In which the pond does a little counter-programming before settling back with Polonius and good old Shoe ...

 

The pond deliberately didn't mention the 11th hour of the 11th day yesterday, but was mildly astonished that the war mongering hive mind of reptiles also failed to feature any remembrance of that day at the top of the digital edition. 

The tree killer edition also ran without a front page mention ...

The pond has a personal reason to forget, being one of a shrinking band of those with one degree of separation from the first world war, with the pond's grandfather a machine gunner on the Somme in the depths of winter. He never talked about the war, but he returned to become a raging alcoholic and a wife beater. 

When he was off the grog, he was kind and gentle. When he was on it, he was off the planet, raging about the pink elephants near the aspidistra on the what not or locking the family out of the house, with everybody standing around on Peel street until the mood wore off. (It was a common cartoon joke back in the day about drunks seeing pink elephants, and such is the power of stereotypes and suggestion, the pond's grandfather was routinely tormented by them). 

On one memorable occasion, he and the pond's father returned from the pub pissed as parrots and tried to extract honey from the family bee hive, with predictable results. The pond can remember being ushered into the darkened bedroom and the badly swollen face gravely presiding over the handing to the pond of a sixpence for its troubles - a veritable fortune - with the waft of rum and pipe tobacco hovering in the air.

It seems remembrance in the UK has something of the same bitter sweet air, if Marina Hyde is to be believed when scribbling In remembrance of our fallen heroes, brave Suella Braverman goes over the top.

Britain is a country that will always come up with new ways to honour its war heroes. You just can’t stop us – respect simply finds a way. Thus it was that in the very week that Captain Sir Tom Moore’s family were tragically ordered to tear down their unauthorised commemorative pool and spa complex, the home secretary stepped up to mark the sacrifice of countless soldiers by using it as a plot device in her never-ending tale of personal ambition.
This week, Suella Braverman has undermined the operational independence of the police, angered politicians and communities on all sides in Northern Ireland, stoked the potential for unrest caused by the far right and antisemites at tomorrow’s pro-Palestinian march, earned a rebuke from Winston Churchill’s grandson, and so much more besides – and all out of sheer respect for the dead we commemorate this weekend and every Armistice Day.
If you could take a time machine back to the Somme, and keep some poor teenager company as he bled out in the mud, you could explain to him the honour of the chance to one day have one’s memory co-opted in this selfless way. Dulce et Decorum Est to die for the future opportunity to be used as a news peg in Suella’s leadership campaign.

That mention of the Somme and the link to the Wilfred Owen poem revived bad memories, but Hyde managed to make her Hydeing a bitter sweet read (whenever talk of war arrives, the pond always remembers a friend who returned from Vietnam, was sent out to Woop Woop to teach, and killed himself).

While on somber subjects, the pond will do one last bit of counter-programming in relation to Israel, this time from Slate, Leave or Die” An account from a Palestinian in the West Bank. ...

