Many of the eccentricities of Bill Gammage’s new book concerning ‘how Aborigines made Australia’ became explicable to me only at the end of the main text when his secret interlocutors were revealed. In the first appendix the author tells of an exchange in 2008 about a talk on Aboriginal fire management he prepared for, but never delivered to, staff and students at the University of Tasmania. It is not clear how, but following the circulation of related materials a scientist from the university got in touch via email and informed the author he ‘must assume that natural features have natural causes until you can prove otherwise’. One suspects that Professor Gammage bristled at the sight of this rationalist razor of environmental science, itself a close relation to the textual reductionism of conservative historians from Gammage’s own discipline. For such reasoning not only covers over its own dependence on uncertain causes or conceits, but also present practices, oral traditions and abundant settler accounts are always outweighed by some higher and ever-evasive empiricism supposedly uncorrupted by contemporary politics.

Notwithstanding the evident latent racism of such a contention—that an eighteenth-century Aborigine is not truly a homicide unless the white colonial confesses it in triplicate, just as eighteenth^-century Aborigines do not manage their land unless there is documentary proof to the contrary—Gammage admits that his interlocutors’ ‘condescension has forced this book into more detail than a general reader might prefer, perhaps without satisfying the specialist’. As there are many present projects involving Aboriginal land management knowledge, such as Caring for Country, had Gammage been giving the talk in other forums I imagine the probability that pre-colonial Aborigines had an integrated knowledge of land management practices would have been preferred to the possibility that terra australis’s pre-colonial ecologies were purely ‘natural’ (despite millennia of inhabitation).

Given his interlocutors it is little wonder that Gammage’s text does not rely at any point on Aboriginal academics or oral traditions, his three main sources being (white) depictions in writing and art of ‘land before the Europeans changed it’, anthropological accounts of Aboriginal societies ‘today’, and readings of ‘what plants tell’ about their history and place. The ‘today’ of this anthropology is primarily, but not solely, the yesterday of Elkin, Strehlow and Berndt, and there is little space for the non-specialist to evaluate the botanical elements of the case as the author presents a series of substantive claims I can make little argument with. However, even those sympathetic with the general point will flinch at Gammage’s ‘Definitions’ and the second chapter, titled ‘Canvas of a Continent’. The former quickly illustrates the broader problems of the book: his claim that the word ‘estate’ can easily stand as a name for Australia and Tasmania from 1788 to approximately the mid-nineteenth century, which in ‘today’s terms … blended a continuum of like-minded managers, mixed farms and national parks’. The latent quasi-anthropological assertions continue, as in: ‘this vast area was governed by a single religious philosophy’—the Dreaming—the practices of which ‘made the continent a single estate’. The practitioners of this avowedly unitary theology were ‘mostly unknown to each other’ and yet the Dreaming is ‘universal’, a law commanding that ‘every inch of the land must be cared for’. While those familiar with contemporary Indigenous politics choke on their lunch, it is worth pointing out that the well-observed problems of the words ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘Aborigine’ are that they are vulnerable to precisely such totalising mythopoeic conflations. Gammage does not go through the work of a case study, demonstrating how language groups integrated into management regime over a specific area, instead conjuring a uniform theo-juridical regime (the Dreaming) out of resemblances between historically and geographically disparate anthropological observations.

The enthusiasm of the author’s language is understandable as, given this is a popular press book, his task is to both satisfy incredulous academics and a public persistently unwilling to take Indigenous people’s ecological knowledge seriously. The author matches the audience’s broadly western assumptions—‘All religions attempt two things: to explain existence, and to regulate behaviour’—but, that said, by repeating the common slippages of the 1980s’ international alliances between Indigenous groups and environmentalists, and mistaking low-impact inhabitation for ‘sustainable development’, Gammage’s language overreaches its warrant. The author is so insistent on the integration of this single ‘Dreaming’ and its ‘estate’—both terms irrevocably embedded in Romantic ideas of indigeneity and landscape/landshape, respectively—that the reader cannot help but start to visualise the disaggregated groups of pre-colonial Australia gathered around a conference room table (scene: Friday afternoon, people have places to be, so the chairman concludes: ‘alright everybody, I think we’re across it, now let’s action the items on this sustainability plan’).

Rather than adopt the scholar-activist position and argue that Indigenous people have a unique non-utilitarian relation to environments, Gammage has ended up in the contrary position of effectively saying that not only was their relationship partly instrumental and partly aesthetic, it was best practice too. Also, for the greater gains of a revaluing of Indigenous knowledge in a country premised on the historical and continuing debasement of exactly that knowledge, Gammage ignores a large body of recent scholarship in which, to paraphrase Kay Milton, balance may not be the ‘ends’ or ideal of Indigenous methods; it may be ‘an incidental consequence’ of other activities and factors. Gammage bypasses the problematic and sets his sights on the polemical.

This approach is on show in the chapter on depictions in writing and art of lands unmarked by white settlement. Particularly in colonial landscape painting, Gammage sees evidence, whether in the spacing of trees on ridgelines or the hues of grasslands, of Aboriginal land management practices. Early colonial artists, it is admitted, nipped and tucked here and there—squeezing land into the frame, decorating the foreground with ‘transient detail’ (frequently Indigenous)—but, ‘this does not make their landscapes inaccurate’. The following claims that such artists were ‘the photographers of their day’ not only repeats the retrospective conflation—painters are to photographers as pre-colonial Aborigines are to park rangers—but also paves the way for a convenient series of rationalisations and ventriloquisms. The officials who commissioned these works were compiling a colonial newsreel, ‘to show people at home what Australia was like’. Therefore they wanted accuracy (lest new settlers complain) and, should you have any doubts, ask yourself: why would artists invent a landscape ‘when the original was so novel?’

This uncomplicated use of colonial portrayals includes the use of impossible perspectives (Parkinson’s A View of Endeavour River, 1770), a claim that contemporary accounts of Glover’s ‘hideous fidelity to nature’ mean that we can trust him as being botanically accurate, and the inclusion of three Lycett paintings of places ‘Lycett never saw’. Repeatedly Gammage quotes excited colonials remarking on how like the parks and ennobled estates of home is this new Australia, without thinking that this may have reflected the class project of settlement or that this aesthetic may have been reflected in the watercolours of these new arrivals. The author concludes that Aboriginal ‘people made the land beautiful’. Whose ‘beauty’ would that be? Days after I finished reading this book I visited the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, which features Richard Bell’s painting TrikkyDikky and friends (2005). In it a comic drama of white ‘rip-off’ artists is flanked by a panel on the left side—reading ‘Australian Art it’s an aboriginal thing’—and a list of colonial painters on the right. It struck me that there is weird irony in the fact that Gammage is primarily using artists named in Bell’s list of plagiarists (those who appropriated ‘an aboriginal thing’) as evidence of superior Aboriginal knowledge of landscapes, in effect having the paintings present evidence against the colonial project of which they were a part.

Many may read Gammage’s argument as an iteration of ‘Blind Watchmaker’ reasoning. There is evidence of design and complexity, and so thereby we can posit a complex designer; there is evidence of management of grassland, regrowth and game, so we can posit an environmental management plan. The difference, of course, should not need explaining. The very fact of the continuing practices of ecological management—whether through fire-sticking or selective harvesting—by Aborigines today, practices which are evidently and professedly understood as continuous with a deep ancestral inhabitation, makes any argument to the contrary plainly ignorant, not sceptical. Here the author’s intent is to present ‘a tsunami of evidence’ that, overwhelming the reader, attempts to thereby patch the gaps of each respective source.

By the end there is little doubt that ‘so many records over so great an area cannot all be wrong’, but the book makes for a chaotic read as the author, replete with botanical and historical knowledge, seems uncertain when to tell you what, given the broad church he is addressing. Reading this book, I felt grateful to the evident hard yards put in and the love of place on show, but also weary of the nationalist gestures lapping at the edges, trying to lure in a disbelieving white public. As such, no real connection is made here with contemporary Aboriginal attempts to reclaim land precisely through the identification of a deep history of inhabitation. I don’t think it impossible that some may finish this book with a new angle on the coup of colonial dispossession: having stolen a country, it’s just as well it was a well-kept one.

I personally have a horror of imprisonment and can imagine nothing worse than languishing in some solitary cell while time ticks away my loud and longing heartbeat. I have often visited friends in jail and they have become in most cases clinically depressed, and ultimately anxious, with the side-effect of being fearful of nature.

It is awful to find yourself, as I myself have, in a claustrophobic prison cell with only enough light to see a tin bucket to defecate into. At an old suburban lock-up when I was not much more than twenty years of age, I squatted in a vile dark cell for a whole day, in company of a rapist, for the trumped up charge of criminal assault. Although it is forty years ago the recollections of my brief stay there are crystalline. I had been beaten up in the city by a gang of thugs and yet the police who saw me trying hard to defend myself charged me as the offender.

I was handcuffed for the first time in my life and frog-marched up the steps of D24, which was the Russell Street Police Headquarters in those times; I was duly finger-printed and charged with numerous offences, none that I’d committed, then driven in an erratic manner to the suburban police station, whereupon I was physically kicked into the cell.

A month later I took the stand handcuffed and a solicitor from Fitzroy Legal Service told the policeman who had just read out a whole cartload of fictitious charges, ‘I think you have perjured yourself enough for one day’.  The magistrate said, ‘You may step down now, Mr Dickins; you are free to leave this courtroom because you have nothing to answer for in any remote way’. So I owe the pro bono lawyer who defended my charges all those decades ago more than I can possibly say.

As I write this memoir, I see the Neighbourhood Justice Centre as illuminating and murk-less and that the openness and transparency of the place has breathed new life into law.

After commencing my observations at the Neighbourhood Justice Centre, I was invited to watch the court and listen and take my notes. I attended a session with Justice Fanning in charge of certain cases. In a blur the people, I must say, made hardly any impression on me and since most were toothless it became a dental impression.

I asked Magistrate David Fanning, ‘People have heard the phrase sausage machine: of all the thousands of plaintiffs who have come before your bench, do some stay in particular, do some faces stay?’ He replied, ‘Well yes, for differing reasons. Yes, some people stay and some people I will forget about, then I will see them again or something reminds me of them and it all floods back’.

The former Victorian attorney-general Rob Hulls envisioned the Neighbourhood Justice Centre so vividly that it came true.  It is like hope having meaning, or law having a reprieve, or the human voice having a dignity it was previously denied. The project team had an international trip and looked at the only two other justice centres in the world. One was at Red Hook in New York and the other was in North Liverpool in England, so they had two models; then this one became a different animal.

The Neighourhood Justice Centre was opened in January 2007. Kerry Walker is its Director. She has been with the Centre since before its opening. She says,

Rob Hulls was a great champion of the place and his vision for it being at the revolution of the spectrum of what was happening with the law was really strong. That this place could be different, that the court didn’t have to be the centre, that the community could be the centre of activity: that’s heresy. It sounds so simple, but it’s heresy.

 Damian James, manager of the Registry of the Neighbourhood Justice Centre says,

We work with the philosophy that we try and put people at ease … The Neigbourhood Justice Centre has a different feel compared to other magistrates courts; there is less tension here because there is often less time pressure and a smaller volume of people. Also there are aesthetic differences. For example, you walk in the front door and it doesn’t feel like you’re walking into a courthouse.

 The building is light and bright, and the concierge, the security guards, will greet and acknowledge you. You don’t have to walk through a weapons detection device.  You can get a free tea or coffee at the kiosk.  So it’s all those little things and politeness that make the difference.

 When I applied for my job, I thought I’ll visit the Centre to find out about the place. So my predecessor showed me around and her parting words to me were, ‘Just remember Damian, it’s a Centre not a court’.  About three months later the penny dropped about what she actually meant because in every other court that I’ve worked at, the court is central, everything’s peripheral to the court; here, it’s the Centre in the middle; the court’s on the periphery.

