Prasat Preah Vihear

This week brought the news that UNESCO has finally decided to list the country’s Preah Vihear temple as a world heritage site, implicitly recognising Cambodia’s sovereignty over the Angkor-era ruin. The announcement came amidst a wave of mewling and sabre-rattling from the anti-Thaksin People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) party in neighbouring Thailand, where zealots from the radical nationalist group Dharmayutra has issued calls for the ‘return’ of Cambodia’s Battambang, Siem Reap and Banteay Meanchey provinces to Thai control. The struggle over Preah Vihear, which has been milked for political capital for more than half a century, is a telling demonstration of how legal disputes can be blown out into the most colourful historical fantasies.

Preah Vihear temple, as seen from the Thai side

The temple dispute, like many of the region’s problems, has its roots in the pre-independence era. 11th-century Prasat Preah Vihear, one of the most stylistically diverse Angkorean temple sites in Cambodia, sits on the northern side of the 525 metre-high Dangrek escarpment, easily reachable by road from Thailand but only accessible via a long and tortuous drive from the south. When the French began delineating the Siam-Indochina border in 1904, it did so with the agreement from both governments that the precipitous Dangrek watershed be used as the ‘natural’ frontier between the two countries, a plan that would have put the temple on Thai soil. However, maps produced after the French border expedition showed Preah Vihear as being in Cambodia, sparking off an international row over the temple’s ownership. It may have been simple oversight; but it was more likely a product of French cultural paternalism — the Gallic self-perception as the ‘protector’ of a ‘lost’ Khmer culture — leavened with a pinch or two of anti-Siamese animus. (For an example of this cloying sentimentalism see The Gate, by French ethnologist François Bizot). What started out as a crude piece of imperial slight-of-hand turned into a source of simmering Thai resentment, simultaneously underscoring Cambodia’s own nascent national identity.

In fact, the tensions between Paris and Bangkok that led to Preah Vihear’s initial contestation can be traced back the establishment of French Indo-China in the late-nineteenth century. After bringing Vietnam and Cambodia under its sway, the French drove their gunboats up the Chao Phraya River to Bangkok in 1893, forcing the cession of Laos — then a fragmented, bandit-ridden vassal-state of the Siamese. Further unequal treaties in 1904 and 1907 forced Siam to give up additional Lao territories west of the Mekong, as well as the northwest Cambodian provinces of Battambang and Siem Reap, which had been under Thai control since 1769.

Bangkok’s Victory Monument, built in 1941 to commemorate the seizure of territory from French Indochina

The coup d’état engineered in Bangkok in 1932 by Marshal Phibun Songkhram turned the tables a little, leading to the diminution of the Thai monarchy, the renaming of the country from Siam to Thailand (‘land of the Thai’), and a irredentist foreign policy geared towards to the unification of all ethnic Tai within a single state governed from Bangkok. After the outbreak of the Second World War, Songkhram — backed now by Japanese military muscle — reclaimed the disputed Indochinese territories in a short border war against the French in 1940-41, also gaining Muslim-majority states from British Malaya and the ethnically-Tai Shan States from Burma. As much as it inflated Thai prestige, however, piggy-backing on the successes of Japanese imperialism turned out to be a bad choice for Songkhram: after the Japanese surrender, Thailand was forced to cede the territories back to French Indochina, which soon solidified into the borders of the newly independent states of Laos and Cambodia as they are known today.

After the French withdrawal from Indochina in 1954, the Thais immediately took the opportunity to extract symbolic revenge, sending troops to occupy Preah Vihear from the north, a move which set off a game of military cat-and-mouse, culminating in a 1962 ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague that the temple belonged to Cambodia.

Despite what some in Cambodia might think, however, Cambodian ownership of the temple is no foregone conclusion. The Thai government could make a good argument that the French border delineation of 1904 ceded the temple to Thailand, but for the ‘variation’ in the subsequent maps, which was not taken into account by the 1962 ICJ ruling. The temple also sits on the Thai side of a significant natural frontier (the Dangrek escarpment), which forms the border between the two countries for the rest of its 320km length. The question of the temple’s history is also irrelevant. Claims that Preah Vihear should belong to Cambodia purely because it was ‘built by Khmers’ are meaningless, since they would also give Cambodians the right to seize large swathes of Thailand’s Surin, Sisaket and Burirom provinces, which contain other Angkorean ruins. This reasoning resonates emotionally, but is a recipe for dangerous irredentism: the Italian government, by this logic, would have the right to claim the Roman ruins in Bath or Alexandria or Volubilis.

The best argument that Cambodia can make is a purely legal one: that the 1962 ruling settled the question in their favour, and, pending a legal challenge by Thailand, represents the final word on the matter. Any appeals to ‘culture’ or ‘history’ seen through the distorting lens of Cambodian nationalism misrepresent the issue and threaten to trigger off more events like the 2003 anti-Thai riots, in which the Thai embassy and Thai-owned businesses were looted and burned after an air-headed Bangkok actress stated that Angkor Wat ‘belonged to Thailand.’

However, the Thai appeals to history are more vague and insubstantial. Calling for the return of Khmer-majority Cambodian provinces on the basis that they were once under the loose suzerainty of Bangkok is sheer fantasy: borders change, and Cambodia has an equal moral claim to the majority of mainland Southeast Asia on the grounds that the Angkorean empire once ruled it. As for protesting UNESCO’s listing of Preah Vihear, as some 100 Thais did at the temple site last month, this betrays the standard exceptionalist tendency to assert that international legal rulings are fine for everybody else, but inapplicable in the case of one’s own country. As a legal issue, Preah Vihear is done and dusted. Thai nationalists better get used to the idea.

