The prison built on fear

Guardian article: The prison built on fear
The US and UK governments use the war on terror to curtail our freedoms. Where does the greater threat lie?

"there are grave doubts about whether "democracies can control the
war-making powers of their executives". The faulty intelligence and deliberate
deception can only lead one to the conclusion that the "entire leadership of the
north Atlantic elite wilfully deluded themselves and then deceived the
people"."

The tiniest glimmer of hope

News in the Sydney Morning Herald today that the grandson of Mohandas Gandhi took the legendary Indian leader's doctrine of non-violent resistance to the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict yesterday, pitching the pacifist creed to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

There have been a number of attempts to encourage the Palestinian people to use nonviolent action in the past (see nonviolence in Palestine, testing the power of nonviolence in Palestine, leading Palestinians call for nonviolence) but to my knowledge none have involved meetings with Yasser Arafat himself.

However unlikely, one can only hope it planted a seed in Mr Aarafat's mind. May it turn out to be a mustard seed that grows into a giant bush of love, discipline and courage among the Palestinian people - creating the opportunity for the Israeli peace movement to pressure the Knesset for a meaningful peace agreement.

Death of Democracy?

Are we witnessing the death of democracy in Australia?

This question is starting to get some airplay in the media these days. That in itself is something of a revelation - the idea that we are is clearly gaining some traction among the political commentators at least; raising such a question 10 years ago would likely have been met with confusion oustide the most fundamentalist right and left.

Margo Kingston certainly thinks we are heading down a slippery slope. Her excellent Webdiary features continual highlighting of the anti-democratic decisions being made by the federal government, and her just-released book "Not Happy John" details some of the key concerns, from the closing of the public galleries in Parliament House duing the visit of US President George W Bush to the casting aside of the Westminster tradition of (and reliance on) Ministerial responsibility. In a speech to the Sydney Institute, she said:

The current weakness of our democracy is clearly shown in its failure to
hold Howard to account for his misleading and deceptive conduct in taking
Australia to its first war of aggression in Iraq against the wishes of the
Australian people. The British and American parliaments and media have
comprehensively shown us up.

Yesterday, Robert Manne (professor of politics at La Trobe University) wrote an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald arguing that the current Prime Minister's contempt for the convention of Ministerial responsibility in the Westminster system of government demonstrates a weakness in the Constitution of Australia:

There is almost no Australian constitutional convention which goes deeper than
the one which says that when a minister deliberately misleads the parliament he
or she should resign. Indeed it is genuinely difficult to see how the
Westminster system of responsible government could survive in the absence of a
convention of such a kind.

In our system conventions cannot be enforced by courts. They rely on the acts of the prime minister. If a minister is shown to have misled the parliament, the prime minister must insist on resignation. But if it is the prime minister who has misled the parliament, who is to act? We encounter here a curious gap in the constitutional convention.

Professor Manne was citing the recent revelations concerning "Children Overboard Affair", in which it has become apparent to anyone with ears to hear that the Prime Minister deliberately misled parliament about whether children had been thrown from a sinking boat full of Iraqi asylum seekers during the election campaign in November 2001. Mr Howard has decided to ride out the controversy, relying on a combination of apathy and xenophobia to take him into the next election.

Given that election is coming up soon, maybe he's right. The people will be able to vote on his honesty directly, and in that respect will certainly get the prime minister they deserve. With Labor's list of 27 lies since 1996 likely to get plenty of airtime in the election campaign, people will be asked to determine how much they actually value honesty in politics, answering for a time at least the confusion amongst pollsters on where that issue sits in the league table of importance of the voting public.

The irony of people potentially voting for the end of democratic accountability of government appears somewhat lost on Gerard Henderson, who seems to have little understanding of the all-too-willing cooperation of the German people in their own disenfranchisement in the early 1930s. In a response to Prof Manne, Henderson today warns against people jumping on the "pre-fascist" bandwagon. While he is right to remind people of the weight of the words involved and the caution that needs to be exercised in using it, he seems to be confused or careless about the difference between "pre-fascist" and "fascist", interchanging these terms in his article as if they are the same thing.

