Journalism was an accident. After five years of high-school, where I stubbornly maintained my intellectual torpor, I was shocked to learn that I’d been narrowly accepted into my preferred university course. Lacking the ability to become a professional athlete, I thought sports reporting a reasonable alternative. Failing that, I’d learn carpentry or sell synthetic acid to surfers.
University was jarring. I soon learnt that, for first-year English students, there were mandatory “Cultural Theory” units with names like: “Dissembling Derrida”, “Foucauldian Discourse” and “The Dialectics of Fuck” (I’m paraphrasing, folks). But the only European names I knew kicked a ball, and having resolved to spend my professional life writing about them, I was alarmed.
My English faculty was staffed with rebels – you could tell by their sandals and how often they drank with students – but the true academic rebel, I thought, could be identified by their willingness to be understood. And there were fewer of those.
At the time I was reading the essays of D.H. Lawrence, the priapic bloke whose books we once banned, then accepted as classics, then ignored, and today, were he a new author, would probably ban again. In 1926, innocent of post-structuralist theory, he wrote: “Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticising. Criticism can never be a science... All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudo-scientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.”
My teachers would’ve said that Lawrence was naive, and he probably was, but what if that was his virtue? So let the academy’s technicians assume custody of his corpse, I thought, and make their graceless incisions. Lawrence will live forever – perpetually thirsty in the spirit glades of Nottingham.
Our course sharpened our cultural attention, but one terrible side-effect of teenagers studying Cultural Theory was the sudden and unshakable sense of one’s worldliness. In the campus pub, friends condemned jean commercials as shrewd exploitations of masculine anxiety, while the exclusively female tile-spinners on Wheel of Fortune were a reminder of our infinite condescension of women. Both true, I suppose, but my peers were demanding trophies and syndicated columns for their insights.
Denim, corduroy, a battered but largely unread book of Romantic poetry – I was weighted with affectation also. But none so great, I thought, as my department’s application of Theory. Technically I was enrolled in English Literature, but it was really a radical politics course run by horny Marxists with a taste for outdated linguistic theory and the belief that every book written by a dead white guy was a form of violence.
I became sceptical, then defiant. English teachers who spoke of “collectivities of knowledge production” did not love language. These post-modern theorists of language were its worst vandals, and I vowed to escape their labyrinths of jargon in which they served as a tenured Minotaur.
I became a young reactionary. I wanted to liberate my passion from their baffling sophistications. My teachers seemed to think that my love for literature was gauche, my aesthetic pleasure naive, my spiritual concerns antiquated, and my belief that the Western canon might be something other than a hegemonic fist as dumb or fascistic.
It didn’t seem to matter to anyone that the Canon wasn’t monolithic; that it variously ignored, refuted or revised its parts. It didn’t seem to matter that it was raucous and spoke of humbling universalities of existence. Now, sure, the Canon shouldn’t oblige fealty – nor be excused of its racial and gendered exclusiveness – but to be fundamentally dismissive of it seemed dull and self-defeating.
Regardless, all letters were power they said, and Dead White Men were to be prosecuted for exercising it. In their litigious fury, aesthetic genius could be dismissed as a cheap illusion of power, and a young man reading Dickens dismissed as a patriarchal dupe.
Having imposed their cryptic dogmas, the Minotaurs deepened the very student indifference that allegedly tormented them. But I, sweet waif, wept at the close of The Great Gatsby – not for the plot’s resolution, but the grace of its language.
These frustrations, I suppose, constituted political interest. But it was my work on the student newspaper that really woke it. An early story I wrote, around March 2001, was a profile of two young Afghani women who had arrived in Perth after fleeing the Taliban. We discussed the group’s destruction of the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan. They described horrors to me. They expressed their relief in coming here.
Then came September 11, 2001. On that evening, I was sitting in a pub booth. The ex-boyfriend of my companion suddenly appeared and told us a helicopter had crashed into the White House. Information was badly fractured then. We held this shard and were bewildered. Was it an accident? Our messenger shrugged. Fatalities? Another shrug. Where had he heard it? His mother said it was on the radio.
We quietly resumed our pints, before the television above the bar was turned on. It showed not the White House, but the smouldering North Tower of the World Trade Centre. A terrible accident, we assumed. Hadn’t a B-52 once hit the Empire State? Within minutes came live footage of the second impact, which we mistook for a replay of the first. More confusion – why were both towers ablaze? Then... realisation, anxiety and a terrible sense of awe.
