Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

Check out Alan Ramsay's column "Amid apathy, a voice of sanity".

Here is a sample:

"One of the lessons from Nazism is not that we should be stupidly paranoid, but that we be prudently sceptical of the wielders of power of any political organisation. The often misquoted warning that 'power tends to corrupt; and absolute power corrupts absolutely' is one we ought to reflect over…"

Scott, I was thinking just that today - what the f is he on about - then the penny dropped - ha - you put it very well.

Scott Dunmore OUCH!

The funny thing is and this is for those in reader land, take note. A socialist is very similar to a religious nut. Even make a hint their core beliefs are not all they think them to be and watch the change. Soon it is all bristling nastiness and personal attacks.

Either that or with the winter months approaching a few maybe have decided to wear the hemp clothing rather than smoke it?

From a personal perspective Scott, I have been done over by much better. I fondly remember one such leftie working in a crack about Viagra. Although this leftie was female, perhaps for you that is a little too close to home?

It is interesting that you should choose the Republic of Ireland for your little experiment Geoff Pahoff. I have spent a good deal of time there. I am damned if I can see how you can come to your conclusion. To be in the Republic is to remember freedom we have lost or forgotten. What is happening in this country is simply outside of their reality.

David Curry: "Hey C Parsons, nice to have you back, minus your friend Dorothy Dix (or was it Beth?)"

Yeah, I had to lie just to be allowed a word in edge-ways.

As you point out, part of the‘formal definition’ of fascism includes “the glorification of the state and the total subordination of the individual to it.”

Two words: North Korea.

Two other words: Nazi Germany.

If Australia is a fascist state, what are they, I wonder?

Part of the reason psuedo-intellectuals call western liberal democracies "fascist" of course is to downplay or belittle the obvious parallels between failed workers' paradises like North Korea and a proudly fascist state like Nazi Germany - right down to the industrial scale gas chambers both states used.

Awkward, the relentless tendency for workers' democracies to develop those rigidly controlled state media, one party dicatorships, million-strong "re-education" centres and bankrupt economies.

How to divert attention from this?

I know. Call democracies "fascist" - and that fixes the problem.

Denise Parkinson:"With the ‘spot on’ comment – I think I made myself clear in what I was implying. Whether it is true or that he would like us to think it is true is another thing."

The misunderstanding comes because I left out the word "time" as in you are "spot on time." My mistake. I suspect Scott Dunmore was a once a upon a time Whitlam hugger so therefore must now be a Green of course.

Greens behave in a similar way to peach face birds, they make a lot of noise whilst doing little else and always seem to travel in pairs. Hence the term "love birds".

I just applied this teenage magazine self-diagnosis questionaire to a country I chose more or less at random.

The Republic of Ireland.

Terrible result I'm afraid. If Australia and the US are exhibiting fascist symptoms then so is Ireland.

What a load of codswallop.

I am not saying that a resurgent fascism is not a real threat. I believe it is and we would be very foolish to ignore it.

It's just that you are looking in the wrong direction.

Nice sum up of Labor Scott. There is no light on the hill there.

With the ‘spot on’ comment – I think I made myself clear in what I was implying. Whether it is true or that he would like us to think it is true is another thing.

Barry Jones, why you aren't stuffed and mounted in a museum somewhere as a specimen of that rare and endangered species, an intellectual Australian politician. I don't know but if you're out there please call home. Anybody that has contact with the aforesaid, please direct his attemtion to this site. His contribution would be invaluable.

We lets just go on calling them Neo-Conservatives – or for short Neo-Cons – after all what is in a name!

I thought I would put up the entry of the definition of a Neo-Con from John Ralston Saul's The Doubter’s Companion.

Neo-Conservative

The exact opposite of a conservative.

Neo conservatives are the Bolsheviks of the Right. Like the Bolsheviks, they appear in restrained groups driven by a simple ideology. They seek practical ways to achieve real power in order to make revolutionary changes. These ‘practical ways’ usually involve creating a misunderstanding over the ‘revolutionary changes to follow.

The first step in the advancement of a Bolshevik movement is the establishment of intellectual respectability. This was achieved by hiring bevies of Academic Consultants to lay out a marginal idea – that the West should revert to the rough capitalism of the nineteenth century – as if it were not only an historic necessity but a natural inevitability. Their determinism literally mimicked the Marxist. What a few years before had been seen as marginal nonsense was now driven home as received wisdom by right wing newspaper columnists.

