My election manifesto

Most of us are comfortable with the idea of change being inevitable. However I believe that some of these fluctuations point towards an increase in civilisation and others towards a collapse. I suspect the latter in these days.

We bear daily witness to the degradation of traditional family values, manners, decorum, civility and self-control taking place before our very eyes and yet every time someone stands up to complain against the endless assault they are shouted down with cries of ‘things have never been better’, and ‘evolution is automatically progress’ or accused of being a grumpy old man/woman, or heaven forbid a ‘dinosaur.

Not all change is automatically better nor is younger/newer necessarily better than older per se. However neither am I a traditionalist for the sake of tradition, in fact I can think of few things more boring than empty rituals…but that’s me and I value others who are enhanced or encouraged by these things. What I think is really happening is a concentrated attack on values much like the assault that was launched by Mao and probably for the same reasons.

“In Shanghai, they came for the University professors and businessmen first. Red Guards, some as young as fifteen, paraded them through the streets in dunce caps to hastily arranged tribunals. There an act of ‘self-criticism’ was demanded – confession to imaginary crimes against Mao Zedong. Most such criminals were sent to be ‘reeducated’ in labour camps. Others were beaten or executed. The great Proletarian Cultural Revolution had begun.

Mao’s goal was to erase 6,000 years of Chinese law, manners, art, and history in one nationwide orgy of destruction and murder. With a society thus freed from tradition, he believed he could mold a new type of man – a socialist man. Anyone who preserved the old ways, anyone with Western contacts, anyone with money, land or education – mall were ‘class enemies’. Violent mobs of students, soldiers, and party officials roamed the streets, attacking anyone with Western clothes or hairstyles, looting the homes of the wealthy. Death sentences were handed out like parking tickets.” (The God of Stones and Spiders, Colson, C. pg. 17)

As I read history I am struck by the predisposition of human beings to repeat their past mistakes. It is as if they are wilfully blind to what has gone before, that and the current rewriting of history that is being pushed into the education system (ala 1984!). What springs to mind is the idea of madness being that you do the same thing over and over but expect a different result each time. Perhaps the evolutionary perspective of inevitable progress is just that; madness.

But what I see in Australia is more than an evolutionary mindset. I believe that Gramsci’s ideology has blossomed. I read about it every day, an ideological war on every front; law & punishment, education, finance, farming, churches, mining, banking, marriage, the unfolding of the nanny state, strongholds on employment freedoms and on and on.

 The fact that the countries Treasurer, the Attorney General and the Minister of finance all indulge in class warfare leads me to believe that my fears are grounded in fact. That plus the fact that Labor has never hidden its Fabian roots and when you read the Fabian manifesto it’s time to tremble for the future.

Let us make every effort to make sure that this government is soundly thrashed in the upcoming election.