Guy, this is an extraordinary piece of thinking under pressure. Clear-eyed, unsentimental, and morally serious in a moment that has been deliberately fogged.
What I admire most is the refusal to accept the lazy causal chain that is being pushed so aggressively. You do the hard work of separating event from exploitation, grief from spectacle, protest from pathology, without collapsing any of them into slogans. The insistence on holding the horror of Bondi and the horror of Gaza in the same frame, without letting one be weaponised to erase the other, feels both intellectually rigorous and ethically necessary.
I especially value the way you dismantle the fantasy of “performative protest.” I was in Bosnia as this began, and in Sarajevo when Gaza was sealed and the mass-casualty bombing started. To stand among tens of thousands of Sarajevans calling for international intervention was to feel something utterly unperformative: a community that recognised the pattern immediately. People who know what it means to be besieged, starved, written off as collateral. There was no theatre in that crowd, only memory, fury, and care. Reducing that response to vibes or fashion isn’t just wrong, it’s a way of looking away. Naming that sleight of hand matters because it protects the lie that nothing real is happening.
There is also a rare honesty here about the limits and risks of street politics, the real work required to push back antisemitism without surrendering moral clarity, and the necessity of not subordinating politics to enforced interior harmony.
This is not comfort writing. It is witness. And it does the job.
And to all who appreciate the quality of Guy's in depth analysis, can I encourage you to be a paid subscriber, or at least buy him a coffee. We need people like him in the media more than ever, and there are so few.
Anybody with a working knowledge of the history of mossad/cia psychological and terrorist operations over several decades considers it highly likely to be a security organisation planned event.
There is no conspiracy ‘theory’, there is likelihood based on recent and distant historical precedence. And there is the unquestionable reality that these two agencies in particular can and will do ANYTHING that advances their cause. There is not, and never has been, a moral red line to limit their activities. The slow torture of a million children is considered mere tactical necessity. Grooming nutters to shoot fifteen Australians is small beer by comparison.
They are the only people who will ever know what happened. No ‘journalist’ in Australia would, or could, go anywhere near it in an investigative sense. . That sort of journalism or journalist does not exist here. It would not occur to any individual employed by the msm to question his/her masters’ motives. That person doesn’t get that job. Critical thinking and historically informed skepticism are impediments to job prospects in this milieu.
Interpreting these sort of events is guesswork. I think I know the names of the killers, I think I know their ethnic backgrounds, because some ratfaced private school bully from asio or the afp told me on the tele. The next piece of ‘information’ will come from the same ratfaced bully. Your best guess is the one that comes from attention to history, cui bono etc.
Rundle writes that the liberal party/murdochracy are freed from the rhetorical restraint that a mass shooting event might have seen previously and are frothing at their mouths with fascist exuberance . It’s not just them.
The influential ‘educated’ middle class elites in the information/arts/academic sphere, the ‘sensible centre’ (most probably alp voters), have fallen into line with alacrity. Most people who work in this sphere are one employer’s frown and an unedited Twitter comment from being pushed back into the badly paid , one step from precarity , mainstream workforce along with the resulting loss of social status.
This class, which, in good times, luxuriates in liberal platitudes about human rights, inclusion, rules based order, national ‘dialogues’, etc. is giving us a live streamed demonstration of another well observed historical phenomenon: the tendency of liberals to morph into besuited fascists when their comforts and income can no longer be taken for granted. Class interest trumps universal morality and even basic human decency every time.
Nobody should mention his name IMO, nor any of the others. They don't deserve the spotlight, the publicity, the notoriety that they seek. A common phrase when mass killers are caught in the US is 'how many did I do?' We should do everything we can to anonymise them.
It feels like the horse has bolted in terms of public awareness and disgust with Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and I agree that the lobby seems to have underestimated public horror at what is going on in Gaza. I query how effective the Israel lobby’s attempts will be to convince everyone that criticising Israel is anti Jewish. Attempting to stamp out criticism simply won’t work in these times with the internet and social media.
