Fate will conspire with history to curse the pallid sack of human hide stretched over a bone-cage of ragged ambition and entitlement that is Australia’s Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull. But first it will mock him, for daring to visit that memorial to an earlier generation of doomed refugees at the very moment he was conniving to doom another generation. Not simply by turning them away, but by fixing them in a place of his choosing where they can come to nothing but their end.
There is no ironic distance far enough to negate the yawning gulf between the smug, poo-eating smarm of Malcolm Turnbull’s visit to Israel’s Holocaust Museum, and the crude but calculated bestiality of his attempt to kindle the merest spark of warmth towards his doomed administration by setting fire to the piled up bodies of refugees in the abandoned concentration camp on Manus Island. Fate will conspire with history to curse this pallid sack of human hide stretched over a bone cage of ragged ambition and entitlement.
But first it will mock him.
Mock him for daring to visit that memorial to an earlier generation of doomed refugees at the very moment he was conniving to doom another generation. Not simply by turning them away, but by fixing them in a place of his choosing where they can come to nothing but their end.
Mock him for abandoning his remote and wretched prison camp just as the SS guard’s had abandoned theirs at the first rumbling approach of Allied units through the dark forests around Buchenwald and Dachau.
Mock him for the confected solemnity of his little Holocaust playdate including a carefully framed photo-op of the deeply affected Prime Minister reflecting on “the nation’s strength to resolve from the horrors of the past”, at the exact same fucking moment his potato-headed übergoon, Dutton, was resolved to construct a post modern tableau from the horrors of our present.
Emphasis on ours.
As Jack the Insider tweeted to me when I wondered aloud where to even start, “The obvious but most powerful point is no one in this country can say they didn’t know what was happening.”
No, in fact a clear majority of them voted for it to happen and kept voting for it.
Even the Nazis knew enough to be ashamed and perhaps a little afeared of what they had done.
But us? Nah mate. We’re good. After all it’s not like we killed them all and burned the bodies.
No.
We just cut off their food, water, power and medical supplies.
The Australian government,faithful servants of more than 15 million voting Australians, confined six hundred refugees to a far off tropical hellhole and when that didn’t work for them, the Australian government, faithful servants, buggered off and left their captives to die.
That’s what happens to people without food, water or medical care.
They die.
That might seem the irreducible core of this horror show, but it’s not. You can distill this barbarism even further, because as awful as what’s happening on Manus might look in the particular—desperate refugees digging holes to find the water table and with it enough brown, contaminated sludge to stave off immediate dehydration, what’s worse is the political calculation of their net worth.
It is a little embarrassing for such a wealthy country to be persecuting hundreds of legitimate asylum seekers they could take in without a care. But for these desperate dickheads, it’s worth it to give them something, anything they can take to an election in the next few weeks or months.
That’s the stuffed and rotting heart of this.
People will vote for it.
Why is the West looking around the world for a war?
Has the time come for the people of West Asia to reclaim political and media narratives stripped from them by Western imperialism?
Are the chickens finally coming home to roost for the BBC?
