Nemesis

By Con George-Kotzabasis

The concept of the “Axis of Evil” had a politically pragmatic Machiavellian sense in the context of religious-riddled America, and not a metaphysical one. Religion can also be used not only as “glue” to societal values that binds people and commands them, as the French philosopher Emile Durkheim suggested, but also as glue to certain critical foreign policies that are vital to the security of a nation. Apropos the Axis of Evil in the context of global terrorism and the rogue states which support it overtly or covertly. Statesmanship does not govern in a vacuum; it has to rally its people, like Churchill did, by certain concepts that appeal to them behind its policies and strategies. Neo-conservatives as pragmatists are amoral, and have no relationship with any kind of Manichaeism, of good and evil.

Interestingly, WigWag’s first comment in The Washington Note, ironically as a past opponent and slightly diminishing opponent presently of the neocons, has loosened all the “demons” of neo-conservatism from their “caves” to come and haunt all liberals in their wishful thinking that Obama was a game-changer. From the “prince of darkness,” Richard Perle, who presciently said in 2002 that “we are all neoconservatives now,” Wolfowitz, Feith, Frum, the Kristols and the Kagans, Cheney and Bolton, have taken the centre stage of American politics by “winning the argument,” according to WigWag, and shattering the unrealistic, idealistic, nursery rhymed policies of the liberals, and especially Obama’s.

And presumably even the White House is presently neo-conservative turf as Obama himself has become their disciple, according to WigWag. But Obama is the bastard offspring of the neocons as he was conceived not by their spiritual virility but by the impotent idealistic policies of his own, which in a profligacy of ‘many nights stands’ on the domestic and international arena proved to be total failures, as the neoconservatives had predicted they would be. The clang sound of the chain of failures in health care, in climate change, in his toothless supine diplomacy in the Middle East, in his hope of changing the view of America’s enemies by practicing American values and asking for penance from those wronged from America’s past ‘sins’, have forced President Obama to semi-adopt the policies of the neocons. Being a ‘pragmatic chameleon’ he had to change his colors purely for his own political survival. Obama is no voluntary convert to neo-conservatism. He is perforce adopting and implementing some of the policies of the neoconservatives because they are the only reasonable policies in town and the only ones that can save his political scalp.

It’s due to the poverty of liberal policies that Obama is ostensibly attempting to become politically a ‘nouveau riche’ from the wealthy and fecund policies of the neo-conservatives.

WigWag responded to the above as follows:

Kotzabasis, I enjoyed this comment and think you made some excellent points; especially when you characterize Obama as the “bastard offspring” of the neoconservatives.

At the risk of sounding wishy-washy, I’m not sure that it’s a question of whether I was once an opponent of the neocons or am slightly less of an opponent now.

I thought the war in Iraq was a mistake for the United States and the West. Whether it was a mistake for Iraq is an open question. Clearly the Kurds are delighted that the United States invaded and eliminated Saddam Hussein; presumably the Shia are too. The Sunni, not so much.

I think it’s hard to argue that the War in Iraq has not left the United States and all of its allies worse off than they were before the invasion…

But opponents of the neoconservatives will be making a serious mistake themselves if they think that the failures in Iraq or other errors in judgment by leading neoconservatives prove that as a philosophy neo-conservatism is wrong.

After all, the serious tactical blunders that the United States made in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia didn’t prove that containment was the wrong strategy to confront the Soviets.

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Maureen Dowd is merely an ‘avatar’ of many other top commentators such as Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, of The New York Times, etc. who claimed that President Bush told lies about the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq.

No lies “about Iraq’s involvement with Al-Qaeda.” Saddam was aware of the increasing influence and appeal of Al-Qaeda in the Arab world. It takes little imagination to see that for this political reason alone he had an interest as the most powerful leader of Arab Sunnis to have al-Qaeda on his side, and for the purpose of controlling it. That is why his Intelligence agents had contacts with representatives of bin-Laden from early on during the short domicile of the latter in Sudan and providing his jihadists with training in Iraq.