* * *
One of the patron saints of my university’s department was Jean Baudrillard – post-structuralist, provocateur, nihilistic charlatan – who famously said that the Gulf War never happened. He didn’t mean this literally. Rather, he wrote, it was an “atrocity masquerading as a war”. Spooked more by the public’s revulsion with the Vietnam War, rather than the substance of their disgust, the US government sought to manage its news coverage like Michael Bay. This meant enfolding reporters, feeding them lines and banking on their gratitude and patriotic enthusiasm. It worked. When victory was announced, Dan Rather wept on-screen as he described “Old Glory” rippling in the desert breeze.
The first war to be broadcast live, CNN’s images ostensibly brought combat into distant homes – but, Baudrillard argued, it was really propaganda about the bloodlessness and technical supremacy of the operation. A simulation, in other words, designed to entertain and hearten.
A decade later, one couldn’t say the same for 9/11. Very little was managed about the coverage. Cameras were everywhere, both professional and amateur. The queasy confusion of the broadcast journalists was obvious, authentic and complemented the viewers’ own. Accurate reports mixed with the inaccurate. The messy stitching of journalism couldn’t be concealed. In the confusion, cameras were fixed to the Towers and it would be some time before networks apologetically shifted their gaze from The Jumpers – as it was some time before studio-bound reporters realised what they were watching.
In that moment, writers were redundant. The value of metaphor plunged. The world was fixed to images. To television. That’s all you needed. We did not need to be told that the planes were like sharks, or the buildings like giant imperial cocks. The things were what they were, sufficiently shocking and comprehensible without the egotistical bathos of writers.
But St. Baudrillard gleefully rubbed his hands. His boredom with the “weak events” and “stagnant” peace of the preceding decade was finally ended (he had presumably ignored the Balkan and Rwandan genocides). September 11 was “the mother of events,” he said – an inevitable, triumphant rejection of globalisation and its insufferable ringleader. That the hijackers had turned the Superpower’s own instruments against it was thrillingly elegant. Shortly after, he wrote: “The horror, for the 4,000 victims, of dying in those towers was inseparable from the horror of living in them – the horror of living and working in sarcophagi of concrete and steel.”
At my university, this grotesque blathering was received like a divine sermon because it blended pretension with an unyielding hatred of America.
Anyway, after we left the pub to watch from home, there was similarly lofty censure of the victims. My Chomsky-loving mates had not heard of al-Qaeda before, but were quick to declare – even as they watched people fall from the height of clouds – US arrogance as the lone root of this carnage. Live footage of mass suicide couldn’t humble them. Eventually they went to bed and left behind a mist of callow theorising.
I stayed on the floor, silent, and then watched the towers collapse.
* * *
The geo-political assessments continued on campus, but it just seemed like schadenfreude masquerading as wisdom. The violence was glorified, and everyone was of one mind: Bush was an incurious, war-loving cowboy, to be despised more than bin Laden. It wasn’t America’s freedom the hijackers despised, but its imperial aggression. They weren’t evil aggressors, but ingenious victims. Convinced of their own theories, my mates ascribed motive to the hijackers rather than listening to their own declarations of it.
But I read Sayyid Qutb, the terror group’s intellectual daddy. And, yes: they hated freedom. It was a Godless conceit. Arrogant, vulgar and illusory: man couldn’t philosophise himself free from His judgement. He was eternal. The Westerner could cut himself from God’s guidance, but never from his wrath. Allahu Akbar.
In 1949, Qutb travelled to the United States on a sort of reconnaissance mission. He lived in Greeley, Colorado, a small, dry and puritanical community. Citing little more than unsweetened tea, inept barbers and sock-hops, he concluded that the place was a modern Gomorrah. Seriously: Al-Qaeda was inspired by a crank. A radical, one-man Statler and Waldorf. And so I wrote a sketch:
INT. MADRASA – DAY
The great teacher returns to his Madrasa, where the students gather eagerly around his feet to hear stories of Satan’s America.
STUDENT #1: Pray share, dear Imam, the secrets of the mighty Infidel.
SAYYID QUTB (enjoying himself): Be patient, child. And strong. All will be shared. Allah demands it.
STUDENT #2: Then please, Imam, share them.
SAYYID QUTB: But are you ready? Are your hearts fortified?
STUDENT #3: By the grace of Allah, yes.
SAYYID QUTB (smugly): But the Infidel’s wickedness is vast and intricate.