A Disclaimer

In light of how popular my last post about conservative writers has been with a certain Herald Sun columnist and other conservatives, I think I should offer a few caveats:

Firstly, as much as I love to bash the sillier brand of leftism, I see myself more as a libertarian, or classical liberal, than a conservative. In fact, conservative moralism is as much a threat to civil liberty as political correctness, the main difference being that university gives us all a keen eye for the former, while the latter slips by under the guise of youthful idealism. In truth, I oppose both.

Conservatives are wise to realise that the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, impartiality and individual rights are just that — ideals — and that where human beings are involved there is always going to be a shortfall between theory and practice. However, the downside to this is defeatism; a repudiation of the idea of progressive change and the congealing of an outmoded and potentially oppressive status quo. The strength of left-wing thought, on the other hand, is its idealism: it doesn’t take the status quo as fixed and immutable, and it marks out the possible contours of future progressive change. Its own weakness, in turn, is that this tends to veer over into utopianism, prompting calls for the restriction of civil liberties and their replacement with a bureaucracy that would trade the liberty of some for the supposed equality of others. Some go further, holding the liberal state itself up as a barrier to ‘true’ freedom and equality.

However, as much as I dislike the left-wing tendency to demonise the past and trash the achievements of Western civilisation, I don’t think there’s any need to legislate ourselves into a coffin-freezer of Victorian tradition. I believe that progressive change is possible — slowly. The Left should probably lower its expectations to bring them in line with reality, while the Right should raise its own to accommodate the human instinct for natural justice. Within this liberal framework, there is surely room to ‘realise our country’ and its ideals, to use Richard Rorty’s phrase, without setting up prison camps and liquidating the kulaks.

Secondly, and all bombast aside, I do have respect for some of the left-wing writers mentioned in my post. Klein, Chomsky and Pilger all have important things to say; and though they often take things a little far, I would more likely side with Pilger on the issue of the Vietnam War than with, say, Roger Kimball. I just wish they’d learn to leaven their prose with a handful of wit and a pinch of nuance!

Thirdly, I tend to attack the Left because, well, it’s just more satisfying. Most informed people I am friends with realise that the Howard Government’s Pacific Solution was unnecessarily inhumane; that the Bush Administration is a shallow duck-pond of moralists, sycophants and ignoramuses, who duped the United States into a thirty-year imperial conflict in Iraq that it has neither the strength nor the stomach to execute successfully. Poking fun at the Right — after eleven years of Howard and seven of Bush — now strikes me as kind of passé. And really, some of the further absurdities of the hyper-PC academy just couldn’t be made up. The self-righteousness of some on the Left really does set it up for a hammering.

Alas! I should have foreseen that conservatives would find my post and drag it kicking and screaming into the trenches. Don’t get me wrong: I’m happy for everybody to read my material. But until the black candle has been lit, the goat has been slaughtered and its steaming blood has been mingled with my own, I will remain steadfastly — sacrilegiously — independent.

Why Are Conservative Writers Funnier?

Last week, I sat through a whole morning at work pondering a thorny and controversial question: why are conservatives so often the best political writers?

While you pause in outrage, rallying your favourite left-wing writers like so many dead-eyed Pokemons, consider the following rhetorical death match, in the vein of TV’s TNI X-Plosion: in the blue corner: P.J. O’Rourke, Roger Kimball, Christopher Hitchens and Camille Paglia; and in the red: George Monbiot, Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali. Now, these are only arbitrary samples, and I have defined ‘conservative’ in the rather loose sense of being ‘non-left-wing’;* but it did strike me how few committed left-wing intellectuals are really cracking writers. (Most of my favourites, in fact, are journalists: John Pilger, Robert Fisk, David Marr, Alexander Cockburn, Mungo MacCallum. But whither the intellectuals?).

Of course, this is not to say all conservatives are good writers. Far from it: many right-wingers are as muddy in their prose-style as in their thinking. But once we jettison the polemical flotsam from both extremes — the mouldering campus Trotskyites and the bigots out in Camden — there’s no contest: the joie de vivre of O’Rourke beats Monbiot’s dour sermonising any day of the week. However, leaving aside the relative quality of their ideas just for the moment — although I do think that there may be a link (see below) — the question remains: why are conservative intellectuals often so supple with the pen? And why are left-wing writers so po-faced and uninteresting?

Part of the problem, as I see it, is that many on the Left are weighed down with political commitments that encourage the smothering out of humorous or irreverent impulses. To accept the basic precept of political correctness — that the words we use directly shape the reality we live in — is to accept that there are certain things that are just too serious for a writer to joke about. Political activism, for instance; or anything that might cause ‘offence’ to women, ethnic groups, religious groups, animal-lovers, the disabled, the young, the old, the unemployed, the indigent or the ‘queer’. Once this muzzle of PC orthodoxy is in place, the only remaining options for the aspiring wit are a) political activism, with its kindergarten reckonings and dead rhyming chants; b) rote establishment-bashing; and c) achieving the ‘ironic’ ‘subversion’ of ‘dominant modes of representation’, in the Judith Butler vein. These are hardly the ingredients for a digestible or entertaining prose-style.

Another factor may be that few truly interesting intellectuals remain committed left-wingers beyond their first publishing deal. To take just one example: the brightest of the second-wave feminists — Camille Paglia, Naomi Wolf, Germaine Greer — have long drifted away from the totem of social constructionism to embrace an old heresy: the possibility that biology plays a roughly equal role in the creation of gender differences as does socialization. Indeed, any true intellectual would immediately leap at the opportunity to pull apart the fascinating implications of this position, rather than falling back into the bosom of the all-embracing ‘gender theory’ that is still worshipped like a lingum in the ziggurat of the liberal academy.

