Newsletter: Week 10, 2023
Newsletter: Week 10, 2023
The importance of cricket diplomacy, the priority of addressing Indian diaspora tensions, and how do we approach Russian art?
Cricket Diplomacy
Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese was in India this week, and along with his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi, attended the first day of the fourth Test Match of the current cricket series between India and Australia in Ahmedabad.
Australia’s engagement with India is often derided as being stuck on the “Three C’s” - Cricket, Curry and Commonwealth. The narrative is that for relations to become more intimate there needs to be other, more substantial, components. Yet I think this perspective misses an important point. While the latter of the Three C’s is fairly useless, the first two are essential elements of life.
Cricket remains a way of engaging with India and shouldn’t be dismissed. It is an open door that can lead to broader interactions. Especially because of its ability to reach people outside of elite circles. Having visited India multiple times (nine to be exact), as soon as someone knows you are an Australian they immediately want to discuss cricket. It is the local passion and therefore an exceptional conversation starter. Even with people whose English may not be fluent, cricket provides a vocabulary and a way to connect outside of language.
Given their love for the game, Indians I have met have an intimate knowledge of the Australian cricket team. And having your own favourite Indian players – Ravichandran Ashwin currently, previously Irfan Pathan – is excellent way to endear yourself to people.
While the pageantry of Albanese and Modi at the cricket riding around on a cricket-themed chariot may have been weird (India is excellent at weird), this shouldn’t be dismissed as mere theatre. Due to its deep cultural resonance, cricket is a potent tool of engagement with India that not many other countries have. In the minds of the Indian public, Albanese has paid them a great respect by attending the game in Ahmedabad. And goodwill is gold-dust in diplomacy.
Negotiating Diaspora Tensions
One of the critical issues that is arising in the Australia-India relationship is the tensions within the Indian diaspora (see Newsletter: Week 4, 2023), and the Indian government’s keen interest in them. In one of his meetings with Albanese, Modi brought up the recent graffiti sprayed on Hindu temples in Melbourne, and sought Australian government action in response.
Police in Victoria are investigation this vandalism. However, it would be a very dangerous path for Australian governments to walk down for them to take attacks on Hindu temples seriously, but not take attacks on Sikhs – which have also occurred – with the same level of seriousness. Especially if doing so at the request of the Indian government.
It is telling that Modi was concerned about graffiti on Hindu temples, but didn’t raise the issue of physical attacks on Sikhs. The latter clearly isn’t considered of great importance to Modi and the BJP.
The Australian media quickly needs to develop a more sophisticated understanding of these issues and be able to report them with knowledge and great care. The ABC’s original headline covering Modi’s request was – “Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi calls on Anthony Albanese to combat Sikh separatist attacks on temples in Australia.” This was rather irresponsible given that no-one has been identified and charged for these incidents yet – this headline was subsequently changed after I mentioned the problem with it to ABC journalist Stephen Dziedzic. But the article also contains some imprecise language and framing that doesn’t do the situation much good.
Animosity within the Indian-Australian community is an issue that the Australian government needs to designate a serious priority, especially given Indians are now Australia’s largest source of migrants. Like the Australian media, I do not think that the Australian government knows India very well, and so lacks the requisite knowledge to address these issues properly.
Addressing these tensions, however, cannot involve favouring one group over another. The current Indian government will be vocal about any attacks on Hindus, but will be deathly silent about attacks on Sikhs and Muslims. Albanese should be clear about this to Modi – all citizens and cultural groups deserve to exist in peace in Australia.
Navigating Russian Art
One of my favourite musical artists of recent years is a Russian woman called Kate NV (real name Ekaterina Shilonosova), who has just released a new album. The compelling and fascinating thing about Shilonosova’s music is she is a product of an era that is capable of answering the question - what would music sound like if artists had access to all music all at once?
While Spotify now makes this possible, it is actually YouTube where Shilonosova resides. The YouTube algorithm has an uncanny ability to dig up obscurities from any region and decade. It is particularly effective with the weird and wonderful world of 80s Japanese alternative pop. This is a space Shilonosova clearly inhabits.
Yet listening to Shilonosova’s music there is a question that requires consideration - how do we approach Russian art in an era of such appalling Russian brutality?
The Baltic states have been insistent that this brutality isn’t simply to do with Putin himself, but it is a problem with Russia itself. That there is a culture of violent resentment and imperialistic lust inherent within Russia’s culture. This may be true, but it doesn’t also exclude the existence of individuals who wish to have nothing to do with this aspect of Russian culture.
