Who's responsible for Christianity's 'Fall'?

I've just lately been reviewing a paper for Religion, a rather fascinating piece on the Marxist classicist Geoffrey E M St Croix. Much of his work explored the dynamics of class struggle in the ancient world ancient and classical Greece. I won't go into the paper I reviewed here suffice to say it focuses on St Croix's studies of early Christianity and the role of class in the 'corruption' if not 'fall' of Christianity from the halcyonic radical days in the lifetime of Jesus to the hierarchical church of the later Roman Empire. The author points out that St Croix runs a Fall narrative of early Christian history. The Guardian obituary I've linked to on St Croix above states that as far as St Croix was concerned

St Paul replaced Plato as his "greatest enemy of the human race", and later that distinction went to Jahweh, the Old Testament Jehovah,

Now I don't mind the old Plato; well at least the younger Plato, before he wrote Laws, and so long as you read him critically (I rather like an Irigarayan lens). He is a crucial figure for any study of love between men, the ethics, spirituality, philosophy thereof. He was a profound influence on ancient culture including what would become Judaism, Christianity and Islam (the Islamic republic of Iran is modelled on Ayatollah Khomeini's reading of Plato as much as it is on anything in the Qu'ran and Hadiths).

But I'm not writing about Plato here but rather Paul, or the Paul of the Fall mythos of Christian historiography. Perhaps more than any other religion (except, perhaps, the 'secular' Marxist/Communist cults, which I regard as a variant of Christianity anyway), Christianity seems haunted by a sense that it does not live up to, does not sustain the power, the purity, the beauty of that time when heaven and earth touched in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Christianity is perennially haunted by a sense of absence, of loss - 'Maranatha!" 'come now Jesus' (or alternatively 'come Jesus but not yet').

And, of course, if there has been a Fall, an absence, then there must be someone to blame. For a long time Constantine has been a favorite scapegoat. That Constantine took over the Church and corrupted it is a fairly old trope. For many Protestants, if the Pope didn't corrupt Christianity it was Constantine, whose corruption enabled that of the Papacy (an idea which no doubt would surprise old Constantine himself). The Da Vinci Code really worked that trope hard even making Constantine responsible for the Christian Bible and the deification of Jesus (Christian biblical canons didn't get stabilised until many centuries after Constantine and Jesus was worshipped long before Constantine was even thought of). Many Catholics shared that point of view too - it let the Pope off the hook, to a certain extent. As a young radical Catholic myself I remember how Constantine was blamed for Christianity abandoning its original pacifism to become a warmongering religion. Certainly Constantine integrated Christianity into the Roman state in what I would term a mutual takeover operation. Sometimes, too, Constantine would share the blame with Augustine. After all, Augustine was liked by those heretics, Luther and Calvin, and he had been a Manichee and he had some very bad ideas about sex. His ideas on predestination were also subsequently rejected by the Church. The fact that Calvin would later run with them only showed what a bad influence Augustine was.

Many Protestants pushed Christianity's 'Fall' back further to some vague period post the New Testament or apostolic period, in the late 1st and 2nd centuries. Pentecostals believe that it was the loss of the Holy Spirit that caused Christianity to go astray but that now, in the charismatic movement which began at the start of the 20th century, the true Christianity has been restored. Ironically, Pentecostalism has been around long enough now that many Pentecostals see that some kind of Fall has happened there, too, in the last two to three decades. Instead of the outpourings of the Spirit, Pentecostal/charismatic churches have become home to rock concert/moshpit feel good Christianity or really 'wild' phenomena such as the Toronto Blessing and being stoned/drunk on the Spirit.

Over the last two centuries another candidate for leading Christianity astray has emerged, Paul of Tarsus. St Croix is not unusual in his estimation of Paul. His view is a common one amongst treatments of early Christianity. If Paul didn't invent Christianity himself then he remade it in such a way that it lost all the radical vision of its founder. Paul is blamed for the deification of Jesus, for mythologising or churchifying Christianity, for misogynising Christianity, for homophobising Christianity. Paul changed a revolutionary movement into a religion and all the rot set in.

Now clearly Paul was an important figure for early Christianity. The New Testament is either dominated by him or is designed to contain him (after all he was popular with the 2nd century Gnostic teachers too). He is most important for Christianity finally being able to relinquish the Mosaic law, enabling it too spread more easily amongst Gentiles (and perhaps just as much amongst Jews too). We also only have letters from Paul - whether or not he wrote all of them I think is immaterial. With the likely exception of the Pastorals, I think they are all in Paul's name and authority, if not from his hand. And I also think that quests for the authentic Paul are no more than attempts to find a more palatable Paul, to let him off the hook of his inconsistencies, errors and prejudices. In which case I'm quite happy to let the Pastorals stand under Pauline authority, as much as Romans, all the more to keep Paul uncomfortable, problematic, a goad to kick against.

But did Paul mark the Fall of Christianity? No. I would argue that the Fall, if such there was, began at the start in Jesus' own lifetime. This 'Fall' is no more than the dynamics of resistance appropriation and assimilation which operate in every movement, religious and otherwise. The idea of a primitive purity is a romantic fantasy. Jesus and his followers were part of an ancient society and had to live in it as much as anyone else. Jesus might have been somewhat an itinerant in his public career but according to the Gospels he had his benefactors too. Not only Joseph of Arimethea, Nicodemus, but also certain women of means such as Joanna and Susanna too. According to Luke, Joanna was wife to the manager of Herod's household! It's easy reading the Gospels to think that all Jesus did was wander around preaching and working miracles until he fell foul of the powers that be. However the Gospels aren't biographies but theological portraits instead. That's why making movies or writing novels about the life of Jesus are so hard to do. None of the Gospels, canonical and non-canonical alike, are interested in presenting a biography of Jesus. Their key concern is presenting who Jesus is, his significance for us the evangelists' audience, and they do so by telling of his teachings and his deeds. For the canonical and some of the other Gospels, the most important of his deeds are his death and resurrection. These events (and also the birth narratives) have an inherent narrative flow that stories of miracles interspersed with parables and preaching don't have. These stories can be arranged and re-arranged in all sorts of ways; if you look at any synopsis of the canonical Gospels it's clear to see. What these stories aren't doing, though, is providing a clear historical narrative of what Jesus did and how he did it and when.

Their effect then is to paint a romantic picture of someone who appears to live simply, itinerantly, carefree. But that is simply an effect, the Gospels aren't interested in what happened in between the parables and the preaching and the miracles and so we don't see it. They're also not interested in plotting his psychology, how he came to know what he knew, how his understanding of himself and his teachings developed. We aren't told about the day to day life, either, of the community around him, his community of followers or of those in his broader support base.

I have little doubt Jesus was a radical but, at least from some of the sayings attributed to him, he was no fool. To put it another way he was strategic about the when and how he would challenge the authorities, particularly the Temple (which was clearly in his sights). While Jesus might have been a peasant I doubt he was either illiterate or poor. The teachings attributed to him in the Gospels are quite sophisticated and show a sharp intelligence, a wittiness and a theological depth. This was no country bumpkin. Jesus picked his times strategically. He certainly did not randomly stir things up without thought of the consequences to innocently or naively stumble into the hands of his enemies. I also think it most likely he aroused messianic expectations in his lifetime, it's the only way to explain his execution. He may well have miscalculated at the end but he may also have embraced the destiny waiting for any messianic figure under Roman rule, re-contextualising it instead in terms of (Day of) Atonement and (associated) Suffering Servant theologies. In other words, Jesus was not simply a political figure, he was first and foremost a religious figure and understood his role in religious terms (albeit with political and social implications). Compare and contrast with Simon bar Kochba, the next Jewish Messiah (Christ) who lived a century later or Alexander Jannaeus who lived over a century earlier, the first Priest-King (Lord's Anointed or Christ) of Jerusalem since the Iron Age. Their roles are more clearly political albeit with religious implications. While bar Kochba is acclaimed Messiah by the great Rabbi Akiva (ben Joseph) he leaves no religious teachings and no cult, whereas Akiva is considered one of the "earliest founders of Rabbinic Judaism... and one of the most central and essential contributors to the Mishnah" Jesus is much more like Akiva than bar Kochba; he is also much more like that other divisive Messiah, the 17th century Sabbatai Tzvi.

One of the greatest temptations in any work on Jesus and Christian origins is to create a Jesus very much like ourselves. Since the Enlightenment, you could say there has been the quest for the rational Jesus, a Jesus that could sit comfortably in Western liberal capitalist societies. Thomas Jefferson 'demythologised' the Gospels to create an Enlightenment Jesus for the new Republic and in the 19th century we get the various Lives of Jesus by such as Strauss and Renan. This Jesus is a kind of philosopher or sage, an idealistic bourgeois. In the late 20th century we get a similar Jesus in the work of the Jesus Seminar. Here we have a peasant sage, itinerant radical, almost Californian, hippie figure. It's not quite clear how or why he ends up crucified, he's such a vanilla figure. It's even harder to figure out how, after his execution, he becomes divine. How does the sage, the Jesus of liberal rational dreams, become the Son of God?

