An asylum seeker calls out to journalists on Papua New Guinea's Manus island, August 2013. EOIN BLACKWELL\/Press Association. All rights reserved. The international trend in first world countries
\ntowards right wing populist politics is symptomatic of rising insecurity and
\ninequality. Each context has its own specific topography whilst there are
\nunderlying dynamics that seem common to all. It may surprise you to learn how
\nfar down this trajectory Australia has gone this century. Observers of
\ninternational human rights know about this, as do figures like Donald Trump who
\nlooks on Australia\u2019s inhumane treatment of \u201cillegal\u201d refugees with envy. Alas,
\nthe story needs to be told such that hopefully Australians will develop a
\nconscience and the rest of the world might be warned.<\/i><\/p>\n
The title I gave this piece \u2013 Nazi
\nAustralia \u2013 was deliberately provocative. This is a function of desperation,
\nbut, alas, also of reality. For there are hundreds of men on Manus Island (PNG)
\nwhom the Australian government has placed in interminable limbo, and
\npsychological and physical danger, so as to maintain an absolute deterrence against
\n\u201cillegal\u201d asylum seekers. The Australian government simply stonewalls all calls
\nby outraged citizens for humane action. So, there is need to call out this
\nstonewalling in very shrill terms. Even so, the claims I am making are very
\nserious, and this will require me to set the argument up carefully.<\/p>\n
Tyson is an English name. My father\u2019s
\nfamily were craftsmen from York who received assisted travel to go to Van Diemen\u2019s
\nLand in 1852. My family were economic migrants looking for a better life. My
\nmother\u2019s family were Irish Kennedys whose origins in Australia are conveniently
\nunknown by my family; likely \u2018criminal\u2019 offshore indefinite detainees tossed to
\nthe other side of the world as part of a no compromise \u2018law and order\u2019 push. <\/p>\n
In other words, I am a classic British Ilse
\norigin seventh generation White Australian. I am of the tribe who likes to
\nthink our language, culture and way of life defines \u2018Australian values.\u2019 We all
\ncame by boat and totally displaced the original way of life that was here
\nbefore we came. Ironically, we fear boat arrival invaders, we don\u2019t want
\n\u2018economic migrants\u2019 to come here and prosper as we did, and we have no sympathy
\nfor criminalized off shore detainees. There is a profound inchoate
\nself-loathing in the flag waving, race- and religion-based fear of boat arrival
\nrefugees in my tribe, for our own sins haunt us, though we will not face them.
\nThis \u2013 in what we delusionally like to think of as an easygoing lucky country \u2013
\nprovides ample fuel for the fires of fascism in our country.<\/p>\n
By ancestry, I am a classic White
\nAustralian. However, my children are more \u2018Continental\u2019 than I am, for I have
\nmarried the daughter of a post-war migrant family from Germany.<\/p>\n
Karl, my father-in-law, was born in 1927
\nand fought bravely for his country as a youth in the terrible closing year of
\nthe war. Karl was shot in the knee, in the water, in Holland. He was fished out
\nby the English, hospitalized and fed. He still remembers the wonders of good
\nmedical care and of real coffee and the novelty of white bread as a wounded POW.\n<\/p>\n
Like nearly all German POWs, he spent a
\ncouple of years locked up being processed after the war, until he was able to
\nreturn to his home. But Germany was in ruins and Australia wanted White
\nimmigrants to populate our nation so as to secure ourselves against the Asian
\nhoards we so feared. So Karl came to Australia in 1952 on a two year contract
\nfor a German company, with all his worldly goods in a single suit case. He
\ntaught himself English by reading the newspapers, fulfilled the terms of his
\ncontract, then stayed. Like many post-war migrants from war devastated Europe,
\nhe worked multiple jobs at the same time, and by staggering hard work,
\nintelligence and diligence, became very prosperous.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Allied post-war attitudes towards the evil
\nGerman Krauts always slightly rile Karl. He has a deep suspicion of demagogues,
\nand the things he is most pleased about from his youth and war service is that
\nhe never shot anyone or denounced any Jews. Karl has absolutely no nostalgia or
\npride for the militant German imperialism and genocidal scapegoating context in
\nwhich he grew up. But \u2013 here in Australia \u2013 history is written by the winners.
