WELCOME TO MY BLOG #1

Keepsake, 2026

WELCOME

Welcome to my blog everybody. I will be publishing an original piece of writing along with an original image every couple of days or weekly. Topics I will cover will be politics and social commentary, Art, poetry, word portraits, amazing places and the extraordinary people that I have met.

This one is political.

Cleaning out the Fascists

At the end of the second lock down I decided that it was time to cull a hefty group of books from my personal library.

I love German Art, music and literature. I’m a collector of books, I read a lot, Art History, Poetry, Novels, Philosophy and biography. Over the past 35 years I have amassed a significant quantity of books concerning the causes of, the history of and the rise of Fascism/Nazism in Germany during the 1920’s and 30’s, the subsequent World War, and the Holocaust.

Like many kids born in the 1960’s, I was part of the TV generation and grew up on staples of classic war dramas like Combat, Twelve O’clock High the Rat patrol and Australia’s Spy force featuring young Jack Thompson.  Every other week there were movies like Judgement at Nuremberg, The Pawnbroker, The Longest Day, and Casablanca. These and countless others were the staple fair for evening family viewing. We also had coverage of the Vietnam war on TV every night and that was all too real.

As a young teenager I was haunted by the power and gravity of Laurence Olivier’s narration of the 26-part BBC series The World at War.

This was a time in Television when there was a Sunday night movie on channels Seven, Nine and maybe Ten. On Saturday there was a late-night horror movie or Creature Feature. In those days television had a pretty tight format.

I grew up watching Nazi’s, Fascists and the Imperial Japanese Army committing unspeakably cruel and brutal acts on innocent civilians and defeated army personnel.

All true, all real.

I also developed a fascination with documentary film footage of this period and from this a hero worship of the extraordinary men and women who were behind the cameras and writing the first-hand accounts. People like Damian Parrar, Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway and Robert Capa to mention a but few.

What made it all the more real for me was that my grandfather had been wounded 3 times while serving on the Western Front in WW1. My uncle had served in the Navy, participating in the Battle of Okinawa and had been present at Tokyo Bay in 1945 for the ceremony that finally brought an end all hostilities of the Second World War. B

Buddies of my father had fought on the Kokoda track and there was our kindly, local “Mr Jolly” Vacuum cleaner salesman who had served as a Luftwaffe pilot in Russia and Western Europe. These men never ever spoke of their experiences and kept their scars to themselves, as best they could.

In the 60’s and 70’s the most visible evidence of these epic conflicts was the amount of middle aged and elderly male amputees in our community. Every Anzac Day they would congregate, I was scared of these men, to me there was something foreign and unknowable about them. It felt to me like they wore some kind of secret on their torn bodies that set them apart from the rest of us.

As a young boy growing up in this climate of historical remembrance the nagging question, I was constantly posing to myself was how in the hell could these fascist men and women of such low moral character and with the potential for enact so much cruelty and despair on their own kind as well as other races have been allowed to amass the political power and authority to actually do this evil work?

So, I decided to read as much literature on these times as I could, to see if there is an answer to this vexing question.

History and fate can throw up some extraordinary sequences of events. The darks stars must have been in some kind of major alignment to put the likes of such personalities as Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, Heydrich, Speer, Himmler together having been all born within ten or so years of each other in the same country.

They were all damaged and they were all complete narcissists.  

On top of this, history provided them with one of the great outfitters to narcissism in the form of the world-renowned clothing designer Hugo Boss.  Dressed to kill.

Then along comes Lini Riefenstahl the sexy Aryan actress/mountaineer who morphs into Joseph Goebbels fascist muse and fascist documentary film maker. Lini makes Triumph of the Will and films the 1936 Berlin Olympics, creating a breathtakingly exciting record of the swastika’s triumphal narcissism. All to the gushing thrills and hypnotic ecstasy of a beleaguered, traumatised German citizenry.

For us, her films sound a warning. A lesson to be posted for the future, for now.

This truly was a devil’s brew, bringing to mind the cruel children mixing and casting hexes in the Nobel prize winning German writer Gunter Grasse’s masterpiece novel, The Tin Drum.  

History tells us that the 1920’s and 30s threw up a perfect storm of disparate characters, converging during a time of quite astonishing advances in the mass media technologies of Radio, film, sound recording and colour photography. Air, ocean and rail travel allowed for rapid movement and messaging. The mass circulation of printed propaganda could reach and message all sections of the German population.

