{"id":90076,"date":"2024-07-01T03:00:15","date_gmt":"2024-07-01T07:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=90076"},"modified":"2024-06-30T16:40:06","modified_gmt":"2024-06-30T20:40:06","slug":"welcome-to-the-omnicause-aka-the-fatberg-of-activism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2024\/07\/01\/welcome-to-the-omnicause-aka-the-fatberg-of-activism\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to the “Omnicause” (aka “the Fatberg of Activism”)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Helen Dale<\/a> first encountered the Omnicause as a university student council member:<\/p>\n

For my sins \u2014 in 1991 \u2014 I spent a year on the University of Queensland Student Union Council. Yes, I was elected, which means I was a volunteer. It ranks up there among the more pointless activities I’ve undertaken. I was 19, that’s my excuse.<\/p>\n

Because I’m conscientious<\/a>, I took it seriously. I turned up to the monthly meetings. I researched the motions to be debated and voted on in advance. I tried to say not-stupid-things when I thought it was worth making a comment. One side benefit: I learnt meeting procedure.<\/p>\n

I also had my first encounter with the Omnicause.<\/p>\n

Every single student union council meeting had a Palestine motion, sometimes more than one. These were long, detailed, and competently drafted. They routinely dominated more typical student union fare: budgetary allocations to fix the Rec Club roof, say, or complaints about tuition fees. I wondered what the union’s employed secretarial staff thought of typing up and then photocopying pages upon pages of tedious detail about Middle Eastern geopolitics. I remember picking up copies of both minutes and agendas and boggling at the amount of work involved.<\/p>\n

There, in miniature \u2014 in sleepy meetings in hot rooms where dust particles danced in stray sunbeams as those of us reading law or STEM subjects tried to make sense of it all \u2014 was the Omnicause we now see in campuses all over the developed world. My earliest memories of it involve Aboriginal activists describing Australia as a “settler-colonial state” which had been “invaded” \u2014 just like Israel. Australia also had no right to exist.<\/p>\n

During one meeting, a Palestine-obsessive buttonholed an engineering student known for his commitment to conservation, bending his ear about the Nakba. I misunderstood the exchange, and congratulated my Greens fellow councillor on recruiting a new party member.<\/p>\n

“I’m not sure we want her,” he said. “She doesn’t know or care about the environment, just this Israel thing.”<\/p>\n

Already, in 1991, the infant Omnicause had learnt to crawl. It was possible to see \u2014 albeit dimly \u2014 what would happen to genuine conservationists as single-issue lunatics took over their movement and rotted its political party from within. Darren Johnson \u2014 whom I’d call a “Green Green” \u2014 and his cri de coeur<\/em><\/a> captures the process well:<\/p>\n