Rjurik Davidson

Last week I finished Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety, which brilliantly documents the French Revolution from the point of view (mainly) of Desmoulins, Robespierre and Danton.

Currently I’m reading Deborah Biancotti’s Book of Endings, a collection of stories by the under-recognised Australian speculative fiction author.

In the future I plan to read Robert Service’s Trotsky, a biography which is critical of the Russian revolutionary and has itself come under some criticism.

John Marnell

Last week, after a very strong recommendation from some Overland colleagues, I read The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman. A delightful blend of travelogue, literary criticism and memoir, the book recounts Batuman’s experiences as a postgraduate comparative literature student and her ever-increasing fascination with Russian literature. The book is thoroughly entertaining and at times quite hilarious, and it is rather impressive that Batuman has managed to create such an engaging narrative around some ostensibly unappealing topics (academic conferences, PhD research, trying to decipher Old Uzbek poetry).

Currently I’m reading The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein. Really the story of Stein’s life, the book details her friendships with many of the avant-garde painters and writers living in Paris at the start of last century. Stein’s acerbic remarks and witty observations are highly enjoyable, however the book would really benefit from a severe copy edit (Stein appears to detest commas, which occasionally disrupts the book’s flow).

In the future, I plan to read Just Kids by Patti Smith. I love both Patti and Robert Mapplethorpe so am really looking forward to reading about their early friendship. These kinds of books can easily become self-indulgent or fall into the trap of overly romanticising the past, however I have faith that Patti’s poetic sensibilities will ensure that it’s a good read.

Jeff Sparrow

Last week, I finished Kraken, the new China Mieville novel. It’s a typically intelligent book but one that’s much more self-consciously genre than The City and the City. In a recent interview, Mieville spoke about re-connecting with the SF fans worried he’d become too literary: “Kraken says, ‘I’m still China from the block.’”

Currently, I’m reading Nina Power’s One Dimensional Woman, one of those books where you read certain passages and silently shout, ‘Hell yeah!’. For instance, Power writes: ‘We must sadly come to terms with the fact that we live in a world in which enjoyment has been profoundly circumscribed. Don’t be misled: The imperative to “Enjoy!” is omnipresent, but pleasure and happiness are almost entirely absent. We can have as many vibrators as we like, and drink as much booze as we can physically tolerate, but anything else outside the echo chamber of money-possessions-pleasure is strictly verboten.’

In the future, I plan to read (or rather re-read) Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, to test an idea I have. At least, that’s the plan. But it’s not impossible that I’ll be distracted by the new Naomi Novik novel Tongues of Serpents (Napoleonic war, dragons: what’s not to like?).

Jacinda Woodhead

Last week I read Slouching towards Bethlehem, a collection of essays by Joan Didion, first published in 1968. She writes, by way of introduction, ‘My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their interests. And it always does. That is the one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.’ Needless to say, I have fallen in love with Joan Didion.

Currently I’m reading another collection of essays, Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt. I recently rediscovered Benjamin after reading ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,’ which I found startlingly relevant. I started today with his essay ‘Unpacking my library: a talk about book collecting’: ‘You have all heard of people for whom the loss of their books has turned them into invalids, or of those who in order to acquire them became criminals.’

In the future, I plan to read all day every day because I am falling behind (yet again!). I shall start with A Dying Colonialism, about Algerian war and colonial oppression by Frantz Fanon, move on to anything Roberto Bolano (because all I hear is talk of him) and then Clarice Lispector. I am also hunting short story collections so am open to suggestions.

Over to you.

If we were to ask a passerby in the street, ‘How do you define democracy?’ it’s impossible to predict, based on recent observations of democracy in action in Australia, in the Unites States, in Israel, in the outbreak of democracy across the free world, what their definition would look like. George Orwell alluded to this when he wrote, ‘It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.’

At its most rudimentary level, democracy means government by the people. It’s a theory of governance in which the state’s power is vested in the citizens, or their elected representatives. Democracy is supposed to ensure equal rights for all, behaviours and actions in accordance with the rule of law, and governance subject to public scrutiny – and accountability.

These days, you would be hard-pressed to find much resembling democracy in those regions that not only holler its merits from the rooftops, but also force-feed other nations its diet. What has happened to our notions of democracy? Did we squander them on compulsions to overthrow governments, control resources and reclaim territories?

Israel is a nation commonly hailed as a beacon of democracy in an enslaved Middle East. Last week, Gideon Levy, who continues to churn out heartbreaking masterpieces as he watches his democracy collapse into the sea, wrote:

[For Israeli nationalists], democracy means only an election every few years, tyranny of the majority and the crushing of the minority, lockstep thinking, the state above all else, Judaism before democracy, a coopted media and clapped-out control mechanisms, an academia under supervision and citizens subject to a loyalty oath – and to hell with all the fundamental values, which are being trampled before our very eyes.

We could be forgiven, in this Australian democracy, for not knowing about the laws currently being read in the Knesset that will make it illegal to boycott Israel or Israeli goods, that will work retroactively and will be used against Palestinians and Israeli activists and will ban international BDS supporters from entering the region for 10 years. For not knowing of the plight of Arab Knesset member Haneen Zoabi, who participated in the Freedom Flotilla and as a result was stripped of parliamentary privileges, was given a mock passport during parliamentary proceedings and told ‘contact Ahmadinejad and ask him to give you an Iranian diplomatic passport … because your Israeli passport will be revoked this evening.’ For not knowing of Netanyahu’s proposed immigration law adopting Avigdor Lieberman’s favoured slogan ‘Citizenship depends on loyalty’ – a loyalty, that is, to ‘Jewish democracy’, which forces new citizens to recognise and remain loyal to Zionism and Judaism.

Considering that more than 20% of Israel’s population is Arab, how is this democracy? As Ishai Menuchin, the executive director of the Public Committee against Torture in Israel observed, ‘Democracy is far more than majority rule … For Israel to be truly democratic, civil society organisations are needed to challenge the government and legislature through the media and courts, and in public protests.’

