“Hungary is our Israel”: Tony Abbott and Orbán’s Danube Institute
It was announced in late in 2023 that Tony Abbott was to be a “visiting fellow” for Viktor Orbán’s Danube Institute, a hub of ultra reactionary thought that gathers anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-feminist, anti-LGBTQIA+ speakers who celebrate the Christian Nationalist project. Or, as Abbott describes it, “a point of light to Conservatives around the world.”
It particularly attracts aggrieved “conservatives” who long for the old days when White men ruled and women knew their place, submissively breeding in the home. Confusion of races, sexuality and genders was not a factor in these mythic days of Western Civilisation’s greatness. All metaphoric borders were strictly policed. Furthermore the colonised were silent about their suffering. Good times for those who controlled the narrative and luxuriated in the spoils.
The Institute serves the purpose for Orbán of laundering his reputation, as seen in Abbott’s 3 May interview with the Hungarian Conservative where he commended Orbán for building a fence in 2015 and stopping what Abbott characterised as “a peaceful invasion” of Europe. Abbott denies the empirical evidence of Orbán’s “electoral autocracy,” asserting that it remains a true democracy.
Rod Dreher is one of the Americans who has been drawn to Viktor Orbán’s Budapest. He moved beyond his conversion to Catholicism, which even in its Rad Trad form proved too lax for him, to Orthodox Christianity. In 2023, Dreher wrote an account of the inaugural conference of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) for The European Conservativejournal where he described the concurrent multicultural coalition of Brits protesting for peace in Israel, misleadingly, as an “apocalyptic unveiling of vast numbers of pro-terror, antisemitic Muslims.”
Celebrating the milling crowds of ARC’s lobby as the most interesting part of the conference, Dreher recorded fellow attendees mulling over establishing isolationist “intentional Catholic communities” in the countryside, modelled on Dreher’s own The Benedict Option. Others he reported as debating emigrating to join him in Budapest. One apparently declared, “Hungary is our Israel.”
Around the same time as Abbott’s Danube Institute role was announced, he was also exposed as a member of ARC’s Advisory Board. ARC is both anti-climate science and theocratic in its goals.
April 2024 has been a busy month for Tony Abbott in his role with Orbán’s circle. On April the 8th, The Danube Institute and Quadrant Journal co-hosted an event at the Fullerton Hotel in Sydney. Quadrant hosted its first Orbán circle event in Australia as early as 2016.
Abbott’s speech at the Fullerton was focussed on contrasting the left and right populist movements, calling for a better political option. He evinced disgust for the “climate zealots” and “identity-obsessives” of left populism. Of course “identity” here is intended to dismiss the experience of anyone who does not experience life as a White, heterosexual, Christian man. Abbott also disdained the Trumpist Right.
He set out a series of global enemies beginning with “apocalyptic, death-to-the-infidels Islam” currently manifested in Iran, and which threat he suggested launched its “opening gambit” on the West in the 7th October attack on Israel. “Communist China” is another. Orbán, as his effective co-host, will not have been delighted that Abbott included friend Putin as “a revisionist nuclear power, as-yet unpurged of its militarism, set on restoring the Russia of Peter the Great.”
Abbott is also on the board of the climate-denialist junktank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Based in London and funded by fossil-fuel money, the body has been fighting climate action since 2009. It is thus hardly surprising that Abbott’s speech pillories the “climate cult” and positions policy to deal with the climate catastrophe as the threat rather than the catastrophe’s disasters.
Aside from the predictable attack on people who don’t accept his limited view of acceptable gender and sexuality, Abbott also expressed his condescension for the First Peoples of Australia whom, he claims, lived in a country that represented “a Hobbesian state of nature” before Western conquest.
Not long after, Abbott delivered two speeches in Budapest. The first was for the Danube Institute, where he pontificated on the defeat of the Voice to Parliament referendum: he depicted it as a conquest over “identity politics.”
Unsurprisingly, he continued to parrot inflammatory misinformation about the power of the proposed advisory body. He also depicted it as separating First Peoples in Australia from the rest of the population. While Abbott admits there is continued suffering amongst Indigenous people, he posits that those living in cities and towns are “reasonably well integrated into the general community.”
Abbott argues that the “considerably worse educational, employment, incarceration, health and housing outcomes” are a result of outback living. The point of the Voice was to allow First Peoples to exercise self-determination about the solutions for the determined problems. It would build a new structure intended to allow collaboration with affected communities to shape the best policies to address needs. Instead Abbott argues that secondary students from First Peoples communities should be systematically sent to boarding schools to assimilate into his definition of Australia.
In a new, hopefully less abusive (or murderous), version of the old boarding school establishments, First Peoples’ youth are to be stripped once again of their culture to become “tradies and professionals” who might return to Country as workers, or only rarely on holiday or in retirement. Abbott’s paternalism is breathtaking.
Fittingly for someone nostalgic for Thatcher and Reagan, Abbott’s only solution for structural problems lies in aiding the individual.
Abbott spoke at CPAC Hungary on the 25th April, spruiking Australia’s success to the religio-ethnonationalist audience as the “only country in the world that’s successfully stopped a wave of illegal immigration by boat.”
