…asks recent immigrant to these shores, Pommygranate, on a Catallaxy thread. I think there’s quite a simple answer to that question. Despite the globalisation of the news cycle, and increasingly of selected political issues, there are still significant differences in national political cultures. Australia never needed Eustonistas because it was the Liberals who took us into Iraq, and the Labor Party (and other left and centre-left parties) was consequently united in opposition. A big contrast both to Blair’s warmongering, and to the way such issues play among the Democrats in the States. And the “Third Way” project needed no great defence because it never took off in Australia – the reason being first that the Australian Labor Party shed its socialist clothes at an earlier stage (and in fact the Hawke/Keating government inspired much of Blairism rather than the influence being from Britain to Oz) and secondly that the far left in Australia has not for many years had anywhere near as much influence or presence as in the UK.
The absence of Eustonistas (and I discount the odd voice in the papers, like Pamela Bone, because they represent more a punditarian slot for an op/editor to fill rather than any real political grouping) is a good thing. We have no need of a “pro-war Left” and it’s significant that tiny sects such as the Maoists at Last Superpower are the only political formations who actually represent in a real sense this tendency in Australian politics. The battle lines are relatively clear, with the right wing commentariat being the exemplars of tortured non sequiturs and ludicrous leaps of logic in the face of the collapse of the Iraq War. In any event, such voices are usually very muted (and fewer) now as reality has finally caught up with the faith based community. The probable election of a Rudd government will see the last embers of the fires of the Iraq War in Australian political debate die away very quickly, and hopefully we will have learned some lessons.
All this is well analysed by Guy Rundle in Overland. Those who do argue the Eustonista position in Australia – and there are a few around the blogosphere if not in the media and in political parties – do so largely through emotional hyperbole and rhetorical tricks – whose lack of substance is also ably pinged by Rundle. The original Eustonista nonsense is admirably dissected by Johann Hari, who remarks:
Cohen, ostentatious claimer of George Orwell’s mantle, has forgotten the quality that made Orwell great – the power to face inconvenient truths. He simply averts his gaze from the burning vistas of Iraq that contradict his thesis, turning towards George Galloway to give him another well-deserved – but increasingly irrelevant – spit in the face.
Hari demonstrates that the claim that only the pro-war left care for “ordinary Iraqis” is the product of yet another false dichotomy.
The privileging of rhetoric and emotion over reason is characteristic of the “pro-war Left”. That deserves some analysis in itself, but these postmodernists of (post)Marxism demonstrate largely the incoherence that results when those who still want to identify with the project of the left become a cheer squad for the wars of the right.
Very well put Mark.
Cheers, mick!
Yep. No need of any of the lilly-livered pontificators around these parts, largely because the entire jerry-built structure was a belated bulwark in defense of Tony Blair and his indefensible Iraq adventure.
In common with their Bushista soulmates, I notice that none of the signatories actually felt like signing anything else, like enlistment papers for her majesty’s infantry.
Stripped of all their high-minded pretensions, they remain chickenhawks to a fault.
This review has been getting a bit of attention, and I’ve just finished a post on it at my blog.
Mark’s question is a valid one. Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that the ‘third way’ types, with their hyperbole, generalisations, and apologetics for war, are seen in Australia as being something other than the ‘third’ way.
mark says:
So we can we take it as read that in AUstralia “those who still want to identify with the project of the left” have officially abandoned any pretence of supporting the mission of allied troops in Afghanistan? I am assuming that Afghanistan is a “war of the right” here, although this assumption is open to question if female emancipation is still an issue dear to the hearts of those on the Left.
The more interesting question isn’t why Eustonistas don’t exist in Australia.
The more interesing question is why they exist anywhere.
Eustonistas are a symptom of neurasthenic, decadent, late-debased moral vanity of social democrats.
How absurd it is for Eustonistas to believe the world works according to the parlour rules of Methodist Creeping Jesuses?
And how recklessly blind to all tenets of common sense for Eustonistas to believe that the idiot scion of the Bush dynasty would be the instrument of the forces of history.
Dario Fo meets Gilbert and Sullivan!
“Australia never needed Eustonistas because it was the Liberals who took us into Iraq, and the Labor Party (and other left and centre-left parties) was consequently united in opposition.”
Suppose Labor had won in 2001 and so Bomber Beazley been PM in 2002 and early 2003 when the fateful decisions were made.
Would Beazley have caved in to the pressures of being a good ally of the US and sent troops to Iraq?
Would Beazley have succumbed to Tony Blair telling him that they, the world’s leading social democrats, had an internationalist obligation to rid the world of Baathist fascism and the threat posed by Iraqi WMD (and the two of them could keep Bush under control)?
Might the Bomber have been inclined to send troops in anyway?
I reckon: yes, yes and yes.
In which case, a local version of the Eustonistas would definitely have emerged.
As for Labor opposition being opposed to the war, if Beazley had stayed on as Oppposition leader after 2001, it would have been a very different opposition. (I’m trying to recall what Beazley said about the war during his second go as Opp leader in 2005 and 2006, but honestly I can’t recall anything about what Beazley said about anything during that time.)
So, uh, I’m kinda new around here. Can anyone explain to me what a Eustonista is? (And, for that matter, a Eustonard?) Google was little help…
I reckon yes!
Jon, you can read the Euston Manifesto here:
http://eustonmanifesto.org/?page_id=132
And here’s what Wikipedia has to say:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euston_Manifesto
No, not if you think about it for a few moments, Jack, though I deny that the war in Afghanistan is a war for “female liberation”!
Let’s look at the Bushite project that the Eustonistas have shackled themselves to:
1. First Afghanistan:
Article 130 of the Constitution of Afghanistan bans apostacy from Islam, punishable by death:
2. Meanwhile in the New Iraq, that Beacon of Eustonista Light in the region
Eustonistas don’t even qualify as useful idiots.
The project didn’t have to make sense. It was little more than an extended love letter to Tony Blair.
Katz, in the Eustonista world view, and this applies especially to Pamela Bone, if you do something with good intentions then it doesn’t matter what the outcomes are. What’s more, anyone who successfully predicted the outcomes prior to the event must have been motivated by bad intentions.
Eustomism is just a feel good fantasy — all care, no responsibility.
Rundle on Bone:
“So, uh, I’m kinda new around here. Can anyone explain to me what a Eustonista is? (And, for that matter, a Eustonard?) Google was little hel…”
Jon, these sites are useful, too.
Mark on 25 July 2007 at 9:19 am
Mark, You need to focus more on objective consequences rather than subjective motives. In all areas not just where it is politically convenient.
No doubt Bush could legitimately complain that his motive in launching Iraq-attack was not to ignite a civil war b/w Shiites and Suunis. But that was the consequence, for which people like Mark rightly hold him responsible.
“Female emancipation” was not the motive for the Coalition’s Afghan-attack. But it has had that effect, in some way. The consequence of the Coalition’s Afghan-attack is that more females have been emancipated than would otherwise have been the case. Wikipedia reports:
The progress of conflict in the Afghan theatre shows that the War on Terror will be won on the homefront, rather than on the battlefront. THis is part of the point of the Euston pro-war Leftists, and it is a valid one to that extent.