As for serious argument you shoot yourself on the foot. The Bush administration did not tell “lies about WMDs”. It presented partly its case for war to the American people on false intelligence information. And as you well know, all the other Intelligence Services of the West, including that of France and Germany, believed that Saddam had WMDs. So if Bush was telling lies, so were doing President Chirac and Chancellor Schroeder. To transform false information into lies as you do, and so many others from the Liberal intelligentsia continue to do, is to do so at the expense of one’s intellectual integrity.

And to compare “home accidents” with the ceaseless deliberate killing by the jihadists of innocent civilians, reveals how much out of your depth you are.

As for your support of the political frolicking of Spain under Prime Minister Zapatero as a serious way to fight global terror, shows your own credentials as political ‘frolicker’ par excellence.

A healthy, challenging, and happy new year to all readers of Nemesis.

Con George-Kotzabasis

By Con George-Kotzabasis
Reply to: The Mellow Doctrine by Roger Cohen
global.nytimes.com May 03, 2009

Roger Cohen riding his high horse as a columnist of The New York Times trots a ‘neighing’ argument that throws the rider on the paddock. He claims and infers that the new policies of President Obama in foreign affairs, which he frames in his term of The Mellow Doctrine, are holistic remedies for the wanton malicious inflicted maladies that the Bush-Cheney administration had placed upon the body politic of America that had alienated it in the minds and hearts of so many people in the world.

These policies now are spreading and reverberating across Latin America, Europe, and Asia Minor and are creating an echoing melodious sound of Europeans, Turks and Latinos–with only a slight discordant hoarse bass note coming through the nostrils of an old dog, Fidel Castro, who can smell in Obama another imperialist rat. In Strasbourg the French and Germans loved to hear the President expostulating on the new fully cooperative conduct of the U.S. with its major allies, the French seeing him as an exemplar of their own past mission civilisatrice in the sphere of diplomacy, and the Germans as a second Ich bin ein Berliner, after John F. Kennedy. In Prague, the multi-cultured Czechs were delighted to hear him say that he was “committing the United States to a world without nuclear weapons,” and his outpouring of a profusion of mea culpa of America’s past misdeeds and the arrogance of imperial powers and its leaders, who like Roosevelt and Churchill would determine the fate of peoples “sitting in the room with a brandy.” In Turkey, the most modern of Muslim nations thanks to its insightful great Soldier-Statesman Kemal Ataturk, the Turks were regaled to see Obama parading before them his own partial Muslim origins and hear him say that Muslims had been treated with “insufficient respect” in the past. And in Trinidad and Tobago, where the Fifth Summit of the Americas was held, Obama enraptured the Latinos to such a degree that even the spirited anti-American warriors Raul Castro and Hugo Chavez were won over, the latter being moved so much so that he gave as a gift to Obama a book on American imperialism and the latter reciprocating to Hugo’s generous gesture by giving him a warm handshake and a friendly touch on the shoulder.

To Cohen, all the above related events are a clear sign that “Foes…have been disarmed by Barack Obama’s no-drama diplomacy.” Obama’s “mellow doctrine…finding strength through unconventional means: acknowledgement of the limits of American power; frankness about U.S. failings; careful listening; fear reduction; adroit deployment of the wide appeal of brand Barack Hussein Obama; and jujitsu engagement.” If the above quotes are not a perfect illustration that Obama made a confession of American weakness before the ‘priesthood’ of his ‘Catholic’ enemies, then one will ever search in vain for a definition of weakness in any dictionary. And to bring jujitsu in this bout of weakness as a saving line is like offering someone who already lies unconscious on the floor from the blows of his opponent the Japanese art of training the mind and body in unarmed combat. In this context for Cohen to mock Dick Cheney for saying that America’s enemies perceive “a weak president,” is to brand himself with his own mockery.

This confession of weakness is the ‘Eighteenth of Brumaire of Barack Hussein Obama,’ to paraphrase Karl Marx on Louis Bonaparte, an intellectual coup d’état by the constitutional lawyer against the constitution of the political wisdom of the ages in whose preamble imprescriptively is written that to show and admit weakness before one’s enemies is the cardinal unforgiveable political sin. As in any human contest only when a party is weakened is prepared to make concessions whereas the strong seek and drive home their victory. This applies more so to fanatically religious enemies who have an ineradicable tendency to see, due to their irrational cogitations, any conciliatory initiative of their opponents as an admission of weakness.

