because Socrates into modern times, philosophy was some- incomplete. In his widely noted 2006 lecture at thing of a reigning deity in the intellectual realm

Quadrant October 2016 55 Brief Reflections on God, Man and the Universe and a major element in the formation of Western Creatures which were too successful in adapting social, political and religious views. But in the themselves to a stable environment suddenly twentieth century, and especially in its concluding changed. Creatures which were unspecialized decades, philosophy began an almost precipitous and opportunistic in their habits had a better decline into the arenas of practical politics and the chance when Doomsday struck. We humans are search for wealth. It began to be treated, especially perhaps the most unspecialised and the most in resource-needy universities, as just another social opportunistic of all existing species. We thrive science, akin to psychology, sociology, politics and on ice ages and environmental catastrophes. others; and limited by demands for student essays or Comet showers must have been one of the major statistically measurable numbers of publications or forces that drove our evolution and made us new “fields” of study rather than for more profound what we are. questions of life, beliefs and behaviour. The changes are well illustrated in a recent In other words, effective immortality—for the article by two discontented philosophers from the species, obviously, not the individual—may result University of North Texas, Robert Frodeman and from technology allowing the human mind to sus- Adam Briggle, published in the New York Times ear- tain its brain or perhaps reincarnate itself as an lier this year under the title “When Philosophy Lost intelligent artefact. Human civilisation might then Its Way”. It laments the way in which philosophy experience neither salvation nor extermination by has declined from its traditional role as the lead- nature, machines, aliens or gods. Humanity might, ing element in the search for knowledge and wis- instead, spread throughout the Solar System and dom, and into a mere handmaiden of social studies into the Milky Way, and be enriched by contact with in the hands of administrators in modern Western other intelligent species and artefacts. Eventually “research” universities. They conclude: humanity’s descendants might so improve their genes and minds that Homo sapiens might exist only Like the sciences, philosophy has largely become as a revered memory. a technical enterprise, the only difference being Whether such unforeseeable changes in physiol- that we manipulate words rather than genes ogy, genes and brains can or will affect humanity’s or chemicals. Lost is the once common-sense conception of the mind of God will surely be an notion that philosophers are seeking the good entirely different matter. But even that might not be life—that we ought to be … model citizens certain. As recently as 1930 the British astronomer, and human beings. Having become specialists, mathematician and physicist Sir James Jeans wrote we have lost sight of the whole. The point of that: “from the intrinsic evidence of the creation, philosophy now is to be smart, not good. It has the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to been the heart of our undoing. appear as a pure mathematician”. So if we humans explored mathematics long enough we would prob- here are other and very different problems, for ably be able to read His Mind. Might that turn out even the thinking of so subtle a philosopher as to be the end of the human story? Probably not, for TBenedict XVI cannot avoid the simple point that as the philosopher and mathematician Kurt Gödel the evolution of humanity since 1700 or so offers proved in his famous incompleteness theorem, only very short-term perspectives. Is it possible to within any axiomatic mathematical system there say anything useful about the much longer-term and are propositions that cannot be proved or disproved the even more fundamental questions: “How will on the basis of the axioms within that system. humans develop? How long will humanity last?” Therefore, such a system cannot be simultaneously No search for an answer can sensibly go beyond the complete and consistent. search for survival for one or two small groups of But there are also some very different approaches representative humans, or spores of humans, capa- to this matter of a human future and the changes ble of procreation and the growth of some form of and transformations of what we might mean by mutually supporting group. Freeman Dyson, for “human”. Perhaps not surprisingly, two of these instance, has thought about Earth’s vulnerability to approaches also come from noted scientists. The comet showers, which seem to occur at an average first is, once again, Freeman Dyson, the Princeton rate of one every 26 million years: physicist and astronomer:

The theory implies that life has been exposed, The infiltration of [human] mind into the at regular or irregular intervals, to a drastic universe will not be permanently halted by pruning. Every 26 million years, more or less, any catastrophe or any barrier that I can there has been an environmental catastrophe … imagine. If our species does not choose to lead

56 Quadrant October 2016 Brief Reflections on God, Man and the Universe

the way, others will do so … If our species is of inorganic intelligences less constrained by extinguished, others will be wiser or luckier … their environment … aliens are likely long ago to have transitioned beyond the organic stage … The other comes from Martin Rees, the British It is a fair bet that machines, not organic brains, Astronomer Royal, who has written: will most fully understand the cosmos. They may be our own remote descendants … [so] it will the collective activities of human brains have be the actions of autonomous machines that will underpinned the emergence of all our culture most drastically change the world, and perhaps and science. They may not have been the first what lies beyond. intelligences in the cosmos, however, and they are most unlikely to be the last … Our earth, What might Dyson’s successor species or Martin though a tiny speck in the cosmos, could be Rees’s post-human machines ultimately make of the unique “seed” from which intelligence this expanding universe? spreads through the galaxy … [In any event] God knows. our era of organic intelligence is a triumph of complexity over entropy, but a transient one, Harry Gelber is Emeritus Professor of Political Science which will be followed by a vastly longer period at the University of Tasmania.

White

Quite a word—five letters to bear a load of meaning, source of suspicion for those of colour, imperial burden for those who were not. Symbol of virtue, yet evil so often whitewashed, pallor of fear or sickness, white noise for escapees from tinnitis and the infamous white feather of cowardice handed to lads in two world wars because they looked like men, so many a mother’s white-haired boy joined up and died at seventeen. Better to think of lilies, white weddings and white ties, clothes for cricket, tennis, white goods for food and washing, white damask for the table and white on white embroidery. Better to remember white-water rafting and the ocean’s white horses or the garden’s white admiral butterfly. Nor can I forget the gift I know will be a huge white elephant, not to mention the little lie I will tell when I receive it.

Barbara Fisher

Quadrant October 2016 57 Simon P. Kennedy

Liberalism’s Problem with Christianity

ere in the West, we like to think of our- Southern Poverty Law Center in the US as saying selves as liberals. Freedom for all, we say. that the group were “fanning the flames of anti-gay Individual rights! is the cry heard from hatred”. According to a news.com.au report, the HPoland to Perth. As liberals we understand society ADF “plans to take society back to before the Dark to be made up of individuals, and believe those indi- Ages”. It’s all scary stuff, clearly meant to discredit viduals to be equal, with each possessing inherent Abbott and his decision to speak to the group. The moral agency. This equality and moral agency, we Guardian’s Jason Wilson wrote that such decisions believe, mean that each individual possesses a set deserve our scrutiny, as they may indicate Abbott’s of basic rights enforceable by law. Our society and public policy positions on certain issues. Some of our political structures and practices are built upon the views espoused by the ADF go “far beyond this liberal ideal. Everybody is free, and everybody what Australians would view as mainstream con- is equal. This, it seems, is our most basic political servatism”, according to Wilson. For Abbott to have and social assumption. attended and spoken at an event held by a group Liberalism defines the political structures and espousing socially conservative views on marriage, philosophies of Western Europe, parts of Eastern the family and abortion, seems to be not only aston- Europe, North America, and Australia and New ishing but also sinister. Zealand. Its ideals are being enacted in parts of Similar responses to people holding their reli- Africa, Asia and South America. In other words, gious and ideological ground on these issues are liberalism holds sway over much of the world. In expressed with some regularity by prominent media the West, liberal democracy is the only conceivable and political figures. These expressions of opinion, option among the many alternative political and soci- generally hostile to core Christian social views, are etal arrangements on offer. This is partly because, in not necessarily representative of the whole of soci- a highly pluralistic society, liberalism accommodates ety. However, they are becoming more and more difference. For example, it allows people of contrary the norm. It seems that liberalism has a Christianity religious views to worship according to the tenets of problem. This Christianity problem might ulti- their faiths. The space allowed by liberal society for mately bring about liberalism’s demise. competing and contradictory views is generous. But there seems to be a limit to this generosity. There is ne part of the problem is historical. The liber- a growing sense that the liberalism of today has a alism of the past did not have a problem with deep-seated problem with Christianity. Christianity.O Larry Siedentop has recently argued, To illustrate the point, one need only look at the in his book Inventing the Individual, that the foun- response to former Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s dations of liberalism were largely laid by the early appointment, back in January, to speak at an Christians during the misnamed “Dark Ages”. In Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) event in the response to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus United States. Much of the media expressed aston- of Nazareth, the Apostle Paul wrote about people, ishment that Abbott would do such a thing. Sydney not as members of a household cult or an earthly Morning Herald journalist Mark Kenny reported polis as the ancient Greeks did, but as moral agents that the ADF is “one of the religious right’s most who stand before God. People, in themselves, were reactionary bodies” which “opposes abortion, wants important because they were made in God’s image to end gay marriage and is pushing to roll back and had to answer to Him. Paul, writes Siedentop, some feminist advances”. Fellow Fairfax reporter laid the “ontological foundation for the individual”. Nick O’Malley’s article on the ADF quoted the For Paul, the “human will is pre-social”, laying the

58 Quadrant October 2016 Liberalism’s Problem with Christianity social foundations for a voluntaristic view of social European society. Its parts were assembled on the relations and hierarchies. Augustine’s conception of fertile soil of Christian soteriology, social ontology the human will, the rise of monasticism, the social and political theology. This idea is likely jarring to changes wrought in a Christianised Roman empire, many liberal thinkers and doers today. The Christian and the medieval distinctions between temporal and society described above does not fit the contempo- spiritual authority, are all important early factors in rary liberal vision of equal individuals, with differ- the story of the emergence of the Western idea of ences between cultures, sexes and classes flattened the individual. by an overpowering egalitarian philosophy. Even During the period of the Carolingian empire, ontological differences are being done away with, Christian magistrates developed a consciousness with men and women regarded, for all intents and of their people as a “Christian people”. This was purposes, as the same. The inbuilt aristocracy and important because they were not merely people, but monarchy of much of medieval Europe is anathema “souls” for whom rulers had a responsibility before to today’s liberal democrats. So Christianity’s social God to rule with integrity. These more philosophi- history is considered problematic by many liberals, cal changes were accompanied by changes in juris- even if it is linked to the history of liberalism itself. prudence, which in turn impacted on law codes themselves. Canon lawyers began to reason along nd yet the historical problem is not the biggest the lines of the importance of the individual in one. The tendency in contemporary liberalism legal matters. On the level of intellectual culture, toA problematise Christianity points to some funda- the aristocratic shape to “reason” itself was gradu- mental shifts within liberalism itself. Why would ally democratised. Not only did individual people an idea that was an outgrowth of Christian ideals have moral agency, but the elites no proceed to turn on Christianity? longer had a monopoly on reason; Liberalism requires adherents and the common people could access it non-adherents alike to live in such also. These, among other important Because liberalism a way that will allow liberal ide- historical events, shaped the estab- has become unhinged als to flourish. Liberalism requires lishment of the nation-state, demo- from Christianity, something of people living in lib- cratic governance in both church eral societies. Liberalism makes and state, and the importance of the it has become hostile demands upon the individuals it individual as a social unit. to it. Contrary to its upholds. Siedentop’s story of liberalism’s Perhaps liberalism is turning on Christian roots is compelling. Yet, own propaganda, Christianity because liberalism has the political and social arrange- liberalism is changed its form. Perhaps liberalism ments within which the intellec- beginning to act in has begun reacting against some of tual, legal and political leg-work the totalising claims of Christianity was done to formulate liberal ten- an illiberal fashion. because it has claims of hegemony ets are hardly reflected in twenty- for itself. It has begun asserting its first-century Belgium or Canada. independence from its Christian And maybe this is part of liberalism’s problem with parent, and in doing so is becoming illiberal. Christianity. Pre-liberal Europe was, well, not very Liberalism, unhinged from the Christian frame- liberal at all. Depending on who you ask, medieval work it was formed in, has become a totalising Europe was a giant pile of theocratic states, a mash- political philosophy. And because it has become up of benevolent and malevolent autocratic monar- unhinged from Christianity, it has become hos- chies, or a thinly veiled papal superstate. The Pope tile to it. Contrary to its own propaganda, liberal- not only had spiritual authority, but also wielded an ism is beginning to act in an illiberal fashion. It is unhealthy amount of temporal power. Some mon- beginning to claim total allegiance. The claims of archs, notably Charlemagne, might have understood Christianity are, ultimately, total upon the person. their subjects to be actual people, but only if they Christ demands complete allegiance to his king- were converted and baptised Christians. Otherwise dom. That allegiance is not contrary to being under they were ripe for the slaughter. Women were defi- earthly authority but, in the end, Christ trumps nitely not seen as equal with men, let alone as intel- Trump, Obama and Merkel. Christianity asks a lot ligent as them. As I already noted: not especially of people. If Jesus Christ is Lord (the most basic liberal. Christian confession) then Caesar isn’t. There is However, if Siedentop is right in his thesis, liber- always a higher allegiance for Christians, beyond alism was not a creation of the Enlightenment period that of the liberal political order. but was formed within a confessionally Christian That is why Christians won’t necessarily bow

Quadrant October 2016 59 Liberalism’s Problem with Christianity to demands for them to arrange flowers for homo- capital punishment for murderers, but that is hardly sexual wedding ceremonies. This kind of response the reason why he wasn’t allowed in the country. to Christian sexual ethics is a point of resistance to Contemporary liberal ideals were threatened by his the liberal order, and one which is causing much presence. Silencing Newman was the only option. tension. Christianity cannot be a private, Sunday- The politicians and immigration officials who only faith, and as liberalism has changed and moved barred Newman’s entry, along with the High Court, away from its Christian roots, it has begun clash- acted in a liberal fashion in the sense that they saw ing with Christianity. Jesus Christ does not just ask Newman’s ideas to be contrary to the liberal order. Christians to attend church on Sundays; he requires Newman’s pro-life stance, a stance held by a free his followers to make much of him on every day of individual, clashed with the stance of other free the week. As the Australian children’s singer Colin individuals who disagreed with him. The state and Buchanan sings, for Christians, “Jesus is the boss”. courts favoured the wishes of one set of free indi- No matter how many evangelicals might vote for a viduals over another. This trade-off between indi- particular presidential candidate, that candidate will viduals is inevitable, and Christians are increasingly never be the boss of those evangelicals because they finding themselves on the losing end of the trade. have a higher authority to bow to. And here is where liberalism is becoming illib- Education could become a key flashpoint for eral. It is protecting certain rights over and against liberalism and Christians. If, hypothetically, public certain others, admittedly an unavoidable aspect of schools in Victoria are required to teach the good- governance. However, the rights which are being ness and rightness of gay sex and gay marriage, protected are not coherent with one another. In there are a significant number of Christians who its original form, liberalism protected freedom of will find it a genuine challenge to keep their chil- speech, which is a fundamental freedom. Freedom dren in the Victorian public school system while from offence is a relatively new invention of the retaining a clear conscience. But this article is not human rights industry, and is now, in certain cases, about Christianity’s problem with homosexuality. a trump card over more fundamental rights like It is about liberalism’s problem with Christianity. freedom of speech and freedom of conscience. This And yet, Christianity’s problem with gay marriage is a sign of creeping illiberalism. Without the larger and associated sexual choices illustrates the point framework of Christian theology and morality, very nicely. Here, Christianity could cause a seri- liberalism simply means that whoever is in power ous problem for the liberal political order because selects the rights it will protect, and labels them Christians may not feel free to educate their chil- liberal. At one time, freedom of speech might be dren as they wish. This hypothetical shows that protected vigorously, and yet a couple of years later liberalism cannot simply create a value-neutral it might be against statute law to offend people. The order where everyone is actually and equally free. ground shifts because morality is now without the Someone’s freedom will always be compromised, bounds of Christianity. At a public level the prefer- and liberalism increasingly chooses to compromise ences of the ruling elites and their allies form the the freedom of the Christian. new boundaries. Liberalism has begun to impose itself upon the hy do liberals now care when Christians dis- individuals it claims to help thrive. It now upholds agree with them? Why, for example, would certain liberal tenets at the expense of more funda- Wanti-abortion activist Troy Newman, whose pro-life mental, traditional liberal tenets. These more fun- views are similar to those of many Christians, not damental tenets were formed and grown in the soil be allowed into Australia for a speaking engage- of Christianity, and in the intellectual milieu of a ment? Part of the answer is that liberalism is now Christian society. Subsequently, contemporary lib- acting in a hegemonic fashion. It protects individual eral ideals are beginning to clash regularly with the rights, to be sure. In doing so it silences particular demands and claims Christianity makes on its fol- opinions and prevents particular actions, all in the lowers. Liberalism is not as liberal as it thinks it is. name of liberalism. A woman’s “right to choose” is As it has moved away from its Christian roots it has protected to the extent that Newman wasn’t even begun to find Christianity’s claims an inconvenience. allowed in the country to speak about abortion. In Christianity gets in the way of the formation of the the Newman case freedom from offence trumped perfect liberal order because it makes claims which freedom of speech. This was masked by claims about contradict the claims of liberalism. Even though Newman’s supposed potential to incite violence, liberalism allows for different religions to share the which was a dubious, implausible outcome of allow- public square, and worship as they wish side-by- ing him to speak at a conference. side, in the end that worship has to fit into liber- Newman might have some unusual views about alism’s rules. As liberalism changes, Christianity’s

60 Quadrant October 2016 Liberalism’s Problem with Christianity tenets are gradually becoming uncomfortable for the nity. Therefore, within the bounds of Christian liberal order. The two no longer fit together as they moral theology, individuals have sets of privileges once did. and rights. These rights and privileges include free- dom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom he solution to this problem is not straightfor- of religion, freedom of conscience and freedom of ward. Some offer a return to Christendom as a association. These classical liberal concepts are, at possibility.T The most notable exponents of this idea bottom, Christian concepts and require a Christian are the Radical Orthodox thinkers, such as John society to sustain them. This is in stark contrast to Milbank. However, the Radical Orthodox solution the current liberal framework, which is, in reality, seems untenable as it would seem to require soci- merely a reflection of the preferences of those who ety to be re-evangelised and re-Christianised. In hold the keys to the corridors of power. Christian the absence of an unforeseen Christian revival, the political liberalism would be based on something Radical Orthodox solution is a long-term one only. higher, and more foundational, than the preferences Another group, the Christian Reconstructionists, of Canberra political staffers and their MP bosses. recently offered a religiously-driven solution to the In one sense I am suggesting that we re-imagine tensions within liberalism. This movement died our society as a part of “Christendom”. This solu- some decades ago and was always tion on the surface seems similar quite small. The leaders of this to the Christendom of the Radical movement, people like Rousas Orthodox. But it is a different Rushdoony, Gary North and David The principles of Christendom, in that it doesn’t pre- Chilton, proposed a return to Christian political scribe what is effectively a “cleri- the founding liberal ideals of the liberalism are cocratic” political order. That is not American polity combined with the the Christendom that can save our enforcement of the biblical Mosaic accessible to believer hard-won liberal political freedoms. law code. This solution is hardly and non-believer Nor will the Christendom of the conceivable or even plausible. Reconstructionists be of much One solution which is both plau- alike because both use. A Christian liberal order need sible and has potential to succeed believer and non- not entail a re-enforcement of the in the short term is that liberalism believer are capable Mosaic polity. Indeed, it should give up its claims to hegemony and not. The Decalogue would likely reharmonise itself with its own first of political prudence. be a feature of a Christian liberal principles and ideas about freedom, order, but this is unsurprising as it is which are in essence an outgrowth pivotal to our current legal arrange- of the Christian view of the good life. A Christian ments already. Indeed, the Christendom that will political liberalism is the solution. Christianity’s save liberalism wouldn’t even require uniformity of claims do not contradict the basic tenets of liber- belief. Both Christian and non-Christian can find alism as they stood in their original form. This is protection within the walls of this Christendom. historically the case, as liberalism was partly formed Both can participate in governance. Faith is not a under the tutelage of the Christian faith and devel- prerequisite for political wisdom. One doesn’t need oped by the Protestant Reformers, and jurists of the to believe, for example, what the Reformers taught seventeenth and eighteenth century. Returning lib- about Christian theology in order to understand the eralism to its Christian roots would reinvigorate the principles of early Protestant political ideas on lib- liberal project and pre-emptively end the impending erty, the role of the civil magistrate, and civil soci- stand-off between Christians and the liberal order. ety. Agreeing with and applying Christian political Liberal ideas were never designed to be total and principles does not entail agreeing on Christology hegemonic; they originally existed within the clear or soteriology. The principles of Christian political bounds of Christian morality and theology. liberalism are accessible to believer and non-believer A Christian liberalism would be stronger than alike because both believer and non-believer are the current arrangement because it would recog- capable of political prudence. nise that every individual, that very important lib- Politics is the art of human beings living well eral social unit, is created imago Dei. This Christian together. Without Christianity, liberalism does anthropology is the foundation of all good liberal not seem up to the task of being a good politi- thought. Each individual is God’s creation and is, cal framework because it lacks a large part of the in some ways, a reflection of Him. Flowing out foundation which made it functional in the first from this theological foundation is the belief that place. Christian principles, such as the imago Dei, each individual is valuable and has inherent dig- form the basis for human dignity and respect for

Quadrant October 2016 61 Liberalism’s Problem with Christianity the individual. These principles are not optional for To retain our liberal political order, it must return liberalism. Without the Christian faith as a founda- to being a fundamentally Christian political order; tion, liberalism will not help us live well together. only then will it be truly liberal. Ironically, it seems However, the political order of Christendom can be that only Christianity can save liberalism. both liberal and Christian. In fact, the true liberal order is a Christian one and will only function ade- Simon P. Kennedy lives in Geelong and is a PhD quately within a Christian philosophical and politi- candidate in the history of political thought at the cal framework. That is the Christendom that could University of Queensland. He writes regularly for save liberalism. Without it, liberalism’s problem the online journal the Calvinist International. He with Christianity might become the primary cause contributed the article “The Destruction of the Family” of liberalism’s demise. to the October 2015 issue.

Looking for Uncle Max, Northern Queensland, 2012

To the locals he was an oddity who had served in Papua, and given to a periodic melancholy that took him to faraway places beyond his family’s reach. You arrived at his remote shack to hear voices back among the trees, near an ancient Holden left to decay under a stand of fragrant, lemon-scented ironbarks. Some thought it was a matter of the heart that brought him north to Queensland, along with the cousins you had yet to meet, the ones concealed in the lush undergrowth who might have answered your many questions. Up in the shadows among the aromatic leaves the whine of two cicadas called for a rendezvous of their kind, as if wired to some alien collective mind. Max stayed hidden, and you waited for a time, finally turning down the muddy track alone, a line of waterfowl passing by high overhead, on their way toward distant ranging hills not unlike those found along the Kokoda Trail.

Dan Guenther

62 Quadrant October 2016 Augusto Zimmermann

Religious Freedom and Muslim Terrorism A Rights-Based Approach

he High Court of Australia has consistently laws of the state”, [but even] if there were no recognised that the right to religious freedom criminal law in existence at the time with which is not absolute in this country. That being these observances are inconsistent, it would be so, not every interference with religion is a breach possible for the state to pass such a law, and so, T to use a common expression, euchre the whole of section 116 of the Constitution, only those that are considered an “undue infringement of religious business. freedom”. As former Chief Justice Anthony Mason and Justice Gerard Brennan pointed out, “general Against the background of qualified affirma- laws to preserve and protect society are not defeated tion of religious freedom, Justice Latham, in the by a plea of religious obligation to breach them”. Jehovah’s Witnesses case during the Second World Religious freedom is therefore a properly quali- War, turned to a catalogue of the evils and hor- fied freedom. This is the understanding that in rors sometimes practised in the name of religion 1898 led many of the Australian framers to resist that should not be tolerated at all. Latham fell back any idea of absolute freedom of religion as posing on a variation of the classical liberal formula which unacceptable risks to the community. During the permits limitations on freedom only in the inter- convention debates that ultimately led to the draft ests of freedom itself. The particular version of this of the Constitution, there was a suggestion that formula quoted in Latham’s judgment was taken the federal Parliament should have power to pro- directly from John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty: hibit religious “practices which have been regarded “The sole end for which mankind are warranted, by large numbers of people as essentially evil and individually or collectively, in interfering with the wicked”. Edward Braddon, though eventually sup- liberty of action of any or their number, is self-pro- porting Henry Higgins’s proposal that ultimately tection.” This statement in Mill’s book was taken in led to the final wording in section 116, had initially the sense of society’s self-preservation. But in fact, sought to amend it by adding the words: “But shall as law professor Tony Blackshield explains: prevent the performance of any such religious rites as are of a cruel and demoralizing character or con- what [Latham] seemed rather to have in mind trary to the law of the Commonwealth”. Similarly, was the Kantian version, according to which Edmund Barton, who hesitated over Higgins’s pro- freedom may be restricted only so far as is posal but finally voted against it, was troubled by necessary to ensure an equal freedom for others, the difficulty of drafting a satisfactory formula to or to ensure the underlying preconditions of ensure that the constitutional protection would be freedom for all. limited to practices that are not inhuman or bar- baric. As Barton pointed out: Blackshield’s opinion is consistent with Latham’s argument: The trouble arises when you try to insert a proviso modifying this prohibition. For the protection of any form of liberty as a social instance, if it were desired to prevent the right within a society necessarily involves the application of the clause to any fiendish continued existence of that society as a society. or demoralizing rite, that might be done Otherwise the protection of liberty would be by inserting the words “so long as these meaningless and ineffective. It is consistent observances are inconsistent with the criminal with the maintenance of religious liberty for the

Quadrant October 2016 63 Religious Freedom and Muslim Terrorism

State to restrain actions and courses of conduct dom during times of national emergency and the which are inconsistent with the maintenance of extent to which provisions protecting the religious civil government or prejudicial to the continued groups can be read down by the courts, especially existence of the community. when religious extremism is involved.