Israeli principal Ram Cohen, who is opposed to the rewriting of history textbooks, and IDF recruitment in high schools, phrased it like this:

A principal must have, for example, something to say about the deportation of the children of migrant workers, trafficking in women, the separation fence, the withdrawal from Gaza, minimum wage law, settlers attacking Palestinian villagers to exact a ‘price tag’, the removal of Arabs from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, the siege on Gaza, corruption in government, or the relations of religion and state.

Take the United States, as another example, where an administration was elected on a platform of hope, change, equality and a retreat from US imperial misadventure. This is a democracy with an administration that, despite electoral promises to the contrary, keeps open Guantanamo bay, home to detainees who have been imprisoned for 8 and half years without trial. Out of 779 prisoners, only 3 have been convicted, including David Hicks. In a country that can’t afford universal health care, post-9/11 Guantanamo has cost US taxpayers $2 billion. More than 20 million Americans are, or near, unemployed. The US has 4.7 millionaires and 39 million people who barely manage to find food.

Meanwhile, the US has 865 foreign bases in more than 175 countries and the US ‘spends almost as much on military spending as the entire rest of the world combined’ – which is 50% of their GDP. They’ve recently discovered their democracy is overseen by a Secret Government that has 854,000 employees with top security clearances who monitor the ‘1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications’ of US citizens daily.

WikiLeaks’ 92,000 documents granting ‘an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan … more grim than the official portrayal,’ verify what many already grasped: the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable and the US COIN mission, absurd:

At the meeting, an old Afghan man spoke scornfully of democracy, which he saw as little more than a guarantee of an equal right to bribe. In response, the reconstruction team’s first recommendation was to:
DO an Information Operation campaign explaining [to] the Afghan people: What DEMOCRACY is? How a democratic systems works? What they can do to report wrong doing? (The last only if there will be real consequences to the wrong doing, if not the confidents/narrators will be squash[ed] by the system).

On the same day WikiLeaks released their data, the Age reported:

The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost Americans a staggering $US1 trillion to date, second only in inflation-adjusted dollars to the $US4 trillion price tag for World War II, when the United States put 16 million men and women into uniform and fought on three continents.

There is now doubt as to when America plans to withdraw from Iraq, the 2011 timeline fading into political rhetoric, so the interminability of war seems assured. Since the US bombardment of Fallujah in 2004, there have been ‘dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia’ that ‘exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.’ Hardly facts to holler from our democratic rooftops.

Orwell, who could have written this passage just this morning, said:

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them.

In Australia, we have a democratic two-party system that doesn’t allow people to directly elect a head of state, nor the head of government. Which doesn’t give people a lot of choice, yet we have to make a choice – it’s a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. And it has reached a crisis point where we expect our representatives to lie, and we suspect our votes are worthless.

A majority of the Australian population has a much more progressive view on climate policy and war – 61% want to see an end to the conflict in Afghanistan – than our government, who have dismissed our opinions on the subject: ‘so long as the bipartisanship holds in Canberra … [public opposition to the war] is not a critical electoral factor,’ boasted former Labor senator, Stephen Loosely. The Age advised that our representatives view ‘bipartisan support for all of Australia’s overseas deployments’ as a ‘measure of a mature democracy.’

Given the war ‘coverage’ in this democratic nation, we could be forgiven for forgetting that we’re still at war – still at several wars, in fact. The platforms our politicians choose to run on are all about political popularity, as opposed to policy that affects us. While they may pretend they’re kowtowing to racists in Sydney’s West, these politicians are the ones controlling the political discourse, constructed around topics of their choosing. It’s not about what’s popular with the people; it’s about avoiding topics like defence spending by focusing on the illusory ‘border security’. ‘No politician can or should defy the wishes of the electorate,’ said Tony Abbott, who clearly has a memory that doesn’t extend beyond the headlines of that day.

Our democracy is so stunted in Australia in 2010 that it is not a critical factor in this election that the majority of Australians are against the war; it does not matter that our leaders were caught lying about Iraq, about Afghanistan, about refugees. It does not matter that are leaders are never held accountable under the rule of law. How is this democracy?

If Israel can get away with an attack on a humanitarian flotilla in broad daylight, if the US can get away with never-ending war, and Australia can get away with obfuscating responsibility, then what can’t these democratic nations get away with under the banner of progress?

One vote every four years is not participatory politics and it is not the way to a functioning, progressive and ‘mature’ democracy. We need to stop with the democracy delusion; it’s time for democracy with a pulse.

Aboriginal elder Uncle Reg Blow will conduct a cleansing ceremony to precede a heat of the invitational Melbourne Believer Slam. Slam MC: Michael Reynolds Competitors: Ben Pobjie, Laura Smith, Luka Haralampou, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Graham Colin, Dandelion Jackson, Rhys Rodgers, Koraly Dimitriadis, Joel MacKerrow and Eddy Berger.

Introductory words by Greens candidate Kathleen Maltzahn. Closing remarks by Greens candidate Brian Walters.

Admission $10 $5 concession.
A fundraiser for the Australian Greens.

The idea that the printing press democratised reading, writing and ideas is widely embraced. This is not to suggest it was – or remains in its internet incarnation – politically progressive or, indeed, revolutionary. Matthew Battles reminds us:

The printing press never only produced the kind of deep reading we admire and privilege today. It also produced propaganda and misinformation, penny dreadfuls and comic books offensive to public morality, pornography, self-help books, and much that was generally despised and rejected by polite culture. Any account of the history of “The Gutenberg Era” that lacks these is incomplete — just as any picture of the Internet that privileges LOLcats and 4chan is insufficient. We must consider both — for pornography, misinformation, and sheer foolishness have thrived from the age of incunables to the advent of the Internet.

Yet it did bring the written word to the people.

During this current age, one of increasing mass literacy – which is unparalleled when we pause to reflect that never before have more people across the globe had the capacity to read and write and actually are reading and writing – it has been suggested that whereas the printing press democratised ‘the written word,’ the internet has democratised publishing itself. In other words, we find ourselves in a time of (potential) universal publishing or content production for anyone who owns or has access to a computer. And the internet. Which, despite their ubiquity, still belong to the realm of the privileged.

‘Here’s what the Internet did,’ posits Shirky, ‘it introduced, for the first time, post-Gutenberg economics. The cost of producing anything by anyone has fallen through the floor. And so there’s no economic logic that says that you have to filter for quality before you publish’.