But the intellectual fragility of Cohen’s argument is exposed by his use of the weakest enemies of America, that is, the Castro brothers and Hugo Chavez, and surprisingly Turkey, which has not been an enemy of the U.S., to drive home the success of the conciliatory attitude of President Obama. In the case of Turkey, he claims that at the NATO meeting the Turks dropped their opposition to the nomination of Denmark’s Anders Rasmussen as the alliance’s secretary general because of “Obama’s conciliatory message to Muslims.” In contrast, the previous administration by “humiliating Muslims” filled the schools of Waziristan and Ramadi with recruits for future terror. When one asks whence this humiliation of Muslims started the unutterable answer of Cohen must be since 9/11. The undeniably harsh but necessary measures that the Bush administration took against Muslim terrorists to protect its citizens from, at the time, imponderable future attacks, were in the eyes of Cohen measures that “humiliated Muslims.” Just as well that columnists of this sort are ‘unsheathing’ their pens to write their columns instead of unsheathing their paper swords to protect Americans.

Most of all Cohen is apparently very fond of the following by President Obama. “Resistance” to set of U.S. policies “may turn out to be based on old preconceptions or ideological dogmas” of the previous administration, and “when they are cleared away …we can actually solve a problem.” So President Obama with a broom in his hand once he sweeps this ideological debris of the Bush administration he will be able to start solving the innumerable problems that America is facing. But the fact is that the United States is not countenancing these problems because of “old preconceptions or ideological dogmas,” but because of its status as the sole superpower is inevitably burdened to carry like Atlas all the world’s crises and hot spots on its back and to set up actions that are not always agreeable by the rest of the world that would have a chance to resolve these crises. And inevitably because of the multiple actions it has to take in so many complex parts of the world it cannot jump over the shadow of fallibility. The alternative, to restrict its engagement with the rest of the world because of its immense risks and possible errors of judgment, is not the raison d’être of great power. Moreover, a disengagement from the hot spots of the world would allow sinister and brutal fanatical leaders to take over countries and oppress their peoples as well as endanger the stability of the world.

The political naivety and immaturity of President Obama is encapsulated in his own terms in regard to Iran: Normal relations can be restored on the “mutual respect” of opponents. This would be forsooth the reality if your opponent considered you to be negotiating from a strong position. It would not be true if his estimate was that his opponent was negotiating from a weak position contra his own strong position. The strong can be at times kind, gracious, and helpful toward the weak but never have any respect for the weak. This is more so in the hard realm of geopolitics. The Iranian theocracy will see any diplomatic initiatives by the United States as an admittance of political feebleness by the latter and will exploit this to their advantage. And by the time when President Obama will become aware of this the Iranians will be already close to the entrance of the nuclear club. No angelic or mellow doctrine of Obama will disarm America’s implacable irreconcilable foes. Only the thunder, and as last resort the bolt of Jupiter, can defeat these deadly enemies.

Hic Rhodus hic Salta

By Con George-Kotzabasis A response to: President Obama’s First Foreign Policy Success –and it’s Only Day One By Amjad Attalah

Washington NoteJanuary 20, 2009

Amjad Attalah must be in a cavorting jocular mood. He ludicrously, for him maybe seriously, claims that the “cease-fire” in Gaza is Obama’s “first foreign policy success.” And the latter was achieved, according to Attalah, not by any specific written communication or request by Obama to the Israelis but merely by the fact that Obama was the president-elect and not anybody else.

For the religious votaries of Obama, like Attalah, this will not be an ordinary presidency but an extraordinarily miraculous one. Just the healing presence of Obama, “He didn’t need to” do anything, the long irreconcilable and implacable conflicts of the world will be resolved beyond “bombing or rocketing.”