 The Centre has a range of support services: financial and other counselling, mediation, supervision of court orders and crisis counselling. As well, it has a number of community development initiatives to help people manage their own lives. However, from crook to honest can be a long and gruelling road, with some emphasis on the gruel.

Beth Swales is a community corrections officer who says she feels blessed and privileged to come to work.

 For me, I mean, Community Corrections, by its very nature, is a community approach to justice.  However, we are often working in isolation disconnected from other community agencies that are able to support our clients and that’s bypassed here. So I’m in, professionally, corrections heaven because our clients have support and access to supports and treatment that they don’t have at other locations and that’s special to me.

 Here people feel respected, they feel seen, they feel understood, they feel the empathy that all the staff here have for them from the minute they walk in the door. They’re greeted by security, they are greeted by the guys at Info Services, with genuine greetings. It is a genuine place to work, we’ve got genuine relationships but they’re not always easy.  It’s a multi-disciplinary team, we all have very different views and we’re really passionate people, so I don’t think that it’s always an easy thing to be that, but ultimately we are all genuine, we are all passionate, we are all striving for a particular goal and that’s to support the community and support our clients.

 One of the things I’ve been writing about while I’ve been here as writer-in-residence at the Neighbourhood Justice Centre, is the relationship between poverty and crime. Often I’ve seen criminals or heard them saying (now they’re called wrongdoers, there are all these euphemisms) that a criminal thinks that what you see is yours.  That if you see a transistor radio on a bar at a club, it’s yours.  It is this misguided, deluded thing where possessions are actually yours, they don’t belong to anyone except the one who grabs them.

I asked Sue Hayes, Police Prosecutor, ‘When you see the same ones, the locals or the people from Collingwood, Abbotsford, Richmond, whether they’re men or young men or young girls, inwardly you must feel, ‘No, not you again?’ She replied,

 You do but I think you have to learn, Barry, that you also realise when someone—whether they have mental health issues or alcohol or drug issues or other issues—usually it won’t be the first time or the second time, the third time—if they genuinely want to change their life it will take a number of engagements with police, with the courts, for them to actually make the right steps. And sometimes, you know, it will just mean a change for them and I think you have to learn, so that you can remain in the police force, you can’t take on some things. You do what you can, you’ll help, you’ll be a sympathetic ear or whatever, you’ll perhaps sometimes guide people and be involved in that, but you can’t become too despondent because you wouldn’t come back to work the next day.

 You don’t get it right all the time but I think life experience helps a bit too. I think you get a feeling and you have to be a bit careful.  Of course you become a bit cynical. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with a good dose of cynicism.

 Last year, I was employed to teach English at a high school in Broome and one night, it was muggy or evaporative or just hot, and I walked by the ultra-modern correction facility there—it seemed to go on forever and ever—and as I passed some officers chatting and smoking by the gate I heard a solitary prisoner cry out something from inside those razor-wired walls. It was really hard to tell what it was he was crying out about, but it was so solitary and plaintive I shall never forget its insistence and penetration. I think it was ‘Oh, God!’ and it just seemed to be so pitiful and heartfelt and upsetting.

Isn’t it odd that a single word or two of them like that, called out in that way can stay in your mind? It was the sense of solitariness that got to me mostly, I suppose—but the solitariness of the imprisoned man at counterpoint to the light-hearted conversation enjoyed between those officers enjoying a cigarette outside the gate.

Much of what Firas Massouh, Yoni Molad and Steve Pascoe write in response to my article is based on assumptions about how I think and how I frame events which have no relationship to how I do think or frame events. Let me deal with a few specific points in their critique, beginning with Syria. In no way did I suggest that Syria was an ‘autonomous and independent entity’ before the appearance of the French and the British. My critics claim the ‘idea’ of Syria was largely the product of ‘imperialist territorial manipulation’. In fact, it is not the ‘idea’ of Syria that was the product of territorial manipulation but the state of Syria. The ‘idea’ of Syria goes deep into history even if overlaid by the administrative divisions of the Ottoman state and its predecessors. Historical Syria included all the territory of what is now Lebanon, Syria, Israel/Palestine as well as a large chunk of what is now southeastern Turkey. It was on the map in the same way that Kurdistan was on the map even though there was no Kurdish state. The Turkish nationalists prevented the French from taking over what is now southeastern Turkey but even the rest would have constituted a very large Arab state at the heart of the Middle East, threatening French and British interests. So it had to be broken up. The people of this territory were specifically denied the opportunity to decide their own future. The argument that there was no Syria because there was no Syrian state is similar to Zionist thinking and runs parallel with the idea that there was no Palestine because there was no Palestinian state.

With regard to Syrian intervention in Lebanon, my critics put the word ‘authorised’ in quotes, as if there is something questionable about it. For the record, the Arab League did authorise the dispatch of an Arab‘deterrent force’ into Lebanon in 1976. Syria provided the force with the League’s approval. It did not intervene in Lebanon to fight Israel but to prevent the civil war from deteriorating to the point where Israel would intervene to protect its Maronite proxies. The role of Hizbullah is irrelevant because Hizbullah did not exist at the time. Syria did not want military confrontation with Israel in Lebanon or anywhere else, and it is hardly to be faulted for this given Israel’s military power, extending to the possession of nuclear weapons.

I never said that Bashar was ‘loved by most if not all’ of the people. I said that he had a solid base of popular support. In my footnotes, I refer to an article by Camille Otrakji which asks what the people like about Bashar and what they don’t like. Readers should consult this for a nuanced view as opposed to media clichés. Neither did I say Bashar was ‘universally popular’ because obviously he is not and even he has admitted that. As for the threatening slogans uttered by supporters of the ‘regime’, its enemies have any number of their own, most notably ‘Christians to Beirut and Alawisto the grave’, which is where many Alawis already have ended up. Many Christians have fled to Lebanon without the soi-disant Christian leaders of the United States and Britain uttering one word in protest.

My critics deny that the United States, Britain, France, Saudi, Arabia, Qatar and Turkey are involved in a coordinated effort to bring down the government in Damascus, partly by funding an exiled ‘national coalition’ and partly by funding armed groups. This will surprise many readers because the facts are so completely against them. They say that the West ‘has not had an appetite for intervening directly in Syria the way it did in Libya or Mali’. I have to assume they have forgotten that the United States made strenuous efforts to secure a UN Security Council resolution that would have allowed open military intervention on the Libyan model, with consequences that would have been far worse, but were repeatedly blocked by Russia and China. Scarcely hidden covert intervention was the second best choice of the collective calling itself ‘The Friends of the Syrian People’. As I have written, the armed groups are their tools, whether my critics admit it not. If Saudi Arabia and Qatar cut off funding and the supply of arms—at least 3500 tons of which have been provided over the past year—the insurgency will begin to wither at its roots.

The claim of my critics that ‘certain foreign Islamist elements’ are taking advantage of the chaotic situation in Syria to advance their own solution is a coy understatement when these ‘elements’ include the Saudi and Qatari governments and the many thousands of jihadis flowing into Syria from across the Muslim world, with some coming from Europe and even Australia. They are creating chaos rather than taking advantage of it. The agenda of foreign and local jihadis—the establishment of an Islamic emirate—has no relationship to the professed motives lying behind US, British and French intervention. They are dominating the fighting and they have not the slightest interest in the ‘civil society’ of which my critics speak.

My critics talk of ‘revolutionary potential’ and ‘revolutionary dynamics’. These ‘revolutionary dynamics’ are being played out in carnage and massacres across the country as the army tries to drive the armed groups out of the cities and towns they have infiltrated. ‘Activists’ and the media have done their best to cover for the crimes of these groups but as these groups often film their handiwork we have sufficient evidence of their atrocities. Cutting throats and sawing off heads are among their specialties. Massacres of civilians in car and suicide bomb attacks and the destruction/sabotage of infrastructure, along with looting of apartments and factories, constitute further evidence of a war on society and not just the organs of the state. Civilians are being targeted deliberately. This is the reality of what my critics call a ‘novel political process’.

The United States is now trying to take control of the armed groups by making sure that arms end up in what it regards as the right hands. This is likely to cause further divisions between these groups and their Gulf State backers, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which have their own favorites and are waging their own war for regional influence behind the scenes. The United States could choose to throw its weight behind a negotiated solution but it is choosing not to do that. This is completely in accordance with imperialist best practice: you don’t give in, you just try a bit harder until you get what you want, and that is the crux of the present problem because a Taliban-style state at the heart of the Middle East is not what this alliance wants. At least it is not what the United States, Britain and France want because Saudi Arabia and Qatar have slightly different agendas, different from each other’s as well as different from the agendas of their Western friends.

 My critics talk of Bashar’s suppression of ‘civil society movements’, personalising the situation always, as the media does, but do not mention the oppression of men and women in the quarters of cities and towns infiltrated and taken over by Islamist armed groups. It is these groups that are leading the fighting and it is they are who are currently best placed to inherit if the government in Damascus can be brought down. Then we will see what the suppression of civil freedoms is all about.

Behind their revolutionary rhetoric, what are my critics actually promoting in Syria? Not civil society, as I see it, but chaos, destruction, disorder, religious fascism and the strategic interests of outside powers. Finally, the peaceful domestic opposition, a broad coalition of left groups, is strongly opposed to the armed groups and to the intervention by the foreign governments supporting them. They don’t like Assad but they want a negotiated, peaceful solution, which is also my option, but it seems to have no place in the thinking of my critics.

The day dawned sunny, as almost every day in California does. Like thousands from all over the globe, my husband, daughter and I had moved to Silicon Valley on our own tech gold rush. The radio droned away as I went through the morning routine, getting my daughter ready for school. The news report of a shooting in a nearby suburb was shocking. A man had gunned down nine of his work mates. The whereabouts of the man were not known. I did not mention it to my daughter. As I drove her to school, I noticed more police vehicles were cruising the streets and a feeling of tension. The next day the man was shot dead in a suburban driveway by police. I felt relieved and outraged at the summary justice. It was my first direct experience with the infamous US gun culture.

Over the last eighteen months I have heard reports of several mass shootings in other parts of the country. I had become somewhat inured to the shock of these acts until the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The world viewed the Sandy Hook shooting with horror and disbelief. Twenty children, ages six and seven, and six adults were gunned down at the school. The children killed in the Sandy Hook massacre are collateral damage of the militarisation of the US civilian population.

I have watched with growing anger as the gun control debate has been highjacked repeatedly by the National Rifle Association (NRA). The progressive Left in the United States seems mesmerised and paralysed by their inability to make headway on gun control. There appears to be a connection between the strong influence of the military in this country, of paranoia at an international level, and gun violence in the civilian population. The civilian population is now fully mobilised to support most, if not all, US military ventures around the world. A militarised population is conditioned to see violence as a normal response to conflict and to see casualties as an unavoidable consequence of protecting oneself from enemies, whether they be Al Qaeda in the Middle East or the home invader. This fear and paranoia have come to pervade every US neighbourhood.

Kenneth J. Saltman, assistant professor at DePaul University, argues that militarism and the promotion of ‘violence as virtue’ pervade all areas of American life: foreign and domestic policy, popular culture, education, and language. The militarised response to September 11 resulted in the institutionalisation of permanent war. A high level of comfort with rising militarism allowed the suspension of civil liberties and was reinforced by an active hostility from the state and mass media towards any attempt to address the underlying causes for the unprecedented attack on the United States.

Such complacency towards militarism was recently reflected in a comment by Teju Cole in The New Yorker:

            I am not naive about the incessant and unseen (by most of us) military activity that undergirds                  our ability to read, go to concerts, earn a living, and criticize the government in relative safety. I          am grateful to those whose bravery keeps us safe. This ominous, discomfiting, illegal, and            immoral use of weaponized drones against defenseless strangers is done for our sakes.   

