Dr Kelly’s suicide has pressed red buttons for many readers. Here are two red hot responses from Luke Stegemann and Jack Robertson. I disagree with their calls to be angry, partly because when I get angry I lose effectiveness and tend to self-immolate, and partly because those pro-Howard talk back callers are already so angry we’d end up with violence, which is the worst way to solve anything. I prefer the energy of optimism, of working with other people, and of dispassionate strategising. Then again, this is a new way of looking at things for me, and I don’t know if it works.
Luke Stegemann in Osaka, Japan
Jack Robertson has hit the nail on the head in many important respects in When spin starts to kill it’s time to kill spin. Not only journalists, but all Australians who care about the direction in which our country has veered recently need to stand up to cant and linguistic nothingness, the vapid speech and lies of politicians and spin doctors who twist and manipulate language to make black seem white, the innocent seem guilty, the poor seem selfish and the greedy seem generous.
Jack says it is disheartening to say the least how seldom – if ever – these spokespersons are held accountable for their devious and downright dishonest use of language. It’s time more and more of us said, in what he points out is the true Aussie sprit, “That’s bullshit, mate!”
It’s also time to realise that anger has a purpose and a goal, and is not to be held at arms length as something pathological and threatening.
John Howard and his crew make much of the great Australian traditions of mateship and the fair go. That this government lays claim to represent such abstractions is by itself reason enough to make many Australians’ blood boil with anger.
But what of another Australian characteristic to which Jack refers, our ability to see through hypocrisy and pretence and to call bullshit bullshit in real time as a matter of instinct? This ability is central to our much-commented tall poppy syndrome. Australians have always called a spade a spade in our dry, laconic way. It’s perhaps one of our most endearing traits as a nation.
Or it was. Times have changed and we have been increasingly educated into a denial and suppression of truth-telling. Truth-telling – revealing the Emperor has no clothes – now implies committing the relatively recent cardinal Australian sin of possibly offending others. Truth-telling or reclaiming against lies and injustice often involves conflict and anger. In our education system at all ages, in the workplace, on radio and television, through the plethora of self-help books, management training seminars and workplace workshops, we are taught NOT to argue. We are educated, increasingly, to be passive, and hence it comes as no surprise how little public ire the WMD lies have raised amongst the Australian public.
Look no further than today’s Newspoll results – two in every three Australians believe Prime Minister John Howard misled them over participation in the US-led war in Iraq but support for his leadership remains as strong as ever.
We have been pacified by notions of “anger management”, “mediation”, “impulse control” and “conflict resolution”, to name but a few. Children are taught it is rude to shout. Adults try at all costs to avoid argument. We are supposed to smile in the company of those we despise while we resolve workplace conflicts with counsellors.
The right to be angry, enraged and furious has been rationalised away as asocial, pathological behaviour. One must be calm: one must not, under any circumstances, offend or disrupt. Our discontent is suppressed within us by the notion that we must not shout, must not be rude, must not embarrass or disrupt by raw emotion, by the notion that we must always seek peaceful compromises.
We are constantly taught that anger and rage are negative, self-defeating, and ultimately, unproductive (the latter absolute heresy in a neo-capitalist world). Protest organisers go out of their way to assure one and all that any protest will be “peaceful”. Why?
The dignity of the Australian people has been deeply offended and compromised consistently by the Howard government. Voices that rise up publicly in anger are treated as voices of irrational, antisocial madness (witness Downer’s description of the ‘feral left’). Witness the outrage and scorn heaped upon Mark Latham when he had the courage to call a spade a spade re the Howard governments subservience to the Bush administration and the subsequent disgraceful interference by the US ambassador.
As John Lydon of Public Image Ltd. once famously sang, Anger is an energy. Anger is dissent. Anger is loudly proclaiming “NO!” Whether in the schoolyard, the home, the office or the street, anger is a way of saying that we will not accept a given situation, that we see through and wish to denounce incompetence, hypocrisy, lies, cowardice, racism and a host of other hallmarks of contemporary Australian society.
Given anger is at its core a form of dissent that cannot be removed from us, is it any wonder that so much effort has been made to neutralise its potency? Anger and rage have been consistently pathologised over the last few decades, viewed more and more as a sign of illness, of wrong, of irrationality, of violence.
Any guesses who are the ultimate winners when from childhood we are taught not to get angry but to seek peaceful resolution, counselling, mediation, therapy and so on? What type of workforce, what sort of mind-numbed populace does this ideology of passivity create? Just look around Australia to find the answer.