Margo Kingston et al are not arguing that Australia in 2004 is like Germany in 1936. They are warning that meaningful accountability has disappeared in politics, that anti-terror laws are being used to stifle dissent, that wars of aggression are being waged on the basis of lies, and that the majority of Australians are willing to let all that happen because they are worried about their mortgages.

That sounds a lot like Germany in 1933.

Alliances and the American election

I came across this fascinating, long (6 A4 pages) but worth it essay by Gabriel Kolko in the Sydney Morning Herald today (published on Aug 24). Scarily, it suggests a John Kerry victory could lead to a MORE dangerous world precisely because he will restore the international coalitions Bush is undermining...highly recommended:

"...style can be important and inadvertently the Bush Administration's falsehoods, rudeness, and preemptory demands have begun to destroy an alliance system that for the world's peace should have been abolished long ago. In this context, it is far more likely that the nations allied with the U.S. in the past will be compelled to stress their own interests and go their own ways. The Democrats are far less likely to continue that exceedingly desirable process, a process ultimately much more conducive to peace in the world. They will perpetuate the same adventurism and opportunism that began generations ago and that Bush has merely built upon, the same dependence on military means to solve political crises, the same interference with every corner of the globe as if America has a Divinely ordained mission to muck around with all the world's problems. The Democrats' greater finesse in justifying these policies is therefore more dangerous because they will be made to seem more credible and keep alive alliances that only reinforce the U.S.' refusal to acknowledge the limits of its power. In the longer run, Kerry's pursuit of these aggressive goals will lead eventually to a renewal of the dissolution of alliances, but in the short-run he will attempt to rebuild them and European leaders will find it considerably more difficult to refuse his demands than if Bush stays in power - and that is to be deplored."

Just getting started

"Everyone else is doing it, so we can't we"

Well, here goes ... welcome to my blog. I aim to use this space to write down thoughts, ideas, rants, and mini-essays on topics of politics, religion, and life in general. Mostly I want to use this site to get back into writing because I feel totally out of it these days, 7 years after leaving university with an Honours degree in environmental politics and walking into a career in ... IT. As you do.

As I write there are a few positive movements that come as a pleasant surprise in the general swirl of diminishing democracy:

1. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez easily won the recall election called against him when the country's poor stood for up to 12 hours to cast their ballots and be heard. Just as they did when they came down from the hills into Caracas to defeat a US-supported coup in 2002, the poor of Venezuela stood up for their rights and for the legitimacy of a rare politician - one who actually uses his country's wealth to provide basic things like education and health care for all citizens. Coming from an increasingly cynical Australia, this upsurge of citizenship and democratic action is indeed refreshing.

2. Closer to home, the Australian Prime Minister is FINALLY under serious pressure over the Children Overboard Affair (or as it is known amongst the left, the Truth Overboard Affair). Despite the fact that not knowing things for which you are responsible should never have been an available excuse (try it out in the corporate world, Mr Howard), "Teflon John" has evaded any liability for the appalling behaviour in the lead up to the last federal election, when he used the lives of desperate people fleeing despotic regimes we would soon be invading 'on their behalf' as fodder for his xenophobic political ends. No, it wasn't the only thing determining the outcome of that election. But it sure helped swing the marginal seats.

Now, at long last, someone in the public service has said he told John Howard directly, on the phone, that the video was inconclusive, the photos were of a different event. Now another former public servant is backing his story. Mr Howard is looking shaky for the first time in a while on honesty and credibility. It will be interesting to see how the media plays this, and how the public responds in turn. Australians are already pretty cynical about politicians so we don't react too badly to news they lied to us. But if Mark Latham can work the "if you don't trust him, our national security itself is at risk" line successfully, he will romp home. Fun times for the pundits.