Attend the tale of David Hicks,
Who could this day hit Bush for six,
Put paid to Howard’s craven rule,
Or just keep silence; April fool.
Though Channel 9 or the Sunday Mail
Can coin it if they tell his tale,
He must count of little worth
The tortures of his life on earth.
Though Chopper Reid or Albert Speer
Or Ronnie Biggs can without fear
Profit from a life of crime,
It seems Dave can’t, or not this time,
And though the wicked Anthony Beevor
Pursues through Holocaust his gold fever,
Through Guernica, Stalingrad, Berlin,
And hauls his bloodstained millions in,
Though Primo Levi made his pile
From fewer years in durance vile,
Though Donald Trump and Conrad Black
Will for their crimes get millions back
,
No such joy soothes Dave Hicks, not he,
No Denton cabcharge, no cup of tea,
No shouted round while he tells his tale:
If you drink that beer, son, you go to gaol.
If capitalism, Primates, means
A man’s life’s worth a hill of beans,
If the market rules, and speech is free
And no tyrant censors you and me,
We should, I think, call up young Hicks,
As one would John Doyle or Hans Blix,
And bid him at this feasting hall
To sink some jars and tell us all,
And if for this we end in gaol,
We’ll sell our story then. Wassail.
Name:
I’m sorry but you are comparing Hicks to Primo Levi??
You are a disgraceful person.
Both survived unjust torture, and wrote about it.
What is the difficulty?
Please answer this.
Both contemplated suicide. Hicks spent longer imprisoned than Levi. Both write supremely well. As does Beevor, of course.
What is the difficulty?
‘Disgraceful’ is not an argument.
Reply.
I wondered, also, if Primo Levi’s name was in the verse “to stir”. David Hicks compared with Primo Levi?
If this is about the proceeds of a book, why wouldn’t the many supporters of David Hicks take $100 from their pockets, or $1,000 from their bank accounts, and give him joy? If making a pile is soothing, then give him the money.
Primo Levi was a lawbreaker (he was born a Jew) according the rues of the time and country but Hicks was not. They had to invent a retrospective crime he was guilty of. He like Levi wrote supremely well of his detention. Why should he be deprived of his money for it? He broke no law.
Sorry Mr Ellis, but that is just about the most asinine comment a man of your sweeping intellect has made in a long time.
Think this through with us for a moment. Primo Levi was a chemist sent to the death camps. He was to be gassed with Zyclon B for one reason and one reason only – his religion. He survived because he was a chemist and after the war spent almost a year in Russian camps and crossing war torn Europe to find his way home to Italy.
Subsequently we wrote some of the most insightful, moving and almost poetic novels – If This Is A Man & the Truce are masterpieces of literature.
David Hicks chose to go to Afghanistan. He asked to join a terrorist training outfit and learn the trade. After 9/11, he returned to Afghanistan and was arrested guarding a tank, armed with a pistol. In letters to his father he blamed Zionist for world’s troubles and expressed support for the same ideology that saw Primo Levi sent to Auschwitz.
Later, someone helped ghost-write his story which forgot to include his letters home, his support for Muslim terrorism and why the hell he went and fought with them in the first place. It should have been sold in the fiction genre.
Hicks should never have been sent to Guantanamo, but to liken him to Levi is rather obscene and frankly, if you think this through Mr Ellis, I’m sure you’ll agree it makes a martyr out of someone who has contributed nothing to the betterment of society or our understanding of terrorism and extremism.
Please excuse the vernacular, but Hicks was a fuckwit in the wrong place at the wrong time. He didn’t deserve the punishment, but I’ve read Primo Levi, and frankly Mr Hicks is no Levi. Our sympathy belongs with victims, not dumbfucks who don’t understand the consequences of training with the Taliban.
No-one with a “sweeping intellect” would ever write something so utterly stupid.
Have you read Hicks? Have you met him? How dare you have an opinion?
There are men who served the Third Reich still growing wine in the Barossa Valley. Some fought for Hitler’s ideas, and believed them. Some killed Australians.
What should have happened to them?
Hicks at no time fired on Australians.
