Andrew Bolt's Blog, page 1909

Prize fools

Paul Sheehan hands out his prizes for the most dubious contributions to public life in 2010. The winners are a peddler of our "shame" - to be fixed, of course, with yet more laws - and a judge flogging the new racism of our times by demanding lesser sentences for those of a difference race.

It's terribly easily to get depressed at the debasement of the great humanist ideals, among which were a commitment to freedom and an insistence on judging each other as individuals.

(Thanks to several readers.)

How black is black?

SBS last night screened Skin Deep, which in passing mentioned the case of the Brazillian twins Alex and Alan Teixeira da Cunha (above). Unfortunately the program dodged the questions most applicable to our own fraught flirtation with race-based policies, and steered well clear of even more startling examples from Australia, which is not surprising, perhaps, when you understand the legal risks now involved.

But Timothy Garton Ash is lucky he can still ask such questions - in Britain, at least - without his words being declared illegal or his anti-racism being declared racist. Here, in an earlier article, he discusses the issues raised by the twins, and the modish government-sponsored racism they encountered:

I went to Brazil asking questions about poverty, social exclusion and inequality. Within minutes, my interlocutors were talking about race. This happened too in a conversation with the impressive former president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. In a vivid memoir, The Accidental President of Brazil, he recalls his own research as a young sociologist in the shantytowns. Noting the extensive blending of the races, he none the less concluded that "in general terms, to be black was to be poor in Brazil".

To address this problem, his government initiated affirmative action programmes, and these have grown under President Lula. Many universities now have quotas both for applicants from state schools and for black undergraduates. Those for black students are the object of fierce controversy. First, there are objections of principle. Maria-Tereza Moreira de Jesus, a black poet and writer, has said: "Racism exists, from how one is treated in a shop to being interviewed for a job, but basing entrance on race is another form of racism."…

There is also a practical difficulty. In such a mixed society, how do you decide who is black? The problem was graphically illustrated by the recent case of identical twins, Alex and Alan Teixeira da Cunha, who both applied to the University of Brasilia under its quota scheme. Alan was accepted as black, Alex rejected as not black. The university actually has a commission that determines race on the basis of photographs of the candidates, using phenotypes including hair, skin colour and facial features. The person who first told me about this was Jewish. "You can imagine what I think of it," he said…

I can see the powerful case against colour quotas; I can also see the tough, inherited reality of discrimination that must be addressed. Brazilians will decide this themselves. But I would say with all my heart that I hope Brazil moves closer to making a reality of its old myth of "racial democracy", rather than retreating to anachronistic racial pigeonholing and the reduction of complex identities to a single attribute.

(Thanks to reader Steve.)

A most unAustralian death

A toddler tragically stabbed to death and her mother attacked, too - all, reportedly, over an argument about going to the beach. But was this also a case of culture clash, in which Afghan notions of a wife's duty to obey her husband have collided violently with Australia's greater individualism?

(No comments during holiday break. Thanks to readers Immanuel and Steve.)

Flannery finds God

Tim Blair on the new ABC-approved faith:

THE ABC'S Science Show, normally given over to scientific issues, as its title suggests, took an unexpected turn on Saturday night.

Host Robyn Williams suddenly found himself in the presence of a religious fundamentalist....

Tim Flannery..., a former Australian of the Year and still on various government panels, predicted the inanimate Earth would soon come to life in the form of Gaia, an ancient Greek god…

Flannery's exact words:

"I think that, within this century, the concept of the strong Gaia will actually become physically manifest."…

Flannery, a frequent ABC presence, continued: "I do think that the Gaia of the ancient Greeks, where they believed the earth was effectively one whole and perfect living creature, doesn't exist yet, but it will exist in future....

"This planet, this Gaia, will have acquired a brain and a nervous system.

"That will make it act as a living animal, a living organism, at some sort of level."…

Still, it's nice that science folk and ABC presenters are getting behind peculiar religious beliefs and general occult weirdness.

During last year's election campaign, most of these types were spooked by Tony Abbott's relatively benign Catholicism.

Now they're easily able to cope with the summoning of a dirt god.

True. And bizarre.

Yet Flannery is not alone in his green faith, of course. Here is Professor Clive Hamilton, the former Greens candidate, preaching the new religion on another ABC program, The Philosopher's Zone, and to a presenter every bit as unquestioning as Williams:

So I think where we're going is to begin to see a Gaian earth in its ecological, cybernetic way, infused with some notion of mind or soul or chi, which will transform our attitudes to it away from an instrumentalist one, towards an attitude of greater reverence. I mean, the truth is, unless we do that, I mean we seriously are in trouble, because we know that Gaia is revolting against the impact of human beings on it.

