Posts tagged 'politics'

Freedom of speech – and freedom from persecution for writers, in particular – has often been a subject for The Wheeler Centre’s events and articles.

This week, Salman Rushdie, one of the world’s most famous persecuted writers, had to cancel his appearance (then the video session that was to replace his physical presence) at India’s Jaipur Literary Festival, due to threats of violence.

Kabita Dhara, veteran of the Jaipur Literary Festival and publisher at Brass Monkey Books (a company that specialises in bringing Indian writing to Australian audiences) gives us the low-down on why it happened – and how it’s connected to Indian politics.

When asked what word he would use to describe the controversy that has surrounded his scheduled appearance at the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) last week, Salman Rushdie uses the word ‘farce’. In an interview with NDTV’s Barkha Dutt, after a scheduled video link with the festival (to make up for his inability to physically attend) was also cancelled due to threats of violence, Rushdie explains that he has been visiting India for years now; he has spoken at events in India a number of times in the past few years. So why all the fuss now?

Fingers are pointing to the fact that it is election time in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, which borders the state of Rajasthan (the state of which Jaipur is the capital). When it was announced that Rushdie would be appearing at the JLF, the Darul Uloom Deoband an ‘influential fundamentalist Islamic seminary’, demanded that Rushdie’s visa be withdrawn. (A poorly thought-out move: Rushdie, born in India of Indian parents, has documentation that means he doesn’t need a visa to enter India.) Consequent events suggest that the government, after initially supporting Rushdie’s visit both on a federal and state level, had second thoughts and decided that courting the 20% Muslim vote in Uttar Pradesh was more important. (One Indian TV presenter likened the situation to instances where villages that struggle with no electricity for years get given free laptops come election time.)

Jaipur, India

Just days before Rushdie was expected in India, emails purporting that three assassins were travelling to Jaipur from Mumbai to murder Rushdie were sent to the festival organisers and government officials, and subsequently to Rushdie himself. Government officials seemed unable to guarantee Rushdie’s safety and doubted that they could control the situation (even though they manage just fine with other visiting international dignitaries and sporting teams). Rushdie decided that it would be irresponsible to attend the festival due to the danger to festival-goers and because of the stress it would place on his family. It was later found that the emails and their content were probably fabricated, and now no organisation is taking responsibility for the emails or the intelligence that informed the emails.

When a video broadcast to the JLF crowds was organised to replace Rushdie’s initial scheduled appearance, the festival organisers again received threats of violent protests in Jaipur and had to cancel. All of which begs the question, while a democracy might see it as prudent to ban a book, how can it, effectively, ban the author? When the government banned The Satanic Verses when it was published in 1988, then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi took pains to clarify that the ban was because of concerns that the book would offend India’s Muslims and cause civil unrest, and that it did not reflect on the literary quality of the work.

The Satanic Verses is banned in India under a law that prevents its importation and dissemination, which raises the question of whether the ban is even relevant anymore given that the book can be downloaded from the internet. This does not mean its author is banned, or that one cannot discuss the book. When four other writers – Hari Kunzru, Amitava Kumar, Jeet Thayil and Ruchir Joshi – decided to read from The Satanic Verses at the JLF, to protest the treatment of Rushdie, they too found themselves under threat of prosecution, although Kunzru and Kumar deliberately read passages that had nothing to do with Islam but reflected instead the quality of Rushdie’s work.

The worrying aspect of this whole saga is the lack of clarity as to, firstly, whether the threats to Rushdie were orchestrated by government officials in a bid to dissuade Rushdie from attending the JLF because of impending elections (an Indian TV presenter charmingly referred to this possibility as ‘match-fixing’) and, secondly, who these people actually are who claim to be speaking for India’s Muslims. While the answer to the first is crucial to answering the second, it can only be speculated on, given that the only evidence is that which has been gleaned from media reports and literary blogs. So let’s consider the answer to the second.

While The Satanic Verses is still banned in a number of countries, after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, in 1998, the fatwa on Salman Rushdie that started the whole controversy was lifted. The book is available in some predominantly Muslim countries such as Turkey, Egypt and post-Gaddafi Libya, and has been translated into Turkish and Arabic. Most relevant to recent events in Jaipur, the book has long been read in India by those who bought it from overseas or downloaded it from the internet – and this group includes Muslims. A number of Indian Muslims have spoken up in defence of Rushdie’s right to free speech and have even sent him messages of support on social media. As Rushdie says in his interview with NDTV, the average Indian Muslim has more to worry about in day-to-day life than to protest about the visit of a writer. So which Muslims were threatened by Rushdie’s presence in Jaipur?

While it is in an elected government’s mandate to pass laws to protect the people of its country, when that country is a democracy, it also has the responsibility to balance that mandate with allowing freedom of expression as granted in its laws and Constitution. A burning question for Indians is how is the world’s largest democracy can justify stifling healthy debate because of threats of violence. (Where is Amartya Sen’s ‘argumentative Indian’ now?)

I will give the last word to Rushdie himself. In a passage in the last chapter of The Satanic Verses – a complex meditation on alienation, migration, Western materialism and the political manipulation of religion (amongst other things) – Rushdie has one stuttering character say, about India,: ‘Fact is … religious fafaith, which encodes the highest ass ass aspirations of human race, is now, in our cocountry, the servant of lowest instincts … ’

Kabita Dhara is director and publisher at Brass Monkey Books.

If you’ve been reading the Fairfax press (or surfing social media) recently, you’re probably familiar with the debate about writer and activist Melinda Tankard Reist – and whether she has the right to call herself a feminist.

Tankard Reist is the author of two books by Melbourne feminist publisher Spinifex Press, Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls and Big Porn Inc. (edited with Abigail Bray). She runs an activist group, Collective Shout, that works against the objectification of women and sexualisation of girls for commercial profit.

She’s also a conservative Christian who is anti-abortion (or ‘pro-life’) and spent twelve years working for Tasmanian senator Brian Harradine.

Melinda Tankard Reist

Tankard Reist has long been a controversial figure – particularly in feminist circles – but the current furore began with a front-cover profile in Sunday Life magazine on 8 January, nearly two weeks ago. The profile writer, left-wing feminist Rachel Hills, says she interviewed Melinda because she ‘thought it would be interesting’. She wrote on her website, ‘Like many journalists, I spend too much time thinking about what goes on in other people’s heads, and Melinda was a public figure I found particularly perplexing … I still didn’t “get” her. And I wanted to.’

This weekend, iconic Australian feminist Anne Summers argued that you need to sign onto certain principles in order to be a feminist – and abortion rights is one of them. ‘As far as I am concerned, feminism boils down to one fundamental principle and that is women’s ability to be independent. There are two fundamental preconditions to such independence: ability to support oneself financially and the right to control one’s fertility … To guarantee the second, women need safe and effective contraception and the back-up of safe and affordable abortion.’

She concluded of Tankard Reist, ‘Just because she says she is a feminist does not mean she is.’