This as-told-to essay is an account from Nasser Nawaj’ah—a West Bank resident and field researcher for B’Tselem, a human rights organization in Israel—of the ongoing attacks by Israeli settlers amid the war in Gaza. It’s been transcribed, translated from Arabic, and edited by Aymann Ismail.
The settlers look like soldiers. They come at night, but sometimes during the day, wearing army uniforms. They execute operations against Palestinians, beating us, taking our phones and smashing them to prevent us from documenting their terror. The settlers steal things from our homes and take our money. And in the end, their message is always the same: “You have 24 hours to flee, or we will shoot you.”
The threat is terrifying. And they’ve already succeeded in forcing the expulsion of six Palestinian villages off their lands so far.
All my life, I’ve been a resident of the Susya village, a small Palestinian village. We’re in Area C in the West Bank, in the shadow of what is happening in Gaza. The settlers see this as an opportunity to take control and claim parts of Area C as their own through terrorism and violence. We know who these settlers are. They’re criminals, and they should be arrested. But at the moment, they have become the law. They administer the law. They are the army, and they do whatever they want.
Over the last three years, settler violence steadily increased day after day. Those of us who live in villages near the settlements know these settlers, especially the violent ones who assault and try to expel us. Four days ago, they came to my village at night. They forcibly entered my neighbor’s home and detained all the men and held them at gunpoint. Then they took them outside the house, and with an M16 gun pointed to the head of the house owner, they told him he had two options, and there wasn’t a third: “Leave or die.”
Things have never been scarier for us. We tried to call the Israeli police to tell them what their citizens are doing to us. They told us we are in a state of war, and that they are powerless to do anything. But even last year, my home was raided in the night by the IDF. They blindfolded and arrested me, terrifying my family, only to release me later without charge but with a stern warning: Stop “causing all the trouble in the area.” Since the beginning of the war to the south, settler violence has increased, but for us, it did not begin on Oct. 7.
Israeli authorities were here on Oct. 16 when a settler entered our village with a bulldozer. He used it to destroy and block the main road into Susya. In total, he blocked 16 roads, and since then, for three weeks now, my village has been under a complete siege. We don’t have water or medical services and supplies. People are unable to get medicine. There are people with chronic diseases, like diabetes and high blood pressure and such, who are now going without their life-dependent medicines. No children have been able to attend any of the schools in our area because of the settler terrorism and their closure of the roads.
The same day they destroyed our roads with the bulldozer, the settlers also destroyed an entire grove of olive trees, and they destroyed three water wells, the only source of drinking water for the Palestinians. They also destroyed our solar panels, knowing that our village isn’t connected to electrical services except by solar panel. Most Palestinian villages in Area C are like this. My people are living in poverty because of this very difficult siege imposed upon us by the occupation. They are waging a war on Palestinians in every aspect of our lives. And they do this, all of this, under the protection of the army and with the knowledge of the police.
None of us are able to so much as disagree with the settlers, let alone fight back, because killing a Palestinian today is very, very easy. If anyone so much as objects to the settlers, they will shoot them immediately. The settlers tell us there is no law because we are at war, and that our land is now forbidden to us, and that it now belongs to Israel. And if we stay, we will die.
The same day they destroyed our roads with the bulldozer, the settlers also destroyed an entire grove of olive trees, and they destroyed three water wells, the only source of drinking water for the Palestinians. They also destroyed our solar panels, knowing that our village isn’t connected to electrical services except by solar panel. Most Palestinian villages in Area C are like this. My people are living in poverty because of this very difficult siege imposed upon us by the occupation. They are waging a war on Palestinians in every aspect of our lives. And they do this, all of this, under the protection of the army and with the knowledge of the police.
None of us are able to so much as disagree with the settlers, let alone fight back, because killing a Palestinian today is very, very easy. If anyone so much as objects to the settlers, they will shoot them immediately. The settlers tell us there is no law because we are at war, and that our land is now forbidden to us, and that it now belongs to Israel. And if we stay, we will die.
There is nowhere for us to go. We are living through constant Nakbas...

You won't hear any of that emanating from the hive mind of the reptiles of the lizard Oz and that's why the pond feels the need to do a bit of counter-programming. 

Why not start with the keen Keane in Crikey, News Corp, climate criminals again top in tax dodging stakes, Big miners and banks paid billions in tax revenue — but fossil fuel companies and their media supporters continue to pay nothing (paywall):

The tax dodging bludgers, full of sanctimonious claptrap and redbacks in the chairman emeritus's purse...

It's almost a relief to turn to stories about Faux Noise's ongoing contributions to American democracy, as in Brian Stelter Says Fox News, Sean Hannity Singlehandedly ‘Seeded’ the Election Fraud Story That Led to Jan. 6:

...“It is remarkable to see how [Fox] seeded the ‘Big Lie’ for Trump,” Stelter continued. “[It] didn’t just happen in 2020. It was made to happen. Maria Bartiromo went on the air to talk about Dominion, with the help of Sidney Powell — the Trump-aligned lawyer — and four days later Trump started saying it.”
Next came a Trump tweet “thanking” Hannity for bringing the Colorado-based voting machine company to his attention: “It was Fox who seeded the story that gets us down the path toward January 6th.”
Stelter also agreed with Wagner’s assessment that Hannity served as a “sort of shadow chief of staff in the White House” during the time when the 2020 election was being questioned.
“What stuns me is the degree to which Donald Trump is at once the puppet master and … the puppet itself,” Wagner said.

