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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 124]
Binoy Kampmark: Watching the Republicans
Friday, 24 February 2012, 9:47 am | Binoy Kampmark
It’s painful. It’s horrendous. It’s grotesque. It’s another Republican presidential debate. Gazing at the behaviour of the candidates at the last Republican primary debate in Arizona, and the shop of horrors is bursting. Newt Gingrich tried to show ... More >>
The Rudd Challenge: Where to Now?
Thursday, 23 February 2012, 12:13 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Another instalment in the phoney war between Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard has now taken place. The Australian foreign minister has resigned his post and is coming home. Over the weekend, he will consult friends and relations before mounting what ... More >>
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Jags and Consciences
Thursday, 23 February 2012, 9:34 am | Binoy Kampmark
Oh what an atmospherically pent up effort – permanent stuffy darkness; grimy, dirty London immune to light, a world of grubby morals and even grubbier characters. But John le Carré was always rather good at charting pathways into dimly lit corridors, ... More >>
The Syrian Dilemma: Whither Intervention?
Tuesday, 21 February 2012, 5:34 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Albert Camus posed a Kirkegaard-like dilemma of madness in his notebooks: the absolute helplessness one feels in doing nothing, and the dangers of doing something. The escalating, blood-drenched violence in Syria is such a case – the sense of helplessness ... More >>
The Lemming Syndrome: Kev, Jules and Labour
Tuesday, 21 February 2012, 10:37 am | Binoy Kampmark
Australia’s Labour party does not want to win the next federal election. It is genetic. The left find incumbency tiring, troublesome, limiting, problematic. Suicidal policies hell bent in wiping their presence off the electoral map is, however, something ... More >>
Airline Madness: The Fall of Air Australia
Tuesday, 21 February 2012, 10:32 am | Binoy Kampmark
The Australian airlines market has always resembled something of a corpse with just a hint of life. Stratified, uninventive, and controlled, it has never been cheap, whatever the dished, dull rhetoric is, to fly across this red dust land. More >>
The Darwin Bombing: The Hidden Story
Sunday, 19 February 2012, 3:54 pm | Binoy Kampmark
History is a mannequin with many dresses. These can be removed in the latest fashion or substituted depending on the latest interpretation. As the Polish aphorist and novelist Stanislaw Lec explained, truth tends to remain the same, whatever fashion ... More >>
The MTC and Melodrama: Summer of the Seventeenth Doll
Thursday, 16 February 2012, 5:11 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It has been 55 years since Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll premiered at the Melbourne University Union Theatre, beginning a sequence of events that made it an essential part of Australian theatre. More >>
The Unexceptional End: The Death of Whitney Houston
Thursday, 16 February 2012, 5:08 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Even if one is not a fan of such songs as Saving All My Love for You and I Will Always Love You (mush, garnished by a touch of sweet spice), there is no question that the person who sang them – Whitney Houston – was someone the music industry took ... More >>
The Farce of Protection: Humans, human rights, and Syria
Thursday, 16 February 2012, 2:43 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Humanitarian intervention is often premised on a fetishizing exercise. Protecting civilians has become the time immemorial justification for interventions that rarely achieve that. Often, the slaughter is exacerbated. Undesirable substitute regimes ... More >>
Binoy Kampmark: Glasgow Rangers in Administration
Thursday, 16 February 2012, 9:45 am | Binoy Kampmark
The shock was palpable at the making of the announcement – Glasgow Rangers, Scottish champions 54 times and winner of some 100 trophies, has been placed in administration. The foe, as football fans will identify, is the ever vicious tax man seeking to come ... More >>
Traveler in Transit: Bangkok and the Miracle Hotel
Monday, 13 February 2012, 5:26 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Transitory states are often uncomfortable. One is neither truly dead or truly living. The tourist in transit can only ever hope that time will kill more quickly than he will kill it. Airports offer a sterile state, and the regular traveler who does have ... More >>
Bald Men, Combs and the Malvinas: Cameron-Kirchner Showdown
Monday, 13 February 2012, 5:23 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The Argentinean wordsmith Jorge Luis Borges could be cryptic. But his powers of perception were always daunting. The 10 week conflict in 1982 that took place over the Falklands, or the Malvinas, as the Argentineans prefer to call it, has provided ... More >>
Baltasar Garzón and the Problem with Transitional Justice
Saturday, 11 February 2012, 4:36 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Those experts in the field of human rights lead charmed and dangerous lives. Sometimes, they also find themselves in the dock, grilled for their efforts and persecuted for their inclinations. In the case of the famed human rights warrior, the Spanish High ... More >>
The EU Fiscal Compact: Righting the Bad Budget
Tuesday, 7 February 2012, 5:58 pm | Binoy Kampmark
On Monday, the EU carousel stopped, briefly, for another round of note taking, deliberation and navel gazing. With so much chatter and babble over fiscal discipline, the leaders of the Eurozone seem to be marching to some orchestrated tune that is all too of ... More >>
Two out of Three: Serbia, Sport and Super Sunday
Tuesday, 31 January 2012, 11:30 am | Binoy Kampmark
Novak Djokovic has won – again. A suggestion about how sport does have a habit of seeping through the pores of every day life can be gathered last Sunday, when Serbia found itself with sporting representatives in three grand finals – the Australian ... More >>
Kodak’s Last Snap: The End of The Great Yellow Father
Saturday, 21 January 2012, 11:28 am | Binoy Kampmark
It went into popular circulation as a term: the Kodak moment. The captured snap to be preserved, be it for posterity, or some other inconsequential reason. The Eastman Kodak Company is seemingly destined to become another parceled bit of posterity. ... More >>
Kodak’s Last Snap: The End of The Great Yellow Father
Saturday, 21 January 2012, 11:23 am | Binoy Kampmark
It went into popular circulation as a term: the Kodak moment. The captured snap to be preserved, be it for posterity, or some other inconsequential reason. The Eastman Kodak Company is seemingly destined to become another parceled bit of posterity. ... More >>
Human Arachnids: The Joke about Monster Bug Wars
Wednesday, 18 January 2012, 3:21 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It all starts with a disastrous human presumption: the animal world is there it be used, abused and mocked. Cage it, memorialize it, idealise it, and worship its remains with a sickly reverence through cable television subscriptions. Animals are merely ... More >>
Desecrating the Enemy: The US Marines and the Taliban
Saturday, 14 January 2012, 11:15 am | Binoy Kampmark
Modern wars, fought with what are often misplaced high-minded ideals, are often the stuff of public relations. Indeed, the public relations feature is paramount – to be a good war, the circulated story needs to be good. In the case of Afghanistan, ... More >>