In a past Wheeler Centre debate, Summers' contemporary Wendy McCarthy recalled abortion in the 1960s – before social pressure from feminists and others made it legal – as potentially fatal. ‘In my own experience, to get an abortion required furtive phone calls, 63 guineas (a large amount of money), cops patrolling up and down the road, hoping someone would give you advice when you left…’

Yesterday, Kate Gleeson said the most significant argument against Tankard Reist’s identification as a feminist is her involvement – through her work as Harradine’s adviser – in restricting the approval of the abortion drug RU486 and ushering in Australia’s adoption of the ‘global gag rule’ that dictates AusAID’s overseas family planning guidelines.

Gleeson said this had ‘profound implications for women’s access to contraception in our donor destination countries’, contributing to ‘the two-tier system in which Western women have mostly unfettered control over their reproduction, while those in the developing world are at the mercy of dangerous abortions’.

Today, Cathy Sherry takes issue with all those who’ve questioned Tankard Reist’s right to call herself a feminist. She says ‘I have long considered myself a feminist and been disturbed by the parts of the sisterhood who operate like the nasty in-group in primary school … I do not know Melinda Tankard Reist and I am not pro-life, but I defend her right to express her opinions, call herself a feminist and prosecute her own beliefs … The real test of tolerance is tolerating those with whom we strongly disagree. We will never have a right to express our own contested ideas if we do not defend others' rights to do the same.’

A somewhat baffled Rachel Hills (who says that the huge response to her profile – including five separate opinion pieces last weekend – has been both ‘a bit of a dream’ and ‘challenging’) reflected this week on what she’s learned from the experience. She concluded, ‘if you want people to listen to what you’re saying – whether you have a big platform or small one – you also have an obligation to engage in good faith’.

Hills’ approach to the profile was to avoid a hatchet job, but ‘to write something critical (in the sense of making analytic judgments) but still human’.

While perhaps not all the arguments being traded are useful (or indeed respectful), the broad debate is teasing out some big questions.

The year in Australian politics was one characterised by tumult, indifference and a degree of soul searching – but there were big changes, too. Julia Gillard succeeded in introducing the controversial carbon tax, which some argued in our Intelligence Squared debate would have questionable effect on climate change. Facing off against record growth in emissions, the bills' passing marked a legislative defeat for climate change denial and earned Gillard a place in Atlantic’s top 50 Brave Thinkers of 2011.

Leadership

While the PM fended off suggestions of internal party dissent (and the niggling threat of a Rudd challenge), and grappled with the challenges of a minority government, the broader question of leadership took the spotlight this year. In her Lunchbox/Soapbox presentation, Christine Nixon argued that Gillard is a progressive, consultative leader who has been wrongly judged against an outdated model.

Speakers debating the proposition that ‘Both Major Parties are Failing the Australian People’ lamented a lack of ‘real policy debate’ and questioned the ability of Labor and the Coalition to ‘govern for all, but also to govern for the national interest’. And Susan Mitchell courted the ire of the Opposition and its supporters when she criticised Tony Abbott’s ‘narrow worldview’ and ‘political opportunism’.

In one of our biggest events this year, Paul Keating blamed John Howard for throwing Australia’s moral compass overboard, whilst recounting the reforms of his own government and reiterating key concepts of his vision. On his party’s current woes, he offered: ‘Labor hasn’t lost its soul, but it has lost its story.’

Oration

Keating was speaking to promote After Words: The Post-Prime Ministerial Speeches. Former Keating speechwriter Don Watson appeared in a separate event earlier in the year, amongst other things explaining his relationship with his former boss.

You may recall the Keating-Watson disagreement over whose words were spoken by Keating in the 1992 Redfern speech; it was among many favourite speeches reread at our Unaccustomed As I Am event in July. (Elsewhere, some wondered whether Gillard’s woes in the polls were linked to her scripted speech style).

Polls

Speaking of the polls, we invited a formidable political brains trust to examine the effect of the news cycle and polling on the political process in our Greasy Polls Talking Point event. Their assessment somewhat echoed the earlier observations of Lindsay Tanner, who lamented the behaviour of the media and described parliamentary question time as ‘performance art for the six o'clock news’.

Who we are

Amidst the political back-and-forth, we continued to examine our changing national identity. Our So Who The Bloody Hell Are We? series turned the lens on blokes, the quarter-acre block and the fair go. Judith Brett talked about the relationship between city and country, while Guy Rundle explored the essentialist, adversarial racial politics emerging from a crisis of identity in the West.

Finally, Thomas Keneally finished our year of Lunchbox/Soapbox polemics with a presentation about twentieth century White Australia’s relationship with its Aboriginal and Asian ‘others’.

The year 2011 was the year a wave of popular unrest spilled out across the globe. It all began in Tunisia and spread to Egypt, toppling the sclerotic Mubarak regime, although doubts remain about how profound the change will actually be. Soon popular dissent was spreading like a wildfire across the Arab world in a phenomenon that came to be known as the Arab Spring, which claimed some big scalps.

Thomas Friedman talked about the end of the American century – and his plan for how the US can re-establish its global hegemony. Naomi Chazan reflected on this ‘extraordinary period in the Middle East’, she analyses the Palestinian experience of change in the region and the effect economic growth has had on its internal politics. She confesses to being ‘increasingly convinced that this is the most momentous period in Israel’s history since 1948’. Amos Oz urged Israel to become the first state to recognise Palestinian nationhood, while Izzeldin Abuelaish discussed the importance of dreaming and optimism in dealing with Middle Eastern conflict.

The Arab Spring was like a fire that jumps over fences and rivers. It spread to Spain’s Indignidad movement and also, arguably, to the streets of London, before it finally jumped the Atlantic and morphed into the Occupy movement. The Occupiers put poverty and community empowerment back on the political radar for the first time in a generation.

We’ve previously covered US President Barack Obama’s reading habits. Now Melbourne’s Grattan Institute has released a suggested summer reading guide for the Prime Minister. The thinktank has suggested Julia Gillard read books it believes “say something interesting about Australia and its future”. The books are Judith Brett’s Quarterly Essay, ‘Fair Share’; Jan Gehl’s Cities for People; Michael Wesley’s There Goes the Neighbourhood; an article entitled ‘Balancing the Risks, Benefits, and Costs of Homeland Security’; Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist; and Frank Moorhouse’s Cold Light.

You can review the full list here, with profiles on each book. The list is an annual event – here’s last year’s.

What books do you think our PM should read over her summer holidays?

She was the only daughter of one of the most famous and ruthless tyrants in history. She said she was doted upon, and only once did her father threaten to hit her, but when at 16 she fell in love with a 40 year-old filmmaker he was banished to Siberia.

Her mother committed suicide because of her father’s cruelty. So did a half-brother and, arguably, her elder brother. She authored books and mixed in the Soviet Union’s highest official intellectual circles. She even had a perfume named after her – (Svetlana’s Breath). And, in 1967 and at the age of 41, Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva became one of the most famous defectors in the history of the Cold War. Her subsequent life would last another 44 years, outlasting the Soviet Union itself, only to end yesterday.

The defection was organised by the CIA from India, where Svetlana had travelled to bury the ashes of her lover, an Indian man she referred to as a husband despite having been denied permission to marry him. She left two children behind in the Soviet Union, with whom she would remain permanently estranged despite a brief return to the USSR in the mid-1980s. At a press conference in New York soon after her defection, she said of her infamous father in a press conference, “I loved him, I respected him, and when we was gone I have lost maybe a lot of faith, just personal faith and respect. Of course I disapprove many things [about Stalin], but I think that many other people who still are in our Central Committee and Politburo should be responsible for the same things for which he alone was accused. And if I feel somebody [is] responsible for those horrible things – killing people, unjustice [sic] – I feel that responsible for this was and is the party, the regime and the ideology as a whole.”