It is apparent the TWN is becoming a stage for vaudevillian plays. With captions such as: “A demoralized and frantic Israeli state”, “a historic shift in our Middle East posture”, “to seek an opening and grand bargain with Iran,” written by that master virtuoso in vaudevillian politics Dan Kervick himself, all of them a box office success since they will attract as audience hoi polloi who have an inveterate craving to laugh at serious things.

Paul Norheim says

“It is apparent the TWN is becoming a stage for vaudevillian
plays.” (kotzabasis)

Amusing, coming from someone who once praised Dick Cheney
as the Captain Ahab of the global war on terror, and who
certainly was not joking when he, some months ago, had this to
say about Sarah Palin:

“Palin’s selection is a political master stroke on the part of
McCain. Moreover this astute move is not merely a brilliant
manoeuvre on the field of American electoral politics, but also
adumbrates what a great president McCain will make.”
HAHAHA, as varanasi would have said if he wasn`t using his
passport right now.

To his credit, kotzabasis`opinions, in contrast to TahoeEditor`s,
are based on his own bad instincts, and not merely copied from
the PR office of the GOP. Errare humanum est. But how can you
expect sound political judgement from someone who doesn`t
believe in political means, but only in their continuation, i.e.
bombs and rockets against evil?

Kotzabasis says

Paul Norheim, what a week reed intellectually you must be in the torrential currents of the river of politics when intentionally and malevolently distort and take out of context the statements of your opponent to make your non-case.

Whatever you might think about Cheney, the gross errors, and indeed, criminal ones, according to you, he was a strong vice-president fully conscious of his responsibilities in the affairs of statecraft in the aftermath of 9/11. I contrasted him with Captain Ahab, as you well know, precisely because of the latter’s strength of character, which you lack, who would “strike the sun if it insulted him”, to quote a great literary critic.

As for Sarah, isn’t it a fact that she rejuvenated the base of the Republican Party and impacted initially a large part of the American electorate and it was only after the dirty campaign of calumny against her and her family by the liberal media that she was besmirched in the eyes of many Americans? McCain lost as a result of the hate many Americans had for Bush-Cheney and by association for the Republican Party which by trumping even the strong emotion of racism brought Obama to the White House. And as we know from Shakespeare, and indeed, Ibsen, your great compatriot, hate is the ultimate wicked human emotion that trumps all others.

And on the contrary, I do believe in the use of “political means” and in diplomacy and cease only to believe in these when they are proven to be completely ineffective, as they have been with the fanatic holy warriors of Islam.

Your errors of judgment have nothing to do with “Errare humanum est”, they rise from your weak character and shallow political nous.

Will Hillary Clinton Be Bad Cop to Obama’s Good Cop?
By Steve Clemons Washington Note, Nov. 22. 2008

A retort by Con George-Kotzabasis

This is an explosion of Steve’s libido of idealism after the inhibitions and frustrations he suffered under the Bush-Cheney administration. Finally in the cloudless sky of Obama made American idealism we are seeing Steve taking wings. But he cannot see that it’s too dangerous to fly too close to the Sun of idealism and those who do ultimately have the fate of Icarus, like all idealistic ventures that cannot be backed by reality.

It’s obvious that the American intelligentsia and its counterpart in Europe are still playing with the silky and well varnished toys of their childhood in an adult milieu. They countenance the ‘brutal’ geopolitics of the world like Church prelates who by spreading the aroma of their balm to this world they will make this miasma of brutality disappear.

By Con George-Kotzabasis

The political cradle of America is rocking! On September 04, 2008, the United States has given birth and laid in its cradle a sassy, vigorous, kicking, and bouncing new baby characteristically named the American iron lady. Sarah Palin on that unexpectedly wondrous day hit the political landscape of America with her feet running. Neither the ‘silent’ mines exploding under her feet that the political machine of the Democrats had planted nor the booming hand grenades that the liberal media were throwing at her and her family were able to prevent her from running the race of the vice-presidency and like a sprightly Olympian athlete winning it with resounding accolades of glory. The savvy humorous content and the strength of her speech before millions of Americans was the oozing of her strong character from the depths of her soul. And, indeed, her speech was Hurricane Sarah hitting the east and west coasts of the United States, where the liberal intelligentsia lounges in, and pontificates on international and domestic issues from, the comfort of their glasshouses, wreaking havoc to their dreams and dislodging them from the certainty and complacency that the election of November 04 was already in the Democratic bag. In their panic seeing the rising waters of the Republicans inundating the country the educated elites are scurrying to find the kind of sand bags that would obstruct these waters from bringing on their crest McCain-Palin into the White House. And the sand bags are already piling up.

