Raiders of our lost ways
Lord Acton wasn’t breaking new ground when he wrote: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” He was stating in a nutshell a self-evident truth expressed by other historians and philosophers. We can thank him for his precision, rather than his insight.
The nine-word maxim still packs a punch nearly a century and a half after Acton breathed it into life in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887. Acton’s warning rings true simply because men and women who have risen to great power have repeatedly proved him right. His lordship rounded off his thoughts by saying, “Great men are almost always bad men.”
He might have been thinking of Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Hannibal, Caesar, Nero and any number of the Roman emperors. And since Acton’s death in 1902, Hitler, Stalin, Lenin and a heap of nasty major and minor dictators have continued to prove him right. Powerful, power-hungry individuals — whether Communist, Fascist or some other type of absolutist — have one thing in common: they control the means of communication in their time and place.
This is why the Australian Federal Police raid on the ABC and on a News Limited journalist must not be brushed off as a trivial aberration, of no
great concern.
The raids were carefully planned and executed in what may yet prove to be an unlawful manner. The police were chasing information about The Afghan Files, a story broadcast by the ABC in 2017. Their keywords algorithm identified 9,214 documents, which the AFP claimed could be relevant to identifying the source of the story about elite Australian soldiers committing possible human rights abuses in Afghanistan.
John Lyons, executive editor of the ABC and head of the broadcaster’s investigative team, made some sort of mark by following the six invading
AFP officers around during their nine-hour scavenger hunt through the broadcaster’s Sydney offices, live tweeting the proceedings.
Lyons said: “One agent soon asked why I was doing it. I told him we were a media organisation that told stories. He agreed — so history was made with the first live-tweeting from inside a high-profile Australian police raid.”
History was made in a much more regrettable way in the open-slather nature of the warrants authenticating the raids. These warrants authorised the Federal Police not only to take any ABC documents they wanted on the Afghan story but also to add to them, delete or alter them as they wished. That’s an all-encompassing invitation to fabricate evidence: or, as we used to say, to stitch up, fit up or frame anyone the police — or whoever — might want out of the way.
I was about to write that this is the thin end of the wedge in the creation of a police state: in fact, I think it’s more than that; it’s the thick edge.
Totalitarian states are created by degrees; their continuing existence depends on the ultimate authority being able to control information about current and past events. In George Orwell’s famous novel 1984, Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth where he rewrites the history of a dystopia named Oceania. The government of Oceania defines its own reality while distracting the people with trivia. Smith’s job is to help make Oceania great again by revising old journals, altering, omitting or adding fake facts, creating a new history of the past that enhances the false reality of the present. In Oceania, Big Brother is always watching everyone, including Smith. Orwell’s novel is a chilling warning about what might happen under totalitarian rule. It might well have been entitled The Big Lie.
Hitler set the stage for over-the-top lying in Mein Kampf. “The great masses of the people,” he wrote, “will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.” The Führer proved the master at creating a monstrous lie with his Final Solution, which was implemented in stages. The Nazis stripped Jews of their civil rights, their property, their citizenship and, finally, their status as human beings. In effect, Jews became non-persons under German law. The soldiers who operated the Nazi extermination camps — many of them family men with children — could sleep well, satisfied that they were not murdering people but ridding the world of a scourge as they operated the gas chambers. Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe the actions of murderers who did their business like tally clerks or accountants.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt wrote: “Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”
Arendt was a German-Jewish philosopher who eluded the pursuing Gestapo twice and who became a controversial figure, living most of her adult life in America. She argued that the big lie thrived in times rife with change and uncertainty, and was exploited by politicians intent on creating a fictional world in which “failures need not be recorded, admitted and remembered.”
She might well have been writing about now.
The world is a mess. Mass migration out of the hellholes of Africa, South America and Asia has created a global humanitarian crisis, it’s fired up incipient racial hatred, fed the ambitions of religious terrorists, made the world less safe, less tolerant, less trusting, more fearful.
The Australian Federal Police raids cannot be dismissed as insignificant; something that will go away if we ignore it. The Germans ignored and tolerated Hitler as he rose to power, finally electing him to the Reichstag where he was soon appointed Chancellor. They began to wake up only when his thugs controlled the streets, when the first of millions disappeared to the gas chambers, when he conquered Europe and eyed off the world.
The Right is on the rise in Australia. We need to do something about it.
Orwellian Rules OK — maybe
Come to think of it, there’s something a bit Orwellian about the AFL’s desire to credit Aborigines with pretty well inventing Aussie Rules football with a kick-and-mark game called Marngrook. The league has been desperate to change its image as a racially marred sport ever since the disgraceful treatment of great Indigenous footballer Adam Goodes last season by so many spectators.
The AFL’s Tanya Hosch says: “Aboriginal history tells us that traditional forms of football were played by Australia’s first peoples all over Australia, most notably in the form of Marngrook. It is Australia’s only Indigenous football game.” She says Marngrook “undoubtedly influenced” Aussie Rules.
