[ Cranky Lizard acknowledges the Wall Street Journal article published on 16 February 2020 from which material has been drawn for this article by Cranky Lizard.]
Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Party of the United States of America’s leading candidate in the current Presidential race, is a life long Marxist. He had his honeymoon in the Soviet Union in 1988, declaring the place to be a modern political wonder where housing costs were 5% of the average Soviet income compared to 40% of the average USA income.
He missed the two-bedroom apartments in Moscow with up to five families living in them!
So what? You may ask. What has this got to do with Australia?
Well, it has a hell of a lot to do with Australia.
And here is why.
This man trashes his nation; he calls the USA a racist society from top to bottom, his radical policies of health, housing and power generation have attracted millennials who have not lived long enough to understand the nonsense of what this man promises.
How did this man, the antipathy of almost everything the United States of America stand for, get into the position that he is?
Well, the answer to that is what is relevant to this country.
He has had the cooperation of the Democrats, in Australia, read the Labor Party and the left-wing individuals who dominate our media and university campuses.
Rather than challenge the ideas, the high taxing nonsense [ remember that from Shorten and Bowen? ] the media and the academics have indulged and promoted Sanders and his weird plans because it suits them to do so.
They have created the political atmosphere, in which he has prospered, and we see the same events unfold here in Australia.
In 2008 the left-wing blamed the panic and crash of the financial markets on capitalism, not, as it should have been, on poor monetary policy, subsidies for bad housing risks and failed government regulation. The attack on capitalism and the markets from which wealth grows continues today, supported by the majority of the universities and the media in Australia.
In particular, there has been a determined and significant rise of left-wing intolerance on campus; curricular has been re-written to suit the ideological fashions, history has been dogmatized and Western democratic tradition has been twisted, distorted and even purged. Witness the destruction of historic figure statues on campus in the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Similar events are unfolding in Australia; the mainstream media, except for a few voices has acquiesced, even encouraged, these trends. Mainly because they are now a product of the skewed system.
Universities have been the institutions trusted with the stories of human development, entrusted with the encouragement of untrammelled minds of our bright young scholars, expected to set the standards of scientific endeavour and debate, to determine and maintain the academic standards of our major professions and sciences, medicine, engineering, the law and the humanities.
But, we can see that first, the humanities, then the social sciences and now even the sciences have been forced to accept identity politics. Race, gender, class and sexual orientation have become the obsession of the academic pursuit of scholarship and tenure. This culture has nurtured millennials and Gen Z into the aggressive personal cultures and identity compartmentalisation and attack which pervade our mainstream media.
Identity politics achieved a ‘ second stage ‘ boost with various police shootings in the United States during 2014/2015. The world is now held in your hand on your mobile phone and the Black Lives Matter phenomena exploded into the media in Australia, Europe the UK and, of course, the USA. The Black Lives Matter movement had plenty of lascivious followers in Australia and in a period of months, years of good work in Aboriginal relations were trashed, once again, enthusiastically supported by mainstream media.
And, where was the truth in all of this? Where were the journalistic standards of probity and research required by any serious commentator on public and current affairs?
Well, those standards were trashed in the name of identity politics. The truth no longer matters in these forums. We can see the effects of these factual distortions when we see images of poor bloody kids holding up signs portraying Captain Cook invading Australia on 26 January 1776 – the truth is that Captain James Cook sailed up and down the Australian coast and landed in Botany Bay in April 1770. Sections of the academia and the media are quite happy to run with this untruth, and poor old Captain Cook has become another casualty in the mad identity politics of Australia.
Disrespect for Australian history and Australian institutions, like our National Anthem, has been fostered by this deceitful and malignant process, Cranky Lizard draws your attention to the slavish following of Aboriginal football players to show disrespect to our Flag and National Anthem because of old Jimmy Cook! Who did not even turn up on the day that they all say he did! You would think that if it was worth protesting about they would get the facts right, wouldn’t you?
And then, of course, we have the most significant moral issue of our time. A similar comment some years ago from an Australian Prime Minister grabbed our attention, but now, with the help of the passage of time, we can stare, open-mouthed in wonder at the nonsense of it all.
Climate change/ climate science has become a religion, no longer a science. There has been a generation of apocalyptic education which has turned what has always been, and always should have been, a matter of temperatures and scientific modelling into a cultural identity!
No dissent is tolerated, note the Greens suggestion for Climate Courts, marine biologists have been sacked from Australian Universities for questioning dire predictions about the death of the Great Barrier Reef…economies can be wrecked with “ Heath Robinson “ schemes of mirrors and windmills to produce baseload power. The media, here in Australia and internationally, fawn slavishly over the utterances of a Swedish teenager who was born in Stockholm, Sweden in January 2003. She is the daughter of Swedish actor Svante Thunberg and opera singer Malena Ernman, and, as far as Cranky Lizard can understand, has no particular climate or scientific credentials which confer upon her any credibility to comment on the world’s climate science – but you see – that no longer matters. It is the identity that counts and the media in Australia go cross-eyed in fervour at the mention of her name. Why?
Wild eyed madness descended on a portion of the nation’s academics, those described as ‘ climate scientists ‘ as they apportioned blame for the bush fire tragedy on politicians, particularly the Prime Minister. Even a few moments of clear thinking will tell you that Scott Morrison could not have been responsible for the green-based policies that were implemented at every level of Government in Australia for many, many years and which produced an impossible fuel load.
The term ‘ woke ‘ is used proudly to describe those amongst us who have become aware of the current issues of gender, race, climate and identity.
Cranky Lizard has another view on being ‘ woke.’
It is a shame that media institutions, for many years, respected as partial and determined to portray the news and current affairs in our Nation as it happened and as it was, have now become little more than advocates for a cause.
They no longer add to the quality of public debate in Australia, because there rarely is any – TV current affairs programmes run mutual admiration sessions around identity politics ; TV news programmes run stories on disgruntled people who are victims of whatever is going, in most cases, it will be the ‘ Gumments’ fault, no one seems responsible for their own actions anymore and our politics is sliding towards a swamp defined by race, gender and the climate.
Cranky Lizard reckons that the old ANZAC spirit of getting on with life, doing the best you can with what you have got is well and truly lost in Australia. Lost in the identity politics of the day. Lost in the notion that it is always someone else's fault and if you can’t find someone – then blame the ‘ Gumment “.
Cranky Lizard believes that if you have a go, you will get a go and that you, you alone, are responsible for actions.
Enjoy your days.