Australia? We are a nation which has voted John Howard into office no less than three times, and may well do so a fourth, in spite of the lies, the scandals and the tearing apart of social and community networks, in spite of the impoverishment of public debate, the withering of diversity, the attacks on public health and education. Something must be very wrong deep inside.
It’s time to stop believing in the bullshit, whether it be political spin or the notion that harmony must be preserved at all costs. It’s time to get angry, and use that anger as an energy. If the left (Howard’s opponents) are to be designated as feral why are we not deploying language in the same way, publicly designating the right (the Howard government and its supporters) as blood-sucking, voracious, criminal, myopic and irredeemably racist?
Your anger may shock some of your fellow Australians, your family or workmates, lulled as they are into a world of tame, self-censoring consensus where anything goes so long as no-one is offended or upset. So be it. Your anger might shock them out of their real-estate, lifestyle and sporting torpor.
The times call for, as Jack puts it, contemptuous rudeness and fruity aggro for the slumber to be broken and for the immorality and cowardice to be exposed. If we advocate and practice rudeness and cause offence, is that not simply replying in kind to what weve been asked to swallow for years now?
In popular discourse, anger, rage and passion are immediately disregarded as emotional responses to any given problem or injustice, as if the presence of emotion somehow precluded insight or veracity, which at the same time are apparently guaranteed by cool, dispassionate analysis. This is the appalling myth of objectivity used constantly by politicians of all persuasions, bosses, managers, teachers, parents, counsellors, therapists. This, my friends, is bullshit.
In our brave new world of schoolyard harmony, efficient workplace relations, and endlessly productive outcomes, in this brave new castrated world, the only place for anger, we are told, is when it is directed against the ill-disciplined, irrational, unproductive, quasi-sinful self. To be furious is to lose self-control, and to lose self-control is to sin. There is no place for anger and rage to be directed against others, or against institutions, forms of injustice, public lying and scandal. When we protest, we must do so where we are told, and like school children, we must promise to be on our best behaviour. The angry student is misguided and rushed before panels of counsellors and guidance officers, the angry worker is a troublemaker and marked down for removal upon the completion of a probably casual contract, the angry citizen is part of a feral left.
And yet, our final irony and misery: the shock-jock when angry is right and good, representing the silent majority. Apparently.
Let’s hope enough Australians reclaim the right to be angry, the right to offend and the right to be rude, to denounce bullshit where it stands, for the state of the country urgently needs that wonderful trait which is deeply embedded in the Australian character to emerge once again.
***
Fisking John
by Jack Robertson
Speaking of WMD Spin, let’s do a little brief deconstruction ourselves. Here’s one cute Prime Ministerial soundbite, hot off the Spin Central presses today:
“We entered the war in Iraq based upon the failure of the Iraqi government of the time to comply with United Nations’ resolutions, we had intelligence assessments of WMD capability and we reacted appropriately.”
It’s been a while since I’ve hung out with the warbloggers, but let’s see if I can remember how to Fisk such waffle. (Margo: Fisking is blogger talk for taking apart someone’s work line by line. I had a go at fisking Howard’s press club question and answer session just before the war in Deconstructing JW Howard.)
1. “We entered the war in Iraq…”
Passive, weak and slippery verb (a real give-away). We didn’t ‘enter the war in Iraq’, Prime Minister. We helped start the bloody thing. We were one of only three countries in the entire United Nations of nations to do so meaningfully. No Australian government has ever done this before – helped start a war. Yours did. Our country won’t ever be quite the same again. No matter what your ‘profound conviction’ might be. Australians don’t start wars, John. Thanks to your government’s strategic stupidity, it’s what Australians now do. You might not think so. Most Australians might not think so. The majority of the world’s countries do. They are more right than we are.
2. “based upon the failure of the Iraqi government of the time to comply with UN resolutions…”
This statement is Classic Spin, which really means lies. The Prime Minister is merely ‘fuzzing-up’ the ‘reason’ for invading Iraq – from the very precise (read: dramatic, scary, public opinion-winning) reasons that were quoted daily, to an over-arching ‘sound-good, feel-good’ cure-all which in reality can never be tested or disproved. The Coalition of the Willing specifically claimed at various times (and among much else), that
a) Saddam Hussein was both able and willing to deploy WMD against his neighbours within 45 minutes;
b) had sought to obtain uranium from Nigeria;
c) had direct and dangerous enabling links with al-Qaeda;
d) possessed unmanned drones capable of delivering WMD beyond its borders;
e) had obtained aluminium tubes intended for use in its nuclear weapons programs, and
on, an on, and on.
