Ideology and narrative are closely entwined.
Not every narrative reflects an ideology, but every ideology creates and maintains a narrative, in order to continue its hold on the faithful and to garner new recruits. It has to. And the narrative has to be powerful. Or at least powerful enough to keep its hold on generally unthinking people. It is all about control.
In the age of instant communications, online mob-rule, the censorship industrial complex and competing stories, every tool that can be activated is activated. And one of the tools favoured in Western democracies these days is “lawfare”. One definition has it:
Lawfare is the use of legal systems and institutions to damage or delegitimize an opponent, or to deter an individual's usage of their legal rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawfare
Public policy has invaded the courts, and judges are now playing God over matters of politics. In America, the home of lawfare, of course, the judges are themselves political figures and subject to election and partisan appointment.
Yet it isn’t new. Nothing is. Here is an historian, Iskander Rehman:
In the fraught decades leading up the Hundred Years War, French officials deployed their expertise in the arcane intricacies of feudal law to continuously undermine Plantagenet (English) authority over their continental territories, 'clogging up administrative processes', 'interfering with fiscal activities' and burying English officials under a deluge of legal cases.
It isn’t new, but now it’s feral. And mainstream, everyday politics. Weaponised. And decidedly ideological.
Lawfare is broadly understood as the strategic use of law in highly contested ideological 'wars' and politicised conflicts.
Every totalitarian since Orwell’s 1984, and probably for a good many centuries before, needs to create an enemy. During Covid, we had granny killers, anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists. The latter, as we know are now the subject of a recent House of Commons paper in the United Kingdom.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-68990672
Anti-vaxxers remain on the ruling class’s hit list, having emerged in 2020 and 2021 as the Covidmaniacs’ enemy numero uno. Think connections with “white supremacists” and (of course) “far-right groups” like QANON. Racists, New World order anti-Semites. Ties to fascism. White Christian extremism. “Groups of men”. Neo-Nazi proud Boys. Aarrgghh!
This narrative continues. Every ruling group needs an enemy. And labels stick. For an egregious example, see:
The anti-vaxxers were a favoured target for, for example, the rabidly pro-vaxx Murdoch press, and every other legacy media outlet to the left of Murdoch, including the once mighty organ most recently presided over by the now (rightly) disgraced Peter Costello. Paul Keating once described him – probably using the words of his muse, Don Watson – as “all tip and no iceberg”. Now we know Costello to be “all shoulder charge and still little substance”.
The creation of an enemy and the subsequent use of lawfare go together naturally. Enemies can be hated individuals or hated institutions or belief systems. Hatred drives much of politics, especially at is outer edges. Jews still absorb much, as they always have. Kiddy-fidding priests are a favoured bete-noir of the progressive class. Colonialists are now the favourite of statue-loppers. Poor old George V just lost his head in, yes, good old Victoria.
What poor old George ever did to the activist class and to the Hamas-adjacent Palestinian brigade isn’t clear. I wonder how many of the rampaging mob have even heard of him, let alone studied his “crimes”.
At any rate, George’s decapitation brought Melbourne to life on the King’s Birthday. As did the award, already much commented upon, of Daniel Andrews with a Companion of the Order of Australia.
But back to the haters and their lawfare. Someone in America, commenting on the Donald Trump verdict in Gotham, noted that now Beijing Biden, the Department of Justice and everybody else with a dog in the already unseemly US Presidential fight can describe the presumptive Republican candidate as “a convicted felon”. Well, so was my great, great, great grandfather and it hasn’t done him (post-release) or his descendants too much harm.
Whether it will harm Trump is another matter. Its purpose was certainly to harm him. According to some polls and their analysts, Trump is a shoo-in for President. Pending voting reform and a stricter attention to ballot fraud than obtained four years ago.
Newsweek suggested:
Trump Gets Good Poll News After Conviction.
A majority of potential voters in the U.S. said that Donald Trump's criminal conviction was not a factor in how they would vote in November's election, according to a poll.
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-poll-felony-conviction-election-cbs-1910184
Another well-known pundit saw it as follows:
Donald Trump's guilty verdict isn't going to change the outcome of the election, says Frank Luntz
Trump’s travails and the strategic use of the word “convicted” reminded me of another George. The late Cardinal Pell was a victim of convicted syndrome, too. And no, you don’t normally associate Donald J Trump with George Pell. Pell was never standing for election, of course. And most people probably don’t even know what Trump was accused of doing. Conveniently and suddenly, “it” was made a felony. Everyone in the world knew what Pell as accused of.