Well, along came Paul, of course. It's a nice binary, sweet Jesus and nasty Paul, and, yes, the Pauline sections of the New Testament, have some much more uncomfortable elements than the Gospels (except for rich people, for whom the Gospels contain a lot of uncomfortable stuff). It's all too easy to make Paul the villain of the piece; he dominates the New Testament, perhaps even more than Jesus does. He is also a central figure in resolving the role of the Mosaic law, Christianity and Gentiles. After Paul, it is no longer necessary for Gentiles to be subject to the Law if they become Christian; it's also not necessary for Jews or Samaritans who become Christian to be subject to the Law either. That's a major change, a significant change. But did Paul invent Christianity? No, it was already there, in some respects you could say it even invented Paul (as my colleague Ed Conrad would say). He gets jumbled up with John and Matthew and Mark and the author of Hebrews, not to mention Peter and Jude and, for a while, with Clement, Barnabas and Hermas too. And if he's not their author(ity) then someone gives him the Pastorals too (and Laodiceans and 3 Corinthians).

I find the binary too neat and tidy and I also think it exists to let Jesus off the hook. Is it really so unimaginable that Jesus invented his own mythology rather than it being imposed upon him by latter day Pauls or Johns or even Constantines? But that makes Jesus rather alien and strange. My own personal view is that if we had a time probe and could snatch Jesus from 1st century Palestine and bring him forward in time we would find him a most bizarre and disturbing figure, not the sweet sage of bourgeois imagination. I'm sure that the authorities of our time wouldn't hesitate to certify him insane (and also Paul, and John and Mary Magdalene and Peter and Joanna and Thomas and Susanna and Matthew and Mark and Junia and Mary his mother and James and probably old Rabbi Akiva and Sabbatai Tzvi too if they were likewise caught up in our time probe). Certainly I can see how a first century Jew could consider himself (or herself), and be considered by other Jews, a heavenly being, a divine being, the divine being. I can also see how that person could decide that their messianic role was to fully instantiate in their own person, no animal substitute, the Atonement ritual of the High Priest, on earth, in the heavenlies (where there is no animal substitute). In other words, objectively that person takes on religiously motivated suicide. I can see that. It fits my readings of 'Old Testament' and studies of ancient Judaism (and subsequent Judaism too).

So how did Christianity 'fall'? Who is to blame? No one and everyone. If there was no 'fall' it could not have survived. There is no such thing as a pure and pristine original Christianity. It's impossible to recreate the 'Church of New Testament times', we don't know enough about it for a start, all we have is an affect of the text. The 'Fall' of Christianity is itself simply the affect of Christian adaptation and translation for new cultures, new times. With adaptation comes appropriation too. Christianity is Romanised, Hellenised, Germanised, Africanised, Armenianised, Slavonicised... But appropriation works both ways too. The cultures, societies, philosophies and theologies that appropriate Christianity are appropriated by Christianity too. The various ruling classes might adopt Christianity as a powerful spiritual juju but they can't get rid of that radical heart, a source, disturbing and uncomfortable but integrally part of that spiritual juju, from which its power is derived, precisely because it disturbs and challenges.

I said earlier, that Christianity, perhaps more than any other religion, is haunted by a loss, an absence. Maranatha! Come Lord! the joyous cry within the Eucharist, the aching cry otherwise; and it is this loss, this yearning, this hope too that is part and parcel of that radical heart, destabilising, undermining the boundaries. The hope, the yearning, the radical destabilising are all part and parcel of the mythology and without it they fall apart and fade away.

Lady Zeus? Curious parallels between Jesus and Ganymede

I'm currently re-reading James Davidson's The Greeks & Greek Love, a fascinating and bulky (nearly 600 pages) study of ancient Greek homosexualities. I'm not going to write about his main thesis or, perhaps better, his key arguments. You can get a bit of a sense from an essay he wrote back in 2007 for the Guardian. But for now I'm interested in some small details he gives about the story of Zeus and Ganymede and make some connections with ancient West Semitic religion and its resulting biblical world.

For those who don't know, Zeus is the High God of the ancient Greek pantheon. Ganymede is the beautiful youth who was carried off to the heavens, in Homer's Iliad by the gods but in later accounts and later representations by Zeus himself, sometimes in the form of an eagle. Zeus fell in love with Ganymede and so the youth was made immortal and ageless, dwelling in Olympus as the High God's cupbearer (a role previously filled by Hebe, the daughter of Zeus and Hera). According to the Iliad, Ganymede was a prince of Troy and Davidson details similar stories of divine abductions of mortals many of which seem to take place in the region near Troy. One such abduction is of Tithonus, a relative, in some accounts a brother, of Ganymede. He is carried away by the "serial rapist" (Davidson's term) Eos, the goddess of Dawn. Riding the dawn skies in her chariot, winged Eos, carries Tithonus away and grants him immortality but forgets to grant him agelessness. He gets progressively older and more decrepit and eventually she turns him into a cicada.

Briefly Davidson considers other parallels to Ganymede further east - Anatolia, Mesopotamia and the biblical world. An example Davidson gives from the latter is Elijah who gets carried away in a fiery chariot recalling for me more Tithonus carried off by Eos than Ganymede himself. I was struck, however, by the parallels between Enoch and Ganymede but Enoch doesn't get a mention by Davidson. In standard bibles today, Enoch only gets the briefest mention too. His main appearance is in Genesis where he is the father of Methuselah. Genesis also tells us that "Enoch walked with God, then he was no more because God took him" (5.24). He also gets a couple of references in the New Testament. He is cited as a prophet in Jude 14-15 while Hebrews tells us "By faith Enoch was transferred, that he should not see death, and was not found, because God had transferred him; for before his transference he had the witness that he had pleased God well." (Hebrews 11:5). So basically Enoch, a prophet from primordial time, is taken away by God and does not know death but gains immortality and agelessness in the heavenly realms. The books of Enoch give us a lot more information about Enoch as a prophet and his translation to, and new life in, the heavenly realm which I will come back to later. But just briefly about the books themselves 1 Enoch is the oldest being in five parts, the oldest dating back to the 3rd century BCE. It seems to have been very popular at Qumran and was also influential in early Christianity and is indeed part of the Ethiopian Bible. 2 Enoch most likely dates from the 1st century CE and only exists in Slavonic, being preserved in Russia, and in several recensions but has never been part of any biblical canon. Neither of these books of Enoch are specifically Christian but they have only been preserved by Christians. 3 Enoch is a Rabbinic mystical text from the 6th century CE.

Returning to Ganymede, Davidson considers evidence that Ganymede might not have been of Trojan origin but Greek instead. There are two references in ancient literature to Ganymede as a Greek. One locates him at Chalcis on Euboea which, as well as having a temple to Olympian Zeus, also had a sacred grove dedicated to Ganymede. It was also regarded as the site where the youth was carried off to the heavens. The other site is in the Peloponnese, the city of Phlius, where there was a sanctuary "nestling in a grove of cypresses... dedicated to a goddess called Dia, also called Hebe" (191). However the ancient writer Pausanius was told by locals that the goddess "most anciently... was (called) Ganymeda" (ibid). Yes, a female Ganymede who had also disappeared "or at least there was no cult image... not even a secret one" (ibid). According to Pausanius, the sanctuary was very ancient "going way back" (ibid). Davidson then tells us that back in Bronze Age Greece, the Mycenaean period in the second millennium BCE, many of the later deities of Greece were worshipped including Zeus/Dios and Poseidon. But he also tells us that Zeus and Poseidon and possibly other deities too were worshipped in both genders, thus Dia/Lady Zeus and Posideia/Madame Poseidon. Lady Zeus/Dia survived into the Classical and later periods in out of the way places like Phlius.

According to Davidson that the unique female Ganymede appears in a sanctuary of Lady Zeus is too much of a coincidence. He raises the possibility that perhaps "Zeus and Ganymede were once aspects of a single deity like Dia/Ganymeda" (192). He says "we could generate a nice little tetragram of relationships: Lord Zeus (Dios), his youth Ganymede, Lady Zeus (Dia) and her youth (Hebe) Ganymeda" (ibid). This tetragram immediately recalled for me a similar tetrad in West Semitic religion as found at Ugarit in the second millennium BCE. Here we have El, the High God, and Athirat (Asherah) together with Ba'al and his sister/consort Anat. Nick Wyatt says that these two pairs represent androgynous dyads of divinity and both pairs are connected, Ba'al and Anat are alter egos of the primary dyad of El and Athirat. El and Athirat represent the divine at a macrocosmic level while Ba'al and Anat are the divine at a microcosmic level. If El and Athirat can be seen as in parallel to Zeus and Lady Zeus can Ba'al and Anat be seen as a parallel to Ganymede/a?

Interestingly, the 5th century BCE Jewish community at Elephantine in southern Egypt worshipped Yahweh (Yahu/YHWH) together with a consort, Anat-Yahu. In the biblical world Yahweh and Ba'al are rivals; El is also there as the Most High and so is Asherah who is worshipped in the Jerusalem Temple and is most notably always associated with sacred groves, including one in Jerusalem. So we have that same Ugaritic tetrad here except that Yahweh has replaced Ba'al. So can Yahweh be likewise seen as a parallel to Ganymede?

If so, it comes most strikingly through the parallel between Ganymede and Enoch, a parallel which will also incorporate Jesus. But Davidson has a bit more to say about Ganymede and Zeus which is worth considering before I further explore the parallels. He makes the point that perhaps everyone has been too hung up on the sexual side of the relationship between god and boy to see the significance of the relationship. Instead, he points out, this is a story of apotheosis. Ganymede "is a unique figure in Greek religion, a mortal on Olympus. It was the very nectar served by Ganymede and the ambrosia, the food of the gods..., that kept the gods gods, that kept them up there (on Olympus)" (196). He continues, the Greeks "would see in Ganymede a pure once-mortal boy mediating between earth and heaven, a resonant symbol of human and divine exchange, a uniquely remarkable figure... a mortal removed from the earthly sphere and chosen by the most awesome of the gods to perform holy offerings in his presence. Here sacrifice and the food of the gods are as one" (197). He underlines his argument by noting that in the Greek city of Aegion there was the custom of holding a beauty contest of adolescent youths, the winner being appointed as priest of Zeus, an office he held until the hair began to darken his upper lip and jaw. Furthermore, in many of their images Zeus and Ganymede are wearing yarmulkes. These are now seen as Jewish headgear but it seems they were once regarded as a sign of holiness across the ancient Mediterranean.

