Simon Schama rails against silence and secrecy: “The fight is between power based on revelation (and thus not open to argument), and power based on persuasion, and thus conditional on argument; militant theocracy against the tolerant Enlightenment. Since the United States, notwithstanding the Pilgrims and the Great Awakening, was very much the child of the Enlightenment, one might have expected this case for tolerant, secular pluralism to be made in the most adamant and unapologetic fashion by the country’s leadership. But the shroud of mass reverence which enveloped everyone and everything after 9/11, and which once again is blanketing the anniversary, has succeeded in making secular debate about liberty into an act of indecency, disrespectful of the dead and disloyal to the flag.”
It only took me 28 hours to get back from Australia, thanks to better connections on the return. Boy it’s a long way. I was silent after Friday because my modem packed up, and when you’re on an island near the Great Barrier Reef, there aren’t many options for repair.
It’s a pity I couldn’t connect because there was some good food for thought at the Hayman leadership retreat. I liked New South Wales premier Bob Carr’s one sentence summation of human history: “The explosion of population and the transmigration of tribes.”
And it was particularly interesting to hear ambassador Richard Butler, former chairman of the UN special commission to dismantle Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. Butler, thrown out of Iraq in 1999, reckons “even if Saddam accepts the requirements for arms control, he won’t fulfil them”. He’s convinced of the need for regime change, but believes it has to happen through a resolution of the Security Council. “If the US proceeds unilaterally, it would be the end of the Security Council as an effective instrument of peace and security.”