And Pell had this to say about Trump, not without some affection:
George Pell: Trump is a barbarian, but 'in some important ways' he's our barbarian
Cardinal praises president’s ‘splendid’ supreme court appointments at the launch of his prison journal.
Except there was one big thing the two men have in common. Much hated, the victim of calculated lawfare and demonised with loaded words used as arrows, following risibly fraudulent criminal cases and subsequent convictions. After both cases, whole populations – or a goodly proportion thereof – were in profound, dumfounded shock.
About Pell, CNN was empowered to intone, in 2019:
How convicted pedophile Cardinal George Pell was brought to justice.
Cardinal George Pell has joined the ranks of other shamed Catholic priests who betrayed the trust of children who believed they were men of God.
The Vatican treasurer, now a convicted pedophile, was a close adviser to the Pope, personally appointed by Francis as the Vatican’s minister of Economy and, until October, was a member of the Pope’s Council of nine advisers.
The phrase endows its users with special powers.
With Pell, it lasted for more than a year. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Crikey, The Saturday Paper, The New Daily and The Guardian were wetting themselves with the excitement of it all. David Marr, Louise Milligan, Barrie Cassidy and the rest of the boys and girls in the band. It was only after the High Court’s exoneration of Pell in 2020 that the tirades toned down. They didn’t disappear totally. One Daniel Andrews AC led the ongoing snarling, albeit very briefly. But the stuffing was taken out of the Pell haters. They went very quiet. But during that long year, the phrase convicted paedophile came up over and over again. Pell’s enemies had never had it so good. Michael Cook of Mercator provides a detailed and excellent overview of the Pell saga, including coverage of the hate speech.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23753234.2021.1882317
I said it lasted a year. Perhaps it will last forever. That was, after all, the intent. It is an interesting exercise to type into a search engine the words “media calling Pell a convicted paedophile”. Funny how most of the results are dated well before the High Court’s exoneration of the prelate. It is almost as though the High Court decision never happened. In many ways, search engine de-optimisation and the general silencing of the enemy is the flipside of weaponising words mortally to wound the same enemy.
Well, Biden’s White House is now having its own time in the sun, trump-wise. “Convicted felon” has a certain ring to it, even though (at least) half the population sees the Trump legal wars as a farce. A similar proportion of Australian’s probably thought the same about Pell. Or at least a sizable minority, and not all, or even many, of them, generally supporters of the Cardinal, and certainly not all of them Catholic.
Peter Smith at Quadrant Online has noticed some similarities between the two trials, in an article titled:
When Justice Comes Jury-Rigged.
Smith initially notes the views of letter-writers to The Australian following an article by Greg Sheridan (a trump despiser) lamenting the miscarriage of justice:
Simon Gamble (Qld) bemoans the possibility of America being led by “a convicted criminal.” Peter Tesch (NSW) refers to the jury as “12 impartial citizens, who quickly delivered a unanimous verdict. Trust in the US justice system has been upheld.” Martin Walton (Qld) notes that “Donald Trump has shown no contrition since his conviction.” David Salter (NSW) finds the verdict “a practical expression of US democratic principles, not an attack on them.” Kevin Burke (Vic) describes Trump as “a narcissistic convicted criminal.” Mark Tomkinson (WA) asserts that Trump’s conviction wasn’t a dark day for America but “akin to the end of a second Dark Age.” Susan McLochlan (Qld) asserts that Trump was “found guilty of paying ‘hush’ money” (he wasn’t; that’s not a crime) and contemplates the Statue of Liberty being embarrassed that he could still run for president from a prison cell while puffing on Cuban cigars (Trump neither smokes nor drinks). Suzanne Germain (Qld) chides Sheridan for failing to mention “the tens of millions of Americans who would lose trust in the American judicial system if Trump were not held to account for his dishonesty.” Nick Palethorpe (NSW) draws a parallel between Cohen and Trump as convicted fraudsters. Brian Tierman (SA) captions the US election as “the decrepit versus the deceitful.” And finally, Tony Brownlee wonders whether Stormy Daniels will need to repay the money to Trump as it “must now be deemed the proceeds of crimes.” (Emphasis added).
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/the-law/2024/06/when-justice-comes-jury-rigged/
Oh dear. What a dreary collection of small-p pundits. Very small-p. None of them seem to have contemplated the significance of the use of lawfare as an ideological weapon, and what this portends for what is left of our democratic system. And what of the targeting of hated enemies through the courts? And the construction and deployment of narratives using strategically repeated headlines like “convicted felon” or “convicted paedophile” – ideological bragging rights, if you will – irrespective of the quality of the legal proceedings involved, including lack of evidence, the crushing of the presumption of innocence, or simply total bullshit?
