They are amputating children's limbs without anaesthetic in Gaza. That's it, that's the headline

The political farce of Australian anti-anti-semitism, against the horror there. Adolescence in review (the TV show, not the life-stage), AFL roundup, and Jesus Christ this musical is 50 years old....

Genocide on the Instalment Plan?

Renewing the attack on Gaza is Bibi’s play for political survival. Its cynicism reeks like the gangrene of shattered limbs. It is a commonplace observation in Israel. There is no discussion of it here

The latest Israeli attack on Gaza has achieved that remarkable thing: getting even less coverage in the mainstream Australian media than the last round was getting towards its end. The renewal of bombing is pure internal Israeli politics projected outwards: Netanyahu needs the three explicitly genocidal hard-right ministers back in Cabinet, before his very minority government becomes a constitutional issue; the US appears to have blunted the Houthi threat, so there will be no attacks on Israel’s cities. There has been no issue with hostage handover.

So the bombing was preceded by the cut off of supplies, food, water and medical. As one of the few reports to come through - an Australian doctor report to Radio National from Northern Gaza - indicated, anaesthesia and pain medication is running out, so people are being intubated without it, spraying blood across the room, and children are having their limbs amputated without anaesthetic.

The first thing to do with such information is simply to say it is happening, before any news or analysis angle. It should be on the front of the news-sites but will obviously not be. This is a charnel house, a butchery. How many techniques of genocide will be deployed before western powers begin to, at best, clear their throats? When this destruction began, a new horror entered: steady genocidal action in a sequestered area, while the world watched. Now they have gone one better: genocide on the instalment plan. Successive depredations will barely make the bulletin. Yes, the same is true of numerous atrocities in the global South.

The question in discussion of Gaza-Palestine-Israel, is how many of the most basic assumptions should be restated. Perhaps all of them occasionally. We stand with the Gazan and Palestinian people, as oppressed. That requires neither endorsement nor disendorsement of Hamas, or its methods. The organisation is a mash-up of Islamist grassroots organising, midwifed into political-guerrilla status by Shin Bet, and now existing as an intersecting set of organisations across the

Middle East, an array of power and capital which also invokes pre-modern apocalyptic scenarios of world-Islamisation. One doesn’t have to justify the most sadistic, atrocious and spectacular parts of the October 7 raid, in order to condemn Israel’s claim to right for unlimited destruction on Gaza. There was no existential threat to Israel; Hamas, pulling all the stops out, could marshal dinghies, Toyota Hilux’s and the occasional hang glider, to attack a nuclear state. You don’t even need to be an advocate of a one-state solution, or an opponent of some form of prior partition, to point out that Gaza, is a sequestered area, created by the same systematic and strategic terrorism, in the service of ethnic cleansing, that Hamas has applied.

What is crucial here, is the non-existential threat of the October 7 raid. If people can agree on that, then Israel’s actions are indefensible.

For precisely that reason, the zionist lobby across the world, both Jewish organisations and gentile enthusiasts, have snapped dutifully into the new position: enough is enough. Release all the hostages now. In Israel, this is Netanyahu’s greatest political risk yet. People were actually getting their loved ones back. The anger at Netanyahu, at this culmination of decades of political cynicism, the Philadelphia political hack turned desert prophet is now immense.

None of this is conveyed in the external reporting.

That’s especially so in Australia, where the coverage is essentially lobotomised. Even the slanted New York Times style coverage has some politics in it. With Australia’s contentless, idealess coverage, in which all anti-Israel violence is inexplicable - like hoons, hooning - while all Israeli action is sadly necessary. What is happening in Gaza is the genocidal lethality of Western enlightenment deployed at its greatest contradictory intensity: all unnecessary suffering no matter how grotesque, sadistic, and adversarial, becomes justified by its very enactment. For the average news viewer, if the Palestinians are copping this, they must have done something realllllllyyyy bad.

So our domestic response to the ultimate horror over there - whole families eliminated, childhood amputations without meds - in this small pocket, a sort of theme park for the ghastly suffering one human can apply to another, is essentially kitsch. No polity/public sphere appears to be more distant, in the near-farcical quality of ours, from the horror over there. This produces a politics that can reasonably be described as ‘hysterical’.

