The Isocracy Network

The story of Timor-Leste is one that is close to my heart. A former Portuguese colony, it declared independence in November 1975, only to be invaded by Suharto's Indonesia less than two weeks later. The subsequent occupation was brutal, to put it mildly. The population of East Timor in 1975 was estimated to be 688,000 people; an estimated 150,000 lost their lives in the years that would follow due to direct violent killings, conflict-induced famine, and so forth. Imprisonment, torture, rape etc was rampant. All during this time, successive Australian governments considered the occupation fait accompli. But the Timorese and their allies for self-determination across the world did not give up, and in 1999 the population overwhelmingly indicated their support for independence and voted overwhelmingly (78.5%) against "autonomy" within Indonesia.

The results led to mass violence by pro-Indonesian militia. As the government dragged its feet, Australians protested and eventually - through a rather concerted mass effort where unions were once again at the forefront - the Australian government reluctantly led a UN military mission, INTERFET to ensure peace (an excellent book on how this occurred is by Clinton Fernandes, "Reluctant Saviour: Australia, Indonesia, and the Liberation of East Timor". INTERFET would be converted into UNTAET, the United Nations Transitional Authority in East Timor, which prepared the country for independence.

For my own part in was in late 1990s, prior to the independence referendum, that Timor became an area of activism for me when I worked as an electorate officer for the Victorian Parliament. In 2002 I visited the country for the first time as the only nominee of the Australian political party appointed as an observer to the UNTAET-run Presidential elections. Whilst I was there I met with representatives of their Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and later in the year I would find myself working as a volunteer for said ministry as the "Information and Communications Technology Policy Advisor" for a year. It is fair to say I worked pretty hard during that year on policy documents, training manuals (translated by the United Nations Development Programme), general network and system maintenance, and even building the first government website. When I left, the Minister (and Nobel Peace Prize recipient) Jose Ramos-Horta provided a rather positive summary of my work. The Australian government's behaviour toward the new country, as Juice Media has pointed out, has not exactly been good.

The snap election called by President Emmanuel Macron for the French National Assembly has resulted in a surprising plurality for the left-wing electoral alliance, Nouveau Front populaire ("New Popular Front") with 180 seats (up 49), followed by the centrist Ensemble coalition ("Together") with 159 (down 86), and the far-right populist and nationalist Rassemblement National ("National Rally") with 142 seats (up 53). The centre-right party, Les Républicains ("The Republicans"), which has a direct lineage from the Gaullist tradition, won a mere 22 seats (down 22), with other left-wing candidates winning 15 seats.

The 577 deputies of the National Assembly are elected for a five-year term by a two-round system in single-member constituencies. A candidate is elected if they receive an absolute majority in the first round and a vote total greater than 25% of the registered electorate. If no candidate reaches this threshold, a runoff election is held between any other candidate who received a vote total greater than 12.5% of registered voters. With an unusual tripolarised electorate and a very high voter turnout (up 20%), the 311 electorates saw three and four-candidate run-off elections ("triangulaires" and "quadrangulaires"), a situation not seen since the 1973 election. By way of comparison, the 2022 election only had 8 such contests, and the 2017 election, had only 1.

If nothing else, the UK election of July 4, 2024 will go down in history as the single biggest loss for any sitting government in that country. Losing almost half their vote (43.6% down to 23.7% from the previous election) and two-thirds of their seats (365 to 121), Rishi Sunak's Conservative Party has landed a landslide victory to Keir Starmer's Labour Party in terms of seats (202 to 412), albeit with only a modest improvement in their primary vote (32.1% to 33.7%). Another big winner was the Liberal-Democrats who, also with a small change in percentage (11.6% to 12.2%) nevertheless gained many seats (11 to 72), their highest since 1923, as the Tory vote collapsed. For their part, the Scottish Nationalist Party have fallen into an existential crisis, losing fourth-fifths of their seats (48 to 9). Also of note was the rapid and late-rise of the populist UK Reform under Nigel Farage, which whilst gaining a few seats (0 to 5), achieved a notable 14.3% of the vote.

Each of these results should be viewed carefully to provide an understanding of the event. For the Tories, the rot began to set in with the Brexit referendum of 2016. Prior to that the neoliberal (socially and economically liberal) Tory Prime Minister, David Cameron, had delivered a largely successful government, albeit one which could only manage the effects of the Global Financial Crisis through austerity measures. However, he critically under-estimated the rise of a populist right which would find an outlet with Nigel Farage's UK Independence Party which gained 12.6% of the vote in the 2015 election. After Cameron's resignation, Theresa May's Prime Ministership was dominated over Brexit negotiations, scraping through in the 2017 election, surviving two 'no confidence' motions, and having her Brexit proposal rejected by parliament three times. Resigning in July 2019, she was succeeded by the prominent and "colourful" supporter of Brexit, Boris Johnson.

