Fascism puts Left foot forward

CALLING Prime Minister John Howard a fascist has become quite chic among certain people.

You know the sort I mean ö the people now ignoring the far more alarming words of Labor hero Paul Keating. This week, for instance, a Queensland University history lecturer, Dr Andrew Bonnell, wrote to the Australian to compare the Howard Government's alleged censorship of critics with that of Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels.

Earlier this month, prominent Sydney Morning Herald columnist Alan Ramsey likewise compared the Government to the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini under the headline: "Here and there, the signs of tyranny".

And in evidence this month to a Senate inquiry, the NSW Industrial Relations Minister, Labor's John Della Bosca, swore that Howard's new workplace laws were "very close to fascism".

Oh, and don't forget last month's rally against Howard's anti-terrorism laws, in which Greens leader Bob Brown addressed demonstrators carrying signs such as "rest to Fascism".

All this jumping at shadows, yet when a true voice of state oppression speaks, the same critics go deaf.

Fascism is in fact an ideology of the Left, as Hitler (the Nazi Socialist) and Mussolini (the former editor of Italy's official Socialist newspaper Avanti) showed.

And it's the Left that still gives us plans to join Big Government to Big Unions and Big Business to bully small citizens. It's still the Left that gives us most of our street-battle protests.

It's still the Left that can give us political leaders such as Brown, who endorsed the violent blockade of a World Economic Forum meeting in Melbourne on September 11, 2000, and former Labor leader Mark Latham, who preached hatred, attacked civility as a plot against the poor and boasted of breaking a taxi driver's arm.

And it's the Left which gave us former Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating, who said this month he'd have locked up Governor-General Sir John Kerr rather than let him sack Gough Whitlam's Labor Government in 1975.

Speaking at a book launch, Keating said he'd told a Labor colleague at the time "we should put Kerr immediately under house arrest". His audience of sympathisers laughed and clapped in approval, but Keating added: "Oh, I meant it, I meant it. And had I been Prime Minister, I certainly would've."

I have seen not a word of criticism of Keating's talk of locking up our effective head of state, presumably with the army's help. Maybe what is fascism in a Liberal is sweet revolution in Labor.

If you think Keating just had a brain spasm, I should add he also appeared last week on the ABC Late Night Live show of his adoring disciple, Phillip Adams, to discuss Jack Lang, the NSW Premier who was himself sacked by a Governor, Sir Philip Game, in 1932.

This time Keating said he was sorry that Lang, his old mentor, didn't "stand Game up" and resist.

Lang had told him he hadn't wanted his state police fighting the army, but Keating said that was "not a convincing answer".

Lang had just felt "he didn't have enough political authority to lock Game up ... but the pity was that he never tried. That's the real pity". If a Game or Kerr "criminalise themselves in this way, they should be dealt with accordingly".

Once again, no one criticised Keating's call for political force, if not possible civil war. Adams, the unapologetic former member of the Communist Party, certainly was unshocked.

I agree, fascism is sinister. But the Howard haters who claim to fear it most should turn around to confront the real dangers behind them.

HeraldSun