Read the rest of my piece over at Meanland.

The day before the WikiLeaks documents were released, I finished reading Evan Wright’s Generation Kill, a book I’d been meaning to get around to reading but life, etc. Generation Kill has become something of a celebrity book now. It’s Wright’s account of being embedded for two months with a company of marines of the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion spearheading the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Wright, who cut his reporting teeth – if that’s the word – writing porn reviews for Hustler, where he seems to have learned something about misogyny, has gained something of a reputation as a sort of latter day Hunter S. Thompson. A Thompson he isn’t, but he is a fine observer and takes full advantage of his role as an embedded journo. We won’t get an Australian equivalent as the ADF controls its info on its operations with an obsessive po-faced secrecy that borders on the ludicrous, and a compliant media ensures that the Afghanistan and Iraq wars are events we are not going to be asked to think about too much.

Anyway, I was thinking that Evan Wright’s marines seem like cuddly angels compared with the antics of their comrades who followed them over the next seven years. Evan Wright’s soldiers are a kind of more profane, intensely homoerotic Dirty Dozen.

They are very real, but they are also strangely moral in their own way. Generation Kill, a book that was further mythologised into a weird HBO TV series, became notorious because of its supposed claim that today’s GIs kill with no more compunction than they would if they were playing Grand Theft Auto. Actually, Wright never said this, but it became an interesting way of demonising individuals and sensationalising the war and playing into the moral hysteria around video games and so on, while ignoring the politics of the Iraq invasion.

Evan Wright’s marines were just a few weeks into a brand new war. Today’s marines are seven years into an occupation, and its brutalising effects on the invaders, and the horror upon horror that seem to be piled on the invaded are so staggering its difficult to fathom the stupidity and evil of the US administration that was so gung-ho in prosecuting the war, not to mention its enthusiastic cheer squad in Australia.

Something very, very horrible went down in Fallujah, for example, after the US assault in late 2004. A recent epidemiological study, published in the International Journal of Environmental Studies and Public Health, has documented rates of cancer, leukaemia and so forth far greater than in Hiroshima after the dropping of humankind’s first atomic bomb. Fallujah was a free-fire zone for the US in their attack there – i.e. you shoot whatever you want with whatever you want – and whatever the Americans were using obviously had quite a lot of highly radioactive material. The local rate of leukaemia is 38 times, childhood cancer 12 times, breast cancer 10 times, and infant mortality 5 times higher than in other comparable Middle East countries.

The larger-than-life hyped up kids of Generation Kill have now become the brutalised, psychotic perpetrators of atrocity after atrocity. The deliberate murder of an Iraqi husband and wife and the murder and the rape of their daughters by drunken GIs at an isolated military outpost in 2006 (one probably similar to Combat Outpost Keating whose destruction was described in the WikiLeaks documents) reads like a criminal act committed in some American horror flick by strung-out psychos trying to cure themselves of years of satanic abuse and torture.

The marines of Evan Wright’s 1st Recon battalion are already hopelessly out of date. Whatever war they were fighting didn’t exist in the first place, and whatever it was has been revealed as a kind of hell that it is difficult to grasp, or understand, or think of. A war pretty much ignored by mainstream media until some kind of vivid ultra-violent intrusion such as the WikiLeaks ‘Collateral Damage’ video makes it briefly visible for a few minutes. The current WikiLeaks documents – an explosive scoop if ever there was one – haven’t been able to compete in the Australian mainstream media with the Masterchef final and Abbot and Gillard’s ludicrous ‘debate’.

The marines of Generation Kill are people who fitted the mould of a hip HBO mini-series, a kind of Deadwood in the desert. Wright’s Bravo Company move through the chaos of Iraq like a sort of strange mediaeval morality play acted out in the confines of a Humvee. Seven years later that theatre is starting to look more like a suburb of Pandemonium, where morality is an object paraded for political convenience, occasionally inconveniently hung with the bodies of the murdered and imprisoned. I doubt that if Evan Wright returned to Iraq now he’d be able to write a similar narrative of what has happened since he was last there. I don’t think anybody could. In fact it has written itself, and we can upload it any time we want to our very own laptops. It has been compiled by WikiLeaks and it junks every other attempt to write about the war.

There was no financial incentive – she would be eligible for the pension should she need it one day. There are no restrictions on her voice as an Australian – she was on the electoral roll before 1984 when the laws changed to exclude non-citizens from voting. She’s been here since she was seven – and she’ll be the first to tell you that she feels Australian.

On that evening, my mum stood up and pledged the following:

From this time forward, I pledge my loyalty to Australia and its people, whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect, and whose laws I will uphold and obey.

The whole family was there – aunts, cousins and their kids, dad, my sisters, my niece and my brand new nephew. And we were all moved.

Mum held the bible that she’d been given by the minister when she married my dad. Aunty Marg held nan’s falling apart St James. And though it was a pleasure to hear the pledge spoken by a group of brand new Australian citizens, I wondered how this context, this particular way of putting the words together, was any different from:

Come here, respect our country, respect our laws, our culture, our way of life. Be Australian, join us, enjoy this beautiful country and everything that it has to offer.

That there is Pauline Hanson, one of the few people who really do need no introduction. So did my appreciation for the citizenship pledge mean that I was one of them? The Cronulla rioters, the One Nation followers, the ‘I’m not racist, but…’s?

I had to separate the nostalgia of being there in the town hall from the words I was hearing and the ceremony I was watching. The very smell and temperature of the room reminded me of donating blood in the foyer, changing into sequined costumes in the supper room and singing Christmas carols on the stage. But having done that, I couldn’t deny that everyone in attendance was happy to be there. They were proud to have their photos taken with the Mayor, they grinned as they waved their gifted native plants at the family and friends in the audience.

I like the pledge. If you don’t like the laws it talks about, then nowhere does it say you can’t try to change them. And it doesn’t preference the rule of law over your rights – nowhere does it say that you can’t elect to use your right to protest against the laws you are bound to abide by. And it tells you that you have a responsibility to my neighbours, something that we could all be reminded of in a country where family and community is increasingly put second to capital.