He celebrated Orbán’s Budapest: “This conservative fusion of freedom, family and nation, this understanding that ‘politics is downstream of culture, and culture is downstream of religion’ is still contentious in the Anglosphere, but not here in Hungary. Hence the colony of English-speaking public intellectuals, that’s sprung up in Budapest, keen to devise a modern formula that can ‘unite the right’ and end the civil war inside established centre-right parties between their conservative and their progressive wings.” It’s worth noting that “Unite the Right” was the US neofascist rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
Rather than blaming the toxic neoliberalism that has increasingly driven political economies since the Reagan and Thatcher era (and resistance to its cruelty), Abbott blames “green-left governments” for “crumbling services, declining productivity, stagnant wages, growing street crime, disruptive and intimidatory protests that are becoming routine, propaganda masquerading as education, emasculated police and armed forces, and an uncertain response to dictators-on-the-march.” Apparently only a true “conservative” politics can solve those problems.
The network of organisations that interweave through these events ought to be remarked. They are all loosely part of the National Conservative (NatCon) movement that aims to prevent climate action because it is fossil-fuel funded. And they aim to prevent change through populist nativist nationalism.
We must watch Abbott and his friends at their elusive gatherings because they watch us. They are demonising us as “cultural marxists” and believe it is only by enforcing our compliance with their values that they can “conserve” their mythical narrative of the past.
This essay was first posted at Pearls and Irritations
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Return to home pageTypical of the mad monk . As the father of twin girls I was particularly agrieved when he apposed HPV vaccine for his daughters saying it would encourage them to be promiscuous . The mad monk is taking Icredelin to tell him what to say and act ??
Abbott is as precious as a preserved dogturd from ancient time, kept in the mistaken belief, by the ultrasuperstitious, that it was a symbol of fertilty, as it worked on gardens. Abbott got caught in a situation long ago, where he was persuaded to imagine he had a son, who was a person standing nearby and working for the ABC. But the actions imagined of his proddypole were not actually true and the story made for much evil mirth. Abbott is fixated and obsessed, especially in moral matters where he was set up to fail by his imaginary fantasy deity, it being all a task too far and hard. Riddled with flawed inner sicknesses, Abbott cannot imagine a world without cruel discipline and subjugation, grovelling of self, forgiveness need. Abbott must selfimagise as a lost floating saintly wannabe “leader”, actually following any dogmatic shitbrained drive. Romanism gone mad, mediaeval mischief…
Fear of the Right, while not baseless, is exaggerated.
Let’s be honest, the most alarming thing in this article is the headline.
And even the headline turns out to be merely an alleged statement by an anonymous source. In other words, something that can be dismissed out of hand.
If Tony Abbott wants to be a global player, it’s not a problem. He was an accident of history.
He has no credibility on his home turf, so he won’t last long on the international scene. He does not have the intellect for it. He has a limited playbook in line with his intellect, so he’ll keep parroting the same old lines until the world tires of him.
Unfounded fear of the Right by progressives was on full display recently as the US Supreme Court considered the case of abortion pill access. After much anxious wringing of hands and clutching of pearls from progressives, the court voted for access. Not only that, it was a unanimous decision.
Lucy continues to look for enemies in all the wrong places.
It’s not conservatives and nationalists that want to do away with public health systems — it’s liberals.
It’s not conservatives and nationalists that are opposed to public housing — it’s liberals.
It’s not conservatives and nationalists that increase unemployment to tame inflation — it’s liberals.
It’s not conservatives and nationalists burning the planet in pursuit of profit — it’s liberals.
We need to get real.
Lucy says we need to watch the Right.
No, we need to get active against those that are causing real harm.
Steve. I kept the Pearls title so as to avoid confusing a surge of new readers on Twitter who had been following the trio of pieces on the Right.
Abbott is a serious player advising Dutton and the Aus Libs, UK Tories and connecting both with Orban/Putin.
Many of the answers to your points will be addressed in the piece that follows.
Once again, I disagree with your characterisation of liberalism. I’ve given you several sources to explain the Right’s colonisation of centrist politics but you are not interested in extending your understanding, just repeating the same rightwing characterisations of it, That’s your choice but it certainly doesn’t encourage me to waste a lot of time dredging out sources for you.
I consider myself left but value liberalism’s rejection of religious dictates. I value individual freedoms in the face of reactionary moralising. I vale representative government, I absolutely share the left’s criticisms of people who pose as politically liberal with no structural critique of the status quo. The idea that humans have dignity and rights is a place to build on, not a dead end.
No Steve, it is not liberals, it is The Liberals, capital ‘L’, the party of Menzies.
The far right nutters are already surging like a zombie army, smelling blood in Queensland and they believe that they can take the state in the October election and once and for all be done with this global warming nonsense.
LNP leader David Crisafulli stepped up on a pre-election pitch, promising to scrap the Pioneer Burdekin Pumped Hydro scheme that the government-owned Queensland Hydro is developing — one in the Pioneer Valley near Mackay and the other at Borumba near Gympie.
The $12 billion project in the Pioneer Valley is the centrepiece of the landmark 10-year Queensland Energy and Jobs plan, which is estimated to support up to 100,000 jobs by 2040.
Labor in Queensland have already announced that the plan aims to have 50 per cent of the state powered by renewable energy by 2030, 70 per cent by 2032 and 80 per cent by 2035. These retrograde plans by the LNP if adopted will severely damage our move towards cleaner energy for the future.