I’m also tired of the term antisemitism being thrown around, especially by cynical zionist parties - it is losing its meaning which is terrible given we have had numerous neo nazis marching in our streets proudly terrorising people.
I'm not so sure, Rosie. In the world I move in, there is wall-to-wall coverage of Bondi from all possible angles; head-nodding for the grieving, outraged Frydenberg; agreement that Labor has been inadequate on antisemitism and more must be done; new laws and new rules - in kindergartens! - and on it goes.
Not a peep now about the starving kids in Gaza, now receiving the coup de grace as floodwaters pour through their torn tents.
I hope I am mistaken, but "we" now seem a small group indeed.
Totally agree. The horse you refer to has bolted. So not only will attempts to stamp out criticism not work, it will just anger the people (which I think will be most people) who see right through it. Totally counterproductive by those who think they've just found the key to smother criticism of Israel.
I keep coming back to the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which Segal wants to embed into our law. The text between the definition proper and the working examples states “Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” The tangle of these two sentences is impossible to escape. The history of Israel is singular, making comparisons to other nations difficult, but surely it’s demonstrable that any other nation carrying out the same level of destruction on a region would be subjected to the same level of constant protest.
I’ve heard the phrase “Never again for anyone” used in this context, and it fits the bill - as Guy has said, the horrors of the Holocaust are foundational to (but not all of) the moral outrage at Gaza’s devastation - and it would be a fitting slogan to be used on the streets. But then we see the IHRA antisemitism example: “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” and we’re caught again, in the most absurd way. The Nazis taught us what to watch out for, when to protest, when to act, what the dehumanisation that leads to genocide looks like. But the G word itself is now deemed to be an antisemitic claim.
How are we to fight antisemitism when it’s been turned into this ridiculous Hydra?
No-one should allow themselves to be gaslit by Lachlan Murdoch’s shrieking culture war foot soldiers. Their hysterical Goyim condescension towards the ‘Australian Jewish community’ will look increasingly like the concealed Jew-baiting it really is inside a few years. No Jewish Australian will thank them for leveraging this outrage for such naked political purposes. They’ll be like the dog that catches the ute: when they have got an Australia that has criminalised words, blamed MPs for murder and shut down university diversity of thought…what then?
It’s one of your best ever, GR, at a time when it’s never been needed more, nor been riskier to try. Maybe we can thank PK after all. Sometimes you need to be a cleanskin gunslinger with no-one to answer to to write the words that need to be written.
Compare these to the spineless equivocating garbage being churned out just now by both the cosplay teeny-bop lefties at Crikey, and the totally-spooked and neutered-tenured middle class social climbers at the ABC.
Ouch…are you including bKeane in the ‘cosplay teeny-bop lefties at Crikey’? As others have noted, he has produced some thoughtful articles on this subject - I don’t see much ‘equivocating garbage’, not from Keane anyway.
Bernard is the worst of them. Michael Bradley a close second.
Listen: Crikey’s LARP-Lefty posturing has done more damage to the possibility of a genuine material Left critique and strategic project than just about any other allegedly independent media outlet in Australia, with the possible exception of Morrie Schwartz’s Bible of Rich Faux-Lefty Guilt Amelioration, The Saturday Paper. It’s one thing to screech banal woke cliches into a dull orthodox echo chamber when you’re a twenty-two-year-old Comms grad attention seeker/wannabe Hitchens. It’s entirely another to still be vamping the same mindless platitudes to the audience on that tired shit when seventy, with a big APS super safety net to bounce upon.