Smith at Quadrant continues, and comes across Pell:
And it is all above board, apparently. Or so the blinkered think. After all, Trump had his day in a duly constituted court, didn’t he? Well, so did Alexei Navalny (Russia), Aung San Suu Kyi (Myanmar), Anwar Ibrahim (Malasia), Imran Khan (Pakistan), Otto Frederick Warmbier (North Korea), George Pell (Victoria), among other victims of politicised courts. Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime; the old-fashioned communist standard, repurposed in New York, especially for Trump. (Emphasis added).
Equality under the law is not a nice to have. It is an essential component of our peerless Judeo-Christian civilisation. When the rule of law is gone, truth, trust and peace of mind are replaced with lies, suspicion and trepidation. [The Australian’s Greg Sheridan] Sheridan despises Trump, he’s made that clear enough many times, but he recognises the enormity of the injustice at work and how it strikes at our fundamental values.
When you can’t find a letter-writer to the Australian able to put aside their disdain for Trump and think more broadly and objectively, you know that something is rotten somewhere in this nation. In that light, it is less surprising that an innocent Cardinal Pell [was] convicted of a crime he could not have feasibly carried out.
But is it going too far to suggest that enabling the use of the term convicted felon was the very purpose of the lawfare, in the cases of Trump and Pell? These days, any conspiracy theory is capable of being plausibly defined as a perfectly reasonable hypothesis.
Ironically, something called the Vera Institute has taken up the cause of those labelled forever as “convicted felons”.
Words Matter: Don’t Call People Felons, Convicts, or Inmates
Throughout history and across the world, dehumanizing language has facilitated the systemic, inhumane treatment of groups of people. This is certainly the case for people impacted by the U.S. criminal legal and immigration systems, and that’s why it’s so important to use language that actively asserts humanity. Many people and organizations are moving away from using terms that objectify and make people’s involvement with these systems the defining feature of their identities. But many others—politicians, media outlets, and more—still use harmful and outdated language like “convict,” “inmate,” “felon,” “prisoner,” and “illegal immigrant.”
https://www.vera.org/news/words-matter-dont-call-people-felons-convicts-or-inmates
So long as you are of the victim class. No risk of either Pell or Trump being so considered. The ironies here are hilarious. Another do-gooder (Josh) opines:
Evolve: Stop Using the Other “F” Word.
First, that means you are defining someone — entirely defining them — by ONLY a crime they committed…That is NOT okay.
Second, the superstructure of mass incarceration rests on the language that justifies treating human beings as objects of ‘deserved’ punishment. The word “felon” is the handshake between society and the carceral state justifying stripping people of their human dignity.
Third, the press sells papers by ratcheting up fear. One of the ways that they do that is by reducing someone into a monstrous other. Use of the word Felon plays a huge role in this process.
https://ypsifactj.medium.com/evolve-stop-using-the-other-f-word-e6abb24bbb31
Yes, Josh gets the ideological thrust of using certain pejorative terms as weapons. Josh, you need to call up Joe Biden.
And, of all outlets, the Washington Post has even weighed in, via Carroll Bogert of the Marshall Project:
Don’t call Trump a ‘felon’.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/06/06/donald-trump-felon-media/
Perhaps WaPo fears, probably correctly, that calling Trump a felon will simply increase his numbers even more. With Bogert, of course, another do-gooder, she couldn’t give a rat’s about Trump. It is all about labelling the downtrodden.
What an astonishing take. It seems that only the “downtrodden”, however defined, are worthy of not being “labelled”.
Not everyone is tainted forever, however. The convicted drug dealer who now runs the New South Wales Treasury, aka Mr Tanya Plibersek, has done all right over the years, despite his early lapse. Of course, as a man of the left, he would do all right.
Pending appeals and the verdict of the American people, The Donald is likely to be accompanied to his final resting place as a “convicted felon”. As, for many, did George Pell. Such is the fate of the hated.
Paul Collits
11 June 2024
Once again, a top article, Paul. Your reference to the Pell conviction is important. It was transparent to any rational observer who examined the facts surrounding the charges against George Pell, that they were preposterous. The very fact that the charges closely aligned with the narrative in an article from the U.S. magazine ‘Rolling Stone’ from some years before indicated that. I was shocked by the depth of deception and corruption of the Victorian Police in their pursuit of Pell.
