The most significant comment to occur in the Yassmin Abdel-Magied “lest we forget” saga was probably the one with least content: Lisa Oldfield’s description of Abdel-Magied as a “bitch” on breakfast TV. Oldfield gained her media perch by appearing in a Real Housewives program, a genre in which powerless women married to powerful men play power games about restaurant seating and who’s wearing what hat at the Cup. The object is maximum conflict among infantilised women, so Oldfield was doing no more than her training.
But the abuse has a chill about it, precisely because Oldfield is so vacuous. She’s being a good soldier, allegedly voicing the public mood, and a hint at how one of these culture-war monsterings will eventually break out of the bounds set for it and result in real violence. Hate and a violent impulse is part of it, of course; the journalists and editors who pursue people like Abdel-Magied or Larissa Behrendt — indigenous and women of colour are the preferred targets — are either after, or indifferent to the occurrence of, a complete psychic collapse on the part of their victim.
[The Diggers didn’t die for bloody Muslims to have freedom of speech]
Practically no one, no matter how strong, can go through being on the front page, day after day, as a hate figure, and come through unscathed. We are social creatures, the nation is an ersatz community, and so the front page is like being shamed in the village. Doesn’t matter how spurious what you’re accused of is, you feel the concentrated fury, and that is what is intended.
In News Corp, there are the sort of journalists one finds everywhere, who are, or would be, actual fascists. They would be indifferent to or positively welcoming of the suicide of one of their targets. Sooner or later, they will swarm on someone at a low point in their life, and they will have achieved the media execution that they implicitly seek (Fairfax has got into the act with a Latika Bourke non-story about a senator wot did a Facebook post. Given today’s sad announcement, the most charitable way to assess it would be pure desperation).
The question for the further future is what sort of “carrying capacity” for political hysteria the nation possesses, especially if underlying economic circumstances were to change and a more intense hostility released. Quite possibly, it is nothing; breakfast TV is, after all, the home of Oldfield, Joe Hildebrand and Richard Wilkins. But maybe because of that, it acts as an early-warning system. Canaries are pretty and stupid, and they’re useful in coalmines.
In the past decade or so, Anzac Day has gone from being a pumped-up ceremony, stripped of all its complexity, to, in the hands of the right, an expression of the totalitarian mind. The insistence that not only must there only be one view of Anzac, but that one cannot use the term “lest we forget” about others, has a touch of North Korea about it. Totalitarian, and hysterical in the sense that’s essential to hysteria: that any questioning of a simplistic fantasy of self is tantamount to annihilation. Such conduct, especially by journalists and editors, is obviously inimical to a free society, and a pluralist public sphere. The more they do it, in the pursuit of individual political vendettas, the weaker they leave the country overall.
The chorus of silence from the pale riders of the IPA about this idea of authorised meanings of a war is far more eloquent than their usual pfaff. That is not just a measure of their innate conformism and cowardice; it is a sign that the right is abandoning any commitment to genuine pluralism, free speech and free markets, in favour of a highly concrete nationalism, in which a series of values are dictated by the state.
This is an abandonment of the difficult double act of free markets and social repression that they’ve tried to enforce since the Thatcher era. It shows how little commitment they have to the notion of “freedom” they bang on about. Witness John Roskam’s pretzel twists around the issue in this week’s AFR piece, one in which he voices support for the founder of the Breitbart website, a swamp of white supremacists, Big State nationalists and conspiratorialists.
[Attack on Yassmin Abdel-Magied is the act of myth-loving, right-wing cowards]
Because campaigns such as those against Abdel-Magied stay at the level of the media and are so confected, many are wont to write them off. The trouble is that these contentless outrages are lit up in a society whose main problem now is a lack of shared meaning, or of much collective meaning at all. There is something entirely autonomous about the way that the totalitarian version of the Anzac myth rolls on, and that is a bad sign. If people are desperate for anything, anything that will give them a feeling of being connected, if they decide, or are convinced that, such feeling remains intact by virtue of being uncriticised, then events are capable of jumping the media/real-life barrier. That is, sadly, reinforced by the insistence by those on the cultural left for ever-expanding state controls on speech.
In the current climate, those on either side who believe that a free and pluralist society is made up of many parts — including a refrain from spruiking unitary “national” values, or demanding that all public broadcasters pledge an agreed interpretation of World War I — need to criticise those on their own side who don’t hold those beliefs, unsparingly. It will be interesting to see if anyone on the right, other than Helen Dale, can find enough courage to speak up for the things they keep telling us they believe.
C’mon, Guy. You’re repeatedly commenting on the media repeatedly commenting on the media commenting on a media personality commenting on an Australian public holiday. Such pap is freely available on Twitter. A journalist shouldn’t be drawing salary to produce it.
