Guy Rundle, By The Book

THIS LITTLE blog's designated Crikey! peruser is Bob On The Murray, who wades selflessly through the twaddle Eric Beecher markets daily to  pseuds, loons, wankers, sprout-suckers and people who think Margaret Simons is qualified to lecture on more than climbing the ivory tower while rubbing sensuously against Jay Rosen. (OK, OK! She also offers a minor elective in how to facilitate hoaxes on ideological enemies and still avow a straight-faced respect for truth). In any case, Bob writes of being busy preparing for Christmas and offers that as his excuse for not noticing Guy Rundle's column on the alleged rise of a neo-fascist racism in European life and politics. Bob is forgiven, but it remains a pity he did not send a more timely alert because the Rundle dispatch in question is a beaut, even by the big puddin's standards.

Give that man a Brazilian

It concerns the latest meshuganah Muslim, the one who killed a lot of innocent Belgians -- except Rundle's screed is not really about that at all, using the Liege massacre only as a springboard to nail what, in Rundleworld, is the real problem. Yes, predictable as poo after curry, the threat is right-wingers and their intolerance, which sees Rundle re-visiting yet again Anders Breivik's rampage. The fact that Rundle has an interest in a new book on Breivik has nothing to do with his efforts to keep the Norwegian in the spotlight. No, nothing at all. Beecher would never stand for that, unless he has targetted the nakedly self-serving as a brand extension to Crikey's well established dill demographic.

The interesting thing about Rundle is, as usual, what he leaves out while attempting to divert attention from a Muslim nutjob in Liege to the  (presumably) Christian one in Florence, where two street vendors were killed for the crime of being Africans. According to Rundle, "...the murderous violence emerged from a context in which Europe is held to be 'disappearing', Muslims are spoken of in disgusting racialist terms, and in which extreme measures are spoken of as necessary and inevitable. There was no question that there would be outbreaks of violence such as this after Breivik's massacre [buy Rundle's book to learn more], and there is no doubt that this one will not be the last. Yet, as with the Breivik killing, mainstream journalists are slow to notice a trend that isn't served to them on a plate."

Rundle would be the expert on "not noticing" -- in this case not noticing an interesting little sidlelight to the Liege attack. Before the cuprit was found dead by his own hand, Belgium cops feared he was part of a team.

That turned out not to be the case, but such confusion was understandable. Not far from the massacre site an entire Muslim family was being sentenced for the honour killing of a young woman, who was daughter to two defendants and sister to the two others.She was shot three times by her brother for refusing an arranged marriage.

Take it from Rundle when he says Europe has nothing to fear from its Islamification. All you need to do is follow his lead, buy his book -- and ignore that which might ruffle the author's favoured narrative. 

Ms. Sweet's Alimentary Deduction

IT’S only Crikey, so we can afford to give thanks for the errors and inanity populating that daily epistle to people who, while now earning too much to read Green Left Weekly with a clear conscience, remain bogged in the smug, undergraduate sensibility that is the essence of Eric Beecher’s little business strategy. If not for the errors and howlers that brighten Crikey’s daily snooze-a-thon, the publication would qualify for listing under the Pharmaceutical Prescriptions Act (1953) as a life-threatening soporific. If you notice a colleague nodding off at his or her desk, be confident that the latest dispatch has reached the in-box.

There was, however, a Crikey item yesterday, copied, pasted and passed along by reader Bob on the Murray, that defied the norm, not for its content but as a remarkable testament to one writer’s willingness to analyse statistics in accordance with which way the wind of accepted opinion happens to be blowing. Writer Melissa Sweet, who is a veteran health reporter, reported in Thursday’s edition that stories asserting a surge in bowel cancer amongst younger people were misleading -- a beat-up, in other words. As Sweet put it, citing one of her sources:

...[WA GP Brett] Montgomery’s analysis (which as he acknowledges merits further review) suggests there has actually been a slight decline in the proportion of bowel cancers occurring in people under 35, depending on which time frame you examine.

Bowel cancer is one of those “safe” subjects, the left’s only interest being that it did not carry off Tim Blair a few years ago. Sweet is thus free to exercise reportorial diligence and question the science, the presentation of statistics in graphs and charts, and the apparently arbitrary selection of periods of years over which the “cherrypicked” numbers can be cast as an ascending trend. Sweet’s suspicions may be justified or they may not, but the important thing is that she can address the alleged misrepresentation without being excoriated as a cancer denier or tumour-frendly tool of, as militant vegans prefer to believe, Big Meat.

