Binoy Kampmark
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.
Binoy's recent articles
13 September 2022
The other side of Elizabeth IIs reign: How to profit from plunder while disclaiming responsibility
Reactions to the death of Queen Elizabeth II from victims of atrocities during her reign were less than warm. Did the British Crown derive profits of plunder yet disclaim responsibility for colonisation, they asked? The Westminster shroud, in this regard, is thick indeed, a layer of forced exculpation.
8 September 2022
Dunderheaded diplomacy: Australias funding offer to the Solomon Islands
What is it about Australian diplomacy that makes it so clumsy and dunderheaded? Is it the harsh delivery, the tactless expression, or the inability to do things with subtle reflection? On September 6, Australian diplomacy gave another display of such form with Foreign Minister Penny Wongs remarks about the Solomon Islands elections.
4 September 2022
Beggars in surplus: Australias university gangsters
With the election of a new government in Australia in May, the begging bowls were being readied by administrators in the university sector. Bloated, ungainly, ruthless and uneven in quality, the countrys universities, for the most part, had inadvertently made their case for more public funding harder.
2 September 2022
Its all political: Julian Assange appeals his extradition
Julian Assanges legal team has taken its next step along their Via Dolorosa, filing an appeal against the decision to extradite their client to the United States to face 18 charges, 17 based on the odious US Espionage Act of 1917.
28 August 2022
Canberra is a fashioned spear for the US against China.
There is an overwhelming boisterous ignorance that characterises Australias foreign policy approach to China.
26 August 2022
The many lives of Ayman al-Zawahiri
Ayman al-Zawahiri is dead or so we are told. Al-Qaidas chief and successor to the slain Osama bin Laden, he was deemed the chief ideologue and mastermind behind the audacious September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. On July 31, he was supposedly killed in a drone strike in Afghanistans capital, Kabul, while standing on his balcony.
23 August 2022
Opaque matters in the Pacific: Fijis maritime essential services centre
With China constantly being accused of insufferable secrecy and a lack of openness about security and defence arrangements among partners in the Pacific, the shoe, when on the other foot, sits just as well. In the case of Australia, it is particularly snug.
19 August 2022
Stumbling Surveillance: The end of the COVIDSafe App
It took a few years of tolerable incompetence, caused fears about security, and was meant to be the great surveillance salvation to reassure us all. Instead, Australias COVIDSafe App only identified two positive cases of infection during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, and failed, in every sense of the term, to work.
16 August 2022
The failings of Westminster: Scott Morrisons Shadow Government
Why the sharp intake of breath, the tingling shock?
14 August 2022
Chegg, cheating and Australian Universities
The note on Radio Nationals Background Briefing on the morning of July 31 was sombre. A student, who did not divulge his real name (he is professionally pseudonymised as Ramesh), talks about services that aid him in his study. Aid is less accurate than do given that he is working gruelling night shifts in the fast-food industry, he is incapable of making morning classes at the said unnamed university. Flipping burgers in greasy splendour takes precedent.
12 August 2022
Facial recognition technology down under
The language is far from reassuring. Despite being caught red handed using facial recognition technology unbeknownst to customers, a number of Australias large retail companies have given a meek assurance that they will pause their use. The naughty will only show contrition in the most qualified of ways.
5 August 2022
Gilding the cage of suburbia: farewelling Neighbours
The statistics of Australias longest running drama series about sickeningly idyllic suburbia will interest soap show boffins. It lasted 5,955 episodes over 37 seasons, starting in 1985.
2 August 2022
Penal assassination: The gradual effort to kill Assange
They really do want to kill him. Perhaps it is high time that his detractors and sceptics, proven wrong essentially from the outset, admit that the US imperium, along with its client states, is willing to see Julian Assange perish in prison.
1 August 2022
Scott Morrison awaits the apocalypse
The minds of defeated prime ministers are rarely pretty. In some cases, they are damnably awful places, where ruins accumulate and dust gathers in wretchedness.
27 July 2022
International accountability: Myanmar, the ICJ and the genocide question
The indomitable spirit of Raphael Lemkin, bibliophile, assiduous documenter of humanitys dark deeds and inexecrable conduct, is bound to be an unsettled one.
