Dutton falsely advocates legislated regional Voices – that’s not on offer. Dutton’s purpose is to confuse, and block Aboriginal constitutional recognition. All for benefit of his ‘real constituents’ – the miners, frackers, industrial pastoralists and water-thieves.
Q: What is more threatening to a democracy than a fascist? A: A stupid one. The Republicans have an abundance of them. My piece of a couple of weeks ago; One step away from total fascism singled out a few of them. I did not except that in the short number of days since …
From the article:
“Ron DeSantis Wants to Make It a Felony to Have an Undocumented Person in Your Home or Car.
A new Florida bill criminalizes not just undocumented Floridians but anyone who associates with them.”
I wonder if he’ll also get some bounty hunters after them. It seems to be the done thing.
Friends in America tell me that DeSantis is worse than Trump. It’s hard to imagine, but I trust their word.
I hope they never find out how bad he can really be.
Over this last weekend, however, a bunch of thugs in black hoodies rather than brown shirts marched through Newtown to disturb World Pride celebrations, intimidating LGBTQI+ people, all the while incongruously waving their rosaries around. The man credited with promoting it is a Maronite Christian, but it is uncertain which denominations accompanied him.
After a steady diet of lies from Fox, followed by countless other erosions of truth on television and on radio, the idea of decency itself began to shrivel and shrink until clearly dishonest and contemptible men could brag about grabbing the genitals of women they barely knew and still be elected to the highest office in the land. The worst men became slavishly devoted to the most corrupt, the most venal, and the most dishonest of their “superiors.” Personal integrity ceased to matter to far too many.
And, when they came for those who still held such quaint values as honor, honesty, and personal integrity, there were just too damn few left to keep the darkness from descending.
Have they come for you yet? If not, they’re surely will be coming as you sit huddled in the enveloping gloom.
A series of crises have shaken the liberal triumphalism of recent decades and produced new antidemocratic forces. Historian Geoff Eley tells Jacobin why it still makes sense to speak of “fascism” — and why the new forms of reaction aren’t just a return to the past.
This right-wing rage, dressed up in the United States as Christian fascism, has already made huge gains in Hungary, Poland, Sweden, Italy, Bulgaria and France and may take power in the Czech Republic, where inflation and rising energy costs have seen the number of Czechs falling below the poverty line double.
By next spring, following a punishing winter of rolling blackouts and months when families struggle to pay for food and heat, what is left of our anemic western democracy could be largely extinguished.
It had been little over a week since President Joe Biden called Donald Trump and his supporters “semi-fascist” when a Trump-appointed judge, Aileen Cannon of Florida, proved Biden’s point. While most Americans were too busy enjoying Labor Day cookouts to pay much attention to the news, Cannon let loose with a decision breathtaking in its disregard for both the law and the judicial branch’s legitimacy.
Without Ronald Reagan, there would almost certainly have been no Fox “News.” He paved the way for this abomination, made room for a cable station devoted to spreading lies that served people in Rupert Murdoch’s wealth demographic by monetizing and manipulating the news, offering the nation what was, without embarrassment or irony, a version of the news they promoted as “fair and balanced.”
Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s new election cops are locking up the state’s citizens for trying to exercise their most basic political right, the right to vote — all to impress the Extremely Online right.
The Kyle Rittenhouse murder trial and the civil suit against organizers of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville hold lessons about fighting fascism with the law.
Using tort law to bankrupt fascist organizations and individuals sits within a set of consequentialist anti-fascist practices: The court proceeding will not itself serve as a reckoning for fascist ideologies; the jury will not be passing judgment on the inherent evil of white supremacy. If successful, though, the plaintiffs will economically devastate several major white supremacist organizations.
Public universities in Florida will be required to survey both faculty and students on their political beliefs and viewpoints, with the institutions at risk of losing their funding if the responses are not satisfactory to the state’s Republican-led legislature.
I’ve come up with a quick fascism worry checklist. Consider this penance for trying to write believable (and therefore somewhat sympathetic) extreme right-wing characters. It is based on a definition of fascism by historian Robert Paxton as well as the experience of living with some very worrying people inhabiting my imagination and real life.
In the world’s largest democracies, far-right movements that embrace violence, reject democracy, and target the vulnerable are on the rise. By Walden Bello | May 5, 2021 The global spread of fascism is real, as real as the spread of COVID-19, and you better believe it.
Trump Built a Wall to Lock Latin American Politics into the USA
When America faces a leader with totalitarian impulses who thinks he can will his way into another term, it is also facing its greatest democratic crisis in decades. The passage of time always heals wounds, including political wounds. But what can be done to revive public trust in elections in the meantime is not just an open-ended question. Democracy’s fragile skin has been stretched as never before, when tens of millions of voters say that they don’t trust the results from the best-run election in years.
Almost dutifully, it seems, the left once again forms its traditional circular firing squad, a big one this year. We’re locked and loaded, ready to tear a new asshole–or a lot of them–shooting the shit out of each other in the interest of fighting fascism, all while arguing that the right wingers are a bunch of dumb fucks.