I agree that the recent media treatment of Ms Abdel-Magied has been bullying and cowardly, cynical, hypocritical and bordering on hysterical, but you could make that point simply in two paragraphs. By reacting and counter-reacting, it’s now feeding on its own frenzy and by serial exploitation of that hysteria, you’re now part of the problem.
The clue that your articles needed more reflection should have come when you first defended Ms Abdel-Magied’s comments under freedom of speech (Crikey, Apr 28), rather than for their historical accuracy, compassionate perspicacity and balanced journalism. Had her comments stood under those criteria, it wouldn’t have mattered who made them. But they don’t, and so you had to talk about the appearance and culture of the person who made them instead. In doing so, you shifted the conversation yet further away from good sense and into your prejudices about other peoples’ prejudices about Abdel-Magied’s prejudices.
Though I wouldn’t wish her recent media ordeal on anyone, Abdel-Magied was right to realise that her comments were insensitive and retract them: not because ANZAC day is or should be sacred, but because in trying to appropriate reflection on unthinkable Imperial slaughter into a conversation about racism and religious intolerance, she missed two critical points:
1. “Lest we forget” was spoken in grief about family-members and citizens whose names are graven on cenotaphs in every country town. Whatever sense modern Australia makes of that, and however it may be exploited, it has not become less tragic or poignant over time.
2. Part of the ANZAC legacy is our modern recognition that a great deal of today’s racism and nationalistic divisions derive directly from the smug, monotheistic imperialism that underpinned the empires of WWI. We can see its legacy in the still-unreconciled rents in Palestine, in revived French nativism, in the jihadism of ISIS, and the Christian supremacism of One Nation. And Muslim imperialism contributed to it, just as did Christian imperialism.
So we are *all* heirs of that blindness, Guy, all victims of it, and in that respect, we have more in common than we have in difference. One reason Turks and Australians have historically had respect for each other despite the slaughter, is their respect for mutual grief.
Abdel-Magied apparently couldn’t see that. In treating the occasion as political opportunity and exploiting it, she managed to both disrespect the appalling legacy of the time, and declare herself a cynical partisan. So of course she would cause offense, of course the struggling right-wing tabloids would milk it while ever it would sell a newspaper, and you are right to this extent: racism and religious intolerance have taken an offense of ignorance and misrepresented it as malignant contempt. But you are wrong to cast Abdel-Magied as a helpless innocent: she was acting cynically, and has more platform than most Australians with which to defend herself.
By abusing her platform with insufficient self-examination, she opened herself to critique, both fair and unfair. But by turning this matter into a cause célèbre, you are making precisely the same category of mistake she did. You can and should do better, Guy: at least Abdel-Magied tweeted on her own dime, but you’re a seasoned professional, and paid to provide insights and perspectives that can’t be found in pubs.
“Abdel-Magied apparently couldn’t see that. In treating the occasion as political opportunity and exploiting it, she managed to both disrespect the appalling legacy of the time, and declare herself a cynical partisan.”
What is the correct way to honour the ANZACs™? Personally I like to call it a creepy holiday where the dead are instrumentalized for the worship of Australia. Usually I bust out a Bakunin quote about how the state is an earthly church and the church is a celestial state. Then I post pictures of the dawn service at Gallipoli and call it a megachurch. Have I been doing it wrong for years? Please tell me how to properly participate in the festival of the dead.
She’s 26 years old. Naive, sure. Insensitive and politically wet behind the ears, of course. But Guy’s right in picking up the scent of something particularly nasty in the media pile-on. The outrage is way, way out of proportion and reflects the utterly cynical desperation of the Murdoch media to milk an issue that ticks every one of their boxes. That it was on her Facebook page and removed right away seems to be overlooked.
Ruv writes, ““Lest we forget” was spoken in grief about family-members and citizens whose names are graven on cenotaphs in every country town. Whatever sense modern Australia makes of that, and however it may be exploited, it has not become less tragic or poignant over time.”
But you’d surely expect it to become less tragic over time as the Diggers shuffle on and it disappears over the memory horizon into history and joins the losses at Agincourt or Hastings or wherever you draw your ancestry to. The awful thing about the Anzac Sector, however, is its constant efforts to portray this military fiasco as being *more* tragic and poignant over time and it is very, very difficult not to be cynical about it in light of that. I welcome a little sacrilege around this, personally.
> you’d surely expect it to become less tragic over time as the Diggers shuffle on and it disappears over the memory horizon into history and joins the losses at Agincourt or Hastings or wherever you draw your ancestry to.
I think that depends on what we’ve done to conserve the history and its human context, Decorum, what we do to become aware of it, and perhaps how compassionate we can feel about people we haven’t directly met.