The Whitlamite left - that is to say, the Boomer pretenders and their fawning generational lackies/descendants - is reaping every last toxic bit of blowback they have flung at the hardball players of the culture war right over the last half century. Every single discursive and rhetorical tactic the pro-Netanyahu/Trump gang is now reverse-savaging Australian society with was invented by the lazy, tire-kicking, prosperous-and-guilty-about-it middle class ‘Left’, and nowhere more so than in the commitment and accountability free e-zones of online ‘radicalism’ just like Crikey. The leveraging of antisemitism to right-wing ends is of course just the Identity Politics and Guilt/Victimhood special pleading that lefties like Bernard have mistaken for a proper Left program and strategy for at least three decades now. A powerful privileged accomplished and beloved (in his own social context, which is all that matters re: alleged ‘victimhood’ status) Jewish figure like an Alex Ryvkin or a Josh Frydenberg or even FFS a Frank bloody Lowy whining about ‘persecution’ is the exact equivalent and logical extreme extension of a Stan Grant grizzling about ‘racism’ and ‘cultural invisibility’ from perhaps the most visible and beloved platform in the joint, or the professional Board/Parly quota gold-diggers of Emily’s List sooking about patriarchal oppression, glass ceilings and gender pay gaps. It was always cynical/guilt anxious horseshit from the privileged Left; it’s equally cynical horseshit from the privileged Right - just without the guilt. These people are nasty and hard in a way that the pussies of Crikey can’t even begin to imagine, much less find substance and grit enough - like Rundle’s, in this piece - to take on. Beecher was always a full of shit grifter; Crikey is pretty much built out of Hypocrisy, Guilt, Narcissism and Passive Aggressive Bullying and the Other’s Straw Men.
Guy Rundle has written/warned often about the suicidal stupidity of the ‘Left’ demanding censorship, hate speech bans, non-platforming, moral sanctimony, the refusal to engage with the Other on good faith terms, etc. As he always argued, you’re just opening the door on a far nastier shitstorm of the same, from the other far nastier lot.
Well: welcome to the reaping. You fucking soft Boomer Lefty morons. Oh - what? You mean they’ve all retired, to enjoy parasitical dotage lives of asset wealth and taxpayer largesse?!?! With the occasional lamenting/nostalgic memoir launch, Walkley’s speech or interview with David on LNL? Great. Thanks for nothing, Boomer Assholes.
Peace, love, equality…maintain the rage, comrades. Hippy fucking hypocrites.
Sorry, Jaybee, 'child' was out of order, and 'fuck off' is too harsh by far. We are all angry and some of us are prone to angry excesses. Sorry. But if you want to participate in a discussion usefully, I would say - to a would-be material left more broadly - now is the time to express that seriously, and the first exercise of our authorial agency that is needed is to start contributing comments to these debates using our real names and identities.
Similarly it's also the time for physical protestors to drop the balaclavas, especially the deeply and counter-productive keffiyah and pseudo-ISISish style cosplay garbage. It's sinister, counter-productive, very frightening (rightly) to Australian Jews, (I think) cowardly, and, yes, too easily portrayed as kitsch anti-semitism. Plenty of it is that, too.
Richard, AI chatbots can make ‘very good contributions to the topic’ these days. Hermetic eloquence is drowning ‘the topic’. now. Whatever the subject and whatever the words…in and of themselves, they don’t matter anymore.
Two things about words matter now, and only two. Their authorial substance: the bodily real-ness of their author. And the material context that author places - bodily forces - them into.
The most materially radical and efficacious words Guy Rundle has produced in the last decade have been the clumsy machine gun short texts he fired at Radio National, and which got him sacked. It invited both the ABC and Crikey to declare where they really stand on tough subjects, at tough moments, and their honest answers extended those of us who prefer honesty the courtesy of being able to stop wasting our time with either going forward.
No-one should ever delude themselves that their genius words alone will change a thing.
The internet is the biggest and most effective gulag the powerful and rich ever constructed.
In Israel, RP? During Israel's attack on Gaza? Sure, if Israel has called it a way, which they did, and was attacking civilians en masse, turnabout was surely fair. But I don't support terror, no.