The logic seems to be that without a strong military the United States will descend into chaos. Cole recognises that drone strikes and military occupations were generating ‘more of the angriest young enemies money can buy’. As a New York Times report put it last year, ‘Drones have replaced Guantánamo as the recruiting tool of choice for militants’. The activities of the US military led to the creation of more enemies. More enemies meant more paranoia and greater domestic threat. Cole’s statement reflected an acceptance of violence which may have extended to the massacre of young children, be they Iraqi or American. This is the price paid for freedom.

One of the outcomes of this cycle of violence is the increased presence of military-style weapons in the community. The greater the threat perceived by the civilian population, the greater the fear and the desire for self-defence and for more powerful firearms. A Report from the Violence Policy Center in June 2011 described the militarisation of the US civilian firearms market through access to guns that were identical to those used by the armed forces of the United States and other countries. These firearms included such sophisticated weapons as the Barrett 50 caliber anti-armour sniper rifle and the FN Herstal Five-seveN 5.7mm pistol, many variants of the AR-15 (the civilian version of the US military M-16 assault rifle) and numerous semiautomatic versions of the Kalashnikov assault rifle, popularly known as the AK-47. The use of military-style assault weapons has become commonplace in mass shootings.

This report also detailed the use of ‘patriotic’ and ‘heroic’ imagery in gun industry advertising which promotes a symbolic connection with military-style weapons. This was a powerful psychological factor in the process of militarisation. Such marketing identifies ownership of military-style weapons with grand themes of ‘patriotism’ and ‘homeland defence’ and dovetails neatly with the recruiting strategy of the US military. This is not a conspiracy theory, rather a convergence of interests in a militarised society.

The gun industry was a major contributor to the NRA and had an interest in promoting this type of imagery as part of its advertising. Patriotic imagery on the NRA homepage focuses on the US constitutional right to own guns. The NRA displays banners proclaiming that ‘We have the right to defend ourselves’, ‘Anti-gun politicians are wasting no time: their mission to disarm the American people’, Sheriffs refuse to enforce ‘unconstitutional gun laws’, and a quote from a Sandy Hook parent that the government will take his guns from his ‘cold, dead hands’. It was chilling that these slogans reflected the sincerely held beliefs of ordinary people. People seem to view the deaths of children as an acceptable consequence of their right to own guns. This attitude is similar to the acceptance of collateral damage in war.

NRA propaganda allows the drawing of the connection between attitudes related to foreign policy based in paranoia and domestic gun violence. In a section titled ‘Life of Duty’, a video paying tribute to soldiers killed in Afghanistan declares ‘Cut from the sacred cloth of liberty, these heroic men defend the innocent, vanquish the oppressors and restore hope in places once hard to find’. Existing side by side with exhortations to defend rights to own a gun, these two sides of patriotism become intimately entwined in paranoid propaganda about the defence of the unique US way of life against foreigners and domestic government.

The military has been one of the few options for advancement available to impoverished populations. Brian Galaviz and colleagues argue that military recruitment aims to develop strongly positive feelings about military-related activities and service in these youth. They found that supportive feelings about and articulated interest in military service by high school seniors was a strong predictor of actual service. Free first-person shooter video games were part of this campaign, along with promises of enormous cash signing-bonuses or college scholarships. In fact the military has had increasing access to children without the presence of parents or guardians, such as in targeting public schools. For example, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, a multiple-choice test used to determine eligibility for enlistment, is integrated and used in schools as a recruitment tool.

Another strategy of military recruitment has been to promote the perception that participation in the military indicates leadership and strong moral character. As part of the campaign for the national draft for the Frist World War, in 1914 there were calls for universal military training in public schools and colleges as a way to resolve perceived social problems, including ‘moral rot’. Proponents of military training in schools claimed that it would create better citizens and a ‘spirit of obedience, of subservience to discipline’. An increase in the number of private military schools in poor areas of Chicago in recent years may reflect this perception among the population.

A further infiltration of education by militaristic attitudes is reflected in the Hart-Rudman Commission. In 2000 the Commission called for education to be classified as an issue of national security. It required increased federal funding for school security at the cost of community policing, and the continuation of the Troops to Teachers program. Today, under conditions of perpetual warfare, US military recruitment strategies converge with the interests of the gun industry and the NRA to mobilize militarised attitudes in the civilian population.

The militarisation of everyday life may explain the inability of the government and gun control groups to make any headway in preventing massacres like Sandy Hook. The lobby group Move On has produced a video to counter NRA anti-gun control arguments. The first point made is that nobody is coming to take your guns. It is shocking. This is exactly the thing which needs to happen. Guns need to be surrendered to protect children. The Sandy Hook shooter stole the guns he used to shoot children from his mother. She had obtained them legally. The very existence of so many guns in the community mean that deaths are inevitable.

In an attempt to protect students from a massacre, our local school district has planned ‘Code Red drills’. The announcement was framed in the innocuous terms of a ‘Safety Plan’ and of equivalence with fire and earthquake drills. Our school newsletter stated that the drills will involve practicing ‘“lock down” procedures in the event of an immediate threat of danger on the school grounds’ including ‘barricading the classroom door and turning out the lights’. I am now haunted by images of my child trying to protect herself from an armed attacker. It was a graphic instance of culture shock.

Such drills, in fact, date back to the ‘Duck and Cover’ drills of the 1950s. Friends have told me that Code Red drills were a normal part of their schooling growing up. During these procedures, classes were moved into the hallways away from the windows; they were kept in lock down and were not able to go outside. These were simply considered a regular part of school routine. It appeared that such drills have been a normal part of American life. There is strange blankness when my friends speak about these events.

These drills reflect the need for ‘obedience and subservience’ in schools and to the militarised state. It would not be beneficial to the Code Red drills for students to question what was going on. Militarised life in the United States does not now involve formation marching and saluting the flag. It does, however, consist of a high level of acceptance that military violence is a necessary evil to keep the United States safe from enemies. It also requires a fundamental acceptance that the troops need community support, materially and emotionally. These deeply rooted assumptions need to be challenged if any headway was to be made in controlling gun violence in this country.

Firas Massouh, Yoni Molad and Stephen Pascoe

A response to Jeremy Salt

Jeremy Salt’s essay on Syria published in this edition of Arena is a misguided contribution to the debate on recent events in that country.  Salt’s central contention is that the Syrian revolution is not a genuine popular uprising, but instead something more sinister.  His essay constructs a rather elaborate theory the essence of which can be expressed as follows: that the people of Syria who have chosen the path of armed resistance are no more than the ‘tools’ of foreign powers who are hell bent on destroying the country, its secular character and its status as part of an ‘axis of resistance’ to Western imperial interests in the Middle East (and by extension, the interests of Syria’s bête noire: the state of Israel).  In this response, we reject Salt’s thesis and uncover the faulty evidential base upon which it is constructed. We argue that Salt’s interpretation of events is misguided because it is anachronistic and abstract, mired in Cold War realpolitik propaganda. Salt’s argument represents a classic conspiracy theory, in the sense that it contains shards of truth, extrapolated into a metanarrative that ascribes agency to some shadowy, globally powerful force.

Inherent in Salt’s argument is an outright dismissal of any revolutionary potential in Syria. This is more than a mere theoretical misinterpretation; rather, it avoids interrogating or making explicit the very ideas and beliefs on which the structure of the Assad regime is built. In place of criticism, Salt offers a spurious distinction ‘between a system most Syrians don’t like and a president many do like’. Elsewhere, he has argued that although Assad ‘sits on top of the system, it is misleading to call him a dictator.  The system itself is the true dictator’.  In what follows, we examine the historical, political and ideological foundations of Salt’s flawed reading of the Syrian situation.

The Historical Dimension of Salt’s Argument

Salt bases his interpretation of recent events on his reading of twentieth-century Syrian political history, arguing that the present attempt at ‘tearing Syria apart’ is the logical culmination of a decades-long campaign to destroy Syria by Western powers acting in concert with Zionism.  But this account is misleading. Firstly, the assertion that France and Britain ‘tore it apart’ in the 1920s suggests that Syria was an autonomous and independent entity prior to this (whereas its territory had in fact been part of the Ottoman Empire for the previous 400 years; and part of a succession of Islamic empires before the Ottomans).  France and Britain undoubtedly obstructed pan-Arabist aspirations of regional unity through the arbitrary drawing-up of national boundaries, but ironically enough the idea of ‘Syria’ itself was largely the product of this imperialist territorial manipulation.  There had been a notion of Bilad Ash-Sham, roughly corresponding to the area of ‘Greater Syria’ later imagined by certain twentieth-century Syrian nationalists, but it never existed as an autonomous political unit.

Next, Salt writes that ‘Syrians fought the French from the beginning of the mandate until the last French troops were withdrawn under British pressure in 1946’.  While this narrative of unending resistance to colonial occupation appeals to nationalist myth-making, it is far from a complete and accurate rendering of the mandate period.  Philip Khoury, in his authoritative work Syria and the French Mandate, shows how, following the defeat of the Great Revolt of the 1920s, the Nationalist Bloc shifted from a strategy of armed resistance to one of ‘honourable cooperation’ with the French colonial administration (before shifting once again to a more forthright diplomacy). This is a far cry from the story of heroic nationalist resistance that Salt has absorbed in his reading of history.

With respect to the early decades of post-Second World War independence, Salt focuses on US, British and Israeli meddling in Syria’s internal affairs.  This is the least dubious section of the essay: it is undeniable that Syria suffered numerous covert attempts at coup-making and espionage at the height of the Cold War, from the 1949 CIA-engineered coup to the infamous incident of Elie Cohen, the Israeli spy who penetrated the upper echelons of the Syrian military establishment and relayed state secrets that helped give Israel the upper hand in the 1967 Six Day War.  However, what is noticeably lacking from Salt’s account is any interrogation of the Syrian state’s motivations, especially following Hafez Al-Assad’s ascension to power through the so-called ‘corrective movement’ of 1970: Why did Syria turn to the Soviet Union as a protective imperial partner? What were the reasons for the breakdown in the one real attempt at pan-Arabism in practice, the United Arab Republic (the union of Syria and Egypt 1958–1961)? What kind of political economy emerged in Syria under Ba’athist rule? If, as Salt’s argument implies, an understanding of Cold War politics and their legacies is critical to appreciating the origins of the Syrian crisis, why are these crucial questions overlooked?

The issue that receives particularly blinkered treatment by Salt is Syrian military presence in Lebanon.  Syria, he writes, was ‘authorised’ to enter Lebanon in 1976.  Why, though, was Syria so eager to enter Lebanon and why did it stay there so long (far beyond the official end of hostilities in 1990)?  Simply to fight Israel?  Given that Hizbullah was much more effective at this task and that Syria has effectively avoided any real confrontation with Israel since 1973—whether in Lebanon or across the Golan Heights—what were the other motivations for Syrian presence in Lebanon? A full analysis of this important question is beyond the scope of this article, but Salt’s sidestepping of the issue speaks volumes of his selective treatment of the past. Most crucially, the assertion that the campaign to end the Syrian presence in Lebanon was driven by Israel and the United States overlooks the widely documented desire among Lebanese to be rid of the Syrian military occupation of their country.

The Nature of Power in Assad’s Syria

Apologists for the Assad regime rarely take the step of appreciating the material conditions of Syrians. They fail to see how the anti-regime sentiments Syrians express are shaped by political and economic conditions as much as by local, ethnic and religious ones, let alone the interests of external powers. In his geo-political assertions, Salt makes the assumption that Bashar isn’t only an anti-Israel, anti-West, pro-Iran and pro-Hizbullah—read pro-resistance—leader, but also the last true caretaker of Arab sovereignty, whose foreign policy is guided by leftist ideals. Moreover, Salt claims, Bashar is a popular leader and a ‘man of the people’ loved by most, if not all, and is receptive to political reform.  However, we are led to believe, he is engaged in an internal battle with the old guard of the Baath Party, the military, and the intelligence apparatuses, all of which are resistant to change.

