The comedy keeps coming from Christian Kerr:
WE not only have the “Education Revolution”. In good Stalinist style, we have the “Building the Education Revolution” plan. We also have a band of doubters and dissidents the authorities have decreed to be counter-revolutionaries.
And in true Stalinist style, these counter-revolutionaries must not just be punished for their thought crimes, but ruthlessly suppressed. Martin Amis used his chilling study of Stalin, Koba the Dread, to talk about the “typhoon of unreason” the tyrant unleased upon his nation.
Is this a new incarnation of Godwin’s law that I wasn’t previously aware of? Or is it just that Julia Gillard has interred 10 millions in death camps and let another 20 million starve to death while my back was turned? Thank heavens Hillary Bray is shining a light into this totalitarian abyss.
Apparently all that stands between us and being worked to death in a labour camp is the unstinting cry of freedom ringing from the Canberra press gallery:
All of Gillard’s huff and puff yesterday simply showed a typhoon of unreason building.
If she lets it grow Gillard will be swept away with the winds.
Whose career do you suppose is going to the gulag sooner? Hillary’s or Julia’s?
Wow, that’s some strong crack that Kerr must be smoking. No bicarb cutting there!
In other news, Christian Kerr’s articles are like the Black Hole of Calcutta. Just as thousands sweltered and died in the rank, parasite-infested gloom, so do innocent adjectives and similes become bloated with meanings not meant for human consumption.
Jared Diamond wrote the book Collapse, which looked at the demise of the Mayans. Just like the Mayans, Kerr is striving to bring modern civilisation to its knees – below its knees! And if his dangerous work is allowed to continue I fully expect my – and millions of others – still-pulsating organs to be offered up as a sacrifice to his vengeful sky-gods, whilst I, gasping, look on.
LOL@Patrick G.
Guys, three blog posts in one week about Christian Kerr is just giving the guy WAY too much attention.
Weird.
But then the Oz’ unremitting campaign against spending money on schools is weird. Particularly the bits where “wealthy private schools” get attacked for taking money from the government. Perhaps they know something we don’t about the ATTACK ON FREEDOM this constitutes, but I have a bit of a feeling it won’t be going down too well in those Greater Public School gulags. False consciousness, I suppose.
Fortunately Howard planned for this day and had flag poles made out of Libertariam installed in every school ground to protect our kids from the evils of socialist thought.
Take that to the next teacher who dares lecture my child on how they should share. Bloody commie. My child is protected!
But what’s this? Julia Gillard is having plaques installed in every school, no doubt made from some Soviet metal with mind altering properties! She must be stopped! Enter our hero!
Commando Christopher! Here to save all good Aussie boys and girls from the lunar left menace and good coffee. Tune in next week, same time same channel for some more biffo in Commando Christopher and the Lunar Left Culture wars!
Kerr may have a point about money being wasted. It’s impossible to know from this article. But all this Red Julia stuff is incredible. Is he trying to do a pre-emptive strike against Gillard’s leadership ambitions? ‘We can’t let this mad, red-headed, commie get in control of government’.
OK, Koba the Dread wasn’t bad, as amateur histories go, but there are plenty of stronger sources on Uncle Joe. Koba included some meandering musings on the Amis family political attitudes. Who cares? Pass the decaf latte.
Is the use of the word “Revolution” sufficiently indicative of Stalinism?If so, the world has been awash with dread totalitarianism for decades: Agronomists forcing the Green Revolution on poor farmers, the IT Revolution (approx 5 phases), the Intertubes Revolution, the birth control, the ……. oh why do I bother? Pass the strong caffein.
How about ‘velvet revolutions’, ‘the Orange revolution’, or for that matter, ‘The American Revolution’? Obedience to your lawful sovereign King George III – George Washington is a dangerous godless subversive!
tssk,
You may describe Howard as many things, but if you want to be accurate I would suggest that he would be unlikely to use Libertariam. Capital “C” Conservatariam would be much closer to his material of choice.
Is curious, cos they dont seem to like Rudd using RWDB “War on X”-speak either. Maybe they just dont like ALP being in government.
In any case, ‘Socialism in one country’, production quotas, socialised agriculture and state terror remind me more of the QLD NATs Im afraid, Christian.
Mercurius,
Godwin’s Law is normally held to apply only to the use of Nazi, not communist, imagery. Does the conflation of the two imnply that you recognise that they are in fact little different from each other?
‘The American Revolution’
A lot of Americans don’t like referring to the American Revolution as the American Revolution, because of the Bolshevik connotations. They prefer the War of Independence.
