QED

Deja Vu Through an Orwellian Lens

101I hope readers will indulge me in something of a ramble as I try to link some seemingly unconnected dots. Let me begin with a recent article in The Australian:

Parents of the Year 4 class were advised of the workshop only days ago when the school sent home a letter. “Safe Schools are visiting …. to assist us with the gender choice of a student who is currently transitioning,” the letter stated.

Is it just me or is the underscored phrasing vaguely sinister?  Are we to believe that ‘gender dysphoria’ is just a normal part of growing up, something like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, rather than what is doubtless a painful and confusing  irregularity, by rights a family matter best managed by a team of medical and psychological professionals.

I have no doubt that, when the situation arises, schools have an important role in ensuring that children are not bullied or traumatized.  But do we have to perpetuate the idea that this is some kind of lifestyle choice, nothing out of the ordinary?  Children will bully other children, not because they are gay or transgender but because they are different for whatever reason.  It should not be beyond the wit of any halfway decent school principal to curtail and eliminate any form of bullying.

I don’t believe that anyone (or the vast majority anyway) chooses to be gay or transgender.  And I have no difficulty imagining how traumatic it must be for someone who is born with a male body and a female mind, or vice versa.  I’m sure it is essential that someone so afflicted must resolve the dilemma one way or the other.  I guess, particularly in this day and age, it’s logical to change the body rather than the mind.

But let’s not pretend it’s something to celebrate, which is suggested by the tone of the letter referred to above, at least by the part of it quoted in The Australian’s report.

Is it really necessary to have a task force from the Safe Schools Coalition choppered in to capture what is being presented as the moral high ground — to hitch the wagon of the extreme LGQBTI lobby agenda to one person’s personal trauma?  In this case, surely the co-operation and understanding of the child’s schoolmates can be better secured by a simple, common-sense explanation and exhortation from the school’s authority figures that appeals to the kids’ innate decency, rather than an ideological diatribe about equality and gender choice?  There is no valid choice here.

Without the involvement of Safe Schools, this incident would likely not be reported in the media.  The family, the medical team and the school would work it out discreetly between themselves, which is as it should be.  But Safe Schools makes it a political issue.

Victoria seems to be setting the pace in the headlong rush to mindless political correctness.

Along with its enthusiastic embrace of Safe Schools and Building Respectful Relationships (about which I have written) we now have another initiative of the egregious Andrews government that should set alarm bells ringing in the minds of any who are contemplating voting for Same Sex Marriage in the fond hope that it’s just a cosmetic change and will have no far reaching effect.

I refer, of course, to the ‘inherent requirement’ legislation restricting the flexibility of religious organizations to employ people who share their views.  Put simply, religious organizations cannot refuse to employ someone on the basis that their religious convictions or sexuality does not conform to the tenets of that religion unless such conformity is an inherent requirement of the job.  This was originally introduced by the Bracks government, then repealed by the Bailleau/Napthine government.  Now Commissar Andrews, taking time off from bankrupting Victoria in the interests of feather-bedding his union mates, is intent on re-introduce it.

Pastor Murray Campbell discusses this issue in a recent edition of The Spectator. The example cited in a number of articles I have read on this subject is that of a godless gardener who would have no teaching contact with students.  Why should he/she not be employed?  Well, fair enough! But how many actual cases have we had of qualified gardeners refused employment on the basis of their atheism?

And what about ‘freedom of association’?  Does that not include the right to associate with (employ) people who share an organisations’ values in preference to those who don’t?  Does the Labor Party allow members or employees who are not sympathetic to the trade union movement?

None of this sounds anything like an urgent requirement to right some widespread (or even minimal) injustice.  This sounds suspiciously like a Trojan horse that can be used, for example, as a wedge to undermine the special place that religion has in our society.  Why, it might even presage a move to weaken or remove any protections of religious exemption to officiating at a same-sex wedding!  It is becoming clear to me that same-sex marriage is not about equality per se; rather, it is an attempt to go beyond mere acceptance of homosexualityand ‘normalize’ it.  After all, marriage is just about the last bastion of ‘heteronormativity’, to use the gender blather so beloved of campus activists and their mentoring professors.  How long after normalization will traditional religious teachings regarding homosexuality be classified as ‘hate speech’ and banned?

