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A state of war in language... perhaps. I'm going to be all affronted, so pardon me Dom - certainty of defeat has never seemed a good enough reason to participate in silent consensus. I think I prefer the cruder analysis of someone like Camus to Beaudrillard; Camus doesn't give the impression that people are just abstractions and that all that needs to be changed is the structural paradigms of language. At 8:44 AM +1100 22/1/2002, Printmaker wrote: >In the meantime they are being fed and housed and protected >from harm all at the expense of the Australian public purse. "Protected from harm" - ? There are at least two documented cases of suspected child sexual abuse in these detention centres. The social workers who are allowed in are constantly saying that the conditions under which asylum seekers are kept are damaging to mental health. These are presumably the same inhuman people who throw their children into the sea to blackmail the Australian people (I don't know if you've followed the scandal on that one, Josephine, but it seems that Ruddock is - rather smugly, alas - facing an inquiry on that bit of spin). If the only means of manipulation these people have is to sew their lips together, or to starve themselves to death, then it bears a slightly more careful examination than the one you offer, which is straight off talkback radio. I'm sorry, I'm too angry to respond properly. It's the anger I feel when I read these same "queuejumper" arguments in the Herald Sun. The black front pages with the one word headline TREACHERY to announce the Woomera riots (how dare they wreck government property!) No question of how much it is costing the Australian Government to con us all by patrolling the coasts with naval ships (did you read the Naval psychologist's letter, most unusually released to the press because of the depth of his concern, on the demoralising effect this is having on naval personnel, who see the misery of these people first hand and are under orders to drive them out into the open sea?) and bribing poor Pacific nations to take "our" refugees. It costs millions of dollars a day, far more than it would cost to process these people under standard UN practice, and the price (I am only talking money here, there are other costs) keeps ballooning out. That money could, yes, be better used. Denmark sounds like a haven of civilisation compared to this place. Malcolm Fraser is sounding like a great humanitarian (who would have thought it twenty years ago?) There's no question that the refugee crisis - a direct result of the multiple and complex global forces which presently go under the vague heading "globalisation" - is not an easy issue, and there may be no "right" answer. But the response of the Australian Government is criminal. Not least because it plays - most successfully, which is what shames me - to the least attractive prejudices of the electorate. White Australia all over again. At 10:17 PM +0000 21/1/2002, domfox wrote: >Also strategic considerations. Why are they letting us see this? I mean the >photographs of the prisoners in Cuba (I keep thinking of Pound, caged, in >Pisa - this is a technique with a history), which affront and attest to an >American "arrogance" but are more importantly setting up a polemical >conflict that certain people - the affronted - are going to lose, don't ask >me how, they haven't played that move yet. The affronted are going to lose >here as well. Thatcher's Tories ruled for years by systematically outraging >their opponents in order to make fools of them. It used to be a trick of >subversives and left-wingers, but the fact is it works on anyone... The affronted are certainly on the losing side. Maybe the affronted should get smarter. The US Government is I have no doubt more sophisticated in its manipulations. The Australian Government doesn't _want_ people to see the detention centres and many people who publicise information about the conditions of the people there - like a friend of mine, the filmmaker Tahir Cambis - are banned from entering them. Best Alison -- Alison Croggon Home page http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/ Masthead http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/