Well, a lot of Americans are currently dubbing what’s going on in Iran the “Green Revolution”…
I think it’s more about the fascism, Andrew.
Give up X-tian. Even my dad likes Julia. Not bad as he has fantasies about being John Howards’ love child.
To be serious for a moment, it was demonstrated in question time yesterday by Gillard that the ‘facts’ on which The Australian has been relying for its campaign are nothing of the sort:
http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/06/16/julia-gillard-gives-the-australian-an-f-on-education-reporting/
Strangely, Kerr fails to mention that.
All this is is a nutty campaign against government spending on social policy objectives. The same crew, of course, have no problem with billions being handed out to polluters as “compensation”…
Yes, Mark, I wrote an e-mail to ABC radio in Sydney requesting that they correct this story after Michael Brissenden reported it as factual, as he does on a regular basis as he regurgitates the latest talking points from The Australian.
Interesting article Mark.
So, based on the Hansard from Question Time, when confronted with newspaper articles that stated that funds appeared to be going to schools due to be closed, the Minister put on record that the money will be going into the new amalgamated schools in lieu of the ones being shut down, and invited people to continue to probe and ask questions about where the money is going.
The parallels with a Stalinist shut-down of information and the disappearing of dissidents are…obvious?
I know, I know. But he’s trying so hard to be noticed!
Don’tcha remember being at school, where there was always a kid up the back row who spent all day making fart noises by putting one hand in his armpit and flapping his elbow? How can you ignore it?
OK Merc!
Just a small threadjack and boast if I may: Daughter (in VCE year) is doing the History of Revolutions subject (the commie!) and she told me this morning she got a 100% mark on her SAT.
“I have so pwned the Russian Revolution,” she said.
When I was at school there was always at least one kid who made fart noises by farting. Hard to tell the difference though.
Depends what the little scamp had from the tuck shop I’d have thought!
Dear Hillary,
Stalinists are warring with Islamofascists for control of the crawlspace beneath my bed.
Is this normal?
Sincerely,
A Concerned Australian.
Dear Concerned Australian,
You have every reason to be concerned. There are probably some hivemind feminazis and a couple of luvvies under there as well. Only the culturally insensitive bordering on negligent could ignore such a threat.
I would recommend a subscription to The Heart of the Nation as a means of raising one’s cultural antenna sufficiently to be prepared for such attacks that represent a threat the very fabric of our existence.
Yours etc
CK
Sam @ 11,
I have a pretty extensive library on the American Revolution as I’m writing a book about it. Justing checking over the titles – 17 use Revolution. 4 use War of Independence. So I guess you’re wrong, mate.
Congratulations Helen. how wonderful for your daughter. My nephew is doing the same subjest. I should check to see how he’s done.
There, I helped finish that for you.
Stalin? I had her pegged as the new Jim Cairns when she arrived, but I have to say she’s been very sensible while minding the shop for Rudd as he attempts to ingratiate himself into world leaders’ affections. She’s doing exactly what a Labour deputy should – faithfully and firmly execute the ruinous policies of her leader.
Craig,
I reckon Kevin’s smart enough not to let anyone remotely resembling Jim Cairns near a Cabinet position. It’s not only Sir John Kerr whom Labor remembers from 1975.
Yes, Mark: so many revolutions, real and imagined. Whole societies, Parties so labelled. And then the marketing whizzes grab the word, and it gets shoved back into pollie-speak of the drabbest, most gradualist type.
FFS there should have been good computers in every school a decade ago. It’s not a revolution, it’s just trying to stay afloat.
Precisely, Ambi. A lot of the “education revolution” is a big disappointment. But, I suppose, the alternative for the Oz would be to have a centralised national curriculum teaching one authorised version of Australian history and only using one method of language instruction. With Kevin Donnelly as commissar. Yeah! Let freedom reign!
Craig Mc, I hear you about the ruinous policies. Since November 2007, we have nothing to keep us warm at night but our melancholy ruminations on the ruthless ruination dished out daily by the forces of darkness!
Compared with the Eden that once was, Rudd’s Australia is Mad Max II meets the Morlocks and Eloi, ruled by a reanimated Stalin/Hitler cyborg controlled by SkyNet!
Oops, sorry, I must stop channeling Hilary.
Gillard is much more Bukharin than Stalin.
Well, yeah. And as Kerr well knows, the more exciting the name of a government plan, the less exciting it actually is. If it really were a commie revolution it would have been called something really, really boring so as not to scare everybody.