Salt makes no mention of Bashar’s suppression of civil society movements and free press. Nor does he mention how the Assad form of governance rested on patron‒client networks, other kinds of personalistic ties like wasta (exchanges of services) connections, Party contacts, or black market deals in order to achieve results. Nothing is said about the mystification of power and the domination of the regime’s iconography over public space. Salt conveniently avoids discussing how the Baath Party was in fact transformed, inflated and de-ideologised so as to fit into the authoritarian format of Assad the Father’s regime, and how Assad the Son inherited the system upon his father’s death. Further, under Bashar, even ‘statist’ phenomena that existed during his father’s reign, such as planning and social welfare measures, were phased out in favour of neoliberal policies, such as privatisation of the public sector and the concentration of the workforce in rentier service sectors. These policies led to the widening of the economic gap and the suffering of Syria’s agriculture industries, as well as public disenchantment at mafia-esque business arrangements.

Due to these social conditions, and contrary to what Salt would have us believe, it is no surprise that Bashar was not universally popular.  One of the key slogans chanted by protestors during the early stages of the revolution was ‘ma minhibbak, ma minhibbak,’ (‘We don’t love, we don’t love you’) in reference to the ‘We love you’ campaign launched in support of Assad.  Another rallying cry was ‘Yalla irhal ya Bashar’ (‘Depart, oh Bashar’).  The epithets attached to the president’s name (‘traitor’, ‘murderer of children’), the destruction of statues of Hafez al-Assad, and the removal of public posters carrying the images of members of the Assad family, illustrate the protestors’ disdain for the ruler. As the revolution has gathered force and geographical reach over the past two years, such acts have bound increasing numbers of Syrians together in the goal of removing the regime, not simply changing it.

Salt is much more comfortable interpreting events in Syria as the machinations of imperialistic powers interested only in regime change. He ignores how the revolution is continuing to expand despite the odds against it. Although the situation is taking on the shape of a civil war, revolutionary dynamics are still very much in play. At the same time, by persevering with the military approach and evading a political one, the regime is standing by its motto, ‘Al-Assad aw nahriq al-balad’ (Assad, or we burn the country). Nothing can deter it, be it the scale of its own criminality, the appeals of its friends or international threats.

On Arming the Rebels

The centrepiece of Salt’s argument is that the United States, Britain, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are collectively involved in an enterprise of providing weapons and other material support to the ‘armed groups’ inside Syria who are seeking to replace the secular Syrian Arab Republic with an ‘Islamic emirate’.  Leaving aside the unlikelihood of the aforementioned countries managing to coordinate this elaborate strategy together, the material fruits of this putative enterprise are simply not evident on the ground.  In reality, the rebels remain nothing more than a collection of defected soldiers and untrained, poorly armed neighbourhood ‘toughs’ operating under the FSA. While the FSA has had some success in defending neighbourhoods and deflecting attacks by pro-Assad forces on certain towns, it is in desperate need of financial, logistical and political support before it can pose a serious threat to the regime. Early in the revolution, it was certain localities that offered protection to defectors and not the other way around.  Attacked with live fire and faced with arbitrary arrests and torture for more than two years now, Syrian opposition forces had no choice but to militarise.

It is no revelation that foreign powers are participating in brokering the flow of funds and materiel into Syria. This has financed further rebel victories, enabled them to purchase weapons from regime forces, seize ammunition from sacked caserns and take control of key checkpoints on Syria’s borders, a step that has in turn allowed for the influx of foreign fighters. Meanwhile, it is becoming more evident that the West has not had an appetite for intervening directly in Syria the way it did in Libya or in Mali. While the rebels receive some anti-aircraft guns and cannons from foreign powers, is that sufficient to claim that the Syrian revolution only consists of ‘tools’ working for the West, abetting the re-mapping of the country?  Would not a massive international conspiracy worth its salt provide its ‘tools’ with some serious anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns?

As to Salt’s accompanying claim, there is no denying that certain foreign Islamist elements have taken advantage of the chaotic situation in Syria to try to advance a radical Islamist ‘solution’.  However, there is ample evidence from across the country that locals have rejected the presence of such fighters and have continued the call for revolution based on a vision of civil society.  Moaz al-Khatib, the erstwhile President of the Syrian National Coalition, recently issued a statement expressing his concerns about the influx of fighters from neighbouring countries and appealing to their governments to control their movement.

Having said all this, it would be foolish and remiss to suggest that there are no plots against Syria, or—more precisely—‘scenarios’ currently being imagined and planned for in the back rooms of Tel Aviv and Washington.  However, the Arab revolutions that Salt dismisses so wantonly are not simply a new theatre in which to perform the old grand power plays.  They are rather a moment for the people of the region to rid themselves of the dead, heavy hand of past paradigms, including the one that Salt is mired in.  By using the slogan ‘The people demand the overthrow of the regime’, the Syrian revolution has continued the demands of Tunisians and Egyptians.  This is not simply a guiding principle for the revolutionaries, but also an opportunity for intellectuals to interrogate the clichéd and limiting polarities that underpin Cold War rhetoric.

The Cold War Continued?

Given that the strands upon which Salt’s argument is constructed are largely speculative, how can we explain his readiness to seize upon them?  It is because his worldview is one inherited from the Cold War.  During the Cold War, because of subservience among certain factions on the Left to Soviet interests, some thought it made sense to support Arab nationalism because it was, for a time, aligned with the USSR in its struggle against US and Israeli imperialism. The fatal entwining of leftist politics with the interests of the Soviet Union, the promise of early Bolshevism notwithstanding, was an error that caused irreparable damage to the cause of revolutionary Socialism. It is even more absurd to hold on to a world view nourished by Soviet realpolitik today, when the excuse of thereby supporting progressive aims is even less based on reality.

Salt is right on one thing: US imperialism is unfortunately alive and well, and it is clear there are many parties with stakes in the Syrian civil war, but the argument that anyone who tries to revolt against what were once Soviet allies is necessarily in the pocket of the United States or the Israelis is myopic at best and dangerous at worst.  It is not surprising that Salt commits another blunder of Cold War thinking—the inability to recognise spontaneous and novel political processes if they occur externally to officially sanctioned regimes. This is the ‘end of history’ dressed up as anti-imperialism. What Salt and counterparts on the Right agree on is this: History is over; there can be nothing new under the sun!  Just like the defenders of the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia and the more recent capitulation of intellectuals who supported the US-led invasion of Iraq, Salt does not see what is in front of him. Beholden to a readymade narrative, he is comfortable alluding to covert international plots for which he provides no reliable evidence. Instead he strings together an interpretation based on what he believes are trustworthy conceptual parameters but which are in reality nothing more than scraps from the ideological dustbin of history.

A war is being waged in and on Syria. Protecting the people from the dictator is no more than the usual pretext for attacks on Middle Eastern countries.The real target is not Bashar but Syria itself. It is Israel’s visceral enemy; it has got in the way of the West virtually since its emergence as an independent state in the 1940s; and for more than two decades it has been the central pillar in the Iran–Syria–Hizbullah ‘axis of resistance’. Unrest following the arrival of the ‘Arab spring’ was an opportunity that outside governments and their regional allies moved quickly to exploit.The United States, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey pooled their resources in an attempt to bring down the government in Damascus. Inside Syria their tools have been armed groups increasingly dominated by local and foreign jihadists who want to turn Syria into an Islamic emirate.They are the very people the United States and its allies were supposed to be fighting in their ‘war on terror’ yet here they are in Syriasupporting them.

Egypt’s President Nasser once described Syria as the ‘beating heart of Arabism’. This was not just a rhetorical flourish. The Arab national idea was largely born in Syria.Aware of its central place on the map and in Arab nationalist thought, the French and the British tore it apart in the 1920s, carving off the best part of its Mediterranean flank to create Lebanon, and allocating southern Syria (Palestine) to the Zionists.In 1938 France took the process of dismemberment further, giving autonomy to the eastern Syrian Mediterranean region of Iskanderun, then allowing Turkey to take it over.

Syrians fought the French from the beginning of the mandate until the last French troops withdrew under British pressure in 1946.When the country’s first elections were held in July 1947, Shukri al Quwatli’s mainstream National Party won the largest block of votes (twenty-four) in a parliament numerically dominated by independents (seventy). Quwatli could not have known it but a declaration made four months earlier had already sealed the fate of his government. On 12 March President Truman had declared before Congress that the United States would assist ‘free people resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure’. The immediate targets were Greece and Turkey but in time the provisions of the Truman Doctrine were extended to any country the United States could argue was under threat of international communist subversion.

In Syria the dominant question in the late 1940s was the future of TAPLINE (the Trans-Arabian Pipeline), which the Bechtel Corporation had been contracted to build for ARAMCO (the Arabian American Oil Company). As planned in 1945 it would run from Saudi Arabia across Jordan and Syria before ending at a terminal on the Mediterranean coast. The initial idea of a terminal at Haifa had to be abandoned in favour of the Lebanese port city of Sidon because of the outbreak of war in Palestine.Popular fury at the state of Israel and all of its backers put Syrian assent to TAPLINE out of the question.At this point CIA operatives began sounding out right-wing Syrian army officers on what could be done about getting rid of President Quwatli. A pliant colonel called Husni al Zaim was found and installed as dictator with the help of the CIA on 30 March 30 1949.Within a few months he had given permission for the construction of TAPLINE, banned the Syrian Communist Party and declared his intentions to take in a quarter of a million Palestinians and make peace with Israel.

This was the beginning of a long US entanglement in Syrian affairs.By the mid-1950s the Syrian government was developing a close relationship with the Soviet Union and in 1956 the CIA and the SIS (Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service) conspired to overthrow it. What the British did not tell the White House was that it was simultaneously planning to attack Egypt in concert with France and Israel. Eisenhower was furious, but the redoubtable Syrian intelligence chief, Abd al Hamid al Sarraj, had already got wind of the plot and either arrested or chased the key conspirators out of the country.Towards the end of 1956 Operation Straggle gave way to Operation Wappen. This also failed, after Syrian officers brought into the conspiracy told their superiors what was going on.

Syria’s union with Egypt (1958–61) was followed by the Baath seizure of power. Opposition to the Zionist ‘entity’ remained as strident as ever. Clashes along the Syrian truce lines ended in the Israeli attack on Syria and Egypt in June 1967. Within three years the shock of defeat had helped to propel into power Hafez al Assad, then commander of the air force, who was to outwit the United States and Israel for the next three decades.

The main arena of their confrontation during this period was Lebanon. In 1976 the Arab League authorised Syria to send a ‘deterrent force’ into Lebanon to put a cap on the civil war. The right-wing Maronite alliance was already on the point of being defeated by the Lebanese Left–Palestinian–Druze coalition. Determined to prevent Israel from being given any pretext for intervention, Assad imposed balance on the warring factions. In fact the new Israeli Prime Minister, Menahim Begin, was already making it clear he needed no pretext to intervene in Lebanon. Begin’s first invasion of 1978 was followed by a much more extensive operation in 1982. This would necessarily involve conflict with Syria. Israel launched its ground operation on 6 June and followed through days later with a large-scale air attack on Syrian SAM missiles batteries in the Bika’a Valley. Of the nineteen missile emplacements, seventeen were destroyed, along with radar installations and dozens of Syrian planes.Without air cover, Syria’s troops were neutralised.

Assad was humiliated but did not have to bide his time for long.Global revulsion at the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila camps during the summer of 1982 marked the beginning of a sharp reversal for both the United States and Israel.They had driven out the PLO only for the vacuum to be filled by a Shia resistance movement far more dangerous than the Palestinians had ever been. In April 1983 a suicide bomber destroyed the US embassy in Beirut, leaving sixty-three dead. In October 1983 it was the turn of US marines sent to Lebanon as part of a multinational ‘peacekeeping’ force: 241 were killed in the bombing of their compound and fifty-eight French paratroops killed in a simultaneous bombing of the French barracks. On 17 May 1983 Israel imposed a ‘peace’ agreement on a puppet Lebanese government, only for it collapse less than a year later.

