The continued predicament of Aboriginal people in Australia is a festering sore that sooner or later must be healed. There appears to be a growing contingent of mostly right/conservative people that wants to deal with this issue by completely discounting the Aboriginal experience in the past and therefore now because it alleviates white guilt.
Aboriginal culture, like all cultures, is not beyond criticism. But such criticism must be based on rational argument and evidence, not a desire to wipe away the extraordinary facts of 60,000 years of Aboriginal history in this land and 200 years of white occupation.
So I get annoyed when such criticism simply trots out the same old ignorant crap. Hence a letter I recently wrote to Crikey.com in response to a speech made by Pauline Hanson’s ex-advisor, David Oldfield in the NSW parliament:
Dear Crikey,
Oldfield’s comments in relation to Aboriginal culture reflect a profound ignorance on this issue. Such sustained ignorance is unacceptable in a paid political representative.
So, in refutation of his key points:
1.Aborigines are estimated to have lived in Australia for some 60,000 years. This is an extraordinary achievement for any culture by any standards.
2.Aborigines are thought to have wiped out existing megafauna (as humans did all over the globe), but then settled to a highly successful system of environmental management (utilising managed fires, amongst other things). Again, this is seen as an unusually effective response to environmental crisis in this particularly dry and arid land.
3.Aboriginals were certainly dispossesed illegally of their land under extant British law (ie the Terra Nullius issue), a point that was discussed much at the time and afterwards.
4.Aborigines have developed such a deep understanding of the Australian environment that they are increasingly seen as a repository of special knowledge and good sense.
5.There was a great variety in Aboriginal culture when whites arrived. Indeed, some have argued that certain groups were moving into an agricultural phase.
6.Many of the cultural concepts of Aborigines are unique and tell us much about how humans can live differently to current mass-industrial society. Their social structures are marvellously complex and suited to their specific circumstances, and their spiritual ideas are wonderfully rich.
Given our manifest failure to effectively manage the Australian environment (in fact,it is in crisis), our social problems and spiritual lack, I would have thought we have plenty to learn from Aboriginal culture.
I just wish those who so fulsomely criticise Aboriginals and their culture would bother to find out a little about it.
Peter McMahon
When I was teaching the introductory Australian Studies unit at Murdoch University, one of the most rewarding experiences was to be told by students how much they had changed their minds on Aboriginal issues once they found out a bit about them. I strongly believe that Australians would get behind genuine land rights reform etc if they understood the issues. I am afraid our current political leadership and mass media do not want this understanding to arise.

Oh what a year it promises to be! The world becomes more and more unstable in almost every way, and there are crucial elections in the US and Australia. Will things turn around in 2004?
In 2003 hopes that the world and its problems could be managed by a increasingly rational system of sustained negotiations utilising existing global institutions like the UN and the WTO really came unstuck. The US under the most divisive presidential administration since WWII was the main culprit. In addition to tearing up a bunch of treaties, it has announced a renewed commitment to nuclear weapons and their use and an intent to totally militarise space, invaded Afghanistan and last year Iraq, and ignored rising concerns about global warming.
However, President Bush is the most hated president in recent history and has utterly polarised American life. A challenger has arisen in Governor Howard Dean who explicitly took on Bush on Iraq when most Democrat leaders were shuffling their feet. Dean has sidelined the Democrat establishment, notably by arranging a new approach to funding through exploitation of the Internet, and grabbed the front running for the presidential nomination. He is a breath of fresh air in US politics and presents a genuine alternative to Bush and the vacillating Democrat insiders.
In Australia we have newly annointed Labor leader Mark Latham taking on an established but aging prime minister who has similarly polarised the nation through his divisive politics. Much of Howard’s approach has been based on unswerving loyalty to the Bush program, so a change in Washington, especially if a multilateralist Democrat is elected, will present real problems for him.
The US election is too uncertain to call, especially because so much can go wrong, or less likely right, for the US in Iraq. The US may find something they can pass off as WMD, at least to the American public, and Saddam’s trial and sentencing might go well. But I doubt both these things. And although the US economy looks OK for Bush, it is still shaky and substantial global problems are emerging, such as the threat of the Euro to compete with the US dollar as global currency.
