In which the pond eventually gets to Our Henry ...

 

What do we want?

We want more lung cancer, we want more diseases, we want younglings smoking, or if not that develop a vaping addiction, we want to put even more pressure on the hospitals and health care system, we might even want a return to smoking in restaurants and offices and planes, heck we want a triumph for the IPA and big tobacco, because we want to return to the good old days of the 1950s, when men (and women) could look incredibly sophisticated by puffing on a fag. 

Why you'd score sex every night if you just exhaled in a seductive way...

What do the reptiles want? 

Hard to say, because the lizard Oz sent the brain fart to coventry, putting it way down the page in the digital edition, easing into it by writing it up as best they could, with hack Sarah Ison hacking away under the header Angus Taylor unveils wider plan to dismantle organised crime’s revenue streams. 

She didn't even dig up a decent illustration ...

 

The real reptile agenda remained as it has been for months, with that eternal nonce, NSW premier Minns top of the page, ma...

EXCLUSVE
‘Baby Premier’: Minns reveals ‘bitter lesson’ from pro-Palestine protest inferno
NSW Premier Chris Minns has called the policing strategy behind allowing the pro-Palestinian march to the Sydney Opera House ‘bullshit’.

By Sharri Markson 

Every word, action and thought that Minns offers to the world, and to Sharri no less - full disrespect - ensured long ago that the pond would rather vote for the Babadook than for him and his government.

As for reading the nonce, sorry, you're on your own in that trek to the intermittent archive.

The real reptile mission, climate science denialism, continued apace, with the indefatigable Geoff back in top spot, putting the canny crusading Cranstonin his box ...

EXCLUSIVE
Bowen’s climate tzars set up ‘misinformation’ unit
Chris Bowen’s department has launched a cross-agency working group as the Climate Change Authority faces accusations of pursuing a stealth carbon tax on industry.
By Geoff Chambers and Noah Yim 

As usual, it was a double barrelled assault with Geoff chambering his own round ...

Albanese government launches taskforce to combat climate policy ‘misinformation’
Chris Bowen’s Climate Ministry of Truth is hunting pesky ‘misinformation’ peddlers – otherwise known as critics of the Albanese government’s energy and climate change agenda.
By Geoff Chambers

A couple of screen caps can take care of Geoff's bleat ...

Sorry, the pond has to interrupt.

What you won't be reading about in the dis- and misinformation rag?

Dammit, the Graudian has reverted to demanding details with menaces before providing access to the yarn, so it was off to the intermittent archive with them ...

And so on and on, but back to Geoff, and in his closer, he was still offering misdirection, with talk of "zealots" in the way that Orwellian hacks do ...

What's so funny about all this? 

Well it's always ironical when an Orwellian propaganda machine, a daily provider of misinformation, lies and distortion, projects it on to others...

That link about "pesky 'misinformation pedders'" linked to a Geoff piece ... which had another of those propaganda images atop it, showing furtive, anxious figures withering under Geoff's gimlet eye ...

Remarkably the only mention of climate in that other piece was a mention of Climate 200-backed teals, so the link itself was a form of misdirection and misinformation, though perhaps it helped Geoff in his martyrdom syndrome ...

The other link featuring the "energy and climate change agenda" did at least link to Geoff and Noah blathering on about climate change ...

Documents reveal energy firms promised $40bn to win deals on Labor’s marquee renewables scheme
Cash payments, Indigenous artwork commissions and free energy systems – the extraordinary price renewable companies are pledging for social licence under Chris Bowen’s secretive scheme.
By Noah Yim and Geoff Chambers

The pond would have liked to linga longa with the man currently atop the lizard Oz's current Orwellian propaganda machine - clearly the canny Cranston needed a break - but duty called on the extreme far right ...

Oh sheesh, not more of it ...

Climate authority has no business tackling tax policy
The Climate Change Authority’s foray into business tax inputs threatens regional industries and risks driving up living costs.
By Tania Constable
Contributor

Where do the reptiles get them from?

Tania Constable is chief executive of the Minerals Council of Australia.

Ah, say no more, how foolish of the pond ...it was obvious where this would be going from the get go ...

When Tania is asked by young 'uns what she did in the climate change wars, she can look the younglings in the eye, and proudly say she did what she could to ensure that the planet became a hellfire for climate activists ... and everybody else too, but what the hell Archy, toujours gai ...

Sheesh, more than enough already, now can the pond get on with the real business at hand, the most important intellectual foray into Orwellianism the reptiles offer each week.

It's the hole in bucket man on a Friday, and this day it's a doozy ...

The header: Why the intellectual left can’t let go of Mao’s Cultural Revolution; From Sartre to Foucault, intellectuals flocked to Mao’s Cultural Revolution and applauded its horrors. Sixty years later they are repeating the mistakes of the past.