By this time Hizbullah had come into existence under the direction of Iranian cadres. The party issued its first manifesto on 16 February 1985. Just three weeks later, an attempt was made to kill a senior Shia cleric, Muhammad Hassan Fadlallah, widely regarded as Hizbullah’s spiritual mentor. Reportedly arranged by CIA chief William Casey, and funded by $3 million of Saudi money,[1] local operatives exploded a car bomb in the West Beirut suburb of Bir ‘Abid. It failed to kill Fadlallah but killed eighty others. In 1992 Israel assassinated Hizbullah’s Secretary-General, Abbas Musawi, in a helicopter missile attack that also killed his five-year-old son. Musawi was succeeded by Hassan Nasrallah, whose own elder son, Muhammad Hadi, was killed in fighting with Israeli soldiers in September 1997. Supported by Iran and Syria, Hizbullah continued to wage a successful war of attrition against Israel and its Lebanese collaborators. On 24 May 2000 Israel was forced to withdraw its forces from all occupied territory except the Shaba’a farms. On 10 June Hafez al Assad died, having lived long enough to savour this historic defeat of the Zionist enemy.

Towards the end of his life Assad engaged in backroom negotiations with the United States and Israel centring on the return of the Golan Heights. These approaches came to nothing but were no more than brief interludes in a continuing campaign to force Syria to its knees.It had been on the State Department list of states sponsoring terrorism since 1979 and, after the attack on Iraq in 2003, the pressure was cranked up. The neoconservatives had a long list of Middle Eastern countries they wanted attacked and Israel’s activists in the US Congress followed through with legislation aimed at crippling Iran and Syria. In December 2003 Congress passed the Syrian Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Act (SALSRA), placing bans on exports to Syria and dealings with Syrian banks and other financial institutions, and freezing US assets of Syrian government institutions and individuals. During the Obama administration such economic warfare, banned under the UN Charter, has been further reinforced, notably by the Syria Freedom Support Act and the Syria Sanctions Act.

At the same time the United States and Israel were still seeking means for getting Syria out of Lebanon.On 14 February 2005 a massive explosion on the corniche road killed former Sunni Muslim Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. The killing was a masterstroke because of the way it united Sunni Muslims and Maronites in a wave of anti-Syrian fury.Syria had no choice but to pull its remaining troops out of Lebanon. Four ‘pro-Syrian’ military and intelligence officers accused of plotting the assassination were held for four years before being released for lack of evidence. Switching track without taking breath, the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon then claimed that members of Hizbullah had killed Hariri. In response, blaming Mossad, Hizbullah released intercepted aerial surveillance showing that an Israeli drone had tracked Hariri for three months, right up to the moment of his assassination.[2] Whoever was responsible, the success of this operation encouraged repeats.A wave of murders of ‘anti-Syrian’ journalists and academics followed the killing of Hariri, each blamed on Syria, each doing damage only to Syria, and not one ever solved.

In 2006 Israel launched a large-scale invasion of Lebanon aimed at the destruction of Hizbullah, only for it to be blocked a few miles from the armistice line and forced into a humiliating retreat three weeks later.By 2007 the failure to shake the Iran–Syria–Hizbullah strategic alliance was strengthening the Saudi view that the best way to fight Shia ideological fervour was with Sunni ideological fervour. In Iraq the United States had already been training a Shia death and torture squad inside the interior ministry to hunt down Sunni jihadis killing US soldiers. Now the Saudis would try to persuade the Americans that the sectarian weapon should be used to contain Iran and rising Shia influence across the region.In fact a full-scale military attack on Iran was the first choice of the Saudi king but such an attack would set off a chain reaction of regional and global consequences the United States and its allies might not be able to control.The option could be picked up eventually but in the meantime a range of effective secondary weapons lay close at hand: economic warfare, targeted assassinations (of Iranian nuclear scientists),cyber warfare(directed against Iran’s nuclear program) and support for militant Sunni groups, including those whose hatred of the United States was scarcely less than that of the Shia.The chief proponent of the last of these threads was Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi ambassador to the United States for more than twenty years (1983–2005), now Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief, who assured the United States he could keep these groups in line.The United States came on board, with consequences that have already included some of the blowback many had feared. The well-planned attack on the US consulate in Benghazi last September, culminating in the death of the US ambassador and three other Americans,was the work of the same Islamic militants who had fought to bring down the government of Muammar al Qadhafi under the protection of NATO air power.[3]

The United States was well aware of the ambiguities in its relationship with Saudi Arabia.In 2008 Hillary Clinton claimed that Saudi donors were the ‘most significant source of funding for Sunni terrorist groups worldwide’, including Al Qaida, the Taliban and Lashkari-Taiba in Pakistan. Other sources of funding included the UAE, Qatar and Kuwait, with Qatar’s level of cooperation on counterterrorism issues ‘considered the worst in the region’. [4]

A ‘strategic embrace’ between Saudi Arabia and Israel and the destabilisation of Syria, with the Saudi government providing ‘funds and logistical aid to weaken the government of President Bashar [al] Assad’ and thus the Iran–Syria–Hizbullah strategic alliance were specific aspects of the new US–Saudi regional strategy.[5] In 2008 the Saudis put forward a plan for intervention in Lebanon by an Arab force drawn from ‘periphery states’. Representing a ‘security response’ to Hizbullah’s ‘military challenge’ to the government in Beirut,the force would be provided with US and NATO aerial and naval cover.[6] Around the time this scheme was proposed, Bandar bin Sultan and Jeffrey Feltman (US ambassador to Lebanon 2004–08) were reported to have devised a detailed plan for the destabilisation of Syria.[7] Feltman had previously coordinated the delivery of billions of dollars in aid to the pro-US Lebanese government. Some of it was channelled in the direction of Sunni jihadis already being cultivated by Saad Hariri, Rafiq’s son and point man for the United States and Saudi Arabia inside Lebanon. Iraq was then in the process of being partitioned between the Kurdish governorate in the north and the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad; in the view of Hassan Nasrallah, chaos and partition was the formula the anti-Shia alliance had in mind for Lebanon and Syria as well.[8] Coincidentally or not, the breakdown of the central Middle Eastern lands into bite-sized ethno-religious statelets has been an Israeli strategic goal for decades.[9]

The sectarian war taking shape encompassed Pakistan and Afghanistan as well as the ‘Shia crescent’ in the Middle East. In Iraq a long-running campaign of suicide bombings directed against the Shia population led to charges being laid against the Sunni Muslim Vice President Tariq al Hashimi in 2011 for running death squads. Hashimi fled to the Kurdish north before moving on to Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, all three Sunni Muslim countries refusing Iraqi requests to hand him over. Sunni militants who once fought the Americans are now fighting in Syria as well as planning to bring down the Shia-dominant government in Baghdad with the help of the Gulf States. ‘We have coordinated with countries like Qatar and Saudi and Jordan. We are organising, training and equipping ourselves but we will start peacefully until the right moment arrives. We won’t be making the same mistakes. Baghdad will be destroyed this time’.[10] In Bahrain Saudi Arabia intervened militarily to prop up the Sunni Muslim minority government against the Shia majority, while putting down demonstrations by the Shia majority in its own eastern province. In Pakistan, Gulf donors and charities have poured millions of dollars into the funding of salafist madrasas and jihadi groups such as Lashkari-Janghvi, which has unleashed a rolling wave of suicide bombings against Shia targets. Such attacks were virtually unknown until a few years ago.

The existence of the Bandar bin Sultan–Feltman plan cannot be confirmed but given the ‘redirection’ of US policy in accordance with Saudi thinking,[11]and taking into account the strenuous efforts already being made to destabilise Syria through economic sanctions and financing the opposition, the development of such a plan seems no more than a logical extension of a process already underway. Key elements in this blueprint for sectarian warfare included the exploitation of legitimate opposition to the ‘regime’; the mobilisation of young people; the formation of a network of thugs and criminals (preferably non-Syrians); the training of ‘activists’ in the use of videos and social media for propaganda purposes; the provision of all necessary communications equipment, including mobile phones with a virtual country code (the Thurayya phones produced in the UAE fitted the bill); the infiltration of peaceful demonstrations by agents provocateur; the killing of demonstrators by snipers using the same guns and ammunition as the police or army so the state could be blamed; the incitement of sectarian massacres; the burning of Baath Party offices and other public buildings and the smashing of images of Bashar and his father.The entire project would be underwritten with $2 billion of seed money by Saudi Arabia.[12]

On 12 January 2011 Hizbullah and its allies withdrew from the Lebanese government, bringing about its collapse and demonstrating yet again the political ineffectiveness of Saad Hariri and his allies. Something more forceful had to be done to stem a fast-running Shia tide: a plan was on the drawing board, and as the ‘Arab spring’ metastasised across the region, an opportunity arose for it to be activated. The flight of Zine al Abidine ben Ali from Tunis (11 January 2011) and the resignation of Husni Mubarak (11 February) were losses to the United States but, adapting quickly, it sought to turn the ‘Arab spring’ to its advantage. Negotiations with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt played out well, with elections bringing to power a president openly committed to maintaining the 1979 peace treaty with Israel despite his movement’s rhetorical opposition to both Israel and Zionism. Protests in Libya created an opening to get rid of an eccentric ruler who had been a thorn in the side of the West for decades. In Syria serious protests broke out in the southern city of Dara’a on 15 Marchafter the arrest of students for scrawling anti-government graffiti on walls, but only when Qadhafi had been dealt with could the same coalition that had been assembled against Libya turn its full attention to the government in Damascus.

If there was no Bandar bin Sultan–Feltman plan, the coincidence with how the situation in Syria has developed is certainly striking. The narrative of a peace-loving people rising up against the dictator was a fabrication in both Libya and Syria. There was no popular revolt against Qadhafi. There was a protest movement in Benghazi which Britain, France and the United States quickly exploited in their own interests. This was their war and the ‘rebels’ advancing westward under a blanket of NATO missiles were their tools on the ground. In Syria a distinction has to be made between a system most Syrians don’t like and a president even his enemies concede many Syrians do like.[13] Support for the armed groups is hard to gauge because when heavily armed men whose reputations for brutality have preceded them turn up in a city, town or village, people are going to ‘support’ them out of fear of the consequences if they don’t. The armed groups are not wanted in many of the cities they have infiltrated: in Aleppo even the FSA admitted that 70 per cent of the people support the government, and food shortages along with the brutality of the armed groups has caused further alienation and anger.[14]

This all points to a carefully orchestrated plan to drag the Syrian government into a maelstrom of violence intended to suck it downwards to its eventual destruction. Arms were being shipped into Syria from Lebanon and Turkey at a very early stage of the protest movement and jihadis were crossing borders from Iraq and Lebanon to take part in the fighting. Dominating the narrative was all important and on this front the Syrian government was not in the race. Truth was indeed the first casualty but whatever the truth was of accusations made by ‘activists’ against the Syrian army and the civilian paramilitaries called the shabiha, the armed groups, even on the evidence of their own videos and mobile phone footage, were guilty of committing atrocities against civilians as well as captured soldiers. Journalists smuggled into the country and moving around under the protection of the armed groups were never going to see what these groups did not want them to see. Such was the situation in Homs, where the siege of the infiltrated suburb of Baba Amr commanded global media attention for weeks, reaching a peak of intensity with the murders of the journalist Marie Colvin, a French journalist who was with her and a third man who remains unidentified. Only when the media had lost interest was it revealed that the rebel battalion at the heart of the action, the Free Syrian Army’s Faruq Brigade, had maintained a special squad whose job it was to take captives to a burial ground and cut their throats.[15]