The second stage involved a series of coupsd etat within established conservative parties, beginning with those of Britain, the United States and Canada. The movement was then able to enter elections disguised as a conservative renewal. They won power with the support of an electorate which would be among the first to suffer from their policies – the middle and lower middle classes.

The third step again mimicked the Bolsheviks. This was the key to destabilizing the opposition – including the now captive and confused conservatives – in order to win re-election. Thye redefined the political spectrum so that their marginal ideas occupied all of the territory from the extreme right to the centre. This left many conservative redefined as dangerous liberals (the Wets, moderate Republicans and radical Tories). The liberals suddenly resembled socialists and the socialists, communists. In other words, the great mainstream which had presided over the remarkable rise of the West was squeezed over to the marginal edge of public debate.

Since the essential characteristics of Neo-conservativism are revolutionary, it was perfectly natural for them to begin by disguising their actions behind reassuring phrases. What they believe is that wholesale change in structures is only way to change society. Continuity, careful progress and memory are their enemy. However, to admit this in the early stages of holding power is to risk losing it. Eventually they felt free to turn on those who rejected their ideas of change and tar them as cowards.

With hindsight it can be seen that the movement was and remains a paradoxical mixture of silly abstract ideology and crude self interest. The Neo-conservative recipe for public action seemed to have been drawn directly from that of Mussolini, which turned on praise of free enterprise, insistence on the need to reduce bureaucracy, suggestions that unemployment relief was part of the economic problem, sotto voce hints that social inequalities should be increased not removed, and aggressive foreign policy.

By the early 1990s they had so successfully redrawn the intellectual map that whenever liberals returned to power they spent their time mouthing Neo-conservative formulae. At the same time, a growing number of political parties appeared who were openly corporatist or Mussolinian. Thanks to the respectability given their ideology by the Neo-conservative they cold present themselves as moderate conservative reformers. They began to make serious political inroads in Canada, the United States, Germany and, ofcourse, Italy. There, three parties drawn from the Mussolini mould triumphed in the 1994 general election. No Neo-conservative movements elsewhere in the West expressed despair or concern.

All of this explained why the Neo-conservative treat cynicism as a sign of wisdom It is not unreasonable to place them among the last true Marxist, since they believe in the inevitability of class warfare, which they are certain they can win by provoking it while they have power.

Now I hope we all feel relaxed and comfortable.

Hurling the emotionally loaded term "fascist" as a general purpose, all round insult at your political opponents is a childish, not to mention counterproductive ahistorical rhetorical ploy.

Whoever uses the term "fascist" in an argument loses, I say.

Virtually nothing about any formal definition of Fascism applies to Australia or other multiparty, pluralist liberal democracy.

Nothing.

Historically speaking, however, fascism probably could not exist in the absence of a broad-based socialist working class mass movement.

And such a socialist movement itself could not arise outside multiparty, pluralist liberal democracies.

Even Bolshevism had to await the advent of a liberal parliamentary regime in Russia before Lenin could stage his coup.

Otherwise, he would have been schlepping his sorry arse around Zurich until he died - rather than being in Moscow so that feminist anarchist pistol-toting Fanny Kaplan could blow his nuts off, setting in train the lingering process that led to the rise of Joe Stalin.

Mussolini, of course, and Franco both came to power by expressly opposing mass socialist movements in their formerly liberal, multiparty democratic countries.

And without Franco's Spain, countless generations of suave bohemians would have had to spend their holidays in Putney or Hamburg or Dapto or wherever instead of really neat places like Campostela, Montserrat or Los Canarias sipping wine and perving on hot senoritas.

Simply equating anyone who doesn't share the immediate opinions or allegiances of this or that socialist with "fascism" is a logical fallacy.

Hence its appeal as a rhetorical device for every desperate, sad little tongue-tied street orator trying to pass himself off as an "intellectual" while in Campostela, Montserrat or Los Canarias.

See?

Perhaps at some level the impulse for street orators and "intellectuals" to shout the epithet "fascist" as everyone and anyone derives in part from awareness that without socialists, you couldn't have had the National Socialists nor former socialists like Benito Mussolini.

It's a projected guilt thing.

My favourite was the Gramsci-Foucault-Derrida influenced imbecile tutoring at UTS who tried to convince a group of us that furniture was fascist.

Because it forced you to sit or eat in certain ways.

