As a bit of a follow up to the discussion of Germaine Greer’s latest book On Rage here, I was interested to see Gary Sauer-Thompson observe that most of the reaction (and there’s been tons of it) to her writing and various speeches and appearances in the press has completely avoided the issues she actually raises, and concentrated on interweaving loud denunciations of her – and claims that she’s irrelevant – with already well established “media narratives”. If she’s in fact got nothing of relevance to say, as one of our commenters observed, you have to wonder why all the energy expended.
Her book hasn’t hit the shelves in Brisneyland as far as I can tell, but I’m awaiting it with interest. There’s a taste of what’s to come at Public Opinion.
Update [by Kim]: Elsewhere, Legal Eagle agrees with Tracee Hutchison about Greer. I think the post is unfortunately all too typical of one of the weird confusions that swirl around Greer’s thought and indeed have a much broader contemporary purchase – that to explain something is to justify it. Greer appears to be setting out to explain Indigenous male rage. From what I’ve seen of her interviews over the last few days, she is insistent that this is not a justification. But apparently people either can’t understand that distinction, or believe that any reference to the origins of phenomena in Indigenous Australia in dispossession and colonisation signals justification. It does not. But it does indicate that we are not exempt from blame. Perhaps the demand that Indigenous people take responsibility, as I was arguing the other day, evades our own mutuality and our own responsibility, and as Greer has been suggesting, diminishes our humanity if we make it in the absence of providing the conditions of its possibility and understand that those conditions involve determinations made by communities whose freedom is a pre-condition of any successful partnership and any true reconciliation.
I liked her a lot better when she was an anarchist.
I’m not across what she’s said in the past about her political commitments. However, I thought what she meant when she said “I’m a Marxist” on Q&A was making an epistemological point – a materialist if you like who thought that ideas were secondary to economic conditions. Though she did certainly want to oppose all the “Marxists killed millions and therefore capitalism is teh excellent” bluster from Sheridan and Carr. There are of course a lot of other excellent reasons for doing that.
But I doubt that it makes any difference to assessing her views in “On Rage”.
(#1): Dude, I’m sure she’s crying into her pillow.
Yes it’s all very strange when you consider you have to be my age to even remember who she was and what she represented. To be quite frank on Q and A she came across as a typical middle age women articulator a pretty reasonable view. Another hunter gather culture fell as have many before. Those effected are pretty upset.
“To be quite frank on Q and A she came across as a typical middle age women [sic]articulator [sic] a pretty reasonable view.”
Yes, she’s intelligent, well-informed and thought provoking in the genuine sense, and how many other women-of-a-certain-age get to peform that job in the media. So the media doesn’t quite know how to deal with her. I’d prefer to sit next to her at a dinner party rather than, say, Bob Carr or, god forfend, Julie Bishop. Not because I’d agree with her every statement, but because she would provoke me to think about why I disagree. And when I do go to dinner parties, chances are I do sit next to someone who shares some of her opinions.
And she get’s even more attractive as she gets older. In Max Gillies/Guy Rundle’s ‘Your Dreaming’, Gillies portrayed her as very school maam’ish – very humorously (I laughed, I cried, but every moment was very, very special), but it only caught one aspect of her character. What it missed was her self-deprecating irony (humour) on the one hand, and her sexiness on the other.
I wonder what it is about Greer that makes people who’ve never met her or even read any of her books feel perfectly comfortable about making personal judgements of her personality, appearance and manner while completely ignoring her arguments.
She will be 70 next birthday, which means she’s probably moved on from ‘middle aged woman’ to ‘elderly woman’, an even more invisible and despised social/demographic category, and one even less expected to have the gall to express opinions and make judgements. I think the reason people have such extreme reactions to her is that she is so outrageously different from those stereotypes. This may be one reason why the Gillies/Rundle version was perhaps the least successful satire on a particular figure that I’ve ever seen them do, despite the prodigious gifts of both.
I think this is just a sort of hunch or a hypothesis, Dr Cat, but I suspect that Greer has a spectral double – “Greer” – or the figure that exists in the popular and media imagination. I’m not sure there’s much connection between the two, though there is obviously some. Clearly there’s an over-writing of her image with all sorts of gendered stereotypes, and I think that if this were to be teased out, the figure of the “feminist” would be somewhere near the heart of all this.
That’s one consideration – analysing why she creats such a stir (and I think Gary Sauer-Thompson has demonstrated it’s got something to do with listeners and readers as well as any possible intention of hers to stir the pot). Theoretically, at least, what she’s arguing should be separable from all these images, ghostings and projections. Maybe that’s a big ask for some people, but I think also they’re losing something in the process of not attending to what she actually has to say.
had a flick through of her book this evening at work… it is really small!
“I wonder what it is about Greer that makes people who’ve never met her or even read any of her books feel perfectly comfortable about making personal judgements of her personality, appearance and manner while completely ignoring her arguments.”
Four things immediately come to mind. 1. Her gender. 2. Her feminism 3. Her profession. 4. Her subject matter. We all know what some 60s feminist academic would say about women and blacks, so why bother reading it? Besides, she’s an old woman.
d
Aas far as I am concerned Greer is brilliant and far better than this hick country deserves as an ambassador.
More the same old, same old middle class dross attacking her, this time in the Age today, this time from yet another Hauseggar clone; Tracee Hutchinson. They are great in their coward’s castles- no linx provided for public feedback. They talk at you and down to you; never to you- but I’d rather one Germs than a trillion (hitchhikers guide…?) useless, stuck-up and vapid, opinionated media ornaments.
Of course, in this instance, she’s writing about Indigenous men.
‘…a materialist if you like who thought that ideas were secondary to economic conditions…’
Like Swifts Big-egg-enders and little-egg-enders? Or Medievalists arguing about angels on the heads of pins?
Seriously mate – if Marxism is the answer…then what was the question again?
An Aquarian Tiger no less!
The attacks on her after her piece on Steve Irwin were just unbelievable. John Birmingham produced the stereotypical misogynist, content-free rant, and it was noticeable how completely unwilling her “critics” were to actually engage with anything she said. I doubt anything better will be produced in the future, though there might be a little less extreme misogynist insults (“hag” indeed!). If ever one were wondering why intellectuals leave Australia, the treatment of Greer should answer all one’s questions.
Elsewhere, Legal Eagle agrees with Tracee Hutchison about Greer. I think the post is unfortunately all too typical of one of the weird confusions that swirl around Greer’s thought and indeed have a much broader contemporary purchase – that to explain something is to justify it. Greer appears to be setting out to explain Indigenous male rage. From what I’ve seen of her interviews over the last few days, she is insistent that this is not a justification. But apparently people either can’t understand that distinction, or believe that any reference to the origins of phenomena in Indigenous Australia in dispossession and colonisation signals justification. It does not. But it does indicate that we are not exempt from blame. Perhaps the demand that Indigenous people take responsibility, as I was arguing the other day, evades our own mutuality and our own responsibility, and as Greer has been suggesting, diminishes our humanity if we make it in the absence of providing the conditions of its possibility and understand that those conditions involve determinations made by communities whose freedom is a pre-condition of any successful partnership and any true reconciliation.
Heh. Indeed. My dad is an Aquarian Tiger and he’s just as scary as she is.
“Do you think that feminism was the most successful revolution of the 20th Century?” Carr: the capitalist triumph in China. blah blah blah capitalism is good, urbanisation is good for women. Sheridan: revolutions are ghastly. Murder! Genocide! Marxist regimes! Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot; Oh that’s right, we’re talking about feminism, feminism is not as bad as those other revolutions. Westbury: Ah, I, I, I,… some extent,… partially completed,… I think it’s, I don’t think, I don’t think,… necessarily… I like Greg actually. Bishop: the rise of democracies was the greatest change in the 20th Century, because… the power of the individual. Greer: …I believe in permanent revolution,… what has to happen is a constant process of criticism,… when people don’t have… enough to eat,… believe me, a capitalist revolution won’t do it for them….
Greer made more sense than all the rest of those clowns put together. But when asked about revolutions in the 20th Century nobody thought to mention the total dominance of the nation state, the hegemony of the United Nations and the sovereignty of its member states. Surely that has been a more successful revolution than “democracy” or “capitalism.”
Mind you, I shudder to think what we would have got from Sheridan and Carr if they had given us their opinions on feminism as opposed to blather about teh evils of Marxism and glories of democracy.
Sorry, I can’t get over the fact that people can’t work out why aboriginal culture, after two hundred years of forced absorption exclusively of the bad traits of western culture, combined with the worst traits of their own older culture, produces dysfuntional, psychotic elements whose behaviours are unconsciously performed by its victims in public view, like trained bears, for the incidental cynical amusement of Hansonist whites.
And I can’t get past the take of middle- class women (or male white thugs of the same profession) journalists and politicians in their Iago-esque blame-game reading of the current problems.
Must be careful here, for the benefit of those who have stuck out their necks to agree with Greer’s commonsense observations, against all this other despicable puffery trying to booster the neolib Abbotist/Pearsonist blame the victim reading and its dubious raisons detre.
Btw, there was a lengthy article by Greer in the SMH on August 2:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/a-look-at-the-rage-epidemic/2008/08/01/1217097533898.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2
I can’t find anything in it that justifies what her “critics” have projected on to her.
Yes, the SMH article. Since am in a Shakespeare mood tonight will move from nauseating white Iagos to “Lear”, when the flawed hero complains on occasions about them making him mad. We know now, from the the example of Australian race relations, that it was only ever in the old boy’s head: same with his old mate with the eyeballs that we know now, just jumped out of their own volition
“.. Out thou jelly, etc…”; that was was just imaginary in his head, too!
Read our feathered friend’s take as recommended and found it stunningly insular and naive as well as disturbingly familiar.
It’s true that many blackpeople maybe could take a bit more responsibility forthemselves, but white society dares scarce point the finger at ANYONE, in ITS current state of deplorable denialism.
Dr. Cat and Mark @ # 6 & 7:
PC: “what it is about Greer that makes people who’ve never met her or even read any of her books feel perfectly comfortable about making personal judgements of her personality, appearance and manner while completely ignoring her arguments.”
Mark: “I suspect that Greer has a spectral double – “Greer” – or the figure that exists in the popular and media imagination. I’m not sure there’s much connection between the two, though there is obviously some.”
Wouldn’t you say that a person as savvy, artful and charismatic as Greer is, does the lion’s share of constructing their public image, esp. one so purposefully at odds with various orthodoxies? And that that image constitutes a sort of readable text, complementary to the written record? I’ve read only a smattering of say Norman Mailer, but I have an idea about the nature of his work and ‘thought’ (we’ll be generous today) and general direction that is probably not too far mistaken, based in large part on the way he cultivated his image and public antics. People who do this (and not everyone does, or with quite so much verve and articulation as the Greers and Mailers of the world) leave themselves open to the sorts of pre-judicial commentary and interpretation Dr. Cat notes, at least for purposes of forming a grounding or platform of criticism; whilst it may not be the most sober way in the world of proceeding, neither is it necessarily shallow or disingenuous. When an anonymous voice says, “Don’t do drugs,” you take it FWIW, as you’re inclined to read it. But if Lou Reed says “Don’t do drugs,” then at the very least, the mind is set a-turning. There’s an awful lot of backspin on that ball. It’s just the rules of the game.
Mark: “Clearly there’s an over-writing of her image with all sorts of gendered stereotypes…”
Another way of putting this might be: “Clearly there’s an interpretation of her image based on the pattern recognition capabilities of the human brain, with its 60,000+ years of acculturation, the reversal of which has been attempted over the course of the historical equivalent of a three-day weekend…”
Not sure about others, Mark.
But I read her “Quarterly Essay” a wile ago – White Fella Jump Up! – and thought it was a poor effort. (just briefly: unsubstantiated sweeping assertions, guesswork; I’d say it was poetics rather than serious policy work. She pontificated.)
I didn’t borrow that judgement from a review or an article in the newspaper, it was just my reaction to the words on the page. Of course I was aware that persons discuss her writings and TV appearances. just sayin’
I recognise her work has many admirers, but I think it’s too easy to dismiss her (possibly very few) critics as some kind of media creation. Of course, I don’t think she should shut up. Neither do I think her various critics should.
I think they’d be a very small minority PC. On the other hand there are plenty; I am one of them; who have read her articles and have criticised them and have faced the very same irrational “judgements”, from her acolytes that you deplore.
Totally agree with you. Greer’s theory of rage in the communities for the men who have been humiliated for more than 200 years holds water. It is a feature of many dysfunctional communities where normal hierarchies are torn apart. We see it in areas of high unemployment or in places ravaged by war and then occupied. Of course it isn’t an excuse and I don’t think she said it was. But if you understand it you can start to help people deal with it . The critics of Greer are angry at her because she confronts you with the question of who did this to the communities. All those stolen children, half castes or whatever we chose to call them were fathered by white men who raped and pillaged their way through the outback and then took no responsibility for the damage they caused. Now we do it as a nation. The children stolen were all those with non Aboriginal blood in them so their colour could be bred out. The rest of the theory was to just leave the full bloods to die out. A O Neville drove the policy in W A
When Greer or someone else raises uncomfortable matters we attack them.
You have to wonder about our media and the way it attacks people. Greg Sheridan has written two columns this week about Georgia which are so delusional as to have you wondering about the state of his mind. It is a distortion of how this thing started and only after digging around in Saturday’s SMH did I finally find a McGeough piece which set out what is happening. Why the Herald chose to bury it and instead run the Gerard Henderson piece which delivered no new information about John Howard is inexplicable. But the Australian allows the increasingly unhinged Sheridan drivel to appear while lining up as many journos as it can in a vendetta against Greer. Even Rosemary Neil who I thought was better than that made an extraordinary attack.
Thank goodness the blogs.
As I was just staying at Slim’s:
I read in The Australian some snide remark from a journalist who when he said he was sorry for interrupting Greer, at some function, she retorted ‘No you’re not’. Which was undoubtedly an accurate comment. He thought it necessary to report that she had made this remark with a ‘wine glass in her hand’. So you see, not only is she a woman and therefore wrong about everything, she’s also a drunkard.
I think the contempt between Greer and Australian journalists is mutual. Although I think she hates them more. They are thoroughly deserving of every spray of venom that comes their way.
I saw her being interviewed by Leigh Sales. Greer was clearly exasperated an exasperation that detracted from her argument. But she was quite right. This ‘get over it’ attitude that prevails in Australia is entirely heartless and ignorant.
(Luckily for Slim) I was just ’saying’ it.
“I’d say it was poetics rather than serious policy work”
With all due respect, Ambi, your criticism is a bit beside the point, because there is nothing in that essay claiming that is should be taken as ‘policy work’. Greer is clearly working at the level of a cultural politics, not at anything as concrete as policy. Having said that, there are still obvious problems with the essay.
I’d be interested in what you think those are, Klaus. I’m not suggesting that Greer’s essay is beyond criticism, just that it’s obvious given the gap between what she’s saying and what people think she’s saying shows that a lot of the criticisms are invalid.
One of the striking things – for me – Greer said on Lateline the other night was that the children who are the object of “protection” are the same people as those from whom they are being “protected”. Stats on std infections, which were referred to in one of the other threads, don’t just imply sexual abuse. It’s clear from the various reports and indeed from some cases from North Queensland which have gone to the courts that there is consensual sexual activity going on among Indigenous kids – some very young. The same of course is true with non-Indigenous kids – it’s well demonstrated that sexual activity is taking place at a much younger age than it was a couple of decades ago – but of course our response is different – fleeting, and displaced onto concerns about sexualisation in the media which may or may not have a causal role, but certainly not welfare quarantining and authoritarian “interventions”. That’s not to say that sexual abuse isn’t a problem, but its etiology – along with that of all forms of domestic violence – isn’t reducible to a lack of “responsibility” or “welfare dependency”. Greer, for me, has made a contribution to suggesting a broader understanding – and in fact a deeply political understanding – of why it might be occurring, which has the effect of calling into question some of the assumptions underlying policy.
I also think she shows that the “innocence” of children is something of a construct here – and one which has a logical tendency to lead to measures which in some ways have the same motivations as those which lead to the Stolen Generation.
