The Upside Down Under

No, mississa, as an Australian I can tell you that the article was, as we say, "spot on". Indeed the article was extremely GENTLE on Australians.

Australia is still in the grip of the worst drought ever and despite the entrenched lying of Murdoch-dominated Mainstream media and politicians (Murdochracy Australia is the Land of Lies and Flies) most Aussies know that they are being lied to and that things are set to get worse (hence the 69% Aussie concern about global warming reportedin Guy Rundle's article).

Of course most Aussies are easy going etc (our street's pre-Christmas street garden party was held at our place this year and everyone got on famously).

However Australians are involved in, for example:

1. an ongoing Aboriginal Genocide - 90,000 avoidable deaths under the Coalition Government);

2. an Iraqi Genocide -post-invasion excess deaths 1.5-2 million;

3. an Afghan Genocide - post-invasion excess deaths 3-6 million);

4. racist US democratic nazism in Asia - post-1950 Indigenous excess Asian deaths in post-1950 US Asian wars total 25 million; and

5. climate genocide - if you include our fossil fuel exports, Australia is the big country with the biggest annual per capita fossil-fuel-derived CO2 pollution, the world's #1 coal exporter and even under Rudd - vastly better than the climate criminal Bush-ite Coalition - there will be hugely INCREASED value of 74 tonnes CO2 per person per year by 2050 as compared to the current 40 and China's 4 over the (see: " Australian Labor Victorious - but not Green Enough": link and "Australian Genocide - Oz ignores, Aboriginal Iraqi, Afghan & Climate genocides": link ).

Unfortunately, thanks to lying, racist Australian mainstream media, most Australians - like most Germans in 1945 - can genuinely claim that "they didn't know".

However inspecting the pamphlets of the Australian Greens in the recent elections instructed that the Greens at least had a very good idea that there is a lot wrong in Australia in relation to racism, environmnet, climate change, IR, education and Indigenous human rights.

Okay so the article was pretty interesting although I have to say I find discussions centred around National Identities, or lack thereof, inherently suspect. The idea that there is a single idea of what a nation is, is always problematic for me. I would also contend that the defining Australian indentity is Aussie Battler... with all that implies. I am not defending it merely pointing out that it exists. But like most "identities" it takes into no account the repressed and oppressed narratives and people that exist in this society (women, Indigenous people, refugees etc.).

Secondly I think that there is a danger in engaging in these topics in a way that seems to imply there is no resistance. Australians, as a rule, have been encouraged to vote from the hip pocket and actively ignore or resist anything that might get in the way of their individual and relentless programmes of acquisition. Having said that there are many many people who are engaged and critical of the direction the country is taking and the policies that encourage it. I guess the point I am trying to make here is that the more we tell people that we are apathetic the more likely it is that we will become so. Millions of people walked against the War in Australia alone. The failure, and Gideon I agree it is an utter failure, is that the press did not keep that pressure on but allowed it to dissipate into neoliberal propaganda. I actually heard Howard say, straight faced, that his going to the war in Iraq was evidence that he wasn't a poll driven politician! The fact that Murdoch owns around 70% of the press in Australia is a disgrace and an impediment to true freedom of the press and of speech as were the ideologically driven attacks on the ABC (Keith Windschuttle is not biased at all).

Nevertheless there are those out there who do have a different vision (some even like football too) and unless we recognise them in these debates, we will, I believe, end up disheartening the very people we need to shore up in order to drag us out of the mire of the politics of fear and into progressive policy making.