Category: rants

Golden threads and weirdness and Australia.

personby Gillian Polack
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I haven’t forgotten that I was going to introduce tsedakah last week. Stuff happens. And then more stuff happens. Much of the stuff has links to matters Jewish.

First we had the Bondi murders, and then a major literary conference fell to bits largely because of internal clashes about ethics. These internal clashes became a national mess. And now, Parliament’s back early and we had so many kind words about those lost at Bondi, and a national day of mourning later in the week and I think the whole country is confused. The latest political opinion poll suggests this. A far right party is coming out of the shadows and making one of the two largest parties in the country scared. The far left has most of its old vote, but not all. And our prime minister has lost most of his personal support: if Labor want a safe election next time, they might need to change their leadership. Or not. Labor is stubborn and full of factions.

All this pales compared with what’s happening in the Middle East, in Iran, in the US, and even in the UK. But it’s our mess, and we must handle it. One thing I would like to see us return to is civil society. Discussions and analyses rather than street marches.

Why? The big Sydney Harbour Bridge march last year had a lot of wonderful people doing what they thought was the right thing. Marching alongside them in support of Gazans were the Bondi shooters, and the rather antisemitic writer who upset the applecart in Adelaide and led to one of the most important writers’ festivals in the country being cancelled. Marching alongside this writer was almost everyone I’ve seen who is loudly and opinionatedly antisemitic. Many of these individuals were grouped near a guy holding a picture of Khomeini. I don’t know if it was a photo op, or if all these people actually work together, but the cluster of them in the most famous photo of the march indicates a cluster of problems.

It’s going to be difficult to roll back the performative and to return to the Aussie politics I used to know. I’m not connected in the way I used to be. I was pushed out of the behind-the-scenes stuff through being too Jewish and too ill. Australia admires health. It also has this really stupid habit of sweeping people who belong but should not be heard under the front stairs.

Why am I thinking of front stairs?

I’m back in the Middle Ages this week and ought to be talking about foodways, but have been focused on trying to understand our current very strange politics. What happens when the Middle Ages is there and I try to pretend it isn’t? Literary references happen, most frequently.

The boy under the stairs was Saint Alexis being holy. I’m probably under the stairs, but being sarcastic. The sarcasm means that old friends and new sneak in to join me, and we watch the goings on and are surprised at how people we know to be intelligent get caught up in performance and leave a goodly portion of their intellect behind.

Tsedekah is much nicer, but must wait until life is less exciting.

Just for the record, I could have gone to Parliament House and heard all the sorrowful speeches today. Instead, I watched the second last season of Stranger Things and I did some work and filled in all kinds of questionnaires. I decided it was not wise to hear those who ought to have sorted out the hate when it was straightforward being terribly sorry at all the murders. All those people should still be alive. Synagogues and mosques should not be burning. And all the time we spend trying to find that bolted horse could have been spent in doing so many things that Australia needed.

It will be Purim soon and gifts to two charities are traditional for this festival. I’ve chosen two that are important to me. It’s early, but all this thought led me to think what I could do. One charity gives reading to children. Those children are very rural and living on the land of their ancestors. They do so much better when they have books that concern themselves and are written by people they know in the language they speak. The other is for OzHarvest, which helped me out when I was under the poverty line. It rescues food and makes sure that food reaches people who don’t have the money to buy it.

Maybe around Purim will be an appropriate time to explain why the books are more Jewish as a gift than the food. Not more Jewish. I’m explaining badly. Ranked more highly as a type of gift. You’ll have to wait until March for the explanation.

Tomorrow is research-for-writing. I am interviewing a group of Jewish teenagers for a novel. A rather special novel, and one that I was not expecting to write. It’s not a guaranteed publication, but it’s a guaranteed “I’d love to see this if you’d consider writing it.” It’s the kind of book I’ve been saying we need for the last 20 years, one where Jewish Australia is shown as the driver of a story about Jewish Australians. The US has many YA novels that do just this for Jewish readers, but Australia, far less so.

I’m also finishing a short story where the King of Demons meets a very English vampire in Sydney. I have other fiction happening, including a novel emerging later in the year, but this week everything is Jewish.

The more hate there is, the more I write Jewish stories and Jewish history. Hate has reinforced my Jewishness ever since I was a child. When I was accused of eating baby’s blood in unleavened bread (in primary school), I taught the accusers basic kashruth. These are the type of stories I always tell.

What I don’t always tell is the reason I learned the Grace After Meals (the long one, all in Hebrew). I was so annoyed with several bigots and I decided I would say it every single lunchtime until the haters stopped bugging me. I kept saying it even after they stopped bugging me. Also they would have stopped bugging me anyhow, but I didn’t know this until it happened.

They didn’t stop because I could babble in Hebrew. They stopped because I became the high school student everyone else needed to ask questions of, especially in the lead up to exams. I could teach and I remembered everything teachers’ said and I understood it all. This gave me a place to belong, a role that was so very much mine. After I put the siddur away, someone would sit next to me and ask “Gillian, do you remember the calculus from yesterday?” or, a couple of years later, “Gillian, tell me about this piece of Chaucer.”

What most Jewish Australians have been pushed out of are those places we belong in the wider community. Since Australia is so secular, this is rather more important than it looks. Changing definitions, not listening to our voices, not publishing our books, telling us we have to leave our home country because we’re Jewish, accusing us of all kinds of impossible crimes… this all smudges together and makes an everyday that’s very difficult to handle.

Every single Australian organisation that still accepts me as Gillian (right now, my professional Medieval one, the Tolkien folks, and the Perth science fiction convention) gives me a golden thread to hold and to guide me through this labyrinth. Every single one that cuts off that thread (more than one writers’ organisation), leaves me stumbling. I find my balance within Jewish Australian culture, because that’s the place where my identity is not questioned.

As has been said so many times about Australia, we’re a weird mob. This is just another facet of that weirdness.

Outrage at the Outrageous

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Back when I was a kid, the idea that any kind of authority could stop a person and demand their papers was considered outrageous, the sort of thing that happened in “bad” countries, not in the USA.