And this week, according to The Australian:

Victorian MPs began debating the Andrews Labor government’s move to allow people to change the sex listed on their birth certificate to male, female, “gender-diverse or non-binary” without any medical procedures.

Need I say more on the LGBQTI front?  I think not.

Recently, here at Quadrant Online, article I adverted to a new CAGW paper from our very own ANU that purports to show that, contrary to all common sense, the malign effects of human CO2 emissions were already being felt in the 1830s.  This is a complete and brazen rewriting of recent history and the warmists favourite narrative, and it was carried out in the full knowledge that those voices callingl out the deception will be drowned in the cacophony of strident pleas for more grant money urgently needed so that we can understand the full horrors of the planet-baking peril that allegedly awaits us.

And just this week, yet another story emerges concerning the ‘cooling’ scare of the 1970s.  A group of warmist activists engaged in a systematic attempt to eradicate the existence of this school of thought, presumably because it highlights the real value of ‘consensus’ in the scientific method.  This story — do read the article at the link above — demonstrates the sheer, self-interested and endemic venality that operates within significant sections of the CAGW crowd.

The smug, sanctimonious posturing of the Safe Schools crowd, the GetUp mob, the Greens and assorted other, starry-eyed loonies, such as the Youth Climate Coalition, coupled with the tortured logic and unprincipled obstructionism of the ALP and the pathetic me-tooism of the supposedly conservative side of politics is undoing centuries of enlightenment more rapidly than did any tribe of pillaging barbarians that poured through the gates of Rome.

Thirty-odd years late, we are now, eerily, in 1984. Up till now, I had resisted the Orwellian analogy. It seemed too far-fetched to believe truth would be whatever the authorities and their academic toadies decided it to be.  But in light of these latest developments I wonder?  Does the barefaced rewriting of climate history echo the Ministry of Truth? Does the corrupting influence of social media foreshadow the ‘telescreen’? Does the one-sided freedom of speech available to us now and exemplified in say, the stacked audiences, ambushes and partisan compering we see on the ABC’s Q&A foreshadow the ‘Two Minutes Hate’? Do the trillions of dollars poured into the pointless, hopeless ‘war’ on our planet’s ever-changing climate amount to a manifestation of 1984’s perpetual war – the war that can’t be won but is necessary to keep the proles fearful, obedient and always under control?

Am I drawing a long bow? Possibly. Orwell described the end result.  He did not show us the journey.  Certainly, the world we live in now is a long way short of 1984, but how far down that road do we want to travel? Or, more accurately, how willing are we to endure being prodded and cajoled, fed the lies and twisted language that is the stock in trade of the left and its implacable social engineers?

26 thoughts on “Deja Vu Through an Orwellian Lens

  • pgang says:

    Donald Trump is demonstrating that there just might be a way back. If only Pauline Hanson had a brain

  • en passant says:

    Peter,
    The Ministry of Truth exists in our Departments of the Environment and Science (with Frydenburg & Hunt to the fore). Data now means what the authorities say it means, so (trust me) we have just had the driest, hottest September evaaaaaaaaa in Victoria! Ignore the mythical floods as it is only nine years ago the BoM told us ‘drought is the new norm’ (as in Norman Gunston, perhaps?) and that we may be at the beginning of a 1,000 year drought …. eh, righto then, whatever you say as soon as the homogenisation is completed all of the above will again be ‘true’.

    We are endlessly told that a rich first world country that owes everyone else for our sin of being rich. Actually, we are technically bankrupt and continuing relentlessly on that path, but no matter when we have shown our prowess by carrying out a census debacle, a Telstra upgrade debacle, a Defence submarine debacle, a $Billion No-Tunnel debacle, a desalination plant debacle (where the payoff is to buy water from it when the dams are full. Yes, we have the best pollie wafflers in the world and the greatest evaaaaaaaaa former Environment Minister.

    So, how do we fix this parasitic destruction of our once great Oz? 500,000 primary voters voted for One Nation, so as in Europe the proles are slowly waking up, though almost too late and with no guarantee of success. As Marx-Lenin-Mao proclaimed, society must be destroyed so that from the ashes a new (sustainable) society may arise – and please board the train to the death camp if you do not agree. I never thought it could happen in Oz, but it is, so your article is pertinent and prescient. These loonies have simply no self-awareness, nor can they think through the consequences of that which the wish for.

