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Binoy Kampmark
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.
Binoy Kampmark - Latest News [Page 118]
The Death of Il Divo: Andreotti and Modern Italy
Wednesday, 8 May 2013, 3:29 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Giulio Andreotti was a creature of the Italian post-war scene, with its astonishing volatility and kaleidoscopic deals. Unlike his opponents, he proved astonishingly versatile. He seemingly occupied every notable position in Italian cabinets he could ... More >>
Totem and Taboo: The Non-Closure of Guantánamo
Friday, 3 May 2013, 5:06 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Guantánamo’s resplendent carceral facilities remain a classic example of double realities, the co-existence of totemic impulses and the reflex of taboo. On the one hand, it has become an institutional reminder of the extensive, vague and indefinite ... More >>
Mississippi Madness: Ricin, Elvis and Elephants
Wednesday, 1 May 2013, 4:46 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It has been a strange month for the citizens of Tupelo in Mississippi. This is Elvis town, and, to be polite about it, frothing with striking eccentricity. Tupelo Police have been kept busy as have papers and the gossip circuit. Did somebody slip rohypnol ... More >>
Economic Blockade and WikiLeaks: Iceland and Beyond
Monday, 29 April 2013, 12:53 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Julian Assange had been using that term for a time, but economic censorship is as close to the mark as any. If you want to shut someone up, deprive them of funding, cut off the supply, hope they go quietly into the night, hopefully without breaking ... More >>
Authentic Fakes: The Hitler Diaries and History
Monday, 29 April 2013, 12:51 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Frauds in time become historical artefacts, objects of their own worth. As projects, they may not have succeeded in attaining the brand of authenticity – but that hardly matters. Their authenticity is merely of a different sort – the fake as real, the ... More >>
Halting CISPA: The Verdict on Cyber Information Sharing
Friday, 26 April 2013, 6:05 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The Congress of the United States is showing again why it remains schizophrenic in its appraisal of rights and obligations – encouraging of various whistleblower protections on the one hand while suggesting at points why they should be prosecuted, ... More >>
Gun Lobby Wet Dreams: The Senate Stalls on Gun Control
Saturday, 20 April 2013, 3:50 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It had to stutter and even fall at some point. The signs were already showing last Sunday when the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms announced it would withdraw support for the Manchin-Toomey bill. The argument of members was ... More >>
Getting into the Cage: Gay Marriage in New Zealand
Thursday, 18 April 2013, 4:56 pm | Binoy Kampmark
What an amusing bunch of radicals on the fringes of world civilization they can seem. But the politicians of the silver fern isles do tend to surprise, and shock, from time to time. Radical measures are embraced as an antidote to size. For being miniature ... More >>
Competitive Grieving: The Boston Bombings
Wednesday, 17 April 2013, 12:49 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Three people are dead, and over a hundred injured after the bomb attacks on the Boston Marathon on Monday. As yet, no group has been found, or perpetrator identified with certainty. The police are scouring the pathway of the marathon anticipating more ... More >>
Deception in North Korea: The Beeb and the LSE
Monday, 15 April 2013, 1:03 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The BBC has become whipping boy of the squeamish, the education establishment and parents. Some of the battering of late has been deserved – an appallingly indifferent culture to the sexual wiles of the late Jimmy Savile was the most conspicuous example ... More >>
Sexual Violence and the Tahrir Syndrome
Thursday, 11 April 2013, 3:20 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The accounts send a shudder down the spine, reports of systematic and orchestrated assaults against women that have taken place in Tahrir Square this year. The incidents are a reminder that nature, in abhorring a vacuum, often fills it with hideous subject ... More >>
Boobs as Stones: Femen’s War on Islam
Monday, 8 April 2013, 10:18 am | Binoy Kampmark
In An Eye of the Dragon, a classic study of South East Asia between the 1950s and 1970, the veteran journalist of The Observer Dennis Bloodworth recalls the Judgment of Paris: “it is difficult to say which is more dangerous – to arbitrate between ... More >>
Gillard in China: When Rocinante was Mounted
Saturday, 6 April 2013, 1:47 pm | Binoy Kampmark
What happens to Australian delegations when they go overseas? They whimper, whine or fawn; they stumble into positions of prostrate foolishness. They resemble, as Malcolm Muggeridge described British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s meeting ... More >>
Illness, Gastro Wars and Noma: The Norovirus goes to Work
Monday, 1 April 2013, 3:19 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Let us not get carried away with schadenfreude, at least for the moment. If a group or class of people wish to throw money at near invisible meals, pretentious service and microscopic morsels that would be better off being served in space, customers ... More >>
Perennial Salvation: The Return of Pervez Musharraf
Monday, 25 March 2013, 1:46 pm | Binoy Kampmark
You’ve got to ask what he is returning for. An answer is easy to come by. Elections are coming up in Pakistan – on May 11th. The former military dictator Pervez Musharraf does not want to be left out fiddling on the sidelines of history. More >>
Kafka and Cocaine: The fall of the Australian Labor Party
Saturday, 23 March 2013, 12:08 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It would be odd to find parallels between the Australian Labor Party’s behaviour during the week, one which saw a meandering and vain attempt at self-destruction, and a central European writer with a sense of the apocalyptic. But the parallels ... More >>
Rough Paternalism: The Conroy Media Proposals
Tuesday, 19 March 2013, 11:46 am | Binoy Kampmark
Governments on the run can’t be trusted to make sound policy. The Gillard government, which for some time has been the somnambulist of Australian politics, careers away to the edge of oblivion in a bumbling way, hoping to make its mark. More >>
The Geert Wilders Formula: Picking Hatreds in Oz
Wednesday, 27 February 2013, 11:18 am | Binoy Kampmark
The play Hate, written with sparkling venom by Stephen Sewell, is a bitter, corrosive account of a wealthy Australian rural family. The family is political, the scheming father John Gleason, a believer of hate – for it is hate that built the country, ... More >>
Removing Leo Tolstoy: Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina
Thursday, 14 February 2013, 12:53 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Would you throw your self under a train for this? This curiously Downton Abbey styled adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina by Joe Wright suggests that this would be far fetched and needless in more ways than one. More >>
Found in a Car Park: Richard III in History
Friday, 8 February 2013, 8:41 am | Binoy Kampmark
Nothing was glorious about his bloody demise, and one can’t help but think that he understood the implications of what would happen even before the Battle of Bosworth Field (1485). Certainly, William Shakespeare understood Richard III better than most. ... More >>