"At work in the ruins, finding our place in the time of science climate change pandemics & all the other emergencies" by Dougland Hine (2023) is an excellent book for our times. The author is an extremely aware and courageous person, it is not easy facing hard truths let alone try to get others to face them. There are layers of confronting complexity, many things we currently do are unsustainable and even without global warming our destruction of soils, vegetation, ground water, surface water, atmospheric water systems and ecohydrological cycles, and animal driven nutrient cycles - will destroy our life support system and us. People don't like to understand those things which is part of the problems that are already profoundly impacting our lives and will effectively destroy all futures, soon, unless addressed.

The narrow framing of the "problem" while ignoring ~3/4 of the larger problems is producing perverse outcomes and will hasten our demise. Before one can "solve" a complex problem one must first understand the problem as completely as possible - and also understand the limits of their understanding and the limits of our science and technologies and human minds to a utilitarian degree. Civilisation operates on the equivalent of "the answer given to a 4 year old" by an indigenous elder, for analogy, in an excellent talk by Phillip Zylstra on decolonialising fire mismanagement in Australia.

The phrase "cash is king" first appeared with McLean in 1890 under the maxim: ""Avoid credit, remembering that cash is king, credit is a slave" [1]. More recently, the maxim has been repurposed to a propaganda slogan for the most recent culture war with, as is often the case, a notable generational divide. In Australia for example, the Facebook group "Cash Is King" is a wild collection of anecdotal stories, conspiracy theories, plain ignorance, and even the occasional genuine concern. Right-wing populist parties, ever hopeful of public funding in elections and competing over the sizeable witless vote, are earnest in promoting their credentials. For example, Katter's Australia Party states: "Moves towards a fully cashless society must be immediately stopped, and the right to use cash must be safeguarded" [2].

The trajectory of history does not favour such opinions. With increased electronic network density, speed of transactions, increased security, and lower economic transaction costs, electronic transactions are increasingly simply more convenient. Of course, electronic transactions have existed since the early 1900s in some form, but it has been in the 21st century that both the quantity and aggregate value of electronic transactions reached majority status in advanced economies; as early as 2016, only 20% of retail transactions were conducted by cash in Sweden, and only 2% of the value [3]. Even in Australia, in the three years to 2022, cash payments declined from 32% to 16% in number and 8% of value [4]. It is notable that high-cash transaction economies are invariably among the poorest in the world, whereas the higher number of cashless transactions is correlated with advanced technological and economic development.

Position Paper by Labor Against War

The AUKUS military agreement and acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines is a major strategic foreign policy commitment and will be the most expensive defence procurement in Australian history. The Australian use of nuclear technology for military purposes is unprecedented and represents a sharp break with previous policy. The agreement was announced by the Morrison Government in September 2021 and endorsed with haste by the then opposition Labor shadow cabinet.

Given the unprecedent nature of the agreement, there has been little coherent rationale provided as to how AUKUS nuclear submarines will actually contribute to the defence of Australia. There has also been remarkably little proper public analysis, scrutiny and democratic debate about the immense costs and risks of the AUKUS agreement.

The AUKUS agreement is presented as a fait accompli, beyond the realm of genuine democratic consideration and decision making. Often a series of essentially political arguments are made to assert that there can be no challenge or change made. Apparently, we must commit to a deeply flawed plan because it would reflect poorly on the Government or Australia's standing to admit a mistake or decide a change of course.

The death of Henry Kissinger in November 2023 was, as could be expected, met with a combination of disappointment and relief. Disappointment that this war criminal had lived so long (Verso have managed to just release a book on Kissinger appropriately entitled: "The Good Die Young"), and disappointment that he never was given the well-deserved opportunity to defend his actions at The Hague. There was a relief too, relief that finally this stain on the human species had been rubbed out and fortunately, before medical advances provided the opportunity for life extension and rejuvenation. Another emotion can be added here; concern that Kissinger's actions and the foreign policy decisions that he implemented and influenced will be forgotten with the passing of time. This remembrance hopefully will contribute to his lasting notoriety.