    I saw a cartoon last year that was so true it hurt (sort of like a Bill Leake one).
    Two students are talking. The first says “I am a guilty white gay Jewish atheist who believes in open borders and destroying the capitalist society in which we live”.
    The second says: “I am a salafist muslim who hates all gays, Jews, atheists and kuffirs and when the time comes I will kill them all and destroy the society in which we live.”
    The first student says: “I’ll help you.”

    Well, my personal solution is to move overseas as I cannot have any lasting effect here. Australian’s have the government they democratically wanted. I accept that, so good luck and goodbye. I moved last July, so moving was no idle ‘threat’.

  • denandsel@optusnet.com.au says:

    There are a great number of leftists in the media and academia who regard Orwell’s 1984 as an instruction manual rather than it being an insightful parody. As I have said here previously many leftists have this sado-masochistic suicidal delusion that they can use Islamic inspired terrorism to weaken western democracies to the extent that they will be able to establish their mythical socialist Nirvana.

  • Warty says:

    For the life of me, I cannot even begin to understand how a four year old can have a male body and a female mind (or vice versa). Now I have no claim to have been a child progeny, in fact, going by reports I was a preschool juvenile delinquent, with a propensity for putting myself into life-threatening situations; but by all reports, I was a boy, my parents believed I was a boy and I has no reason to doubt them.
    I have no claim to understanding how these things work, but what if Aunt Jemima Puddleduck hand come visiting, and having sighted me for the first time, had said “what a pretty child”? Perhaps my father’s colleague, on sighting me for the first time, had said “ what rosy cheeks your son has”, and then a mere two weeks later, the butcher accidentally confused me with a girl, despite the fact I was pulling the wings off a fly. Would the idea then enter my mind that, despite my body, I felt like a girl? Surely that is more the sort of higher order thinking of transvestite Einstein, not a four year old?
    By the time I was four, my younger brother, the first of two other siblings, was in constant danger of his life, not his virginity. So I don’t know how these things work. It couldn’t be that the parents had implanted an utterly destructive thought into their four year old child’s mind, partly due to their Aunt Jemima’s unguarded comment, or their father’s colleague’s equally inappropriate statement, or perhaps the butcher’s myopia.
    But then I wasn’t intelligent enough to study psychology at uni.

  • nfw says:

    Whilst I don’t disagree with your gist, I fear you may be confusing 4 years old with Year 4. A Year 4 child would be 10 years old. Still for a child, one suspects encouraged by snowflake petal parents who are also pushing their own marxist (marists around the world really have been mass murderers haven’t they?) or watermelon agenda, this choice is rubbish and does not need the interference of the LGBTIQWERTY crowd to infect the other children.

  • rh@rharrison.com says:

    “It is becoming clear to me that same-sex marriage is not about equality per se; rather, it is an attempt to go beyond mere acceptance of homosexuality and ‘normalize’ it.”

    With respect, this is merely the explanation used by the cultural Marxists to entice the ‘useful idiots’ to support their cause.

    The underlying motivation for pushing SSM, as with the global warming scam, is to undermine the foundations of Western society – the ultimate goal of the cultural Marxists. SSM is designed not to gain equality for homosexuals but to weaken the traditional family. The global warming scam is a means of weakening the economies of Western countries. Sadly, in both areas the cultural Marxists have made great progress.

    Perhaps the most Orwellian of the age’s fashions is the ‘transgender’ racket. Gender is a grammatical category and is simply not applicable to human beings. Male and female are sexes, not genders. A human cannot be ‘transgender’ because humans don’t have gender to start with.

    Male and female are biological realities and are not chosen and cannot be changed, although a superficial simulation of change is of course possible. If a boy actually believes he is ‘really’ a girl then he is suffering from a psychotic delusion and needs treatment. To enable his delusion by permitting him to take on female social attributes (name, clothing and so forth), let alone prescribing hormonal or surgical ‘treatment’, is our age’s great innovation in child abuse.

  • ian.macdougall says:

    Am I drawing a long bow? Possibly. Orwell described the end result. He did not show us the journey. Certainly, the world we live in now is a long way short of 1984, but how far down that road do we want to travel? Or, more accurately, how willing are we to endure being prodded and cajoled, fed the lies and twisted language that is the stock in trade of the left and its implacable social engineers?

