When a mysterious virus emerged from central China in the final weeks of 2019, many Australians had not heard the name Wuhan. One of several industrial cities scattered along the Yangtze River, it is home to more than 11 million people but is little known outside China. By 2020, the city’s name had entered world history for all the wrong reasons.
The rapid spread of Covid-19 unleashed a new era of social panic and chaos throughout much of the world, as countries such as Australia wielded unprecedented state powers to combat the virus. In March 2020, weeks after Covid-19 was classified a global pandemic, The Australian’s Steve Waterson wrote the first in a series of articles that challenged the wisdom of government restrictions and deployment of the police to enforce them.
A shockwave of a different kind emerged three years later, this time from the Middle East, as Hamas terrorists crossed into Israel on October 7 and perpetrated the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. In the aftermath, as terrorist supporters rallied to celebrate the slaughter of Jewish innocents, The Australian’s Henry Ergas wrote of Hamas and its international cheer squad: “At least the Einsatzgruppen … tried to hide their crimes, showing they had some inkling of breaching morality’s fundamental principles. Hamas’s killers did the opposite: they videoed their atrocities and posted them – to howls of joy that echoed from Gaza to Lakemba – on the internet.”
This is part of our 60th anniversary series. See the full collection here.
‘THIS WAS EVIL AT ITS ROOT’
- By Henry Ergas. First published October 20, 2023
They weren’t hunting for Israelis, much less for soldiers; they were hunting for Jews. Their instructions were simple: kill as many as you can. Nor were the civilian casualties collateral damage: they were the objective. And maiming babies, butchering children, raping women and defiling corpses wasn’t the work of a handful of sadists; they were a pervasive feature of the operation.
At least the Einsatzgruppen – the Nazi brigades who murdered nearly half a million Jews in a matter of months, forcing their victims to stand naked at the edge of mass graves before shooting them through the head – tried to hide their crimes, showing they had some inkling of breaching morality’s fundamental principles. Hamas’s killers did the opposite: they videoed their atrocities and posted them – to howls of joy that echoed from Gaza to Lakemba – on the internet.
Only one word can describe these people: evil. To use the term may seem as anachronistic as speaking of abomination, uncleanness or iniquity. Even the Oxford English Dictionary tells us “evil” has been “commonly superseded, in familiar speech, by “bad”. But exactly as we know good from bad, so we can differentiate evil from ordinary wickedness – and this was it.
“Radical evil”, thought Immanuel Kant, is ultimately incomprehensible: to explain human action, he argued, is to appeal to good reasons; and there can never be good reasons for murdering babies, mutilating toddlers and disfiguring the dead. However, even if we can’t make that evil intelligible, we can capture its essence: the denial of the victims’ humanity.
Thus, just as the Nazis believed Jews were less than human, so the Islamists, gripped in their death cult, refuse to acknowledge that Jews have the moral standing that would protect them from humiliation, degradation or extermination. Hamas knew that: it knew that Israel, as it grieved its dead, would be faced with a choiceless choice. And Hamas also knew it could maximise the scale of the tragedy by placing rocket launchers in schools, hiding its command centres in hospitals and preventing Palestinians from fleeing to safety.
As these consequences unfold, there will, no doubt, be ever louder calls from Hamas’s supporters for an immediate ceasefire. “Every aggressor,” wrote the great military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, “is a lover of peace: he wants his aggression to go unopposed; but to prevent aggression, we must fight.” And fight Israel will, by whatever means suit it best, until it has achieved its objectives – no matter how many of the Islamists’ useful idiots burn Israeli flags and chant anti-Semitic slogans.
Those Jew-haters were out in force, disgracing Sydney’s streets, even as Hamas was still butchering its way through southern Israel. If they weren’t as vocal in subsequent marches, it was because the organisers specifically asked for the Jew-baiting cries to be silenced.
Israel will survive these idiots, as it has survived so much else. Judaism’s fundamental principle is that of obligation: its ethic is based on the duty to give, never on the right to take.
But just as the secular, democratic state of Israel is founded on the overriding imperative of “mamlakhiyut”, or civic responsibility, so the Jewish tradition vests in each person the absolute obligation to protect this world of ours from evil. With evil, chemically pure, once again unleashing the furies of death and destruction, that is our duty too.
LOCKDOWN NATION
I thought of my father, terminally ill with pulmonary fibrosis, when I heard of another victim of coronavirus this week.
He’s confined to his house, alone since my mother died four years ago. He relies on family and friends to shop for him; they wave through the window and leave him food on the doorstep.
I spoke to him as news came in of a 90-odd-year-old woman dying in a nursing home. He’s sick of the isolation and doesn’t want the time left to him to be spent in solitary confinement. His first great-grandchild was born six months ago and he fears he will never see the boy again.
“Look, son, I’m 88 in August,” he said, cheerfully. “I’ve had a good run. Whatever happens to me from now on, it’s not a national tragedy.”