Davidson has plenty more to say about Ganymede, including exploring the way Plato recalibrates the dynamics of the love between the god and the boy in the Phaedrus. But what came as a big surprise for me was the discovery that the ancient Jewish philosopher and Torah commentator, Philo of Alexandria, used the image of Ganymede in his work. Here Davidson draws on a short paper by John Dillon published back in 1981 in the Classical Quarterly, "Ganymede as the Logos".

It is the image of Ganymede as the wine-steward or wine-pourer, that Philo draws on (Ganymede is identified with the constellation Aquarius, the water-pourer). On three occasions Ganymede appears in this context in Philo's work. In Quod Deus sit Immutabilis, 155-8, he compares God's grace to nectar and ambrosia and says

He is not, then, going to drink from a cistern, to whom God has granted unmixed draughts of intoxication, either from the hand of one of his servants among the angels, whom he has designated to be his wine-steward , or even from his own hand, without the mediation of anyone between the donor and receiver

The wine-steward is a Ganymede image, the ambrosia of Olympus, here the wine of divine grace


There are two more striking images in Philo's Somneia.

Who, then is God's wine-steward? It is he who pours the libation of peace, the truly great High Priest who first receives the loving-cups of God's perennial bounties, then pays them back when he pours a libation of that potent undiluted draught, himself (2. 183).

Here the wine-steward is turned into the great High Priest who serves in the heavenlies and who is represented on earth by the High Priest in the Temple. As Dillon observes

For Philo, the figure of the High Priest (of whom the ideal example is Moses himself) is a mediator between God and man, a representation of the Logos immanent in the world.

And further on in Somneia, Philo explicitly uses the same Ganymede image in reference to the Logos

And who can pour over the happy soul which proffers its own reason as the most sacred cup, the holy goblets of true joy, except the cup-bearer of God, the master of the feast, the Word (Logos)? not differing from the draught itself, but being itself in an unmixed state, the pure delight and sweetness, and pouring forth, and joy, and ambrosial medicine of pleasure and happiness; if we too may, for a moment, employ the language of the poets (2.249)

John took a fairly standard (according to Daniel Boyarin) 1st century Jewish hymn to the Logos and Christianised it, or maybe more appropriately, Jesusified it to serve as the introduction to his gospel. So this last passage from Philo already serves as a link from Ganymede to Jesus. But the High Priestly role gives a direct link to Enoch the prophet in Genesis who was carried up to heaven. Here is what Jubilees, another ancient text that didn't get into any canons apart from the Ethiopian Bible, has to say about Enoch

And he was taken from amongst the children of men, and we conducted him into the Garden of Eden in majesty and honour, and behold there he writeth down the condemnation and judgment of the world, and all the wickedness of the children of men. And on account of it (God) brought the waters of the flood upon all the land of Eden; for there he was set as a sign and that he should testify against all the children of men, that he should recount all the deeds of the generations until the day of condemnation. And he burnt the incense of the sanctuary, (even) sweet spices, acceptable before the Lord on the Mount. For the Lord hath four places on the earth, the Garden of Eden, and the Mount of the East, and this mountain on which thou art this day, Mount Sinai, and Mount Zion (which) will be sanctified in the new creation for a sanctification of the earth; through it will the earth be sanctified from all (its) guilt and its uncleanness throughout the generations of the world. (Jub 4:23-26)

Here we have Enoch as both the heavenly scribe, as well as the High Priest offering incense to the Lord, to ensure some sort of sanctification of the earth, a form of atonement. The first two books of Enoch give very detailed accounts of this same process - the prophet is carried off to the heavens where he is anointed and vested to become an angelic and (high) priestly being. In subsequent rabbinic tradition, too, Enoch on his ascent to heaven is transformed into the great angel Metatron and in 3 Enoch is termed the lesser Yahweh beside the Lord, the greater Yahweh. In many respects Enoch's story more explicitly and spectacularly is one of apotheosis, deification than that of Ganymede but the core of both is the same principle - a human/mortal who wins the favour of a god and is taken to heaven and there transformed into a heavenly, a divine being to sit or stand beside the Most High God.

These Enochian themes of apotheosis/deification, heavenly high priesthood, grace and atonement are also central to the Christian portrait/understanding of Jesus, so crucial, in fact that I'm inclined to regard them as coming from the source, Jesus himself. Thus Enoch also serves to link Jesus and Ganymede. Jesus is further linked, via Philo's applying Ganymede imagery likewise to the Logos.

It's clear from his book that Davidson has a somewhat jaundiced view of Christianity. Given that he's a gay man it's quite understandable. But Davidson does note how prominent Ganymede imagery was in late medieval and Renaissance Christendom. He notes wryly that the image of Ganymede's abduction is actually on the doors of St Peter's in Rome. Given the bitter contemporary debates about Christianity and homosexuality I'm sure many conservative Christians might look askance at Ganymede's image on the entrance to the most important church in Western Christendom. But ironically it would seem that there is no more appropriate place for Ganymede to be seen. Perhaps the Ganymede story can be seen as a pagan prefiguring of the Christ story. And perhaps Ganymede might enable Christians to see just how much the homo-amorous, homo-erotik inheres in the very divinising dynamics the Christ story itself.

Homophobia, Heteronormativity and the fall of David Campbell

One of the ever present temptations of keeping a blog is to turn it into no more than a vehicle for venting and rants. It's a temptation I've felt a number of times and I've probably succumbed on the odd occasion too. When NSW transport minister, David Campbell, was outed by Channel 7 over a week ago visiting a gay sex on premises venue in Sydney, I came very close to writing a full on tirade. I really wanted to let loose. After all, what Channel 7 did must have cast an icy chill over all those many people still in the closet, and those trying to live 'discreet' lives as well. And the fact is that large numbers of lesbigay people are still either closeted or discreet. We don't live in a post-homophobia world yet - I don't expect I'll live to see that as a reality even though we've made so many advances in this country and others (but not all).

It seems the 7 reporter, Adam Walters, was determined to get Campbell who is not regarded as the most effective Minister in a State gov't that is itself on the nose and probably well past its use by date (although the alternative doesn't strike me as any much better). And it seems there had been questions raised in Parl't about the whereabouts of Campbell during a recent major traffic breakdown. One of the refreshing things about Australian politics is that there hasn't really been any fixation on the sex lives of MPs as blights politics in the UK and the US. The whole Clinton Lewinsky saga seemed so bizarre and improbable from an Australian perspective while in the UK it seems that the merest hint that a senior political figure has engaged in any sort of sex outside of authorised marital relations has been enough to end that person's career full stop.

In this country however such matters have been mostly off-limits. Certainly all manner of salacious gossip has circulated when various political figures have been having difficult times but generally has never entered the public domain of the media. That's not to say there haven't been sex scandals but nothing like the US or UK experience and certainly nothing like what happened to Campbell. Well almost. We saw something like that back in 2002 with the campaign against Justice Michael Kirby by federal Liberal MP, Bill Heffernan. Prior to that in the 90s, there was Wood Royal Commission into police corruption in NSW which degenerated into a homophobic witch hunt over allegations of paedophilia. NSW State Labor MP, Franca Arena, pushed the campaign which led to the suicide of a NSW judge after she outed him in Parlt as someone who used public toilets for sex with men. Here in Qld, too, I remember homophobia being used by both sides of politics in the 80s again with allegations of paedophilia and under-age sex. Both sides were trying to use homophobia against the other, which led to the State gov't passing legislation they claimed would close down gay bars in Qld. It didn't of course, and couldn't, partly because of the wording of the Act and also because the level of police corruption meant that manner of illegal activities were going on almost in full public view a long as the police got their own payoffs. The further irony was that the then Labor leader (and Baptist preacher), Keith Wright, was subsequently sprung, and went to gaol for, sex with under age girls, after he left State parlt.

Campbell's case is most reminiscent of Kirby's, although Kirby's case relied in part on the ghosts of the Arena campaigns in the 90s. Kirby was the victim of completely false allegations. There were false allegations, or more suggestions that would turn out to be false, with Campbell too but the substantive allegation was that he went to the gay sex on premises venue. And so the issue became Campbell's double life. NSW Premier bought into it and disgraced herself by saying

she was "disappointed and angry" about the minister's behaviour but, as a woman, she was concerned for his family, "his wife in particular"."I would say speaking as a person and a Premier I was shocked, I was saddened, I'm distressed," Ms Keneally said. "As his friend I'm disappointed and angry."As a Premier ... as a woman, I am concerned for his family and his wife in particular and I cannot imagine the impact this is having particularly on his family and on him at this time."She did not think it was acceptable for him to abuse the benefits of his office, his car in particular. She said she did not think that Mr Campbell had previously thought about the impact on his family of his double life. "It is appalling that he lived a lie, and it is appalling that he lives in a society [in which] he feels he has to live a lie," Ms Keneally said.

It is appalling that such hypocrisy can be gotten away with so publicly.