I also think that global warming will become an issue again in 2004. Right now it is the dog that is not barking, but evidence is growing so strongly that it will have to be addressed again soon. And properly, this time.
Which will present an interesting problem for ALP leader and very likely new PM Latham. His environmental credentials are untested, and his preference for markets over government action will be put under pressure. So far, neo-liberals have put up no credible market-based response to the global environmental crisis, so it looks like any action will have to come out of good old multilateral negotiations between nation-states.
I have real hopes for 2004: A revitalised and re-engaged US under a dynamic and innovative new president who can restart moves toward a sustained international debate on global problems like climate change and international terrorism. And at home a new prime minister who begins the reconstruction of a nation splitting in two culturally, politically and economically.

Some of the more important events of 2003 had an air of inevitability about them. President Bush II was always going to invade Iraq and Simon Crean was always going to get knocked off as ALP leader.
Looking back, the intent of the US under the leadership of George W Bush and his coterie of eager Neocons to invade Iraq was crystal clear. You might have thought the S11 attacks would have distracted him, after all this was the most effective assault on the American heartland since Pearl Harbour. But in some of the most devious manipulation of public opinion in modern times, in a process that showed the utter mendacity of the US mass media, he managed to conflate the two issues. Apparently, almost half of the American public still think Saddam and Osama were linked, which is a real worry.
The out-of-touchness of the US public is becoming a serious global problem. Much of the gulf that looms ever more between the US and Europe, for instance, reflects the growing disquiet in Europeans over the wilful ignorance of Americans.
Of course, WMDs have not been found in Iraq (if Saddam finally has) and even if they were found it is still most probably the case that this was an illegal war according to international law. Whether or not Bush – with the active connivance of Blair and Howard – has dealt a body blow to collective security in the 21st century we will have to wait and see. It is quite possible that a President Dean, Prime Minister Latham and even Prime Minister Brown will go back to the existing international relations fora and shift away from unilateralist action.
Latham has a special incentive to do this. He knows a lot about Labor and Australian history, so he knows how much the post-war Labor government, and especially Doc Evatt, supported the idea of collective security in general and the United Nations in particular. This is a tradition he could well champion as an alternative to Howard’s increasingly blind subservience to the Bush II doctrine.
The way Howard is locking Australian foreign and military policy into the US agenda is a public debate we should be having right now. We are rapidly returning to the bad old days when we were the regional representative of British Imperial might. We know how well that worked when the Japanese actually threatened Australia. For their part, perhaps unlike the British, the Americans have never said they would act in anything but their own direct interests.
There is another interesting parallel with history in the so-called ‘War on Terror’. Howard is showing a definite disinterest in engaging with the underlying cultural complexities of terrorism, just as the Australian government did when the Japanese were attempting to eradicate structural racism between the wars. In failing to deal with legitimate Japanese concerns, we helped ensure a vicious and racist war in the coming years.
There was a decided element of inevitability about Crean’s fall, if not about Latham’s rise. There are some important lessons here for Labor that go well beyond the matter of leadership.
In retrospect, we can see that Crean inherited the leadership because an attitude of lazy acceptance, of business as usual, had permeated the federal ALP. This trend began with Keating, who took the leadership from perhaps the second most successful ALP Prime Minister when it was clear that the electorate was hostile to him. Keating fluked an election (thanks to Liberal stupidity), and then got ejected next time around.
Then nice guy Kim, who was the son of a prominent minister in the Whitlam government, but (who despite all the complimentary things said about him, especially in his appallingly bad biography) had never shown any special leadership qualities, inherited the leadership because there was no else about. His lack of leadership ability was really shown up in the second election he lost when he acceded to the fundamentally flawed ‘small target’ strategy.
And then Simon, son of prominent minister in the Whitlam government, but who had never shown any special leadership qualities, inherited the leadership because there was no one else about. Another nice guy, but the electorate read through him like they read through Beazley.
Labor, due in large part to the fat years of the 1980s and early 1990s, is bereft of talent in the FPLP because it is chock-full of careerists. The Labor Party itself is still weak and demoralised because of the way opportunism has run rampant and as the result a deliberate strategy by the peak office holders to minimise rank and file participation. The ALP was in pretty good shape when Bob Hawke won the leadership, but it has been going down hill steadily since then.