As I read back over my last paragraph, I’m looking for the words, the phrases and the tone that might make me one of them. The pledge, unlike Pauline, gives all Australians rights and responsibilities: the right to be different and the responsibility to respect difference. It is easy to read it and align it with old-fashioned, conservative, John Howard-esque values simply because it is a pledge and because it refers to an idea of a nation, but to do that would be to give the pledge a meaning that it doesn’t necessarily have for those who are taking it.

(To do that would also be forgetting that it was in fact a Labor government in 1993 that updated the pledge that called ‘on applicants to commit to the Australian nation and people rather than pledging allegiance to the sovereign’, with its leader arguably the Australian leader most committed to indigenous reconciliation. In Parliament, the then Senator Faulkner said ‘As the multicultural society we are, it is proper that the pledge of commitment be one which will be equally meaningful to all our people’.)

I am proud that I live in a firmly democratic country. I feel lucky that I live somewhere where the rule of law is respected, where laws change as the people change, and as a result, justice can be served in a considered and peaceful way. I feel grateful that I live in a country where as a woman I can work, work alongside men, vote, wear a veil, wear bathers, wear bathers on the same beach as men, choose which god I want to worship, choose not to worship any god, not get married, not have children, be educated, have access to all kinds of doctors, doctors who take me seriously. I love that I live in a country that criticises itself and its leaders and that constantly strives to be better.

Australia is far from being a perfect place, I know that. In the lead-up to the election, our politicians are treating us like idiots. University places are prohibitively expensive and our two major parties seek to entrench a class divide by further encouraging parallel public and private systems. Our press is still talking about refugees as criminals, our leaders are still afraid of doing anything about climate change.

But as someone who never took the citizenship, who is here by birth rather than by choice, I look forward to a long life in a country whose democratic beliefs I share and whose rights and liberties I respect, and will happily bear the responsibility of making it a better place.

The whistleblower site has begun releasing a trove of new documents containing an almost blow-by-blow account of the Afghan conflict. Here’s what the Guardian says:

Behind the military jargon, the war logs are littered with accounts of civilian tragedies. The 144 entries in the logs recording some of these so-called “blue on white” events, cover a wide spectrum of day-by-day assaults on Afghans, with hundreds of casualties.

They range from the shootings of individual innocents to the often massive loss of life from air strikes, which eventually led President Hamid Karzai to protest publicly that the US was treating Afghan lives as “cheap”. When civilian family members are actually killed in Afghanistan, their relatives do, in fairness, get greater solatia payments than cans of beans and Hershey bars. The logs refer to sums paid of 100,000 Afghani per corpse, equivalent to about £1,500.

US and allied commanders frequently deny allegations of mass civilian casualties, claiming they are Taliban propaganda or ploys to get compensation, which are contradicted by facts known to the military.

But the logs demonstrate how much of the contemporaneous US internal reporting of air strikes is simply false.

There’s a ton of new material and it’s going to take a while for it all to shake out. One thing’s clear, however: if the digital revolution facilitates the kind of on-message media spin evidenced at the leaders’ debate, it also facilitates the remarkable revelations offered by Wikileaks. In other words, there’s no technological excuse for the shoddy journalism we’re so often served up.

Almost twenty years later, I finally made it to Paris and there I discovered that in Paris one is likely to see a) Parisians b) people pretending to be Parisians c) crepe vendors, and d) a large monument that one has already seen in movies, books or on the telly. There are several such monuments to choose from, all equally enjoyable to experience while gnawing at a baguette and muttering the words ‘tres bon’ in a feeble attempt to make it appear that one is not a tourist (sorry, traveller) but hangs out around the Eiffel Tower all the time.

I also found something unexpected happening as I wandered the streets of Gay Parry. (Oh come on, why is it perfectly acceptable and charming for French people to pronounce every word with a French accent, yet a total fox pass for an Australian to do the same?) Every time I looked upon The Seine, or the Arch d’Triumph, or a stylishly dressed mother and daughter sharing a cigarette, I could not help but think of Sydney and how bloody young it is.

You see dear Overlanders, prior to my recent transcontinental adventure, I had experienced but two cities in my entire life. Two. (Sydney and Melbourne, in case you’re interested.) While most twenty-somethings were making lattes to finance their overseas treks, I spent my footloose, fancy-free years writing essays on postmodernism and participating in dodgy performance-art pieces about the crushing weight of capitalism. You’ll never believe it, but this didn’t pay terribly well. Thus my imagination was given a lot of time to build on my fabled fantasies of Paris.

My imaginary Paris grew more and more embellished with each new Jason Bourne movie. In my dreamy mind Paris was lit by fairy lights and peopled with slender folk in real cashmere, leading poodles and air-kissing. (Also a lot of car chases and handsome men carrying concealed weapons.)

I walked down the aisle to the Amélie soundtrack, for goodness sake – slightly romantic notions? Check. Yet when I finally arrived there all I could do the whole time was make comparisons with Sydney: the water, the sky, the smell (contrary to my preconceptions, Paris does not smell like vanilla). It was (of course) in reality different to my imagination. Not better or worse, just different. There was also a point of contrast with Sydney that went beyond the superficial; I felt that Paris, unlike Sydney, had a certain authenticity about it. It didn’t feel contrived and I suppose that has something to do with the age of the place. Fittingly enough, it was an artwork at the Centre Pompidou that finally nailed it for me. (Louvre shmouvre people, the Pomp is where it’s at).

Dreamlands is an exhibition that explores the way in which amusement parks, world fairs and utopian ideals have influenced cities and become realities. To borrow from the exhibition’s curators:

The dreamlands of the leisure society have shaped the imagination, nourishing both utopian thinking and artistic creation, but they have also become realities: pastiche, copy and artifice now provide the environment in which real life takes place, their normality dissolving the boundary between dream and reality.

One artwork in the exhibition was a video installation by Pierre Huyghe. Titled Streamside Day, the film documented the festivities held by the newly established New York community of Streamside. Streamside is in fact a sort of housing estate, which uses the architectural style of much older New York suburbs in an attempt to disguise the fact that it is brand new and that a lush forest was partially flattened to make way for it. In other words, Streamside has a very short history and it’s not a very noble one. The artist approached the community with a proposal for a celebration day, through which the residents might be able to build a sense of history and belonging. ‘I was interested in creating a ritual that the people in the town would actually celebrate because it’s based on what they share,’ said Huyghe.