It would be nice if anti-war Leftists could encourage the real progress being made on this front. To paraphrase Orwell, “A thing may happen, even if [Bush] said it happened”.
Katz on 25 July 2007 at 9:35 am
For some reason I am reminded of Karl Marx’s aphorism, that “It is the mark of a fool to judge social systems by their formal constitutions”.
No doubt Katz, like most sensible people, takes no notice of Marx these days.
Spiros on 25 July 2007 at 9:59 am
Correct. So far as real politic is concerned, good intentions are not even neccessary. All that is required are good consequences.
To that extent, Iraq-attack has demolished the deontological position once and for all. Teleologists rule!
By the same token, if there are unintended good consequences of another course of action – such as female emancipation through Coalition military action in Afghanistan – then logical consistency demands that some credit should be attributed to the source. In this case, Bush.
Otherwise, to paraphrase Spiros, anti-Eustonism “is just a feel [bad] fantasy”, no care for all responsibility.
Best post ever!
It’s the mark of an imbecile to mistake a political system for a social system.
The progress of conflict in the Afghan theatre shows that the War on Terror will be won on the homefront, rather than on the battlefront.
Is this your way of saying that there has been no “progress” on the military front in Afghanistan?
By the same token, if there are unintended good consequences of another course of action – such as female emancipation through Coalition military action in Afghanistan…
Female emancipation doesn’t result from military action, any more than the military can prevent child abuse.
Katz on 25 July 2007 at 11:04 am
It is the mark of a moron to expect a primitive multicultural social system like Afghanistan morph into something like Scandanavia in quick time, or in any time, for that matter.
But even a moron should be prepared to give credit where credit is due, for steps in the right direction.
But the purpsoe of military action is to produce the warm fuzzy feeling that the real men are in charge again, dishing it out in righteous dollops to all the usual suspects. Most satisfactory all round.
And you are performing that task admirably Jack.
Congratulations on finding an avocation appropriate to your talents.
I take it Eustonistas are along the lines of the “Larouchies” I read about about after the recent climate debate on the ABC ( only worse ).
Szego and Bone are cited as probable examples. I take it the local “Eustonista” would be someone like Iemma or Rudd; a person horrified by and in total flight from ethics, imagination, ideas and compassion..
Katz on 25 July 2007 at 12:33 pm
Dont play much chess do you Katz? You have managed to become check mated in two moves.
By affirming my conclusion you have about-faced and conceded my original substantive point. Namely that civil progressive “steps in the right direction” have been made by the Coalition in Afghanistan.
THat’s Fools Mate, “an avocation suitable to your talents”.
The Eustonistas seem to find it astonishingly difficult to believe that one can object to Saddam, Islamic terrorism and human rights abuses, and the wars of George W. Since these positions are more or less consistent, the onus is really on the Eusless Manifesters to explain how the use of cluster bombs and white phosphorous corresponds with ‘Enlightenment principles’, or constitues ‘humanitarian intervention’.
As for Afghanistan being ‘emancipated’ – just a few weeks ago, the pro-US leader of the country complained that invading forces appeared to regard Afghan lives as ‘cheap’, and reprotes noted the fact that Coalition forces had killed more civilians this year than did the insurgents. The ‘unintended consequences’ of those humanitarian bombs, you see.
Where are the Australian Eustonistas? Waiting to emerge after a terror attack on Australian soil, no doubt.
The soggy left’s cultural relativism that has lead them to decide that Islamacist anti-American far outweights Islamacist homophobia, persecution of women, support for theocracy etc will look pretty bloody facile then.
But what is the morality of leaving either the Taliban or Saddam in charge of their respective countries?
Id invite a few of the posters to go and have a chat to a few of the Hazara boys who came across in 200-01 and ask them how they thought the Talibs should be dealt with.
Maybe the chap whos back was a solid mass of scar tissue from butt to neck? Or the chap whos 2 brothers were shot when he hid from conscription.
Or even the one who was “fined” (using a perverted interpretation of Islamic law) for not keeping a talib troops fire going while they went away for a week.
It is NOT a moral position to allow that to continue, it is however moral to propose practical alternatives to military actions which will work in foreseeable periods of time.
As an example what would posters here “do” about Zimbabwe? I think everyone agrees something should be done to ease the suffering of the majority of the population there but what?
In all seriousness what other than military action or a coup (maybe only installing another despot as bad) can cause a speedy demise of Mugabes mob?
BTW neither the left nor the right can claim any credit on its actions there at the moment, thats why I picked it rather than the more polarising Darfaur.
Hope to get a couple of interesting postings from this, Thanks.
Jeez Christian, wasn’t Bali enough?
Shorter Christian Kerr: “Australia is deficient in martyrs.”
Mark
I have to just smile and grin at your moral vanity, delusion and misrepresentation. The Euston movement grew out of the ugly anti-Semitism and bovine reflexive paranoid anti-Americanism that has gripped the British Left. Australia has not had to deal with this as our working and lower-middle class said “ENOUGH!” in 1996 and made it quite clear that those luvvies were no longer welcome. Labor finally worked this out and so, over the past five years, has also worked overtime to marginalise the type from whom the Eustonites have split.
Euston is not relevant to Australia because the Australian people neutralised and marginalised the offensive types all on our own.
‘Cultural relativism’? A choice between Osama bin Laden and Bush/Blair is no choice at all. It’s a bit of mushy post-modern thinking on the part of the neo-liberals and co. to justify the moral exceptionalism that characterises the foreign policies of the US, and others. By the same ‘logic’, we might as well support Russia’s ‘liberation’ of the Chechnyans from their ‘backwardness’, or China’s attempt to free Tibet from its religious superstitions.
The solutions for different human rights abusers need to be different in each case, given that each case is different. Humanitarian arguments for military intervention are undermined when the ‘liberators’ are acting unilaterally, and entirely out of self-interest, disregarding their own abuses along the way.
A good start to finding solutions would involve nation-states refraining from propping up dictatorships in the first place. This wouldn’t have necessarily have helped Zimbabwe, but it might have made a difference elsewhere.
Never mind Eustonistas – I’m still wondering what happened to the small-l liberals in a Liberal government. It will be interesting to see if they will come out of the woodwork post-Howard, and what form moderate liberalism could take after being out to lunch for the past eleven years.
Surely Mark you’d support unilateral action by a large power to stop genocide. You wouldn’t wait for the security council.
So frankly, it is the war in question – Iraq – you have a problem with.
I didn’t see anyone requesting Afghanistan or strikes on Serbia be authorised by the UN.
I think it possible to be Left and have supported wars in the name of liberal democracy.
Mark
You misunderstand the basic tenets of the Euston Left. To label them as the ‘pro-war’ Left is lazy and incorrect. Who on earth is pro-war? Put simply these folk led by Nick Cohen and Norm Geras and including media cheerleaders such as Christopher Hitchens are people who believe it is morally wrong to stand back and watch as the population of a country is tortured (Iraq), murdered (Darfur) or starved to death (Zimbabwe) by its corrupt leadership. To use a different analogy, if a girl is getting harassed by a guy on a bus, do you bury your head deeper into your paper or do you weigh up the consequences of action and help.
Regarding Iraq, most Eustonistas were against the US-led invasion believing (correctly) that the risks of insurgency outweighed the benefits of removing Saddam. However, none were against the invasion of Afghanistan. Two very different wars.