Thus, in the US, pro-Palestionian activists are being expelled, locked-up, prosecuted by a right-wing government with a transformative agenda. The leaders of Columbia etc may have been cowardly, but they were under a real hammer. Here, our vice-chancellors fell over each other to concede ground on nebulous notions of ‘psychic harm’ and ‘safety’, when they could have made a firmer stand on pluralism and free inquiry grounds. Their excessive reaction was ludicrous, as in Sydney Uni’s byzantine new speech guidelines, which makes a vigorous exchange on zionism, in a tutorial - should they ever happen - essentially in breach. The mangled form of the IHRA ‘anti-semitism’ document adopted, more or less criminalises whole research programmes. Parallel to this was the wave of anti-semitic graffiti, the loaded caravan, and the pinging of a network of meth-heads as the culprit. The prudent, governmental thing to do, would have been to urge caution, condemn, anti-semitism as a scourge, but wait and see, etc. Instead, this was taken as an opportunity to speculate on a unique Australian sickness, with the implication that it was our Middle Eastern Muslim immigration that was to blame. When it turned out to be, allegedly, one shady type, deploying some nuff-nuffs, there was a lot of coughing and shuffling of feet.

The whole event was distinctively Australian, but not in the way it was pushed. Everything is so small-scale here, that one alleged bad actor running a scam could distort the country’s whole politics. But it could only be done so, because the powers were willing to ensure that a symptom became the disease. In NSW Chris Minns used it to do what Labor always does: increase social authoritarianism as a substitute for real social action.

This is the character of the zionist push in Australia. The Zionist project has nothing like the cultural and political heft that it does in the US, where it has joined American self-conception. Here, despite the best efforts of part of zionist groups and some indigenous leaders to join it to aboriginal history, it has not taken. Why then, does the Coalition pile in so hard on it, quite aside from the usual back-corridors influence? It is obviously part of the great shift that occurred in zionism’s meaning, before and after WW2, the Holocaust and the creation of Israel. Before that, zionism was a threat to the conservative Christian order, and the idea that the Holy Land should be given to the Jews was radical and left-wing. After World War II, there was a strong push to retain the Christian order - ie the European empires - which fell apart quickly, under the challenge of the third world/global South. Zionism was bumped up to the front, as a Christian substitute. Every braying hyperzionist in News Corp would have been, in that earlier era, a conventional anti-semite. (Robert Menzies had, notoriously, praised Hitler as a ‘great gentleman’, in 1938). To a degree the Holocaust prompted a genuine re-appraisal on the right. But their racist disdain for the hideous and symmetrical sufferings being visited on the Palestinian shows the particularist, sentimentalist, and essentially narcissistic logic of right-wing anti-anti-semitism, and pro-zionism. Politically it is being deployed as a standard-bearer of European-Australianness, against its challengers. No over-reach is too much, too kitsch, from tipping $35 million to the Adassa synagogue to rebuild, to putting specific questions about attitudes to Jews on the citizenship test. The more farcical it gets here, the more abhorrent it becomes in Gaza (‘tragic’ doesn’t hit it), and that seems to be our current national cultural condition. It is important only in spurring us to a constant reminder of what is actually happening there, to keep it in the forefront of our minds, to continue to represent it to others in its full horror. The essentially absurd character of Peter Dutton’s antics here, can serve as release valve, a cheap laugh that dispels the full sense of what is being done under our eyes, in our name.

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Review

Adolescence, limited series, Netflix, by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham

What still alive at twenty two?

A fine upstanding lad like you?

Surely, if your throat’s not slit

Then slit your girl’s, and swing for it!

Hugh Kingsmill, AE Housman parody

Episode two of the crime/social drama-procedural, currently, number one worldwide on Netflix, takes place at a high school, after a thirteen year old British boy has been arrested for murder. The police are building the case. Here, the cops talk to a crowd of adolescents, in their full imagined horror: clannish, defiant, hypersexualised, violence-fantasising, misogynist boys, nightmare girls, teachers who are either blithe or overwhelmed, and above all, as one of the detectives ruefully remarks, every class being a video presentation. The episode shows one reason why the four-part series has had an impact far beyond the usual Netflix churn: it draws on the tradition of British social-realist/social issues TV, to suggest the world beyond the investigation, which few procedurals do. It has given the show an imprimatur of a truth-telling classic, gritty and real.

Alas, it’s a false one. Post-war British ‘social’ TV took its realism seriously: by which is meant, it got drama from everyday life. The TV plays done by the BBC (and the ABC) centred on family conflicts, small crimes, petty incidents, the ramifications and causes thereof. They’re easy to disparage in retrospect (most of the tapes were wiped anyway; thousands of hours gone), but they were made with the realist writer’s awareness that plot can easily get out of hand. Start with something big, and you are shooting for full tragedy. Fall short - and you ain’t no Sophocles - and what you get is melodrama.