The events of the last four years surrounding the Covid pandemic and the rollout of the mRNA injectables have upended my previous rather naïve understanding of how society operates, and in particular, how easy it is for persons and organisations skilled in sociopathy to manipulate the mass perceptions of whole populations. Only now has there some small admission in the corporate media that the mRNA injectables have caused severe damage and death to many people, but of course the ‘health’ bureaucracy and the medical profession generally remain in complete denial, and continue to promote the mRNA injectables as some sort of wonder drug. Five years ago, I would not have dreamt that such profound evil was possible in a Western country – especially Australia – but now I know better. It is as if I have eaten of ‘The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil’ (Genesis) and, having lost my sociological innocence, can now see things more clearly. The matter of the toxic injectables has a long way yet to run, and the politicians & bureaucrats ducking for cover will eventually find no place to hide. You cannot kill tens of thousands of people in Australia with an experimental pharmaceutical and hope to get away with it.
But coming back to the matter of George Pell and his wrongful conviction - in my newfound paranoia, I suspect that there possibly might have been a connection with what has occurred over the last five years and his removal from any position of influence. Let me explain. George Pell was an intelligent man, but a blunt speaker – he told things like they were. (He displayed some of the characteristics of Aspergers). For this reason, he was not liked by his peers in the Catholic Church. The lack of any meaningful reaction to his kangaroo-court trials suggests to me that some of them were happy to see him put away. Most people (especially media people) don’t understand that the Catholic Church is really governed by the local bishops – ultimately that is where the real power lies – it is called ‘subsidiarity’. However, generally speaking, Pell’s brother bishops could be described as pretty weak, fearful men. With a few exceptions, they prefer to adopt a low profile and usually go along with the prevailing cultural ethos in the fast-degrading West. They do not stick their heads out. For example, most Australian Catholic bishops have failed to make any real effort to push back against the adoption of the deeply unchristian state-sponsored euthanasia in Australia, or unrestricted abortion, for that matter. The situation is much worse in the U.S. where the majority of Catholic bishops just ‘go-along-to-get-along’ with the deeply degraded anti-Christian Biden administration. (There are a couple of exceptions). And then there is the matter of the erratic, mentally unstable, elderly Argentinian gentleman who was elected pope eleven years ago in controversial circumstances – immediately supported by a blaze of what seemed to be pre-arranged very favourable publicity in the Western media. The nature of his election has been written about – but never discussed in the lying corporate media.
With regard to the declaration, management, and the extraordinary international coordination of the response to the Covid Pandemic - those who have taken the trouble to look at the evidence can see clear evidence of pre-planning. (Just Google ‘Event 201’ and note the dates of the planning meetings). None of the things that have happened in the last five years make much sense as coincidental occurrences. There is a well-founded suspicion by many who have looked at the evidence surrounding the mass deployment of the experimental mRNA genetic injectables, that it was long in the planning. We even have a situation where a secular (agnostic) Jew – former Professor Bret Weinstein – was wondering whether some sort of quasi-satanic force had engineered the Covid situation and the massive transfer of wealth that it brought into effect.
Back to George Pell again. Cardinal Pell had considerable influence internationally in the Catholic Church and was regarded as uncorruptible. If he had remained in his position of influence, and given the nature of his no-nonsense personality, he could have presented a serious threat to the cabal that wished to push ahead with the universal rollout of an experimental pharmaceutical genetic product that had not been subjected to the normal multi-year evaluation process – especially one that tragically triggered spontaneous abortions and appears to have rendered many young woman infertile. What do you do with a contrarian such as Pell? The answer is - you pull out all stops to discredit him and lock him up. I could say a lot more on this subject, but time and space does not permit it. But is my pattern recognition nothing but another ‘Conspiracy Theory’? (By the way – many are not aware that ‘Conspiracy Theory’ is a pejorative term first used by the CIA in the 1960s in the wake of the Kennedy assassination). Well – if you read Victor Davis Hanson’s latest book on civilisational collapses in history, you will find that the collapsed civilisations never saw it coming. Their arrogance of assumed superiority was such that they effectively dismissed any Jeremiahs as – you guessed it – ‘Conspiracy Theorists’.
(PS: Some observers have remarked that George Pell’s premature and unexpected death during what should have been a ‘routine’ surgical procedure in a Rome hospital has a certain stench about it. All credit to Archbishop Anthony Fisher of Sydney for allowing George Pell to be interred in the crypt of St Mary’s Cathedral, where his mortal remains will remain safe from the demoniacs who attempted to defile his memory during life – particularly the banshees sponsored by the ABC).
Good piece. I commend you for still reading the Oz. Sheridan and his pals just drove me away. They still trot him out on Sky.
Both the Pell and the Trump cases were travesties if justice and in Pell’s case have forever ruined the agencies that went after him. The American justice system is a mess and decidedly unjust mostly.