Week 41: Heartbreak
Week 41: Heartbreak
The disappointment of Australia's referendum outcome, speaking about Australia in Lund, and the barbarity of joiners
Losing The Voice
On Monday I took the train across the Öresund Bridge to Copenhagen to vote in Australia’s referendum. The referendum was to acknowledge Australia’s indigenous people in the country’s constitution, and to established a new advisory body on indigenous affairs. Unfortunately, as results were calculated on Saturday night, the referendum had been defeated.
The first element was about basic respect. To give the indigenous community the recognition they deserve as the original inhabitants of the continent, and acknowledge their rich culture and history. The second element was about problem solving. Indigenous Australians fall behind other Australians in most of the key human development indices, and new ideas are essential to close this gap. An advisory body to establish a more direct link between indigenous leaders and government was a conservative proposal to give indigenous communities’ own ideas for their future greater influence. Enshrining this in the constitution would have placed it outside of political interference.
Unfortunately, the process for its establishment became highly political. Rather than taking the opportunity to be problem solvers, the Liberal and National parties sensed a political opportunity to divide the country (while blaming others for their own behaviour). Without the support of all of Australia’s significant political parties the proposition was destined to fail.
Those who opposed the Voice have offered no solutions to the discrepancies between Indigenous and other Australians. They’ve instead used Indigenous Australians as a political football, a way to find an issue to build fear and try to ride this fear back into government.
I’ll write a piece for The Diplomat this week on the disappointment of Australia eschewing the idea that the social health of the nation is tied to the uplift of those who currently don’t share its abundance. And why occasionally there does have to be some flexibility to liberal neutrality in order to be responsible. The offer of responsibility was presented to us, and, unfortunately, we failed to take it.
Further Contemplating Australia
After voting in Copenhagen on Monday, I got the train back across into Sweden to give a lecture at the University of Lund to the Association of Foreign Affairs (Utrikespolitiska Föreningen). The talk was on Australia’s strategic landscape and the path towards/motivation for AUKUS. Despite Australia being on the other side of the world, and being a state of limited influence, there was a good turnout and interest in the talk. With some really great questions and discussion following my remarks.
As I mentioned last week, part of the reason for doing such talks is to improve my public speaking skills and to try to overcome my inclination to never talk at all. Another part, especially with this talk, was about engaging with Australia. I write a lot about Australia, and primarily work on issues concerning Australia, but I’ve always found the rest of the world far more interesting. Obviously being familiar with a country means you’re less likely to be intrigued by it. But when I was both putting together this talk and delivering it I released that maybe Australia is reasonably interesting.
As a developed country in a developing region it has has strategic calculations distinct from similar developed countries. Australia also has cultural differences to overcome to build habits of trust and cooperation in its region. Australia doesn’t do this as well as it should (we’re terrible at language-learning, for example), but having to think clearly and with empathy about how Australia builds relationships in Asia is positive. It means Australian foreign policy cannot be lazy, that it requires placing serious neighbourhood diplomacy at the heart of its national strategy, in a way that, say, Sweden doesn’t.
I’m heading back to Melbourne this week after five months in Sweden. The disappointment of the referendum aside, it offers me an opportunity to think – and write – more seriously, and with less instinctive reservations, about Australia.
The Barbarity of Joiners
During the week, Samantha Rose Hill, in response to events in Israel/Palestine shared her syllabus for The Problem Of Evil, a course that draws heavily on the work of Hannah Arendt. In particular her book Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Arendt described Adolf Eichmann as a “joiner” someone who defined himself by the organisations he could be a part of. Incapable of thinking for himself, he required the direction of others to negotiate the world. His psychology was not simply one of lacking individual thought, but a fear of being an individual. As someone only capable of following a group the evil he committed was mundane, or “banal” as Arendt described it. Not the work of a wicked genius.
This banality is also the cowardice of groupism. We’ve seen this cowardice over the past week from those who hide themselves behind symbols, slogans and shibboleths on social media – outsourcing their brains to others. A belief that one is serving a higher purpose – or simply going along with any purpose – reveals the ease by which evil can be carried out or endorsed. It exists within our desire to belong over the necessity of being one’s own person.
Groupism is the abandonment of moral consistency. It doesn’t seek universal ideas of human worth, it is instead bound to ideological conceptions of who has worth and who doesn’t. It’s mired in the whataboutery of two wrongs making a right. What I fear is that as insecurity escalates groupism becomes even more attractive. It is within insecurity that we lose the responsibility to think for ourselves, and it becomes more likely that we descend into barbarity.