We also know (although they won’t admit it) that the Qld LNP have done a deal with the Minerals Council to reduce royalty payments of on existing and new coal projects in the state.
Be warned, the white shoe brigade are on the march in Queensland !
Geez,I really wait for the day Abbott puts his hand up for leader of the liberal mess that has flowed from the misgovernment of his time(not long),culminating in the farce of the Liar.We just need someone to give the tap to Boofhead, so Tones the budgie smuggler can put things to rights.He’ll get my vote.What a shlump.
Lucy, thanks for the response.
My criticism of liberalism does not come from the Right as you suggest, it comes from well to the Left. I have noticed that the Right agrees with some of my views, but that merely means that occasionally the Right is right! (How’s that for confidence!)
I mentioned the Supreme Court decision for a reason — the Right is not a monolith, which is the picture you are intentionally or inadvertently painting. This is one reason that I see their danger as exaggerated. The Right will fracture when the pressure is on. Even your article referred to tension between Abbott and Orban.
You referred to the value of representative government. Democracy existed long before representative democracy, and in fact it is supporters of liberalism who have diminished representative democracy. Take a look at the dominant liberal democracies as they operate today. A complete shambles. Representatives bought and paid for.
You say you value certain liberal virtues, but in the main these are human virtues, they are not peculiar to liberalism. Not only was Marx an advocate for the dignity and human rights you mentioned, he explained how liberals have manipulated and diminished dignity and rights.
This brings me to the comment you once made in regard to liberalism, that we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. You have not elaborated on that. Just what is it about liberalism that you think should be retained, and what should be rejected?
Bert, Menzies was actually “small L” if my memory is correct.
With a strong dose of royalty fawning thrown in.
The Libs lurched to the Right approximately in step with Thatcherism, which saw the Conservative Party transform into a liberal economics party, (almost libertarian) along with Labor here in Oz.
Hawke thought he could combine free market thinking with social values, but the two are in conflict.
Yes Steve, compared to today’s Liberals, maybe Menzies was small l.
Almost like today’s labor .
My how things have changed.
Steve Davis, at present, Tone the Botty is the Member for where? He was booted out of Warringah five years ago and made a bloody fool of himself with his concession speech. Tone the Botty was the most incompetent nincompoop to ever enter Kirribilli and his performance in the role was shithouse! Outside of politics, Tone the Botty is not much of a threat unless he is appointed to an executive role in the Liberal Party (he is unlikely to be pre-selected to stand for a parliamentary seat, as he is nearly 67) and he hardly draws listeners like shit draws flies, even though he’s full of shit.
Cool Pete, I agree.
Lucy is concerned because Abbott is said to be advising the UK Tories and Dutton.
The Tories are a shambles at the moment, and will remain so until after a period in Opposition, so he’s no threat there.
Dutton made two huge mistakes recently with the push for nuclear, and floating a withdrawal from the Paris deal. Those will not go down well with voters.
And if Abbott is advising Dutton, that’s just the sort of advice he would give.
I haven’t followed Abbott’s UK adventures closely, but I have the impression that he might be getting some left-over traction from Lynton Crosby’s forays there, Crosby being a real threat.
Once the Poms realise that Abbott is not even a shadow of Crosby, he can kiss a knighthood goodbye.
It’s not conservatives and nationalists that want to do away with public health systems — it’s liberals.
It’s not conservatives and nationalists that are opposed to public housing — it’s liberals.
It’s not conservatives and nationalists that increase unemployment to tame inflation — it’s liberals.
It’s not conservatives and nationalists burning the planet in pursuit of profit — it’s liberals.
If you have a proper look at the UK, the US and Australia, it’s definitely the conservatives and nationalists: LNP in Aust, Tories in the UK, Republicans in the US. It is very much the Right that is doing this.
Abbott’s right wing Danube Inst. is partnered with the Heritage Foundation in US fossil fuel Atlas Koch Network* that shares donors with the white Christian nationalist Tanton Network e.g. SPA, TAPRI and MB locally.
Abbott needs scrutiny and/or a heads up, like others including Downer and Sheridan, being linked to an anti-western, anti-EU and anti-NATO Danube Inst. supported by a foundation of PM ‘mini Putin’ Orban’s government? Security risk or against Australia’s national interest?
Meanwhile his Fox employer, Fox News in particular and former employee Tucker Carlson have been promoting anti-Ukraine, EU, NATO, immigration and anti-semitic talking points on Russia’s invasion. Meanwhile claiming to be pro-western but support in background from Tanton’s chum, alleged white Christian nationalist & Brit immigrant Peter Brimelow, also friends with Abbott’s boss & Quadrant correspondent O’Sullivan in Budapest (NYT did series on Fox, Carlson, Brimelow et al. in ’22)
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/30/us/tucker-carlson-tonight.html
Joining the wheels within wheels, by coincidence (?) we have Tom Switzer and others at CIS Sydney, in Atlas – Koch and behind the Voice No Campaign, dissing Ukraine while in the past they have platformed US faux geopolitical expert Mearsheimer (Kissinger II & geopolitical social Darwinism?) who is supported by Charles Koch Foundation and Putin’s Valdai Club.
It’s quite transparent when the US Koch – GOP House Freedom Caucus was leading the opposition to aid package for Ukraine, sharing mutual anti-EU and anti-liberal democracy actions with Putin and Fox News?