I was an Anglo kid, of course – Anglo in the Texas sense of being white and not Mexican American. Black people knew better as did Mexican Americans, including those whose families had lived north of the Rio Grande since before Anglo settlement in Texas in the early 1800s.

These days I know enough history to understand the amount of racial privilege packed into my outrage. Our history is littered with stories of people forced again and again to prove their right to exist while others are accepted even when they’re doing harm.

But I still feel that outrage on behalf of all the persons being harassed by trumped-up semi-cops right now. And I would get very angry if someone asked me for my papers.

I mean, I still get mad every time I’m driving near the Mexican border and have to stop at one of the border patrol stations that are inland from the actual border.

Not that I ever have any problem there. I’m very obviously Anglo and dealing with cops brings out my Anglo Texan accent. But it still pisses me off in a deeply personal way, and not just because I’ve noticed at those places that people whose skin is a little darker than mine end up spending a lot more time answering questions.

In his January 15 issue of his Law Dork newsletter, Chris Giedner reports that the awful woman who is running our Department of Homeland Security (an agency whose very name evokes Nazi Germany in my mind and has since the right wing came up with it after September 11) says anyone in the vicinity of an ICE operation can expect to have to prove their identity.

And of course, even proofs of identity don’t work if they want to abuse you. Or shoot you.

It is reported that a couple of the thugs doing these raids have said to people after the murder of Renee Good, “Didn’t you learn your lesson?” Continue reading “Outrage at the Outrageous”…

More Context

personby Gillian Polack
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Last week I gave some of the contexts for current antisemitism in Australia.

This week, so many of the Left are arguing that we don’t need a Royal Commission and so many others are arguing that we do need a Royal Commission, but very few of them are talking about the path Australia had taken to reach the point where Jews were murdered on Bondi. For some (especially on the right) it fits a bunch of their conceptions of the Labor Government, and on the Left, they are being very careful to disassociate the shooters from any demonstrations and other hate and very slow to admit the government cutback on investigations of what ASIO had determined was the #1 threat to Australia. In other words, the government may well have seen this coming.

If they didn’t, then they missed the picture of the shooters marching across Sydney Harbour Bridge. My view is (since I had friends marching) that we can’t assume hate on the part of all marchers, but we need to know how much hate was on the Bridge at that time. We also can’t assume that the march itself didn’t (whether intentional or not) support hate towards Jewish Australians. A group of senior people at the head of that march have been very public with their negative thoughts about Jewish Australia. I follow them on X, because I feel I need to understand them, but I always have to clear my mouth from the bad taste of their thoughts.

If you want to follow these people on social media, begin with the Australian Union Movement (Doug Cameron is a good path into that) – not all unionists are such bigots, but some of the leading unionist are. This is not new.

The historical context is that there was a strong Jewish component in the Australian Left. This was especially true in the 1950s and maybe 60s. In the 70s, more and more Jews hid their identities or turned to being a performative “Good Jew” in order to stay in the Left. I’m not that good at being performative, whatever branch of politics we’re talking about, in case you were wondering (which you were not!) This have reached a curious point since the 70s. Now, the further left someone travels, the more likely they are to be in a nest of joyous antisemites. I wait to see what anyone says about who I am and what assumptions they hold about my existence before I know I’m safe with them. This is not only unionists, but, for family reasons, the union aspect contains certain ironies. I can identify how safe I am with the far right (mostly not, but easy to spot) more easily than with the left.

What I thought might be useful today is not a list of those who hate and claim not to, however, but links to places that open the subject in different ways. I don’t agree with everyone and all the things said, but these citations will enable anyone who also needs to understand to explore further. To cross boundaries and begin to understand modern Australia, rather than being fixated on a narrow view,

I want to begin with something that doesn’t even mention Jewish Australia. Let me link to someone who says this better than I can and then I’ll try to explain anyhow: https://x.com/MatthewNouriel/status/2007975770342506846
The subject is performative politics, directly speaking about this week. When are we helping someone, and when are we failing even to listen?

First thing first (and why I talk about Jewish Australia rather than the people of Gaza) listen to those who are being hurt to determine the nature of the hurt. I cannot speak for the people of Gaza. I can speak for myself.

When we listen, we can help more effectively. And the best help is often in ways that support multiple voices of those under attack. I can attest that most performative people will tell me what to think rather than ask what I’m dealing with. I began to post some of my experiences on my Facebook page to address that a little. For the status of this, see the note below.
Just to make it clear that I’m not talking about extremists, a kind soul put some social media screenshots of more extreme thinking. I have not looked into it (I’m not that well right now and everything’s a bit difficult), and I really hope it’s fake. https://x.com/l3v1at4an/status/2007847171723505810

Next is a bit of background about Labor’s relationship with Islamic preaching in Australia. At the time of the Hilaly furor (1980s, when I was working on a PhD in Sydney), I was treated quite unkindly by performative supporters (‘performative’ is my work of the week) and those who kept me safe were Pakistani Australian, Lebanese Christian Australian, and Palestinian Australian friends. In the early 2000s there were places in Sydney I already I had to hide my Jewishness and spend as little time as possible there, but there was far less spitting hate. It was just as difficult to be a woman in those streets as a Jew. And the streets to avoid weren’t many.
Due to my experience over time, I am always going to look for the views of informed individuals. Those who act on the preaching of extremists need to learn to live in a shared society. Those who do not, are getting blamed for the hate of others. This applies to the Jewish community too, but in a different way. All Jews who are not “Good Jews” are in the wrong, I’m told, and be deported from Australia (for existing, I assume) but are not allowed to go to Israel because the same people want it not to exist.