I’m also fairly astounded that her statement of the fact that abuse begets abuse is taken as somehow outrageous – for instance in the post by Legal Eagle which has been linked here. I’d have thought it was:
(a) true and uncontroversial;
(b) suggestive that more is needed to break the cycle than demands for responsibility (which doesn’t mean that responsibility doesn’t need to be taken, but by all concerned, including us whitefellas).
j_p_z, I don’t know whether or not Greer consciously tries to shape her own image – at least beyond the obvious point that anyone who appears regularly in the media must be doing that to some degree. I can’t look inside her mind, but it seems to me that the bad press she constantly gets must say something about what she’s saying and how it’s received over and above any desire she might have to be provocative. For one thing, a lot of it must be exasperating and hurtful, and I think she’s demonstrated on occasion that it is. I doubt that anyone sets out consciously to be exasperated and hurt.
Onya, Mark, re 29: They never quarantined Indoorapilly and subjected the kids there to coerced physical examinations to see what turned up.
In fact, your whole top post just shows up so well what a despicable farce the thing has been from, all along.
Well, paul, the point could also be made that sexual abuse – and indeed high rates of sexual activity among young adolescents – also occur in middle class White Australia.
Mark, that is beyond naive. She is a professional contrarian and controversialist.
And she is good at it. So she gets the response she wants.
Give her the respect she deserves.
It’s hard to explain, then, GregM, her obvious frustration on Thursday night on Lateline.
Not at all, mark. All part of the act, which she does so well.
Did you watch it, GregM? I think in this instance cynicism is driving out observation.
That strikes me as an extraordinarily ungenerous interpretation of her. Does she aim to provoke discussion? Of course she does, but that’s not the same as being contrarian purely for the sake of it.
If she was just acting, she’d actually be better at handling the controversies to her advantage, more like Ann Coulter. I’m with Mark, her frustration at continued wilfully obtuse misinterpretations of what she’s actually saying is genuine, not an act.
Well that’s what Salman Rushdie thinks of her. As does any objective observer of her career.
And if she chooses to be be wilfully obtuse, which she does, because that’s part of her m.o., then you must expect wilfully obtuse interpretations (not misinterpretations) of what she is saying.
Mark, I’m working on some of the issues with ‘Whitefella Jump Up’ for a book chapter, although my head’s not really there at the moment to list criticisms as I’m busy on the thesis. What I’m interested in is the strategic redeployment by Greer of a fairly common figure in white Australian culture and literature in the last 100 years – that of the ‘white Aborigine’. Greer offers a particularly unreflective and explicit version of settler indigenization (a concept from Terry Goldie).
However, I agree with the thrust of your argument in this post and comments, and as you can see I’m starting from a quite different point in offering criticism. I haven’t teased out the implications of all of this yet, either.
Have you read the published responses to ‘Whitefella Jump Up’? I like Tony Birch’s. As he does elsewhere and with other authors, Birch picks up one of the visual metaphors – to do with looking in the mirror – and changes it in an interesting way.
“Obvious frustration” is one of her more time-worn media strategies. From the coruscating rancour directed at people stupid enough to think that the ghastly Bob Dylan is a “poet,” to the appalling pretensions of Richard Neville assuming he’s “famous,” to the disgraceful “good guy” eulogising of Steve Irwin, she is eternally – and strategically – frustrated. It’s become her schtick and as she’s aged, it has opened a whole host of new media opportunities – of the curmudgeonly old bluestocking genre – to add to her already crowded schedule. Indeed, she has been a featured performer on Brit TV’s “Grumpy Old Women,” has appeared as her obviously frustrated self in “Extras” and galumphed and harrumphed about as an unlikely – and obviously frustrated – milkmaid on “Celebrity Big Brother.”
She was as frustrated with Leigh Sales as she was with Andrew Denton and indeed Tony Jones on Q&A. She is perpetually frustrated.
Q&A was vintage Greer. Wave one’s arms about, roll one’s eyes and pull faces at the contribution of other panellists; pronounce “Ossetia” and “Shaskavilli” with what might pass as native-speaker enunciation (demonstrates superior cultural understanding and expertise) and avoid affirming anything anyone else might say. She is a study in calculated frustration.
In fact I love the way she demonstrates her superior knowledge. Memorably, in offering very rare congratulations to the stingray that took Irwin out, she insisted on using the correct genus descriptor, “Dasyatidae,” thereby establishing her superior zoological credentials and her manifest irritation at those who would see this heroic creature as just some weird, grouchy, flat fish.
I note that her publisher, Melbourne University Press, is billing, “On Rage,” as follows:
“Germaine Greer’s passionate and powerfully worded essay about Aboriginal rage is a provocation that will cause heated and intense debate.”
It seems a curious choice of words for one frustrated at being perpetually miscast as a provocateur but quite gratifying, I guess, if the reverse is the case.
On her essay, (which I’ve yet to read) I note, along with many others, that her thesis – that dispossesion and cultural deprivation provoke male rage – is scarcely new. Alan Duff’s “Once Were Warriors” explored this theme memorably as did Tom Keneally’s “The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith.” Arguably, Tennessee Williams’ Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire” traverses the same territory from a class rather than an ethno-cultural perspective.
I’ll be interested to see what she has to say but some of the early out-takes – indigenous women could be perceived as colluding with the enemy – do sound like the sort of carefully planted literary landmines that can only result in the whole cycle of misunderstanding, frustration – and endless publicity – repeating itself. Poor Germaine.
Klaus, thanks for that – I haven’t read either Whitefella Jump Up! or any responses though.
I think it was on “Enough Rope” (or after…?) that Ms Greer made some observations on her treatment by the Australian media. She said that her reception in the Australian media is dominated by critique of her media relations, rather than the content of her material, and that this reception is unique to Australia. So in Australia her latest article will be portrayed (by otherwise “intelligent” (lol) journalists and theorists) as “attention-seeking” or similar; while in the UK the content of the article will be addressed.
I think the Australian media and academic establishment are so blinded by rage at/ envy of her that they just can’t engage with her ideas any more, whether or not those ideas are straightforward (Irwin), kooky (that weirdo book of nude boys) or stupid (insert random article I haven’t read). I wonder if this is why Peter Singer left Oz as well…?
“I wonder if this is why Peter Singer left Oz as well…?”
Or John Pilger who cops it with triple barrels.
Maybe Greg Sheridan and Bob Carr could move to London and see how they go as global public intellectuals?
“Maybe Greg Sheridan and Bob Carr could move to London and see how they go as global public intellectuals?”
I don’t recall either of them claiming to be public intellectuals, Mark, but it’s curious that you think that one needs to go to London to be one.
joe2, Peter Singer spent most of his career at Monash before he was offered a chair at Princeton in 1999 and John Pilger cops it with triple barrels regardless of his current geographical location.
I don’t think that, Geoff. I was being sarcastic.
Even if Greer actually approved that blurb (not especially likely from what I’m told of how publishing operates) it doesn’t necessarily follow that “provacateur” is necessarily the same as “contrarian”, which is the claim that was made. Provoking people to think of issues in different ways is a good thing, IMO.
As sg said, the Australian media almost never engages with the actual content of her writings. I certainly don’t think that she gets everything right, far from it (her opinions on transgender identity and intersex conditions I especially take issue with, along with some of her arguments re FGC) but I do think that there’s a lot of her writing that hits the nail squarely on the head, and that’s rarely acknowledged.
“However, I thought what she meant when she said “I’m a Marxist” on Q&A was making an epistemological point – a materialist if you like who thought that ideas were secondary to economic conditions.”
If she meant that why didn’t she use the term Marxian?
I really wish the media would stop giving Germaine Greer oxygen by publishing her opinions on subjects she clearly knows little about, but the media loves people of the Greer/Ruxton/Hanson variety because they generate heat and sell copy.
Geoff, I’m not so sure that Pilger cops it with triple barrels so much in the UK. Maybe double.
Ok, so here we have steve munn’s sockpuppet, Lord Sir etc., comparing Greer with Pauline Hanson and Bruce Ruxton.
Maybe it’s someone who feels compelled to make risible comments like this who’s the contrarian and the provocateur in the bad senses of both words? It’s such a self-evidently wrong analogy that it can only be designed to rile people. Not playing, sorry.
Greer’s bizarre and ill-informed swipe at a recently deceased Steve Irwin was every bit as crazy as Ruxton and Hanson’s rantings. Greer’s antics of Big Brother were, well, ineffable.
There’s nothing particularly bizarre about what Greer wrote about Irwin, which can be found here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/sep/05/australia
She’s arguing that a certain over-confident masculinity characteristic of the “Aussie larrikin” demonstrating mastery over the animal world is dangerous. How does that constitute “rantings”? I think a lot of the reaction had to do with the “speaking ill of the recently dead” thing, not with the substance of what she had to say. Which you don’t bother to address.
I think a lot of the tossers who diss Greer just want to make their own little minds seem bigger than they are. Ultimate tall poppy syndrome.
What special insight can you give us on what she wrote about the Bali dead, and those still dying as she wrote her piece, Kim?
My own take on it was that it was a peculiar piece of filth without any substance and I think a lot of the tossers who support Greer just want to make their own little minds seem bigger than they are. Ultimate wankers.
The link can be found here: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/10/21/1034561443711.html
Just a few details dragged over from my comments on LE’s post (and expanded somewhat):
1. Australia treats its genuinely eccentric intellectuals shockingly – that’s why they leave. Boiler-plate intellectuals like Craven or Manne are fine (that’s why they don’t leave). Oddballs like Greer are doomed.
2. An Australian intellectual who chooses to leave Australia needs to realise that ‘ex-pat’ status means Australians will probably react badly to any commentary on the old ‘home’. Greer is very English in the way she engages (including the talent for confected outrage Geoff pointed out above). I do think she has become much more English as time has passed, with the inevitable consequence that Australians react to her as a ‘bloody Pom’.
3. It’s very easy to get out of touch with a place when you’re away from it. I’ve found this when I’ve been living away from Australia – things get harder and harder to grasp, people change etc. I fully expect my ability to make intelligent remarks about Australia will have evaporated within the next five years.
4. I did notice some fairly basic errors in Greer’s piece for the SMH and subsequent interview. Clarence Thomas wasn’t the first black justice on the SCOTUS, Thurgood Marshall was. Bob Katter has no base in the NT that I’m aware of, although Jacques Chester may be able to advise otherwise.
SL, yes there are some errors – or apparent errors anyway – which may indeed be a product of distance. But I don’t think they necessarily invalidate the broader argument as they don’t seem to me to be central to it.
Btw, the thread on LE’s post is an interesting one – comments are worth reading:
http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2008/08/what-has-happened-to-greers-feminism/#comments
GregM, I hadn’t read that piece before. I’m not setting myself up as a “defender” or “supporter” of Greer’s. I am pointing out that she makes arguments which are worth discussing – whereas the evidence on this thread appears to be that those who don’t like her want to ignore that and abuse her personally, make silly analogies, or suggest all sorts of things about her motives. Calling an article a “peculiar piece of filth” hardly establishes anything about its merits.
The article seems to me to reflect an isolationist streak which is there in Australian culture, and also to put forward a view that was widespread at the time – that our involvement with Bush and his “war on terror” may have put our citizens at risk from terrorism, and that there was no good reason for that involvement. An awful lot of Australians shared that view. Again, you seem to be upset by the timing – “lay dying” etc. On this basis, I can’t understand how you could support any publication of any opinion at the time of Bali or s11, unless what you really mean is that any opinion departing from the government approved view somehow insults the dead or dying. That strikes me as an absurdity.
There is an argument in this piece as well, and not one I’d endorse in toto, but it’s there. But you respond with hyperbole and put downs. Again, less is said about Greer and rationality here than about her critics.
The Thomas error is fairly telling, Kim – she clearly knows little or nothing about him. Much of his rage came about because employers assumed his Yale JD was the product of affirmative action, when he actually achieved the appropriate entry requirements and did not require ’special consideration’ on the basis of race. Discrimination against affirmative action recipients is actually economically rational (ie, employers stand to win in the long run). Ordinary taste-based discrimination (aka bigotry) by contrast is irrational; in the long run employers who do it will take a hit to the bottom line.
Well, that’s a difference of opinion about AA and rationality you have with Greer, isn’t it, SL, rather than an error she made? The actual error – about Thomas being the first rather than Marshall – doesn’t seem to me to be a material one, though if she’s writing in major newspapers, she should check her facts (and so should editorial staff!)…
No Kim. You are transparently setting yourself up as supporter of Greer, and uncritically so.
How you can find anything in Greer’s piece as being about Australian isolationism is quite beyond me. A large part is a diatribe about Australia’s all to ready willingness to get involved in the disputes of others.
Also at the time the issue of Australia’s involvement in Bush’s “war on terrorism” was hardly a factor. Just about every other Western country and a good few more, had committed to supporting that. Australians knew that, as the Bali bombers later confirmed, this was payback for our intervention in East Timor.
It is too late tonight but tomorrow I will take you, point by point, through the piece of trash, which I may add is illustrative of Greer’s scholarship generally, to demonstrate its factual errors, simple untruths and mendacious and meretricious reasoning to establish its complete lack of any merit.
Not that I think for a moment that that that will shift you for a moment from being an uncritical and unthinking supporter of hers.
Oh, and btw, wrt the whole “provocation” and “attention seeking” thing, I don’t exclude that as being part of her m.o. but so what? Lots of people who want to occupy space in the media have to pimp themselves – it seems as if it’s only the women who do so who get attacked. Which brings me to my second point – it seems that Greer inspires a bit of rage in white blokes too. Ironic, heh?
However, I don’t buy the whole “speaking ill of the dead” totally or “being a critic at a time of a national catastrophe” criticism at all really.
Irwin was a very public figure. His pseudo-canonisation was a public event. My main concern here would be the privacy of his family, though the later schlepping of Bindi around the world suggests that may not always have been theirs.
Certainly you might find it easier to get noticed making a statement such as the one she did immediately after the Bali bombings. But as I said, it didn’t stop lots of other opinionators and pollies, and there were elements of exploitation there too. Insofar as it was a public event of importance, putting a contrary view, which can be argued (even if one doesn’t agree with the argument), and I think, expressing aspects of what was subsequently demonstrated to represent a majority sentiment despite the best efforts of John Howard to turn it around, plays a valuable public role. I wonder how committed some of Greer’s detractors are to even a thin notion of free speech.
He’s been badly taken out of context, even used to support a position that is anathema to him, that’s what I’m saying; this is along with the basic factual error. I must admit when I saw that – along with the comments about Katter – I formed the view that the piece is poorly researched and exists mainly to generate confected controversy, rather than make any substantive contribution to debate.
The hysteria is made worse thanks to Greer’s expat, English status: Australians will grab the ring (look at the hysterical, multi-article response in the Australian for one) and get to be ‘wounded’; Greer then gets to be ‘wounded’ in return.
Ok, take that point, SL. But I still don’t think it establishes she’s being disengenuous. Not everyone knows a lot about the Clarence Thomas story. Having said that, if she’s going to write about it, she should find out.
I read Greer differently. As clarification, I only read her essay On Rage and didn’t see her on Q&A. From that alone, I took a particular interpretation of what she was saying. I’m obviously not alone: Tracee Hutchinson had the same reading as I. It may well be that Greer meant something quite different by her essay, but in that case, she needs to revise it to prevent misunderstanding.
My reading was that she was not only explaining indigenous male violence (in my opinion, a perfectly valid explanation of why indigenous society has turned out the way it has), but I also saw her as excusing certain conduct. So she says in On Rage:
I read this as an excuse for violence by indigenous men towards indigenous women who had already suffered violence and rape at the hands of white men, and it made me mad. I also read her comments as a broader sweeping assumption that it was unreasonable to expect indigenous men to contain their rage, and it is thus understandable that violence is perpetrated against women and children. This seemed to remove individual responsibility from the man and make it into someone else’s problem.
I’m not saying that indigenous people have to take individual responsibility for all their problems all by themselves. It’s impossible to resolve these problems without (a) proper government support, resources, health care etc. and (b) community consultation of indigenous communities as to what their needs actually are. The Behrendt piece nicely illustrates that an “individual responsibility” approach which fails to deal with other problems such as health and quality education is destined to fail. But I think that if someone hits his wife (regardless of what colour or ethnicity he is), he has to acknowledge that he is responsible for that action, and that ultimately, he is the only one who can prevent himself from committing future acts of the same kind.
Further I should say that I’m not diametrically opposed to Greer on principle. I take each piece as it comes. I didn’t like her Irwin piece much (too much like speaking ill of the dead before the body has even cooled) but I must confess that I tend to agree with her assessment of Princess Di…
As one of her detractors, Kim, I’ve a very sound notion of it. She has a perfect right to mouth any nonsense she wants and I am perfectly free to to denounce the nonsense she mouths for the nonsense it is. That is free speech, hers and mine. It’s two way street. I wonder how committed some of Greer’s supporters who have trouble with that are to even a thin notion of free speech.