Extrapolating from Wittgenstein’s dictum that good ideas should be able to be expressed well (thanks, Yosh), it’s not entirely inaccurate to argue that left-wingers are bad writers because they are so often peddling bad ideas. While I’ve always supported left-wing positions on particular issues — from abortion rights to gay civil unions to opposing the war in Iraq — nothing is more reductive than applying a socio-political template that ‘explains’ everything and quashes all ambiguity. One might say that the tendency to boil down the complexities and contradictions of human existence to an easily ingestible political opiate is the reflex action of a juvenile mind; but the surprise is less that this sort of thinking exists — since it does on both Left and Right — than the fact that it is so disproportionately prevalent amongst the crème de la crème of the Left.

Well-educated conservatives, on the other hand, have less ideological preconceptions about the use of language, and so less reason for self-restraint in their writing. If one rejects social constructionism — and with it, the whole superstructure of speech codes, censorship and political correctness — public debate becomes less an argument about words (‘you can’t say that!’) and more an argument about ideas. If offense is taken, so be it: to paraphrase Supreme Justice of the US Supreme Court Oliver Wendell Holmes, every idea is potentially an incitement; and it is not to state’s job to dish out self-esteem to everyone ‘offended’ by simple words or phrases. This type of debate — free of ideological shackles — lends itself well to extravagant self-expression and the parry and thrust of well-honed wit, which seems, for better or worse, to be a strong suit of the centre-Right.

Furthermore, traditionalism has always been more closely aligned with the idea of excellence in the arts, while most of the Left — from Orwell on down — has shied away from style as somehow ‘deceptive’ or ‘bourgeois’. While most intellectuals are elitist, conservatives are less afraid of being seen as such; neither are they afraid to proclaim the objective value of truth, beauty, or great works of art. Free from the shroud of relativism that blankets academic literary criticism and art history — by which any work of art can be subjected to the fashionable theory of the moment to reveal hidden ‘power structures’ or ‘narratives’ — these writers are more likely to respect the pursuit of aesthetic excellence, a trait which emerges in their prose. It also tends to make their political arguments more convincing.

Add to this the academic Left’s penchant for self-parody — a veritable Vegas of dazzling illogic – and you’ve pretty much rounded out the argument. Consider, just for fun, the following examples: firstly, the case of Dartmouth professor Priya Venkatesan (and here) who recently threatened to sue her students for violating her civil rights in class by disagreeing and questioning the authority of her ‘French narrative theory’ (no joke); or the Yale art student who repeatedly inseminated herself and then allegedly miscarried the pregnancies as part of an video art project that demonstrated, somehow, ‘the ambiguity surrounding [the] form and function of a woman’s body’. (The stunt may or may not have been faked by the student). As I read about these two cases, I could practically hear the pundits tumbling over each other in their attempts to skewer them using the most finely-worded witticisms. With such source material, is there any way that conservatives can lose?

*Actually, many of the ‘conservative’ authors that I am discussing would more accurately be termed classical liberals, Burkean conservatives and libertarians. While their views differ on many subjects, they are all staunch defenders of freedom of expression and self-declared enemies of political correctness in all its forms. Of course, the fact the these writers either identify as ‘conservative’ in the popular American sense, or have been labeled as such by their left-wing opponents, gets me over the line.

Kampot

Since arriving in Phnom Penh, I’ve already managed two short trips down to Kampot, a somnolent town 150km south of the capital. Although both were work trips, I was struck by the charm of the town’s riverine setting and have planned a dedicated weekend of reading and indolence at the French-run Les Manguiers guesthouse, whose small wooden bungalows gaze over the pine-dark expanses of the Kamchay River.

My first trip was on a press junket with the Centre Culturel Français (CCF), which has been running a dry-season portable cinema tour of the country, designed to bring the stunning proboscises of French cinema to the benighted hinterlands. While in Kampot, the CCF screened Didier, a film in the high Gallic tradition of nonsensical, slickly-produced slapstick, in which a pet dog (the eponymous hero) is transformed into a human, thereby casting the narcissistic bourgeois world of his owners into utter chaos. To my mind, the only thing missing from this film was either Gérard Depardieu or Daniel Auteil, but straight-man Jean-Pierre Bacri filled their customary spots with aplomb. The locals — who turned out in their hundreds on motorbikes and on foot — loved Didier, which I suppose provided a rough (though better-acted) analogue to the pie-in-the-face antics of Cambodian cinema.

View from the banks of the Kamchay River, south of Kampot.

The week before last I got a chance to return to Kampot with my colleague Sokheng to tour the large hydroelectric dam that is under construction on the Kamchay River 15km north of the town. The weather was dire, reducing Highway 3 to a honeycomb of pot-holes and rust-red puddles, through which lorries and buses lurched with audible exhaustion. But under sheets of May rain, the countryside of Kampot province was stunningly picturesque: the dun-coloured paddy fields, bracketed by mango trees and bandy-legged borassus palms, were dotted with the incipient emerald pin-pricks of the coming harvest. As the highway wound down towards the coast, the farms melted away into forested hills, the limestone karst peaks of the Elephant Mountains rearing up like tethered balloons in the low-lying mist.

