Could fascism arise in Tasmania?

phill Parsons

That a form of fascism cannot arise in Tasmania is a belief expressed by Bonham (Detoxing the public sphere) but only evidenced by his observations and beliefs. Never happened here before, can’t see those uniformed thugs about.

The struggle between individual identity and the social whole and its impact on expression and dissent.

Elements that allow it to arise

That a form of fascism cannot arise in Tasmania is a belief expressed by Bonham but only evidenced by his observations and beliefs. Never happened here before, can’t see those uniformed thugs about.

A society under stress allows/accepts or has forced upon it extreme forms of government. Mussolinis Fascists and Hitlers Nazis forced themselves onto their society with degrees of co-option and acceptance from the state structures that democracy depends upon.

William Reich, unpopular with some, described fascism in colours, black and red, making no distinction with the authoritarian dictates of single party states. He did not have the experience of religious fascism, such as the dissent free Iran, sent on this path by the intervention of the US against the popularly elected Mossadeqh government in 1953 and the following stresses and the Pavlivi regime.

This was the other post WW2 western intervention, the first being Israel, that fed the troubles in the middle east including the Muslim fundamentalism grown in the hothouse of national struggle and refined in struggle between ideologies in Afghanistan, now being used to stifle dissent to government policy today [asylum seekers, children overboard, we will decide who comes here through to the post 9/11 pressures on Muslims [dress and behaviour] and finally the Cronulla riots, the one’s nobody in power wanted but were happy to feed the conditions leading to them when it aggrandized them in the street and pub.]

Alan Jones, one shock jock of many happy to feed his ego on the difference element, is not that far removed from the politicians who have used cultural difference combined with social distress to their advantage. No trained and equipped terrorists have entered the country by refugee boat, contrary to the government position, the one definite, Willie Bridget, had a ticket and a visa.

Thinly veiled racism is a current that runs through Australia, fed on the fears of an isolated community making aboriginal Australia disappear one way or another. It has its genesis in the colonialization process, reinforced by the Lambing Flat riots of the 1850’s as Asia came to confront those who were in the full throes of making money, led to the White Australia Policy and is kept alive today by a hard core of Nazis and used by politicians to gain or retain power [Hanson and Howard today].

Howard has given a lead to racism through his encouragement of debate knowing that it can be used as a tool to monoculture Australia, from assimilating Aboriginals to ending the solidarity of the ethnic communities based around Mohammadism as we all join in some unstated belief in a set of Australian values we have not debated and agreed upon.

A furtherance of the history and culture wars of the neoconservatives that Howard leads depends on the belief that your values are correct and all the others aren’t, even though comparatively there is a general commonality on the basics, the differences resulting from oppression [theft of land, destruction of culture] or dislocation [migrant communities].

A complex mix of the correct [your] vales and the wrong [from the results of oppression and dislocation unaddressed] are used to make the media picture, so the user does not appear a totally raw and unyielding exploiter of power and image.

Fascism does not have to dress up in uniforms or march about, a great image of power in a militarized society, it can be in a pair of shorts and thongs, it can be disguised as a religion or sect or meet as a club or group of businessmen with one interest at heart. It must however reject the unorthodox and unacceptable, as its masters tell it, taking all measures acceptable on the day to the extreme in ensuring dissent is excluded from the social body.

It is part of a battle of ideas and as an idea can appear in all sorts of guises.

Dissenters are then dealt with in varying ways

First ignore them, they may just be unappealing and thus be rejected by the social bodies agreed beliefs, ossified ideas resident in the body.

But if potentially dangerous or they begin to achieve acceptance, tell us they are some form of insanity, from the supposed madness of an individual [the tactics used on Andrew Wilke for his dissent from deep within and taken much further in the Soviet Union with institutionalisation] to the crazies who would take everything you have worked for from you.

The Labor party when it first formed, through to the communists as the Labor party conformed to the orthodoxies of capital, through to the Greens today with their threats to the untrammelled exploitation of nature through the policies of sustainability, democracy and equity on which they are based are one group form flagged as crazies [supposedly

whacky policies]

A commonality of principle between the methodology of dealing with dissent is the impacts on the self granted right of money and power to consume life for its own sake. A fault that drives stupid monkey’s behaviour toward its fellows and its world.