In this respect, I notice a difference between a ‘city history’ of WWI, and the history you get from visiting any country town. In a big city, if you wanted to learn about WWI, you’d go to a library or museum and pore over dry words peppered with monochrome photographic plates. But in a country town, you need go no further than the main street. There’ll be a cenotaph there, with surnames that still appear on shop hoardings and letterboxes. If there’s an old family winery in the region and you visit it when the Cellar Door is open, you might see pictures of the ancestors who built the farmhouse, and their relatives in AIF uniforms. Almost certainly the CWA or any local museum will have artefacts and records they can tell you personal stories about, woven into the town’s own history.
So I partly agree with you: our WWI history is a dead, textbook history *if* you visit a city library, but it’s also a living history if (like me) you enjoy a visit to country towns to poke about a bit.
It’s bound to be a personal thing, but I can’t connect the names of cenotaphs with the names on letterboxes, and not be moved. For me, it has nothing to do with nationalism… I get the same feeling when I see the shrapnel marks on the Victoria and Albert museum in London, or the centuries-footworn doorsteps of some former Roman stable now turned panel-beater shop down some back alley of Tübingen in Germany. I don’t imagine I’m alone in that. It doesn’t make me want to attend marches or dawn services, or flock to Two-Up, but it does mean that I understand people for whom Anzac Day remains a commemoration of lost family, torn community and an opportunity for personal reflection.
So I don’t think national tragedies do become less poignant over time, if extensive conservation has occurred. And for better or worse in other respects, the institution of Anzac Day has conserved a lot of that period.
“Lest we forget” was spoken in grief about family-members and citizens whose names are graven on cenotaphs in every country town”
Nonsense. In fact, as the Aus War Memorial website attests, the phrase originally comes from Rudyard Kipling’s poem Recessional, which urges against grandiosity and complacency rather than in favour of commemorating the attempted invasion of a foreign country:
“Lo all the pomp of yesteryear is one with Ninevah and Tyre”
that’s drivel, Ruv. Typical pathetic excuses by someone who wants Anzac to be some sort of Juche-type celebration, and uses a convoluted argument to justify it to themselves
Guy, I do not myself observe Anzac Day. It wouldn’t bother me if it were abolished as a national holiday, and like you I deplore its sanctification, commercialisation and political exploitation. But I also don’t object to people commemorating the slaughter since in my view anyone who understands why Australians joined the AIF in WWI cannot ignore the tragic ignorance of doing so. There’s still wisdom to be had from reflecting on the thinking of that time, as long as we’re actually thinking, and not simply invoking mawkish nationalistic jingoism.
So ‘defending the sanctity’ of Anzac Day isn’t my motive: defending better critical thought and a better grade of journalism is. At least four factors are at play in this matter: Abdel-Magieb’s self-promoting ignorance, the fact that Australians are still coming to terms with the unresolved legacy of their imperial history and are still conflicted over it, there’s racist/anti-Muslim sentiment from some quarters, and newspaper sales are struggling.
To make the initial point you made, that racism and Islamophobia are being exploited here, is fine — they certainly are. But your analysis has also created a false dichotomy: by collapsing it into a freedom of speech vs. nationalistic oppression of minorities issue, you’ve cast anyone who critiques Abdel-Magied’s tweet on any grounds at all as either Islamophobic, jingoistic or both.
Which is itself ignorant, and worse, it’s ignorance that a second article has now made an axe to grind — which is why I wrote to ask you to try and do better.
As I said, I believe you’re capable of better, but a good way to persuade me otherwise would be to lash out at criticism, and call your critic a wannabe North Korean nationalistic zealot. That’s recycling the very reductionism I asked you to revisit.
My arguments need not persuade you now or ever, but I trust that your own critical thought eventually might.
How much further can the defenders of the ANZAC Orthodoxy go if a seven-worded tweet triggers such apoplexy and hatred? It is astonishing and says so much about the Australian psyche. I wonder what a psychoanalyst would make of all of this.
She works for “the opposition/ABC” – admittedly tweeeting from Civvy St?
….. Remember the reception of Leak’s “cartoons”?
Sir, what a heap of absolute , apparently educated, gobbledegook. Do you have any person in your family, your grand, your father, mother, uncle, second cousin, sister, niece, nephew who got killed in any stupid war?
Who are you? Why are you carrying on like this? What is your beef? Whom do you hate?
I am not particularly concerned with her silly Anzac Day comment. My only problem with this woman is that she is sprouting Islam and Sharia Law which, after my extensive research, seems to have horrible rules. Perhaps you can discount these rules. But it seems that those espousing this religion can pick and choose which bit they want. Nobody agrees on anything.
I just do not want this woman on the Australian Government payroll, that is all. She/you can spout whatever you like but I will not pay you to do so.
That is all, sir.
Other than that I do not know what on earth you are all about.
Hope tomorrow is brilliant for you, maybe the sun will come out, who knows?
Got the Lotto numbers while you’re there?