In other words, hate is not shared equally. Rhetoric counts more than checking things through and understanding. The rhetoric is strong in this one, but at the heart of his clamour there is some really interesting (and worrying) Australian history. https://x.com/MarkWRowley/status/2007965362776945037

So what is the Jewish community thinking right now? So many different things, but this article by Adam Slonim in The Australian, shared by the president of the National Council of Jewish Women of Australia sums some of it: https://www.facebook.com/lynda.benmenashe/posts/pfbid0S4dFspFfPFJLSinvEewo17cq1pJQNMhnQZ3qLaLci35Qj8ehwcB8skKuHWoM7Bffl?__cft__[0]=AZYKbgPaM44VBpGF3-7O3tHeBoRT__5gkXWnjvplaV9F7Hrx_z9Xqy80jfFTeg-g64wTEiH6KLvvOKD71r6YQJpQWKzlaWruEbYwGgdEpX1yK1afdv_QmsObJ0_dAlkf770&__tn__=%2CO%2CP-R

And this is some of what it boils down to https://www.facebook.com/adam.klein.7399/ which links to this https://www.commentary.org/articles/eli-lake/asajew-brief-history/

As I said earlier, I don’t agree with everything. This is purely to help those who need to understand things from other (Jewish Diaspora) directions. I cannot speak for Israel, partly because I’m Diaspora and partly because I don’t know enough. I do however, as my historian self, see that most people shouting at Israel are doing it from emotional pedestals and without sufficient evidence. This may be pushed as propaganda, or it may come from deep cultural antisemitism… either way, I need to learn more.

I had intended to give you something more balanced and also some idea of the definitions of Zionism that are used to connect people and t push hate (9 definitions so far and– we can’t talk on common ground without agreed definitions, which doesn’t help at all. What I’ve shared today is an emotional rollercoaster, so I shall stop there. If anyone wants me to talk about definitions and how they help us find what we share and where we disagree on heartland matters, and why some of the defintions contribute so directly to violent hate, say so in the comments and that will be your post next week.

Small update: I have been thrown off Facebook (no reason given, nor any apparent way of sorting things out, though I’m still trying.). I am considering what I can do to keep in touch with everyone.
In case you need to contact me directly and I’m still (or forever) banned from FB, ping me in the comments, please, and when I work something out, I’ll let you know.

Meanwhile, in Australia’s disconcerting summer…

personby Gillian Polack
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So many posts and thoughts online talk about 2025 and what happened and what a good year it was. So many of my friends have written me cheerful season’s greetings saying “Happy Chanukah” after Chanukah is over (this happens every year) and hoping I had a really good Chanukah and… I’m Jewish, so of course I get these greetings and these thoughts. I’m Australian and it’s a hot summer and most people are very cheerful. I’m Jewish Australian and every single friend who sends me happy notes and telling me I am enjoying the season is ignoring the elephant in the room: antisemitism.

I only knew one person who was killed at Bondi. I know many people who were on that beach, however. I have family who live in Bondi. No-one expected me to be cheerful during the summer holidays that followed the massacre in Israel. Yet this year they stick to happy thoughts and tell me Chanukah is a time of cheer.

What is happening here?

First, Jewish pain in Australia doesn’t count for much, and Jewish problems in Australia are often pushed to the side. This is how Australia reached the events of December 14. The police are more willing to send officers to monitor protests than to send officers for a Jewish beach party when there are known threats against the party. While most Australians disagree with this, there are far too many who have said publicly these last two weeks that Jewish events should not take place in public and that Jews should handle every bit of risk ourselves.
This is familiar turf for bigots of most kinds. It’s pretty standard where there is race bigotry, class bigotry, bigotry due to skin colour, against new immigrants. It’s pretty nasty, whoever is told “It’s your fault, keep us out of it.” School bullies win when the class president says “Sort it out yourself.”
When the non-violent equivalent happened to me in the public service, I lost my career. “You can sort it out between yourselves,” my branch head told me. I couldn’t. Also, it took me far too long to realise that the work community that pranked me and left me out of things because I’m Jewish was part of a wider community that kept telling me that English was not my native language, and that both these things are part of a bigger picture that paints Jews as different and not people to support. Not all Australians… but enough Australians so that one of my friends went to twelve funerals in a week. And back then, we dealt with Molotov cocktails, not guns. Back then, no-one was hurt.

There is a wider context for this.

Jewish Australians have been around since 1788. One of the very first free settlers in Australia was Jewish. Her name was Roseanna or Rosanna. Her mother was Esther Abrahams, who was a very young convict. I am part of a colonialist-settler society and am one of the settlers. That country is Australia. Indigenous Australians are still fighting for equality and safety.
When I compare what happens on a daily basis to my Indigenous Australian friends and myself and my Jewish friends in the present (after the attempts by at genocide and ethnic cleansing in colonial Australia), it strikes me that an important difference between us historically is that Jews can ‘pass.’ This is why public Jewish events are so wrong for some: Jews don’t try to pass and are guilty of being visible. We’re seen. In public. As Jews. That’s why synagogues and Jewish schools and cars that announce “Happy Chanukah” have been targeted recently. Chanukah by the Beach was publicly Jewish. If we went into hiding, I’m told, we’d be fine.

Australia is developing new cultural structures and the prejudices and hate show what those structures are. Too many politicians (especially on the Left) and far, far too many people at the glittering end of the Arts are passive bigots. They are led by active bigots. Those active bigots spoke up loudly and publicly against the shooting, but almost none of them got in touch with Jewish colleagues to check we were OK. I say this as one of their Jewish colleagues. None of the Greens I know and only a small number of my writer and artist friends got in touch with me. Other Australians did. Non-Australian friends did.
Every friend who contacted me is a treasure. Everyone who did not, has made it clear who they are. In some circles, there’s public virtue but not private.
This is shaping Australia: some writers can have books in bookshops, some artists can get grants. Too much Jewishness or the wrong kind of Jewishness and you are, regretfully, pushed to the end of a queue. I’ve been told I’m privileged and White and should step aside and let others who have suffered discrimination take my place in this event or that conversation. This has been going on for about 15 years. More historical context.