The final phase of this is when the dissenter[s] will not stop and threaten that money and power. That is when they must be put away or put down to save ‘us’, all the varying drivers trotted out to marshal a society that could reject the exclusion of its own except in the interests of values held dearer. [Myanmar is a modern example]

The family springs to mind, threatened by all sorts of libertarians and of course homosexuals, religion another where there is a cohesion and difference between elements [hence the linking of Jews and communism in the saving of Catholic Christianity] and of course age old enmities [in Europe gypsies, elsewhere indigenes or migrant communities. Often described as racism when now we know that there is so little genetic difference that we are one race.] and nationalism, it’s not really Australian you know.

Fragility of Democracy

Defenders of the Faith

Here they are kind, kitch und kirk. Racists, misogynists, fundamentalists keep alive the elements that I describe as fascism when combined to drive a political/social outcome.

Greens tell lies has fallen in a hole as it is recognized again that many in car sales and politics do, the differences in attitude to ‘dissenters’ exploited as the message about environmental stability gains traction in the mainstream, making the Greens just that. The attacks on the changes to marriage and drug treatment are two examples.

However large votes are no guarantee against falling out of favour and being portrayed as dissenters. Labor should know this from its recent experience in a time of social stress brought on by the action of a former US agent and ally.

Indeed, as the correctness of the message on climate change is belatedly recognized and taken up by the old parties of the old values the differences will continue to be exploited in case more recognize that the message on addressing this issue is part of a package about changing society to remove those differences from being exploitable

Is there a democracy or multiple forms of the same

Hay is not wrong to fear the rise of ‘fascism’, dissent is only tolerated whilst it is ineffective.

Interestingly, here is climate change, the tension between the end of modern society through a climate change driven collapse [Lovelock] or its transformation through technological innovation [governments solution] will generate changed attitudes toward the messengers as they move from portrayal as dissenters to mainstream messengers.

The outstanding recent example must be the 6m sea rise brought to the attention of the Australian Senate by Brown [Green, Tasmania]. At first they were stunned and thought he had misread the figure [surely you mean 6cm, not 6m]. Then we moved to the laughing stock position, lala land for Bob, you know; well meaning but. Now government is busy doing reports [eg. for Tasmania, Sharples] and formulating strategies to deal with between 22 and 88cm by 2100 from figures generated 5 years ago whilst the latest science is saying 1.5m from Antarctica alone. Yes it will be lala land if that comes to pass.

The conditions for the old parties to address climate change will have to be managed. Blame for any failures attributed, hopefully on the dissenters of the day, the coal and petroleum industry diehards, to ensure that normative behaviour has continuity, and if times become tough through changes to economic or environmental conditions there is always the messenger to shoot in the last throes of a monumental failure.

Bonham should know from his work with the spineless that the social organism will preserve itself at extreme cost [ants and bees] and the different cellular arrangement of the species typing and reading this does not generate vastly different forms of social behaviour.

The modern capitalist model is strong and currently dependent on exploitation through commodification. Changing the elements commodified so that becomes environmentally and socially sustainable and retaining the distributional differences within and between nations in some new world order will test the democratic form. It may have to change beyond that to ensure continuity.

phill Parsons forecast the change that Howard made to his stance on climate change, although it was becoming so crystal as to be unmissable. Further changes will follow, the government cannot continue to ignore its own advice. He has also forecast Howard attempting to further wedge this issue to defeat Labor and the Greens and that Howard’s offer will be smoke and mirrors for more business as usual on the slope to catastrophe.

One feels he cannot let pass this opportunity to lambast the Labor Party. It has now given places in the formal body politic to Family First and the DLP through its preference arrangements and you can be sure that the other side of politics will use that at every voting opportunity it can get.

Understandable, because Labor is saving the church that it has become. However, the ideas for which it stood are walking away to vote elsewhere as it hollows out itself to seek election.

A new generation might appeal to the 2 party preferred house as it searches for new ideas to replace socialism, the wealth of the nation transforming the physical conditions of the working class thus making an appeal to different values the common battleground of the 3 major and some of the up and coming parties.

However, in the Senate the dissenters will express themselves through the ballot box and the stresses that Australian society is under may see a balance of power held by the most challenging party. Such a prospect will see a fight of unprecedented ferocity between the 2 old parties. The level of attack on the Greens will also be ratcheted up to full volume by both of these old parties and every ally they can muster, and some needing no call up at all, to end the run of the dissenters.