This Week’s Reading
Eliot Cohen - The Atlantic
“Barbarians live for grievance—grievance against those who they believe have wronged them, but also against those who enjoy the good things in life. That is why they enjoy wrecking homes and kidnapping children and, as Russian soldiers have done in southern Ukraine, raping women. That is why they excel at building only certain kinds of things—arsenals and strongholds, booby traps and minefields, sports stadiums and missiles of all kinds, but not places of beauty and contemplation, elegance and human proportion. They prefer either the fetid bunker or the gaudy palace and despise the suburban garden or the tranquil quadrangle. They dream of an unrealisable utopia, in which their nation dominates the Earth, or their religion extirpates all others, or their enemies grovel for a mercy they will never grant.
Barbarians fear argument and are driven to madness by certain books and certain ideas. In place of reason, compromise, forgiveness, or compassion, they revert to rage, and that is because they sense their inner weakness. A curious inquiry about truth or values is beyond them. They have no use for the legacies of Athens or Jerusalem.”
John Ganz – Unpopular Front
“Strategy and tactics are not what’s really at issue here. At core of the worldviews in question is a belief in sheer murderousness. What both Hamas and the far right in Israel want this is to become is a war of annihilation and extermination. This is the fundamental vision of their nationalism of despair: races and peoples pitted against each other in interminable conflicts that can only be concluded with “final solutions.” Of course, a similar vision of permanent racial war underpinned Nazism and the Holocaust. I categorically refuse to be recruited to this conception of the world. And I will not be manipulated by emotional appeals and propaganda—by one side or the other—to participate in it.
I had an argument with a friend: He insisted that Jews were only really safe in Israel among fellow Jews. I pointed out the absurdity of this since Jews were quite evidently not particularly safe in Israel. Then he shifted: “Well, at least if you died there, you’d die amongst your brothers.” This is what I mean about nationalism being a doctrine of despair: ultimately, when you pull back the layers, nationalism is about desiring death, death for others and death for yourself. A warm, comfortable death for you, and a violent, cold, and terrible death for the other guy. It choses being subsumed in a mass to avoid the terrible difficulty of remaining human that rises to the fore in tragic moments like this one. When I die, I hope it will be here in New York, the promised land, surrounded by my brothers: all the different peoples of the world.”
Ian S. Lustick – Foreign Policy
“If we really do want to know and address the causes of the butchery we have witnessed, and which we are otherwise bound to witness again, we must shift our frame of reference.
The fanaticism and bloodlust of the militants who carried out the attack and perpetrated war crimes—along with their leaders’ calculations, tactics, ruthlessness, mobilization skills, and readiness to die—are not products of a special Palestinian and Muslim prowess or innate evil.
They are what can—and perhaps inevitably will—happen when masses of human beings are treated as the 2.3 million human beings living in the Gaza Strip have been treated for decades. Nor can the event be explained by the undeniable incompetence, hubris, and apparent negligence of the Israeli government and its security apparatuses. Given enough time, any system designed to contain explosive and steadily increasing pressures will fail.”
Hussein Ibish – The Atlantic
“Israel appears poised to fulfil Hamas’s intentions. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed retaliation that will “reverberate for generations” among Israel’s adversaries. The Israeli general Ghassan Aliyan warned, “You wanted hell—you will get hell.” Defence Minister Yoav Gallant declared, “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.” None of these speakers made any effort to distinguish between Hamas militants and the 2 million Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The “human animals” comment is telling. For decades, and especially in recent years, the people of Gaza have indeed been treated like animals. Perhaps not surprisingly, guerrillas emerging from their ranks indeed acted like animals when they attacked southern Israel. So now Israel will triple down on the dehumanisation and collective punishment of all of these “human animals.” Tehran couldn’t ask for more.
Israel’s apparent eagerness to fall into this trap is understandable, and indeed predictable, which is why Hamas was confident in laying it. Outrageous overreach by terrorists typically aims to provoke overreach. Washington and other friends of Israel who are now seized with sympathy should immediately caution Israel not to make this blunder. If Israel instead exercises restraint, however difficult doing so might be both politically and emotionally, it can thwart the goals of Hamas and its Iranian sponsors. Restraint would go a long way toward ensuring that the diplomatic opening with Saudi Arabia continues to move forward, dealing a major blow to local revisionist powers, such as Iran, and global ones, such as China and Russia, that wish to supplant a rules-based order with one based on “Might makes right.”
