The Brutus Club

On the Shills and Hollowmen after the Bondi Massacre

Before I start the main topic of this stack, it is imperative that I set some personal context regarding Israel/Palestine. I served as a small contingent commander on one of the UN Missions in the Middle East. During that year, I lived in both Lebanese and Israeli communities, not on an isolated military base. The Australian higher headquarters, which changed my desk officer three times, never read into the area. Decisions were made that affected our force protection posture (the removal of CBRN equipment) without my consultation, and intelligence support was nonexistent. I will add, however, that the UN Head of Mission was an excellent Australian general, so if needed, I could have dialled it up. But that was not his core role, and it was for me, as commander, to manage.

This is not a complaint; it is just the reality of small-unit deployment when more ‘exciting’ operations are underway. But that lack of support forced me to read voraciously. I checked five or so reliable news sources daily, discussed issues with our experienced interpreters, listened to the UN political advisers, and constantly read credible texts on the region. I am certainly not an expert on the area (anyone who says they understand it isn’t either), but I know of a few who are and how to listen.

There are zealots and monsters on both sides of the fence; there are also those seeking peace, and many in between. Both political structures are dominated by corrupt old men who see power and absolution through violence as the only path.

I don’t comment publicly on the conflict; polarisation of debate is immediate and vicious. I hold no malice towards or hope for either side; it is just a veil of tears draped over the endless suffering of innocents. When it comes to the Israel/Palestine question, ‘A plague on both your houses.’ is my current view of this eternal tragedy. Neither side really wants to fix it.

We will soon return to Shakespeare.

I do not hold that position over the Bondi Massacre; it is the work of monsters, who, as the Muslim community has rightfully done, are to be cast aside and forgotten. I will not wade into causation; many others have written very well on this. Rodger Shannahan, Levi West, and Kenneth Yeo have been excellent. But I am going to take on the response of some who tried to catch the Australian public eye. I could not write immediately after the disaster; I was too furious. It would have been just a stream of invective, and that was the time for grief. It still is, but those stoking the fires of division need to be called out. To do this, we turn to Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

The evil that men do lives after them;

The good is oft interred with their bones;

So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus

Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:

If it were so, it was a grievous fault,

And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.

Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–

For Brutus is an honourable man;

So are they all, all honourable men–

Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.

He was my friend, faithful and just to me:

But Brutus says he was ambitious;

And Brutus is an honourable man.

He hath brought many captives home to Rome

Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:

Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?

When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:

Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:

Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;

And Brutus is an honourable man.

You all did see that on the Lupercal

I thrice presented him a kingly crown,

Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?

Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;

And, sure, he is an honourable man.

I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,

But here I am to speak what I do know.

You all did love him once, not without cause:

What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?

O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,

And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;

My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,

And I must pause till it come back to me.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56968/speech-friends-romans-countrymen-lend-me-your-ears

Shakespeare was masterful at observing and revealing the human condition. This play and the other ‘king’ plays place much of that in the realm of power and politics. The other advantage of his prose is its thematic richness, allowing multiple interpretations. Please let me share mine and how it relates to the Bondi Massacre.

This excoriation by Mark Antony of Brutus is precisely what many commentators who sought to push their own agendas through the tragedy richly deserve. The current crop of strategically irrelevant business and sports figures mindlessly calling for a Royal Commission are due the same treatment. They are all scheming with the intellectual ability and emotional sensitivity of a river pebble. The clueless feed the divisive fires of single-issue zealots who somehow possess the solutions to intractable problems. Let us call them the Brutus Club.

They fail to recognise that the individual psychopath will always seek their moment of fame; the trick is to minimise the chance and impact of that moment. Rodger Shannahan has just written about it in The Australian. But heroes will also always exist, as well, something the Brutus club seems to be blind to. It doesn’t fit the narrative.

Exempting the grieving, attempts to blame-shift onto the current Federal government (I am politically agnostic; I like them competent and genuinely caring) were equally cowardly. This is a second-term government that has demolished the opposition in two elections; if they are incompetent, then the blame is on all of us voters.

Such commentators additionally demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding of national security agencies and poor long-term memory. When in government, the current opposition conducted a massive agency shuffle across departments to build an ego-centric mega-department for a now disgraced secretary. Unpicking this is still going on. It dissolved the nascent NSA position, which had a highly competent first appointee. The Head of ASIO has been floating in and out of the NSC for decades. These are bipartisan problems.

It may be that there are faults in the national and state security apparatus, but with this type of threat, it is a challenging zero-sum game. Hundreds of intercepts and warnings are rendered void by a single incident. But you certainly don’t stop improving.

Does any of this make a difference to what happened? I have no idea, but they should be considered and outcomes made publicly available, yes. That is not a call for a Royal Commission, because whether it is the most empowered investigation available in the Australian legal system, or done by Columbo, it all depends on the terms of reference. At present, it is just yelling, but a clear investigative path needs to be mapped out and made public at every step. Not just a tome dropped on the desk at the end of the process.

Mark Antony makes the point that he cannot make any judgment because his heart is still in the coffin. Such commentators in the Brutus Club are not about grief or empathy but political grandstanding over Caesar’s corpse. Like Brutus, some of those may have helped sharpen the knives. Usually, they fall silent when a more complex view is considered that brings this fact to the surface. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’ To quote another part of the play.

The anti-immigrant messaging (in reality, anti-Australian, because if you are white like me, I have news for you, we aren’t indigenous) was mercifully dumped into oblivion. The courage beyond measure of a former Syrian policeman and the Muslim community’s response were exemplary. It is amazing what happens when you go back to source texts and find they condemn the killing of innocents.

Mark Antony additionally raises the deep sociopathy of those attending Caesar’s funeral, and their profound stupidity. The force of the ‘correlation equals causation’ is strong in the Brutus Club. It presents in two forms, the ‘I told you so’ brigade, which unsurprisingly included the leaders of Israel, deflection and sanitisation of their own strategic incompetence. The wicked part of such claimants is that they are wrong until they are right, like the broken clock.

They tend to overlap with the second group in the Club. The simple fix group, stop immigration, it all goes away, ban Islam, fixed. Like those thinking that knifing Julius Caesar would solve Rome’s problems, the next seven years of ruthless civil war would indicate that it is always more complex than that. This set of Neanderthals conveniently forgets that Australia’s homegrown white killers are far more brutal. This group also tends to present with faux passion, believing that if they yell loudest, they are more correct than all others.

Mark Antony’s own fate was as tragic as Julius Caesar’s, and when it comes to Bondi, I think my heart is still in the grave. Nor am I a scholar of Shakespeare, but when the dark games started after the massacre, it was blatantly obvious what was happening, and it still is. Refreshingly, the derision on social media is in some cases as good as the Immortal Bard himself. I do not wish forgiveness now for the Brutus Club, like Brutus, they know what they do. When the darkness calls upon them in some quiet, alone moment, I hope they do recant; until then, they only deserve scorn and total obscurity. Thus, it allows greater space for those who want to build a safer place for all of Australia and help those affected heal.

Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt - Measure for Measure.