Thank you Guy for cutting so sharply through the noise. One quibble: labelling the incidental antisemitism you’ve observed in the movement to end genocide in Gaza as “kitsch” appears to trivialise something that, as you so carefully argue, must be taken seriously, and must be challenged. Kitsch is vulgar, but fun. Racism is vulgar, but it’s never fun.
I took the use of Kitsch in this sense to mean the Kundera (unbearable lightness of being) kitsch. As in sentimental, trivialising and unable to bear dissent. Not fun at all
As far as the Lib-Nat Coalition are concerned: "Realignments have already rendered parties unrecognisable to their creators. The Coalition looks more and more like One Nation, Labor more and more like the Liberals used to, the Greens have morphed into Labor’s old guard left. The teals waft and weave between them all."
The same effect has been seen in the US: "During the primaries, someone made the observation Bernie Sanders was running as an old fashioned mainstream Democrat and Hillary Clinton was running as an old fashioned mainstream Republican. Donald Trump was running as a kind of John Birch Society candidate."
Sudan is not ‘what about’ ery. I think Sudan more worth attention.
I gave up on Israel Palestinians finding a solution when the 1990s discussions came to nothing.
Israel’s continued pushing of Palestinians out has been clear since - but gained minimal attention.
Sudan blew up again early in 2023 and continues. Actions numbers current problems all equal Gaza. Yet there is close to attention to it.
Instead we get the circular argument that the world is active about Israel Palestine hence we should keep being so. It is important because we declared it so.
My view is that all the attention to Israel across my life has achieved nothing. It could not be worse through ignoring.
Of course that means a focus on sudan could also make little difference or worsen - yet different place new options perhaps something useful might emerge.
But there's a difference between a lethal govt like Israel, purporting to have our public support, being helped by our govts, etc, and Sudan, where neither side is claiming to represent the west, or being supported by us. With Israel/Palestine, we seek to do something material: deny Israel silent consent, and push back against the Zionist lobby etc. With Sudan we're reaching in to fix it, which doesn't always go well
That is the circular argument. We have engagement thus we should keep it.
I have not noticed people saying pull back from any support for Israel ( which I have noticed people noticed much of) and then leave them both to sort it out. That would be the Sudan option applied.
what you say has been the default all my life. The difference being that Israel has steadily lost its assumption of being a democratic country. But then I remember the PLO as once being the hope for a Palestinian government.
I cannot help but feel that peoples across the middle east are accepted as just like us in a way that those from Africa are not.
I commented since you aligned taking Sudan seriously as more important than Gaza with a pro Israel distraction.
I am a random commentator. Yassmin Abdel-Magied has lamanted the lack of interest in Sudan - I make no claim about her views on Gaza.
Thanks for your invaluable insights, again. I will always disagree with you about the nature of modern progressivism, but what would be the point of reading someone I was in complete agreement with?
"... those who run the knowledge-capital economy, and its inherent progressive culture"
Not 'inherent', 'co-opted'. '..those who run..." are progressive mostly in the old fashioned 'arrow of progress' sense of the term and play both sides of the culture wars for power and profit.
Guy, this is an extraordinary piece of thinking under pressure. Clear-eyed, unsentimental, and morally serious in a moment that has been deliberately fogged.
What I admire most is the refusal to accept the lazy causal chain that is being pushed so aggressively. You do the hard work of separating event from exploitation, grief from spectacle, protest from pathology, without collapsing any of them into slogans. The insistence on holding the horror of Bondi and the horror of Gaza in the same frame, without letting one be weaponised to erase the other, feels both intellectually rigorous and ethically necessary.
I especially value the way you dismantle the fantasy of “performative protest.” I was in Bosnia as this began, and in Sarajevo when Gaza was sealed and the mass-casualty bombing started. To stand among tens of thousands of Sarajevans calling for international intervention was to feel something utterly unperformative: a community that recognised the pattern immediately. People who know what it means to be besieged, starved, written off as collateral. There was no theatre in that crowd, only memory, fury, and care. Reducing that response to vibes or fashion isn’t just wrong, it’s a way of looking away. Naming that sleight of hand matters because it protects the lie that nothing real is happening.
