Michael Leunig, the veteran cartoonist for the Melbourne 'Age' newspaper, models for a papermache likeness of his head to commemorate his 112th year of employment at the great bin liner and wino insulator.
It seems the chances of not reading either a bog standard casual, taken for granted Jew hating cliché or a Central Scripting "I'm not anti-Semitic but," comment most anywhere, is perhaps as unlikely as Michael Leunig doing a series of cartoons condemning the murder of Jews.
For that matter, the same odds apply to Leunig the bi-polar and Jew-hater [hey, not a Jew-hater, he just supports Jew-haters and says and draws Jew-hating cartoons and attends Jew-hating rallies] scribbling even a single hilarious 'Cartoon Masterwork' condemning say, Islamic terrorism in particular and its supporting theocracies. Or maybe a few duck populated panels on the oppression of women in Islam, the murder of Iraqi children by various terrorists, militants, gangsters and opportunists etc, etc, etc, would be nice? Or indeed any of the daily, far reaching and many thousands of global terrorist attacks anywhere, anyhow and anytime.
Maybe Mr Curly can look forlorn about the collapse of an oppressed Zimbabwe, three million dead in the Congo, the concentration camp and torture chamber state of North Korea, the constant murder by beheading of Buddhists in Asia by Islamists, or a nuclear Iran etc, etc? Nope. Leunig doesn't give a duck, so it seems. I guess none of these things are the 'right kind' of oppression and mass murder for our Mike, the comfortable critic of the West. Gee, maybe I missed 'em? Who knows? I'll just keep scouting the fronts of more inner-city Brunswick refrigerators then.
I'll also keep an eye out for the ones reflecting with genuine uninhibited joy any of the enormous improvements made in economics, health, life expectancy, medicine, food production, wealth, civil law, science and communications etc, etc. Gosh, some of it even here in Australia! I can't wait for Mr Curly showing even a little snit at any of the Islamic militants and gangsters currently murdering the people of Iraq or anywhere. Or a series showing any of the scandalously and mostly non reported achievements in Iraq all due to the incredible courage and efforts of the many better men and women of the military and elsewhere, of good and Democratic will, now fighting for freedom and normality in a region that has had little to zero of neither. Hey, fit in a default snigger here at the word freedom, mainly because the sniggerer already has their freedom. So, just what does one believe in if not the absolute basic of human freedom? Precisely nothing, that's what.
Internal Contradiction of the Left PC Liberal and Radical No. 1238/B: "A professed optimism for a Utopian future coupled with an ingrained and automatic cynicism regards the basics of what makes ordinary and normalized life possible". None of this means much of a damn to a dull conformist media, or to a not so intelligentsia, various ignorant celebrities, out of their depth musicians, narcissistic actors, wilfully deluded activists or wonderfully venal radicals.
Such carefree twerps actually don't care about Iraq or its people at all and never will. Such suffering or whoever else is handy, is used as lazy, raw material for comfortable and dreary default attacks on George Bush and the West, and the now vanished art of irrational auto-Howard hating. The idea of difficult choices and harsh responsibility to action, never seems to occur to old Mikey the Kikey hater. Nope, his default is never about doing anything, it's always entirely from the basis of self loathing and blaming the US, the West or the evils of Capitalism, the system he despises and is completely supported by.
Yep, there's a long, ugly and disgraceful history involving many a governments behaviour regards many a crap regime. But er, that's of little relevance to how we must act against global and current Islam now. Just as the free world did finally fight and destroy Fascism in the 1940's, we better do the same with Islam and er, now. This is so whether we want it or not, kid. And it better be with a total commitment to crushing victory, as the alternative is our utter defeat at the eager, monstrous hands of Islamist's both foreign and domestic. Victory? See Leunig run screaming! Winning? How triumphal! Survival? How gauche! See Leunig scribble! The Western Canon? How essential. See Leunig scribble! Scribbly, scribble...
Leunig and his hordes of micey fans are no friends of the truly oppressed. That would require being able to discriminate between say, good and evil. Discrimination, not moral equivalence, is the basis of rational thought. Yep, we're on Shite Street with our Aussie MSM, sho' nuff. Have ya read Mike's bit's in 'TheAge?' How can so many produce so little for so long and not get fired?