\nThe racist simplicity of Aussies confronting the thickly German accented Karl with
\n\u2018you killed my father\u2019 is not easy to swallow. Karl notices the moral
\nincoherence when Australian flag loving militant patriotism is treated as an
\nunquestionable good, but the German or Japanese soldier is inexcusably evil for
\npractising the same unwavering loyalty to country. There is a strong
\nundercurrent of moral superiority from \u2018us\u2019 Allied Good Guys to \u2018those\u2019 Axis
\nBad Guys.<\/p>\n
With Karl, I have no sympathy for using the
\nterm Nazi in a simplistic self-congratulatory manner that presupposes the
\ninnate moral superiority of the Allies. However, the Nazi regime really did
\nembody fascist and genocidal evils. The war against those evils really was a
\nmorally significant struggle, and the determination to make sure these fascist
\nand genocidal herd movements were never repeated again, really did define the
\npost-war Australia that I grew up in. It deeply disturbs me that we are
\nincreasingly unconcerned about fascist, police state and concentration camp
\nsupporting trajectories in Australia today.<\/p>\n
The militant nationalism, \u2018strong
\nleadership\u2019, and racist scapegoating that characterized the rise of Nazism in
\nGermany is being followed today in mainstream Australian politics. That rise
\nwas not looked on with much concern by many law and order militant nationalists
\nin England and the US in the 1930s, just as its rise in our society today is
\nnot looked on with much concern here. But when the militarized interests of the
\nnation trump the rights of citizens to know about and question the actions of
\nour government towards vulnerable \u2018Others\u2019, we are moving in a Nazi direction. We set things up on Manus Island such that the men that
\nwe put there are being deprived of food, water and basic health facilities and
\nlive not only with an imposed limbo but a justified fear for their safety.<\/p>\n
When we have no commitment to genuinely
\nuniversal human rights but are prepared to set up off shore concentration camps
\nthat are designed to traumatize our detainees, we have abandoned the post-war
\nhorror of the Holocaust. We set things up on Manus Island such that the men
\nthat we put there are being deprived of food, water and basic health facilities
\nand live not only with an imposed limbo but a justified fear for their safety.
\nTen men whom the Australian government put on Manus Island have died their
\neither by violence from locals, or from their own hands out of total despair.<\/p>\n
Since the Australian funded Manus Island
\ndetention centre has been closed, I have emailed my Prime Minister repeatedly
\nwarning him that our government risks having the blood of these men on its hands
\nunless he relents from our inhumane deterrent absolutism, insisting that these
\npeople will NEVER come to Australia, be they refugees or not. <\/p>\n
I have received no reply from his office. I
\nnotice that on the PM\u2019s webpage there are a string of warnings about how to
\nwrite appropriately. Offensive emails will be ignored and destroyed and emails
\nthat his office interprets as threatening will be referred to the Australian
\nFederal Police. So \u2013 having received no reply \u2013 I do not know if I am just
\nconsidered offensive and dismissed, or if I am under investigation by the National
\nIntelligence Community for my abhorrence of a legal Australian security policy.