Shilonosova has been courageously vocal on her Instagram account about Russia’s brutality, and after the invasion she abandoned her flat in Moscow and has spent the past year living itinerantly. A recent interview mentioned she is currently in Serbia, one of the few places Russians can live visa-free.
Russia’s actions has made the enjoyment of Russian art more difficult. Yet art has the right to exist outside or above the actions of a state. Oftentimes art performs an essential critique of states engaged in brutal and inhuman behaviour. And when it is cultures, rather than states, that are the problem – as is the Baltic critique – then there still needs to be space made for individuals to be assessed by their own character and actions.
This Week’s Reading and Listening:
Finding The Right Approach To India As A “Civilisational State”
Benedict Coleridge - The Interpreter
“It’s clear enough that a more intimate Australia-India relationship is vitally in Australia’s interest. It’s also clear that the Republic of India ought to be approached with the kind of respect that avoids reduction and countenances its true internal diversity. To be credible and mature in this partnership – to be taken seriously as interlocutors – means to exhibit a more obvious familiarity with India’s domestic politics and the meaning of certain formulations in this setting.
To this end Australia ought to be considered in our reception and repetition of the Modi government’s talking points while also developing public messaging more layered than “cricket and Holi”. Ian Hall suggested this week in The Interpreter that Australian MPs and policymakers quite simply do not know enough about India. More broadly, I would suggest that for too long Australian policymakers have tended to think in methodologically secular, structural and commercial terms, leaving them hamstrung when faced with intensely religious, internally multivalent, societies in which the constitutional state negotiates for social authority with deeply inlaid devotional cultures and political ideologies.
Engaging across the Indian Ocean with a mega-state undergoing deepening social rifts along identarian lines requires some level of well-informed caution.”
Micronesia’s President Writes Bombshell Letter On China’s ‘Political Warfare’
Cleo Paskal - The Diplomat
“On top of all the financial assistance, Panuelo sees the option of recognizing Taiwan as providing “greatly added layers of security and protection that comes with our country distancing itself from the PRC, which has demonstrated a keen capacity to undermine our sovereignty, reject our values, and use our elected and senior officials for their purposes.”
Given the highly sensitive nature of the letter, toward the end he writes: “I am acutely aware that informing you all of this presents risks to my personal safety; the safety of my family; and the safety of the staff I rely on to support me in this work. I inform you regardless of these risks, because the sovereignty of our nation, the prosperity of our nation, and the peace and stability of our nation, are more important. Indeed, they are the solemn duty of literally each and every single one of us who took the oath of office to protect our Constitution and our country.”
With his third letter, Panuelo is planting a flag in the sand – a brave attempt to reclaim FSM’s sovereignty. What happens next may shape the future of China’s engagement with the Pacific Islands – and the world.”
China’s Ukraine Peace Plan Is Actually About Taiwan
Craig Singleton - Foreign Policy
“China’s diplomatic gambit was immediately disavowed as a viable path to peace in Ukraine in Washington, Brussels, Kyiv, and elsewhere. But read more carefully, Beijing’s proposal lays bare the rhetorical and legal scaffolding it intends to erect if and when Xi decides to forcefully retake Taiwan. If last August’s marathon of military maneuvers around the island revealed the attack vectors China likely intends to prosecute during an all-out amphibious assault on Taiwan, the laundry list of conditions embodied in the peace plan reveals how China intends to complicate Western attempts to replicate the Ukraine playbook during a future contingency.
Central to China’s peace plan are demands that Western countries abandon their “Cold War mentality” and avoid “bloc confrontation”—phrases that are code for NATO’s alliance system and Beijing’s belief that Kyiv should not receive any additional Western military assistance. China’s crack at military de-escalation masks its real motive: It would like Russia to prevail over Ukraine in the absence of continued U.S. and European support. That same preferred balance of power applies in a Taiwan contingency, too. In a head-to-head match-up between China and Taiwan, China wins handily. If Taiwan, like Ukraine, can draw on extended external military equipment, training, and real-time intelligence support, all bets are off. And so, Beijing remains focused on degrading the ability of international actors to inject strategic risk into Chinese decision-making, as well as on exploiting cleavages among U.S. allies.”