So, if Mark Latham is to get the ALP into a position to win government and stay in long enough to implement genuine reform, he needs to oversee the renovation of the party itself. But the fact that Crean’s minimal attempts to reform the party generated such hostility indicate the size of the problem. The fact is that the ALP is now riddled with people who place their own interests over the party’s, and certainly over the nation’s.
Latham’s hero Whitlam had to push a sustained agenda of party reform as part of his project to regain political relevance (and some of those reforms have gone sour), and Latham faces a similarly Herculean task.
So it was a significant year. World affairs are in turmoil, with the Bush agenda leaving little or no room for much open negotiation of crucial issues, like responding to terrorism or global warming. John Howard, with his adept but utterly dishonest handling of the Iraq, terrorist and refugee issues, which he readily confuses, seemed to consolidate his power over the Liberals, the government and the nation. But a smart, young Labor leader is now on the scene, albeit with plenty of ideational and personal baggage.
All up, 2004 looks like being a hell of a year.

What is Newspoll up to? According to the Sunday Mail today 66 percent of people favour banning tobacco smoking in pubs and clubs, and 77 percent believe that the number of poker machines should be reduced.
Both figures are probably true, and elicit a “So-what?” response from me. The interesting thing is what else the pollsters found.
The hard copy version of the Sunday Mail actually leads with a stamp duty story pulled out of the polling – 84 percent believe it ought to be eliminated for buyers of first homes. The polling consists of a list of propositions that were put to 1200 randomly selected Australians over 18 years of age. Stamp duty is the number one issue, followed by factory farmed chickens, poker machines, the UN taking over running Iraq, reality TV, smoking in clubs, a national identity card, and so on down to privatization of Telstra.
There is no indication how the questions were chosen, but my suspicion is they are a list of propositions that the SM intends to beat up during the course of the year. Certainly the list is useless as an indication of what people are really concerned about. Are factory farmed chickens really going to be a major issue in any election this century, let alone in the next year? I doubt it. This is just another version of push polling.
In fact, I have objective information that proves the list is a crock. According to the poll 57 percent of people favour a new referendum on the republic. This is undoubtedly quantitatively true, but completely irrelevant because it doesn’t tell us how strongly that belief is held. When we asked 300 or so Australians to nominate what issues would be most important to them in deciding their vote at the next election only one mentioned the republic. That’s one-third of a percent only.
Public opinion polling can be incredibly useful, but too much of it is pumped out to confirm the prejudices of corporate clients, or worse still, because the people designing the questionnaire have no idea what they are doing. A poll like this one skews its results just through its choice of questions. While I suspect that is deliberate on the part of the client it does not reflect well on Newspoll that they would conduct the research at all.
The worst thing is that election “pundits”, starved for results of their own will parrot these findings as though they have some authority and it will not only poison the public debate but lead some people to do silly things in the pursuit of worthy causes. Of course On Line Opinion will continue with its innovative qualitative research. One of the features of our research method is that it eliminates interviewer bias and agendas as much as humanly possible and so allows what our interviewees really think to come through clearly. Unfortunately we don’t receive the same amount of publicity for our research from the mainstream press as the established quantitative researchers do. We’ll keep at it until we do.

World Idol screened last night (be prepared to wait if you click on that link, it’s one of the worst professionally designed sites you’re likely to ever use). It’s not as good as the regional competitions. It is a one-off Eisteddfod style competition where the only innovation is that the public gets to vote for the winner. There is no attempt to build a community of supporters around the contestants.
The show has been done on the cheap. Judge Simon Cowle called it a Karaoke Competition. You would have thought that with the international audience that they had they could have afforded any number of backing artists, rather than a pre-recorded soundtrack. Belgium Idol Peter Evrard did a heavy metal number and was told by one judge he shouldn’t have been there, he should have been fronting a band. Indeed. Why wasn’t he, and who is to blame? Surely not Evrard?
I’m not prepared to say Sebastian had the best voice on the night, nor that he deserves to be the winner. But then, my career hasn’t been based on getting the best candidate into first place, it is based on winning with whatever candidate you have, so here’s some technical analysis.