No, Greg M.
Kim is not “biased toward Greer”, she is a balanced, rational, educated and intelligent woman who can recognise the truth when she reads, hears or sees it.
I want to ask certain wolves in sheeps clothing why they feel the need to alibi and obscure the crippling psychic damage done to indigenes by white settlement, and this urge to provide virtual Aztec type human sacrifices to moralistic reductionist blackletter legal interpretations of complex situations.
For example,I see the Sceptic Lawyer has visited the site. She probably recalls my clumsy post to her site where I suggested her naivety. Her response was unequivocal.
But nonetheless she is fundamentally following the Leigh Sales lead in reducing the problem of the NT Intervention to naughty black men being wilfully bad.
The misconception rests on the acceptance the NT Intervention was not first and formost a politically motivated stunt predicated on a smear against black victims male and female, rather than something that occurred out of genuine concern for the weaker members of a dysfunctional sub group. But why have people forgotten The Little Children are Precious” report, or pondered why an effort had not been in the years since Wik and Mabo, rather than the wilfully destructive policies of those largely Howardist years?
There is a clear disagreement between certain bloggers and certain other later-day Rev.Samuel Marsden types, as to comprehension or lack of it, of the severity of damage done to black males as well as other black people. Instead, we get this fierce and terrible middle class hunt for scapegoats based on an unquestioning acceptance of Howardist framing of the issue, as exclusively discrete aboriginal wilfull male naughtiness, and is evidence of the continued avoidance of a recognition of the severe undermining effect of white colonisation right up until now.
Fortunately, Greer, Mark, Kim and others DO recognise an effect of white brutality and neglect in the creation of dysfunctional people and their behaviours, for whom the normal expectations of middle class colonial law might not necessarily be appropriate. It is more likely that these could have applied in the case of the police seagent who was let off after brutally murdering an aborigine at Palm Island.
The Sceptic Lawyer, Albrechtsen-like, dismissed the above as “victimology” in the Legal Eagle thread, but I’d love to see what shape this individual would have ended up in had they had to grow up in some of these chaotic environments, rather than her own probably privileged one.
A bit of humanity, please!
GregM, what I’m suggesting that whatever else “a peculiar piece of filth” might be as a characterisation of Greer’s article, it’s not an argument. It’s obviously very affect-laden.
Wrt to your comment about a critique of that article, of course, I will reserve judgement until you have the chance to write it on the morrow and I to read it. But I would point out two things:
(a) Simply agreeing with John Howard that “the War on Terror didn’t put Australians in danger” is not proving anything – because he had a political barrow to push, and it’s been contradicted by many people who know something about all this without the political baggage of having to justify the Iraq War – most recently, Martin Indyk, for instance;
(b) As I recall, nothing was known about the motives of the Bali bombers at the time.
As you’ve pointed out, Greer’s article was an instant response. So you’d need to remember that it was written contemporaneously and therefore to show that she got things wrong or argue that she did with reference to subsequent events and disclosures proves nothing, because she couldn’t by definition have known any more than anyone knew on 22 October 2002, and anything that transpired subsequently.
Secondly, I’m not sure that op/eds written by academics are necessarily to be judged by academic standards. Partly because they’re opinion, and secondly because of their nature as interventions in current political debates, rather than reports on research written over a long period of time and under the discipline of peer review. I don’t think Greer was writing with her academic hat on (as she is with her work on Shakespeare’s wife, for instance). Now you can of course say that she’s “outside her field” but what I see her as doing in these sort of things is cultural commentary. In other words, I think it’s an intervention by a citizen not from a professorial chair.
LE, thanks for commenting around here! As SL said, we’re getting a bit of blog drift, so I’ll just link to my comment at your place:
http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2008/08/what-has-happened-to-greers-feminism/#comment-13874
… and ask people to read subsequent comments and note that we end up in agreement about most stuff other than Germaine on this occasion!
LegalEagle, rather than reading it as an excuse, why don’t you 1) put it back into the context of the entire article where it belongs, and then 2) attempt to answer the question?
The man in the example couldn’t either. So what’s the current political solution? Take away his alchol, that’ll do the trick! Might even shift the focus from cause to effect…hang on, didn’t Greer make that point a few times earlier in the article? What happens when you ONLY deal with effects?
It’s nothing to do with excusing personal responsibility – it’s about not excusing political irresponsibility. Especially that which, for its own convenience, played the victim cards in the first place.
SL, I don’t think she took him badly out of context at all – citing Thomas invited you to explore the contradictions and nature of the turmoil borne in a man who’s been such a strong and widely recognised advocate of individual responsibility.
I’ll have some fun and suggest the factual error was a clue. Like when the bell rings in Eastwood’s Mystic River to tell you who the murderer was, fifteen minutes or so into the film. But that’s just me
though I think there’s more than one pitfall written into the article.
Kim, Re 67,
The feathered advocate once mediated my way on a discussion some time back involving either Greg or Jack G, I think.
Am also aware that this poster is likely motivated by the plight of the helpless and is likely influenced to passionate advocacy at the thought of the worst of the violence and pain.
The fact that Germs at the age of 70 or so is still capable of getting the establishment’s knickers in a knot, I think says more about the establishment’s crustiness than her crabbiness.
If she had a dick, she’d be getting the VS Pritchett or Naipaul treatment by now.
I don’t agree with everything she says but who else these days is stirring the possum with such worldy and earthy yet bulging cranium style?*
*Graeme Bird and his immediate family are restricted by the Victorian Lottery Act 1996 from responding to this question for profit or gain.
Bob Katter? Base in the NT? For the lack of a pithier answer: “LOL”.
Mark wrote:
“Klaus, thanks for that – I haven’t read either Whitefella Jump Up! or any responses though.”
I was offering my opinion on an essay that I HAD read. My opinion may be based on misunderstandings, general foolishness, ignorance, etc. But I had taken the time to read it. I gave it that respect at least. I thought it was weak.
I read that essay because Dr Greer’s reputation preceded her. I recognise that many writers are “uneven” in their work. Thanks for saying you don’ty think Dr Greer should be immune from criticism, Mark.
It seems to me she is a polemicist, a contrarian, and very active. But I wonder if it’s the tone of her polemic: frequently very personal, if not abusive, which tends to call forth very angry responses? Where someone writing (or speaking) in a more dispassionate tone might not “cop it” so much??? I mean this as a serious question, not as an “attack” on her utterances.
It’s a bit of a problem for public radicals – always has been I suppose – how to speak and be heard ….?? Cheerio.
Ambi, I think that’s a perfectly reasonable opinion. I disagreed with you when you brought in the distinction of serious policy work vs poetics. My understanding was that Greer wasn’t trying to do serious policy work but something quite different, so I didn’t think that particular criticism was sound. I do think that there are other weaknesses in the essay as well, I just don’t think they’re fatal weaknesses. I’m happy to accept that you do.
Somewhat off topic, but I haven’t read one of those ‘Quarterly Essay’ volumes that hasn’t had some weaknesses, although I thought Judith Brett and Paul Toohey did pretty well with the format.
You’re right Klaus,
she was trying to do something different in “Whitefella Jump Up!” and I suppose I was disappointed because I had hoped to see a fresh policy approach from her….. I’m pleased that you’re studying her essay in detail. I must say I was quite surprised to see it had been reissued as a paperback (published in Britain?) sometime later. Yes, many other “Quarterly Essays” have been flawed. I do appreciate their policy of printing several quite lengthy critiques in subsequent issues.
OT, but I think New Zealand has handled indigenous policy much better than Aust over the centuries; many factors working in their favour. Not perfectly, just a bit better. The white population there has, imo, moved closer in its attitudes to a Maori perspective over recent decades. I think so, anyway. If this is partly what Dr Greer wants for Aust, perhaps she might have looked across the Tasman? Cheers.
Paul, probably a fair comment – I do get very cross at the thought of indigenous women and children being ill-treated.
About 10 years ago, I was very close to an indigenous student who had suffered terribly both at the hands of her community and at the hands of the white community. At one point some stupid young fellows from the indigenous community came and trashed her place (cos she’d disagreed with the wrong elder) and she had a nervous breakdown. Therefore, I’m very sensitive to any suggestion that actions such as those undertaken by the lads who wrecked my friend’s place might have some excuse. Yep, there was a lot of rage, but no reason why it ought to be taken out on my friend. Three years later, and she still hadn’t totally recovered.
Greer is absolutely right, so far as she goes, on the basic issue of Aboriginal male rage as the most painful symptom of the social pathologies within Aboriginal communities. I have witnessed it at first hand and it is an order of magnitude beyond the anger expressed or rampages gone on by white settlers.
The rage that Greer identifies is caused by culture shock which triggered a collapse of patriarchy in Aboriginal society. How ironic is that, coming from the world’s most capable critic of that institution!
The culture shock of the new has made traditional Aboriginal ways of life obsolete or extinct. It has destroyed old pro-social rules and unleashed young anti-social males.
We Anglomơrphs have disempowered traditional Aboriginal males from their previous role of top-dogs in this country. They have lost the respect of their women who have paid them back by scorning them and breeding with the conquerors. This dishonour eats away at the core of their identity as male providers and protectors and causes free-floating rage and self-destructive behaviour.
The culture shock has temporal and spatial aspects. The temporal culture shock is apparent in the way that Aboriginal’s pre-modern special nature is misfitted to the white settlers post-modern social structure. The spatial culture shock is obvious in the remoteness of Aboriginal’s rural and regional locations from urban provisions, amenities and conveniences.
The larger the temporal and spatial cultural gap between one way of life and another the more likely that the more primitive and remote peoples will fall by the wayside. And no indigenous community in history has been more primitive in sociological time and more remote in geographical space from its imperial conquerors than the Aboriginals.
The collapse of Aboriginals pre-modern moral and legal restraints and responsibilities has not been accompanied by healthy assimilation to the Anglomorphs modern forms. This has caused a rampant case of anomie in the more vulnerable outback communities. The combination of destroyed rules and dis-empowered males has created a niche for demonic male behaviour – what one might call the Lord of the Flies syndrome.
The rage is triggered by any proximate cause of irritation which reminds males of their social irrelevance. The rage is permitted by the absence of proper law and order which constrains social male-volence. (Is not etymology teaching us something abour anthropology here?)
The prescription for radical culture shock is clear. Number one priority is social cohesion – the state must organise a restoration of law and order and the resurrection of proper respect for authority, primarily male authority. Number two priority is urban consolidation – the state must re-locate younger people into proximity with useful facilities.
Howard’s intervention promotes both social civility and spatial proximity as the way forward for Aboriginals. It has made a decisive break from the failed cultural policies of the past generation, which seems to have been willfully ignorant of the anthropology of human status and progress.
Insofar as I like the ‘Quarterly Essay’ series, it is probably for it’s flaws, I think. It brings out a whole range of things that would probably be edited out of a thorough and long-term approach to the topic under consideration. Some of the essayists are remarkably candid about their prejudices and make little attempt to rationalise them. The shorter time-frame means that that stuff doesn’t get further qualified or removed. Perhaps that should be a warning given to contributors before they agree to write one: you may be laying bare your own assumptions in writing these.
I haven’t looked at any of these MUP little books on big themes yet. Hopefully there’ll be a bit more of the same going on.
Can I say to all those pundits and publishers out there, please can those “little books”! they really give me the shits because there’s nowhere to put them – they don’t sit in the shelf properly due to their size! (I refuse to turf my old Beatrix Potter collection, but still…)
I believe the On Rage article is freely available on the www, I wouldn’t pay Borders money for such a fussily un-storable object.
“Yep, there was a lot of rage, but no reason why it ought to be taken out on my friend.” Is rage reasonable?
Kim writes:
“I think a lot of the tossers who diss Greer just want to make their own little minds seem bigger than they are. Ultimate tall poppy syndrome.”
Then goes on to dismiss GregM’s response as “affect laden”.
I’m speechless.
With respect to Irwin, he was more than the bozo suggested by his public persona. He did a great deal of real conservation work behind the scenes including the protection of vast tracts of brigalow. He could have done the sexy thing and harped on about rainforests, but no, he opted to put his efforts into areas where it was most needed. Greer’s viper-like response to his death was ill-informed and lacking in insight.
With rage?
Commenting, observing not dissing!
Why is that so difficult for some people to read? Not everything has to be some chest beating macho polarised pissing contest. It’s a fair comment, and that’s all it’s intended to be.
I think you’re reinforcing my perception of the gendered aspect of the reaction to Greer.
Meanwhile, in the Strocchiverse:
Meaning what exactly?
Most above posts that are critical of Greer prove the point that Mark was making in the post – all angry negativity that fails to engage with any of the points that she is making, or any of her ideas.
Kim:
http://rofl.wheresthebeef.co.uk/HappycatMonocle.jpg
I can has wartakres sammich?
Nah, FDB, it’s gotta be this bloke.
Does anybody else here suspect that Gino’s seen Mandingo a few too many times?
That’s a grim story, LE.
For me, the challenge lies in understanding how it happens, why and what can be done about it. You actually point to certain externalised universal elements ( think of thuggery in the Balkans, on the West Bank in Palestine/Israel, African dysfunctional post colonial societies, etc ) and strengthen your case. I would agree that there is also a limit, therefore, as to how long decent people can countenance certain behaviours when within eyesight of innocents being damaged.
For me the problem is in deciding when the excuses run out; also to what extent my own responsibilities begin in realife shades of grey situations.
The whole unmanageable mess that has been created by history involving indigenous peopple in this and other societies surely does also involve victimhood and I really beleive many in “she’ll be apples” OZ underestimate our moral and potential material liabilities vis a vis Aborigines.
I think we are a very simplistic people and one day there is just an off-chance that what has happened to Aborigines for two centuries may come back to haunt us, as what goes round eventually comes round and our own “dream time”comes to an end. What form it will take I can’t guess, but heaven help us if our come-uppance is as severe as the Aborigines has been, for they surely can’t have been any worse than us.
“seen Mandingo a few too many times”
I hear there’s going to be an Australian remake/adaptation titled “Man, Dingo”.
Well that’s enuf out of me. Ladies and gentlemen please welcome our next very talented performer…
It is interesting how Germain Greer is badly hated by a large section of Australians. This goes back a long time. I remember in the 80s she was named (by various then local celebrities) as Australia’s most embarrassing woman. I couldn’t figure out why. She hadn’t done anything for a while – why her? One female newsreader naming her such gave a very leafy-suburb, pearl necklace, rounded vowel type bit of condesention viz women being perfectly happy before she came along.
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??????????????????????????????????
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Thing is of that 1960s bunch she probably had the most impact on the world stage (Hughes and Hamilton tying for second place). I tend to think it was a downhill slide after 1970 and I think some of the Freudian excursions in The Female Eunuch are a load of cobblers but it’s still a classic. And she’s been doing what seems to be interesting stuff recently. Haven’t read any and The Boy is ripping of Camille Paglia not that there’s anything wrong with that.
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Over-rated? Probably. But Philip Adams is really over-rated. Let’s pick on him. No really, let’s.
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I reckon Greer courts it tho’. I had the impression she was relishing the creating of a tabloid shitstorm when she slagged of Irwin. She had a point tho’. Irwin was crackers.
# 83 Kim Aug 18th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Kim is being far too charitable attributing this term to the creator of the Strocchiverse. Although the implied snark is pathetic given her failure to make the cut in psephological prediction or anthropological anything.
The term “Anglomorph” was coined by Knopfelmacher to denote the UK and its dominions who more or less pioneered the transition to modernity and, it appears, post-modernity. In that sense “Anglomorphic” does double duty as a concept, denoting both assimilation to an ethnological identity (Anglicisation) and initiation of a sociological process (modernization).
Nowadays Anglomorph would probably be folded into some more abstract term like “developed country”, “OECD nation” or subscriber to the “Washington Consensus”. Pretty much all of these states have been either primarily instigated, invaded or influenced by the UK. Thus Anglomorph now describes any nation state that is composed of “juno-centric” families, catallactic firms and democratic government along the lines of ex-British empire.
I am not fit to lick the boots of Dr K, whose CV included membership of the Communist party during the Depression, a stint on a kibbutz during the proto-Israel period, surviving the liquidation of his entire family in the Holocaust, service in the British Army in North Africa and Normandy (!), witnessing the Bolshevik takeover of Czechoslovaki and coming to prominence in Australian academia during the sixties.