My father’s attitude is, he believes, not uncommon among his contemporaries, who understand the tough reality of old age. As he put it, with his winning sarcasm, “These people in nursing homes aren’t exactly snatched away in the prime of their lives, are they? Half of them don’t know they’re there, don’t even recognise their children when they visit.”
It’s brutal, but I’m sure he’s right. If you’re in an aged-care facility you’re not waiting to be discharged and sent home in a few weeks. You’re on your way out, and the exit’s probably not that far away. Coronavirus is speeding up the process, and it must feel overwhelming to the medical staff on the frontline. Which is precisely why they shouldn’t be making the decisions.
The health of a nation is not the sum of the health of its citizens. We require doctors and nurses to focus on their patients, but politicians need to take a broader view of the myriad components of a functioning, worthwhile society.
Sarcasm aside, when did life move from being precious to priceless? We lost 20 people to the disease in March. In the same month we lost another 13,000 or so to other ailments and accidents, but let’s not worry about them.
As more facts emerge about the virus, it looks as though it does most harm to the chronically sick or the elderly, as do most respiratory diseases. And when old age is combined with a pre-existing serious illness, you’re in real danger.
So the high-risk group would be wise to take all precautions, withdraw from society if they wish, and resurface when there’s a vaccine. We could devote enormous resources to looking after them.
Instead, we are asking the healthy, most of whom will be no more than inconvenienced by this latest strain of flu, to sacrifice or cripple themselves, their livelihoods, their children’s future, to preserve people whose own future is already precarious and limited.
As individuals it’s excruciating to assign a value to human life, and happily few of us are obliged to do so; but as a society we make those calculations all the time.
Our highway speed limit is 110km/h; we could reduce that to 20km/h and watch the fatalities tumble, but the inconvenience would be intolerable. We let people swim and surf (at least we used to) from wild, unpatrolled beaches, and sadly accept some of them will drown, measuring the pleasure of millions against the misfortune of a few.
We are always managing risk, but suddenly in this panic no risk, to anyone, is acceptable. Even news organisations have adopted this position, their HR departments issuing earnest communiques that declare “the health and wellbeing of our employees is our paramount priority”.
Sorry, since when? As part of my job I have been sent, and sent others, to war zones – yes, with bombs and bullets – to bring our readers the news. That’s what I thought our priority was as journalists. Now half my colleagues in the media have emerged as trembling amateur epidemiologists.
Our reckless, hysterical governments tumble over each other to impose ever more ridiculous constraints on our liberty, supported by police forces that interpret their authority in a fashion sinister and absurd at the same time. And they have the audacity to quote “the Anzac spirit” as they order fit young men to cower in their trenches.
Some of us are not surprised that our elected leaders and their unelected enforcers have been found wanting, but what really shakes your faith in society is how meekly their ludicrous commands have been obeyed.
Did anyone really think more than 500 people at Sydney’s Bondi Beach represented a threat? Save your comments; I know there will be plenty of people rushing to justify any extreme measure that “saves someone’s life”.
The curtain-twitchers are busy in Britain, dobbing in neighbours who leave their houses twice a day or have their girlfriend over. They’ve adapted to their police state very comfortably. Fortunate, perhaps, that Winston Churchill’s World War II promise that “we will fight them on the beaches” was never tested.
One day we’ll emerge blinking into the economic wasteland we have wilfully created, but next year winter will come around again, and with it more flu, no doubt with another horror mutation.
So what will we do then? You can only kill yourself once.
WHY THE YES CAMPAIGN FAILED
This is not an account of why the No case won the referendum. That will be written, triumphantly, by others. This is the story of why the Yes case was lost.
It is quite straightforward to trace the causes for the implosion of the Yes case. Tragically, all were or should have been known to its leaders. But they were denied, derided or discounted. There were eight fundamental reasons for failure.
The first was endemic overconfidence. The leaders for Yes – including Anthony Albanese – were simply convinced victory was inevitable. They would hear no contradiction. They were told repeatedly that history showed referendums were hard, and those on controversial topics – such as Indigenous recognition – were especially difficult. .
The second problem was an absolute dismissal of bipartisanship, especially by the Prime Minister, but also by other Yes protagonists. At one level, bipartisanship simply was unnecessary when there was only one answer.
The third reality was that the advice being received by the PM was appalling. The vast majority of Indigenous leaders around him confirmed his view that this was a cakewalk. He could not lose.
Further, it was made clear to him that unless they got exactly what they wanted in a referendum package, they would walk. The non-Indigenous advisers were just as problematic. They were equally convinced the poll was a foregone conclusion and ridiculed anyone who dared disagree with the process or drafting as troglodyte conservative stooges. Any voice of dissent was constitutionally cancelled.
The fourth disaster was the failure to disclose the architecture for the voice. This was a direct result of the campaign’s massive overconfidence.
