It is not a rise of the "far right" predicted in Europe, but a reversion to fascism

People have often pretended that Stalinism and fascism are politically very different and opposite ideologies.

However, one of my first recollections of discussing the issue of communism and why it failed to work out as Karl Marx said it would is of my father telling me that "in practice, communism is very similar to fascism". When my father become utterly crazy and I turned to radical "fighters" like Socialist Alternative and the Democratic Socialist Party because of my (justified) concern that Kennett's abominable wastage on freeways would cause runaway climate change, I heard a message that:

1. fascism was totally different from real socialism in which the workers had complete control over production, but
2. fascism was similar to the "state capitalism" that actually ruled in all the so-called "Communist"/"Marxist" nations

Since I first read Human Events a couple of years ago, I have seen that the "Old Right" view any form of Marxism or fascism as essentially similar. Both are seen as left-wing because they support big, intrusive government. In the words of Robert Patrick Murphy from his Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism:

This is the difference between fascism, where enterprises are state-directed, and Communism, where enterprises are state-owned.

For the "Old Right", both fascism and Communism are antithetical to Wetsern Civilisation because they rejecte its pillars of Christianity, free markets and strictly limited government.

Erik von Kühnelt Leddihn said that, despite its racism and elitism, fascism was/is essentially "democratic" because they appealed to the simplest desires of the people and aimed to destroy the old forms of society by inciting the masses. The fundamental difference between this view and that of radical Trotskyists is that direct ("real") democracy which the radical socialists see as the ideal political system is seen as having the same flaws as the representative democracy seen in Europe today. In contrast, Kühnelt-Leddihn saw a limited absolute monarchy as not based on party rule and as fitting into the tradition of Christian society in a way democracy cannot.

In the context of this argument, claims here that

“Into the void has stepped a resurgent group of extreme-Right political parties, among them the British National Party, which gained two seats at recent elections to the European Parliament.”

are surprising from a Christian site. If they are remotely Christian they ought to know how thoroughly secularised Europe is today, and then they should at least think about whether Christianity can offer answers. History suggests Christianity actually has at the very least a prospect of doing. If a site dedicated to Christianity in England actually knows the religion is doomed in Europe, it should at least take a different tone - one of learning from past mistakes. It is this tone that I try mentally to take when looking at the problems faced by Europe. They also do not know what to make of a fascist reaction to the spread of Islam - one which so many people in the United States and Australia know to constitute fighting fire with fire to no effect.

They ought also to know that radical defeminisation of women and culture in general with resultant lack of stable marriages can likely only be solved by reduced government.

Take this, all in all, as a lesson that there really is little communication across the Atlantic!

No "Tories" in Europe

In today's Age, an unnamed writer is calling for Australia's conservative parties to "watch how conservative parties overseas are embracing the challenge of tackling climate change".

The simple problem with this call, originally made by the Southern Cross Climate Coalition, is that what are "centre-right" parties in Europe or New Zealand or California are, economically and culturally, much more akin to the Australian Greens than to the Liberal or National Parties.

I will emphasise here that this characteristic is not confined, as I imagine some readers will think my analysis in recent posts could suggest, to climate change policy. It applies equally to other aspects of government policy, from welfare to foreign aid to education. Even Labor governments are less generous than Conservative ones have typically been in Europe. Especially in Western Australia and Queensland it was often Labor governments who most strongly supported ecologically destructive policies and refused to develop a strong public sector. Writers on the Fitzgerald Inquiry, for instance, note the continuity between Queensland's (Catholic) Labor governments between 1915 and 1957 and the policies of (National) Nicklin and Bjelke-Petersen governments between 1957 and 1989.

The net result is that differences in the overall size of the public sector become accepted by the public in each nation, but are not understood when labelling parties abroad. A party with policies like

• withdrawing from the UN
• abandoning foreign aid
• compulsory military service

would be completely implausible in Europe, Canada or New Zealand. Yet, in outer metropolitan and rural Australia, such a party obtained a substantial proportion of the vote in 1998. More recently, Family First, which in spite of overwhelming evidence from rainfall records advocates a complete end to emissions targets, obtains ten percent of the vote in many suburbs.

It's time we had a uniform labelling for parties in all nations, whereby the different position of politics in different nations would be put into the fullest view it ever has. Australian academics might learn something they don't even suspect now, and it would be interesting to see how they responded in writing.

There actually is a coalition that can win - unfortunately

In today's Australian is an article discussing the problems the Coalition is facing about climate change policy. The fact that it says adapting to climate change may be more sensible than trying to create the carbon-free economy Australia should have had decades before countries in Eurasia or North America do is unimportant for the issue at hand.

