Life on the West Island - No laughing matter

Sometimes, something jumps off the page and sticks in the mind – such as a recent West Island newspaper opinion piece repeating a quote once made by a rising national leader:

It makes no difference whatever whether they laugh at us or revile us; whether they represent us as clowns or criminals; the main thing is that they mention us, that they concern themselves with us again and again…

At the time, in the mid-1920s, the author of these cynical words was widely regarded as a ludicrous figure of fun, who would never amount to much. The writer was, of course, Adolf Hitler. It seems that his words have become the guiding principle of far too many contemporary political aspirants around the world.

Writing in The Guardian, journalist and historian Adrian Chiles remarked: Everyone laughed at Hitler in the 1920s. A century on, are we making the same mistake?

Chiles was thinking in particular of the outrageous actions of politicians such a Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, widely regarded as buffoons, but he added …just because we find a political leader ludicrous, that doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous. This seems to be the case with the unbalanced narcissist Donald Trump, whose continuing outrageous behaviour is designed just to keep him in the news, no matter how disgraceful or absurd it appears to be.

A current example is his behaviour at the ongoing court case into his attempts to illegally conceal substantial hush money payments to a woman with whom he had a grubby extramarital affair. Trump has engaged in behaviour which – at least on the West Island, but probably also in the Land of the Free – would result in any ordinary citizen spending time behind bars for blatant contempt of court. This has included public attacks on individual jurors, daily public rants about the judge, court officials and witnesses in openly defamatory terms and the publishing online of private details of the families of many other parties to the case. Trump claims to be exempt from the rules which apply to everyone else and even asserts that as an ex-President he is immune from prosecution for criminal acts.

This behaviour has no justification in truth or in law, but does generate a flood of media coverage, which is the lifeblood of unbalanced megalomaniacs like Trump – modelled on Hitler’s observation a century ago. In their view, any news is good news. Or, as Oscar Wilde famously opined, there is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. Winston Churchill took a slightly more nuanced position when he said, a fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. In Trump’s case, the fanatical subject is of course himself.

It doesn’t take long to identify West Island politicians and political aspirants who would do anything to stay in the public eye, no matter how ridiculous their actions might be, or how much their policies are based on lies or totally unproven hypotheses. A quick viewing of Sky After Dark will identify a host of them, many of whom use other platforms as well to spread misinformation and to scare their audiences.

Pauline Hanson springs to mind, along with Gina Rinehart, Clive Palmer and Alan Jones. But not all are from the hard fringe of the right. Jacquie Lambie is not beyond using histrionics to gather eyeballs and clicks, even though she openly admitted to being leader of a policy-free group in the recent Apple Isle election. Mild-mannered Andrew Wilkie recently appeared in the halls of parliament dressed as a pig, admittedly in the company of stunt-prone Bob Katter – but in Wilkie’s case that was a one-off, not a continuing course of conduct.

A better example might be the erratic Barnaby Joyce, whose pronouncements on global heating, alternative energy and nuclear power plants for all verge on the unhinged.

Perhaps more worryingly, the leadership of the Liberal Party is veering toward the making or extreme statements just to get their names and faces into mainstream and social media. Deputy leader Sussan Lee had become a red-faced sneering attack dog, with wild claims about almost every action of the government and predicting the end of life as we know it with almost every federal government policy or decision.

Meanwhile, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is prone to making outrageous overblown claims to grab the headlines, as well as to divert attention from popular government announcements such as the “tax cuts for all” or huge increases in spending on defence and national security. Examples were Dutton’s false and ridiculous claim that Melbournians were too afraid to eat out because of the prevalence of African gangs and his inflammatory equating of a peaceful protest rally at the Sydney Opera House with the Port Arthur massacre, which drew derision from within his own party and strong criticism from the Tasmanian Liberal premier and from families of massacre victims. Dutton has continued to take a provocative and divisive position in relation to the massive death toll in Gaza, blaming it entirely on one side of the complex conflict in which many thousands of civilians have died.

While it would be wrong to classify Dutton and Lee as openly using Hitler or Trump-style tactics, the origins of their strategies too often mirror the “big lie” technique promoted by the Nazis. This terminology was first used by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf (1925) to describe how people could be induced to believe a colossal lie because they would not believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." It also depended on constant repetition of the lie until it became commonly accepted as fact – which has now became simple in the echo chamber of social media.

To repeat West Island journalist Adrian Chiles: everyone laughed at Hitler in the 1920s. A century on, are we making the same mistake?