![merkel moping](https://quadrant.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/merkel-moping.jpg)
Much to Celebrate, More To Do
I love the label “reactionary”. It’s far more useful as an anti-Right insult than those slightly more common slurs – Nazi, fascist, etc. – because, well, obviously no prominent right-wing leader islooking to Hitler and Mussolini as models of good government. The “reactionary” label, while less stinging, is at least believable. It doesn’t stink of hyperbole. You can say of conservative politicians like Tony Abbott, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Nigel Farage, and Boris Johnson, “They’re just raging against the modern world,” and even those gentlemen’s most ardent supporters will have a hard time rebuffing your claim. Boris, by the by, is a new hero of mine. He speculated that President Barack Obama’s call for Britain to remain in the EU is “a symbol of the part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British empire”.[1] As if we all haven’t been thinking the same thing.
But when conservatives describe themselves as reactionary, it’s like a nuclear…
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
Aug 29 2024
6 mins
To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
Aug 20 2024
23 mins
A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
Aug 16 2024
2 mins