For my money US Idol Kelly Clarkson was the best. She was stylish and her voice was incredibly controlled for a 21 year old as she sang Carole King’s Natural Woman. That doesn’t mean that she will win. There are geopolitical forces at work.
In our focus group research on the proposed US Australia Free Trade Agreement we found a very strong strand of anti-Americanism. That is also a theme that international research work has uncovered. Put bluntly, the US involvement in Iraq is a major hurdle for Clarkson to overcome. She looks and sounds great, but in the Aussie rhyming slang, she’s a Septic Tank, and as a result her prospects may well tank.
The voting system is a bit like our constitutional referendum voting system. Each of the 11 participating countries is treated as a bloc. They vote for the contestants and a country rank order is generated which automatically gives 12 votes to the hometown contestant and then starting at ten numbers the others off in descending order of popularity. These numbers are then taken and added together. The contestant who scores the highest number wins. So the smallest countries exercise disproportionate influence. A win in South Africa counts as equal to one in the US, even thought the US is 50 times larger.
This is a system designed to give the win to the least offensive candidate. Rational voters in individual countries will be least inclined to vote for the obvious winner who might threaten the prospects of their local champ. The more hype around a singer, the worse they will fare.
This is a system which should favour a dark horse like Sebastian. It also may help Norwegian Idol, Kurt Nilsen. I think it was “Dicko” who said that Australian Idol had helped a lot of ugly people to win record contracts when commenting on Nilsen. The judges thought Nilsen had the best voice, and one can infer, the worst looks. His gap-toothed smile is one for the under-dog.
Of course there are other things at work. The Get Out the Vote factor will be significant. How many viewers will actually vote if they can’t vote for their national idol? Any country that runs an organized campaign can help their own Idol. I have read that Australians are messaging people in other countries to vote for Sebastian. What are the Americans doing in a country where everything is professionalised within an inch of its life? Is anyone pushing the message – “Well, if you can’t vote for Sebastian, vote for X (where X is anyone other than the most likely winner).”
In this context the US has a big advantage. Their total population is probably larger than that of the rest of the contestant countries together. As a result, there should be proportionately more connections from Americans to voters in other countries who can vote for Clarkson, than there are from Australia to voters who can vote for Sebastian. It’s quite possible that the result of World Idol will come down to a power law of 6 degrees of separation.

One Christmas I remember being given a game of “Pick up sticks” where the aim was to gradually extract tiny straws from a tangle without moving any of the others. It is an entirely opportunistic exercise where you take relationships between sticks as they come. I’m finding writing about Christmas like that.
One definition of humour is the “sudden shock of recognition of the unfamiliar”, but it can work the other way. That’s why I laughed watching a television programme yesterday to find that Powderfinger’s latest album is called Vulture Street. Vulture Street has played an important part in my life – it’s where I grew up in a typical Brisbane two-bedroom worker’s cottage that had been extended to make it into four bedrooms by adding one room and “filling in” the verandah with hopper windows and fibro sheeting. It’s where my Dad grew up after being delivered by a midwife in the front bedroom in 1912. It’s where he and Mum still live, so naturally it’s where I often spend Christmas. Obviously it has played a part in Powderfinger’s existence too.
Vulture Street is one of those Brisbane streets. Dad used to tell me that it is the longest street in Brisbane, which always seemed like a bit of a fiddle. When does a street become a road and therefore entitled to be much longer than a street, but without attracting comment? It is home to the Gabba cricket ground, which takes up two-thirds of a very large city block but only one street number. Consequently, our house, a mere two blocks further along is 483, but the house on the other side of the street is five-hundred-and-something.
Last night there was an attempted knife murder in Vulture Street at West End. The police shot the assailant dead. At East Brisbane, where Mum and Dad live there was another knife murder a month or so ago just up the road in Sinclair Street. Vulture Street stitches the southern suburbs that marked the boundaries of old Brisbane together – the rougher boundaries of old Brisbane. Famous names lived on or near Vulture Street. David Malouf grew up in Browning Street, a tributary down the South Brisbane (another boundary suburb) end. Former Lord Mayor of Brisbane Sallyanne Atkinson briefly lived opposite us above her father-in-law’s surgery.