Football historian Roy Hay, who has recently published a book on the code, says: “That just simply is an attempt to rewrite history. There’s no evidence.”
Goodes isn’t fussed. Champion that he is, just gets on with his life, one high mark after another in whatever he takes on.
Beware the hides of emailers
One of the benefits of old age is that you lose the ability to be surprised. This may be because whatever it is that’s just happened won’t bother you for much longer, and neither will anything else. Curmudgeon’s last big surprise was the 9/11 outrage, but that swiftly lost its shock value when this old fella rationalised it. They’re always thinking up novel ways of waging war, he said to himself, this is just one more step into darkness.
I remember being genuinely and shockingly disturbed when a senior Islamic cleric put Salman Rushdie, the writer, on his hit list. So infuriated that I rushed down to the nearest book shop before breakfast to buy The Satanic Verses, the novel which had offended the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. After reading it, I wondered what all the fuss was about. It seemed inoffensive and wasn’t a patch on Midnight’s Children, the book that had brought Rushdie to public attention.
So, this week I was mildly surprised to receive a poster by email ranting that the “age of entitlement” is over and campaigning for the abolition of politicians’ pensions.
The document has an initially appealing pitch. Many of us regard the body politic as a waste of time and space. I have long been convinced that big business runs the world and that governments, of various shades, are largely the administrative arm of the corporations. They are there to give democratic clothing to matters that have already been decided in the boardrooms.
In the email the anonymous author grabs our attention straight away. First, scrap all political pensions, he or she pleads, and let politicians buy their own retirement plans “as most other working Australians are expected to do”.
Second, require that terminated politicians under 70 get a job or apply for Centrelink unemployment benefits “like ordinary Australians”. This measure should be enforced against all politicians, past, present and future.
On reading this, Curmudgeon, with a number of politicians in mind, visualised them lining up at Centrelink, their well-fed bodies and immaculately tailored suits brushing against the Vinnies hand-me-downs of the downtrodden and desperate. A warm feeling of camaraderie stole over me.
The poster carried on from this admirable objective to present a string of points about how this ideal state of affairs should be managed and achieved. Now, we’re getting somewhere.
Or are we?
On rereading the email, the cynic strand of the Curmudgeon DNA (which runs about 99 per cent fully charged) raised a distinct twitch in the liver. There’s something about this document that rings a small but insistent warning bell in my Beware-the-Bogus alarm system. It’s pitched firmly at those members of affluent society who have “made it”, and believe all those who haven’t must be drunks, imbeciles, junkies or bone lazy.
It’s designed to rub the fortunate ones against the grain in their most sensitive parts — their wallets and money bags. It kicks off with a line about the aged pension being unsustainable, then abandons this single line for the rant against politicians’ entitlements.
I’m not sure where this document originated. It came to me through an email connection only recently established.
It urges recipients to pass it on to at least 20 people, expecting that most Australians will have received the message in three days or so.
What then? Will it spark a mass uprising, demanding politicians vote themselves into penury? Hardly likely. Does it urge the hoi polloi to storm the strongholds of their local members, threatening retribution if they don’t come into line? You’ve got to be joking. We couldn’t get off our arses 44 years ago when the representative of a foreign power sacked our government, so what are the chances of politicians in any of our parliaments feeling sufficiently threatened to volunteer undoing their own cash-grab?
What are the chances of any action? Buckley’s!
So we have to ask ourselves, what does the author of this poster hope to achieve? S/he is patently too lucid and intelligent to waste time on the unachievable. That leaves two possibilities:
1 The objective is to open a debate on parliamentary pensions, which will swiftly stray into a debate on age pensions and their so-called unsustainability; or
2 It’s the first shot in a campaign to send democracy hurtling backwards, to restrict voting rights and holding office to wealthy people who don’t need to draw a wage. The poster proclaims Serving in Parliament is an honour not
a career! It’s an honour most of us couldn’t contemplate without adequate compensation. Let’s not confuse a fair go with blatant money-gouging.
Reactionary forces around the world are gearing up for a fight against socialism, which to them is anything that gives a sucker an even break.
Working-class reformers once saw socialism as the holy grail that would lift the desperate poor out of starvation and endemic disease. It was something worth fighting for. The wheel has turned. The wealthy and would-be wealthy are preparing to crush socialism. It will be a bloody, dirty war with many wrong turnings. The truth, as always, will be its first victim.
In his State of the Union address in February, Tyrannosaurus Trump declared: “Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.” A month later T. Trump appeared with Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s new Fascist president, and announced: “The twilight hour of socialism has arrived.”
Stand by for the fight of the century. And beware, the reactionary assault might come wrapped in sugar-coated packages.
UNCLE CURMUDGEON
(Gratuitous advice from a grump)
Dear Albo, You’re fighting out of your weight division, son. Best take a dive before you get hurt.
Dear David, Good to see you back on the paddock and belting the leather off the ball, mate. But an occasional meal at the Humble Pie Café wouldn’t hurt and please steer clear of Bunnings’ home handyman aisle, where sandpaper is going at bargain prices.