And what about this in the New Republic? Why Is Mike Johnson Flying a Christian Nationalist Flag Outside His Office?

House Speaker Mike Johnson has three flags hanging outside his office: the American flag, the Louisiana state flag, and a flag representing a movement that wants to turn the United States into a religious Christian nation.
Normal stuff, you know?
The flag is white with a green evergreen tree in the middle and the phrase “An Appeal to Heaven” at the top. A report published Friday by Rolling Stone confirmed that the flag is outside his district office in Washington.
The flag was originally used as a banner during the Revolutionary War, but over the past decade, it has been embraced by a sect of Christianity called the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR. A central tenet of NAR’s belief system is that it is God’s will for Christians to take control of all aspects of U.S. society—including education, arts and entertainment, the media, and businesses—to create a religious nation.

Theocrats gotta theocrat ... did Mike, always ready to bash women and gays, experience any of the morning sickness diagnosed by Luckovich?

And with all that done it was time to turn, almost with a sigh of relief, to prattling Polonius doing his bit talking up Captain Spud ...

This is of course just a variant on the US disease. Better to be loathed than loved, better to stick it to the woke and the libs, and sweet victory will be yours ...

It's no surprise to see that under Captain Spud the Libs have embarked on an ethnic cleansing that would make Benji envious, with the aim to remove all wetness, including poor old Bid: Eric Abetz behind push to dump moderate Liberals, including Bridget Archer, party sources say

...The moderate Liberal MP has become increasingly outspoken against her party, recently accusing the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, of appearing to “weaponise” child abuse for some “perceived political advantage”.

Archer had crossed the floor in October after the Coalition moved to suspend the standing orders to vote on calling for a royal commission into child sexual abuse in Indigenous communities.

It marked the 28th time the Bass MP had crossed the floor against her party.

Brad Stansfield, a party veteran who once advised Abetz and is now a partner of Tasmanian lobbying and public relations firm Font PR, singled out his former boss as the driving force behind the move to stop Archer running for Bass again in the 2025 federal election.

Stansfield had earlier labelled “certain forces” looking to topple Archer as “politically crazy” in March but had declined to name names.

When asked why he didn’t name Abetz, or others he suspected of being involved months earlier, he said he “didn’t think that was appropriate at the time”.

That's the sort of talk and Erica action that gets Polonius trembling and moist with excitement ...

It will be noted that none of this shows the slightest interest in, or concern for, difficult, uppity blacks, made pawns in political feuding ...

Now back to bashing any thoughts of the moderates and moderation. Yes, as foreshadowed, Polonius had his eye on Bid ... here no moderates, no moderation here ...

To the extent that the Sydney Institute and Polonius can move heaven and earth, Captain Spud will be your vengeful master, banishing the wets to the wilderness ...

Meanwhile, with so many reptiles given a red card this weekend, the pond was only left with good old Shoe, also doing another bleat about the current government ...

Apparently it escapes this good old Shoe that there's no easy way to keep a straight face talking with a dictator, talking up the prospect of US subs before 2090 and and also chatting up the islanders, while cheerfully launching new coal mines, as a way of making sure that they'll certainly need a refuge ... and at 280 a year, the resettling should be complete around the time the first sub arrives ...

As an aside, whenever good old Shoe turns up - rare for the pond - the pond is reminded of that classic film Wag the Dog (if the tail were smarter, it would wag the dog).

There was a song celebrating the way bullies tossed hapless school kids shoes over power lines ....

Daddy had a hound dog we used to call him blue (yeah that's what his name)

He used to follow me around, stick to me like glue (Shown up)

And he's favorite thing to play with used to be my good old shoes (Yeah that's what it was)

I wish I had a woman half as good and true

To keep out of trouble the way he used to do

Someone I can depend on, just like that good old shoes

Good old shoes, good old shoes

Whatever road you're walking he will get you through

Good old shoes, good old shoes

Stand up straight and proud to way he talked to do

And you might even get to heaven so like that good old shoes

Well daddy always told me, hang on with what you got

Just smile and be thankful for that you get on the life

Grass is always greener on the other side of the field

So, before you leave, boy, just use your common sense...