What was he punished for?
Please answer this.
Have you read Hicks?
I rank him with Koestler.
What’s your view?
You’ve lost me (and I suspect others) with your reply.
First, the issue was your comparison between one of the world’s greatest authors, Primo Levi, and someone who faced rough justice but was never in a death camp which exterminated millions.
Do you think Guantanamo and Auschwitz are the same? Please say so publicly as I am sure many others would like to comment on your analogy.
I presume you have been to both and are aware of the difference – 2.5 million gassed, and 500,000 dead from disease and starvation contrasted with 4 suicides and 3 reported dead from US interrogations.
And these are the same?
Are the survivors of both to be given equal status – one the victims of genocide based on religion, sexual inclination and communist sympathies; the other for those who took up arms against the West.
Poor misunderstood pitiful David. He didn’t know the Taliban wanted to hurt anyone. It was just a bit of jungle fun, shoot a few wooden Jews and Americans, have a few laughs around the campfire, read a bit of the Qur’an where it talks about Jihad, maybe some Gin Rummy in the evening and a chin-wag with Osama when he stopped by.
Harmless really … oh yes, 3000 dead in the World Trade Centres but that’s by-the-by. They asked for it. They made us do it with their foreign policies and their David Williamson plays.
Mr Ellis, I honest believe you write this shite just to stir, so you can put down those who disagree and argue the indefensible.
David Hicks is to Primo Levi what Bill Shorten is to Gary Hart.
Death is death, injustice is injustice, we each die only once, and Hicks risked that, and underwent injustice, as Levi did.
Millions have died for different versions of the colonised-Arab cause, the one you lately applauded as the Arab Spring. I’m not sure numbers matter when a man is arrested wrongfully, tortured wrongfully, told he can’t speak to his family, told he might never know freedom again.
If you think Hicks deserved this please say so.
And please say why.
Happy to answer your questions, I welcome banter with you!
Yes, injustice is injustice and it is always wrong. We agree.
Did Hicks deserve his punishment, torture et cetera – absolutely not. We agree this was wrong on every level.
Is he an innocent victim such as Levi? No. He chose to train with a group whom he knew to be involved in terrorism and had stated goals that involved the killing of civilians. Read the letters he wrote to his father and get back to me about that.
Hicks should either have been charged with an offence or released, we agree on that, I trust.
Did he commit a crime under Australian (or US) law – no. I think we agree on this perversion of justice.
But can you compare someone willingly involved in an armed conflict with the victims of the death camps of Nazi Europe – absolutely not.
Hicks didn’t deserve to be captured and held without trial, but he wasn’t some cloud watcher strolling through the Khyber Pass when suddenly the SS rounded him up and sent him to the death camps.
Come on Mr Ellis, by all means defend someone who was the victim of injustice, but don’t give me your Executioner’s Song riff about the poor misguided sod being akin to Levi.
He fucked up. He stupidly joined a bunch of killers. He was unfairly treated. He wrote a book that contradicted the letters he wrote home and what he told the Australian authorities.
Please, pick a better martyr than this bloke. Next you’ll be telling me Fairlie Arrow was misunderstood …
He ‘stupidly joined a pack of killers’, did he? Like those who in the US Air Force enacted Shock and Awe, you mean, on Baghdad at midnight? On civilians unpossessed of WMD? Suddenly, without declaration of war? Killing thousands? And although he did not kill anybody, and they did, he, not they, is guilty of, what? Thoughtcrime? What other crime?
Believe in Thoughtcrime, do you?
You can charge me with it, then. Because when I was a Seventh-Day Adventist, I believed all Catholics would fry in Hell.
You can charge Fred Nile with it. He believes that homosexuals will fry a billion years in Hell.
Once you go after a man for what he thinks, not what he does, you join the fascists in your heart. You are one with Pinochet, Poujade, Le Pen and John Howard.
Comfortable in that company, are you?
Just asking.
Fuck you, Terrance.
Reply.
Okay, let’s push this a little further.
Should David Hicks be compensated for his unjust imprisonment? As Cornelia Rau was?
Say yes or no.
If yes, please say with how much money.