It’s a street of contrasts. Big houses like Jon le Court’s mansion leave little worker’s cottages like ours jostling for breath on their 10 metre frontages. Down David Malouf’s end there is the odd chamferboard defaced with a stuccoed faux Aegean front applied by a Greek or Italian immigrant 40 years ago, with a market garden instead of a front yard. Our end the immigrants were more likely to be “White” Russian, or Balts or Slavs. There are three churches along its length. West End Uniting, where Mum was once the Deaconess, the Greek Orthodox at Kangaroo Point and St Paul’s Anglican just up the road where Dad has his name on a foundation stone.
Multi-cultural as that world was, it hung together. Not because of the thread of geographical connection, but perhaps paradoxically because we all had a sense of our own separate communal identities. We went to different churches, but most of us did go to church and believed similar things even though at times it seemed we prayed to different gods. I used to play with the dentist’s son up the hill in the house with the tennis court, but money didn’t really matter – we both went to school in bare-feet. While each of us in our community might have borne different fruits we were branches grafted to the same trunk.
Now the community has gone. It is not just the knife murders in the street. It is not that we believe different things. It is that we don’t really believe anything at all. While we appear to have more in common than ever before we actually have less because we lack any sort of structured way of interpreting the world. Without structure we have no language capable of communicating to others what we think, and they cannot interpret what we express in any complexity. Our world is existential. Who knows what drove my knife murderers? Like Meursault it may have just been the sultry weather.
The same murderous apathy and lack of connection and commitment seems to have done for Christmas. This is a religious festival that we are afraid to celebrate as a religious festival. Christmas cards now rarely have any reference to Shepherds, Wise Men, Mary, Joseph or Jesus. Children sing “Christmas” carols where the jolly fat man in the red suit sitting down stage center dominates, and “naughty and nice” have replaced good and evil.
Church organists have a bird’s eye view of the congregation. I went to church twice this Christmas. There were fewer worshippers this year, and far fewer visitors. In some ways this is a good thing – those who attend have shown real commitment. In another it is devastating. If I were living in a Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist country at the height of one of their religious festivals I would attend a ceremony if at all possible, and if allowable according to their customs. Whether one believes in Deity or not, there is no way that you can understand the complexity of a society without understanding its religious belief, and perhaps more importantly, its religious observance. There is also the small matter of respect, of being a witness to that which a community believes in most strongly.
Anyone attending a Christian ceremony this Christmas would be witness to the complexity of beliefs which have underpinned our society. At the same time as we celebrate the mid-winter birth of the King with carols and pomp and ceremony, we anticipate his death in early spring by partaking together in a symbolic meal of bread and wine. So birth and death are entwined, and one becomes the other.
On Christmas Day there were murders in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan committed by people with motive. These people see Christianity and Christians as their enemy, yet they understand more about Christianity, and the mysteries of life that Christianity attempts to explore, than most of us in the Christian world. They understand, and most of us have forgotten, that there can be more important things than life, and that death can be a beginning rather than an end.
Throughout the time since 9/11 I have been struck by our collective lack of imagination: our inability to walk in our enemy’s shoes and see the world through his eyes. As a result we are almost equally divided in how to deal with him, and in dealing with our own internal panic and feelings of insecurity we pass laws which destroy some of our most basic rights and liberties, compromising those things most worth protecting.
The transformation of Christmas from a celebration of deep communal values and mysteries into a combination mid-summer holiday and consumption binge is a sign of our decline as a society. It also represents the crux of the liberal dilemma, which is the dilemma of the Enlightenment – how does one keep form in a society when the only control on an individual’s exercise of his or her rights is the exercise of rights by others and where the limits to what one can believe or do are very few?
Once upon a time I might have found some answers walking up and down my street – Vulture Street. Not now. The street might be more violent, but it is becoming homogenous as the houses are gradually eaten up by unit blocks. Perhaps this is the way that the world ends, not with a bang, just a steady decay. Or maybe this is merely the way that the world continues – grey, bleak, undifferentiated, timid, inward-looking and unimaginative. Happy Christmas.