It’s not obvious hatred. These people are otherwise good and charming and often witty. They just don’t want Jew cooties and, in the not wanting, create new layers to Australian society to protect themselves from said Jew cooties. It’s fine to have a Jewish friend, but you should not engage in private conversation with them when bad things happen. If a Jew is banned from certain circles, you don’t protest it.
Most Jews are currently lesser beings and our company can contaminate. We aren’t the only ones, but I experience the Jewish side every day, so the antisemitism is something I can talk about.  I speak from personal experience.
It began, years ago, with Jewish writers and historians having to be the Ginger Rogers in our society. We had to do everything everyone else did, but better, on subjects others approved of, as if we were dancing backwards and in heels.

This Gentlemen’s Agreement approach to Jewish Australians has been around since Federation. And earlier, but Federation and the infamous White Australia Policy contain clear issues that apply today. Under White Australia, only special Jews were White. Sir Isaac Isaacs, the first Australian Governor-General, was Honorary White. Sir John Monash, who was rather important in World War I… was not. The official war correspondent (Mr Bean) did all he could to make sure Monash didn’t get the job. Even today, military and ex-military will (for the most part) treat Jewish Australians like any other Australian, due to Monash. But my electorate was named after Bean, and the far left and the far right now both shout that Jews need to be deported. The left is too busy hating Israel to come to the aid of Jewish Australians, and I am mostly banned from conversations with politically active old friends and colleagues because I don’t pass their purity tests. (I don’t pass because I refuse to do them, to be fair.)
These Australians are not even close to the whole of Australia. This is a limited number of Australians in a limited number of power blocks. If they weren’t building on the old hates that led – in Germany – to Holocaust, I wouldn’t be so worried. If Chanukah by the Beach had not been one of the worst mass murders in this country in the last fifty years, I would not be so worried.

While I can see where the passive bigotry is leading, it would take 10,000 words to explain. How about just two observations?
The first, is that it’s like frogs in a saucepan. The Left and the Literati and the politicians presenting that passive bigotry are enjoying a bath in the saucepan and we’re telling them the fire has been lit underneath it. Because we’re Jewish, some tell us “You’re the boy who cried wolf” and ignore what we say. These folks also ignored our concerns right up to the moment the shooters started to fire at Bondi.
The second is, if you factor in the history of antisemitism DownUnder, and if you add the history of treatment of others who’ve dealt with bigotry, right now, it looks like we’re heading for a society structured by bigotry.
This is canary in coalmine stuff. Every time antisemitism is rampant here, historically, we develop concerns about people from this background or that: non-English speakers, recent migrants, those from other religions, women. Indigenous Australians have never been let off that particular hook, and the Indigenous Australians I know and who I listen to are divided between those who support Jew-hate and those who fight alongside the Jewish community. I’m pretty sure (since I know some of the hate-supporters) that they have no idea they are antisemites. At least three I know believe they’re supporting people on the other side of the world by putting us in our place.
Some bigots think they’re doing the right thing. So did the guys who designed White Australia, which is the last time we had a divide this big and this dangerous (skipping World War II, because I am reaching my limits on the subject of hate, and these last few weeks have reminded me of how my European family disappeared). World War I and all the Australian soldiers (especially those who came from the various demeaned groups) broke that to pieces. World War I didn’t get rid of it, though. The social structure still hurt Indigenous Australians in appalling ways… and that aspect didn’t even begin to be addressed until the 1960s. It still hurts far too many.

One of the reasons the antisemitism brings down the whole of Australia: it’s never been only about Jew cooties.
Many Australians have always fought the hate and the fear and the cooties. Some Indigenous Australians are so much more capable than I am, and work for their own communities and for others who hurt. One of my heroes is William Cooper, a Yorta Yorta elder, who, when he and his family and friends were all not-quite-citizens marched to the German consulate in Melbourne after Kristallnacht and let Germany know what they were doing to their Jews was evil.
If you read his biography, you get a sense of what he had to handle in an almost-impossible everyday and how extraordinary he was… and why it’s so problematic that Australia is returning to this particular outlook.
I see so many otherwise intelligent people saying “The shooting was over two weeks ago – let’s spend the next 20 minutes on another crisis” when this crisis is linked to the other they then describe. I hear others saying “It’s the Jews’ fault,” and yet others explaining, “Jews are liars and shot themselves at Bondi. Look to Mossad.” There is passive hate, active hate, aggressive hate – every single bit of hate that’s shared, adds to the Jew cooties and changes the country.
This is why I couldn’t post last week. Getting through this is a full-time job because we don’t have enough words for it because those who have words are part of the problem. It’s a very Australian antisemitism. Like Australian Christmasses, it happens upside down to the rest of the world and is connected to the lives of so many people on our continent. I’m scared for myself and my family and my Jewish friends, but I’m also worried for Australia. My metaphors are still inept, but when a society changes this much it’s really, really bad.

History and fiction and time out from hate

personby Gillian Polack
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I found my missing post. Here it is!

I logged in, expecting to tell you how the hate in Australia (which began as antisemitism and is now extending) is so tightly focused that your best friend might be bullied and you might not see it. When I’m alone, that bullying eats up a chunk of my day each and every day. This last week, however, it was less than a minute of each day and it was not every day. I was able to talk work with colleagues. When I sat down here, it struck me that I don’t often talk about that side of my life.

I used to. I used to be the kind of irrepressible historian who got excited for everyone. I’m still that historian. I don’t get to talk about it so often, is all.

Instead of dwelling on the bad side of life, then, let me find one page of notes from one day of the conference (one in forty-five pages of notes from the conference) so that you can enjoy history with me. We all need time out from hate, after all and every single US reader here had a lot more trouble to handle in the every day.

Some of you know that one of my novels (Poison and Light) is about how future humans use the past to hide from a present they found uncomfortable. Right now, a group of Australian scholars is examining how people in Early Modern England (and elsewhere, but the papers I heard were on Early Modern England) use history to imagine the future. The discussion was wide-ranging. They talked about witches and about ghosts, about predicting disaster and about what happened when the disaster failed to occur, about pamphlets and politics and poetry. It was the perfect panel for fiction writers and an exceptionally strong example of why fiction writers should get to know Medievalists and Early Modern scholars. Every other minute I thought of a writer who should have been there, asking questions about the ghosts and about the politics. The worlds they explain and the concepts they explore help us understand what we write and help us write it the best we can.

