Hal G. P. Colebatch, neo con arcana, and the musings of a man whose name we dare not speak ...

Arcana: arcana [ɑːˈkeɪnə -ˈkɑː-]
n
(Spirituality, New Age, Astrology & Self-help / Alternative Belief Systems) either of the two divisions (the minor arcana and the major arcana) of a pack of tarot cards

One of our favorites - Hal G. P. Colebatch - seems to have left his nest at the American Spectator, and settled back into a perch in The Australian, however temporary the move might be.

And as a result we now have an antipodean guide to the arcana of the neo con, and who is in and who out in the neo con pack of playing cards.

No one can win when your allies become your enemy, Colebatch muses, promptly drawing up a list of right wingers who are now the enemy.

Chief amongst them seems to be Pat Buchanan, whose neo-Nazi inclinations have become too much for Colebatch to bear:

Recent effusions by Buchanan include attacks on the pre-World War II Polish "regime" (his term) for provoking World War II by not giving Danzig to the patient and reasonable Adolf Hitler (a line also taken up recently by some Russian militaristic, ultra-nationalist and anti-Polish circles), and claims that, in effect, the countries liberated from Soviet occupation at the end of the Cold War have no right to self-determination because they lie within Russia's sphere of influence. The fact that tiny Estonia, the victim of countless Soviet atrocities, moved a war memorial erected by the Red Army from the centre of its capital has been described by Buchanan as a reckless provocation to Russia. The American Conservative, as well as all its other attacks on Israel and Zionism, actually published an article after Buchanan left the editorship insinuating - with obvious implications - that Israel had prior knowledge of 9/11.

Oh yes, baby, lay it on me, tell me how hideous Buchanan is. What else you got?

Buchanan's work is also pushed on a website run by Greek multi-millionaire Taki Theodoracopulos, another ceaseless critic of the neo-cons and of Israel, from a so-called paleo-conservative position. One article published on the Taki website earlier this year, "Little Miss Zionist Gossip Queen", was a self-congratulatory account of how the Palestinian author, one Adam Kharii, had intimidated and chased away a lone Jewish girl in a nightclub: "I shouted at her, 'Don't be here when I'm back.' She was not even worthy of all the insults I'd hurled at her." Such, it appears, are the heroisms of self-styled US paleo-conservatism, descended more or less from the isolationist, anti-Semitic-tinged America First movement of World War II. I doubt it is a conservatism that Ronald Reagan, William Buckley or John Wayne would recognise.

Wow, so much for the grotesquely mis-named American Conservative and its cohorts. But then as I studied the arcana ever more closely, I became mystified:

One Australian-sourced attempt in The American Conservative to blame an alleged collapse of Australian conservatism on a neo-con takeover left its author lamenting that no notice had been taken of it. Among the alleged neo-cons listed there were Tim Blair, Andrew Bolt, and the late Frank Devine. The same author lamented elsewhere that his application to edit Quadrant had been, for some reason, rejected. He further described Howard as: "a semiliterate school prefect, haunted (to an extent remarkable even for antipodean statesmen) by what Mencken would have called the nagging fear that someone, somewhere, might be free", a description which, whatever one thinks of Howard, is simply off the planet. The big battle facing conservatives in Australia at present is against the expansion of government power and control in the name of environmentalism and here neo- and paleo- divisions are also irrelevant.

Schisms on schisms, splinter groups on splinter groups, schismatics all around.

But who is this nameless soul, perhaps so feared and reviled that none, not even Colebatch, dare speak his name? Perhaps the antipodean joker, or the hanged man from the dark arcana pack?

Could it be R. J. Stove I wondered? After all, in a blog item dedicated to the great Quadrant Windschuttle hoax he wrote:

I am probably the only reader of Professor Quiggin’s website who has ever applied (unsuccessfully of course) for the editorship of Quadrant. As such, I thought the following comments, even if they do savour of sour grapes, might be worth making. I have not seen anything like them made by anyone else.
(a) Quadrant’s editorship is an unpaid post. (This is something I didn’t know till after I applied for it.) The assumption has long been not only that successive editors will do their work for free, but that they shall frequently top up the available taxpayer funding by subsidising Q from their own pockets. Which puts me, for one, in mind of the old saying “You pay peanuts, you get monkeys.”
(b) In America (which is where I am usually published), the prevailing attitudes towards editors of intellectual magazines are very different to Australia’s, and much more stringent. If Quadrant were based in the USA, and if anything like this brouhaha over “Dr Gould” ever occurred, Mr Windschuttle would lose his job. Furthermore, he would be considered lucky if he were given more than 10 minutes to clear his desk. This is in the unlikely event that he had not already been dismissed through making such extraordinary pro-plagiarism remarks as “There are very few cases where plagiarism should be a sacking offence for a university teacher” (Quadrant, May 2008). In America, plagiarism is regarded across the political spectrum as the intellectual sin. (here).

