(Above: key representatives of the Workers' News break bread with Colonel Gaddafi).
Malcolm Turnbull starts the day off by proving he's an expert Maoist, with Let a hundred flowers bloom in the broadband field.
This is often misquoted as a thousand flowers blooming, when the correct term refers to the Hundred Flowers campaign or the Hundred Flowers Movement, inspired by Chairman Mao.
"Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting progress in the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land."
Turnbull seems to think it will work just as well with broadband. Can someone make sure the shadow minister keeps his paws off the sewerage, water supply and electricity? The last thing I need is a hundred flowers blooming in the workings of the toilet ...
Or perhaps it's just a mischievous Fairfax subbie at work.
Or perhaps Turnbull thinks the rehabilitation of Maoist thinking proceeds apace in the Liberal party.
Not to worry. We now cross live to Greg Sheridan for an update on Colonel Gaddafi in Dictator's useful idiots happy to take his money.
Sheridan lathers himself up into a frenzy over the Workers News, a bunch of Trotskyite splitters who'd split from the splitters, and who apparently have in the past found some charm in the thoughts and works of Gaddafi.
It seems that Gaddafi in his day was celebrated by leftists and progressives, and accordingly must be reviled by Sheridan as useful idiots, only too happy to deal with the colonel and take his cash in the paw.
There was a period in my life where I couldn't wait each week to visit the big news stand at Sydney's Town Hall to read the new edition of the Workers News. This was the journal of a Trotskyite grouplet, the Socialist Labour League. It was financed in part by Gaddafi's munificence, and I rejoiced at the exotic ideological material it offered. In among the routine denunciations of uranium mining and calls for greater trade union militancy would be a couple of pages extolling Gaddafi's fatuous and incoherent green book and the Libyan revolution.
And so Sheridan manages to spend the entire piece not once mentioning George W. Bush. And yet he speaks of useful idiots.
You have to think that, compared to the Workers' News, Bush was not only useful, in his day he was powerful ...
In a further sign of warming ties, U.S. President George W. Bush called Libyan leader Col. Muammar Gaddafi on Monday to voice satisfaction at a U.S.-Libya deal to compensate victims of terrorism, the White House said.
A senior official said there were no records of any previous U.S. president speaking to Gaddafi, who seized power in a 1969 military coup.
Now there's a useful idiot. And who complained?
Rights groups say Gaddafi's reign has been marked by human rights abuses and restrictions on freedom of expression. (here).
The usual rights groups. Probably a doltish bunch of tiresome liberals.
At the same time - this was in 2008 - Condolezza Rice, a thoroughly useful idiot, was planning to meet one of Gaddafi's sons, Saif al-Islam.
Yep, it was a long trek back from the days when Ronald Reagan dubbed Gaddafi the "mad dog" of the Middle East, but thanks to the Bush and Blair administrations, the Colonel made it. This in 2006:
When I called on Libyan Leader Muammar Gaddafi in his Bedouin tent last year, he was at pains to explain how he and President Bush were on the same wavelength. In all his years as a bad boy in the eyes of the West, he said, Libya was simply doing what Bush did when he invaded Iraq. "Bush is saying that America is fighting for the triumph of freedom," Gaddafi said between sips of tea. "When we were supporting liberation movements in the world, we were arguing that it was for the victory of freedom. We both agree. We were fighting for the cause of freedom."
At the time, it may have sounded like the typical ramblings of the Libyan leader. But now, a year later, Gaddafi and Bush do apparently see eye to eye. On Monday, Gaddafi accomplished one of history's great diplomatic turnarounds when Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice announced that the U.S. was restoring full diplomatic relations with Libya and held up the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya as "a model" for others to follow. Rice attributed the ending of the U.S.'s long break in diplomatic relations to Gaddafi's historic decision in 2003 to dismantle weapons of mass destruction and renounce terrorism as well as Libya's "excellent cooperation in response to common global threats faced by the civilized world since September 11, 2001." (Why Gaddafi's Now a Good Guy)
Damn you Workers' News and your covert deep operations to bring Trotsky to America.
Of course there's not a word of any of this in Sheridan's rant, which concludes thusly:
Dearie me, so Sheridan thinks that George Bush and Condeleezza Rice are Western activists and intellectuals who displayed utter absolute intellectual and moral bankruptcy by embracing the Libyan dictator?
But, but, but what are we to make of Sheridan's A great president for these terrible times back in 2006:
Let me be the first to offer a bold, revisionist view. George W. Bush may well be judged, ultimately, a great president, especially in foreign policy, especially in the war on terror. This consensus won't form for 20 or perhaps 30 years.
Bush resembles Harry Truman. This is not an original observation on my part. Bush himself sometimes makes the comparison.
Bush resembles Harry Truman. This is not an original observation on my part. Bush himself sometimes makes the comparison.
Bush himself makes the comparison?
Well it must be right then.
What a relief to know that Bush was a Democrat all along, he just kept it a tad hidden.