How does this understanding work in practice? My notes have an outline describing how the chair (and the head of the research project, who of course I talked to afterwards and of course we’ve planned to meet to talk about the science fiction side of things) breaks down the concepts of Imagining the Future into categories that can be explained.

She spoke about writing that give models of temporality: utopias, dystopias, and the mundane. Think about how these categories fit modern science fiction. Poison and Light is half-dystopia and half mundane, because all of my fiction talks about the lives of individuals and so the mundane is important to them. China Mieville (to my mind) writes dystopias and so does Sheri S Tepper.

But who writes utopias? I can think of earlier writers, like Sir Julius Vogel. Help me out! Who is writing now and has written a utopia that brings history into the future? We were given the theory of Star Trek, because it claims to be in a perfected future (at least for humans) but the reality of Star Trek is not utopian. Star Wars is, however, dystopian. It’s much easier to find examples when one looks to television. But I want to talk about novels!

She then moved to scales of temporality, whether the novel is set near (Earth!) or far away (Poison and Light again, since it’s in a solar system far far away – I may have attended the conference as an historian, but during this panel I felt so seen as a writer). With TV, my mind goes straight to the Jon Pertwee years of Doctor Who and compares them with (of course) Star Wars … again.

Why is the near and far important? Because so much of historical writing is used to discuss this apocalypse, or that. How far is apocalypse from our everyday? Much further, if it’s not on Earth. And here Poison and Light fails. It’s set far away, but Earth faces apocalypse while the people on New Ceres pretend they live in the eighteenth century. (I’m seeing this now with the lucky souls who are not enmired in hate – they are the people on New Ceres, while most of us are, alas, on Earth.)

I keep thinking that this whole project can help me understand my own New Ceres universe. I’m writing a second novel set on Earth next year, where the 14th century and the 17th century and how we deal with post-apocalypse join the party. My project echoes the ideas of people hundreds of years ago as humanity faces a bleak present. Where some people find refuge in fancy dress, others find refuge in explaining the world through ghosts and looking at neighbours as if they themselves are the catastrophe.

The last category asks whose future it is. Is it personal and everyday? Is it national? Is it a global future (my New Ceres again), a human one… or is it post-human.

The experts were historians and literary historians and most of the examples (by a long, long way most of the examples) belong to our past. The categories were however, really handy for questioning and understanding science fiction. And now you know why I will not give up that side of my life. I have learned so much in such a short time, and my fiction benefits.

Every time universities lose these experts, we lose the benefit of their thought and learning… and our everyday suffers.

Let me go away and think about what our lives would be like if we didn’t have these little injections of learning to help us tell better stories. No, let me not. Let me go away and write more fiction, celebrating the worlds of both historians and writers.

Talking History

personby Gillian Polack
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I spent a week in Melbourne. I learned a lot, mostly about the Middle Ages, because I was at one of my favourite conferences and so many scholars are breaking old walls and talking across disciplines and reducing bias. This is not universal. It’s Australian experts in the Middle Ages and in Early Modern history and literature. Also, it was one of those rare conferences where there was no antisemitism. There were individuals who were on the verge of saying something, but they looked up and caught themselves and found non-hateful ways of asking questions or of answering questions.

ANZAMEMS (the organisation whose conference it was) has a good history in this regard. I’ve been a member for squillions of years and, while sometimes I’ve been isolated, I’ve never experienced hate.

My most fun moment was when one of my undergraduate lecturers called on me at question time. He remembered my name… This is not always guaranteed 45 years after that degree.

My paper was about how museums tell stories of the past and how those stories can be worrying. I used one example, with a few pictures and compared it with some other museums. I played safe and the museum itself was in Germany. Several people came up to me afterwards and said that they need to read museum’s displays more critically.

What I intended to show (and what I actually showed, judging by the responses!) was that we take many of our stories from what we see and hear over our lives. When we’re not critical, we get so much bias and hate from well-intended people. I put my theory into practice at an in-service at the State Library of Victoria. The librarian was not at all impressed with me. She had claimed that the writers in some SF magazines on display were Australian, when every single one of them was American. The magazines were printed in Australia because of the really interesting politics in the US at that time, but they were still US magazines and are very famous for this. She also wasn’t entirely happy with me when I asked her why they only had Jewish ritual books and no other indication of Jewish book culture (or other Jewish cultures) when for every other ethnic or religious group on show they answered questions about books (authors, genre history, the nature of the book itself – the display using Islamic texts explained the texts, but was all about the binding and its brilliance and variation). Her excuse was “We borrowed the display objects from the Jewish Museum and this is what they gave us. I know the Jewish Museum. I used to teach the guides at the Jewish Museum. And I know their collection. That cabinet was part of a conversation between the two museums and for it to be only about the very-religious and without some of the basic explanations (why the miniature Torah was no longer able to be used was a very book-related query that was not asked nor answered) is due to the shape of that conversation. I want to know what the State Library asked for. Was it “Jewish items”? Was it ritual items? Was it book history (which was the subject of the exhibition)? There was a conversation that needed to happen before that display cabinet was filled, and it obviously didn’t happen or didn’t happen in the best way.

My conference was extraordinary in that it consistently asked the questions and discussed the answers and most topics were nicely nuanced. The SLV and the street marchers the day I arrived and the day I left were more typical of current Australia.

And I just realised I wrote you a post while I was away. It’s on my laptop and I haven’t downloaded it yet! Next week…

Reprint: What We Can Do After NoKings

personby Deborah J. Ross
schedulePosted on

10 effective things citizens can do to make change in addition to attending a protest

A crowd gathered for a “No Kings” protest on October 18, 2025 in Anchorage, Alaska.
Hasan Akbas/Anadolu via Getty Images

Shelley Inglis, Rutgers University

What happens now?