There is also a rare honesty here about the limits and risks of street politics, the real work required to push back antisemitism without surrendering moral clarity, and the necessity of not subordinating politics to enforced interior harmony.
This is not comfort writing. It is witness. And it does the job.
And to all who appreciate the quality of Guy's in depth analysis, can I encourage you to be a paid subscriber, or at least buy him a coffee. We need people like him in the media more than ever, and there are so few.
Thanks Henk
Thanks Kris
Superb response, Kris. Agree with every-single-word.
Thanks,
Jay.
Thanks JB, and all for your continuing support....
G
At least Kris had some positive things to say, eh JayBee?
Anybody with a working knowledge of the history of mossad/cia psychological and terrorist operations over several decades considers it highly likely to be a security organisation planned event.
There is no conspiracy ‘theory’, there is likelihood based on recent and distant historical precedence. And there is the unquestionable reality that these two agencies in particular can and will do ANYTHING that advances their cause. There is not, and never has been, a moral red line to limit their activities. The slow torture of a million children is considered mere tactical necessity. Grooming nutters to shoot fifteen Australians is small beer by comparison.
They are the only people who will ever know what happened. No ‘journalist’ in Australia would, or could, go anywhere near it in an investigative sense. . That sort of journalism or journalist does not exist here. It would not occur to any individual employed by the msm to question his/her masters’ motives. That person doesn’t get that job. Critical thinking and historically informed skepticism are impediments to job prospects in this milieu.
Interpreting these sort of events is guesswork. I think I know the names of the killers, I think I know their ethnic backgrounds, because some ratfaced private school bully from asio or the afp told me on the tele. The next piece of ‘information’ will come from the same ratfaced bully. Your best guess is the one that comes from attention to history, cui bono etc.
Rundle writes that the liberal party/murdochracy are freed from the rhetorical restraint that a mass shooting event might have seen previously and are frothing at their mouths with fascist exuberance . It’s not just them.
The influential ‘educated’ middle class elites in the information/arts/academic sphere, the ‘sensible centre’ (most probably alp voters), have fallen into line with alacrity. Most people who work in this sphere are one employer’s frown and an unedited Twitter comment from being pushed back into the badly paid , one step from precarity , mainstream workforce along with the resulting loss of social status.
This class, which, in good times, luxuriates in liberal platitudes about human rights, inclusion, rules based order, national ‘dialogues’, etc. is giving us a live streamed demonstration of another well observed historical phenomenon: the tendency of liberals to morph into besuited fascists when their comforts and income can no longer be taken for granted. Class interest trumps universal morality and even basic human decency every time.
More like anti Semitic rubbish
Thank you Guy
Nobody else has mentioned Brendon Tarrant. Should have been the first point of reference.
Nobody should mention his name IMO, nor any of the others. They don't deserve the spotlight, the publicity, the notoriety that they seek. A common phrase when mass killers are caught in the US is 'how many did I do?' We should do everything we can to anonymise them.
It feels like the horse has bolted in terms of public awareness and disgust with Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and I agree that the lobby seems to have underestimated public horror at what is going on in Gaza. I query how effective the Israel lobby’s attempts will be to convince everyone that criticising Israel is anti Jewish. Attempting to stamp out criticism simply won’t work in these times with the internet and social media.
I’m also tired of the term antisemitism being thrown around, especially by cynical zionist parties - it is losing its meaning which is terrible given we have had numerous neo nazis marching in our streets proudly terrorising people.
I'm not so sure, Rosie. In the world I move in, there is wall-to-wall coverage of Bondi from all possible angles; head-nodding for the grieving, outraged Frydenberg; agreement that Labor has been inadequate on antisemitism and more must be done; new laws and new rules - in kindergartens! - and on it goes.