A war conducted in the name of ‘liberal democracy’ as opposed to a war conducted by polities claiming the mantle of ‘liberal demcoracy’ would be an interesting thing indeed. Can you point to one, and inform us how such a war can be usefully distinguished from just ordinary old war type wars?
War is liberal democracy by other means.
What a load of tosh! Bloody Marxists.
Only Socialists think Afghanistan was a mistake.
“To use a different analogy, if a girl is getting harassed by a guy on a bus, do you bury your head deeper into your paper or do you weigh up the consequences of action and help.”
False analogy: this is just muddying the waters by individualising the situation and making it emotive on an interpersonal level. As such, the analogy implies a kind of moral naivety which is inappropriate to the scale of action under discussion. I also note the way in which this analogy rests on assumptions about gender.
Adam, what about Darfur. I’d support major action by a major power to bring a semblance of law – unilateral if needs be.
“Adam, what about Darfur.”
Ah, yes, this is a classic refrain in a tradition of anti-intellectualism, earnestness and action within the left. My comment was about pommygranates analogy, not necessarily about the Eustonist position. But since I’m going to get dragged into this anyway, I think the Eustonists replicate aspects of the aforementioned analogy by appealing to individualised notions of moral action, and by lazily lapsing into an assessment of the morality of actions on the basis of intention only. Almost anything is permissible when framed in this way, and hence the admonition to ‘do something, anything’ is an imperative that I am very wary of. I also agree with Melanie Klein’s insights about the violent potential of an exaggerated desire to ‘do good’.
I’m just interested in allowing the discussion to flow, so I’m not commenting on individual instances, except to suggest that while there are circumstances under which I would support some form of intervention in Darfur, it is firstly a false dichotomy to suggest (as other commenters have noted) that the only or even an effective response to a humanitarian crisis is military (and see comments from members of the Clinton administration regarding Kosovo) and secondly that as Adam implies, “what about this?” is very flawed reasoning when discussing international politics.
It’s also interesting to reflect on the fact that many of those who welcomed Kosovo as an “emerging norm of international law” shifted their ground when it came to the actual bombing, and many others later realised a precedent had been set which actually facilitated lawlessness.
Carl Schmitt said “Whoever invokes humanity, invokes barbarism”.
Tosh. If you are going to talk about something at least know something about it.
From the Euston Manifesto:
And of course this segment of the Euston Manifesto carries its most egregious logical flaw.
The Manifesto asserts that the Left has done little but whinge “over” intervention.
In fact, many Leftists have argued about intervention.
What is the distinction between “over” and “about”? Subtle but crucial.
“Over” connotes obsessional arguments about motives. This is the view of the Left that the Manifesto wishes to smuggle in.
“About” connotes engaged arguments about methods. The Left correctly perceived, and have not tired in pointing out to an increasingly convinced world, that the methods of intervention were doomed to failure and were therefore easily disposed of using consequentialist arguments.
Pommygranate misrepresents the Manifesto.
The Manifesto misrepresents the Left.
A sad hodge podge, really.
Quit with the psycho-babble. People are dead. It is simply a question – will intervention help if the government/dominant group are keeping an oppressed in near slavery or worse. What kind of heartless soul turns their back on catstrope in the name of ‘non-interventionist peace’.
It is also like the current Aboriginal intervention – so may be there is a Euston Left – you may disagree in part with the tactics but the scale of action is manifestly necessary.
Exactly. In both cases we have an ill-conceived ‘intervention’, and hysteric cries of betrayal launched at anyone who dares to disagree with the official propaganda. In both cases, a complex scenario is reduced to an issue of force, with little apparent attempt to think through the consequences of ‘intervention’.
Happy Revolution, do you daily think through ‘non-intervention’ as well and does it just make you feel all warm at night knowing the all of people around the world being beaten, harmed, enslaved or simply hungry.
Again, you illustrate my points for me. Real world problems exist, and you frame the options as either bloody-minded displays of force, or ‘non-intervention’. Anyone who disagrees with some dubious scheme to beat Iraqis/Aboriginals into submission is denounced as a supporter of torture/child abuse. There are other options here, Frank. I don’t know of anybody whose stomach got filled by swallowing American lead.
The pro-war party (interventionist Left and militarist Right) are completely discredited. The anti-war party (legalist Left and isolationist Right) have more or less won the warfaring argument.
The Australian Euston pro-war Left never got off the ground because of the small size of the ideological Left in this country. The pro-war Right seems to have been more or less run by Murdoch, apart from some useless idiots cheerleading from the blogosphere.
More generally, the radical Left in the UK and US has a substantial grounding in the Jewish revolutionary tradition. This is a fertile breeding ground for the kind of personality that glimpses a once-and-for-all fix of social problems besetting the Holy Lands.
This radical tradition is absent in Australia because most Jews came out here to make money not trouble. And because revolution is not that attractive a proposition to warring classes who would rather go sailing.
Afghan-attack was a justifiable war as it addressed a real threat (terrorist bases), had limited aims and has been executed with reasonable competence. It has also had an unintended benefit of improving the civil condition of that god-saken nation.
It would be nice if just one anti-war Leftist could bring themselves to acknowledge this fact. One hopes the requirement for ideological vigilance does not prohibit a minor concession in this area.
Katz
In no way is what i wrote a misrepresentation of the Euston position. As opposed to your cutting and pasting a section of the manifesto, i know many of those involved. There was a huge debate and much soul searching regards the Iraq war.
“what about this?� is very flawed reasoning when discussing international politics.
Is that because it requires thinking rather than merely parroting slogans?
For f**cks sake FE, just because a person doesn’t support action that will make the situation worse, doesn’t mean that they support doing nothing.
Why you, and others like you can’t understand this concept is beyond reason.
You’re right! There’s no time to lose! FAB Franky.
Right, so where do we start?
Zimbabwe
Darfur
The Congo
Burma
Ethiopia
Irian Jaya
Sri Lanka
Chad
Cameroon
Saudi Arabia
Central African Republic
Belarus
Liberia
Central African Republic
Burundi
Yemen
Sierra Leone
Bangladesh
Nepal
Uganda
Nigeria
Uzbekistan
Rwanda
Colombia
Kyrgyzstan
Malawi
Burkina Faso
North Korea
Fiji?
Hmm, this is gonna be tricker than I thought. Maybe it’ll just be easier to sit on my arse in front of a keyboard, pour another drink and castigate other bloggers for not sufficiently exerting their geo-political powers to make the world a better place.
Cheers, mine’s a Talisker.
As a comradely rejoinder to Pommy, as a Euston signatory (though not of course an actual Eustonista) I was opposed to both the invasion of Iraq and that of Afghanistan.
But Euston embraces all sorts. It’s one of its strengths.
I’ll go back to what I said in the post about Eustonistas preferring emotional hyperbole to reasoned argument.
As to whether the Eustonistas are identical with the pro-war Left, there’s a huge overlap (and with such a wordy piece of verbiage you can find almost anything in it to argue the toss) and there’s no doubt in my mind either that without the particular conjuncture of events in British politics which the Iraq invasion caused, it would never have come into existence. Which is also the point of the post.