The artist proposed that the community’s origins should be identified and celebrated, thus residents – both adults and children – dressed up as the animals whose habitat they now lived in, or cardboard boxes, to symbolise the way everyone ‘moved’ in. People also decorated their homes and nature strips with bubble wrap and fairy lights in the shape of boxes. A procession was held and everyone ate fairy floss and hotdogs. The video of the celebrations could quite easily have ridiculed residents, but it didn’t; it was, instead, a strangely endearing portrait of a community endeavouring to own its origins and build something authentic from them.

Huyghe’s work could not help but make me think of Australia and the kind of make-believe identity constructed for its inhabitants. Our history is not something that can be remedied by dressing up as Captain Cook and popping an Aboriginal elder on the two-dollar coin, and yet our governments continue to behave as though this is the case. I arrived back home to be greeted with an election campaign, which has Labour promising to ‘manage population growth’ and the Liberals vowing to ‘stop the boats’. It’s enough to make one wonder that if in fifty years time, there won’t be a national Sorry Day for asylum seekers. Everyone living in this country who is not Aboriginal is a ‘boat person’. The sooner Australia owns up to its past and starts having street processions with everyone dressed up as sea-faring vessels or jumbo jets the better. We must allow ourselves to change, rather than desperately trying to maintain an imperialist vision of Australia that is no more authentic or real than Streamside’s pre-fab brownstone condos.

And perhaps we should embrace the idea of crepe vendors on every corner while we’re at it.

American Radical is an account of Finkelstein’s own warrior exploits against Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians and an excellent portrayal. He has published numerous books on the conflict. He has been engaged with the Palestinians and their struggle since his first book on Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. He visits Palestine every year and has a number of close friends there. With inexorable reason, he dissects the mystifications around Israel and its history put out by the Zionist ideologues.

The driving fact in Finkelstein’s life is that he is a son of Nazi holocaust survivors. Solidly working class and committed pacifists, both his parents fought in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. His mother was in Majdanek concentration camp and his father was in Auschwitz. The Holocaust was a daily presence in Finkelstein’s life as his mother, in particular, endlessly and vocally processed her traumatic experiences. As is well-known, traumas such as these, if not resolved, are handed down from generation to generation, distorting and limiting human potential. American Radical shows how this manifests in Norman Finkelstein.

The pain borne by Finkelstein is palpable as he speaks of his parents’ experiences. He virtually channels the Holocaust, its flames burn in his veins. Yet this pain drives him in a direction diametrically opposed to that of so many Jews. The trauma of the Holocaust has been shamelessly used by the Zionist movement to build uncritical support for Israel. It is a branch of what Finklestein has provocatively dubbed ‘the Holocaust Industry’. Because Israel has been framed by Zionism as the guarantee of existential security in the face of carefully nourished terror, too many Jews are incapable of considering the issues clearly and are tragically ready to believe all kinds of nonsense promulgated by the chasbarah (Israeli propaganda) brigade. Also, such victimhood justifies everything. Who can argue against the imperative to survive against what is said to be constant threat?

For Finklestein, ‘Never again’ means never again for any human group. Not for him the endless communal self-absorption and narcissism underlying so much of Jewish attachment to Israel. Following in the footsteps of his mentor Noam Chomsky, he is a fierce, even provocative critic of Israel. He argues passionately that Jews have a special obligation to ease the suffering of all humanity because of what was done to them. Yet his views are essentially moderate. He is not an anti-Zionist (in the sense of opposed to a homeland for Jews in Palestine) and he supports a two-state solution.

His situation is essentially tragic. Now jobless, he is very much a victim of the Zionist establishment. But even his strong supporters, Noam Chomsky and John Mearsheimer, admit that Finklestein is over-provocative in a way that unnecessarily arouses opposition. To that extent, he blocks communication of his message and the important results of his rigorous scholarship. The inherited experience of the Holocaust has left its scars.

It is possible to understand Finkelstein’s fierce denunciation of the atrocities committed by the state of Israel as rooted in his determination not to betray the suffering of his parents, to be worthy of what they went through; perhaps, in some small way, to make it up to them by in turn suffering for the exercise of moral courage.

Whatever the roots of Finkelstein’s commitment, his story illustrates that the power of terrible experiences can be used to fight for a better world or they can lead, as in the case of those who cling to Israel for security in an ultimately self-destructive way, by failing to confront Israel’s ongoing assault on the Palestinians and the denial of their rights.

Historically Jews were in the forefront of progressive movements and apart from the issue of Israel, they are still on the liberal side of politics. However, the official Jewish leadership persists in unquestioning support for Israel regardless of justice or international law. And too many Jews are driven by their fears to blindly follow. This fear and despair gives Hitler a tragic posthumous victory.

However, even this is changing. Peter Beinart, in his recent article in the New York Review of Books, reminds us that younger Jews are no longer driven by an overpowering sense of victimhood and imminent destruction. They are distancing themselves from Israel, and feel it is less relevant to them as Jews.

Finkelstein’s career reminds us that unquestioning support for Israel is not the only lesson to be drawn from a tragic history, that a passionate commitment to the wellbeing of all human beings is equally rooted in the Holocaust experience. It is the only way of conquering its legacy.

What makes this journal unique – and what ultimately resulted in its downfall – is that it published writing only by West Australian authors. The idea was to showcase WA’s emerging writers alongside its established writers, to promote the state’s literary prowess throughout Australia and beyond. Each issue saw three guest editors in creative non-fiction, poetry and short stories (for volume 5 it’s Carmen Lawrence, Caroline Caddy, and Ray Coffey respectively). One of the noteworthy aspects of this journal was that all work was read blind, therefore avoiding any parochialism and bias towards well-known writers. Furthermore, all shortlisted writers received feedback on their work. This is an unusual approach and one that has the potential to help writers hone their craft.

The press release accompanying my review copy reels off a list of indigo’s success stories, and boasts continued ‘unprecedented success’. Obviously the WA Department of Culture and the Arts (DCA) didn’t agree. On 7 June indigo announced that DCA had decided not to fund the production costs of the next two issues and it could therefore no longer continue to operate.