Not a peep now about the starving kids in Gaza, now receiving the coup de grace as floodwaters pour through their torn tents.
I hope I am mistaken, but "we" now seem a small group indeed.
Totally agree. The horse you refer to has bolted. So not only will attempts to stamp out criticism not work, it will just anger the people (which I think will be most people) who see right through it. Totally counterproductive by those who think they've just found the key to smother criticism of Israel.
I will need to read this a few times to absorb it. Thanks for the depth and clarity of this piece, and the courage to write it.
I keep coming back to the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which Segal wants to embed into our law. The text between the definition proper and the working examples states “Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” The tangle of these two sentences is impossible to escape. The history of Israel is singular, making comparisons to other nations difficult, but surely it’s demonstrable that any other nation carrying out the same level of destruction on a region would be subjected to the same level of constant protest.
I’ve heard the phrase “Never again for anyone” used in this context, and it fits the bill - as Guy has said, the horrors of the Holocaust are foundational to (but not all of) the moral outrage at Gaza’s devastation - and it would be a fitting slogan to be used on the streets. But then we see the IHRA antisemitism example: “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” and we’re caught again, in the most absurd way. The Nazis taught us what to watch out for, when to protest, when to act, what the dehumanisation that leads to genocide looks like. But the G word itself is now deemed to be an antisemitic claim.
How are we to fight antisemitism when it’s been turned into this ridiculous Hydra?
No-one should allow themselves to be gaslit by Lachlan Murdoch’s shrieking culture war foot soldiers. Their hysterical Goyim condescension towards the ‘Australian Jewish community’ will look increasingly like the concealed Jew-baiting it really is inside a few years. No Jewish Australian will thank them for leveraging this outrage for such naked political purposes. They’ll be like the dog that catches the ute: when they have got an Australia that has criminalised words, blamed MPs for murder and shut down university diversity of thought…what then?
It’s one of your best ever, GR, at a time when it’s never been needed more, nor been riskier to try. Maybe we can thank PK after all. Sometimes you need to be a cleanskin gunslinger with no-one to answer to to write the words that need to be written.
Compare these to the spineless equivocating garbage being churned out just now by both the cosplay teeny-bop lefties at Crikey, and the totally-spooked and neutered-tenured middle class social climbers at the ABC.
Bravo. Go well.
Ouch…are you including bKeane in the ‘cosplay teeny-bop lefties at Crikey’? As others have noted, he has produced some thoughtful articles on this subject - I don’t see much ‘equivocating garbage’, not from Keane anyway.
Agree with the points you make in the first para.
Bernard is the worst of them. Michael Bradley a close second.
Listen: Crikey’s LARP-Lefty posturing has done more damage to the possibility of a genuine material Left critique and strategic project than just about any other allegedly independent media outlet in Australia, with the possible exception of Morrie Schwartz’s Bible of Rich Faux-Lefty Guilt Amelioration, The Saturday Paper. It’s one thing to screech banal woke cliches into a dull orthodox echo chamber when you’re a twenty-two-year-old Comms grad attention seeker/wannabe Hitchens. It’s entirely another to still be vamping the same mindless platitudes to the audience on that tired shit when seventy, with a big APS super safety net to bounce upon.
