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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 85]
Journeying to the DMZ
Thursday, 21 December 2017, 7:28 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Atrocity tourism and what might be termed the tourism of divisive obstacles (fences, barbed wire, mine fields) can be great money earners. Former concentration and extermination camps in Europe bring in currency even as visitors shake with stunned grief and moral ... More >>
Preconditions to Conditions: Rex Tillerson on North Korea
Monday, 18 December 2017, 2:03 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The worst of times, and the best of times. This must be a sentiment that filters through the Trump administration as it discusses, disagrees and fights itself on how best to deal with Kim Jong-un and the North Korean situation. With a transactional ... More >>
Neutral Athletes: Russia, Drugs and the Olympics
Sunday, 17 December 2017, 2:03 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Being a moralist in the Olympics doesn’t carry you very far. Turn one way, and there are enterprising drug cheats; turn another, there are wads of cash in envelopes finding their inexorable way to an official’s accounts. The challenge of the Olympics ... More >>
The "Me Too Movement," Sexual Politics, & Unnatural Justice
Friday, 15 December 2017, 9:00 am | Binoy Kampmark
The overthrow of iniquitous power relations is a point many would celebrate. But such overthrows are themselves marked by the contradiction of their origins. Any revolution must, by its very nature, suffer inconsistency, defeats and weaknesses. More >>
The Fall of Sam Dastyari: The Allures of Foreign Influence
Friday, 15 December 2017, 8:53 am | Binoy Kampmark
Gazing at the politics of a vassal state is interesting in one acute, and jarring sense. Voices of presumed independence are often bought; political opinions that seem well informed are, in fact, ventriloquised. The origin is always elsewhere. More >>
Pakistan, US Drones, and Idle Threats
Monday, 11 December 2017, 8:11 am | Binoy Kampmark
Should US drone operators and the officers responsible for them be concerned by the latest sentiments from the Pakistani Ministry of Defence? The head of the Pakistan Air Force, Air Chief Marshal Sohail Aman, made the most pointed remarks yet that ... More >>
The Fate of the Pine Gap Pilgrims
Sunday, 10 December 2017, 10:35 am | Binoy Kampmark
It barely registered a murmur across the Australian press, though it caused the traditional ripples over the protester fraternity. Christian activists, collectively known as the Pine Gap Pilgrims, had received sentences pursuant to the Defence (Special Undertakings) ... More >>
Milo in Australia: Yiannopoulous, Free Speech and Violence
Thursday, 7 December 2017, 5:01 pm | Binoy Kampmark
To what limit protest? Naturally, this was exactly what colourful agitator and former senior editor for Breitbart News Milo Yiannopolous wanted: outrage, insensible anger, and heady adoration. Without any of these, he would vanish, a figure charged on a ... More >>
Hopes and Nightmares over Crypto Currencies
Tuesday, 5 December 2017, 7:12 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The crystal ball gazers, astrologers and tea leave readers have been suffering a lingering fever of late. Bitcoin recently romped through the $10,000 barrier, an event that sent speculators swooning and conservative voices into a gloomy mood of ... More >>
Holding Uber Accountable: Litigating over Data Hacks
Monday, 4 December 2017, 10:43 am | Binoy Kampmark
It sent patrons and users into fits of puzzled anger. It numbed a good many more who had placed mistaken faith in its operations. Rapacious, predatory Uber, a ride-hailing company famed for its international ruthlessness, had behaved accordingly. Last week, ... More >>
Investigating the Banks: A Royal Commission in Australia
Sunday, 3 December 2017, 11:52 am | Binoy Kampmark
On Collins Street, Melbourne lies a monument that acts as a gloriously loud remark about how banks are treated in Australia. The ANZ Gothic Bank, studded with stain glass windows, and equipped with a chapel for bankers is a secular tribute to capitalism. ... More >>
Divorce Bills: The EU and the Surrender of the Brexiters
Saturday, 2 December 2017, 3:51 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The parties had been groping (appropriate, given the daily revelations about harassment) for some common ground. There had been discussions about having further discussions, hedging, ducking and weaving. In a dysfunctional relationship, options tend to shrink ... More >>
The Vanishing Submarine: Hope and the ARA San Juan
Tuesday, 28 November 2017, 2:24 pm | Binoy Kampmark
A certain type of grief and moroseness accompanies deaths at sea. Not being naturally adapted to living in water, humankind has braved the aqueous environment, seeking to conquer it and tame its residents. At sea, the great battles of mythology are ... More >>
North Korea as “State Sponsor of Terrorism”
Monday, 27 November 2017, 4:47 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Are such designations ever useful? At the stroke of a pen, an entire state is designated “terrorist” or a seemingly milder sponsor of terrorism, its name finding a way onto a list of supposed unmentionables and moral inverts. Obscure groups and more ... More >>
Foreign Policy Blues: Australian Foreign Policy White Paper
Monday, 27 November 2017, 7:58 am | Binoy Kampmark
The Australian Foreign Policy White paper was touted as a main course for consumers of policy, a document that revealed the inner workings of those creatures working for the Department of Trade and Foreign Affairs. Its temper is predictable, its prose ... More >>
The Violent Conclusion: Manus Island
Saturday, 25 November 2017, 1:54 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It was another etching in a chronicle of extended violence. For days, resistance by refugees and asylum seekers against forced removal from the Lombrom Naval Base on Manus Island had taken very public form. Images of defiance and distress were ... More >>
Binoy Kampmark: History, Law and Ratko Mladić
Thursday, 23 November 2017, 5:34 pm | Binoy Kampmark
While Zimbabwe was changing under various inexorable forces of power, the more sterile surrounds of The Hague and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia offered the scene for a conviction. More >>
Binoy Kampmark: Zimbabwe, Colonialism and Violence
Wednesday, 22 November 2017, 2:14 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The strongman lost some muscle this week. Robert Mugabe, a leader of the liberation movement that transformed colonially pressed Rhodesia into post-colonial Zimbabwe, had issued a letter of resignation. There had been no orgy of blood, no ordering ... More >>
A New Movement of Rights and the Right in Australia
Wednesday, 22 November 2017, 9:13 am | Binoy Kampmark
Scholars have wondered what “triggers” might be in the social furniture of a culture that might propel a people to embrace a bill of rights. Australia remains proudly, and idiosyncratically, opposed. More >>
Trump and the Nuclear Option: The Fiction of Sanity
Monday, 20 November 2017, 11:05 am | Binoy Kampmark
It had not happened in decades. On Tuesday, members of the US Congress gathered to consider the scope of presidential power in launching a nuclear strike. The state of the mind of the current president was very much at the forefront of the discussion, ... More >>