Working on these kinds of publications is truly a labour of love. Budgets are always tight, staff are few and usually ridiculously overworked, and expectations are high. So I really feel for managing editor, Donna Ward. When I spoke to her recently I was surprised to hear that, unlike editors of other literary journals, she has never received a salary because of budget limitations. So it was most definitely a labour of love.

In the wake of DCA’s decision she says she has received an ‘overwhelming response’, an outpouring of outrage, and not just from WA residents but also from many prominent Eastern States authors. The funding body’s decision was based on its assessment that the journal was not ‘well known in the Eastern States and should receive submissions from around Australia’ in order to better promote WA writers. But Westerly has already done this very successfully since 1956, and indigo was established primarily to provide a space for WA’s emerging writers to get their work into print.

It is also important to note that building an audience takes time, and DCA made their decision on the back of only five issues. Did they give the fledgling publication enough time to build that wider audience? Personally, I don’t think so.

Audiences for literary journals are traditionally very small. indigo currently has a print run of 800, 70 percent of which is sold through bookshops across Australia. As a comparison, an article in The Australian in 2008 revealed Meanjin’s subscription stats. The journal – which has been on the Australian literary landscape since 1940 and is considered a highly desirable place for writers to get their work published – has under 1000 subscribers. Depending on the issue, bookshop sales can add another 500–1500 to the total. But that’s still only a total of 1500–2500 copies (it should be noted that literary journal print runs do not accurately reflect readership). What I’m getting at here is that these journals are by their very nature niche publications. And it seems to me that DCA’s expectations of what indigo could achieve in such a short time were unrealistic.

The sad fact remains that journals come and go. Some – like Overland – have managed to stay the course. But our history is littered with journals that have fallen by the wayside. However, after a well-deserved break, Ward intends to meet with the Arts Minister to discuss the future of indigo. If (and it’s a big if) funds are found to support the journal, Ward is no longer prepared to continue without a salary and administrative support. And rightly so. But will indigo get a second chance? That remains to be seen.

Let’s step back from all this controversy now and get to the contents of the latest issue. It opens with a revealing interview with WA’s most famous author, Tim Winton, on the novel. I was fascinated by his description of the freedom and liberation of writing, particularly in moments that he describes as ‘the eternal present tense’ where he is at his best. He compares this state to that of a child playing in the sandpit, where time ceases to exist. This, to me, is a perfect analogy, and one to which I suspect many writers can relate. His gripes about the PhD novel, and all the novels about writers and writing, are well worth a read, as are his thoughts on the profound influence his isolated location has had on his work. His honesty on the business of writing is refreshing. For example, he admits that winning his fourth Miles Franklin Award for Breath means ‘much less’ to him ‘than people imagine’ because he understands ‘how arbitrary these judgments are’. The interview manages to cover a lot of ground and Winton’s openness makes for a rewarding read.

This volume also contains a substantial section of creative non-fiction, a relatively new genre that I have come to love. For me, Helen Garner is indisputably the master of creative non-fiction, and I couldn’t help comparing her sharply observed prose with the six works offered here. This is perhaps unfair, and certainly none of them proved to be her equal. However, Catherine Wright’s sensuous prose is definitely worth noting. She captures the textures, smells, sounds and feel of the Carpenteria so beautifully that I almost felt I was standing alongside her. Having thus captivated the reader, she then plunges us into a darker place where the threats of this remote location become visceral, pulling us inside her ‘corset of fright’. It is a powerful, entrancing work – a highlight of this issue.

The short stories, however, were a little disappointing. I was hoping to discover brilliance but instead found writing that was competent and enjoyable but not particularly memorable. Cecily Scutt’s ‘The Lighthouse’ proved to be the exception. This story demonstrates an observational authenticity as it leads the reader towards its disquieting resolution. As with many of the works in this issue, the landscape is so vividly rendered that it becomes a character in its own right.

There is a sizable poetry section in volume 5 which includes placegetters from the Out of the Asylum Writers’ Group Spilt Ink Competition. The quality of the sixteen poems varies greatly but that is to be expected in a journal that showcases both emerging and experienced writers. Flora Smith’s ‘Fifth Generation’ was the standout with its beautifully observed and striking imagery. The issue also includes a substantial review section and an excerpt from Alex Miller’s novel Lovesong which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award this year.

Overall, this issue of indigo proves that Western Australia punches above its literary weight for a population of its size. I’ll be sorry to see it go.

At 0900 hours the enemy combatant was identified squatting, camouflaged, in the undergrowth. The target was photographed and captured without incident. He is believed to be a scout from the coming invasion party.

Perhaps that’s not quite how the first cane toad was reported near Noonbah Station, southwest of Longreach in Queensland last week, but it was there nonetheless. The amphibious peril is moving to the strategically important Cooper Creek, buoyed by swollen outback rivers. Cooper Creek may allow the force to reach Lake Eyre in South Australia.

Strategists are hoping they will not survive the harsh desert environment once the rivers dry up. Yet some scientists are worried that the ever-adaptable toad may endure until the next rains, and continue its toxic march.

The cane toad set sail from Hawaii in 1935 on invitation from the Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations. The trip to Sydney was a draining two weeks, followed by two days on a train to North Queensland. They couldn’t be fed on the journey. A lesser beast would not have survived such hardship. The toads, however, displayed that true-blue Aussie Battler spirit that would place them in such good stead in their adopted home. The Bureau forged an allegiance with the toads before deploying them against the native cane beetle, which had, without provocation, attacked the non-native sugar cane plantations of Northern Queensland. The beetle was threatening the livelihood of hardworking Australians and needed to be eradicated.

The Bureau’s experiment largely failed: in part because the cane fields provided insufficient shelter for the toads during the day. There was also plenty of other nourishment to be found.

After being unleashed they hopped along at a pace of around six kilometres a year. Now it is estimated they roll through new terrain at fifty kilometres per annum. An inexorable army of over two hundred million toads occupies around one million square kilometres of Australian territory. And they don’t look like stopping there.

