Seen and heard

The antidote to news avoidance is careful curation, sayeth the Prophet

When the vectors balance in stasis, when the distances cancel out, when the needle returns to the originary perfection of zero — then, with recollection and anticipation yielding to what surrounds us, we will have found a centre of our universe at last beyond compare. The unveiling of heaven while in hell. The dream inseparable from the suffering which gave it life. Know this once, and there is nothing left to know.

—Louise Michel

I haven’t done a deep-dive compilation post in a while, so here goes. I’ll share some of what I have been reading, listening to, and watching, and take the opportunity to pick your brains about a few things I’m working on.

Source

To begin, a couple of quick mentions of other Substacks, starting with Denise Shrivell’s True North aggregator: if you want a shortcut to keep up with key articles on important topics, or the best in extended writing on matters political—with an Australian-progressive focus—then True North is your go-to.

Amy Remeikis is a welcome addition to newsletter world, as is Deep Cut News, Guy Rundle and Rachel Withers. You should definitely add Emergent City and Matthew Lamb to your reading lists: I loved this recent piece by the latter. Matthew Clayfield has a great piece about the Jaipur Literary Festival, including a telling encounter with Anna Funder. Add your own recommendations in comments. Meanwhile, my full Substack recommendation list is here.

We on the left/progressive side of politics need to get much better at referencing and circulating each other’s work. Share as much as you can. Link. The network effect is real, as the right well know. Subscribe when you can afford to do so, 'cause none of this can run on love alone.

There are two new books about the Australian labour landscape that are worth your attention. One is No Power Greater: A History of Union Action in Australia by Liam Byrne. The other is Work and Industrial Relations Policy in Australia by Bradon Ellem, Chris F. Wright, Stephen Clibborn, Rae Cooper, Frances Flanagan and Alex Veen. (Anything Frances Flanagan is associated with is going to be worth your time.)

The Sunday Shot—livestreaming on YouTube on Sunday mornings and available online thereafter (so you can watch it whenever you want)—is pulling together some great panels. Jo Dyer is a brilliant host.

Let me add another plug for the citizens’ assembly conference and workshops coming up in South Australia soon.

Lucius have a new album, yay, and I have two new Lucius t-shirts (thanks Noah)! Australian singer-songwriter, Emma Swift, looks like she is kicking into gear, too, not just with new music but a new Substack. If you haven’t heard her album of Dylan covers, Blonde on the Tracks, now is the moment. Also, this is an excellent piece by my friend Andrew Stafford, based on a wander around Brisbane with Robert Foster from the Go Betweens.

Back in the early 1980s, when I lived in Sydney, I nearly ran over former NSW Premier, Neville Wran. He walked in front my old Ford panel van at the top of Oxford Street one lunchtime, crossing against the lights. I thought of this when I started rereading Brian Mckinley’s 1981 book, The ALP: A short history of the Australian Labor Party because Wran writes the book’s foreword.

No history of Australia, and scarcely a line in the history of Australia for the century, can be written without reference to the services of the men and women of the Australian Labor Party and the fundamental role the Australian Labor Party has played in building and strengthening this nation and its people.

Too true, and worth remembering as we sit contemplating—more than forty years after Wran wrote those words—what Labor has become. It’s why I’m rereading the book; to remind me. I’m also rereading Brian Matthews’ book, Federation. I’m trying to gradually get my head into that era.

A couple of academic articles of interest.

1. Ignoring harm, saving face: non-knowledge, senior public servants and the Robodebt scheme by Adam Hannah & Linda Courtenay Botterill is a discussion of “the specific strategies used by senior public servants over the life of the program to obscure or cast doubt over legal and policy advice, create misleading narratives within agencies, and sideline those who raised concerns.” I must admit, I’m endlessly fascinated by the ways in which institutional pressures and groups loyalties override rational, even moral, decision making.

2. The war on woke: continuity and change in Australian anti-elitist discourses by Marian Sawer & Kurt Sengul discusses the way the Murdoch media uses “woke” as a populist strategy to undermine progressive politics. I like it because it is alert to the hybrid nature of the media environment, as well as continuities with previous rightwing strategies such as how they used “political correctness” to achieve the same ends.

We’re watching Carême on AppleTV+ and quite enjoying it, if for no other reason than to practice listening to French. Somewhat unexpectedly, I really enjoyed A Different Man, a movie starring Sebastian Stan: laughed out loud in a few bits. Also, if you haven’t seen Stan’s portrayal of Donald Trump in The Apprentice—with Jeremy Strong playing Roy Cohn—I would recommend it highly.

Speaking of Cohn, tell me he isn’t holding back tears in this incredible exchange from House UnAmerican Activities hearings.

Paul Barclay, late of Big Ideas on ABC radio, has been working with The Australia Institute on a series of podcasts based on their recent book, What’s the Big Idea? Paul is one of the best interviewers in the country and I’ve enjoyed every episode I have listened to (working my way through them atm). (Let me just plug the interview he did with me when the last book came out.)

Speaking of former Labor Premiers of NSW.

Last week, Michelle de Kretser won the Stella Prize for her novel Theory and Practice, and during her acceptance speech she spoke some truth about what is happening in Gaza. (The relevant section starts at about 2:58 if you want to skip ahead.)

John Quiggin remains one of the few Australian commentators to speak clearly about what is happening in the US. Just wanted to pick up on this observation because it touches on something I’ve been thinking about….John writes:

The situation in 2025 is radically different. Having been vindicated by a plurality of voters in the 2024 election, Trump has governed as a radical extremist, with appointees to key positions who are, if anything, even more extreme than he is. Both domestically and internationally, he has shown a clear preference for dictatorship over democracy. And there is no reason to suppose that things will return to pre-Trump normality even assuming he leaves office as scheduled.

