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Last updated on August 6th, 2017 at 05:46 am
Malaise-stricken Richard Flanagan mopes through a Guardian interview promoting The Unknown Terrorist:
“We’ve talked too much about politics,” says the Australian author Richard Flanagan towards the end of our rambling five-hour discussion of his latest book.
Five hours with Flanagan; five whole hours. You’d rather spend five hours sucking laundry. Naturally, peacenik Flanagan is a fan of Jew-hating random shooter David Hicks:
The politics are there in the first three words. In the dedication – “For David Hicks”, the Aussie drifter who has spent five years in Guantánamo Bay.
And the Left keep telling us they “support Hicks’ rights, but not Hicks the man.”
The novel itself deals with another – fictional – drifter, Gina Davies (aka “the Doll”), who has a one-night stand with a small-time drug runner from the Middle East. He gets fingered as a terrorist suspect and when he is killed, the Doll, guilty by association, becomes public enemy number one – hounded by the media, betrayed by friends, the victim of dirty tricks by spooks eager to ratchet up the state of alert, a useful pawn for politicians.
Sounds great. Can’t wait to burn it.
The Unknown Terrorist, full of disconnected, lonely, angry, desperate people, is an urban book, centring on a lurid Sydney of beggars, crooks and strip joints …
Hey, that’s why I moved here!
He has set out to write a thriller, but after the thrills have subsided, the meaning – that we get the politicians and the world we deserve; that we have allowed the “war on terror” to be used to undermine freedom and oppress the marginalised – remains.
Well, there’s a bonus.
I finished the book close to midnight and slept very badly, fretting over my part in the Doll’s fate.
Why? Did the reviewer think he’d be sent to Dolltanamo Bay?
“I’m sorry about that,” says Flanagan when I mention my post-book depression. “I wanted to make a mirror to what I felt Australia had become. I think it is a pretty bleak country at the moment. It was a land of such hope and possibility when I was younger, and in the past couple of years, like a lot of Australians, I’ve ended up feeling ashamed of what it had become.”
We can’t be that bad; after all, we did produce idealistic drifter hero David Hicks.
“But we can’t blame governments or parties or politicians; we have to accept in the end it was we as a people who happily went along with this. There was a loss of empathy. I don’t know where that comes from. We’re a migrant nation made up of people who’ve been torn out of other worlds, and you’d think we would have some compassion.”
Australia has “torn people from other worlds”? I guess that explains all those damn Martians.
[Flanagan] sense[s] that the world in which he grew up in the 1960s – founded on the family, social cohesion and a sense of all being in it together – has been replaced by one characterised by social dislocation and obsessive materialism.
A white picket fence Leftist! They’re surprisingly common; having spent the 60s railing against family and order and societal monoculture, now they want it back again. Although Flanagan wasn’t a 60s radical, being only eight years old when the decade ended. He evidently wants to return to his childhood.
“We’re obsessed these days with believing that the answer is always individual, that it lies in ourselves. This takes every form of madness from self-help manuals to step aerobics, and is always about improving yourself. But the reality is, it lies in other people and making connections with them, yet it is a world where it’s ever harder to make those connections.”
Flanagan has just flown all the way to London to spend five hours talking to a stranger, and he’s complaining about how difficult it is to make “connections”.
He spent time in Sydney researching The Unknown Terrorist and describes it as a Martian might …
He’s ONE OF THEM!
“In Australia,” says Flanagan, “we have a whole spectrum of media commentators who consistently argue that things like national security demand that individual freedoms be truncated, and we’re also constantly told there are needs and necessities of the nation that mean there are limits on the truth.”
Some details would be nice. Care to name the “whole spectrum of media commentators” demanding limits to individual freedoms, mate?
Wasn’t the dedication to Hicks, who had links with al-Qaida and the Taliban, needlessly provocative? “To train with al-Qaida prior to 2001 is a different thing than to go and train with them now,” says Flanagan.
Prior to 2001, they were training for peace.
“One can understand how people like him might end up there. You don’t have to agree with them, and I don’t. I have a friend who died in the Bali bombing. I don’t support the murder of innocent people anywhere by anyone, but what really matters is truth and individual freedom, and when those things start coming under such heavy attack as they have in recent times, then people should be very disturbed. All around the west you see the language of Stalinism being invoked. ‘There are things that matter more than individual freedom’ – that was the language of Stalinism. Well, there is nothing higher than individual freedom.”
