How the Muslim Brotherhood Won and Lost Egypt

The unanswered question accompanying almost every page of Carrie Rosefsky Wickham’s The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt: Evolution of an Islamist Movement (2013) is whether or not the Muslim Brotherhood will turn out to be the solution to the country’s malaise. Wickham’s book, to be fair, was published before the majority of Egyptians, in partnership with General Abdul-Fattah al-Sisi, swept Mohamed Morsi’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) from power. The reader knows what the author cannot know: the extraordinary events of July 3, 2013. What The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt: Evolution of an Islamist Movement shows, however, is that an associate professor of political science in an American university can provide a most valuable compilation of names, dates and events, while remaining surprisingly obtuse about the totalitarian nature of the phenomenon she is describing. The kindest evaluation of Wickham’s tone would be “studiously detached” so that we might connect the dots for ourselves.

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https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2013/12/25955/ 

Your Taxes, Their ABC

For one tantalising moment on the oh-so-progressive Jon Faine 774 ABC Melbourne programme, the earnestly progressive social researcher Hugh Mackay seemed to reach out a metaphorical hand to not-so-progressive fellow guest Nick Cater, author of The Lucky Culture: And the rise of an Australian ruling class (2013). Mackay, on the show to promote his own tome, The Good Life: What makes life worth living? (2013), assured the listeners that, as an advocate of the Golden Rule, he had been paying close attention to Cater’s argument, and even agreed with him that journalists hold attitudes notably different from regular Australians. Cater must have swooned at the prospect of somebody on the ABC, albeit a guest, endorsing his ‘New Class’ thesis.

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http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2013/12/taxes-abc/

What John F. Kennedy's Assassination Did to America

Courtesy of The Onion: America's Finest News Service  http://www.theonion.com/         

Being only six at the time of John F. Kennedy’s death, I have no idea where I was when I heard the news. Nonetheless, I was gripped – in a creepy, unsettling kind of way – by television documentaries and magazine stories throughout my school years postulating one conspiracy theory after another – fabricated photographs of Oswald posing with a rifle, an alleged gunman on the grassy knoll, the impossibility of “the magic bullet” hitting both Kennedy and Governor Connolly, the pristine bullet assertion, the Head of State’s head reeling back instead of forward after the fatal shot, Jack Ruby’s connection with the Mob, Oswald allegedly anti-Castro and not pro-Castro, the Oswald doppelganger theory, the perfidy of the Warren Commission, and so on. Many of the conspiracy angles might have been far-fetched, including the one about the driver of the presidential limousine, William Greer, and yet how could there be all that smoke and no fire?

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https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2013/11/john-f-kennedys-assassination-america/  

Peace in Obama's Time

   

The summit must have been a success: the White House spokesperson declared them substantive. “Extensive” and “candid”, said US Officials. No “overnight breakthroughs”, of course, but things are moving “forward”. It seems that all of the participants of the latest P5+1 Meeting in Geneva, October 15-16, are upbeat at its conclusion and everyone has promised to participate in another round of talks in November.

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http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2013/10/peace-obamas-time/

Reassessing the Iron Curtain

 

Anne Applebaum’s Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56 totally undercuts the revisionist notion that the Sovietisation of Eastern Europe was a response to American belligerency. Roosevelt and then Truman, according Applebaum, were essentially bystanders during the Sovietisation of Eastern Europe. Iron Curtain convincingly demonstrates that Soviet-style communism, operating in the vacuum created by the collapse of the Nazi Empire, obeyed a totalitarian logic all of its own.

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http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2013/10/reassessing-the-iron-curtain-1

Aussie Green Bikers - Salisbury Review, Autumn 2013

British-born journalist Nick Cater emigrated to Australia in 1989 and his career never looked back. For nine years now he has been a senior editor at Murdoch’s flagship newspaper The Australian. Cater’s The Lucky Culture: And the Rise of an Australian Ruling Class (2013) argues that the good old days of Australian egalitarianism are now under threat from “a knowledge-owning nobility”. Cater asserts that where a spirit of fraternity and mateship once held sway in our young nation, and with it a sense of fairness and non-doctrinaire tolerance, now divisiveness rules. “Classless Australia” might be becoming a thing of the past.

Delusional to the end, Labor stays the course

      

Emotions, to paraphrase Clive James, are a tricky thing. In the midst of defeat a sense of hopelessness can often prevail, when hope is the quality required in such a situation. Conversely, during times of triumph it is humility, or at least clear-headedness, that serves us better than haughtiness. This particular reflection, admittedly, occurred to me as television pundits began calling the September 7, 2013, election for Abbott – and I sipped a celebratory glass of a 1996 Barossa shiraz.

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http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2013/09/a-party-resolutely-steeped-in-delusion