And er, much of the Left supported in one way or another, Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini, as was the fashion. Just as they do today with Islamism, Fidel the Cuban mass murderer and Chavez the fat killer and so on. Er, that's the Fat Killer, not the fat killer. Whatever. Anyway, read Nick Cohen's great book 'What's Left?' Hey, that's left liberal fascism for ya, via big government fantasies and standard dreams of conformity to Utopian ideology. And why not, eh?
Like Michael Leunig, most of the left perversely never criticize murderous Islam at all. Now ain't that peculiar? Islamism is anti-life, anti-women, anti-gay, anti-Democracy and anti all human freedoms etc. These are the things any lefty is supposed to believe in and stand resolutely for, so you must ask why they don't stand up for any of them when it comes to Islam? Well, the Left is also mostly interested in total control of everyone via the state, so that everyone just has to agree with everything they say, just like Islam! So, yep, natural bedfellows, really. The left have virtually always either totally ignored, championed, applauded or offered standard apologia for the mass murdering Communism of Cuba, China and North Korea. Ditto the military Dictatorship that has killed over three million people in the Congo, or Mugabe destroying Zimbabwe etc, etc, etc. Instead, Left posers relentlessly attack and condemn Western Capitalist Democracies because they can never be faultless.
The Iraqi people’s situation like many others is mostly ignored or held in contempt by the illiberal Left. Iraq is a profoundly pivotal and authentic struggle. Many Iraqi people have a naturally deep desire for the freedoms and prosperity that the frivolous, glib, fashionable, disingenuous and phony liars of the Western Left take for granted. The people who face questions of their own life and death everyday, like Iraqi's, tend to be a little more focused and clear minded about reality and what's of human value, than those who sit lauded and unchallenged in fakery and assumptions. However terribly imperfect is the destruction of such regimes as Saddams, it must be done and to all such like eventually. Weirdo's like Mike are all allegedly opposed to freaks like Saddam, right up until something is actually going to be done about it. At which entirely predictable point, they start doing mental back flips like some morally inverted 'Ringling Brothers Circus of the Insane'.
No liberation of anybody anywhere will ever be up to the high standards required of our already free, Mike Leunig. Hero of 'The People!' Leunig, like many allegedly ‘good’ folks, do for all thoughts and purposes appear quite mad in their delusions, and dangerously so. This mindset has not only appalling consequences for the oppressed people in the world who don’t fit neatly into the Lefts stupid paradigms and idiot dichotomies, but for the survival of Western civilization and it's hard won and precious freedoms. Leunig et al, cannot seem to bring himself to criticise Bush and support the Iraqi people at the same time, and right now. Like most of the lefts fantastical views, that will only happen in an imaginary and absurdly Utopian future.
It’s a shame Mike’s love of the Palestinian people never extended to a single strong and public criticism of Arafat or any other Islamist freaks and extremists that dominate Palestinian life and death and wish to murder all Jews and destroy Israel. If all these militants were completely defeated and replaced with a civil government and a non corrupt, non-Mafia style based economy, the Israeli's could leave. But that would be a solution. The millionaire freaks in charge murder about 150 Palestinians a month, mostly by execution in the street. This is the fate of any dissenter, those who wan't pay the required protection money, or anyone that co-operates with the Israeli's in any way, or is suspected. No trial. No jury. One verdict. One outcome.
Leunig's response? Zilcho. Nada. Zip.
The smug chums in the MSM and the arts etc, have the great privilege of a platform of well paid influence and opportunity, and what do many often do with it? They lock into an obsessively shrill and narrow frivolousness that is irrelevant and devoid of any real world actions and answers. If the war in Iraq is illegal, then the logic would be to have put Saddam and his sons back in place. If the lack of WMD’s is important, then you could have ignored the MGD's: the mass graves of destruction as many have and just let Saddam carry on until he did get them eventually, as he or his sons surely would have. Etc, etc, etc. The only relevant questions are; do you or don’t you support the removal of Fascist Dictators like Saddam or not? Er, that’s without the ridiculous caveats.
Do you support the right of Israel to exist and think it's a crime to murder Jews? As Nick Cohen has asked in his book 'What's Left? How Liberals lost their way', "which Iraqi’s do you support and what kind of Iraq do you want to see built?" Do you believe in supporting any and all people who believe in freedom and human rights anywhere, anytime or not? This would include Israel, civil government and responsibility for Palestinians, the people of Cuba, North Korea and Iran etc, etc. Well, do ya punk?