Kampot itself lies in a verdant bend of the soon-to-be-dammed Kamchay River, some 10km upstream from the Gulf of Thailand. Even in the town, the water is pure and parasite-free, at least by the Mekong’s standards; but environmentalists fear that the construction of the dam to the north could lead to the release of toxic blue-green algae from the reservoir’s ground soils, resulting in deleterious effects downstream. (A similar problem has been documented downstream from the Yali Falls Dam in Vietnam’s Central Highlands). The project is also set to flood about 2000 hectares of protected forest — potentially a worthy long-term sacrifice — but the concerns about water quality, peasant evictions and downstream agricultural impacts could easily tip the scales over into unsustainability.

Like all major dam projects, the Kamchay dam — a project of Sinohydro Co. Ltd., the Chinese state-firm that is building the titanic Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River — poses a familiar development-versus-conservation dilemma, but even after speaking to both environmentalists and engineers I’m not entirely settled on the issue. On the one hand, Cambodia is in dire need of electricity: only 20% of the population has access to reliable power, and blackouts are still a fairly common occurrence in the capital. But on the other, it makes sense that any large-scale project should meet certain benchmark environmental standards. For long-term infrastructural projects especially — Kamchay is expected to generate electricity until the end of the century — there’s little harm in taking an extra few months to ensure that all the environmental effects have been accounted for.

When I quizzed some of the engineers at the dam site, they proudly proclaimed that Kamchay will be built to the same ‘high’ standards as the Three Gorges Dam in China, without realizing that for a Westerner this sort of statement is akin to a self-indictment. (The Chinese, whatever their other virtues, are hardly paragons of touchy-feely enviro-activism). At the same time, however, I find it hard to take the moral high-ground over China on environmental issues. As a civilization finally freed from the scourges of war, famine and socialist economic planning, the Chinese arguably have as much right to satisfy their energy needs as the West did its own period of development, and any argument to the contrary is plainly hypocritical: a squawk of self-righteous indignation made from the high perch of fossil-fueled material comfort.

The same applies for the issue of climate change. As economist William Nordhaus observes in his recent book A Question of Balance, the British government’s Stern Review, which envisions drastic restrictions of China’s carbon emissions, would exact unjustifiable short-term costs on the country for relatively modest long-term gains. As Freeman Dyson has paraphrased in the New York Review of Books, the full implementation of Lord Nicholas Stern’s recommendations would impoverish ‘several generations of Chinese citizens… [but] make their descendants only slightly richer.’ The present costs of Stern’s proposed policy are simply not worth the benefits that will accrue in a century’s time; and Nordhaus argues persuasively that an effective carbon trading regime would be both more effective and more economically viable than installing an austere across-the-board carbon cap. Either way, the Chinese government has come out in staunch opposition to the hypocrisy of the Stern Review, claiming that the developed world has an ‘unshirkable responsibility’ to take the first steps to alleviate the effects of climate change. It’s hard to argue with that.

Earth-moving equipment ranged for action at the Kamchay dam site.

The dam walls take shape.

The Cephalopods of Syntax

In my downtime at work, I’ve been reading some amusing material about bad academic writing, my arch-nemesis while at university and, it appears, something of a sub-genre of humour on teh web. The primus inter pares of this genre is undoubtedly Postmodern Pooh by literary critic Frederick Crews, a riotous satire of the state of contemporary academic literary criticism. In eleven sham essays, Crews applies every major academic fashion of the past few decades — from postcolonial studies and chaos theory to queer theory, trauma studies and New Historicism — to A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, with predictably hilarious results. Take the following from a self-described ‘negotiationist’ (?) Pooh scholar:

We have shown that works such as Pooh don’t drift towards a banal meaninglessness; they become active historical players in their own right, shaping the public’s illusions about the important issues of the day, such as conquistadorial predation, witch trials, ius primae noctis, and the castration of preadolescent countertenors. The immediate issue here is whether the Pooh animals realise they constitute a de facto nudist colony.

Or:

If the ravages of imperialism are ever to end — if the colonising Heffalump one day lies down with the formerly colonised lamb — history may record that the first tremor of productive change was felt here, today, as we dear friends and scholars recontextualised a mere space of interrogation as a veritable site of intervention and, dare I say it, of contestation as well.

Then there’s Denis Dutton’s annual Bad Writing Contest, which in 1998 unearthed the following bilge from The Location of Culture by Homi Bhabha, a professor of English at the University of Chicago:

If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.

Ah yes, I remember encountering Bhabha in some of my compulsory historical theory courses, droning on about ‘fixity’ and clouding the transparent empiricism of real historical analysis with his quasi-literary squid’s ink. It’s not hard to imagine whole tomes of Bhabha being spat straight from Andrew C. Bulhak’s Postmodernism Generator, which is to clear thinking what Snoop Dogg’s now-defunct Shizzolator was to, well, everythang on th’ net, know what I’m sayin’?:

The primary theme of Hubbard’s analysis of textual capitalism is a self-referential paradox. It could be said that cultural discourse implies that art is used to reinforce outdated, colonialist perceptions of sexual identity.

More amusing than the above — which is plausible enough to past muster in first-year Art History — is the weak justification for this mental debility offered by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin in their Critical Terms for Literary Study. I remember similar arguments being dredged up by tutors to justify the inclusion of incomprehensible texts in subject reading packs:

Theory sets out to produce texts that could not be processed successfully by the commonsensical assumptions that ordinary language puts into play. There are texts of theory that resist meaning so powerfully — say those of Lacan or Kristeva — that the very process of failing to comprehend the text is part of what it has to offer.