Anyway, I’m out tonight at the Gruen grogblogging.
Anyone reading this post who wants to do something about oppression might consider leaving a comment on this post, though in order to generate some dollars, you have to do so without scoring political or personal points:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/07/04/egypt-fgm-and-making-a-contribution/
Which is kind of the point about Euston as well – they never miss a chance to diss someone on the left in the name of “principles”.
“What kind of heartless soul turns their back on catstrope in the name of ‘non-interventionist peace’.”
You are not offering any particularly good reason to take on what you are saying. By insisting upon my heartlessness, you have only antagonised me. And this is the problem with Eustonism in a nutshell: it attempts to interpellate its supporters and opponents within an individualist moral economy, when the problems are manifestly more complex than that. The primal scene of Eustonism is interpersonal, but the terrain it hopes to act upon is global, and the agents are states and militaries – ie institutions. It has an individualist imaginary which is more at home with anecdotes of resistance, than with the machinations of military intervention.
Lost me, Adam. Translation, please.
Rob
You were against the invasion of Afghanistan? i’m genuinely surprised.
Pommy, yeah, I thought it was a dumb thing to do. No invader has ever succeeded in Afghanistan. But more than that, the Taleban were born, trained and nurtured in Pakistan.
I thought the US should have attacked Kandahar and Kabul, probably with flights of cruise missiles, in retaliation for 9/11, to destroy or at least dislodge al Qaida, but not invaded. Invasion was what bin Laden wanted, so he could inflict on the US the kind of defeat he imagined the Islamists had inflicted on the Soviets.
[sniping at blog-admin deleted]
I was one of those persons.
But I withdrew my support as it became clear:
1. The US was outsourcing to the warlords, who were the worst of the worst.
2. The US attempted to bring about social reform on the cheap.
3. The process of political reform was thoroughly corrupted.
4. The US decided that OBL really wasn’t worth bringing to justice.
5. The US began to make precisely the same bone-headed mistakes as every previous occupier of Afghanistan.
All of these insights convinced me that Bush was completely inadequate to the much more complex challenge of Iraq, which I lampooned with deadly prescience from Day One.
Pommygranate, I’ve provided you with a direct quote from the Manifesto, which is consistent with your assertion about it. How do you explain this inconsistency?
(Please note, I said inconsistency, not contradiction.)
err, that should read inconsistent with… sorry
Not that there’s anything wrong with fried-egg sandwiches.
Excellent with bacon, too, especially if you started early in the morning to get to Canberra by lunchtime. The Seymour roadhouse does themn well. Not so good on the chips, though.
Roo sausages are good, too. Have you tried them? Wowed a bunch of American visitors with them out at the old space tracking station site at Ororral. Live roos hopping around at the time as well.
No fried eggs though.
Mind you, Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station is more of a wow. That’s where the first pictures of the moon landing came down in ‘69 – but only because the Americans had set the switches wrong on the camera gear. Still, another first for Oz.
Can you believe that half the internet believes the whole thing was faked?
Canberra’s a great place for space. Did you know that the big tracking dish at Tidbinbilla is 70 metres in diameter? That’s the biggest dish in the Southern Hemisphere. I was down there the day three years ago when Cassini-Huygens began its orbital burn and dropped down toward the surface of Saturn. Amazing.
As a point of information (for those in Sydney anyway):
This Friday 27th July at 6:30pm
University of Technology Sydney
Building 1 Level 4 Room 6
Sohaila from the Revolutionary Afghan Women’s Association will be speaking about her experiences in Afghanistan. Soahila is a women’s rights campaigner and helps run a school set up by RAWA to counter the lack of basic education for women.
RAWA is an independent women’s rights organisation. According to RAWA, the situation for women has not improved as a result of the US invasion.
For more information about RAWA see their website: http://www.RAWA.org
Sohaila will also be speaking at Sydney University on Thursday 26th
at 1pm in the Old Geology Lecture Theatre
What I mean, Rob, is that the way in which Eustonists seem to approach these problems is in terms of a simplistic morality that is more at home in the interpersonal than the international. The call to act and to intervene may be a moral imperative if faced with an immediate situation at the personal level, but what seems to be lacking in interventionism is a thoroughgoing examination of the medium of intervention. This strikes me as an ideological effect, or an effect of language: it relates to how we talk about and conceive of our institutions. While I don’t doubt that many who subscribe to these ideas are far from blind to the complexity of ‘action’, most of the rhetoric I’ve encountered is Manichean.
This radical tradition is absent in Australia because most Jews came out here to make money not trouble.
For goodness sake, enough of the sweeping generalisations (not to mention ethnic stereotyping).
Thanks for the link, suz. I was reminded of this event after a lecture this morning. I’m not sure if I can make it yet.
I’m all in favour of simplistic morality, Adam.
And roo sausages.
Interesting discussion. The internal dynamics of Euston will necessarily elude me because I have little aptitude, and even less taste, for ideologically pure or consistent positions. I’m just thinking out loud here, not trying to support any argument. If it helps other people to fine-tune their own arguments a bit, fine; but otherwise feel free to ignore this, if you feel like it.
The phrase “anti-war Left” (or “pro-war Left” for that matter) is essentially meaningless to me. The root of the wars in both Afghan and Iraq was, whether just or unjust, accurate or inaccurate, wise or unwise, a local issue, not a universal principle; it was simply an issue of US national security. The decisions about the war (or whether to even have a war) should have been based on a careful examination of the facts, and an exhaustive and aggressive criticism of the actual detailed plans, strategies and goals for the war and its aftermath, as they related specifically to US national security; and not to bizarre goals of spreading democracy, or hidden goals that have to do with oil or Israel or anything else. I don’t think very many people in the US government in 2003 behaved like either patriots, honest citizens, grown-ups, or sober professional policy-makers, and that is a lasting disgrace. (But in fairness, the urge to “spread democracy,” when it wasn’t acting as a cover for simpler and grosser ambitions, probably is rooted in a mistaken but wholly understandable extrapolation of the successful reform of Japan and Germany to embody a universal policy principle, instead of the once-in-a-lifetime bonanza it probably really was. How did the old song go? “We did it before, and we can do it again…” Huh.)
I can’t see what any of this has to do with improving the lot of working-class and property-less people in industrial Western nations, which to my mind is the fundamental brief of the Left. (And if that’s not what the Left is primarily about, can someone ’splain to me what it IS about? I mean, short of a quasi-religious position?) How the Left came to have a detailed prix fixe position on so many other, rather comically unrelated, issues, is to me a source of perpetual mystery. What is the Left’s position on my car repairs, or what I plan to have for breakfast? I think that the Left, like the United States, has unwisely and even dangerously expanded its portfolio to include the entire universe, and that just never works out so good. The Euston people, as I see it in a big-picture sort of sense, were simply trying to treat, or perhaps to quarantine or neutralize or reform, some of the barking hydrophobic quarters of the grand Left; which quarters, take it from a disinterested outsider, are a little larger than you lefties tend to realize. Naturally there are plenty of kooks on the Right, too, but we just ain’t talking about them today. (But actually I tend to think that the malign influences on the Right come in greater force not from actual barking-mad kooks, but from very dishonest people.)
