From Zman:
One of the weird things about this age is how certain groups of people remain locked in a form of psychological stasis. Their views of the world remain the same as they were at some point in the past. For some it is always 1985 and the biggest fear is the commies will get control. Some are locked in 1968 where they are trying to keep corporate interests from crushing the working man. These people live like modern people, but their worldview remains in the world of the past.
From the perspective of dissidents, the most obvious of these groups are the civic nationalist types.
A local example of this is the National Civic Council in Melbourne, which many would never have heard of but from 1940s-1970s was a very big deal, especially in Victoria and Queensland, for demographic reasons. The NCC was a kind of umbrella organisation for “the Movement”, an overwhelmingly Irish Catholic (but led by an Italian, B.A Santamaria, above) political and trade unionist movement to beat back communist influence in the unions (where their faction was the ‘Industrial Groups’) and Labor, enormously influential and majorly responsible, through its political vehicle, the Democratic Labor Party, of keeping federal Labor out of office for almost 20 years, and Victorian and Queensland Labor out of office for about 30 years each, despite the fact that the DLP never got more than 11% nationally, because its voters were extraordinarily disciplined in following the party’s how to vote card preferencing instructions, and would faithfully put Labor last when strategically directed to in key seats (to extract concessions from the Liberals, and punish Labor for being soft on communism), a crucial thing in a preferential system of voting.
It is now a shadow of its former self, sectarian loyalties having long ago dissipated and the Cold War being no more, sort of, but is still banging on in its 80 year old publication News Weekly about COMMUNISM, meaning China of course.
Communism was once of course a gigantic threat, being messianic, revolutionary, proselytising, and internationalist, and the early Soviet leaders believed, wisely as it turned out, that their system could not survive on its own, it had to be spread to the world, above all to Germany and Britain in the beginning, but it’s likely that that project suffered a profoundly debilitating setback on 22 June 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union.
Insular China has never been on the same level of threat as the USSR and today its ‘communism’ is certainly not “messianic, revolutionary, proselytising” but the country is internationalist in some ways, but it seeks to do deals and make money, and yes, exert influence over other countries, but they don’t care what kind of government their ‘friends’ have, they are not trying to spread ‘communism’.
Not that it is any of our concern, but once, in the 1960s, it was a really bizarre kind of slave society but it has modernised and the people there are free to start businesses if they can, get married and even have more than one child if they want, and they can go into shops and choose from all sorts of different crap to buy and these trinkets and gadgets give them happy happiness. No, they can’t vote, they have no choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee like we do, but it makes little difference to the average person’s life.
Another of the NCC’s preoccupations is that we support our Greatest Ally in whatever stupid wars it gets into, like Afghanistan, where the NCC’s position boils down to We Should Protect Afghani Girls From The Taliban SAVAGES, Forever. The NCC was balls deep in the pro Vietnam War movement and there was enormous bitterness when South Vietnam was abandoned but even with that, and now after 20 years in Afghanistan, they don’t seem to have realised that our greatest ally is not in the business of winning its wars.
It’s a mystery as to why these dinosaurs at the NCC are so concerned about what kind of government other countries have, whether it’s fundamentalist Muslim or a state capitalist dictatorship (‘communism’) or whatever, and it’s just none of our business, and certainly no reason to get our best young men killed over.
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