The catch to this terrifying cabalistic fable of suffering is that these narcissist pigs had enablers. These enablers funded, protected and sheltered them. The German Nazi’s were backed by big industry and capitalists, they were enabled by conservative political parties and their self-serving leaders.

Does this sound familiar. Does this story resonate in the wake of current events and trends in our world?

What is the collective pronoun for a group of narcissists? Gaggle is already taken, so is murder. What about “A Shatter of Narcissists.”

Today

Alarmingly there seem quite a few of these types around in in contemporary public life, both internationally and locally. These men and women worry me. I don’t trust them and their motives and I don’t trust the people in our society that enable them. It’s the devil’s work.

Across the world, once again we are seeing the rise of the narcissist to high political office and the thing about these types is that once they get power, they don’t like giving it up. Take Putin, he ticks all the boxes. Before he came to power Russia was heading towards a functioning democracy. Now Vlad is a Stalinist Czar.

Every year the list seems to get bigger. We have despots like Bolsonaro in Brazil, Emperor Xi in China, Trump testing the resilience of Democracy in the USA and that idiot reform UK leader Nigel Farage.  Rodrigo Duterte and his death squads in the Philippines, fratricidal killer Kim Jong-un in North Korea, the sadistic women hating Taliban, Genocidal Prime minister Netanyahu in Israel (charged by his own judiciary with corruption) and many, many more.

When a narcissist politician attains power in a democratic or quasi democratic country, unless the system is structurally airtight and can maintain a separation of powers between the church, legislature and judiciary and has a rigorous, independent and balanced 4^th estate these narcissist power seeking leaders will attempt to subvert the political landscape for their own ends. To keep hold of power even if it is at the cost of democracy itself.

I live in Australia I am 66 years old. Growing up in NSW I witnessed the virtual dictatorship of Queensland during the Bjelke Peterson era. It took a royal commission to bring him and his criminal cohorts to justice and the bastard was still given a state funeral. I witnessed the removal of the Whitlam Labour Government and in 2002, the Howard Government assume a leading role in the criminally Irresponsible invasion of Iraq, with all its catastrophic geopolitical consequences.

Over the last 25 years Australian politics has thrown up many far-right populists into the Australian political landscape. Pauline Hanson arrived draped in an Aussie flag during the Howard era and she’s still here. We Have oligarchs like Gina Rhinehart, Kerry Stokes, Clive Palmer and Murdoch. They buy television networks, radio, newspapers and rafts of internet space.  They subvert, manipulate and shred truth, using a repetition of lies, misdirection and the distortion facts. Their mouthpieces are disciplined, smartly dressed and articulate with resonant voices and perfect teeth.  They know how to hammer home fear and loathing.

People like Gina and Kerry we are familiar with. Alas, for every Clive Palmer there are scores of the faceless, far right lieutenants of industry. Masters of the universe. Many whom made their fortunes at the big end of town in the finance Industry boom during the last thirty years.

I know them and I have seen how they operate. To them, any person that holds liberal opinions is a socialist, an enemy out to take their money. So having made their fortune their obsession is to guard their fortune from the socialist hordes AKA the Labour Party, Greens and moderate leaning liberals - at any cost, even if it means making a pact with the far-right edge of politics.

This is the sharp end of the wedge. The far-right consider Malcom Turnbull to be a traitor. They hate Dr Norman Swann and ABC journalists. They have the intellect to understand the scientific truth of climate change yet they will deny it because they think it will lead to higher taxes. Nobody takes their money.

In 18 months Australia has to hold to a federal election. Look for the moment when the big money starts to get splashed around during the campaign.

Clive will spend another 30 million pedalling fear and lies on You tube, television, newspaper ads and signage. Gina will crawl out of her fortress writing cheques for puppet Pauline and so will many faceless others. Their only goal is to maintain the status quo with regard to our countries tax regime. Nothing else matters, not education, not health, not aged care and definitely not climate change.

It’s all about the money. Watch them.

So, I’ve culled the fascists from my bookcase. I’ve done my learning; I know their type and what they were capable of. I can spot them a mile off. I can recognise their tone. I hope you can too. Some of them are even wearing Hugo Boss, some of them go on Dancing with the Stars and some of them even wear Akubra’s.

#politicsnow