Personally I don’t think the US owed the Afghans anything at all in the way of democracy, social reform, feminism, etc.; it owed the Afghans and the Islamists a good old-fashioned ass-kickin’, nothing more. As I said above, I think the urge to rebuild or remake such a deeply alien society stems in part from the rather cantilevered idea that that’s the lasting key to national security, making Them into Us, a la Germany and Japan. But just because the first success was spectacular, doesn’t make it a general principle for all time. A friend of mine once pointed out that Japan and Germany both largely turned (and not without ENORMOUS effort!) because the outcome of the war had enabled them to see, very very clearly, that the fundamental ideological basis of their society had been entirely, completely discredited. Nothing of the sort is true in the Islamic world, and therein lies a critical difference.
I had more to say about all this, but it’s getting kind of long and I should quit hogging the mic. Maybe I’ll come back later…
Some good points there zengerman.
However:
A very laudable aim. Shame it was executed in practice with all the denouncing, knowing bad faith, self-righteous grandstanding and high-flown yet ineffectual posturing that so often plagues the Left elements for which the Eusties think they’re providing an alternative. I mean can anyone point to a single outcome from the eManifesto that has made the world any better? I mean beyond turning one bunch of ideological moralisers on eachother instead of on the rest of us?
True though it does accurately reflect the issue that inspired it in that it’s another possibly well intentioned yet woefully planned and incompetently delivered clusterfuck.
Also jpz, do you not note the discrepancy between:
and
That second point is a good observation yet it appears no one pulling the main levers of US power has worked out that their efforts should be devoted to that as a central principle of all their actions.
The 911 killers overwhelmingly came from and/or got funded and radicalised through the US’s two main Islamic client states/allies/geo-political floozies, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, both of which are artificial states carved out of colonialism and now run by corrupt oligarchies, majorly propped up by Western military-industrial-oil alliances and full of angry and frustrated young men watching pirated first world porn and yet can’t easily get a root. That’s just asking for it, whether you think the overall settings are right or wrong.
Damn right, if Australia was attacked on the same scale as 911, I’d wanna see some arses kicked too but I’d like to see our leaders (our employees basically) kick the right arses so they stay kicked.
But Iraq and Afghanistan have had their arses kicked in a way in a way that just inflames and not drains their pilonidal cysts.
(Come to think of it, the Bali bombings, both in terms of per capita casualties and of a very nasty shock to a populace’s sense of how it’s seen in the world, were not that dissimilar to 911.
Yet John Howard behaved not at all like Dubya and just like I’d hoped an intelligent first world leader would under such circumstances. He handled the shock, grieving and mourning process with low key but fitting dignity, quickly despatched much needed and effective medical , forensic and law enforcement resources to the scene of the crime and didn’t invade Malaysia.
I was quite proud of him then. Then of course after that he went back to whipping up hysteria over fauve issues for grubby political gain.)
Anyway, getting back OT. Never mind the morality of the kind of interventions endorsed by the Eusties, what about the practicalities?
The kind of western liberal democracies we’d trust to some degree or another to intervene appropriately already have their forces seriously stretched in South Asia and/or are now distinctly wary of such similar engagements for the future – while, after the Mesopotamian fiasco, t’would be hard to imagine any potential interventees welcoming any such intervention with open arms, flowers and rosewater.
Therefore I put it to you that the Eusties are just the latest generation of ideologues issuing feel good manifestos secure in the knowledge they’ll never be tested in reality.
And of course banging on on blogs about the merits or demerits of the eManifesto does nothing more to make life better for 70% or so of the world living in various degrees of shit.
But at least the likes of FE, Rob etc get to check out the cut of their International Rescue costumes in the mirror. The one that doesn’t lead to the cockpit of Thunderbird 2.
Maybe it’s because I’ve had a few very fine pinot noirs tonight but can someone enlighten me as to why Rob is banging on endlessly about bangers? Is there some subtle sausage sizzle a la Eustonista that I’m too frizzled to get?
Just wonderin…
Yes, well that much is clear, Rob.
Aside from that, I am at a loss to understand how the Eustonistas have descended from simplistic and false moral dichotomies to recommendations for where to get a good egg cooked.
Maybe it’s in para 67890 of the Manifesto?
So been partying on with Nick Gruen, hey Mark?
He’s a wild one.
Did he do the Nekkid Mortgage Rain Dance on the table again?
See here, Nabs:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/07/26/a-tale-of-two-thinktanks/
“I’m all in favour of simplistic morality, Adam.”
Well, I think it is totally naive to act as though your intentions can simply be ‘communicated’ by the military, so simplistic morality doesn’t cut if for me when it comes to dealing with ‘failed states’ or dictatorships. There are so many parts of the manifesto that I disagree with, and they all seem to hinge on gross over-simplifications. It seems to refer to the op/ed version of the world.
You are all so easily stirred from your self righteousness.
Mark — I was engaged in a heated argument with your moderation filter.
j_p_z:
Nabs’ observations on the above:
J_p_z’s observations on the relationship between military annihilation and social reconstruction are well-founded. Both of them were advanced, industrial economies where people had mortgages and took the commuter train to work. The US offered German and Japanese folk a return to modernity without the raving demogogues. Afghans have never commuted to work. They aren’t invested in modernity. Under these circumstances it is difficult for the US to find social allies in Afghanistan. As Nabs observed, the US made some unforced errors in cementing alliances as well.
Moreover, the allure of people’s war, and its formalisation as a military methodology make it impossible for a professional first world army to impose a monopoly of violence. The professional occupying army will always run out of patience, self-discipline and domestic political support before the job is done.
Therefore structural and intellectual realities vitiate the US project.
Another point, Katz: Afghanistan has been subjected to interventionist wars since the mid C19th (as has much of the Middle East), with one 40-year period of relative stability in the midst of it all (1933-1973). This situation is not comparable to the history of Japan and Germany leading up to World War II. Japan at least had been on a course of military expansion and conquest since the late C19th – it’s modernity as such was hinged to military victory, so military defeat had enormous significance. As the terrain for the imperial ambitions of other powers for so long, the people of Afghanistan have little to ‘learn’ from intervention. Arguably the ideological basis of the Taliban, and the warlords, is merely confirmed by intervention.
Look clearly there is a limit to raw power delivering beneficial effects when exercised. There has to be good understanding of locality and reasoned intent. Even if that intent is in part about ‘resources’ and not only ‘humanity’ – so what.
Also sometimes people don’t want to be ’saved’, sometimes you make a catastrophe worse. But that is no excuse to never act – even unilaterally.
In my view there is a lot of reason in ‘Livingstone Liberalism’ and the use of intervention.
Put it this way – Make Poverty History – screams Livingstone Liberalism in every sense, including promoting intervention where necessary and resources willing.
I’d say parts of Africa probably need to be re-occupied by external armed forces – best in blue helmets – if it is to set itself up for longer term development.
Security is the oxygen of development as they say. It is also the lifeblood of good social order.
The soggy left’s cultural relativism that has lead them to decide that Islamacist anti-American far outweights Islamacist homophobia, persecution of women, support for theocracy etc will look pretty bloody facile then.
Well, straw gets soggy pretty easily under a stream of piss I guess.
And what’s “outweights”? Is that a word?