The fifth failure was the drafting. The amendment was formulated in secret. There was no input from constitutional conservatives, whose support for the draft during the referendum would be crucial.
The sixth disaster was a truly appalling Yes campaign. This was mind-boggling, as the Yes case had at least $20m to spend. They promised a media blitz, a stunning social media campaign and thousands of appealing on-the-ground campaigners. It was like one of those predicted Russian tank columns that never arrived at Kyiv. The media advertising was more talked about than actually aired. When it was aired, it was calculated to appeal to those already voting yes.
The seventh enemy of Yes was condescension. Whatever the Yes campaign said, it seemed to believe any ordinary Australian who was not convinced was a cretin. The electorate hated it.
The eighth and final failure was the ineffectiveness of the political artillery on the Yes side. The Prime Minister was pinned down by his own platitudes, unable to advance beyond a “modest measure” and a “gracious request”. For whatever reason, Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney was never more than a faltering presence. Against the thundering of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, there was no contest.
All of this is a sad retrospective. The real question now for supporters of recognition is where to from here? The post-mortem needs to begin now. If delayed, reality will be obfuscated by excuses, slick explanations and deflections.
BELLS TOLL ON SECOND ELIZABETHAN AGE
- Editorial first published September 10, 2022
“Life, of course, consists of final partings as well as first meetings,” Queen Elizabeth II said in her last Christmas message in December. She was referring to the loss of her “strength and stay”, Prince Philip, earlier in the year.
As Australians woke on Friday to the sad news of the Queen’s death, many felt as though the world had changed, an anchor was gone. After her 70 years on the throne, most people have not known any other monarch.
The Queen was one of the world’s most recognisable people, especially in her bright outfits with matching hats designed to show her face. She loved Australia, visiting 16 times from 1954 to 2011. She shared and led milestones such as opening the Sydney Opera House, the Australian Stockman’s Hall of Fame, Expo ’88 in Brisbane and Parliament House in Canberra.
With Prince Philip, her husband of 73 years, she saw more of this nation than many Australians have, traversing all states, major cities, many towns and the outback.
The Queen was unfazed by the 1999 republican referendum, despite the fact that she had reigned for over half of the life of the Australian commonwealth. She was ready to “continue faithfully to serve as Queen of Australia under the Constitution to the very best of my ability”. After the vote, the Queen made it clear that the royal family would have retained deep affection for Australia, regardless of the outcome. The future of the Crown in Australia, she noted, was a matter for the Australian people.
Bells are now tolling, flags are at half mast, prayers are being offered and queues are forming to sign condolence books. The second Elizabethan age provided much to give thanks for. So did the great woman whose name it bears and whose sterling service will be remembered in history.
May she rest in peace.
Readers’ view
Calling Mr Showboat
If the UN is looking for a secretary-general who will showboat around the world and have absolutely no impact on world affairs, then Kevin 07 is your man.
K. Bell, Paradise Point, Qld. September, 28, 2015
‘Choppergate’
Given Bronwyn Bishop’s predilection for exotic and exciting modes of transport, perhaps her supporters could provide a hovercraft to transport her to Parliament House. What could be more delightful than the sight of the former Speaker gliding across Lake Burley Griffin, then up King’s Ave; a sort of amalgam of Boadicea, Cleopatra and wotsername from the Titanic?
STUART Buss, Kewdale, WA. August 4, 2015
Nothing like a dame
Good on Tony Abbott for reintroducing antiquated titles for our gentry. Perhaps he could also consider introducing court jesters and village idiots. Certainly there have been more than a few of them in our federal and state parliaments over the years.
MAL Brown, Redwood Park, SA. March 29, 2014
Justice prevails
Justice has prevailed at last for Cardinal George Pell. The outrageous persecution of a good and decent Australian – the first prelate to attempt to address sexual abuse by the
clergy, with his Melbourne Response in 1996 – is over, at least as far as the criminal law is concerned. The media gave maximum exposure to Pell’s troubled accuser, the police pursued fanciful claims and the
juries were poorly instructed. It remains a matter of gross incredulity that two Victorian Court of Appeal justices could not see the imperative for reasonable doubt in this case.
The High Court has reversed the greatest injustice in Australia since the persecution of Michael and Lindy Chamberlain, interestingly another case affected by religious bigotry.
PETER Curtis, Werribee South, Vic. April 8, 2020
A spent force
Given that Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump by three to one, her landslide loss may go down as the most epic political failure in history.
RICHARD Sallie, Nedlands, WA. November 11, 2016
Why Australia will continue to rely on high migration
A low migration scenario in Australia would require a complete overhaul of our national business model. This is not likely and looking up to 40 years into the future, the only plausible migration scenario for the nation is a high one.
Brutal crackdown on Hong Kong
The persecutions of several innocent people reflects what Beijing’s dictatorial rule is doing to Hong Kong, and why world leaders, including Anthony Albanese, should not fall for Xi’s bogus blandishments.