Latest news with #Darwinian
Miami Herald
6 days ago
- Automotive
- Miami Herald
Stellantis board chooses Antonio Filosa as new CEO
May 28 (UPI) -- Stellantis on Wednesday announced that Antonio Filosa, a top executive in the Dutch automaker's Americas branch, will become its next CEO. A Special Committee of the Board led by Executive Chairman John Elkann unanimously chose Filosa, who served as chief operating officer for the Americas and chief quality officer, to become the company's top executive effective June 23. "Antonio's deep understanding of our Company, including its people who he views as our core strength, and of our industry equip him perfectly for the role of Chief Executive Officer in this next and crucial phase of Stellantis' development," Elkann said in a statement. Filosa succeeds Carlos Tavares, who unexpectedly announced in October he would step down in 2026. "We have the world's best and most iconic brands in automotive history and an over 100-year heritage of innovation. That legacy, combined with our relentless dedication to giving our customers the products and services they love, will continue to be key to our success," Filos said. Stellantis brands include Chrysler, Dodge, Ram, Jeep, Fiat, Alfa Romeo and Maserati. When Tavares announced he was leaving in October, Stellantis was dealing with dropping profits and sales and other issues in the United States. "During this Darwinian period for the automotive industry, our duty and ethical responsibility is to adapt and prepare ourselves for the future, better and faster than our competitors to deliver clean, safe and affordable mobility," he said at the time. Stellantis will convene an extraordinary shareholder meeting within days to elect Filosa to the board. The company said during his tenure in the Americas Filosa expanded Jeep's global presence while "taking the Fiat brand to the market leading position." He also significantly grew the Peugeot, Citroen and Ram brands, according to Stellantis. Among the problems Stellantis faces is the uncertainty and volatility created by the Trump administration's tariffs. In April Stellantis temporarily shut down four plants due to the tariffs. Workers at assembly plants in Mexico, Canada and the United States. were laid off. The temporary layoffs affected 4,500 Canadian workers and 900 in the U.S. Workers at the Mexican plant continued to report to work but cars were not produced during the production pause. In November, Stellantis delayed the launch of the Ram 1500 electric pickup, citing a "very significant amount of workload" and the need to carefully validate its products. Stellantis experienced a 14% annual net revenue downturn in the first quarter of 2025, prompting withdrawal of its full-year performance guidance due to Trump tariff uncertainties. Copyright 2025 UPI News Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
UPI
6 days ago
- Automotive
- UPI
Stellantis board chooses Antonio Filosa as new CEO
Stellantis said Wednesday Antonio Filosa will become the multinational auto conglomerate's new CEO effective June 23. It was a unanimous board decision. File Photo by James Atoa/UPI | License Photo May 28 (UPI) -- Stellantis on Wednesday announced that Antonio Filosa, a top executive in the Dutch automaker's Americas branch, will become its next CEO. A Special Committee of the Board led by Executive Chairman John Elkann unanimously chose Filosa, who served as chief operating officer for the Americas and chief quality officer, to become the company's top executive effective June 23. "Antonio's deep understanding of our Company, including its people who he views as our core strength, and of our industry equip him perfectly for the role of Chief Executive Officer in this next and crucial phase of Stellantis' development," Elkann said in a statement. Filosa succeeds Carlos Tavares, who unexpectedly announced in October he would step down in 2026. "We have the world's best and most iconic brands in automotive history and an over 100-year heritage of innovation. That legacy, combined with our relentless dedication to giving our customers the products and services they love, will continue to be key to our success," Filos said. Stellantis brands include Chrysler, Dodge, Ram, Jeep, Fiat, Alfa Romeo and Maserati. When Tavares announced he was leaving in October, Stellantis was dealing with dropping profits and sales and other issues in the United States. "During this Darwinian period for the automotive industry, our duty and ethical responsibility is to adapt and prepare ourselves for the future, better and faster than our competitors to deliver clean, safe and affordable mobility," he said at the time. Stellantis will convene an extraordinary shareholder meeting within days to elect Filosa to the board. The company said during his tenure in the Americas Filosa expanded Jeep's global presence while "taking the Fiat brand to the market leading position." He also significantly grew the Peugeot, Citroen and Ram brands, according to Stellantis. Among the problems Stellantis faces is the uncertainty and volatility created by the Trump administration's tariffs. In April Stellantis temporarily shut down four plants due to the tariffs. Workers at assembly plants in Mexico, Canada and the United States. were laid off. The temporary layoffs affected 4,500 Canadian workers and 900 in the U.S. Workers at the Mexican plant continued to report to work but cars were not produced during the production pause. In November, Stellantis delayed the launch of the Ram 1500 electric pickup, citing a "very significant amount of workload" and the need to carefully validate its products. Stellantis experienced a 14% annual net revenue downturn in the first quarter of 2025, prompting withdrawal of its full-year performance guidance due to Trump tariff uncertainties.