Certainly, Adam, the national myths of both Japan and Germany from the 1870s to the outbreak of WWII emphasised the nation’s position at the vanguard of material progress.
Both versions of this myth conveniently overlooked some inconvenient truths. But it is true that there was considerable consensus in both Germany and Japan about the credibility the identity of the nation as “modern” and “progressive”.
I guess I would argue tentatively that this rhetoric has a public and national aspect. But incorporated into the rhetoric is the promise of a modern lifestyle for citizens — jobs, autonomy, self-improvement, a career open to talent, private property, etc., etc.
Yes, that is true Katz. I was merely trying to bolster your observation with more context on how the situations differ. It seems like in Japan and Germany, military expansion was hinged to modernity – this is a colonial residue as much as anything, especially in Germany eg ‘place in the sun’ rhetoric – so military failure, coupled with the offer of continuity at another level could successfully displace that tendency.
Actually, I can see how the current agenda in Afghanistan is attempting a kind of ‘return of the king’, and thus invoking that long interregnum between interventionist wars in which a sort of modernisation took place. Clearly that looks better on paper than on the ground.
Mark, there’s nothing false about the notion that those who are sent into an area of armed conflict require protection from those who are themselves armed. If there’s one thing worse than the massacre of Dutch peacekeepers in Srebrenica, it’s the idea that nothing has been learnt from their deaths.
This debate has all been done before, probably started with the Boer War. Maybe the 50s are the best template: cold-war liberals right on the horrors of Stalinism but wrong on Soviet foreign policy, progressives more realistic on the dynamics of Soviet foreign policy but naively apologetic on Soviet doemstic policy. Right on both counts; Irving Howe.
A whole thread about the Euston group without any mention of Zionism. Geras, Cohen and Horowitz are Zionist liberals. Unllike the Democrats, the British Labour Party has always had an uneasy relationship with Zionism ever since Labour’s Foreign Secretary Ernie Bevin voiced strong support for an Arab state in Palestine in 1948. The simple fact was that then, as now, the US had clout and Britain did not. The Eustonistas are the latest in a long tradition of UK intellectuals [like Richard Crossman] who support many progressive and small ‘l’ liberal policies, but feel uncomfortable with those in the Labour Party and the left who support an Arabic Palestine state. They opposed apartheid in SA and ethnic cleansing in Serbia, but those who criticise Likud policies they brand as anti-semitic.
Why is there no Euston (Flinders Street?) manifesto in Australia? You tell me.
Stephen
My point exactly. This is extremely spooky. What has happened to the Left’s obssession with Jews? It seems to have died with British Independent Jewish Luvvies Against Israel and its Australia mini-me.
Euston was established to distance Leftists from “the crazies” who constitute that rabid anti-Semitic strain that has become a malignant tumor rotting the British Left.
Good point Stephen. For me there are more substantial philosophical problems with Eustonism than it’s unquestioning Zionism (a cause for which, with some qualifications, I feel some sympathy), which is why I wouldn’t have chosen that as a starting point. However some of those problems may in fact spring from the circumstances that you’ve gestured to – ie from attempts to consistently support Israeli government policy at the same time as supporting small ‘l’ liberalism.
Again, I think this issue has far less salience in Australia than in the UK.
Mark
I agree. There was an attempt a few months ago when Anthony Lowenstein was given a very large chunk of media space to run the “Jew lobby” thing. There was a bit of excitement for a few weeks, but the political situation in Australia was never going to fracture over such a marginal issue.
Mark said:
The major if not sole reason for the presence of the Eustonistas in UK is that, unlike in OZ, the anti war movement needed to be taken very seriously by the Left because of the rise of the racist Left communalist political parties/movement ie Galloway’s Respect Party and the SWP’s common front with the extreme homophobic, mysogynistic, anti socialist Islamist groups.
Euston actually developed out of the failure of the establishment Left media (Graud and Indy), the Left academia and Left political figures to denounce these groups or even put them to sustained criticism, not from Euston’s pro war position.
Anyone interested in the dimensions of the issue as it should have been affecting the Left can read:
http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2006/08/10/against_communalism.php
Never would have happened in Oz because, as Mark points out, the ALP (read Labor movement) shed socialism a long time ago, but also because the bulk of the remaining Left has also shed socialism in favor of embracing the Green/Dem position of opposing economic change or advancement. But the cost was to hand its once impregnable role as history’s agenda setters, including in Oz, to the neo cons and the radical right. Leaving the Left on the sidelines, forever complaining and handwringing in response to the actions of the very people to whom it willingly surrendered its power. (One reads examples of this frequently in the threads and comments on this site)
Mark crows that there is no need for Eustonistas in Australia. But history has proved unforgiving of passive armchair “ain’t it awful” observers-not-actors. Thus the caravan moves on while the eyes of the Oz Left remain fixed on the ground, or on each other, not on the horizon.
You’d define blog commenters as actors not passive armchair observers, then, Barbara?
Isn’t there a bit of projection there? After all, surely it’s the Eustonistas and the Last Superpower-ites who now argue in favour of neo-con and radical right foreign policy interventions?
Certainly do not define armchair blog commenting as being active. However if I lived in UK I’d be a Eustonista and would have been campaigning with them in Bethnal Green.
LastSuperPower and Eustonistas consider, rightly in my view, that the neos and the radical right were following the historic left progressive agenda by intervening in the context of middle east facism, not the other way around.
Barbara B
And you are spot on in drawing attention to the Eustonista’s horror at the new alliance between “the Left” and Islamists!
Nice to see this thread still winding on.
Talking of the Socialist Workers Party, they arranged the rally in London last year where marchers trailed behind banners that read “We are all Hezbollah”.
Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah has returned the love. He has said of the West “We don’t want anything from you. We just want to eliminate you.”
I’ve never been particularly interested in what banners Trots want to march behind, or anything they do. Conor Foley makes the point that Cohen and the Eustonistas actually resemble the far left sectarians they criticise:
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/conor_foley/2007/08/trotting_out_tired_cliches.html
Of course, in Australia, the analogy is even closer as the only organised Eustonista-like grouping is a Maoist group.
Does the world really need yet another bunch of ideologues in a back room of some watering hole, hammering out one more high-minded yet ineffectual manifesto and then requesting people sign it or forever be idealogicaly tainted in ongoing discourse with the signees?
The only value I’ve seen emerge from the Euston Manifesto is that it provides a new set of monkey bars for the kind of people who want their playground to be seriously appreciated as some kinda grownup simulacra with practical and relevant real life applications.
And yes-
Dunno about the rest of you but I feel any point of view both endorsed by Maoists and a very sweet yet quite pointless and stately old high Tory like Norm Geras will pretty much end up like this.
And maybe also waiting on a bench with a 3 digit number in hand in the US Pundits Office if they’re really pushy.
I hold no particular brief for the old, new, classical, revoluntionary, counter-revoluntionary, Trot, Fabian or social democrat left. Let them organise complex schoolyard games and the school concert and social while the rightwingers and libertarians run the ciggie and pot franchises and half-arsed proetction rackets behind the bicycle sheds. I reserve my right to get involved in any or all of it.
But the moment I’m steered towards any kind of manifesto, I start smelling a combination of loyalty oath and blank cheque. (I believe that description is another Dsquared coinage).
