Articles/Letters
Malignant mutants move among us in well-cut suits Story & image S Sorrensen
Lismore. Tuesday, 7.50am. I’ve had enough of these buggers. I’m not normally an angry man, but today as I sip coffee at the cafe, I feel my anger rising like a warming ocean. Rich people in power. How did it get to this? Was it Plato who said that people in government should have no personal wealth because it would obviously corrupt their ability to do what is best for the people? I think so. Or was it Superman? One or the other. Both insightful heroes. (X-ray vision is like insightful...) With their blandness developed through focus groups, these rich blokes in their dull suits and neat haircuts look like automatons, and are interchangeable (and often interchanged). They act like automatons. Any indisigned death warrants particularily targeting Christians – the enemy being the old Czarist regime. It needs to be pointed out that Trotsky and Stalin were bitter rivals during, before and after the years Mr Stott highlights. Lenin’s last will and testament advises that Stalin should never be allowed to become the leader of the Soviet government. Needless to say that history did not follow Lenin’s advice and Stalin did prevail, with tragic consequences. One of Stalin’s main political preoccupations was dealing with Trotsky and his supporters known as The Left Opposition. Trotsky and his supporters were gradually isolated and eventually banished and exiled. Trotsky remained a political threat to the paranoid Stalin right up until he was assassinated by a Stalinist agent in Mexico in 1940. Roy Drew Mullumbimby
Lennox bike track
In response to the recent article critical of my support for a children’s bike track at Ocean Breeze Reserve: The bike track will only take up a small portion of what is a large and under-utilised park. It will also be designed as a very low key facility for 6–10-year-olds and will have very little, if any, impact on the neighbouring properties, whose owners have expressed a desire for no
viduality – any humanity – is quickly eradicated. Humanity, with its compassion and love of children, is a threat to the greed ethic; a threat to the party line. Both parties. And, to top it all off, my latte tastes weak. And the beans are a tad burnt. Jeez, how bad can things get? These mutants talk in a stilted way, like Daleks, heartless buggers from another planet (Skaro). They do to language what they do to everything. With furrowed brows and a faked sincerity, they impersonate concern, but, it’s obvious to everyone what they’re really saying is ‘Exterminate. Exterminate’. I know that the Christ fella, another hero, didn’t have much truck with the rich. He didn’t beat around the bush about it either. The rich will not go to heaven, he said at one of his shows (or was it the film?). He didn’t say they recreation or community facilities to be located on their reserve. Our public parks and reserves are for the whole community and not just residents who are fortunate enough to have properties backing onto them. Some of the complaints received by Ballina Council have been way over the top (increased crime, noise, lights, etc). Once the final designs have been completed I’m sure most of the concerns will be addressed and residents will see the wider benefits for the community. With all the new subdivisions in Lennox and a large number of families moving to the area it’s important that Council actively supports providing facilities for our growing community to enjoy. I’m proud to support local families and our youth by promoting the provision of low-cost recreation facilities that encourage an active lifestyle and community. Cr Jeff Johnson Lennox Head
Rush to judgment
Gareth Smith (Letters, April 6) does not handle contradiction well. He accuses Israel of acting as judge, jury and executioner of a Palestinian who was shot dead on March 24, and then proceeds to act as judge and jury of the Israeli soldier who did the shooting. In his highly selective account of the facts, he omits
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might get to heaven if, say, they got rid of the deficit, or sent their kids to a Catholic school, or got cannabis users off the road, he said they wouldn’t get into heaven. Peter the Bouncer would turn them back at the pearly gates like a boatload of refugees – despite the Salvatore Ferragamo shoes. (Didn’t Superman have something to say about giving shelter to those need-
ing refuge? Or was it Doctor Who?) The rich are all through our governments, like a malignancy. They are big business, cheating the country of its common wealth, polluting the water, warming the future, and hiding their money in offshore schemes. They rip up land and rip off indigenous people to make their wealth. They pay
to mention that (i) the Palestinian was initially shot while on a stabbing rampage, severely wounding one person, (ii) the soldier who fired the second, fatal shot maintains that he was concerned that the Palestinian was armed with a bomb and was about to detonate it, and (iii) the soldier has been arrested and charged by the Israeli authorities and is facing trial. Nor does Gareth, in his rush to judgment, tell us that Israel is the only country in the Middle East which has an independent judiciary that regularly rules against the government of the day, and in which all citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, get a fair trial. To Gareth, it seems, these are unimportant formalities. He has already made up his mind, half a world away, that the soldier is guilty. To respond to Jenny Bush’s letter, I am not ‘conflating criticism of Israeli government policy with antisemitism’, as she asserts. When Gareth Smith wonders out loud whether Israel is responsible for an advertising infringement notice he received from the local council in Byron Bay, even Jenny would have a hard time explaining what that has to do with criticism of Israeli government policy. The most vigorous critics of Israeli government policy are Israel’s own citizens. Regardless of ethnic and religious background, they each
get one vote and the opportunity to vote Israeli governments into or out of office at regular, free and fair elections. Something which does not happen anywhere else in the Middle East. Vic Alhadeff CEO, NSW Jewish Board of Deputies
Syrian conflict
Recently a new academic study in the form of an e-
The waitress brings coffee to another table. She passes by me and smiles. ‘Enjoying your coffee?’ she asks. Oh dear. But things are changing. No-one believes them any more. We’re over it. After the chit-chat and champagne in Paris, it’s business as usual: The Carmichael mine is approved, protesters are to be heavily fined and jailed, and taxes are for the poor. The Emperor wears no clothes! I’m not going to take it any more. It’s time to speak out. Bugger these buggers. ‘Oh, the coffee’s fine,’ I say to the waitress. She flashes her smile at me again, and moves onto the next table.
bugger-all taxes; instead, they rifle through the chattels of the poor to pay for the infrastructure required for their excesses. They cut spending on education, the environment and health, while subsidising climate-changing quick-buck schemes that make a mockery of all that palaver in Paris. I take another sip – ew. Could be the milk that’s burnt... Like junkies, they are selfobsessed buggers, with an addiction that overrides any sense of the common good. As their wealth and bloat grows, their need becomes more and more demanding, more blatant, and the planet is sucked dry. This is the new morality. The new normal: A strong currency is bad. Cheaper housing is bad. Water is for mining. Forests are for clearing. Rich is right.
at echo.net.au/here-and-now
book entiltled The Dirty War on Syria was published by Dr Tim Anderson, senior lecturer in political economy at the University of Sydney. I recommend this study written in plain English for anyone who may feel confused about the nature of the more than five-year-long conflict in Syria. Dr Anderson has provided many references to a wide range of source documents
for each chapter in this book. Since this conflict began I have also accessed some 500 documents from worldwide sources related to this conflict. About half of these are from mainstream reporting, including corporate-funded think tanks and about a quarter from academia and a quarter from independent journalists and reporters on the ground. continued on page 14
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The Byron Shire Echo April 13, 2016 13