The freedom of religion guaranteed by section hen it comes to religious extremism, few 116 is freedom within a democratic society based on organisations compare with Hizb ut-Tahrir. the enjoyment of fundamental rights and freedoms. WIt describes itself as a global political party whose Consistently with that philosophy—indeed, in ultimate goal is to create a caliphate to rule all order to secure their continued enjoyment—every Muslims around the world according to sharia law. democratic society is perfectly entitled to defend A Hizb ut-Tahrir spokesman, Mr Uthman Badar, itself not only against subversive religious activity claims that Muslims should not have to submit to certainly in wartime and, in my strongest opinion, so-called “forced assimilation”—such as pledging also in time of peace. Accordingly, any steps to support for human rights and democratic values in be taken to outlaw extremist teaching that incites the citizenship oath or singing the national anthem. religious violence and disregard of Mr Badar believes that singing the the rule of law are entirely compat- national anthem is forcing Muslims ible with the freedom of exercise of t is reasonable to integrate into society, and that religion under section 116. Indeed, I the values of Islam are not nego- the whole High Court has agreed to assume that a tiable even if they are incompat- with these conclusions in the past, committed Muslim ible with Australian values, laws and has rested them on a broadly or culture. Although former Prime similar conception of religious free- who migrates to a Minister Tony Abbott promised to dom that must remain “subject to Western society might “crack down” on Hizb ut-Tahrir, powers and restrictions of govern- have no intention which is banned in some coun- ment essential to the preservation tries, it has not been proscribed and of the community” (Justice Rich) of assimilating. He the Turnbull government appears or “subject to [such] limitations … may even support to side with those in the security as are reasonably necessary for the establishment who argue it is best protection of the community and the Islamisation of to keep it legal. This is so even after in the interests of the social order” the host society. Hizb ut-Tahrir released a statement (Justice Starke). declaring that Australian Muslims This is particularly relevant in should refuse to partake in any of order to understand the present context of religious the government’s counter-terrorism programs and extremism. In a case before the Federal Court a initiatives, since it believes that co-operation with couple of years ago, the imam of a Lebanese- spy agencies in their fight against terrorism “is out- Australian mosque was refused a continuation of right haram” (forbidden). his temporary permit visa because he had openly Orthodox Islamic teaching informs that the encouraged extremism and violence against non- umma (the Muslim community) cannot be under- Muslims. The imam and several other members stood as a minority community within a modern of the mosque challenged the deportation order, state. Rather, the whole of humanity should follow arguing in part that it violated Section 116. The Full the way of Islam and become part of Dar-ul-Islam Court of the Federal Court correctly rejected this (the house of Islam) that will ultimately triumph argument. over the Dar-ul-Harb (the house of conflict or war). Turning to the landmark Jehovah’s Witnesses Neither of these “houses” is understood in terms of case, the High Court upheld government regula- nationality or ethnicity. Because the Dar-ul-Islam tions that purported to dissolve a religious organi- is a universal community that must eventually sation because of the detrimental effects that such encompass all the earthly governments, to have any preaching was said to have on morale. These regu- legitimacy governments ought to show “their sub- lations were challenged and the court held (three mission to Allah by contributing to the advance of to two) that the regulations were constitutionally Islam, typically by showing respect for the higher valid and that the religious organisation could be authority of Shari’a”. dissolved, at least for the duration of the war. The According to Dr Tariq Ramadan, a well-known judgment was based in part on an interpretation of Muslim scholar and grandson of Hassan al Banna, the defence power of the Commonwealth, demon- who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt strating the possibility of reducing religious free- in 1928, sharia “touches all the aspects of existence,

64 Quadrant October 2016 Religious Freedom and Muslim Terrorism from the intimately personal and spiritual, through Caldwell notes that public condemnation of terror- to the management of interpersonal relations at the ism by the Muslim community in Western societies societal level”. Such law does not allow for the pri- “has never been frequent or full-throated enough vatisation of faith and for leaving public governance to assure their fellow citizens”. According to law in the hands of “secular authorities”, because sharia professors Rex Ahdar and Nicholas Aroney, since comprises an all-encompassing “moral and pasto- September 11, 2001, ral theology and ethics, high spiritual aspiration, and detailed ritualistic and formal observance; it governments eagerly awaiting firm denunciations encompasses all aspects of public and private law, by Muslim community spokesmen of Al-Qaeda hygiene, and even courtesy and good manners”. terrorist attacks have been consistently In this sense, it is reasonable to assume that a disappointed … The extent to which this silence committed Muslim who migrates to a Western represents tacit acquiescence and support for the society might have no intention of assimilating into radicals remains a moot point. the host society. Professing “an all-encompassing way of life in which the whole of reality falls under Dr Abdullah Saeed may explain why this is the sovereignty of Allah”, such an immigrant will occurring. Dr Saeed is the Sultan of Oman Professor demand that “the host society must change in line of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of with their beliefs, or grant them separate rights and Melbourne, and he argues that, broadly speaking, privileges”. He may even support the Islamisation of Australian Muslim views fall into three different the host society through a process that might range categories. First, there are those Muslims who are from the hudna (a temporary truce) to identifying radical Islamists and so they completely reject any the occupied territory as being either a Dar-ul-Sulh compliance with the law of the land, reasoning that (the abode of peace by agreement) or a Dar-ul-Ahb “a Muslim cannot be bound by a national constitu- (the abode of covenanted treaty). Nonetheless, “it tion that allows interest, alcohol, and [any] other is still assumed that these territories and peoples behaviour which contradicts Islamic teachings”. are in tributary relationship to the Muslims”. As Second, there are those who are “undecided as to noted by Pakistani-born British Anglican bishop whether they want to be full members of Western Dr Michael Nazir-Ali: societies”. Such people are reluctant to recognise any law that violates sharia. Finally, there are The theory remains that Muslims should Muslims who seem quite happy to live in Australia either withdraw from the Dar-ul-Harb or, because they think the legal system in this coun- through jihad of one kind or another, seek to try is already “Islamic” enough, insofar as it accepts turn it into the Dar-ul-Islam ... The classical basic Islamic notions of justice and morality, and consensus seems to be that Muslims should not it allows the Muslim community to exercise their remain in the Dar-ul-Harb. Where exceptions religious duties in according to Islamic law. are made, it is demanded, for example, that Dr Saeed believes that most Muslims in they should be able to live as distinct and Australia fall into the third category; that is, they separate communities, and that they should be agree to respect Australia’s “secular law” and think able to have their own law, their own judges, it can be tolerated “provided … that the law of the and even their own governors. Further, they land supports [Islamic] notions of justice … and must not contribute to the wealth and strength allows Muslims religious freedom to practise their of a non-Muslim polity and should not serve fundamental beliefs”. The media and politicians in the military, especially against Muslims. also refer to such people as “moderate Muslims”. Nonetheless, as Daniel Pipes, a well-known expert One of the key questions facing Western socie- on Islamist ideology and President of the Middle ties is how the Muslim community will adapt to East Forum, points out: living as minority communities in non-Muslim polities. Most Australian Muslims are not radical Muslims present a disproportionally large Islamists trying to impose a totalitarian version of source of problems, as becomes clear when they their faith, but are law-abiding citizens who are just are compared with Hindu immigrants, who are trying to live their lives in peace. By definition, of roughly the same in number but generally fit course, “moderate Muslims” do not subscribe to quietly into the West. Violence is the headline the radical Islamist agenda. It is a pity, however, topic relating to Muslims, whether it’s large- that such people, perhaps out of fear of retalia- scale plots (Paris) or sudden jihad syndrome tion or because of sheer passivity, comprise a silent lone wolves (San Bernardino), but violence is majority of the Muslim community. Christopher hardly the whole problem. Muslim hostility

Quadrant October 2016 65 Religious Freedom and Muslim Terrorism

towards non-Muslims takes many other forms soil—the Lindt Café siege, the shootings of police such as teaching Islamic supremacism in accountant Curtis Cheng, and the stabbing of mosques, spewing anti-Semitism in the streets two police in Melbourne—were all carried out by and threatening anyone who dares to publicly Muslim immigrants who had successfully applied criticise Islam. Issues concerning women for refugee status. Islamic State’s most influential include female genital mutilation, honour recruiter in Australia, Muhammad Ali Baryalei, killings, polygyny and forced marriages. was a Muslim refugee that the government allowed Islamic mores lead to strong antipathies against to stay in the country. seeing-eye dogs, mixed swimming pools, and The problem is that we do not really know who homosexuals. to trust among a group of immigrant people who largely despise our democracy, culture and laws, and Pipes explains that, to deal with Muslim immi- who do not understand the principle of “separation gration in a responsible manner, Islamists should of powers”. As a matter of national security, John be legally prohibited from entering Western coun- Stone, a former senior public servant and senator, tries. In Pipes’s opinion, Muslims who embrace the recommends that the federal government “should Islamist ideology should not be allowed to immi- reduce, to the point of virtually halting, further grate because they seek to apply Islamic law, oppress Muslim immigrant inflow”. As he points out, “we women, and establish a worldwide caliphate. They are under no obligation to allow into Australia peo- make up, he says, about 10 to 15 per cent of the ple who are likely to form a distinct and alien group Muslim population. According to him, countries here”. Here it is worth reminding the words of the like Australia “should engage in serious research late Sir Harry Gibbs, formerly Chief Justice of the into all would-be visitors and immigrants, not the High Court of Australia: pro-forma review that prevails these days”. Doing so, Pipes concludes, “requires money and time as While it would be grossly offensive to well as creative inquiries to smoke out ideological modern standards for a state to discriminate proclivities, but each person entering the country against any of its own citizens on the grounds must be checked to make sure no Islamists are of race, a state is entitled to prevent the allowed in at all, even for brief visits”. immigration of persons whose culture is such that they are unlikely readily to integrate into he escalation of global tensions and, in par- society, or at least to ensure that persons of ticular, increasing tensions in the relationships that kind do not enter the country in such Tbetween Muslim and non-Muslim Australians may numbers that they will be likely to form a eventually force the Commonwealth to face Islamist distinct and alien section of society, with the teachings more squarely and to make the decision resulting problems that we have seen in the to ban the immigration of Islamists. There is indeed United Kingdom. a greater need for Australian governments, federal and state, to prioritise counter-terrorist policy and, In the United Kingdom, a study commissioned one would hope, to make this a bipartisan effort. by Policy Exchange reveals that four out of ten And if it eventually becomes less and less likely that young British Muslims wish to live under sharia the radical actions of this faction within the Muslim law. In answer to the question, “Do you think the faith can hardly be prevented because of the intrin- bombing attacks were justified or not?”, some 6 per sic nature of such a religious doctrine, probably the cent regarded them as “on balance” justified, while best way to reduce the risk of terrorism is by fur- another 6 per cent avoided the issue, responding ther tightening Australia’s immigration policy. Of “Don’t know”. Further, in answer to the ques- course, this would not be agreed to by the usual sus- tion, “Do you personally have any sympathy with pects of the radical Left. the feelings and motives of those who carried out The unspeakable terror in places as varied as the attacks?”, 24 per cent answered affirmatively, London, Nice, Orlando and Sydney underlines the with more than half of them expressing “a lot” of problem that no matter how small the percentage sympathy. Again, another 6 per cent took refuge in of radical Muslims, we can hardly tell who they are “Don’t know”. Finally, 13 per cent expressed open among the Muslims in our countries. Remarkably, sympathy to terrorist groups such as Hamas and of the twenty-one men already arrested and jailed Hezbollah. In answer to the question, “How loyal in this country for terrorist-related activities, twelve would you say you personally feel towards Britain?” were born overseas. Seven more were born in 16 per cent felt “not at all loyal” or “not very loyal”. Australia to Lebanese families. What is more, the According to Munira Mirza, one of the academics past three successful terrorist attacks on Australia’s conducting the survey:

66 Quadrant October 2016 Religious Freedom and Muslim Terrorism

the emergence of a strong Muslim identity Muslim immigration invariably provides a larger in Britain is, in part, a result of multicultural recruiting ground for terrorists and other Islamist policies implemented since the 1980s which militants. Consequently, the influx of asylum- have emphasized difference at the expense of seekers from dysfunctional majority-Muslim shared national identity and divided people countries and the constant influx of Muslim immi- along ethnic, religious and cultural lines. grants to Australia naturally exacerbate the threat of terrorism. Australia’s Muslim community, it is claimed, Given the continuing threat of terrorism, the is predominantly of a more moderate variety. Our need to recruit support from the Muslim popula- Muslim community, it is claimed, has a major- tion is increasingly stressed. Government agencies ity from Asian countries such as have been engaged in substantial Malaysia and Indonesia, where contacts with Australia’s Muslim the Muslim faith is apparently he text and structure community. This is a “difficult task exercised with moderation. But T … [that] has yet to reach successful the problem with such an argu- of the Constitution conclusion”, says Dr James Jupp of ment is that, before the attack on give rise to the general the Australian National University. the Lindt Café in Martin Place, According to him, “any official the closest threat seemed actually proposition that there attempts to consolidate Muslims to come from Indonesia’s Jemaah is an implied freedom behind counter-terrorism are likely Islamiyah, which was implicated to discuss religious to be frustrated in a welter of dif- in the Bali bombings. The group’s fering traditions and loyalties”. In spiritual leader, Abu Bakar matters openly, fact, the most troubling aspect of Ba’asyr, visited Australian nine particularly when counter-terrorist measures is the times from the mid-1990s, “with erratic behaviour of Muslim lead- the apparent object of creating a these matters involve ers who regularly preach hatred local network”. serious public interest. against “enemies of the faith” and Furthermore, a revealing 2004 who often excuse terrorism by survey by the Jakarta Post and blaming the West for supposedly Associated Press has shown significant support for inviting such attacks on innocent lives. However, radical Islam in Indonesia. It found, among other as Dr Ian Spry QC reminds us: things, that although “59 per cent of respond- ents disagreed with the attacks” carried out in There has been a tendency amongst left-liberal Bali, “16 per cent supported those attacks” and groups in the community to champion the a further 25 per cent “did not have an opinion”. cause of Moslems in Australia and to dismiss Further, the survey revealed that a large majority concerns about aggressive statements by some of Indonesians “support the establishment of laws Imams, the fact of Islamic terrorism in many based on the Koran”. Since Indonesia’s population parts of the world and specific threats by is around 250 million, of whom around 200 million terrorists that they will target Australia or are Muslims, it is therefore possible to argue that Australians. apparently about 30 million Indonesians support the Bali bombings. The Turnbull government seems lukewarm to the problem. It needs to take a much more effective ustralia has a population of approximately 24 stand against Muslim leaders who regularly preach million and around 500,000 of its people are hate and who refuse to unequivocally denounce Muslim.A The number of Muslims in this country terrorist advocacy within their religious circles. has risen dramatically over the last thirty years. The last electoral campaign coincided with a string Over 300,000 of them normally use Arabic at of terror raids and major terrorist attacks across the home. While security measures are not specifically globe. At no point did our Prime Minister use his directed against the broader Muslim community, authority to make the case to fight against radi- terrorists are, of course, drawn exclusively from cal Islam. Instead, Malcolm Turnbull refuses to this religious group. utter the terms “Islam” and “terrorism” in the same Needless to say, most Muslims are not terror- breath, probably because he believes that Islamic ists but, unfortunately, it is equally obvious that teaching is not the source of the problem and most terrorists consider themselves to be Muslims. that criticising the more troubling aspects of the Although jihadists are not drawn exclusively from Muslim religion can make the country less safe. the first-generation Muslim immigrants, a large Apart from revisiting misleading assumptions

Quadrant October 2016 67 Religious Freedom and Muslim Terrorism about the source of terrorist activity, and changing Allan, “this lack of a bill of rights is the most obvi- our immigration policy in order to protect Australia ous way in which the Australian Constitution dif- from religious extremism, other measures to be fers from the US Constitution”. After comparing adopted should include the repeal of all laws that this constitutional model with the American one, prohibit the strong criticism of religious doctrine. the late Australian constitutional lawyer W. Anstey This includes the ill-conceived and poorly drafted Wynes stated: Victorian Racial and Religious Tolerance Act (2001), which makes it a crime to voice any com- The performance of the Supreme Court of ment deemed “offensive” to a religious group. These the United States has become embroiled in laws create undue fear and intimidation among discussions of what are really and in truth people who simply wish to express their ideas and political questions, from the necessity of opinions. They are based on moral relativism and assigning some meaning to the various “Bill of they can be used as a weapon by Islamists to silence Rights” provisions. The Australian Constitution criticism of their radical beliefs by claiming that … differs from its American counterpart in a they, rather than their extreme beliefs, have been more fundamental respect in that, as the … attacked. This might also explain why so many Chief Justice of Australia [Sir Owen Dixon] Australians seem reluctant to join public the moral has pointed out, Australia is a “common law” conversation, seeming to fear what others and even country in which the State is conceived as their own government might do in return. deriving from the law and not the law from the State. ortunately, the constitutional validity of policies combating Islamist activity is greatly assisted Surely, one might say, people have the right to Fby the fact that, unlike other Western democracies, express their opinions without being bullied and Australia does not have a bill of rights. Some of the censored by those who don’t agree with them. If so, justifications for the absence of a constitutionally politically oriented speech that addresses the nega- entrenched bill of rights in Australia point to the tive implications of Islamist teaching must be easily historical context of its constitution-making which characterised as constitutionally protected speech was not, as compared to the United States, brought for the purposes of the implied freedom of political about by revolution against tyranny. One of the communication. Indeed, the text and structure of primary reasons why the Australian Constitution the Constitution give rise to the general proposition does not have a bill of rights is because the fram- that there is an implied freedom to discuss religious ers believed its insertion would conflict with the matters openly, particularly when these matters common-law tradition of inalienable rights to life, involve serious public interest. That being so, it is liberty and property, a concept they had inherited important to remember that religious freedom is from England. Hence, one Chief Justice of the High not an absolute right, and that the Australian gov- Court, Sir Anthony Mason, commented: ernment is constitutionally obliged to protect our community from any violent extremism. Our gov- the prevailing sentiment of the framers ernment is perfectly entitled to prohibit the immi- [was] that there was no need to incorporate gration of anyone who poses a threat to our national a comprehensive Bill of Rights in order to security, or who demonstrates a considerable disre- protect the rights and freedoms of citizens. gard for basic human rights and the protection of That sentiment was one of the unexpressed our democratic values. assumptions on which the Constitution was drafted. Dr Augusto Zimmermann is a member of the Law Reform Commission of Western Australia. He is Under the system of government created by the also Director of Post-Graduate Research at Murdoch Australian founders one proceeds on the assump- University School of Law and Professor of Law tion of full rights to life, liberty and property, and (Adjunct) at the University of Notre Dame Australia then turns to the positive law just to see whether (Sydney campus). He wishes to thank John Ballantyne there are any exceptions to the general rule of and Heath Harley-Bellemore for their suggestions and freedom for all. According to law professor James comments regarding the final draft of this paper.

68 Quadrant October 2016 Gary Furnell

Anxious Activists and Nature’s Essential Resilience

n spring 1919, farmers across Belgium and fecundity and ability to bounce back—and bounce northern France ploughed their fields for the back quickly—from disaster and depredation. first time in five years. Over the past four years Despite this obvious fact, the tearful environmental- Itheir fields had been subjected to repeated heavy ist, the artist concerned with the survival of the reef barrages, estimated in total at one tonne of high near his seaside villa, and the activist eager to sway explosive per square metre of the battlefield; the soil public opinion against coal seam gas all emphasise had been impregnated by poisonous gases includ- that the natural world is fragile and threatened— ing phosgene, mustard and chlorine gas; the farm- perhaps terminally—by man’s activities, even if ers’ fields had been extensively trenched; mines had those activities appear common or benign: clear- been dug, packed with explosives and then deto- ing land for houses, dredging a harbour, irrigating nated; woodlands and orchards had been destroyed, broad-acre crops, mining, growing an economy to the trees blown to shattered stumps and then, with provide jobs, or having children. We are bombarded the advent of tanks, farmland had been repeatedly with the view that if the natural world is to sur- traversed by heavy machinery. Despite all this envi- vive, then man must keep his grasping hands off ronmental devastation, the farmers sowed crops and nature’s delicate parts; man has no right to change within a few years the rich productivity of the region and manipulate what is considered a tenuous natural had returned. One hundred years later the produc- world to provide for human extension and amen- tivity of this land continues, although farmers are ity. At the very least, man must minimise his min- still unearthing dangerous gas and high-explosive ing, agriculture, manufacturing, lessen the spread of shells, such was the intensity of the destruction his infrastructure and reduce his population. In the unleashed on their fields. view of some people, it would be better for the earth In Nagasaki’s Urakami valley in 1945, hungry if man did not exist at all. survivors of the Tall Boy atomic bomb cleared the debris from their small allotments and planted bar- t is no surprise that the widespread environ- ley. The survivors hoped for a harvest to keep them mental awakening of the West in the 1960s and from starvation. There was no precedent for this I1970s followed the widespread influence of French crop, never before had seeds been sown into such and German existentialism in the 1940s and 1950s, uniquely baked, blasted and irradiated soil, but the because there is a vital connection between the barley grew and much-needed grain was gathered. doctrine that existence precedes essence—the core The catastrophes of the Western Front and of affirmation of existentialism—and the idea that Nagasaki occurred before the environmental awak- nature is fragile. For most of human history, the ening of the 1960s and 1970s, so the French and common presupposition was essentialist; that is, Belgian farmers and the Nagasaki survivors were people believed that essence preceded existence: the not familiar with the new and soon thereafter widely universe was the result of intention, a creation of popularised view that nature was fragile, always on deliberation and forethought through some divine the brink of irretrievable collapse and exhaustion agency. Broadly speaking, religions are essential- because of man’s activities. Instead, these farmers ist, as are most of the defining philosophies of the had found what every generation of humanity has Western tradition, including Platonism, Thomism found: nature is tough, with prodigious powers of and Hegelianism. recovery and fruitfulness. Since the Second World War, with the Observation and experience testify to the resil- championing of existentialism and the growth ience of the natural world, together with its immense from it of postmodernism, which shares the view