A few minutes ago Flanagan was whining about individualism – “We’re obsessed these days with believing that the answer is always individual, that it lies in ourselves” – and urging some vague kind of connection-based collectivist society. Now he’s on an individualist bender. Let’s conclude with Flanagan’s terrorism remedy:
“The danger for western societies at the moment is that we seek to protect ourselves by creating and feeding difference, and by making people feel alienated, and that it’s not possible to share with other human beings the possibility of being fully human. The best defence we can offer against evil and the possibility of terrible, murderous acts is by letting people back in. Then the appeal of a death cult starts to evaporate.”
Mohamed Atta and his pals were let in to the US. Incredibly, the appeal of a death cult didn’t evaporate at all.
UPDATE. Henry Rosenbloom is another Leftist who supports Hicks the man:
For my money, David Hicks is our alternative Australian of the Year …
Powerless, voiceless David Hicks has proven he is a genuine little Aussie battler.
- Great deconstruction, Tim! Flanagan is a true moron.Posted by Mystery Meat on 2007 04 23 at 11:21 AM • permalink
- There’s a reason why loopy Utopian meanderings like this are called “pipe dreams”. Put down the bong, Dick.Posted by Spiny Norman on 2007 04 23 at 11:23 AM • permalink
- The only individual right I can see being curtailed is the one to commit mass murder, prefering by means of a WMD. Evidently Flanagan is fighting to protect that right.Posted by wronwright on 2007 04 23 at 11:56 AM • permalink
- This is getting ridiculous. It seems like every new Leftist tract produces a whole crop of sleepless long-dark-nights-of-the-soul, which the columnists get to use as fodder to prove how moral and responsible they are.
Don’t burn Flanagan’s book, Tim. You’d have to buy it first. Just walk past it and pick up something more fulfilling and enlightening–like the latest “Captain Underpants.”
Posted by Tungsten Monk on 2007 04 23 at 12:06 PM • permalink
- to share with other human beings the possibility of being fully human.
What he wants is Christian Schutze’s Stenciled Speech for All Occasions, cited in Adorno’s The Jargon of Authenticity.
[Flanagan] sense[s] that the world in which he grew up in the 1960s – founded on the family, social cohesion and a sense of all being in it together – has been replaced by one characterised by social dislocation and obsessive materialism.
“We’re obsessed these days with believing that the answer is always individual, that it lies in ourselves. This takes every form of madness from self-help manuals to step aerobics, and is always about improving yourself. But the reality is, it lies in other people and making connections with them, yet it is a world where it’s ever harder to make those connections.”
From the end of the sixities to the mid nineties the left seeped into the viens of this country, with social policy that has led us to our society today. Richard, you long for the days of family. Sorry, it’s over. Example: David Hicks. Left behind kids to fight for terrorists.
Due to the non existent teaching standards today, most kids (15-18 year olds) will not read your book. They don’t know you, they don’t want to know you and they have no interest in what you have to say. Your side of the political spectrum is to blame. David Hicks is not an American Rapper or a movie star. They don’t know who he is. They do not care. You speak of rights being taken away, yet they can spit, swear, fight, steal and vandalise – all with the knowledge that as long as they belong to a minority, have a sad tale of woe or front an extremely leftard judge, nothing will happen, except maybe an inquiry to make sure their rights were not impeded. You have no relevance to their lives.
You talk of diminishing rights, ignorant of the greater truth, that the rights of ordinary citizens have been systematically eroded by policy of the left. Also (and I think this is worse) restricting future generations by extolling the virtue of unlimited rights without consequence of action. That has bred an apathy that will not be felt for another decade or two. Right about the time we need a workforce to carry your retired arse, we’ll have a population who doesn’t give a rat’s arse. But hey, at least you’ll still have Dawood to stand beside.
- What a self-absorbed, pretentious wanker. Oh wait that’s right he’s a leftist. Next!Posted by shockcorridor on 2007 04 23 at 12:35 PM • permalink
“To train with al-Qaida prior to 2001 is a different thing than to go and train with them now”
If you run an MRI scan on any leftard’s brain, you’ll find a tiny little dark spot where the memory of al-Qaeda’s 1993 attempt to take down the Twin Towers with explosives in the basement has somehow been excised. It didn’t fit with their whole “George Bush provoked all of this” meme, so out it came, along with the odd bit of frontal lobe.
For my money, David Hicks is our alternative Australian of the Year …
Powerless, voiceless David Hicks has proven he is a genuine little Aussie battler.
If that’s the definition of a “genuine little Aussie battler”, I’m proud not to be one. I wouldn’t want people thinking I were an anti-semitic, immoral terrorist scumbag!
- If Flanagan is so depressed about what Australia has apparently become, why doesn’t he do himself a favour?