These are hard, specific claims which, correspondingly, can be proven wrong or right – and all have been proven wrong. Nothing has so far turned up that ‘proves’ Saddam had ‘failed to comply’ with UN resolutions. In the absence of UN sanction for this invasion this is in any case an absurd accusation, since without the UN’s own imprimatur that very ‘reason’ to invade becomes a bitterly-dishonest forgery. The Coalition invading Saddam’s Iraq for his ‘failing to comply with UN resolutions’ – even as the UN refuses to support the action – is like thumping a kid because he ‘looked at your mate funny’, even though your mate is himself urging you to calm down and not hit him.
‘Failure to comply’ is an arbitrary, malleable, meaningless standard when you alone are the sole arbiter. ‘Failure to comply’? What is ‘compliance’ in measurable terms, John?
How can we ever prove or disprove ‘compliance’ now? This is uber-Spin; Alice-in-Wonderland stuff par excellence: Saddam Hussein will have ‘complied’ with UN resolutions when, and only when, the Coalition says he has. A self-defined, UN-excluding, self-serving linguistic roundabout. Spin. Spin. Spin – any faster, John, and your government will whirl right up its own ‘profound convictions and fundamentals’.
Also Spin here is that nifty ‘Iraqi government of the time’ bit – it’s pure (instinctive) Howard verbiage, designed to add an artificially sombre and measured tone to his reference to Saddam’s regime, and to inject a subtle reminder that ‘the world has changed’, that ‘we’ve moved on’, that of course everything (including the ’emerging’ facts) is now ‘different’, and thus, you surely can’t expect the government’s position not to change subtly, too?
As transparent as a sheet of glass. The Emperor has no linguistic clothes.
3. “we had intelligence assessments of WMD capability…”
Big deal. I’ve got my own intelligence assessments of WMD capability, too. So has every other man and his dog on the planet, now. My brother, who’s just spent several savage months in Iraq, could tell you a thing or two about ‘intelligence assessments of WMD capability’ too, John, but I bet you wouldn’t like what he’d have to say, mate. (And you wouldn’t be able to destroy him as an anti-American Lefty loon, a cowardly appeaser, or un-Australian, either; he was nicked by shrapnel once and got a richochet under the chin for your troubles, John. Didn’t find any WMD, though – maybe he was too busy reading Greg Sheridan’s riveting prose).
So – now that we’re all on a ‘WMD intelligence assessment’ level playing field – namely, none of us really have a bloody clue what was what – do tell us about these ‘intelligence assessments’ of yours, John. What did they all specifically say? Which ones (‘sexed-up’?) did you choose to accept with glee, and which ones (sexed-down? boring? too long and measured and grounded in grown-up, detailed, expert opinion?) did you choose to ignore completely? And why, and how did you make those subjective judgements, and where is the hard vindication that your choices and judgements were better than mine, or Bob Hawke’s, or Ray Funnell’s, or Scott Ritter’s, or Robin Cook’s, or Peter Gration’s, or Andrew Wilkie’s, or the late Dr David Kelly’s?
And if you can’t give us that now or soon, with Coalition soldiers increasingly being picked off in the ugly mess you’ve dumped them in, doesn’t that mean your government and your intelligence advisers are incompetent, weak on security, cavalier with our soldiers’ lives, and – above all else – not not not to be trusted on future ‘intelligence assessments’ of when and where they should be sent, in this ‘war on terror’ we are fighting?
Prime Minister – do you (and George W. Bush and Tony Blair) know what the bloody hell you are doing in this war? Or is it time for a change of government? Australian conservative leaderships, as history reminds us, have a proven knack for getting Australia into the kinds of strategic military messes that require fresh, sceptical and lateral-thinking governments to extract us from.
Are you weak on security, Mr Howard? Is George W. Bush? Because it seems pretty weak to me to commit the grand bulk of your fine fighting forces to occupying a country half-way around the world where there was no real threat to begin with, either to you or your allies.