Quadrant October 2016 69 Anxious Activists and Nature’s Essential Resilience that existence precedes essence, existentialist or chaotic conception, so it can only ever be a matter presuppositions have determined the discourse of faith. It is with commendable honesty that each of the commentariat, secular universities and statement begins, “by faith”. It is an honesty which media. This dominance is now being violently is rarely practised, and as a consequence unconscious challenged. The church has long passively resisted dogmatists are often unable to understand the posi- the belief that existence precedes essence, but more tion of conscious dogmatists and in their frustration recently Islamists are challenging—with shootings seek to advance their agenda by manipulation via and suicide bombs—this central belief of the the media, ever more restrictive legislation, attempts postmodern West. It could be said that, in part, the at shaming and sometimes abuse. Again Chesterton intensifying clash of civilisations we are witnessing noted, “There is no end to argument if there is no today is a conflict between the relativist values of the understanding of beginnings.” existentialist West and the essentialist convictions While humanity is proclaimed to be free to make of Islam. and re-make ourselves (including human sexual These presuppositions are dogmas, but that is no identity), the contradiction is that this freedom does snide denigration. It is an honest acknowledgment not extend to the natural world: it must be left alone, that our presuppositions are matters of faith; it is preferably in a pristine condition. There is no basis best to admit that fact because it is for this call if existence precedes better to have a conscious faith that essence; it is an arbitrary absolute. can be articulated and discussed he secular world There seem to be vestiges of a vague than an unconscious faith that can’t T essentialism here, a leftover per- be articulated and discussed— decries the absolutes of haps of Hegel’s concept of a World and amended if necessary. G.K. religion as oppressive Spirit although now re-imagined Chesterton highlighted the value in the rainbow tie-dyes of Gaia. of consciously-held creeds. He said, and attempts to A consistent existentialist would “There are two kinds of people in “relativise the have no qualms about re-making the world, the conscious dogmatists nature as well as man: whatever is and the unconscious dogmatists. I absolutes” of other possible through genetic engineer- have always found myself that the faiths but then ing, for example, may be explored unconscious dogmatists were by far “absolutises the and exploited. H.G. Wells’s char- the most dogmatic.” acter Dr Moreau is the model for Three thousand years ago the relative” values of its a consistently existentialist view of divide between the presupposi- own faith. No coal. nature: we humans have evolved tion that essence preceded exist- to be powerful and manipulative, ence and the presupposition that No gas. No nuclear therefore might has given us the existence preceded essence, as they power. No whaling. right—and there is no authority to pertained to man’s nature, was artic- instruct us otherwise—to deter- ulated with stunning precision by mine nature’s non-given essence. the Hebrew psalmist: “It is He who made us: we And we can change it again if we want. A consistent did not make ourselves.” Nietzsche, postmodern- existentialist would not protest against GMO foods, ists and nihilist philosophers like Richard Rorty eugenics, vivisection or whaling. say the exact opposite: “He did not make us: we But the ardent environmentalists’ demand that make ourselves—and we can remake ourselves.” nature be left alone as much as possible is perhaps Two thousand years ago, the essentialist presuppo- only based in part on the leftover essentialism of sition as it pertained to all creation was stated: “By Hegel’s World Spirit; more likely it is panicky reac- faith, we understand that the things which are seen tion to the transitory view of nature inherent in the were not made by things which appear.” In other existentialist presuppositions of Darwinism. All we words, existence had a non-material, spiritual origin delight in and enjoy in nature, together with all that which we cannot currently see in direct action. we battle against (some bacteria and parasites, for By contrast, the modern secular presupposition example) is a product of chance and the competi- may be stated, “By faith, we understand that the tive purging of natural selection. According to this things that are seen were made by things which view, life on earth is freakish, a wondrous monstros- do appear.” According to this creed, reality is only ity in a universe that has so far shown no evidence physical and was made by physical processes that whatsoever of biological life elsewhere. The earth, are still discernible. However, no human was at humanity, the entire biosphere is in no way a prod- the origin of the universe to observe and verify the uct of choice but a product of chance. This formula nature and conditions involved in the initial creative is well known: we are the Cinderella planet that just

70 Quadrant October 2016 Anxious Activists and Nature’s Essential Resilience happened to have the right set of conditions for life since reason, forethought and choice are involved; to somehow, inexplicably, flower and develop. No moreover we see evidence of personal essence in the giver of essence was involved or remains involved, personhood of every human. only the existential conditions of chance and natural With this presupposition, we see the natural selection. world—and ourselves—as intended rather than To add to the existentialist’s anxiety, there is accidental. Things have an inherent value simply plentiful evidence of mass extinctions in the past because they have been brought into being. And even without the baleful influence of humans to part of the telos—the purpose that drives every liv- make things worse. And the universe is silent; ing thing—is the capacity to reproduce, to colo- it provides no guarantees of continued existence nise, to find niches, to thrive in good seasons and and does not speak to us with any guiding wis- to survive, as a species, adverse seasons. Life’s given dom. Troubling too is the fact that human wisdom essence is to be resilient, to adapt and to perse- has no unanimity and is in many ways problem- vere. Every farmer knows that nature is immensely atic. With no other responsible agency, saving tough; he must work hard to control the spread of all of this fragile life is, by default, if we want it, pest animals and weeds. If he neglects to control our responsibility. No wonder, given the convic- them, they flourish, colonise and spread. In ancient tion that existence precedes essence, that there is Rome, Horace observed, “Though you drive nature alarm and urgent calls for the flame of life to be away with a pitchfork, she is quick to return.” preserved at all costs; no wonder its being is seen Of course, not every species that ever existed as unbearably light and brittle. It is perceived as has survived. Immense, unique cataclysms, about contingent rather than intended; an unstable prod- which we can only speculate, wiped out dino- uct of chance rather than a stable entity born of saurs and the megafauna of the Pleistocene. This purposive deliberation. is a problem for the essentialist. We ask why many But the call to protect nature even at the expense things were given existence which no longer exist, of human amenity is itself another arbitrary abso- and we have to be content with mystery. The inex- lute; by what authority could such a call be made plicable features in the existential view of life are imperative? Why not let man do what he wants and matched by the inscrutable features of the essen- let natural selection sort out which species survive tialist view of life. There is, however, a big episte- and which do not? That, at least, is consistent with mological difference between what is inexplicable biological history. Indeed, if man is only another and what is enigmatic. Likewise, there is a sig- part of nature, why not consider his activities— nificant difference in seeing the natural world as some of them destructive—his natural behaviour? given and seeing it as contingent. Roger Scruton Instead, the existentialist seeks to “absolutise the highlights this in The Face of God: “There is surely a relative”, which is Kierkegaard’s descriptor of the great difference, which we all understand, between secular world’s inconsistent mode of thinking. It seeing something as just there (there for the taking) decries the absolutes of religion as oppressive and and seeing it as a gift.” attempts to “relativise the absolutes” of other faiths What is obvious is that the essentialist faith but then “absolutises the relative” values of its own expects that the intended natural world has—even faith. No coal. No gas. No nuclear power. No in the face of earth-shattering events—prodigious whaling. Do the activists with existentialist presup- powers of recovery. This potential is not expressed positions mean that these activities must be banned perfectly in every situation but it is still astounding. forever, no matter what the circumstances? It seems This does not condone treating the natural world they do, and if so they are demanding that we abso- with contempt, knowing that it can recover from lutise particular values which, on an existentialist’s almost any disturbance. After all, it is as intended as own basis, can only ever be relative. we are and, like us, shares a common essence. Thus, Francis of Assisi could call the sun his brother and he presupposition that existence precedes the moon his sister without lapsing into pantheism. essence is not the only basis for our under- Scruton observes, “By remaking human beings standingT of the reality that confronts us, or better, and their habitat as objects to consume rather than the reality that embraces us. The reverse of that for- subjects to revere we invite the degradation of both.” mula—that essence precedes existence—provides Thus, there is no basis consistent with essentialism the basis for a different view of reality, including for wanton abuse of nature; for example, by hunting environmental issues. At once, it appears that all the thylacine to non-existence. But when human that exists is the result of deliberation and deci- folly has greatly diminished the numbers of a sion; its essence is given. Here, I am assuming the species, as has often happened, but has stopped giver of essence and existence is personal essence the destruction, then the natural world shows its

Quadrant October 2016 71 Anxious Activists and Nature’s Essential Resilience fecundity and powers of recovery provided some radiation on animals was conducted. What became remnant habitat remains and the depredation ceases unexpectedly but immediately apparent was that or is greatly reduced. The increasing populations of with people removed, nature flourished. Biologists wolves, cougars and bison in North America, the have concluded that there is minimal evidence of increase of whales in every ocean, and the prevalence radiation effects on the flourishing animals. Now, of crocodiles in northern Australia are prominent populations of wolves, for example, are much higher examples of dramatic population increases in just than in other nature reserves in the region. Red a few decades from perilously low numbers. The eagles, otters, roe deer, elks, bears, moose, beavers, recovery is what an essentialist view of nature would stoats and owls are just some of the animals that are anticipate; it will not come as a surprise. increasing in numbers in what was thought to be a nuclear wasteland. Nature recovered so quickly and ature can recover despite both low num- to such an extent that ecotourism is an emerging bers and extremely hostile conditions. Bikini industry. NAtoll and Chernobyl both provide stunning and Scientists who examined Bikini Atoll and encouraging examples of the resil- Chernobyl delighted in the recovery ience and prodigality of nature. of nature, but the conclusion that At Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall f nature recovers was drawn in both cases was that Islands, twenty-three atomic bombs I humanity destroys nature, which were detonated on a tiny lagoon in prodigiously from otherwise prospers in our absence. only twelve years, from 1946 to extreme devastation, This is a justified conclusion, but 1958. One of the bombs, the Bravo it is not the only possible conclu- hydrogen bomb, was one thousand then we can pursue sion. Another conclusion, reflect- times more powerful than the Tall our necessary activities ing an essentialist expectation of Boy bomb dropped on Nagasaki. and many of our resilience—and much kinder to It vaporised three small islands in humanity—is that if nature recov- the atoll and created a crater two desirable activities— ers prodigiously from extreme kilometres long and over seventy with care—and devastation, then we can pursue metres deep. Temperatures in the our necessary activities and many lagoon were estimated to be 55,000 we don’t destroy of our desirable activities—with degrees Celsius. The coral reef eco- things forever. care—and we don’t destroy things system was obliterated. forever. There may be a season of Scientists were so concerned harm, but then there will be recov- about the radiation levels that it was decades before ery. Obviously, the shorter the season and the less they returned to study the lagoon. They expected the harm, the better. Prudence, good stewardship an underwater “moonscape”. What they found was and need rather than greed should be guiding prin- an underwater garden that Ringo Starr could have ciples, but activities including mining, broad-acre sung about. The reef ecosystem was extensive and irrigated farming, road-building, harbour-dredging, vibrant. Huge corals thought to take centuries to expanding the economy and having children can all develop had developed in only five decades. The proceed. devastated area, it is thought, was quickly colonised with the aid of currents from nearby reefs, although rian Coman identifies two streams of environ- some coral species requiring particular niche condi- mentalism. In significant ways, they represent tions have not yet been observed. Becological expressions of the two radically different It is common for environmental activists to faiths highlighted in this essay. What Coman calls oppose some development by crying that the forest/ “Resource ecology” is consistent with the presup- reef/groundwater system will be “ruined forever”. positions of essentialism, while “Radical ecology” is The evidence from nature itself is that this fear is consistent with the presuppositions of existential- unfounded: nature recovers if given the chance, ism. He writes: with relative speed, even after extreme disturbance. At Chernobyl, in 1986, a nuclear power plant Resource ecologists constitute the mainstream exploded, releasing radiation across Ukraine, forcing group since most governments espouse the basic the government to move over 100,000 people out of tenets of their ideas and they enjoy widespread a 2600-square-kilometre exclusion zone. Given the public support. Put simply, resource ecology chaos that followed the event and the collapse of the views the natural world in an anthropocentric Soviet Union, it was some years before any exten- manner, but seeks to place constraints on human sive survey of the effects of the blast and lingering use of natural resources.

72 Quadrant October 2016 Anxious Activists and Nature’s Essential Resilience

It sees humans as having certain obligations Every person sees the world according to what towards the natural world but those obligations they believe about it, especially about its origin. We are essentially to secure the present and future cannot see the world except through the particular well-being of humans, both in terms of the lens of our presuppositions. But we can be conscious maintenance or improvement of aesthetic of our presuppositions and the effect they have of values as well as the more basic, instrumental focusing attention on some features of the world requirements of natural resources (food and to the neglect of other features. And we can make water, clean air, etc.). our presuppositions a matter of careful thought and Radical ecologists completely reject the decision, although this already assumes that an notion of a human-centred cosmos and call essentialist agenda is the best one. Otherwise, we for fundamental changes in the way in which can leave them to chance and afterwards discover humans view their place in the natural order. where we are and what we’ve become. Drawing heavily on evolutionary theory, they Chesterton, an essentialist informed by Thomism, see humans as no more than intelligent apes said, “There is a time when we must firmly choose whose activity in nature since Paleolithic times the course we will follow, or the relentless drift of has been such as to “unhinge” them from the rest events will make the decision.” Our culture is drift- of the natural order in a way which is potentially ing towards a common but unconscious acceptance of disastrous, not only to themselves as a species, the existentialist presupposition, which has already but to the whole of the living world in general. shown evidence of a disturbing misanthropy. This [For radical ecologists] the transformation of drift gains much of its speed and sweeping momen- nature through human work is a wholly negative tum from a significant degree of misapprehension development, separating humans from the rest of and a state of chronic anxiety; and at the same time nature. They see the root cause of this separation it helps to reinforce these crippling conditions. as being a fatal dualism in which humans have set themselves apart from and above the natural Gary Furnell, a frequent contributor of fiction and order. non-fiction, lives in rural New South Wales.

At Reedy Creek

A cluster of reeds is stroked by the current’s whirl as if the greenish strands are being rinsed by the slim, cleansing hands of a skilful girl. The creek flows clear and quick; it has done since last winter’s rain and the coiffed reeds sway. Stripping, then tying back my tangled hair, I dive in deep to find the bed of clay. It’s slippery smooth to hold so I work with care, digging out the lumps of precious stuff. Arranging the clay along the bank, I knead it into rounded forms: when set in a rough design, they soon resemble loaves of bread; such little loaves, all bluey-grey and white, dense yet luminous in all this watery light.

Suzanne Edgar

Quadrant October 2016 73 Peter R. Cly ne

Terrorism and the Battle for Language

consolation of getting older is that it comes onto the victim. Thus the victim looks at himself with memory. Older people can remember (or herself) as the problem, not at the real enemy. events for which younger ones depend on It’s an excellent strategy for the attacker. If you can Awhat they read and what they are told. And what hit someone and then convince that person it was we read and what we are told is under the control really their fault, why, you have it made. of those who are doing the writing and the talking. The first battle for people’s values, attitudes and Thus can reality be manipulated. That manipula- understanding is to capture the language. This is tion, which is a manipulation of values, attitudes not too small a victory. The consequence for the and understanding, starts with the manipulation victim is profound and treacherous. The spoils of and control of language. war are the understanding of who is the perpetrator Which brings me to terrorism. But before that ... and who is the victim. Thus, victory for the terror- What follows here may appear to some to be ist is role reversal. The terrorist becomes the victim far too subtle for its own good—too tangential and the victim deserves everything that is coming to be relevant, perhaps disconnectedly academic, to him (or her). a conspiracy theorist’s thought-bubble, or even Active voice is replaced by the passive. The paranoid. Think not. None of this is novel. It has terrorist is not bad, he or she is “radicalised”. all been done before, only very few of us are old “Radicalisation” is done to the terrorist—the ter- enough to have a personal memory of it. rorist is the victim of this “radicalisation”. Back to terrorism ... But how could this happen to such a hapless, A victim who survives or witnesses an atrocity, vulnerable, “disaffected”, individual? ’Twas the vic- in the face of the confusion of injustice and unrea- tim that done it: the victim has made the terrorist sonableness, searches for some form of meaning unhappy, existentially lost, vulnerable to evil per- because, without meaning, the victim is left with suasion. The terrorist—now the victim—is a radi- existential nothingness. (By the way, to encourage calised pawn who is not responsible for the suicide spiritual nothingness in their doomed Jewish vic- belt he or she carries onto the school bus. The ter- tims, concentration camp guards would routinely rorist has become the victim; the terrorist’s victim reply to their question “Why?” with the devastat- has become the problem. ing answer “There is no ‘why’.”) That’s clever. Meaning requires a notion of cause and conse- But this alone will not work because it is not quence. The victim needs to know: “How did this enough. It is not convenient that, whenever the happen?”, “Who did this to me?” or “Why did they media report an attack by a terrorist, we see in our do this to me?” Out of this needy, confused vul- mind a masked, anonymous, heartless murderer. So nerability may squirm any form of serpent from a do terrorists not make convenient victims because Medusa’s head of reassuring beliefs: “They are evil” they are too nasty? Well, no worry, that can be fixed! or “I deserved it”, “I made them do it” or “It’s divine Let’s just make the enemy not the terrorist but the punishment”, and so on. Any of these explanations, terror we feel between attacks as we walk through or perhaps some other, if reinforced by some con- the shopping mall, down to the underground, and venient intellectual or emotional scaffolding, even onto the plane. Our emotion (within ourselves), not if tenuous, will give the victim a handle to attach the terrorist, is what we must overcome, not the necessary meaning to existential confusion. murderous assassin with the knife or the gun or Such an insidious hissing serpent is the redi- the bomb. So now we, the victims, are the problem. rection of causality away from the perpetrator and That’s not just clever. It is very clever.

74 Quadrant October 2016 Terrorism and the Battle for Language

The job is done. The enemy is within ourselves ordinary, everyday language. and the attacker is not responsible for what he or she Game, set, match. And we did it to ourselves. is doing. We believe it and we preach it. It becomes part of political correctness. And it becomes part of Peter R. Clyne lives in Sydney.

Ready or Not

Jump, jump, ready or not! Your bro is in the doghouse, your daddy is a nut. Jump, jump, know you’re alive both now and in nineteen fifty-five. At some still point of ’50’s toddlerhood I watched the agile fingers of Miss Wood mint piano notes to flood our dour school hall, then strew them tumbling in their free-for-all. She lined us up and had us sing a song. Is tunelessness a kind of moral wrong? She poised her ear beside my churning bouche tilted her pretty eyebrow, bade me hush. Sing, sing, you’re out of key! Your daddy is a chimpanzee, And you must feel you’re one-of-the-crowd … but Sweet, don’t speak that need too loud. The pipers surged from childhood like a wave their kilts and sporrans swaying like sea-kelp, drum-major hurling high his gleaming stave, and petit-moi too drowned in skirl for help. First music here, the musketry of drums, bass drummer apronned in his leopard skin, and pipers with their urgent sonar plumes creating turmoil that my life was in. Coming, coming, ready or no. Your hidey-holes are where you’ll grow. Here’s Mister Snot behind the door, some petit moi who’s sixty-four!

Alan Gould

Quadrant October 2016 75 Other Worlds

A neanderthal handprint, eons old marks the cave wall an understanding of time, some idea of the seasons, a future to make the darkness visible like Bede’s lone sparrow, flying securely from the lit-up meadhall into this unknown silence; the parallel sighting of a bird of paradise its ruddy plumes aflame destined to vanish into the mass of green. Inbuilt, this need for some afterword: De Quiros in another century voyaging towards the South Land his vision and obsession; William Lane’s utopian dream a new-world colony in Paraguay Nueva Australia, then Cosme, further south. Mormon settlers crossed the Mojave desert in search of salvation and a promised land. The seed vault of icy Longyearbyen was built to preserve a food-store’s DNA for 20,000 years if galaxies or climates don’t collide. New worlds swim into our sight like hedgerow prominences on the sun, we need the “glint” or rainbows from their oceans the sign of water in their atmosphere. Kepler 438b is one of these, 475 light years away perhaps our “twin”, a double indemnity? I dream a transit life, the air (blue, or a shade thereof) is filled with plastic drones (like particle bubbles) collecting information. Thinking to move to where the grass (if it exists) is greener, to a galactic urban sprawl beyond the crowded CBD? Get in before the rush.

Margaret Bradstock

76 Quadrant October 2016 BOOKS, ARTS & LIFE

Choosing Our National Shirt Peter Costello

Only in Australia: The History, Politics, and shirt for the finance ministers and a Driza-Bone for Economics of Australian Exceptionalism the leaders. edited by William Coleman Driza-Bone boasts that for over 110 years it has Oxford University Press, 2016, 320 pages, been part of Australia’s rural heritage. Both it and $69.95 the R.M. Williams brand are part of the bushman legend. Australians, according to this view of our- have a cupboard full of national costumes at selves, live on a vast and forbidding continent which home. They are garments I picked up at APEC has shaped us to be tough, resourceful and inde- Iministerial meetings over more than a decade. I pendent—people like R.M. Williams—who can have a batik shirt from Indonesia, a Chinese silk make coats from ship sails and riding boots tough smoking jacket, a barong shirt from the Philippines, enough to tame the brumby. a Canadian ice hockey jacket and many others. Each It was not only a case of decking out the min- was custom tailored and given to me to wear for an isters to look uniquely Australian that stole so official APEC photo. I guess the idea is to empha- much of our officials’ attention. It was also neces- sise the unity of the APEC region. After the meet- sary to put on distinctive national entertainment ing the costume is yours to take home. But what to for them to enjoy at the official dinner when they do with them? were decked out in our national clobber. I set on When it came time for Australia to host APEC, a singer who, we thought, would be distinctively our officials spent as much time thinking about how Australian and asked him to sing a distinctively we would deck out the ministers in distinctively Australian song. It was John Williamson and the “Australian” costumes as was spent on any other part song was “True Blue”. of the ministerial meeting. Not only did we have to think about what an Australian costume would True Blue, is it me and you look like but we had to find one that was made in Is it Mum and Dad, is it a cockatoo Australia. Imagine the glee of the press if it turned Is it standin’ by your mate when he’s in a fight out that Australia’s national costume was made in Or just Vegemite China! In the end we opted for an R.M. Williams True Blue, I’m asking you

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Hey True Blue, can you bear the load a constitutional descriptor of “Australianness”. Will you tie it up with wire Ironically it was the Left of politics that refused to Just to keep the show on the road accept it in the wording of the proposed preamble Hey True Blue and the electorate, mostly for conservative reasons, Hey True Blue, now be fair dinkum that voted the referendum down.

Is your heart still there his book consists of chapters written by thir- If they sell us out like sponge cakes teen distinguished authors who each write Do you really care aboutT something that makes Australia exceptional Hey True Blue … or different. Geoffrey Blainey sees it in the rising of the seas that cut the country off from land bridges What I did not know then, or rather what I had and isolated it from the rest of the world. William not conceptualised in my thinking, was that: Coleman sees it in electoral idiosyncrasies like the secret ballot and compulsory voting. But if there There are several contrary diagnoses of is a common theme linking all the contributions the condition that lies beneath Australian about what makes Australia exceptional (different) exceptionalism. The most popular turn on it is the large role played by the state and the affin- the alleged slightness of vertical relations ity (despite what they might say) that Australians (“egalitarianism”) and the supposed thickness of have for it. horizontal ones (“mateship”) ... J.R. Nethercote discerns in Australia a “tal- ent for bureaucracy”, Phil Lewis and Peter Yule and write in different ways about Australia’s extraor- dinary regulation of industrial relations, Jonathan Why these social arenas were atrophied or Pincus describes the state development of railways hypertrophied was typically then traced … [to] as “socialism in six colonies”, Adam Creighton ... either an enduring physical reality, or some describes Australia’s system of compulsory superan- cultural legacy of Australia’s historical origins. nuation as “extreme paternalism”, Richard Pomfret finds that the state acquiesces in a paternalistic I had not thought about this question of structure of sports administration. In an interest- “Australianness” in such a penetrating way because ing exploration of the difference between the grain the book Only in Australia had not yet been writ- trade in North America and Australia, Nick Cater ten and I had not had the advantage of reading finds that Australian agribusiness has been made it, in particular William Coleman’s own chapter, weak by its bureaucratic development. “Theories of Australian Exceptionalism”, which I The writers would mostly agree with W.K. have just quoted. Hancock who in his seminal work Australia (1930) John Williamson is a country boy who sings in a wrote: broad country accent. His song might be reflecting the fact that an era of reliable and honest characters Australian democracy has come to look upon (like the people you find in the country) is passing the State as a vast public utility whose duty it is and it is strong on the mateship theme. We’re all in to provide the greatest happiness for the greatest this together—me, you, Mum, Dad—and there is a number … to the Australian, the State means chance that “they” will sell us out like sponge cake. collective power at the service of individualistic That’s the thing about being True Blue—as if “rights”. Therefore he sees no opposition it isn’t hard enough to battle the land—someone is between his individualism and his reliance upon always liable to get you. It might be the bosses or Government. it could be those economic rationalists deregulat- ing orderly price schemes or it could be the British Many of the authors cite Hancock, and Henry High Command sipping tea at Suvla Bay. That’s Ergas has an intriguing chapter comparing why you need your mates. Hancock’s Australia with Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Mateship” feeds easily into ideas of fraternity Democracy in America. It should be remembered and socialism. But it is not the exclusive preserve that Hancock was critical of this overweening state. of the Left. When John Howard wanted to insert He also saw the obsession with “fairness” as hold- a preamble into the Constitution in 1999, the word ing the country back. he cherished most was mateship. Had his preferred Where does this Australian belief in government preamble been adopted, and had the referendum come from? Some see it as the legacy of government succeeded, “mateship” would have been raised to settlement, the fact that it was not individuals who

