THE SPLITTING OF AUSTRALIA

American conservative, Pat Buchanan, opines that the US has never been as polarised as it presently is since the Vietnam War era, perhaps even since the Civil War. and whereas the previous confrontations comprised one main cleavage, the country is now fragmenting along multiple fault-lines.

A similar, gloomy diagnosis could be made of Australian society; it was also plunged into a national altercation by the Vietnam war, but more likely, opposing camps haven't  been at loggerheads with each other with such vituperation since the bitterly turbulent times of the conscription referenda  of 1916 and 1917. (It's interesting that back then people were given a say on whether men should be sent to their deaths in war, but now as modern serfs under a soft tyranny we are not given a say on whether the entire nation should be sent to its death by Asianisation)

The Vietnam War protests here also included an anti-conscription element but was primarily anti- war.  The ensuing polarisation that occurred here was dissimilar to that in the States where traditional/patriotic elements became enraged at the activities of the anti-war protesters. The side ranged against the protesters here was first and foremost the government and the states' police forces. Citizens who supported the war largely because they had accepted the "Domino Theory", that prophesised that if South Vietnam fell, other South East Asian nations would fall one after the other until Communism would be taking a sledg-hammer to our own front door.  Many others who weren't completely convinced about the rightness of the war, felt however they were honour-bound to meet our obligations as an ally of the US. Be that as it may, people who supported the war were not sufficiently inspired by their beliefs to return the protesters' fire. This demographic may have fumed in front of their TV sets as they beamed images of rampaging university students who formed the backbone of the protests, but their political activism was contained largely to writing vitriolic letters to the editor.



The past is a different country, as was Australia. Instead of chests bursting with patriotism, Australians were simply quietly proud on their country. Rockets and waving flags were best left to the Yanks and we sniggered at their vulgarity. Australia Day then, for example, was just another holiday like Labour Day or the Queen's Birthday - a far cry from it being Americanised into the expensive multicultural circus it has become. It can't hurt to let the suckers let off a little harmless patriotic steam once a year. Far better that than let pressure build up to dreaded nationalism, which as we all know, is only a pogrom away from holocaust 2.

Possibly if Australians then had been more patriotic in the American sense during the Vietnam War era, the rowdy protesters may have had a real match on their hands. But because the opposition that chose to remain largely silent, possibly because they weren't young enough to know as much as the students, and maybe were even willing to concede that the anti-war crowd may have had a point, it was very much a one-sided affair, that is, apart from the side that won the argument - the Australian government.

 Naturally, a lot of the twenty year old males (females were not itching then for equal opportunity to off people with the government's blessing) who were automatically entered in the macabre lottery in which was won all expenses paid trips to Vietnam, might have been looking uniquely askance at the war, but surprisingly few who were actually conscripted resisted. There was little if any of the draft card burning popular in the States.

The storm surrounding conscription during the First World War was an entirely different affair, and understandably. The British wanted more than 5,000 men a month from Australia just to help fill the holes being blown in our side's military forces. That alone gives an indication of the odds stacked against returning after being fed into the inferno of the Western front - significantly higher than against returning from the war seventy years later. The earlier war could be seen as the industrial revolution culminating in murder on an industrial scale. Western civilisation would never recover from its optimistic belief in unlimited progress being shattered by the most destructive war ever known - until the next one.

Is it any wonder passions were aroused by the proposed conscription so badly wanted by Billy Hughes's two governments - the one he was thrown out of, and the new one he formed by merging with the opposition? Two referenda were conducted asking the people's blessing for the desperately needed conscription. Curiously they would not be binding but would have given Hughes a solid mandate with which to run in the next election. The first in 1916,  and a reworded one  in 1917 were both narrowly won by the NO side

WILLIAM MORRIS HUGHES
"THE LITTLE DIGGER"

However, the battle worsened stress fractures already present in Australian society. The already toxic smouldering between labour and capital, for example, was fanned by a fresh breeze. Instead of being killed slowly for increased profits, the workers were on the brink of being forced to the same fate only much faster but for the same reason, or so it seemed.

Another of the deepest cuts in Australian also began  to bleed. This was the centuries old hatred between Catholics and Protestants that had been transported to the Antipodes. The acrimony that existed between these two versions of Christianity is almost unimaginable today. Because of a significant overlap between Catholics and the Irish in Australia, a poisonous anti-British view prevailed amongst many. Cromwell and the much later potato famine had lodged themselves into the racial memory. Why fight for the hated English? They'd rather fight against them.

