Hate Speak in Australia - Salisbury Review, Summer 2014

"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." G.O.

As Tony Abbott’s Coalition government warns the Australian people of a tough budget ahead to pay back debt incurred from six years of Rudd-Gillard’s reckless spending (2007-13), a sense of déjà vu pervades the land. We have been here before. After the Whitlam debacle (1972-75), it was Fraser’s Coalition administration (1975-83) that had to repair the nation’s finances. Similarly, Labor’s Paul Keating bequeathed his nemesis, John Howard, a $96 billion debt – not an astronomical figure in today’s terms, perhaps, but quite something back in 1996.

The Looming Prospect of a Second Cold War

After Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March this year, President Obama had this to say about President Putin in an interview on CBS News:

He’s been willing to show a deeply held grievance about what he considers to be the loss of the Soviet Union. You would have thought that after a couple of decades that there’d be an awareness on the part of any Russian leader that the path forward does not revert back to the kinds of practices that, you know, were so relevant during the Cold War.

 In April 2005, on national Russian television, Vladimir Putin lamented that the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) left tens of millions of his fellow countrymen outside Moscow’s command. The break-up of the Soviet Empire was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”. Clearly, President Putin’s understanding of “the path forward”, which aims to reconcile the reach of the Soviet Empire with a born-again Holy Mother Russia, contrasts sharply with six years of President Obama’s multilateral New World Order.

To keep reading the article, click this link:

http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2014/06/looming-prospect-second-cold-war/    

Putin's Chechens in Ukraine

It is now being claimed by various sources that Chechens mercenaries have joined pro-Putin militia in Eastern Ukraine to cause havoc. Here is a link:
 http://www.voanews.com/content/chechens-fighting-in-ukraine-could-erode-support-for-separatists/1926283.html

The Ideology of Holocaust Inversion

  

                                       Hannah Pick photographed by Daryl McCann 

On Sunday January 8, 2012, twenty-three Australian educators gathered in the seminar room on the ground floor of Prima King’s Hotel, Jerusalem, and officially commenced a seventeen-day scholarship-funded Holocaust studies programme. One of the Yad Vashem co-ordinators of the Teaching about the Shoah and Anti-Semitism course invited us to introduce ourselves and explain why we were foregoing an Australian summer to investigate the harrowing details of genocide. Learning the importance of tolerance seemed a priority for many of my compatriots. The logic of this, I assumed, was that since intolerance played a key role in bringing about the murder of six million Jews, greater tolerance in society (and in the classroom) creates a better environment for people to co-exist harmoniously, thus diminishing the likelihood of another Hitler-style genocide or, at any rate, crimes of a related but lesser magnitude. For an instant I was almost persuaded – but not quite.

Too keep reading the article, click this link:

http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2014/05/lethal-ideology-holocaust-inversion/

The Free Speech Debate in Australia

Senator George Brandis, Australia's Attorney-General

The anti-bourgeois bohemian Left in Australia is determined to tribalise our nation in order to play the role of Chief of All Tribes. But freedom-loving Aussies are fighting back. Read, for instance, Brendan O'Neill's interview with Australia's Attorney-General in Spiked!    

Just click the following link:

http://www.spiked-online.com/freespeechnow/fsn_article/the-state-should-never-be-the-arbiter-of-what-people-can-think#.U1HFLuaSxbt

The Decline of Freedom in Erdogan's Turkey

Here is an interesting report in The Independent newspaper, by Ozan Ozavci, on growing authoritarianism in Turkey.

To read the article, click this link:

 http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/erdogans-twitter-ban-is-just-the-latest-in-a-series-of-restrictive-measures-9210838.html

Obama's 'All Thumbs' Syria Policy

   

On August 21, 2013, as many as 1,400 Syrians died after the use of chemical weapons in the rebel-held Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta. The perpetrator of this crime against humanity, according to the Obama Administration, was none other than the Syrian government. The Assad regime had crossed Obama’s “red line” by using sarin gas to eradicate targeted neighbourhoods of opposition forces. The New York Times, along with all the MSM outlets, saw no reason to question the White House’s contention that evidence indisputably linked the Syrian regime with the sarin attacks. Obama was soon readying the United States Armed Forces for a massive knockout blow that would have deprived Assad of virtually all his military assets. The Syrian rebels were already at the gates and Obama’s own version of "shock and awe”, scheduled for Monday morning, September 2, 2013, would guarantee them victory.

To keep reading the article, click this link:

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2014/04/obamas-thumbs-syria-policy/