As bad as Trump is, there is a way in which he is bulwark against people who are much worse than him. Getting rid of Trump doesn’t solve the problem; it probably makes it worse. Trump is a symptom of a democratic collapse that has been happening for decades and that is almost irreparable. What comes next will be worse, not better. Or at least, worse before it gets better, if the better angels of the US can get their act together.

I’ve written a few pieces—here and here—about how the Trump Administration is using extra-judicial spaces to undermine the rule of law in the US and I’m completely fascinated by the concept of how such carve-outs are achieved and how blind we are to most of them. The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, is a deep dive into every sort of murky space in which various governments and the forces of capital have created these legal nether regions in order to avoid the laws—and taxes—the rest of us are obliged to obey and pay. “Atossa Abrahamian traces the rise of this hidden globe to thirteenth-century Switzerland, where poor cantons marketed their only commodity: bodies, in the form of mercenary fighters. Over time, economists, theorists, statesmen, and consultants evolved ever more sophisticated ways of exporting and exploiting statelessness, in the form of free trade zones, flags of convenience, offshore detention centers, freeports, charter cities controlled by foreign corporations, and even into outer space.”

She talks about the book in some detail in this video.

I’m going to finish with this Adam Tooze piece and I’m going to linger on it a little. Apart from being a great article in its own right, it is helping me think about something I am writing, about the way Trump is killing people. Basically, Tooze addresses the idea—common in the literature—that the Nazi death camps represent the industrialisation of political murder. He begins:

[Y]ou have the killing centers themselves, the death camps where more than half of the six million victims of the Holocaust were put to death. What kind of places are these? As they emerge from Jean-Claude Pressac’s famous account of the Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers (1989), the killing facilities at Auschwitz were archetypical industrial artifacts, designed by German engineers, inserted into the architectural ensemble of the camp.

Tooze calls this idea “an entrapping cliché” of Holocaust studies and sets about dismantling its explanatory power.

Regardless of where you sit with the general argument, the death camps are a defining feature of Nazism and I think one of the reasons people reject the claim that Trump is a latter day Nazi, or even a fascist, is because he hasn’t engaged in this sort of mass slaughter.

But when you start reading about what the US Administration is doing in terms of

• deportations and their associated violence and brutality

• its attacks on health measures as basic as vaccine provision

• its attacks on women’s health

• it’s defunding of USAID projects around the world

• its refusal to provide federal aid to states affected by fires and floods other “natural” disasters

• the ongoing military support given to Israel to help conduct its genocide in Gaza

• and countless other administrative decisions dressed up as something else but that nonetheless bring death and illness in their wake

you can’t help but feel there is some sort of contemporary equivalence between Nazi Germany and what Trump is doing.

As Bill Gates said the other day, speaking of the role Elon Musk has played in cutting funding to international aid projects, “I’d love for him to go in and meet the children that have now been infected with HIV because he cut that money…. The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one.”

Tooze’s point is that the idea of the Holocaust being a highpoint of (then) modern industrialisation doesn’t hold up because, in fact, the scale of the operation—as an industrial project—was miniscule. Compared to the war effort itself—particularly on the Russian front—or even to the industrial-scale farming that kept the German nation fed during the War, the death camps were almost an afterthought. Obviously—I hope obviously—this is not to play down the significance and sheer horror of the Holocaust, only to say that we need to better understand what “industrialisation” means in this context.

Tooze’s most scalding observation is that, in fact, as an industrial-scale act of mass murder, the Manhattan Project—the creation of the atom bomb by the US—far outweighs anything the Nazis were doing.

When taken seriously as a technological proposition, the comparison of Auschwitz to Hiroshima is even more grotesque. On the development of the atomic weapons program, the US military lavished 2 billion dollars and mobilized the most brilliant scientific minds of a generation, concentrated in a giant technoindustrial complex stretching across a continent.¹ Oppenheimer, as he unleashed the unprecedented inferno of the Trinity Test, was worrying not about unburned residue, but whether he was touching the divine power of creation and destruction.

The Holocaust was the most intensive and directed campaign of mass murder in world history. It had a truly singular logic. But it is a fallacy to imagine that this moral and political weight had a material counterpart of equal significance, involving major material trade offs, or expressing a deep relationship to the history of industrialism….

If the Holocaust is part of the history of modernity it is not because it was at the “cutting edge”, but because modernity is defined by the “contemporaneity of the uncontemporaneous”, by uneven and combined development. In this sense the coincidence of the Final Solution and the Manhattan project is significant, not for their identity, but because of the juxtaposition of two such incongruous projects of modern killing.

The idea I have been heading towards in researching the ways in which the Trump Administration is killing people—allowing people to die—is that it represents something about modern forms of bureaucracy, globalisation and information processing in a post-industrial world. That is, if the Holocaust could be seen as some sort of apotheosis of industrialised murder, what Trump is doing—through Musk and DOGE and the techbros—is a data-driven killing machine that reflects the technology of today, from cloud storage to algorithms to artificial intelligence.

I am certain that future historians will study Trump’s virtual processes of killing and ultimately see it as a sort of silent holocaust, something people will claim not to have known was going on. But Tooze’s article has made me more cautious about using the post-industrial analogy. Open to your thoughts about this.

1. Compared to the 20 million Reichsmarks spent on Auschwitz.