The latter experience he described as a form of “convalescence home”. And having spent a bit of time observing off-duty academics on this site I can see why.
Its interesting to speculate on how he would treat Kim’s light-hearted parody of social analysis. I suspect that, being a more chivalrous chap than me, he would probably treat her gently.
Was he a shoe fetishist, then? Hang on that was Franz K with the recently unearthed pr0n collection…
To attribute modernity and post-modernity to the English speaking world is very disrespectful of many of the contributions to modernity from outside this sphere. Art and Philosophy in the modern age owe a lot to the French, the Germans, the Spanish etc….
I would humbly beg to differ.
Knopfels! Now I really feel old…
Slightly shorter Knopfelmacher:
“Can ethnically diversifying Australia remain anglomorph?”
[Why should it remain 'anglomorph'? Because...]
“…the alternatives are, inevitably ghettoized cultures, permanent strife and eventually civil wars”
“So far there is no evidence that the postWorld War II intake of nonanglomorph immigrants generates opposition to our hegemonially anglomorph culture and political system.”
“Some deviant ethnicity is bound to remain,”
“Occasionally such ethnic diversions can be exploited to subvert our general system.”
“They must be fought, politically, to the death.”
“There can be no reason for deanglifying a country such as this”
[Naturally, who wants "permanent strife"?]
“Anglomorphy as a dominant way of life is good enough where a country is marked or Crowned by it.”
Good stuff Jack. Why do you aspire to lick those boots?
# 86 Lølmorph Aug 18th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Lơlmorphs’s social analysis is as lame and off-mark as his feeble attempts at humour. Incidentally, I note that his comment is not self-identified. Frightened of his boss’s reaction. Thats kind of…small of him, isnt it? It figures.
The reference to Mandingo is apt enough in some way – its obvious that black men bonked white women as payback white men for enslaving them. (Possibly white women bonked black men for much the same reason.) This notion is common enough amongst blacks who like to brag about it.
Blacks took out their rage out directly and physically against whitey in the immediate aftermath of liberalisation (emancipation in the 1860s and integration in the 1960s). But whitey always gets the upper hand, through lynch mobs after the Civil War and maximum security prisons after the Civil Rights War.
But Lơlmorph characteristically gets it ass-backwards in another way. African males have a higher social status than Aboriginal males because of their superior fighting and bonking capacities. SO when they go off the rails they tend to ignore, rather than abuse, their women and children. Back-door men and dead-beat dads.
Also, African males have retained some of their traditional laws and mores evolved in the homeland. Most obviously in religion, music and, in some way, through sporting prowess. Unfortunately in recent times some of their primitive social organization skills appear to have translated into gangsta forms.
So African males have retained some socialstatus and have maintained some social order. This has kept African males in better shape, both psychologically and sociologically, than Aboriginal males who have done neither.
Aboriginal men were neither willing nor able to directly physical challenge whitey either socially or sexually. SO when Aboriginal males were disempowered (lost their top-dog status) and Aboriginal rules were destroyed (lost their law) they turned on the only groups who were lower status than them – their women and children.
Aboriginal women got some payback by bonking lower-status white men. Probably ex-convicts or some such who hung around the camps and traded liquor for sex. Not exactly a novel seduction technique, but hey, we’ve all been there.
Politically incorrect anthropology (is there any other kind?) is not for the faint-hearted. But going by the likes of Lơlmorph, its obvious that politically correct anthropology is for the thick-witted.
# 91 Kim Aug 18th, 2008 at 7:17 pm
SOmetimes I think I take a pun or addiction to rhyming jargon too far. ie “multicultural diversity and sub-cultural perversity”. But then along comes somone like Kim who makes it all worthwhile, reality in some ways getting ahead of figures of speech.
Its sad to see how far the Left have fallen. In my fathers day the modernist Old Left included mighty giants like Solzhenitsyn, Knopfelmacher and Amis, and Dad himself in his parish. (Its no accident that they were all were front-line soldiers.)
But in the past generation the modernist Left underwent a moral disingenuation and intellectual degeneration into the post-modernist New Left. THe Left has shrivelled into something like the midget size of Lolmorph and Kim.
SO its not surprising that the modernist Old Leftists morphed into black-hearted reactionaries. Theres always going to be a flurry of disownership when the sins of the sons are visited on the fathers.
What an unbelievable racist tirade. Can’t you go and hang out at Vdare or some place like that where you’d at least have an echo chamber?
who hung around the camps and traded liquor for sex. Not exactly a novel seduction technique, but hey, we’ve all been there.
Um, no. Speak for yourself, Jack. I suppose we should award some kind of point for TMI honesty though.
Damn, Jack, that’s really special. But I think you need to cite the works of Brown as well as Knopfelmacher.
Lølmorph at 86 – yep
You’re a genius Jack Strochhi! Why has no-one else thought of that? According to you, Aboriginal men just need to learn to fight and “bonk” better. So simple.
Sorry Katz at 93, Jack was right the first time.
> parody
What I love about your delusionary rants, Gino, is the fulsome substantiation with, you know, facts and suchlike. Your anthropology [fully sic] reads like fairy tales for troglodytes, but without the wit and verve.
Are there a lot of fairy tales for troglodytes written with wit and verve?
It’s all relative, Mark. If the Strocchibot measures absolute zero, the only way is up, baby.
# 94 Helen Aug 18th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
You shouldnt. Classics never age.
This maxim goes double for social theory. It is apparent from the complete collapse of anthropology into politically correct balderdash that there has been intellectual retrogress, rather than progress, in the past generation.
The results, presented as ethnic and indigenous social pathologies for the mid-70s through mid-90s period, speak for themselves. That was until Howard introduced some adult supervision over self-appointed self-determinators.
Certainly there are vervey fairy tales for troglodytes. Time for popcorn, I think.
I can see you’ve taken the “show, don’t tell” rule to its extreme, TCHB. Well, seeing as Gino introduced the subject of “backdoor men” back at #97, here’s another fairy tale for ye, ya feckless gobsheen.
mark says:
Correct. Its not all about Greer, although she is a compelling persona. It is about the ideological taboo that she violated when she red-flagged fundamentals.
It is fascinating and inspiring to see Greer, the most incisive critic of settler patriarchy in the post-modernist era, essentially give a defence of indigenous patriarchy in the modernist era. Her argument is analagous to that of the Marxists who defended capitalism in the early modern period as a necessary stage of historical development pre-cursing socialism’s arrival in the late modern period.
Up till now I hadnt bothered reading Greer’s book or even excerpts. The title was enough for me to go on since the rest can be worked out be reference to anthropological theorisation (read Weber, Darwin) and ethnological observation (go North). In any case, every school boy knew this stuff until the recent collapse in intellectual standards in the humanities and social sciences.
Now that the hornets nest is stirred I thought it wise to actually read what she had to say. It turns out that Greer’s analysis is spot on, as far as it goes, and exactly converges on the sexual-racial issue, taboo in more ways than one.
But the indigenous violence problem is deeper and more complex than that. Aboriginal male rage in remote indigenous communitiesstems from social disposession and sexual frustration. They lost their role as protector and providers for their women. It was taken from them, sometimes with the best of intentions, by white authorities.
But Aborìginal male rage against their conquerors was intensified by Aboriginal women’s response. The women want to have kids and they want husbands who are higher-status than themselves (patriarchy is inevitable so women must be hypergamous).
The Stolen Generation were mostly half-breeds who were an issue of such unions. The government kid-napping program was a form of triage, attempting to salvage something from the social wreckage. It was racist alright, more about bringing back the whites rather than breeding out the blacks.
To make matters worse the liberal-Left then moved in with its victimology and its romantic noble savage ideas for self-determination on reservations. Thats when all authority started to lose its grip on power over the aboriginal community. The anomic rot set in. The centre did not hold and the Lord of the Flies began to hold sway.
Its not surprising, in that context, that a serial rapist came to be the head of the Aboriginal peak representative council. So, just as in the Lord of the Flies, Her Majesty’s military forces had to be called in civilise boys gone feral in a remote desert location.
Perhaps, given the cultural gap b/w indigenous and settler societies, it was always going to end in tears. But things might have worked out better had more effort been made to consolidate Aboriginal families into the urban centres, integrate Aboriginal men into the modern work force and regulate Aboriginal communities.
“I think you’re reinforcing my perception of the gendered aspect of the reaction to Greer.”
I think you’ll find most women outside the educated inner city crowds don’t have much time for Greer. Certainly that has been my observation whenever her name is brought up. Steve Irwin would beat Greer hands down in any popularity contest, and this may well be part of the reason for her rage. Germaine just can’t understand why she isn’t loved.
Nonetheless, I’d rate Greer up there in the top dozen intellectuals Australia has produced. It’s just a pity she doesn’t know when to shut her gob.
# 102 Lølmorph Aug 19th, 2008 at 10:36 am
Lolomorph will have to do better than “point and titter” if he wants to make up some of the ground he has lost since he acquired his intellectual disabilities. Exposure to dangerously high levels of post-modernist radiation does terrible things to the impressionable undergraduate brain.
And still hiding behind his nom de pixel. Too ashamed to reveal his true identity, no doubt.
The reference to “delusional” is rich. I would be surprised if Lolomorph, given his friv pose and flip prose, has spent much time visiting Aboriginal settlements outback. And it isnt me who is looking “delusional” now that the popular acclaim and policy success of the Intervention re-confirms old-traditioned wisdom.
Contrary to Lolomorph’s glancing reference to “facts” I have witnessed these events at first hand. Although it is primarily womens written testimony on which I am relying.
As does a person I am very close to who works in this area and has forgotten more about this stuff than Lolomorph will ever learn. (Which, admittedly is not saying much given his willful indifference to the truth.) This person was a real DIY Leftist. (Unlike the Lifer Leftists of the media-academia-bureaucratic-apparatchik complex who make cushy careers sucking off the public teat whilst pretending to care.)
“Isnt it ironic,” as they might say, that po-mo Lefts obsession with “celebrating cultural diversity” so often results in the consolidation of the misery and oppression of women and children. More ideologic, say I. What a relief that now, as the Intervention is beginning to bear fruit, we are putting this disgraceful ideological rabble behind us.
Perverse, roflmorph. Nothing says good taste like a filthy muppet on the end of someone’s fist.
But back to delusionary rants.
101 Nick Aug 19th, 2008 at 10:35 am
Could you please, in the interests of intellectual honesty, point to where I have suggested that “Aboriginal men just need to learn to fight and “bonk” better” to ameliorate their condition? In fairness I always quote an opponents words verbatim when making mincemeat of their argument. Its much more satisfying for me to watch them eat their words to the letter.
FTR, although African men can raise their social status above that of indigenes by out-fighting and out-bonking Caucasian men, I do not recommend this as the best way to invest their resources. The gains are limited and the pains are great. They would be better off going into sales and marketing, using their innate verbal and acting skills to clean up. Lotta money to be made drumming up trade.
Here, for the dwindling number of people on this site interested in literal truth, is my modest proposal for indigenous progress.
I would tack on a third priority: re-integration of Aboriginal men into the commercial workforce. “Sit-down money” and “make-work” are demoralising and fail in the fundamental task, which is re-building Aboriginal mens shattered self-respect and raising their social status.
Fortunately Australia’s richest man, Andrew Forrest, has just made some such proposal and appears ready to back it up with real resources. On the job training would be much better investment in resources than hanging around TAFEs.
This practical stuff, on top of the Intervention, will do much more good than symbolic tokenism of Sorry Days and Reconciliation Weeks. That apologetic Stuff That White [liberals] Like is part of the problem, not solution.
Noyce find, Creepster, but I don’t think you’re trying hard enough. Personally, I think this troglodytic fairy tale fits the bill. Plus, you can tell it’s set in the Strocchiverse because of the dinosaurs, and none of the caveman are black.
“Are there a lot of fairy tales for troglodytes written with wit and verve?”
Well, ‘troglodytes’ wouldn’t be quite le mot juste I suppose, but ya gotta admit, “The Palm Wine Drinkard” and “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” have to count as some kind of fairy tales for… um, what would you say?… folks who, uh, see things… uh, differently.
Then there’s Kinski’s unearthly “All I Need Is Love.” That’s GOTTA count for *something* in this category…
Oh, and Kathy Acker, let’s not forget her…
Greer could have had Strocchi in mind when she wrote about white male rage.
You want a black caveman? One that’s gotta find a woman, gotta find a woman, gotta find a woman?
I’ll sock it to ya.
99 Helen Aug 19th, 2008 at 10:05 am
Helen, you seem like a nice enough person. But if you carry on like a hysterical ideologue then you are destined to endlessly run the same ideological agitator: lather, rinse and repeat cycle until the End of History.
Please do me the courtesy quote my words – out of context is fine! – if you feel you must defame me. And please do not do violence to the language by turning blunt straight talk into a political crime.
“Racism”, so far as I can gather, is now equated with noticing politically inconvenient facts about human nature ie anthropological realism. This makes approximately 99% of humans racist, including most of the most fervent anti-racists on this site (protesting too much…).
I suggest we preserve the term “racism” for social policies, postures and proposals that deliberately privilege or persecute specific biologically-related populations. That would at least catch Hitler, whilst ruling out Darwin from the ideological drag-net.
Anthropology is not for the faint-hearted. Its often a story of conquest and dispossession. That means there will be losers and there is no real way of telling the truth by gilding the lily.
Nor is anthropology for people who refuse to acknowledge that biological identification to some extent conditions sociological stratification, for better and for worse. No doubt this fact is one that racists leap on. It does not make it false.
Denial of this socio-biological brutality is what I call “anthropological delusionism”. Its on a par with “meteorological delusionists” who deny that anthropogenic industrialization conditions stratospheric carbonization.
Its no accident that both forms of delusionism emerged as post-modernism turned most uni-educated persons into amateur spin-doctors, latter to turn pro.
The bullsh*t piled up so fast…you needed wings to stay above it.
Cpt Willard
Tutuola eh Japez? Didyou, like me, first read MLITBOG because of Byrne and Eno?
I quibble with the depiction of hominina taxonomy and culture in that video.
Nice one Liam. That’s a hell of a track – got to try and find me the record now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdB136EFcg4
Moderated
# 114 silkworm Aug 19th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
I make no apologies for my withering scorn and contempt for anthropological delusionists. It is an outrage that there is not more outrage at this professional and political deformation, which causes so much needless suffering and tax-payer waste.
Although I will confess that their Pharasaic posture does raise my blood pressure. There is something about pampered po-mo liberals posturing and pontificating about subjects on which they are clueless that really riles me.
However this is righteous anger, not free-floating rage. If you think mistake my expression of the former then you dont really know the latter.
Interestingly Greer does talk about “white male rage” as described by Bob Katter when talking about his farmer constituency in the outback. Greer makes the black-white parallel explicit in order to generalise her theory:
(I love “women folk”. GG is making a great come-back as an anthropological realist.)
I count the farmers example as a further data pơint to my (spatial and temporal) “culture shock” theory of modernity’s social pathologies.
Farmers have somewhat “pre-modern” cultural aptitudes and attitudes. So not well adapted to the hectic pace of “post-modern” social structural change.
Also, farmers are in remote communities, not well serviced by modern conveniences and amenities. So they have less buffers to cushion the buffeting from change.
Obviously farmers are less temporally “pre-modern” and less spatially “remote” than Aboriginals. Their culture shock is not so violent. Hence their rate of social pathology is lower.
So my theory has predictive legs. (You can perhaps use it to explain why Russia, rather than England, suffered the most traumatic transition to modernity.)
Jack Strocchi Aug 19th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Obviously [he hastened to add, wary for once of over-reaching] culture shock is only a partial explanation of the Russian revolutionary tradition, since unrest of landless Russian serfs is a long way off the rage of dispossessed Aboriginal males.
Still it was no less an authority than Marx who warned about the gap between town and country. (Although he did ridicule the conservative “idiocy of rural life”.)
And Trotsky claimed it was Russia’s backwardness (“the weakest link in the imperialist chain”) that made it a happy hunting ground for political agitators seeking to exploit social unrest.
Kim, you wrote on Sunday night, in response to my comments on Greer’s Bali bombing article of October 2002
I’ve finished the critique but given the amount of nonsense in Greer’s article that I’ve had to rebut it is four pages long. It would not be proper to post anything that long on this thread so I will just have to give a few excerpts from it which capture some of her egregious mis-statements.
