Arena Magazine articles from April 2002

Arena Magazine archives from April 2002

Broken-hearted threnody; the crisis in embryo. (editorial).(United States power)(Editorial)
April 1, 2002... We are entering a period of apparent total power for the United States. Its military dominance is all but unassailable, and the recent increases in military spending will make it more so. Its proposed National Missile Defence system will not...

Armageddon in the Middle East? The roots of the current Middle-East conflict were laid long before Israel was founded. The last, best hope for a just peace is that the Israeli people will come to terms with the problematic history of Zionism.
April 1, 2002... In the form of suicide bombers striking in Jerusalem, Haifa, Tel Aviv and Netanya, the chickens are coming home to roost with blood-drenched wings. There are echoes here of the barrel bombs the Zionists rolled into Arab markets in the 1940s, or...

In Central Asia, the great game goes on; oil, Russia, terror, China ... shifting alliances in the Central Asian region make for a flashpoint of unparalleled complexity. A comprehensive analysis of a region about to become much better known.
April 1, 2002... The US response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon was overwhelming. It resulted in a regime change in Afghanistan, the uprooting of al Qaeda forces from that country and the establishment of the US military...

Into the valley of the shadow: the United States' nuclear posture review indicates that we are entering a period of unprecedented global hazard. Can an emerging global consciousness prevent global destruction?
April 1, 2002... Recent releases from the US archives have confirmed that in the darkest days of the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon proposed the use of nuclear weapons in order to gain victory, and that the principal opponent of the policy was Henry Kissinger. ...

Stem cells -- cleaving at the root? The green light on stem cells research is a victory for those who have sought to construct the debate as one between clear-headed science and mediaeval religion. The reality is a politics in which social and ethical reflection is sidelined.
April 1, 2002... In the past month or so there has been a concerted campaign by embryonic stem cell researchers to ensure that they gain access to so-called `excess' IVF embryos for experimentation. It began with a sensationalistic airing of claims in the Age...

The universities in crisis? Which crisis? The threats to the institution of the university are real enough, but they are not the problems identified by today's higher education mandarins. It is their proposed cures that imperil free inquiry.
April 1, 2002... The Australian Senate report Universities in Crisis is a serious, grey read. Drawing upon submissions by university staff, it documents the drive in the sector to compete viciously for government funding, commercialise operating styles, accrue...

Totalitarianism with a human face: the combination of surveillance cameras and face-recognition software is creating new threats to such freedoms as remain.
April 1, 2002... June 18 1999 was an international day of action against corporate globalisation that focused on the G8 summit held in Cologne, Germany. Protests occurred in over forty countries, but activists from London got the most attention, where actions...

Argentina -- a way out of the crisis. Excerpt from a plan by a group from the Economics Department, University of Buenos Aires. (Document).
April 1, 2002... Against the background of Argentina's dramatic economic crisis a meeting was held in the Faculty of Economic Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires to focus on the need to work on alternative proposals to deal with the events. The...

Owen Gager on Fabianism, Arena, and the Third Way. (letters and debate).
April 1, 2002... Welcome, WELCOME, welcome! Should this be the response to Race Matthews' eulogy in Arena Magazine of the Fabian Society as the epitome of diversity and political abstentionism, virtually a new anarchist grouping? Should Fabians be piped into...

Population talking. (letters and debate).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... The population summit 2002 was a great success according to media reports, despite the fact that three-quarters of our so-called `leaders' at the summit were male, mostly Caucasians. (Are we to believe that women, aboriginal people, migrants...

An open letter from Australian human rights medallists. (letters and debate).(treatment of asylum-seekers)(Brief Article)(Letter to the Editor)
April 1, 2002... We appeal to the humanity, decency and sense of fairness of our fellow Australians in respecting the human rights of men, women and children escaping persecution. We urge all Australians to remember that: In 1954, under the Menzies...

Unfinished journey -- indigenous self-determination: setbacks and political reaction have led many to turn away from the difficult project of extending indigenous rights. But it is only through completing the journey to full self-determination that true indigenous liberation can be achieved. (Features).
April 1, 2002... The Right have been active in asserting the notion of `practical reconciliation' and implying that a rights agenda is the privilege of the elite. This lack of vision for indigenous policy is going to impede the way towards indigenous...

Towards the new Australian settlement: new times demand new strategies for a just society and the conditions of contemporary globalisation have rendered old models of democratic socialism obsolete. By working for the development of a social-industrial complex and the productive use of people's capital, new vistas of political possibility can be opened up.
April 1, 2002... Gone are the days when advocates of social transformation could simply draft their policy `wish lists' and dream of building the ideal party. Persuading a socially fragmented electorate saturated with market individualist values requires...

The future of Australian liberalism: liberal values are under attack across the world from a reactionary social conservatism seeking to impose a uniform social and political order. Only by rediscovering the values of pluralism can liberalism prosper in the twenty-first century.
April 1, 2002... On the North Shore of Sydney, and in the inner-eastern suburbs of Melbourne, there is a new breed of voter -- the `reluctant liberal'. Typically university educated, in a professional occupation, or at least having been at some time, this...

An age of sewn lips: even in a risk society christians cannot use the excuse of institutional responsibility to avoid taking moral stands.
April 1, 2002... The sewn-together lips of the Woomera inmates suffering mandatory detention -- an image no less powerful for not having been filmed or photographed -- will no doubt live with us for a long time. Such actions spoke eloquently of banishment to...

Women trafficking and the Australian connection: do legalised sex industries encourage the trafficking of women and children? Are they partly to blame for the explosion in this trade over the last decade? Whose needs are being served by the legitimation of sex work?
April 1, 2002... The number of women and children trafficked internationally each year, mainly for the sex industry, is estimated by experts in the field to be between 700,000 and 2 million. On the international stage this traffic has been understood as a...

Small rope.
April 1, 2002... LOB IT THROUGH SOMEONE'S WINDOW AND IT BECOMES A TAX DEDUCTIBLE CHARITABLE DONATION `It's a wonderful day for families and it's just before the ski season so you get together with the people you spend the ski season with'. Anna Gale,...

Autonomy and the new global social movements: autonomous organisations are succeeding in carving out new social spaces and networks. But is the full story of a revolution in radical organisation getting through?
April 1, 2002... The goal of autonomous movements is to transcend the nation states, not capture them. George Katsiaficas Recent years have seen the large growth of northern social movements resisting capital and corporate globalisation -- often...

Sir Henry Parkes -- in praise of terror. (From the Archive).(one of Australia's founders)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Numerous commentators have noted that new US anti-terrorist laws -- the so-called USA PATRIOT provisions -- are of such sweeping purview that they would catch many of that nation's founders in their net, from guerrilla leader George Washington...

The Beauteous Terrorist.(ode to Terrorist party member Sophia Perovskaia)(Poem)
April 1, 2002... prologue `She was beautiful. It was not the beauty which dazzles at first sight, but that which fascinates the more, the more it is regarded. A blonde, with a pair of blue eyes, serious and penetrating, under a broad and spacious...

Jeannie Rea on peasant utopias and the forty-hour week.
April 1, 2002... Sharon Beder, Selling the Work Ethic: From Puritan Pulpit to Corporate PR, Scribe/Zed, 2000. In the first part of Selling the Work Ethic, Sharon Beder chronicles the rise of modern capitalism and with it the development of the protestant...

Missing indigenous opportunities.(Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting )(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... The fifty-four countries at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) at Coolum near Brisbane in March 2002 ignored Indigenous issues in their concluding utterances, despite active Commonwealth work on the subject. They preferred to...