The Age of the closet totalitarian

With each day, the Age more closely resembles a student newspaper from an Australian university circa 1970, selling a totalitarian ideology already responsible for the enslavement of more than 1 billion people and the deaths of perhaps 100 million.

From the paper's online edition, this juvenile Marxism of John Passant:

During 2010, the third phase of the global financial crisis – making workers pay – began to play itself out.

Capital in Europe has used and is using its parliamentary dominance — it doesn't matter whether reformists or conservatives are in power – to attack their working classes. While there have been magnificent strikes and demonstrations, the lack of a genuine mass revolutionary party to provide guidance to the class and learn from it has allowed the reformists to sidetrack the fightbacks and ultimately accept capital's attacks....

In Australia, ...the ongoing degeneration of the Labor Party into a completely neo-liberal organisation continues apace. It is arguably now just another party of the bourgeoisie…

Imperialism has met setbacks. In Central and South America popular left-wing movements have challenged, or been pushed to challenge, the rule of both domestic and international capital. These struggles have within them the potential to destroy capitalism but the situation remains fluid and inchoate, not least because of the lack of a mass revolutionary socialist organisation of the working class....

Yet while the class is sullen, watching and waiting, it is not bowed. If there is any hope it lies with the proles.

That hope can only be built through the working class establishing its own political parties to tear the head off the bourgeoisie and destroy their crisis-ridden system – a system of war and poverty.

In Australia you should consider joining Socialist Alternative in the fight for a better world free of their system's war and poverty, free of sexism and racism and homophobia, a world where production is organised democratically to satisfy human need.

HL Mencken:

The urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it.

In a world run by the likes of Passant and the Age editorial staff, how free would you be? How safe to dissent?

So, what will the Age print tomorrow?  The manifesto of some neo-Nazi outfit?

They hate and call it love

More evidence that the Left is the natural home of the modern barbarian, whose prideful "compassion" is no more than the thinnest disguise of a savage and violent hatred. Here's what some of the Left's notables told the ABC's Unleashed they wished for 2010:

Sophie Cunningham, Meanjin editor and author:

I WANT less government-sanctioned homophobia. I don't want to hear the phrase "Australian families" one more time. Ever. I want the people I love to be well and the people I don't love to be well also. Except for Tony Abbott.

Catherine Deveny, comedian, columnist, author:

MY dreams for 2010? The reintroduction of stoning for Channel 9 executives, religious fundamentalists, people who ask you to bring your own meat to their barbecues, parents with gifted children and climate change sceptics… If I could hope for something that could feasibly happen by this time next year, it would be the legalisation of voluntary euthanasia. Or, in the case of my racist, bigoted, homophobic, judgmental, passive aggressive, narcissistic, wealthy grandmother, involuntary euthanasia.

Bertrand Russell actually said if first:

Much of what passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.

(No comments during holiday break.)

If it slimes the US, it must be true

Gavin Atkins suggests several strong reasons to doubt this latest Guardian report (republished by The Age) purporting to reveal US atrocities in Iraq, this time involving the Left's much-favored bogey of depleted uranium:

A study examining the causes of a dramatic spike in birth defects in the Iraqi city of Falluja has for the first time concluded that genetic damage could have been caused by weaponry used in US assaults that took place six years ago.

The research, which will be published next week, confirms earlier estimates revealed by the Guardian of a major, unexplained rise in cancers and chronic neural-tube, cardiac and skeletal defects in newborns. The authors found that malformations are close to 11 times higher than normal rates, and rose to unprecedented levels in the first half of this year – a period that had not been surveyed in earlier reports…

The findings are likely to prompt further speculation that the defects were caused by depleted uranium rounds, which were heavily used in two large battles in the city in April and November 2004. The rounds, which contain ionising radiation, are a core component of the armouries of numerous militaries and militias.

Their effects have long been called into question, with some scientists claiming they leave behind a toxic residue, caused when the round – either from an assault rifle or artillery piece – bursts through its target.

Good work by Atkins in pointing out that DU is not fired by rifles, that the battle for Falluja did not require much (if any) DU anti-tank ordnance, and that the prime source of the health claims has a spectacular history of anti-US ranting.  Then there's the past failures to implicate DU as a serious health risk - unless fired into your body in the form of a tank round.