However, Tony Abbott seems oblivious of the ecosystem he inhabits when squeaking about support for Ukraine in Fox safe places when linked to Atlas – Koch ‘mothership’ the Heritage Foundation? According Republican and never Trumper Bill Kristol:
‘@BillKristol 10 Dec 2023
Heritage Foundation and Viktor Orbán are not simply against aid for Ukraine. They are against Ukraine. They hate Ukraine, because a) they’re pro-Putin, and b) they hate liberal democracy, especially one fighting to defend itself against a brutal dictator.’
Open rumours going around, not just Hungary, but many Anglo and European conservatives have been compromised and worse, act as ‘Kremlin cutouts’; no wonder so many look paranoid?
PS Steve has established my main critique of his view. Men, particularly those who belong to all or most of the default categories – White Christian Cishet Middle class, are wont to discount the value those of us in the traditionally disempowered categories might invest in a philosophical liberal critique. (While not accepting the whole.)
Anyone saying the right is not the problem, but centrist (liberals) are, is not watching the international trajectory or doesn’t care. You aren’t set to lose control of your own body, Steve. You aren’t set to be made illegal or perhaps shot in the street because you are a (mythical) danger to children. You aren’t set to be violently deported as a non-White citizen alongside migrants. All of these things are on the cards in America if Trump wins. Aspects of them are on the cards in different weightings around Europe. Australia’s “conservative” parties are emulating them. They won’t have power to do these things yet. If you base your political plans on the next election cycle, however, you’re reckless. Climate will push this all into our scope if we don’t work out how to prevent it.
Socialists: some have been our allies, many haven’t.
I’m not committed to any one faction because I don’t trust any of them to be fully intersectional (including a class analysis). We need to overhaul the system thoroughly. The Right is the imminent danger to all the disempowered categories in the meantime.
Lucy, you might recall that I stated that fear of the Right is not baseless.
So of course sections of the Right discriminate against minorities and the powerless. But when you put all white Christian middle-class men in one basket, as you have done, you’ve done yourself a disservice.
All of the violence you anticipate is not “on the cards” as you say if Trump wins. It’s happening now in the US, but is Trump in power? These things are happening in all liberal democracies, so how effective has your liberalism been in curbing this?
You say “Australia’s conservative parties are emulating them. They won’t have power to do these things yet.”
C’mon now, hate crimes have been going on for decades here, in fact, about twenty years ago NSW was a hot-spot for hate crimes.
By looking for enemies on the Right you are diverting attention from the failures of liberal democracy. Liberalism has not protected minorities because a fractured society is cornerstone of liberalism.
It’s liberalism that has you living in a state of fear.
A Hobbesian world of fear and mistrust is not a target for liberalism to eliminate — it’s a target to achieve, to aim for. It’s where liberals feel comfortable.
Because liberalism Lucy, is a form of sociopathy.
Tone the Botty was President of the Board of Trade for Boris Johnson, and he made a pig’s ear of it. Only an idiot would have farted, “Don’t worry about crashing out of the EU without a trade deal.” In fact, only an idiot would have voted Leave to Brexit.
Let’s not forget that Tone the Botty hung around Dennis Napthine like a fart in a spacesuit and would have had a greater audience if he’d put an onion down the seat of his pants (a reference to a joke about a guy who asked a bartender for advice and who was told to get a potato and put it down his pants, and when people turned away from him, he confronted the bartender, who said, “Down the front, Stupid!”). Excuse my humour, but a commonality between Tone the Botty and a sewer is that both are full of shit.
Let’s look further at the sociopathy of liberalism.
Why is it, do you think, that liberals have such a high regard for “the rule of law”?
It’s because liberalism, based as it is on the right of individuals to pursue self-interest, i.e, the right of individuals to put self-interest ahead of community interest, (a fact that they all admit) cannot have an ethical base. Ethical standards are group-based, a social glue so to speak, a set of standards that protect society. So individualism, by definition, cannot have an ethical base.
Liberals accepted the warped view, the utterly incorrect view of Thomas Hobbes, that people in their natural state are fearful of each other and will harm each other in satisfying their personal needs. The natural state as Hobbes put it, is “a war of all against all.” This is a denial of our evolutionary history, which is a history of sharing and mutual aid.
So liberals, being sociopaths with no concept of empathy, (we see it in Gaza right now) seek security in the legal system. The legal system is their substitute ethical system. Wrapping themselves in their rule of law security blanket is their only means to feel safe, because devoid of empathy, they cannot trust other members of society. They see other members of society as being copies of themselves. To a liberal, another member of society is just another selfish bastard ready to take them down.
If you think I’m overstating my case, consider this from possibly the best known and best credentialed liberal of the 20th century, Milton Friedman.
“Liberalism, as it developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and flowered in the nineteenth, puts major emphasis on the freedom of individuals to control their own destinies. Individualism is its creed… The state exists to protect individuals from coercion by other individuals or groups and to widen the range within which individuals can exercise their freedom; it is purely instrumental and has no significance in and of itself. Society is a collection of individuals, and the whole is no greater than the sum of its parts. The ultimate values are the values of the individuals who form the society; there are no super-individual values or ends.” (From “Milton Friedman On Freedom”, Hoover Press.)