This just in: Gillard shares a birthday with Pompey the Great, Horatio Nelson and Silvio Berlusconi.
I think we’re done for…
Well, Stalin wouldn’t have tolerated independent and militant construction unions either…
Of course using that metric Howard was the great visionary having shared his birthday with Aldous Huxley,Stanley Kubrick, Mick Jagger and er Kevin Spacey.
To reinforce Paul’s observation about ‘Revolution’ vs ‘War of Independence’ – the Library of Congress files all its stuff pertaining to rows of 1775-1783 under the subject heading
United States — History — Revolution, 1775-1783
But of course librarians are the biggest Bolshies of them all.
Paul @ 23 and Laura 23, I’m not saying that the American Revolution wasn’t one; just that quite a lot people call it something else. (The same people tend to refer to the Civil War as the War Between the States.)
But why Sam??
Uncle Sam to you, young lady!
Where’s Japerz when you need him??
Isn’t that now referred to as the Teabagging of George III?
Godwin’s Law is normally held to apply only to the use of Nazi, not communist, imagery.
The point of Godwin’s (prescriptive) law was “Cut out the stupid Hitler comparisons. It makes you look stupid, and it annoys everyone else. In fact, we should make it a convention: adding glib Hitler comparisons to an existing conversation makes you lose it.” At that time (1990), most people on Usenet were fine with it; on average, people has been called a Nazi in a flame war 2.3 times or so. This convention survived the decline on Usenet to cover email lists, bulletin boards and blogs. That’s one reason most people avoid cheap Nazi comparisons these days – they’re a fucking cliche, and people know that’s a 100% guaranteed way of losing the argument automatically. Game over man. Game over. Even Kerr wouldn’t bother indulging in the practice. He has (probably) heard of Godwin’s law, and the lawyers at the Oz would be leery of defamation suits.
For better or worse – it is far more acceptable (and far less actionable) to compare person X to Stalin these days. Now if person X is Mugabe or Kim Jong-Il, I’m cool with it (for obvious reasons). But if person X is Julia Gillard, that’s just a tawdry and banal slur that shows the moral and (what’s worse) literary bankruptcy of the accuser. In other words, he’s lost the argument as well. Why? For the same reasons as for Hitler – it’s cheap, it’s a cliche, it make you look stupid and it annoys everyone else. FAIL.
If Godwin’s law doesn’t cover cheap Stalin analogies, it should.
The lame examples the Oz are dragging up are all over the shop in terms of waste…but I didn’t get involved at the P&C in relation to this new round of capital works funding – but if it is being planned centrally and being doled out by State Govts, you probably aren’t going to get great value for money….like durr.
OTOH, having a bureaucracy oversee major capital or even minor capital works at schools means that neither parents nor principals need crash courses in Building Project Management and Building Certification etc.
The Feds however should be heavily overseeing what overheads the State Govt are whacking on top. I was shocked what the State Govt wanted to charge us for some building works done via the NSW Dept of Commerce. It was up to 100% more expensive than doing it privately in most cases. We decided to use our fete money to buy a much needed demountable for the Band a few years ago, and had it installed for $50K- the Dept were going to charge us over $100K etc. Otoh, proper building works require expertise to oversee building subcontractors and unless school communities buy in this expertise – projects can end up unfinished, not up to proper standard, over-budget etc, etc.
There is definitely a case to see how these bucks are being spent.
Howard threw $1 billion at schools over 3 years in 2004. $700m to public and $300m to private. The funds were dispersed directly to school communities if they choose, after submitting grants (3 quotes etc). Just prior to this program by the Commonwealth – the NSW Dept of Ed. had actually banned school communities from undertaking capital works in schools due to sort of issues I mentioned above. But once $700m worth of works, spread over so many schools, needed to be undertaken in a short timeframe – they changed their minds, and school communities mostly disbursed those funds.
And yairs, some funds were supposed to be set aside to get the brass plaque, in this case for Talcum, but due to circumstances beyond our control, the timeframe blew out and by the time the project was completed…the Govt had um, changed….. We acquitted the grant sans Mal’s plaque, which we spent on extra patterns in the rubber softfall or something.
Pity, there isn’t a decent bunch of journalists covering this – they might know what they are actually looking for.
Fuck Kerr.
Anyone see the SkyNews interview of Gillard last week? Half of it consisted of her fending off ‘You’re Rudd’s successor, aren’t you?’ questions.
Right now, particularly since the re-election of Bligh, it’s a done deal. Eventually Kev will do what all his contemporaries in the states have done—retire voluntarily. Then Julia gets the big chair, for Rudd’s legacy and to get the leadership away from the Queesnland mire.