Again, if there was no plan, the coincidence between with the ‘redirection’ and the Bandar bin Sultan–Feltman plan and what was happening in Syria was striking.Financed and armed by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar and mobilised in southeastern Turkey, salafist jihadis streamed into Syria from the four corners of the Muslim world: Libyans (the first large batch), Tunisians, Saudis, Egyptians, Turks, Chechens, Pakistanis, Lebanese, Jordanians and Saudis (even criminals sentenced to death for murder or drug dealing were released from Saudi prisons if they agreed to fight in Syria[16]).The crimes committed by these Muslim contras include summary executions, massacres, bombing targeting civilians, murder of workers at state institutions, rape, kidnapping, attacks on Alawi and Christian villages, plunder of businesses and private dwellings and an enormous level of infrastructural sabotage. Recent attacks on civilians include a car bombing in central Damascus that killed fifty-five, including many school children (21 February); the suicide bombing inside the Iman mosque that killed an elderly Islamic scholar, Muhammad Said Ramadan al Bouti, and forty-eight others (21 March); and the mortar attack on Damascus University that killed ten students (28 March). Commenting on the killing of civilians in Damascus, British reporter Alex Thomson concluded that ‘it is hard to build any other case than that the rebel tactic here is pure terror and demoralisation’.[17]

Syria was never going to be broken as Libya was. The fact the army has not disintegrated is proof it is an army and not the media’s ‘Assad loyalists’. Similarly, while there have been some defections, the government has also held up to the intense pressures of the past two years, showing that it is a government, not a ‘regime’. It still has strong public support. Syrians want change but not at the expense of the destruction of the country, a sentiment that is probably stronger now in light of the devastation of the past two years. While the exiles call for even more armed intervention, the domestic peaceful opposition opposes it. The National Coordination Body for Democratic Change is a coalition of thirteen leftist political parties and a number of independents and can therefore be said to represent a significant body of public opinion. It opposes both the militarisation of the conflict and foreign intervention; it is just as strongly opposed to the system as the exiles but regards dialogue as the way out.

In early 2013 the United States, Britain and France deepened their involvement in Syria by deciding to supply the ‘rebels’ with ‘non-lethal’ battlefield equipment such as body armour and armoured vehicles. Their official refusal to go so far as supplying weapons is meaningless in light of their approval of weapons being shipped into Syria by their Arab allies, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Libya, including arms supplied to Saudi Arabia and diverted to Syria in breach of US arms export control regulations. Earlier reports that the United States and Britain were directly involved in the arms traffic have now been pulled together in an account of a plan aimed at another attempt to capture Damascus, five previous attempts having failed. This covert operation involves the supply of at least 3500 tons of weapons, many of them more powerful than the armed groups were previously receiving. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are paying for these weapons while Turkey and Jordan are said to be providing ‘the land channels for the shipments to reach the rebels’ once the weapons have been airlifted to airports in both countries. Many of the arms are coming from Croatia and Eastern Europe.[18] The scale of the airlift ‘simply dwarfs the massive weapons airlift mounted for the Afghan resistance in the 1980s’.[19]

Obama has said he will support only ‘moderates’ inside Syria but how he could make sure no arms end up with the ‘extremists’ is far from clear and is probably impossible. If by ‘moderates’ he means groups that have not committed all or some of the crimes listed in this article, there are no ‘moderates’ in the armed opposition. The United States plans to channel weapons supplies through the so-called Free Syrian Army (FSA). As this is no more than a name given to fragmented groups acting on their own initiative it is hard to see what its ‘military command’ actually commands.

The Syrian National Coalition, of which the FSA is the military wing, has its own command problems. On 19 March the coalition elected as its ‘prime minister’ Ghassan Hitto, a computer scientist from Texas who has not seen the country of his birth for several decades. The election followed a struggle behind the scenes by Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Hitto is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, which is supported by Qatar and opposed by Saudi Arabia. Thus the outcome was a victory for Qatar. The election was also seen as an attempt by Qatar to railroad an attempt by Russia to set up negotiations with the government in Damascus involving Muadh al Khatib, the coalition’s president. Khatib and twelve other members of the coalition resigned in protest at Hitto’s election, with the commander of the FSA, Salim Idris, also rejecting his authority. The quarreling continued at the Arab League summit in Doha a few days later, with the Saudi and Qatari delegates ‘shouting abuse at each other down the corridor and exchanging blows in private rooms’.[20] This time the outcome appears to have been a victory for Saudi Arabia despite the prominent role played by Qatar: it was Khatib and not Hitto who was awarded Syria’s seat at the summit meeting before clamouring to have it at the United Nations as well.

Enough is not yet enough. The United States, France, Britain, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are determined to destroy the central pillar in the Middle East axis of resistance even at the risk of destroying Syria. Not since the end of the First World War has a Middle Eastern country been targeted for destruction in such a remorseless fashion. The means are justified by the end: as a geo-strategic triumph, the destruction of the Syrian government would eclipse the sidelining of Egypt through the 1979 treaty with Israel and perhaps surpass even the destruction of Iraq as a unitary state.The stakes could not be higher: nothing is beyond contemplation, including the assassination of Bashar if his enemies think they can get away with it. The outcome of this latest phase of the long-running struggle for Syria will determine the future of the Middle East for many decades to come.

March, 2013

So many of today’s political heroes harked back to on Left and Right were active in the 1980s. Keeping in mind that a hero for some is a vision from hell for others, it is worth asking why these figures emerged as and when they did. The death of Margaret Thatcher is a useful time for such reflection.

The kind of commentary found in the media today is not likely to be terribly helpful. Did Thatcher, despite her media image of the Iron Maiden, have a sensitive side? Could she feel for those who were displaced and broken by her insistence on market solutions? Or those ruined by her resistance to the unions—especially the miners unions? Was she really hard, or just someone who saw the larger picture of what needed to be done?  While these and other such matters largely compose the elements of her construction as a media icon, it will be suggested here that they are all mystifications when it comes to the real significance of her actions.

This is not to deny that she had capacities of her own in finding her way through the dilemmas she faced. One is tempted to see these narrowly in terms of a blinkered and absolute determination to pursue her interests, in this respect not unlike Australia’s current Prime Minister. It may be that Thatcher also had more complex capacities, although a number of her close associates attributed her success to an extremely narrow frame of mind. The issue, though, is not really such capacities but rather the meanings associated with Thatcher’s transformative agenda. The main reason she is so highly (or lowly) regarded is what is considered her transformative ‘success’. But this success was surely not a consequence of personal qualities.

Thatcher was one of a number of political leaders in the 1980s attributed with miracle powers because of the novelty of their actions in breaking with past institutional arrangements: whether confronting union power or giving new openings to the market, de-regulating financial institutions, challenging welfare assumptions, embracing global institutions, or championing the individual. One can also point to Ronald Reagan, and in Australia, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. (John Howard and Peter Costello come from a later decade but essentially carried on the new ‘tradition’.) It has been argued that these 1980s leaders all had the courage to step outside the contemporary political-economic norms of their time, but this is misleading. It attributes too much to their personal courage and says nothing of the underlying transformations they simply took for granted and of which, by and large, they had no understanding. Nor did they have any inclination to understand, preferring to act, take advantage of the opportunities at hand and remain oblivious to their consequences. We are still suffering the consequences today.

A transformation for which we are still paying today? This could be a statement about how policy changes in the 1980s have undermined the welfare state and the security once offered by union organisations. It could be a statement about the demise of any sense of social alternatives after the collapse of the socialist states, or the present overwhelming, if declining, power of the US military. It could be a statement about how the social security offered by families and local institutions has imploded, leaving the individual to cope as best as she or he can. It could be a statement about the GFC.

There are other examples. But how do these relate to Thatcher? What about the GFC, for example? The connection lies in the contemporary demise of the global economy, a collapse that has just begun. Thatcher can hardly be blamed for bad management of the economy today, but she, like Reagan, Hawke and Keating, have been credited with the rise of certain institutions in the 1980s and it is these that directly link to the cause of the collapse that began in 2008.

It is of course ironic that the very developments that are still celebrated as major achievements and attributed to these political names are yet to be brought into contention. Thatcher is associated with the re-emergence of the market in social affairs, but she and others simply took for granted the novel elements in the emerging new economy of the period. Thatcher, for instance, took for granted the silicon chip that made this resurgent market possible. This market had new powers to draw the domestic sphere into its logic through advertising and to create a global economy based on the computer and the internet. But this market is just one of the elements of something much larger: an emergent social world. To put it another way, the ‘miracle’ technology of the silicon chip is a product of emergent social relations: a development within capitalism, in turn dependent on the new university and the centrality of intellectual practices that are practical in the world.

The Thatcher and Reagan, Hawke and Keating years were those of a fundamental social transformation which lay beneath the conscious range of politicians and policy makers. In terms of precedents, this transformation goes back to the emergence of high technology first concretised in the absolutely novel form of the atomic bomb—producing the unprecedented from natural powers that were previously regarded as ‘nothing’. In the 1980s this new relation between the academy and capitalism gained more embracing expression in a range of institutional developments: the market unleashed with such violence by Thatcher; her attack on the unions in the United Kingdom and its ‘moderate’ equivalent in Australia with Hawke and Keating’s Australia Reconstructed (both strategies answered to the same transformation); the attack on the traditional university, with demands for practical outcomes in the economy led by high-tech science (pursued with diligence in Australia by John Dawkins); various developments in money and finance facilitated by high technology that flew in the face of long-standing historical constraints and led progressively to the financial debacle of the GFC; the shift in trade whereby currencies were floated against others, facilitating globalisation of the economy at the expense of local culture and production, simultaneously opening the door to widespread currency manipulation by corporations and states (such as Japan’s current policies of forcing down the Yen against other currencies in a wild attempt to propel its economy out of twenty years of crippling deflation); and de-regulation of banking and currencies on a grand scale, promoted by the Australian Labor Party as the fundamentals of a reformist party.

These are the tip of the iceberg of unprecedented transformations in the nature of our economy. Long-standing constraints on how to manage economy within bounds disintegrated from the 1980s on. Dick Cheney observed that Reagan proved that deficits no longer mattered—budget deficits or trade deficits. He lowered taxes and ignored the consequences. The financing of the deficit by export-oriented economies like China re-investing export income—leading to unmanageable distortions—became the typical solution, all facilitated by the liberation of the floating currency and its availability for manipulation. What would normally have been massively inflationary was offset by low-cost imports, and they destroyed local economies.

There is no need to blame Thatcher for these unsustainable developments; but we should see that the underlying processes that allowed her to perform her ‘miracle’ were fundamentally socially transformative, and she leapt onboard. She rode a tiger far more vigorous than she was, and like all of the ‘miracle’ politicians of her time she promoted the unsustainable.

As I am suggesting, these developments in economy were really elements of something much larger: a transformed society in which social relations were reorganised around the more abstract potentials made possible by the high technologies, while more concrete forms of association and community were thinned out. That people experienced a heightened sense of being alone, or individual, in this new context should not surprise us. That they often came to be drawn into excessive consumption as an expression of meaning in the world was one of the necessities of the emergent economy. That the economy became morbidly attached to debt and that debt became associated with ‘prosperity’ (by and large in the form of asset inflation) were elements that culminated in the GFC. Indebtedness had reached record and unsustainable levels. Now, after the crisis, we are faced with underlying deflation, which the Japanese know all about but cannot tell us how to fix. When debt peaks, and ‘prosperity’ is dependent upon debt, there are long-term consequences. Peter Costello, the ‘world’s best treasurer’, was awash with debt-supported budget surpluses. It was close to a miracle! Wayne Swan, embattled by deflation despite a resources boom, is puzzled by where revenue and surplus have gone.

As serious as these consequences are, they are phenomena of deeper realities about the society we have entered. Drawn away from the natural world as it was once experienced, we have, at a social level, lost our feel for natural constraints. Climate change is one example; living with the limits of our bodies is another. The social world that began to take shape in the 1980s is unsustainable, and we have merely experienced the first major expression of this with the GFC. With the death of Margaret Thatcher we might reflect that we certainly need political leadership in a new key after the debacles unleashed by the leaders of the 1980s.