Well we've already had the anonymous editorialist at The Australian comparing Tony Blair to a mix of JFK and Winston Churchill, so it's good there are useful idiots ready to extol the virtues of George 'call me Harry' Bush.
Naturally Sheridan also doesn't mention Tony Blair's infatuation with Gaddafi, or more particularly with his control of Libyan oil, and the unseemly moola that goes with it. Google Blair and Gaddafi and there's a good chance you'll find them hugging ... all that's missing is the gotcha snap of the pair in bed.
No, no, no, it's those hugely influential deviants at the Workers News who cop Sheridan's righteous anger.
It's the same kind of bizarre logic that produces this kind of bon mot:
The same is true of all those who supported getting rid of Saddam. They have nothing to apologise for. If you opposed Hitler and he was replaced by the even more murderous Stalin, as happened for much of eastern Europe, you were still right to have opposed Hitler. The obligation then was to oppose Stalin. (Ousting Saddam was right).
Uh huh. So that's why in the second half of his piece, Sheridan forgets his war with the progressives and the socialists and makes an impassioned plea for an immediate Western military intervention in Libya ... since it seems that right at this minute, we have a Stalin on hand ready to bomb the civilian population into submission.
Ha, gotcha.
Sheridan actually spends the second half of his column meandering and maundering through memories of an interview he conducted with Saif Gaddafi. In the process, Sheridan compares Saif's dress sense to John Pilger's.
Oh dear, that Pilgering Sheridan copped on ABC television - on the way he has been a thoroughly useful idiot in relation to that dear departed, murderous dictator Suharto - must still sting a little.
Indonesia's Suharto was an authentic giant of Asia, a nation-builder, a dictator, a changer of history.
He was also, for Australia, the most important and beneficial Asian leader in the entire period after World War II.
He was also, for Australia, the most important and beneficial Asian leader in the entire period after World War II.
If you can hold down the rising gorge at the rapture, you can cop more of it at Farewell to Jakarta's man of steel. There you can find the killings and the invasion of East Timor swept under the carpet along with this sort of risible assessment:
The worst, but by no means the only, human rights excess under Suharto occurred in East Timor, during and after its incorporation into Indonesia in 1975.
Suharto’s rule had many other flaws. He was a strong president but a weak father.
Suharto’s rule had many other flaws. He was a strong president but a weak father.
Yes, he conspired in the murder of millions, but really, his main problem was that he was a weak dad.
Meanwhile, I've reached the end of my tether scribbling about ratbag commentariat members who assume that secularist atheists (often lumped into the progressive camp) are somehow infatuated with Islamic extremism. Or Christian extremism. Or come to that, minions of Murdoch fanaticism.
It brings me to an unseemly conclusion. There are many useful idiots in the world, but really when you boil it down Greg Sheridan is a hopeless foreign affairs editor, and a thoroughly useless idiot ... because the gullibility of a certain sort of minion of Murdoch is almost infinite.
Finally, in late breaking news, it's been confirmed that the Workers' News covert operations in Europe have resulted in the capitulation of Europe's leaders, at least if the insights offered by Peter Popham in Libya is peering into a vacuum of Gaddafi's making is any guide:
It is shocking to think how recently, and how obsequiously, the Butcher of Tripoli was being feted in the capitals of Europe .... the Libyan vacuum into which we are now peering – trying to envisage what might come after Gaddafi – helps explain why, once he had agreed to drop his laughable efforts to construct a nuclear deterrent, Europe's leaders were prepared to trade what remained of their dignity for a slice of the Libyan pie.
Damn you, Trotskyites and Workers' News acolytes. Using their lust for oil to turn them into useful idiots.
Let Europe and the United States and Greg Sheridan run free of your baleful influence ...
(Below: a key Workers' News representative gives Colonel Gaddafi a man hug.
For pictures of other members of the dominant Workers' News faction consorting with Gaddafi, go here to see Gordon Brown shaking hands with him, ditto Barack Obama - well we knew he was a Kenyan socialist - and Nelson Mandela, Vladimir Putin, Spain's Zaspatero, and Jacques Chirac all hanging out the progressive Workers' News mat. Oh and let's not forget Silvio Berlusconi offering his cheek. Yes, he'll do it with seventeen year old girls, and he'll do it with Gaddafi when there's oil in the air).
Sheesh, so many Western activists and intellectuals showing utter, absolute intellectual and moral bankruptcy, so little time.
Hmmm, now why am I not surprised at all that the young Greg Sheridan was all cuddly with the Socialist Workers...
ReplyDeleteSheridan is a goose. On QandA the week before last and he kept quoting "people I have spoken with" as though that was evidence enough. Bush used to say "folks tell me...".
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, unless you tell us who they were, ie were they sufficiently well placed to give an informed opinion, then such phrases are meaningless?
Secondly, however, they do serve one purpose - self-aggrandisement. There's something phony about name-dropping when you don't actually drop any names.
Sheridan is like Kochie and the other talking heads flown into Christchurch by the Aus media - the story is secondary to the commentator.