But such quality fact-checking is yet to match the very high standards set by Atkins himself only the other day in fact-checking the nonsense published by the ABC's Unleashed about the US's alleged brutal treatment of WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning.

Why is the Leftist media so gullible when reporting any wild claim of US wickedness?

(No comments during holiday break.)

One way or another, it's better if the batsman is Muslim

Peter Roebuck hails the selection of the first Muslim to an Australian Test team as the sign of Anglo racism in retreat. He also hails the conversion of a rare Christian in the Pakistani team to Islam as a sign of, of ... well, of a batsman finally freed from a pressure distracting him from his cricket.

Rudd now declares a dictatorial Marxist his inspiration

Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd finished his astonishingly pointless and humiliating tour overseas with a typically bizarre announcement in Chile:

And very finally could I say that I just been moved to visit the rooms which Presidente Allende occupied in 1973. Those of us who studied in Australian universities in the seventies were inspired by Allende. So for me this has also been something of a personal and political pilgrimage.

Rudd was inspired by Allende?

By which part of the Allende agenda precisely?

Augusto Pinochet's 1973 removal of Mr. Allende's Marxist government in Chile, and human rights abuses by security forces within Mr. Pinochet's subsequent military government, have overshadowed international perception of the Allende years. Yet Mr. Allende nearly succeeded in three short years in turning Chile, Latin America's oldest and most stable democracy, into a Marxist dictatorship. How did he go about it?

Mr. Allende narrowly won the presidency with 36 percent of a three-way vote and the confirmation of a fair-minded congress after committing himself to a Statute of Guarantees of individual liberties. This was a mere tactical ploy (as he told the French communist writer Regis Debray), which he never intended to honor. Instead, he used every device to subvert the Chilean Constitution, negate the law or bypass the congress.

Mr. Allende resorted 32 times in respect of 93 measures to an emergency power permitting him to override congress and the courts. All but one Chilean bank was acquired by the state through share-buyouts, using misappropriated revenues; factories were requisitioned through misuse of administrative decrees; and farms were expropriated, often at gunpoint, thanks to a forgotten decree from 1932 that remained by oversight on the statute books. The only nationalization that proceeded legally, with due approval of congress, was that of some large multinationals.

That these policies led to triple-digit inflation, currency devaluation, economic chaos and social tumult bordering on civil war is not surprising; nor is the fact that the congress eventually voted 81-47 to call on Mr. Pinochet's military to remove the government.

Surely it wasn't Allende's creation of a personal army, backed by thousands of Cubans, or his defiance of the constitution and parliament that "inspired" Rudd:

One useful compilation is "Out of the Ashes," by James R. Whelan, a history of Chile from 1833 to 1988. Sharp political divisions helped Allende get and hold power for three years despite his radicalism and his reckless economics. He cleverly used the law to shield himself while he consolidated that power. There were assaults on the press, extensive nationalization of businesses and a methodical effort to build a shadow army, which produced mounting violence throughout the period. The weapons for his informal army were coming from Cuba, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In the end there were enough to "equip a division of 15,000 men," according to Mr. Whelan.

By 1973 the country was in shambles and housewives were banging empty pots to protest Allende economics. Early that year the government announced rationing. Former President Eduardo Frei, no friend of Chile's justify, called it "a clear and definitive action toward totalitarian control of the country . . . The people of Chile cannot tolerate that they be submitted to a dictatorship without escape." That opinion gained adherents as the year wore on.

On May 26 all 14 Supreme Court justices signed a document complaining that "an open and willful contempt of judicial decisions [by the executive]" threatened an "imminent breakdown of legality." On Aug. 22 came the resolution from the Lower House declaring a "grave breakdown of the legal and constitutional order" and placing the responsibility for restoring "legal paths" with the military. On August 25 the Medical Association asked the president to resign and the Bar Association followed suit on Aug. 31

And it couldn't possibly have been Allende's musings on gays and Jews that made him a Rudd hero:

Salvador Allende, the socialist president of Chile who was killed during a CIA-backed coup in 1973, was an anti-Semite who held fascist ideas in his youth, says a new book which has split Chile…

The disclosures come from Allende's 1933 doctoral dissertation which had been kept secret. In it he asserts that Jews have a disposition to crime, and calls for compulsory sterilisation of the mentally ill and alcoholics.