It’s no wonder PhD enrolments in English literature are going into a nosedive. As blogger Danny Yee observes, many of these extracts are ‘constructions of dubious stability… built on highly questionable theoretical foundations’. But if the ideas of these authors have any objective value — which I’m sure some do — why coddle them in shrouds of jargon, irony and impenetrable syntax?

The Invoice, or, Unwrapping Origami Activism

Last week I received via email a mysterious invoice from the University of Melbourne Student Union (UMSU) instructing me to pay (via cheque or direct bank transfer) the sum of $226.00, purportedly for the quantity of 1 (one) ‘Bound Farrago Editions’. Remembering the miscommunication and bureaucratic tomfoolery that resulted in said purchase, I was unexpectedly swamped with warm memories of my time in the Union — of gin-swilling in the Farrago office and mud-slinging on Council.

It’s only now — nearly six months out — that I realise just how much I owe (aside from the aforementioned fliff) to UMSU and its corps of scraggy activists.* My year in the union taught me to defend my beliefs passionately; it also exposed me to that tired brand of leftism that wheezes on in the iron lung of the academy, giving me the opportunity to formulate my own system of liberal politics in its place. The Union provides the sort of departure point for contemporary political debate that Cambodia — a place where left and right are even less meaningful than at home — can never hope to. How I miss the kindergarten combativeness of Union activism, with its self-parody and lonely excesses! It is to real politics what The Bold & The Beautiful is to the whole technicolour glory of life itself.

I also fear that being around rational, intelligent individuals for the last two months has blunted the pugnacious edge to my writing — and what better way to tune up than with another excoriation of the lazy formulas that masquerade as critical thought on the New wing of the Left? Most of the following was written sometime last year as an argument (if I recall correctly) against affirmative action, but it could apply in equal measure to the issue of selective censorship, which I’ve used as an introduction and an extension of my past commentaries on the subject.

After receiving a copy of Ramon Glazov’s piece from edition three of Farrago, I am even more bewildered why it should have been a target of political action. As far as I can make out, Glazov raised hackles around the Union by using the phrase ‘yellow dollar’ to describe the premiums that the university squeezes out of its Asian students. So what? I’ve already argued at length that personal ‘offense’ is a spurious basis for censorship. Most confusing, however, was the reference in the UMSU Council motion to the ‘queer, women [and] international students’ who may have been ‘offended’ by the expression. Let’s assume for a moment that Glazov’s comment was an overtly racist one. Why should women, gays, lesbians and international students as a group have any more reason to be offended than white men who oppose racism? Why are certain categories deemed more ‘sensitive’ to offense and worthy of protection than others?

In a influential 1968 essay entitled ‘Repressive Tolerance’, German philosopher Herbert Marcuse argued that traditional freedoms and liberties had been co-opted as tools of oppression by the ruling class, which used their claim to ‘tolerance’ as a smokescreen for the perpetuation of ‘oppressive’ and exploitative practices. Marcuse denied that these rights were inviolable, arguing quite openly that their selective restriction was necessary if marginalised groups were ever to achieve ‘liberation’ from their circumstances of oppression. Aside from arguing that potentially repressive means were justified by wooly, panglossian ends, Marcuse created a unbridgeable division between those who supported the status quo and the mass of ‘victims’ who were presumed to oppose it. Both groups were seen as undifferentiated and monolithic, providing a carte blanche justification — when ‘the revolution’ finally arrived — for the arbitrary restriction of the rights of whole groups on the basis of subjective judgments. If white men benefited from the economic and social status quo and certain minority groups experienced discrimination, the state should reduce the rights of those deemed privileged and ‘redistribute’ them (so to speak) to the disadvantaged.

But on university campuses, the only place where this pseudo-Marxist cant has taken any root, it has failed as a program for political action: if women, queers and ‘students of colour’ have at certain times and places been subjected to grave injustices (including imagined ones in the pages of the student paper) it is hopelessly misguided to interpret them as a unified political class with a unified set of political interests. Indeed, this is tantamount to saying that the interests of all women and all queers and all international students are essentially interchangeable; that they all, at the bottom of it, want the same thing. This is the intellectual equivalent of the first little piggy’s house: an edifice of straw and hay that can be toppled with barely a huff of common sense.

Anyone who has breathed the air outside of the hermetic confines of gender studies or New Left theory will realise that the categories of class, race, gender, religion and sexuality cross and overlap in complex ways, muddying the neat classifications of identity politics. This has implications for those who argue in favour of ‘protection’ for groups on the grounds of historical disadvantage: who, for instance, can say objectively whether a middle-class woman is more or less disadvantaged than a working-class man, or whether a male African immigrant is more or less ‘structurally oppressed’ than a cosmopolitan lesbian? Some obviously experience disadvantage some of the time, but how — aside from sheer hopeful divination — does one quantify relative levels of discrimination?

As absurd as these conjectures are, they are pertinent for the radical left, since they would presumably determine the relative level of bureaucratic recognition that individuals would receive in a Marcusean state. Giving certain groups the legal (or quasi-legal) right to, say, freedom from ‘offense’ requires that they pass some hypothetical ‘disadvantage test’, proving that they have been victimized enough to qualify for these rights. That Caucasian men are ruled out at the outset is a sine qua non: their membership of a perceived historical in-group of oppressors and tyrants overrides any idea that individual rights should be applied equally. However, life shows us that there are outliers in every group — conservative lesbians, female tyrants, straight white males who melt into a puddle at the most innocuous Glazovism — who will always defy categorisation. Left-wing radicals who generalise about the proclivities of ‘white males’ — and thus justify stripping them of certain rights — are qualitatively no different from right-wing bigots who once advocated the same treatment for ‘blacks’ or ‘gays’.

