She's baaack !

Earlier we joked that surely the Institute of Public Affairs ( The Sydney Morning Herald's legal writer Richard Akland says the IPA is often referred to as the "Institute of Paid Advocacy ") should admire Ayn Rand,  just as US Republicans on the hard right have rediscovered the woman who exhibited all the traits of a text book psychopath.

We spoke too soon. For there she is on the IPA's website with her book The Fountainhead  promoted as one of the "100 Great Books Of Liberty" that must be read by all. They claim that Rand's book is one of the books that " laid the foundation for the modern world". Alarmingly, they are right.

Rand described Howard Roark, the hero of her novel The Fountainhead thus: "He was born without the ability to consider others."

To Rand this was an admirable trait. In an interview with Mike Wallace in 1959 she said "you only love those who deserve it". Those who expressed altruism or a love of their fellow man were weaklings according to Rand who abhorred all religions and in particular Christianity which she considered akin to Communism.

Writing in 1927 about a ghastly killer  named William Hickman who strangled a 12 year old girl he had kidnapped and then sadistically set about dismembering her body with a pocket knife, Rand said this :
 "Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should," he has "no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel 'other people.'".

She could have been describing the ideals of her weird philosophy 'objectism'.

When she died in 1982 Rand was discovered-as an advocate for the demolition  of social security and government health programmes, to be receiving both.

Her funeral was paid for by an admirer Alan Greenspan who hung on her every word. Greenspan became the Chairman of the US Federal Reserve and as an exponent of the 'free market' like Rand actively promoted the dismantling of financial controls that in turn set-up the USA for the sub-prime financial crisis of 2007 that has wrecked thousands of lives in the US.
Be afraid. Very afraid.

# Fresh from his demolition of Noam Chomsky in that organ of intellectual discussion-the Daily Telegraph, a missive arrives from IPA fellow Ted Lapkin to inform us that the term "enemy combatant" is indeed a legal concept-and he is right. Except an enemy combatant is a fighter for a state that a country is at war with.

Unfortunately it defeats Lapkin's claim that former Guantanamo Bay inmate David Hicks was an enemy combatant as no legal declaration of war has been made against the 'state' of Al Qaeda, Afghanistan or indeed, Iraq.

No problem there for Lapkin though : "the US has fought many armed conflicts without the benefit of a formal declaration of war", he says. So that's all right then. Might is right.

 Here is Mike Wallace's 1959 "I'm Alright Jack' interview with Ayn Rand :

Newspaper Catches Up

It's become quite common now-we lead the way, others follow.

The Sydney Morning Herald today has published a far more eloquent piece than we could hope to produce on the Institute of Public Affair's Ted Lapkin's trashing of not just former Guantanamo Bay inmate David Hicks but the entire audience for having the temerity to attend a discussion with Hicks and applaud him afterwards. Lapin's piece appeared in the same newspaper.

David Hicks & wife Aloysia chat to NSW Governor Marie Bashir

Not only did Lapkin engage in twisting legal concepts, he made a gratuitous attack upon the moderator of the Hick's event Donna Mulhearn who travelled to Iraq at the beginning of the conflict to be a 'human shield'.

Former SBS presenter Mary Kostakidis lays out the case and dissects Lapkin's  attempts to bend even the slightest piece of information into a condemnation of Hicks. :

"In the Herald yesterday, Ted Lapin from the Institute of Public Affairs, persisted with the Howard government's demonetisation of Hicks with no regard for history, facts or the rule of law."

One issue is the persistent false claim that persons are 'illegal combatants" in the yet to be formally declared  "War On Terror" It's a term used by George W. Bush, former PM John Howard , Tony Blair and numerous others.

It is a fallacy and a meaningless term. It has no legal definition and never has under any of the laws of the countries whose leaders use it nor does the UN accept the term. The US Supreme Court tossed out Bush's attempts to write it into law and Barack Obama finally abandoned the term last year after trying to do likewise.

Hicks was held unlawfully at Guantanamo Bay because there was no law to hold him elsewhere. Howard admitted that Hicks has broken no Australian law.

The US simply swept people up on any pretense and 'rendered' them to Cuba. Hicks was grabbed at a bus stop by the corrupt criminal gangs comprising the Northern Alliance and handed to the US for a bounty.

Read Mary's response to Ted Lapkin here.

Illustrating the dangers of people like Lapkin and the laughingly named Institute of Public Affairs in the fascist style distortions they help promote one only has to read the comments that follow Kostakidis' piece and plenty of readers bang on with this 'enemy combatant' falsehood because it's been drummed into their heads a thousand times.