The notion of living a lie, Campbell's double life, became the issue and the justification by 7 News for outing him in the first place. Apparently all his promotional publicity showed him with his wife and family. Acording to Walters, the journo who outed him:

"It's blindingly obvious that since 1999 Mr Campbell has purported to be a family man," he said."He's represented himself to the people of Kiera as a family man, even going to the extent of sending Christmas cards to his constituents highlighting the fact that he is a man of family values."This is about pretence, it's about integrity, it's about character."

As Marieke Hardy points out:

While it may come as a shock to Walters to realise that family men on occasion sleep with women other than their wives, visit prostitutes, and - yes - have sex with other family men, the fact is this does not preclude them from being loving fathers, caring partners, and upstanding members of society. Sometimes they're even police ministers.

I agree with Hardy but I'm also struck by the way the debate shifted from straight out homophobia (I won't hold my breath waiting for similar stories about Ministers being sprung with prostitutes or other extra-marital hetero relationships) to heteronormativity. In other words, Campbell isn't performing marriage, family and even heterosexuality properly and so his constituents need to be made aware of that so that he can be driven from public life.

Hardy also shows how the heteronormative shift was not confined to straight commentators but was also picked up by gay commentators trying to defend Campbell, in particular, Sydney radio newsreader Geoff Field. Field wrote a piece in Sydney's Daily Telegraph in an attempt to defend Cambell or at least to try and counter the homophobic baying over Campbell. The title says it all - "Stupid and morally wrong but an absolute tragedy" Certainly a tragedy but where the stupidity, let alone the moral wrongness? Field is determined to prevent the story turning into a gaybashing exercise, which is highly creditable, but he does so by further bashing Campbell to reinforce the regime of heteronormativity responsible for Campbell's 'double life". He says:

First and foremost I feel sorry for the former police and transport minister's family and friends. I also feel for David Campbell himself, although many of you believe he deserves what he gets. I understand that train of thought, but this man was obviously living a double life which has now been exposed to a hungry media baying for blood. Don't get me wrong, what he did was stupid and morally wrong. Not only does he have to deal with his family, he also has to deal with the full force of the media. I hope this doesn't turn into a gay bashing exercise by certain people, because what he did was wrong whether it involved going to a straight or gay sex club. I just hope there is some way that those people directly involved can get their lives back together without even more suffering. Before you condemn this man, are you perfect yourself? I'm not saying he should be allowed to get away with this, without any consequences, but let's not allow this to turn into a titillating, salacious gay scandal....

But it already is. Campbell resigned once the story was out, no doubt to spare him and his family being subjected to further prurient scrutiny but the story is a salacious gay scandal involving sex on premises venues.

Sex on premises venues are a feature of contemporary gay life. They are safe and private compared to the public toilets and parks and out of the way places where men would meet for sex in the past. Beats and sex on premises venues are and have been frequented by 'family' men as much as by anyone else. In many cases they do so because the regime of the closet required they lead a double life. I don't know whether that was Campbell's situation or whether he and his wife had worked out a different sexual arrangement. One of the 'rules' of marriage has been sexual exclusivity, the ownership of the other's body. In the past it was male ownership of the woman's body and her womb in particular, marriage is after all about guaranteeing the patriline. But over the centuries such sexual exclusivity, monogamy, has been extended to both parties, at least in theory. But it's origins lie in the control of the womb and its products by the male.

The sexual revolutions of the last few decades have meant that many couples are living marriage differently with more open (but not public) (hetero) sexual arrangements. On the homo side, many long-term same-sex relationships are likewise more open in their sexual arrangements and always have been. Some types of same-sex relationships really don't fit the monogamous marriage model at all - and nor should they. Geoff Field publicly 'married' his partner, Jason, back in 2005 and so, no doubt, subscribes to the heteronormative mythology of the institution of marriage. But the heteronormative model allows no place for David Campbell to start with (and maybe not even for Geoff Field). So rather than reinforcing the heteronormativity, and the homophobia that derives from it, it would be better to argue for an affectional plenitude and a plurality of relationship types.

Samaritans

I might have been 15 or 16 when I discovered that the Samaritans, mostly known through the famous Gospel parable of the Good Samaritan, still existed in the Middle East. Ever since then I have been intrigued and fascinated by this community, once quite extensive in Palestine and the Roman world (there were ancient Samaritan communities as far afield as Sicily). Ed Conrad remembers me in my early undergrad days asking questions about the Samaritans. For me I guess what was important was that the Samaritans had consistently received a bad press in the biblical narratives, hence the punch of the Good Samaritan story, but if they were still around I was intrigued to find out what their side of the story was. Why was it so infrequently referred to in the studies of Ancient Israel and ancient biblical religion? So when doing my PhD, I was determined to get my hands on whatever Samaritan texts in translation I could find. I couldn't find a lot, the Memar Marqah, the Asatir, the Samaritan version of Joshua and the subsequent history of Ancient Israel. I also read a number of studies of Samaritan religion.

For those who don't know, the Samaritans reject the legitimacy of the Temple at Jerusalem, reject the very legitimacy of Jerusalem itself as a sacred site. Instead they believe that Mt Gerizim near modern day Nablus on the West Bank is the true site intended for the worship of the God of Israel, being the ancient Mt Moriah where Abraham took Isaac for sacrifice. If Jerusalem is illegitimate so too is the priesthood that was based there. The Samaritans maintain a line of priests and high priests claiming a direct descent from Aaron, the first High Priest according to the books of Moses. The Samaritans also venerate as scripture only these books of Moses, the Pentateuch, the Torah. They have their own version of Joshua which introduces a Chronicle of the history of Israel and the Samaritans but these aren't counted as scripture. The Samaritans reject as false all the additional books of the Hebrew Bible and Christian Old Testaments. I found the Samaritan Chronicle a fascinating read. Not only are the kings and priests of Judah and Jerusalem treated negatively (with the exception curiously of David, who while not counted as among the Samaritans is treated fairly positively notwithstanding) but also the kings and priests of the northern kingdom based at Samaria. In the Samaritan account, the Temple at Mt Gerizim was as much challenged by the Samarian kings as by the Judahite establishment. The Samaritans name for themselves means something like the Faithful or the Pure.

So I was interested to read this article by Benjamin Balint on the modern Samaritans via a link at Dr Platypus. The article describes the celebration of Passover by Samaritans this year at Mt Gerizim. Unlike Jews, for whom Passover is a household feast, Samaritans observe Passover as a pilgrimage feast i.e. it's a Temple feast and hence must be observed at the sacred site of the Temple, Mt Gerizim. The article touches on the rescue mission launched last century by a Jewish group and subsequently supported by the second President of Israel whereby Samaritan men married Jewish women who had effectively converted to Samaritanism. The Samaritan community numbered then only 140 people and was in danger of dying out. Now, while split into two communities based in Nablus and near Tel Aviv in Israel, they number some 730. I also found out from the article that Yasser Arafat appointed a Samaritan to the Palestinian Legislative Council. Nablus Samaritans aim to keep good relations with their Arab neighbours. In actual fact, I remember this fascinating story from 2007 on the now lamentably defunct ABC Radio National Religion Report program about Samaritans in Nablus. It would appear that Samaritan priests have a reputation as being effective fortune tellers and dealing with magic and consequently are in great demand from both Muslim and Christian Palestinians and some Jews as well.

While I recommend Balint's article at the same time I have some problems with aspects of it. He glosses over a key fact of Samaritan history crucial to the antipathy between Samaritans and Jews at the base of both the Good Samaritan story and also John's account of Jesus meeting with the Samaritan woman at the well. Balint says:

When the Jews made Jerusalem, some 40 miles to the south, the exclusive center of worship—a chosen city for a chosen people—the Samaritans regarded the Jewish cult as illegitimate. This initiated the ancient “temple race” between the Samaritans and the Jerusalem-centric Jews whose beliefs and history shaped modern Jewry. By permission of Alexander the Great, the Samaritans built a temple of their own, measuring 400 by 560 feet, atop Gerizim. In use for some 200 years, the temple was destroyed before the first century BCE, never to be rebuilt.

He then recounts ancient tales of Samaritan-Jewish antipathy:

The 1st-century Jewish historian Josephus reports on Samaritans who intruded into the temple in Jerusalem one Passover eve and scattered human bones to render the place unclean. The Samaritan Chronicle boasts of another episode in which Samaritans substituted rats in a cage of doves being carried to Jerusalem as temple offerings.

The antipathy ran both ways. Among Jews threatened by a rival to Jerusalem’s claim of exclusivity, a deep anti-Samaritanism prevailed. This culminated in a rabbinic ruling by Rabbi Yehuda Ha-Nasi that, despite their scrupulousness in the observance of biblical law, the Samaritans were to be considered as Gentiles in every respect.

In Balint's acccount these attempted acts of Samaritan desecration seem odd; he gives a clear sense of them being unprovoked or due to some irrational rivalry. But he omits a key fact about the destruction of the Samaritan Temple. It was destroyed in 128/29 BCE by John Hyrcanus who was both the High Priest of Jerusalem and ruler/de facto king of the independent Maccabean Jewish state that had extended its rule over much of Palestine. Hyrcanus's son and eventual successor, Alexander Jannaeus, made it official and declared himself king as well as high priest thus restoring the old priestly kingship that hadn't been seen in Palestine since the Iron Age. In light of the facts of the destruction of the Gerizim Temple, the Samaritan attempts at desecration of Jerusalem's Temple don't seem so irrational.

Balint also cites scripture to give a picture of a long antipathy between Samaritans and Jews:

The Bible recounts that when Ezra and Nehemiah rebuilt Jerusalem and its temple, the Samaritans tried to prevent them; Sanballat, then leader of the Samaritans, mocked “these feeble Jews” (Neh. 4:2).