The eminent economist-cum-commentator Paul Krugman of the New York Times and his colleague the fiery and always charming but vitriol-splashing Maureen Dowd have discovered new mantras with which to attack the Republicans and their nominees McCain-Palin. Krugman asserts that the GOP is forging a new “strategy of resentment” to pounce upon the Democrats as being elitist that tend to “look down their noses at regular people.” In his resuscitation of Nietzsche’s ‘resentiment’ and intention to graft it on the stem of the Republican plant Krugman completely forgets or doesn’t want to admit that the Democrats are already running their campaign on a strategy of hate both against the Bush-Cheney administration and the GOP as well as all of their followers. So if it’s true that the Republican campaign is going to be infused with resentment against the Democrats and hence the competition will be between resentment and hate one perforce poses the question which campaign will be morally worse, one that runs on resentment or one that runs on hate?

Maureen Dowd on the other hand with master strokes of mockery and irony in which she is a virtuoso storms Palin’s status of inexperience in international affairs deriding her with the words an “oversized igloo (Eskimo house) becomes commander in chief after the president-elect on his first day chokes on a pretzel…” And telling Putin, a former KGB agent, that being an Alaskan close to the border of Russia she knows how to handle a gun and shoot straight, the implication of this mockery by Dowd being that such ‘straight talk’ by Palin would force Putin to run to the United Nations asking for help.

But in reality what value experience has in the cutting edge knowledge of our contemporary times that only experts in their fields are qualified to delve in and make recommendations to governments with the precision of their expertise? Certainly some rudimentary experience is necessary in the affairs of state, and Palin as a mayor for four years and a governor for two appears to have that. And if a haberdasher and an actor made great presidents, Palin could also be in the same league. The authority and qualification for being commander in chief do not lie so much on experience but on intelligence and character. The presidency is a ‘receptacle’ of knowledge attached to multiple channels of knowledge of other members of the executive and advisors and experts from the different departments of government. The task of the president is, once he has a number of recommendations on a specific issue coming from the professionals in the field, to make his/her decision, after intense study of the different recommendations, on the basis of intelligence and character. Palin’s tenure as mayor and governor as well as her speech before the Convention, undoubtedly show—of course her opponents with their bitter predilection to belittle and malign her will never admit this–that she is a highly intelligent person with a very strong character. And on these attributes alone she would make a great president if McCain somehow choked on his pretzel.

The Democrats may draft as many horses from the stables of Krugman and Dowd to pull their flat tyre omnibus that Palin punctuated with her entrance on the political proscenium of America beyond the finishing line on November 4, but the result will be, E pur non muove, (And yet, it doesn’t move) to paraphrase Galileo.

Over to you

I would like to notify the readers of Nemesis that an article is being written by me on The American Iron Lady, Sarah Palin, making her debut on the political proscenium of America. It will be published on Sunday night Australian time.

Reply by Con George-Kotzabasis to:

Obama Surrogate Fires Back By Andrew Lebovich

Washington Note, June 18, 2008

For Andrew Lebovich to post his fire cracker after the smoke that has been emitted from the intellectual ashes of Dr. Susan Rice’s argument how Obama’s plan will stop the support of extremists as a serious argument, reveals clearly what a crowd of political dilettantes are attempting to enter the corridors of power and hence crowding out statesmanship.