Where was (and is) the true Middle Eastern threat to America, England and Australia? And, for that matter, to Israel? Iraq? Or was and is it from Hamas, from al-Qaeda, from Jemah Islamiah, from Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, North Pakistan, the remote Afghanistan deserts? Because it’s pretty clear that none of these groups or places had, in relative terms, very much to do with Saddam Hussein’s WMD or his version of Iraq – however awful either was. Or at least, not until we waded in there with our guns blazing, anyway. Now, of course, the world has changed again; an increasing number of Iraqis hate our guts just as much as the next self-respecting anti-Western fanatic.
So why, for our own sakes, don’t Bush, Blair and you at least admit the awful truth: that of all the countries in the Middle East to invade and occupy – creating chaos, misery, resentment and increased anti-Westernism – Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was, in hard-nosed military-strategic terms, the very stupidest, most self-defeating choice. While 200, 000+ American soldiers have their hands full with newly anti-American zealots in Iraq, established anti-American zealots worldwide are cheering with glee and busying themselves with their next box-cutter or Bali plans.
So tell us a few details about these ‘Iraq threat intelligence assessments’, Prime Minister. What we want to know is why you sent our soldiers to disarm Iraq’s WMD threat by brute force if, as it looks increasingly likely, there wasn’t much of a WMD threat after all. British and US soldiers are still dying every other day. Meanwhile, we don’t even know where Saddam is, let alone what Osama bin Laden and his friends – our true arch-enemies – are currently up to. I just hope that the Coalition’s ‘intelligence assessments’ of that are a touch more reliable.
4. “…and we reacted appropriately.”
‘Appropriately’ – the most pointless word in the English language. Appropriately to what? Appropriate to John W. Howard is what, because as today’s frightening polls show, the bulk of the population in this country is utterly committed to you, John, and nothing else. A majority of Australians still cling desperately to your contrived ‘politics of conviction’ Presidential persona, Prime Minister, even in the stark face of their own dawning realisation that you lied through your teeth on WMD.
So many voters have invested so much in you personally that they have now apparently embraced an almost visceral refusal to allow the scales to fall from their own eyes. Refugees, WMD, ASIO, ANZAC deployments, Reconciliation, the Republic – swathes of ordinary Australians are screwing their eyes and minds shut against ugly facts, against their own common-sense instinct and decency, simply – disastrously – trusting in the convictions of the self-ordained Battler’s Best Mate. Welcome to Louis the Fourteenth territory, Prime Minister: L’etat, c’est Moi! Where ‘appropriate’ means whatever the hell you think is ‘appropriate’. Fine. Let me ask you about the modern Spin Doctor’s ‘Word of Mass Delusion’ I:
Is it ‘appropriate’ that Australia has ‘moved on’ from Iraq even as many Australians are still over there in-country, hunkered down in their flak jackets outside Baghdad airport or patrolling the streets with their anxious Yank and Brit comrades, wondering when a grenade is going to blow up in their face, or an anonymous bullet enter the back of their head?
Is it ‘appropriate’ that David Kelly – Iraq WMD expert – killed himself in isolated despair while gutless politicians just like you keep running like buggery and persist in avoiding the deeper truths about Iraqi WMD that he was trying to make public?
Is it ‘appropriate’ that American soldiers are being daily killed by an increasingly hostile and resentful Iraqi population that just doesn’t really want them to be there any more, and almost certainly never will again?
Is it ‘appropriate’ that George W. Bush recently excluded many of those same soldiers – low-paid political cannon fodder – from the swathe of tax cuts he bestowed upon his most supportive constituency – the rich, many of whom helped sweep him into office, and thus helped drive that an already-dangerously threatened America into an unnecessary and probably-unwinnable war? I
Is it ‘appropriate’ that your own Liberal Party backbench continues to raise not a squeak of dissent about this staggering strategic fiasco? Is it ‘appropriate’ in a modern liberal democracy like Australia – Peter Costello and Phillip Ruddock and Robert Hill and anyone in Cabinet or the back seats – that so many voting Australians continue to ‘support’ your Prime Minister, even while simultaneously agreeing that he lied to them to gain their support for sending our sons and daughters away to kill other human beings?
This, to me, at last, is lunacy territory, and with Australian soldiers again outbound on an unpredictable international intervention, it’s time for the broader parliamentary Liberal Party to wake up, re-assert some Westminster collective balance, and force our Prime Minister to stop spinning his self-serving and now dangerous webs of deceit. Or have they, too, now got too much vested interest in continuing to place their deaf, dumb and blind trust in our nation’s Spin Doctor-in-Chief?