78 Quadrant October 2016 Books led the migration of the eighteenth century but a an economic role model today. government mission which made settlers reliant on But with the resumption of competent govern- government from the earliest days. For others it is ment, can we resume the drive to make Australia the fateful political “settlement” of Australia’s first competitive and prosperous? Could that become decade of government entrenching protection, arbi- the norm once again? Or have we reverted to type? tration and White Australia. Was the period of economic reform an aberration? The original settlement and the Deakinite set- Was it a short period of exception to the exception? tlement soon after Federation are historical events Has the country gone back to the way it always that no doubt influenced the country. They made it was? different at the time. But are they so important, so This is the interesting question that hovers over overwhelming, that their legacy will always reside this book. Coleman is quite pessimistic: in the Australian soul? Will Australians forever be disposed to look to the state to solve individual Australia is the country that won’t move on, problems? which is stuck in its way. Australia is not My experience as Treasurer for nearly twelve the world’s “social laboratory”; it is a sacred years was that we had shaken off a great deal of grove dedicated to the dogged observance of that secretly harboured lust for big government. By customary gods. 2007 spending was down to 23 per cent of GDP, one of the lowest in the OECD, our tax and spend Like Coleman I feel pessimistic but I do not feel ratios were significantly below the US, our govern- hopeless. The customary gods can be challenged ment had no net debt. When the doors closed at the and exposed like the prophets of Baal on Mount meetings of the IMF, G-20, APEC and OECD, Carmel. But they need to be challenged. Australia would generally be recognised as a leader Spending is currently 25.8 per cent of GDP. It on economic reform because we had a track record was increased as a “temporary measure” in response of success. In its 2004 Economic Survey of Australia to the financial crisis of 2008. The big-government the OECD said: cheer squad, of course, says it cannot be cut. They want to entrench this spending permanently. But if In the last decade of the 20th century, it is to be pared back, they say, it can only be done Australia became a model for other OECD “fairly” if taxes are commensurately raised, that is, countries in two respects: first, the tenacity the price for reducing what was to be a temporary and thoroughness with which deep structural increase in spending will be a permanent increase reforms were proposed, discussed, legislated, in tax. The effect will be to lock in a new, perma- implemented and followed-up in virtually all nent, higher base for both. markets, creating a deep-seated “competition None of these advocates pays any attention culture”; and second, the adoption of fiscal to the effect higher taxes have on an economy. and monetary frameworks that emphasised They seem to think that a cut in spending and an transparency and accountability and increase in tax amount to the same thing. In fact in established stability-orientated macro policies the Orwellian world of Canberra a tax rise is now as a constant largely protected from political described as a budget “save”. debate. Together, these structural and It would be bad enough if that happened— macro policy anchors conferred an enviable a slight expenditure reduction for a slight tax degree of resilience and flexibility on the increase—but as the experience of the Abbott gov- Australian economy. The combination resulted ernment has shown, the Coalition, after delivering in a prolonged period of good economic a tax rise by increasing the top marginal tax rate performance that shrugged off crises in its main to 49 per cent, was dudded on the quid pro quo. trading partners as well as a devastating drought The Opposition parties refused to deliver expendi- at home. ture cuts. So the Abbott government hiked income taxes for no return. Incidentally, the increase in In 2006 Australia was invited to the G-8 income tax was one that the Opposition never had Finance Ministers Summit in St Petersburg to lead the courage to advocate on its own and certainly a discussion on good governance in public finance. never had the capacity to deliver in government. That had never happened before—or since. The Coalition, the custodian of lower tax, can deliver tax rises if it abandons its traditional posi- hings today are different from the way they tion. In this cause it can always count on Labor were a decade ago. We have had a period of support. Labor, the custodian of higher spend- Tbad government. No one would consider Australia ing, can deliver expenditure restraint if abandons

Quadrant October 2016 79 Books its traditional position. In that cause it can usually purple bougainvilleas lining the streets almost count on the Coalition. Leaving aside the cross- distracted one from the grand houses that stood bench, if Labor stands by its traditional constitu- behind them—all within walking distance of ency and the Coalition deserts it, then what we end the best churches (preferably Anglican), the best up with are higher taxes to match higher spend- schools (predominantly Protestant), “and axiomati- ing. The Coalition becomes the facilitator of higher cally, the best people”. taxes. It can’t be done without them. And there is a As Sandra’s best and oldest friend, the spirited very clever move to out-marshal them. Lucy, put it: Take industrial relations. Our union movement represents fewer employees than ever—around 11 I can’t believe how restricted it was: everything; per cent in the private sector—and yet the “Fair religion, schools, suburbs, colour, sex and Work Act” intrudes into every workplace and place money. The last is the same though, money. of business—even volunteer firefighting. No one That’s important, but the rest ... We were identifies this as a systemic failure. more like conscripts, compulsorily enrolled The advocates of big government seem to be in in marriage by our teachers, our parents and the ascendancy. But the costs are rising and the society itself. country will have trouble paying the bill. A book like this gives a perspective to these The mention of parents calls up the book’s issues. Times have been worse. And history ebbs colossus—Sandra’s late father. “Daddy”—patriarch, and flows. With good leadership things can get patrician, plutocrat, prophet—saturates almost better. every page; his pronouncements and prejudices So this is a stimulating book of scholarly work. have always provided unquestioning reassurance I congratulate all the authors, and especially the and comfort to Sandra until she begins to navigate editor, on an important contribution to Australian a mid-life crisis through a haze of disenchantment history and life. Only in Australia is an exceptional and chardonnay. Where does she belong? book on exceptionalism. We Australians have always been squeamish about discussing class. It challenges our egalitar- This is the speech with which The Hon. Peter Costello ian ethos, and is an affront to our much-prized launched Only in Australia last month at Berkelouw notion of mateship. But as the Melbourne writer Books in Leichhardt. Thornton McCamish has put it, “Australian society has more layers than a MasterChef gateau.” In his very readable study in 1997, Class in Australia, Craig McGregor unabashedly insisted that class existed in Australia, that it still mattered, and that it deter- Mark McGinness mined people’s lives and futures. McGregor argued that “class is not just a matter of snobbery, which There Must Be More to Life is merely stupid; it is a matter of ‘the right to rule’. And who has it.” The editor of the Age from 1979 to Belvedere Woman 1981, English-born Michael Davie, in his absorbing by Ian Callinan Anglo-Australian Attitudes (2000), wrote of a slice of Arcadia, 2016, 212 pages, $29.95 Australian society with a social yearning

he year is 1975 and Sandra Rentle, the sub- along English lines that would set them apart ject of Belvedere Woman, Ian Callinan’s tenth from the Aussie “gidday mate” rabble. The novel,T is facing her fiftieth birthday. Claire, the yearning reveals itself in snobbery and social local dress-shop owner, probably sums her up best: rituals that pop up in, for instance, Sydney’s “there was still something disarmingly young about Eastern Suburbs, the Adelaide Hills, or Mrs Rentle ... poor, spoilt, slightly stupid, slightly Melbourne’s South Yarra and Toorak. rich, snobbish Mrs Rentle, a nice woman, adrift, victim of her upbringing, struggling to get away He might have added, although the southern from it all”. states would have regarded it as risible, Brisbane’s And what she wants to flee is five decades in Ascot and Hamilton (undoubtedly the models for Thirlmere Street in Belvedere—at the centre of Belvedere). an enclave of twenty or thirty blocks, north of the In 1974, the country was shocked to read Dr Ron Brisbane River, where the brilliance of the purple Wild’s study of a lightly disguised Bowral, which jacarandas, the red poincianas, and the red and revealed a town as socially stratified as any town

80 Quadrant October 2016 Books in the Home Counties. Bradstow: A Study of Status, which I don’t think has been done before Class and Power in a Small Australian Town was in any detail: Australian writers don’t seem published the year before the setting of Belvedere to have considered it aesthetically desirable Woman, revealing a hierarchy that would have been to write about the rich … At least with the familiar to Sandra and de rigueur for Daddy. rich, who are slightly more cosmopolitan, Wild had spent nearly four years living in one can get away from what is referred to the Southern Highlands town studying its 1635 as “the Australian image”, which no longer households and 5210 people. He identified six interests me. status groups: first, the descendants of old grazing families and those who had been enriched by As Kerryn Goldsworthy observed in The mid-nineteenth-century industrial capitalism; Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature: second, the Grange-ites—Pitt Street farmers, professionals, plutocrats from the city, living in the Satirical representations of the hated Grange with large houses, manicured lawns and suburbs with their Bakelite telephones and elaborate gardens. These two groups would have pink chenille bedspreads disappear and are been Daddy’s sort of people. Next came the local replaced [in White’s later fiction] by a far bosses and self-made men of business; socially more complex set of representations of urban unacceptable to the graziers and Grange-ites. Sydney. Fourth and fifth came the skilled manual workers and small shopkeepers; and then the semi-skilled The days of rural Dogwoods and Sarsaparilla tradesmen (40 per cent of the town’s population). were behind him. Goldsworthy also observes: Finally, in a heap (constituting 4 per cent of the town) were the unskilled and unemployed; known White’s preoccupation with class difference contemptuously as “the no-hopers”. and with the triumph of individual genius or The general reaction to Bradstow was that it was virtue over class origins, for example, impels a comical freak of a town. The Bulletin observed, him to rewrite Cinderella three times in a “Fortunately Australia as a whole is not so stuffy row: first in The Vivisector, then in The Eye of and rigidly compartmented as Bradstow.” Callinan’s the Storm, and finally in A Fringe of Leaves. Belvedere certainly is and, although his novel is a In all of these novels the main characters work of fiction, it is also a roman à clef. His Belvedere are pulled free of humble class origins by did exist in Brisbane. Perhaps some of it still does. mediocre people of a higher class who sense, The extraordinary aspect of Bradstow (Bowral) is and want to possess by marriage or adoption, that a re-examination twenty-five years later by aca- their superior qualities. demics Drew Cottle and Helen Masterman-Smith (a 1997 journal article titled “Bradstow Revisited”) In his letter, White did acknowledge the work observed no significant changes to the town’s social of Martin Boyd, but by way of exception—Boyd’s structure. While the focus of Callinan’s novel is upper-class focus was on Melbourne. Boyd’s ele- narrower—a suburb rather than a country town— gant Langton tetralogy—The Cardboard Crown, A one should not be surprised to find that the bastions Difficult Young Man, Outbreak of Love and When of Belvedere would still stand largely un-breached Blackbirds Sing—published over a decade between in 1997. 1952 and 1962, covered a century in the life of a family. Modelled on his own kin, the à Becketts ne of the catalysts for Callinan’s writing and the Boyds, it is a picture of a well-to-do Belvedere Woman was the paucity of Australian Anglo-Australian family in love, at war, at rest and Ofiction about the upper classes. It is true, there have play—but rarely at work. Although Boyd’s inter- been few. In 1957, Elizabeth Harrower produced est was more about the individual than in social Down in the City, a striking novel, set in 1940s groups, he occasionally gave way to a satiric aside. Sydney, about Esther Prescott, another young He deplored the public school myth: upper-middle-class woman, who had spent her whole life in closeted isolation in prosperous Rose To [our parents], school was simply something Bay. Until, that is, her marriage—to a Kings Cross you made use of, like a shop, and the idea that crook. grew up with the nineteenth-century middle- In 1969, more than a decade later, Patrick White class, that one derived social standing from a wrote to a friend about his soon-to-be-published school, had not reached them. They would have novel The Vivisector. White observed that he was thought it as absurd to expect to derive social writing about the Sydney plutocracy: importance from their dentist.

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He was also not above the occasional swipe. because they’re always complaining they In A Difficult Young Man he sketched a withering never meet people … Sandra and I could see portrait of an Australian social climber, Miss they were thrilled to bits. I honestly don’t Barbara Stanger of Moonee Ponds. understand girls who get homesick in London. Boyd’s Langtons tended to live in a cosmos of There’s so much to do in our flat you never get their own—a little like Galsworthy’s Forsytes— time to think, and Patsie’s mother sends us big and, like Boyd himself, never quite at home any- airmail parcels of the Women’s Weekly and the where—in Melbourne, London or the Home Bulletin supplement, so we never really think Counties. The inhabitants of Callinan’s Belvedere we’re out of things. have their own world too—those twenty or thirty blocks that define them; but they have none of In his inimitable way, Humphries has Debbie the Anglo-Australian restlessness prattle off no fewer than fifteen of the Langtons. They are content fellow Melburnians (including in their privileged enclave. And allinan is at his Jocelyn, Ailsa, Monica and Val; so was Sandra—were it not for C Miggs and Margery, Miriam and Dan Bencham, the clever, ambi- sardonic best. Yet the Shirl) boarding or disembarking tious, state-school boy from the mocking is wry; a from nine of the ships which plied south side (a suburb Sandra had the route between Australia and never heard of called Creekdale), model of restraint. Southampton—from the Aurelia a fitter-and-turner’s son, who from He has observed and the Fairsky to the Orcades and the day he met her, aged four- this world from the the Southern Cross. But not before teen, at dancing class, declared his shopping—and here the Master undying devotion. Dan was really edges—and from the puts his finely tuned social anten- Patrick White’s noble figure of centre—all his life. nae to use: “Alwyn; she’s a phys- modest origins who could rescue ed instructress … also insisted on Sandra and make her better. buying a box of Sheffield grape- In one of his impassioned pleas, Dan says to fruit spoons. Quite nice, but a bit Mrs Everage I Sandra: thought.” Debbie ends her monologue with: “It’s funny We’re two young people living in unimportant to think I’ll be back in Melbourne in such a short suburbs in a little city thousands of miles from time. I don’t know what I’ll do. It’ll be all so dif- anywhere or anything that counts and I love ferent.” That stultifying provincialism was a mark you. That’s what we have in common. What of the time. divides us is a ridiculous misunderstanding by your parents and their friends about who they allinan’s Sandra also joined that privileged are and what they mean, here, or anywhere clique. Daddy still called England home else. That illogical, dying, anachronistic, Calthough his forebears hadn’t lived there for more unforgivable social snobbery should divide than a century. Of course she met a cricketer on us now, in the most egalitarian country in board the Oriana between Perth and Colombo—a the western world, will be scoffed at in a few member of the Second Australian Cricket Team. years. As the waspish Lucy snapped, “Second at cricket; Second Eleven socially.” Len Steer had told Sandra Boyd’s swipe at Moonee Ponds recalls Barry he was “in timber”. “Have you looked at his hands Humphries’s best-known suburban icon, Dame and fingernails?” shot back Lucy; “I bet he’s a car- Edna, but one of his forgotten gems was selected penter’s apprentice.” Nothing came of this flirta- from a higher register. “Nice upper-middle-class” tion, nor of her time abroad. She was soon home Debbie Thwaite (recorded in a falsetto monologue and engaged—it was inevitable—to Jack, a doctor. in 1960) is a type of Australian girl Humphries kept Daddy had reservations about Mummy’s (his meeting in London at the end of the 1950s: “Often rather genteel wife, Dawn’s) unqualified embrace they succeeded in returning to Australia—always of the medical profession: by steamer, in that far-off epoch—without having once met an English person.” Here is Debbie: There had been a time, he told her, when doctors, although they were received in society, Last Friday night Bev brought home a we’re not really part of its inner circle. Just terrifically sweet couple from Geelong and because you need a dentist does not mean you we invited the two Sydney girls from upstairs had to mix with them socially.

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But Jack’s family lived in Belvedere, only a few there may still be a happy outcome: the author streets from Sandra, and his father was a member should have more time at his desk. of the Club so Daddy was prepared to allow the match. The distractions of the nurses, the rowing Mark McGinness wrote on Evelyn Waugh in the club and cards had slowed Jack’s completion of April issue. “med-sn” (to have heard medicine pronounced with three syllables would have given anyone away as an upstart in this circle; not to be entrusted with one’s life; and certainly not to be received socially). But: “It was no impediment to his halting progress that James McCann the Professor of Surgery had been nominated as a member of the Club by Jack’s father.” No Need to Apologise, Alas Jack becomes a fashionable obstetrician and gynaecologist. Known as Peter Pan by his The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo colleagues, he becomes a passionate jogger and by Amy Schumer a dedicated adulterer. The now loveless marriage HarperCollins, 2016, 336 pages, $29.99 had produced an estranged daughter (who blames her mother for her own disastrous marriage) and a few years ago, Amy Schumer was a success- nice, introverted son (who disappointed his father ful comedian. More recently, she has become by becoming an accountant). By the mid-1970s, someA sort of feminist messiah. Her tweets, inter- they are in their twenties and no longer living views and public sightings send the pop-culture at home. Sandra’s sumptuous empty nest is even press into a frenzy of adoration. Last year, while emptier, and she looks back to Dan. her popularity was exploding, she managed to Does she, can she, shake off the habits and renegotiate the advance on her autobiography from prejudices of a lifetime and leave Belvedere for $1 million to a record breaking $8 million. Dan? In this—although his tenth published novel, Sadly, the most interesting, controversial moment it was the first that he wrote—Ian Callinan is in Amy Schumer’s career isn’t covered at all in The at his sardonic best. Yet the mocking is wry; a Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo. Last year, shortly model of restraint. He has observed this world before the much anticipated release of her debut from the edges—and from the centre—all his life. feature film Trainwreck, the Guardian published an What is extraordinary is that this leading Queen’s op-ed accusing Schumer of racial insensitivity. She, Counsel and retired High Court judge—now in apparently, had “a shockingly large blind spot around his seventies—can carry a novel like this. race”, habitually telling jokes like: “Nothing works Daddy’s proclamations and pre-war perspectives 100 per cent of the time, except Mexicans”, which are, of course, conveyed with aplomb, but that delved “into racial territory tactlessly and with no Callinan has been able to sustain a life story, and apparent larger point”. Via Twitter, Schumer was an intimate one at that, through the eyes of a quick to defend her work: woman is remarkable. He has accomplished this before—with Cecily Towne, another Queensland Stick with me and trust me that I’m joking. I go daughter of privilege, and the protagonist in his in and out of playing an irreverent idiot. That seventh novel, Betrayals. But he has not simply includes making dumb jokes involving race. You replicated Cecily in Sandra. Sandra is no match for can call it a “blind spot for racism” or “lazy” but the clever Cecily. Sandra’s snobbishness and simple you are wrong. It is a joke and it is funny … I acceptance of all that Daddy stood for should make am not going to start joking about safe material. her contemptible. But perhaps her lack of intellect, her level of self-awareness and her husband’s The Guardian piece was, of course, a hatchet indifference make her vulnerable and make one job. Jokes were taken out of context and deliber- wish for a happy ending. ately presented in an unfavourable light. The joke Judges, even retired judges, are immune to cited above is actually just a fragment in a longer popular opinion; bound to honour an obligation routine. I am loath to explain the point of the to pronounce the truth. In exposing the foibles original joke, since nothing is quite so dull as the of post-war Belvedere (yes, I know, it is now at dissection of humour, but here goes: after saying least four decades ago, but patrician memories “except Mexicans”, Schumer pauses, and waits are elephantine), Ian Callinan may find for the audience’s uncomfortable response. In the fewer invitations finding their way from his video you can hear, if not booing, then at least an contemporaries north of the Brisbane River. But “ooh-ing” noise. “That’s the one, right?” she says,

Quadrant October 2016 83 Books acknowledging that a line has been crossed. “‘Boo, are usually reversed. Anchorman, for instance, scores Mexicans!’, I hear you! You guys are preaching to 66 per cent and 86 per cent respectively, and Happy the choir.” This second part of the joke is delivered Gilmore, 60 per cent and 85 per cent. satirically—in a mocking southern accent. She is acting as though the audience is offended, not at he Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo is a mess. the invocation of a racial stereotype, but at the very Overtly “not a memoir”, it is instead a hodge­ mention of Mexicans. The first part of the joke, the Tpodge of anecdotes, essays and old diary entries, part quoted in the hit piece, is merely a gambit. It presented in no cohesive order. It is not so much is supposed to sound as though it was lifted from a a book as a series of long, confessional tweets. bad 1950s joke book. It is merely the prelude to the The writing itself is burdensome, with tiresome second part of the joke, in which a direct correla- asides like “Anywhoozle” scattered all over. If a tion is drawn between stupidity and racism. Amy ghostwriter was involved, they weren’t very good. Schumer is, in her own words, “playing an irrever- On stage, Schumer overflows with charisma. Her ent idiot”. impeccable comic timing, however, in no way trans- By standing up for herself she didn’t win over lates to print. If using an exclamation mark is like her detractors, she infuriated them. The Washington laughing at your own joke, heaven knows what the Post wasted no time comparing her to Donald equivalent is of repeatedly following up punchlines Trump, saying that both “draw with “JKJKJKJK!” on cultural stereotypes”, and use Comedians do not tend to make “dehumanising language that gives good prose stylists; those who can life to an ecosystem of racial fear Her meteoric rise say so much with a wink or a nod and violence”. This was not a bat- was thanks, in no can seldom say nearly as much tle Schumer was well equipped to small part, to the with actual words. In stand-up or a fight. Her meteoric rise was thanks, sketch, Schumer is capable of rais- in no small part, to the glowing glowing support ing vulgarity to high art. Her gross- support she had received from the she had received out humour, combined with truly very same progressive periodicals outstanding delivery, is liberating. that were now going for her jugu- from the very same When written down, the non-stop lar. “The response is dishearten- progressive periodicals references to defecation and geni- ing for those who’ve been cheering that were now going talia quickly become tiresome and Schumer’s ascendance,” wrote E. boorish. Alex Jung for Slate, rather threat- for her jugular. Worse are the chapters devoted eningly. The twitterati giveth, and to consolidating her cult of person- the twitterati taketh away. ality. “On Being New Money” is a A few days later, Schumer posted a very dif- very laboured attempt to reconcile her newfound ferent explanation online. “I am evolving as any wealth with how generous and down-to-earth she artist,” she wrote, “I am taking responsibility and avowedly is. “Beautiful and Strong” is about how, hope I haven’t hurt anyone. And I apologize it [sic] you guessed it, she feels “beautiful and strong”: “I I did.” Apologising for a joke is about as close as a embrace my power. I say if I’m beautiful. I say if comedian can come to selling their soul. After her I’m strong. You will not determine my story. I’ll apology, the likes of the Guardian, the Washington speak and share and f—k and love, and I will never Post and Salon went back to being her personal apologise for it.” I read that section aloud to my Pravda. girlfriend to see if there was something innately In many ways, her film Trainwreck was one, but female required to appreciate it. She asked that I the critics couldn’t find enough nice things to say. not further expose her to “any more of that cancer- “This is a film that belongs not to its director but ous garbage”—so no luck there. You might grant to its star, who, if there is any justice in the world, a celebrity some gushing sentimentality at the end is about to ascend from cult icon to mass phenom- of their memoir, but this sort of thing is on every enon,” wrote the Atlantic. “The title of the movie second page. It’s exhausting. suggests its heroine is in need of repair,” wrote The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoois mostly dis- Buzzfeed, adding that, somehow, the movie man- appointing, but when Schumer tells the tales of her aged to “defy condemnation”. No kidding. Movie life’s traumas—her mother breaking up two mar- reviewing aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes gives the riages, her father developing multiple sclerosis, her film an 85 per cent rate of approval from critics, but survival of sexual assault and domestic abuse—she only 67 per cent from the public. In a star-driven, writes with great pathos. Also, she has throughout blockbusting, pleb-pleasing comedy these numbers avoided telling cheap, gossipy stories about other

84 Quadrant October 2016 Books celebrities—of which she must have hundreds— family’s station, Killeen, at Longwood, near Euroa which shows more self-restraint than most newly in north-eastern Victoria—as it happens, only an mega-famous memoirists could muster. Still, at no hour or so’s buggy ride away and less than two years point does any of it approach literature. One is left earlier than the birth of his future highest-profile with the impression that this was a book written patient Edward Kelly. Ryan’s Irish grazier father solely because Schumer is at the point in her career had earlier overlanded down from the Sydney side. when it is appropriate to release a book. She is an His mother was from the Cotton grazing dynasty, of ascendant star, with popularity powered by the English background. A year after the birth, Charles renewed and enthusiastic support of the social jus- senior gave up his grazing lease and moved to the tice industrial complex. Financially, if not artisti- easier life of Melbourne business and residence at cally, that $8 million was probably a good call. bayside suburban Brighton. The wonderfully funny irreverence that propelled He established Ryan & Hammond stock and Schumer to fame in the first place is absent from her station firm. It was a good time to do so with, as well book. You couldn’t accuse her of only joking about as the gold boom, the pastoral industry bouncing “safe” material, but neither has she written a single back after the sluggish prices and erratic seasons of sentence here she’ll ever be pushed to apologise for. the 1840s. Commercial success seemed to bring the extra affluence that supported lifelong establishment James McCann is an Australian writer and status for the family. comedian. He may be found online at Instead of being sent to an English public school www.jamesdonaldforbesmccann.com. like his own son, Charles junior was sent to the only slightly less salubrious Melbourne Grammar. He went on to study medicine at Melbourne University and then a final year in Edinburgh. Post-graduate work in Bonn and Vienna followed, mixed with Robert Murray holidaying in Europe. At twenty-three, his first job was as a battlefield Free and Easy surgeon with the Ottoman forces in the Turkish- Russian war of 1877-78. The young Australian tourist Plevna: A Biography in Verse: Sir Charles had rushed to London after seeing the advertisement “Plevna” Ryan (1853–1926) in the Times and got the job. The Muslim empire by Geoff Page then seemed to be the goodies, and the Russians, as UWA Publishing, 2016, 120 pages, $24.99 so often, the baddies. His nickname and the book’s title come from his battlefield surgery at the little levna is a short biography, in free verse form, of local hospital at the siege of Plevna in Bulgaria. Sir Charles “Plevna” Ryan, who became Surgeon Military surgery book-ended his career. He was PGeneral of the AIF in the First World War. the oldest surgeon at Gallipoli and became surgeon- Though the impact is uneven, Canberra poet general based in London in 1917. Heart disease trou- Geoff Page’s verse produces some vivid descriptions bled his later years, but he lived long enough to see of Ryan’s battlefield surgery at Gallipoli and earlier Maie, his only daughter, marry the rising politician in the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-78—and on Ned Richard Gardiner Casey in 1926. The marriage was Kelly after Kelly was badly wounded in the siege of to take her to Yarralumla when Lord Casey, as he Glenrowan in 1880, only to be hanged soon after- became, ended a long, often ministerial career, as wards for the murder of police at Stringybark Creek Governor-General from 1965 to 1969. Maie was her- in 1878. self a writer, artist and flyer. It is also a nostalgic portrait of a colonial-minded Charles’s son Rupert also became a Menzies-era establishment family in Federation times, with a political figure, returning to Australia in 1935 and capacious town house, servants, fine dinners and holding the Mornington Peninsula federal seat of cigars, above the Collins Street surgery opposite Flinders from 1940 to 1952. the Melbourne Club, children dispatched off to England and Europe for education. he free-verse format is an interesting approach Ryan’s daughter Maie (later Lady Casey) after- to short biography. Page’s device is second wards wondered in public if it was the kindest thing Tperson, as if speaking to his subject. Many for her father to send her brother Rupert off to distinguished lives deserve fuller treatment than Harrow at fourteen and then on to Sandhurst for a an obituary or an entry in the Australian Dictionary career in the British Army. of Biography but do not get a full biography. I Charles Snodgrass Ryan was born in 1853 on his would have preferred a longer, more informative