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Natural Law Does Not Lead to the Unbound Executive
In 2016, I was studying the rise of the National Socialist movement. My project was to investigate the philosophical origins of the National Socialist German Worker's Party—that is, the Nazi Party. That story is a complicated one, since National Socialism was not a cohesive philosophical movement in itself. It was constituted by a variety of different threads: the master morality of Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosophy of Otto Weininger, Darwinian population medicine, and a number of other influences. It was during this work that I encountered the work of Nazi jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt, famous for his legal justification of Adolf Hitler's rise to power. Back in 2016, Schmitt's work was coming again into the public eye, thanks in large part to the influential Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule. Schmitt's sharp critiques of liberalism and his theories of law and politics, Vermeule argued, could be separated from his Nazism, and that to ignore these insights on account of Schmitt's politics was mere 'puritanism.' More recently, Vermeule has made waves with his idea of 'common good constitutionalism,' a new theory of legal interpretation arguing the executive branch can read into the law its own determinations about what serves the common good. (This is in contrast to the traditional notion that the courts make final determinations on constitutional questions.) In making this case, Vermeule makes liberal use of classical philosophical terms like 'common good' and 'natural law.' Vermeule's theories, however, should not be taken as representative of the tradition whose language he borrows. Rather, his project is fundamentally Schmittian and should be distinguished from wider theories about natural law and the common good. The significant and serious risks in Vermeule's project are not inherent in either natural law or common good political thought themselves. It would be a shame to throw out a tradition of thought, the tradition of natural law, that has so much to offer our public life because of a certain odorous bathwater. For the past several decades, Adrian Vermeule has been making an extended case for a more powerful executive branch of government. In the wake of the Iraq War, he co-authored The Executive Unbound, which made the case that legal constraints on the executive are really a fiction, and that American legal thinkers have overblown the need for separation of powers and the rule of law. In the modern era, given how quickly technology, markets, and foreign policy dynamics shift and how complex governance is, the legislature and courts are increasingly irrelevant. The executive is, or at least ought to be, 'legally unconstrained,' he wrote. Vermeule draws this line of thinking from Schmitt, a legal academic in early 20th century Germany and the 'crown jurist' of the Nazi Party. Schmitt played an important role in the early days of the Reich as chief legal counsel in party meetings. He wrote legal opinions for the party, drawing on his theories about the executive and the state of emergency, in order to justify Hitler's rise to dictatorial power and the extra-legal murders during the Night of the Long Knives. As the executive, sole power for determination with regard to the state of emergency—when to declare it, what it meant, and how long it would last—rested with the fuhrer. In this historical case, one element of the emergency was the existence of enemies of the party in important public positions. The fuhrer was, therefore, according to Schmitt, well within his proper role in ordering their killing or removal. Just as Vermeule claims that the executive's power rests not on what is granted to him by law but on the support of the people, so Schmitt claimed that Hitler's acts were justified because he had a special 'affinity' with what was popular among the German citizenry. Vermeule and his coauthor, Eric Posner, argue in The Executive Unbound that it is unreasonable to be afraid of tyranny on the part of an executive who is legally unconstrained, because public opinion itself will limit the administration's power (they have to worry about being ousted or about a lack of political will among the people). This, however, is precisely why Schmitt thought Hitler was justified in his policies: namely, because the German people wanted them. In the ensuing years, Vermeule has applied a Schmittian analysis to the administrative state—that is, to federal agencies acting under the executive. In articles like 'Our Schmittian Administrative Law,' and books like Law's Abnegation, he has argued that, inevitably, legislatures leave gray areas and gaps in the law, within which agency officials would have an unlimited breadth of action and judgment. The rise of the administrative state has long been a concern for originalists, who bemoaned the legal doctrine known as Chevron deference (overturned last year by the Supreme Court) which held that courts should defer to agency judgments in matters of the agency's own expertise. Many originalists regarded the legal doctrine as a problematic violation of the separation of powers since it gave unelected members of the executive wide latitude to exercise lawmaking power via regulations, unchecked by the courts or by Congress. Such a vast expansion of executive power opens the door to abuses of power, they maintained. But for Vermeule, this is a feature of the administrative state, rather than a bug. It is precisely with the executive, unfettered by law, that this kind of power should rest. 