Interesting historical footnote: not only was Franco's Spain Cuba's largest trading partner from 1959 to 1975, it was not until 1960 that the Spanish government repealed the 1492 Statute of Expulsion by which Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Sephardic Jews from Spain.

Don't you just love history?

Submission to the ALRC wrangle:

PREAMBLE

The laws of the land as they are written, are an arcane mystery to a layperson such as myself. Therefore I hesitated before attempting to make a submission to this review, wondering if my opinions could possibly be of any value.

I am 58 years old and grandfather to five girls, who are the apple of my eye. I have enjoyed an interesting and varied life, all the while sustained by the civilising effects of the laws of the land, both upon myself and those around me. Laws are a blessing which I have admittedly taken for granted - until now.

Perhaps being a layperson with some experience of everyday life is a pretty good qualification in its own right.

SHOCK AND AWE IN CARISBROOK

Any fool with half a brain and an internet connection knew full well that our own Australian Government had abandoned any pretension to the rule of law, any pretension to the use of truth, in the leadup to the invasion of Iraq.

Even the most Orwellian interpretation of "realpolitik" does not begin to describe the holocaust that we have unleashed upon the impoverished people of that country. Those that were killed outright are probably the lucky ones. The chemical cocktail of modern battlefield weaponry, topped by the intractable dusting of uranium oxides, will result in a creeping genocide that will last into the geological future. As a mining metallurgist, I am qualified to know something about these things.

The UN Sub-Commission on Human Rights passed resolutions in 1996 and 1997 banning the use of DU weapons, along with fuel-air explosives, the "Daisy Cutter", napalm and cluster bombs, all of which have been dumped on the people of Iraq by the smiling assassins of the Coalition of the Willing.

It is inconceivable that my government and their military-intelligence advisers could not have been aware of the criminal method by which the invasion of Iraq was to be prosecuted. I can only conclude that they (and therefore, we) are guilty of war crimes.

AUSTRALIAN SERVICEMEN AS HOSTAGES

The Prime Minister moved unilaterally to send Australian troops to Iraq. This was done without consultation with Parliament (as promised earlier). As a result, Parliament, the media and a large segment of the public, were compromised by the perceived danger to our service people that awkward questions might have brought about.

By these actions, the Prime Minister used our servicemen as hostages. The price of their hoped-for safe return was our acquiescence.

CUI BONO? - FUZZY LAWS AND CONCRETE BARRICADES

The Australian Anti-Terrorism Act 2005 was justified as legislation intended to hamper the activities of any potential terrorists in Australia. As such, even the layperson can discern that the Act is a fuzzy potpourri, unlikely to change the way we might react to a real-world situation.

As a pseudo-legal firewall for a wayward Prime Minister and Cabinet however, it serves a much better and more practical purpose.

The sedition provisions, abetted by ASIO and the Federal Police, may grant our leading politicians freedom from the public scrutiny which they so richly deserve in the matter of Iraq. Noble laws are framed by noble statesmen, but these sedition laws are THE EXCREMENT OF FRIGHTENED, GUILTY MEN - the verbose equivalent of a concrete barricade.

WHAT SMELLS?

I am old enough to recognise fascism when I smell it - and the blonde roots are showing through these laws. The measure of civilisation is the kind of world that we leave for our children. Civilisation will be severely compromised if we remove the checks and balances that hinder the fascist, dictatorial or unlawful aspirations of present or future politicians.

BRING IT ON

Ladies and gentlemen of the ALRC, I ask for no compromises. I ask only that you resist the sedition provisions with all of your might.

If you must yield, then at least let the line in the sand be drawn deeply and firmly, so that we might all take sides accordingly and know clearly who our children's enemies are.

Sincerely
Chris Shaw

Scott Dunmore: "Sure is loaded Jay, do you need time to think?"

No, I just do not feel the need to walk into something that has a outcome pre-determined. Neither it seems do you.

Denise Parkinson, you are of course spot on!

I have been reading Webdiary - well as much as I can find time too - almost since Margo first got it going on SMH site. And before 911 used to sometimes go into a very cool chat room from time to time. It was often disrupted by people who would drop in - the Yanks used to comment to them, 'hope you are going more than 5 bucks an hour for this gig!' The room was left of centre.

Scott Dunmore, your conspiracy theory made me smile and have a chuckle - been thinking about how someone would find the time and the passion to bother when all's going pretty bloody good as far as they can see outside of cyber world.

