Old Stalinists Never Die, They Just Turn Green

This issue of Quadrant will be in your hands some time close to April 1. My printed pocket diary, which dutifully lists St Bartholomew’s Day (August 24), Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand (October 21) and World Vegetarian Day (October 1) omits somehow to distinguish in any way April 1. However, we all know it well as All Fools’ Day or April Fools’ Day, the origin of which lies back in the lifetime of Jesus—even earlier than the settlement of Hawke’s Bay.

Perhaps it is less surprising that my diary omits mention of another—much less ancient —anniversary which also falls on April 1. On that day in 1924 Adolf Hitler began his rise to greatness by being thrust into the slammer at Landsberg Fortress with a five-year sentence. His crime: an unsuccessful attempt, centred on a beerhall in Munich, to overthrow the lawful provincial government of Bavaria. Under a dodgy sort of “amnesty” he was released in a few months. At that time, the Nazi Party to which he belonged had a mere twelve members sitting in the German Reichstag.

However, his months “on the in” were not wasted; he used the time to complete the text of his famous book, with the help of his Nazi colleague Rudolf Hess, the German leader who scuttled to Britain during the Second World War. (One of his specially selected guards there was John Young, later Chief Justice of Victoria.) The book’s title was Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice, Settling Accounts with the Destroyers of the National Socialist Movement. A wit remarked that every writer benefits by the services of an editor, and so his farrago of bile and hatred was issued to the world as Mein Kampf.

Except for the thinness of the numbers they commanded in their parliaments, it would be absurd to compare Adolf Hitler with Australian minority Greens leader Bob Brown. For one thing, Bob quite lacks the hirsute endowment to attempt the black flop-over forelock, though he could have a try at the funny little toothbrush moustache. And I don’t think Bob has ever written a book. (Job 31:35) But, in the present degenerate and dishonest state of Australian political life, it is neither absurd nor premature to consider whether German politics of the 1930s and 1940s offer us any lessons or warnings.

Hitler’s method was based very substantially on the unscrupulous manipulation of minorities, and upon wholesale indulgence in untruth. At the present time here, the overall job is being shared between the Greens, who handle the manipulations, and Julia Gillard, who looks after the lies. One concedes that, in their fields, both are tolerably capable performers. Indeed, our prime minister might have been trained by Josef Goebbels himself, Hitler’s chief of propaganda; his mantra was that a large enough lie, repeated sufficiently often, would eventually gain acceptance.

No visible blush stains Julia’s cheek as she fronts the cameras to deny earlier pronouncements which television playbacks clearly show her making. Our prime minister performs this abject act of puppetry because off-stage her strings are being tweaked by Brown, whose Greens will turn her out of office if she doesn’t jump to order.

The Gillard government is a moral mess and administrative shambles. It eclipses even the previous record for flakiness and incompetence held by Gough Whitlam’s lot. The opinion polls show it as having already forfeited voter approval and trust. A federal election would see it swept away into oblivion, and Labor extinguished for ten years, if not for ever. And all this at the dictation of a minority party of ratbags.

Unhappily, one cannot feel fully confident that the Coalition will come galloping over the hill like rescuing cavalry to put the varmints to flight. Rats in the Coalition ranks are gnawing away at the Opposition’s insides, and the organisation goes on leaking away like a punctured bucket.

Just at present, real power in our national politics rests with the Greens; Bob Brown, as the tail that wags the dog, is the one who calls the tune. (I just love the occasional mixed metaphor, don’t you?) With our fate so largely in their hands, the Greens deserve the closest critical scrutiny.

I think it was Geoffrey Blainey who, years ago, diagnosed the basis of Green activism as metaphysical, not empirical; that they were, at bottom, not a political party at all, but a religious sect.

The Greens want nothing less than a revolution in our whole way of life; they won’t be happy until they have us all wearing homespun underpants and goat-skin sandals, and “enjoying” a diet of muesli and pumpkins; as to housing, it’s healthy and totally “carbon-free” to live up a hollow log. That’s what it would come to if the Greens’ present policies were to shatter our economy.

The French Revolution was described by Edmund Burke as a “revolution upon a theory”. He blamed the dogmatic abstractions of Rousseau for its murderous nastiness, and its inevitable culmination in the tyranny of Napoleon. He would have said much the same about the Russian Revolution of 1917, substituting respectively the names of Karl Marx and Josef Stalin. A Green revolution would be nastier still, with overtones of Pol Pot to ensure a thorough job.

The Greens’ foundation theory is that human activity—especially productive activity that gives us jobs and food on the table—causes catastrophic warming of the Earth: a theory it remains—an unproved hypothesis about as impalpable as the Marxist dialectic. Only a fool would claim that it is necessarily and wholly false; but only a fool would attempt to change our whole way of life on the basis of the poetic advice of Auden, to “leap before you look”. Exposure of the dishonest and unethical quality of some recent “Green” science suggests that we would be prudent to postpone any leap for quite some time.

Perceptive voters will not feel reassured by study of the origins and background of the Greens movement. The shadow of the revolutionary building trades unionist Jack Mundey still hovers—a ratbag if ever there was one.

Influential Greens are refugees from earlier gods that have already failed once—communists, Trotskyites, Maoists and Stalinists. In such a milieu, how could democracy flourish? It was pleasing, therefore, to observe that the tactic which recently secured the return of the Baillieu Coalition government in Victoria also swept away the Greens.

The essentially authoritarian cast of Green minds was candidly (if naively) expressed by their deputy leader in the Senate, Christine Milne, who is poised to take over from Bob Brown. Late in February she was crowing about Julia Gillard’s emissions policy announcement, just produced under blackmail from Brown. The Australian of February 25 reports her words: “Majority governments would not have produced this outcome.” She was undoubtedly right but, however you look at it, this translates into: “To hell with democracy, and to hell with whatever it is that the majority of voters desire. What you’ll get from us is whatever the Greens happen to think is good for you.”

“Unrepresentative swill” … wasn’t that Paul Keating’s description of the Senate? 

A collection of Peter Ryan’s columns for Quadrant since 1994 will shortly be published by Quadrant Books.

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