Quadrant October 2016 85 Books introduction, with more context. The road is snug between the mountains and the Despite the upstairs-downstairs background, cliffs—like the Amalfi without the motorini. Unlike Ryan comes across as plain Charlie, as he liked to the beaches of southern Italy, there are no rented be called, friendly, honest and fond of a yarn. His lounges under umbrellas, and very few people. own memoir (Under the Red Crescent: Adventures of Which is good really because there are crocodiles in an English Surgeon with the Turkish Army at Plevna the Mowbray River that winds behind the houses and Erzeroum, co-written with John Sandes, 1897) on Oak Beach, named after the sheoaks on the was a principal source and is liberally quoted; Maie first dune. A vast melaleuca has grown hugging an Casey’s An Australian Story (1962) is another. Page equally large fig arching over the road with aerial has also used the modern internet access to old root streamers. newspapers. The beach to the north is Four Mile Beach, edging the blush-pink Mirage resort built by Christopher Robert Murray is the author of The Making of Skase in the rash 1980s. The grey nomads and Australia: A Concise History (Rosenberg). escapees from southern states flick open their chairs for the day. At sunset, flip-flops are found, towels shaken. The crowd ambles past the ice-cream shops to the port. The Tin Shed is the place to be—rum- and-cokes as the sun sinks and the boats from the Jane Sutton outer reef return to their moorings. Everyone waves. Cockroaches in Paradise hite Sands is Dyer’s farewell wave to Britain, a not-so-fond backward glance. Southern White Sands: Experiences from the Outside CaliforniaW has entranced him. He mentions “blue World skies” and “cycling” many times. It is a paean to life by Geoff Dyer in Los Angeles, surrounded by quite beautiful peo- Text Publishing, 2016, 256 pages, $32.99 ple. Does it matter they don’t know who Theodor Adorno was? Not when they look so splendid doing he cockroaches set up their morning and after- acrobatics at Muscle Beach near Santa Monica. noon teas on the lawn. I don’t know where they Dyer with his Oxbridge degree is bemused by the Thave lunch—perhaps under the fridge in the shade. Adorno lapse in his paradise. That he might expect They drag fig leaves as big as platters across the the Angelinos to be familiar with a cultural theorist gravel and arrange little twigs as seats. Somehow from the Frankfurt School of Marxism in the 1940s my breakfast of scrambled egg is delicately placed is funny. Especially so when Adorno, an émigré with a bacon rind on top. Why am I surprised in living near Burbank, compared the American film paradise? I yell at the family, “Don’t drop your industry to fascist Germany. clothes on the floor—they will nap in the pockets.” Dyer has written about biennale art in an earlier Crisp little legs fall out of the clothes dryer. work—Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (2009). This Geoff Dyer has found that paradise is wanting time he is surveying vast permanent installations of in his travelogue White Sands: Experiences from the land art in the Western landscape. Where better to Outside World. He is in Tahiti writing about Paul start than with the bravura of the 1970s, Walter de Gauguin’s visits. The trouble is, Gauguin went to Maria’s Lightning Field and Robert Smithson’s Jetty? remote black sand beaches, not the spa in Bora Bora. He follows with Watts Towers by Sam Rodia, built What do you need in paradise? Nice clean as therapy by the Italian-born immigrant between white sheets, an espresso bar down a sandy track 1921 and 1955. As many of these things do, the proj- and e-mail coverage, maybe. We can wander down ect took on an unwieldy presence in a Los Angeles a coconut-edged path to where the boat comes en backyard. All three have a marvellous gestural lar- route to Port Douglas. The ship’s master drops off a gesse of the late Cold War period and all have con- freshly caught bundle of prawns to eat with drinks. servation problems. Muscle Beach has some too. Later, we have seafood platters prickling with lob- Why not include James Turrell’s Roden Crater or sters and sea urchins, served on wire stands by slim- the ephemeral installations of the Christos? Dyer hipped waiters. The drinks are metre-high cocktails. might say that his slender volume of essays is not On reflection, there has been some exaggeration. a catalogue raisonné of American land art. The Dia But it is true that the locals charge seven dollars a Foundation—the institution behind Lightning Field kilo to clean your catch from the reef. and which held the site deed for Jetty, commissioned From Cairns to Port Douglas along the Captain Crater in 1979. It is sited inside the cone of an Cook Highway is a nine-out-of-ten scenic drive. extinct volcano in Arizona. As with de Maria’s

86 Quadrant October 2016 Books and Smithson’s work, a metaphysical response is we have stubbed a toe or two along the way. It is expected. The visitor can walk the basalt rock spiral recoverable; a fitting end to modernism. But we of Jetty, become part of an atmospheric dance in know it hasn’t turned out that way. The new slogan Lightning Field and experience celestial phenomena of our times is “What Have We Done?” I haven’t in Crater. The 1970s nostalgia ever whiffs and Jerry glimpsed it in neon but the catchphrase prefaces Brown has been re-elected as the Governor of discussions on climate change, Brexit and Trump. California. Granta magazine dedicated the Autumn 2015 edi- I fell into paradise at the British School at tion to it, Teresa May has come back with her own, Rome twenty years later. The artist and musician “Brexit Means Brexit”, and some Republicans are Martin Creed was commissioned to install a neon offering former CIA agent Evan McMullin as a light work, Everything Is Going to Be Alright, across presidential candidate. the facade of the building. I know this is special I’m with Martin Creed and a flawed paradise; because the classicist Mary Beard in her blog, “A everything is going to be alright. The Scottish National Don’s Life”, has reproduced the photograph twice. Museum of Modern Art agrees and installed Like Mary, I arrived from Rome’s Termini station Creed’s neon on the frieze facade in 2009. Creed to Via Gramsci, climbed the stairs, pressed the bell said in response: and waited. There is a distinct moment for everyone as they enter the Edwin Lutyens-designed building. Although it is at first an overtly familiar and Comforted by Creed’s signage, I stepped into the reassuring phrase, it plays on our personal entrance foyer with a garden beyond and thought, insecurities and gently suggests that everything gosh. I was shown to my single room with spare might not be alright. furniture and stiff white sheets. That night was the special weekly dinner. Gnocchi with brown butter Maybe we could cross our fingers, grimace and and sage was served at communal tables decorated think. Although I will have to speak sternly to the by the waiter Rino with nandina and candles. I cockroaches before they rearrange the pantry. wanted to stay forever. Martin Creed’s installation acknowledges that Jane Sutton, a regular contributor, lives in Melbourne.

In a Restaurant in Nova Gorica Slovenia, April 2012

She’s chosen her jumper well, black, a dramatic contrast to her hair— long and ropey blonde hair, dyed (though you’d look hard to notice), the strands falling randomly down from her neck to lie vivid against her jet-black top.

I hope she’s a good friend. I hope the young man she faces, looking up now and then from his pasta, thinks her face, which I cannot see, compensation for however much of his life has been in her service.

I hope he envisions her hair as it soon may be, beneath her, spread out on her pillow, framing a face that confronts him only with love.

Knute Skinner

Quadrant October 2016 87 Patricia Azarias

Against the Tide The Independent Spirit of Jean Dutourd

fter the Second World War, the literary and the Occupation, there was every excuse for the and intellectual scene in France was domi- predominance of the Left in intellectual discourse nated by the terrible two of French phi- in France. Less understandable was the continued Alosophy and letters, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone sway of the Left after 1956, when knowledge of the de Beauvoir. For many, from the mid-forties until gulags and the defenestrations became widespread. 1980 or so, Sartre was an untarnished hero, a man May 1968, of course, spawned its own confusion of who had been imprisoned in 1940 by the Germans, groupuscules and their multifarious positions, all who had helped found the underground group of which were held with a passionate intensity, and Socialisme et Liberté, who had established the left- many of which enjoyed afterlives up to around the leaning magazine Les Temps Modernes, who devel- early 1980s. Sartre and de Beauvoir figured promi- oped a “philosophy” he called existentialism, who nently throughout, changing their views, issuing was arrested for civil disobedience in May 1968 and long, sometimes very long, treatises, and in general who remained on the Left all his life. taking gratifyingly starring roles. A few slightly inconvenient points were glossed One who had little patience for the Sartrean over: unlike thousands of others, he had spent only oeuvre and its obfuscations and pretentiousness over a few short months in the German camp; he had that entire period was Jean Dutourd, Gaullist and chosen to replace a Jewish teacher sacked under member of the Académie Française, for whom tur- Vichy’s anti-Semitic legislation; he had allowed bid writing was not thought-provoking, but sim- one of his major works, L’Être et le Néant (Being ply sprang from muddy thought. A writer of a very and Nothingness) to be published under German French wit, clarity and depth, Dutourd denounced censorship; he had hedged his bets by writing in the “pedantic and barbarous language of this phi- clandestine and non-clandestine press alike; after losopher lost in literature” and vigorously contested the war, he had written, “It is not our duty to write Sartre’s equally cloudy political views. Dutourd about the Soviet labour camps”; he had actually is an unknown quantity in the English-speaking been released from arrest in 1968 by de Gaulle him- world, so it is worth taking a little time to become self, who handsomely said, “One does not arrest acquainted with one of the most charming and pro- Voltaire”; and confounding many of his acolytes, found writers produced in Europe in the second he had claimed at the end of his life that he had half of the last century. been an anarchist all along. The derivative charac- ter of his existentialism (“Heidegger with a French accent”) and his messy personal life added piquancy Dutourd the “perennial escapee” to the detractions. Nevertheless, Jean-Paul Sartre ean Dutourd (1920–2011) was born in the 17th set the literary and philosophical agenda in France arrondissement of Paris, where he sets his novel for most of the second half of the twentieth cen- JGuns and Butter in the rue Pandolphe (published in tury, and at his funeral in 1980 more than 50,000 1952 as Au Bon Beurre). His father, a dentist, was mourners filled the Paris streets. from the Auvergne, his mother, née Haas, who died His on-again-off-again mistress Simone de when Dutourd was seven, was from a prominent Beauvoir did not aspire to the same philosophical Jewish family in Alsace and was related to Charles heights but instead wrote feminist tracts and novels Haas, the model for Proust’s Charles Swann. and simpler expositions of existentialism. (Dutourd sometimes joked that, with Proust and Of course in the period 1944 to 1956, after the Montaigne, he made the trilogy of half-Jewish men extreme Right had been discredited by the war of French letters.) Like Léon, his hero in Guns and

88 Quadrant October 2016 Against the Tide

Butter, Jean was a skinny, honourable, idealistic, Polycrates of Samos. Polycrates was the king of literary young man who engaged very early on in Samos, prosperous, happy, beloved, exceedingly direct action against the German occupiers, and fortunate. Indeed, so blessed was he that he began made a storybook escape from a fascist prison. to feel disquiet. He decided to ward off an even- At the age of twenty, Jean Dutourd found him- tual compensating disaster by throwing his favour- self, like thousands of other French soldiers, at a ite ring into the sea as an offering to the gods. loose end, a member of a collapsing, demoralised A few days later, some fishermen presented him army that had fought bravely but, badly led, had with a great fish, and when it was cut open, there disintegrated under the rapid German onslaught. was his ring. He fainted, knowing that the gods In Les Taxis de la Marne, he talks about his first had rejected his offering and that disaster was imprisonment, which took place only a fortnight imminent. Indeed, Samos was soon after invaded after he had joined the army. Posted to northern by the Persians, and Polycrates was flayed alive. France, he found the French army disintegrating, Remembering Polycrates, Dutourd, hoping to ward and with five friends embarked on a picaresque off disaster, gave his favourite watch to his cellmate attempt to travel to Bordeaux. In the middle of the night before his execution. all the chaos, they found an inn But in his case, the stratagem open, with a bizarrely courteous worked. The next morning, he was platinum-haired landlady, and it being taken to the place of execu- was from this mère Coco, who had Jean and Camille tion in Lyons by the French milice. heard General de Gaulle’s broad- went into hiding, Dutourd’s wife, Camille Lemercier cast, that he first learned about the and continued their (whose family name he uses for man he would in later years come another hero of Guns and Butter, to admire above all others. At the clandestine resistance Jules Lemercier), had in the mean- time, though, the young men were activities until the time contacted the local French less impressed by the General than police commissaire. The commis- by a peasant who refused them Liberation. They ran saire, with his own party of French food, shouting, “Shove off! You’d guns and other arms, police, intercepted the execution get some food if you’d fought, carried messages and party, and told the milice that there instead of coming here begging.” had been last-minute orders from Both of these snippets, carefully hid British pilots. Paris that, instead of being shot chosen by Dutourd, reveal the early They ate very poorly, that day, Dutourd was to be taken impulse of the French populace to to the capital. Dutourd was freed resist. but they lived well, an hour before he had been due to The haphazard ramble around in secret apartments. be executed. France soon fizzled out and After so many years, one can Dutourd found himself in an army only speculate as to the reasons for camp in northern France, a strangely anarchic the commissaire’s readiness to help. Perhaps by then installation whose inmates were allowed to leave in it was obvious, after El Alamein and Stalingrad, the morning, provided they promised to come back and the switch of Italy to the Allies, that the in at night (most did), and which French prison- Germans were going to lose the war, and the com- ers shared with German infantrymen and guards. missaire wanted to hedge his bets. Perhaps, even From there, Dutourd was transferred to a German probably, he was a genuine patriot. Perhaps the prison camp in France. In his understated way, milice had invaded his “territory”. Perhaps there Dutourd in later life often said to his son Frédéric were other reasons. In any case, the world on that that he just walked out of that camp. Eventually day gained a man who would become one of the Dutourd joined the Resistance as a member of greatest French writers of the twentieth century. Libération. In late 1943, events occurred which Dutourd fter the escape, Jean and Camille went into seldom spoke of in later years, although he drew hiding, sending their six-month-old son on virtually every other event in his life, from his FrédéricA to relatives. Both continued their clandes- childhood to his old age, to create his books and tine resistance activities until the Liberation. They essays. In Lyons, he was arrested by the French ran guns and other arms, carried messages and hid milice, on the orders of the Gestapo, beaten and British pilots. They ate very poorly, but they lived condemned to death. well, in secret apartments. But like many of those His son says that the night before his execu- genuinely in the Resistance, and unlike many bogus tion, Dutourd remembered Herodotus’s tale of fighters, Dutourd was always reserved about what

Quadrant October 2016 89 Against the Tide he did and experienced during those secret years. quench the essential gaiety and buoyancy of his As time went on in 1943 and the first half of 1944, character. His sunny nature surfaces through the it became clearer and clearer that the Germans, gloomiest contexts, and Guns and Butter in the rue despite everything they could do in France and Pandolphe is one of the best examples of the tri- eastern and southern Europe to suppress opposi- umph in his works of joy over sorrow. tion, were going to lose the war. On June 6, 1944, the Allies landed in Normandy, and the various elements of the Resistance coalesced into a kind Dutourd the writer of army, which called itself the Forces Françaises ean Dutourd was not just a novelist. He was an de l’Intérieur (FFI, popularly shortened to Fifis). essayist, a humorist, a grammarian, a literary These were swaggering, swashbuckling young men, critic,J a moralist, a media personality, an icono- whom Dutourd brings to sparkling life in a few clast, a memoirist, and a great lover of English and quick strokes towards the end of Guns and Butter. American literature. Dutourd himself was a notable Fifi, taking over In many ways his work evokes Mencken, the whole Paris-Soir building on the rue du Louvre Thurber, Thackeray and Wilde, and like them, with only two other Fifis. The Fifis fought the he was a writer of deep understanding of human remnants of the Germans in street fights in Paris nature, charm, wit, and a decidedly contrarian until the Liberation on August 19, 1944. Some were approach to literature and politics. incorporated into the French army thereafter. Dutourd’s greatest work is Les horreurs de l’amour Jean and Camille were in Paris in the heady days (The Horrors of Love) (1963), a 750-page novel which of August 1944, and at this point he resumes his takes the form of a dialogue between two friends, memoirs. In Le Demi-Solde (On Half Pay), he looks a short-tempered cantankerous moi, and a generous back at the intoxicating period of the liberation of and tolerant lui, over dinner on a single night. The Paris, even more exhilarating for a young person subject of the conversation is Edouard Roberti, a of twenty-four, as he was, and remembers with distinguished and happily married Fourth Republic amused indulgence his élan as the temporary ruler parliamentarian. Roberti has embarked on a light- of the Paris-Soir building, his heroic but doomed hearted and banal affair with a secretary, but to his efforts to fit into post-Liberation bureaucracies, dismay he gradually finds he is being overwhelmed and his final escape into his true destiny, that of by a grand passion, which will engulf his life and an independent artist. Actually, when in 2005 the drag him down to murder, disgrace, prison and former Prime Minister, Pierre Messmer, conferred premature death. Like Proust, Dutourd plumbs, on him the award of Grand Officer de la Légion analyses and dissects human emotions with deep d’Honneur, he called Dutourd un évadé éternel, a understanding and forgiveness. But his writing is perennial escapee. of Mozartean elegance and concision. Unlike Léon, the hero of Guns and Butter, Jean John Lukacs called Les horreurs de l’amour “a Dutourd was a virtuoso stylist. He won many liter- delicious and profound work of art, from beginning ary prizes, wrote fifty books (Guns and Butter alone to end. André Maurois likened it to Proust; but in went into innumerable editions and was made some ways it is better than Proust, sprightlier and into a television series), appeared constantly in the more imaginative. The language itself is superb.” media, and earned his living by his pen. Guns and Butter in the rue Pandolphe is the best- In later life, Dutourd had to live through severe known of Dutourd’s other novels. Like many of trials, the deliberate bombing of his apartment in his works, it springs from Dutourd’s basic idealism 1978 and the death of his beloved daughter, Clara. and his exasperation at inauthenticity. For years Clara’s death had additional resonances for him. that same irritation would be directed at the pre- She bore the name her mother, Camille, had at tentions and accepted wisdoms of the Sartrean and Jean’s suggestion used as a nom de guerre during the Beauvoiresque productions of the post-war era. Resistance. This name was not chosen by chance. Aphorisms, paradoxes and wit abound in Clara is the French version of Klärchen, the hero- Dutourd’s work. In no other form are they as evident ine of Goethe’s Egmont. Count Egmont resists the as in his fables, which follow a long and honourable (French) invader and dies in prison, hailing free- French tradition. One of them, a typical example, dom and saying: Ich sterbe für die Freiheit, für die ich has as its hero the sculptor Pygmalion. He spends lebte und focht (I die for freedom, for her I lived and three years sculpting a statue of Venus and is happy fought). The choice of the name Clara represents a and satisfied with his work. When the real goddess key to Dutourd’s most profound and serious moti- Venus comes and breathes life into the statue, vations, both political and literary. Dutourd, unlike Ovid, has Pygmalion explode in But no seriousness or tragedy could altogether indignation. His statue had been immortal, an

90 Quadrant October 2016 Against the Tide expression of his highest art, and now the goddess surprising that perhaps his greatest literary love has turned her into a simpering shrew who will was Stendhal, with Mérimée a close second, both grow old and, with her imbecilic chatter, will stop geniuses. In L’Âme sensible (1959), this third gen- him working. In the end, having taken her to bed, ius takes Mérimée’s essay on Stendhal, his friend he abandons her for his art and, artificially perfect and sparring partner, and, paragraph by paragraph, as she is, she fittingly marries a banker. weaves around it an enchanting series of glosses The same fresh eye characterises his literary that illuminate both artists as well as French his- criticism. Nobody before Dutourd called Edgar tory and literature. Allan Poe un écrivain français, or described Gide, Indeed, there are many resemblances between in front of Oscar Wilde, as like an usherette face to Stendhal and Dutourd himself. Neither of them face with Bacchus or the god Pan. Few have called suffered fools gladly, but both were profoundly Dickens a poet. understanding and forgiving of human flaws; at the He has a similarly original take on the book of core of them both were a sunniness and optimism Genesis. In Le septième jour (1995) he takes the bib- in the face of stupidity and the complexities lical stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, of everyday life. As writers, both were at once and adds his own psychological and subtle and limpid; they brilliantly historical insights. The fixed, leg- combined narrative drive with endary figures of tradition acquire, psychological exegesis; and both in his inventive but respectful Dutourd was created characters that can stay hands, fully human contours, col- caricatured in certain with the reader for decades. ours and complexity, and turn into people very much like us, that we circles in France as lthough Dutourd was fond of can relate to and understand. a curmudgeon and American literature (he made Jean Dutourd’s mother was from a reactionary. He definitiveA translations of Truman a Jewish Alsatian family, and in the Capote and Ernest Hemingway), Resistance, many of his comrades was untouched. He and admired the British for their were Jewish. He dedicated Guns continued writing his tolerance and for standing alone and Butter to one of them, Jacques against Hitler, at his very core was Silberberg, and he was good friends regular newspaper a love of France. And for him no with André Maurois and oth- columns, his novels, modern figure embodied France as ers. Jacques Silberberg went on to his essays, his totally as General de Gaulle. become a well-known writer him- From his days in the Resistance self, under the name of “Michel theatrical reviews, in Occupied France, Dutourd con- Chrestien”, after a character in and his defences of ceived a high admiration for de Balzac’s Comédie Humaine, a pure- Gaulle, which persisted throughout hearted journalist who is killed on stylistic clarity. his life and works. In the depths of the barricades in 1830. French humiliation in 1956, after Dutourd’s last book, Leporello the defeats of May 1940, Dien Bien (2007), written when he was eighty-seven, has his Phu and Suez, Dutourd published Les taxis de la typical combination of amusement, irony, compas- Marne, a call to courage and renewal, based on the sion and deep understanding of human nature. The example of the taxi drivers who drove soldiers to book is essentially a fable, a series of inventive riffs, the front line and so saved Paris in the Great War. with Leporello, the factotum—and, here, nurse— De Gaulle, who was then in the political wilder- of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, as the first-person nar- ness, read it and asked to see him, and this was the rator. Longinus said that, as great artists age, they first of many regular meetings. In fact, Dutourd become more interested in legends, tales and sto- was one of the few people who could turn up at the ries, as opposed to the grand epics or the narratives Élysée Palace unannounced and see the President, based on real life which they wrote in their prime. if he were free. By way of example, Longinus pointed to Homer, Gaullists, however, were of course not popu- who, he said, wrote the Iliad in his prime and the lar among the post-war French literati, despite de Odyssey as he grew old. In the same way, Dutourd Gaulle’s liberation of Sartre in 1968. This, added can be said to have moved from the grand real-life to Dutourd’s contrarianism, his refusal to accept chronicles, like Les horreurs de l’amour, of his prime, received ideas, led to his caricaturing in certain to the story-telling genre of Leporello of his old age. circles in France as a curmudgeon and a reaction- Dutourd was a very French writer, civilised, ary. He was untouched. He continued writing his elegant, paradoxical and profound, and so it is not regular newspaper columns, his novels, his essays,