'As for the structure and distribution of authority within government,' Vermeule writes, 'common-good constitutionalism will favor a powerful presidency ruling over a powerful bureaucracy, the latter acting through principles of administrative law's inner morality with a view to promoting solidarity and subsidiarity. The bureaucracy will be seen not as an enemy, but as the strong hand of legitimate rule.' Finally, in Common Good Constitutionalism, his most recent book, Vermeule argues that it is within the executive's prerogative to read into the text of the law its own judgments on what serves the common good. This prerogative, further, ought not be limited by ideas about the original public meaning of the Constitution or later statutes. Originalists have long argued for their position on the basis that straying from the original public meaning of the text in favor of 'reading into' the text the policy priorities of a given judge effectively untethers judicial and executive action from the law altogether. It provides no principled limit to a judge's ability to disregard the actual meaning of a law in favor of his or her preferred policy objectives. Here again, this kind of wiggle room is what Vermeule likes, and he likes it not just for judges but for administration officials. In Common Good Constitutionalism, as legal scholars William Baude and Stephen Sachs note, Vermeule's motivation for attacking originalism seems to be that it has failed to achieve his preferred policy ends (among these are a stricter public health regime, the curbing of elite liberal wealth, and forming 'better beliefs' among the public). For Vermeule, the limitations of original public meaning are too constraining. Despite the introduction of natural law and common good language in his most recent book (following on Vermeule's recent conversion, in 2016, to Catholicism), that work's project is the same Schmittian one that Vermeule has been on for decades. Additionally, the elements of Schmitt's thinking that Vermeule affirms were not incidental to Schmitt's support for Hitler, but constitutive of it. It was on the basis of the very theories that Vermeule affirms that Schmitt gave to the Nazi party the justifications it needed for dictatorship and political murder. I do not think this is the outcome Vermeule wants. But it is a grave misjudgment to think there's a nugget of gold hiding within the mottled stone of Nazi jurisprudence. Again, Vermuele's latest work has a distinct flavor from his earlier writing, in that it makes liberal use of 'the common good' and 'natural law' and of quotations from Thomas Aquinas. The term 'natural law' refers chiefly to a tradition of ethical, not legal, thought. It is a tradition as broad as it is deep, and includes ancients like Aristotle and the stoics, medievals like Aquinas and Ibn Sina, and moderns like Hugo Grotius and Jean-Jaques Burlamaqui. On the other side of the world, it includes also the epochal philosophers Mengzi and Zhu Xi. These thinkers are united by the idea that ethical truths can be drawn from facts about human nature. Within the natural law legal tradition in America today, Vermeule is decidedly on the outskirts. The leading thinkers in this world are people like Jeff Pojanowski, Kevin Walsh, and Robert P. George, none of whom would agree with Vermeule's particular application of classical or natural law terms and traditions. Where Vermeule sees the meaning of law as open to the unconstrained interpretation of the executive, Pojanowski and Walsh ably argue that the classical tradition has more to say in favor of faithfulness to the original public meaning of duly promulgated law. The differences between these thinkers is enough to show that Vermeule's line of thought should not be taken as representative of the natural law legal theorists at large. The strength of natural law theory is that it holds that ethical and political debates may be grounded in facts about human nature that are accessible to all. This does not mean that the answers to moral and political questions are obvious or easy. It simply means that it is possible for us to argue, disagree, deliberate, and reason together constructively, because we all have access to some degree of common ground upon which to argue. To understand natural law in the American tradition, you might turn to Hugo Grotius, the Dutch natural law legal theorist of the Early Modern era and an influential figure in the legal landscape that shaped America. Working mostly in the early 17th century, Grotius was facing a newly diverse, pluralistic, and interconnected world, one in which the dictates of particular religious traditions would not have universal sway. Was it ever possible to come to any kind of agreement about moral life and the law? Grotius thought so, because essential facts about our human nature, like the fact that we are rational and social animals, are universal, and can ground our deliberation about what constitutes the human good. In his great work, De Jure Belli, Grotius argued that natural law is 'a dictate of right reason' based upon human nature, one which could ground the laws of engagement between diverse nations. We still find ourselves in the same situation: a pluralistic and diverse society. Natural law allows us to govern together based on certain fundamental facts about human nature. We will all bring our own biases and interests to the table, but—unlike the executive branch Vermeule would make all powerful—the legislature is specifically designed for bargaining, reasoning, deliberating, and accommodating in order to achieve stable, moderate, and reformable governance through law. Natural law theory supports the idea that this