Whenever Christmas rolls around and there is the usual debate about how commercial it all is these days, it just brings into stark relief how much we need to have a sense of moral direction in our lives. Our new religion, it would seem, is faith in a volatile mix of technology and markets.
Not that we should bring back the old days when human minds were in servitude to harsh religions that gave us very little in return for our unquestioning devotion. The revival of Christian, Islamic, Hindu etc fundamentalism is enough to remind us just how bad that deal was.
As for the remnants of the insitutionalised churches, their abject failure to show genuine moral leadership is obvious enough. The Catholic Church is still largely preoccupied with waging its war against human sexuality, and thus mostly women, through its irrational policies on birth control, AIDS, etc, while dodging and weaving over its reponsibilities to those abused by its ‘celibate’ employees. And the Anglicans are in a furor over homosexuality. These days the Christian church seems obsessed with sex; meanwhile horrific abuses of life and limb go on around the world with little resistance from these supposedly universal bodies.
Our technology and markets have provided humanity with unprecedented levels of material abundance. For some, anyway. But leaving aside the environmental and social costs of this rampant commodification of the earth’s bounty, these things clearly fail to give us a sense of purpose and higher meaning.
Most trivially, this lack makes us feel hollow at Christmas time, when we are supposedly celebrating the birth of a man who, rather controversially, said that the purpose of life was to love (and who seemed to be skeptical about the value of material goods). And in a somewhat more extreme case, it makes us completely unable to understand why some people are so affronted by the lack of morality in our ways (as they see it) that they are prepared to offer their own lives in protest.
Oppressive religion had to go if a new rational society was to be born. And in a way the old certainties were replaced by a more conditional set of rules based on socio-cultural values, including increasingly open negotiation and a rejection of monolithic authority of all kinds. Civility and legal formality were both aspects of this new way of seeing things, and as democracy progressed, they became more and more legitimised.
But these concepts and practices never answered our most basic needs, like how to relate to death, and in any case they are now being steadily replaced by a new social order defined in terms of money.
Ultimately, money, as the most abstract form of information, embodies no meaning other than that of commercial utility. It is irrelevant to our most basic concerns about birth, death, suffering, meaning, and morality. Money is useful for some things – like organising production and consumption of goods and services – but it has to be mixed in with other ways of living, including constant discussion about our personal and social values, if we are to live good lives.
Christmas is a vestige of our attempts to create meaning and a sense of true morality. That is why the commercialistion of Christmas seems so wrong; that is why our failure to recreate some kind of meaningful moral order seems so poignant at this time of year.

That’s the time it takes to get a response from the National Party’s dobber site www.GovernmentWaste.com.au based on an entirely unrepresentative sample of one. Given that the two days were the weekend, I think that’s more than satisfactory. [In fact, since originally posting I found a message on my work message bank from Andrew Bibb only a couple of hours after my test, so their performance is closer to “excellent” rather than “more than satisfactory” GY 23/12/03.] This is the result of the real world experiment that I announced in my last post . The purpose was to find out how seriously committed to this site the Nationals are by submitting their online response form with a suggestion that they ring me to discuss. That was Friday afternoon at 12:11 p.m. This morning at 8:05 a.m. my youngest daughter, Sophia handed the phone across the breakfast table. “It’s Roger someone…”. It was – Roger Harcourt, the National Party State Director.
There was a reason for me running this experiment. Over the years I have subscribed to email alerts from a variety of political sites and the only ones to have subsequently sent me anything were the Federal Labor Party. That’s if you don’t count the Victorian Libs who mysteriously send me material even though I didn’t ever ask for it. I blame my old friend Victor Perton for this, however will retract if I am wrong! Besides, theirs is a very professional e-newsletter, and as a political party they are exempt from the new spamming laws that the government will proclaim early in the New Year (more of that in a later post).
I’m not the only one to have noticed this lack of commitment from political parties to their sites. Peter Spearritt will give you a well-rehearsed ad hominem homily on the subject if you ever meet him. I also heard ABC radio presenter Helen Razer complaining about exactly the same thing after the last federal election. It appears that while many political parties feel they need to be in the new media, they don’t understand that a website is not an artifact, it is a process, and it needs to be integrated into your other activities and properly resourced. Better no website than one that won’t talk back.
