Kym Robinson | The Libertarian Institute

A Problem From Hell

by Kym Robinson | Apr 29, 2024 | Book Reviews, Featured Articles

"Indifference can be just as deadly as direct violence.”- Samantha Power, A Problem From Hell When Raphael Lemkin came up with the word "genocide," he needed a handle for the savagery of mass murder that was occurring in the 1940s and the years before. Unfortunately, since Lemkin came up with the word, genocides have continued. In her book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Samantha Power addresses some of the great crimes against humanity that have occurred over the past century. It was once a crime without a name, a savage act of "barbarity" that defied the nature of a...

I Met a Man

by Kym Robinson | Apr 24, 2024 | Blog

Located nearly three hours drive from Adelaide, the property rested in the South-East. The nearest township a good thirty minutes if you pushed your vehicle over dirty unselaed road. It was a job that a mate threw my way, help out some old timers that he knew through the grapevine. Good people, I was told. I arrived early in the morning, a brisk autumn day, with blue skies and puffy white clouds. The country still brown from a late summer with flocks of trees and the occasional blistering of bushes. A tall man with a leathery face greeted me. A rabbit skin hat on his head, with olive green...

The Dogs of War are in Heat

by Kym Robinson | Apr 14, 2024 | Blog

The dogs of war are always in heat. They bark, they gnaw, they kill and breed. Civilisation a chimera, chewing through bones, tearing at flesh, the killers are never in defeat. No matter how well behaved they act, whatever laws claim to be their collar and what kennel of state they sleep from within. They bark for more. A hungry pack, they hunt, kill. They want more. As a mob we tell ourselves lies, we pretend to be cultivated and wise. We look down on the savagery of ancient times, when tribes waged wars. They did it with bare hands, axes and clubs. We are sophisticated now with missiles,...

The Wigan Pier of the Periphery

by Kym Robinson | Apr 11, 2024 | Blog

I just finished some work in the city. I was working with a pair of carpenters, men in dirty clothes with splinters in their hands. As we worked the nicely dressed office class ignored those building the world around them, the delivery drivers, the cleaners, the homeless picking tobacco from pieces of spent paper. I was among the people in the periphery, the insignificant to the important careerists of the government and corporate class who rode elevators up towers of glass to sit through a day where taxation and monopoly fees keep them paid. The conversations among us dirty men is usually...

Triple Tap Murders…Oh Look, a Cat Video

by Kym Robinson | Apr 10, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Recently the Israeli Defense Force murdered an aid convoy. A group of international aid workers who had coordinated with the IDF and who were travelling on an IDF approved route. When the aid workers came under attack, they contacted the IDF. Three assaults were launched by the IDF, killing seven World Central Kitchen aid workers. The term "triple tap" has been used. The IDF will investigate itself. The outraged, the shocked, and the indifferent alike watch as children die daily in Palestine. The aid workers' bodies were mutilated by weapons likely supplied by the United States.And in...

A Home into a House

by Kym Robinson | Apr 9, 2024 | Blog

It’s a modest house, a unit trapped inside of a suburb within a suburb. Mostly elderly live here. A woman in her late seventies greets me, “I’m Rosanne, the neighbour.” She takes me through the house and shows me what needs to be carried out. Heavy furniture and the boxes too heavy for others to lift. The house is stripped down to its bare bones, dust and remnants of a home barely linger. I load my ute, Rosanne watches, disappears and returns with a cup of tea for me. We share idle chit chat, the weather, never having enough time and eventually how lovely the person whose belongings I am...

Five Chimneys of Gaza

by Kym Robinson | Apr 8, 2024 | Blog

Millions and thousands become empty numbers when scaled in the context of history. As a scale of human life taken, those numbers are tragic and can seem unreal. A life balanced against policy, allowed to suffer and die beneath a wider context that is expedient or abstract skewered by passions and contemporary politics. A life that destroyed, punished and tortured by complete strangers with such certainty, despite innocence. At best guilt by association in the most remote attachment is the only grounds for culpability. With ideology, the authority of law and the language of justice, the...

$5400

by Kym Robinson | Mar 27, 2024 | Blog

One of the terrorist-murderers captured in Moscow claimed that he was paid the equivalent of US$5400 to kill innocent people. In his native Tajikstan that is no doubt a lot of money. His willingness to kill for money is not new, the mercenary trade is one steeped in romance but also be despised. Usually depending on any given historical perspective. Though these men were murderers. Spree killers, motivated by the ideology of terror and money. While other spree killers the world over may do their terrible deed with a vicious thrill these men are now heroes to some, because the crime is...

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