kind of deliberation is possible, and that politics can be something more than raw expression of preference and power. In a legislative body, members will bring many resources to bear in making judgments about what is and is not good law. For deliberation to be possible, however, there must be some common ground, some public set of reasons accessible to all. Otherwise the parties are at an impasse. Natural law holds that this realm of public reason really is accessible to us through observation of human nature. In the rationality and freedom of the human person, for instance, we might be able to ground arguments about rights; in the sociality and fellow-feeling of human nature, we might be able to ground arguments about duties. This does not mean everyone will come to the same easy conclusions, it just means that there is a common, non-sectarian discourse within which reasons can be exchanged. Natural law holds that there really are objective claims we can make about what is good and bad for the human person. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, makes his famous 'function argument' to express how this works. In looking at any natural thing, we determine what is good or bad for it based on its characteristic functions. Thus, we know that it is better for a dog to be able to run and play and be with other dogs than to be legless, caged up, and alone. This is because we can observe the nature of the dog is to run, to play, to be social. So it is with human beings. Our characteristic functions include our health, security, but they also include distinctly human things, like our freedom, sociality, and rationality. Early Americans thought that the law should protect certain liberties, like freedom of speech, worship, and expression, because these were conducive to the characteristic functions of free and rational creatures. But this exchange of reasons, this deliberative practice where, as a group, we try to come to practical arrangements in accordance with human flourishing and the common good, does not satisfy Vermeule. He would like government to instantiate his own conception of the common good without compromise and deliberation. In his picture, the executive will be in the best position to decide difficult questions of politics and morality. But how can we be sure the executive will use this awesome power well? On the one hand, in The Executive Unbound, he says that public opinion will constrain the executive, but in Common Good Constitutionalism, Vermeule claims that the executive will do what's best for the people whether they like it or not. How we guarantee that the executive will be so wise, restraining itself from using its unchecked power tyrannically, remains a mystery. Vermeulism also should not be taken as 'the Catholic position.' Although Vermeule quotes St. Thomas Aquinas—a towering figure in the natural law tradition—in support of his legal theory, whether Vermeule's view represents Aquinas's, let alone the actual teaching of the Catholic Church, is debatable. Pope John Paul II, in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus annus, affirmed that there should be a balance of power between executive, legislative, and judicial, with the law reigning over all. 'This is the principle of the 'rule of law',' John Paul II wrote, 'in which the law is sovereign, and not the arbitrary will of individuals. … Authentic democracy is possible only in a State ruled by law.' What is more, Vermeule bases his thinking on the political theology of Carl Schmitt. But no less an authority than Joseph Ratzinger, who would later become Pope Benedict XVI, wrote in 1970 that it was 'impossible' for a Catholic to adhere, as Vermeule seems to, to Schmitt's 'political theology.' Our constitutional system, inspired by the writing of Aristotle among others, is designed with human weakness in mind. An unbound executive was precisely what it meant to avoid because the Founding Fathers recognized, as Aristotle did, that an executive unconstrained by law is a tyranny, and that those in whom such power was concentrated were likely to be corrupted by power. Aristotle thought that it would be lovely to have a perfectly wise and just monarch, but recognized that, human nature being what it is, a tyrant was much more likely. The solution of our founders was the elaborate system of separation of powers and of checks and balances. And even further, the founders, as expressed in The Federalist and elsewhere, did not believe that their system was self-enforcing or self-constraining. They understood that it could devolve into tyranny in various ways. As John Adams said, our Constitution is only fit for a moral and religious people, and any other would 'go through it like a whale goes through a net.' The founders also believed that, fallen as human nature is, it could still rise to virtue under the right cultural influences and within a well-designed constitutional system. The Constitution is designed for people who have the virtue to adhere to, rather than violate, its limits. As administrative law scholar Adam White argued in his review of Law's Abnegation, the rise of a more imperial presidency is not a historical inevitability, but a consequence of a lack of public virtue. The loss of the rule of law is, in some respects, a matter of choice. Today, perhaps, we face a choice. Do we still believe in the Constitution handed down to us, or do we want to slide toward Schmitt's authoritarian vision? It is a vision that could be embodied on the right or the left theory and that of the founders both made use of the idea of natural law. If we accept Vermeulism, let us at least not say that natural law made us do it.