Greer writes:
In 1939 Robert Menzies did not declare war on Germany before Britain did. His precise words were:
“Fellow Australians,
It is my melancholy duty to inform you officially that in consequence of a persistence by Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her and that, as a result, Australia is also at war.. ”
There was little if any Irish-Australian opposition to Australia’s involvement in WW2. All the major churches, including the Catholic Church, a bastion of Irish Australians, and political parties, including the ALP, then another bastion of Irish Australians, supported it.
Jehovah’s witnesses and “international socialists” –supporters of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact – did not, but that was about it.
These are elementary points in Australian history. It is inconceivable that anyone who makes any claim to have even a passing knowledge of Australian history, let alone any claim to scholarship, could get them wrong.
Greer writes:
In fact the fear was not that Japan would invade from the north, but the north-east along the Queensland coast, where Japanese troops would have found settled communities and agricultural land upon which to subsist, right down that coast. Hence the Battle of the Coral Sea fought off the coast of Queensland.
Greer then says:
Again a complete and abysmal ignorance of history. The abandonment of the Japanese offensive came with the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Battle of Midway, the Battle of Guadalcanal and the Battle of Papua New Guinea, the first three of which, being American victories, demonstrated to the Australians, at least in respect of the second world war, that when push came to shove they were pretty fortunate to have an outside power to rely upon.
On East Timor she states:
In fact the Americans did provide men and materiel in assistance to the Australian led INTERFET forces. This from World Politics Review, (July 2008):
http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/Article.aspx?id=2461
One would have thought that anyone who has the slightest pretensions to academic credibility could at least get these facts right. The INTERFET intervention was not a secret operation after all.
On the Bali bombing she concludes:
What??? American intelligence allowed Howard to identify the Bali bombers with Al Qaeda??? That is plain weird. It was well known well before the Bali bombing from Singaporean, Indonesian and Australian intelligence services that Jemaah Islamaiyah was connected with Al Qaeda and that they were planning bombing operations against western targets in Indonesia. Howard was by no means the first to identify that and it had already been published in Australian newspapers before the Bali bombing.
I was in Indonesia before and at the time of the bombing and the Jakarta Post was reporting on the efforts of Western diplomats, our own included, to get the then president Megawati, to take the JI threat seriously before the bombing occurred.
I hope there is enough there for you to gain some appreciation as to where my views on her come from of of their solid foundation. She is worse than Pilger.
GregM, please post the rest. Four pages of merciless derision is always entertaining, no matter who the target.
BBB
Thanks for that GregM. I think GregM and Skeptic Lawyer have amply demonstrated that Greer has little respect for facts, abysmal research skills and a prima donna like desire to be the centre of attention. She reminds of that veritable army of retired scientists who are now in the vanguard of AGW denialism. Like them, she is well beyond her used by date.
ps GregM, I’d be grateful if you could send your 4 pages on Greer to allocasuarina.blogspot.com. Cheers.
I think maybe a certain amount of exotica fetishism came into play as well. In both directions.
Black boys are delicious
Black boys fill me up
Black boys are so damn yummy
They satisfy my tummy….
Black girls too. I was with a Jamican lass for too short a time. She was foxydelicious. (Yeah I know, thanks for sharing)
Nice dmolition job GregM. Did Greer really write that nonsense?
However, I can’t let this pass:
These Japanese fleets had no invasion component. The Japanese may indeed have considered invasion of the Australian mainland at a later date. I object to your use of the word “hence”. There was no connection between the location of these particular sea battles and an invasion of the Australian mainland.
Mr Strocchi esq
It is interesting. I don’t think you’re necessarilly making a correct surmisal of what she’s doing however.
.
There’s two ways of characterizing her argument. On the one hand you could say it’s an expression of extreme cultural relativism that’s been the subject of much comment in cultural war talk: she’s saying it’s their culture and I refuse to judge it. This is a kind of guilt ridden irrational post-colonial neurosis.
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The way I read it tho’ is within that tradition of feminism which is neither constructivist nor Roussaeuian, that is, it deals with Nature. As I recall Greer did harbour some of the Roussaeuian tendencies of her generation but she’s Romantic not neo-Calvinist hence she realizes there’s a human animal with a nature. Men have natures and society attempts to curb or channel its wilder aspects.
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All societies patriarchal and otherwise must do this somehow. There are psychological realities to men. One such is the need to prove something. The tribal culture of aboriginal men like any functioning culture must deal with this. To remove the culture hierarchy even a patriarchal one, perhaps especially a patriarchal is to open the lid on a box much worse than Pandora’s.
That’s a spurious analogy and inaccurate. The Marxists believed capitalism was an essential stage. When Lenin grabbed power they jettisoned Marx’s argument. Their trouble was that they were Romantics at heart and chose to jettison Marx’s central thesis which was based on material reality: humans are animals. They ended up thinking they could build a newer better model of human by decree.
.
This has nothing to do with Greer’s argument whatever the truth of its basis.
She did indeed Katz. Here is the link. http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/10/21/1034561443711.html
I’ve got another three pages of demolition if you’d like to see them. She doesn’t get any better.
What do I care if you are ignorant of geography? The Japanese purpose in occupying the Solomon Islands of which Guadalcanal is part, and the reason for the ferocity of the Americans in taking Guadalcanal from them, was that from Guadalcanal the Japanese would have a base to interdict Australia’s sea-lanes with the United States and hence reduce or eliminate it as a base for American military operations in the South Pacific.
With that achieved the option of an invasion of the Australian mainland along its north eastern coast-line would have been available to them at a later time. And of course their fleets had an invasion capacity. How else do you think they got to land on Guadalcanal or at Milne Bay in PNG for that matter? Hot air balloons?
And I am equally unconcerned about your ignorance of the English language.
Interdiction is not the same as invasion.
I don’t dispute your characterisation of Japanese objectives. But as you have acknowledged, neither the Japanese Coral Sea Fleet, nor the Midway Fleet had as their objective an invasion of the Australian mainland.
In fact, although some in the Japanese Navy contemplated invasion (Admiral Yamamoto opposed the idea) of the Australian mainland, the High Command of the Japanese Army, notably General Tojo, specifically and categorically ruled out invasion of the Australian mainland.
Katz, your problem is one of lack of comprehension (not for the first time) and as a consequence of petty and ill-conceived nit-picking.
What I said was:
The Japanese Coral Sea Fleet assembled off the Australian north eastern coast, not its northern, nor its north-western, coast where Greer’s assertion that:
would have had validity. Off the north eastern coast it does not. At the time there was a genuine fear of invasion from the north east. The Japanese military were not in the habit of disclosing their intentions to their enemies so it was not until after the war that the Australian people were to become aware that those intentions were of interdiction rather than invasion.
Re: the yes-or-no of Japanese intent to invade Australia: I’ve heard it asserted that the Japanese gov’t went to the trouble of designing and printing up new Australian money for the day when it was controlled by Japan, which implies the intention at some point in the future. Does anyone know more about this (or whether it’s true)?
GregM, the paragraph in question displays a fatal illogicality.
As I said my objection was to your use of the word “hence”. Why? That should be clear to most, but perhaps not to you.
Your paragraph begins with a discussion of “fears”. Whose fears? Possibly Australian civilians, possibly Australian decision makers. Probably you are not referring to Japanese fears. (You can disconfirm this if you wish.)
Then the fatal use of the word “hence”.
The Japanese had the initiative at this time. They decided where this battle would be fought as part of their Operation Mo. By using the word “hence” you are alleging that Japanese campaign plans were determined by Australian fears of a non-existent plan to invade mainland Australia. This is bizarre.
Are you saying that if Australians and Americans believed that the Japanese did not intend to invade Australia, they would not have bothered to fight the Battle of the Coral Sea?
If you had used the word “coincidentally” rather than “hence”, I would have found nothing particularly objectionable in your paragraph.
Do you stand by your use of the word “hence”?
I’m not sure that the Australian people ever really became aware of that, or if they did they’ve forgotten it. Viz the comments of Wing Commander Ron Usher, the national secretary of the Battle for Australia Commemoration National Council, on the new Battle for Australia Day (1st Wednesday in September):
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/06/26/2286362.htm
And I doubt he’s alone in those sentiments. But hopefully Peter Stanley’s new book, Invading Australia: Japan and the Battle for Australia, 1942, will do something to change that.
By all means, let’s have an almighty shitfight about how to use the word ‘hence’ properly. Extra points for the first person to employ the phrase ‘read for meaning’.
BBB
GregM, Australian military history is something I know very little about, but on the basis of the odd claims about Menzies and the attitude of Irish Catholics, I’m happy to accept your word that there are egregious errors in that article.
I would point out that very few people are polymaths, and Greer may well have been commissioned to take a particular angle by an editor (it’s the way a lot of op/eds take shape) and done a sloppy job on her historical research. However, that’s not to excuse her here – it would be more appropriate to refuse such a commission, particularly as deadlines for such articles usually don’t permit people to research properly things they don’t know about.
However, while it may be that we can put that together with other things like the Katter/NT reference and reasonably conclude that she is sloppy with some facts, it remains to be demonstrated that she knows nothing about anything and it doesn’t really show she’s on shaky ground with the core arguments in On Rage, though it’s not particularly a good look for her credibility.
I also think the reaction to her points about the causes of dysfunction – some of which I’ve drawn out in my interchanges here and on LE’s blog with LE – is something telling in and of itself.
I’m also still unsure, just by the by, that you’ve answered my question as to why you regard that article as a “peculiar piece of filth” which seems to have an emotional resonance far beyond a concern for factual accuracy.
Your statement demonstrates a farcical incomprehension of military reality and WW2 history. The Japanese fought the Battle of the Coral Sea because that’s where the US Navy was at the time. You fight your enemies where you find them and the US Navy was in the Coral Sea and threatening the Japanese Operation Mo. They had to fight them where they were threatening that operation and therefore they had no choice in where the battle was fought.
Next you’ll be telling us that the Japanese, holding the initiative at the time as you tell us, decided where the Battle of Midway was to be fought. Despite all the evidence to that the Americans used Midway Island as a lure to trap the Japanese navy.
Keep posting. You are a source of comic relief. What more can I say?
You ignorance, evidently, knows no bounds.
The major American asset was the aircraft carrier Yorktown. On 27 April 1942 the Yorktown was being repaired in Tonga.
This refit was interrupted by intelligence of Operation Mo.
Tonga is about 2000 km from the site of the Battle. It took more than a week of speedy sailing to interdict the Japanese fleet.
The Battle was fought on 7 May.
The Lexington sailed in directly from Pearl Harbor.
These two carriers weren’t loafing about in the Coral Sea as you seem to imagine. They had to hustle there at full speed to counter the Japanese initiative.
Are you frequently troubled by wish fulfilment fantasies?
Kim, the whole article is full of egregious errors and not just about Australian military history. These are not just “odd claims”. For the reasons I have given I have listed less than a quarter of them. I will be most happy to list the rest to demonstrate what an apostle of untruth and mendacity Germaine Greer is. It goes far beyond egregious errors in military history, about which Menzies’ declaration of war and Irish-Australian attitudes to WW2 are not part, by the way. They are just part of the general political history of Australia about which I am surprised that you, as an interested and involved Australian citizen, are not aware.
As to it being a “peculiar piece of filth” perhaps I should publish the rest of my critique to demonstrate its malice (and I don’t buy for a minute the argument that she had just done a sloppy job on her historical research; she is a controversialist and was looking for a controversial sensation on the bodies of our Bali dead) and then let you reflect upon its date of publication just 10 days after the Bali bombing, when our nation was in trauma, to allow you to comprehend why I think it is a peculiar piece of filth. Perhaps, though, to be more accurate, and to satisfy our resident self-appointed, though thoroughly inept, pedant, I should have said particular rather than peculiar.
GregM, I think you’re misreading what I said. I said “odd” because it’s really quite weird that someone would make errors like that. I’m well aware they’re false claims – perhaps that was obscured by my wording.
I’ve already dealt with the “trauma” argument which I don’t accept, and what I was really looking for was a response to what I said about that.
Kim, the fact that you don’t accept my argument about “trauma” is your problem and not mine. It just means that we have different expectations of human decency.
But what you have asked me to respond to is, I understand, this:
In your first paragraph you are off into the world of hyperbole that you accuse me of. It’s not a matter of a simple choice between Greer’s malicious filth and the government approved line. There is a vast area between them and there was plenty of commentary published at the time that was critical and intelligent and incisive that certainly did not toe the government approved line in any way.
In the second paragraph there is the argument, carefully hedged with the words “and not one I’d endorse in toto” to which you appeal for my cosideration. What is that argument? How factually based is it? What part of it (for you don’t endorse it in toto, as you have said) that you do endorse?
When you have identified the argument I will go back to my critique and look for that part of it that addresses that argument and post it.
Then we will see who is using hyperbole and put downs and who is being rational.
GregM, there’s no need to take this personally. I’m interested in what it is about Greer that causes people to get het up, not in critiquing individuals.
As I read that article, as I said before, the argument that Australia ought to avoid “foreign entanglements” because we’re unable to effectively defend our territory without military alliances which imply a quid pro quo of fighting in causes we really have no stake in is an isolationist position which is not without precedent in Australian culture and public debate. The converse position – put by John Howard – that we need to place our chips on the US alliance in return for a quid pro quo is well known. She also represents a position which was widespread at the time – that participation in the so-called War on Terror rendered us less safe. The statement about the goals of terrorism – taken generally – also seems to me to be a justifiable one.
I’d appreciate it if you didn’t imply that I have less “human decency” than you. I’ve made a case that public dissent at a time of trauma is justifiable. It does seem to me to be the logical extension of your argument that people should refrain from all political discussion at such times, which is untenable.
Kim, your response deserves more consideration than I can give it tonight so it will have to wait for tomorrow.
However I don’t think that you have any less “human decency” than I have. There is no way I would have any reason to believe that. I have read your posts over many years now and you have always come across as a decent, sincere and good-hearted person.
What I said was that your expectations of human decency, in others by necessary implication, is lower than mine. That is a very different thing.
Thanks, GregM, I very much appreciate the clarification and your kind words.
Let me respond to Kim’s question: “what it is about Greer that causes people to get het up?”
The answer is Greer’s modus operandi. She barges into a controversial area that is often light years removed from her field of acknowledged academic expertise (remember, she is a Professor of English Literature, not of anthropology, sociology, or military history).
Then, she lays down the law. She does not express herself with any tentativeness — as people who are operating out of their area of expertise would be well advised to do. No, Greer tells it like she sees it. And if it ruffles the feathers of those who ARE genuine experts in the field (like, in relation to indigenous affairs, Professor Marcia Langton), well, Greer doesn’t give a damn.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24202631-7583,00.html
Then it often transpires that there are egregious errors of fact and/or logic in her arguments — as GregM has shown in that piece written after the Bali bombings. (For so many errors in such a short essay, it must surely deserve a place in the Guinness Book of Records.)
If presented with any criticism, she gets all narky and exasperated with those shallow interviewers who just don’t get what she’s saying. Geoff Honnor’s comment earlier in the thread perfectly nailed Greer’s carefully-crafted public persona.
Now this often makes good theatre — her frustration is flamboyant and often amusing — and so the media is always keen to interview her (although it can’t be much fun for the unlucky interviewers themselves).
Of course, to keep this process going, Greer must regularly produce “provocative” works on controversial topics. And thus the cycle continues.
Oh, if only those whose area of expertise is not English literature would heed those wise words.
Btw, I bought Greer’s book today so expect a review soon.
I think a comparison of GregM and John Greenfield’s contributions to the thread show the contrast between the two ways of engaging Greer’s scholarship (or “scholarship”, if you prefer, GregM). On the one hand we have GregM ruthlessly attacking the content; on the other hand you have Greenfield calling her a termagant and a bint and saying her ideas are wrong because she doesn’t like men.
Sadly the media in general prefer to take the Greenfield approach to her, and they do so regardless of whether the content is egregiously wrong (a la the piece GregM criticizes) or quite straightforward (a la her piece on that Irwin wanker). This is a sure sign, I think, that they have an antipathy towards her which way exceeds what she deserves. And no amount of cogent criticism of her less well-constructed works will serve to justify that rage – especially when you compare the way she is treated with the way women like Paglia and Roiphe are.
Would you like me to fact-check it for you, Kim? I am sure Greer hasn’t.
Jack, I see your knowledge of anthropology is the reason for your victories.
This is a justifiable conclusion. Indeed, at candid moments, even Howard government ministers acknowledged the truth of this insight.
But a justifiable conclusion is never actually justified unless a logical and factually correct argument supports it.
Greer’s Bali piece is a farrago of nonsense and a disgrace.
