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. 

The Saab Of Journalism

IT IS far too nice a day to be deciphering what Guy Rundle is on about. For those with the fortitude and stamina, here is a sample:

...hollowed-out Anglosphere economies are hostages to stagnant capital. Thus, when Saab, one of Sweden's five auto manufacturers, failed after the global financial crisis, it could be allowed to do so, with no social cost. When General Motors teetered on the brink in the US, the government had to buy it, or face an implosion in the economy.

If Saab goes to the wall, the hope at the Billabong is that it does so at maximum velocity. A Saab 9000 once sat in the driveway, and then it would sit at the mechanic's, then the driveway, then the mechanic's once again. In between times it sat beside the road with the bonnet up. Other than its near-permanent immobility, it wasn't such a bad vehicle, given that the exhaust manifold was on the front of the block and the transmission-fluid cooler  inside the radiator, meaning the slightest leak stuffed the gearbox. Twice. The seats were comfortable enough, but then they had to be: all that time waiting for tow trucks and the RACV made for lots of unscheduled naps. What else? Oh, yes... interior panels shook loose on dirt roads, the dome light fell out on a suburban speed bump, plastic  fittings became brittle and cracked, the turning circle was bigger than Phillip Adams', and the fuel line was apt to develop vapour lock if attempts were made to re-start the engine when warm.

Saab, a marque so stupid it would suit Guy Rundle perfectly.

Anyway, the golf club beckons. More later.

PS: Who are the "five Swedish" auto makers? Saab, Volvo, Scania and, and, and...

You Don't Say

IT happens to all sane people. You will be at a social function or even a family gathering, for we cannot choose our relatives, when your interlocutor, someone with whom you may not agree but who has seemed until then reasonably rational, quite suddenly says something so staggeringly unhinged that it requires a genuine effort not to gasp. This is not just a predilection of leftoid types, for the remark that strikes like a slap can come from any quarter. It might be, say, global warming that is the topic, and all parties will be sipping drinks and agreeing that it is a con and a scam, and that the only beneficiaries will be brokers, bankers and taxmen. Then it comes, the shocker. Did you know, the envoy from another planet will ask, that the entire climate change swindle is masterminded by the Duke of Edinburgh, who is also the world’s biggest drug dealer? You make excuses and sidle away, perhaps even attaching yourself to a knot of astrology women, bicycle fetishists or folks who profess to believe that “Julia” really does have something to offer and can still restore her standing in the polls. Almost as mad, it’s true, but the left’s lunacies most often have the benefit of familiarity, so experience tells you not to be swallowing liquid when the big, dumb moment comes, as it inevitably does.

There is no protection from the involuntary nasal spray – not today, anyway -- at The Failed Estate, the blog of a former journalist, Mr Denmore, who cants very heavily to port. Quite a good writer and source of sometimes original thinking, Denmore’s site is worth the irregular visit, and his latest post seemed for the first few paragraphs to have justified the click. It is about university journalism courses and how all those youngsters, thousands of them, are signing up with no real hope of landing jobs in a diseased and dying industry. This might have been the springboard for all sorts of commentary – the observation, perhaps, that the kids now swotting their settled climate science will be even more hard-pressed to land gigs, given how quickly the CO2 is going out of that little bubble.

But Denmore’s point is about the business he has left, and he encourages hopes of meaty thoughts by noting the Himalayan decline of Fairfax stock and why News Ltd shareholders have nothing to dance about either. Fair enough and all very well and good – until he outlines his vision of a transformed media landscape. Put down your drinks, keep a straight face and heed the cure for modern media ills:

Given the total saturation of our commercial airwaves by right-wing shockjocks and shouters, it seems hard to believe there is no room for a progressive news-based network in this country. Perhaps Eric Beecher should buy the Fairfax network and fashion a radio version of Crikey?

Can you imagine what 3AW would sound like with the Crikey! crew behind the microphones? Jeremy Sear for brekkie, Guy Rundle for lunch and a long, long snooze in the afternoon with Margaret Simons. And at night, what about the Lavatoreous Prods giving “informed commentary on news and public issues”?

No mention of the Duke of Edinburgh, it’s true, but the company of astrology women suddenly seems quite inviting – especially when you get to the thread's comments, where there is universal agreement that the ABC, raped and perverted by John Howard & Co., is now just another corporatist mouthpiece of the evil right. (sample comment: “I agree re Crikey radio. I also think Crikey TV is quite feasible, once the NBN is built, which is why Rupert was trying to demolish it”).

It is not just that some people have strange opinions, it is that they somehow contrive to manufacture goals and business plans from the whole cloth of favoured fantasies. As the carbon tax and it's rejection demonstrates, that will always be the shocking bit.

Drive Time with Guy Rundle indeed!

Guy The Goose -- Part II

HOW easy is it to be Guy Rundle? Need an Orwell quote? Well, just make one up. Don’t like the way public opinion has turned against Prime Minister Brown’s tax on everything? Even less impressed that the catastropharian creed is losing adherents, despite the litany of lies that was supposed to have sealed the deal by now?

Well, if you live in Rundle World, no problem! Just deny reality and write about how your side is winning. After all, it’s only in the Fairfax press, where reality is similarly scorned for talk of “quality journalism” and a good smear must never go unpublished.

In Australia, where climate change scepticism - both honest and utterly corrupt - has flourished more than anywhere else outside the US, that is a tremendous achievement and a victory. In little more than a year or two, the Lord Moncktons, Barnaby Joyces and Ian Plimers have gone from being the official opposition in the debate to being a set of marginal eccentrics, part of the menagerie of irrationalism on the right, from creationism to anti-vaccination movements.

Funny that Rundle should tie opponents of vaccination to the climate deniers he despises, because the leading, most vocal and, to be frank, the nastiest and most irresponsible of those who take the side of measles, whooping cough and polio against Australia’s children also happens to be a foaming fan of Al Gore and a believer in the notion that the weather can be made to behave itself.

Her name is Meryl Dorey and she works her mischief out of Byron Bay, which just happens to be one of the two areas in the country where diseases all but wiped out just a decade ago are once again claiming the greatest numbers of young lives. Given her passion for scares, charlatans and bum science, is it any wonder that Meryl lives in fear that global warming will get us before she can be proven right about inoculations? As she puts it: 

How can we possibly have good health if we are living in a world that is slowly cooking itself? If we allow the world to continue on its current path, the drugs we take or the vaccines that are pushed on us become a bit of a moot point.

The full measure of Meryl’s reverence for Al Gore and his movie (which “changed my life”) is here. Just don’t read it on a full stomach

As for Rundle, no need for him to read anything at all, not when he has the Phage’s permission to smother skeptics with the whole cloth of libel and invention.

A NOTE:  The other area, apart from Northern Rivers, where infant deaths are re-gaining lost ground is Sydney’s well-heeled Eastern suburbs. Is it a coincidence that each is a warmist hotbed, and the latter also home to Malcolm Turnbull?

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.