Quadrant October 2016 91 Against the Tide his theatrical reviews, and his defences of stylistic German invasion, France lost 124,000 killed. But clarity. the best German generals, particularly Guderian Writing about Dutourd in his book With and Rommel, were more daring and skilled than Stendhal (2010), which includes the first transla- most of their French counterparts, who in many tion into English of Mérimée’s essay on Stendhal, ways were still fighting the last war, of attrition Simon Leys summed up the man himself when he from standing positions, rather than the new war of called L’Âme sensible “free, whimsical, profound, fast movements enabled by modern tanks, and who paradoxical, sensitive, original ... a treasure”. were slow in believing, let alone effectively combat- ting, the speed of the German advance. The British army withdrew from the continent Guns and Butter in the rue Pandolphe between May 27 and June 4 in the Dunkirk evacu- uns and Butter in the rue Pandolphe begins just ation, leaving France alone and undefended except after the Germans have entered Paris. It is by its own troops. On June 5, the Germans renewed subtitledG “Tales of Paris under Occupation”. their assault on France, and from then on events Hundreds, even thousands, of books—academic moved with unexpected speed. On June 10 the histories, memoirs, biographies, analyses—have French government abandoned Paris and moved to been written about life in Paris under German Tours. On June 14 German soldiers entered Paris. occupation. But if the reader has time for only On June 15 the French government, no longer uni- one book on the subject, Guns and Butter in the rue fied, moved from Tours to Bordeaux, the capital Pandolphe would be a good choice. Just as Picasso of the Gironde. On June 22, German commanders or Matisse can bring an individual to life with one met French military leaders who wished to surren- or two quick lines, so Jean Dutourd can, with a few der and signed an armistice. The principal French strokes, create, and skewer, an entire city, a whole signatory was the doddering eighty-four-year-old period of history, with its cowards, heroes, prof- Marshal Philippe Pétain, the victor of Verdun in iteers, collaborators, occupiers and victims. And the First World War. The French were stupefied unlike every other author on this grim subject, he by the swiftness of the disaster, and by the chaos it gives the reader a belly laugh or a wry smile on brought in its wake. nearly every page. Parisians had not waited for the first German With hindsight, none of the disasters that befell soldier to enter the capital. From the end of May France in May and June 1940, which Jean Dutourd and the early days of June, a massive surge of lived through and mined so brilliantly for his novels inhabitants flooded out, at some estimates as many and essays, particularly Guns and Butter in the rue as eight million people, who mingled with Belgian Pandolphe, appears inevitable. If the political and refugees and French soldiers back home from the military leaders of France had been more imagina- disintegrating French army. In this huge exodus, tive and suspicious of German intentions, and had Paris lost between three-quarters and four-fifths listened to their own intelligence, the bold, risky of its inhabitants. People piled their belongings and rapid thrust of the German tanks could have into their cars, onto bicycles, wheelbarrows, carts, been countered. The failure was less a failure of the covered wagons, motorbikes, their backs, anything French soldiery than of its leaders. This time for that moved. But so crowded were the roads out France, there was no Napoleon. that nothing could move. German Stuka planes Six weeks was all it took for the less well- bombed the almost immobile columns of civilian equipped and smaller German army to take over refugees below. France. On May 10, 1940, German troops invaded Two broadcasts, on June 17 and June 18, encap- neutral Belgium as a first step towards conquer- sulated France in those very early days. The first ing France. Both the Belgians and the French were was made by Marshal Pétain, who said, “I tell you taken by surprise. A few days later, the Germans today that you must cease fighting.” The second, sprang a further shock on the French by invading from London, was made by General Charles de through the Ardennes, where the French were com- Gaulle, who asked, “Has the last word been said? paratively weak, since they had concentrated their Must hope disappear? Is defeat final? No! ... what- defence on the Maginot Line further south. Recent ever happens, the flame of French resistance must research has shown that, contrary to subsequent not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.” decades of accepted wisdom, many sections of the Few people heard it. French public were eager at that stage to resist, and In Paris, fifteen civilians chose suicide rather that French soldiers actually fought courageously than live under the enemy’s boot, but virtually and almost pushed the German forces back. Indeed no armed resistance was offered. Indeed some in the six weeks of fighting that followed the first Parisians offered water to the exhausted, impassive

92 Quadrant October 2016 Against the Tide victors rumbling into the city in their tanks. Hitler that rationing usually generates. Jean Dutourd arrived on June 23, visited his favourite building in knew some of them well (one in particular on his the world, the Paris Opera (the doorman refused own street in the 17th arrondissement), and in the his tip), and posed for his famous photograph in characters of Charles-Hubert and Julie Poissonard, front of the Eiffel Tower. Food shops re-opened he telescopes, and skewers, them all with skill, speedily, and after a few days, Parisians started charm, humour and rage. The crèmeries they ran to trickle back. In the novel, Charles-Hubert and were known by the sign above their shop entrance: Julie Poissonard are relieved to return to their shop, Beurre Oeufs Fromage (butter, eggs, cheese), pop- Au Bon Beurre, in the rue Pandolphe, from their ularly shortened to BOF. Parisians were very well trip to Bordeaux. The “exodus” was over. The 1533 aware of who was using the black market to profit days and nights of the Occupation had begun. from their misery, and the term BOF became a In those early days of the Occupation, many term of scorn and derision throughout the war, and Parisians discovered they were not as unhappy indeed till 1948 when rationing was finally stopped. under a German regime as they had expected. On June 22, 1940, the Germans divided France Soldiers actually paid for their purchases (in into two, an occupied zone to the north and west, Occupation marks), shops were and a non-occupied zone to the not looted, places of entertainment south (the “zone nono”—that is, were appreciated by large num- t the Liberation, non-occupée—in the slang of the bers of German troops, cultivated A day, or “Zone Libre”). The Zone German generals went to famous many Parisians, Libre was nominally under French restaurants (Goering, although not like the Poissonards, rule, but once the armistice had very cultivated, went to Maxim’s been signed by Pétain on June 22, on June 29 and many times there- discovered that they the French government running after) and to the Opera; the aris- had been résistants the Zone Libre was essentially a tocracy and upper bourgeoisie held all along. They put collaborationist tool of the invad- parties and galas attended by ele- ers. The “capital” of the Zone Libre gantly uniformed German officials, up tricolour flags. was Vichy, a charming little town including the head of the German They bravely shaved in central France. It was in Vichy’s embassy, Otto Abetz; and well- Hôtel du Parc that Pétain’s admin- known artists of various kinds, the heads of women istration was headquartered (and like Sacha Guitry, Jean Cocteau who had consorted where Dutourd’s young hero Léon and Serge Lifar, began socialising with Germans Lécuyer tries to kill the head of the regularly with the victors. Notre collaborationist government, Pierre Dame re-opened for services, and pilloried Laval). Paris, on the other hand, as did the Paris Bourse and the them in public. saw a bizarre phenomenon, an Moulin Rouge. The trains ran on ambassador to France from Vichy, time, if less frequently, since many a certain Fernand de Brinon, who, had been commandeered for service in Germany. incidentally, had a Jewish wife. But within a few months, hardship had set Under the Occupation, there were in many ways in. The winter of 1940-41 was the coldest in liv- two cities in Paris—the city that continued its pleas- ing memory, and it was at its worst just as food ures, that published its books and newspapers, that and petrol rationing took hold. The Germans sang and acted on the stage, that socialised with were commandeering not only trains, but cattle, the invaders, that denounced resisters, that turned vegetables, wheat, any foodstuffs that could feed in hidden Jews, that joined the fascist militias, the German population. Allied military blockades that attended fascist rallies with arms thrust out were strangling food imports from French colo- in the fascist salute, that even joined the SS, and nies. Brutal food rationing had been introduced in that was warm and ate well; and the Paris that was September 1940. Quite soon starvation and mal- starving, that queued for hours in the freezing cold nutrition became common. Teeth fell out, people for a few grams of butter, and that included those fainted in the Metro, and there were deaths. who printed and distributed clandestine tracts, and There were a few Parisians, however, who put on carried out sabotage and assassinations, and were weight and became sleek during the Occupation. arrested, tortured and shot. Gilles Perrault heads a These—apart from the active collaborators—were section of his book Paris under the Occupation, “I say the crémiers, the owners of the shops that sold but- Paris; but which Paris?” ter, eggs, cheese and dairy products in general. The ones who suffered the most during the They thrived under the black market conditions Occupation were of course the Jews. They were

Quadrant October 2016 93 Against the Tide compelled to wear the yellow star, lost their jobs, Germans paid bounties) and condemned to death. were forbidden to enter shops except during the Julie Poissonard’s 1940 letter denouncing Léon to hours when all shops were closed, and forced to the Nazis—not a caricature—is one of Dutourd’s ride in the back sections of buses and trams. Over many felicitous, even hilarious, touches in the novel. the period of German rule, 76,000 Jews living in (Fortunately, Léon escapes at the last minute, gal- France were transported to death camps and mur- loping over the rooftops in his underpants.) Overall dered. They were doctors, housewives, grandmoth- it has been estimated that between 2 per cent and ers, musicians, generals, children, poets, scientists, 4 per cent of the French population participated businessmen, who as a community had considerably in the Resistance during the worst period of the added to the prosperity and well-being of France. German occupation. These crimes against innocent people, mostly civil- Some writers joined the Resistance, and a few ians, were committed with the collaboration of the paid the ultimate price. Jean Cassou was part of French government, who provided the personnel the Musée de l’Homme group; Louis Aragon, Paul to round the Jews up. In July 1942, 900 squads of Éluard, Vercors, Robert Desnos, Albert Camus and French militia arrested 12,000 Jewish men, women François Mauriac were probably the most famous of and children and crammed them into a sports sta- the writer-resisters. And of course, Dutourd him- dium, the Vélodrome d’Hiver, in an operation since self, who became famous later, was an active mem- notorious as the Rafle (that is, Roundup) du Vel’ ber of a Resistance group Libération. Desnos was d’Hiv. These Jews were deported to Auschwitz and arrested and died of typhus in a death camp. On murdered. Certain sections of the French popula- the other side, however, were writers like Robert tion also supported the elimination of the Jews from Brasillach, Céline, Abel Bonnard and Drieu La France. Most French newspapers of the time were Rochelle, who were pro-fascist. Brasillach was sen- racist: Le Pilori wrote on March 14, 1941: “Death tenced to death after the Liberation. to the Jew! Aye, we say again! Death! D.E.A.T.H. In November 1942, the Germans occupied the TO THE JEW. The Jew is not a man, but a foul- Zone Libre, continuing to keep a close watch on smelling beast.” And the main fascist newspaper, Je the French government; and in the same month, Suis Partout, published rabid issues called The Jews the Allies won their first victory of the war, at El and The Jews and France, complete with the usual Alamein in North Africa. Three months later, it caricatures. In the person of Rappoport, and his became clear that the Germans had lost the bat- family, Dutourd has created, with his usual econ- tle of Stalingrad. The tide began to turn. Now not omy and insight, figures who sum up the fate of only did the resentment of the French against the many of the Jews of France. occupiers begin to grow, they also started to real- However, even though he had been beaten and ise that German occupation was not going to be sentenced to death on the orders of the Gestapo, permanent. The Resistance gathered pace. In Paris, Dutourd never demonised all Germans. The two and throughout the country, it was fed by several main German figures in Guns and Butter are political streams, including Gaullists, socialists, tender-hearted and vulnerable. And the reader is monarchists, Catholics, anarchists and of course sorry at their eventual fate. It is for the French that communists, and was joined by people of all ages. Dutourd reserves his sharpest barbs. They provided intelligence, sabotaged railway lines and electricity networks, and wrote and distributed ne Frenchman at least did hear General de fliers and tracts. Their exemplary bravery was often Gaulle’s broadcast. He was Anatole Lewitsky, rewarded with death, but their activities, together aO French Jewish anthropologist at the Musée de with the memory of the tens of thousands of sol- l’Homme, and together with his academic col- diers who had died resisting the invader in May leagues Boris Vildé and Yvonne Oddon, he and June 1940, salvaged the honour of the nation founded the first group of Parisians to resist the and helped it face its future with some dignity after occupier. (He, Vildé, and five others, were shot in the war. February 1942.) Others soon followed, of all politi- At the Liberation, many Parisians, like the cal stripes. After 1942, the strongest single force in Poissonards, discovered that they had been the Resistance was the Communist Party, and in résistants all along. They participated with gusto in Alphonse, Jean Dutourd has painted a memorable the barricading of their streets and put up tricolour character who captures the communists’ flaws and flags. They bravely shaved the heads of women who virtues. Especially in these early, extremely dan- had consorted with Germans and pilloried them in gerous years, young people predominated in the public. They welcomed the Allies as they entered Resistance, their courage exemplary. Most were Paris, led by General de Gaulle, who, to plant discovered, through inexperience or betrayal (the the useful legend that it was the French who were

94 Quadrant October 2016 Against the Tide liberating themselves, had insisted on his primacy margarine, but that was a secret—one of the many in the liberation march. secrets—kept by Monsieur and Madame Poissonard The nightmare was over, for most of the French alone. The customer would be effusive in her at least. thanks and would ruin herself without a murmur. In a few years, there were more victims of the two utourd often said that every writer has his or Poissonards than of the famous Russian railways. her petite musique, and his own is captured in It was in the affair of the milk that Charles- thisD brief but perceptive observation, taken from Hubert showed that he had taken back the reins. his Pensées of 1990: Julie wanted it to be “thinned” by ten per cent, that is, to nine parts of milk one part of water was added Literary conversations are the most delightful to make up one full litre. That procedure yielded kinds of exchanges afforded by civilised life. one extra litre out of ten. Profit: twenty-five francs. Literary criticism is not made for periods of Charles-Hubert said no. His wife was so astonished barbarism. Neither is literature itself, for that that she did not protest. She went through two days matter. Barbarians are not willing to see the of agony. What was driving her husband? Was he obverse of the world, which is joyous, but only crazy? Was he afraid? But afraid of what? The con- the face it presents, which is tragic. science of the government food inspectors was no proof against a piece of gruyere. The third day, the The perfect thought on which to begin our grocer said: extract from Guns and Butter in the rue Pandolphe ... “From today on, we’ll be thinning the milk by twenty per cent.” Julie did not dare to smile. She was tamed. * * * Charles-Hubert had proved the stronger. He was easants can never resist a profit, however slen- indeed the ruler of the Bon Beurre. der. Charles-Hubert’s patter did not convince It is interesting to note that neither Julie nor Pthem, you never convince a peasant, but they ended Charles-Hubert liked to chat very much about their up by giving in. He knew all the black-market business and their methods of trading and mak- and the official prices off pat. During the whole ing money. A sense of decency, which a superficial Occupation, not a single Norman peasant managed observer would have called hypocrisy, prevented to fleece him. He bought everything, rancid but- them from talking freely to each other about their ter, rotten eggs, maggoty cheese. Everything could business practices. Although they knew each other come in useful. But he bought so skilfully that he very well and were in total agreement on their aims never spent all his cash. Bit by bit, he built up his and the ways of achieving them, the Poissonards savings by thousand-franc lots. He was bitten by would have considered the merest mention of the investment bug. With a man’s thrusting ambi- them to be cynical in the extreme. Just the oppo- tion, and, to be honest, a breadth of vision not pos- site. When no one else was present and they were sessed by his wife, he planned an expansion of his alone together, they went to great lengths to find business. Why not sell everything that was being moral justifications for their schemes: “extraor- rationed? At any rate, he could start with meat. dinary times, extraordinary measures; the more He brought back half a side of beef, which made stocks we lay up now, the better we’ll be able to a decent profit, then a whole side of veal, which he help our customers when supplies get short; we go sold for twice what he paid for it. to so much trouble, it’s only fair we should get a bit The rancid butter and rotten eggs were sub- of something back” and so on. This need to legiti- stituted for the government butter and eggs and mise their actions was truly remarkable. It never left sold under the counter for higher prices than the Monsieur and Madame Poissonard. In their way, official ones. The black market was thriving. Julie they were idealists. The noble words and lofty jus- would slip a little parcel into a trembling hand and tifications with which they clothed their practices murmur: and which they ended up believing, allowed them “Special, just for you. Don’t tell a soul. That’ll be to go through eight full years with absolutely clear thirty francs.” consciences. “Thirty francs for a quarter kilo of butter?” “That’s the price I buy it for. It’s quality butter ife was good behind the shop. Now meal- that comes from Charente. It’s spreadable, it’s mar- times were very cheerful, the Poissonard table vellous. Y’have to try it.” Lgroaned with victuals, the wine flowed freely. Never The only reason that butter was so spreadable had they dined in such good spirits: extra fine but- was that it had been “extended” by a third with ter, fresh eggs, juicy lamb cutlets, the best quality

Quadrant October 2016 95 Against the Tide chickens from Bresse, rib-eye and sirloin steak, arti- to another kid in the street, ‘My Dad said he was sanal cheese, and so on. Riri had become as plump disgusted at that dirty old trout in the metro.’ A as a piglet and his character had improved amaz- German’s passing by, hears ‘dirty old Kraut’, thinks ingly; Jeannine, with the assistance of these lavish he’s being insulted, drags the kid to headquarters, calories, no longer looked as thin as an asparagus. and the kid’s never been seen since. They don’t joke Here is a snapshot, documentary style, of dinner- around, let me tell you.” time in the Poissonard home in the middle of the “Stories like that are scary,” says Julie with a sigh. month of December of 1940. “You hear that, Riri? Hear what happens when you Charles-Hubert has inserted the corner of his say Kraut?” napkin into his collar. It forms a great white trian- “What are you supposed to say, then, if you can’t gle over his chest. He is holding his knife and fork say Kraut, Daddy? I don’t want to go to prison like in his closed fists as if they were royal sceptres. The the little boy.” entry of the food brings a half-smile of ecstasy to “Just say ‘German’. Anyway, at your age you his lips. The two children keep a respectful silence. don’t need to talk about them. Only grown-ups are Julie busies herself around the gas cooker, where supposed to.” three separate frypans are bubbling away. In the “Well, I won’t say anything, right, Dad? What first: a ten-egg omelette with bacon; in the second, happens when you don’t say anything, Dad?” sausages; and last, the pièce de résistance—a loin of “Nothing.” veal with sautéed potatoes. Cheese, crème caramel, Charles-Hubert sniffs, smacks his lips and fruit. Wine: superior Bordeaux. Liqueur: Calvados. groans, thereby indicating both his dissatisfaction “Had a good day, Charles?” asks Julie. and the pleasure he takes in his food. The only sound “Can’t complain,” Charles replies. “But it’s get- to be heard in the room is the one that emanates ting harder and harder to get around. Any day now from four jaws. Four Poissonard mandibles tear at you’ll have to get a pass to go to Bécon-les-Bruyères.” their food with muscular force, four throats swal- “Hey, Dad,” Henri interrupts, “how many Krauts low in unison; the omelette and the bread descend you seen? Dad, Dad, did you see lots of Krauts? rapidly into four stomachs like plummeting shells. How many Krauts you seen, Dad?” The superior Bordeaux cascades headlong down. “How many times have I told you not to say Riri is given a few drops. Krauts? It’s not nice to call them Krauts, and they “Anyone want any more omelette?” asks Charles- don’t like it. When you call them Krauts, they get Hubert. “Nini? Riri? One more piece?” angry, and then they could kill the lot of us. And “No, Daddy,” Jeannine answers. “Can I take my that’s the truth. Put yourself in their shoes. Would book?” you like to be called a Kraut, Riri?” “Don’t read at table,” says Julie. “Leave him alone, Charles,” says Julie. “The kid Regardless, Jeannine leans down and grabs Slave doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He learns or Queen, by Delly, to which she has been glued those bad words at school. Tell Mummy you’ll never since morning. say Kraut again, my treasure. If the Germans heard “Does you a power of good,” says the grocer, you, they’d take you off to prison. You wouldn’t like drinking up. “A person’s got to eat, right? People to be in prison, would you, darling?” who only have their ration cards, how the heck do “Say what you will about the Germans,” says the they get by?” grocer, “they’re behaving properly. Can’t take that “They do what we do,” says Julie. “They manage away from them. Since they don’t like to be called somehow.” Krauts, just don’t call them Krauts, that’s all. Why run after trouble, I say. Better to keep our heads Dr Patricia Azarias, former head of internal audit at down. Even though they’re on top, I think they’ve the United Nations, was the most senior Australian at been very decent with us. The least we can do is the UN from 2004 to 2006. Her translation of Guns show some respect. Let’s be practical. Talking of and Butter in the rue Pandolphe, an extract from Krauts, you know that fellow Gambillon, the one which is included above, is awaiting publication. She that gave me two tons of kindling on the Q.T., well, has also recently completed a PhD which touches on he told me a story that made me sit up. A kid says wartime resistance.

96 Quadrant October 2016 Neil McDonald

Romeo and Juliet as Film Noir

hen I read that Kenneth Branagh blend of comedy and tragedy. Mercutio, played as a was going to set his Garrick Theatre much older bon vivant than usual by Derek Jacobi, is production of Romeo and Juliet in the indeed a lot of fun whether he is swanning around in Wworld of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and film noir, I a white dinner jacket and cane or singing the bawdy feared the worst. To be sure, he has employed similar exchanges with the Nurse as a duet. The inspiration devices before—Love’s Labour’s Lost as a Hollywood for Jacobi’s interpretation, Branagh tells us in his musical, Twelfth Night in a wintry Victorian garden, introduction, was Oscar Wilde in his last years in even As You Like It in nineteenth-century Japan. Paris. However, in spite of the twentieth-century But for me there is always the problem that a costumes and this sort of allusion, the challenge sixteenth-century play invariably evokes the time it and duel with Tybalt is played Elizabethan, at was created. Where are the rapiers they talk about? least internally. There is the dialogue registering Somehow in “modern” productions a knife or an Mercutio’s contempt for the new style of fencing edged weapon of some kind gets produced but it adopted by Tybalt and it is clear the old bravo is remains awkward. Worse still, almost invariably itching to teach the obnoxious Capulet a lesson. As the modern setting contradicts the assumptions in the original, Romeo’s intervention is “all for the that shape the characters as written. Shakespearean best”. He has just married Juliet. When Mercutio productions don’t have to be Elizabethan romps, steps in to fight his new cousin on Romeo’s behalf it but the “pastness of a work”, to borrow a phrase is appalling. All of which is established by Branagh. from Lionel Trilling, needs to be embodied in the It becomes even more dangerous if Tybalt’s new production. fencing moves are being countered by Mercutio. His The defence against this sort of criticism is the reproach—“I was hurt under your arm”—implies old one of relevance: the events of the play have Romeo knocked up a deadly attack by Mercutio. to be associated with something happening now! This is not fully realised. Unfortunately, out of Branagh, however, is much subtler than that. As he concern for Jacobi’s age—the great actor is seventy- says in an eloquent introduction to the broadcast, seven—Branagh has included only the briefest of the production is using the 1950s setting and the interactions in the actual duel. Still, Jacobi provides evocation of the style of film noir to heighten the a magnificent death scene that once again is true to emotional intensity of the original. So there are the play’s Elizabethan origins and much the better hints of the mafia in Michael Rouse’s imposing for it. Capulet, with short black coffees regularly handed For all the modern trappings, the love story has to him by an attendant and dark glasses. When he an intensity that is both truthful and very moving. rebukes Tybalt and threatens Juliet he is as terrifying It begins at the ball, which includes a torch song, as any Mafia don. Missing, however, is the original with a witty exchange of compliments that for character’s alternation between the comic and all the richness of the imagery and the elaborate the dangerous. Branagh has cut the darkly comic conceits become increasingly emotional when we passages from the opening brawl where Capulet calls come to the balcony scene. Lily James’s Juliet may for his broadsword and is held back by his wife. The be accomplished at the stately game of love but she costumes are pure 1950s; narrow pants and thin tie gets a very human attack of hiccups and irreverently for Romeo, slacks and bare-midriff top for Juliet’s waves a bottle of champagne as she makes her first first appearance. responses to Richard Madden’s Romeo. Between Still, the production tries to do justice to them they make the always difficult love-at-first- Shakespeare’s subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle sight convention believable. My one criticism of

Quadrant October 2016 97 Romeo and Juliet as Film Noir the staging is that the balcony is too low. Romeo’s resolution is drastically abridged. On the whole dialogue requires him to look up to Juliet, who on this is welcome, but I missed Romeo’s exchanges the Elizabethan stage would probably have been just with the apothecary who sells him the poison. under a canopy ornamented with representations of When well played, as in the 1936 film version by the planets, much of which is in the verse. Leslie Howard, they reveal a new maturity in the Usually the lovers’ emotional outbursts when character and a terrible despair. The double suicide everything goes wrong tend to be underplayed. at the end benefits from the cutting. The viewer Here the excesses seem believable. The Nurse’s knows how it must end and is free to concentrate upbraiding of the hysterical Romeo when he learns on the sterile consummation in death and the two he has been banished is at once moving and comic. families’ anguish. A modern audience does not need to know that “stand” is Elizabethan English for an erection to s with nearly all Branagh’s Shakespearean pro- appreciate lines such as “Stand and ye be a man” ductions I have seen on film, and now broad- as spoken by the splendid Meera Syal playing the cast,A the performances are uniformly excellent. The Nurse; and the scene works much as it would have colour-blind casting, with Ansu Kabia making a on the Elizabethan stage, only Branagh and his suitably menacing Tybalt, works well. Lily James is co-director Rob Ashford do not follow the original a radiant but very human Juliet. Richard Madden direction that has the Nurse snatch playing Romeo had some of his away Romeo’s dagger. movement abridged in what was a Equally authentically, the play’s virile and athletic performance, so contrast between love as sex, and Film noir is not he could go on for the live broad- love as redemption, emerges clearly just trenchcoats cast. I did not notice any handi- in this production, with the bawdy and fedoras. It is cap. Derek Jacobi demonstrated lines delivered with relish and that Mercutio can be played older the love scenes moving from the menace, shadows and very successfully and this can be an passion and humour of the balcony ambiguity, all more enrichment of the text. Perhaps in scene to a sincerity that justifies the future the fight choreographer the Friar’s belief that their union than compatible with could come up with a not-too- might reconcile the feud between settings and costumes exacting but seemingly deadly parry their families. Branagh has always that evoke the and riposte to bring about Romeo’s been very good at evoking simple intervention. unaffected verse-speaking from his Elizabethan world. Finally, what about the evocation actors. Here the thoughts behind of La Dolce Vita and film noir to the lines emerge with clarity intensify the emotion for a modern and truth—never better than in Juliet’s potion audience? Branagh even broadcast the production speech staged by Branagh and Ashford with her in black-and-white to enhance the analogy. For me standing alone, a slim figure against a white curtain they could have done without La Dolce Vita; but film surrounded by shadows that reinforce the gruesome noir does have possibilities. It has been done before images of graves and madness in the verse. As the on film. There were Laurence Olivier’s shadows, potion takes effect she falls between the curtains. high-contrast photography and deep focus in his In a coup de théâtre the hangings fall on her like a Hamlet (1948). And early in the twentieth century shroud and the lights come up and we are in Juliet’s Max Reinhardt employed expressionist lighting for bedroom the following morning. a stage Hamlet. Of course most directors imagine Branagh does not cut the mourning scene that sunlight when thinking of Romeo and Juliet. But follows the discovery of the supposedly dead Juliet. Juliet’s charnel-house imaginings are very black, Certainly it is wildly over the top and Shakespeare and seeing Verona as a city shadowed by the feud may have been burlesquing the family’s earlier between the families is perfectly valid, and heat, harshness when she resists marrying Paris. But an integral part of the final duels in the play, has to play the scene that way is a risk, especially for featured in many film noirs, most notably in Out of modern audiences. Instead Branagh begins with the Past (1947). What is more, film noir is not just the lamentations then blends the cries with Patrick trenchcoats and fedoras. It is menace, shadows and Doyle’s score and follows with the Friar’s rebuke ambiguity, all more than compatible with settings that segues into a very moving funeral procession. and costumes that evoke the Elizabethan world. We The play’s final movement towards the tragic await further developments.