STUDENT #1: And we are ready.
SAYYID QUTB: Very good. I’ll commence. So… their tea? No sugar. I mean, you can request some. You can add it. It’s not like they don’t offer it. But most don’t add it, on account of them being heathen pigs.
There is a lengthy, embarrassed silence.
STUDENT #1: What else, Imam?
SAYYID QUTB: Well, their barbers are bad. I’m not sure if the Devil has taken their eyes or what, but they are not fit to trim the beard of a pig.
STUDENT #2: Barbers?
SAYYID QUTB: Yes. Cruel and wicked men.
STUDENT #3: What happened, Imam?
SAYYID QUTB: I’m coming to that. But first you must prepare yourselves for my frank testimony.
STUDENT #1: We are ready, Imam.
SAYYID QUTB: Well, I wanted a little off the back and sides. As I do each week to please His eye. Neat and Godly. But this kaffir removes too much. It’s as if I’m bald. And then he has the temerity to hand me a mirror and ask how I like it! I should have cut his throat with his scissors.
STUDENT #1 (sceptically): Imam?
SAYYID QUTB (angrily): What?
STUDENT #1: It’s just… If I’m going to violently martyr myself repelling Satan’s Kingdom, well… I think I’m gonna need a little more.
SAYYID QUTB: But I’m not finished, child.
STUDENT #1: I’m sorry, Imam.
SAYYID QUTB: We now come to the great horror.
STUDENT #2: What is it, Imam?
SAYYID QUTB (gravely): The sock-hop.
STUDENT #1: The what?
SAYYID QUTB: The sock-hop.
STUDENT #3: The sock-hop?
SAYYID QUTB: Yes, my child.
STUDENT #2: Is this a new weapon?
SAYYID QUTB: No, it’s a dance. For young heathens. They remove their shoes and sort of shimmy around in their socks.
STUDENT #1: A dance?
SAYYID QUTB: As if Gomorrah itself had held a shoeless disco.
STUDENT #1: Well, did they fornicate upon the unclean floor?
SAYYID QUTB: No.
STUDENT #1: Did they press belly upon belly?
SAYYID QUTB: It was actually very chaste.
STUDENT #1: Were there rivers of liquor?
SAYYID QUTB: Ah, well, the town’s dry, you see.
STUDENT #1: Imam, I don’t understand. Where is the horror? We are prepared to wage furious war – you mustn’t feel that you should protect us from the very wickedness you teach us to fight.
SAYYID QUTB: Well, there was music. And dancing. I mean, “dancing” might suggest a certain rhythmic co-ordination that these kids didn’t possess. It was more awkward twitching. Very self-conscious group, actually. Possibly embarrassed by their haircuts.
STUDENT #1: I’m going home.
The other students follow. Sayyid is left alone, still ranting about baseball and tipping.
Of course, Bush possessed his own destructive certainties and God Himself had joined his war cabinet and fawningly confirmed the wisdom of invasion. Prospectively, the Iraq plan seemed impetuous, overly optimistic, shallowly designed, premised upon elusive intelligence, and bearing no relationship to al-Qaeda. Retrospectively, it was much worse. As reluctant as I am to question His perfection, it seems on all evidence that He’s a God-awful war strategist.
I marched against that war. And 20 years later, those responsible still remain largely unaccountable and unchastened.
*
Just as parts of the Left – notably, white Greens and Theory addicts – had no interest in understanding al-Qaeda, no interest in listening to their own beliefs and intentions, there was various equivocation, excuse-making or plain denial from the same folks when, in 2012, hideous protests were held in Sydney’s Hyde Park by Islamic fundamentalists furious about a foreign documentary. Banners, some held by children, read: “Behead all those who insult the Prophet”.
I remember this well, because at the time I was an Age columnist and had several fraught exchanges with other white folks with humanities degrees that thought this was all fine, that others were alarmist, the police brutal, and that my objection to public chants endorsing the beheading of filmmakers was racist. I have no doubt that many of those who sought to ignore or diminish this – or placed blame not upon the religious fanatics, but upon those who criticised them – also selectively believe that “words are violence” and have fashionably supported dubious trigger-warnings in classrooms.
We now come to the recent Hamas atrocities, and the pro-Palestine protests on the steps of the Opera House which followed with indecent haste and chillingly included chants of “Gas the Jews”. One man, holding an Israeli flag, was arrested “for his own safety,” NSW Police later said, and warned Jewish people to be cautious – or, better, to stay home.