\nIt seems the only sort of email one is likely to get a reply from is either
\napplauding the PM for his excellent work, or very gently suggesting that maybe
\nhe should tweak his policy directions slightly, all the while acknowledging his
\ngood intentions. Genuine outrage at his policies seems likely to draw a total
\nblank or be referred to the investigative branch of our internal security
\npolice. Does this make anyone nervous about the state of political discussion
\nin Australia? Germany is now far more strongly
\ncommitted to universal human rights, citizen and civil liberty protections
\nagainst the police \u2018security\u2019 state, and the hosing down of political
\ndemagogues, than is Australia.<\/p>\n
We have German friends who were permanent
\nresidents in Australia who have gone back to Germany because of the Australian
\npolitical sea change that has been going on here over the past two decades. The
\nshift of the political mainstream to the right; the vast increase in police
\npowers with various responsibility and powers acts in the early 2000s and
\nfollowing; the amazing \u2018security\u2019 surveillances that modern technology makes
\navailable to the state (such as mandatory biometric photographs for car
\nlicences and passports); the reneging of our commitment to universal human
\nrights: shifts of this nature made our German friends too uncomfortable to stay
\nin Australia. <\/p>\n
Germany has been made to remember what happens
\nwhen you let this sort of trajectory have its head, and post-war Germany\u2019s
\nconstitutional safeguards and their political culture is very uneasy with what
\nis going on in places like Australia. Germany is now far more strongly
\ncommitted to universal human rights, citizen and civil liberty protections
\nagainst the police \u2018security\u2019 state, and the hosing down of political
\ndemagogues, than is Australia. And \u2013 unlike Australia at the bottom of the
\nworld \u2013 Germany carries a real refugee burden following the crisis in Syria.<\/p>\n
I have not a few German relatives who lived
\nthrough the Second World War. They were either children or ordinary good
\ncitizens. They largely trusted their government and did what they were expected
\nto do as good nationalists. As Bonhoeffer\u2019s lonely witness attests, the
\nordinary \u2018good citizen\u2019 had less excuse for compliance with the mainstream of
\nthe day than any claim to ignorance and respectable conformity can really bear.\n<\/p>\n
Even so, once a ground swell of state-funded
\nconformist propaganda and harsh internal enforcement regimes are in place, it
\ntakes unusual courage and independence to stand against it. The majority of
\nAustralians would have done the same as my German relatives had we been in
\ntheir position. Indeed, today, good citizen Australians seem remarkably similar
\nto good citizen Germans in the 1930s. <\/p>\n
But we are not similar. We have far less Nazi Australia. Is it here already? Is Do we just need another 1929, another 2008, The men on Manus Island are yet another Views expressed in this article are Paul An asylum seeker calls out to journalists on Papua New Guinea's Manus island, August 2013. EOIN BLACKWELL\/Press Association. All rights reserved. The international trend in first world countries towards right wing populist politics is symptomatic of rising insecurity and inequality. Each context has its own specific topography whilst there are underlying dynamics that seem common…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nexcuse than they had, for we know what happened in Nazi Germany and we defined
\nourselves in the post-war era as not <\/em>being
\nlike the Nazis. We cannot pretend that we are ignorant of what political ground
\nswells towards militant nationalism, the police state, and the race- and religion-based
\nscapegoating of displaced vulnerable people leads to.<\/p>\n
\nAustralia on the edge of its own 1930s, all primed to dump her fears and
\nfailures onto the heads of carefully prepared scapegoat groups? Has Australian
\nbeen carefully prepared to accept some \u2018strong leader\u2019 who can harness the
\nirrational resentments and clandestine herd reflexes of the insecure mob in
\norder to make Germany\/Australia\/America great again? <\/p>\n
\nto push us into the same trajectory of fascist inhumanity that we thought we
\nwould never allow to happen again? If we do not step back from racism and
\nreligious scapegoating in our politics, if we do not re-affirm a genuine
\ncommitment to universal human rights and our refugee responsibilities under the
\nUNHCR, then we are indeed becoming Nazi Australia. <\/p>\n
\ncarnie in the coal mine on the point of expiring. As the 1930s demonstrated,
\ngive this dark energy its head and horror for all of us, not just the men on
\nManus Island, will follow. We must step back from the brink. <\/p>\n
\nTyson\u2019s own opinion and do not represent any official position endorsed by
\nEmmanuel College.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"