I have to confess that I'm sceptical of such stories. Jews and Samaritans share the same religious origins i.e. they both share the Torah as scripture and both follow the Mosaic Law, albeit in different ways. Both were also in origin Temple religions with a shared framework of ritual and symbolism. It is a curious fact that Mt Gerizim is referred to a number of times in the Torah but never Mt Zion. The fact is we don't know who wrote the Torah or where it was written (or even when). It's generally assumed that Jerusalem was the location but can we be sure of that. Perhaps the work began at Mt Gerizim or was even a much more collaborative work across the various shrines and scribes and priests of Yahweh. Certainly the Torah represents the rewriting, the reconstruction of the older Palestinian cults of Yahweh, a process I think most likely took place in the Persian period, a process I think was an indigenous response to Persian (religious) hegemony.

We know very little of the religious world of Persian Palestine (or of Greek Palestine in the Ptolemaic and Seleucid periods either, for that matter). As Balint observes, Ezra-Nehemiah paints a picture of rivalry and antipathy between Samaria and Jerusalem. A similar sense of antipathy emerges in the Twelve Minor Prophets and there is also the fiction that all the Israelites of the north had been deported by the Assyrians to be replaced by foreigners and 'half breeds' thus making northern religiosity suspect. But we know from Assyrian archives that the north was not depopulated en masse. A substantial minority, but a minority nonetheless, were deported and replaced by foreigners but the majority remained behind. The 'ten tribes' were never lost but always remained in the land. Obviously, Ezra-Nehemiah and the Twelve Minor Prophets are written in Jerusalem or at least with a Jerusalem perspective and quite likely much later after a breach between Gerizim and Jerusalem.

When did that breach occur? We don't know but I'm inclined to think it was very late. What I find most telling is that in the 4th century BCE, the Jewish military colony at Elephantine in the south of Egypt wrote to both Samaria and Jerusalem asking permission to rebuild their own Temple. So for this ancient Jewish community both Samaria and Jerusalem had equal and authoritative status. We know that both Samaria and Jerusalem gave approval to the rebuilding of the Temple at Elephantine and gave instructions about how the cult was to be conducted there. Presumably then for these Jews in southern Egypt there was no breach. It must have come later.

The Samaritan Chronicles were written quite late, definitely after the breach, probably after the destruction of the Gerizim Temple. They read almost as a response to Kings, Ezra-Nehemiah, Chronicles and the Twelve. I mentioned above that they give a fairly positive portrait of David. The name David means beloved and in the biblical accounts everyone loves David (he, however, is much more limited, and faithless, in his affections) and it seems the Samaritans also fell under his spell. The Samaritans also regarded the northern kingdom as apostate but in their account both Judah and Israel apostatise and only the Samaritan community, centred around the Temple at Gerizim, stays faithful. Furthermore, while both apostate north and south suffer deportation by Assyria and Babylon respectively, God protects the Samaritans and keeps them in the land.

I don't regard the Samaritan Chronicle as history, any more than I regard Samuel, Kings, let alone Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah as history. But I think all of them contain elements of history in their stories. I hope to write some more about that at a later stage.

But right now I want to say how thankful I am that the Samaritans survive and I hope that they will continue and maybe even grow. Because they follow a much more literal application of the Mosaic laws they can never be be a large community. Oddly enough I think that such Samaritan literalism may well have been an innovation because I don't believe those laws were meant to be followed en masse. They are portraits of utopia and had their strongest application in Temple practice, whether it be in Jerusalem or Gerizim (or Leontopolis or Elephantine for that matter). But to be followed by everyone and in every way, I don't think so. But that's something for another post. But I am not someone who believes in one religion for all (or no religion either). I like the mosaic of religious plurality and don't want to see religions die out, particularly small and vulnerable religions like the Samaritans, the Karaites, the Mandaeans, the Donmeh, the Parsis/Zoroastrians, not to mention the many indigenous religions. Like languages, religions express something about what it means to be human. The death of a religion, like the death of a language is an irreparable loss. Religious diversity must be fostered, encouraged, sustained and celebrated; respected.

All religions are inter-related and Christianity needs to recognise and acknowledge its Samaritan roots, to acknowledge and honour the Samaritan woman at the well, the Good Samaritan and all those early Samaritan converts mentioned in the book of Acts. To that end I think the Samaritan Torah should sit beside both the Masoretic and Septuagint versions in Christian Old Testaments. Furthermore, I think the Samaritan Chronicle should be included in Christian Bibles, perhaps as an appendix to the Old Testament, to show that there was another account of that history by another community who saw themselves, and still do, as the faithful holding on tenaciously to the religion of ancient Israel, to the God of Moses and Abraham, when all others had forsaken it.

Walking Oxley Creek Common

I have been back house-sitting for the last month and a half. At Corinda, I'm looking after a big old house and its two cats, whose humans are travelling overseas the next few months. When I came down here in April, I was working full time but that job finished end of last month. I was also busy with stuff to do with the LGBT History Action Group much of my spare time that month too.

But my current unemployment has given me a lot more time, or more correctly, more flexibility in my time, as now that I'm unemployed I've been able to direct my attention back to a variety of projects, including the History Action Group stuff that had been pushed aside by the demands of full time employment. It also means that I've been able to get out and about in the neighbourhood here, at last, and explore it.

By that I mean, in particular, the Oxley Creek Common, which is not far, as the crow flies, from where I'm staying. The Common consists of old Dept of Primary Industries research farmland and includes a long walk alongside the creek ending at a grove of hoop pines, the Secret Forest, which are the remnant of an old commercial forestry that was based here early last century. Another trail branches off to a patch of wetlands known as Pelican Island. The old farmland, too, fenced off from the walk, still has grazing animals, cattle and sheep and horses, even some goats.

I first started coming to the Common when I was housesitting here in 2007. Back then we were still in the drought. The fields were brown and stubby with only small numbers of cattle grazing. The Common was only just established. There had been tree-planting along the path but most were still saplings and many were struggling to get established. Some had died, looking like long dry twigs planted in the ground. The wetlands were there but much diminished, mostly more mudland with pond, and seemed to be the home of the ubiquitous ibis rather than the pelican. But nevertheless I was captivated by the place. The mangroves along the creek were thriving and healthy and home to many birds, which you could hear as you walked along the path. What's more the Common is adjacent to industrial land and a busy link road, as well as the Brisbane Markets at Rocklea. Yet as you walk down the path into the Common, you hear all the noise of traffic and industry become muffled, until you reach a point of near silence, where it becomes distant and is overwhelmed by the sounds of breeze and bird and insect.

I managed to get back to the Common in 2008 when I was housesitting down here and also early last year so I've experienced it in all the seasons. I went there again middle of last year but it was closed because of flood damage. Over the last couple of years, Brisbane and, indeed, eastern Australia, seem to have moved into a cycle of much wetter weather (Bob Hawke jokes that the best way to end a drought is to elect a Labor government). I've been told that as far as Brisbane is concerned, we seem to have returned to a wetter period in a long term pattern of cyclical wet and dry periods each lasting for quite a few years.

So a couple of weeks ago, now that I was unemployed, I made my way to the Common. While close by it's not easy to access as the only way is to go along Sherwood Rd crossing both the railway line and then Oxley Creek itself. But whoever built the bridges only provided a pedestrian footpath on one side and each bridge the path is one the opposite side to the other. That means that pedestrians like myself are forced to cross Sherwood Rd not once but twice and over the last few years the traffic on that road has become much busier. There are no designated pedestrian crossings either. So I was hoping the Common was open, it's not a walk one takes lightly and it was late afternoon heading into peak hour traffic.

Not only was the Common open but I was amazed at the transformation. All the plantings along the path had not only grown but were thriving, tall and dense. I was astonished by how much the path had become a type of woodland walk. The grazing lands alongside in some stretches could only be glimpsed through the foliage and, what's more, there weren't just a handful of cattle grazing there now. Instead there were herds of cattle everywhere in the lush and tall green grassland. Sheep too and some goats could be seen if you looked closely enough. Along the path, there was the sound of birdsong and most surprisingly several times I had the cracking call of the whipbird. I've never heard a whipbird in Brisbane! There were turkeys too - I'd never seen turkeys in the Common before.

Pelican Island was a revelation. The mudlands were now underwater and with manner of waterbirds; the ibis were no longer dominant, ducks were everywhere and there were pelicans and I even saw a black swan! It's hard to describe the impact all this had on me. I was at first elated and then moved to the point of tears. It was all so beautiful - the scents, the sounds, the colours, even the changes in air temperature as the evening advanced and as one moved from densely wooded to open stretches of the oath.

We're also in Autumn now in Brisbane and there's something about that season here, the quality, the clarity of the light. It triggers something in me awakening impossible unconscious memories that strain against the walls of consciousness. I don't know what these 'memories' are, not mine surely, but they come with a yearning a nostalgia for something undefined, for that which never was.

That first time was late afternoon and I hurried, as the evening advanced, to get out again again before it got dark. I was surprised to find I was passing people coming in, mostly dogwalkers, as it grew darker. I've not been in there at night and the path is not, thankfully, lit. I went back twice more, once in the morning on a weekday and then again one afternoon last weekend. And then yesterday I went back again, very late in the afternoon. By the time I arrived, the sun was going down and the western horizon was ablaze. The weather has cooled over the month but this is Brisbane in the sub-tropics and so, while I wore a pullover, I can get around in shorts and sandals.