That may well be the question being asked by “No Kings” protesters, who marched, rallied and danced all over the nation on Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025.

Pro-democracy groups had aimed to encourage large numbers of Americans to demonstrate that “together we are choosing democracy.” They were successful, with crowds turning out for demonstrations in thousands of cities and towns from Anchorage to Miami.

And while multiple GOP leaders had attacked the planned demonstrations, describing them as “hate America” rallies, political science scholars and national security experts agree that the current U.S. administration’s actions are indeed placing the world’s oldest continuous constitutional republic in jeopardy.

Once a democracy starts to erode, it can be difficult to reverse the trend. Only 42% of democracies affected by autocratization – a transformation in governance that erodes democratic safeguards – since 1994 have rebounded after a democratic breakdown, according to Swedish research institute V-Dem.

Often termed “democratic backsliding,” such periods involve government-led changes to rules and norms to weaken individual freedoms and undermine or eliminate checks on power exercised by independent institutions, both governmental and non-governmental.

Democracies that have suffered setbacks vary widely, from Hungary to Brazil. As a longterm practitioner of democracy-building overseas, I know that none of these countries rival the United States’ constitutional traditions, federalist system, economic wealth, military discipline, and vibrant independent media, academia and nonprofit organizations.

Even so, practices used globally to fight democratic backsliding or topple autocracies can be instructive.

In a nutshell: Nonviolent resistance is based on noncooperation with autocratic actions. It has proven more effective in toppling autocracies than violent, armed struggle.

But it requires more than street demonstrations.

One pro-democracy organization helps train people to use video to document abuses by government.
Tactics used by pro-democracy movements

So, what does it take for democracies to bounce back from periods of autocratic rule?

Broad-scale, coordinated mobilization of a sufficient percentage of the population against autocratic takeover and for a renewed democratic future is necessary for success.

That momentum can be challenging to generate. Would-be autocrats create environments of fear and powerlessness, using intimidation, overwhelming force or political and legal attacks, and other coercive tactics to force acquiescence and chill democratic pushback.

Autocrats can’t succeed alone. They rely on what scholars call “pillars of support” – a range of government institutions, security forces, business and other sectors in society to obey their will and even bolster their power grabs.

However, everyone in society has power to erode autocratic support in various ways. While individual efforts are important, collective action increases impact and mitigates the risks of reprisals for standing up to individuals or organizations.

Here are some of the tactics used by those movements across the world:

1. Refuse unlawful, corrupt demands

When enough individuals in critical roles and institutions – the military, civil servants, corporate leaders, state government and judges – refuse to implement autocratic orders, it can slow or even stop an autocratic takeover. In South Korea, parts of the civil service, legislature and military declined to support President Yoon Suk Yeol’s imposition of martial law in 2024, foiling his autocratic move.

2. Visibly bolster the rule of law

Where would-be autocrats disregard legal restraints and install their supporters in the highest courts, individual challenges to overreach, even if successful, can be insufficient. In Poland, legal challenges in courts combined with public education by the judiciary, lawyers’ associations initiatives and street protests like the “March of a Thousand Robes” in 2020 to signal widespread repudiation of the autocratic government’s attacks on the rule of law.

3. Unite in opposition

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, Maria Corina Machado from Venezuela, is an example of how political parties and leaders who cooperate across differences can offer an alternative vision.

Novel candidates can undermine the ability of autocrats to sow division and demonize major opponents. However, coalitions can be difficult to form and sustain to win. Based on experiences overseas, historian Anne Applebaum, author of “Autocracy Inc.,” has called for a pro-democracy coalition in the U.S. that could unite independents, Libertarians, the Green Party, dissident Republicans and the Democratic Party.

4. Harness economic power

Everyday consumers can pressure wealthy elites and corporations that acquiesce to, or prop up, would-be autocrats through boycotts and other methods, like the “Tesla Takedown” in the U.S. that preceded a drop in Tesla share value and owner Elon Musk’s departure from his government role. General strikes, led by labor unions and professional associations, as in Sudan or Myanmar, can be particularly effective.

5. Preempt electoral manipulation

Voting autocrats out of office remains the best way to restore democracy, demonstrated recently by the u-turn in Brazil, where a pro-democracy candidate defeated the hard-right incumbent. But this requires strategic action to keep elections truly free and fair well in advance of election day.

6. Organize your community

As in campaigns in India starting in 2020 and Chile in 2019, participating in community or private conversation forums, local town halls or councils, and nonpartisan student, veterans, farmers, women’s and religious groups provides the space to share concerns, exchange ideas and create avenues to take action. Often starting with trusted networks, local initiatives can tap into broader statewide or national efforts to defend democracy.

7. Shape the story

Driving public opinion and communicating effectively is critical to pro-democracy efforts. Serbian students created one of the largest protest movements in decades starting in 2024 using creative resistance – artistic expression, such as visual mediums, satire and social media – to expose an autocrat’s weaknesses, reduce fear and hopelessness and build collective symbolism and resilience.

8. Build bridges and democratic alternatives

Bringing together people across ideological and other divides can increase understanding and counter political polarization, particularly when religious leaders are involved. Even in autocratic countries like Turkey or during wartime as in Ukraine, deepening democratic practices at state and local levels, like citizen assemblies and the use of technologies that improve the quality of public decision-making, can demonstrate ways to govern differently.

Parallel institutions, such as schools and tax systems operating outside the formal repressive system, like during Slobodan Milosevic’s decade-long crackdown in Kosovo, have sustained non-cooperation and shaped a future vision.

9. Document abuses, protect people, reinforce truth

With today’s technologies, every citizen can record repressive incidents, track corruption and archive historical evidence such as preserving proof of slavery at danger of being removed in public museums in the U.S., or collecting documentation of human rights violations in Syria. This can also entail bearing witness, including by accompanying those most targeted with abusive government tactics. These techniques can bolster the survival of independent and evidence-based media, science and collective memory.

