Back in the Bin: Bulletin No 5
1. Say not the struggle nought availeth…
One of my old History Lecturers, an incorrigible conservative, used to repeatedly warn us, the young wannabe radicals, that when we examined a particular historical conjuncture, we should not be overly fascinated with changes and ruptures but that we should also pay attention to what things stayed the same. We were enjoined to ask, “Where is the continuity?”
That warning resonates with me still and perhaps even more so now, because the pace of change has quickened so greatly, especially since the return of Trump to the White House. We are all bewildered by the spectacle of the world’s most powerful nation being in thrall to the whims of a gross buffoon.
But if we are bewildered, spare a thought for the likes of Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong. Their brief is to ensure continuity in the relationship between Australia and the US. But not only do Rudd & Wong have to try and get a good deal from the Trump Court, but they have to endure the public humiliation of being denounced as “ass kissers” by the Emperor himself.
Poor Kevin, I thought. He had publicly turned against China to get the posting to Washington and look at him now trapped in the midst of a grovel with the only end in sight being Trump’s rear.
So, there we have our continuity. The urge to create a new independent nation, to advance Australia fair, has been sabotaged yet again by the constant need to suck up to a Great Power, so they would help us keep the Asian Hordes at bay. After the Fall of Singapore in February 1942 to the Japanese Army, Australia jumped ship and settled on the USA as the Great Protector. It is Trump’s spectacular achievement to raise the price of obeisance to the US to such a level that our PM, the bold and fearless Anthony Albanese, was forced to desperately signal the wish to return to the bosom of the Mother Country, England. The code for this change on the hoof was a declaration that Australia would send troops to Ukraine to support Starmer, the UK’s PM, in his promise to put “troops on the ground and planes in the air” to defeat Russia.
There is yet another continuity here. From 1853-6, Britain fought a brutal war against Russia in Crimea to limit Russia’s control of the Black Sea. The current desperate urge to keep the Ukraine War going is about preventing Russia from capturing Odessa and thus having full spectrum dominance in the Black Sea. The small problem facing Starmer is that he does not have an army or an air force to defend Odessa and although Anthony Albanese is eager and willing to get us all involved, he doesn’t have an army or air force either. So, the continuity will have to make way for a rupture, and things look very grim for Ukraine. Russia will win and will dominate the Black Sea.
2. Our aim is to ensure that revolutionary literature and art follow the correct path of development…
The recent revival on the Marxism List of interest in Mao Ze Dong’s work on “contradictions”, and the decision of the Chinese Communist Party to republish on the net an old Mao clip expressing defiance of the US’ attempt to intimidate China has brought to mind my encounter with Maoist thought when I was teaching in China in 1990. After the experience of being harassed and arrested by the Queensland Police Force for years, and the constant sniping from the supporters of Bjelke-Petersen, I thought I could express my true revolutionary self in the People’s Republic. But no, I was weighed down with English Language classes and I became desperate to be able to express some radical ideas. After a great deal of effort, I managed to persuade my Department Head to allow me to run a course on poetry for the postgraduates who were studying English Literature. So, I got together a course where I read the poems and then discussed their social and political contexts from a Marxist standpoint.
Now, my experience of over 50 years is that all teaching is performance based, and you can never tell when the magic will work. One really must just prepare thoroughly and hope that the stars will align. Well, the brutal truth is that my course flopped. I have seen some bored students before but class after class? Never.
But context is everything. Eventually one of the students informed me that the class were bored with the ideas I was promoting. They did not want to hear about the class struggle, nor did they share my Utopian longing for the Workers’ Paradise to come. Now desperate, I went to the Poetry Professor and asked him what to do. He was polite of course and advised me to pay attention to “metre and rhymes”. That was the very stuff that dominated poetry teaching when I was at school, and I was absolutely horrified.
Then I picked up an item of gossip about the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s visit to China in 1984-5. Ginsberg had a triumph with his public reading of Blakes Tyger. Reports were that he pranced about the stage ringing a bell and chanting the poem. I thought, well, I can chant with the best of them as my performances in the Right to March campaign showed. I determined, if it is chanting, they want, by God, I will give them chanting. I left out the bell and the prancing but shouted through the poem waving arms and pounding on the desk to the rhythm and the rhymes. Beginning with a whisper I was howling by the time I got to the great lines
When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Then I switched back to a whisper, and finished with
Tyger, Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
making sure, by the way, that “eye” and “symmetry” rhymed.
Afterwards, the students came up to me and congratulated me on my reading of the poem. I was exhausted and also haunted by the memory of the Sparticist League militant who denounced my performance in the Right to March protests as “mere populism”. I shuddered to think what we would have said about my reading of Blake. It was not until I had returned to Australia, and I read that intellectuals in China sought refuge from Maoist aesthetics by turning to the formal aspects of poetry, that I had the beginnings of an understanding of where my students were coming from.
3. Homage to Palestine
No column, especially one with progressive intent, and that addresses current affairs should neglect, especially in these dark days, to mention the genocide in Gaza. It is to our eternal shame that in our nation to say that a genocide is being carried out in Palestine, in Gaza and the West Bank, is impossible for our rulers. The American Embassy in Canberra has such a tight hold on our politicians that there is no one in the major parties who can express reservations, never mind horror, at the mass slaughter of Palestinians.
It seems impossible to believe that during the Vietnam War there was brave and determined opposition in the left of the Labor Party to what the Americans were doing to the Vietnamese. Now there is nothing but an embarrassed silence as they take refuge in the “Fast Thinking” slogan – “Israel has a right to defend itself” and repeated incantations of – “Hamas are terrorists”. It is as if these two mantras have been able to keep at bay all acknowledgment that Israel is committing a great evil and that there is an arrest warrant out for the Israeli Prime Minister.
Our part, though, is to hold onto to the belief that the courage of the Palestinians will eventually force the world to intervene to stop the slaughter. If we fail in our solidarity efforts, and if Palestine falls, then there is no hope for humanity, and we deserve to pass away from the earth.