The Euston Manifesto really smacks to me of the pompous highmindness of a student council calling for everyone to get behind the head PE teacher ‘cos a big game is coming up. The fact he was recently caught in the showers, wet, naked and soaping up his charges, is utterly irrelevant.
Go team!
Nabakov
While I admire and share your own “Sceptics Against Ideology” Manifesto, you would be more credible if we read such a passionate spray against other ideological pamphleteering here on LP.
John Greenfield on 2 August 2007 at 10:05 am
Those sacred cows are grazing far too close to home to slay.
Aha! the old denounce the denouncer for not denouncing the things you love to denounce trick, hey John?
Why Jack, I do believe you’ve found your Mini-me at last.
No Nabakov. There is no logical fallacy here. What I am saying is that your are being disingenuous in rather than addressing the realities of the horrific British Left – that the Eustonistas expose – you choose to declaim the relevance of any political positioning. And yet, elsewhere merrily chuckle on with the usual pamphleteering, elsewhere. Words like ‘hypocrite’ and others come to mind. Is that a bit clearer?
So much denunciation. Where do they find the time?
Hey, I like the sound of that. Actually I just had a merry chuckle or two while reading your last comment mini-J.
Tell you what. Why don’t you draw up a list of things to denounce and we can work through them. Maybe have a denouncement of the day. It’d be a nice complement to the “I condemn” threads.
*chuckles merrily*
John Greenfield said:
Thank you. It’s telling that an informed “Left” website raises questions about the Eustonistas but seems to be ignorant they were propelled into organising as result of the rise of the racist Left in UK which no-one else of the Left felt the need to take on.
But then again the Communalistas haven’t had much media attention in the Graud or the Indy or “Left” academic discourse, the reason the Eustonistas mobilised, so that probably explains the lack of knowledge or interest.
I think you should have a duel, so JG can show you how manly and not at all ‘luvvie’ he is. The 21st century version of this might be a Deathmatch of Counterstrike, with Nabokov obviously on the side of the Terrorists and a vigorous teabagging inflicted upon the loser.
Nabakov on 2 August 2007 at 3:19 pm
John Greenfield on 2 August 2007 at 3:25 pm
Nabakov is probably the best preserved specimen of the fleet-footed political animal that “runs with the hares and hunts with the hounds” currently held in captivity. We shouldnt begrudge him his little flights of fancy ideological footwork. Certainly better entertainment value than much other government sponsorship of “the Yartz”.
If people want to read pages of rhetorical drivel and sign up to it that’s their right. I’d hardly call that a meaningful political mobilisation against racism. The whole point of the post is to explain why there’s no need for Eustonistas in Australia. The need for the Last Superpower awaits a justification in its own right, I guess.
Reflecting on the thread and comments leads to an interesting question:
What is the actual genesis of the “pseudo/soggy” Left as labelled in turn by maoist LSP and liberal party leftist Christian Kerr?
When I was active in Left politics – 1963/75 -there were four distinct groups in the Labor Party: 1. the Stalinist/soviet fellow travellers who controlled the Vic, WA and Federal executives; 2 the next-gen power challengers led by Bob Hawke, Clyde Holding who eventually called themselves “Labor Unity”, 3 the independant “third way” led by Dick McGarvie, Race Mathews, John Button et al whose derivation was Fabianism and 4. the NSW catholic Right opportunistic thugocracy of which Keating, Richardson and Brereton are the recent examples who most memorably come to mind, although there were and are many others. All positions were represented in varying degree in the other state branches.
In the wider Left spectrum there was the now defunct Democratic Labor Party who persued neo-con like foreign policy and Green/kookie economics and on the other side a few Trot/ Maoist splinters who were dedicated to scorning mainstream politics and maintaining their ideological purity.
BUT ..
There were NO pseudo/soggy Leftists even in SIGHT in those heady days, comrades!!
The first manifestation was not until the emergence of Chipp Democrats late in 70s in reaction to Fraser/Howard policies: a split you should note from the Right, not the Left. (Has Larvatus ever paid homage to Don Chipp, I wonder?)
So how did it come about that your movement that arose from the Right now speaks so righteously for the Left? What are the political/cultural forces that led to this transition? Has anybody done a Phd or published on this yet?
On the face of it the orgins from the Right are a plausible explanation for the “pseudo/soggy” Lefts apparent cognitive dissonance re the raison d’etre of the Eustonistas and the last stand being mounted by the maoists?
No idea what you’re talking about, there, Barbara, old china. A concern with human rights is hardly peculiar to Don Chipp or the Democrats. Indeed, the Eustonistas justify their warmongering in humanitarian terms, not the motor of history Hegelianism of the Maoists (there’s no Marxism there, I’m sorry to say). I myself have often criticised the lack of focus on social justice, class analysis and economic issues in some quarters of the left – as you’d know if you read carefully rather than engaging in your dialectical generalisations. I don’t think there’s been any analysis of this done because you’ve formulated the questions wrongly, I’m afraid.
Bring on Psudeo/Soggyism! And of course there is the inevitable Facebook group.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=4324886740
Barbara B., four points.
First, I can tell you as an enthusiast and long-time Sussex St. watcher that the Catholic Right ‘thugs’ of the NSW Branch are as intellectually charged these days as you’d expect any gifted Jesuit student to be. They’ve prized university training, especially in economics and law, for decades, to the point where even sleazy fixer manqué Joe Tripodi had to come through the ranks with a BEc (Hons).
Second, the “Labor Unity” factions solidified nationally as a response only after your claimed period of involvement, well after Bob Hawke’s election, and directly as a response to the organisation of the Steering Committee (later SL) after its defeats in WA and Vic. You’ve got your chronology wrong.
Third, none of the personalities you’ve cited—PJK, Richo or Brereton—were ever prominent Labor Catholics in public life, rather, they were technocrats and Labor Council trained smart-guys before all. That is the enduring tradition of the NSW Right. You’re thinking of Johnno Johnson, Pat Hills, and their lot, who were half a generation older, at least.
Fourth, you confuse the DLP’s anticommunism with “neo-con” faith in military interventionism. The DLP supported the war in Vietnam because it was already a war zone by the late 1950s, but they also supported the UN unquestioningly and never believed in anything so crude as the primacy of national sovereignty. If the splitters of ‘55 were alive today, they’d piss on war plans as twice as half-arsed as Rumsfeld’s.
I pity you that the world has passed you by and you don’t seem to have absorbed any of it.
Heh.
Welcome back, Liam.
Fastest growing Facebook faction tonight, I’d wager.
Tamzin Lightwater has become my Facebook friend. Nothing else there matters.
(Actually, I’m annoyed that you have to chose your political affiliation off a list at Facebook. I wanted to put my self down as Tory Anarchist [not to be confused with Drink Soaked Trotskyite Popinjays for WAR http://drinksoakedtrotsforwar.blogspot.com/.)
Particularly as the list is so totally US-Centric and perpetuates the oversimplistic Liberal-Conservative equation with the Left-Right divide.
I chose “Other”.
Yes, “Other” is a good choice, and then you can explain in the rest of your profile if you want to. The US system means very little to me because each of those positions have associated traditions that just aren’t that relevant outside of the US. The terminology carries too many stereotypes and other baggage with it.