This Is Definitely A Coup. Israel Is On Its Way To Becoming A Dictatorship
Yuval Noah Harari - Haaretz
“It can be very confusing when a “coup from above” takes place. On the face of it, everything looks normal. There are no tanks in the streets, and no general with a uniform sagging with medals interrupts the television broadcasts. The coup occurs behind closed doors, with laws being passed and decrees being signed that remove all restraints on the government, and dismantle all checks and balances. Of course, the government does not declare that it is carrying out a coup. It claims only that it is passing some much-needed reforms, “for the good of the people.”
How can we in Israel today determine whether we are facing a genuine reform or a coup? The simplest test is to ask: Are there still limits on the power of the government? When instituting a reform package, the government makes significant changes, but still respects the limitations on its power. Even after the reforms are implemented, it still doesn’t mean the government can do anything it wants. On the other hand, a coup is a situation in which the government tries to gain unlimited power. If the coup is successful, it means that from now on there are no restrictions on the government’s decisions and actions.”
Max Boot - Foreign Affairs
“Washington should still call out human rights abuses. It should still champion liberal dissidents, such as the Russian political prisoners Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Kara-Murza, and Ilya Yashin and the brave Iranian demonstrators risking arrest and execution. It should send military aid to embattled democracies, from Ukraine to Taiwan. Even though I am no longer as idealistic as I once was, I have not become the kind of self-styled realist who blames the United States for Russian aggression or thinks that it should sacrifice Ukraine as the price of peace. Nor do I approve of a president kowtowing to dictators (as Trump did). The United States remains the world’s most powerful liberal democracy, and it has a moral obligation to at least speak up for its principles.
But there is a crucial difference—one I did not sufficiently appreciate in the past—between defending democracy and exporting democracy. The United States has a better track record of the former (think Western Europe during the Cold War) than the latter (think Afghanistan and Iraq). Twenty years ago, many advocates of regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan, myself included, were misled by the U.S. success in transforming Germany, Italy, and Japan after World War II. What we failed to grasp was that these countries benefited from unique historical circumstances—including high levels of economic development, widespread social trust, strong states, and a blank slate created by defeat in a total war—that, it turns out, are nearly impossible to replicate. It was and is foolish to try.”
Adrienne LaFrance - The Atlantic
“The sociologist Norbert Elias, who left Germany for France and then Britain as the Nazi regime took hold, famously described what he called the civilising process as “a long sequence of spurts and counter-spurts,” warning that you cannot fix a violent society simply by eliminating the factors that made it deteriorate in the first place. Violence and the forces that underlie it have the potential to take us from the democratic backsliding we already know to a condition known as decivilisation. In periods of decivilisation, ordinary people fail to find common ground with one another and lose faith in institutions and elected leaders. Shared knowledge erodes, and bonds fray across society. Some people inevitably decide to act with violence. As violence increases, so does distrust in institutions and leaders, and around and around it goes. The process is not inevitable—it can be held in check—but if a period of bloodshed is sustained for long enough, there is no shortcut back to normal. And signs of decivilisation are visible now.”
Gary Linekar, BBC In Crisis, And Small Boats (audio)
Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart – The Rest Is Politics
“After an extraordinary and bizarre week where a tweet from Gary Lineker led to a crisis at the national broadcaster, Rory and Alastair try to make sense of the BBC’s handling of the situation, question its governance structure, and explain why the government’s refugee policy is flawed.”
The EU’s Future In A World Of Deep Disorder
Martin Wolf - Financial Times
“Internal reforms must depend in substantial part on what role the EU wishes to play in this new world. The more active and independent it wishes to be, the more crucial it will be to deepen its federalism. Such a deepening would be risky, no doubt, since it will awaken nationalist reactions. It may also be impossible to agree. But a degree of deepening may be inescapable, given the need for a more robust security posture and the fragility visible in divergence across the eurozone.
The Kantian dream has not proved exportable. We live in a world characterised by disorder, nationalism and great power conflict. This is not the world of which the EU dreamed. But if its leaders wish to preserve their great experiment in peaceful relations, they need to strengthen it for the storms.”
The Ramayana (audio)
In Our Time - BBC
“Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Ramayana, the ancient Hindu epic which is regarded as one of the greatest works of world literature. Its importance in Indian culture has been compared to that of the Iliad and Odyssey in the West, and it’s still seen as a sacred text by Hindus today. Written in Sanskrit, it tells the story of the legendary prince and princess Rama and Sita, and the many challenges, misfortunes and choices that they face. About 24,000 verses long, the Ramayana is also one of the longest ancient epics. It’s a text that’s been hugely influential and it continues to be popular in India and elsewhere in Asia.”