I can’t even call these leftards bleeding hearts any more because they don’t have one.
They are cracked vessels, from which they leak out all their bile and bitterness because the world doesn’t work to their demands.
Justin you are spot on, the kids going through school today won’t know or care about Flanagan, and they most certainly won’t be inclined to pay for his retirement. Why should they? He and his cohorts have contributed mightily to the breaking down that he now bleats about.
And as for “Powerless, voiceless David Hicks has proven he is a genuine little Aussie battler.”
Fucking spare me! He’s proven that he is a gormless twat who has about as much direction as a windsock in a tornado.
Why else would he convert to islam, the religion of micromanagers worldwide?
Posted by Nilknarf Arbed on 2007 04 23 at 08:03 PM • permalink
- “In Australia,” says Flanagan, “we have a whole spectrum of media commentators who consistently argue that things like national security demand that individual freedoms be truncated, and we’re also constantly told there are needs and necessities of the nation that mean there are limits on the truth.”
Seriously, where? As someone mentioned above, this just doesn’t stand up to any serious analysis. No great group of people is going around saying anything like that. “Truncated” – yeah, right.
As is (or should be) clear to any sane individual, those on the left have honed “projection” to a fine art form and whenever they accuse someone of something, the surest way to find an actual example of said behavior is to look among their own number.
For example:
“All around the west you see the language of Stalinism being invoked. ‘There are things that matter more than individual freedom’ – that was the language of Stalinism. Well, there is nothing higher than individual freedom.”
Yes, and who are the Stalinists who are always trying to tell other people what to do? Hell, who are the people who openly admired Stalin? None other than the Left. The only place “all around the West” that I see the language of Stalinism being invoked is by the Left. If Flanagan truly believes that there is nothing higher than individual freedom does that mean he would, for example, oppose the Stalinist environmentalists and support my right to use any damn light bulb I please? Or is he in favor of forcing me to use the light bulb he or someone else prefers? Are individual rights sacrosanct or not?
I hope he means what he says but I seriously doubt it. Usually his type only supports individual rights when they are used to agree with him. If someone chooses a different path, suddenly their rights are subject to regulation and restriction.
- “Powerless, voiceless David Hicks..”
Thank God. No longer training with a tank buster. Forbidden to profit from his irresponsible, mercenary commitment to evil.
As for incoherent Flanagan [half a Flan-nery actually!], these aging leftards all now seem to like the ‘pre-Keating view of 60s Australia as a nice place to live – with family and all that nostalgia. Even the Retro Style is back!
Keating backed all their stupid moral vanities and causes with a lack of adequate social policies.
Then he complained that it was the ‘arse-end of the World’ and the Left all obediently cheer again!!A five hour interview that produced no coherent questions or challenges to his nonsense!?? – just shows the quality of the interviewer…
- OT but still related: has anyone else considered the Liberal Democratic Party?Posted by flying pigs over mecca on 2007 04 23 at 11:31 PM • permalink
- Justin—My five cents worth. I think most kids today know very well how disconnected much of their education has become from their life. They don’t give a rat’s arse about all the touchy-feely multi-culti garbage they’re being taught, but they do give a rat’s arse about their own life. They’re just hunkering down. They’re quietly getting on with their maths and their chemistry or setting themselves up an apprenticeship. There are a few starry-eyed greenies among them but in my limited experience—and as a rep soccer coach I’m dealing with 16yr old boys all the time—they’re realists, and they see thru the hypocracies of the chattering classes better than we think.
The Flanagans of this world are utterly irrelevant to them and everyone else. Thank God.
- #11 – Flanagan is not a scientist.Posted by Blithering Bunny on 2007 04 24 at 03:30 AM • permalink
- #8. I agree.
The tome sounds turgid in the extreme.
For those who have not been put off reading completely by the publication of this thing, may I recommend a new book I recently browsed through (can’t afford it yet!).
It is The Last days in Babylon by Marina Benjamin, a novel about her family and the history of Jews in Iraq.
Looks fascinating, well-written and is located in this dimension.Posted by carpefraise on 2007 04 24 at 09:13 AM • permalink
- Oh, and one for the women – The Goddess Guide by Gisele Scanlon.
It’s like a fairy godmother in a flock dress. Love it.Posted by carpefraise on 2007 04 24 at 09:14 AM • permalink
- It’s so distressing to see one’s family name associated with such a fatuous dork. Does Australian law permit me to sue him for damages to the name for any reason? Perhaps we can get the courts to change his name for him.Posted by JDFlanagan on 2007 04 24 at 01:44 PM • permalink
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