Dr. Rice’s contention that Obama’s plan will “dry up support for extremists…by upholding at home the values that we preach abroad, even with respect to terrorists and extremists”, is riddled with historical and psychological ignorance and by the fact that she does not know thy enemy and therefore can only be laughed out of serious political debate. The supporters of the extremists and the latter themselves have their own apocalyptic Allah-made values and they don’t give a hoot about the values of the infidels as preached or practiced. Their only concern is to destroy these values thus obeying the orders of their God. If this is the plan of Obama as a new diplomatic strategy if he became president to defeat terrorism, then this diplomacy is destined to be an abject failure and will lead with mathematical precision to the shipwreck of his strategy against global terror to the detriment of the American people and the civilized world.

The correct strategy how to defeat the extremists and to deprive them of their support is already foreshadowed in Iraq, by defeating them in the field of battle, as is being done by the new strategy of general Petraeus, one deprives the extremists of both recruits and supporters. This is why the extremists in Iraq are now using and deploying children and women with Down syndrome as a result of the drying up of recruits. As I’ve argued seven years ago only by depriving the terrorists of their successes by capturing and killing them can one defeat them decisively. And the first signs that this is happening presently is in Iraq. An withdrawal therefore from Iraq at the threshold of a U.S. victory, as pledged by Obama, will be the ultimate stupidity executed by a Commander-in-Chief and an ignominious chapter in American history, surpassing the defeat in Vietnam. And it will be considered by the jihadists to be a great success and thus encourage droves of recruits into the arms of al Qaeda and its affiliates. Obama must not pass!

I rest on my oars: Your turn now

The following paper was written on May 2000. It’s republished here to remind readers that the detachment of the Labor Party from the political “sins” of its past is still to come, as it continues to relish them by increasing them. It’s clear that a Rudd government would sign up to the UN declaration on indigenous rights whose article 3 gives aborigines the right to freely determine their political status, and article 4 the right to autonomy or self government, thus championing indigenous separatism that would lead to the fracturing of the unity and strength of one nation, without bettering the political, economic, and social status of aborigines with their separation from the nation. Once again Labor under the populist leadership of Kevin Rudd, who by this definition will be too feckless to deal with the critical issues of the economy and security of the country in these dangerous times, will embrace all the external remedies and shibboleths that issue from the politically incompetent and morally corrupt UN and apply them to the internal affairs of the nation that with mathematical precision are bound to be so destructive to it.

There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present time Edward Gibbon

By Con George-Kotzabasis

A curse is haunting the Labor party, the curse of Paul Keating’s ‘Banana Republic’. Whereas for the latter, however, the Banana…was merely a slippery future economic threat under the feet of the country, for Kim Beazley, the banana republic is virtually a political reality. It’s for this reason therefore, that he is implicitly calling, and more explicitly supporting, the individual and institutional cries for the United Nation’s Human Rights Commission (HRC) to intervene and redress the plague of inequities and injustices that has inflicted the country, as a result of an unjust and uncaring government. The lack of compassion by the coalition government on two issues, (a) its unwillingness to utter the word “sorry” to the aborigines of this land, and (b) its “stand-aloofness” in regards to mandatory sentencing, its reluctance to intervene directly and abrogate a state law that jails children for apparently minor offences.

It’s ludicrous to believe that the word sorry has some magic quality that could sanitize or make less bloody any injustices or atrocities of any scale that have been perpetrated by institutions and governments in the past against aborigines. Within such a context the word sorry would be a crude joke, as it’s not a matter of someone stepping over the toes of another and apologizing for this. No human apology can exculpate criminal actions committed against humanity. This is “God’s bailiwick”. (One can only wonder that associate professor Robert Manne, a brawny votary of the “sorry” campaign accepts, with apparent philosophic equanimity, the apology of the German government for the gassing of the Jews.) The demand for such an apology arises from pious, soft thinking. Furthermore, the official expression of such an apology, could lead to “wealth by inadvertence” for some groups and professions in a society that inchoately moves more and more toward a litigious state, at the vast expense of the taxpayer.

Also, on mandatory sentencing, Labor’s accusation that the government is heartless and inhumane in its refusal to abrogate laws that are targeting aboriginal children, is political theatrics and is not serious. The abrogation of these laws by the federal government would be an infringement of states’ rights and would add another plank to the coffin of these rights, which Labor during its tenure in office had been carpentering, furthering thus the advance of the centralization of power in Canberra. The coalition government therefore, has acted prudently in refusing a casting role in Labor’s “play”. But to Labor, it’s this remissness of government on these two issues that shames and censures Australia in the eyes of the world and irretrievably damages its international reputation.