Unfortunately, in the efforts to eliminate Hamas, which cannot be done by force, and to ensure that such a threat can never be allowed to reemerge, which is equally impossible so long as the occupation continues, Israel seems ready to jump right into the briar patch.”
The Age of Great-Power Distraction
Michael Kimmage & Hanna Notte – Foreign Affairs
“The current cocktail of competition and distraction poses a different problem, one the world is ill prepared to tackle. Tension now emanates from two separate and often overlapping sources: the collision of great powers’ ambitions in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia as well as the great powers’ paralysis and passivity outside of a few hot spots. And so a profusion of crises is emerging in which midsize powers, small powers, and even nonstate actors collide, and the great powers can neither deter nor contain them.
Great-power distraction invites considerable long-term risk. It invites revisionism and aggressive risk-taking by other actors. Azerbaijan is anything but a superpower: its population is some ten million people. And yet it has been able to act with impunity in Nagorno-Karabakh. Hamas is not a state at all, but it was emboldened to attack a country with world-class military and international partners, the United States among them.
As tensions in the Middle East boil over, great-power competition—classically understood—cannot be the world’s sole focal point and means of analysis. This is not an era of strengthening international order. It is not merely another era of great-power competition. It is a moment of anarchically fragmenting power, an age of great-power distraction.”
Anne Applebaum – The Atlantic
“To explain why one permanent member of the UN Security Council and one quasi-state have adopted this kind of behaviour, it is best to start with the nature of their own totalitarian regimes. But there is plenty more blame to go around, because the rules-based order, always pretty tenuous, has actually been dying for a long time. Autocracies, led by China, have been seeking to undermine or remove language about human rights and the rule of law from international forums for years, replacing it with the language of “sovereignty.” Not that this is just a matter of language: The Chinese have carried out atrocities against their Uyghur minority for years, so far with impunity, and openly conducted a successful assault on the rights of the population of Hong Kong. They, and others, have also indulged in deliberately provocative behavior, designed to mock the rule of law outside their own borders. Belarus got away with forcing an Irish-owned airplane to land in Minsk and then kidnapping one of its citizens who was onboard. Russia has organised murders of its citizens in London, Washington, and Berlin.
Democracies, led by the United States, bear a lot of the blame too, either for refusing to enforce anything resembling order when they could, or for violating the rules themselves. George W. Bush condoned interrogation black sites and torture during the War on Terror. Barack Obama accused the Syrians of using chemical weapons, then failed to do anything to stop them. Donald Trump went out of his way to pardon American war criminals and continues to advocate extrajudicial murders, among other things implying that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff deserves to be executed. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has notably indulged the most extreme voices in Israeli politics, including political figures who explicitly seek to undermine Israel’s independent judiciary and Israeli rule of law, and parties whose members openly advocate for the mass expulsion of Arabs from the country.”
William Deresiewicz – Persuasion
“But are there really only two sides to every question? Consider the abortion debate. While we speak of pro-choice and pro-life, there are actually many places to stand on the issue. But “side” pushes people to extremes, to single principles and simple emotions. Pro-lifers say that life is sacred; the pro-choice camp, that a woman has a right to control her own body—two absolute beliefs that almost no one believes absolutely. Very few would claim that the life of the fetus trumps all other considerations, and nobody thinks that the right to end a pregnancy should extend to the moment of delivery. Nearly everyone feels the tug of competing claims and conflicting feelings and ends up somewhere in the middle: six weeks; twelve weeks; second trimester; heartbeat; viability; exceptions only for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. These are not sides. This is a spectrum.
Instead of sides, we need to speak, and think, in terms of positions. On any given issue, there are almost always more than two. But adopting a position is very different than choosing a side. It takes thought; it takes investigation; it takes a willingness to consider alternatives. Sides are intellectually easy and emotionally satisfying. Positions are intellectually challenging and emotionally complex. Once you know which side you're on—in the culture war, or the political war—you can let your friends, or your podcasts, do your thinking for you. But “positions” requires you not only to think things through for yourself, but to think each issue through on its own terms, from the ground up.”
There is no playlist this week, but instead I will leave you with this composition by Italian composer Lino Capra Vaccina. It is a stunning work of minimalism played with marimba, vibraphone and oboe. Given the stresses of the past week, it is a piece that will hopefully provide you with at least ten minutes of tranquil respite.
I find it incredible that Australia voted against its own people. The world is in the hands of men who are deeply patriarchal. Men across the world have become imbued with the base values of porn & video games. I really worry that in a time of world wide crisis around climate change, leaders are distracting themselves through war