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To wake from a nightmare

A political nightmare has spilled out and we wake from sleep each day into the dark side of humanity getting about in daylight dressed up as reputable, and so bold.

In 1996 in Australia, Pauline Hanson was disendorsed by the Liberal Party for advocating for the abolition of special government assistance to Aboriginal Australians. However it was too close to the election to change the ballot paper and she remained on it contesting as a Liberal. Pauline Hanson won the seat of Oxley and entered parliament as an Independent. Her maiden speech was not only critical of the benefits received by Aboriginals but targeted Asians specifically in her attacks upon immigration and multiculturalism. She advocated for a return to high-tariff protectionism. She claimed that she was only saying out loud what others were thinking to themselves. We all have our shadow self that has thoughts that are antisocial, but most of us realise that it is in nobody's best interest to put these ideas into action. At the same time also, such thoughts shouldn't be suppressed but openly debated. These thoughts do now have a voice with Pauline Hanson's One Nation party which has survived to this day. It is a minor party and will remain so because Australia has egalitarian roots than run deep. 

The nightmare emanates from America. A man whose dark side has swamped his personality has galvanised a following to create a world in which lies become truths, on the sole basis that a person has the ability and audacity to say those things. No proof is needed. A world in which fairness and tolerance is seen as weakness and being taken advantage of, is a world in which civility is trodden underfoot. It has happened before; a world of derangement in which terrible crimes are inflicted. 

In Reading the Holocaust, the late Australian historian and anthropologist, Inga Clendinnen wrote, 'Civilised values are a chosen state, not a natural condition.' She exhorts us 'to know both ourselves and the worlds we are capable of making' and not to remain as perplexed outsiders as events unravel.

Out of the shadows and into the daylight the neo-Nazis strut, within a fantastical history of their own invention.


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