24 July 2022
Customary barbarity: Britains SAS in Afghanistan
The insistence that there is a noble way of fighting war, one less bloody and brutal, has always been the hallmark of forces self-described as civilised. Restraint characterises their behaviour; codes of laws follow in their wake, rather than genocidal impulses. Killing, in short, is a highly regulated, disciplined affair.
4 July 2022
Terms of condescension: The language of Australias Pacific Family
When will this nonsense on familial connection between Australia and the Pacific end? In 2018, Australias then Pentecostal Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, drew upon a term that his predecessors had not. On November 8 that year, he announced that Australias engagement with the region would be taken to another level, launching a new chapter in relations with our Pacific family.
3 July 2022
The brutality of Bulldozer Justice in India
It looks all too eerily similar as a method: the expulsion of individuals from their home, the demolition of said home and the punishing of entire families. All excused by a harsh reading of local regulations. But this method, used by Israeli authorities for years against vulnerable Palestinians, has become a weapon of choice for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Gujarat.
2 July 2022
Convenient omissions: The Ukraine-EU candidacy show
Instances of sympathy are rarely excuses to throw out the rule book. In the case of the European Union, throwing out the rule book about admission has tended to be a feature of enlargement. Credentials of candidate states have been, when needed, boosted or cooked for the occasion. Others, whatever the progress, have been ignored. For a collective that really ought to tidy the stables before admitting more occupants, the enthusiastic glee with which Ukraines symbolic candidacy has greeted stayed true to form.
26 June 2022
Deadly games: The labour casualties of Qatars World Cup
A sordid enterprise, nasty, crude and needless. But the World Cup 2022 will be, should anyone bother watching it, stained by one of the highest casualty rates amongst workers in its history, marked by corruption and stained by a pharisee quality. The sportswashers, cleaning agent at the ready, will be out in force, and the hypocrites dressed to the nines.
18 June 2022
Binoy Kampmark: Julian Assange in Ithaka
Keep Ithaka always in your mind. Arriving there is where youre destined for. P. Cavafy, trans. Edmund Keeley
15 June 2022
A Spanish court calls: Mike Pompeo, we want you
On June 3, Judge Santiago Pedraz of Spains national court, the Audienca Nacional, issued a summons for former CIA director and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to testify in an ongoing investigation into the conduct of private security firm UC Global and its founder, David Morales.
12 June 2022
Fighting the first UK-Rwandan refugee flight
June 10 bore witness to a valiant effort on the part of refugee groups and a trade union to stop what promises to be the first journey of many as part of the UK-Rwanda plan. Their attempt to seek an injunction failed to convince the High Court. Next Tuesday, the first flight from the UK to Rwanda filled with asylum seekers will, unless the Court of Appeal rules otherwise, take off. Some 31 people of Iraqi and Syrian background have been told they will be on board with one-way tickets.
9 June 2022
Dear times and costly cricket: Australias Sri Lankan Tour
For a country experiencing its worst economic crisis since gaining independence in 1948, the picture of a touring team pampered and fussed over might cause consternation. But the Australian cricket tour to Sri Lanka has only been met by praise from the countrys cricket officials, where logic is inverted, and the gaze of responsibility averted. Not even a shortage of foreign currency, precipitating a dramatic fall in medicines and fuel, along with demonstrations that have left nine dead and 300 injured, prompted second thoughts.
6 June 2022
New Brooms, old stories: The Australian Labor Party and Julian Assange
After having a few lunches with Australias then opposition leader, Anthony Albanese, John Shipton felt reason to be confident. Albanese had promised Assanges father that he would do whatever he could, should he win office, to bring the matter to a close.
5 June 2022
Platinum jubilees and republican questions
The platinum jubilee will bore and cause some to yawn. It might certainly agitate the republican spleen in the fourteen countries where Queen Elizabeth II remains a constitutional head of state. But the question remains: How does the institution this figure represents endure, if it should at all?
26 May 2022
Biden in Tokyo: Killing strategic ambiguity
Could it have been just another case of bumbling poor judgment, the mind softened as the mouth opened? A question was put to US President Joe Biden, visiting Tokyo and standing beside Japans Prime Minister Fumio Kishida: You didnt want to get involved in the Ukraine conflict militarily for obvious reasons. Are you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan if it comes to that? The answer: Yes. Thats a commitment we made.
30 April 2022
Political appointments and downgrading the Australian Human Rights Commission
The international standards body on human rights has found that the Australian Human Rights Commission should be downgraded in its standing.