Once again I was overwhelmed by the power, the beauty, the exuberant life of the place. I heard the whipbird again and everywhere cicadas. And there were turkeys too. I walked down to the Secret Forest by which time the light was really fading fast. I should have brought a camera because the fading light on the western horizon, dull embers really, seemed to have dissolved any sense of a city around this place. I felt as if I was far away with maybe only a small country town somewhere nearby. Walking back along an unwooded stretch of the path and looking east across the pastures, Brisbane seemed to have been turned into a kind of country town. In the distance I could see the hills of Toohey Forest and between them and the Common you could only really see the scattered lights of the Rocklea industrial area and then outlines of some of the buildings. Once again I felt transported and the pangs of unconscious memory pressed against me. If these are my memories, rather than cultural ones created by text and image and shared experience, maybe they come from early childhood in Lithgow? I don't know but I have throughout my life been haunted by this sense of memory, bitter sweet as they say, and most prominently in autumn, but also on those evenings when the sky is clear and the light fades like embers in the west.

It was a half-moon last night and as I made my way along the path could see my shadow cast in the moonlight. I thought I was alone but I could hear some people in the distance coming back from Pelican Island; they had a dog with them too. I quickened my pace because the last thing I wanted was any sort of human contact in that place, at that time. It was an exquisite moment of solitude, rich with an intimacy that could only be shared by invitation.

I will be going back, especially in the evening. I look forward to it in winter. Many native trees go into bloom in July and I look forward to the tangy but musty sweet perfume of wattle especially. I might even dare to make an early rising and explore the Common as the dawn breaks. Maybe.

I found this photo of sunrise at the Common. And here's the site for the Friends of the Oxley Common.

Bible, History and Ancient Israel

I've just finished reading Megan Bishop Moore's Philosophy and Practice in Writing a History of Ancient Israel, well, rereading actually. I read it last year and was supposed to write a review but life got right away from me as '09 progressed. Re-reading it I'm ready to do the review but I thought I would first gather/research my thoughts here.

I have to say the book is pretty good in the way it surveys how "biblical" history or "Ancient Israel" history has been done from mid-last century to present. It provides a particularly good account of the challenge raised by the 'minimalists' in the late 80s and 90s to a whole suite of assumptions that had underpinned biblical/Ancient Israel history writing up until then. Two key assumptions, in particular, were questioned by the minimalists - the reliability of the biblical texts for providing any valid information about Ancient Israel and the very validity of the term Ancient Israel to understand Iron Age Palestine. Was the history of Ancient Israel/Iron Age Palestine nothing more than a scholarly construct based on biblical texts, themselves products of the later Persian/Hellenistic eras, that had but retrojected a constructed narrative onto the past, even displacing that Iron Age past?

The one thing that strikes me reading this book is just how much old testament biblical studies has been aligned with doing history, in many respects subsumed by doing a specific history, that of Iron Age Palestine. In terms of the texts, I'm pretty much a minimalist. I don't think any of them come from the Iron Age. They may draw on Iron Age resources, a few psalms and hymns and poems, a few laws and maybe some rituals. And clearly the author(s) of Kings had some kind of chronicle or king lists for Palestine in the Assyrian period and later because we can find references to these same monarchs in Assyrian records. But at the same time it's clear that Kings is written well and truly after the events it describes - it has to be to end, when it does, at the Babylonian conquest of Judah. Kings ends in an exile present so it has to be written some time later, later exile, Persian or beyond. And as Kings serves as final instalment of the saga, Joshua - Kings, known in Judaism as the Former Prophets, and known by scholars as the Deuteronomistic History due to recurring patterns of style and thought, ideology, then it seems fair enough to regard all those texts as roughly contemporaneous in composition. The alternative account of this history, Chronicles, definitely ends in a Persian present, as do, of course, Isaiah and the Book of the Twelve Minor Prophets. So their composition has to be in the Persian period or later.


The Torah, too, has long been regarded as post-exilic in its final form. The famous documentary hypothesis of historical critical scholarship, following Wellhausen postulated a post-exilic context to the P or priestly material that was understood as one of the four key assumed sources of the Pentateuch. This was the material added by the editors who redacted the materials into the Torah's final form. Historical critical scholars relied on the assumed age of the other assumed sources, most famously (the Book of) J, which was generally dated to the 10th or 9th centuries BCE. The dating of these various assumed sources relied on the historical veracity of the biblical narratives about Ancient Israel. But for a long time, what was crucial was to identify and date sources, it was a kind of an archeology of the text from which a history could be constructed and by which scholars could identify and locate specific voices, not least the 'original voices' of different prophets. A similar process has been employed in New Testament studies, especially in the quest for the historical Jesus but I wont go into that here.

By mid-20th century, methodological problems with such source criticism had led to the development of form criticism and redaction criticism. The latter analysed the way the sources had been edited together to create the final text. However if an editor is too skilful in their work, then they are starting to be more like an author, what became termed as the case of the disappearing editor (redactor).

Most of this historiography is not covered by Bishop who starts her account early/mid-20th century with the US based biblical archeology 'school' of Albright and Bright who weren't at all interested in digging in the text when they could be digging in the (Palestinian/Israeli) soil instead. Like the historical critics, these archeologists had great confidence in the overall historicity of the biblical accounts and theirs was a genuinely scholarly approach, unlike the ark hunters and other Christian fundamentalist so-called archeologists of today e.g. the late Ron Wyatt. She turns then from US biblical archeology of the soil to European archeology of the text as represented by Albrecht Alt and his 'school'. This is the good old historical critical project that I referred to above. Like Albright and his followers, Alt and his colleagues had as their goal the reconstruction and elucidation of the history of Ancient Israel. As with the US archeology school, Alt and his colleagues followed a genuinely scholarly approach to their work with texts. Both schools were positivist, empirical in their approach and committed to objectivity in the way they did history.

I think several factors undermined both these approaches. By the 70s archeology is starting to put in doubt some of the presumed historicity of the biblical narrative. At the same time, for both archeology and for history more broadly, the 20th century saw changes in philosophy and practice in both disciplines. Bishop outlines these shifts in her first two chapters. Inasmuch as biblical studies had been conflated with doing history, then the rise of minimalism was necessary and inevitable. The minimalists could be seen as calling people to more rigorous standards of doing history. Or even more importantly, asking just what was the point of all this history of Ancient Israel work in the first place. How much was the interest in the states/statelets of Iron Age Palestine due to theological rather than straightforward historical concerns? And, given their later provenance, how relevant are the biblical texts to reconstructing a history of Palestine in the Iron Age? Is placing reliance on the biblical version of events, evidence of theological bias, especially if artifacts and other data don't give support to that version?

Bishop gives a chapter to the minimalists and then turns to the 'opposition' which she terms non-mimimalist. It's a rather awkward term because it implies an opposing binary whereas I think the reality is more like a continuum at (or towards) one end of which sit the minimalists while the non-minimalists stretch along most of the rest of the continuum. Some such as Iain Provan (and his colleagues Long and Longman) would appear to sit right down towards the other end of the of the continuum, at least in accepting the reliablity of the biblical narrative, accepting everything from the Abraham/Sarah story onwards as a history (alas Bishop doesn't report why Provan, Long and Longman don't accord the primordial 'history' - Adam to Babel - the same sort of reliability). The problem with such an approach is that, especially with no other data, artifactual or textual, for verification, what's produced is not so much history as scholarly paraphrases of biblical narrative. So much of the older history of Ancient Israel really is nothing more than biblical paraphrase.

Bishop's final chapter assesses the state of the discipline i.e. history of Ancient Israel. It seems that for many if not most non-minimalists, there is a new consensus in approach, one in which results are understood to be more contingent and in which there can be a greater variety of reconstructions and consequent discussion and debate. As a biblical scholar, rather than ancient historian, I'm most interested in what we can learn about the religious world of Iron Age Palestine and how much continuity it had with the older 'Canaanite' world of the Bronze Age. I'm also interested in the religious interactions between Palestine and its neighbours e.g. Egypt. However what I would really like to know more about is Palestine in the Persian and Hellenistic periods and not just Palestine but the communities of YHWH worshippers within Palestine and beyond. We get a glimpse from the Elephantine papyri and can get some glimpses by reading some of the biblical texts such as Isaiah and The Twelve. Biblical history for me is, in part, the history of the religious ideas found in the Old Testament and related texts, how they fit in the broader religious world of the ancient Middle East and beyond. Whether or not there was a Samson or a Saul or a Solomon is nowhere near as important, at least from a biblical studies perspective.

St Mary's and Peter Kennedy - the Book

It's been about 7 or 8 months since I've written on St Mary's South Brisbane and the dramas there with the former priests, Peter Kennedy and Terry Fitzpatrick. I had promised I would write something about going back to St Mary's but it seems other things got in the way. I have been pretty much a regular at St Mary's since the change took place last year. I don't live in the area anymore so I don't know how long I can sustain it, especially as, coming up this year, I have quite a bit of housesitting quite a few kilometres away in the southwestern suburbs. Along with quite a few others my main purpose in going back was to provide support in a difficult time and to ensure that a diversity of congregation was maintained. And lets face it I like the church and the community there. It still makes a nice contrast to some of the more mainstream suburban parishes I've visited.

I've not been to what's been termed St Mary's in Exile, at least not for their regular services in Trades Hall. However, last December I did attend a book launch for Peter Kennedy: The Man Who Threatened Rome (published by One Day Hill), a compilation of essays and reflections, in large part by people involved in or sympathetic to the Exile community. The launch seemed much more like a religious service - possibly something out of Hillsong - than any book launch I'd been to previously (I'm not used to community hymn singing at a book launch, for instance). And unlike other such launches it was the subject/s of the book, Peter Kennedy as well as Terry Fitzpatrick, at the centre of attention and signing copies of the book, not the authors/editors.

