One of the things that has most upset me in the time I have lived here in Germany, is the way in which my home country of Australia has changed in the eyes of the world, forever. I was always happy to go forth into the world and state my nationality with pride and the certain knowledge that we, Australians, were the most eclectic mix of race, religion and politics on the face of the planet. We were a nation built on the cultural foundation of every other nationality on the planet. We have never shown reluctance to accept the ways of others, no matter their background, until the spin doctors in Canberra started the fear and loathing propaganda. A campaign which to my mind was responsible for setting off the race riots in Bondi.
The world was welcome to share our land and our lives once upon a time.
Since my departure from Australia I have watched in mute anger and desperation as dentention camps sprung up in the deserts, people being detained without chance of reprieve for years on end. I have watched in disbelief as an anti-terrorism bill, which was defeated in the British parliament due to infringements of the Human Rights Act, was swept in to law in Australia. Our constitution had never needed or required a Human Rights Act before yet the failure to instigate one has enabled the Howard government to push this bill into law virtually without opposition. A large smoke screen was also thrown up at the time of its instigation by making sweeping reforms in the Industrial Relations laws that dramatically affected every working Australian.
Did it ever occur to you Mr Howard, the type of legacy that you leave behind you for your children's children? I think not. Paradise lost! Paranoia found!
I came across the excerpt below recently and felt it really said just so much about our current political and social direction in recent times. I will let you the reader draw your own conclusions.
“What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap between the government and the people. And it became always wider…the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think…for people who did not want to think anyway, gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about…and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crisis’ and so fascinated…by the machinations of the ‘national enemies’, without and within, that wehad no time to thinkabout these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us…
“Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted’, that unless one understood that the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’…must one day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer sees the corn growing…Each act is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.
“You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone…you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble’. But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes.
“That’s the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed.
“You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father…could never have imagined.”
From Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1938-45 (University of Chicago Press, 1955)
1 comment:
Terrorism attacks kill how many Aussies per year? The Aussie road toll is far more terrorising in my mind to the threat of terrorism. How's this for an alarming statistic!
Each day in the United States, more than 4 children die as a result of child abuse in the home.1
In 2003, an estimated 1,500 children died of abuse and neglect-an average of more than 4 children per day. (Victims known to child protective services agencies, which track abuse and neglect in the home.)1
More than three-quarters (78.7 percent) of the children who die are younger than four years of age.1
Of these fatalities, 89 percent were under the age of eight; 43.6 percent of the children were under the age of one.
Now that is Scarry!!!
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