I did one of those political spectrum surveys and they put me in the libertarian left, but it didn’t ring true because I was right next to the Dalai Lama on the diagram. I never agree with that guy!
Hooray for the Psuedo/Soggy Left group
LIAM -
If you do a refresher I think you’ll find the Victorian Exec was removed and the branch occupied by the Feds after the 1969 election. The late comrades Mick Young and Tom Burns were appointed as Vice Roy duo. In an odd similiarity with another as yet ongoing Occupation, they installed a proportionally representive system for intra party elections which is the basis of the entrenched factionalism the party enjoys today.
Anyway, Liam, it was all well in place by the time Gough won in ‘72, that’s why was done. You’re out by more than a decade.
It’s pleasing to learn the NSW Right bovvers have now embraced higher education, despite HECS. I always thought if Keating had had more of a formal education he may not have destroyed the Labor Gov and resurrected John Howard?
No, the basis of the entrenched factionalism the party enjoys is entrenched factionalism. Deals made together between factions implicitly lock out non-factional candidates: PR itself has nothing to do with factionalism.
For comparison, the Italian Parliament uses PR, and they’ve got the most unstable Party system on the planet. If the “Occupation” you’re referring to is the Iraqi one, the Party difficulties there stem from sectarian voting blocs acting in very rational self-interest, which is a human deficiency, definitely not a flaw in the PR voting.
No, I’m not. The Labor Unity/Labor Forum groupings solidified as a national Right faction only in the 1980s. Read Macintyre and Faulkner on this, and my comment more closely. They got organised in response to the efficiency of the factional Left after the Whitlam years.
I see you appear to have no response to my other points in which I point out your exceptional wrongness, or Mark’s, for that matter.
I’d choose “marshmallow left”. It’s a long boring story.
Mark’s points, that is, not his wrongness.
Marshmallow left. Sometimes pink, always soggy?
And everyone wants to see us burnt on a stick, CK.
Barbara B
You have nailed it beautifully. Basically what happened was the sanctimonious bourgeois Left raped and stole the ALP. Their wretched progeny now breed in university humanities departments, the Fairfax press, Gay BC, and the blogosphere. Their legacy? John Howard.
But sweet. Very sweet.
Liam, you are amazing. Just learned more in the last five minutes than for the whole year of Politics 1.
Liam’s quite the labour history guru!
John Greenfield said:
It was actually the development of al fresco dining in the inner cities and a growing taste for fine food and wine among the bien penseurs that facilitated the rise of the pseudo/soggy/marshmellow left.
Again, it was the Chipp Dems who led the way. Their strategy – long lunches in the late ’70s designed to separate the emerging Labor middle classes from the blue collars – proved spectacularly successful. Capacity for clear and logical thought was systematically undermined with the result that connection with the past struggle on behalf of the working classes was irrevocably broken. The blue collars were driven from the inner cities to the northern and western wastelands. No shame over perpetrating this dispossession was ever felt by the PSML, the first signs of the cognitive dissonance that is their distinguishing characteristic today.
“SOLIDIFIED in the 80s”?
Okay, but my original statement was ; “ the next-gen power challengers led by Bob Hawke, Clyde Holding who eventually called themselves “Labor Unity�.�
I wasn’t talking about the 1980s, but the period when Labor Unity, Socialist Left etc were actually formed ie the early 1970s which was direct result of Fed intervention, which was in turn reponse to Whitlam having won enough seats in ‘69 to make the ‘72 election winnable.
So the “solidificationâ€? of LU in response to later political contexts wasn’t relevant to my point. I was describing the spectrum of interests as it existed between ‘63 and ‘75 which I assume you no longer contest now that you’ve refreshed?
You also mentioned “the organisation of the Steering Committee (later SL) after its defeats in WA and Vic.�
The defeats in WA and Vic occurred in the period I was referring to, as was the organization of the SC and SL which was undertaken at the time by Bob Hogg and others as Holding, Hawke, late Ian Turner and others organised LU.
It is proportional representation that enables every faction get representation in proportion to the vote it receives. As a consequence parties are forced into coalitions and alliances and govts can be notoriously unstable as in Italy.
This is the direct opposite of the “winner take all� system that applied in the Labor Party prior to Young and Burns’ decree.
You are right to suggest PR doesn’t “createâ€? factionalism. And “entrench” may have been a misleading term. What PR does is force factions into compromise and deals, instead of one party grabbing the lot as used to happen in the ALP.
Sorry, didn’t think you mean’t them to be substantive points. I only said neo con “likeâ€?. At least one Grouper still remaining in public life, Ray Evans, would have supported the invasion, I think?
As for the NSW Right “technocrats�, this was not the term that was used at all to describe them in the 60s and 70s, more a term applying to them since they’ve grown up. It’s a strange argument to suggest Keating et al didn’t come out of the NSW Catholic Right Labor tradition, but whatever.
And a brilliant strategy that should be a weekly event. Viva la Psuedo/Soggy Left.
Back from an all-day family thing, long lunch I suppose you’d call it but for the odd proportions of grog to food, I’m refreshed by the faint praise of my elders and fuelled by the soft bigotry of low expectations, and I’m primed for a bit of comments-field ding-dong. Grown man acting like a boor and all that (cheers for the description Darlene).
Yep. They were challengers to the power holders of the FPLP, and in the period, they distinguished themselves not by coming from a different ideological starting point but simply by coming from outside the Federal Parliament.
I *am* refreshed, in fact, quite chipper, but I still don’t know what you mean. You’ve described your life involvement in the ALP of twelve years more than thirty years ago. What’s to contest?
No indeed.
Thanks for agreeing with me entirely. I appreciate the sentiment, and I think both of us applaud the political outcome of PR, the best voting system as yet devised by humans. Please feel free to concur with me any other time you like. Just stick up your thumbs, smile, and say “Right again! You’re the man, Liam”!
I’ll let that pass, to the keeper, or the sommelier, I suppose. No I won’t: “Marshmallow” has no “e”, a letter that itself was an innovation of the late 1980s. Ahem.
That I can’t let slide, as a lover of my city—Sydney. The best and most enduring thing about Sydney is the culture of its Western suburbs, not at all the bits bounded by overpriced water. I’d love to know why it is you apparently hate suburbanites so much. “Wastelands”? Now that’s just offensive.
I think you’d enjoy Michael Thompson’s stuff, especially Labor Without Class, Pluto Press, 1999(abouts). He’s right into sticking it up imaginary élites and raising fictional proletarian class-based analyses onto non-Marxian pedestals, and all from his spot of Balmain real estate.
His is just the kind of perversity that makes Wests Tigers when they win the heirs of the Balmain greats, but nothing but that shitty team from Campbelltown when they lose.
Not really, it’s not. He was a Catholic and a right-winger, but just being a bog-wog and a De La Salle boy doesn’t make you part of the NSW Catholic Right. That requires a far more activist stance—and required, even in the 60s and 70s—on the issues of concern to the Vatican: abortion, most of all.
Bit too much of a mess that. Might have been more coherent if you’d left it til Monday to reply.
CLOWN: Well, God give them wisdom that have it; and those that are fools, let them use their talents.
– Twelfth Night or What-you-will