{"id":161,"date":"2005-10-24T22:22:53","date_gmt":"2005-10-24T22:22:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/?p=161"},"modified":"2015-08-23T20:44:24","modified_gmt":"2015-08-23T09:44:24","slug":"jm-coetzee-on-moral-barbarians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/2005\/10\/24\/jm-coetzee-on-moral-barbarians\/","title":{"rendered":"JM Coetzee: On moral barbarians"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My heart gave a little lift this evening when I read that the Nobel winning novelist JM Coetzee had <del>spoken out<\/del> implying that John Howard&#8217;s proposed new anti-terrorist laws<span class=\"bodytext\"> were similar to the human rights abuses under apartheid in his native South Africa.<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span class=\"bodytext\">&#8220;I used to think that the people who created (South Africa&#8217;s) laws that effectively suspended the rule of law were moral barbarians. Now I know they were just pioneers ahead of their time,&#8221; he told the Australian Book Review function.&#8221;<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Detailing how South African police were able to do whatever they wanted, Coetzee ended with: &#8220;All of this<br \/>\nand much more during apartheid in South Africa, was done in the name of the fight against terror.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(Via <a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20100824182949\/http:\/\/www.abc.net.au:80\/news\/arts\/articulate\/200510\/s1488729.htm\">Articulate<\/a>)<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.smh.com.au\/news\/opinion\/laws-for-a-secret-state-without-any-safeguards\/2005\/10\/19\/1129401313470.html\">Laws for a secret state without any safeguards<\/a> by Malcolm Fraser is also worth reading on the topic.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.getup.org.au\/\">GetUp<\/a> is a newish Australian online activist site, along the lines of MoveOn in the US. Their <a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20070528165741\/http:\/\/www.getup.org.au:80\/blog.asp\">blog<\/a> sure could use an RSS feed, though.<\/p>\n<p>Updated links 2015<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My heart gave a little lift this evening when I read that the Nobel winning novelist JM Coetzee had spoken out implying that John Howard&#8217;s proposed new anti-terrorist laws were similar to the human rights abuses under apartheid in his native South Africa. &#8220;I used to think that the people who created (South Africa&#8217;s) laws [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[366,1358],"class_list":["post-161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-jm-coetzee","tag-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paZhI-2B","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3550,"href":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161\/revisions\/3550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}