    O’Brien, you speak in generalities all the time of this vague crowd you call ‘the Left’. I cannot recall you ever getting specific.
    Care to mention one or two names? Could you cite a couple of references perhaps?

    • bemartin39@bigpond.com says:

      Ian, this is surely the most unreasonable comment you have ever posted. Peter O’Brien clearly identifies the groups, organisations and assorted cohorts advancing the agenda of “1984”. Would you expect him to list by name all the membership thereof? Is it possible that you were riled by the inclusion of your pet obsession, CAGW, in the list of the corrosive elements beleaguering our society?

      • ian.macdougall says:

        Bill:

        Peter O’Brien clearly identifies the groups, organisations and assorted cohorts advancing the agenda of “1984”.

        You mean like “The smug, sanctimonious posturing of the Safe Schools crowd, the GetUp mob, the Greens and assorted other, starry-eyed loonies, such as the Youth Climate Coalition, coupled with the tortured logic and unprincipled obstructionism of the ALP and the pathetic me-tooism of the supposedly conservative side of politics is undoing centuries of enlightenment more rapidly than did any tribe of pillaging barbarians that poured through the gates of Rome.” ?
        Point taken. I stand corrected.
        😉

  • gary@feraltek.com.au says:

    Everyone move along the bus please. We’re step by step re-defining what a person is. First they dumped the idea of a soul. Then your mum was told that you, an accessory lump of meat inside her might be an inconvenience, so no need for you to spring into life. Soon you’ll be able to end it all yourself whenever it becomes a bit too inconvenient to remain alive. Male & female is the next item on the shopping list. Marriage isn’t being re-defined – personhood is. The primary components of being an creature are being declared a load of rubbish subject to fashionable political decisions. Orwell didn’t go this far.

  • Meniscus says:

    For those wanting a clear and fully referenced summary of how the Safe Schools agenda has come to be, go here:

    https://themarcusreview.com/2016/08/12/the-extreme-lefts-education-agenda/

    • Jody says:

      What I find most frightening of all is that we have a nanny state which says we need “Safe Schools” programs – that the people are so out of control and barbarian that the State needs to re-educate them on the art of living together. This is horrific.

  • Salome says:

    ‘It is becoming clear to me that same-sex marriage is not about equality per se; rather, it is an attempt to go beyond mere acceptance of homosexuality and ‘normalize’ it.’ Exactly. And when that doesn’t work, they’ll have to foist something else on it. Mind you, it wouldn’t surprise me if those who have been advocating it (rather than those who are merely now going along with it because it seemed a good thing to do) had become discontented with having themselves and their relationships accepted in society, to the point that they lost their privileged victim status, so they had to engineer a new demand and a new controversy in order to get their cherished victim status back. Now they can feel happily unhappy again.

    • Peter OBrien says:

      Good point, Salome!

      • ian.macdougall says:

        The artist Sidney Nolan (of the Ned Kelly series) remarked once that he had met a lot of homosexuals in the course of his life, but never one that appeared to him to be happy.
        Could it be that misery must have company?

    • Erin Potter says:

      Such engineering a demand for crises reminds me of H. L. Mencken’s “endless series of imagined of hob-goblins” designed to “keep the populace alarmed” …

      • Jody says:

        Yet it is the Left which has constantly accused the Right of this same bogeyman. People like Philip Adams have crowed about the Right and “moral panic” in the most contemptuous way for a long time. It now appears this was another of the Left’s “projections”. Well, who’d have thought…???

  • Keith Kennelly says:

    En

    Forget the useful idiots and their machinations.

    Here is the root problem.

    In 1979 I came to Australia from NZ. My main motivation at the time was that more than 50% of the voting population Of NZ was dependant on the Givernment for their income.

    It has taken just under 40 years for Australia to reach that same position.

    I hadn’t thought of Vietnam. But I have considered other SE Asian countries as well as Canada( too cold and now with a pseudo Marxist pm) US (hopefully Donald will welcome me) and parts of Europe( I’ve mastered the latinbased languages only)
    Thanks I’ll be investigating.

  • Keith Kennelly says:

    And if you knew the sorts of social dislocation and hardship suffered in NZ since that time, you’d leave too.

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