How is Greer allowed to commit serial disgraces? What Paulus said.
Katz, you can’t indeed have logic and fact without following strict steps of argument.
Here are some lessons we can all follow.
FWIW, I only caught that episode of Q&A last night and I agreed with just about everything Greer had to say and although she can do the hysterical thing a bit too much I thought she was pretty classy. Bob Carr made a few good points (surprisingly) but Sheridan on the other hand…
And, speaking of classy, Haiku, you can’t touch this.
Classy and anglomorphic? I think Australia’s own fillum industry has that one beat.
Su -
Indeed.
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On Legal Eagle’s thread viz this topic Skepticlawyer mentioned the Australian reluctance to accept eccentricity or heresy amongst it’s intelligentsia. I think there’s a particular resistance to brassy broads like Paglia or Greer in this country and this is reflected in the fact that Australians don’t take pride in Greer the way we do of other succesful ex-pats like Robertson, Kidman, James, Hughes, Jackman, Blanchett etc etc.
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Hughes is likewise a bit on the nose altho’ not as much an object of hatred. Could a common factor be that both Greer and Hughes have the temerity to criticize the country of their birth?
Speaking of Australia’s fillum industry, what could be more appropriate on this ‘ere thread than a slice of Aunty Jack? In black & white, naturally…
I perused the book a bit last night. I wanted to know where she was coming from in the context of the social constructivist v sociobiologist spectrum of argument insofar as this manifests in feminist polemic. I was pleased to see that Dr Greer addresses natural processes as significant in understanding gender issues.
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It’s been a while since I’ve read her. Didn’t know what she thought these days. And I’d forgotten how well she writes. It’s a pleasure reading her.
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I don’t believe she’s excusing the violence of Aboriginal men so much as explaining it.
In answer to Jack Strocchi (who always refuses to take me on) and his assertion that she’s arguing that the deprivation of Aboriginal men’s patriarchal priviledges have led to this appalling situation –
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Bollocks!
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Really sir. Read the bloody book. She’s says no such thing. Her strategy is to explain current violence as a product of historical nefarities and sociobiological realities. Apart from the fact that she has the chutzpah to remind Australia that its history is pure as the driven slush it’s actually quite ‘right-wing’. Academically speaking.
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It’s simply amazing how many people express comprehensive opinions on this book without reading it.
# 152 Nemesis Aug 20th, 2008 at 9:36 am
My knowledge of anthropological principles is not much more than that of my Celtic grandmother who, god bless her, never bothered mincing words surveying her domain around Carringbush. All I do is go back to the 19th classics in order to give the more sensible folk wisdom a general theoretical gloss.
Knowledge of anthropology is not necessary for better social policy. All that is required is some common sense practicality and a uncompromised political interests.
But ignorance, indifference or inimicality to realistic anthropology amongst the so-called “indigenous policy and research community” has a tendency to increase the frequency of child rape. Call me old-fashioned but I dont think that this practice advances the interests of indigenes.
Over the past generation persons much like yourself have dragged anthropology backward into a kind of epistemological black hole. Knowledge is sucked in and disappears (pee-cee) but nothing enlightening is ever emitted (po-mo). So my “victories” are nothing to crow about.
Still, it would be heartless and insensitive of me to blame you for your intellectual disabilities. Exposure to damaging levels of po-mo radiation plus abuse of the usual substances inflicted irreparable damage to your impressionable undergraduate brain.
Of course running the indigenous activist industry has advanced the interests of indigenous activists. The success of the Intervention – which represents the anti-thesis of everything promoted by the liberal-Left over the past generation – means that this “bunch of people flying business class around Australia” have few victories to celebrate.
WHY YOU SHOULD BE A CONSERVATIVE
by D.C. Stove
Proceedings of the Russellian Society 13 (1988)
Jack -
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I’d find it easier to take your assertion of what is and is not needed for the development of good social policy if you had the decency to apologize for issuing a nefarious summary of a book you didn’t read.
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I come from a long line of posh Gaels and the word honour comes to mind.
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And interesting that an advocate of sociobioligical approaches believes one has much of a choice in political oreintation.
# 161 Adrien Aug 20th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
I plead guilty to the charge of “express[ing] comprehensive opinions on this book without reading it”. Just going on half-remembered snatches of conversation overheard in crowded cafes plus some quotes plucked out of context. I have already made a full and frank confession here .
I am not entering a plea on the lesser charge of “always refuses to take [Adrien] on”. If I had to answer every challenge thrown down on this blog I would not have much time for that pale imitation of virtual life in the real world.
Adrien says:
THere is no contradiction b/w my “culture shock” theory and Greer’s “indigenous male disempowerment” theory. In fact they are complementary.
The culture shock of conflict b/w the pre-modern natives and post-modern settlers caused a collapse in indigenous males Alpha social status and eventually the indigenous community’s social structure. The Commonwealth’s welfare and warfare state re-inforced the usurpation of the indigenous male role. Males who are disconnected from their patriarchal role as protectors and providers become literally unhinged.
Women have an instinctive urge to “marry up”. So the demotion of indigenous males led to the disaffection of indigenous females from their natural breeding partners. Many Aboriginal women took to “sleeping with the enemy” (which naturally led to the problem of half-castes and “stolen generations”).
David Foster’s “A plea on behalf of Eros” sees the upside of this process. But the down side was that indigenous males, already prone to demoralisation and dissipation through substance abuse, reacted violently to this final cut to their already shattered self-esteem.
Greer’s book, as you concede, is implicitly “right wing” (as if this makes it axiomaticly wrong!). Her assumption that Aboriginal men have presumptive “ownership” of Aboriginal women is blatantly patriarchal. How else do you explain her use of the term “stolen…womenfolk”.
If my theory is not a recognition of “historical nefarities and sociobiological realities” then nothing is. And it is consistent with, indeed implies, Greer’s analysis of the European destruction of indigenous patriarchy.
No Adrien the reason that she is, to use your words “an object of hatred” though a better expression would be an object of contempt, is not that she has the temerity to criticize the country of her birth. It is that she slanders it.
I have demonstrated her modus operandi (in small part; I have hardly scratched the surface) in my post critiquing her Bali piece above. She fabricates transparent falsehoods to advance her arguments. Of course her hope is that the gullible will accept every fraudulent word of hers as the truth without bothering to check her bogus assertions.
Geoff Honnor and Paulus have cogently explored her sad motivations.
She appeals to the less intelligent who are used to taking the word of whoever is their chosen guru without rising to the challenge of inquiring after the veracity of her assertions and critically analysing the soundness of her arguments. And she has an audience among those decent, sincere and good-hearted people who really wish well for the world but who just don’t have the independent intellectual capacity to work out for themselves what they opinions they should hold on the basis of verified assertion and sound argument.
As Katz has so correctly said a justifiable conclusion is never actually justified unless a logical and factually correct argument supports it.
Greer does not expect of you that you work out for yourself what is a logical and factually correct argument. She has a lesser standard. Just accept her “insights”. Don’t do the hard yards. Don’t think for yourself.
Someone else will do it for you.
# 163 Adrien Aug 20th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
My “assertion of what is and is not needed for the development of good social policy” amounts to the restoration of law and order, the re-location of remote communities into urban centres and the re-integration of Aboriginal males into the paid work force. Its not rocket science.
Adrien says:
I think my summary, nefarious or not, does justice to her theory in so far as it can be gleaned by sound bites. So I dont feel under any cbligation to apologise.
No doubt my shameful lack of contrition is due to my disgraceful Celtic-Italic heritage. Who somehow came to rule your “posh Gael…line” on more than one occasion.
Adrien says:
The indigenes dont have much choice, as they are a subject people. THe same cannot be said for elite white liberals who should have known better.
I actually try to do the hard yards Greg. It’s harder than you’d think. I’ll read your critique with interest tomorrow. Greer might be ’slandering’ Australia in On Rage but she’s not doing it the way commentators have said she is. (Jack Strocchi still waiting).
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And she just because she’s ’slandering’ Australia doesn’t mean that my views on the reason that she is hated here are incorrect. How many of those who hate her do the hard yards?
Harking back to thread topic, anyone watch Red Kezza’s show tonight with the ubiquitous Tracee Hutchinson doing a skit on “Koori courts” in Victoria?
A possible scenario for the outworking of issues discussed here?
Apparently these courts more or less sift the wheat from the chaff as to the huge number of Aboriginal cases coming to court, in effect offering counseling rather than incarceration for minor offenders, where it seems likely to do more good.
If the claims earnestly proffered are to be beleived, serial offenders and serious cases can still be approached in a ‘meaningful’ way, as to the full weight of the law.
I’ve backed Greer against her critics, as to any minimising of the effect and culpability of white racism and colonisation on Aboriginals , but for heaven’s sake, I don’t necessarily agree that chronic or gratuitously brutal offenders should be avoiding accounting for themselves, just to keep offenders of a certain colour at an artificial low as per jail population.
There comes a time when others have to be protected and that’s where I’d agree with Legal Eagle/ Scepticlawyer, as to their trajectory.
From an indigenous perspective (often missing in these debates) I concur with others here who have pointed out that many have misunderstood GG’s key thesis, that rage needs to be understood in its entirety. No it is not a means of justifying violence (as Langton’s rebuttal of GG”s essay claims). See: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24202631-7583,00.html
Since Pearson began playing Sigmund Freud for the edification of all that read the Australian and went about inventing a whole new set of psychometrics about us – these pathologies have become the norm and have to dominated and peppered all public debate about us and on our behalf.
In the manufacture of orthodox discourse a new glossary of terms and phrases have attached themselves to understanding Aboriginal people as being the bearers of “welfare mentalities, dysfunctional behaviour and all sorts of culturally justified explanations about and for our benefit to understand ourselves (apparerently). These ways of knowing us as subjects are now accessible to anyone with an opinion on Aboriginal people and affairs. The likes of Helen Hughes and others who have spent less than 5 minutes in our company can be instant experts.
For me Greer puts forward a more plausible analysis of ‘our dysfunction’ that illicit its power not just from us but at the interface of relationships between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australia.
No she is not attempting to justify violence against our women but rather to understand how this rage comes as innate and because of the history we all share.
Can’t be government, must be the grog!
“No doubt my shameful lack of contrition is due to my disgraceful Celtic-Italic heritage. Who somehow came to rule your “posh Gael…line” on more than one occasion.”
Its beautiful in its kookiness really. But no matter how lovely, you do not get to claim points for the Roman conquest of Britain. You are not a direct descendent of the Romans who invaded Britain Jack – your ancestry no doubt being of a more modern and pedestrian kind. Your ancestors movements across the globe were not at the behest of Caesar, but more likely due to the lack of work in post World War II modern Italy, having been humiliated out of existence by the americans around 1943. It was us Italians that surrendered Jack. So at least half of you should bow to the British gaels who beat your Italic arse. just sayin…
But, if you insist, what the hell, its LP after all – if you must elide modern history and return to an age where you can accommodate your visions of yourself in a short metal skirt and mohawk helmet, then at least make it worth it. Why not do what other kooky Romans do and claim a direct line of descent from the Roman Gods while you are at it. Perhaps Hermes. I can see the scarf round your neck now. Fetching. Now run Jack – like the wind, run like the wind. The skirt – it flies up splitting light into a hundred pieces, the scarf – it flashes continental style. Nothing like an “Italic” when it comes to fashion sense.
I see that Liam and Fyodor have once again disgracefully derailed a thread. Let’s bring try and bring it back OT, OK?
Now, about Imperial Japanese Navy strategy during the time of the Battle of the Coral Sea. There was none. On of the reasons the Allies beat the Axis powers, aside from the vast US industrial giant being wakened, was cross-forces and cross-country theatre command, something the eternally internally feuding Japanese and German armed forces never worked out.
I trust this puts this myth of Germaine Greer as a flawed carrier group commander to rest, once and for all.
Y’know Jack S does make some good points, albeit in his usual windy “why use one clear sentence when four pompous paragraphs will do?” fashion.
“The culture shock of conflict b/w the pre-modern natives and post-modern settlers caused a collapse in indigenous males Alpha social status and eventually the indigenous community’s social structure.”
Yep, I’d ride with that.
But then as usual, Jack goes and spoils it all by saying something stupid like:
“Knowledge of anthropology is not necessary for better social policy.”
“But ignorance, indifference or inimicality to realistic anthropology amongst the so-called “indigenous policy and research community” has a tendency to increase the frequency of child rape.”
So anthropology is only a useful tool when Jack wields it? Realistically?
“Celtic-Italic heritage.”
From those wonderful people who brought you the the IRA and the Mafia. Hey don’t look at me. Jack started this inherent racial and cultural traits thang.
“So, just as in the Lord of the Flies, Her Majesty’s military forces had to be called in civilise boys gone feral in a remote desert location.”
“Called in to civilise”? “Remote desert location”? That’s another book Jack that you should actually read before employing it in argument.
Truce moment. Congratulations on your wedding Jack. No matter what’s said online, I have no doubt you will be a good man there for a great woman, for better or worse.
OJSattt:Omlosms Aug 20th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
Possibly, but the ođds are against it. The Italian side of my family hail from Romagna. The conscientious editors spell it out for those who are a bit etymologically challenged:
The male side of the family have all got wickedly beaked or bridged honkers. Maybe we are related to Red Indian braves. I wish!
OJSattt:Omlosms says:
Grand-dad spent WWI as an Alpini. His “movements around the world” were largely spent dangling at the end of a rapelling rope in the process of monstering Austrians.
The notion of “us Italians” was not particularly apt for those crossed by the Gothic line. Dad became a partisan after Mussolini fell, ordinanced by the OSS. Hardly a sign of being “humiliated out of existence by the americans around 1943″.
I dont know what your father did during the war. But no “British gaels beat [JS pater's] Italic arse”. Although late in the piece a battery of Kiwi gunners did flatten his village with an unnecessary and stupid fire mission against some Wermacht die-hards.
He emigrated to AUS in 1954, when the European Economic Miracle was well underway. I think he just got rabbit in his heels and was looking to have a bit of a holiday in the sun.
As for the Scots-Irish side of my family, well, dont get me started…
Actually, Nab, what I loved about Gino’s last sprays was this pearl:
I have this vision of Gino’s gran as the Margaret Mead of Caringbush, dispensing deeply erudite wisdom on native sexual practices to an impressionable young Strocchinino.
So, in sum, what our unlearned pontificator is saying here is that because he hasn’t read the book, don’t know much about anthropology, knows someone who saw an aborigine once AND had a grandmother who knew Caringbush moderately well we should all take his advice ["RESPECT TEH AUTHORITAH!"] seriously.
Best. Argument.
ForFrom. Authority. Evah.Nice place, Romagna – great food. In point of fact, however, it’s arguably no more “Roman” than any other joint in Western Europe. In recorded history, it was first inhabited by the Etruscans [who really are quite faskinating], who founded Bologna (Felsina, in their language), before being overrun by celtic tribes, e.g. the Boii (from which the modern name of Bologna is derived), in the 4th C BCE. It wasn’t conquered by the Romans until quite late in the Republic, and resided within the province termed by them “Gallia Cisalpina”, or Gaul-this-side-of-the-Alps. You come from the wrong side of the Rubicon, Gino.
They’re a wierd mob in Carringbush. A suburb, if I recall, which was itself Roman—at least Roman à clef.
As I’m assuming it’s another book you haven’t read, I’ll recommend Power Without Glory to you, Jack, it starts with an entrepreneur bribing the cops, has political fistfights, gambling, Irish Catholic guilt and features a good flogging. You’ll love it.
I’m sure this “your ancestry no doubt being of a more modern and pedestrian kind.” was written in jest, but HOW could it be?
The ancestors of Gino surely didn’t come into being ‘ex nihilo’, say during the Italian Renaissance as accomplished painters, or during Garibaldi’s campaigns as accomplished brigands?
I reckon some of his ancestors were damn ancient. Like mine and yours. And as we delve back into the mists of time, and see a smaller and smaller human population, I’m almost certain at least one of HIS is also one of MINE.
Heavens to Betsy, thank you nabakov!! at 10.45pm, for bring the thread back onto its true topic: the Imperial Japanese Navy circa 1940
Yes indeed, Fedor Imperator. I can also imagine that the practices of barbaric tribes would have made an impression.
Yes Nabs. Japanese governance revolved around the Army and the Navy fighting over access to the Emperor and over contending interpretations of his head movements when various proposals were put to him.
Like the Russians currently in Georgia, the Japanese had little idea of what to do with their conquests.