Straight from the horse’s mouth. It could not be plainer.
So they then go further down the path of delusion by telling themselves that the rule of law gives them freedom. The opposite is the case. As Marx explained, laws do not provide freedom, laws put limits on freedom.
So, even while wrapped up, tied up and bound in their own tangle of laws, they proclaim liberty as the highest ideal, when in fact their liberty is no more than a justification for infantile self-indulgence and satisfaction.
Thanks Lucy,
I’m glad to be kept up to date with the manoeuvres of potty-boy Abbott, and his global transmission of foot-in-mouth disease. He’s a curse upon Oz as a seeks to trade on the allegedly once ‘good name’ and ‘fair go’ of the hard-doers of Oz of yesteryear. Lest, just like Murdoch before him, becomes a scourge and scum of the Anglosphere.
They opportunistically absent themselves from Oz, where they once would be subject to the unremitting piss-take, bringing down their self-interest and grandiosity, and flee to the ‘West’ which doesn’t reckon with irony and the piss-take. They hide out amongst fascist extremists, absolutists, oligarchs, budding plutocrats and the flunkies of neoliberalism, peddling faux gravitas, for fame, infamy or whatever, in any case just for the power of a buck.
As post-WWII cooperative reconstruction and hope of reform and paradise progressed, increasingly the freebooters, old industrialists, and budding oligarchs and plutocrats coalesced to run a con job on us all. They didn’t want universal equity and equilibrium, as this was anathema to their notions of supremacy and righteousness. They set about press-ganging and or bribing separatists and god botherers to their process of coercive control of governments around the world, undermining regulation and legislation under the auspices of more efficient privatized free-market determinism and conflicted individualism powered by bling and lollies. It worked, and they sat back fashioning troughs whilst accumulating much of the worlds wealth and assets in a sea of anti-science wreckage. But ho! Surprise, surprise, they can’t do or even recognize projects without the upwards needs-based drive of the populace through the guidance of peoples parliaments. So as strangulation and stagnation has set in, they screech and squeal as they fall victim to the attrition of their own greedy supremacist devices.
Whatever they call themselves, and however they describe their ideologies, doesn’t really matter, their purpose remains easily recognizable – they are traditionailist anti-social psychotic despot promoters. They are as scum agglomerating on the inert pond of their own making, and as they now reach critical mass they will sink to the bottom as a toxic and virulent mud.
IMO it pays to always keep a whether eye on them in case they transmogrify into gorgon or godzilla, until they and their sprog have been metamorphosed to stone by their own hell for eternity.
And I believe that’s a long time.
For Services Australia and ACOSS
Amanda Rishworth and Cassandra Goldie,
You have to publicly acknowledge 2 illegal debt schemes administered by Services Australia.
Scheme #1. Fake Review scheme. Instead of a formal review decision, Services Australia sent me an objection decision by an anonymous “delegate or authorised officer”. This is illegal.
Scheme #2. Family Assistance Office automatically issue debt notices for a full Rent Assistance, if a parent was ineligible for FTB. This is illegal. Instead of a debt for around 15% of Rent assistance (dependent on FTB), FAO demands the rest 85% of Rent Assistance as well.
Both Services Australia and ACOSS refused to answer simple questions regarding legality of the schemes or debt notices I received.
Amanda Rishworth and Cassandra Goldie, you have to comment this information.
The rabbott is no lying rodent in Australia and his stories of ‘stop the boat’ refugees, are of minimal use to Europeans.
He may sound good to the converted but he is no matteo and cannot recruit.
It’s time we took a deeper dive into the greatest confidence trick in human history.
Liberalism, as discussed earlier, developed from a mistaken view of society, a view held by those whose asocial foundations leave them anxious, even fearful of other members of society who intend them no harm. As a consequence there is no upside to liberalism. There cannot be any — it’s founded on misconceptions.
Liberalism is a virus. It affects the way people think. It works on the remnant selfishness that we do not completely expel as we mature. It even colonises the minds of those who do not see themselves as liberals.
Based as it is on a potent mix of two common human frailties, selfishness and anxiety, liberalism uses anxiety as a tool and engenders anxiety in those it infects. That’s how liberals get into government.
In the era of the Soviet Union, they used fear of communism. Reds under the bed. They’re gunna take all yer got. With the Soviets gone, a phony war on drugs became the next big fear. That lasted about 5 minutes until the role of a certain liberal democracy in the drug trade became too visible to hide. So terrorism became the next fear, but it soon became clear that much of the terrorism was also organised by the liberal democracies, (ISIS, Gladio etc.)
From The Guardian 4th June 2015 “On Monday the trial in London of a Swedish man, Bherlin Gildo, accused of terrorism in Syria, collapsed after it became clear British intelligence had been arming the same rebel groups the defendant was charged with supporting.” You couldn’t make this stuff up.
So it’s now a fear of the Right. Not the Right at home of course, fear of the despicable foreign Right. The Right that operates with scant regard for the oh-so-civilisational refinements of liberalism. The domestic Right is exempt from this — far too useful when political alliances are needed.
Lucy’s fear of our domestic Right is misplaced.
The chances of a Meloni getting control here are slim to zero. We are protected by our preferential voting system.
We’ve had a string of clowns from the Right trying to gain influence here for decades. They all flounder in the end, even those who are flush with funds.