Following her defection, she briefly married an architect and engineer closely tied to the Taliesin West headquarters of Modernist architect Frank Lloyd Wright. When she returned to the USSR, she disavowed her time in the west, but family ructions caused her to return to the US shortly after. She settled in small-town Wisconsin where, over the years, Svetlana became increasingly reclusive. In a documentary she complained of the burden of the expectations of others: “I’m neither this nor that. I’m somewhere in between. And that ‘somewhere in between’ people don’t get.”

This sad news comes the day after a Wall Street Journal look at the children of China’s ruling class.

It’s the 48th anniversary of the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in 1963. The New York Times has published a short film by noted documentarian Errol Morris called The Umbrella Man, in which he interviews Josiah Thompson, writer of Six Seconds in Dallas. Here’s an excerpt of Thompson’s speculation about what the assassination means for historians:

“In December 1967, John Updike was writing [the] ‘Talk of the Town’ [column] for the the New Yorker and he spent most of that ‘Talk of the Town’ column talking about the Umbrella Man. He said that his learning of the existence of the Umbrella Man made him speculate that in historical research there may be a dimension similar to the quantum dimension in physical reality. If you put any event under a microscope, you will find a whole dimension of completely weird, incredible things going on. It’s as if there’s the macro level of historical research, where things sort of obey natural laws and usual things happen and unusual things don’t happen, and then there’s this other level where everything is really weird.” Watch the film here.

The Morris documentary is based on what’s known as the Zapruder film – footage of the assassination captured on a hobbyist camera by Abraham Zapruder. While it’s not the only footage of the assassination, it’s considered the most complete and the only one that clearly shows the president’s head wound. The film has thus been extensively surveyed by amateur sleuths and professional investigators ever since, despite the fact that the vision is extremely unstable. Now, the Zapruder film has finally been stabilised – although we must warn you that the content is extremely violent.

We’ve come a long way since then. Last week, a pepper spraying of Occupy protesters by police at the Davis campus of the University of California was captured on a variety of handheld video capture devices – let’s call them phones. The image of a policeman casually releasing pepper spray from a shake-up can is now a meme. Four of these videos have been synchronised and can now be viewed simultaneously. It’s led some to write about the birth of the citizen reporter – but, as Zapruder’s film shows, citizen reporting isn’t exactly new. What’s new is the platform, which is why the emerging debate about internet censorship looms as a critical one. (Read our recent story on the debate between the champions of DIY journalism and the defenders of traditional, institutional reporting.)

Far more disturbing though is footage of the public unrest in Egypt. This Guardian footage is bad enough – this Al-Masry Al-Youm TV footage may give you nightmares. “The age of authoritarianism is over, no one can tell the Egyptians what to do anymore,” says a young Egyptian revolutionary quoted in the Guardian, one of thousands of Egyptians protesting against the ruling military junta that has triggered the resignation en masse of the interim government and threatens to derail elections scheduled to be held in a week. So far, the protests have claimed the lives of 33 protesters. Here’s video of the Wheeler Centre’s recent event on the Arab Spring, where former diplomat Paul Bowker warns that the Arab Spring could take five to ten years and see many twists and turns.

(Click to watch video.)

“This year two thirds of all world growth has come out of the developing economies. And we think we can have a debate about the circumstances of someone’s birth and their complexion and how they look. I mean, it’s sick, sick, sick. It’s truly sick.” Paul Keating’s recent conversation with Robert Manne at the Melbourne Recital Centre revealed a man still passionate about the value of conviction politics. It also allowed a born political storyteller space to tell his stories – and there were several major themes.

In classic Keating gladiatorial form, the former Prime Minister reiterated his belief that, were the federal electoral cycle four years rather than three years, he would have beaten John Howard in 1996. “I just needed more time,” he told Robert Manne. Keating blames a Royal Commission involving Carmen Lawrence in Western Australia that took up most of 1995 – at the time he called the commission a political stunt. “By the time I got on to Howard, I had him a blithering wreck … He didn’t know whether he was coming or going. If I’d had another year I would have done to him what I did every other day, was tread on him. He never got on top of him in the polls … and I would have massacred him in 1996 if I’d had another year, but I didn’t have the time. I just didn’t have the time.”

On the issue of illegal refugees, Keating berated the ALP for not having the courage of its convictions. “One of the primary duties of a Prime Minister is to protect a country from prejudice,” he says. At the time of Tampa, Keating recalls having advised the then Labor leader and opposition leader Kim Beazley that the ALP couldn’t hope to outflank Howard’s conservative reaction: “The Labor Party should have stood its ground.” This leads Manne onto the topic of the Labor Party’s mixed fortunes since Keating. He asks, has Labor lost its way? “Labor hasn’t lost its soul, but it has lost its story,” Keating replies. “This is another transition. This is perhaps the biggest transition in 300 years. This is the transition to the establishment of China’s position of primacy again in the international system. A change in the way the world works, from West to East. And … here we are, a primary exporter to this.” The Labor Party, he adds, should be “constructing a story of transition”. The transition “should also be a cultural one”, he says, and thus Keating comes to the tagline that made the papers the next day: Australia should derive its security in Asia, not from Asia.

This is Keating’s biggest theme, one he returns to repeatedly in the course of the conversation. The rise of China is the great story of our generation. “All great states claim strategic space. And if you don’t give it to them they take it.” Keating warns that refusing to accord China the strategic space it demands may lead to catastrophic results. “Accommodating China a new construct is … the most important thing facing Australia.”

Keating concludes his Wheeler Centre appearance with another classic aphorism that summed up his political fortunes: “You don’t necessarily give the public back what the public wants. You give them what the public needs. If you give them too much of it they get sick of you.”

Is nothing sacred? It’s a subject that continues to torture the stylish brows of French literary types following the bombing of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo last week. Last week’s edition – titled Sharia Hebdo – had reported on the triumph in Tunisian elections of an Islamist party and featured on the front page a cartoon of the prophet promising readers 100 lashes if they didn’t “die laughing”. As a result, the magazine’s Parisian HQ has been firebombed, its website has been hacked and death threats have been aimed at its staff (full story). Readers wondering how the magazine would respond to the events will discover on their newsstands today (Paris time) this cover featuring a magazine cartoonist and an Islamic man locked in passionate embrace under the headline, ‘Love is stronger than hate’.

More than a statistic, “one per cent” has become the slogan of a diffuse but determined worldwide movement that, many believe, has already changed political discourse, regardless of its ultimate destiny. Where did it all begin? With an article entitled ‘Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%’ by Joseph Stiglitz in the May issue of Vanity Fair magazine – hardly a bastion of anarchist extremism. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and professor at Columbia University, is a neo-Keynesian economist who was famously fired from the World Bank for dissent.

In his Vanity Fair article, Stiglitz argued that increased concentration of the ownership of wealth was harmful for everyone, including the 1%. It’s an argument that doesn’t wash with critics of the movement, like conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks, who argues the movement should concentrate on expanding opportunity, not reducing inequality.