The caption the snap setting the tone for Our Henry's rant: An illustration of Mao Zedong talking to his people from Lily Xiao Hong Lee’s book, Woman of the Long March.

This is an exceptionally handy form of misdirection.

Our Henry could have marvelled at the folly of an Iran war of choice, he could have noted the US slide into an autocracy and a brocracy ...

He had a vast palette available to him showing how the far right - and what passed once as centre right - was leading the world towards misery and disaster.

But instead he retreated into the past, into a safe space for the hive mind ...

Sixty years ago, as Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution took hold, Beijing was convulsed by an orgy of killing. In one district alone, Red Guards murdered more than 100 schoolteachers and academics in the two weeks from August 26 to September 8, 1966. Instead of being killed outright, most were tortured to death, in ordeals involving an X crudely scored into shaven scalps, whippings with copper-buckled belts, beatings with nail-spiked clubs and scalding with boiling water. Nor were educators the Red Guards’ only victims: citywide, political killings claimed nearly 2000 lives over the same period.
Mao had launched the Cultural Revolution in June. But the decisive turn came in late July, when Jiang Qing swept away every restraint on violence. “When good men beat bad men,” she declared, relaying Mao’s instructions, “the bad men merely get what they deserve.”
Thus began China’s descent into the abyss. In Guangxi, on the Vietnamese border, cannibalism became part of the punishment ritual: people branded “demons and monsters” were cut up alive; their livers, believed in traditional Chinese medicine to contain the soul, were removed; and local party officials encouraged banquets at which human flesh was mixed with pork.
Meanwhile, at the other end of China, authorities hunting an imaginary separatist conspiracy brutally interrogated some 790,000 ethnic Mongols, permanently disabling 120,000; another 20,000 were executed or driven to suicide.

This is water off a duck's back to the pond, what with the pond never having been charmed by Mao, or for that matter Stalin, in much the same way that the pond isn't currently charmed by sociopathic Vlad the invader or mad King Donald, with his devotion to North Korea and Vlad ... with The Death of Stalin one of its favourite films, and with Steve Buscemi doing a rich comedy turn as Nikita, Soviet leaded Nikita Khrushchev farewelled by Chinese leaders Mao Zedung and Liu Shao-chi after 10th anniversary celebrations of Chinese Republic.

Our Henry can't contemplate what Faux Noise has wrought in the United States, nor is he willing to understand how a cruel dictatorship might at the same time result in material success, helping explain why the pond is currently driving around in a Chinese-manufactured EV, with many other Chinese-made gadgets in the house (for that matter, where would the Allies have been without Stalin in the second world war?)

By the time the Cultural Revolution was over, the dead numbered over one million. Yet none of its crimes dampened the enthusiasm of the Western intellectuals who flocked to admire socialism’s latest great experiment.
Drab and discredited, the Soviet Union could no longer plausibly pose as humanity’s earthly paradise. Exotic China – a land of mystery, beauty and purpose, rising to greatness after decades of Western humiliation – became the vessel for revolutionary romanticism’s every hope.
Hailing what Australian author Dymphna Cusack had already said was not a “revolution” but a “resurrection”, Maoism’s achievements were vaunted in messianic terms. Returning from China when the killing was at its worst, fabled Harvard Sinologist John K. Fairbank described a “miraculous” transformation that had made the Chinese “healthy, well-fed and articulate about their role as citizens of Chairman Mao’s new China”. Echoing the Gospels, Australian-born Harvard scholar Ross Terrill proclaimed that Maoism had “healed the sick, fed the hungry and given security to the ordinary man”.
China, American psychologist Carol Tavris reported, had “eliminated many of the diseases that the flesh is heir to” – including “prostitution, drugs, theft, rape, murder and litter”.
But such “dreamlike” accomplishments were only a small part of the Cultural Revolution’s appeal, especially to those who embraced Maoism as a political creed. What it truly fed was the intellectuals’ longing for total revolution: the fantasy not merely of changing the world but of remaking humanity itself. Better still, “culture” stood at the project’s very heart, installing intellectuals at the revolution’s commanding heights.
That the new world would emerge blood-drenched from the old was not an unfortunate blemish: it was a vital part of the attraction. Bourgeois violence, Jean-Paul Sartre maintained in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), was repressive; the violence of the oppressed, unleashed in a “sublime revolutionary upsurge”, was inherently regenerative. Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) – to which Sartre contributed a sanguinary preface – built on that foundation, casting violence as a “cleansing force” that cured the black man’s “inferiority complex” by shattering the white man’s privilege.

It's easier just to traduce the left, when it might have been just as easy to traduce all those intellectuals who thought Herr Adolf was mighty fine, or who have fallen into line with the Orange Mussolini, but no Our Henry, in his simple-minded way picks obvious targets ... Jean-Paul Sartre

The pond knew that there would be a real point to all this rabbiting on ...

