Orwell, Whose Orwell?
W.B. Yeats is said to have fainted when — at a state occasion marking his birthday — he was honoured by a thousand Irish boy scouts reciting in unison ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’. The event has always...
View ArticleAccounting for War
In our hyper-visual culture, where the hidden lenses of reality television shape the domestic lansdscape, where even cruise missiles have cameras attached to them, what significance can we afford to a...
View ArticleFreedom’s War
When will the war end? In Arena Magazine No. 75, Ghassan Hage described ‘warring societies’ as those ‘permanently geared towards war’. Such a society ceases to be structured around the distribution of,...
View ArticlePeace in Our Time
The performance of the Premiers at the recent Council of Australian Governments (COAG) meeting to hammer out new terror laws had more than a hint of the Neville Chamberlain School of Political...
View ArticleA Mobile Slaughterhouse
Google Ads, the paid links that appear on many web pages offering goods and services supposedly tailored to the content of the page, often seem like the unconscious of the web — a kind of free...
View ArticleElemental Blindness
There is little doubt that the war in Iraq has moved into a new phase out of which any possible ‘victory’ will require an inversion of the meaning of the word. The underlying facts tell the story. None...
View ArticleAfghanistan: Gift or Grand Conceit?
Many tend to think of the war in Afghanistan as a war in one country. It could be any country. Thinking this way is only possible if the country is seen to have no cultural history or broader cultural...
View ArticleGlobal Challenges
Cities have a distinctive capacity to transform conflict into the civic; in contrast, national governments tend to militarise conflict. This does not mean that cities are peaceful spaces. On the...
View ArticleAustralia-US Relations in the ‘Asian Century’
I will speak a little of Australia’s history since the end of the Second World War to the present and how I see the possibilities for the future. With the economic rise of China, and the United States’...
View ArticleProducing Refugees (Editorial 1) Permission to Abuse (Editorial 2)
Editorial 1, Producing Refugees, by John Hinkson The deep distress implicit in responses to the latest developments in refugee policy—where refugees are to be dispersed across the Australian community...
View ArticleTearing Syria Apart by Jeremy Salt
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....
View ArticleGoing in Hard, by Alison Caddick
It is a classic situation of a war government gathering support on the home front by creating divisions and binding loyalties, and of a shallow media setting up feared figures then knocking them over...
View ArticleHere We Go Again, by Paul Barratt
In this desperately complex situation, the nature and extent of Australian involvement is effectively in the hands of just three people—Prime Minister Tony Abbott, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, and...
View ArticleWar Culture, by John Hinkson
The failure of globalisation and its trajectory towards war is a drama that is completely novel.
View ArticleTony Abbott’s Iraq Adventure, by Paul Barratt
Romance and reality in following the United States into war
View ArticleBougainville: Australia’s Secret War, by Kristian Lasslett
The hidden hand of Canberra in a war little cared about by the Australian people.
View ArticleViewing the New War in Syria, by Stephen Pascoe
Donald Trump’s recent strikes on Syria were launched on the centenary anniversary of America’s entry into WWI. Whether this coincidence was accidental or planned – and in the absurdist theater of...
View ArticleDefence After the Pandemic
The announcement by Prime Minister Scott Morrison of a redirection of defence strategy towards an acquisition of long-range missiles plus a variety of other investments marks an aggressive turn in...
View ArticleWill the Australian project end as it began?
As Hugh White notes in the Australian Financial Review, the assumption on which the new defence strategy paper rests is that all the nations of the Asia-Pacific region will be willing to unite against...
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