Just got through @markwillacy’s book. To coincide with Alan Tudge’s speech today, I’m going to just post a couple of scenes from Australia’s proud recent history of standing up for freedom and liberal values.
Blooding - the execution of prisoners as a rite of passage - wasn’t just carried out in Afghanistan. Preparing people to do it was part of training in Australia.
One possible such case - a village imam taken out and shot because he happened to have the same name as someone the SAS was looking for.
I’m not someone who believes that because someone is identified as an “insurgent”, our troops had the right to be in Afghanistan and kill them. But leaving that aside, it seems people’s names were added to the kill list after being killed.
Walking into a village and threatening to massacre everyone.
Taking a photo of a dead Afghan boy, slapping it on a leaflet that you’re going to terrorise the local population with.
We’ve seen photos of Nazi flags, not sure if any of these Confederate flag photos have been published though?
Bantering about the good old days.
Couple of interviewees, who’ve been through hell themselves and did the right thing by speaking up, both end up making the same analogy.
I’m sorry this is extremely grim, and there’s much more in the book. Then you remember that everything in it reflects only a short window of time (~ 12 months) from a much longer war, and all from just one small corner of Afghanistan where Australians operated.
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Quite some shenanigans at USyd regarding the new Group of 8 definition of antisemitism. Many solid critiques have been made of this, most recently by @jumanabayeh, and not surprisingly staff have strong reservations. What to do? overland.org.au/2025/03/silenc…
The university took the definition to Academic Board last month, proposing to include the definition alongside other definitions in the appendix to its anti-racism statement. But this "proposal" wasn't actually put as a proposal to Academic Board, and no vote occurred.
The meeting report nevertheless said that Academic Board "resolved to note" the definition. That was strange enough, since no vote took place. But then this week's edition of Staff News annouced that Academic Board had "endorsed" the new definition!
Some thoughts on recent stoushes, and my own position, which evidently confuses people.
I’m sure the @ASPI_ICPC report is mostly accurate. It’s an impressive piece of work. But the empirical debate is substituting for a political debate, and no amount of data will shift that.
Camp skepticism or denialism, in its various forms, is really not about empirical questions. It reflects skepticism towards the actors and organisations making the running on China issues in the West. We're better off just facing up to that and talking about the politics.
The vitriol on the weekend is a sign of the centre collapsing on this issue, and the pressure is pushing some (thankfully not all) towards simple anti- and pro-China camps. These are both conservative positions in their own way. I want to restate what I see as the alternative.
Interesting side note to @BackgroundBrief's report on the Falun Gong and Oz media a while back. Last year the Department of Human Services had a partnership with FLG's Sound of Hope 希望之声, which resulted in the show "Engage Australia" 走入澳洲. ozvoice.org/radio-programs…
A Youtube series with the same title was also made. It began with videos about life in Australia - the kind of stuff that the Department presumably had in mind. Then, in July, the "Engage Australia" Youtube channel changed its name to "Voices" 真觀點. youtube.com/channel/UCAwVp…
If you search Youtube for 走入澳洲 today, you'll go straight to Voices. The video announcing the change is here. The first episode of the rebranded series is on Dr Yan and the Coronavirus - currently a hot FLG talking point. It continues in that vein. youtube.com/channel/UCAwVp…
Bit more on this still vague story here. Raid said to have occurred on 26/6, on 4 PRC journos from 3 media orgs, relating to the Foreign Interference Transparency Scheme, & came up with nothing. Date would place it in advance of the Cheng Lei detention. chinanews.com/gn/2020/09-08/…
June 26 was the day after the raid on Moselmane. Possibly related?
Xinhua story seems to confirm that it was linked to the raid on Moselmane, and adds that the Chinese journalists were told to keep the raid secret. Not sure exactly what that means - were they legally prevented from revealing it? xinhuanet.com/world/2020-09/…
Does anyone have a link to the original offending article in Chinese? The author's name "Cho Yao Lu" comes from the Russian articles cited here, not sure what his actual name is.
Ok, think I found it. The Russian title is Таджикистан инициировал передачу Китаю его земель и потерянные горы Памира были возвращены истинному хозяину, which seems to be this article: 塔吉克斯坦主动归还中国领土,丢失的帕米尔高原最终回归
Twitter won't let me link to it because it's such a junk website, but if you search the title you'll find it. If this is the article in question, it's not making new irredentist claims to Tajik territory. It's just an article celebrating the 2011 border agreement.
I'm wary of using border controls as an instrument to advance human rights. Giving bureaucrats or a minister powers to deny entry on human rights grounds can legitimise the use of discretionary power to restrict entry more generally, and might backfire on progressives.
The parochialism surrounding Magnitsky also makes me skeptical. Those promoting it make no effort to sound impartial - it's about joining a "club" of Western allies. The idea that there might be people responsible for human rights abuses in Western countries just isn't discussed.
This is what you find, for example, in Geoffrey Robertson's writings - it's all about closing off the West (or "advanced democracies") to bad folks from the non-West. But what about the "cruel and corrupt" who are from the "advanced democracies"? newsroom.unsw.edu.au/sites/default/…