Scott Dunmore, I tell you what, why dont you give me an example of a previous Australian government since your time as a voter that would pass the 50% and less not a fascist test?

This checklist is loaded and could apply to any government in the world at anytime. If you get back with a answer give me some time for research although likely I could give you most of the answers off the top of my head.

Hows that for an experiment?

Reading this and the "Values" thread brings to mind a story that I once heard, but can’t confirm, about the differing survival rates of Australian, British and US POWs at Changi.

Changi as Television: Myth, Memory, Narrative and History by Stephen Garton

 

"the important work of Gavin Daws on all of the prisoners of the Japanese shows that ‘tribalism’ and ‘little brotherhoods’ were the hallmark of almost all of the prisoner groups — British, American, Dutch as well as Australians"

According to the story I heard, the Americans organised themselves like the good capitalists and libertarians they are and for them it became a Darwinian dog eat dog struggle, with only the strong or cunning thriving. The weak died.

Think King Rat.

The Brits naturally fell into their allotted classes, with Officers getting all the jam and the lower orders doing most of the dying on their behalf.

Think Gallipolli.

And as for the diggers, the ideology that drove them on according to Norman Joseph Derrington in From The Sharp End of Two Wars;

"Ingenuity, unselfish caring and indomitable spirit account for Australians’ high survival rate."

Think The Castle.

Until the last few years I thought that this was still a pretty good representation of the Australian character. It’s obvious now that with the canonisation of Kerry Packer (will we see Rupert ascend straight to heaven if and when he dies?) and the pathetic fawning over Tony Blair, John Howard’s Australia has finally relinquished those antiquated values and is now the bastard child of those national characteristics that were so successful for the Brits and Yanks in Changi.

I don’t see any suggestion anywhere that Australia is already a fascist country; only that by the criteria set out, many recent events in our society indicate that we are heading that way, and that for this reason we must be vigilant. Just because we do not snugly fit all the criteria listed doesn’t mean we aren’t in considerable danger.

Nazi Germany at its height didn’t just happen: it was the result of insidious, incremental changes to the point where people didn’t even know if they could trust members of their own families. For a small but fascinating insight into the rise of Nazi Germany read Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haffner.

We must keep arguing, keep criticising, keep questioning what we’re told is happening, and keep looking for the real agenda. We must keep objecting when we’re told that our email can be read by government agencies without our knowledge, that we can’t discuss euthanasia on the phone or by email, that if we inadvertently have any connection with someone who’s thought to have a connection with a terrorist suspect we too can be arrested. If we just switch off from what is going on around us we are simply giving a free ride to those who would reshape society into something quite frightening.

Coetzee didn’t say “Australia is like just South Africa under apartheid”; only that he was reminded of it by some of what is happening in Australia today. Nit-picking and abuse won’t get you anywhere, Jay White. To describe Green voters as being "content governed by a group of communist nutjobs" reveals either your ignorance or your bias, perhaps both. It’s obvious, if you open your eyes, that many of the commentators in the press are of the right, and in some cases of the far right, to the point of being simply cheerleaders for the coalition. You, Jay White, may like that, and consider that it’s the way things should be. Personally I’m fed up with so much of what happens in this country being viewed through the prism of whether it’s a plus for John Howard or yet another minus for Kim Beazley, while the issue itself, and certainly its impact on the citizens of the country, is either totally disregarded, or quickly sinks without trace.

I have two problems with this piece. Whatever definition of ‘fascism’ Dr Britt uses, it is not included here. ‘Fascist’ is thus (a) ill-defined, and because of that, the word as used is (b) imprecise. We are invited to scrutinize the checklist, and note how many features the current Australian government shares with fascist regimes. The problem is that none of them are exclusive to fascism, and are shared with governments that are just authoritarian (eg military dictatorships) or parliamentary democracies going through an authoritarian phase (eg the McCarthy period in the US, 1950-56.)

For example, consider point 3: “The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.” This applies to communist regimes like Castro’s Cuba as well as to Hitler’s Germany. So unless we want to drop any distinction between fascism and communism, the point is not exclusive.

The other points in the list suggest that the difference between fascism and say communism, military dictatorship and parliamentary democracy (which four types cover most political systems in the world today) is a matter of degree, not quality. This leads easily to assertions like “John Howard is a fascist” which I would suggest is not only incorrect, but dangerously misleading, because it likely leads to failure to recognise a genuine fascism as it forms.

