Who's Guardianing Israel's nuke propaganda? Hanging Points: prisons, decolonisation, and universality; Age books coverage in basement; how not to fill a metro news column

Aegrotat Saturday....

Aegrotat: if this week’s issue is a little light-on, it’s because your columnist is under the weather. Aegrotat is the old designation for a bare pass given to someone who missed an exam through illness (and got my Dad into Melbourne Uni in 1948). We will thus designate any future column tapped out from bed….

Israel’s Invisible Nukes: who are its Guardians?

It would be too tiresome to restate at any length, the standing hypocrisy of the Middle East: that Israel has a nuclear arsenal of between 50-200 missiles, submarine-mounted, and whose commanders have more latitude than other nuclear forces to launch wihtout central command, in case Israel has been obliterated (the ‘Samson’ option). That this goes unmentioned by Western governments, Newscorpse and other right wing mouthpieces is to be expected. But what’s the excuse of the English-language ‘left’ media? Well the New York Times, ha, no chance of course. On this issue, it’s a relentless zionist mouthpiece, which gives the passive voice a workout whenever Israel bombs and kills, and still describes zionist terrorists like Menachim Begin as ‘freedom fighters’. No hope there. Here? The Saturday Paper? Equal ha. A relentlessly ‘neutral’ line of silence will continue to be pushed, as part of the local zionist effort. Crikey? It has been ‘leftish’ in its view of the attack. But there have been relatively few articles on the conflict itself, seperate from US etc politics, and no real treatment of this central hypocrisy of our time: nations in the region are not ‘permitted’ to build a defence force that will match Israel’s nuclear arsenal.

But those sins are small compared to the vast silence in The Guardian. Running a search using ‘Israel’ on the Grauniad’s archive, I found no single article on this topic, in the last 100 published. There was one, one-sentence mention in a June 18 editorial. Oh, I tell a lie! Here’s an article ‘nuclear-non-proliferation-is-a-failure-in-the-middle-east’ on June 19. Article? No, it’s a letter. That’s the only way this topic can be addressed in the modern Guardian,

Why is this? Well, look there’s no beating around the bush. The editorship of the Guardian has been an intersecting Oxbridge Hampstead elite for twenty years now. They’ve spent the last fifteen years steering it away from the left. In the wake of October 7, 2023, and Israel’s genocide, it seems fair to say, has stirred liberal Jewish sympathies amongst the Guardian elite, back to a residual solidarity zionism. Getting yelled at a lot by family is probably part of it too. They have seen their role as damping down what the Guardian’s role should be, a relentless filleting of the cracked western logic that allows Israel to destroy a whole society, eliminate a ghetto, under the slogan of ‘never again’. That’s the UK command. In Australia, the paper is run by apolitical press gallery mediocrities, and the remaining leftists inside it keep their head down and think of their mortgage, as far as we can see. The last column which might have been forthright on this genocide - Jeff Sparrow’s - was knocked on the head a few years ago, nothing has replaced it, and this situation is probably why.

You could say, oh well, the Guardian’s got to mediate between this and that and etc. But let’s face it. What the Guardian does is arguably worse than Newscorpse, whose propaganda is so laughably tilted as to be in plain sight. Subtly, by silence, the Guardian enforces the idea that Iran is the problem that must be dealt with, not Israel. That is manufactured consent 101, and people need to be more clear-eyed about what exactly ‘the Hampstead entity’ does with those membership fees it scarfs up.

Hanging Points

Thirty years ago, I was editing Arena (I am still editing Arena), and i asked around for an article on prison reform. I got a few names of academics, who sent me their recent academic articles. None would take the time to write a general 3,000 word piece for us - that’s another story - but one article stood out. The copy-editor and I read it at the same time and we both just gaped. It was about hanging points in prison cells - outcrops and ridges where a prisoner could loop a sheet around their neck and kill themselves in deep despair - and how bickering between state and federal governments, regulatory authorities, prison governors, and private prison firms had ensured that these easily removed items remained. Something like 20 prisoners had died that didn’t need to, since the various prison inquiries of 1990-1991, including indigenous deaths in custody. We never got the article. I presumed, after I left editing for a while, that eventually, after more years of waste and death, that the problem was fixed.

Thirty years ago. That was thirty years ago. It hasn’t been. Reports this week suggest that sixty prisoners have unnecessarily suicided because of this residual problem. For the same reason: turf wars between jurisdictions. Probably, Jesus, hopefully, different hanging points - by which I mean, I hope the toll is less than it otherwise would have been. Nor is there any sign that this will change. Interviewed on RN Breakfast this week indigenous affairs minister Malamdirri McCarthy could not even step out of Cabinet solidarity long enough to answer in the affirmative Sally Sara’s pointed question: ‘could you commit to having the hanging points removed by the end of the year?’. McCarthy waffled and waffled, part of the pure subaltern act for Labor she’s taken on, running interference for them while dressing ethnic, halfway between Angela Davis and Aretha Franklin, to give an appearance of radical intent.

But there’s another problem in pushing for this change, from our side. Thirty years ago, there was a prison reform movement in Australia, that was cross-race. It drew on leftist universalism to say that the prison population should be vastly smaller than it now is, and that those who had to be in prison should have decent conditions. Aboriginal conditions, and deaths in custody were a distinct part of that, but also drew on the wider movement, and the universality of its demand.

The prison reform movement leaders cycled out, exhausted, and were not replaced (and some went on strange political trajectories). The general movement more or less died. The revival of the campaign around indigenous deaths in custody, has thus occurred in a new framework of settler-colonial and decolonial politics, in which race rather than ‘social category’ - ie prisoners as a distinct social class of power - has become dominant.