Compulsory reading for the Lapkins of the world should be this piece by the former US Chief Prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, Ben Ferencz who at over 90 years of age has seen the precedents set at the WW2 trials to determine who was a war criminal trashed just 60 years after they ended :

 "My Government Today Prepared to Do Something for Which We Hanged Germans"

# The publishing of Hick's autobiography puts the current government in an interesting position. Under the proceeds of crime legislation profits made from books published by convicted persons can be confiscated after court action. 

Will the government take such action and open up the can of worms that may expose former powerful politicians and the lies they told ?.

Ghastly Right Wing Think Tank Attacks Writer

Let us introduce you to the Institute of Public Affairs.

David Hicks & wife Aloys

Just as the USA has been plagued by 'think tanks' Australia is beset by these well funded groups who usually sing from the same song sheet : the free market will be our saviour and we should still (despite the GFC) be worshipping at the feet of Hayek and that old phony Milton Friedman.

There's the usual guff about privatised medicine being a god send and currently on it's website, a homage to that nutty historian Geoffrey Blainey who coined the term "black armband of history'.

That's a  re-visionist view of the decimation of the Aboriginal people that basically says the disappearance of the Tasmanian Aboriginals was of their own doing and not a result of hundreds of colonists using them for target practice- that the 'Stolen Generation; is a myth despite it being written into government policy in the early 1900's and anyway, all those little half caste kiddies looked much nicer in their Mission Home smocks and being wrenched from their wailing mother's arms was for their own good.

Blainey all wild-eyed collared the Shuttle one night a few years ago at a party and gave your scribe a potted history of Aboriginal self administered negligence in failing to stay alive and mistook the fact that he was standing by the Champagne Bar from whence we re-filled our flute as a concerned interest in his crack pot ideas. Thankfully the old bugger has retired now,.

If this was the USA no doubt the IPA  too would have elevated that fruit loop Ayn Rand to Goddess like status as the loopy right have recently. Needless to say, they are Climate Sceptics.

Writing as a fellow of the IPA Ted Lapkin in a piece titled "Audience On their Feet For a Fraud " has berated the entire audience who watched former Guantanamo Bay prisoner David Hicks talk about his autobiography at the Sydney Writer's Week on Sunda

Hicks plead guilty ( after 6 years confined in a tiny cell) to 'providing material support for terrorism' (apparently guarding a burned out tank). He was sentenced to time served  plus another 9 months in Australia. His defending counsel including US Army Major Michael Mori said the guilty plea was in sheer desperation to get out of Gitmo.

Despite the Pentagon's  former Chief Prosecutor Colonel Morris Davis saying that the Hicks should never have been prosecuted and his case was replete with political interference from the George W. Bush and John Howard governments, Lapin knows far better.

There was no evidence against Hicks but Lapkin surmises by cobbling together a series of un-related events and throws in a quote from Martin Amis to condemn Hicks in an odd case of 'guilty by association' that somehow proves that Hicks was basically in cahoots with the former Pakistan resident O.bin Laden.

Lapkin isn't too sure if Hicks was an "enemy combatant" or an enemy soldier in the perpetual ( but never legally declared ) War On Terror.

Despite the Bush administration attempts to legalise 'enemy combatant' status  the US Supreme Court has rejected it and Barack Obama has finally abandoned the wording.

Martin Amis

He clutches at straws in his convected outrage that Hicks should be afforded an audience at a writer's forum (despite the concept that it will be an exchange of ideas) and gets to the nitty gritty: the taxpayers funded the event IE : a room and some chairs.

Lapkin has plunged the depths of quotes to justify his hate piece, from former ASIO  director Denis Richardson who during his tenure provided the false claim that Iraq was replete with WMDs to the diminutive writer Martin Amis. who apparently said (long before his embarrassing love letter to Christopher Hitchens)  : "People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the apologists for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist, and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those that want them dead."

So there. Amis said that so it confirms all our fears about lefties and Hicks as well.

Lapkin promotes a right wing agenda via something as simple as distorting the tale of the hapless Hicks who was caught up in events way beyond his control.

But why is this tosh being published in an august organ like the Sydney Morning Herald ?.
Probably because they provide free copy yet a few weeks ago Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood said on the ABC's  Media Watch " What I'll be saying is that we'll be investing in creative journalism, the journalism that people read".

Lapkin's piece was certainly creative. He uses a couple of bravado boasting letters Hicks penned years ago as proof. He says we must believe what Hicks wrote then but not what he writes now.
 
Two weeks later Hywood said 300 staff including 80 sub-editors had to accept 'voluntary redundancy'.

At this rate, is it any wonder Fairfax's Canberra Times ran an Trivia Quiz last week put together by Pagemasters-the outfit who will replace the sub-editors and journalists (and 40% owned by Rupert Murdoch) where every answer ended up with a nickname for penis !