Then that fucking fuck Bray/Kerr can go and live in Pinochet’s Chile or whatever wet dream his tiny mind imagines.
‘The Queensland mire’.
No offence intended, but you know what I mean vis-à-vis the ALP.
If you’re going to claim there are “doubters and dissidents”, it would be nice to list them, as well as provide evidence of their being “ruthlessly suppressed”.
How long has this fellow been writing essays? Big fat F for this one, on grounds of being an exemplar of its title.
Moral High Ground Alert: A number of my relatives suffered at the hands of Stalinism. If Christian Kerr weren’t so pathetic, I’d be offended.
I can’t believe people actually get paid for this kind of thing. Labor are a bunch of commies….what an original gut-buster.
Koba the Dread is actually a very moving book. It takes a Liberal to read a book like that – with all its horrors – and then to make light of it. There are still many Australians alive who fled communist regimes and who I’m sure would find any comparison, even in jest, between a social democratic government and Stalin’s regime as just beyond the pale.
Could you imagine the hue and cry if a left-leaning pundit calling Libs fascists?
Peurile stuff.
P.S. On the substance – if you can call it that – of Kerr’s piece, how many articles did Kerr write on, say, the Seasprite helicopter fiasco? Or the sums Howard spent on propaganda (which reached levels that would have impressed even a communist dictator)?
But if a single contract goes awry for a school building somewhere west of Bourke…
@34
Not Kubrick, anyone but Kubrick … sob
Just imagine if Kerr had read Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar and Young Stalin. He’d be falling over himself to list all the endearing and interesting personal qualities which Stalin and Julia have in common and exhort us to draw the requisite political conclusions.
Then again, Beria’s comment to Stalin, made whilst holding an axe, that there was no tree that he would not cut down does suggest a parallel with Julia’s long-time associate Michael O’Connor.
Sam,
)and the New Left all generally refer to the American Revolution. So do the neo-Whigs, though they tend to concentrate more on constitutional issues and the evolution of republicanism.
let me see id I can get this right for your benefit.
The American revolution began about 1763 and ended about 1789. The war for American Independence, (which, incidentally, is a totally different thing) began in 1775 and ended in 1783.
Of the various schools of historians dealing with the American Revolution the traditionalists, the Progressives, the Imperialists (who are sometimes apt to describe Americans as ‘Those damned rebels!’
Now, its just possible all these scholars of the Revolution have got it all wrong after their years of study, despite the fact that they range right across the political spectrum. After all,some Australian historians persist in calling what happened under and after Phillip ‘settlement’ rather than ‘invasion’, don’t they?
Godwin’s Law seems to apply most of all to right-wing bloggers. They seem to think totalitarians are on the brink of taking power everywhere. Maybe they’re spending too long blogging and need to get outdoors more and see that communists and fascists are not roaming the streets.
We’re much too busy setting up FEMA re-education camps and indoctrinating children in public schools to be roaming the streets, Ginja.
ah, but it’s not the street-roamers you have to worry about: it’s the back-room plotters, the secret vipers in our midst, the cool dudes furtively typing away at their perverted keyboards……
hmmmm, maybe I should get out and breathe some fresh air? foetid is simply horrid
Paul, thanks for the historiography lesson, but I wasn’t making a point about what scholars think. In keeping with this thread, it’s about what people on the same intellectual plane as Christian Kerr think. And a lot of them don’t like the term American Revolution.
Christian Kerr thinks? Show me the evidence!
Sam,
the RWDBs always get it wrong. You should know that by now. As for me I prefer to get my history and terminology in any field of history from people who at least a smidgin of an idea of what they’re talking about, whether they’re popular or academic historians. And btw, I wouldn’t be the least surprised if the Bolsheviks pinched their revolutionary cell structures and various other facets of revolutionary organisation from the American Revolution’s Committees of Correspondence and Committees of Safety, but then again I have only a passing acquaintance with Russian history, except for Russia in the 18C, so I could be wrong.
Interesting point Paul: just like conservatives copy each other, revolutionaries may get some ideas & methods from earlier groups. Yes, why not?
There are suggestions Bolshevik secrecy was born of the nastiness of the Tsarist secret police; but by golly did they copy that secret police (and hire some of its leading members?) after they seized power!!
Closer to home, a piece in the OO yesterday claimed the Chinese Govt sent a boatload of weapons towards East Timor circa 1976, intended for FALINTIL. The boat was turned away. The story claimed that FRETILIN was closely aligned with the Khmer Rouge (also recipients of Chinese arms) at that time.