That’s Adolescence, made especially so by the synecdoche of the title. Episode One, we’re with the cops, 6am, outside a Yorkshire family home, raiding the place to arrest Jamie, a pale, slight thirteen year old, for murder. The rest of the episode is a deliciously slow cop-shop procedural which establishes (spoiler alert) Jamie is on cctv, stabbing a 13 year old girl to death with a borrowed knife. The reason, as revealed in the following three episodes is from the headlines: cyberbullying, porn, Andrew Tate, incel-teasing, a bit of bitchery, and ostracism. It’s a cracking, driving story. But it’s using the texture of the everyday, for a plot more suited to a US ‘crime of the week’ TV movie, and in that sense it’s counterfeit, and perhaps perniciously so.

Though there’s an increasing number of such ghastly ‘identity’ killings by younger perpetrators, 13 and 14, they remain rare. Of the UK’s 500-700 murders a year, about 50 were of under-16s, in an average year, about 15-20 of those by another youth, and no more than 5 for those under 14. These are freak events, and the appropriate dramatic form is either the mass-culture histrionic (US made-for-TV movies are our opera) - or, in more skilled hands, the ‘uncanny everyday’. What Adolescence has done is use the techniques of realism to make the freak event look not merely normal, but inevitable. In that respect, both the style and subject are being misused to get cheap thrills TV which gains much of its gravitas from the texture of social concern and commentary. The drive of the plot is powered by the false syllogism that runs through much youf/VAW commentary these days: an attribution of causality to violent media and texts that kids are now surrounded by. These may be contributory, but they are overwhelmingly contributory to teenage boys sometimes being shitty, misogynist, pornographic, cruel etc - in a manner that seems to have new features - not to murders so rare, the trials run for weeks in the news.

The precipitate of melodrama is the Gothic, and that is how Adolescence turns out, escaping tedium by rendering a dank world, in which the destruction of all that is good is only a Snapchat away. Tremendously watchable, its final half hour - a strong performance by co-writer Stephen Graham, as the guilt-stricken father - gives a clue to what it should have been: a focus on the utterly singular existential plight of having produced a child murderer.

Instead, it seems more bogus than something like: ‘Long Island Lolita: The Joey Buttafuoco Story’ cooked up in an LA backoffice. Its producer/director Jack Thorne has a whole slate of ‘concern’ series on the go; it’s difficult not to feel that this is social realism juiced up to the Netflix house style.

It has already been co-opted to the current grand narrative of violence prevention, by mass socio-cultural re-engineering, the folly of the day It’s spot on about the collapse of education into video though. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is a fan. He says it should be shown in every school. There, it will tell British working class boys what they already hear everywhere: that they are murderers in embryo. One could not think of a better recruiting sergeant for Andrew Tate, as a figure of basic refusal and dissent.

Likely you’ll not be glad

When they come to hang you lad

But bacon’s not the only thing

That’s cured by hanging from a string….

Erewhon

Sports update

AFL Round 2

Victorian vets Carlton and Hawthorn had a torrid tussle at the G with the Baggers too strong for the Mayblooms, while all eyes are on Western Bulldogs (back to Footscray for this centenary outing tonight Friday, also at the G, and every indication that the absence of Captain Bontempelli may be disastrous, especially with De Goey back in the black-and-white. At Marvel, St Kilda are up against a renewed Cats, after their 78 drubbing of…oy! Don’t drift off! You’ve got a family barbeque this weekend! You’re going to need to know this! Port Adelaide is um, oh, and don’t call Hawthorn the Mayblooms….

Poem of the Week

Christio Imitati

Jesus Christ Superstar premiered in Melbourne this week, a half-century after its debut. Kim Serca was engaged to freshen up the lyrics

Mary Magdalene

I don’t know how to sing this

What to push

How to sell it

It’s a song

About a whore

Saved by the

Sort of man

We’ve met before

Some long haired dude

Says he

knows the score

Reads Marcuse

Can play three chords

It’s all very

1974

*

Chorus:

Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ!

You totally cool dude

It’s all really ace!

And everything’s a gas!

But bulk bad stuff’s going to happen

I’m really heaps worried!

E-a-g-l-e rock!

*

Mary Magdalene

Middle Eight

Should I play for laughs?

Or self-parody?

Surely no-one

takes it seriously?

I never thought I’d

Come to this!

Three years at QUT!

*

Pharisees, to Judas

What’s the kerfuffle?

What’s the malarkey?

Is the Brecht estate suing

Because of the score?

Tell em to rack off

They don’t own rock gothic

It’s a few free

Borrowings

Borrowings

Borrowings

Nothing more

*

Mary Magdalene

coda

Really, dinner theatre.

Beats hand modelling

And there’s the fee….

And there’s the fee….

I’ve got car rego

And there’s the fee….

*

Till next week…..

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