The ‘surge’ in opinion polling popularity of the id party seems inexplicable to the lumpen-scribblers calling themselves ‘journalists’. Maybe because so many of them are bourgeois drudges, too cowardly or too self-censorious to ever tell the truth about anything, let alone something that confronts them with their own personal failings. Perhaps they are, after all, a part of the uncomfortably large numbers of people who are in fact treacherous, sociopathic scum, barely constrained from enacting their own variations of Lord of the Flies savageries.
One Nation is like a magnet for such people, with its toadying to the nihilistic, sadistic corruption of MAGA America. It holds out to the libidinally-challenged barbarians a revenge porn fantasy of being ICE thugs and shooting civilians—recast as real or imagined culture wars enemies the way they are shown in A Super Progressive Movie. Shooting them in the back if they are men, and in the face if they are not. Such fantasies for One Nation supporters probably include even worse thoughts, steeped in self-destructive primal fear and depraved, self-loathing psychosexual neuroses that ultimately lead to elaborately fetishized hatreds.
It is tough to stomach, but with the exception of a small number of protest voters giving the finger to all established parties, One Nation supporters are the sort of people who pulled the wings off flies when they were five, bullied weaker kids at school from about the same age, possibly practised bestiality the way the Anita Cobby killers did in their teenage years, graduating to abusing children who should have been able to count on their protection, committing domestic violence, and turning into bitter but cowardly bullies in the workplace.
They have no empathy for even their own kin. They are ignorant by choice and inclination, and petulantly stupid, the way MAGA supporters in the USA have shown themselves to be, repeating absurdly cretinous conspiracy theories as if it were sacred liturgy. They are the people who make it possible at all for a civilized society to descend into a corrupt and cruel tyranny with their mass support, just as they were the backbone of the Nazi party in another time and place. Willing to abandon all ethics and humanity just to hurt others, as an onanistic satisfaction of their own pathetic shortcomings and degenerate impulses.
One Nation supporters cannot—or stubbornly will not—understand that their support of the foreign and poisonous MAGA corruption is treasonous, rather than the Chinese-made flag waving, hooligan, migrant bashing patriotism they claim for themselves. They have no concept that the party they strengthen regards them as merely useful idiots, and will betray them as soon as they have served their purpose, treating them like so much manure in the fantasy killing fields of the id party’s culture war against all but a narrow elite of moneyed oligarchs.
What does the One Nation utopia look like, assuming there are enough festering closet fascists to vote them into power? Without a clue about running anything more complex than a raffle, all One Nation can promise is turning the witch hunting of culture wars enemies into a permanent feature, probably underwritten by Nine Entertainment, News Corp, and Seven West Media, who have already turned the Orwellian two minutes of hate into a permanent, continuous diet of bile-spewing invective. We could look forward to that diet of hatred to be made mandatory in all public spaces, delivered through television by AI generated talking heads, in print, for slightly less ill-educated people as editorials credited to long dead or retired polemicists. People will be encouraged to denounce their colleagues and neighbours, feeding a televised stream of public executions carried out by fat middle aged men wearing camouflage gear and flack jackets, playing at being soldiers. These executions can be real or artificially generated, presented as spectacle, like a spectator sport.
Pauline Hanson will be kept alive well past her demise, like the Thatcheresque robot in Silverchair’s ‘Anthem for the Year 2000’, as a fake figurehead. The real government will be a cartel of corporations strip mining the country’s natural environment and its people entirely for profit, and offering few perks even to the bureaucrat minions keeping things ticking over on their behalf.
Compared to One Nation, the Coalition rabble is comprised of disciplined and honourable people, even if no such qualities can be discerned when looking at individual Liberal and National party MPs. What is all the more horrifying is that whole sections of our mass media gleefully anticipate and enable this kind of barbarism with the express aim to undermine our democratic and civilized institutions, just so an unprincipled and unaccountable group of billionaires and millionaires can pay even less tax than they already do, rape and pillage the land, and sell off the rubble of our civilization like second hand bricks and copper wire.
If the opinion poll numbers translate into votes, our nation—our society—will have fallen away into a kind of barbarism infinitely worse than the worst periods in Western history. Worse because we know about that barbarism and have the choice not to repeat those nightmare epochs. We are at Nietzsche’s precipice, staring into the abyssal depths of human depravity and ugliness. Most of us might be too frightened to recognize in that hellish nothingness the worst of ourselves, preferring to pretend it’s all going to end in some comfortably benign, bourgeois fantasy in which a technocratic bureaucracy will save us from the worst of the fallout while we sit on our sofas and watch the kind of television that allows us to blank out the pustulent ugliness we have become. But some of us will know even then that bureaucrats themselves have always been the willing executors of terror and chaos.
It’s not yet too late to step back from the brink. But I wonder who has the integrity to call out the beckoning, all-corrupting, sadistic, and depraved nihilism for what it is.
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