Though fascism began with Mussolini in Italy in the 1920s, the type specimen is really Hitler’s Germany. Franco’s Spain provides a third, classic example. In my opinion, any student of fascism must read the contemporary pamphlets on the subject written by Leon Trotsky, and dealt with well in the commentary on them written by Isaac Deutscher in his 3 volume biography of Trotsky. Trotsky, while blinkered to some extent because he operated within the framework of Marxism, none the less saw far more clearly than any of his contemporaries.

Trotsky saw fascism as the movement of ‘the petit-bourgeois run amok’. For him it was a lower middle-class mass movement operating as a social counterweight to the working class movements then led by the communists, social democrats and others such as syndicalists and anarchists. It shared with communism the aim of overthrowing the existing order rather than merely capturing it from within through the parliamentary process. In place of a theory of politics and society such as Marxism, which had a scholarly basis in the humanist tradition, fascism had a mass appeal blended together from racism, nationalism, mysticism and traditional religion. But the overwhelmingly most important fact about it was that it was a mass movement with mass appeal: not a mere parliamentary party or faction. That above all made it so distinctively dangerous, far more so than a mere military dictatorship.

People join movements because they find security in them, or at least the promise of it. Hitler promised the Germans an end to the misery of the 1930s depression, and order in place of (apparent) chaos. He also promised them a future as the ‘master race’ of Europe. However lowly their existence in Germany, they would be aristocrats of a sort in the wider European context. Members of his party would fare better still, according to rank. Without going into detail, my view is that the fascists were about setting up a new feudalism in the context of industrial Europe.

Mussolini and Hitler both formed armed parties to achieve this, while Franco led a classic top-down military coup, but with mass support in the more conservative regions of Spain. Mussolini and Franco were supported by the Catholic hierarchy, while Hitler (a lapsed and never excommunicated Catholic) really set up a religion of his own, with ‘Mein Kampf’ as its bible.

Suppose, in the modern Australian context, that the formations which recently did battle at Cronulla continued their struggle at the political level, with “Aussie Aussie Aussie Oi Oi Oi” being used by the ‘Australian’ side of it as a counterpart of the Horst Wessel Lied and “Muslims Out!” being their ‘SiegHeil!’ Then we would be looking at something that might, with the right conditions and a bit of help from sundry theoreticians and organisers, metamorphose into a genuine fascist movement in Australia. As long as there were a lot of sympathisers out there who sided with them all the way – beyond the mere protection of beaches from Muslim thugs (and please don’t get me wrong on that: I refer to a minority of Muslims) – we would have a monster arising that would make JW Howard and all his works look very small indeed.

Then all democrats would really have something to worry about.

Michael de Angelos: "I'd be interested to hear which of the Green's policies you consider are communist".

I am glad you got the point of my previous post.

It would appear that making statements such as this I would not need any proof on this thread. Take the broad brush to a percentage of the population appears to be the way to go.

Remember though this can and does work both ways. In truth I doubt a large percentage are communists just like I doubt a large percentage of people are fascists.

I must confess I find it hard to fathom, that in spite of the warnings we have had for the past four elections, the Australian electorate still has no real idea, of what is being done to them, in the name of "democracy" and "protection from terror".

Five billion dollars of our hard earned cash has been put up, to protect "us" from a problem which has been brought on by our own lemming-like adherence to the gospel of John, and the only thing to show for it, is that this week at last some poor sod was found guilty of taking a plane ticket and some money from some supposed threat to our corporate freedom, who may or may not exist, depending on who you believe.

Australia under Howard and Darling Millie and whoever else wants to come to the Barbeque and bring a plate has become a fearful nation, yet, where is this fear?

Australian Federal Police, long regarded as suspect internationally, in terms of their ability to investigate and tidy up terror issues, or to maintain "intelligence" to prevent terrorism, have been made a laughing stock among Asian Police Forces, for doing their job for them, when they themselves were either too corrupt (Indonesia) or too incompetent (Thailand and Indonesia), to do it themselves. This has usually not been the result of investigation as we understand it, but rather the result of rumour, innuendo and plain giving up, that many Australians do to their neighbours anyway. The Bali Nine a case in point, where the father of one of the accused was the vehicle for giving his son up to the AFP.

Does this mean we fear the Australian Federal Police off-shore? If so, good. It's a reasonable fear.