Small pockets of resistance have sprung up around the country. Usually on the toad frontier local enthusiasts have formed pseudo-militias to halt the toads’ charge. Squads wielding 4 irons engage in swinging expeditions. Upstanding citizens swerve all over the road to pancake the optimum number of toads with a satisfying pop! The enthusiasm of these toad terminators sometimes outstrips their knowledge and native frogs end up suffering from friendly fire. It can be difficult to tell the difference between cane toad and endangered frog.

The attractive pair above happen to be native frogs.

Fighting on the front lines is thought not even to slow them down. Even if the Toad Busters wipe out 2207 in one night, it’s nigh impossible to catch ‘em all. Those few remaining toads can produce thirty thousand eggs in a single clutch. They breed like rabbits. Or maybe rabbits breed like toads. In any case the brutes can move a kilometre a night when it’s wet, so the escapees could be a kilometre away the next day, ready to procreate like there’s no tomorrow (which when you’re a cane toad is all too likely).

Perhaps I’m being the whiny vegan that I am but the joy taken in the destruction of these poor ugly bastards seems perverse. Killing them is a sport: the all-Australian past times of toad golf and cricket, to be precise. They are not executed for food, though they can be eaten, or materials, though their skin can be made into leather and charming novelty purses.

It’s not like they’re illegal aliens trespassing on our land, to borrow some racist rhetoric. They were shipped over by the government to serve Australian agricultural interests. Now we are dealing with the problem we created the only way we know how.

Of course there is no denying the damage these pesky critters do. The toads have no natural predators in Australia so various predators used to eating other frog-like animals experiment on eating the toads. In a kamikaze-style situation they excrete poison when attacked. This results in goannas, snakes and quolls sometimes found dead with a mouth full of toad.

This upsets the balance of the ecosystem with predators under threat from the toads’ arrival and a corresponding explosion in the numbers of their prey.

Including, of course, the toads themselves. This initial impact tends to reverse as native animals learn to adapt to the toads presence, either by not eating them or finding creative ways to kill them. No Australian species is known to have gone extinct due to toads.

More organised approaches to toad control include research into creating an all male population. An idea that could very well have been plucked from the science fiction canon, just to see if it is indeed possible. Genetically modified female toads would only give birth to males. These sex-reversed toads would then be released into the wild so that eventually the population would become all male.

The cane toad has not sat idly by during our schemes and machinations. The toads all along the western front have evolved about ten percent longer legs allowing them to travel further faster. Toad 2.0 proves Darwin right in the worst possible way.

As I was reading a recent Overland blog post on the subject of contemporary metaphors, I realised how very much the cane toad invasion fit that mould, and not just because of the pervasive military tone used when they’re discussed. The toads are a devastating colonisation machine, moving overland at frightening speed, with utter disregard for the native environment. They claim new land as their own by strength of numbers or strength alone, at the great expense of the original inhabitants. The toad’s success is the local’s loss. These are colonising qualities almost on par with those who introduced the toads in the first place. We have managed the Frankenstein we created with cane toad colonisation better than we have dealt with the problem of our own colonisation. And that is a terrible thing to say.

Monday was a day for the history books — if those will even exist in the future.

Amazon.com, one of the nation’s largest booksellers, announced Monday that for the last three months, sales of books for its e-reader, the Kindle, outnumbered sales of hardcover books.

In that time, Amazon said, it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there is no Kindle edition.

Twitter and the blogosphere were saturated by speculation as to what this meant for the drum of publishing: yet another indication that print was on its deathbed?

The Times quotes one Mr Mike Shatzkin, CEO of the Idea Logical Company, ‘which advises book publishers on digital change’:

“This was a day that was going to come, a day that had to come,” he said. He predicts that within a decade, fewer than 25 percent of all books sold will be print versions.

If I may draw your attention to the operative noun: hardcovers. Hardcovers. As readers, writers and publishers know, hardcovers are generally no longer a viable print option. They’re expensive to produce and there’s not a great demand outside of collectors or fetishists. Hardcover production has been on the decline for some time; most books, in fact, no longer have a hardcover print run, rather, it’s straight to the paperback route.

Read the rest of the post over at Meanland.

Laurie began his published career with A Collapsible Man (1975) and The Wife Specialist (1979), both witty fictions that satirise academic and bohemian life around Melbourne University and its suburbs. Although he spent time in the United States on a Harkness Scholarship, and was a knowledgeable and insightful critic of American literature and an admirer of much about American life, he was very much a Melbourne man. He was educated at CBC St Kilda and Melbourne University and tutored there before moving to La Trobe as lecturer and senior lecturer. After his first retirement he began part-time teaching in the Creative Writing course at RMIT, retiring from this position only at the end of 2008. His intention to devote himself to full-time writing was cut short the next year when he was diagnosed with cancer.

While at Melbourne he, with John Timlin, established the Melbourne Partisan, which was intended to be a literary and political quarterly. It was forced to cease publication after it published a revealing article on Tom Doherty, national secretary of the AWU and a power in the federal ALP. When the editors gloated that Doherty had not responded to their attack, he replied with a libel writ.

When in 1980 the National Book Council took responsibility for publishing the Australian Book Review, I was editor and Laurie became associate editor. As I went overseas shortly afterwards, Laurie became acting editor with responsibility for building up the new editorial organisation. He did this most effectively, and after my return remained associate editor for several years until it became incompatible with his teaching and writing. He continued to contribute invaluable reviews and book notes.

His most important novel is probably Perfect Love, published in 1983. This book corresponds to the lifespan of his parents, and is a moving account of the highs and lows of an ordinary family life. The narrative leaves Melbourne for a couple of chapters, and succeeds in making real the struggles of a Depression wife matched to a husband who turns to his mates in the local pub to support him through the hardships. At times the lives of his characters descend into broad comedy, but the author never loses sight of their complex humanity and maintains his readers’ interest in their fates. His most recent story in Overland was a response in fiction to the death from cancer of his younger brother.

As well as fiction, Laurie published several books of literary criticism including a Reader’s Guide to Australian Fiction and books on Christina Stead and Xavier Herbert.

My friend, who I shall cunningly disguise by calling ‘X’, poked my thinking a bit. Thinking about our discussion on my way home during the long boring drive down the Pacific Highway, it seemed to me that he might possibly have been asking me how to be happy, or how to think about happiness, which I took as an indication that he had actually taken my blog writings in the way I’d like them to be taken, if I had any choice in the matter.