Alas, common sense isn't a feature in this good old Shoe ...

Here's the thing. What did the bromancer's war on China accomplish? What did SloMo's war with China achieve? What were the practical outcomes? Did they manage to secure the release of just one of the Australian political prisoners in the grip of the dictator and his minions?

How did trade go? Are the cockies out and about deploring the renewal of trade with China? Is the wine industry anxiously waiting for bad news, pleased not to do business with dicators?

Shouldn't the reptiles be pleased that Albo's mob have stayed loyal to coal, and are sticking it to the renewables and greenie crowd? Sure, it'll fuck the planet, but aren't we offering refuge to islanders?

Is there any way to answer the question "when did you stop beating your wife?" that will satisfy good old Shoe? Apparently not ...

Yesterday, the dog botherer was cracking jokes about "stability", and today good old Shoe is demanding "credible strategic coherence"?

That's not the way in the modern world, where you're forced to deal with all sorts of weirdos, from fundamentalist Israeli theocrats to fundamentalist US Xian theocrats to dictators of the Xi kind to sociopathic war mongers of the Vlad the impaler kind, not to forget Aboriginal people blown up by Captain Spud and islanders anxious they might not have any place above the waves ...

A final reading just for good old Shoe, who no doubt recalls all the ecstatic murmurings about Modi emanating from the lizard Oz on the occasion of his visit - the bromancer was orgasmic on a daily basis - rejoicing in Albo's willingness to pander and to please.

The reading is in full in Pankaj Mishra's When the Barbarians Take Over in the NYRB, paywall.

Ostensibly it's a review of the perils faced by writers in Nazi Germany, described by Uwe Wittstock in February 1933: The Winter of Literature.

But Mishra can't help himself and sees a modern parallel (footnotes are in the print version):

...Many writers in India and Russia—two societies roiled by messianic nationalists—today confront the risks of indecision and misjudgment. The pressures on them do not always emanate directly from a rogue state and its organs. Nor are they comparable to those once exerted by the regimes of Hitler and Stalin. Nevertheless, a climate of war or militant chauvinism, and the accompanying fear of things getting worse, makes living and writing increasingly arduous, if not impossible. As the Indian novelist Anuradha Roy put it last year:

"We are perpetually in turmoil—a state of debate, worry, anger, and confusion…. Formally there is no censorship of written work, but the atmosphere of constant anxiety within a whole community of reading and writing people, a sense of there being violence in the air we breathe, is equally undermining."

Russia has witnessed, since Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine, the biggest exodus of a literary intelligentsia in our time: Vladimir Sorokin, Maria Stepanova, Maxim Osipov, Galina Yuzefovich, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, and Mikhail Shishkin are among those who have chosen exile. Writers in India, too, are trying to discern the crucial point Wittstock retrospectively identifies: when “everyday life turns into a fight for survival and when a historical moment necessitates personal decisions about one’s very existence.”

Many Indians felt after the landslide electoral victory of Narendra Modi in May 2014 something of the same “icy horror” that Sebastian Haffner knew on Hitler’s ascent to power. Modi’s elevation to supreme power had been, as Haffner wrote in February 1933, “a possibility for a long time. You had to reckon with it. Nevertheless, it was so bizarre, so incredible, to read it now in black on white.” The sense of incredulity was great also because, unlike Hitler or Putin, Modi had revealed himself as an exponent of mass violence and organized hatred more than a decade before he became head of government. He had, as a new two-part BBC documentary demonstrates, supervised or at the very least facilitated the killings and rapes of hundreds of Muslims in 2002 in Gujarat when he was chief minister of the state. A report commissioned that year by the British Foreign Office—UK citizens were murdered in the pogrom—held Modi “directly responsible” for the “climate of impunity” that led to gruesome violence. A similar belief in his complicity provoked the Bush administration in 2005 to deny him a diplomatic visa to the United States and cancel his existing business visa—a travel ban lifted only when Modi became prime minister in 2014.

For many Indians, Modi was inseparable from his right-wing, Hindu supremacist paramilitary outfit, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which since the 1920s has been culpable in numerous massacres of minorities in addition to the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi. Its founding ideologue was explicitly inspired by Nazism—Mein Kampf is extensively read and admired in India today—and convinced that India’s Muslims ought to be treated the same way as Germany’s Jews.