Does the fear help us here? In all likelihood, probably not, though one will never be able to say the five billion was a good investment, since we likely could have survived without spending it, but the spin-doctors will tell us it was a great idea, and actually saved us.

We are being groomed by this government, much as Darling Millie may groom the new copy-boy. We are being set up to accept the need they say we have, to be protected from terrorism. They are asking us to bend over and then putting Crisco in our hands, not their own. As a nation we are being set up to be screwed.

Keelty, wearing his crown of office, has long hankered after a voting place on the Asian Police Force forum, ASEANPOL, but still he lingers in the wings, with observer status. Problematically, it is this yearning in his heart, which has been at least in part responsible for the people languishing in Asian jails. He feels (wrongly it appears), that by proving his good intent to the Asians, he can win their hearts, and a place in the forum.

Where can this head, I wonder? Where can Australia look for guidance in what is really the beginning of the end of our egalitarian society? Where do we head, knowing there are enough anti-immigration, anti welfare, anti just about everything voters, to put "The Howards", back on the box.

When writers blithely opine that our concerns are groundless, then in fact our concerns are meaningless, since we have them alone and the McMansion and leased BMW set with the 2.4 in ABC care etc from five weeks of age, have won the day. That is the reality. Using the words may be anathema to some rightist idealogues, but the end product of Fascism is certainly what they want.

It may well be time to try to stretch out at the pub and to discuss politics, also anathema to the drinking man, and talk about the subtle signs we see with each new regulation, designed to emasculate us, and to cast our votes before the drinking rabble, well before the ballot box. We have always been a nation of essentially non-thinkers. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand a football game, but it sure does require thought to analyse the end-products of our decline into the planned humanity dump we are currently embracing with each trip to the polls.

What will we say then, Jay et al.,? How will we explain to our kids what we have done to them? We can't compete on wage terms, with India and China, and we shouldn't try. To do so now, is to invite the Wal-Mart syndrome into our weekly shopping, and I for one am disgusted by that possibility.

Greens are Communists now?

It's interesting that you should say that, Jay White, as I've just finished reading a chapter in Margo Kingston's Not Happy John about the Liberal's George Brandis, a moderate and intelligent Coalition MP who declared that the Greens were actually Nazis after their spontaneous questions to George Bush when he addressed our Parliament on his visit to Canberra - which most assumed was a State visit but in fact was a private visit to thank John Howard, at our expense.

I'd be interested to hear which of the Green's policies you consider are communist.

Peter Woodforde, Would you count as an intellectual under Alison's definition? Just wondering is all.

There are so many defects in this tendentious piece that to comment is to take it more seriously than it deserves. However, I have to make one point.

Alison Broinowski says that hostility to intellectuals is a characteristic of fascism. The term "intellectual" is not defined. But curiously the one specific point made about such hostility in Australia concerns something nasty one Padraic McGuinness is said to have done to "intellectuals". Since McGuinness is himself, judged by any reasonable standards, an intellectual, this is very revealing. You have to be left-wing to be in the "intellectual" club and Paddy, not having been left-wing for decades, is by definition excluded.

M’Jay:- “insults are like water off a d*cks [sic] back.”

M’Jay, you is NOT a d*ck nor paltry nor foul. You is more probably Noam Chomsky, holidaying in Oz on a rare blend of crystal meth, crack cocaine, morphia and Ritalin. And cheap gin, one suspects. With little Mr 4X dancing attendance.

Or you could be Gore Vidal. There’s always been a touch of the Myrons about you, m’Jay.

Big Nurse feels you need to go to the nearest ICU to Noosa. Naughty m’Jay-cum-Noam-cum-Gore!!

But your writing is an equally rare blend – an incisive admixture, spoofing the luridly insane abuse and patronizing burble of the looting classes.

And I’m not Joshin’ [cap J], m’Jay-cum-Noam-cum-Gore.

By looting classes, one refers to the inbred donkeys who don’t work, can’t work, bugger up the country, evade taxes as a matter of pride and bash poofters, lesbians, Asians, Abos, Muslims and any other undesirable subhuman listed in their demonology. Also Jews, Slavs and Zingari. And (shudder) the Left.

They love sport, but only on plasma screen. Oink-Oink-Oink.