God knows there are good reasons for that, as the deaths of indigenous people at the hands of cops and private security attests. But two problems have arisen. The first is that a strong ‘prison abolitionist’ current has developed in black politics. Whatever the pros and cons of that - for another time - it makes a campaign and discourse around improving prisons (or making them less worse) - muddied and unclear. To campaign to make a prison somewhat less lethal than it is, can’t help but affirm prison per se. So abolitionism may have taken some of the steam out of demands for prison conditions’ reform, its utopian demands giving the state an easy get-out.

The other problem is the same one as occurred in the 1990s, as far as regards prison suicides (and not deaths at the hands of police or guards]. Indigenous prisoners do not kill themselves at a significantly higher rate than all prisoners. They are simply such a high proportion of all prisoners relative to overall population proportion, that more prisoners who kill themselves are indigenous. This may have altered somewhat since the 1990s, especially among young indigenous prisoners. But it remains an overall rule, that the horror of these deaths is obscuring the more mundane reality.

Prisoners are overwhelmingly male, and commit suicide in very high number - because, in part, these hanging points have been allowed to persist for decades. The image of it is distorted for the same reason that the image of murder vis a vis gender is distorted. The one group no-one notices or gives a shit about is ‘lower-class’ - ie damaged, petty criminal, benefits-dependent, mentally-ill and lower income - men in general. So their violent deaths anywhere go unreported, unless they are spectacular and make for a good news ‘yarn’. This distorts the picture of what is happening socially. There is plenty of structural and explicit racism in the system, but much of the system’s operation is against prisoners in general, marked as the ‘civil dead’.

When there was a general prison reform movement in the 90s, the indigenous movement was part of it, and their political expressions were thus reciprocally strengthening. Its wholly indigenous expression now is making it sectoral, and thus weakening its demand, because the universality - that all prisoners deserve human rights as persons - falls out the bottom. There is an opportunity for the indigenous groups and people leading them to take up the universal cause - of the safety (or reduced lethality) for all prisoners. That is emphatically not to bury the specific indigenous demand in the general one, but to make each strengthen the other. The indigenous demand becomes the powerhouse of the universal demand, amplifying its own political role and social leadership.

Fred Hollows’s motivating slogan in expanding the availability of complex surgery was ‘an eye is an eye’. It was an expression of his universalism, as a Catholic and a Communist. One could equally say that ‘a neck is a neck’. Most people, prisoners included, who survive a suicide attempt that is serious (ie not 8 panadol and a note on Hallo Kitty stationery) will never do so again. In most cases it’s an illusory solution coming from psychic splitting and shame. So a campaign to prevent it, drawing on all social forces, and forcing Labor’s flak-catching minister to take a stand, could have real momentum. Anything, anything. I mean, thirty five years of this (at least), thirty five fucking years. 12,783 days. The 8 extra, for the leap years….

Kulcha

The Age’s Book coverage is in the basement.

Spare a thought for the Age’s short reviewers, Fiona Capp, Stephen Carroll and Cameron Woodhead. The first two are a couple, and the third is an aging Pinocchio, wood cracks showing at his joins. They all live together in a basement. The Age sends down books in a dumb-waiter and the three send back reviews, for which food and toilet paper are sent back down in turn.

As Spec noted in a previous issue, the Age was about to dumb down and pretty much eviscerate its books coverage, and it has begun. The novels covered in these short reviews are now the ghastly detritus of the airport WH Smith, a mix of Gothic black cover schlock, horror schlock, gay YA-for-adults, one serious translation of Japanese sci-fi, and another novel about a gay man in Brunswick, which is what we now have instead of a car industry. Non-fiction includes self-help for introverts, how to mourn the death of a pet, and the joys of ageing disgracefully, darling. Dear oh dear. What will come down the dumb-waiter next?

Meeja

If You’re Baiting Me, Your Career Is in Trouble…

Your correspondent received this text on Monday:

0488 012 XXX

Hi Guy

Stephen Brook from CBD The Age here. Just pointing out a mistake in your June 13 Court column [ie in a previous issue of Spec]. Ian Wilkinson is still alive, it was Don and Gail who were killed. Let me know if you want a [sic] comment, and we will do a small CBD item

Best

Stephen

The CBD is the Age’s page 2 ‘about town’ column, which runs a lot of press releases by the rich, and Sydney stories. Oh no, I thought what had I done? Misconstructed the whole case in my live reporting of a mushroom trial day? What fresh disaster had befallen me for no reason than my own slackness and poor judgment?

Ha, no. What I had done, in the middle of a 1000 word report was, instead of ‘Don and Gail Patterson’ write, ‘Ian and Gail Patterson’. That was it. Simple, single, mis-write at speed, I didn’t pick up in the proof. Yeah, I proof! Amazingly, I did not reply to Stephen’s kind invitation.

But what was the column covering a city of five million doing, trying for this, for one of the three stories they do daily? Easy, they wanted what is always wanted in these gotchas: for the contacted person to panic, call up the journo, forget to say ‘off the record’, expostulate, etc, generating enough copy to make as a head of the story, filled out in this case by backstory from my voluminous file (Brittany Higgins’ shoes/David Feeney’s tongue/’Tim Blair’s colostomy bag is writing his column while he’s recovering from cancer, which is why it’s good’/etc).

Pathetic and desperate in other words. There’s a million stories in the naked city, but at 2.44pm on a Monday, Stephen and Kishor Napier-Ramen couldn’t find 999,998 of them and were hoping to get a third column filler out of a typo. Stephen, you were deputy editor of the Media Guardian once! The real UK one, not the Oz emo girls outfit! This is sad shit, mate. Come on boys, get your lazy arses out of the office and cover the city (they filled the next day with a Sydney rich person story). If you’re baiting me for copy, your careers really are in trouble….

Till next week…