So do not succumb to the anxiety virus that’s trying to colonise your mind. Because while distracted by anxiety, while you carefully study the antics of the Right as Lucy instructs, the plunderers behind the global financial system are creating new realities for you to study.
Your passivity is their goal.
Steve. Your definition once again limits you. That’s fine. You do you.
(a) the aspects of the Right I’m describing are happening in America now, only sometimes because of Biden. The Red states have taken power by a series of anti-democratic strategies built on an anti-democratic electoral system. They are already implementing a range of the actions that Trump’s cohort of creeps aim to make national. Police and other armed groups are largely filled with MAGAts: the treatment of student protesters is as much down to that as it is to university administrators scared of losing critical donors and/or their careers. The Dems are centre/right on the whole which is a big problem, but the capture of the democratic process that the Republicans have enacted out of liberal/left complaisance has meant that Dems are usually shackled. eg. Obama thought a universal healthcare system wouldn’t swing with the GOP, so he used a Republican model in the ACA to try to make it bipartisan. We saw how that worked out. (He was only just starting to understand how hard the GOP had been captured by the neofash over those years too. Read Dark Money.) The point that it is set to go national is the one I’m trying to make about America.
(b) as I’ve said before, the neofeudalists who crept out of the Mont Pelerin Society and Chicago have been working to destroy the nastily socialist (eyeroll) project of democracy since the New Deal. They have created the consensus within which the centre/left aims to operate. They have most of the money and ruthless indifference to whom they hurt on their side. The centre/left parties have been shackled by the power of the (bunk) narrative of how economies operate and the power of the neofeudalists to break the centre/left’s chance at power. They cower in fear of reprisals.
Since the earliest days of capitalism, capital has been ready to break worker strength with everything it has. That’s not a portrait of the philosophy of liberalism. (As ideas to build on, not set in stone.)
Again: the liberal political position is untenable. Structural change is imperative.
Lucy, I agree with much of what you say.
We simply differ a little on motives, intentions, how we got to where we are, and how to arrive at a remedy.
Actually, now that I’ve written that, it seems we differ on quite a few things! 🙂
I opened myself up to criticism by suggesting a means of curtailing the power of those who dream of domination.
Can I suggest you do the same.
Thanks.
Steve,
Thanks for the views in your comment. Of course, I can only speak for myself, but I certainly don’t operate on a level of anxiety, nor do I see much evidence of the authors or most other commentators demonstrating capture by an anxiety virus.
A view of history and the wider world is essential to putting the now into context, and from there making assessments of the actions, policies and prognostications of politicians, commentators and theoreticians that seek to control and influence us. Thank goodness today we have a huge well of commonly available historical writings and musings upon which to draw, and also a huge stream of art and literature upon which to cogitate. And amongst that, a broad and matured range of sciences, and epistemological processes available.
Given the above, there would appear to be much to draw upon in a bid to understand cause and effect, and to wrangle the vast machinations we humans are capable of in the creation of abstractions. Promulgating information we have, and our analysis of it, can serve a multiplicity of purposes; just providing information prima facie, seeking to understand imposed ‘rules’, evolving a story for story’s sake, sending messages into the ether – maybe to gods, eliciting group-think, contesting the promulgations of others or what we might consider to be the status quo, or maybe just testing ourselves for cognitive biases.
That we dream, have dreams and nightmares, are able to do art and be subject to hallucinations may reveal that our thinking and the tags we put on things may be influenced by inference and metaphor. Just so, we entertain not only ethos and logos, but the muses, pathos, comedy and absurdity.
But surely none of this means that we have to respond passively, impassively or be infected by an anxiety virus. That time passes and we compare existence and its vicissitudes to what we might perceive as our grounded home, does not have to mean we are lost or astray, nor that we ought use the agency of others to ‘fix’ things. Maybe we can just take our chances as opportunity presents, or as we have a mind to.
Nevertheless, try as we might in our quest to understand all the components and levers of univesral betterment, altruism and freedom, it seems we are bound not only by our pressing need for nourishment, but also our own ideas, and those of others. Perhaps that’s what we really want, as opposed to somehow dwelling with our invention of alternative paradoxes and our short lives?
Clakka, many good thoughts there.
Yes, the “anxiety virus” was a bit of poetic license, a rhetorical flourish, but it did the trick — it made an impression even though it did not resonate. It got you thinking. And as metaphors go, it’s actually not too bad.
Although anxiety is a tool used across the political board, the virus aspect applies particularly well for liberalism, due to libs accepting the Hobbes view of society. Anxiety permeated the thinking of Hobbes, and it permeates the thinking of liberals. It can be extremely subtle, which is probably why you’ve missed it.
A great example of its subtle use is seen in the redefining of economics by liberals. It is now taught as the study of scarcity.
Not only is this a misleading distortion — the original definition was perfectly adequate and realistic — it’s a harmful distortion because every economics student now is infected with anxiety from day one of their studies. The degree will vary of course, but how much innovation and insight will such students produce? Very little. Anxiety is a stifler, not a facilitator. Worse still, when they graduate, they’ll all be perfect little liberals! 🙂
The scarcity definition is a great example of “reduction beyond the point where analysis is useful”, as the great Ernst Mayer said of gene-centrism in evolutionary biology. Concision is not always a virtue.