On global warming, however, Sweet’s skepticism goes walkabout, as her 2007 cover story for Rural Doctor leaves no doubt. Global warming will present all manner of problems to country physicians, she reports, mentioning dengue fever and various other maladies poised to scourge the bush as temperatures soar. The article’s certainty is summed up in the index, “The Heat Is On: How climate change is threatening rural health and what needs to be done”, and the publication’s editrix, Marge Overs, expands the alarmist line in her note to readers:

In March, leading epidemiologist Professor Tony McMichael addressed the National Rural Health Conference in Albury about the impact of climate change on rural health. His wake-up call left many of us shifting uncomfortably in our chairs, as he painted a dire picture of new and changing disease patterns, of increasing injury and death from floods, droughts and heatwaves, and of ecological processses that will change crop yields, human nutrition and health. In this issue Melissa Sweet investigates climate change and rural health, and whether enough is being done to protect vulnerable rural communities.

Funny, ain’t it, how one topic brings out a reporter’s inner statistician while another inspires nothing but unquestioning stenography. While all Sweet’s observations about the poor reporting of bowel cancer statistics could be applied to assertions about the impact of climate change, they aren’t.

CONUNDRUM: How will Ms Sweet report this development?

Guy The Goose

NOT ALL the notes arriving at the Billabong are penned in vitriol’s ink, and the alert that arrived this morning from “Bob on the Murray” is one of those. “Have you seen Crikey?” he wonders, going on to note that Guy Rundle has done to George Orwell what so many others have found irresistible: conscript him posthumously to various and often contradictory causes. Conservatives, hard-to-port lefties, environmentalists – all are a bit too fond of grinding Orwell’s bones to make their bread. As Brit left-leaner Alistair Harper observed last year in Prospect magazine, “Crudely put, George Orwell is anyone’s bitch.”

Now Rundle has appointed himself Orwell’s latest butch cellmate:

The Australian’s war against Manning Clark had a final twist this week when Fairfaxista Gerard Henderson weighed in, to remind readers that among the million-plus words Clark published, he once remarked that Lenin had a “Christ-like visage”, and that appears sufficient to damn his reputation. This pathetic snippeting represents the sad decline — from debate to culture war — that makes genuine intellectual life impossible. What, for example, would the Henderson kid make of this quote:

“I have to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler … that Christ-like face, so full of suffering.”

The speaker is neither Oswald Mosley nor even Sir Robert Menzies, but George Orwell (Collected Journalism Vol 3, item 1). Even more amazingly it was from a review of Mein Kampf, published — near incredibly — the day Britain declared war on Germany.

As a former winner of  The Age Non-Fiction Book of the Year award you expect Rundle to get a few things wrong, but the above attempt at literary necrophilia is a genuine shocker. Start with a glaring error of fact: The Mein Kampf review was not published on “near incredibly -- the day Britain declared war” or even, near incredibly, in the same year. That conflict officially began on September 3, 1939, two days after Hitler invaded Poland, and not, as Rundle believes, on March 21, 1940, when the edition of New English Weekly which carried the review reached newsagents.

As to the review itself, you would not get the gist of Orwell’s thoughts from Rundle’s snatch quote, which is nothing less than the slandering by abridgement of a man who copped a bullet in the throat while fighting fascists in Spain. Yes, Orwell did write of being unable to “dislike Hitler”, but that was not all he had to say. Here is the full quote, the one Rundle bowdlerised in the interests of making his dishonest point:

I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power — till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter — I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity.

Rundle deploys ellipses – that same “pathetic snippeting"  he decries in Henderson --  to conceal Orwell’s meaning. So here for the record are the words he found it expedient to flush down the memory hole, as the man whose memory he is smearing put it in 1984:

The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photographs — and I recommend especially the photograph at the beginning of Hurst and Blackett’s edition, which shows Hitler in his early Brownshirt days. It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself. The initial personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is there. He is the martyr, the victim. Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can’t win, and yet that he somehow deserves to. The attraction of such a pose is of course enormous; half the films that one sees turn upon some such theme.

So where did Rundle get that quote, which appears nowhere in the original review? Notice the difference between “that Christ-like face” and the actual text, which reads “the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified”?

It is a question Crikey’s editor should mull before putting it to her star correspondent. Were she to extract a coherent answer it could be dreadfully embarrassing to admit the goose-stepping boys at Stormfront  are deemed a reputable source of inspiration.

FOOTNOTE: Orwell’s widow, Sonia Blair, was a fierce guardian of his legacy and reputation, sometimes stripping out little bits of her late hubby’s work she must have foreseen would be open to mis-quotation by the cherrypicking Rundles of this sorry world, where “genuine intellectual life” is “impossible”.  In the wife’s version of the Mein Kampf review the line about never being able to dislike Hitler was made to vanish entirely. Like Rundle, Sonia found ellipses very handy.

UPDATE: Is Rundle incapable of even the most undemanding transcription? Apparently. He quotes the Henderson letter at which he takes umbrage as saying Lenin had a “Christ-like visage”.

What Henderson actually wrote is this:

It is well established that the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin was a corrupt killer. Yet, in Meeting Soviet Man, Clark declared that Lenin was "Christ-like, at least in his compassion".

Wrong again, Mr Rundle, wrong again.