New European
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
Matthew d'Ancona's culture: The Phoenician Scheme, a gem of a film
PICK OF THE WEEK The Phoenician Scheme (Selected cinemas) It is 1950, and the private plane of Anatole 'Zsa-zsa' Korda (Benicio del Toro), who is engrossed in a book, cruises 5,000 feet over the 'High Balkan Flatlands'. An explosion rips through the fuselage, cuts his administrative secretary in two, and forces a crash landing – the tycoon's sixth, we are told. Even as his death is reported on the news, he stumbles from a cornfield into shot, clutching a 'vestigial organ' to his belly. A headline flashes on screen: 'Ha! I'm still in the habit of surviving'. Wes Anderson's latest movie is one of his very best, not least because it is draped over the charisma of del Toro (for whom it was specifically written by the director and Roman Coppola). Based on the plutocrat Calouste Gulbenkian (1869-1955), aka 'Mr Five Per Cent', and Anderson's late father-in-law, the Lebanese construction entrepreneur Fouad Mikhael Malouf (to whom the movie is dedicated), Korda is planning a mighty infrastructural project, the 'Phoenician Land and Sea Infrastructure Scheme', but must first secure the necessary finance, which he calls 'the gap'. Along for the trip is his 20-year-old daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton, terrific), a pipe-smoking novitiate nun from whom Zsa-zsa has been estranged for six years, but whom he how regards as his heir; and his Norwegian family tutor, Bjorn Lund (Michael Cera), now doubling up as his administrative secretary. Bjorn quickly falls for Liesl, who is initially more preoccupied by suspicions that Korda killed her mother ('I was very fond of your mother – and would never have murdered her under any circumstances whatsoever!'). Though debonair and (mostly) unflappable, he is also a man of eccentric habits, offering those he encounters a hand grenade as a gift, and full of Darwinian mottos: 'If something gets in your way, flatten it'; 'Who could lick who, or whom, I guess'; 'I don't need any human rights'; and, cryptically, 'Break, but don't bend'. He has nine adopted sons, confined to a dormitory. The investors visited by Zsa-zsa and Liesl are played by an extraordinary ensemble cast: Prince Farouk (Riz Ahmed), the 7th King of Lower Western Independent Phoenicia; the Sacramento Consortium, Leland (Tom Hanks) and Reagan (Bryan Cranston), with whom Korda and Farouk play a high-stakes basketball game; the fez-wearing 'Marseille Bob' (Mathieu Amalric), the 'Newark Syndicate', represented by Marty (Jeffrey Wright); Korda's second cousin, Hilda (Scarlett Johansson), to whom he proposes marriage; and his wicked younger half-brother, Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch). Such is Anderson's cachet as an auteur that A-list actors now queue up for a cameo role in one of his movies. Rupert Friend plays 'Excalibur', leading a shadowy group of US government officials determined to destroy Korda by (among other secret ops) driving up the cost of 'bashable rivets'. At his palazzo, the mogul is attended by his butler (Alex Jennings), while Jason Watkins pops up occasionally to notarise a document. Richard Ayoade is Sergio, leader of a group of freedom fighters straight out of Luis Buñuel. In Zsa-zsa's black-and-white near-death experiences, God is played (of course) by Bill Murray, alongside the celestial figures of Willem Dafoe and F Murray Abraham. The narrative is punctuated by Anderson's signature rectilinear tableaux – an overhead shot of a bathroom, a cabin on a ship, the interior of a plane – an aesthetic reminiscent of Peter Greenaway's movies or the Bloomsbury Group's fixation with 'significant form'. What he himself has called his 'visual handwriting' is sometimes criticised as too mannered or too predictable; but one has only to think of Douglas Sirk, John Ford or Andrei Tarkovsky to recall that many of the greatest directors have a distinctive cinematic sensibility. It matters, too, that Anderson's style is not chilly, but a means of fascinating and reeling us in so that we may be immersed in his surreal but sincere emotional universe. The heart of The Phoenician Scheme is Korda's search for redemption as a parent, allied with his growing awareness that, independent of his schemes and avarice, 'maybe I matter'; that, in the end, he must close 'the emotional gap'. Oscillating between apparent invulnerability and a sense of his mortality, he reaches for a better way of living and takes the audience with him. An absolute gem of a film. FILM Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (General release) Does anyone now remember the original CBS television series of Mission: Impossible that ran from 1966 to 1973? Almost 30 years after Brian De Palma directed the first spin-off movie in 1996, the brand, which has already clocked up $4 billion at the box office, and its distinctive theme tune, have become inseparable from the superstardom of Tom Cruise. This, the eighth instalment and the fourth to be directed by Christopher McQuarrie, is the franchise at its most entertainingly deranged and delivers in every way you might expect. Cruise, who turns 63 in July, returns as Ethan Hunt, the agent whose messianic capacity to save the world is now more reminiscent of Keanu Reeves's Neo in the Matrix movies than an American James Bond. Indeed, Angela Bassett, as US president Erika Sloane, is