The Whitlamite left - that is to say, the Boomer pretenders and their fawning generational lackies/descendants - is reaping every last toxic bit of blowback they have flung at the hardball players of the culture war right over the last half century. Every single discursive and rhetorical tactic the pro-Netanyahu/Trump gang is now reverse-savaging Australian society with was invented by the lazy, tire-kicking, prosperous-and-guilty-about-it middle class ‘Left’, and nowhere more so than in the commitment and accountability free e-zones of online ‘radicalism’ just like Crikey. The leveraging of antisemitism to right-wing ends is of course just the Identity Politics and Guilt/Victimhood special pleading that lefties like Bernard have mistaken for a proper Left program and strategy for at least three decades now. A powerful privileged accomplished and beloved (in his own social context, which is all that matters re: alleged ‘victimhood’ status) Jewish figure like an Alex Ryvkin or a Josh Frydenberg or even FFS a Frank bloody Lowy whining about ‘persecution’ is the exact equivalent and logical extreme extension of a Stan Grant grizzling about ‘racism’ and ‘cultural invisibility’ from perhaps the most visible and beloved platform in the joint, or the professional Board/Parly quota gold-diggers of Emily’s List sooking about patriarchal oppression, glass ceilings and gender pay gaps. It was always cynical/guilt anxious horseshit from the privileged Left; it’s equally cynical horseshit from the privileged Right - just without the guilt. These people are nasty and hard in a way that the pussies of Crikey can’t even begin to imagine, much less find substance and grit enough - like Rundle’s, in this piece - to take on. Beecher was always a full of shit grifter; Crikey is pretty much built out of Hypocrisy, Guilt, Narcissism and Passive Aggressive Bullying and the Other’s Straw Men.
Guy Rundle has written/warned often about the suicidal stupidity of the ‘Left’ demanding censorship, hate speech bans, non-platforming, moral sanctimony, the refusal to engage with the Other on good faith terms, etc. As he always argued, you’re just opening the door on a far nastier shitstorm of the same, from the other far nastier lot.
Well: welcome to the reaping. You fucking soft Boomer Lefty morons. Oh - what? You mean they’ve all retired, to enjoy parasitical dotage lives of asset wealth and taxpayer largesse?!?! With the occasional lamenting/nostalgic memoir launch, Walkley’s speech or interview with David on LNL? Great. Thanks for nothing, Boomer Assholes.
Peace, love, equality…maintain the rage, comrades. Hippy fucking hypocrites.
okaay - nice way to close off the discussion, Jack….
Mission accomplished.
Oh please.
You prove my point, child. Fuck off and e-cosplay lefty with someone else’s time and good faith.
Sorry, Jaybee, 'child' was out of order, and 'fuck off' is too harsh by far. We are all angry and some of us are prone to angry excesses. Sorry. But if you want to participate in a discussion usefully, I would say - to a would-be material left more broadly - now is the time to express that seriously, and the first exercise of our authorial agency that is needed is to start contributing comments to these debates using our real names and identities.
Similarly it's also the time for physical protestors to drop the balaclavas, especially the deeply and counter-productive keffiyah and pseudo-ISISish style cosplay garbage. It's sinister, counter-productive, very frightening (rightly) to Australian Jews, (I think) cowardly, and, yes, too easily portrayed as kitsch anti-semitism. Plenty of it is that, too.
Regards, Jaybee and my apologies again.
Well said Jack. Although I reckon both Bernard Keane and Michael Sainsbury have made some very good contributions to the topic in recent days.
Richard, AI chatbots can make ‘very good contributions to the topic’ these days. Hermetic eloquence is drowning ‘the topic’. now. Whatever the subject and whatever the words…in and of themselves, they don’t matter anymore.
Two things about words matter now, and only two. Their authorial substance: the bodily real-ness of their author. And the material context that author places - bodily forces - them into.
The most materially radical and efficacious words Guy Rundle has produced in the last decade have been the clumsy machine gun short texts he fired at Radio National, and which got him sacked. It invited both the ABC and Crikey to declare where they really stand on tough subjects, at tough moments, and their honest answers extended those of us who prefer honesty the courtesy of being able to stop wasting our time with either going forward.
No-one should ever delude themselves that their genius words alone will change a thing.
The internet is the biggest and most effective gulag the powerful and rich ever constructed.
In Israel, RP? During Israel's attack on Gaza? Sure, if Israel has called it a way, which they did, and was attacking civilians en masse, turnabout was surely fair. But I don't support terror, no.