In a recent New York Times blog, economist Paul Krugman argued that the Occupy Wall Street movement was aiming too low. Krugman believes that the movement should be targeting the top 0.1% of the economy, which he argues has benefited most from the concentration of wealth in recent decades. This roughly equates to 307,000 individuals, a tiny fraction of the US’s five million-plus million-dollar households.

In an attempt to map the intellectual history of the Occupy movement, The Chronicle of Higher Education has traced its origins back to a remote Madagascan tribe. Anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber, one of the intellectual figures behind Occupy Wall Street, conducted ethnographic research into a group called the Betafo from 1989 to 1991, written up in the 2007 book, Lost People. The Betafo are descendants of Madagascan colonisers and indigenous people. As the Madagascan government was too poorly resourced to provide services to the Betafo, they devised a form of autonomous, decentralised, consensus-based decision-making – in short, a form of anarchism.

What the Chronicle report doesn’t mention is that the Arab Spring demonstrations earlier this year on Cairo’s Tahrir Square also helped set the scene: there, makeshift social services – including tents, food, education and health facilities – were organised by demonstrators to make the occupation of Cairo’s centre of gravity sustainable. It’s a pattern taken up by Occupy protests around the world, which has also taken from the centuries-old commons movement and the anarchist ‘squatting’ tradition, such as this 2007 Barcelona squat, with its ‘occupy and resist’ tag.

The roots of anarchism stretch back at least to the mid-19th century. At the end of the 19th century, extremist anarchists invented modern-day terrorism. Joseph Conrad wrote about them in his novel, The Secret Agent.

But contemporary anarchism represents a wide field of ideas that straddle the left and right of politics and includes libertarian strains. The kind of leftist anarchism that intellectuals like David Graeber espouse champions grass-roots collaboration and autonomy. It eschews reliance on government but, unlike the anarchists that Conrad wrote about, also eschews violence: “One of the things that revolutionaries have learned over the course of the 20th century is that the idea of the ends justifying the means is deeply problematic,” the Chronicle report quotes Graeber as saying. “You can’t create a just society through violence, or freedom through a tight revolutionary cadre. You can’t establish a big state and hope it will go away. The means and ends have to be the same.”

While Palestinian attempts to secure full membership of the United Nations are still pending, signs have abounded that they will ultimately prove futile. Representatives of the Palestinian Territories are currently in confidential talks with the 16-member United Nations Security Council. The Palestinians needs to obtain a Security Council recommendation before the 193-member United Nations General Assembly can vote on granting them full membership. This means that not only do they require the votes of nine of the 16 Security Council members, they also require the votes of all five of the permanent members – Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States – any one of which can veto the proposal. The United States has already indicated it will exercise its veto on the grounds that Palestinian statehood can’t be unilaterally declared without Israeli support. This probably won’t be necessary: Bosnia, which hold a temporary seat on the Security Council, has indicated it will abstain from the vote, making a majority of nine unachievable.

Meanwhile, the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) voted to admit Palestine as its 195th full member on Monday. Only fourteen member states voted against the move (including Australia and the US), while 52 abstained. The move comes at considerable cost to the organisation – some $70 million, or a quarter of the budget – as both US and Israeli will withhold their funding allocations to UNESCO as a result of the vote. By law, the US government cannot fund a UN agency that accepts Palestine as a member. Indeed, the US boycotted UNESCO from 1984 to 2003, alleging the organisation was corrupt, censorious and anti-Israel.

Palestine’s curious UN double status is the result of differing admission procedures between the two organisations. No UNESCO member nation holds veto power. The Palestinian foreign minister insisted this week the two admission applications were not linked. UNESCO is a global development agency which hosts the City of Literature program, of which Melbourne is a member city.

The video/podcast of the recent Wheeler Centre event, ‘The Arab Spring’, is now available. Click on the image below to watch, listen and download.

(Click to watch video.)

“If you allow this toxic combination of religion and politics to become too closely entwined, then you’re in trouble.” In her recent Lunchbox/Soapbox, Dr Susan Mitchell spoke on the topic of her newly-released polemic on opposition leader Tony Abbott, Tony Abbott: A Man’s Man (watch the video). She explored at some length the influence of the Catholic Church on the man many are inking in as a shoe-in for prime minister following the next election. Tony Abbott, Mitchell argued, “has allowed religion and politics to become entwined.” Indeed, if Abbott were to become prime minister, he would be the first practising Catholic prime minister of Australia from the conservative side of politics (there have been, by our count, three on the Labor side: James Scullin, Joseph Lyons and Ben Chifley).

Mitchell, adjunct Professor of Creative Writing at Flinders University, a radio and television broadcaster, and a former opinion and humour writer for The Australian, presented Tony Abbott as a man who sees things in black and white. She attributed this to his Catholic faith, listing key Catholic mentors in Abbott’s youth. Father Emmett Costello, a Jesuit priest in Sydney’s Riverview College, trained Abbott in Churchillian rhetoric and encouraged him to enter politics. At university, Abbott was a protégé of B.A. Santamaria, an influential anti-Communist journalist and Catholic activist who believed the Church should instruct Australians how to vote and, Mitchell contends, taught Abbott that “politics is a way to give glory to God in the human sphere”. Another Jesuit priest at Oxford University encouraged Abbott to take up boxing. At the age of 26, Abbott chose to enter St Patrick’s Seminary in Manly. He later discontinued his religious studies and became a journalist, writing for The Catholic Weekly for a time.

While Tony Abbott has never shied away from acknowledging the importance of the Catholic Church to him as a person and as a politician, he is nevertheless capable of having a foot in both camps (Church and state) when the situation requires it. How does he justify this? In a speech he gave in 2004 to the Adelaide University Democratic Club decrying the annual number of women having abortions, he had this to say on how Christian politicians should juggle their responsibilities to Church and state.

“Despite the debt that political institutions owe to the West’s Christian heritage, there is the constant claim that Christians in politics are confused about the separation of church and state. There’s also a tendency among Christians in the community to think that Christians in politics have to sell out their principles in order to survive. Christian politicians are often warding off simultaneous accusations that they are zealots or fakes. Indeed, the public caricature of a Christian politician is hypocrite or wuss, in denial about the ruthlessness and expediency necessary to wield power, or too sanctimonious to be effective … Christians are not required to right every wrong. Christian politicians are not required to promote policies for which there is no demand in the community.”

The next Intelligence Squared debate on 15 November at the Melbourne Town Hall will debate the proposition, ‘The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world’.

(Click to watch video.)

“Whether or not we agree that anything at all in modern society needs to be changed, we must at least come to understand that the occupiers are not just another political movement, nor are they simply lazy kids looking for an excuse not to work. Rather, they see the futility of attempting to use the tools of a competitive, winner-takes-all society for purposes that might better be served through the tools of mutual aid. This is not a game that someone wins, but rather a form of play that is successful the more people get to play, and the longer the game is kept going.” Read the entire column, via CNN..

Douglas Rushkoff is an American media theorist, writer, columnist, lecturer, graphic novelist and documentarian. He is best known for his association with the early cyberpunk culture, and his advocacy of open source solutions to social problems.