98 Quadrant October 2016 Christopher Heathcote

Japanese War Guilt and Kurosawa’s Rashomon

hen the cable arrived from Europe, the city through the gate is in utter ruins with dead tree president of Japan’s Daiei Film Company trunks rising amid rubble. was puzzled. “What is a Grand Prix?” Mr Within the gate a priest and a woodcutter are WMasaichi Nagata asked his office staff. No one knew. squatting together, exchanging mute glances and Months before, a representative from Italiafilm had headshakes, clearly bothered by something. The requested that one of his studio’s recent productions, dripping journeyman breaks pieces of wood from an historical tale called Rashomon, be screened at the gatehouse walls, starts a fire and, settling on the the 1951 Venice Film Festival. Mr Nagata complied, flagstones beside them, asks what has happened. although he considered the movie unsettling. He The pair explain that a local magistrate has just had already demoted both the company executive completed an investigation into a violent encounter and the producer responsible for the project fol- between a samurai, his wife, and a bandit. But it lowing a disastrous run in Daiei’s cinema chain. is unclear what occurred because their statements Since then Mr Nagata had also suspended the film’s are thoroughly at odds. Wicked things surely took director, Akira Kurosawa, for continuing to make place, although the truth is buried under a heap of unprofitable motion pictures touching on awkward lies. No other evidence has been found shedding issues. light on the incident, and everyone in the district In the meantime news arrived that the Italians is anxious. The community’s mood is expressed by had awarded the Golden Lion to Rashomon. No the priest: one was more surprised than the unemployed direc- tor, because Daiei hadn’t notified him the movie War, earthquake, winds, fire, famine, the had been entered in the major festival. Kurosawa plague, year after year it’s been nothing but did immediately hear, several weeks later, that disasters. And bandits descend upon us every Rashomon had been nominated for Best Foreign night. I’ve seen so many men getting killed like Film in America’s forthcoming Academy Awards— insects, but even I have never heard a story as an Oscar it won. horrible as this … This time I may finally lose So the Daiei company re-released the film across my faith in the human soul. Japan, and Mr Nagata, who had publicly dismissed the film as “incomprehensible”, appeared in the He then relates the conflicting versions of events media taking personal credit for Rashomon. Still, which had been given at the official inquiry— domestic audiences did not flock to see it. Nor, when accounts which the viewer watches via extended interviewed by journalists, would the film compa- flashbacks. ny’s president acknowledge what the difficult—and Domestic cinema audiences were unsettled by embarrassing—movie meant. Kurosawa had opened the subsequent twisting plot. Publicity suggested up themes not discussed in post-war Japan. Rashomon was a popular Japanese jidai-geki, medi- eval costume movies with much swordplay between ashomon has a puzzling plot. It is bucketing handsome heroes and theatrical villains. But it did down rain when the tale begins, and we are in not conform to type. Rashomon broke generic cus- RJapanese woods. A journeyman in period costume tom in ways unprecedented in Japanese cinema. runs for shelter under Rashomon, the freestand- Mind you, Kurosawa’s film had troubling roots. ing city gate of medieval Kyoto. This majestic edi- It was very loosely based on two tales by Ryunosuke fice is half-wrecked and badly burnt, evidently in Akutagawa, who had adapted the Western- a recent battle. What we can see of the once great form short story to Japanese literature. He was a

Quadrant October 2016 99 Japanese War Guilt and Kurosawa’s Rashomon controversial figure. Akutagawa was acknowledged second flashback which, set to Ravel’s Bolero, builds as the leading author of the liberal modernising a throbbing emotional tension. Taisho Period, and his suicide in 1927 was regarded Lies are densely layered over each other as the as marking the end of creative and intellectual film proceeds, and a Western audience wonders if freedom. After came the cultural insularity, esca­ we will ever get to the truth. Those acquainted with lating militarism and political repression ident­ contemporary events in Japan were not so puzzled. ified with the reign of Emperor Hirohito, an James Davidson, a Japanese policy expert who had era when writers and artists lived in fear of the worked for the US State Department during the Shiso Keisatsu (“Thought Police”) which pursued war, instantly recognised the references to post-war “thought criminals” who encouraged “dangerous Japan. He pressed this point in an essay published thoughts” (terms borrowed by George Orwell for not long after Rashomon’s American release: his 1948 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four). Akutagawa’s writing had been at odds with the mental climate It should not be forgotten that this film was during those troubled years, and Kurosawa’s made in the first instance for Japanese audiences, inventive screenplay added a startling abrasiveness at a time when Japanese films were only to Akutagawa’s stories by using feudal Japan to say beginning to emerge from an understandable unpalatable things about post-war Japan. period of complete escapism. A drama laid in medieval Japan, involving questions of human n the bandit’s testimony in the film, he boasts of nature, could have provided a respectable type overwhelming a travelling samurai by trickery, of escape without sacrificing its integrity. Yet the thenI tying him up. Finding her husband captive, picture opens on the ruined Rashomon: once the the samurai’s wife pulls a concealed dagger and great architectural symbol of the capital of Japan, frantically tries to knife the lusting bandit. As the now the crumbling reflection of a devastated pair wrestle she becomes aroused and gives in to city whence the seat of power has moved. It is her attacker. After passionate sex, the wife begs the deluged by a relentless, windless rain. bandit to murder her grim-faced husband. The ban- dit cuts the samurai’s bonds, and they have a fierce According to Davidson, the city ruined by war duel which the bandit barely wins, running his blade is an unambiguous metaphor for Japan in 1945. And through the expert swordsman. The distraught wife he was certain Japanese audiences were being led to then flees into the forest. reflect on their own experiences, seeing events in The samurai’s wife tells it a very different way. the story accordingly. Making similar points, the She says she was raped by the bandit, who afterward film historian Mitsuhino Yoshimoto adds that hav- left the scene. She is traumatised by the assault. But ing the camera never show the magistrate struck rather than comforting her, the motionless samu- local audiences as signifying the Occupation legal rai glares, simmering with anger. He says she has system within its remote Western judges. dishonoured them both. So she begs her husband A similar view was taken by the academic Donald to kill her, although he does nothing. She becomes Keene, who worked as a Japanese interpreter for overwrought and faints. She finds her husband lying the US Navy during the war years. He was might- dead when she regains consciousness, mysteriously ily impressed when he first saw Kurosawa’s film in stabbed in his midriff with her dagger. Massachusetts where he was lecturing in Japanese Next a clairvoyant appears before the inquiry so language and literature. Keene likewise explained: that the samurai’s ghost may also testify. The spectre holds that the bandit consoled his distressed victim As I watched Rashomon in 1951 I became after the rape, wanting her to become his concu- convinced … that it was an allegory for the war bine. However, the samurai’s wife demands that the crimes trials in Tokyo, still fresh in everyone’s bandit kill her husband for honour’s sake. The ban- memory. For years the Japanese had read in dit is unsettled by this, then turns to the samurai the newspapers the testimony of men who and offers to kill his wife. The wife panics and runs had declared under oath that they had not off. So the bandit frees the samurai, who weeps in committed the crimes of which they were humiliation and takes his own life with his personal accused, and they were contradicted by other dagger. men, also under oath, who swore the opposite. Rashomon’s quality as a motion picture relies Who was to be believed? Were there no on the craftsmanship of these flashbacks. Careful witnesses who could tell the truth? editing gives each segment its own mood and pace through variations in lighting, camerawork, even Much about the conflicting accounts surely did musical accompaniment. This is most evident in the mirror war trials. Retreating into self-justifying half-

100 Quadrant October 2016 Japanese War Guilt and Kurosawa’s Rashomon truths when presented with contrary evidence, the Public opinion in Japan was also soon influenced accused did not even adopt the infamous Nuremberg by an emerging Cold War arms race. Prompted by excuse, “I was following orders.” Instead, the blunt Moscow, leftist agitators in the West and Japan con- Japanese reply to allegations of misdeeds was, “I saw demned America’s use of atom bombs on Hiroshima nothing morally wrong in what I did.” Blame was and Nagasaki. These events were branded as poten- anathema to the proud. tial crimes against humanity far outweighing other disputed misdeeds in Asia and the Pacific. he war tribunals were a fraught issue in Japan. Of course, the film industry itself was buffeted Nearly 6000 soldiers, politicians and officials by political winds. In 1950, soon after Rashomon Thad been indicted and then prepared to appear was completed, twenty-nine former staff members before courts convened in Tokyo as well as China, of the Daiei Film Company, who had previously South-East Asia and Melanesia from 1945 to 1950. been purged as war criminals, were excused and Trials held outside Japan proceeded efficiently. allowed to return to the firm. Then MacArthur The most common charges comprised: the abuse, ordered a nationwide purge of suspected commu- torture, maiming and murder of prisoners; execu- nist elements, resulting in thirty other staff at Daiei tion without trial; rape and sexual receiving pink slips late in the same slavery; ill-treatment of labour- year. The newly expelled included ers; mass murder, pillage, brig- he shocked priest Kurosawa’s assistant director andage and wanton destruction in T Mitsuo Wakasugi. invaded villages, towns and cities. says he will hear The Japanese media’s reporting of no more of human s Rashomon nears its end we these courts was often slim, which discover there was a separate is understandable given the large deceit, although the witnessA to the crimes, although number of cases. But obfuscation journeyman sneers, he did not present himself to the and heavy summarising did occur “They are common inquiry. The woodcutter admits when atrocities were referred to. to having gone into the forest to The principal tribunal in Tokyo stories these days.” He work that day and, coming upon itself was a different matter. Sitting looks around and sees the samurai, his wife and the ban- from April 1946 to November dit after the rape, spied on the trio 1948 at the former War Ministry, the rain shower is from cover. it moulded public perceptions ending. “Men want When the woodcutter arrives throughout the nation. Besides the bandit is on his knees begging proclamations of innocence by the to forget things they the distressed woman for forgive- accused, and evidence problems don’t like,” he mutters. ness, and asking her to run away because military records had been with him. She frees her husband incinerated on a vast scale, there from his bonds, but he refuses to were mounting exemptions from prosecution. Over fight the bandit to avenge her. Instead, the samurai sixty military leaders, politicians and heads of busi- rejects her. He orders his wife to kill herself, then ness were charged, but only twenty-eight eventu- offers her to the bandit when she refuses. The wife ally stood trial. The remainder were freed while the becomes abusive in turn, mocking the two men as Tokyo court was still active. cowards without honour. The samurai and bandit Behind the scenes there were frictions over this then reluctantly start a floundering swordfight. among prosecutors and the judiciary. Many from Both shake as they nervously try to strike each other allied nations felt the United States held too other. There is much running for cover, dropping of much sway. For instance, certain figures in finance, swords, and frantic ducking behind protective tree manufacturing and politics got off because America trunks. Finally the unarmed samurai, whose sword considered them crucial to post-war recovery. Most gets stuck in the ground, is skewered by the fright- galling was how Emperor Hirohito was not charged ened bandit. The samurai’s wife and the bandit then on direct orders from General MacArthur. Likewise run off separately. there was anger that Japan’s heads of research into The priest and the journeyman look at the wood- biological and chemical warfare were given immu- cutter in bafflement after hearing this independent nity from prosecution by the US military in exchange account. They ask why he hadn’t come forward for all information gathered in their program. Even during the trial. “I didn’t want to get involved,” he the activities of this shady unit, which conducted whines defensively. The journeyman erupts into cyn- extensive experiments on live human subjects, were ical laughter, claiming it is in human nature to look hushed up. the other way. He has also noticed an inconsistency

Quadrant October 2016 101 Japanese War Guilt and Kurosawa’s Rashomon in accounts, and accuses the woodcutter of having Resistance admired his efforts, because the clandes- stolen the wife’s ornate dagger from the crime scene. tine newspaper L’Écrain Français accused the film He is correct, for the woodcutter shamefully admits of upholding the Nazi attitude that “the inhabitants his theft. of our towns are nothing but degenerates”. Likewise The shocked priest says he will hear no more the church condemned the movie for defaming vil- of human deceit, although the journeyman sneers, lage life and rural priests. “They are common stories these days.” He looks Far worse was actually to come after the lib- around and sees the rain shower is ending. “Men eration. Georges Sadoul, a Stalinist film critic, want to forget things they don’t like,” he mutters penned a caustic attack in Lettres Français accusing as he stamps out the fire and prepares to leave. The Clouzot’s anti-collaborationist movie of being pro- priest objects, although the journeyman shrugs off Nazi by presenting a bad view of the French peo- his pieties with a rhetorical question, “Who is hon- ple in wartime. This prompted charges being laid est nowadays, anyway?” then hurries away. at a post-war government purge tribunal. Given the retaliatory fervour of the moment, the com- he film’s poor reception in Japan was surely to munists had their way. Le Corbeau was banned in be expected. Besides overt allusions to com- France and Clouzot was barred for life from making promisedT testimony at the Tokyo trials, community films. Pierre Fresnay, the movie’s male lead, was also cowardice, betrayal and brazen dishonesty in time barred, and shorter sanctions were placed on other of war are not easy subjects for a nation to stom- actors and crew of Le Corbeau. ach. Witness the response across France to Henri- Fortunately the denizens of St-Germain-des- Georges Clouzot’s similarly disagreeable movie Prés, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Andre Malraux Le Corbeau, produced in 1943 during the Nazi and Raymond Aron, made a mighty fuss. So Occupation. Clouzot’s ban was reduced to two years. Mind you, Clouzot’s drama depicts havoc festering then the issue was becoming an embarrassment because breaking out in a country town when an elderly spin- Hollywood had made Clouzot an offer. (On his ster anonymously accuses neighbours of misdeeds, return to Paris, years later, he made the award- even crimes. The story was based on true events winning Wages of Fear.) However, the government at Tulle in south-western France where between veto against screening Le Corbeau stayed in place 1917 and 1922 a wave of unsigned letters—around a until 1969. The French had continued to find this thousand—had circulated, revealing family secrets, anti-collaborationist film unpalatable for twenty-six marital infidelities, illegitimate births and other years. social embarrassments. The emotional climate there became so toxic that some desperate townspeople ashomon likewise took up themes of betrayal, were driven to crime and suicide. cowardice, dishonesty and personal responsi- If the film makes no reference to the war, denun- Rbility. These were unmentionable subjects which ciatory letters were a key factor of life in Occupied rubbed a painful nerve in Japanese society for dec- France, when Clouzot read an unsolicited screenplay ades after the war; which is probably why, writ- by Louis Chavance. Written by corbeaux—“crows”: ing in his autobiography as late as 1982, Kurosawa slang for authors of poison-pen letters—1500 were deflected questions of symbolism and covered the streaming into the Wehrmacht’s headquarters every film’s contentious content tactfully: day, the greater majority being sent by women intent on derailing the lives of often innocent neighbours. Human beings are unable to be honest with Clouzot got this risky project authorised by mis- themselves about themselves. They cannot talk representing it as a drama of small-town life, pre- about themselves without embellishing. This cisely the type of film encouraged by Goebbels’s script portrays such human beings—the kind propaganda office. But the depraved and corrupt who cannot survive without lies to make them characters in Chavance’s script were far from those feel they are better people than they really are. amusing and lovable, earthy and good-hearted rus- It even shows this sinful need for flattering tic types common in approved movies. falsehood going beyond the grave—even the There was tension in the Wehrmacht when character who dies cannot give up his lies when the film was commercially released. The Gestapo he speaks to the living through a medium. wanted to know who gave it the green light, because denunciatory letters were an invaluable source in The international success of Rashomon allowed locating resisters, communist cells, Jews and oth- Kurosawa to join a more supportive film company. ers they wanted. Clouzot’s career was finished, on Over the next decade he produced nine major joint orders from Vichy and Berlin. Not that the movies. There would be adaptations of Dostoevsky’s

102 Quadrant October 2016 Japanese War Guilt and Kurosawa’s Rashomon

The Idiot (1951) and Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Throne of Fred Zinnemann, writer Carl Foreman and pro- Blood, 1957), a low-life melodrama The Lower Depths ducer Stanley Kramer employed the western genre (1957), a picaresque tale The Hidden Fortress (1958), to set American audiences reflecting on mass cow- and three films on pressing modern issues: Ikuru ardice in the face of McCarthyist bullies: the entire (1952) on a terminally ill bureaucrat who judges town is too scared to help a decent pillar of the com- his life to be shallow; I Live in Fear (1955) about a munity who has done no wrong. middle-class family dealing with worries of atomic High Noon’s similarity to Kurosawa’s approach war; and The Bad Sleep Well (1960) on a respected was, however, quite coincidental. As for a cluster of corporate head with concealed war crimes in his cowboy and gangster movies now claimed to have past. been indebted to the Japanese director, none really Significantly there were also two historical films stand up to critical scrutiny. Then there are com- set in the Sengoku Jidai (1467 to 1568), a period of mercial films that did begin as Kurosawa stories but turmoil and civil wars. Like Rashomon, they imply succumbed to heavy-handed rewrites and garish parallels between transitions in Hollywood razzmatazz—like the medieval Japan and contemporary sorry metamorphosis of The Hidden society due to the loss of customary ashomon took up Fortress into George Lucas’s glitzy morals. The epic Seven Samurai of R hit Star Wars of 1977. 1954—set during the peak years of themes of betrayal, Still, one great motion picture medieval lawlessness—tackles the cowardice, dishonesty has an irrefutable connection. In predatory opportunism and unscru- 1958, Ingmar Bergman’s admira- pulous business practices which and personal tion for Kurosawa, and Rashomon broke out in the immediate after- responsibility. These especially, came to creative fruition math of defeat. Yojimbo of 1961— were unmentionable with The Seventh Seal. In a story which highlights the displacement set in medieval Sweden during of noble values by a grasping mer- subjects which rubbed the Crusades, again we encounter chant class—laments the spreading a painful nerve in a brooding reflection on how the materialism and avarice of the 1950s trauma of the Second World War economic boom. Japanese society for has affected humanity. The central The latter two films were soon decades after the war. character is a knight who has been adapted by foreign companies into fighting in the Holy Land. But as the costly westerns The Magnificent a consequence of his brutal experi- Seven of 1960 and A Fistful of Dollars of 1964. But ences he has lost his religious faith, lost even his belief both pictures are travesties. Besides shedding allu- in human decency. In other words, he has suffered sions to changing modern values, the characterisa- an existential crisis, and he gives voice throughout tion is corrupted. The samurai became a rabble of Bergman’s arresting film to those urgent spiritual tough gunslingers and hard-drinking cardsharps questions coursing through post-war Europe, and played with insolent swagger by Hollywood actors the early Cold War. including Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson and Robert Vaughan. This is far aving unsettled its Japanese audience with the from the moral worlds portrayed in Seven Samurai depths of human frailty and deceit, Rashomon and Yojimbo. Kurosawa’s samurai are dignified men Hdoes finish with a redeeming act of kindness. After of high principle in a lapsed world of wickedness their discussion, the men sheltering beneath the city and greed. They aim to refrain from violent acts, gate hear a baby’s cry. They search the ruins and and they abhor cocky arrogance, always living by a find an infant wrapped in a kimono and placed in a virtuous code. Hence, for example, their shock late safe corner. The troubled priest wonders what to do. in The Seven Samurai when one of the heroes is shot But the woodcutter says he will take this abandoned and killed by the bandit gang—using muskets in orphan into his family, raising it as one of his own battle is disgraceful. It amounts to cheating. sons. So he picks up the baby tenderly, and sets off If Hollywood did produce a western in tune with for home. Kurosawa’s medieval dramas, it was surely High Noon of 1952. The reluctant hero, a clean-cut man Christopher Heathcote wrote on the Italian paintings of principle played impeccably by Gary Cooper, of Jeffrey Smart in the July-August issue. His most displays samurai-like traits throughout. Abhorring recent book is Inside the Art Market: Australia’s violence, he walks about weaponless; although when Galleries: A History 1956–1976 (Thames & Hudson). forced into a fight, he is a master. High Noon also A footnoted version of this article appears at had an overarching allegorical intent. The director Quadrant Online.