Yeah, right, THEY’RE the dumb fucks. And let’s never forget it.
It is not just governments or private businesses that undermine free speech. There is, for example, a vast army of people who blame the current societal problems on “the other” — the other being people like asylum seekers and refugees, or immigrants, or Indigenous Australians, or Muslims. When the great uniformity of their ideas is challenged, they go into overdrive to shut down dissident views.
The treatment of Channel Nine reporter Brooke Boney is an example. Brooke is a Gamilaroi woman. When interviewed recently about Australia Day, she had this to say:
‘… I can’t separate the 26th of January from the fact that my brothers are more likely to go to gaol than they are to go to school. Or that my little sisters and my mum are more likely to be beaten and raped than anyone else’s sisters or mum.’
She went on to make clear that this began because of the invasion that started on 26 January:
‘And that started from that day. So for me, that’s a difficult day and I don’t want to celebrate it… That’s the day it changed for us. That’s the beginning of what some people would say is the end. That’s the turning point.’
The “thought uniformists” responded, both in the media and online. The Daily Mail, for example, called it called it ‘an astonishing Australia Day rant’. Failed Labor leader and wannabe One Nation NSW Legislative Council member Mark Lathamdescribed Boney’s comments as “victimology”and “absurd“.
Even worse were the responses from many ordinary Australians, many of whom have been force fed and accepting of commercial TV propaganda for years. The backlash included hate speech and racism.
The aim of those who want everyone to bow before the flag – dressed according to Scott Morrison’s uniform standards – and stand when the band plays ‘God Save the Queen’, or ‘Advance Australia Fair’ or whatever, is to shut the rest of us up. They want to marginalise those who disagree with the deeply ingrained racism and xenophobia in Australia, let alone raise questions about the nature of society.
As in the 1930s we have been witnessing for some time now in Australia how easy is it for these forces to normalise brutality towards vulnerable people, and how those same forces are deliberately creating a society of increasing inequality, distrust and fear of ‘otherness’, through racist dog-whistling about immigration and multiculturalism.
Just as in the 1930s Australian conservatives are again ideologically aligned with fascism. We need to remember the story of Lt-Col Scott of Gull Force, for his contemptuous and contemptible attitude to the fate of his own men is ultimately a classic example of the character and values of fascism in practice.
The One Nation senator Pauline Hanson has been written into her party’s updated constitution as effective president for life.
With no term limits on her presidency, the constitution names Hanson as leader of the party’s national executive as well as the registered officer for its divisions, giving her considerable heft, News Corp reported.
“The president of the party is Pauline Lee Hanson,” the constitution now states. “Upon resigning from the position of president, Pauline Lee Hanson shall appoint her successor to become the next president of the party.”
Definitions of fascism tend to sound like neoliberalism’s mission statement, listing elements critical to the business model of … call them what you will: the wealthy elites, the one percent, the military/industrial complex, the economic rationalists, the political hard right, the corporate predators of neoliberalism … in other words, those who profit from chaos.
Socialism to fascists is what Kryptonite is to Superman. Fascists hate socialism, communism, even conservatism, which can appear too moderate in the eyes of these far-right bully boys. To fascists, concepts such as “human rights” and “social justice” are irrelevant.
Aspiring fascists prowl the corridors and back alleys of our federal parliament and public service.
Home Affairs, Immigration and Border Protection Minister Peter Dutton presides over a vast portfolio which, it could be argued, places too much power over others in the hands of one man.
In my view Mussolini’s fascism in Italy is a fair exemplar of the phenomenon. One characteristic fascist societies have in common is social hierarchy. Men are better than women, they hold. Men are entitled. Some ethnicity is better than all the other ethnicities. White people are entitled (even if some white supremacists in Anglo-Saxon societies wouldn’t consider Mussolini’s Italians or Franco’s Spanish to be “white.” Hitler put off an alliance with Italy because he was still hoping he could get the white British to join him and they seemed to him a superior race). A corollary is that some ethnicities are sick or polluting to society and need to be eliminated, made to emigrate or diminished in some more sinister way.
Trump’s failure to swiftly condemn racist violence is appalling. But he’s right that it’s always been part of this country’s story.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, Southern slaveholders said the Bible compelled them to hold slaves—that, in fact, civilizing black people was a good Christian way of “liberating” them from savagery. “Christians across the Confederacy were convinced that they were called not only to perpetuate slavery but also to ‘perfect’ it. And they understood the Bible to provide clear moral guidelines on how
With all the frenzied hysteria comparing the election of Donald Trump to the second coming of Hitler, the media has been strangely silent on the assault by police, government, military and private security on water protectors protesting the North Dakota Access Pipeline. Over the course of months, peaceful protesters have been sprayed with water cannons in sub freezing temperatures,…
Environmental watchdog is refusing to release contamination reports to a Sydney landlord in dispute with his former tenant Woolworths.
How to spot Fascism before it’s too late
A man who spent two months as a member of an outlaw bikie gang is facing deportation back to the UK, where he has not been since he was two.
High school hijinks or a taste of things to come?
olddogthoughts 