The real issue is that only for a vocal minority in academia have the major parties any need to deviate from a consistently greenhouse-sceptic position. Radically deviating from this viewpoint would mean the crucial support of mining and energy corporations would be lost, with the result that Australia would become a one-party state, although actually supported by the majority of its population. This is because one-party stability brings them prosperity without any need for radical new inventions. The long-term consequence is that even if, as paleoclimate records from the Tertiary suggest, climate change does convert all of southern Australia's farmland and the cities of Melbourne, Adelaide, Hobart and Perth into hyperarid deserts where summer temperatures consistently reach 50˚C, Australia is not going to do anything to move its energy policy away from coal (except perhaps to nuclear). More likely water will be piped from the northern super-monsoon to irrigate crops next to permanently dry channels along what were once the Murray and Murrumbidgee Rivers.

The article's claim that it will be possible to adapt to climate change is made dubious by the history of Saudi Arabia, where expensive oil-sponsored irrigation schemes to allow the country to become a net expoerter of wheat is not likely to be able to be maintained once oil revenues decline. However, in the case of Australia, mineral revenues are not likely to decline until every other nation is completely exhausted of its minerals, so that the money to build and maintain numerous pipelines from a super-wet north (and likely even the historically arid Centre) will remain for a long, long time. Moreover, if governments in Europe, Asia and the Americas are forced to eliminate their farm subsidies, all or almost all of their farmland will be turned into housing, placing even mroe responsibility upon Australia as a food producer.

Some signs can dominate more than others

As a long-established student of astrology - even though I know it cannot make sense scientifically, the fact that its predictions can seem to be correct makes me find astrology incredibly funny - I have always had an interest in looking at horoscopes, including my own. It is especially fascinating when I find really unusual charts, owing to such features as

1. dominance by a single sign
2. major grand trines
3. major grand crosses
4. horoscopes like mine with (almost) all planets and asteroids on one side

Of these, the easiest to detect are those with dominance by one sign (where at least five planets are in that sign).

Because it is very rare for more than two of the outer planets to be in the same sign, a stellium necessarily contains mainly inner planets, that is, the Sun, Mercury, Venus and Mars.

Thus I have tabulated from Astrotheme all the charts were the Sun, Mercury, Venus and Mars are all in the same sign. the following table shows the results by sign:

Sun in	Mercury in	Venus in	Mars in	# of celebrities
♈	♈	♈	♈	48
♉	♉	♉	♉	52
♊	♊	♊	♊	48
♋	♋	♋	♋	53
♌	♌	♌	♌	34
♍	♍	♍	♍	41
♎	♎	♎	♎	48
♏	♏	♏	♏	69
♐	♐	♐	♐	59
♑	♑	♑	♑	27
♒	♒	♒	♒	59
♓	♓	♓	♓	25

What is noteworthy here is that it is far more possible to have all of the Sun, Mercury, Venus and Mars in some signs (Scorpio, Sagittarius, Aquarius) than in others such as Leo, Capricorn and Pisces.

The problems created by this for the astrologer are seldom taken seriously, though when one looks at the asteroids, Pluto, Eris and even Mercury and Mars, it can be seen that the are of more importance to the study of astrology than they are generally supposed to be.

An RDS, not an ETS

In today’s Australian, it says that the Coalition wants a new “emissions trading scheme” that they believe will improve on the one Labour developed.

The reality is, as I have said many times before, that such moves will only make the ultimate end of catastrophic climate change in which southern Australia’s rivers become dry beds at the same time as an annual super-monsoon fills Lake Eyre permanently but only turns the interior from a dry desert into a tropical land so infertile it is of less use for primary production than at pre-industrial carbon dioxide levels.

There is no doubt that agreement from the major parties on the global warming issue is a good thing. The trouble is that in the key electorates of the mortgage belt greenhouse scepticism is economically profitable because it allows privileged low energy costs to be maintained, whereas serious means to lower atmospheric CO₂ levels would raise them not merely to those of Europe or East Asia, but to orders of magnitude higher.

Instead of an ETS (emissions trading scheme) what Australia needs and has needed since at least 1983 when Barrie Pittock wrote his first post on the likely results of global warming (all of which have been verified by a ten degree widening of the climatological tropics in thirty-five years) is an RDS.

RDS stands for road demolition scheme and would involve a multilateral plan to demolish every existing freeway over the continent and to invest every cent of government (or private) transport funding in rail. Laws that absolutely forbid all road building apart from local traffic streets would be an essential component so that the ecological catastrophe wastage of public money on roads has caused can be reversed or ameliorated. Rail is admirably suited to Australia’s flat, fragile environmental because of its energy efficiency over long distances and requirement of flat relief. People may think that redeveloping extremely old railways will be expensive, but the paradox is that once road capacity is drastically cut as an RDS would do, there becomes a financial incentive to invest in rail because only reductions in road capacity could make rail profitable. Consequently Australia can take the steps it should have began in 1983 or earlier toward a car-free continent without loss of mobility.