Turn on a TV, read a paper or fire up a browser these days, you're going to see the same tale told across the world. Violent, incendiary protests against austerity in Greece, Occupy Wall Street in the States, French austerity protests, revolution in Libya, uprising in Syria, activists jailed in China, pampered family deriding the Kim Jong Il dictatorship in North Korea. Baha'i people are airing their grievances with the Iranian theocracy to the world. Bolivians march against their own government to protect the Amazon. Just yesterday, news broke of Indon forces opening fire at a West Papuan congress, another subjugated people the victim of brutal repression.
The world is changing, and everywhere the apparatus of a lazy state fights back. Against its own people. Wars seem passé now. The big trend for Presidents and Prime Ministers and Generals and dictators of all stripes seems to be the sometimes brutal control of your own people. In smaller or poorer countries, brute squads of savage soldiers are assembled to shoot, burn, beat, rape and torture people to keep them in line. In the west, we're a bit more slick. We hastily change laws to suit ourselves, and pass internet monitoring laws - ostensibly for the prevention of crime, but who really believes that these days? Most internet monitoring or censorship laws have proven empirically to target political blogs and activists, not hate groups, not fringe religious groups. No, crime is a pretext to shut the hell up anyone who disagrees with you.
Where will this lead? The uprisings and protests and dissatisfactions aren't going to just vanish. The revolution in Libya might be over, with the recent capture of Moammar Gadaffi, but they're a long road from putting their house in order. Syria meanwhile is just now coming to a boil. Greeks aren't going to just lie down and accept austerity. Unless something else gives, Greece is likely to burn down to the ground before that happens.
I tend to think one of two things are about to happen. Either all of these many struggles are going to be lost, and the forces of oppression get another round of control for a few years, or we're about to enter a radically different world. Can you imagine a US without the Koch brothers or Bank of America or a marauding Fed Reserve? How about a starving North Korea who rise en masse to violently overthrow the Kim family? What about a secular Iran? A democratic, capitalist China? What about all the world's most corrupt bankers jailed, and the debts erased?
And Australia, perched nervously in the corner like a straight country boy at an inner city gay bar. Trying to pretend everything is fine, everything is normal. Where are we going to fit?
What happens to us if the US implodes? What happens to us if the old communist guard in China die out and are replaced by a generation of democratic young turks? We're not very good at most of the things we do. Our one attempt at internet control fizzled out pretty ordinarily. Our protests are civil enough that no anonymous white-shirted cops are called out to violate our rights, and beat the ever-living crap out of us. Even our corruption is lazy. Whether it's an ALP pollie hiring hookers, or an ombudsman writing his own questions for an inquiry just so he can give our government a serve, our corruption is pretty piss-poor.
The protests and the uprisings and the anger are not going to go away. A lot of these issues have been buried too deep for too long, for people to just give up and forget. While Australia stands in the corner and nurses a warming beer, the rest of the world is changing rapidly before our eyes. We just have to decide what side we want to be on. Do we throw away our Labor and Coalition business as usual cronyism and join in with the sentiment of revolution and change? Do we allow our particular brand of lazy democracy to bubble along, and see how much more craven and self-serving it can get? Or do we do the classically Australian thing of pretending everything is normal, and wait and see what everyone else does?
Everything is not normal. The world is changing. We are living in momentous times. Do we accept change and steer it towards a good result, or do we allow ourselves to get swept along?
To quote a certain fictional Time Lord 'Time will tell, it always does.'
0 comments:
Post a Comment