ready to defy the entire military-industrial complex as she entrusts Hunt personally with the preposterously difficult task of stopping an AI super-being called 'the Entity' from triggering global nuclear apocalypse. At his side once again are Benji (Simon Pegg), Luther (Ving Rhames) and Grace (Hayley Atwell); joined, this time, by Paris (Pom Klementieff) a former assassin who owes her life to Hunt. The plot, such as it is, sets them against the dastardly Gabriel (Esai Morales), and involves the matching of a cruciform key to the mysteriously named 'Podkova' device. All of which is really a MacGuffin to set up Cruise for a series of sprints across bridges, against-the-odds fight scenes and (of course) extraordinary stunts. These include breaking into a long-sunk Russian submarine deep below a polar ice cap and a biplane chase sequence that combines Buster Keaton gymnastics with Top Gun aeronautical action. There are plenty of callbacks to the previous seven movies, as well as a blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference to Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Is this truly the final Mission: Impossible? That's classified. BOOK The Director, by Daniel Kelhmann (Riverrun) 'The important thing is to make art under the circumstances one finds oneself in': so says Daniel Kelhmann's fictionalised version of the Austrian director G.W. Pabst (1885-1967) in this wonderful novel, published in Germany as Lichtspiel in 2023 and now translated by Ross Benjamin. First in Hollywood, then in Austria after the Nazi annexation, Pabst is portrayed as hovering in a world of dream and nightmare, as if he himself is a character in an expressionist movie. Though he helps to launch the careers of Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks – the love of his life, in this account – he struggles in Tinseltown, mistaken for Fritz Lang and FW Murnau. His encounter with Goebbels (not named, but unmistakable) has the quality of phantasmagoria: 'the room had folded over so that he was suspended from the ceiling, walking upside down'. At his country estate, Pabst finds that the caretaker Jerzabek and his family are now zealous Nazis, and very far from deferential. Meanwhile, the director's son, Jakob, learns the art of brutality and the psychological surrender that are necessary to prosper in the Nazi era: 'When you can't do something and at the same time have no choice but to do it, there's only one solution: have someone else do it. Someone who looks like you and who uses your body'. PG Wodehouse, a prisoner of war, is a guest of the Reich at the premiere of Pabst's Paracelsus (1943); as is Leni Riefenstahl, whom the English satirist describes as 'a peculiarly spine-chilling creature' As they work on The Molander Case (1945), Franz Wilzek, the director's assistant, asks him whether he finds it strange 'that we're making a movie like this in the middle of the apocalypse'. As in Andres Veiel's recent (and fantastic) documentary Riefenstahl, this is the heart of the matter: a question to which Pabst has no satisfactory answer and a dilemma superbly explored by Kehlmann in one of the best novels of the year. STREAMING Code of Silence (ITVX, all episodes) Four years since she won Strictly, and three since she left EastEnders, Rose Ayling-Ellis is now in the top rank of British dramatic actors. Weeks after her role in the BBC's ground-breaking series Reunion, she stars in this compelling six-episode crime thriller, written by Catherine Moulton, as Alison Brooks, a deaf woman working in a police canteen in Canterbury, who becomes embroiled in an investigation because of her lip-reading skills. In less confident hands, this could have been a patronising gimmick – but, as framed by Ayling-Ellis, who has been deaf since birth, and Moulton, who also has hearing loss, the concept works brilliantly. As Alison looks for cues, plosives and gestures, we watch the words forming on screen; and soon she becomes indispensable to DS Ashleigh Francis (Charlotte Ritchie) and her boss DI James Marsh (Andrew Buchan) as they pursue a gang planning a big jewellery heist. In spite of warnings from the cops to stick to her specific role, Alison cannot help chasing the leads that her lip-reading delivers, and she soon finds herself talking to, and attracted by, the gang's tech expert, Liam Barlow (Kieron Moore). Her increasingly risky inquiries are made plausible by her exasperated longing to be taken seriously and for her sharp intelligence to be acknowledged. 'I'm really fed up trying to prove myself,' she says, after losing yet another part-time job. The villains – codenamed 'Wolf', 'Hulk', and 'Cruella' – are properly nasty, too; though Liam is clearly cut from gentler cloth, which makes Alison all the more conflicted by her feelings about him. A first-class police drama, which fully deserves a second season. …and finally I'll be interviewing the great Anne Applebaum at Waterstones, Trafalgar Square, on Tuesday May 27 at 5pm, to mark the paperback publication of her best-selling Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World (Penguin) – a masterly exploration of global kleptocracy, authoritarian regimes and the networks that link them that seems all the more prescient now that Donald Trump is back in the White House. You can get tickets here. (You can also hear TNE founder and Editor-in-Chief Matt Kelly and I talking to Anne on The Two Matts in July).