“We, the undersigned writers and all who will join us, support Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Movement around the world.” Hundreds of writers have lent their names to the website Occupy Writers to support the Occupy Wall Street movement and others like it spawning in cities across the globe (including Melbourne).

The list is a literary who’s who and includes names like Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, Tariq Ali, Ann Beattie, Noam Chomsky, Michael Cunningham, Junot Diaz, Jennifer Egan, Barbara Ehrenreich, Sasha Frere-Jones, Nell Freudenberger, Neil Gaiman, Naomi Klein, Jonathan Lethem, China Mieville, Rick Moody, Salman Rushdie, Gloria Steinem, Donna Tartt, Alice Walker, Ann Patchett and Naomi Wolf. Australian writers on the list include Alison Croggon and Paddy O'Reilly.

Some are going a step further, penning work for publication n the Occupy Writers website. Daniel Handler, better known by his sobriquet Lemony Snicket, the author of A Series of Unfortunate Events, has published a list entitled, ‘Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance’. It’s a plea for social justice made in typical Lemony Snicket style. We especially liked points 4 (“4. People who say money doesn’t matter are like people who say cake doesn’t matter—it’s probably because they’ve already had a few slices”), 10 (“It is not always the job of people shouting outside impressive buildings to solve problems. It is often the job of the people inside, who have paper, pens, desks, and an impressive view”) and 13 (“99 percent is a very large percentage. For instance, easily 99 percent of people want a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and the occasional slice of cake for dessert. Surely an arrangement can be made with that niggling 1 percent who disagree”).

(Click to watch video.)

The passing of a raft of bills associated with the carbon tax through the House of Representatives this week earned Prime Minister Julia Gillard a place in the Atlantic magazine’s list of the top 50 Brave Thinkers of 2011. The prime minister rubs shoulders alongside Barack Obama, recently deceased Apple demigod Steve Jobs and filmmaker Terence Malick for, in the words of the US magazine, “betting her job on a plan to tax greenhouse-gas emissions”. A profile of the PM on the magazine’s website adds that “80 percent of the country’s electricity comes from coal, helping to make Australia the worst per capita carbon polluter among wealthy nations. Australia is also the world’s leading coal exporter, and vocal factions of the powerful mining industry say the tax scheme will destroy jobs and sink the economy. Such fears help explain the prime minister’s horrendous job-approval numbers.”

Also on the list is Richard Muller, a prominent physicist who was considered a climate change sceptic determined to debunk the scientific consensus on climate change. Muller led a team of researchers – called the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project (BEST) – on a thorough review of the science behind anthropogenic climate change… only to testify before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology that the science was credible.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has pledged to scrap the tax if and when he is elected. Layer and climate change policy analyst Fergus Green argues on Crikey that this pledge might be made than kept.

Meanwhile, the New York Review of Books has published a review by John Terborgh of Tim Flannery’s book Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet that puts the global environmental situation in stark terms. Titled Çan Our Species Escape Destruction?‘, Terborgh writes, “Estimates of how bad the situation is, or course, differ, but various assessments agree that the global economy is consuming resources at a rate equivalent to 1.3 to 1.5 times the earth’s capacity to supply them sustainably.”

In recent days, tragic events in Cairo’s Tahrir Square have overshadowed the previous gains of the Arabic Spring. The violence claimed the lives of 26 and injured some 300 more – all unarmed – after Coptic Egyptians had walked to Tahrir Square to voice their frustration over several recent incidents of anti-Coptic violence. The weekend violence seems to have been instigated by elements of the Egyptian army and security forces.

Some ten to 15% of Egyptians are Copts, an indigenous ethnoreligious group distinct from Muslim Egyptians. The Coptic Church is an ancient Christian community that predates the arrival of Islam into Egypt. It bears some superficial similarities with the Eastern Orthodox Christianity of Greece, but is theologically and ecclesiastically distinct. The Coptic language fell into disuse for everyday purposes several centuries ago.

In an op-ed published in the Guardian, William Dalrymple, best-known for his authoritative writing on Indian society and history, gives some historical context to these events. According to Dalrymple, Egyptians as a whole hold their army in high esteem, despite the abuses of the Mubarak era, because of the role the army played in key national events in the 19th and 20th centuries. Moreover, Dalrymple suggests that, when Egypt was under the sway of European powers, Coptic Egyptians dominated the national economy, a privileged status that has since been eroded. Now that, in the post-Mubarak era, the political balance of power in Egypt is being contested between the army and the Muslim Brotherhood, the Copts are in danger of becoming the one scapegoat both sides can agree on. Senior army figures are now reported to be in negotiations with Coptic leaders, who have called on Copts to observe three days' mourning beginning today.

To make sense of these and other events consuming the Middle East and North Africa, join us next Thursday, 20 October, as chair Hamish McDonald and a panel of specialists discuss the Arabic Spring, its achievements, its failures and its future implications.

It’s Anti-Poverty Week and, coincidentally, the Occupy Wall Street movement, having mushroomed across North America, has now jumped the Pacific and is set to reach Melbourne this Saturday. Having borrowed the US movement’s ‘We are the 99%’ tag (in the US, 1% of the population owns 42% of the wealth), Occupy Melbourne will begin at 10am at the City Square in Melbourne (on Facebook here), with similar events planned for Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. Overseas, similar protests are planned in Italy, Spain and at the site of the London Stock Exchange. Occupy Wall Street’s goals are diffuse but seem united by a single theme: posters and flyers published on the Occupy Melbourne website include such slogans as “End corporate greed”, “End corporate welfare” and “Greed is over”.

Occupy Wall Street (on Facebook here) is a movement that began in New York on 17 September. It has been depicted as a continuation, at least in spirit, of the Arabic Spring movements, particularly the events in Egypt that led to the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak earlier this year, by way of a wave of protests in Spain that has come to be known as the Spanish Indignants. The Spanish Indignants are so-called because they are said to have been inspired, at least in part, by a book written by a 93-year-old French Resistance hero, Stéphane Hessel, whose pamphlet, Indignez-Vous!, urges young people to give voice to their frustrations (previously covered here).

The rise of the movement has been fascinating. At first, the New York protests slipped under the media radar, but a senior New York policeman who pepper-sprayed protesters seems to have done the movement a favour of sorts. Footage of the pepper-spraying went online and went viral: before long, it was being picked up by media outlets hungry for a drama upon which to pin the story. Suddenly Occupy Wall Street was being dubbed the left-wing equivalent of the Tea Party movement, although, as this chart shows, the Tea Party movement garnered much more initial media attention. Then, enter the celebrities (cue Kanye West, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Mark Ruffalo). This Al-Jazeera report traces the movement’s short but compelling history, while this film, shot at Zucotti Park in New York where Occupy Wall Street is based, gives viewers a ground-level glimpse into the movement, how it’s organised and, presumably, what to expect in Melbourne beginning Saturday.

A poster promoting Occupy Wall Street created by ‘Adbusters’ magazine with the question on everybody’s lips.

The Wheeler Centre, in partnership with the Melbourne Festival, presents a series of events dubbed ‘You Say You Want a Revolution’ from 19 to 21 October featuring Emmanuel Jal, a panel discussion on the Arabic Spring and a panel discussion on Indigenous activism, at the George Fairfax Studio at the Arts Centre.