Nope, I guess none of that is for Mike, because the liberation of the oppressed is just never done to a high enough standard for him anymore, is it? The main country capable of doing it, predominantly the US, are just never going to be pure enough for the Lefts permanent narcissism, empty ideologies and moral vanity via perfect inaction. For the question of Israel you'll always get the "I'm not anti Semitic, but," line. I have not seen one crummy Leunig cartoon condemning any Baathist, Al Qaeda, gangster, Islamist, Iranian, Syrian backed terrorist group or any opportunist criminal atrocity. In fact, Leunig always shows and clearly more than infers, that only the Western Allies are committing this deliberate mayhem. What a disgusting slur.
For Leunig etc, there is no such thing as a terrorist except for President Bush, nothing Western worth fighting for ever, and no legitimate war against Islamic terror.
Leunig and the Left cannot escape their own moral relativist gnomery and see any difference between the criminal behaviour of a small amount of prosecuted soldiers at Abu Ghraib and the million and a half deliberately tortured and murdered by Saddam in a 35 year policy, or for that matter, any of the Apocalypse Now toned aims of global Islamic Sharia jihad. The mental gymnastics that Leunig and others perform are quite something to behold, to avoid saying that the real fascist threats today are Islam and their Marxist sodden left pals and not free-market democracies, .
The few kind of 'positive' realities that regularly register with Mike are the odd, eccentric and wistful; as if happiness and comfort is available only in daydreams and inward yearnings, often alienated and on the edge of crazy. In Leunig’s peculiar inversions, it's as if nothing 'out there' is any good, of any worth or has even occurred unless it falls under the fashionable and meaningless term of 'natural'. To Mike not much out there seems as important as simply being out there. Mostly, Mike seems to blather how Western Democracy and modernity is a total write off and a lost cause, strictly for perversely modern poo poo faces only. He curiously writes with either a yearning 'edge of a breakdown' motif, or a mean and sour style, describing often miserably in line after line as either a common subtext, or in his main theme of despair.
In the end, Leunig seems to despise it all, except for the feeble, the ineffective, the pathetic and the neutered. He habitually disdains most of us people who just ain’t up to his downward spiral of peculiar standards. Mike's dopey non-ideas exist mostly in a simple minded and paradoxically, oddly complicated rural Never land that in reality is attainable mostly by the affluent. I remember seeing a thing he did showing the city as a cliche'd urban jungle with a an absurdly polluted beach.Not where I live Mike. The beach side is prime real estate and as such is treated accordingly by the affluent folks who pay big money for it and demand a lot from their local authorities. As laughably dated as Charlie Chaplin's ridiculously way off predictions in of Modern Times, I'm afraid.
Yep, I can't exactly remember his brave and cutting series on the "you wouldn't know it was so common a crime unless you asked" rape of white Australian girls and women by one or more young ethnic, read Muslim, Lebanese, African males etc. I think that may have been after the ones he never did showing his deep concern for honour killings, child genital mutilation, corrupt and murderous third world governments and the actual two main causes of poverty being bad economic systems and a lack of democratic civil governments. What about Leunig's outrage at Al Qaeda and his other 9/11 things? Hey, remember Mike speaking out about the rampant alcoholism, paedophilia, murder and other violence in Aboriginal/Koori communities? Ya don’t? Nope, either do I. Of course there's Mike's much more urgent need to expose Prime Minister John Howard as identical to Hitler.
When Leunig’s anti-Semitic cartoon was submitted to the Iranian Freak Club by someone else, it never seemed to occur to mad Mike or anybody else that much, that his crummy cartoon was precisely suitable for an Islamist, Jew hating and Holocaust denying ‘cartoon’ competition. Well, at least Michael Gawenda had the "judgement" and "good taste" according to himself to not accept a similar style of cartoon from a Nazi or extremist, because that would be so unacceptable. Sheesh. It's really neato that Leunig can be so comfortable with a casual, easy and often accepted anti-Semitism, [which is a nice term for Jew-hatred] and state endorsed policy of Jew-hatred, because so many clearly are and not just in left media land.