22 April 2022
The extradition of Julian Assange 'to a country that conspired to murder him'
It was a dastardly formality. On April 20, at a hearing at Westminster Magistrates Court, Julian Assange, beamed in via video link from Belmarsh Prison, his carceral home for three years, is to be extradited to the United States to face 18 charges, 17 based on the US Espionage Act of 1917.
15 April 2022
Stumbles and fictions: The Australian election campaign begins
That a figure like Scott Morrison comes across as competent, able and free of imbecility after a day of electioneering in Australia suggests a broader sickness in politics.
8 April 2022
AUKUS in the hypersonic missile wonderland
As this idiotic, servile venture proceeds, Australian territory, sites and facilities will become every more attractive for assault in the fulness of time.
20 March 2022
Homicidal drives: US dreams of killing Putin
The US imperium will dispose of leaders and prominent figures it does not like, even if it fails along the way.
18 March 2022
Wars do not merely make truth a casualty but kill off intellectual inquiry
The Australian National University officially announced the suspension of all ties and activities with Russian institutions on March 3.
15 March 2022
The Ukraine War and the 'Good Refugee'
These people are not people we are used to these people are Europeans. Kiril Petkov, Bulgarian Prime Minister, Associated Press, March 1, 2022
8 March 2022
Advertising and election gimmicks: New submarines in the 'I don't think, I know' era.
In an election year pledges are made to be broken; promises are made to seduce, not convince. When the subject matter involves fictional submarines, even greater care should be taken.
6 March 2022
Antarctica: Where China and Russia get the blame again!
A frozen continent. Another potential frontier for conflict and competition. Antarctica is a part of the world where real politician meets scientist; the desire for finding exploitable resources meets environmental expectations and fears.
5 March 2022
Australia's doomed koalas
In a country expert in killing off mammal species at a rate exceeding that of others (to be fair, there are so many more to destroy, with more to come), Australians now face the prospect that the koala, one of its most singularly recognisable animals, has its days numbered.
25 February 2022
The US is seeking revenge for its failure in Afghanistan by starving the people
Nation states are habitually doomed to defeat their best interests. Conditions of mad instability are fostered. Arms sales take place, regimes get propped up or abandoned, and the people under them endure and suffer, awaiting the next criminal regime change.
16 February 2022
Blinken's visit to the colony
It must be a sure handicap to be saddled with such a name when piloting a large government department, but US Secretary of State Antony Blinken shows no sign of that bothering him. It has, however, become a hallmark of a policy babble that is markedly devoid of foresight and heavily marked by stammering confusion.
14 January 2022
Treadmarks on the taxpayer: Australias $3.5 billion tank folly
The last batch were kept in blissful quarantine, untouched by conflict. But better to feed the US military machine than act on global warming.
22 December 2021
Baa humbug: Australia's trade triumph breeds a British backlash
Celebrations are likely to be short-lived. Australia overestimates the benefits of the agreement, while British farmers remain justifiably worried.
18 December 2021
Jailed Danish politician exemplifies growing anti-refugee populism
Denmark's former immigration minister has been jailed for separating refugee couples but her actions did not lack parliamentary approval.
9 December 2021
Beijing Winter Olympics boycott is a hollow gesture
A boycott of the Winter Olympics serves no real purpose history shows that Olympic boycotts in the name of human rights abuses are ineffectual.
7 December 2021
Where there are tailings, no grass grows: Serbians protest against Rio Tinto
Australian mining giant Rio Tinto is at the centre of a new controversy this time, over a lithium mine and processing plant in Serbia.
6 December 2021
Hawkish US Global Posture Review speaks obscurely and carries a big stick
The US's national defence strategy calls for regional policing in the Indo-Pacific. The fixation is on China and the spotlight is on Australia.
1 December 2021
Australia's twisted Taiwan foreign policy fetish
Australian politicians' Taiwan fetish shows their bloodlust is unquenchable. It's another iteration of the Cold War.
29 November 2021
Omicron emerged because rich countries neglected global public health
Omicron shows that without global vaccine equity, COVID-19 will continue to mutate and spread around the world.
21 November 2021
Gasbagging in Glasgow: COP26 and phasing down coal
After a succession of drafts, the climate pact trod a delicate path. There was greenwashing and subversion, triumphs and laments ... and lifestyle.