The UK arm of Amnesty International has launched a series of weekly vodcasts called Amnesty TV. In a preview of this week’s vodcast published by the Guardian online, psychiatrist Dr Philip Hodson explores the psychology of dictators through the ages from Julius Caesar to Hosni Mubarak. The vodcast echoes the findings of Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test, which we’ve written about several times before. Hodson states that dictators tend to have several traits in common: sadism, paranoia, narcissism, anti-social behaviour, and split personality. “If you put this simply, it means they enjoyed being cruel, they had massive egos, they cared little for human suffering, had no genuine friends, believed everyone was plotting against them and rewarded nearly all acts of treachery with death.”

Hodson goes on to refer to the famous 1971 Stanford prison experiment, which divided the test subjects randomly into guards and prisoners in a simulated prison. The ‘guards’ became so abusive that the experiment was abandoned after only several days. The outcome of the experiment suggests that, given the right conditions, most human beings are capable of committing unconscionable acts.

(Click to watch video.)

Former Victorian Police Commissioner Christine Nixon delivered last Thursday’s Lunchbox/Soapbox on the subject of leadership. Comparing what she argued are old and new models of leadership, Nixon stressed that qualities such as independence, lateral thinking and openness to the needs of others are key to leadership in a progressive society. She also acknowledged the reluctance of some to leave behind the comfort and security of militaristic, top-down command, a reluctance she attributed to a reluctance by the old guard to relinquish power.

Nixon pointed to Prime Minister Julia Gillard as an example of a new style of leader being judged on an outdated model. Dismissing the media’s undermining “voice of ridicule”, she argued that Gillard is dealing with “an incredibly complex system where she is in a minority government, having to make sure that a whole range of other people are a part of it”. This ridicule, she says, is borne from fear. Rather than being weak for capitulating to the ideas of others, though, Nixon praises leaders like Gillard and Obama for their strengths in consensus governance.

A bookshop in the Libyan capital Tripoli was among many businesses to reopen last week following the fall of the Gaddafi regime. But more than most, the owner is hoping that the inauguration of a new period in Libyan history won’t represent business as usual. As recounted in this profile, septuagenarian Mohammed Ali Al-Bahbahy’s life story is itself book-worthy. A former military man educated in the UK and USA, Al-Bahbahy welcomed the bloodless coup that brought Muammar Gaddafi to power in 1969 but fell victim to it ten years later when educated officers were purged from the armed forces. In 1995, Al-Bahbahy opened a bookstore with 200 of his own books. Over the years, he’s acquired some 12,000 more, mostly from impoverished Tripolitanians selling books to make ends meet.

Al-Bahbahy’s bookstore was spared the suppression that characterised intellectual life in Libya under Gaddafi because of its owner’s military connections and its location in central Tripoli, around the corner from Green Square (recently re-christened Martyr’s Square).

Colonel Gaddafi on a 2009 state visit to Italy, alongside one of his military advisers and Italian President Berlusconi, via Libero Liberos/Flickr

The shop also stocked many translations of Gaddafi’s signature tract, the Green Book, published in 1975 as the colonel’s answer to Mao’s Little Red Book. The Green Book, a short book of about 20,000 words, was a collection of Gaddafi’s aphorisms with no discernible logic or sense of coherence, but it was an unavoidable part of everyday life for Libyans. It was so-called because the colour green has a long-held association with nature and life, particularly in the desert cultures of the Middle East, and has come to be the colour most often associated with Islam.

Gaddafi’s book was translated into 45 languages; Libyan schoolchildren were required to study it for two hours every week; choice quotes were daily fare on Libyan television and radio broadcasts; and ‘research centres’ were set up throughout the country dedicated to its study. On one occasion the Green Book even sponsored a West German ice hockey team.

Here’s one particularly apt example among many others of the book’s almost hallucinatory strangeness: “If a community of people wears white on a mournful occasion and another dresses in black, then one community would like white and dislike black and the other would like black and dislike white. Moreover, this attitude leaves a physical effect on the cells as well as on the genes in the body.”

Julian Burnside has written on the High Court’s decision overturning the government’s Malaysian solution on the ABC’s The Drum. Here’s an excerpt of what he wrote:

In the past 15 years, most boat arrivals have been Afghan Hazaras fleeing the Taliban, Iraqis fleeing Saddam Hussein, Iranians fleeing the theocracy in that country, and Tamils fleeing genocide in Sri Lanka. Not surprisingly, a very high percentage (approximately 80-95 per cent) of boat people ultimately establish an entitlement to protection. […]

It is therefore difficult to assume that anything done by Australia will make any appreciable difference to the arrival rate of boat people.

If things are left as they are, Australia will continue to face the following problems associated with the present system: needless infliction of mental harm on detainees and damage to Australia’s reputation as a nation which cares about human rights. And don’t forget the huge cost: mandatory detention costs us about $1 billion a year.

There is simply no merit in the idea of detaining people indefinitely just because they have arrived in Australia by boat. Asylum seekers also arrive by air: typically they arrive on short-term visas such as business, tourist or student visas. Once in Australia, they apply for asylum. Once their initial visa expires, they are given a bridging visa pending assessment of their claim for asylum. This may take years, but they remain in the community while it happens. Most of these asylum claims fail on the merits (only about 20 per cent succeed). By contrast, about 80-90 per cent of boat arrivals ultimately succeed in their claim for asylum, but they are detained during the entire process.

The arrival rate of asylum seekers who come by air is two or three times greater than the arrival rate of boat people.

A question inevitably arises: what is the justification for detaining boat people indefinitely, at vast expense, when most of them will ultimately succeed in their claim for protection but will be damaged more or less severely by the process? To this question, it seems that the only genuine answer is an appeal to political advantage.

Read the full piece.

“Prison is a place where one can meet the most extraordinary people,” according to Russian tycoon and billionaire jailbird Mikhail Khodorkovsky. According to an Agence France Presse report published in The Australian, Khodorkovsky’s observation was made in the first of a series of chronicles of prison life he’s begun writing for Novoye Vremya, or New Times, magazine.

His column, called ‘Prison Folk’, will be about the inmates of a prison in the far-northern Russian republic of Karelia where Khodorkovsky, formerly one of the richest men in the world, has been incarcerated since the middle of the year. The first instalment is about a prisoner called Kolya, “who disembowelled himself and threw his intestines at guards for being set up for a crime he did not commit: grabbing a purse from an elderly woman.”

Khodorkovsky, whose life story seems lifted from a Russian fable, is in the middle of serving an eight year term for tax evasion. His oil company Yukos was the subject of litigation, and subsequent takeover, by the Russian government in 2003 in an action designed to signal the end of Russian gangster capitalism.

Russian history has been marked by viciously punitive prison regimes. Because writers have often been the target of official opprobrium, Russian literature has chronicled these regimes in detail. Varlam Shalamov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn are the best-known chroniclers of the Russian prison system during the Soviet era.

The scale of the Russian penal system has led to the rise of a kind of ‘prison anthropology’, looking into the complex social systems that have evolved over time. Danzig Baldayev, a prison guard at St Petersburg’s notorious Kresty Prison for 33 years, documented this culture in the three-volume Encyclopedia of Russian Criminal Tattoos (here’s a preview via the book-design blog Brain Pickings).