Michel Foucault carried the legitimation of violence further still. Until the Cultural Revolution, he had cut a relatively conventional figure: soberly dressed and largely detached from university politics. Almost overnight, he reinvented himself: drastically altering manner and appearance, he joined the Gauche prolétarienne (Proletarian Left), France’s most extreme Maoist sect.
This was not merely a choice of viewpoint but of identity, with admiration for terror at its core. Violence, Foucault said, was an understandable “act of vengeance against the oppressive classes”; once it seized power the revolutionary vanguard would quite rightly “exert a power that is violent, dictatorial, and even bloody”. Ashamed of having played no part in the May 1968 student rebellion, Foucault conspicuously hurled rocks from a safe height at riot police, experiencing a cathartic, highly sexualised feeling that his partner described as “a definitely Nietzschean ‘joy in destruction’ ”.
Throughout the West, Maoism’s converts likewise adopted a total identity, with dress and the Little Red Book – which Lin Biao called a “spiritual atom bomb of infinite power” – serving as litmus tests of revolutionary authenticity. Two of the founding members of Germany’s Red Army Faction, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, waved little red books in the air at their first trial in Frankfurt. More comically, this paper reported in October 1971 that a young Brisbane radical attended a university disciplinary hearing “in full Chinese workers dress – blue cotton tunic, matching cap, two-inch-square Mao badge and well-thumbed Little Red Book”.
The China these Maoists revered was not a real country: they worshipped “la Chine dans nos têtes”, the China in our heads – a China purged of every fact that might disturb their faith.
Those facts were there for anyone who cared to look. As early as 1967, René Viénet, who taught at Nanjing University, denounced the Cultural Revolution’s horrors; Father László Ladány’s Hong Kong-based China News Analysis meticulously documented them week by week. Then, in 1971, Simon Leys published The Chairman’s New Clothes, demolishing the Maoist myth.

A snap heralded the real point ... Palestinian Hamas militants spictured (sic) during a military training training (sic sic) session in Gaza City. Picture: Mahmud Hams / AFP

After a little more ranting, the real point came ...

But to Foucault and his comrades, it scarcely mattered that the “Cultural” Revolution had slaughtered Chinese scholars and devastated the country’s cultural heritage. What mattered was absolution for the sins of their imperialist forebears, forgiveness for basking in the bourgeois comforts of an affluent society – and, most of all, the exhilaration of imagining themselves at history’s spearhead, borne on the “wind from the East” into a sunlit future.
That sunlit future left China in ruins, its people reduced to abject poverty. Yet startlingly few of the Western leftists who had hailed the Cultural Revolution later acknowledged their error, much less grappled with its causes. Foucault remained enthralled by total revolution, insisting on its necessity. Contending that “morality is a residue of the old world”, his colleague, Alain Badiou, refused to mourn Maoism’s “hundreds of thousands of dead”: “violence, often extreme”, he argued, marks “every attempt to practice a free politics”. As for Slavoj Žižek – the New New Left’s intellectual darling – he acknowledged that “the Cultural Revolution miserably failed” yet insisted that “terror is the condition of freedom”.
For these leading left-wing intellectuals, liberty must come wrapped in death. And the exaltation of bloodshed still quickens the hearts of today’s useful idiots, just as it did those of their predecessors.

The real point?

Yes, they have traded the Mao badges for keffiyehs, replaced an imaginary China with an imaginary Hamas and morphed yesterday’s “imperialist running dogs” into “filthy Zios”. But the yearning is unchanged: to be swept up in the human tide of total revolution, to be cleansed of every sin, to be intoxicated by the sheer thrill of violence. The Cultural Revolution is over. Sixty years on, its virus remains as lethal as ever.

How could the pond resist?

Here's a man who fellow travels with ethnic cleansers and those inclined to genocide ...

Far-right Israeli minister outlines plan for removal of all Palestinians from Gaza
Itamar Ben-Gvir claims proposal for illegal forced displacement of 2 million people is ‘realistic’ and ‘concrete’ (intermittent archive link)

How about a little palate cleanser? A reminder where Our Henry's rhetoric leads? How about a reading from Haaretz? 

What with Orwellian abuse of words today's reptile feature ...

Israeli Settlers Turn Words Into Action. So Should Their Opponents
The Israeli right hates the phrase 'violent settlers' but it loves 'voluntary emigration.' Confronting both will mean adopting the strategy that settlers and Israel's government have perfected

Say what?

"genociders," "violent Zionist colonizers," "Nazi invaders."

That about summarises the company Our Henry likes to keep ...

Our Henry learn a lesson? Is it possible for lickspittle fellow travellers ever to learn a lesson?

Luckily some are not as competent as others in the killing fields ... even if it lets mad mullahs off the hook, and actually helps to solidify their repressive regime ...

Sociopaths everywhere ...so many Lord Haw Haws of the lizard Oz and Our Henry kind ...