Quadrant October 2016 103 S t o r y

Ambon Sean O’Leary

he mail drone deftly opens my mail box and slips some letters in. The thing whistles as it takes off just like they tell us the human “posties” did in the past. Humans used to be posties, connies, ticket inspectors, clerks, ticket sellers, security guards, cleaners and I could go on for infinity if I so chose. Nothing to do but accept it, like my old man said before he died. I live in Ferntree Gully, home of the Puffing Billy tourist train and far enough out of Melbourne to still live close to forest, Sherbrooke Forest. But technology is here in theT form of drones and customer service robots and in other more sinister ways. Law enforcement. Change came quickly. Zero tolerance came in in 2064. We call these law enforcement robots the Guards. The debate is endless. Do robots give better customer service? And my answer is yes, unless you have a left-field request. But nearly every conceivable scenario is written into them with computer codes together with the appropriate response. Customer service via telephone robots is better, the best, too good to be true in fact, but it’s a little boring, too clinical. Still, I don’t wish for the old days in that regard and at only forty-four years old I can remember them. There’s enough shit going on that a little customer satisfaction is most acceptable but there’s more, there always is, isn’t there. That law enforcement thing and quotas and racial profiling and profiling of all citizens in fact. The ID card. Your life is one big, long ID card. Let’s say you have an overdue fine, it happens even in the perfect world, the Guards can access your bank account balance and then force you to pay the fine or you won’t be released. Like wheel clamping for humans. They can’t access your account, just the balance, but is that coming too? And the big irony here, because I’m complaining about them, is that I’m a technical writer. I write the codes for the Guards. Not the kill system but everyday stuff, and yeah, I have to write in where a little force is needed sometimes. The Guards are owned and run by a huge conglomerate of big business and government called The Guardians. The Government can freeze your bank account a lot easier these days. Any hint of corruption at your work or drugs or violence and they’ll close it down until they get the truth. We asked for law and order, the outlawing of bikie gangs and organised crime, and we got it in spades. For twenty years one of the scourges of law enforcement in Australia was small dealers using their 3D printers as small pill presses. You could get any synthetic high you wanted and there were thousands of dealers instead of hundreds but centrally controlled by organised crime. It worked for synthetic heroin and ice and everything else too, just change the ingredients package, hence the law enforcement problem. I wrote the code that The Guardians used to infect every computer and mobile device in the land to disable home 3D printers from being used in this way. The criminals’ software became

104 Quadrant October 2016 Story outdated and it made my name as a technical code writer. They nicknamed it the flu because it infected everything. So, I earn big money, live in a big house and have the latest-model electric car which the manufacturer tells me is faster than anything the Guards might have at their disposal. Cars don’t have rego plates any more or any signage of the make and model. Inside you’ll know the difference. They’re mostly all silver sedans so that rich folk aren’t targeted. Obviously the temptation to test the speed of my car against the Guards is high, but the code I wrote means if they catch me they can legally run me off the road and then I’ll go straight to prison for two years, which is the predetermined sentence for that crime. Jail first; court case second. In jail until proven innocent, but the courts move fast now. I would probably only spend a month in jail before the trial. And there are different levels of jail. The most secure and notorious jails are pretty much like the old ones except everything is locked down. You can’t knock out or kill a Guard. They’re made of steel. Picture a store mannequin, face unchanging, spouting nonsense through a grill-like mouth about law and order and systems must be maintained. That’s the big catchphrase I wrote: systems must be maintained. And someone above my station programs the consequences for people who don’t maintain the systems. The kill system. Soft crimes like shoplifting and inability to pay a fine, inability because you don’t work and have no money and that means the punishment might be you lose all data for a certain period. No computer; no phone for say six months. Your life will be so fucked up you’ll never dream of doing it again in your wildest nightmare. Unemployment sits at about 10 per cent. Nearly all retail and customer service jobs went and a lot of these jobs were replaced by people doing simple data entry (a huge industry now) or factory-line work, building the Guards and drones and the computer-operated phone systems used by all internet and phone carriers and all other customer service. I log out of my computer and set up the security protocols for my office and close the door. Time for a coffee. Turn the house security on and walk out. I pass a Guard on my way down to Ferntree Gully Road and he wishes me a good morning using my Christian name, Felix. The creepiness never leaves you. Remember, think of a mannequin store dummy that talks. Traffic is light out here. Cars are very expensive. Everything you could need is here in Ferntree Gully. And plenty of beautiful stuff you don’t need. There’s an amazing chairlift up through the forest and lyrebirds still walk around. They created a kind of disease that killed all the feral cats, so the small wildlife is back. It’s still possible for good things to happen. I usually order a double-shot latte in a small glass followed by a second one. As I talk to freaking robots all day, Sheila, who runs the café, is probably the closest thing or person that you could call a friend of mine except for Milo, who left the big city years ago. It’s only 6.30 a.m.; I usually start work at 4 a.m. Sheila brings me the latte and sits down and says, “Did I tell you that when I lived in Sydney, before I escaped to this part of the world, I smoked ten cigarettes a day? A luxury. I had a friend with a big house in Potts Point; there was a basement flat we used to go down to three times day. We’d drink coffee and chain smoke three or four cigarettes three times a day. I wasn’t working.” “Nothing surprises me about you. Do you ever smoke now?” “No. I don’t want to die a painful death.” “This is the only business I go to that doesn’t have Guards working in it.” “I like to talk freely and this café is small enough not to need to use the Guards. Besides they’d smash all the plates. I’ll just hire a teenager to wash up if I need anyone. You still haven’t bought me that dinner, yet.” “I got tickets to the game tonight at the MCG. Want to come?”

Quadrant October 2016 105 Story

“A real live game. In a stadium. Can you buy me a Four’n’Twenty pie?” “Yeah, sure.” “Then I’ll come but you have to drive us in that fancy car of yours, no trains.” She walks away and serves a customer who comes in for take-away coffee, then comes back and sits opposite me. She has short orange-red hair, bright green eyes and she’s taut and wiry and strong looking. I say, “Did I ever tell you about the time I went to the northernmost tip of the Northern Territory?” “No, but you’re going to.” “It’s a place called Smith Point on the Cobourg Peninsula. There’s nothing there, complete wilderness. My friend Milo is the sole park ranger there. A friend of a friend of mine flew a light plane up to Darwin when I worked there in 2051 when I was twenty-one. I camped in a two-man tent and he flew back and picked me up two days later. A small dirt airstrip in the middle of nowhere, that’s all it was. A few others camping. You needed a permit to get in there because it was Aboriginal land.” “Did you find your friend?” “Oh yeah, he met the plane and we talked and smoked a joint or two together at night. He’s a big reader and I had about twenty books he’d asked me to bring for him and you could see he was dying to get at them but he wanted to catch up with me too.” “Was anything worth looking at?” “Oh yeah, I swear to God it felt like I was at the end of the world. There’s something to say for remoteness. You don’t understand until you’re there.” “Nice beach?” “The beach is amazing. Pristine. The only set of footprints in the sand is your own but the killer is it’s boiling hot but you can’t swim because the ocean is full of crocodiles and sharks and stingers. I thought a lot about what I did back then. I had just started writing code and I had a crisis of conscience and when you feel like there are only two people on the planet I ... you know I write the codes, Sheila, it’s just, what do you think God or the gods would think of the Guards?” “Don’t do it to yourself, Felix, you have no choice now, don’t even talk about it, no one can hear you in here but be careful. People know you’re a decent man.” “That means something coming from you. Do your other customers ask about me? What kind of person I am?” “Yes, that’s the nature of people, but in here we’re still human, a heart beats inside us.” “You mean you don’t answer them.” “I’m very skilled in talking and saying nothing.” I finish my second latte and get up to leave but sit back down and say, “The business side of The Guardians is becoming more and more powerful. The Government is very much the lesser player. I can access all kinds of information with my security clearance.” “Stop, Felix, enough information. I’m not your priest. You’re my friend but we need to be careful what we say, even here.” “Do you know the only place on the planet where the Guards don’t exist in any form whatsoever?” “Don’t tell me. Smith Point.” “No, there is one Guard at Smith Point and one person to service the Guard and there’s surveillance by the navy, airforce and army and digital cameras and imaging and my friend Milo still works there but he tells me nobody bothers him and he can still smoke a joint if he wants. But Milo knows how to be alone, he thrives on it. Maybe they know he grows and smokes dope, maybe not. He has a hydroponic setup in his hut

106 Quadrant October 2016 Story in the middle of nowhere and the Guard mainly operates on the airstrip. The man who services the Guard has a monitoring role in combination with the armed forces and the weather stations. But there is a place where the Guards don’t exist and it’s a place I always dreamed of escaping to, but if I told you where it was I would have to kill you.” Sheila laughs and says, “Then tell me tonight and kill me after the big game.” I get up and say goodbye and leave. We haven’t changed that much. Friday night is still the big game of the round and tonight it is traditional rivals Melbourne versus Collingwood at the mighty MCG.

That place I was telling Sheila about, where there are no Guards, is Ambon in the Spice Islands of Indonesia. The Aborigines used to trade with Ambon long before white people arrived to settle Australia. There are thirteen thousand islands in the huge Indonesian Archipelago and I’m sure there are other islands that don’t have the Guards or monitors but Ambon I know for sure doesn’t. There was a yacht race from Darwin to Ambon each year but it stopped in 2050 after relations with Indonesia disintegrated to only the most basic diplomatic necessities. However, Indonesia has 3 million military personnel and twice that in their army reserve. Who needs Guards? They are the fourth-largest country in the world in terms of population. The US maintains the peace between Australia and Indonesia but in my view the stronger the business side of The Guardians gets, the weaker the relationship will become. Ambon is 970 kilometres from Darwin downwind and maybe, just maybe, I’ll go one day. Sail along the Rhumb Line through the Arafura Sea and onto the Banda Sea and then into Ambon Bay. Milo has a catamaran.

I don’t have any urgent work, but I update some protocols for the Guards. Of course I’m not the only technical writer but I have a higher clearance than most. I can’t write whatever I like. I need clearance for some new ideas but I can change already written code to a certain level. I can block out CCTV and delete video that might work against The Guardians, the traffic Guards and so on, and I’m in a position to be offered bribes daily, which I refuse and mostly don’t report. I just set people straight. If I take your bribe I will have to report you and that is a mandatory five years in a high-level prison. No one wants a month in one of those places. Five years would be like life. The people who contact me for bribes are usually old friends I don’t talk to any more or people I went to school or university with. People I knew when I was with my wife, Leila, and who dropped off when we broke up. No kids. I take a gun in the car with me when I go out at night because car-jacking is becoming more prevalent. Criminals are always looking for new ways to make money and they come out of nowhere, like ghosts, and with weapons to disable your car. The speed of my car from scratch has saved me a couple of times. Guns are outlawed but my security clearance allows me one at home. The gun is a Hercules snub-nose job that would blow a hole the size of a football in someone’s chest. I pick up Sheila at 6.30 p.m. The game starts at 7.10 and I have priority parking and seating. It’s a quick drive down Ferntree Gully Road onto the Princes Highway and Punt Road to the ground. Like I said, cars are very expensive and most people don’t own one. The public transport is great so long as you have a ticket and keep your mouth shut. Trains, trams and buses every five minutes from everywhere. “We should win tonight, Sheila.” “Yeah, go Melbourne. Really, I just like watching men in shorts. This car is amazing, so quiet, and it looks like every other car from the outside. A small silver sedan but so

Quadrant October 2016 107 Story

cool inside and fast. I know we’re flying but it feels so smooth.” “Thanks.” “How come you never made a pass at me?” “Maybe I think you’re too good for me.” “That would be pretty stupid.” We both laugh. “No, seriously, am I that bad?” “You’re perfect. I promise I’ll hit on you after the game tonight.” We both say nothing until I need to try and rid myself of the guilt I feel for what I do. “I’m going to get serious for a second here. I agree with the Christians that the soul survives when we die but I think we become better and better people with each reincarnation or whatever you want to call it. Maybe there’s no heaven. Just next time around. We don’t make the same mistakes. It would also explain déjà vu and give me a clear conscience for what I’m doing this time around.” “You just can’t keep feeling like that. You need to get away or change jobs. You’re complaining about a system that you work within. You write the rules, Felix. You’re complicit with everything that’s wrong.” “I don’t make the rules, I just write the code. The rules come from The Guardians.” “I can’t win with you, Felix. Shut up and talk about the game now.” It turns into a great night. It’s the last quarter of the game and we’re in front by 30 points with five minutes to go. Sheila has managed to drink too much but be quiet about it, and I turn to her and say, “You want to cut out now? They can’t lose.” “No, let’s stay and sing the song.” We shuffle out at the end, Guards at every exit making sure we’re all good people. We walk briskly to the car, it’s cold and I open the doors a few metres away, and see someone approaching quickly from the left but it’s nothing, he veers off. I should know better. Sheila is still drunk and still singing the team song as we drive out onto Punt Road. We make it to the Princes Highway and when we exit onto Ferntree Gully Road at Oakleigh a Guard waves a fluoro yellow stick at us and signals us to stop. I slow down and the Guard turns on a loudspeaker and says, “Sir and madam, please get out of the car.” I look at Sheila and say, “It’s cool. Get your ID card ready. They’ll see who I am with my card and it’ll be fine. I must have been going too fast.” We both get out of the car and Sheila hands the Guard her ID card. He looks at the card and then starts scanning Sheila’s face, which is not normal. The Guard says, “This is a fake ID. You are not Sheila Wilson, you are fugitive Connie Neilson. I am taking you into custody.” Sheila gives me a look that tells me she’s in deep shit here. She has managed to surprise me at last, and I wonder who she really is or what she has done. I think fast and say to the Guard, “My name is Felix Norton. I’m a code writer. This woman is with me. I have security clearance.” “Where is your ID, Felix Norton?” the Guard says as he scans my face. I have it in my pocket but I say, “It’s in the glovebox.” “Get it.” I take the gun out and put it in my jacket pocket. He doesn’t see me. I have the ID card too. He has hold of Sheila. I walk up to him and say, “Let her go for a second.” He does, because of my clearance, and then he reaches for her again but I quickly put the Hercules snub-nose to his chest and fire. It forces him back on the road and a semi-trailer pummelling down Ferntree Gully Road runs into him and sends him flying down the road and then runs over him.

108 Quadrant October 2016 Story

The semi pulls up and I run to it, wave the gun at the driver and say, “Get in, keep driving. This never happened.” He looks at me, sees the Guard, and starts working it out in his head. He doesn’t want any of this action. “Get in. Drive. Forget it happened,” I say again. He climbs quickly back into the cab of his truck and drives off. The Guard is a mess on the road. I drag him off, slowly, and no one comes past. Then I place the gun behind his metal knee and blast a hole in the steel where his USB device is fitted. The USB device is similar to the old aircraft black boxes, holding vital information, probably including video of what just happened. I look at Sheila and say, “Who are you? What did you do?” She doesn’t speak. “Too late. We have to go. Get in the car. Now!” I explain as I drive. “If I can get to my laptop quickly enough I can erase all the CCTV from the cameras on the road but I can’t delete the Guard’s video. We may have until morning. Sheila, they don’t take you in for nothing. What’s this about your name?” “Good people do bad things, Felix; you of all people should know that.” “This is the deal, Sheila. Get all the clothes you need. I’ll drive you to the bank. The daily limit is $20,000. Take it all out if you have it. We’re not coming back. Understand that clearly.” She nods. “I’ll get my laptop and clothes and I have $40,000 in a cash box plus the $20,000 from my daily limit. They’ll shut down our accounts when they find out what happened.” Sheila looks dazed and I say, “Are you clear? It’s important.” She looks at me and I can see her nodding, knowing it may all be over, whatever it is. I speed down the highway at 200 kmh and drop her off, get into my house and send an email that I’ll be off line for twenty-four hours, the maximum sick time I’m allowed. I get security clearance and erase the CCTV from the cameras on the road. I send another email saying that the Guard who was on Ferntree Gully Road, Oakleigh, has been taken off-line until 7 a.m. I tell them I noticed faults in the way he was talking when he stopped me for going too fast, and good system management meant I had to come home and take him off line. We have until the morning if we’re lucky. I drive quickly to Sheila’s flat and thank God she’s waiting. She knows it is the only way. I accelerate away down Ferntree Gully Road but stop after five minutes and call Milo. “You can’t come here,” he says. “You’ll stick out like dogs’ balls. I can’t hide you in the bush and anyway you’d need a four-wheel-drive to get here, flying is out of the question. The Guard controls the airstrip.” “You know where I want to get to, don’t you?” “Ambon. Your best bet is to get to Darwin and steal or buy a yacht, a small sailing ship. I know you can sail. Make it a minimum of ten metres and monohull. Your best bet is Cullen Bay, there’s less security, maybe only one or two Guards, maybe you can somehow take them off line. How much money do you have?” “I have over a hundred grand in the bank if they don’t shut my account down. I plan to be in Adelaide tomorrow morning. Banks open at 7 a.m. I may be able to take it all out.” “There’s lot of maybes in this, Felix. What happened?” “I’ll tell you when we get somewhere safe, if ever.” Back in the car I say, “Sheila, I’m going for Adelaide. Like you said, this car looks like any other car, with luck we’ll make it. A bus to Darwin or we’ll get another car, maybe even keep this one. Milo says we can’t go to Smith Point. Stealing or buying a yacht and sailing to Ambon is our best bet, if we can get there.” “Ambon? What is it? Some kind of paradise?”

Quadrant October 2016 109 Story

“If we can get through the Arafura Sea to the Banda Sea we might just make it. Ambon isn’t paradise, the Christians and Muslims have been at each other’s throats for over a century. But there are over 550,000 people living there. Not so small that we’ll stand out too much, and the possibility of a life without the Guards, if not there then on to Manado or some other island, some other place in the Indonesian archipelago.” She looks at me and says, “I’m sorry, Felix. I ...” I put the accelerator flat to the floor. We may always be running.

Sean O’Leary is a regular contributor to Quadrant. His short story collection Walking is available at www.peggybrightbooks.com. His website is: http://seanoleary56.wixsite.com/mysite.

Avalanche of Oranges

Sydney to Melbourne Small, barely dry, his fish mouth wet and gulping, If you didn’t have a “sleeper” a toddler, unattended on the old night train to Melbourne in the produce department they called it “sitting up”, reaches for the oily whether or not you reclined orange globes, enticing with a cushion and a rug as glass bubbles that bobbed and a paper bag of sandwiches in his old watery world and popped without reason. to savour in the dark. Such was my childhood travel One orange rolls down returning to boarding school, the cobbled mountain, falls to the floor, sleeping, waking, sleeping out of place now, separate, and opening my eyes at dawn a disorder, something wrong. to bleached and empty paddocks The toddler, on tip-toe, tries to put it back where it belongs, stained with rosy light tries to right the wrong. and at melancholy intervals One by one the oranges fall, swarm a litany of dark blue hoardings around his feet like things alive. advertising Dr Morse’s Then rolls the avalanche of oranges. Indian Root Pills. He stands ankle deep What were they for? in confusion, slowly, slowly, And who was Dr Morse? like a convalescent, picks up one They haunted me orange at a time, and seemed at one with the ache puts it back on the table. And so it begins. of loneliness and longing He grasps spheres too big for his hands, for family and home. juggles planets in clumsy palms trying so hard to do the right thing Barbara Fisher a fistful at a time.

Carolyn Evans Campbell

110 Quadrant October 2016 Jenny Stewart

Home and Away

f you are a fan of British comedy, you will no cally, and is said to have promised the referendum doubt recall that memorable episode of Fawlty on EU membership believing that it would help to Towers when Basil, the crazed Torquay hotel- unite his party, and enable him to secure a better Ikeeper played by John Cleese, welcomes some deal for Britain in Europe. In doing so, he violated German guests. The more Basil tries not to men- one of the few maxims of politics: “Don’t voluntar- tion the war, the more obsessed with it he becomes, ily commit to any process of whose outcome you until after a bump on the head, he begins goose- cannot be reasonably sure.” stepping around the foyer in an incredible parody One good thing to come out of the resulting mess of the fuehrer. The German guests are distressed is that Britain now has a woman prime minister. and incredulous. “However did they win the war?” Indeed when the male politicians self-destructed or asks one. simply gave up, the only two contenders left stand- It’s a good question. As we have watched, fasci- ing in the Tory party were both female. With mat- nated, the goings-on in the UK over the European ters threatening to run completely out of control, it Union, it’s as though a much-loved relative, always was clearly time for a woman to take charge. a little inclined to eccentricity, has now gone com- Despite its shortcomings, the process was, as pletely off his head. It’s not that the result, surpris- many have remarked, an example of democracy at ing as it was, was unreasonable. We can hardly work. The people may have given the wrong answer blame citizens for wanting to resume control of to the right question (or maybe it was the other way their own country, no matter how difficult that around) but they clearly had a point of view. As we might be in practice. It’s just that in institutional know, the result came as a shock. A close friend terms, no one seemed to have any idea what they who lives in Scotland almost had a nervous break- were doing. How, one wonders, was it possible to down. She wondered whether she should investi- wander into a yes-no referendum, technically non- gate Irish citizenship for her daughters. Another binding, but politically anything but, on an issue acquaintance wondered how on earth one was sup- as important as EU membership, with so little posed to get one’s house renovations done if all the detailed official thought apparently having been Poles were forced to go home. given to the implications? What might be in it for Australians? I suspect As decision-making tools, referenda are very the answer is, not much. The depreciated pound blunt instruments. Unless they are mandated will make that UK trip more affordable, but is not in some way, they are useful only if they have a good news for exporters. British consumers will clear context within which the results are to be no doubt continue to prefer subsidised European applied. Australians, for example, are periodically agricultural exports to those from distant Oz. For required to vote in referenda about changing the Australian firms seeking access to the European Constitution. We almost invariably vote “No”, fig- market, via investment in Britain, London will be uring that the status quo is likely to be preferable somewhat less attractive than formerly. For start-up to any change the politicians might have in mind. firms, the US was probably a more attractive source Nevertheless, great thought goes into the crafting of capital than the UK, anyway. of the questions, because a specific constitutional For the British themselves, there are some up- amendment is at stake. As John Howard showed in sides that have not been well remarked. The glory the 1999 referendum on the republic (a referendum days may be about to return for the British civil he had to have, but which he feared he might lose) service. When you are running your own country, the way the question is put is crucial. rather than forming part of a supra-national state, David Cameron was in a tricky situation politi- you have to work on a wider range of policies than

Quadrant October 2016 111 Home and Away before, particularly those relating to trade. Relations it off. But that was fifty years ago. In a globalis- with the EU will form only part of this unfolding ing world, effective policy on people movements complexity. The British are about to rediscover the requires the ability to respond flexibly to change, joys of international political economy. which in turn requires both diplomatic reach and some control of one’s borders. Just when the British f course immigration is the thing. One of the needed a policy on immigration, membership of an big problems with the EU was that it kept on expanded EU effectively precluded them from hav- gettingO bigger. In the 1970s, when it was a tidy lit- ing one. tle club of nine countries, and Britain was the sick man of Europe, no one much wanted to come to ow, this is contentious terrain for an Australian the UK. But the fall of the Soviet Union changed to tread, when the forebears of all non-Aborig- all that. Now that the EU has enlarged to include inalN Australians came from somewhere else within countries formerly behind the Iron Curtain, the the past 200 years or so. My grandfather’s family balance has shifted. From a British perspective, it is emigrated because there were no jobs in Scotland a little like discovering you have more relatives than and, in those days, you could travel to Australia and you ever imagined, and nearly all of stay with very little fuss. them want to come and stay. They My husband’s Greek father, may be super-helpful and nice, and who arrived in Sydney in 1925, even load the dishwasher without In theory, all the simply got on a boat in Port Said, being asked, but surely there must advanced states of which was then controlled by the be a time for them to go home? British. When he got to Sydney, In theory, all the advanced states the EU should be they weren’t going to let him off. of the EU should be equally attrac- equally attractive However as the vessel needed to tive to citizens from the poorer to citizens from the be dry-docked, they let him go, on states seeking to better themselves. condition that he worked for a few But the trade in people is mostly poorer states seeking years on the roads in New England. from the rest of Europe (and to better themselves. While people from many cul- beyond) to Britain. There are many tures have settled here, British cul- reasons for this. One is that the UK But the trade in people ture and British literature continue has a freer labour market than many is mostly from the to shape our imaginations. Few European countries. Another, per- rest of Europe (and older Australians would not have haps not so often noticed, is that, “wandered lonely as a cloud” in their apart from Ireland, Britain is the beyond) to Britain. youth. As soon as they could, those only EU country where English, who wanted to be writers took off the only true global language, is for the UK. While most now stay also the first language. Europe’s younger citizens at home, our capacity to produce excellent drama learn English as their second language, and it is to of our own remains mysteriously limited. The ABC the UK that they tend to go. and SBS continue to feature television drama and Migration is largely seen as a problem of race, or documentaries made in the UK, with British pre- culture. But whether the migrants are black, white senters and actors front and centre. If the endless or purple they can bring about a significant increase repeats are any indication, the dramas we go for are in population. In a country which was already heav- nostalgia personified, the picture-postcard Britain ily populated, the UK’s towns and cities are filled to of the past. bursting point. New housing is eating up more and It is ironic, isn’t it? We are indubitably on our more of England’s green and pleasant land. own in an increasingly threatening part of the The UK has traditionally exported rather than world, yet our public cultural institutions con- imported people, so it is scarcely surprising that tinue to be British-oriented, while our security- this reversal of the historical situation is a cause for related dependence on the US is stronger than ever. some consternation. In the 1960s, when immigra- Nevertheless, I am very glad Australia is not part tion from the former British Empire looked threat- of a supra-national union. We may make many bad ening, the British government effectively choked decisions. But at least they are our own.

112 Quadrant October 2016

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ANZAC & ITS ENEMIES THE HISTORY WAR ON AUSTRALIA’S NATIONAL IDENTITY

The Anzacs died in vain in an imperialist war and their legend is a reactionary mythology that justifies the class, gender, and racial oppression that is tearing Australian society apart. So say the anti-Anzacs led by a former prime minister, influential academics, intellectuals, the ABC and other sections of the media. They are determined to destroy the legend and ruin the Centennial commemorations of Gallipoli and the Great War. In this book, Mervyn F. Bendle explores the origins of the Anzac

Photographs © Australian War Memorial legend and exposes the century-long campaign waged against it.

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