To the relentlessly mediocre George Negus, Mike said he was sick of all the hate mail he received as he called it, just because he fought fascism! Er, riiight. Leunig means non-existent US, Israeli and Western fascism and not actual Islamofascism and leftist fascism. Fascism coming from the Italian "fasci", meaning bundled sticks and was coined by the socialist collectivist Mussolini.
How does Leunig ‘fight’ fascism exactly when he can’t even recognize it, no matter how blatant and in ya face Islamic and leftist fascism are? As far as I can see, he refuses to see much anything factual and thus problematic like virtually all leftovers. Yeah, when did he ever ‘fight’ against any beheading's? “It happens everyday, no matter what you say. You’ll find it happens all the time, oh baby!”
For a guy who likes to project a caring and whimsical image, I wonder what causes all that frothing hatred in Mike? Maybe his views at core are not so caring and whimsical after all, but actually just straight out poisonous and dodgy crap. Like nearly all the left, Michael is permanently disingenuous about the reality of Islamic and other totalitarian things, no matter what the overwhelming evidence. It’s all just the West’s fault, you know, provocation, colonialism blah blah and all without a shred of adult history or context. If he admitted that Islamic uber-fascism exists and where it exists, he would have to admit that the conflict in Iraq had a point, even a little bit as do Bush, Howard and Blair. He would have to admit that there are wars that have to be fought against very real global Islam and totalitarian Marxist states. The always posturing left would have to examine their delusions, paranoid hatreds, general dishonesty and the current house of cards as per Mad Mike. But no.
Yep, Mike's a real hero of the people alright, but mostly the affluent inner-city left. Leunig is a mostly repetitive, even sometimes amusing often not funny at all cartoonist; a convoluted, strange and mostly bad writer who appears more profoundly neurotic and deluded with every stupid, predictable, morally inverted publication. He's a stale old lefty bore of the kind that has infected much of the dull, dull and duller, Australian media both public and private since the 1970's. Er, when are the 70's due to end exactly? Perhaps with the passing of Leunig et al? Doubt it. It'll commit suicide by incompetence and bias first.
Now it’s not just in Australia that the repetitive, smug and limited are held up as sacred cows cum national treasures when in fact they are boring and merely protected from serious competition. And it's not just here that there's a serious lack of the long term and comfortable in their privileged positions ever being challenged on conceited group shibboleths, orthodoxies and various ideological fashions. There's a lack of change and real creative and intellectual competition in Australia. It's dull, kid. OK for reinforcing the default positions of their market, but I don't buy it at all that Leunig is so deep and mega talented. Er, where exactly?
There ain't no room or place for much of the often lauded 'diversity' we hear so much about actually ever happening in reality. Hey, ‘treasures’ often buried, eh? Where do the actually different, inspiring, exciting, outstanding, fresh and truly individual, especially the young, go for opportunities? Overseas and the Internet, I guess. They ain't at the profoundly boring 'Age' newspaper, that's for sure.
What will never happen in reality are Leunig and many others, not ascribing the most absurd, extreme and biased attributions to their chosen targets. John Howard to Leunig is a one dimensional cipher of Mike's right on and thus acceptable bigotry. Everything the PM does, according to Leun's relentless under-grad drivel, has an evil motive and can only ever turn out badly. A successful economy, stable security, international statesmanship and winning several elections in a row etc, is merely more evidence of an extremely long-term and malevolent strategy, strangely hidden and unknown as it is. Old 'Mike the Hammered' seems determined to eventually drive himself and others completely nuts with his own ideological obsessions. Leunig's tedious, narrow default positions relentlessly expressed reducto ad absurdum's have a negative side too.
Poor old Michael with his bushy outpatient hair, mumbling uni lecturer woolly jumper and baggy pants ensemble, looks to me like Professor Julius Sumner Millers lost in dementia cousin. You know, the odd one who maybe had a breakdown, then disappeared and lived in a hut while scribbling down the 'evidence' of a vast government conspiracy. Obviously, with my total lack of success in media, that's where I went wrong. Now where's that old pullover from my faux James Dean period?
Here's a letter of reply from me to the freakishly sour yet perverted mediocrity Catherine Deveny at The Age, and my comfortably dismissed reply to a follow up by one of Kathy's Aged comrades.
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