More important from a political perspective is the question of who would be wise enough to be the final arbiter of this ornate taxonomy of disadvantage. Marcuse would likely offer some political organisation with the power to back its decisions with force; but any state ruled by such a power, where resources and rights are apportioned arbitrarily according to relative levels of disadvantage — according to what one is rather than what one does — fails all but the most elementary tests of ethics. This Marcusean logic totally subsumes the individual within monolithic categories, disregarding the dimension of individual psychology, which arguably affects human behaviour as much as membership of any historical ‘group’.

To branch out one step further: it is even more daft that ‘capitalism’ should be indicted, as it so often is, as the mainspring in this structure of gender/class/race oppression. Pure, corrupt capitalism — vividly caricatured in Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle — is brutal and cruel, but liberal capitalism, regulated by government, is by its very definition non-discriminatory. Certainly, it discriminates against the lazy and indigent; but individual rights apply to all, and resources are apportioned on the objective basis of ability rather than on the subjective basis of entitlement. F.A. Hayek openly admitted in The Road to Serfdom that capitalist systems create economic inequalities, but argued that these inequalities were ethically acceptable since in a properly functioning system they are not determined in a discriminatory way. He contrasted this with socialist (or strongly social democratic) systems, in which positive discrimination is used to ‘force’ economic equality, purposely constraining or elevating the priorities of whole swathes of society in the process.

You wouldn’t know it from his Reaganite-Thatcherite admirers, but Hayek looked upon nationalised health, education and welfare systems with some favour: in fact, he supported any measure that could, in a non-discriminatory way, increase equality of opportunity, ensuring people were given equal — or as close to equal as possible — chances in the free market. But Hayek’s most valuable insight was that individual rights are meaningless unless applied equally. He acknowledged the logic behind discriminatory government policies, but cautioned against individual liberties being truncated out of an impatient desire for change:

There is some danger that our impatience for quick results may lead us to choose instruments which, though perhaps more efficient for achieving the particular ends, are not compatible with the preservation of a free society… [such as] the tendency to rely on administrative coercion and discrimination where a modification of the general rules of law might, perhaps more slowly, achieve the same object.

This is why campaigns against racism and sexism must fight words with words, and actions with actions, all the while maintaining a firm distinction between the two. To arbitrarily restrict the rights of one group to the supposed, but often mistaken, benefit of others is to take a step away from the Enlightenment ideal of equality before the law, which underpinned the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and continues to provide the best compass for progressive change. True racists and sexists will not be deterred by censorship, and their worldview will persist regardless of the saber-rattling of the origami activists on our university campuses. History teaches us that positive change can occur; but it also warns against forcing the pace of progress to the satisfaction of hobby-horse politics and personal vanity.

Let these paper tigers burn.

*Of course, every generalisation I make about the Student Union is just that: a generalisation. There are many within UMSU who do excellent work — this includes the caretakers, administrative staff and a fair portion of the representative wing — and anyone who knows me will know to which factions and individuals I refer when I talk about the minority of bunglers, utopianists, supplicants and bootlicks that burrow through the wood heap of student politics.

Lon Rith

The nights now are cool and humid, alive with the whisper of insects and the chk-chk of tiny geckos. I am sitting on my balcony after a long spell of wine-induced sloth, staring down at the pin-pricks of moto headlights and the tumult of the fountains in Hun Sen Park. After just sixty days, fragments and experiences of this city have begun to cohere into new shades of feeling, distinct shades, unlike the powdered oyster grey and emerald of Edinburgh, or the electric blue of Australian summers. No: Phnom Penh is the sulphur-orange of streetlights and the dim discordant yellow of Buddhist wats, dusted with fragile parchment and the charcoal of cloud-cities pregnant with rain.

The monsoon has broken early this year, bringing respite from the searing heat of April and a rich new palette: storm clouds rolling across the city, blackening the sky and unleashing batteries of torrential rain; forks of lightning, soundless and salmon-pink, with their colourless recoil of thunder. Often I gaze westward over the park towards Wat Botum, where the cascading rain catches the crystal-pink and silver of passing traffic, the light rising like a liquid halo around the neck and shoulders of the pointed stupas.

It’s been a busy week. On Thursday, we shifted from the cramped villa-office of the Post to the ice-cold facilities in the Phnom Penh Centre (meaning: wifi, acres of desk-space). After a function at the Australian ambassador’s residence on Thursday and the new office launch last night — both oiled by red wine and canapés — I spent the afternoon in, listening to the sigh of the daily thunderstorms and finishing off the third season of Six Feet Under, which rallied after a sluggish start — like the Vics in Saturday’s AFL Hall of Fame tribute match — to uphold the amazing standard of the first two seasons. (For a brief moment after finishing the last episode I regret having not followed through with scriptwriting after writing Crime & Punishment: the Musical with Hugh and Robin in 2003. I’ll never forget the after-party of that show, a bacchanalia of Jägermeister and cheap wine book-ended by house-brick Jenga and barbecue-black eggs. It’s frustrating that I won’t be in town for the five-year reunion in August: I’m sure if we could dredge up even half a cast it could be a bender for the ages).

Work at the Post continues to be interesting. As the July 27 national elections approach, all manner of obscure political parties are coming out of the woodwork to mount hopeful challenges against the incumbent CPP. One such pretender, the Khmer Republican Party (KRP), was founded last year amongst the Khmer diaspora in California, and is led by Lon Rith, the eldest son of General Lon Nol, who seized power in a coup in March 1970 and ruled until the fall of the country to the Khmer Rouge in 1975 (I’ve written about Lon Nol’s regime elsewhere). Rith arrived in Phnom Penh last month, and I interviewed him at his party headquarters in the city’s southwest, where photocopied pictures of his father (who died in Fullerton, California in 1985) line the walls.

