Seeing into our future

We’re sitting around powerless as we enter a period of democratic despotism. I’ve ranted many times about the various mechanisms of influence and untruth through which we are controlled in the modern world, and particularly under this Howard government. None of this is new. In fact, it’s increasingly as predicted by George Orwell in 1984, although he saw the dangers in Stalinist communism, rather than a manipulative form of democratic capitalist despotism. How prescient he was!

No doubt, many will see this as ranting based on misconceptions. After all, we voted; we chose this; this is a democracy; we’re a fair and sensible people; we’re not given to ideologies; we are the people of the fair go and common sense. But Hitler was elected, and the German people agreed with, or at least acquiesced to, what followed. Much has been written on the complicity of the German people with Nazism. I haven’t read it, but Karl Jaspers argued soon after WW2 (The question of German guilt / Karl Jaspers. Greenwood Press, 1978) that there are “four categories of guilt: criminal guilt (the commitment of overt acts), political guilt (the degree of political acquiescence in the Nazi regime), moral guilt (a matter of private judgement among one's friends), and metaphysical guilt (a universally shared responsibility of those who chose to remain alive rather than die in protest against Nazi atrocities)” (quoted from the editorial review on Amazon). I fear we are now guided by our bad side in much the same way as the German people in the 1930s, although not yet to such extreme actions.

So what are the images of the future that I’ve seen in recent days? They are both throw backs to a forgotten and despised past, which I fear we are returning to.

Dogville

I could see why Nicole Kidman’s film was not taken to heart by her adoring public. View the cast list (John Hurt, Lauren Bacall, James Caan) and start wondering why it was not better received. Start with a stage set representing the backwoods US town of Dogville. Notice this is a European production. This is a complex view of the dark side of America – back woods town life meets gangster power. I was confounded by the emotions from both sides. The shallow, self-serving justice of the people of Dogsville v. the power of the gangsters and their own twisted ethics. The untested philosophy of Tom and the (temporary) acceptance by Grace. It left me a bit confused with the complex themes, but enlivened by the complexity. At first, I thought Bowie’s Young Americans was inappropriate to finish this morality play, but against the backdrop of (presumably true-to-life) depression-era pics, it served to illuminate the horror that Howard’s radical marketplace and conservative social policy is taking us to. The upcoming IR legislation is just one component in his creation of our little America on Australian shores.

Dogville / written and directed by Lars von Trier. Zentropa Entertainments, 2003.

God under Howard

What is our bad side? Marion Maddox’s book on Howard’s use of religion in Australian politics speaks of the “Us and Them” approach to divide and rule the nation. How Howard sounds reasonable and secular, but subliminally speaks to our emotive side. Howard talks up our good feelings of ourselves, while promoting our worst actions, but…

“we lack the churchgoers and atheists who might resist a peculiar type of racist politics. Firm in our belief in our own reasonableness, benevolence and common sense, most of us may have few resources to resist frightening stereotypes. That is just the sentiment that Howard has so skilfully cultivated. We pay a price for our religious naivety.” (p. 142-3)

God under Howard : the rise of the religious right in Australian politics / Marion Maddox. Crows Nest, NSW : Allen & Unwin, 2005