I hadn’t heard of such a link before. Can anyone shed some light?
I’m not one for ad hominem attacks, but Christian Kerr has a ridiculous voice.
Is there a Christopher Pyne Finishing School out there to get that perfect private school falsetto?
If I were Christian Kerr, sounding the way he does, I wouldn’t go around accusing others – like us at LP – of being inner-city trendies.
The only typhoon of unreason around here is our national so-called newspaper..
Ambi @ 57,
The Americans were a lot more public about it. But then, even after Bunker Hill, apart from a few gung-ho radicals, they still had visions of some sort of reconciliation with Britain within the empire, As did the British, even after the Declaration of Independence.So they didn’t need to be that secret. It was George III who was intransiggent, And it didn’t help the pommy cause that the Howe brothers were peace negotiators as well as a general and an admiral conducting a war against the American rebels.
“The boat was turned away. The story claimed that FRETILIN was closely aligned with the Khmer Rouge (also recipients of Chinese arms) at that time.”
The blockade part of this based on a report by Ramos-Horta’s son, written at a Chinese Defence Academy, and published by the French SE Asia research centre.
Whether RAN was involved in a Indo naval blockade, I have no idea.
What I can tell is that the idea that FRETILIN was “closely aligned” with the Khmer Rouge is just about the silliest thing Ive read in the OZ this year, which is saying something- and I suspect just thrown in by Mark Dodd at the OZ for the culture war lulz (teh domino theory wuz right!) . Loro Horta certainly doesnt mention it in the article he wrote. FFS, in the lead up to the invasion, FRETILIN approached just about every nation in the region for help – with the possible exception of Cambodia, that is.
In reality, FRETILIN got with no bloody assistance from anyone – with the small but honourable exception of two guys in Darwin on the other end of the Radio Maubere transmitter.
So, Doddster, if you wish to re-author the SE Asia history curriculum, please put your concerns in writing to the education revolution coordinator.
Thanks Lefty E: if Loro Horta doesn’t mention the KR story, then it’s a throw-away line in a throw-away rag. Cheers
IIRC, Mark Aarons, in an article a couple of years back critical of the Stalinist proclivities and associations of elements of FRETILIN, did not mention anything about the KR. Mark Aarons is very knowledgeable on East Timor matters from a social democratic perspective, is unlikely to be unaware of such a link if it ever existed, and would certainly not fail to comment on it if he was aware of it.
Sigh. Ginja, the thing about rwdb’s is that not only do they see totalitarians everywhere they work actively to protect us from the worst examples. Who can forget the protests and actions of brave Republicans with their outcry against things like free speech zones under George Bush? They were fair and balanced. They so didn’t think it was a funny abuse of power against the hippies.
Next you’ll be accussing right wingers of being for totalitarianism as long as it’s their brand, their man.
Sorry about that below-the-belt dig, but if you go around calling people communists….
The relevance of ‘Godwins’ here is nonsense. You do realize that Gillard actually is a fully blown Socialist don’t you?
And so was George Orwell. So what? If you’re going to say he’s as bad as Stalin, then people are going to laugh at you.
I make no comment on this, but merely draw attention to the choice of adverb and adjective.
“You do realize that Gillard actually is a fully blown Socialist don’t you?”
And your point is what exactly?
I think Dimity S. thinks Gillard is dead meat. Got news for you, luv, we socialists are alive and well AND taking over the world.
btw,Gillard ain’t no socialist. Have you listened to her lately, like, on the ABCC? No true socialist would stand for keeping Ratty’s Star Chamber alive in any shape or form.
I have lived in the UK for the last 15 years, teaching in London schools. We have done some serious investigating into the ‘Building Schools for the Future’ programme and those behind the Academy Schools agenda in the UK. What we have come up with is disturbing indeed.
The head of Studioearchitects, Andrzej Kuszell, confirms that architects are working on the principal of ‘human re-engineering’ although declines to make detailed comments about this, also known as ‘euthenics’, the reframing of the mind on account of the physical environment someone is placed in.
We know that a new schools agenda is occurring in Israel, India, Libya, Vietnam, Australia, the US, and Canada, at least. The National Audit Office in the UK commissioned the Rand Corporation to write up a document on the 14-19 curriculum to be applied in the Netherlands, Sweden and Australia.
Evidence is available for a eugenics programme now in place in UK schools on the youtube video ‘ARK Schools, Academies and Eugenics’ at this location:
And more here:
http://www.global-elite.org/node/912