General Lon Nol (left), and Lon Rith (right), after his arrival in Phnom Penh last month.

Aside from the usual questions about the KRP platform — Rith, unlike his republican father, is in favour of retaining the monarchy — it was fascinating to talk with Rith about growing up in 1970s Phnom Penh, which he visited during each vacation from school in the States. When in town, as I later discovered on the web, Lon Nol’s children traveled under the protection of Buddy V. Amato, karate Grand Master and host of TV’s Amato’s Fight Nights, now based in Keansburg, New Jersey (you can visit his bad-ass personal website here). After Rith’s arrival in Cambodia, King Father Sihanouk posted a reminder on his own website that the Lon Nol leaders were ‘world champions in matters of corruption’. But Rith has fond memories of those times, and said that despite the tragedy that quickly engulfed the Khmer Republic, many of the republican leaders had noble intentions. ‘Many people did all they could in order to prevent the [Khmer Rouge takeover],’ Rith said. ‘And I have to give them credit for that’.

Pisah Khmer

After two months, my Khmer is coming along like a dry-season slum fire. I now have a tutor named Sokha, a former journalist, who comes to my apartment on Sundays to guide me through a fairly solid textbook course. Speaking Khmer is not too difficult in comparative terms — I’ve met a lot of people who have achieved semi-fluency quite quickly — but like most things here, it is strewn with frustrating and unnecessary obstacles.

A particular difficulty is that Khmer lacks a standardized transliteration system (such as pinyin for Chinese or Vietnam’s quoc ngu system) and every textbook has its own system of translating the language into Roman script. The word bram (‘five’), for instance, is listed in my three textbooks as pram, brum and bprah!m, making memorisation and accurate pronunciation a real pain. (The French did apparently try to replace the Khmer script with a Roman system in the 1940s, but abandoned the attempt after violent street-riots in the capital. This old French system is still used for the place-names now appearing on most maps, such as ‘Siem Reap’, but bears little similarity to how the words actually sound when spoken, especially for English speakers).

I’m also trying to teach myself to read Khmer script, which is a whole new world of difficulty. Khmer has two separate sets (or ‘registers’) of consonants, each of which determines the pronunciation of the vowels with which they are paired. To read Khmer, you essentially need to learn two separate alphabets, which are then employed arbitrarily, first one then the other, according to the vague patterns handed down from Sanskrit. Then there are the diacritics. And the consonant clusters. The mind reels.

Khmer is nominally part of the Mon-Khmer ethno-linguistic family, closely related to a raft of minority tongues scattered from central Vietnam to India’s eastern hill-states (and also to Vietnamese, if one rogue branch of linguistics is to be believed). But Southeast Asia’s colourful history of invasion and counter-invasion, leavened by sprinklings of cultural chauvinism, has seeded Khmer with vocabulary from across East Asia. Although linguistically distinct, Thai-Lao and Khmer share a large body of Sanskrit-derived terms. I’ve already noticed clear similarities in some common political terms: the Khmer procheachon (‘the people’), for instance, corresponds to pasason in Lao, while proteh (‘nation, country’) finds parallels in prathet and pathet in Thai and Lao respectively. The odd Vietnamese loan-word has also slipped through the net of cultural antagonism, so that Khmer has boon (‘four’), deriving from the Vietnamese bon, and soay (‘mango’), derived from xoài.

After interviewing some employees from the Sinohydro Hydroelectric Co. Ltd. (中国水利水电建设集团公司), the Chinese state firm that is building the Three Gorges Dam and the controversial Kamchay hydroelectric project in Kampot province, I’ve also decided to seek out a Mandarin tutor. Due to the profusion of Chinese restaurants in Phnom Penh, my Chinese is hovering just above survival level, and the Chinese community here is large enough to justify weekly lessons. Aside from English, Chinese is also the commonest language taken by Khmer students, and with the Chinese government leading a massive push into Cambodia (culminating in a US$600 million aid package in 2005), expanding my small palette of 普通话 might prove useful in the short-term as well as the long.

Mix-Tape: April ‘08

In any place where you can get a bottle of Ricard for ten bucks and a brick of Davidoffs for $1.50, there are few excuses for not listening to Serge Gainsbourg records — least of all taste. So here he is in full Humbert Humbert mode, sucking on Gauloises, assaulting adolescents and laying down seedy basslines. To dilute, as it were, Gainsbourg’s concentrate of bohemian sleaze, I’ve lodged him between fifteen great tracks, including one from urban girl-band Klymaxx — with state-of-the-’80s Jimmy Jam/Terry Lewis production — and a couple cuts from Do You Want More?!!!??! , an old Roots album that I discovered in Saigon, inside a sleeve that was supposed to contain a copy of Miles Davis’ 1964 live LP Four & More . I’ve also included some early fusion, a much-maligned genre, and one that I hope these lean, funky inclusions by Jaco Pastorius and Herbie Hancock will go some way to redeeming. (Listen out for Herbie’s Steinway solo around the 6′30" mark of ‘Hidden Shadows’).

This is the last mix-tape I’ll do for the time being: my headphones are busted and iTunes is in need of an intravenous transfusion of bad-ass. Any tips? Send them my way.

