The poet in a time of terror
In December 2017 a man in a black SUV drove his car into a group of pedestrians crossing the street outside Flinders Street station in central Melbourne. The incident had…
Tag: terror
More reflections on 2017: persistence, terror and Das Schloss
Persistence Twelve months ago I was approaching Christmas and the end of a liberating period of long service leave. It was a period of leave that rejuvenated my writing and…
The return of sacred violence
“Central to both torture and terror is the political psychology of degradation” Paul Kahn, Sacred violence: torture, terror and sovereignty Violent imitation, which makes adversaries more and more alike, is…
On tyranny or terror?
The American historian of the holocaust in Eastern Europe, Timothy Snyder has delivered in On Tyranny: 20 lessons of the twentieth century a best-seller by combining seemingly wise apothogems –…
Islam and false lessons from history.
Tony Abbott has provoked outrage in some circles, and proud banner raising in others, by proposing that Islam needed to reform itself, and so undergo something akin to the complex…
Forebodings
It is not just the Paris attacks but Lebanon, the Russian plane from Egypt and Paris in quick succession, in a crescendo of terror. And Hollande’s direct words: we are…
