While the speechless unite, in a silent accord. Australia’s Geopolitical Present and Future: Bethlehem through Poetry and Literature.

An incomplete – very incomplete – snapshot of the current season of Advent: Internally the US is divided and its global leadership is crumbling; the Middle East, and Ukraine play insolent, obscene court jesters to kings, nobles, and governments; Israel is deaf to feeble US pleas to moderate its violence in Gaza. The Global South now more than ever, understands its allocated role in relations between the powers: collateral damage. Impassioned outrage and a turning away from the US are the common – indeed, dominant dispositions among the members of the United Nations General Assembly but they do not, it seems, find expression in Australia.

To answer a prior question to those asked below: why poetry and literature?

Answer: Poets and writers of literature frequently express things not only better, but also in such a way that those of us who, lacking their talent, but read them, are moved to transgress against the analytical modes of international relations and strategic analysis by introducing them into the discourse in a special way: while we may claim to know more about the subject matter, they excel in seeing its essence clearer and more poignantly. And we should take note.

Of the many questions that arise two deserve immediate attention. The first is whether the overall situation is significantly different to the daily throb of global politics. The second is why, independent of the answer to the first, Australia has not initiated attempts to ameliorate the conditions outlined. This would include answering the implied question as to whether Australia might actually be a contributing cause to those conditions.

As to the first, it is apparent to anyone paying close attention to the United States, and the politics its touches, that what Yeats wrote in 1921, in “The Second Coming,” is unnervingly relevant to the here and now:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. . .

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand. . .

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The question is, of course,........

© Pearls and Irritations