01 Lamb - Merge - Lamb (1997)
02 Serge Gainsbourg - En Melody - Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971)
03 The Roots - Distortion To Static - Do You Want More?!!!??! (1995)
04 The Beastie Boys - Car Thief - Paul’s Boutique (1989)
05 The Brothers Johnson - Thunder Thumbs & Lightnin’ Licks - Look Out For #1 (1973)
06 Minnie Riperton - Every Time He Comes Around - Perfect Angel (1974)
07 Jurassic 5 - Back 4 You - Feedback (2006)
08 Public Enemy - Security Of The First World - It Takes A Nation Of Millions… (1989)
09 Klymaxx - Meeting In The Ladies Room - 20th Century Masters (1984)
10 Jay-Z - Roc Boys (And The Winner Is)… - American Gangster (2007)
11 Jaco Pastorius - Come On, Come Over - Jaco Pastorius (1976)
12 Jah Wobble’s Invaders Of The Heart - Lam Saravane Dub - I Could Have Been A Contender (2000)
13 Herbie Hancock - Hidden Shadows - Sextant (1973)
14 The Roots - Proceed - Do You Want More?!!!??! (1995)
15 Quincy Jones - Summer In The City - Space Junk 2001 (2001)
16 Prince - Adore - Sign ‘O’ The Times (1987)

Khmer New Year

Khmer New Year and the stifling heat of mid-April have conspired to cast a smothering blanket over Phnom Penh. Just about everything is shut: even the roadside barbers have folded up their chairs, unhooked their mirrors, and scattered back to the provinces to pursue the cycle of binge-eating, Buddhist offerings and family activities that marks the nation’s main annual holiday. At the height of noon, the park on Sothearos Boulevard is an empty expanse of rippling heat-mirages crowned with palms, mobile towers and the needle-points of Buddhist stupas. The streets nearby hum with sparse, listless traffic.

Since New Year in Cambodia lasts anywhere from three days to a week, we all crammed like crazy on Friday afternoon, gathering comments and making appointments before next week’s imposed curfew. Afterwards, we went to the sparkling new Phnom Penh Post office to see it blessed by a troupe of Buddhist monks, who chanted for a solid half-hour and showered the Post staff with holy water, jasmine flowers and jelly-cups. The Phnom Penh Centre, one of the city’s few dedicated office buildings, is a horrible eyesore, but the view from the new office on the eighth floor is nothing short of breathtaking. To the east lies the new Chinese-funded National Assembly building, all spires and rearing nagas, flanked by an empty lot (the new Australian Embassy), the Buddhist Institute and the Naga Casino — the latter a structure of monumental brutality, reveling like a pre-meltdown Chernobyl in its gleaming modernity. In the background — a distant brushstroke of aquamarine — lies the Tonle Bassac, thickening into khaki under the punishing sun.

The Front du Bassac apartment slums from the roof of the Phnom Penh Centre.

Westwards, the building gazes over the low sprawl of the city, a view dominated by the 300 metre-long Front du Bassac apartment slums (see March 23’s post ). As I have since learned, this entire portion of the riverfront was planned as a single housing project in the 1960s, and included three sets of apartments, a municipal park and the striking triangular prow of the Preah Suramarit Theatre, gutted by fire in 1994 and finally demolished, to the tearful anger of its architect, late last year. The Bassac slums have also been slated for demolition for some years now, but, like many things in Cambodia, the project seems to keep hitting bureaucratic roadblocks of one sort or another. While slum evictions are commonplace in Phnom Penh (they’re barely ‘news’ nowadays), the Bassac slum community is large and in uncomfortable proximity to the National Assembly. According to the government’s new Land Law, moreover, many of the inhabitants are also in legal possession of the buildings, and with a clutch of Western NGOs willing to raise hell in the courts, there’s little chance of an eviction happening soon and without fanfare. A second set of apartments, more distinguished in design, and better preserved — the old village for the athletes of the 1966 GANEFO games — sits to the north. Beyond that lies the third and most recent block, distinguished by its V-shaped roof, which was bought by the Russian Embassy in 1979 and is now used as housing for embassy staff.

The satisfaction one gets from following sport, like all human activities, is prey to the theory of rising expectations. Last week’s five-goal defeat of the Demons might as well have been a loss for all the enjoyment I got watching the game. Demons fans — who are now savouring anything better than a ten-goal defeat — would undoubtedly have enjoyed it more than Cats fans, for whom anything less than a ten-goal win now reeks of bitter failure. Last year’s Grand Final raised the bar impossibly high; now nothing short of the flawless, dizzying football that clinched the Premiership in ‘07 will slake Cat fans’ awakened thirst for opposition blood. But things were different this week: I’ve always liked and feared the young St. Kilda outfit, torn between wanting to see them fail and wanting to see them raise the cup themselves sometime in the next few years. The game that rekindled my interest in football was the see-sawing Cats-Saints match at Skilled Stadium in late 2004, in which we scraped home by five points. Since then I’ve followed the rivalry with white-knuckled attentiveness.

The Saints’ strong start at Telstra Dome on Saturday afternoon was ominous, enough to bring on a twinge of that particular abdominal ache that must be unique to Geelong supporters. But almost as surely as our boys used to slowly, inexorably crumble under pressure, they now find a new gear and deftly brush the opposition aside: the pattern this year has been a slow-to-moderate opening quarter, followed by a blitzkrieg in the second and third and a listless trot home in the fourth. What a pleasure it was, sitting in a fly-blown internet café listening to the live 3AW stream, hearing the crowd rise in my cheap headphones as Steve Johnson, Chappy, Wojak, Jimmy Bartel and Joel Selwood dished out pain to the opposition! Football has become a welcome diversion overseas: home-town cultural indulgence and weekend relaxation rolled into one.