10. Mitigate risk, learn and innovate

The success rate of nonviolent civil resistance is declining while repressive tactics by autocrats are evolving. Democracy defenders are forced to rapidly adjust, consistently train, prepare for diverse scenarios, try new techniques and strategically support each other.

International solidarity from global institutions, like European Union support for democrats in Belarus or Georgia, or online movements, like the Milk Tea Alliance across Southeast Asia, can bolster efforts.

Democracy’s future?

The end of American democracy is not a foregone conclusion, despite the unprecedented rate of its decline. It will depend, in part, on the choices made by every American.

With autocracies outnumbering democracies for the first time in 20 years, and only 12% of the world’s population now living in a liberal democracy, the future of the global democratic experiment may well depend on the people of the United States.The Conversation

Shelley Inglis, Senior Visiting Scholar with the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, Rutgers University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue reading “Reprint: What We Can Do After NoKings”…

Journalism and “Brands”

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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As someone who was all but born on a copy desk – my mother always said she wasn’t the first woman copy editor on the Houston Chronicle, but she was the first pregnant one – I grew up with the myths, the realities, and the ethics of journalism at the core of my being.

I may have picked up much of the same sort of beliefs about the legal profession in law school, but to be completely honest, I’ve always believed in journalism more than I believed in the law. I do know a lot of lawyers who really believe in the law and right now some of the finest of those are using it to fight the abusive regime that’s trying to destroy our democracy.

There are some journalists who believe in true journalism doing that as well.

But then there are the others.

I had never heard of Olivia Nuzzi until the scandal broke about her relationship with the Kennedy scion who is now dismantling our health resources, a relationship that went on while she was supposedly reporting on his presidential campaign. (I’m using the word “relationship” because I don’t know the details and really don’t want to find out what they are, but what went on between them was not a simple matter of reporter and subject of interest.)

She was “cancelled” – lost her job, was criticized heavily in many corners – but now she’s back. It’s been about a year. She’s written a book and The New York Times did an elaborate feature piece on her. Apparently she also has a new job at Vanity Fair.

I have not read her book. As far as I know, I’ve never read anything she’s written and from what I’ve read about her I can’t think of any reason why I would. I have, however, read a few pieces about her, which caused me to reflect  on what journalism is and should be.

In the piece that brought her to my attention, Colby Hall (who I also never heard of before) compared her to Hunter S. Thompson. He was talking about the kind of political coverage Nuzzi did and he meant it as a huge compliment, an assessment that she broke the rules in the same effective way that Thompson did back in the day.

It’s possible she is equally outrageous. Maybe she’s an asshole in a manner similar to Thompson. (I read Thompson religiously during the Nixon and Reagan years, but while I loved his savage reporting, I never wanted to meet him.)

But here’s the thing that makes me question that comparison – and question the judgment of anyone who would make it – Thompson never had anything approaching a friendly relationship with the political people he covered. In fact, he mostly hated them and made no bones about it.

Hunter S. Thompson did not do access journalism. At all. He was the anti-access journalist. Continue reading “Journalism and “Brands””…

Reprint: Abortion Rights vs Authoritarianism

personby Deborah J. Ross
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Banning abortion is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes

Abortion rights protesters march against Trump’s deployment of federal troops to Washington, D.C., on Sept. 2, 2025.
Jose Luis Magana/AP

Seda Saluk, University of Michigan

Pregnant women crossing borders to get an abortion. People who miscarry facing jail time or dying from infection. Doctors who won’t perform lifesaving procedures on a pregnant patient for fear of prosecution.

For years, this was the kind of thing that happened in Poland, Nicaragua or El Salvador. Now, it’s headline news in the United States.

As a scholar who studies the relationship between reproductive rights and political regimes, I see the U.S. mirroring a pattern that has happened in authoritarian regimes around the world. When a government erects barriers to comprehensive reproductive care, it doesn’t just cause more death and suffering for women and their families. Such policies are often a first step in the gradual decline of democracies.

Yet, the U.S. is different in a meaningful way. Here, abortion has historically been framed as a personal right to privacy. In many other countries I’ve studied, abortion is viewed more as a collective right that is inextricably tied to broader social and economic issues.

The American individualist perspective on abortion can make it harder for people in the U.S. to understand why banning abortion can serve as a back door for the erosion of civil liberties – and of democracy itself.

Autocrats target abortion first

Restricting reproductive rights is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes.

From Benito Mussolini’s Italy in 1926 and Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union in 1936 to Francisco Franco’s Spain in 1941 and Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania in 1966, the first move most 20th-century dictators made after seizing power was to criminalize abortion and contraception.

Initially, for some of those autocratic leaders, limiting access to abortion and contraception was a strategy to gain the approval of the nation’s religious leaders. The Catholic Church held great power in Italy and Spain, as did the Orthodox Church in Romania. At the time, these faiths opposed artificial birth control and still believe life begins at conception.

Restrictions on reproductive rights also aimed to increase birth rates following two world wars that had stamped out some of the population, particularly in the Soviet Union and Italy. Many political leaders saw procreation as a national duty. They designated women – white, heterosexual women, that is – specific roles, primarily as mothers, to produce babies as well as future soldiers and workers for their regimes.

In the past two decades, countries in Europe and the Americas have been following this recognizable pattern. Nicaragua and Poland have both banned abortion. Hungary, Turkey and Russia have all clamped down on access to it.

Restricting reproductive freedoms has helped Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stoke lasting political divisions within society that help them consolidate their own power.

These leaders invoke a threat of moral and demographic decline, claiming that child-free women, queer people and immigrants pose a danger to national survival. In doing so, they portray themselves as defenders of their respective nations. It’s a way to regain and retain popular support even as their policies deepen poverty, erode civil liberties and increase corruption.

These politicians have also taken power away from a significant portion of the population by reinstating earlier, fascist-era restrictions on bodily autonomy. As feminist scholars have pointed out, strong reproductive rights are central to functioning democracies.