John Hinkson

The film begins with the statement that it is ‘based on firsthand accounts of actual events’. This implies that the film has some authenticity—that its narrative is as much documentary as it is entertainment, and indeed the film’s narrative unfolds like a police procedural. Times, dates, locations are shown on the film as if events were being reconstructed. Yet the film is also an artifice, a constructed narrative using deliberative plotting, music, images, camera shots and the like to create a tense plotline that keeps audiences riveted. This slippage between journalism and ‘art’ has allowed Bigelow and writer Mark Boal to dodge criticism. To those who claim the film glamorises torture, the filmmakers reply that they are just presenting events as told to them—as if they were journalists. On the other hand when facing the most serious criticism that the film falsifies the facts by asserting that the use of torture provided information that led to Bin Laden, the filmmakers declare (in the words of Boal) that ‘it’s a movie, not a documentary’.

This slippage of genres has become commonplace within our mediasphere, news fuses with entertainment, reality TV is part documentary, part soap opera/gameshow and the like. But in hiding behind the hybrid nature of their project the makers of Zero Dark Thirty, in purporting to make an ‘apolitical’ film about the hunt for Bin Laden have in fact made a seductive and unsettling piece of propaganda. That the film was made with the cooperation of the CIA makes it possibly the first contemporary example of what Peter Maas has called ‘government-embedded’ filmmaking. The film’s use of high tech military equipment including state of the art helicopters also indicates state cooperation on another level. How then does the film reflect such ‘embeddedness’?

Zero Dark Thirty opens with a distinctive choice: no visuals at all. Instead we face a blank screen and hear the distressed voices of 9/11 victims trapped in the towers, one voice fears that she’s ‘never getting out’. The audience, too, is visually trapped; we are made to feel something of what the victims felt. It is a powerful but manipulative opening, enshrining the logic of victimhood and the desire for revenge. Sure enough the following scene shows a detainee being tortured at one of the CIA’s ‘black sites’. Maya, the lead character is new to the interrogation and asks of the detainee’s chances of release. The definitive answer comes; ‘he’s never getting out’. The repetition of phrases invites a comparison between the 9/11 victims who are ‘never getting out’ and the detainee. Indeed from this point onward we share the perspective of the CIA who maintain control of people and spaces. The film creates a sense of intense intimacy, a world of secret interrogations and shifting CIA ‘black sites’ stretched across the globe—punctuated only by violent acts that come from outside. By remaining exclusively within the perspective of the CIA we are invited to share this feeling of hermetic power—of a fragile hegemony broken only by acts of terrorism. Indeed apart from the conclusion all of the violence in the film is perpetuated by Muslims upon American victims. We get 9/11, the London bombings, various other terrorist attacks but not the Iraq or Afghan war.

There’s already been a lot of debate about the depiction of torture in Bigelow’s film. Some claim the film glamorises torture but the reality is more complex. The scenes of torture in the film—while they show waterboarding, sexual humiliation, and physical abuse—actually seem to have little by way of affective content. In fact the film adopts a modesty of sorts in depicting torture—one detainee has his pants removed to create a sense of humiliation in front of Maya but his nakedness is shot from the back and from a distance so we are not invited to share in his shame. We are told at one point that a prisoner has soiled himself but are not shown this. All this might seem slight but it indicates how slippery the film is when it comes to torture.

One prisoner is fitted with a dog collar and led around Abu Ghraib style—the reality is that this kind of amateurish humiliation was not used by the CIA as an interrogation technique. From what we know the clinical and bureaucratised mode of interrogation-as-torture that the CIA did use is more disturbing. If the film had shown the reality of torture as a banal mass procedure—where horror is subsumed behind a standardised routine of recording, filing, and auditing by doctors, soldiers, secretaries and so on—the result would have been both accurate and more chilling. By conflating the juvenile and amateurish humiliations of Abu Ghraib with actual CIA methods the film’s depiction of torture becomes diluted. From actual records we know the CIA’s use of torture provoked widespread condemnation, not just from civil liberties and human rights advocates but within the government itself. Steve Coll notes that at many of the ‘black sites’ there were also FBI agents present, many of whom denounced the CIA’s methods as ‘counterproductive and morally wrong’. The film conveniently leaves this out.

Despite Bigelow’s claims of neutrality there is not a single moment in the film where torture is questioned. In fact one interrogator even complains that no more information will be able to be extracted now all the Guantanamo prisoners have lawyers—the implication being that legal process will not bring the ‘justice’ needed. There is no attempt to show the lasting effects of torture on either the detainees (many of whom still cannot recount their experiences without breaking down) or the torturers. The closest we get is the declaration by one interrogator that he is returning to the United States because he ‘has seen too many naked bodies’ and because the culture is shifting at home he doesn’t want to be caught in the wrong place—hardly an indication of moral consequence.

More importantly the film repeatedly depicts torture as a means to getting important information—information that will ultimately lead to Bin Laden. Almost every vital piece of information Maya gets is a result in some way of torture. In the words of one interrogator ‘everyone breaks in the end … it’s biology’. Outside of the film claims for the efficacy of torture have been widely debunked. From Robert Fisk to John McCain to senior members on the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Armed Services Committee, there is no reliable evidence that torture led to the finding of Bin Laden—or to anything else useful for that matter. Yet because the film repeatedly insists that torture leads to crucial intelligence the fundamental message from Zero Dark Thirty is—as Frank Bruni put it—‘no waterboarding no Bin Laden’.

Which leads to perhaps the most pernicious aspect of Zero Dark Thirty; the claim from Bigelow that her film reveals the ‘complexity of the debate’ concerning torture. It is not so much that the film distorts the efficacy of torture, or that it dilutes its effects, or that the film adopts only one perspective —that of the CIA—the real concern lies in the presumption that we ought to be debating ‘torture’ as a legitimate technique for modern democracies to use. Zizek has argued that once torture becomes just another in a list of possible techniques our sense of horror at what it actually constitutes is diminished. He claims that ‘in a way, those who refuse to advocate torture outright but still accept it as a legitimate topic of debate are more dangerous than those who explicitly endorse it’. By allowing torture to be a subject of debate the barbarity of the act is diminished. Torture—a medieval form of violence is now open for democracies to debate using modern Enlightenment techniques of reason. Such contradictions frame the essence of Zero Dark Thirty—a film that purports to create debate and yet poses little in the way of questions or controversial opinions. It is indeed a film for our times—a risk-free endorsement of Enlightened barbarism—entirely compatible for a regime where drones kill at a distance without responsibility.

Needless to say, Gillard’s promotion of an image of technical competence for her government was immediately challenged, if not by journalists and others savvy to her timing (Craig Thomson’s arrest, two ministerial resignations), then in a Newspoll that saw her popularity with voters decrease post-announcement, and Abbot’s increase. Whatever the image Gillard is trying to promote, the message seems not to be enough. Despite technical competence in fact being a high aim of Labor in power, it is an incomplete and unsatisfying image for voters, if for divergent reasons according to constituency. Of one thing, in any case, we can be sure, the instinct of the political animal is ever-present behind Labor’s contemporary technocratic aspirations. It is a hallmark of Gillard’s personal style, and, in a self-fulfilling prophecy, that very attribute, held in such deep suspicion by voters, will be more than ever necessary for Gillard’s success if Abbott’s fortunes remain so high.

Whether one thinks that this apparently rational setting of the election date will make a difference to the quality of the policies is one thing. Asa ploy to introduce a very long election campaign and to offer a political challenge to the Coalition to put its policies up for scrutiny, it could be.We could hope, for instance, that climate change policy would, given its complexity, and unpopularity, be seriously explained to the public, with the justifications and options laid out, and Minister Combet and others responsive to broad-ranging public discussion of it. But even if that utopian version of policy making were to come to pass, the political field is dangerously divided and the appeal of merely technical solutions is highly doubtful. It is the attitude of voters to the latter, perhaps more than anything else, that seems to elude Labor.

Labor’s horizon is that in office it will be the responsible party, that  whatever the deals that have to be done, and whatever the neoliberal imperatives that drive decisions, policy making is where they excel, and around which an ethics can be constructed. This is certainly where huge amounts of time and energy are expended by committed ministers, for instance. But whether history will confirm this as the moment for rational-purposive action above other political arts is highly doubtful. The setting of an election date does nothing to allay fears associated with deep shifts in culture and society, or to help trace out the complex problems associated with such shifts, which are of another order than politics as usually thought of, with its assumptions of a common and accepted ground of action, and its embodiment in representative democracy.

Those concerned about the planet and the quality of life for all in late capitalism, or the directions being set for our collective future, surely must find mainstream politics a strange, unworldly, maybe supra-worldly other dimension; a world constantly with us all but somehow only dancing on the surface, hardly touching down on the same ground as we live on, with all its complex indications of turmoil, change and possibility. This is the same ground most Australians are in touch with, and that’s why disengagement from electoral politics is manifest across the political spectrum. Across the ideological divides we all tend to think our politicians don’t ‘get it’ and we don’t trust them for that reason. They are meant to be ‘representing us’, yet they seem to have little feel for our concerns and circumstances, variously felt and understood. It is arguable that we all have the very same pressures, problems and conundrums intimated to us every day,even if we respond to them in different ways, some, for example, as Tony Abbott supporters; others as Greens.

Whether representative politics represents anyone in a period of deep change is a complex question. I am taking this deep change to be the emergence of neoliberalism and postmodernity: basic changes at the level of culture and self, society and politics, most profound in consequences of the pursuit of Development, as in the case of climate change and consumption capitalism, and the various identity confusions that especially arise from the latter. The contemporary idea of political representation especially follows a rationalistic and highly individualistic understanding of people knowing what their best interests are. But is that at all clear today? On what ground does one make a decision? How might one do that on a shifting ground? And then, in coming to have a better grasp of what that ground might be, is that the question we would want most to ask? For instance, what if part of that ground is a decaying and destabilised planet, with ramifications at the level of life lived within a regional economy on a beloved landscape, or in a city no longer capable of adequately feeding its people? On the other hand, if part of that new cultural ground is those neoliberal values now pressed down into social life and shaping individual identity, where might we come to judge our best interests to lie?More basically the question is where do we get to discuss what makes up the fundaments of our life world, the ground of social structure and social practice, that once was able to be taken as more or less stable?

In the political sphere, the calculating individualist is epitomised as the intelligent voter. S/he will pick the policy set that best fits his/her individual circumstances. This is the figure of the undecided voter, especially in those key electorates where elections are won or lost on a handful of votes.This voter is indeed a key to election success today, but s/he also appears as a fetishised identity in terms of the media presentation to electors of who they are and should be. In modernity, individual representation—one man/person, one vote—rested on a much broader, more corporate ground of identification in the thinking of those who voted—largely class identification. Broader again, both liberal and socialist identifications had something of a common humanistic core that pushed outwards through class towards an idea of a common humanity. As we know, in the welfare state, social liberalism and democratic socialism, two sides of the modernist political coin, came pretty close to being identical in terms of some policies and programs. People’s needs and aspirations were thought to have some common basis—a corporate identity in the largest sense.

This outlook has massively changed both with neoliberalism’s erosion of the things that gave us a sense of being in common—replacing public with private, society with consumers and the like—but it has also been a result of ‘postmodern’ political theory, including feminist, subaltern and environmental critiques of modernist political representation. What was assumed to be human was revealed as a biased transcendent, with many actual and emerging identities finding little in the way of specific representation within the public sphere of the late twentieth century. The problem of the break-up of the old electoral constituencies has been taken up in a small-l liberal sense of attempting to expand the identifications (women, gays, Aborigines, migrants) that might be represented,by both the Liberal Party and the Labor Party, to more or lesser degrees. It is also taken up in the much more challenging, and possibly disintegrative, terms of some on the Left, where electoral representation as such is seen as an incorrigibly modernist hangover, or an incorrigibly capitalist one, or both.