I have to admit the title of the book put me off. It buys into what is by now a founding myth of a new religious denomination forming amongst the exiles, that Peter Kennedy, alone standing for the principles of Vatican 2, was the victim of Vatican powermongers, aided and abetted by local reactionary Catholics dubbed the Temple Police. The first essay in the book, by Paul Collins, someone who did, unfortunately, get monstered by the Vatican apparatchiks, assumes that this myth is a realistic account of the events that led to the dismissal of Peter Kennedy and the community's move into exile/separation. I only wish the myth was a true representation of the facts in which case Collins' essay would have been quite apropos. But the reality is that the final upshot of the saga was very much a local affair, as much to do with Terry Fitzpatrick as Peter Kennedy and very little to do with either local reactionaries or Vatican enforcers.

But of course Paul Collins was not to know that and so I can't judge his essay too harshly. The real story behind the events will probably never enter the public domain and so reading Collins' contribution was for me a salutory process enabling me to make a perspectival shift before proceeding with the rest of the book. The rest of the book is fascinating, irritating, moving, depressing, confusing, inspiring and enlightening. It is, as the back cover blurb says, an assembly of voices, an assembly framed by a two part hagiography of Peter Kennedy by Melbourne based journalist, Martin Flanagan. There follows a large section - nearly 60 pages - by Michele Gierck titled "The People Speak" a series of sketches of eleven people involved with St Mary's (including Gierck herself and Terry Fitzpatrick). That's followed by some 21 essays/reflections mostly by people who are part of the St Mary's community or others commenting on the events. However there are other essays by such as John Shelby Spong, Hans Kung, Roy Bourgeois and Joan Chittister that I presume were chosen for their illustrative effect. None of them reflect on the St Mary's events or betray any evidence of awareness of those events. Kung, Bourgeois and Chittister have all in their own different ways fallen foul of the Vatican and so their essays presumably are meant to illustrate the Vatican power dynamic that was likewise supposed to have also rolled over Peter Kennedy. I strongly recommend the essays by Roy Bourgeois and Joan Chittister. They make a trenchant critique of the authoritarianism and patriarchal clericalism that is one of the key problems of the Roman communion. Kung's essay,'If Obama Were Pope', no doubt written in the heady early days of the Obama presidency, reads now as rather embarassing in its naive understandings of the dynamics of US presidential power. One thing we don't need in the Vatican is a charismatic and popular Pope; the last one was John Paul 2 and he was a disaster! The Spong piece is his recent Manifesto in which he declared that he is no longer going to debate the issue of homosexuality in the Church with those pushing homophobic agendas. I'm sympathetic to Spong's position. I get sick to death of always having to go over the same old stuff too. I'd love to move on myself - I've spent many years reading some most odious materials. I'm much more interested in developing very different readings and understandings of biblical and other texts that will help open up especially Christian possibilities for new ways of living, beyond patriarchy, sexism and patriarchy. In the St Mary's context, Spong's piece is presumably designed to reflect the reasons for going into 'exile'. Peter, Terry and community are no longer going to waste time debating with or justifying themselves to the patriarchal homophobes in the Vatican and the local Temple Police.

However, the remainder of the contributions reflect and comment on the issues at St Mary's and many of them are from members of the community and supporters of Peter Kennedy. Some of the pieces, like the four from overseas, were presumably first published elsewhere. Certainly the critical piece by Neil Ormerod, 'Mary Mary Quite Contrary', I remember reading last year, on Eureka St, I think. Some of the essays, like that of Paul Collins, take as their starting point the foundation myth of Vatican bullies and Temple Police, but others are more far-ranging and get into a range of issues that are highlighted by the St Mary's experience.

The strength of the book is those contributions and accounts of the ordinary members of St Mary's. It's a strange experience for me to read these accounts because of the shared ideals, often even shared languages. I know the well that St Mary's drew on. That well lay deep in the long traditions of the Catholic left, in particular the Catholic Worker movement and I think also the Poustinia movement. St Mary's in its heyday would have come very close to the vision of one of the early figures of the Catholic Worker, Peter Maurin, who imagined every Catholic parish operating a house of hospitality and active with the poor and outcast, building community and developing spirituality, not least by maintaining some sort of rural retreat. Each parish was to be a centre of activism in which the seeds for a new human-centred (not profit, not power driven) society would be sown. St Mary's didn't have a house of hospitality but it had a community orchard planted around the old presbytery and it also had Micah Projects, a government funded community agency. Peter Kennedy also had a property up in the Numinbah valley with little cabins for people to go and spend time in reflection. I spent a few days there myself many years ago in early '91.

But the crisis at St Mary's stemmed in part from a form of thinking in many Catholic circles that saw the 2nd Vatican Council as the Roman Church finally catching up with the Reformation. Vatican 2 was all about 'relevance' about modernising the Church and the modernity looked to was pretty much a Protestant Reformed modernity. This suited some of the more conservative circles who could engage in liturgical changes and purges of the calendar of saints and changes in clerical dress etc while not really addressing the underlying issues of power in the church. JP2 drew on such aspects of modernity as PR and the cult of celebrity to reinforce his authoritarian Papacy. He also heavily promoted a variety of rather strange and dubious movements to counter more progressive and dissenting movements in the Church.

But the same modernising discourse was embraced by many Catholic progressives as well. They were able to draw on it to develop critiques of Church power structures, often by looking to Protestant models or through liberation and feminist theologies. All too often, however, there came a jettisoning of any sense of value in the past/tradition, under the influence of modern myths of progress. The Roman Church was regarded as a medieval institution that had to shed all its backwardness to enter the modern age. In actual fact the Roman Church was/is as medieval as, say, the Anglican Church, having been very much remade through the 16th century Council of Trent and then through the various settlements of Church and Papal power in the 19th century. It was only in the 19th century, with the rise of secular societies, that the conditions developed, which enabled the full flourishing of Papal power and Vatican centralism. Papal Infallibility was only declared as an item of necessary belief in 1870 at Vatican 1, at the same time as the secular power of the Papacy was stripped away by the new Italian state. In purely political terms, losing that secular power was probably the best thing to happen to the Papacy. In some respects the post-1870 church anticipated various developments in the modern world. It became an international corporation operating under a democratic centralism that would put Lenin's to shame while the purge of the Modernists a century ago was every bit as ruthless as the late Bolshevik purges, albeit without the bloodletting. Papal infallibility itself would be echoed in conservative Protestantism with the notion of biblical inerrancy which became a key plank of the fundamentalism born in the US a century ago. So one could say that the Roman church was as thoroughly modern as any other aspect of modernity.

There were aspects of Catholicism, that sat awkwardly, were even embarassing, in the liberal bourgeois order. The cult of Mary is one such example and certainly over the last few centuries the place and figure of Mary had been progressively diminished within the Church from the great Mother and Queen of Heaven figure of medieval Latin Christendom. Her diminution mirrored the rise of the patriarchal nuclear family as the structuring base of the capitalist state. This diminution was accelerated post-Vatican 2 under the perceived need to get to a more Christocentric (and masculine?) focus in the Church.

I'm not knocking Vatican 2 or saying that there should not have been changes. Many of the changes I think were desirable and necessary. Others I suspect were distractions or were driven by a modernist desire to rid the Church of perceived medievalisms. But the real problem in the church is the problem of power, the centralising clericalism, which has its roots most strongly in the medieval reform movement of the 11th and 12th centuries in the Latin West (and in which the 16th century Reformation also has its roots). What's so rotten about this clericalism was illustrated by the various clerical sexual abuse scandals over recent decades. But those scandals were on symptoms of a continuing problem of power by which the local church operated as a branch office of the Head Office in Rome and the clergy were held up on a pedestal to function as agents of that head office.

In its early days I think St Mary's had the potential to challenge that clericalism and to do so from within, reconfiguring the language and traditions of Catholicism. I've written about this in some of my earlier posts. But in the end it failed to do so, taking instead a reprise the Reformation and more recently wandering into an almost post-Christian New Age realm. The St Marys exile church seems to have become pretty much a form of liturgical Unitarian Universalism. That's fine, of course, if that's what you want but is quite definitely not Catholic, whether it be Roman, Independent, Orthodox or even Anglican (which allows for a wide variety of styles).

And that is why, in the end, Peter Kennedy was not any kind of threat to Rome at all. By adopting a post-Catholic, even post-Christian, universalism, Kennedy and the community took themselves out of any Catholic orbit and abandoned any attempt to reconfigure Catholicism, from within its own terms (Roman and non-Roman), abandoned any shared discursive framework by which to challenge Rome on its own terms Instead they had developed into a new sect. And the even greater irony was that, far from threatening Rome, in a sense there was an emulation of Rome. Rome had its cult of personality around JP2 and I think in the latter years a cult of personality had developed around Kennedy. It's understandable - he had been a good priest. But I wonder if, towards the end, that cult of personality took him over. It's very easy for something like that to happen and certainly there were aspects of the book launch and the, dare I say, veneration of both Peter Kennedy and Terry Fitzpatrick displayed there, which gave me pause. And I couldn't help but think that this is the same old Roman clericalism reinscribed.

But by all means get a copy of the book. The questions raised, the hopes expressed, the visions dreamed have not lost their urgency, relevance and import. St Mary's was a model for how a church of Catholic tradition could be. The crisis last year arose because the priests and other leaders of the community had pretty much lost their moorings in Catholic Christianity. They were becoming, will become a distinct separate denomination, only vaguely Christian. On the other hand, the ongoing parish community has had to almost start again from scratch. It's early days yet but I hope that St Mary's may again one day model a way for church of Catholic tradition to be. Who knows, it might even one day genuinely threaten Rome, or even liberate it. Ah, but there I fall into utopianism.