Restrictions on reproductive freedoms often necessitate other kinds of restrictions to enforce and maintain them. These might include free speech limits that prohibit providers from discussing people’s reproductive options. Criminalizing political dissent enables the arrest of people who protest restrictions on reproductive freedoms. Travel bans threaten prison time for individuals who help young people get abortion care out of state.

When these civil liberties weaken, it becomes harder to defend other rights. Without the right to speak, dissent or move freely, people cannot engage in conversations, organize or voice collective grievances.

Putting the US in a global context

In 2022, the U.S. joined the likes of Poland and Hungary when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending 50 years of federal abortion protections.

President Donald Trump was not in power when this happened. Yet the Supreme Court’s conservative majority was shaped during his first term.

Since then, both the second Trump administration and many states have enacted their own regulations or bans on abortion. This has created a divided country where in some states abortion is as restricted as it is under some of the world’s most autocratic regimes.

Yet, there’s a key difference.

In the U.S., abortion is viewed by the law and the public as a matter of individual rights. The debate often boils down to whether a person should be allowed to terminate their pregnancy.

In many other contexts, reproductive rights are understood as a collective good that benefits all society – or, conversely, harms all society when revoked.

This perspective can be a powerful driver of change. It’s how, for example, women’s and feminist groups in places such as Argentina, Colombia and Mexico have successfully pressured their governments to decriminalize abortion in recent years.

Since 2018, the movement known as Latin America’s Green Wave, or “Marea Verde” for their green protest bandannas, has deliberately and strategically reframed abortion as a human right and used that assertion to expand reproductive rights.

The Latin American feminist activists have also documented how restricting abortion intensifies authoritarianism and worsens both individual and collective rights.

In a region where many citizens remember life under military dictatorship, highlighting the relationship between abortion and authoritarianism may be particularly galvanizing.

Limits of framing abortion as an individual right

Roe v. Wade in 1973 recognized abortion as a private medical decision between “the woman and her responsible physician” up to the point of fetal viability − roughly around 24 to 26 weeks − and that framing has stuck.

This was basically what the mainstream pro-choice movement advocated for at the time. White feminists saw abortion rights as a personal liberty. This framing has real limitations.

As Black and brown reproductive justice advocates have long pointed out, Roe never served women of color or poor people particularly well because of underlying unequal access to health care. Their work has, for decades, illustrated the strong connection between racial, economic and reproductive justice, yet abortion is still largely regarded as solely an individual issue.

When debates about reproductive freedoms are framed as fights over individual rights, it can engender a legal quagmire. Other entities with rights emerge – the fetus, for example, or a potential grandparent – and are pitted against the pregnant person.

Recently, for instance, a pregnant woman declared brain dead in Georgia was kept alive for several months until her fetus became viable, apparently to comply with the state’s strict anti-abortion law. As her mother told the press, her family had no say in the matter.

Narrowly focusing on abortion as an individual right can also obscure why banning it has societal impacts.

Research worldwide shows that restricting reproductive freedoms does not lead to fewer abortions. Abortion bans only make abortion dangerous as people turn to unregulated “back alley” procedures. Maternal and infant mortality rates rise, especially in marginalized communities.

Simply stated: More women and babies die when abortion and contraception laws become more restrictive.

Other kinds of suffering increase, too. Women and their families tend to become poorer when contraception and abortion are hard to get.

Abortion bans also lead to discriminatory practices in health care beyond reproductive health services, such as oncology, neurology and cardiology. Physicians who fear criminalization are forced to withhold or alter gold-standard treatments for pregnant patients, for example, or they may prescribe less effective drugs out of concern about legal consequences should patients later become pregnant.

Lifesaving procedures in the emergency room must await a negative pregnancy test.

As a result, abortion bans decrease the quality and effectiveness of medical care for many patients, not just those who are pregnant.

Defending reproductive freedoms for healthy democracies

These findings demonstrate why reproductive rights are really a collective good. When viewed this way, it illuminates why they are an essential element of democracy.

Already, the rollback of reproductive freedoms in the U.S. has been followed by efforts to limit other key areas of freedoms, including LGBTQ rights, freedom of speech and the right to travel.

Access to safe abortion for pregnant people, gender-affirming care for trans youth, and international travel for noncitizens are intertwined rights – not isolated issues.

When the government starts stripping away any of these rights, I believe it signals serious trouble for democracy.

This story is published in collaboration with Rewire News Group, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to covering reproductive and sexual health.The Conversation

Seda Saluk, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue reading “Reprint: Abortion Rights vs Authoritarianism”…

Feeling Thankful

personby Nancy Jane Moore
schedulePosted on

It’s going to be Thanksgiving in the United States in a couple of weeks, and that got me to thinking about the people who worked hard and made sacrifices to make sure “we the people” means everybody. Given the way the current regime is trying to destroy those rights, it seems important to remember how we got them and what we need to do to keep them.

I’m thinking about these things in the United States because that’s the history I know best and it’s also where rights are under attack right now. But you can find similar histories in many countries.

Me, I thank the suffragists who made it possible for me to vote and led to many more women in positions of authority. That happened 105 years ago now, which may seem like ancient history if you were born in this century, but doesn’t seem that long ago at all if you’re my age.

I mean, my grandmothers were born before women could vote in the United States. My mother was born just three years afterwards.

I also thank the predecessors of the suffragists, the women who organized for their rights back in the 1800s, often working alongside abolitionists. I looked up the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and discovered that Frederick Douglass – who was the only African American at the convention – argued strongly for the inclusion of women’s right to vote, which was why they included it in their statement.

Douglass’s efforts in this regard are just one reason I think the abolitionist and the later civil rights movement were critical to rights that I have, and that we all share these days.

It’s not really freedom if it’s not freedom for all. The activism that finally implemented some of the rights set out in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments not only expanded the freedom of Black people, but expanded the rights for everyone.

I also thank unions for my freedoms. I’m personally grateful to the News Guild, my union, which enabled me to retire in reasonable comfort, but I’m grateful in general to all those people who fought for workers’ rights over many years, and who are still hanging in the fight right now. Continue reading “Feeling Thankful”…