Plainly grotesque. And, once again, by the same people who zealously police language, who believe certain topics verboten, who sweat the misplacement of a pronoun… Well, there was either support, equivocation, or denial.
The NSW Greens promoted the rally, and took a long time to workshop their response to the crowd’s supportive invocations of the Holocaust. Their language was much sharper, and arrived much faster, when it was white cookers wielding effigies of Dan Andrews and foaming about 5G. (And, for the record, I didn’t like those displays either.)
If you tell us that certain principles are inviolable to you, if you invoke those principles to condemn others as fascists, and if you then conspicuously falter in applying them when things get uncomfortable for you, then I cannot take you seriously.
Ignorant and insecure, George W. Bush had a fatally Manichean view of the world. But I suspect many white progressives do too: that the world is comprised of wholly good and bad people; the oppressed and oppressors. They cannot believe, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did, that “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts”.
And then there’s the English faculties, student unions and intellectual editors of political journals. This, tweeted this week by the editor of US socialist publication, The Drift, inspired for me some 9/11 déjà vu:
to search for an analogue seems almost inappropriate to Palestinians’ world-historical audacity to seize the components of self-determination for themselves, if only because the idiom of liberation invents itself anew with each instance that the yoke of bondage is sloughed off.
A near-century’s pulverized overtures toward ethnic realization, of groping for a medium of existential latitude – these things culminate in drastic actions in need of no apologia. the thrum of history as it develops is one of force; its inertia and advance require some momentum.
Hamas are jihadist cutthroats. They’re patrons of Iran’s vampiric Ayatollahs. They are avowed killers, violent misogynists and view homosexuals as vermin. Allah decrees it. They believe not merely in resisting Israeli violence, or agitating for stable Palestinian statehood, but in the violent liquidation of the Israeli state itself. Israel, inherently, is a grotesque aberration – an insult to God.
Hamas were born out of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni group founded almost a century ago, who sought to repel British occupancy but, ultimately, instate a sweeping caliphate under sharia law. Their intellectual leader in the 1950s and ‘60s was – drumroll – Sayyid Qutb, who was publicly hanged in 1966 for plotting the assassination of the Egyptian president. Qutb didn’t merely abhor American barbers and teenage sock-hops, he fanatically abhorred Jews, believing them “evil” and engaged in a “cosmic struggle” against Islam that has existed for Millenia.
Incitement of genocide is literally, and quite explicitly, written into Hamas’s original constitution. Their 1988 Charter is one of recent history’s most feverish, blood-lusty anti-Semitic texts – another Protocols of the Elders of Zion (which, in fact, the charter quotes).
That Charter had always, quietly, embarrassed Western supporters of an established – and peaceable – Palestine. It was eventually revised in 2017, but precious little that has been said or done by their leaders suggests that the alterations were little more than PR. And still enshrined in their charter is the belief that Israel is illegitimate and should be dissolved. Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian legislative election, and assumed governance of the Gaza strip the next year. There has not been an election since.
I’m not unaware of the decades of Israeli brutality. I’m basically in agreement with this piece, sent me to as I was finishing this one, and which I found, unfortunately, to have better said what I was saying. Hamas have now exposed the people of Gaza to violent, gruesome reprisal. More children will die. I don’t know what follows tomorrow, or next week, or next year – I only know that there will be more blood. Much more. And I feel fucking sick thinking about it.
But I don’t write to make friends, join groups, or to pimp my virtue. Nor do I write here to propose, preposterously, a solution. My interest in this piece is narrowed to the flagrant hypocrisy, pretentiousness, and herd-mindedness of swathes of progressives – and their weird and dissonant identification with barbarism.
I cannot take seriously a Left that can’t condemn the butchering of babies, the machine-gunning of kid ravers, or the rape of women and the parading of their bodies. I can’t take seriously those who righteously condemned anti-lockdown protests, but become tongue-tied about “Gas the Jews”. I can’t take seriously those who depend upon fashionable jargon to describe, or elide, wickedness. I can’t take seriously secular progressives who praise investigations into Catholic Church abuse, but become deaf or obtuse about Islamic fundamentalism. I can’t take seriously those who pretend to worldliness having read a chapter of Edward Said. I can’t take seriously white progressives who, time after time, find ways to sympathise with or excuse jihadist barbarism. And I can’t take seriously those who refuse to acknowledge what Hamas are and have told us they are.
I’ve seen it all before, but this week my contempt was freshly renewed.