The Federal Opposition, like so many Mr. Feelgoods, is self-appointing itself as the conscience of the nation. Heavily burdened by this conscience, it can only alleviate it by invoking the External Affairs Power in the internal affairs of the nation. But like most politicians, it has a further and more valuable interest in this exercise that goes beyond its moral ken. By tarnishing the government as inhumane and unjust it hopes to put it beyond the pale in the electorate’s eyes and hence augment its own political stocks in the coming election. Its libido dominandi, its surge for power is so virile that it hardly baulks at the prospect of prostituting the sovereignty of the nation and its inalienable right to determine the laws of the land.

As the intervention of the United Nations HRC in the internal affairs of the country would be no less than the defloration of the nation’s sovereignty, as it would inexorably have a corrosive effect on the legislative power of government. The latter would be looking over its shoulder for Big Brother every time it passed a bill in parliament in regards to its domestic affairs, which might not be in accord with the letter and spirit of international conventions and treaties that Australian governments had signed in the past. Moreover, such intervention would be adding insult to injury in respect to the nation’s mores, as it would imply that Australia is a “crooked nail” on moral and human issues, like a truly banana republic, and would need the vise of the HRC to straighten it and hence making it fit to enter the family of civilized nations. Therefore Australia is not fit from its own record and reputation on human rights to have its place among civilized societies and needs an “usher”, the HRC, to find its seat among these societies.

Labor’s Mental Blindness

It’s mind-boggling that Labor is so myopic and cannot see that the invocation of the External Affairs Power would open a Pandora’s box. It would place parliament under a “spooky” surveillance, as all legislation in relation to human rights laws will have to be written under the shadow of the HRC. In other words, the legislative power of government will be held to ransom. It would also open the floodgates of litigation and provide a gluttonous banquet to lawyers and their clientele as the menu of human rights would be in the hands of all interest groups and individuals who have an inordinate appetite to be seen as trailblazers of social and political change, like Senator Bob Brown, or who more prosaically would settle for a substantial financial payment. Moreover, it would spur a promiscuity of legal activism among judges from the lower courts to the High Court, and would widen the windows of opportunity for active “progressive” judges to throw their flat earth judicial stones from their glass-house existence-like that avatar of “creative” activism Justice Kirby of the High Court of Australia. Such creative activism by the judiciary however would be the usurpation of the legislative power of government. Hence, it would strike a sledgehammer blow to the cornerstone upon which the separation of powers rests.

Two cases of the High Court illustrate this whittling down of the constitution by the judiciary. In the Commonwealth v. Tasmania (1983), the Commonwealth prohibited the construction of a dam by the Tasmanian Hydro-Electric Commission under the provisions of the World Heritage Properties Conservation Act (1975). (Chief Justice Gibbs, with his characteristic wisdom, dissented against the majority decision 4-3 maintaining some basal distinction between external and internal affairs to ensure the integrity of the Constitution’s federal division of authority.) Also, in the Koowarta v. Tasmanian Dam (1983) the laws upheld treaty obligations. That triumvirate of goody-goodies Justices Mason, Murphy, and Dean, all considered that the External Affairs Power extended beyond obligations and embraced benefits and rights.

That this raid of the judiciary, not to mention others, on the Constitution, leaves Federal Labor under the leadership of Kim Beazley insouciant and unconcerned speaks volumes of its poverty of thought, its lack of foresight, and political dilettantism. Of course Labor may deceive itself and believe that it will have a safeguard against the intrusions of the judiciary in laying the latter on a Procrustean bed. It can always cut to size its appointees to the courts of the land (this equally applies to the Coalition) as it has done in the past , to fit its own agendas. Judges, however, like all others appointed to high positions by government, whilst they might owe their positions to the latter, they own their reputations and amour proper. This fact alone does not bear good news for governments that judges will toe the line.