Poster of a Queensland production of the Casey Bennetto musical, Keating!, via Jiggs Images/Flickr

In a recent Wheeler Centre event celebrating great speeches, a variety of guests read their favourite orations. Actor Noni Hazlehurst read the Redfern speech, a speech delivered by former PM Paul Keating in Redfern Park on 10 December, 1992. The speech didn’t receive much media attention at the time, but it has gone down in history as one of the great Australian political speeches. It came in at number three in a 2007 poll of favourite speeches among listeners of ABC Radio National, behind only Martin Luther King’s 1968 ‘I have a dream’ speech and Jesus' sermon on the mount. Here’s edited footage and here’s a transcript.

In his classic political memoir, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, Keating’s speechwriter Don Watson provides background on the event. At the beginning of the speech, he writes, “there were intermittent catcalls from the back” from disgruntled indigenous locals. The catcalls stopped when Keating began to speak about “recognition”: “Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers…”

“The first principle of the Redfern speech,” Watson notes, “was that the problem could only be solved by an act of imagination. The country had to acknowledge certain notorious facts – indisputable facts, not hedged about with doubts and qualifications, nor as elements of a partisan agenda. There was no hope of a useful debate if the truth was not acknowledged and consequences of it imagined. The consequences were trauma, alienation, anger, despair, suicide…”

Inevitably, there was a backlash to the speech. “The problematic word was ‘we’. From ‘we’ the inference has been drawn that the present generation of Australians is responsible for the actions of previous generations. This was not intended.”

As a result of the publication of Recollections, Paul Keating and Don Watson – “the puppet master for the highest puppet in the land”, in Keating’s words – are no longer on speaking terms. It’s a rift that journalist Michael Gordon, in a Saturday Age feature, calls “one of the most enduring, unexpected fallings-out in modern Australian political history.”

(Click to watch video.)

Perhaps no journalist can match Polish writer Ryszard Kapuściński’s reporting on revolutions around the world. His analyses of political change remain as relevant now as they did in his lifetime. As Libya teeters on the brink of regime change, we revisit one of Kapuściński’s best books, Shah of Shahs, a classic account of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The causes of a revolution are usually sought in objective conditions – general poverty, oppression, scandalous abuses. But this view, while correct, is one-sided. After all, such conditions exist in a hundred countries, but revolutions erupt rarely. What is needed is the consciousness of poverty and the consciousness of oppression, and the conviction that poverty and oppression are not the natural order of this world. It is curious that in this case, experience in and of itself, no matter how painful, does not suffice. The indispensable catalyst is the word, the explanatory idea. More than petards or stilettoes, therefore, words – uncontrolled words, circulating freely, underground, rebelliously, not gotten up in dress uniforms, uncertified – frighten tyrants. But sometimes it is the official, uniformed, certified words that bring about the revolution.

Revolution must be distinguished from revolt, coup d'état, palace takeover. A coup or a palace takeover may be planned, but a revolution – never. Its outbreak, the hour of that outbreak, takes everyone, even those who have been striving for it, unawares. They stand amazed at the spontaneity that appears suddenly and destroys everything in its path. It demolishes so ruthlessly that in the end it may annihilate the ideals that called it into being. […]

As for the technique of the struggle, history knows two types of revolution. The first is revolution by assault, the second revolution by siege. […] In a revolution by assault, the first phase is the most radical. The subsequent phases are a slow but incessant withdrawal to the point at which the two sides, the rebelling and the rebelled-against, reach the final compromise. A revolution by siege is different; here the first strike is usually weak and we can hardly surmise that it forebodes a cataclysm. But events soon gather speed and become dramatic. More and more people take part. The walls behind which authority has been sheltering crack and then burst. The success of a revolution by siege depends on the determination of the rebels, on their will power and endurance. In the end, the gates yield, the crowd breaks in and celebrates its triumph.

Colonel Gaddafi on a 2009 state visit to Italy, alongside one of his military advisers and Italian President Berlusconi, via Libero Liberos/Flickr

It is authority that provokes revolution. Certainly, it does not do so consciously. Yet its style of life and way of ruling finally becomes a provocation. This occurs when a feeling of impunity takes root among the elite: We are allowed anything, we can do anything. This is a delusion, but it rests on a certain rational foundation. For a while it does indeed look as if they can do whatever they want. Scandal after scandal and illegality after illegality go unpunished. The people remain silent, patient, wary. They are afraid and do not yet feel their own strength. At the same time they keep a detailed account of the wrongs, which at one particular moment are to be added up. The choice of that moment is the greatest riddle known to history. Why did it happen on that day, and not on another? Why did this event, and not some other, bring it about? After all, the government was indulging in even worse excesses only yesterday, and there was no reaction at all. […]

All books about all revolutions begin with a chapter that describes the decay of tottering authority or the misery and sufferings of the people. They should begin with a psychological chapter, one that shows how a harassed, terrified man suddenly breaks his terror, stops being afraid. This unusual process, sometimes accomplished in an instant like a shock or a lustration, demands illuminating. Man gets rid of fear and feels free. Without that there would be no revolution.

Excerpts taken from pages 103 to 111 of Shah of Shahs (1982), translated by William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand, Vintage International 1992 edition.

The Wheeler Centre will present a panel on the Arab Spring in partnership with the Melbourne Festival on Thursday, 20 October, at the Fairfax Studio at the Arts Centre. It’s part of our series, ‘You Say You Want a Revolution’.

A Newsweek infographic listing every book US President Barack Obama has read since he ran for president in 2008 makes for interesting, er, reading. In September 2008, for example, Obama was reading Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age by political scientist Larry Bartels, in which the author, according to the blurb, “shows the gap between the rich and poor has increased greatly under Republican administrations and decreased slightly under Democrats, leaving America grossly unequal.” Curiously, just a few months before, on 17 April 2008, Bartels wrote an op-ed in the New York Times demolishing a controversial statement made by Obama about small-town people (that they “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them”). Obviously the man can take criticism.

Mash-up image of Presidents Obama and Lincoln by Sascha Stefan Ruehlow, via Flickr.

By November, as President-elect, Obama was taking himself on a crash course in presidency, drawing inspiration from Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. In the second half of 2008, he read two books on each, including Fred Kaplan’s Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer. Around this time, coincidentally or not, veteran New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani wrote:

“Although Fred Kaplan, the author of Lincoln, never mentions Mr. Obama by name, it’s hard to read this volume without thinking of the current president-elect – who turns out to share a startling array of philosophical and literary qualities with his predecessor, as well as an equanimity of demeanor – and this book’s focus on the role that language and writing played in one president’s life promises to shed light on the role they may play in another’s.”

Are we starting to see a trend emerging here? Does President Obama take his reading cues from the Gray Lady’s book pages? He even found time to read Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – and How it Can Renew America, by erstwhile Gray Lady columnist Thomas Friedman. Obama’s version of the green revolution has been stalled by economic realities. On the other hand, his reading of Gordon M. Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster (“A compelling portrait of a man once serenely confident, searching decades later for self-understanding", according to Richard Holbrooke in – yes – the New York Times Book Review) was either intended to help him extricate the US from more contemporary entanglements or a harbinger of things to come for Obama himself.