Nevertheless, Operation Mo did have an identifiable and achievable tactical objective — the capture and garrisoning of Port Moresby. As it turned out, much of the fighting in PNG was incidental to the outcome of the Pacific War. However, an operational Japanese base at Port Moresby established in mid 1942 would have been an inconvenience.
And interdiction of Operation Mo served as a convenient beginning of the process of attrition of Japanese naval assets.
A spot of counterfactual history here:
Germaine Greer’s talents could have been put to excellent use during the Pacific War. As a coast watcher she would have dared any would-be Japanese invasion force to pit themselves against the murderous wilderness of the Australian continent.
The Cassandraesque performance of the formidable Greer would have forced the invaders to withdraw in despair.
Rage is an accumulation of frustrations and social injustice!!!
Germaine is perfectly in tune with the society of today.
When you repeatedly offend people, insult their intelligence and treat them with disrespect, you can expect nothin but extreme rage which produces undesirable results.
Teenagers and so called “Terrorists” resort to violence as a form of expressing their rage. We need to address their needs and determine the cause of their frustrations instead of marginalising them.
That’s right, Kay, don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.
Jack, dude, I love your work on Romagna Emilia. By that estimation everyone in Italy is a descendent of the metal skirted ones. And putting this gently now: Becoming a partisan AFTER they strung up the tattered Duce and Clara is kind of like joining the communist party after the revolution. Its not surprising the Kiwis gunned down your island home.
On gli Alpini. My grandfather was being a stretcher bearer on those them there alps while your mob adjusted their their feathered caps and lederhosen by his recounting. Nice outfits though. Una’s Austrian Restaurant in Darlinghurst has fine waiters who dress similarly.
Hey, steady on, you go too far. The Kiwis were no doubt aiming at the Germans; it’s not like the Italians were much chop at fighting. That’s why Italian women were selling sex to the Anglomorphs for booze…oh, hang on: wrong stereotypes. Sorry, deepest apologies – my bad.
I just love these uniforms. Like I said, Italic style. Cant beat it.
http://www.truppealpine.it/Mulo_file/Alpini%20con%20mulo.jpg
Check the alpini uniform link above Fydor. With outfits like that, they made love, not war dude. The interest in the donkey worries me though.
You want FEATHERS, TSSoICR? You can’t HANDLE FEATHERS!!!.
Forebears? you mean Strocchi is descended from the litter of four alpine bears???
Now you got me really worried, and if i call out “Head for the hills!” you’ll misunderstand
….. and were those four bears skinned? Are those the four skins so proudly displayed at Museo d’Alpini?
And don’t forget what must surely be the most splendidly attired policemen on the planet: the Carabinieri, seen here in formal dress:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/19/101078782_8d9d0f46b8.jpg?v=0
I love the way they haven’t forgotten their light cavalry origins, and still wear cloak, riding boots, spurs and sabre!
P.S. They have magnificent automobiles too, as you would expect from Italians.
http://www.boreme.com/boreme/funny-2008/little-carabinieri-p1.php
*bonus!*
Hirsute, I wouldn’t display your four skins in public. It’s not done.
Ah, the Italian sense of costume: is there any problem it can’t solve?
but, they’re in a simply darling little Museo, in that wonderful town, near the trattoria, across from the Holy Sepulchre of the Sacrificed Virgins. Why can they not display them (I hear myself cry)? They are the one certain link between that benighted region, and the blameless and famous Count Strocchi of far-off Australia.
Nope, not for these carabinieri. The high heels and makeup are a nice touch.
Maybe the next generation of army uniforms will have the super low slung “waist” band, similar to the contemporary jean. Then you’ll have a return of the crack regiment
The crack regiment. Those were the days, eh? The old trouser blunderbuss. “Don’t fire until you see the ****** of their a****, men!”
From feminists and angry black men, to troglodytes and backdoor bandits, to the Imperial Japanese Navy, to sexy Carabinieri and now builder’s crack.
This thread’s over, man. Tune in next week.
I love it when the boys get silly. When they’re away, they’re away all the way.
Interview with Germaine on Channel 10’s 9am this morning…
[link]
Jack Strochhi -
Um no. The Romans conquered the South-East bit of the island (and France and Spain of course). Most of my heritage goes back to the Highlands and Ireland. No wogs there. However there is a line going back to Brittany. Nominally the Romans conquered that, but, as we know from Asterix comics, they actually didn’t.
I reckon you’re the kind of guy that’d rather eat his own guts and ask for seconds rather than apologize. Am I right?
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You have been putting forth what appears to be an entirely fictitious version of Greer’s argument. Your excuse is that it does justice insofar as its gleaned from soundbytes. In other words you’ve read some columnist’s
deliberate distortioninterpretation of On Rage and proceeded to repeat it like the sheep in Animal Farm. I don’t care if you got it from somewhere else. If you persist, or refuse to reconsider your position, even after it’s been demonstrated to be false, then your behaviour is dishonest, dishonourable and a major cause of malfunction in modern democratic culture..
PS your solution to the Aboriginal problem is actually the problem. The problem isn’t the Left or Right and their legacies of batshit policy. The problem is white people think they know what’s best for black people and never listen to ‘em. (What ever you do, don’t mention the genocide. I did once but I think I got away with it).
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How ’bout this: shut-up and listen.
its interesting isn’t it, when challenged with thinking about Aboriginal problems many default to their own insecurities about being white. and so it goes
Um no. The Romans conquered the South-East bit of the island (and France and Spain of course). Most of my heritage goes back to the Highlands and Ireland.
So, Iberian celt?
Yes Freddy Frog, I read somewhere that no-one does identity politics like “anglo/celts” – they’re obsessed with it! Truer quote was never quoted. Sadly though, I have completely lost that reference so I do not know who said it.
Hmm.Just realised I’ve ascribed publication (including elsewhere) of this thread to Kim, on the basis of her enthusiastic and sane contributions to it, whereas the original credit should go to Mark.
It’s important.
This is a well framed intro to a serious issue and credit where credit is due.
Great work Nik and freddy frog.
Germaine Greer is the best white women, elder, at the moment that will help.
paul, it’s kinda a joint effort!
And here’s my review of the actual book, which I’ve now read:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/08/21/on-rage-germaine-greer-reviewed/
Four pages is far too much to post on your site. Do you have an email address?
“no-one does identity politics like “anglo/celts”
That lets the boxheads off a bit lightly, don’t it?
Sean, mate! When Germaine stirs up the ant’s nest we all go bl**dy ape-sh*t, and start sayin’ the wildest things! She has her wicked way with our tiny minds and large emotions: scrambles ‘em good ‘n proper.
Kim: “Its a joint effort…”.
Hmmm. Remember plenty of these meself, back in the ’seventies.
Am almost inclined to ask as to participation of bingo bango bongo, in all of this…
Kim I am sorry about taking so long to respond to your comment, where you wrote:
The argument that we ought to avoid “foreign entanglements” because we are unable to effectively defend our territory without military alliances is an illogical one, which Greer admits herself in her Bali article when she writes of Australia’s involvement in the Gulf War:
As I demonstrated with my rebuttal of her nonsense about the INTERFET operation Australia could count on the US for support in that instance. The message to the Indonesians of US involvement in that operation was that if they contemplated attacking Australian forces (and they did) was that they could not discount having the American 7th Fleet bearing down on them. The Indonesians got the hint.
Greer also writes in her Bali piece:
The history of countries which have relied upon neutrality as a way of avoiding invasion and war is a bleak one. Let us look at some examples from the last century. It worked well for plucky little Belgium in WW1 didn’t it? Belgian neutrality stopped the Kaiser right in his tracks, or so Greer would wish us to believe
The United States was a neutral at the time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, wasn’t it? That seemed not to have dissuaded the Japanese from attacking.
Norway, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands were all neutrals in World War 2 as well. A lot of good it did them, didn’t it? The Baltic States too. Neutrals all three of them; taking sides with no-one. Neutrality seems not to have put the brakes on, respectively, Nazi and Soviet aggression.
Thailand was a neutral at the start of WW2 and friends to everyone as part of its consistent foreign policy. That didn’t stop the Japanese suborning them into becoming an ally and forcing them to accept Japanese troops on their soil.
What history teaches is that what is an obvious fact to Greer is an obvious untruth in the real world. In the real world countries enter into alliances because history shows that neutral countries get picked off and that there is greater safety in collective security.
The value of alliances was demonstrated in the case of Great Britain in WW2 when after the fall of France it still had the resources of its Commonwealth and Empire to call upon, appoint made by Greer herself (though poorly made) in her Bali article where she writes:
In any event Howard telegraphed to the United States that there are limits to Australia’s commitment to its alliance and that the US could not take for granted Australian involvement in the event of a conflict between China and Taiwan. I expect the ALP position would be much the same.
Greer’s point on the War on Terror is trite. She makes the argument in the Bali article:
That being the case, it does not matter if a country is neutral or not. The purpose of the terrorists is to force the country out of neutrality and into conflict. So saying that participation in the War on Terror renders us less safe is just stating the glaringly obvious for, by Greer’s reasoning, we have no choice but to participate. The terrorists will attack whether we want to stay neutral or not.
198 Adrien Aug 21st, 2008 at 8:10 pm
No. I am not pretending to a complete account of, and agreement with, Ms Greer’s explanation and prescriptions. Got better things to do and say.
Also, the Caucasians did commit genocide against the Aboriginals. It was imported disease that was the big killer of indigenous society. They had no natural resistance to us grubby unauthorised arrivals. Just shows you what havoc a lack of strict border protection can cause.
THe other form of “genocide” is self-inflicted, when women dont breed with their natural co-habitants. But this is a topic that is a little touchy, and no doubt a source of much unarticulated rage amongst those men who did not put their genes into the next generation.
We have inflicted “memocide” on Aboriginal society though. Its the price of progress.
All I am saying is that her view and mine are in sync on one fundamental aspect – the demotion and commotion of Aboriginal males, particularly the dis-integrated and remote ones. The destruction of Aboriginal patriarchy, through culture shock, policy failure and subsequent political mischief, has given a sizeable fraction of remote and dis-integrated Aboriginal males nothing much better to do than take out their frustrations on their women folk.
Just last night Greer went on the offensive and repeated her argument, which eerily parallels my own, about the trauma of culture shock and the cheap facility of apologies. Stuff that white liberals like because it feels good to reprimand their parents for a change.
Greer and I independently, through observation, came to the same conclusion: that the fundamental problem with remote indigenous society is that the menfolk have lost their authority as Alpha providers, protectors and therefor pro-creators for their communities. This displacement created political anarchy, economic autarchy and social anomie, effectively feralizing the community constituents.
Although my observation was that the older Aboriginals – “strong in their culture” as they say up North – were able to function okay as they lingered on. ONce that generation dies, thats it for traditional Aborigial society. Finis. Caput. [It happens to the best of us, he thought, eyes lingering sadly over the toga hanging in the closet.]
The younger descendants have totally lost direction, shipwrecked b/w the lost pre-modern and the toxic post-modern. Hence the Lord of the Flies syndrome.
Except when younger Aboriginal men happen to get integrated into a proper modern structure of authority. THats why they tend to do better when missionaries, officers or football coaches arrive on the scene and lay down the law. Kevin Sheedy is an arche-typal Alpha-male father figure, central castings idea of a “fighting Irìsh priest”.
But Aboriginals can never recover their role as the country’s leaders. That train has left the station long ago. But they can become team-players.
Once they were warriors.
Adrien says:
Who died and elected Adrien Emperor? I doubt very much whether my “position causes” anything other than raising his blood pressure, let alone a “malfunction in modern democratic culture”.
Adrien says:
The Romans conquered both your ancestors and the conquerors of your ancestors. Thats why the Micks and Frogs took to using the Roman lingual, liturgical and legal system. SOs you could claw your out of those superstitious and ignorant peat-bog ways. Get over it, and while your at it, stop yer’ whinin’ and grumblin’.
Jellon Lamb: Forgive me, sir, but I’ve been stuck here with no one but this sorry sack of Hibernian pig shit for conversation. Poor, poor Dan O’Reilly. Sit, sir. Drink with me.
[Charlie cocks his gun and points it to Lamb]
Charlie Burns: One more crack about the Irish, Mr. Lamb, and I’ll shoot you. Am I clear?
Jellon Lamb: Oh, as the waters of Ennis, sir. Let us drink, then, to the Irish. No finer race of men have ever…peeled a potato.
THE PROPOSITION by Nick Cave
Um no Scottish highlands after Brittany and Ireland. The Iberian Celts have melted into the miasma of history.
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And there’s no Anglo in me sister. A dash of Norweigan arsehole (my great-grandpa, his wife danced on his grave – literally). The Gaels do do identity politics quite a bit; possibly the first practitioners of such.
Ah Jack. Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack!!! -
Poisoned blankets, poison bread, shooting ‘em for sport. Doesn’t count ‘ey?
Oh yes people just love it when those who’ve deprived them of everything and fucked their culture come in and lay down the law.
An aboriginal Australian is as entitled to run for office as anyone else.
Your position and anything else that emerges from the dark cavern of your mind causes only whatever slight efforts it takes to issue rebuttal. But in aggregate the tendency to change history to suit one’s own ideological position and political allies, the tendency to distort the rhetoric of those one disagrees with, the adherence to convenient lies rather than empirical complexity is indicative of what is wrong with democratic culture today. You have, more than once, put forth a thesis re what Greer says in On Rage that is plainly false. Yet you feel not the slightest tinge of shame about it.
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These Manichaeist errors of behaviour are possibly the single worse impediment to functioning democratic culture. You don’t do it by yourself. But along with all the other practitioners (both left and right) of this nefarious creed you’re lowering the tone somewhat old bean.
Please provide evidence that the Romans conquered Ireland and Scotland. Please also provide evidence also that the Gaels of these places were conquered by someone else first (as in apart from each other). The historical profession awaits these revelations breathlessly.
Excellent quote, and John Hurt delivered it so well. Here’s another toast:
211 Adrien Aug 23rd, 2008 at 4:35 pm
No, they dont count as genocide. Genocide is the attempt to destroy a distinct ethnic group through annihilation of its breeding facility, typically as a matter of government policy. Frontier skirmishes by settlers or rogue officers, bad though they were, dont make the genocidal cut.
Not even Henry Reynolds, the doyen of black-armbanding Left wing cultural historian, is willing to hold onto the refuted and odious genocide claim. (If Windschuttle did one thing right it was tip that nonsense into the Dustbin of History):
Adrien says:
Well, indigenous self-determination left a bit to be desired, didnt it? What with a serial rapist winding up in charge of ATSIC. And lots of other “members of the indigenous policy and research community…flying around in business class”.
Norforce is a great success in keeping troubled kids on the straight and narrow. Even, or especially, Aboriginal elders recognise this:
Much the same can be said for the activities of other credible authority figures, such as missionaries and football coaches. Some Aborìginals have even called for a return to the good old days of taking Aboriginal children into institutional custody, under the care of religious instructors (shades of stolen generations!):
Young human beings, Aboriginals especially, all need authority to develop properly. It is a vicious fallacy of po-mo liberalism to deny this.
Adrien says:
You keep saying this as if tiresome re-iteration is identical with proof. This is the method of political indoctrination, not ratiocination.
I have quoted Greer chapter and verse as a proponent of the “culture shock” displacement explanation of Aboriginal social anomie. It is also obvious that she is using basic socio-biological concepts such as Alpha-male contests and hypergamy in order to explain the collapse of Aboriginal social order.
This implies a defence of Aboriginal patriarchy, in the context of European settlement and social displacement. (On “Better the devil you know…” grounds.) Which implication is confirmed by use of terms such as “their womenfolk”, a phrase which would be considered anathema by any post-Greer feminist.
All this is rather old hat for me, I have been banging on about it for more than a decade. Its refreshing that at least one AUS intellectual is willing to stand up and say it in public.
Its up to you to show by quote where my partial interpretation is inconsistent with her stated words. Not just try to bluster and bluff it until you are red in the face. Still less try to shame me for merely stating the obvious.
Adrien says:
I am interested in restoring pre-Vietnam war anthropology to its original status as a real science of human nature. And exposing the inanities, idiocies and iniquities of post-modern liberalism in its -Left and -Right wing forms.
I seem to be swimming against the elite ideological tide in this, although populist psephological tides have turned recently. I doubt very much whether this Quixotic crusade is likely to make much difference to “a functioning democratic culture” one way or another. But it certainly poops the po-mo liberal party, which is enough for me.