But of course all wars end eventually - even the Hundred Years War. The hatred flickers and dies down and, given enough time, usually disappear entirely. It's a tragedy that the same cannot be predicted for the animosity presently tearing Australia apart. Conveniently, the current cold civil war is most easily presented as a mounting struggle between the Left and the Right. This model unfortunately ignores the complexity of the conflict. For example, the Left is chameleon-like in its ability to shape-shift. It has gone from Socialism to Marxism then back to Socialism once the earthly body of Communism had collapsed in ruins, then on to Neo-Marxism and presently hovers in a shimmering form perhaps best described as Left-Liberal-Progressivism, sometimes meanly designated as Cultural Marxism. And to compound the problem, the Right isn't really the Right, that is, the old Right dominated by fat-gutted, cigar-chomping Capitalists and their 'elected' stooges. No, anybody with any real political consciousness, that is, the ability to see what the 'Left' is up to these days have crystalised into the 'Alt-Right'.

The Alt-Right is a reaction to the fanaticism of the Lunatic Left now that it has convincingly attained a cultural hegemony. The hubris and arrogance of the Left appear to know no bounds. It is now so our of control that people who not so long ago doubted they had a political bone in their bodies are stirring and becoming aware of something fiendish and diseased is taking hold of their country. Whether they like it or not, even if of the working class who once believed the Left was their champion, these new awakeners are being inexorably shunted to the right by the obsceneness of what the Australian Left has morphed into. Too strong? Try on for size their current obsessions: homosexual marriage which for thousands of years right up until very recently would have been  so ridiculous as to be unthinkable and if thought of at all would have been deemed a crime against nature; the Safe Schools initiative craftily disguised as an anti-bullying program but features role-playing as homosexuals and inviting boys to attend school wearing a dress; the unrelenting assault on freedom of speech. For instance, Commissar Triggs in an unguarded moment lamented the fact that families were able to indulge in uncensored discussions about the dinner table; quotas  set for hiring females in companies and government departments regardless of ability; quotas for enlisting females in the military regardless of ability and remaining stubbornly oblivious to such trifles as the US Navy having to refit its ships with laundries kinder to 'delicates' and the first US Navy's female jet pilot putting an F14A into the drink after completely missing the carrier she was aiming for. She was of course treated to a hero ... heroine's funeral. And of course, taking first prize, is world record mass immigration which is another way of saying Asianisation. Goodbye not so lucky fucking country.

What was being warned about by nationalists who were absolutely beyond the pale socially and politically over thirty years ago is all coming to pass. Talk-back radio programs now openly rail against all the sickness outlined above. But the Left, now in its unbridled arrogance and confidence, has, where it once sedately cantered, broken into a headlong gallop. The endgame appears to have arrived and it senses total victory. But now that push has come to shove, it remains to be seen how much those best described as 'traditionals' can be shoved before shoving back. If the millions of air-heads who take as gospel anything the media - the most formidable ally and co-conspirator  of the Left - tell them, are added as pawns on the Left's side, it is clear that the traditionals are vastly outnumbered.

However, if the so called same sex marriage survey has shown anything, it is the dangerously short distance the New Left has travelled from the mentality of the old Left so implicitly certain of the rightness of its cause it would brook no opposition. And so history recycles as the YES campaigners adopt guerrilla tactics in its efforts to show the NO side it is on the wrong side of history and really has no right to attempt to impede 'progress'.  The types of bitchy churlishness that has been demonstrated includes churches being graffitied, a university free food stand cum NO campaign pamphlet table destroyed, its attendants abused, a shit-storm of anger erupting because someone had the temerity to have NO written in the sky above, and supporters of the NO side abused at every turn. And all this from the side that feared a plebiscite would unleash a torrent of hatred. It has, but at the side that was predicted to cause homosexuals killing themselves like lemmings.

Well before the current sorry episode, ANTIFA, just like its American counterpart was leaving no-one in doubt as to where to fear violence erupting from in the left/right contest. Invariably, where the two sides have come into contact, it is the so self-righteous, God-is-on-our-side, rightists who have initiated violence.

All this bolshy bullshit has no doubt not gone unnoticed by the fence-sitters and and their sisters who who wonder why we can't all just get along. They can't all be  completely stupid and when realisation dawns that not taking a stand is not an option a great many, after having seen what the Left is capable of, would be extremely reluctant to alight on that side of the fence. 

Like tectonic plates grinding against each other, something has to give eventually.