Anna Louie Sussman - The Cut (New York Magazine)
“In 2016, a young man murdered a young woman in a Seoul public bathroom, telling police after that he killed her because women had always ignored him. Despite the perpetrator’s own statement, police refused to label the murder a hate crime. Furious, women flocked to online feminist message boards, communities, and chat forums. This wave of digital feminism attracted women from all backgrounds, including working-class women like Minji and Youngmi, making it different from traditional Korean feminism, which was largely confined to universities, NGOs that often received government support, and other elite spaces.
In December of that year, as Korea’s fertility rate hovered at 1.2 births per woman (it has since slid to 0.78, the lowest in the world), the Korean government launched an online “National Birth Map” that showed the number of women of reproductive age in each municipality, illustrating just what it expected of its female citizens. (South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol won the election in March 2022 with a message that blamed feminism for Korea’s low birth rate, and a promise to abolish the country’s Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. ) Women were outraged by the map, observing that the government appeared to consider them “livestock”; one Twitter user reportedly created a mock map illustrating the concentration of Korean men with sexual dysfunction. Several of these digital feminists responded with a boycott to the reproductive labor expected by the state and decided that the surest way to avoid pregnancy was to avoid men altogether. It was through these online communities that 4B emerged as a slogan, and ultimately a movement.”
Nicole Penn - American Purpose
“Friendship is in many ways at the heart of what has enabled the evolution of the egalitarian relationships between men and women that modernity rightly prizes. In the United States in particular, friendship between the sexes was historically understood as indispensable to cementing the bonds between citizens at the inception of the early Republic. Friendship was also foundational to the companionate model of marriage that emerged in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which in advancing the acceptability of women’s equal moral dignity in the home laid the groundwork for the pursuit of female equality at the ballot box.
Even if the term is treated flippantly today, friendship properly understood is a relationship that imposes real obligations between two people. The mutual concern and sacrifice that friendship demands would help mitigate the trends worrying Reeves and Emba by filling the ontological void haunting men and soothing the hedonic dysphoria plaguing women today. If men and women are to take each other’s struggles seriously, they will need to draw on a framework that encourages the sexes to view each other as friends rather than as competitors who must be dominated in either the economic or sexual marketplace.”
The Illusion Of A Frictionless Existence
Kat Rosenfield - Persuasion
“Of course, it is also important to realise that this is not their fault: Whatever Gen Z is doing, it is born of what we did to them first, by bringing them into a world where quotidian annoyances were being increasingly eliminated for the comfort and convenience of people who had already had plenty of practice in dealing with them. Indeed, it is only because older generations had gotten used to dealing with friction that we could ever decide to dispense with it. Experiencing minor hardship will make you resilient, but first, it will make you uncomfortable—which is a problem in a society that has decided to prioritise comfort and safety, having convinced itself that resilience is overrated. If the old mode of thinking was that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, the new one is something like: What makes you feel bad must be eradicated.”
John Ganz - Unpopular Front
“While I’m not gonna whine about being misunderstood, I will note some ironies. “Bossism” has, in the space of a year, gone from what I had meant to be a term of opprobrium to a neutral or even positive word for vague ideas about “leadership.” Suffice it to say, I was not talking about a management style but an ideology, a way of conceiving (or not-conceiving) the totality of social relations.
As you can see above, I used the term to translate the Afrikaans word baaskap, which is more often translated as “boss-hood” or boss-ship.” Baaskap is a concept from the ideology of apartheid South Africa. It referred simply to white overlordship in the economy and politics. Some proponents of apartheid wanted “total separation” between races, some paid lip service to ideas of “separate development,” and others more realistically favored “baaskap,” essentially the unbridled economic exploitation of natives and other non-whites by whites. It’s a little bit funny to see some cheery tech CEO going, “In defense of [this idea from literal apartheid],” but maybe also it’s revealing.
I chose this word deliberately to be a little provocative. I wanted to highlight how crude, authoritarian, and openly exploitative I believed this “new” tech ethos appeared. Another reason was to hint at what I believed is its proximity with racism and other concepts of “natural superiority,” as typified by Curtis Yarvin’s interest in Race and IQ “questions.” It was also to poke at the origin of many of its proponents in apartheid South Africa, where Musk, his ally David Sacks, were born and where Peter Thiel spent a part of his childhood, when his father was an engineer at a uranium mine. I wanted to thereby imply that perhaps some of the spirit of that particularly brutal type of capitalist exploitation rubbed off on them. Is that a cheap and unfair insinuation? Maybe, but fuck ‘em.”