Victor Farias, the book's Chilean-born author, said Allende quotes approvingly a "cure" for homosexuality, which was then a crime: "It could be corrected with surgery - small holes would be made in the stomach, into which small pieces of testicle would be inserted. This would make the person heterosexual."

Farias, who teaches at the Latin American Institute of Berlin's Free University, says only opposition from medical associations prevented Allende, a medical doctor, from introducing a compulsory sterilisation program when he was Chile's health minister from 1939 to 1941.

Very, very curious. And, of course, Rudd finished his tour by giving his customary tip to the locals, using taxpayers' dollars:

Rudd took the opportunity to announce the launch of the Australia-Americas Awards, a new scholarship program offering 200 scholarships over four years to students in the region.

(Yes, I know I'm a week or two late to this, but I've been holidaying - and noted that not one Australian journalist picked up this latest weirdness from a deeply troubled man who's busily trashing our reputation overseas.)

UPDATE

Salvador Allende:

Our objective is total, scientific, Marxist socialism.

Kevin Rudd, the man Allende allegedly "inspired":

I am not a socialist. I have never been a socialist and I never will be a socialist.

So I ask again: in what way precisely did Allende "inspire" Rudd? Or was our foreign minister just lying again?

Rudd now declares a dicatatorial Marxist his inspiration

Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd finished his astonishingly pointless and humiliating tour overseas with a typically bizarre announcement in Chile:

And very finally could I say that I just been moved to visit the rooms which Presidente Allende occupied in 1973. Those of us who studied in Australian universities in the seventies were inspired by Allende. So for me this has also been something of a personal and political pilgrimage.

Rudd was inspired by Allende?

By which part of the Allende agenda precisely?

Augusto Pinochet's 1973 removal of Mr. Allende's Marxist government in Chile, and human rights abuses by security forces within Mr. Pinochet's subsequent military government, have overshadowed international perception of the Allende years. Yet Mr. Allende nearly succeeded in three short years in turning Chile, Latin America's oldest and most stable democracy, into a Marxist dictatorship. How did he go about it?

Mr. Allende narrowly won the presidency with 36 percent of a three-way vote and the confirmation of a fair-minded congress after committing himself to a Statute of Guarantees of individual liberties. This was a mere tactical ploy (as he told the French communist writer Regis Debray), which he never intended to honor. Instead, he used every device to subvert the Chilean Constitution, negate the law or bypass the congress.

Mr. Allende resorted 32 times in respect of 93 measures to an emergency power permitting him to override congress and the courts. All but one Chilean bank was acquired by the state through share-buyouts, using misappropriated revenues; factories were requisitioned through misuse of administrative decrees; and farms were expropriated, often at gunpoint, thanks to a forgotten decree from 1932 that remained by oversight on the statute books. The only nationalization that proceeded legally, with due approval of congress, was that of some large multinationals.

That these policies led to triple-digit inflation, currency devaluation, economic chaos and social tumult bordering on civil war is not surprising; nor is the fact that the congress eventually voted 81-47 to call on Mr. Pinochet's military to remove the government.

Surely it wasn't Allende's musings on gays and Jews that Rudd found so illuminating:

Salvador Allende, the socialist president of Chile who was killed during a CIA-backed coup in 1973, was an anti-Semite who held fascist ideas in his youth, says a new book which has split Chile…

The disclosures come from Allende's 1933 doctoral dissertation which had been kept secret. In it he asserts that Jews have a disposition to crime, and calls for compulsory sterilisation of the mentally ill and alcoholics.

Victor Farias, the book's Chilean-born author, said Allende quotes approvingly a "cure" for homosexuality, which was then a crime: "It could be corrected with surgery - small holes would be made in the stomach, into which small pieces of testicle would be inserted. This would make the person heterosexual."

Farias, who teaches at the Latin American Institute of Berlin's Free University, says only opposition from medical associations prevented Allende, a medical doctor, from introducing a compulsory sterilisation program when he was Chile's health minister from 1939 to 1941.

And, of course, Rudd finished his tour by giving his customary tip to the locals, using taxpayers' dollars:

Rudd took the opportunity to announce the launch of the Australia-Americas Awards, a new scholarship program offering 200 scholarships over four years to students in the region.

(Yes, I know I'm a week or two late to this, but I've been holidaying - and noted that not one Australian journalist picked up this latest weirdness from a deeply troubled man who's busily trashing our reputation overseas.)