And the BEST part of your parodies is that they serve as a constant reminder that the poor old Reich has no policies other than brutal mistreatment of the people who DO work, and pay taxes, and rear kids and keep the blood pumping and the muscle and sinews of this country going. The Reich’s lazy fat drones have no health or education policies, no infrastructure ideas (other than to sell the lot), no fiscal or tax policies (other than to sweat the lower orders), no defence and foreign relations policies worth spit. Ixnay. Zilch.

Just a smash and grab raid to knock off the entire national till and piss off with the money to the Bahamas or Switzerland or wherever to bludge forever on the boards of foreign corporate mates as a payoff. Traitors. Oughta be shot. So thanx for that, m’Jay.

NOW SAY AFTER DADDY: “I IS NOT A F*N D*K.”

And just DRINK the bloody water, m’Jay-cum-Noam-cum-Gore, don’t splash around and bathe in it!

It’s good for your poor old raddled kidneys, with a strong flavour and aroma of d*k grease.

David C: "Hi Michael. Got a source for your claim about George Bush’s grandfather?" Grandfathers, David. Maybe try this [extract]:

How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power
Ben Aris in Berlin and Duncan Campbell in Washington
Saturday September 25, 2004

George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.

The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company's assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator's action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

The debate over Prescott Bush's behaviour has been bubbling under the surface for some time. There has been a steady internet chatter about the "Bush/Nazi" connection, much of it inaccurate and unfair. But the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis' plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler's rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.

Remarkably, little of Bush's dealings with Germany has received public scrutiny, partly because of the secret status of the documentation involving him. But now the multibillion dollar legal action for damages by two Holocaust survivors against the Bush family, and the imminent publication of three books on the subject are threatening to make Prescott Bush's business history an uncomfortable issue for his grandson, George W, as he seeks re-election.

While there is no suggestion that Prescott Bush was sympathetic to the Nazi cause, the documents reveal that the firm he worked for, Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), acted as a US base for the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, who helped finance Hitler in the 1930s before falling out with him at the end of the decade. The Guardian has seen evidence that shows Bush was the director of the New York-based Union Banking Corporation (UBC) that represented Thyssen's US interests and he continued to work for the bank after America entered the war.

The Bush family recently approved a flattering biography of Prescott Bush entitled Duty, Honour, Country by Mickey Herskowitz. The publishers, Rutledge Hill Press, promised the book would "deal honestly with Prescott Bush's alleged business relationships with Nazi industrialists and other accusations".

In fact, the allegations are dealt with in less than two pages. The book refers to the Herald-Tribune story by saying that "a person of less established ethics would have panicked ... Bush and his partners at Brown Brothers Harriman informed the government regulators that the account, opened in the late 1930s, was 'an unpaid courtesy for a client' ... Prescott Bush acted quickly and openly on behalf of the firm, served well by a reputation that had never been compromised. He made available all records and all documents. Viewed six decades later in the era of serial corporate scandals and shattered careers, he received what can be viewed as the ultimate clean bill."

The Prescott Bush story has been condemned by both conservatives and some liberals as having nothing to do with the current president. It has also been suggested that Prescott Bush had little to do with Averill Harriman and that the two men opposed each other politically.

However, documents from the Harriman papers include a flattering wartime profile of Harriman in the New York Journal American and next to it in the files is a letter to the financial editor of that paper from Prescott Bush congratulating the paper for running the profile. He added that Harriman's "performance and his whole attitude has been a source of inspiration and pride to his partners and his friends".

The Anti-Defamation League in the US is supportive of Prescott Bush and the Bush family. In a statement last year they said that "rumours about the alleged Nazi 'ties' of the late Prescott Bush ... have circulated widely through the internet in recent years. These charges are untenable and politically motivated ... Prescott Bush was neither a Nazi nor a Nazi sympathiser."

However, one of the country's oldest Jewish publications, the Jewish Advocate, has aired the controversy in detail.

More than 60 years after Prescott Bush came briefly under scrutiny at the time of a faraway war, his grandson is facing a different kind of scrutiny but one underpinned by the same perception that, for some people, war can be a profitable business.

Scott Dunmore: "Jay, I know for a fact that half the population is content with fascism because they believe it doesn't or will not effect them. I suggest a quarter at least are fascist in inclination".

I have no idea how you could come up with this figure. Did you ask these people?

I could say that I know 8% of the population would be content governed by a group of communist nutjobs. I know this by looking at the Greens election numbers. Would I be correct?