Modi’s nine years in power have validated all the fears incited by his apotheosis in 2014. In the culture of impunity he inaugurated, Hindu fanatics assail, often murderously, various “enemies of the people,” including writers and journalists, while he maintains a complicit silence. As noted in the introduction to PEN America’s “India at 75” series, whose contributors included Jhumpa Lahiri, Hari Kunzru, Anita Desai, Geetanjali Shree, and over one hundred other writers from India and the Indian diaspora, Modi’s election in 2014

..."transformed India into a country where hate speech is expressed and disseminated loudly; where Muslims are discriminated against and lynched, their homes and mosques bulldozed, their livelihoods destroyed; where Christians are beaten and churches attacked; where political prisoners are held in jail without trial. Dissenting journalists and authors are denied permission to leave the country. The institutions that can defend India’s freedoms—its courts, parliament and civil service, and much of the media—have been co-opted or weakened."

Citing intensifying violence and calls for mass killings of Muslims, a recent report by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ranks India at number eight on its list of countries at risk of mass killings, above Sudan, Somalia, and Syria. Once the clamor to exterminate all Muslims becomes routine, “even the most hard-bitten and cynical among us,” Arundhati Roy wrote last year, “find ourselves whispering to each other are they still posturing, or has it begun? Is it organized or out of control? Will it happen at scale?”

The loneliness of India’s literary intelligentsia is deepened by the fact that many Western politicians, businessmen, and journalists see India as a lucrative market and democratic bulwark against Chinese autocracy in the new cold war. “He is unbelievable, visionary,” US commerce secretary Gina Raimondo recently said of Modi, who was honored in June at a state dinner at the White House. Writers from India today are thus obliged to bridge a vast abyss of ignorance separating them from readers in the West—a task not faced by dissidents from Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, or from China today.

Those wishing, and financially able, to emigrate to Western Europe and the United States confront steep visa hurdles and rising anti-immigration passions, unlike their Russian counterparts, who have been relatively quickly accommodated by Western countries eager to welcome Putin’s detractors. Even if they succeed, they will struggle to find readers abroad who have an inkling of their backgrounds and preoccupations—they can’t even draw upon the news-driven interest Western readers often take in literature from societies that they can clearly identify as victims of violence and tyranny. “Inner emigration,” too, is scarcely viable, given the scale and frequency of monstrous acts by the government and their inescapably loud rationalizations in print, on television, and on social media outlets dominated by Modi’s zealots. In the face of such isolation, any decision, whether to stay or to leave, to engage or to disengage, can only be inadequate.

Writers in India today have also made Musil’s unpleasant discovery: that the liberal values essential to their task are not cherished enough by their fellow citizens. Over two national elections, they have had to confront the possibility that the leaderless masses have found their leader and nothing will dent their adoration of him.

If this turns out to be true once again—elections are due in 2024—they will have to continue to pit their powers of individual judgment against the crushing verdicts of the ballot box and the media while lurching among feelings of dread, disgust, and shame. They will also have to live with the suspicion that their heightened moral sensitivity is useless, even counterproductive. For the catalog of outrages, and the gleeful justifications made for them by politicians and journalists, expands every day; and the feeling that this can’t be happening provoked by such a deluge of atrocity paralyzes thought and over time normalizes a brutal and mendacious regime. In such a situation, platitudes about the ultimate victory of the human spirit or the importance of storytelling can only seem childish. Far better to follow Joseph Roth’s despairing but correct instincts in India’s long winter of literature, and admit that yes, we have been beaten.

Could good old Shoe explain to the pond why the reptiles are so infatuated with Modi and cheered on this authoritarian when he visited?

Could it be that there's simply too much conflict and confusion in the world to produce credible strategic coherence?

Perhaps it's catch as catch can, and a game of Red Rover, and you tag the authoritarian, the dictator, the theocrat or the fascist you prefer, and run with them, as the herd did with the Nazis in 1933...

There's a couple of cartoons that help clarify the confusion implicit in good old Shoe's incoherent cry for coherence ...