There’s a solitary woman on the list of authors, which is also predominantly American. On the flip side, it’s reassuring to see that there’s a lot of fiction and poetry on the list (Derek Walcott!) – although, dare we say it, there are interesting observations to be made here, too. We find the usual standard-bearers of contemporary American lit – Dave Eggers’s What is the What, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom – and Obama takes up the small-town folk theme again with Kent Haruf’s novel Plainsong. But dig a little deeper and it would seem that some of the titles have an interesting father-son theme. Obama (who, as is widely known, was raised by a single mother) goes for gritty urban realism with father-and-son themes in The Way Home by Wire writer George Pelecanos, while Brad Leithauser’s A Few Corrections is about a son on a quest to find out the truth about his late father’s life.

By George Friedman, Stratfor Global Intelligence

“Classical political economists like Adam Smith or David Ricardo never used the term ‘economy’ by itself. They always used the term ‘political economy.’ For classical economists, it was impossible to understand politics without economics or economics without politics. The two fields are certainly different but they are also intimately linked. The use of the term ‘economy’ by itself did not begin until the late 19th century. Smith understood that while an efficient market would emerge from individual choices, those choices were framed by the political system in which they were made, just as the political system was shaped by economic realities. For classical economists, the political and economic systems were intertwined, each dependent on the other for its existence.

“The current economic crisis is best understood as a crisis of political economy. Moreover, it has to be understood as a global crisis enveloping the United States, Europe and China that has different details but one overriding theme: the relationship between the political order and economic life. On a global scale, or at least for most of the world’s major economies, there is a crisis of political economy.”

Read more.

“In constituency, it’s most similar to a prison riot: what will happen is that, usually in the segregation unit, nobody will ever know exactly, but a rumour will emanate that someone has been hurt in some way. There will be some form of moral outrage that takes its expression in self-interested revenge. There is no higher purpose, you just have a high volume of people with a history of impulsive behaviour, having a giant adventure.

“Of course, the difference is that, in a prison, liberty has already been lost. So something pretty serious must have happened in order for young people on the streets to be behaving as though they have already been incarcerated. As another criminologist, Professor John Pitts, has said: ‘Many of the people involved are likely to have been from low-income, high-unemployment estates, and many, if not most, do not have much of a legitimate future. There is a social question to be asked about young people with nothing to lose.’”

Taken from Zoe Williams' column in The Guardian.

“Countries and nations are born out of geography, they are born out of history, out of politics, and out of demography.” So began Amos Oz, Israel’s most internationally-recognised novelist, when he delivered the Monash Israel Oration at the Melbourne Town Hall late last month.

“Israel,” he continued, “was born out of a dream, and everything – everything at all that is born out of a dream – is destined to feel like a slight disappointment. The only way to keep a dream perfect and rosy and intact and unspoilt is never to try to live it out. A fulfilled dream is a disappointing dream. This is true of writing a novel, this is true of building a house, this is true of living out a sexual fantasy, and this is true of building a nation. Israel has a certain air of disappointment about it, but this is not in the nature of Israel. It is in the nature of dreams.”

But the paradox in which Israel finds itself is more complicated still, says Oz, because Israel was born not of a single dream but “out of an entire spectrum of dreams – a federation of master plans and blueprints and visions. And many of those initial dreams of the founding fathers and mothers of Israel were contradictory and mutually exclusive.”

The novelist used his oration to define doubt, argument, compromise and secularism as virtues – and more pointedly as hallmarks of Jewish, and Israeli, culture.

(Click to watch video.)

What’s the difference between WikiLeaks and the News of the World? More than meets the eye, according to Michael Fullilove, director of the Global Issues Program at the Lowy Institute for International Policy. In an Atlantic opinion piece entitled ‘The News of the WikiLeaks: Both Share a Dangerous Rationale’, Fullilove has found all kinds of connections between the two.

“Both,” he writes, “adhere to the same dangerous rationale, that no one is entitled to confidential information. As Assange said in April: "The government doesn’t have a right to secrets.” But would the world be safer or saner if governments could not hold confidences? How could wars be averted in such a world? How could peace agreements or trade deals be negotiated?

“Both hacks and hackers eschew the balancing of competing imperatives: the tabloids in the pursuit of profit; Assange in the pursuit of an ideology.

“Both institutions are blasé about breaking laws to obtain information they say we all have a right to see.

“Both are willing to play God. There is no human frailty or weakness the tabloids are not prepared to expose and judge. Rarely do they show mercy or compassion. Assange has his own capricious ethical code, which he summarized last November: ‘I like crushing bastards.’

“Both exhibit the same reckless disregard for the innocent victims of their actions. Tabloid editors are prepared to ruin bystanders for the sake of a scoop. In his early reluctance to sift through and redact the cables he had acquired on Afghanistan, Julian Assange was wilfully blind to the fate of Afghanis who had assisted the NATO forces. According to journalists from the Guardian, when they pressed him on this issue he replied: ‘These people were collaborators, informants. They deserve to die.’”

The Wheeler Centre is hosting a Talking Point event, ‘Taking Liberties with the Press’, tomorrow night at 6:15pm. Panellists will be Margaret Simons, Mark Day and Professor Rod Tiffen; the event will be chaired by Richard Ackland.

Image courtesy Robert Scarth/Flickr

Click on the ‘What’s New’ page on the website of the Project for the New American Century and you’ll notice that the Washington DC-based neo-conservative thinktank hasn’t published anything for a while. Not since December 2006, in fact. Yet five years earlier – a decade ago – the Project for the New American Century was the most influential thinktank in the US. Founded during Bill Clinton’s second presidency, its mission was to advocate that what was good for America was good for the world, and it came into its own at the start of the first Bush presidency, particularly in pushing for a war in Iraq.

The apogee of PNAC’s power came in in September 2000 – a year before 9/11 – with the publication of a report called Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For a New Century. It was a hawkish American call to arms: “America should seek to preserve and extend its position of global leadership by maintaining the preeminence of U.S. military forces,” it said.

A little more than a decade later, the Project exists in name only. The US is in terminal decline, economically, militarily and diplomatically. It will struggle to emerge from its recent military adventures with any semblance of victory. How did the American century end so quickly?

It was a theme weighing heavily on the mind of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman last Friday at the Melbourne Town Hall. Never a neo-con, Friedman has over the years assumed the mantle of the voice of American liberalism.

In an extended presentation, Friedman explained why US domestic politics are so central to its adventures in foreign policy, and what he means when he says that the American dream is now “in play and in peril”.

Friedman read from his latest book (co-authored with Michael Mandelbaum), That Used to be Us: What Went Wrong With America? And How it Can Come Back. The book is a kind of call to arms for a broken and demoralised America, describing everyday signs and comparisons that signal the nation’s struggle to keep up with new powers like China. Friedman outlined what he reads as the four great challenges facing his country.

Friedman summed up his idea of the importance of America to the world with a joke he attributed to his grandmother: “never cede a century to a country that censors Google”. He closed the event as he started it, with an exhortation to Americans that, in order to progress, America must look inward.

(Click to watch video.)