My reply at the time that X asked his question was to mutter something about having my own thoughts on why we’re in the mess we’re in, but that they were of interest only to me and that this was fine and good. There was, however, a more adroit answer to X’s questions floating at the back of my mind, an answer I couldn’t quite remember but that came back to me last night when I was trying to sort out why I’d got myself into a tangle of weird misunderstanding with someone else in a completely different situation. It’s a quote from Thomas Merton’s strange novel, My Argument with the Gestapo:

When you ask me to tell my real name by means of passports, I can only answer you in a set of equivocal jokes by which I am all but helpless to tell you, that I don’t understand what you are talking about.

Another way of putting it, would be to say that I think that moments of joy can not be systematised anymore than you can make yourself fall in love with someone, but that being happy and thinking about happiness is a profoundly political act. If that’s too abstruse a way of putting it, perhaps I should talk about the funniest film ever made.

The funniest film of all time, as everyone knows, is Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday released in 1953. Every time I watch it, it reveals something to me, as though it’s a kind of celluloid onion with an infinite series of transparent skins. One of the things that my repeated viewings have uncovered for me is the care with which Tati engages the viewer. There’s a quality of thought, of something being thought through, as though nothing has been forgotten but only embraced in a kind of steady and unwavering empathy.

There is no real plot in M. Hulot’s Holiday anymore than life has a plot, but only a series of apparently disconnected events wound tightly around each other by circumstance. Hulot, an odd and engaging character with a swivelling, stiff-legged, spring-heeled walk, goes on holiday to a little French seaside town where a collection of eccentric but insular bourgeois have gathered for their annual summer holiday a few years after the end of World War II. The beach at Saint-Marc-Sur-Mer where Tati filmed M. Hulot’s Holiday is only a few kilometres from the massive Nazi U-Boat pens at the port of St–Nazaire, installations that are still standing because they are too difficult and too expensive to demolish.

Thousands of French civilians died in the gigantic Allied bombing campaign in the opening weeks of the Normandy invasion, bombing that created landscapes of fantastic destruction.

When the Allies landed and were pushing out of their beach-heads, the fighting in the north-west of France became unbelievably vicious and the Nazi retaliation on the French population for perceived sympathies with the Allies or as reprisals for actions of the French Resistance was carried out with a ruthlessness and savagery it is hard to credit. On June 10 1944, at the village of Oradour-Sur-Glane, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oradour-sur-Glane, four days after the Normandy landings, the SS machine-gunned 190 men and then burned to death 247 women and 205 children in the local church in retaliation for the killing of a German officer.

None of this, events that took place only four or five years before Tati started making Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, is visible or even alluded to in the film. A cascade of tiny moments, banal holiday experiences, are sewn together via Hulot’s innocent wanderings. The only narrative sequence is the beaded thread of gag after gag with no humorous soundtrack to warn you when the funny bits are about to happen, and no hammy build up to the gags themselves. They happen and you have no way of knowing when, and in fact the film is littered with gags, many of them very small but scattered about in such a way that the only way to watch the film is with the assumption that everything and anything is meaningful and is therefore potentially funny. Your potential cues are always in relation to any object or person’s capacity for humour, a humour that makes that object or person friendlier, more amiable in their weight. It’s as if every detail in the film has been cared for and thought over, and being thought about, allowed to find its own place. In the very heart of a country devastated by four years of Nazi occupation and by the horrific battles initiated by the landing on French shores of the biggest invasion force in history, a man cradles a fragile comedy about a timid and comical loner, as innocent as an angel, who goes on holiday to the beach.

One of the film’s central jokes is that no-one in the film, with the possible exception of a young boy and an elderly English spinster, has any idea that the myriad of odd and unexpected events that clatter through the summer are consequences of Hulot’s largely ignored, and eventually despised, presence. It is an old joke, like the clown who repeatedly loses his hat because it keeps being stolen and returned, unseen, by a small dog. Only we, the watchers, see the intricate couplings of cause and effect that wind throughout the film in idiosyncratic loops.

I’ve come to think of Tati’s film as a kind of manifestation of Thomas Merton’s quote, as a collection of equivocal jokes, as a response to the catastrophe of the Nazi occupation. To the French of 1953 when the film was released after four years work, M. Hulot’s Holiday must have seemed like the sanest thing in the world. Perhaps it was a kind of helplessness after the devastation and occupation of France that drove Tati to create a film that made everyone laugh at themselves. A film that that somehow communicated, in the very shadow of Oradour-Sur-Glane, how precious and weird an experience living is, and how completely insane and fucked-up an idea it is to intentionally construct anything that makes anyone else miserable.

How has the online temperament of news changed journalism? In Katrina Fox’s article on objectivity, transparency and advocacy in journalism, “What’s your bias?”, Marcus O’Donnell, lecturer in journalism, explains:

[O]bjectivity was a trust mechanism we relied on in media that didn’t do links. But now we can make it perfectly clear where we are coming from, what our sources are and what our values are, and it is this transparency that is the new trust mechanism that both readers and writers have to rely on.

Consider the recent Bradley Manning-Adrian Lamo-WikiLeaks case, a tangled web of intrigue, opacity and half-truths, with a dose of nepotism thrown in. Manning, a young US soldier, allegedly boasted to web journalist Lamo, online, that he was the source of the Apache helicopter video, Collateral Murder, in addition to a number of other documents leaked to WikiLeaks, including unreleased footage of a civilian massacre in Afghanistan and “hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records”.

No-one outside the key players, however, is quite certain to what extent Wired played a role in Manning’s arrest, how much information in Manning’s arrest, how much information was extracted by Lamo during the online chats or what information, if any, Manning actually leaked.

Manning is potentially facing 53 years in prison for his unverified crimes. If he is indeed the source of the “Collateral Murder” video, journalist Glenn Greenwald asserts:

That’s a whistleblower in the purest form: discovering government secrets of criminal and corrupt acts and then publicizing them to the world not for profit, not to give other nations an edge, but to trigger “worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms.”

Read the article over at Drum.