SEE NO EVIL
HOW TO KILL A LYREBIRD
By ellymelly – If you enjoy my work, consider shouting me a coffee over on Ko-Fi
Cartoonists matter.
When gunshots echoed down the streets of Paris and images of a blood soaked office hit the press – the world was shocked. Charlie Hebdo, a satirical newspaper, had become ground zero for the violent core of cancel culture. Twelve people were killed including five cartoonists because they dared to poke fun at intolerant Islamic extremism. In particular, the cartoon in question mocked the relationship between fear and laughter.
‘A 100 lashes if you don’t die of laughter!’
Well, there is nothing tyranny hates more than a good joke at its expense.
It wasn’t long before the press watered down their overwhelming support of Charlie Hebdo to a tepid, ‘well, maybe they deserved it?’ After all, particularly left-leaning publications went on to argue, the cartoons were hate speech. Blasphemy is a minefield for the modern left. On the one hand, they love to scorn the Christian religion as part of their wider Marxist portfolio, but where blasphemy crashes into Islam it interferes with the more powerful movement of identity politics.
In reality, blasphemy is a form of political rebellion against a system of authoritarianism. It is no different to Chinese teenagers mocking Xi Jinping with memes of Winnie the Pooh or unpleasant, satirical drawings of Marie Antoinette during the prelude of the French Revolution. Are satirical cartoons hate speech? Sure, but then, when did we decide that as humans we were not allowed to hate things that are dangerous to our survival or morally objectionable?
Cartoons are a warning – a buoy bobbing in the swell, outlining the shadow of a reef.
Yesterday, Johannes Leak found the outline of submerged political rocks right next to the boat. His cartoon, published in The Australian, depicted presidential candidate Joe Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris. In doing so, he highlighted a glaring hypocrisy inside the fabric of the Democratic party and boy are they mad about it.
The cartoon consists of two frames, the first is Joe Biden proclaiming, ‘It’s time to heal a nation divided by racism.’ In the next, Kamala Harris stands beside him and Biden continues, ‘So I’ll hand you over to this little brown girl while I go lie down for a while.’
Johannes found an uncomfortable truth and in one fell swoop an Australian cartoonist ruined the favourite propaganda of the Democratic party.
Since President Trump was elected, the Democrats have been stoking the fire of racial tension by ramping up their commitment to identity politics. There isn’t a single campaign but rather damaging shrapnel splitting the political landscape. Democrat mayors have thrown their support behind the Marxist movement Black Live Matter – a borderline Communist outfit that snapped off Black Power which has a habit of making white people kneel, demanding reparations and marauding through the city looting and burning. Less violent but more frightening, is the infestation of social politics inside universities that has brainwashed two generations of kids into thinking their value as a person is a tally of their race, gender, sexuality and class – an idea institutionalised by Democrats un-doing racial discrimination law to allow ‘positive’ discrimination.
Far from ‘healing a nation divided by racism’, the Democrats are at the centre of the push to radicalise race politics and change the conversation from one of class, to that of race. Anyone with a working knowledge of history knows the very last thing you do if you’re leading a nation is deliberately go looking for racial unrest.
Somehow or other, the Democrats never got this memo and when it came to picking Joe Biden’s running mate, they made an announcement that they would only be selecting a candidate from a pool of coloured women. Like it or not, at this moment the Democrats openly publicised that their selection process was not one of merit but rather a declaration of racial and sexual discrimination. By excluding the rest of the candidate field they strongly implied that women and people of colour were not capable of winning the coveted position themselves but, like all quota-based systems of employment, it is something the godly regime gifts to them.
Without realising it, Biden reduced Kamala Harris to a coat of paint on the side of his campaign bus.
Plenty of furious Australian journalists pointed out that the quote Johannes used was inaccurate. What Biden actually said, was this:
“This morning, little girls woke up across this nation — especially Black and Brown girls who so often may feel overlooked and undervalued in our society — potentially seeing themselves in a new way: As the stuff of Presidents and Vice Presidents.”
Joe Biden
Setting aside how appalling it is that political leaders are now referring to people’s colour as a matter of habit or the insulting notion that it’s how people look that matters, not their achievements, the cartoon was never about the specific quote – it was about the collective ideology of the Democratic party.
For those who thought the cartoon was racist, I wonder if you consider cameras to be racist when they catch despicable actions on film? Are the journalists who document racism racist themselves for printing the crimes of others? If this Johannes Leak cartoon fiasco has taught us anything, it is that the left are like vampires – unable to see their monstrous reflection when the mirror is held up.
That is what cartoonists do; they mimic in order to mock.