Kissinger's major appointments were as Secretary of State and National Secretary Adviser for the US Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. His approach was one of partisan international realism, that is, he argued that the United States should act in the interest of the United States in the lawless environment of international relations without regard to the cost to the lives of real, flesh-and-blood, human beings. In the eight years that he served in these positions, it is estimated that he was, directly and indirectly, responsible for the deaths of millions of people. As war crimes prosecutor and human rights advocate, Reed Brody has remarked; "few people who have had a hand in as much death and destruction, as much human suffering, in so many places around the world as Henry Kissinger". Now circulating as a popular meme, celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain has some very blunt words:

"There are only ninety thousand people out there. Who gives a damn?"
-- Henry Kissinger on the Marshall Islander people affected by the US nuclear test programme

Like every other part of the world, as the Europeans developed their age of "guns, germs, steel, and sail", discovery, conversion, imperialism, and colonisation would follow in subsequent centuries. Often there is confusion over these terms, especially imperialism and colonialism. Given their importance, brief definitions are provided, before exploring the history, effects, and solutions. The four definitions that follow typically will occur in a temporal order.

Important Definitions

"Discovery" seems obvious enough, but is often used to deny the existing presence of indigenous peoples. Perhaps the most obvious examples are phrases like "Christopher Columbus discovered America", which of course is inaccurate in the sense that he and his crew "discovered" Cuba, the Bahamas archipelago, and then the island later named Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Of course, people had already discovered these lands and had settled there, the Taíno people. Arguably, one could say that if there was a discovery, it was of the mid-North Atlantic. Columbus, for what it's worth, was a religious fundamentalist and apocalypticist who refused to believe that the islands and coastlines that he visited were not part of Asia. As Matthew Inman has pointed out he was not a very nice person at all.

The phrase "conversion" refers to the religious conversion of populations which already had their own faith, and can be carried out through a continuum of forced conversion to persuasion by proselytism, and both means can be backed by State power, including State atheism. Persuasion by proselytism is typically more effective, organised with missionary zeal and acumen (c.f., the Jesuits), and especially when the converting faith, backed with wealth and influence, can incorporate or adapt existing elements of a mythos and social norms into their religious schema. Conversion of existing rulers is an effective means to soften resistance to a forthcoming imperial conquest.

This is a seemingly impossible proposition; that all people are deserving of universal rights. That the life of a Palestinian has equal value to that of an Israeli, not because they are Palestinian or Israeli, but because they are people. That the life of a Muslim, a Jew, a Christian, or an atheist has equal value, not because they are Muslim, Jewish, Christian, or an atheist, but because they are people. One could even argue that all people are entitled to inalienable rights that include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that these are self-evident and axiomatic. Of course, such a "simplistic" approach, coming from a perspective of universal moral rights, stands in stark contrast to the behaviour of state and organisational actors and their followers.

The current context, of course, refers to the latest outbreak of violence in historic Palestine. On October 7, following a rocket barrage, Hamas-led fighters broke through the Gaza barrier and attacked Israeli military bases and civilian population centres, including a music festival, with around 1200 killed (859 civilians, 354 soldiers, and police) and over 200 hostages taken, the latter drawing attention to the 1000 Palestinians in "administrative detainees", that are indefinitely incarcerated without charge. Israel declared that it was at war, activating its reservists and beginning airforce bombings of Gaza followed by an invasion of the territory, all of which is ongoing. At the time of writing, more than 1300 Israelis have been killed, and along with some 11,250 Palestinians, including almost 4700 children.

In part one I gave a broad overview of Germany, how its unique history (with Russia in particular) led to Berlin becoming a semi-witting enabler of Vladimir Putin's imperialist ambitions. “Semi-witting” as this enabling did not come about due to malign intent, but rather through a combination of historical guilt for World War Two in general and the death and suffering inflicted on the people of the Soviet Union especially, and Germany's constructed post-Cold War identity of a nation of hard workers who desire only trade and peace. Prussia, as Napoleon famously put it, was a state hatched from a cannon ball, however its modern descendent, the Federal Republic of Germany, has become soft and accomodating by design, both from within and without. Putin smelled this weakness and capitalised. Even as Ukraine mounts its 2023 counter-offensive, with German Leopard tanks now a key part of Kyiv's newly acquired heavy armour, Berlin continues to avoid taking on a true leadership position in the defence of Europe. And the roots of this hesitation are old and deep.

An issue of ongoing academic debate is how pacifist Germany has been since 1945. (For the purposes of this argument the focus will be on West Germany, the defence and foreign policy of communist East Germany was really dictated by the Soviet Union, and while the official term describing what happened in 1990 is “reunification”, it would be more accurate to describe the former GDR being absorbed into the political and legal structure of the FRG.) This “pacifism” needs to be understood more as a sort of a national mood, not like the (in)famous Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan that forbids that country from ever declaring war. As covered in part one, West Germany's position as a NATO member on the front line of the Cold War meant that it had to be something of a military power in addition to hosting foreign troops. But as Japan has a “Self-Defence Force” that isn't technically a military, so too did Germany have an army, but for most citizens the idea of these soldiers deploying overseas was considered unlikely to deeply undesirable.