The hollow man seeks to lower the temperature
Jan 24, 2025
“And don’t forget Australia, that reliable imperial lapdog ready to hop to” – Eve Ottenberg.
One interesting consequence of Australia’s ignominious support for the Biden and Netanyahu regimes over the last 15 months has been its slide into inconsequential status as a voice of significance in international affairs.
One senses that the intellectual vapidity and moral vacuity of prime minister Anthony Albanese on full display when he said he hoped the mooted “ceasefire” agreement between Hamas and the Netanyahu government can “lower the temperature” in the Australian community, merely reinforced the contempt for Australia within east and south Asia.
Not once in the last 15 months of barbaric criminality in Gaza has Albanese made any attempts to ensure Australia complies with any of the advisory opinions of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which have been issued to member states as Israel has systematically ignored all UN instructions to prevent genocide in Gaza.
Not once has he sought to support any UN rulings about the illegality of Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory and the right of resistance of a people oppressed and denied self-determination by an occupying power.
Not once has he done anything constructive in the international arena. Only once has he demurred from the deliberate slaughter of tens of thousands of children, the creation of tens of thousands of orphans, the murder of hundreds of doctors, nurses and other health workers, and that was a confected political stunt of ineffectual and inconsequential mild protest about the murder of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom in April 2024.
Not once has he attempted to halt material, diplomatic and intelligence support to Israel and its military forces. Not once has he demurred from the Biden administration’s agenda of massive military support to facilitate Israeli objectives of ethnic cleansing in Gaza. He has taken care to be silent about everything occurring in Lebanon, the West Bank and elsewhere where Israeli destruction has been greenlit by the Biden administration.
Perhaps most significantly of all, he has deliberately refused to oppose the transparently stated objectives of Netanyahu and his ministers to utterly exterminate the Palestinians like the biblical extermination of the Amalekites, to treat the Palestinians as “human animals”, to kill them all, to destroy their society in its entirety.
Instead, after 15 months of the implementation of the project of “extermination of the Amalekites”, Albanese sent his hard-right attorney-general, Mark Dreyfus, to grovel to Netanyahu, a wanted alleged war criminal, surely among the top echelon of the most grubby political decisions ever made by an Australian government.
Now he speaks mindlessly about “lowering the temperature”, as if he is sightless, as if he is impervious to screams of hundreds of thousands of dying and injured, of permanently incapacitated and traumatised, as if he is without thought, only capable of banality and meaninglessness.
Albanese lacks all comprehension, understanding or meaning of a Palestinian reaction to the “ceasefire” in Gaza. Here is the impact on just two Palestinians – “I was sitting next to my mother when they announced the truce. She quickly grabbed the pictures of my martyred brothers, Mahmoud and Ahmed, and started sobbing like never before. It wasn’t just silent tears; it was cries filled with anguish. She screamed, ‘Life will return to everyone except you. For me, the war starts now!’ I couldn’t calm her down—these weren’t just tears; they were delayed tears, grief that had been postponed for too long. I joined her in crying, but I was helpless in the face of her pain.”
“Lowering the temperature”, conveys a soulless message which is fundamentally antithetical to the truth, a message which undercuts the grotesque barbarity of massive and prolonged human carnage, physical and mental devastation, monumental suffering, grief, mourning and calamitous and permanent life-long loss beyond any real hope of remedy, an intergenerational catastrophe extending for decades into the future.
To “lower the temperature” suggests that the barbaric horrors can now be swept under the carpet, even when the mass murders continued in full ferocity after the announcement of the agreement, and then switched to the West Bank once the “ceasefire” came into effect, and when Australia itself is actively involved in a war against Yemen in support of the US and Israel.
“Lowering the temperature” occludes mention of all relevant information to the public about the “deal”. The reality, of course, is that the “deal” provides legal cover to Biden and Blinken to falsely claim that they had finally arranged a ceasefire they’d being trying to achieve for more than six months (when they had supported Netanyahu’s opposition to every ceasefire opportunity throughout 2024), while also creating the image of Trump as the Man who stopped the war, who closed the deal even before he was inaugurated as divine POTUS.
It’s all a charade, of course. It’s similar to the charade of Albanese supporting several UNGA motions in November, which was no more than an attempt to provide legal cover in the eventuality that Albanese, Wong and other government ministers find themselves in need of defences in the ICC in the future.
To paraphrase Jeffrey St. Clair, perhaps for people like Albanese, a self-confessed acolyte of Biden, “this ceasefire, this lull in the killing, is meant to erase … at least [any] responsibility for the killing that has come before. As Jean Baudrillard wrote: ‘Forgetting extermination is part of extermination’”.
“Lowering the temperature” suggests a mindset that a reckoning and an accountability should amount to nothing, just water under the bridge, following the well-worn precedents established by Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Thus, perhaps “evading the temperature” is what Albanese really has in mind, having the dubious distinction of being referred to the International Criminal Court as an accessory to genocide in Gaza, together with several of his ministers as well as Peter Dutton, charges filed at the beginning of May 2024.
For more on this topic, P&I recommends:
Australian Prime Minister referred to ICC for complicity in genocide