Roger Harcourt tells me that the site has already generated responses. This doesn’t answer my question “Why would you use this site?” but it does suggest I need to do further research. So, if you know any retired engineers or janitors with an obsession for cleanliness, godliness and stamping out government waste, send them this link www.GovernmentWaste.com.au – it could be the best present you’ve ever given them for Christmas.

If only because of the way Saddam Hussein has been compared to Hitler, the process of ending his rule reminds us of the Nuremberg trials held after WWII. Running from 1945 to 1949, ten Nazi leaders were eventually executed, and Goering killed himself before sentence was carried out. Others were imprisoned for various periods.
No doubt there were different agendas at work in this signal event, but we should not dismiss the fact that here was an attempt to put human affairs back on a moral grounding. WWII, which many historians see as an extension of WWI, was probably the most catastrophic, deliberately-caused event in history. It nearly finished off international industrial civilisation, and if the subsequent Cold War had gone hot or the Americans had not been so pragmatic about aiding Europe through the Marshall Plan, it could have been the start of a new Dark Ages.
In 1945 everyone knew something dreadful had taken place, and some of them wanted to know what and why, and allocate responsibility. Naturally the victors decided the criteria for judgement, and they focussed on the extreme brutality of the Nazis.
The most important conclusion to come out of the trials was that each person must answer to their own conscience and cannot claim higher orders as an excuse for their behaviour. This is a radical idea and goes back to the most basic precepts about our ideas of right and wrong, as expressed in religion, philosophy, etc.
So the Nuremberg trials were a chance for civilisation to start again on sound, moral principles. What went wrong?
The simple answer is that politics reasserted itself over morality. Specifically, the ideological contest between communism and capitalism, put on hold while fascism was defeated, started up again. Winston Churchill, probably the most authoritive leader to come out of the war, made his famous ‘iron curtain’ speech in March, 1946, while the trials were underway. He didn’t start the Cold War, but he announced it, and it lasted for another 43 years.
And so here we are, the Cold War consigned to history, with another chance to make some basic rules to guide our increasingly global society. Some people think we have another bi-polar split, this time between modern, global civilisation and Islamic fundamentalism, while others argue that we are heading for a multi-polar ‘clash of civilisations’. According to these people, morality (and even its poor cousin, legality) must take second place to the need for ‘security’.
The real threat, of course, is from forces let loose by mass industrial and now global civilisation itself. It is runaway technology and the associated environmental impact that threatens to destroy civilisation, whether it be by nuclear or biological war or global warming, or some other global problem.
Nuremberg was an attempt to reset our moral compass and it is high time we had another go. Perhaps Saddam’s trial will be the start of such an effort.

Brutal dictators like Saddam Hussein often have a history of being physically abused as children. In such cases, the personal tragedy is translated into a social one. So the costs of ignoring this connection can be enormous.
We are regularly horrified by the crimes that people (all too often, let’s be frank, men) commit. The trial has just finished of a man in the US who murdered no less than 48 young women. Apparently, he wanted to rid the world of prostitutes. But these were just young women with families and friends who would miss them. This is horror and misery on a massive scale.
The response is often an understandable but ultimately misplaced outraged clamour for harsh punishment. But the real lesson of such tragedies is rarely learned, and that is to understand what could make such terrible things happen.
Heinous acts of any kind are a communication to us all. They tell us that something has gone wrong, badly wrong. We should take the time to fully investigate the underlying causes of such acts, and do something about them. The connection of child abuse with later violence, for instance, and the role poverty and lack of education play in creating socio-paths need to be fully understood. Only then can we minimise the likihood of them re-occurring.
Crimes of violence, whether committed against one person or many, are tragedies for us all, but to not learn from these events and thus not act to make sure they don’t happen again is a worse tragedy.
Saddam’s brutality is famous, and millions have suffered because of it. But once that old man dug out of hole near Tikrit was an innocent baby boy born to a poverty stricken young prostitute. A childhood of pain and fear made him a monster. The smart thing to do would be to eliminate the threat of more Saddams by eliminating the conditions that give rise to them.