On October 12 2002 a bomb ripped through Paddy’s Bar in the Kuta tourist district in Bali. Shortly after another bomb went off outside the Sari Bar. Two hundred and two people were killed. Eighty-eight of them were Australian. On 22 October Germaine Greer published her smug response to this Australian tragedy in London’s Daily Telegraph.
Here is that smug response, which certain smug contributors at this site see as being within the bounds of decency.
The first part of Greer’s article, duly fact-checked by her according to her exacting standards as an academic, addresses the Australian lifestyle and demonstrates her grasp on basic economics. My commentary follows.
Even if it were true that Australians have an attitude that relaxation is the aim of life and nothing is to be taken too seriously what is wrong with such an attitude? What alternatives would she propose?
When I was growing up in Australia, I was taught that Australia’s standard of living made it the envy of the world, but the Bali bombing was not in any obvious way an attack by have-nots on the haves. I know now that the Australian economy is small, and that as a producer of raw materials Australia is in competition with the poorest countries in the world.
When Germaine Greer was growing up in the late 1940s and early 1950s Australia’s standard of living was the envy of the world. It had at the time the third highest GDP per capita in the world. Most of the world was at that time recovering from the devastation wrought by WW2.
Jack -
Oh. Oh really? Oh I didn’t know that. Well I’m glad you explained that. It makes it all okay then.
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It doesn’t necessarilly imply any such thing. The main thesis is that family relations – social relations – patriarchal if you will, yes, have been destroyed by Europeans; and that Aboriginal males are very pissed off.
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It does not automatically follow that Greer is defending patriarchy. The distortion of one’s ideological opponents so what that they actually say is more simplistic and dumber than their real argument is a feature of this relativist po-mo bullshit of which you speak. No truth, no facts just competing discourse. In the context of the ever spiralling downward quality of political debate this does not help.
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As for post-Greer feminism I’d suggest you read Camille Paglia. I suggest you meet Camille Paglia…
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She’ll beat the shit out of you.
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I myself have thought the military might provide this authority of which you speak. You shouldn’t assume you know all about me. You’ll find my views are quite eclectic.
Having established her credentials in economics and her authority as a lifestyle guru polymath Germaine moves on to her special topics of uranium mining and defence strategy:
This vast country does not lie defenceless as a turtle on its back. There is no meaningful connection between developing infrastructure along Australia’s endless coastline and the defence of Australia.
The ragged millions to Australia’s north may or may not envy Australia’s whole mountain ranges made of iron ore but at least those in closest proximity, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, are pretty well endowed with natural resources themselves.
The fact that they have not tried to annex those mountain ranges of pure iron ore may well be testimony to them taking the view that Australia is far from being as defenceless as a turtle on its back.
The rest of the world buys Australian uranium otherwise we would not be mining it. It is not a matter of letting us do anything with impunity. If the “international community” did not support the “desperate attempts” of some Aborigines then presumably they had their own good reasons for doing not so.
It is typical of Greer that she condescends to Aborigines by implying that the concerns of some are the views of all. Apparently they a just a collective mob to her, without the ability to hold differing views and concerns. If anyone but Greer did that her complacent smug acolytes would be screaming about the racism of it.
It has not occurred to Greer that Australian uranium mining is an entirely lawful activity for the purpose of providing uranium to be used for peaceful purposes such as electricity generation, carried out within the framework of IAEA
guidelines and that it not murder. She will have to get used to it as there will be a hell of a lot more of it in the future.
My next post will be about where Greer, authority on everything, or at least those dumb, silly fools to whom she is a font of all knowledge(yes Kim, I am thinking of you) moves on to geopolitics and World War 2.
Greer on geopolitics and war:
Greer’s argument for neutrality. Let’s have a look at it. Worked well for plucky little Belgium in WW1 didn’t it? And the United States was a neutral at the time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, wasn’t it?
Norway, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands were all neutrals in World War 2 as well. A lot of good it did them, didn’t it? The Baltic States too. Neutrals all three of them, taking sides with no-one.
Thailand was a neutral at the start of WW2 and friends to everyone as part of their consistent foreign policy. That didn’t stop the Japanese suborning them into becoming an ally and forcing them to accept Japanese troops on their soil.
What history teaches is that what is an obvious fact to Greer is an obvious untruth.
In 1939 Robert Menzies did not declare war on Germany before Britain did. His precise words were:
“Fellow Australians,
It is my melancholy duty to inform you officially that in consequence of a persistence by Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her and that, as a result, Australia is also at war….”
There was little if any Irish-Australian opposition to Australia’s involvement in WW2. All the major churches and political parties supported it. Jehovah’s witnesses and “international socialists” –supporters of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact – did not.
These are elementary points in Australian history. It is inconceivable that anyone who makes any claim to have even a passing knowledge of Australian history, let alone any claim to scholarship, could get them wrong.
Greer leaves aside our gallant Russian allies with some 20 plus million dead, our allies the Chinese with 15 plus million dead and our Polish allies with six million dead.
In fact four of them were shot down.
The fear was not that Japan would invade from the north, but the north-east along the Queensland coast, where Japanese troops would have found settled communities and agricultural land upon which to subsist, right down that coast. Hence the Battle of the Coral Sea.
Again a complete and abysmal ignorance of history. The abandonment of the Japanese offensive came with the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Battle of Midway, the Battle of Guadalcanal and the Battle of Papua New Guinea, the first three of which, being American victories, demonstrated to the Australians, at least in respect of the second world war, that when push came to shove they were pretty fortunate to have an outside power to rely upon.
This not being so Greer’s argument is quite fallacious.
Next Greer moves on to the Gulf War, East Timor and current affairs. Let’s see from when I next post what arguments she puts forward which so impress LP’s village idiot.
But Greer isn’t asserting that if Australians thought that aridity and distance saved them then they were necessarily correct in that assumption. She is saying that this is what Australians thought, whether or not they were correct.
The question is whether or not Australians “may have” thought this.
The interesting thing is that the Battle of the Coral Sea does not appear to have achieved the same status in the minds of Australians as the Kokoda Track. This in turn suggests to me that Australians’ perceptions of the outlines of the Pacific War are seen through a prism of nationalism, or even parochialism, that rejects to some extent the suggestion that Australia was saved by the Americans.
This being the case, it seems to me that there is some validity in Greer’s characterisation of Australians’(perhaps erroneous) views about the main outlines of the Pacific War.
Of course, any policy based on ignorance is fraught with peril. Just ask George W. Bush, or on second thoughts, don’t ask George W. Bush.
FFS GregM, your posts are interesting enough (although too long for this format) but do you think you could end one without a dig at others’ intelligence? It’s just tiresome.
Second that. GregM, you’re quite capable of holding your own in debate. Dissing others does nothing except making the tone generally nasty.
Adrien, a handy tip for dealing with Jack Strocchi. What he says is far less important than why and how he says it. Ignore the signal, listen to the noise.
While he’s actually pretty
smartwell read (on occasion) and can sometimes make sense (I agree with some of his geopolitical points), he’s basically commenting for the same reasons that Birdy or that Greenfield creature are, ie: to use whole online communities as surrogates for someone who once dissed them very badly many years ago in a galaxy far far away.Just think of a combination soapbox/therapist’s couch surrounded by an army of strawmen and you’ll get an idea of what motivates these three horse’s arses of the Blogacalypse. They’re all self-obsessed solipsistic Manichaeans in search of an audience, any audience. Bar bores basically, pissed off that no one ever gets their orders right.
“self-obsessed solipsistic”
Yeah OK, that was a tautology. For “self-obsessed” substitute “humour and empathy-free”.
And to be honest, I shouldn’t have lumped Birdy in with Strocchi and that Greenfield creature. Unlike those two, Graeme’s a true original who has displayed an identifiable sense of humour at times. And is on record as a fan of George Clinton.
Now I lay me down to sleep
I think you have missed one Nabs: “data laden, Strocci structured, low rent Tom Clancy…..”
XYZ
Canberra
Greg M -
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Many of your factual corrections of Greer are correct and, I think, telling. Greer’s point about the Australian declaration of war is meaningless as the UK and Australia declared war on the same day in response to the German invasion of Poland. The point is moot even if Australia did it first. This is simplistic reiteration of doctrinal opposition to Australia’s vassal mentality viz foreign relations.
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However I feel that the sheer breadth of your attack devolves into pedantry. After all wouldn’t one post suffice to point out that she’s made factual errors?
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It is true for example that Australia is not defenseless. This dates Greer back to that era where Australians typically thought the country easy pickings because there was a vast continent, lots of unguarded coastline and a small population mainly in the South-East corner.
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It is for that reason that we’re actually pretty hard to invade. And also because we habitually buddy up with the biggest kid in the park. But so what?
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But her principle point is not about geopolitics but about Aboriginal dispossession and the endemic rage that results. Her book is a partisan polemic. Most polemics about this subject verge on hysterical and her’s is no exception. She uses the pampleteer’s license with the truth. Here she is not alone; such license does her and others discredit. But I think the real question is whether or no her central argument is sound. I think she has a point. It’s that point we should address, principally, no matter our stance.
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It’d be nice if we did not to take the pamphleteer’s license with the truth. Sure you’d agree.
“GregM, you’re quite capable of holding your own in debate.”
Indeed, Kim.
My bet is that his best debates are held firmly in his own personal space.
Adrien, thanks for your response, and I am sorry to take some time to get back to you.
No, the sheer breadth of my attack doesn’t devolve into pedantry. It exposes her as a systematic academic fraud who fabricates facts from which she then manufactures dishonest arguments. It is not an issue that she makes factual errors. It is that she is a liar. One post on a few errors might show that she is fallible as a researcher. Four posts (and the last one is below) demonstrate that this is her systematic modus operandi. Fabricate an untruth and then use it to construct for the gullible a false argument that can only be justified on the untruth that it is built upon.
You say that she is a polemicist. However as Katz has pointed out:
A polemicist will respect an obligation to stay within the bounds of the truth and at least state facts correctly, even if selectively, whatever spin, emphasis and interpretation they put on them to pursue their argument. Greer does not. She just makes things up.
You also describe her as a pamphleteer. Why not cut to the chase and accept that she is a liar and recognise that makes her worthless as a participant in discourse. She offers no special insight as her acolytes wish of her. She offers no insight at all. She is just a cheap act, a sideshow alley character. A controversialist, as Geoff Honnor and Paulus have exposed.
Being not an anthropologist, nor a sociologist nor a historian nor a person holding any qualification in any relevant discipline she has no qualifications to speak with any authority on Aboriginal male rage, any more than she is qualified to speak on proctocology. Not that would stop from straying into that area (and she probably will) if she calculated that it would give her a few days of media sensation. This is her struggle for relevance and it’s sad that there are so many people who delude themselves that they are intelligent who accept her words so uncritically.
You’ve fact-checked my posts then? Care to point out where there is an error of fact in them? If you want to uncritically buy her lies that’s up to you. You can confidently expect however that, in the spirit of free speech, that I will be quite happy to point out the errors in your thinking. You have along way to go in developing the faculty of independent thought.
As promised my last post on Greer’s Bali article will appear next.
Greer on the Gulf War, East Timor and the Bali bombing.
The Prime Minister at the time, Bob Hawke, explained the reasons for Australia’s involvement in the Gulf War. Greer needs only read his explanation and the mystery will be solved for her. Since her research abilities are so inadequate that she is incapable of looking up his speeches in Hansard I provide the following link to his speech to the House of Representatives on 4 December 1990 setting out the reasons for Australia’s involvement in the war, to assist her, should by chance she come across this critique of her Bali opus.
http://parlinfoweb.aph.gov.au/piweb/view_document.aspx?ID=102354&TABLE=HANSARDR
Greer can’t resist having an anti-Israel dig. The Gulf War coalition included Saudi Arabia, Oman, Morocco, Pakistan and Bangladesh, hardly noted for being part of any pro-Israel axis. Also given what Greer calls Australia’s minuscule contribution to the Gulf War it is hard to see how it could have been seen as a conspicuous member of the pro-Israel axis.
In fact the Americans did provide men and materiel in assistance to the Australian led INTERFET forces. This from World Politics Review, (July 2008):
One would have thought that anyone who has the slightest pretensions to academic credibility could at least get these facts right. The INTERFET intervention was not a secret operation after all.
It is strange that Greer bemoans Australia’s increased defence expenditure when earlier she had said that during the 1980s the Australian defence establishment had gradually and deliberately been reduced to next to nothing. However Australia’s increased expenditure on defence has had no significant impact on the Australian economy, which has been booming from 1996 to the present day
This is a bizarre statement (though just one of many) by Greer. Australia was already, at the time of the Bali bombing, in the enemy camp as far as the terrorists were concerned. It is hard to think of any country outside of Afghanistan, Iraq and North Korea which had not already, in the wake of the September 11 attacks, aligned themselves with the United States and against the terrorists. Even Cuba lined up with the United States on this one.
Greer’s characterisation of “the deplorable cases of gang rapes of girls who happened to be Christians by boys who happened to be Muslim” is disingenuous in the extreme. The evidence before the courts demonstrated abundantly that a motivating factor of the Muslim boys in raping the “Christian” girls was very fact that they were not Muslim and therefore fair game for sexual assault. That is to the eternal discredit of the perpetrators though it reflects nothing at all about Muslims generally for whom the rapes would have been grave sins and flagrant breaches of Islamic law and morals.
What??? American intelligence allowed Howard to identify the Bali bombers with Al Qaeda??? That is plain weird. It was well known well before the Bali bombing from Singaporean, Indonesian and Australian intelligence services that Jemaah Islamiyah was connected with Al Qaeda and that they were planning bombing operations against western targets in Indonesia. Howard was by no means the first to identify that and it had already been published in Australian newspapers before the Bali bombing.
I was in Indonesia before and at the time of the bombing and the Jakarta Post was reporting on the efforts of Western diplomats, our own included, to get the then president Megawati, to take the JI threat seriously before the bombing occurred.
Exactly, yet they were portrayed by the mouthpieces for mouthpieces as Muslim boys with strong anti-Western sentiments who’d failed to assimilate with Australian society and very much supposed to be symptomatic of a particular brand of misogyny imported by the larger Australian Muslim ‘community’ (a word which became heavily loaded)
The K brothers employed every available ‘cultural defence’ and excuse but from my readings these were the ‘desperate’ resorts you find in almost any rape defence. The media would proceed to simultaneously dismiss these arguments (as you did above) and attempt to legitimise them as broader indicators – often from within the same article.
John Howard would respond with:
From the same article:
Costello would harp about the death of ‘mushy multiculturalism’ in almost every speech he made.
Why? It’s demonstrably accurate. Hundreds of newspaper articles/tv news and current affairs transcripts/radio talkback transcripts/political speeches and press releases attest to it. On the other hand, thankfully there were many in the media writing concurrently about the political and ‘media massaging’ of events.
I admire your fact checking ability but I’m certainly not convinced I could ever trust your interpretations of facts without some checking of my own (there’s at least one other highly contestable point you made in disagreement with Greer that’s not based on simply ‘getting something wrong’ – and not to avoid that Greer’s factual errors severely weakened her reasoning). Katz demonstrated earlier in this thread, your interpretations are commonly prone to fallibility.
For all the lengths you’ve gone to I still haven’t seen any evidence that led you to believe Greer engaged/engages in ‘malicious filth’.
Nick, I’ve no doubt that you’ll soon realise the error of your ways as you are politely informed that you are a gullible idiot or some such patronising tosh.
FWIW I am not convinced either, bit then I wouldn’t be would I.
Nick
Thanks for the link to Christina Ho’s article. Normally I try to stick with primary source articles when I am fact checking. Also my special focus was Greer’s mendacity and I just wanted to leave it there, as being a matter of record. However since you have drawn Christina Ho’s article to my attention I just think I might fact-check it as well. At the very least it should cause some laughs in her faculty commonroom.
Wow, ‘fact check’ as a threat. That’s not wierd at all.
GregM, if you’re going to make a habit of “fact checking” people’s articles, I suggest you get your own blog to do so, and don’t indefinitely extend this thread.
Not to anyone who takes facts seriously. But, given the fact freenonsense that gets posted on this site, quite threatening to a lot of posters here who don’t.
By the way, just a small fact-check, for gratis, it’s “weird”, not “wierd”. You must have been asleep in grade 3 when they taught you that.
Ok, I’m closing this thread. It’s had a fair go. If you want to host such discussions, it’s not difficult to set up a blog through wordpress or blogger or wherever.
It’s been pointed out to you before that snark at other commenters is not consistent with acceptance of our comments policy, GregM.