Who are you 'replying to' Guy? Or at least tell me how your comments are ranked, so I can figure it out myself.
thanks
Its a pretty big thing
Thanks GR - that’s it.
‘Kris’ in the comments has conveyed everything I tried to pen in my reply but failed…
Thank you Guy for cutting so sharply through the noise. One quibble: labelling the incidental antisemitism you’ve observed in the movement to end genocide in Gaza as “kitsch” appears to trivialise something that, as you so carefully argue, must be taken seriously, and must be challenged. Kitsch is vulgar, but fun. Racism is vulgar, but it’s never fun.
I took the use of Kitsch in this sense to mean the Kundera (unbearable lightness of being) kitsch. As in sentimental, trivialising and unable to bear dissent. Not fun at all
As far as the Lib-Nat Coalition are concerned: "Realignments have already rendered parties unrecognisable to their creators. The Coalition looks more and more like One Nation, Labor more and more like the Liberals used to, the Greens have morphed into Labor’s old guard left. The teals waft and weave between them all."
https://archive.is/20240909062630/https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/the-major-parties-could-disappear-if-pollies-and-journos-don-t-tell-the-truth-20240909-p5k8zr.html
That’s a good read I hadn’t seen at the time, thank you for the link :-)
The same effect has been seen in the US: "During the primaries, someone made the observation Bernie Sanders was running as an old fashioned mainstream Democrat and Hillary Clinton was running as an old fashioned mainstream Republican. Donald Trump was running as a kind of John Birch Society candidate."
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/on-the-inside/317446/economists-letter-might-put-trump-over-the-top
Powerfully argued, the consequences of our confusion explained. Thankyou.
Sudan is not ‘what about’ ery. I think Sudan more worth attention.
I gave up on Israel Palestinians finding a solution when the 1990s discussions came to nothing.
Israel’s continued pushing of Palestinians out has been clear since - but gained minimal attention.
Sudan blew up again early in 2023 and continues. Actions numbers current problems all equal Gaza. Yet there is close to attention to it.
Instead we get the circular argument that the world is active about Israel Palestine hence we should keep being so. It is important because we declared it so.
My view is that all the attention to Israel across my life has achieved nothing. It could not be worse through ignoring.
Of course that means a focus on sudan could also make little difference or worsen - yet different place new options perhaps something useful might emerge.
But there's a difference between a lethal govt like Israel, purporting to have our public support, being helped by our govts, etc, and Sudan, where neither side is claiming to represent the west, or being supported by us. With Israel/Palestine, we seek to do something material: deny Israel silent consent, and push back against the Zionist lobby etc. With Sudan we're reaching in to fix it, which doesn't always go well
That is the circular argument. We have engagement thus we should keep it.
I have not noticed people saying pull back from any support for Israel ( which I have noticed people noticed much of) and then leave them both to sort it out. That would be the Sudan option applied.
what you say has been the default all my life. The difference being that Israel has steadily lost its assumption of being a democratic country. But then I remember the PLO as once being the hope for a Palestinian government.
I cannot help but feel that peoples across the middle east are accepted as just like us in a way that those from Africa are not.
I commented since you aligned taking Sudan seriously as more important than Gaza with a pro Israel distraction.
I am a random commentator. Yassmin Abdel-Magied has lamanted the lack of interest in Sudan - I make no claim about her views on Gaza.
And your point is…..?
Sorry - ignore this. It was meant to go against the comment about fundraising
Thanks for your invaluable insights, again. I will always disagree with you about the nature of modern progressivism, but what would be the point of reading someone I was in complete agreement with?
"... those who run the knowledge-capital economy, and its inherent progressive culture"
Not 'inherent', 'co-opted'. '..those who run..." are progressive mostly in the old fashioned 'arrow of progress' sense of the term and play both sides of the culture wars for power and profit.