By Fred Pawle
Even now, 90 years later, we don’t fully understand how Nazism came about. From the lofty height of hindsight, we simply conclude that its evilness and inevitable demise should have been blindingly obvious to everyone at the time, and whoever supported or – heaven forbid – fought for it got what they deserved.
We would never be that stupid. Would we?
Well, we might not be marching in rows saluting a cocaine-addicted murderous autocrat, but we are in more subtle ways subscribing to an even broader suite of ideologies whose catastrophic conclusion is equally, if not more, inevitable.
Let’s take just one ideology that now thoroughly dominates our culture: environmentalism. A blind man in a blackout can see that the climate isn’t changing any more than usual, and the oceans aren’t rising. And even if they were, only a fully industrialised economy fuelled by oil, uranium, coal and gas would be rich and innovative enough to do anything about it. Instead, our fossil-fuel infrastructure is being replaced with windmills and solar panels that at night or on windless days couldn’t power an electric toothbrush.
The protagonists of these fake fears and virtues are, at best, megalomaniacs seeking power for the sake of it. A less generous but still plausible interpretation, based on their own admissions, is that they want to kill our economy, then us, in order to save the planet.
Here’s another: multiculturalism. We are told it is our “strength”. But, to take just one example, the gangs of Muslim thugs chanting “Gas the Jews” on the steps of our formerly iconic Sydney Opera House last year prove it’s anything but.
And that’s just the start of it. The destruction of the family, decreasing equality before the law (which now has its own catchy name: two-tier policing), identity politics, the decline of Christianity, governments collaborating with Big Pharma to inject citizens with dangerous gene-therapy “vaccines”, and unprecedented levels of censorship, along with environmental misery and multicultural chaos, are all happening right before our eyes.
It’s horrifying enough for those of us already born that the zealots may succeed in their endeavours; but even more horrifying for those yet to be born is that, in the process, they will also kill off western civilisation, the greatest force for freedom and prosperity in human history.
Like Nazism in the 1930s, none of this has been tried before. Also like Nazism, the apocalyptic end game is clear to see.
Still, the official fantasy – that a child can have two mothers, all cultures are equal, Islam is peaceful, sexuality and race define character, government is the ultimate arbiter of power, and safety is preferable to freedom – has seduced enough unheeding fools to become the orthodoxy for everyone else.
This is an extension of the delusion that embedded itself after World War II. George Orwell warned in an essay in 1945 that, “We are all more or less subject to this lunacy that whole races or nations are mysteriously good or mysteriously evil.”
The people who dominate our culture and politics have failed to notice two things: that they aren’t as “mysteriously good” as they think they are, and the way they seize and wield power now bears awkward similarities to what went down in Germany and Italy 90 years ago.
Fascism has been reduced these days to a byword for white supremacy. It’s not. It’s more a means of seizing power than an actual ideology. It starts with a charismatic leader exaggerating or even inventing an unprecedented crisis and encouraging widespread feelings of victimhood, from which springs a consensus that some minorities must be sacrificed for the good of the collective. Unprecedented (or tyrannical) political power becomes necessary, which is enabled by partnerships with private enterprise, a compliant bureaucracy and a reluctance of conservatives to resist. Eventually, the state controls everything, to the point where, as a former Nazi official told Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the only privacy a citizen gets is when he’s asleep.
Um, does any of that sound familiar?
We didn’t ask for any of this, of course. Our current leaders will be the ones most easily remembered for their complicity and cowardice. But the only thing enabling that is our complacency.
Not only did we Australians inherit western civilisation, we did so on an island that is rich in resources and has until now been relatively free of conflict. We don’t need to look far to see how much we have allowed it to diminish in our lifetime. Try carrying an Israeli flag through one of the neighbourhoods colonised by Muslims in Australia and you will quickly discover that there are parts of this nation where free speech and social harmony are foreign concepts.
As for the future, that’s obvious. I was in London last year and was alarmed by how much that once exhilarating city has been destroyed by immigration. The city of John Donne, Oscar Wilde, JMW Turner, The Beatles, Benny Hill and the world’s best pubs has been smothered beneath a depressing layer of multicultural ennui. Birmingham, I’m told, is worse, if that’s even possible. “I don’t recognise our country any more,” British conservative writer Douglas Murray lamented recently.
Australian politicians know this is where we are going, and either do nothing or hasten the process. The mainstream media pays lip service to the issue but only when it sells newspapers; for the rest of the time it’s careful not to rock the boat.
For all his faults – which, to be clear, were diabolically evil – at least Hitler had a goal. He wanted to build a German version of the Roman Empire that would dominate Europe for a thousand years. Our leaders today don’t even have that. They just pursue political careers while idly watching everything slowly decay.
No wonder politicians don’t talk about the future any more.
There is much hope among the “far right” (previously known as people with jobs and children) that the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency in November will be the catalyst for a global reversal of direction, but this is wishful thinking. The left don’t concede power that easily.
We need our own Trump, and now.
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Fred Pawle is one of Australia’s most experienced journalists. He worked for many years at The Australian newspaper. These days you can watch him on ADH TV where his bio sums him up thus: Surfer, veteran journalist and author Fred Pawle brings a larrikin perspective to the issues that perplex ordinary Australians. Are you bewildered by the conformity of politics, the idiocy of academia and the cultural authoritarianism of corporations? So is Fred.
Illustrations are of The Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD during the reign of Nero.