I have a book on liberal philosophy that was published by the Australian Libs, and it expresses the Hobbes view of society, without mentioning his name. In fact, they were extremely coy about their philosophical roots, which is telling in itself. I have a feeling that this discussion has a bit further to go, so I’ll have to dig it out. After all, I can understand the scepticism of someone learning for the first time of the shaky foundations of a major political brand.
Just wonder, “Israel is Australia’s Orban”
Never mind, I am being whimsical.
This is the year so much went down the tube.
If you want to see a good example of inducing anxiety amongst the centre middle class and especially older voters see ‘The Brainwashing of my Dad’ where fringe media outlets nudge the mainstream further to the right; it’s been going on in ‘plain sight’.
Not unlike the more recent and supposedly centrist IDW ‘intellectual dark web’, but ‘social-Darwinist’ and linked to Koch (who else?), that simply complains about the centre, but disappears the right, with its fringe and extremist policy views?
The doc ‘The Brainwashing of my Dad’ focuses upon the influence of Roger Ailes, John Birch Society and Atlas-Koch Network think tanks, employed by Fox News to denigrate the liberal centre; includes Tanton Network agitprop recent years via Tucker Carlson and consultant Peter Brimelow, both friendly with dec. white nationalist, white Oz admirer, visitor and hosted by SPA, John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton’.
Synopsis: ‘As Jen Senko tries to understand the transformation of her father from a nonpolitical Democrat to an angry Republican fanatic, she uncovers the forces behind the media that changed him completely: a plan by Roger Ailes under President Richard Nixon for a media takeover by the Republicans, the 1971 Powell Memo urging business leaders to influence institutions of public opinion (especially the media, universities, and courts), the 1987 dismantling of the Fairness Doctrine under President Ronald Reagan, and the signing of the 1996 Telecommunications Act under President Bill Clinton.’ (Wiki)
https://www.thebrainwashingofmydad.com/
Hmmmm.
I have connections in not only my mind, but also otherwise, not only to the place of my birth and infancy, but also to the more than forty places I have lived and the more than forty countries I have traversed. Apparently such inclination for me was innate, and was demonstrated for my beginning.
I have lived my life by moving about mostly by inspiration, and sometimes by design, and a few times seeking opportunity. Although I have been where I am for more than my typical three year max, my connections are not diminished, but continue to enhance my existence.
I have had guns pointed at me, been interrogated and incarcerated, cajoled, coerced and imposed upon, none of which have diminished my existence. More than anything my life has been enriched by ordinary folk demonstrating their living, and the creatures, land and atmosphere of their surrounds.
As I find myself here, I find myself intrigued by the people and processes that would have folk remain still, limit them or send them away. The opportunity to listen and in turn tell my story is rewarding as I get to know myself and my surrounds better, and muse about how my occasional recklessness can result in a momentary hiatus, but such is the risk of the unknown, given perfection is a nonsense.
Clakka, not to be too mechanistic in crunching the numbers, but three year domiciles multiplied by ~40 gets a number in the order of 120, not counting the formative years when presumably you stayed put for longer than the triplet number. Are you really that old? Does the Guinness Book of Records have you on their wait-list?
The Liberal Party publication titled Liberal Thinking is a gem, a treasure trove of insights into the fallacious foundations of liberalism itself.
In the first words of the chapter titled The Ethics and Ideals of Liberalism, (P.14) we see this, “Political philosophies tend to go hand in hand with ethical theories. Historically however, liberalism has been associated with a diversity of such theories. It would, accordingly, be unrewarding to try here to discover the ethical framework in which liberalism should be placed. It would also be unrewarding here to delve too deeply into the philosophical validity of various ethical theories.”
Unrewarding?? In a book on liberal thinking? So there it is, straight from the horse’s mouth — liberals do not want to talk about ethics and philosophy. And for good reason. I’ve argued previously that liberalism, being based on individualism, cannot have an ethical base, by definition.
I stated in an earlier comment that the book made no mention of Hobbes, but my memory let me down. I found in the Epilogue a list of quotations that the authors made clear do not form an official liberal philosophical framework, but which “we feel in some way encapsulates a thought with which liberals would fundamentally agree.”
Among these thoughts that they like but don’t have the courage to endorse, was a shortened version of the most famous quote from Hobbes. Here is the book quote.
“(The state of nature.) no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes concluded from this nonsense that our original state was “a war of all against all.”
Not only is this unforgivably ignorant, being a denial of evolutionary history, but it re-surfaced in Liberal Thinking p.134 — “Liberal philosophers have long maintained that it is possible to create order out of anarchy, and that the state of nature in which force rather than law holds sway, can be turned into a peaceful and orderly community.”
And that’s where the problem started. The liberal fear of anarchy. Which is of course, derived from the inability of sociopaths to assume that others might have good intentions. The assumption that everyone thinks as they do — that everyone’s out to get yer. Whether liberals like to admit it or not, the false Hobbes view of the state of nature was included because they see it as relevant. That it states a truth.
Here’s a few more pearls from Hobbes to give you the flavour.
“Man is by nature more individualistic than social.”
“Humans are driven by a perpetual and restless desire of power.”
“All in their natural condition are possessed of the will to injure others.”
“The origin of all great and lasting societies consisted not in the mutual good will men had toward each other, but in the mutual fear they had of each other.”