Sky News AU
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Sky News AU
Kel Richards: The shared flaw that makes 'Welcome to Country' ceremonies, Black Lives Matter movement inherently racist to the core
All 'Welcome to Country' and 'Acknowledgement of Country' ceremonies are racist. That will look like an outrageous and offensive statement to some people. So let me try to make my point clearer. I am not saying that everyone who does a 'Welcome to Country' or an 'Acknowledgement of Country' is racist. Of course they're not. Most are well-intentioned people just trying to do the right thing. The problem is that they (and most Australians) have not given any thought to what the action of a 'Welcome to Country' or 'Acknowledgement of Country' is, or means, or implies. And when you unpack the unexamined assumptions behind these ceremonies they turn out to be deeply racist. Let me go through this process step-by-step - and (I hope) at the end you will no longer be offended or horrified by the judgement with which I began. To begin with we need a definition of racism. The most helpful definition says this: 'Racism consists of dividing people on the basis of race.' In other words, it's classifying or pigeon-holing people based on their racial category. This usually means treating their racial category as the most important thing about them. There are (at least) two types of racism. And that complicates matters. The reason so much debate and discourse about racism is at cross-purposes, muddled and confused is that these different types of racism exist, and function, in our society and they are simply not being clearly recognised. Racism can be either (a) Darwinian racism, or (b) Marxist racism. Darwinian racism is based on the notion that some races are more evolved than others. White supremacism is an expression of Darwinian racism. When a white South African tells me his black fellow citizens can't run the country because they are 'just out of the trees' he is exactly expressing the central notion of Darwinian racism. Marxist racism is based on the idea that some races should be preferred over other races. This Marxist idea of racial preference can be clearly seen in the Black Lives Matter movement. You will remember how strongly they objected when they were told that 'all lives matter'. Their slogan (incorporated in their title) embodied this notion that some races should be preferred over others. These two types of racism heartily loath each other. Darwinian racists accuse the Marxist racists of practicing 'replacement' - of aiming to 'replace' white people with black in the social structure. While Marxist racists accuse the Darwinian racists of arrogant hatred of non-white races. But despite the clear distinction between them, both types of racism are built on the same foundation - the same core error. Both types of racism mistakenly believe it is racial characteristics that define a person. And both believe that racial differences vastly outweigh common humanity. That which distinguishes one race from another is not shallow and skin-deep (they assume) but is at the very foundation, heart and soul of each human being. If you are of one race, then you are fundamentally different from every other race. Most of you - not just your skin colour, hair colour, eye shape, and so on - will be deeply unlike persons from another race. That's the error both types of racism make. And that's why I am proposing that the best definition of racism is 'dividing people on the basis of race'. Because division between races lies at the heart of both Darwinian racism and Marxist racism. For the most part the dictionaries tend to offer definitions that only succeed in defining Darwinian racism (e.g. 'the belief that some races are better than others'). However, the most authoritative dictionaries include an acknowledgement that 'racism' means 'dividing people on the basis of race'. For instance, the Oxford English Dictionary includes 'beliefs that members of a particular racial or ethnic group possess innate characteristics or qualities' as part its long and complex definition. And the Merriam-Webster Third International makes this the lead statement in its definition, saying that racism is: 'The assumption that psychocultural traits and capacities are determined by biological race and that races differ decisively from one another'. This belief says that people are distinguished from one another not by culture, or community influence, or intelligence, or upbringing but by DNA - by inherited racial characteristics. This deep (and unchangeable) division of the human race according to racial categories is what all racism consists of. And this division can express itself as a claim of superiority (Darwinian racism) or of an entitlement or preference (Marxist racism). It's on this basis that I claim that 'Acknowledgement of Country' and 'Welcome to Country' ceremonies are inherently racist. Such ceremonies express a preference for one race over other races. That preference is expressed by acknowledging one race. It is an acknowledgement of one racial category. It is a division on the basis of race. The alternative view of humanity is that race does not matter - that racial category is a minor, not a major, component in the identity of an individual. That is what Martin Luther King Jr was arguing in his famous 'I Have a Dream' speech in Washington on March 28, 1963. Delivered to tens of thousands of supporters from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial the speech called for civil and economic rights. In the course of that speech, King said: 'I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.' This is a bold assertion that race ('the colour of their skin') does not matter - that there are other characteristics of each person that matter far more. Both types of racism, both Darwinian and Marxist, are based on this mistake. People are not defined by their racial characteristics. Race is not the most important thing - the most distinguishing thing - between persons. There are scientific, theological and common-sense arguments to support this. In his book 'The Language Instinct' Steven Pinker writes about the findings of two geneticists. This is how he summarises their findings: 'Eighty-five per cent of human genetic variation consists of the differences between one person and another within the same ethnic group, tribe or nation. Another eight per cent is between ethnic groups, and a mere seven per cent is between races'. In other words, the genetic difference between, say, two randomly picked Swedes is about twelve times as large as the genetic difference between the average Swede and the average Apache or Warlpiri. Our common humanity is vastly greater than our racial differences. Or as Pinker puts it: 'Among laypeople, race is lamentably salient, but for biologists it is virtually invisible.' Race is mere skin-deep. The trouble is that it can be seen - in skin colour, hair colour, eye shape and similar superficial differences. But the human heart is the human heart. And the human soul is the human soul. And, despite the assumptions of the Darwinian racists and the Marist racists, the human soul has no racial characteristics. That's why the same point can be put in theological terms. The founding claim of the Judea-Christian worldview on which Western civilisation is based is that the human race is made in the image of God. And that means the whole of the human race - every man, woman and child regardless of their family tree or their personal DNA. Everyone is an image bearer of God. So, in theological terms, there is only one race - the human race. All those superficial racial distinctions are just that - superficial. Common sense sees this clearly. When the Indigenous Voice referendum was put to Australian voters on October 14, 2023, the implication was that the roughly 800,000 Australians who identify as Indigenous could be treated as a single, homogenous group. The unexamined (and mentally lazy) assumption behind the referendum proposal was everyone in the 'Indigenous' racial category was sufficiently alike as to have the same problems, the same concerns, and the same political needs. That is why common sense rejected the Indigenous Voice proposal by 60 to 40 per cent in the outcome of the referendum. Common sense lines up with science and theology on this. The racists (whether they be Darwinian or Marxist) will, of course, reject his. They will continue to claim that you are defined by your family tree, by the racial characteristics in your DNA. I have debated this on talkback radio and been told that the high number of Jewish winners of the Nobel Prize proves that racial characteristics are central and defining. That argument does not hold water. The success of Jewish scientists in winning the Nobel Prize is best explained in terms of culture and community not race. The Jewish people have a 3000-year history of literacy and stressing the importance of education and rational debate (Talmudic debate). That is a culture that produces Nobel Prize winners. There is no gene in Jewish DNA (yet to be discovered!) that will explain this as racially inherited. We need to learn to treat racial categories as unimportant. Race does not matter. Except that we are surrounded by people who claim the opposite. The Darwinian racists and the Marxist racists are defying the science, the theology and common sense to claim that race is all important - that people need to be categorised, divided, pigeon-holed on the basis of race. That is what makes each 'Welcome to Country' or 'Acknowledgement of Country' a racist act - even when performed innocently by well-intentioned people - because it is a ceremonial announcement of racial division. If you have one particular family tree (one race) then you are entitled to welcome all other races to 'country.' But if you have the wrong family tree (belong to the wrong race) you are not allowed to. Similarly, in 'Acknowledgement of country' one race is to be acknowledged to the exclusion of all others. So, what are we to do about this? Well, the answer depends on what sort of Australia we want to live in. If we are comfortable having the Australian population divided along racial lines we will continue to encourage 'Welcome to Country' and 'Acknowledgement of Country' ceremonies as public ways displaying the deep division we wish to see characterise Australia. However, if we want to stress our common humanity, our easy-going acceptance of each other (what Lawson and Paterson would have called 'mateship') and the relaxed friendship and loyalty of all Australians then we will lend our voices to a demand that all 'Welcome to Country' and all 'Acknowledgement of Country' ceremonies will cease. Kel Richards is a veteran Australian broadcaster and author whose distinguished media career includes hosting the ABC current affairs show AM and his own talkback commercial radio shows. He is also a frequent on-air contributor for Sky News Australia