Arena Magazine’s diverse contributors are keen to the sorts of questions raised above. In this issue, we see precisely the novel hybrids and new contradictions that frame our politics. Whether in Boris Frankel’s critique of Marcia Langton’s Boyer Lectures, largely on the grounds of her uncritical support of mining development in the north; Maarten Stapper’s critique of scientific farming and its consequences in land degradation and depleted food values; or Justin Clemens’ essay on the digital slavery of internet users who think themselves independently free and even self-creative, we have revealed to us some of that shifting ground that unsettles our sense of ordinary life being able to be simply lived; where assumptions of continuity simply cannot any longer hold true. In these examples, of a deep-going cultural commitment to Development, of the consequences of a similar mindset in the collapse of life-giving ecosystems, and to technologies of ‘freedom’ that have radically altered meanings when examined, we glimpse more of the kind of society we are becoming than our political representatives ever reveal, or could, exactly because they are so deeply enmeshed in the new ‘cultural givens’ and imperatives of postmodern capitalism.

In other articles in this issue, John Hinkson reviews a recent book on ‘The New Depression’, in which the consequences of neoliberal financial arrangements and the GFC are said to be massively entrenched and ongoing, with shocking implications of hardship and austerity for the peoples of Europe and North America,and possible also for Australia, an integral link in the world economy through our relationship with Chinese developmental needs. In an article by Pietro Castelli Gattinara and Caterina Froio on the Italian elections, with a focus exactly on party political representation, we find, as elsewhere in Europe, new divisions around populist ideologies in large part a response to the extreme case of the technocratic management of the Italian economy, and in consequence Italian polity, of appointed prime minister Mario Monti. Finally, in an ongoing debate Patrick Jones and Andy Scerri argue over the principles for responding to some of the key destabilisations of the ground as discussed above: climate change, ‘powerdown’ and the consequences of  commodity capitalism. Will we have to accept forms of voluntary ‘austerity’, that might be better understood as modest and creative forms of communal life? And what role will the state and indeed policy play, when the actual conditions of our existence are adequately explored and come to constitute the base of assumptions on which a new politics is played out?

We enter the dimly lit, high-ceilinged space to the haunting strains of Chopin and the clacking of a vintage Monarch typewriter. It is a barefoot Antony (Tim Wotherspoon):wearing dirty long-johns, his eyes lined with kohl, we find him crouching over the keyboard, intermittently punching out a draft of the narrative we have just entered. In the minutes we spend waiting for the performance proper to begin, Wotherspoon maintains this distracted, discomfited posture, often pausing to stare twitchingly through space at the audience, as though he suspects that there is something with him in the room but cannot be sure. The floor-level stage is set as directed by Flaubert.

It is in the Thebaïd, on the heights of a mountain, where a platform, shaped like a crescent, is surrounded by huge stones. The Hermit’s cell occupies the background. It is built of mud and reeds, flat-roofed and doorless. Inside are seen a pitcher and a loaf of black bread; in the centre, on a wooden support, a large book; on the ground, here and there, bits of rush-work, a mat or two, a basket and a knife.

These opening lines—written like stage directions and situating the action within a theatrical space form the first of an elaborate system of frames used by Flaubert in The Temptation of St Antony. By placing the book (literally) ‘in the centre’, it can be argued that this novel opened the door to literary modernism. Foucault argues that Flaubert did for the library what Manet, his contemporary,did for the gallery, by surpassing mere irony and giving birth to a new metalanguage of art about art.

Four Larks take the book metaphor and run with it: instead of stones, the semi-circular space is surrounded by book-laden shelves, packing crates and suitcases, and in place of mud and reeds, the walls are pasted with hundreds of pages torn from books. Every surface has a pile of books on it, and behind the cluttered, shed-like scenery the actors—also clad in grubby long-johns—and the orchestra are concealed. A recording of Wotherspoon begins, narrating Antony’s account of his own life up to this point. (This, and almost all of the dialogue, is lifted directly from Flaubert.) The dissonance between the elegant composure of Wotherspoon’s voice-over and his dishevelled, neurasthenic presence is underscored by the percussion of the typewriter’s clacking, in time with the narration.Clever dramatic devices such as this are used everywhere throughout the production to frame and adapt the original text.

Flaubert’s Antony possesses the complexity of a modern, neurotic bourgeois in the depths of a mid-life crisis. True to this, Wotherspoon’s distraction is like that of a jaded scholar. Dissatisfied with the successes of his youth—the successful forging of an order of anchorites and a certain renown within his own lifetime—Antony dwells instead on a failed attempt at martyrdom and resents the disciples who have left him to pursue their own careers as ascetics. Lonely, bored and suicidal, he turns for succour to the Bible, but he can’t help comparing his own life to the heroic deeds therein: the Jew’s laughter of their enemies, Daniel’s victory over Nebuchadnezzar, Solomon’s wisdom in the face of the Queen of Sheba’s ‘temptation’. Compared with these legendary figures, whose names and deeds resound to the present day, Antony comes up short—and if so in his own eyes, surely also in the eyes of God. As the sun goes down on yet another monotonous day, Antony’s mind overflows and the night teems with delirious representations.

Are we inside Antony’s head or looking over his shoulder? Is this memory, dream, desire or haunting? Four Larks brilliantly evoke the startling ambiguity of the novel: the Queen of Sheba appears and bursts vampishly into song, her skirt boldly emblazoned with the book’s opening lines. The voice-over continues to narrate Antony’s encounters with each of the Seven Deadly Sins, played by the wonderfully physical ensemble who, like living hieroglyphs, perform the words and deeds en masse. The narration only ceases upon the appearance of Hilarion, Antony’s favourite former disciple turned Devil’s advocate. This shift—a jarring and spooky irruption of imagined reality into pure delirium—is executed marvellously. In the novel, Hilarion appears, framed by the threshold, a creepy, white-haired child-like figure. Here, Emily Tomlins plays Hilarion as an effusive, domineering dramaturge. As Tomlins strides onto the stage shouting directions, Antony’s cell becomes a rehearsal space. The ensemble pack up their props and move to the side of the stage to stretch, while Hilarion begins mercilessly to critique Antony’s narrative of ‘continual martyrdom’. Tomlins’ gregarious Hilarion is the perfect foil to Wotherspoon’s peevish Antony and we can’t help but feel some sympathy for the idealistic author being called to account for his self-indulgence. Tomlins adds a degree of brash humour to the part, authored by Flaubert as a cool, clear-eyed, sceptical counterpart to Antony’s raving idealism.

While Flaubert’s story of the neurotic anchorite is not his most widely read, it is arguably the most important of his novels. St Antony presaged by a decade the publication of Nietzsche’s essay ‘What Do Ascetic Ideals Mean?’ (Part III of On the Genealogy of Morals), and it is this same question that Flaubert investigates in Antony’s night of temptation. Nietzsche contends that asceticism arose during ancient times from the need of the philosophers to ‘overthrow the gods and traditions inside themselves, in order to be able to believe in their innovation’,and that it has since been instrumental in the spread of Christianity’s universalised and morbid representations of human subjectivity. For the ordinary person, ‘ascetic ideals’,

are an attempt to imagine themselves as ‘too good’ for this world, a holy form of orgiastic excess, their chief tool in the fight with their enduring pain and boredom; among the clergy they are the essential priestly belief, their best instrument of power, and also the ‘highest of all’ permits for power; finally among the saints they are a pretext for hibernation…their repose in nothingness (‘God’), their form of insanity.

Nietzsche the psychologist sees through asceticism’s paradoxes—seeking beauty in ugliness, life in death—to pre-empt, in a way,the Freudian notion of the death drive. As a will to nothingness, asceticism is an instinctive response to the constraints of a repressive social order based on a universalised subjectivity steeped in individual guilt:‘Man will sooner will nothingness than not will…’ St Antony of Egypt (ca. 251–356),as one of the founding figures of Christian asceticism, is hugely important in its history and arguably more influential to this subjective template than Christ himself. St Antony helped cement at the heart of Western ideology the concept that the cause of suffering lies within the realm of the individual’s thoughts and deeds. In doing so, he helped found an empire of Sin.

In Hilarion’s scathing critique of his former master’s literalist interpretation of the Bible, Flaubert demonstrates in the strongest terms the powerful role that asceticism has for so long played in the construction of truth.

Antony: ‘But it is the truth of the doctrine that makes the martyr.’

Hilarion: ‘How can he prove its excellence, seeing that he testifies equally on behalf of error?’

Antony: ‘Be silent, viper!’

Hilarion: ‘It is not perhaps so difficult. The exhortations of friends, the pleasure of outraging popular feeling, the oath they take, a certain giddy excitement—a thousand things, in fact, go to help them.’

It is here, too, in the worldly affirmation of the will—in desire—that Nietzsche would seek to locate the only ‘good’ that can, without deference to some metaphysical or ideological principle, lend meaning to any act. As Nietzsche demonstrates, asceticism has played a key role in the construction of global and unitary knowledges, with modern science no exception. For Nietzsche and Flaubert both, temptation, or the testing and rupturing of faith, is the crux of wisdom, not its stumbling block—for ‘what sense would our whole being have if not for the fact that in us that will to truth became aware of itself as a problem?’—a concept that runs through modernism, structuralism and the ‘post-’ derivations of each.

Nietzsche always held that artistic production provides one of the most fruitful grounds for the excavation of meaning.As implied by the ‘junkyard’ tag, the Four Larks sensorium is a rich and eclectic one. The orchestra is made up of eight first-rate performers, whose sombre composure, as they sit on stage during the lulls, belies the brightness and intensity of their sound. Ellen Warkentine and Mat Sweeney’s score is at once exotic yet familiar—I have never heard a banjo sound so oriental. The music both underscores and parallels the dialogue, while providing an open, dynamic milieu for the bodies of the ensemble to move about within. Aside from Wotherspoon and Tomlins, the ensemble has four actors, who—when not working in unison as a multi-headed, many-limbed signifying machine—also bring their diverse individual talents (and voices) to a variety of cameo roles during the procession of exotic deities, prophets and demigods to whom Antony is introduced by Hilarion.

Esther Hannaford speaks her parts through song and dance to great effect, her excellent bluesy vocals spontaneously swinging the production into cabaret mode on more than one occasion. Emmeli Johannson Stjarnfeldt’s performance of, among others, a radiant Isis, is a subtle assemblage of understated gestures and great physical beauty. Reuben Liversidge portrays a boozed-up Bacchus and a campy Indian gymnosophistin the great Australian tradition of buffoonery. And Terry Yeboah’s Apollo and Nebuchadnezzar dominate the space with a powerfully eloquent vocal delivery and a dynamic, muscular presence.

The simplest but most impressive achievement of Four Larks’ stagecraft occurs towards the end of the play, during the Spinoza-inspired monologue, in which the Devil explains to Antony:

Never shall you understand the universe in its full extent; consequently, you cannot form an idea as to its cause, so as to have a just notion of God, or even say that the universe is infinite, for you should first comprehend the Infinite!

In the novel, the Devil speaks these lines while carrying Antony on his back through the silent depths of space.It is the thrilling climax of Antony’s materialist epiphany, the moment in which he learns to love existence and embrace desire. In this production, the Devil narrates in Hilarion’s voice while the space is suddenly plunged into darkness, eradicating all of the chaotic, claustrophobic detritus of the hermit’s cell while palpably evoking a sense of great depth. This contrasting effect, which makes the audience feel they are floating,encapsulates Four Larks’ striking bricolage. For Foucault, Flaubert’s greatest literary achievement lies in his construction, in The Temptation of St Antony, of ‘an extremely complicated space’. Four Larks may also be highly commended for having successfully done just that.