This fear, this sociopathy was evident in the quote from Milton Friedman that I gave earlier. It’s worth presenting again to show how pervasive the Hobbes influence is, centuries later.
“Liberalism, as it developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and flowered in the nineteenth, puts major emphasis on the freedom of individuals to control their own destinies. Individualism is its creed… The state exists to protect individuals from coercion by other individuals or groups and to widen the range within which individuals can exercise their freedom; it is purely instrumental and has no significance in and of itself. Society is a collection of individuals, and the whole is no greater than the sum of its parts. The ultimate values are the values of the individuals who form the society; there are no super-individual values or ends.”
It’s clear from this that liberalism is no more than primitive Hobbesian thought that has been forced to conform to changes in knowledge and contemporary views over time, but which has retained all the stifling negativity that we would expect from one who suffered all his life from fear and anxiety.
Hobbes was born prematurely when his mother heard of the coming of the Spanish Armada, and he later reported that “my mother gave birth to twins — myself and fear.” His father abandoned the family when Hobbes was young. He witnessed his country tear itself apart in civil war when in exile in Paris. Fear was to be a recurring element in his life.
Cangaru,
Ha ha ha haaar. Very good, except, I said ” … my typical three year max …”. I guess you might have been a tad mechanistic, whilst overlooking the abbreviation max. Numerous were in fact, weeks. But if lengthy, I typically moved on before or about the expiry of three years. Hardly worth counting my growth rings, or tapping the Guiness Book of Records for.
🙂
Clakka… well responded, and yes… I knew there’d be more to the story than simply trudging down the timeline on a mechanistic basis of three years here, three there and so on. I had a brain fart several years ago when I thought it might be an interesting challenge to put together a memoir of sorts, an account of a life derailed or something along those lines; the preparatory work of assembling the basic details gave me a list of close to 80 discrete and separate locations that I’d called ‘home’ (for want of a better word) up that point, along with 52 discrete and separate periods of employment, across four Australian states and two overseas countries.
And as for “I have had guns pointed at me, been interrogated and incarcerated, cajoled, coerced and imposed upon, none of which have diminished my existence. More than anything my life has been enriched by ordinary folk demonstrating their living, and the creatures, land and atmosphere of their surrounds.”… yes, yes, yes, yes and yes.
Brothers in arms, it seems, or harms, charms, alarms.
Steve,
Interesting commentary about the Liberal Party, Hobbes and Friedman, and ethos / philosophy.
Where I say “I have had guns pointed at me, been interrogated and incarcerated, cajoled, coerced and imposed upon.”, I add that in all cases, those actions were perpetrated by desperate drugged pirates, ill-informed officials of state, bounty hunters and militia, all responding to implanted fear. And it seems to me that they afforded me my liberty because I had nothing to hide, didn’t challenge their fear and remained patient. That’s not to say I was unaware of the presence of risk.
And where I say, ” … my life has been enriched by ordinary folk demonstrating their living, and the creatures, land and atmosphere of their surrounds.”, I add that they were aware of the presence of risk, and would usually convey to me the nature of those risks, and where they emanated from people, the m.o. used by those people to trade in peril.
The vast majority of those ordinary folk were not trading scores with me, but rather with wit swapping with me stories of their lot, and my lot from my place of origin – how we both might thrive amid the idiosyncrasies and constraints.
That we form co-operative alignments for bettterment and exercise of our altruistic nature, it’s weird but no surprise, that as those alignments grow and succeed, supremacist outliers try to capture the process, and weirder still that they invent and interpose a new language to affect that capture. Is it the socialized inner language of their obsessive psychopathy? Is it so powerful that they engender a madding crowd, that this way or that way abdicates its responsibilities and reasoning to such demagogues whose usual m.o. is to divide and conquer?
Perhaps it’s rooted in physics, for every force there’s an equal and opposite force? In any case, it seems that the network of webs has become more entangled and ubiquitous. And with the complexities, an ever increasing pile on of sophistry just so the demagogues may differentiate each other. It’s surely not about them, but about ordinary folk and their incredibly useful networks. Maybe we are drawn to lose sight of our ingeniousness and those networks, by the sticky wiles and sophistry of the demagogues’ creating a mirage of their necessity. Perhaps we have become increasingly conned into not obtaining improvement from the bottom up, but rather in vain hope nihilistically swapping demagogues.
As Satre mused that we may have developed fear of freedom itself, it begs a few questions, “What is thought of as freedom?” and “At what point did we develop that fear and why?”
Nina Simone on freedom & fear…
Clakka, your final question is a beauty.
I read something relevant to it yesterday, and thought that it’s worth pursuing, but I’m travelling at the moment, so it might be a few days before I can say anything useful, if at all.
Cheers…
“No Fear.”
Canguro, that’s excellent. Thank you.
Yes Canguro.
Where would we be had Zarathustra been mute?
Like Nina, we probably can’t explain it, just recognize the feeling, to play out like children.
No fear.
Sorry folks, music is like drugs for me, and Nina is one that I can’t get enough of…
Come in at 1.20 if you want to see the action.
Yesterday I tried to befriend a juvenile Black Shouldered Kite that was loitering round one of my worksites. It politely told me to back the phuq off. https://photos.app.goo.gl/p8RKeu2aN8NZpMLg6