Academics Toe the Line of Labor

What is startling, if not alarming, however, is that this poverty of thought finds solace and support among some academics. But on second thought it may not be so surprising. As what else could one expect from the mass production lines of most universities than the entry into its teaching faculties, especially in sociology and law, of a stream of intellectual usurpers who are more proud of displaying their radicalism than the rigor of their mind?

Professor of international law at the Australian National University, Hillary Charlesworth, in an article in the Australian subtitled “The Victory of States’ Rights over Human Rights has Impoverished our Social and Political Culture”, remarks, that the UN’s legal opinion is, “that Australia’s mandatory sentencing laws violate the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention of the Rights of the Child”. On the pivot of this opinion she mounts (molehills?) her own argument that because “Australia has freely agreed to abide by the principles set out in the relevant human rights treaties” we are bound legally and morally to accede to them. Furthermore, she continues, “under the human rights treaties, it’s the Federal Government that bears the international responsibility to ensure that all Australian laws ( this is no diminutive, this is “matronly-sized” outsourcing of Australia’s sovereignty) conform to our treaty obligations…Internal political or constitutional arrangements can be no excuse for failure to live up to its treaty commitments”. Capping her argument, she claims that even in the event that mandatory sentencing is popular, “public policy cannot be driven by political popularity alone or on purely utilitarian grounds”.

No sensitive and sensible person can defend mandatory sentencing—except perhaps if she/he is a victim of the particular offence—especially if it applies to children. It’s obviously a “desperate” legislative action by the Western Australian Government and the Northern Territory to protect mainly household residents from a spree of serial burglaries and break-ins that previous laws were unable to stop or abate. An impartial objective evaluation of this situation however, sans academic metaphysical nonsense, would consider not only children’s rights but the rights of the victims as well. More importantly, a deeper probing of the matter, would consider children’s rights in the continuum of their life, and the repercussions of the social conduct and behavior and the successes and failures of juvenile life upon adulthood. It’s essential therefore to make children not only conscious of their rights but also of their responsibilities and duties. Indeed, to shield them from self-punishing failure in later life, it’s necessary to make them aware that punishment is the price one has to pay for unsocial, law-breaking actions.

The bone of contention therefore should be, and is, what kind of effective punishment should apply to these minor crimes committed by juveniles that would prevent major ones committed in their adulthood. Academics therefore who passionately emphasize and advocate the rights of children would have been more fecund in their deliberations if they were just as passionate in their search and discovery of programs and laws applying to children, laws that not only would protect victims from the crimes of children, but more crucially protecting children from failure in their adult life. As even petty crime committed by minors, especially when it takes a serial form and is inadequately punished, ensures with certainty the “success of failure” in later life.

Professor Charlesworth with enviable Olympian athlete’s ease jumps over the hurdles of these issues. Neither the erosion of the Constitution, nor the plight of the victims, or the double jeopardy that children would be placed in by their serial petty crime nor the punishment in the present and the more severe serial self-punishment that hovers over their future, concerns her. All these things seem to be peripheral, indeed, satellites to her fixed universal position. But to respond to the basal argument of her article, that the government should adopt international laws and implement them in our internal affairs, one cannot do better the great German jurist philosopher Friedrich Savigny. “The legal institutions of a nation are part of its individual life…and of the whole of its historically determined situation. They fit as does the skin of the human body. And to replace them by a rationally excogitated code is like tearing off a body’s skin in order to replace it with a synthetic product”. He denounced theories of rationalism which deduced legal theories from general and universal principles, irrespective of past history and national peculiarities. This illustrates tellingly why some professors of jurisprudence in this country are dusted off and drop from the shoulders of giants.

But let us return back to the leader of the Opposition Kim Beazley. The definition of a strong and farsighted political leader is an “animal” that protects its own territory from the incursions of foreign assailants. Beazley as leader of the Opposition and as potential Prime Minister (God forbid) does not fit this definition. Instead of vigorously protecting and making unassailable our sovereignty from the incursions of foreign bodies, in this case from the United Nations HRC, he prostrates himself before it and willingly and wantonly out sources the sovereignty of our nation to alien bodies.

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