Okay, so that's a lament for a failed job application, and a hearty swipe at Windschuttle and Quadrant along with it. But where was the American Conservative angle?

Well way back on June 5, 2006, the mag. published Wizards of Oz, by R. J. Stove, which is a spray at, amongst others, P. P. McGuiness:

When a man can be appointed Quadrant's editor – as was incumbent editor P. P. McGuinness in 1998 – on the strength of a career whose apex consisted of laboring for the Moscow Narodny Bank during the Brezhnev epoch, one's own idiocy in opposing Communism becomes manifest.

Andrew Bolt:

The preface to Bolt's 2005 book, Still Not Sorry, risks almost universal Bronx-cheers by extolling Rupert Murdoch's steadfast championship of free speech. Contemplating such gaffes makes newly relevant a prayer by Spanish historian Salvador de Madariaga: "Let us always hope that our adversaries are stupider than we are."

Tim Blair:

If Bolt is the neocon your nearest knitting circle would invite to tea, Sydney's inexpressible chickenhawk blogger Tim Blair is the neocon your mother warned you about; he acquired his intellectual credentials by editing the pornographic magazine Melbourne Truth. Blair is determined to cram into his prose more obscenities than a gangsta in rut. Presumably he craves the linguistic equivalent of Madeleine Albright's attitude to weaponry: "What's the point of all these four-letter words if we can't use them?" Rather than engage with Robert Fisk's books regarding Lebanon and other Middle East countries, Blair, whose own experience of Middle Eastern physical peril stops with the local shish-kebab diner, described Fisk on October 14, 2002 as "the f--king dumbest dumb f--k of them all."

Blair combines his sewer mouth with paranoid defensiveness about the pubescents who supply most of his blog's comments, hailing them on March 14, 2005 as "intelligent and discerning." Anyone who trawls through these pubescents' threads – eager to learn what such "intelligent and discerning" savants might be like – encounters more smutty allusions than any half-dozen South Park episodes will disgorge. If these scribes are among Blair's "intelligent and discerning" readers, heaven preserve us from the stupid and undiscriminating ones. The possibility exists that Blair cannot be bothered to read his own blog. If true, this would be creditable to his literary taste; but it seems decidedly self-defeating, not least when so much of his blog's content parasitically relies on neocon sources in America.

Frank Devine:

... one returns to Quadrant and examines its March 2006 issue. Whereupon the first words to leap from the page are a supercilious comment from former Reader's Digest editor Frank Devine. Addicted to the royal plural, and effortfully explaining why Australia must forever relish the prospect of more and better beach-side jihad, Devine intones:

We are embarrassed by white supremacist aspects of our past . . . it's a healthy sign that we are discomfited by the misjudgments and excesses of our forebears and that to most of us, a White Australia Policy now seems as bizarre as cigarette smoking.

Gentle reader, in that one quotation you have seen the future of Australia's intelligentsia – and its name is Marie Antoinette. To adopt the famous establishmentarian threat hurled at troublesome Hollywood starlets: would you really want to eat lunch in this town again?

Oh dear, never mind that the most famous use of the line "You'll never eat lunch in this town again" belongs to Julia Phillips, who could hardly be called a starlet, so much as a one time producer, including The Sting, Taxi Driver and Close Encounters, with a fondness for drugs.

Clearly lunch is off, if the menu is eating your own, and in public too.

There's plenty more Stove to hand at his web site, wherein he freely describes himself as editor, writer, composer, organist and narcissist, and quotes Paul Valéry, and you can find the home page here.

But still I wonder, if this is the man who looms in Colebatch's nightmares as the recalcitrant, why doesn't he name and shame him? Why must I hover in this desperate abyss of uncertainty?

Is it because Stove wrote his piece in 2006 and yet Colebatch returns to the emesis, still hurt and brooding, as if the dirty deed was still fresh in memory, the blood still dripping from the poisonous pen? 2006! And still in 2009 it upsets Colebatch and he refuses to name the unspeakable name. By golly, if that's the case, the scars run deep in the conservative camp.

Whatever. What fun it was to take this little detour down the by ways of conservative thinking and come across more vituperation than any sane mind can handle in one day, first with Colebatch tearing apart Pat Buchanan and then Stove tearing apart all and sundry.

Even a gorgon like me felt the need to cry out enough already, and head back to the path that leads out of the thickets and briars covering the conservative temple of despair.

The sight of snakes eating their tails (and their tales) is always exemplary ...

And now one final word from Stove:

One particularly haunting comment from the Pontiff bears citation: "The day the Church abandons her universal tongue [Latin] is the day before she returns to the catacombs."

Indeed. Pax vobiscum.