United States Terror in Afghanistan

Keeping a blog carries certain risks. The biggest risk is that of turning it into a stage for personal rants, condemning and bemoaning. It's very tempting and there have been the odd times when I've given in and denounced something. When I have done I've tried not to make it a rant but to attempt some analysis and argument but I've not always been successful, I know. In my blog roll at the side I list a number of political blog sites, including my flatmate's, Larvatus Prodeo. So if you want good political analysis and discussion and not just rants, those are the places I recommend.

But in the last couple of days I read a quite appalling story over on Asia Times Online. It's by Anand Gopal, Terror Comes at Night in Afghanistan. It's an account that deserves to be read and brought to everyone's attention. Gopal describes the terror that ordinary Afghans have had to live under since the US invasion of that benighted land. It appears the US military is in the habit of raiding people's homes by night to detain suspects. Here's one instance of a night time raid from late last year

It was November 19, 2009, at 3:15 am. A loud blast awoke the villagers of a leafy neighborhood outside Ghazni city, a town of ancient provenance in the country's south. A team of US soldiers burst through the front gate of the home of Majidullah Qarar, the spokesman for the minister of agriculture. Qarar was in Kabul at the time, but his relatives were home, four of whom were sleeping in the family's one-room guesthouse.

One of them, Hamidullah, who sold carrots at the local bazaar, ran towards the door of the guesthouse. He was immediately shot, but managed to crawl back inside, leaving a trail of blood behind him. Then Azim, a baker, darted towards his injured cousin. He, too, was shot and crumpled to the floor. The fallen men cried out to the two relatives remaining in the room, but they - both children - refused to move, glued to their beds in silent horror.

The foreign soldiers, most of them tattooed and bearded, then went on to the main compound. They threw clothes on the floor, smashed dinner plates and forced open closets. Finally, they found the man they were looking for: Habib-ur-Rahman, a computer programmer and government employee. Rahman was responsible for converting Microsoft Windows from English to the local Pashto language so that government offices could use the software. He had spent time in Kuwait, and the Afghan translator accompanying the soldiers said they were acting on a tip that Rahman was a member of al-Qaeda.

They took the barefoot Rahman and a cousin of his to a helicopter some distance away and transported them to a small American base in a neighboring province for interrogation. After two days, US forces released Rahman's cousin. But Rahman has not been seen or heard from since.

"We've called his phone, but it doesn't answer," says his cousin Qarar, the spokesman for the agriculture minister. Using his powerful connections, Qarar enlisted local police, parliamentarians, the governor and even the agriculture minister himself in the search for his cousin, but they turned up nothing. Government officials who independently investigated the scene in the aftermath of the raid and corroborated the claims of the family also pressed for an answer as to why two of Qarar's family members were killed. American forces issued a statement saying that the dead were "enemy militants [that] demonstrated hostile intent".

Weeks after the raid, the family remains bitter. "Everyone in the area knew we were a family that worked for the government," Qarar says. "Rahman couldn't even leave the city because if the Taliban caught him in the countryside they would have killed him."

Beyond the question of Rahman's guilt or innocence, however, it's how he was taken that has left such a residue of hate and anger among his family. "Did they have to kill my cousins? Did they have to destroy our house?" Qarar asks. "They knew where Rahman worked. Couldn't they have at least tried to come with a warrant in the daytime? We would have forced Rahman to comply. "I used to go on TV and argue that people should support this government and the foreigners," he adds. "But I was wrong. Why should anyone do so? I don't care if I get fired for saying it, but that's the truth."

Such night time raids and "arrests" have been fairly standard since the invasion back in 2001. People abducted by US forces generally disappear into the shadow world of prisons and interrogation centres the US operates throughout the country, the most infamous at Bagram airbase. If you're really unlucky you might end up at Guantanamo or you might just be murdered and your body dumped. Torture is pretty much par for the course in the US Afghan prisons.

Night raids are only the first step in the American detentionprocess in Afghanistan. Suspects are usually sent to one among a series of prisons on US military bases around the country. There are officially nine such jails, called Field Detention Sites in military parlance. They are small holding areas, often just a clutch of cells divided by plywood, and are mainly used for prisoner interrogation.

In the early years of the war, these were but way stations for those en route to Bagram prison, a facility with a notorious reputation for abusive behavior. As a spotlight of international attention fell on Bagram in recent years, wardens there cleaned up their act and the mistreatment of prisoners began to shift to the little-noticed Field Detention Sites.

Of the 24 former detainees interviewed for this story, 17 claim to have been abused at or en route to these sites. Doctors, government officials, and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. a body tasked with investigating abuse claims, corroborate 12 of these claims.

One of these former detainees is Noor Agha Sher Khan, who used to be a police officer in Gardez, a mud-caked town in the eastern part of the country. According to Sher Khan, US forces detained him in a night raid in 2003 and brought him to a Field DetentionSite at a nearby US base. "They interrogated me the whole night," he recalls, "but I had nothing to tell them." Sher Khan worked for a police commander whom US forces had detained on suspicion of having ties to the insurgency. He had occasionally acted as a driver for this commander, which made him suspicious in American eyes.

The interrogators blindfolded him, taped his mouth shut and chained him to the ceiling, he alleges. Occasionally they unleashed a dog, which repeatedly bit him. At one point, they removed the blindfold and forced him to kneel on a long wooden bar. "They tied my hands to a pulley [above] and pushed me back and forth as the bar rolled across my shins. I screamed and screamed." They then pushed him to the ground and forced him to swallow 12 bottles worth of water. "Two people held my mouth open and they poured water down my throat until my stomach was full and I became unconscious. It was as if someone had inflated me," he says. After he was roused from his torpor, he vomited the water uncontrollably.

This continued for a number of days; sometimes he was hung upside down from the ceiling, at other times blindfolded for extended periods. Eventually, he was sent to Bagram where the torture ceased. Four months later, he was quietly released, with a letter of apology from US authorities for wrongfully imprisoning him.

According to Gopal, over the last couple of years, the US has cleaned up its act in Bagram. However, prisoners can be handed over to Afghan authorities for torture and then returned after being "roughed up". This process can go on and on. There are also reports of a secret black gaol.

One day two years ago, US forces came to get Noor Muhammad outside of the town of Kajaki in the southern province of Helmand. Muhammad, a physician, was running a clinic that served all comers - including the Taliban. The soldiers raided his clinic and his home, killing five people (including two patients) and detaining both his father and him. The next day, villagers found the handcuffed corpse of Muhammad's father, apparently dead from a gunshot.

The soldiers took Muhammad to the black jail. "It was a tiny, narrow corridor, with lots of cells on both sides and a big steel gate and bright lights. We didn't know when it was night and when it was day." He was held in a concrete, windowless room, in complete solitary confinement. Soldiers regularly dragged him by his neck and refused him food and water. They accused him of providing medical care to the insurgents, to which he replied, "I am a doctor. It's my duty to provide care to every human being who comes to my clinic, whether they are Taliban or from the government."

Eventually, Muhammad was released, but he has since closed his clinic and left his home village. "I am scared of the Americans and the Taliban," he says. "I'm happy my father is dead, so he doesn't have to experience this hell."

Clearly Abu Ghraib in Iraq was not an aberration. What went wrong was that the 'grunts' got into taking trophy snaps for the folks back home. Indeed reading these reports I'm reminded first of all of accounts from the Vietnam war of US secret operations there, in which many thousands of Vietnamese civilians were arrested tortured and murdered. I'm also reminded of accounts from Latin America in the 70s and 80s, especially Argentina's war on its citizens, in which people would be abducted at night for torture and murder. The people, military and police, responsible for such crimes had been trained in the US at the School of Americas, "whose training manuals advocated torture, extortion and execution." According to School of Americas Watch

Among the SOA's nearly 60,000 graduates are notorious dictators Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina, Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador, and Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia. Lower-level SOA graduates have participated in human rights abuses that include the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the El Mozote Massacre of 900 civilians.

In other words the US has form going back decades of promoting and using torture and murder and generally waging terror campaigns against foreign populations. What was exposed in Iraq and what Gopal describes in Afghanistan is not some neo-con Cheney-Bush aberration but standard operating practice by the US military for who knows how long. It's just over a century since the US took up "the white man's burden" and invaded the Philippines who had had the temerity to declare their independence from Spain, following Spain's defeat in the Spanish-US War. The US waged a brutal war to take control of the country in which hundreds of thousands of Filipinos were killed. So no doubt the US learnt an awful lot about terrorising local populations there.

I opposed the invasion of Afghanistan and still do. I am appalled that Australia was part and parcel of it and that we seem to have been committed for the long haul to that miserable war. War is rarely a viable solution to anything and the invasion of Afghanistan is yet another catastrophe in that country's recent history of being the plaything of the big powers. The behaviour of US forces there, just like their behaviour in Iraq, is clear evidence that the US is not interested in the plight of the local people. The real issue is control of the energy resources of Central Asia.


The US military and political elites like to talk about the war in Afghanistan being a long war over many years even decades. But if it keeps up this sort of behaviour we can be sure of one thing. Just like Britain and the Soviet Union before them, the US will lose its war in Afghanistan, just as it did in Vietnam back in '75.

I strongly urge you to read Gopal's full article, Terror Comes at Night in Afghanistan.