Remember, at least forty-five churches were burned down when the printing presses at Charlie Hebdo resumed, but nobody burned a Christian church because of a blasphemous cartoon published in secular France. They burned churches because religion is at war with itself, as it has been for thousands of years and any excuse will do.
It is the same with the media storm we experienced yesterday, where even our taxpayer funded ABC sent out its advance guard of shills to cancel Johannes Leak and, if possible, their competition at The Australian. Anger directed at cartoonists comes from a place of weakness. Regimes, ideas, and political parties that know that their foundation is rotten are the first to reach out with claws in the direction of a cartoonist.
Humour is, after all, a beam of light pressing through a crack in a dusty window. It gets into otherwise complex ideologies and reveals their absurdity in a single frame. Making a citizen chuckle at tyranny is a form of unmatched power.
Identity politics is a serious business. It represents a new system of sorting human civilisation where the features of your birth assign you to a pre-determined glass ceiling. The meritless can climb over the invisible chains of intersectionality and all of a sudden, the Civil Rights movement is a smudge on a redacted paragraph.
When you’ve found a short-cut to the White House, the last thing a political movement wants is the world throwing their heads back in laughter as the lyrebird mocks.
By ellymelly – If you enjoy my work, consider shouting me a coffee over on Ko-Fi
THE SENSIBLE CENTRE
By ellymelly – If you enjoy my work, consider shouting me a coffee over on Ko-Fi
We live in a time of political upheaval. I know you are afraid. There is a sense of déjà vu hanging over the world, pressing but not quite breaking the surface of our tepid global peace. Revolution. No one wants to bell the cat but our cities are flooded with violent Marxists who are destroying property, history, and human life. It is the duty of every citizen to sit up and take an honest look at what is going on.
In all likelihood, that hour of the night is approaching where blades fall indiscriminately and fires take hold of the streets. But whose revolution is it, really?
Very few ordinary citizens fantasise about political upheaval. Instead, loosely connected activist groups have fanned out to grasp at civilisation’s corners, dragging it uphill toward carnage like slaves lashed to stone in a quarry. If the whip cracks hard enough, all of us will be drawn in to their horrific vision of ‘utopia’. The time to stop them is now, before the momentum overwhelms us. Unfortunately ‘peace’ isn’t very useful for political parties involved in dethroning stable governments. How do you get out of the monotony of opposition if the people are comfortable with the status quo? Simple. Manufacture a civil crisis by copying notes from the French Revolution and then fudge the detail with a few freshly minted micro ‘isims’.
Politicians do not like you to know that there is a mass of people who sit at the centre of politics. In Australia, where voting is compulsory, the politically disinterested are the votes that radical candidates struggle to move with their heated words and unrealistic promises. I speak of the Mrs Gafoops and Bobs of our world. Their ambivalence to the mindless shrieking of rancorous activism ties our political class down to ‘reason’ like the ballast of a ship keeping the vessel steady against the wind.
I have heard the argument that only the politically enthusiastic should vote. Young political hopefuls are especially keen on this. Surely, they insist, draped over their beer in a conniving manner, only those who follow the campaign trail have a right to decide the outcome? How can the uniformed vote correctly if they do not care?
First, it is the right and duty of every adult citizen in a democracy to vote – whether you like their choice or not. Otherwise, do not pretend to call yourself a democracy.
Second, it is the most politically devout who bring about history’s worst dictators. They are in love with the game and worship its heroes – this makes them especially vulnerable to sweet sounding lies from the lips of charismatic leaders.
Third, those who do not care for politics vote to benefit themselves based upon what they see presented. The working class and peasantry of humanity typically value security, stability, autonomy, and prosperity. It is their unwillingness to engage in personal risk that acts as the Achilles heel for revolutionary movements. More to the point, they have a habit of re-enforcing Aristotle’s theory on group behaviour in which random samples of the population average better results than small teams of experts. Can they make mistakes? Sure, but in a mimicry of evolution, groups of individual selfish motivations more accurately represent the needs of a diverse nation than an homogeneous panel of self-appointed geniuses.
This roadblock to power is what drives those who wish to deplatform democracy into breaking down compulsory voting. They want you to stay home. They want your silence. They want the majority out of the ballot box. If you don’t care about politics, you’re hard work as far as a party is concerned. After all, it’s such a nuisance to come up with sensible policies. When you hear a political leader start talking about the ‘sensible centre’, they do it begrudgingly.
And what is the centre of politics?
It is customary to refer to political theory as a flat spectrum – a single line upon which recognisable parties cluster. These parties are not stuck down to any particular point but rather have a tendency to drift around over time. Their philosophy is an average of its members; an approximation of ideas loosely connected with history. Because a party’s position on the line is defined by continuously re-written polices, it is often the case that a voter’s fond, youthful memory is no longer the reality of the party running at the ballot box. Stability does not come naturally to politics because it is bound to the flux of human thought, and, like the metaphoric boiling of a frog, it is only when parties completely abandon their foundation that people notice.
