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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 73]
Binoy Kampmark: Oaked Christmas in Serbia
Wednesday, 9 January 2019, 2:58 pm | Binoy Kampmark
They set out early in the morning, men with axes, boys in tow and, for some, the odd girl champing at the bit. The woods are some way from Bujanovac, but these columns of individuals resembled statues who have moved off their plinths, heading to the ... More >>
Suspending Choice: The Patrick Melrose Series
Monday, 31 December 2018, 11:12 am | Binoy Kampmark
Ashes, even when washed way, can haunt the living. A cracked Patrick Melrose has come to retrieve the cremated remains of this late father. He is addicted, indulgent, outrageous. He drinks and doses to excess; his moments of brief sobriety are nothing ... More >>
The Hand that Won’t Sign the Paper: Adani’s Stalling Project
Saturday, 29 December 2018, 1:01 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It should be a sign for this Indian giant, a company that has done much to illustrate the ethical and moral bankruptcy in Australia’s political classes. Despite support stretching from Canberra to rural Queensland, lifted by the fantasy of job creation, ... More >>
Cooking Books and Limiting Responsibility: Goldman Sachs
Wednesday, 26 December 2018, 5:21 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Managing a bank will always be a more lucrative criminal enterprise than raiding one but this Brechtian styled analysis only goes so far. A closer look at the extraordinary nature of Goldman Sachs and its operations reveals not merely a bank but a flesh-eating ... More >>
The Misuses of History: The Christmas 1914 Truce
Monday, 24 December 2018, 10:45 am | Binoy Kampmark
All memorialised events, when passing into mythology, must be seen critically. In some cases, there should be more than a hint of suspicion. The Christmas Truce of 1914 remains one sentimentalised occasion, remembered less to scold the mad mechanised ... More >>
Orbán’s Latest Dance
Saturday, 22 December 2018, 8:58 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Viktor Orbán of Hungary is not to be hectored to. Arching with fury at the EU’s September motion to sanction Hungary for bad behaviour under the Article 7 process, he was resolved to ratchet things up. The motion, while getting 448 votes concerned ... More >>
Leaving Syria: President Trump’s Withdrawal
Friday, 21 December 2018, 8:53 pm | Binoy Kampmark
“The President announced an apparently impulsive decision that shook the world, showed little sign of nuanced consideration, confounded top advisers and by the end of the day left Washington in chaos and confusion.” So goes a typical contribution ... More >>
Agreed Rules, COP24 and Climate Change Protest
Thursday, 20 December 2018, 4:24 pm | Binoy Kampmark
“If children can get headlines all over the world just by not going to school, then imagine what we can all do together if we really wanted to.” Greta Thunberg at COP24, Dec. 2018 More >>
Tumblr and the Cult of the Safe
Tuesday, 18 December 2018, 1:27 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Be aware of the titty. Or pudenda. Or anything else suggesting a copulative angle familiar to most adults with a decent constituency of desire. The world of Tumblr, home of the expressive identity and sexual subculture, has shrunk before the pressings ... More >>
May Days in Britain
Monday, 17 December 2018, 4:25 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It is hard to envisage sympathy for a person who made a name as a home secretary (prisons, detentions, security and such) taking the mast and banner of her country before hopeless odds, but inadequate opponents will do that to you. Vicious, venal ... More >>
Having it All Ways: Scott Morrison’s Jerusalem “Compromise”
Monday, 17 December 2018, 9:17 am | Binoy Kampmark
The pieces were already put in place during the Wentworth federal by-election, a hopeless, needless gambit that reduced the Coalition government’s majority whilst giving the outgoing Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull a crack at some vengeance. His ... More >>
The Kosovo Blunder: Moves Towards a Standing Army
Sunday, 16 December 2018, 1:46 pm | Binoy Kampmark
There never is a time not to worry in the Balkans. The next conflict always seems to be peering around the corner with a malicious enthusiasm, eager to spring at points of demagogic advantage and personal suffering. The centrepieces of future disaster ... More >>
Be Offensive and Be Damned
Thursday, 13 December 2018, 4:21 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It has been an ordinary year for universities in Australia. While the National Tertiary Education Union pats itself on the back for supposedly advancing the rights and pay of academics, several face removal and castigation at the hands of university management. ... More >>
William Blum: Anti-Imperial Advocate
Wednesday, 12 December 2018, 1:11 pm | Binoy Kampmark
In the incessant self-praise of the US imperial project, kept safe in a state of permanently enforced amnesia, occasional writings prod and puncture. Mark Twain expressed an ashamed horror at the treatment of the Philippines; Ulysses Grant, despite being ... More >>
Charters and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Wednesday, 12 December 2018, 10:46 am | Binoy Kampmark
It was a gathering of activists masquerading as deep thinkers. Ostensibly, it was to celebrate seven decades of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, one devised in the aftermath of a traumatised world and easier to do so for that fact. But this ... More >>
Exhuming Franco: Spain’s Immemorial Divisions
Monday, 10 December 2018, 4:16 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Of course there’s one Spain. If there was another, we’d all be in that one.” Joke on Franco’s Spain, in London Review of Books , 37, July, 2015 More >>
The Security Derangement Complex
Friday, 7 December 2018, 2:39 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Australia is being seen as a test case. How does a liberal democracy affirm the destruction of private, encrypted communications? In 2015, China demonstrated what could be done to technology companies, equipping other states with an inspiration: encryption keys, ... More >>
Julian Assange, Manafort and The Guardian
Thursday, 6 December 2018, 4:32 pm | Binoy Kampmark
“This is going to be one of the most infamous news disasters since Stern published the ‘Hitler Diaries.’” WikiLeaks, Twitter , Nov 27, 2018 More >>
In Contempt of Parliament: The Legal Advice of Brexit
Wednesday, 5 December 2018, 1:23 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It is attrition, suffocation and contortion. While Theresa May’s Brexit program, weak, compromising and cobbled as it is, endures that bit longer, her opponents from within and without government have been essentially undercutting her on various fronts. More >>
Lying About Age: The Legal Efforts of Emile Ratelband
Wednesday, 5 December 2018, 10:12 am | Binoy Kampmark
Oscar Wilde famously warned that one should never trust a woman who revealed her true age; anyone so inclined to do so was bound to tell you anything. He also, in his characteristic stab at modern manners, suggested that no woman should be quite ... More >>