This is a good site to read – may help to explain why a country need not have half their population as fascists to live under a fascist government

They Thought They Were Free

Here is a sample:

To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it - please try to believe me - unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, "regretted," that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measures" that no "patriotic German" could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

Robert Ekins: "Jay, Straight in with the UN is useless and the left are losers, sadly predictable".

Well you have to admit it is strange that a person can complain about her nation being fascist whilst on the other hand wish to see more control given to the UN. Seriously how many democratic nations are involved with this assortment of one government swill? And why would Australia give more rights to a body its citizens do not even elect? What do you call that?

Australia still has elections and only good policy will win the left power in this nation, nothing else. Insults are like water off a ducks back.

Solomon Wakeling: “I don't think it's correct to label a government fascist until it starts murdering its own citizens.”

Or illegal non-citizens, Sol?

The transition from a Prussian Kaiserisch militarist authoritarianism via a decade-long fumbling attempt at democracy to Nazism and its treatment of non-citizens is only one model.

Our transition from proto-democracy to an “Ozzie-Ozzie-Ozzie oink oink oink” swill, saluting a not unswastika-like union jack and adoring, like m’Jay), our li’l Kirribilli Fuhrer, is another.

While we sing not at all sorts of venues.

We end up in the same place, saying the same things, roaring the same stupid songs and suppressing the same ideas, with batons, capsicum spray und Wasserkannon.

Eventually, voting will be on-line at one of the Murdoch-Pakka-Coonan shopping sport channels, and we’ll all vote for the same thugs, too.

Thugs a bit like Coonan and Howard – sly, decent, fatherly (I particularly like Helen Coonan and Janette Howard as father figures, and greatly admire the Comonwealth Marriage Act which permitted them to wed partners and gain access to vast superannuation wealth) and all-knowing. And safely banal - that hallmark of the Schutzstaffel and Ray Martin.

And a bit like m’Jay, but probably without the Ritalin™. Fine Young Coonibal and Jannette look like they use other medications, to my eye. Rich Sydnoids can afford it, when compared with impoverished little neoCon wonks. Only Joshin’, (cap J) m’Jay.

Where was I…? Ah, yes, and in the end, murdering more of our citizens, or illegal non-citizens (whether or not manifest on a suspected illegal entry vessel), as the case may be.

And while we’re on the subject of ethnic cleansing, what has Warren Entsch had to say about West Papua, that Paradise on the Pacific adjoining his Cape York and Torres Strait electorate of Leichhardt?

Warren has a lot on his hands at the moment, given the heavy breathing poofter-bashing arbitrage of der l’il Kirribilli Fuhrer, der Rüddoch und dieJanette messin’ with his tourists.

But if the lakatois keep fleeing from Merauke way, Warren might have a whole ‘nother buncha tourists on his doorstep.

And a whole new welter of Australo-fascism through which to muddle. Just like it is, for all of us.

This is as good a place as any for this link.

The Price of Democracy, by Norm Kelly (extract)

The price of democracy in Australia is about to rise, becoming out of reach for many Australians. This is due to the Howard Government’s electoral reform legislation, which is currently before parliament.

The Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Electoral Integrity and Other Measures) Bill 2005 contains numerous clauses that are a serious affront to the democratic principles of political equality and the quality of public debate. The two main areas of concern are: electoral roll changes, which are set to prevent many from participating in the electoral process; and changes to the political finance laws, which will skew political debate in favour of the wealthy.

The whole 'Australia is fascist' argument is so silly and desperate it is almost comical.

1. If it is half the population must be fascists because they consistently vote for the government. So at least it is democratic.

2. The same people claiming it is so will on the other hand stand up for the unelected swill that makes up more than half the UN.

3. If by intellectuals this person means those on the Left. I simply say, saying one is something does not make it thus. Rather than wasting time I suggest they attempt to find a half decent policy and actually win something like say an election.

Incompetence is neither intellectual nor of much value to anyone.

The South Africa analogy does resonate C.Parsons although of course we haven't yet, and hopefully never will reach those depths.

However fascism is a relevant term to use for the new strict control of John Howard's government that is creeping up on us slowly.

However this halfwit will bite - prove it isn't so.

Maybe WD could borrow a tag from Woodie’s guitar, “This machine kills fascists.”

Not crypto-fascists, nor Stalinist fascists, nor “Islamofascists” nor Hitchenso-fascists nor even neoLiberalo-Likudnikim fascists.

Just plain old fascists. So we bin singim, that lot. Back into the tarpits.