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Showing posts with the label International Relations

Trump 2.0

Given the likelihood that the 2024 US election will be a repeat of 2020, Joe Biden vs Donald Trump, and Trump has a realistic chance of winning, I've been catching up on Trump 1.0 via the venerable Bob Woodward.  He wrote three Trump books.  Fear  was published in 2017 and dealt with Trump's transition to power and the first nine months of his presidency.  Rage was published in 2020 and dealt with most of the Trump presidency, from its early days to the COVID pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests.  The final book, Peril , cowritten with Woodward's younger Washington Post colleague Bob Costa, deals with the 2020 election, its aftermath and the early months of Biden's tenure. Bod Woodward is a strangely appropriate person to be documenting the Trump and Biden years.  He became famous alongside Carl Bernstein in the early 1970s for exposing the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon, back in the days when committing a criminal offence was enough to end so

Archie Roach Meets Queen Elizabeth II

I feel slightly sad at the death of Queen Elizabeth. Not deeply sad. I didn't know her. I never had much time for the monarchy. The signs of her impending death had been there for a couple of years in her increasingly brief appearances at royal events and, in the past year, her frequent absences and cancellations. She was 96, the time had come. The closest encounter I ever had with her was in  1977 when she came to Australia. Among other engagements she opened the Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Stadium at Nathan where the 1982 Commonwealth Games were to be held. School students were bused in from all over Brisbane for the occasion.  The ground had been levelled and the athletics track laid but as yet there were no stands. We sat on the grass while she made an extremely boring speech in her strange, plummy voice, then she and Prince Philip paraded around the track in their open-top limo treating us all to the royal wave. I felt a good deal sadder back at the end of July at the death of

Chasing the Scream

I've written before about the crazy world of drug policy and the arms race between dealers and police that marks our futile efforts to outlaw various substances.  We are caught in an endless loop of first order change , doing more of the same and hoping for a different result.  The victims, it has always seemed to me, are the poor people at the bottom of the heap - people with addictions, trauma and other issues in their lives who end up jailed or homeless as casualties of a pointless war.  So I was excited to learn about the existence of Johann Hari's Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction. A friend told me about Hari's most recent book, Stolen Focus , which looks at the prevalence of digital technologies and the way they are robbing us of our ability to concentrate and be present in the moment.  I really enjoyed it, if that is the right word for a great book about a terrible thing, but it was this earlier book that really made me take notice.  Publi

New Zealand

While I've been recovering from a piece of minor surgery I've spent a bit of time reading Philippa Mein Smith's A Concise History of New Zealand. Strange reading for a health break, you think?  Well, I've spent most of my life in Australia, just a short trip across the Tasman from New Zealand, and yet I'm ashamed to say I know less about the place than about many countries further from me.  The closest I have come to visiting is a quick change of planes in Auckland Airport, and before reading Mein Smith's book I knew almost nothing about its history. Like most Australians I guess, I see New Zealand as like a younger sister.  They are near us, they were founded by the same British colonialists, they speak the same language, they share a history of displacement of their original inhabitants.  Like younger sisters everywhere, they are similar to us, but a bit nicer.  Their people are a bit friendlier, their race relations a bit less oppressive, their politics a bit

Farewell Donald Trump...I Hope

So, Donald Trump is gone.  At least, he's not President any more.  True to form, he didn't go quietly, and he keeps hinting he'll be back in 2024.  He could be in jail by then, or at least convicted of one of the many crimes for which he is currently being investigated.  But since he's so far been a Teflon man, I wouldn't like to count on it. Trump has raised untruthfulness to a pitch you would only ever expect to see in a totalitarian regime with a State-controlled media.  His daily storm of tweets, not to mention his speeches and press conferences, involved a steady stream of lies.  These are not a secret because the US has a free press which employs fact checkers.  The Washington Post has been keeping a tally and in October 2020 it passed 30,000 untrue statements for the four years of his presidency, an average of over 50 per day.  In one single day, on 11 August 2020, he made 189 untrue statements.   Some of these are trivial and silly, but some are serious.  H

Propaganda

Continuing my trawl through some of the books that have been waiting to be read for way too long....  Quite some time ago I bought a second-hand copy of Jacques Ellul's Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes,  probably at a Lifeline book sale.  I remember starting to read it, finding it dense to the point of incomprehensibility, and putting it on the shelf for later.  I'm not the only person who felt this - the book's previous owner covered the pages with underlining and illegible marginal comments for about the first third of the book, after which its pages are completely untouched. If this memory is accurate then I must have got smarter in the intervening years. His writing is not nearly as impenetrable as I remember it.  Not that it is exactly an easy read - he's a French intellectual, after all - but I found it clear, highly logical, and completely disconcerting.   Ellul was a prominent Christian intellectual in the second half of the 20th century, writin