Generally speaking, in a system dominated by two parties, one sits on the left and the other, on the right, of this arbitrary line. Defining the centre is hard, especially when each country puts the centre either in a different location or uses an alternate set of ideological norms to draw the line. Suffice to say, the concept is a mess but in Australia both parties are closer to a Westernised centre line than their American equivalents while the UK sits somewhere in-between. Other European nations with deeply held Socialist histories scatter their parties all on the left so ‘right’ for them is ‘left’ for us. Religious theocracies do the reverse and single party dictatorships pick a spot and plant a flag.
To define this poorly drawn political line, the left follow the works of Karl Marx. They are the Socialists, Communists, and miscellaneous Collectivists. These are big government, low freedom, heavily censored welfare states with tightly controlled or non-existent markets who rarely employ a system of real democracy. The right are Conservatives. A misnomer, in my opinion. Far from conserving they have been agents for political change, dragging civilisation into the famous golden age of the Enlightenment. They are small government, fierce supporters of democracy and capitalists who use free markets to liberate the individual. Focus is placed on advancement through private property and economic competition.
Here is where I will pick a fight with accepted political theory.
Extremism has always been labelled as ‘far-left’ or ‘far-right’ but I believe the political spectrum has another dimension – a vertical axis where traits that belong to neither side of the line belong. Some of these are harmless, normal, and necessary – others are recognised as destructive. Their addition gives much needed perspective to the line.
Expansionism. Despotism. Nationalism. Militarisation. Personality Cults. Social Responsibility. Border transparency. Ethnonationalism. Surveillance. Transparency. Freedom to Speak. Fair legal system.
This clustering of unaffiliated ideas paints a better picture of political threat posed to the populace and its neighbours.
Take nationalism. All historic definitions list this interchangeability with patriotism. (Forget re-written ‘woke’ definitions – I refuse to play the revisionist game.) Historically, nearly every political system is nationalistic. National pride is how you hold scattered village populations together, especially if they have different cultures, languages or religions. Nationalism makes a country harder to attack and generally more harmonious internally. It is also an indicator of political health. People are more likely to love their country if they are not victimised by it. A lack of nationalism can act as a warning sign. Some Socialist parties suppress nationalism in favour of creating alliances of dictators – the last two times this played out, it ended in civil war or serious regional instability.
Let us contrast this with ethnonationalism. Despite how Europeans feel about this one, it is not an uncommon political trait across the globe. Indeed, most countries on Earth consider race to be a requirement of citizenship – many go so far as to put that in print. This can and often does lead to acts of genocide, internally and externally. Not always, though. Japan places emphasis on ethnonationality in its laws but does so dispassionately.
Expansion is an indicator that accurately predicts risk to the sovereignty of neighbouring countries. This trait exists solely for the expanding of territory and conquering of other nations. When coupled with other risky behaviour like ethnonationalism, militarisation, despotism, and a personality cult, you get someone like Hitler or Mao. Take out ethnonationalism and you have Stalin. Take out expansionism and you have Kim Jong Un. Or, a combination of expansionism and militarisation in conjunction with an otherwise open, democratic nation with a strong sense of liberty and law gives you the British Empire during its period of conquest. Put a dictatorship and personality cult in and you have the Golden Era of the Roman Empire.
With this sampling, we can see how the line of left and right tells us very little about whether a political system is fundamentally dangerous.
What does this mean for the sensible centre? Well, in reality they are not people sitting at the centre of the ideological political thread. Instead, they are the group of citizens who shy away from zealous political extras. They tend to fear personality cults. Oppose despotism. Reject expansionism. Side-eye surveillance and rise-up against racial politics.
This scepticism is a survival instinct. The common people have a collective wisdom passed down through generations. It is the sensible centre who are generally composed of citizens that find themselves on the front line of a war if one were started, oppressed by a maniac government, or terrorized by political radicals. While ever they are required to vote, these people will hold back the tide on extremism.
Not only are they the centre, they are also the majority. In most elections during dull electoral cycles when the public are casting their vote between two innocuous parties, their vote is split. But, if ever there is a time when a party manages to upset them, their invisible force underwriting politics suddenly rises up in a wave – destroying parties, leaders and entire systems of government.
Colloquially, we call this revolution. A revolution of the sensible centre.
By ellymelly – If you enjoy my work, consider shouting me a coffee over on Ko-Fi
THE SENSIBLE CENTRE by @ellymelly
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