There isn’t much about the mainstream media that is impressive these days, but it does deserve credit for seizing opportunities to promote an agenda with co-ordinated speed and skill whenever they arise.
Then again, maybe this isn’t so impressive after all. The media discarded most of its integrity, intellect and cultural kudos during the Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates, if not before, so all it’s got left now is the ability to react quickly and cleanly whenever its shadowy puppet-masters deem it necessary.
It gave us a textbook demonstration of that yesterday. No sooner had several people booed “Uncle” Mark Brown for conducting a “Welcome to Country” during the Dawn Service at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne than the media responded in lockstep to reduce its focus of the protest to one person and remind Australians repeatedly that the man is a “neo-Nazi”.
Channel Nine, The Australian, Sky News, The Herald Sun, The Age and of course the ABC responded as one. If you didn’t know that the “Welcome to Country” had been invented by Ernie Dingo in 1976, you could be forgiven for thinking it was as integral to the Anzac Day Dawn Service as The Last Post and coffee served with a shot of rum afterwards, such was the indignation with which the media reported this act of abominable insolence.
“The solemn mood of the event was broken,” the ABC lamented in a rare moment of patriotic fervour.
The disruption was “completely inappropriate and disgusting,” federal Veterans Affairs Minister Matt Keogh was quoted saying in The Herald Sun.
“To pierce the sombre silence of the dawn service is… disrespectful,” Victorian Premier Jacinta Allen was quoted saying in The Australian.
And so on.
The main culprit, Jacob Hersant, was routinely described as a “prominent neo-Nazi”. I can’t have been the only person who needed to Google him to find out how “prominent” he was, and how terrified I should be about the presence of this “neo-Nazism” in my midst.
Not very on both counts, as it happens. People like Hersant seem to be willingly playing the villains in a media pantomime that mashes 1930s Germany with 21st century Australia.
They hide behind cupboards or under staircases and then jump out yelling “Seig Heil!” to frighten the innocent damsel or frail grandmother while the audience gasps then laughs when the villains get their comeuppance by appearing like losers on the front page of the newspaper.
The dramatic conceit as far as the media is concerned is that Australia is just a goose step away from hosting its own Nuremberg rallies, such is the depth of the racism that lingers just beneath the surface of our deceptively peaceful country. Only journalistic diligence is preventing Hersant from brainwashing the media’s own readers and viewers from putting on brown shirts and hitting the streets to hunt down Jews.
It’s a little insulting, don’t you think? No wonder the media is in a death spiral of its own.
The point that journalists, in their haste to beat up this story, failed to contemplate is that you don’t need to be a “neo-Nazi” to think the “Welcome to Country” is stupid. It’s bad enough hearing it every time a Qantas plane lands on home soil, but as an introduction to the most solemn event of the year it’s about as appropriate as a trampoline at a nudist colony.
Nevertheless, journalists and politicians soldiered on, as if by staunchly vilifying a popular opinion they are as courageous as the fallen Diggers themselves, fighting the eternally brutal war against fascism.
“Anzac Day honours the values our Anzacs lived and died for: courage, loyalty, mateship, and sacrifice,” Jacinta Allen said. She deliberately omitted the other quality they died for — freedom — because, as one of the architects of Victoria’s draconian Covid lockdown, which we now know was as proportional a response to a mild flu as Hitler’s kristallnacht was to the assassination of a German diplomat by a Jewish teenager, that would have exposed her hypocrisy.
Albo was as quick to jump on the bandwagon. “What occurred at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance and Kings Park in Perth was a disgrace,” he said.
“There is no place in Australia for what occurred. The disruption of Anzac Day is beyond contempt, and the people responsible must face the full force of the law.”
It’s a pity that Albo doesn’t think the same laws should apply to thugs who chanted “Gas the Jews” on the steps of the Opera House on 8 October 2023, or who say that participating in a democracy is a fundamental sin against Islam, as Sydney preacher Wissam Haddad recently announced on social media, describing the act of voting as a type of polytheism that is “far worse than possible benefits”.
Actually, in Haddad’s defence, he is half right. There aren’t many benefits to be had from voting for the crop of party hacks and anonymous retards vying for our votes at this election, but on a wider level he’s being far more provocative than the likes of Hersant and his “neo-Nazi” friends could ever be.
What’s worse, declaring democracy to be a sin or wishing that we could be relieved of the tiresome welcome to our own country even during the most solemn moment?
You know the answer to that. But the laws to which Albo refers were passed by parliament to punish only people like Hersant. The real opponents of freedom, the types our Diggers died fighting, have nothing to worry about these days.