Please reply.
Of course he should be compensated. And generously too. I fail to see what your point is.
But let me ask you to reflect on your reposte. You write articles and invite comments. I have done so many times and enjoyed the exchanges on many issues from Sinatra to actors of note. We are of similar age although I was in ‘Nam and served in the Middle-East and maybe have seen a thing or two about the wrongs of militarism and the evil bastards who send your men to war.
We have also met on a few occassions but I suspect you won’t remember me. I do however fondly recall your Bill O’Chee and Bronwyn Bishop stories.
Anyway, here I disagree with you about prison literature but like a school boy you call me names and liken me to murderers because I have a different view about the merits of Mr Hicks vs the great Italian!
Honestly, is ‘fuck you’ the best you can come up with when someone has a different opinion? I thought something more entertaining and witty would be in your kitbag.
Can we raise the standard a little?
TP
Comrade, I’m sorry.
But you have said a fellow human being who writes better than either of us deserved to have his twenties wrenched out of his young life…why? Because he believed something other than what you believe? Because he trained as a soldier (as you did) and thought western society worth destroying (as I did),and killed, or wounded, or bruised, no-one? No-one at all?
And I should forgive you believing this nonsense, and because you met me once?
Really?
Really?
Explain yourself.
I’ve read Hicks. His “writing” is feeble, dissembling ghost-written shit.
How can you say he writes better than you, Bob? What is you’re agenda in making such a falsely self-deprecating and dishonest appraisal?
Quote a shitty sentence.
Do it.
I’d have to buy another copy as mine was tossed at a garage sale.
Fuck that for a game of soldiers.
But have you heard Hicks speak in public? He’s not capable of writing.
I have heard Hicks speak in public and he was brilliant.
Have you?
Have you?
Stop telling lies.
Yes. I have even conversed with him. He’s as dumb as dogshit.
Have you conversed with him? If so, stop telling lies about his intellectual output. Dunce.
“Dumb as dogshit” sounds about right.
How would you know? How could you possibly know? His book was shortlisted for a Premier’s Award. Have you read a sentence of it?
How could you possibly know? How dare you have an opinion?
I again ask Smitty for a shitty sentence of Hicks’s.
Perhaps of interest is this excerpt from Clare O’Meara at Crikey :
(quote)
Waleed Aly gave the book three out of five stars, saying it “leaves readers with as many questions as it does answers”. He wrote “the book is probably at its weakest on the points of greatest political scrutiny”.
Sally Neighbour described the book as “deceptive and disappointing”, pinpointing the main problem with the novel being “that out of the 456 pages he spends less than one page talking about his training with Al Qaeda”.
Mark Davis, who was instrumental in covering Hicks’s trial, lauds the book as “a revealing account” but admits “he’s not highly educated. And he’s certainly not articulate.”
(end quotes)
Perhaps the book has artistic merit, but most people would not read it for the artistry, one suspects.
As to the merits of Hicks’ case, it seems to me he was a poor fool in the wrong place at the wrong time, and little deserved his subsequent demonisation. But neither should he be lionised or sanctified.
Let him get on with his life.
Read it, you moron.
Quote one ill-written paragraph.
That’s the nicest thing you’ve said to anyone today, from what I have seen so far.
Did you read my post?
What part of “Perhaps the book has artistic merit” did you not understand?
You have 1 hour to apologise and withdraw or I’ll . . . I’ll . . . I’ll . . .
cry . . . (sobs)
Fuck off.
Either argue truthfully or don’t contribute.
Quote one bad paragraph of ghr book.
Fuck you too;
Fuck your dog, and
Fuck the horse you rode in on.
How’s that for truthful argument?
Better now, Bob? So cathartic.
All my dogs are dead and I do not fuck ashes. I take on board your view that you have not read Hicks’s book and it might have artistic merit, and I congratulate you on your psychic powers, much as I would a critic of Hamlet who has not read or seen it.
It is not a giant, Quixote, it’s a windmill. Give your poor old horse a morning off.
I hope you and Rocinante are in a consensual relationship. If you are not, by God the RSPCA shall know of it.