by FRED PAWLE – WE IN the Enlightened West can no longer scoff at the destructive delusions of authoritarian societies. In some ways, we are now worse.
Those living in liberal democracies have been spared the excruciating dullness and dysfunction that less fortunate people in authoritarian societies are forced to endure.
- In many ways, our primitive art and barbaric pseudo-science make the Soviets look cautiously restrained by comparison.
- The difference between us and most other dysfunctional societies is that we’ve not felt the consequences of our lunacy yet.
There are many examples from the past century of how awful life is under despotic regimes – every Islamic shithole in the Middle East springs to mind, as does North Korea and most of post-colonial Africa.
But the most entertaining example is still the Soviet Union, partly because its leaders were so convinced that their controlled society was superior to our less-controlled one.
FREE-THINKING
Not only did they deliberately eliminate anything even remotely related to free-thinking Western culture and technology, but they boasted about it to useful idiots like New York Times reporter Walter Durante and Columbia University sociology academic Bernhard Stern.
The delusions the Soviet leaders had about life in their workers’ paradise were a thin veneer over industrial-grade misery for hundreds of millions of people.
The process of thoroughly separating Soviet culture from the West began at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, at which the doctrine of “socialist realism” was declared.
It dictated that all artistic endeavours must henceforth be unambiguously optimistic about socialism, and anyone found indulging instead in abstract or critical ideas like those popular in the bourgeois West would be arrested and sent to a gulag.
It didn’t stop there. Socialist realism soon spread to science, where research opportunities and academic tenure became reliant upon adherence to Party principles.
The most startling case was the official replacement of the Western concept of genetics with Lysenkoism, which argued that the characteristics passed down from one generation of a species to another were not genetic but acquired from the environment.
It sounds mildly eccentric at first but, in reality, when it was applied to agriculture across the Soviet Union, it led to widespread famine and even more misery.
We in the dynamic, innovative, free West could once scoff at all this mandatory culture and science. But we can’t any more.
Our governments are busily devising cultural and scientific dogmas that are just as deluded and destructive; the only difference is that we haven’t felt the consequences of them yet.
This is partly because they are being implemented at the lethargic pace of overpaid 21st century public servants rather than with the urgency of early Soviet revolutionaries.
But don’t worry, the consequences will arrive soon enough.
The Australian Government is currently halfway through reviewing its National Cultural Policy, a five-year plan that started in January 2023, which will determine how it spends more than $300m in grants a year through its culture agency, Creative Australia, among others.
I became aware of this when I received several reminders on social media that as an Australian citizen I could submit my own suggestions to this process on my own behalf or as the representative of an arts organisation.
CULTURAL RIGHTS
It took only a few clicks to learn that this was not as democratic as it seemed, and that all submissions must include suggestions about how to respect the “cultural rights” of First Nations people and other diversity diktats.
Still, snooping around this enormous branch of the federal Arts Department’s website did uncover some unintentionally hilarious material.
To ensure that stupid people are not excluded from this important cultural process, the guide for submissions is also published in something called “Easy Read”, which “uses simple words and pictures to explain ideas”, such as why culture matters.
Once you scroll past that, things become less easy to read than the authors of the document intended.
For example: What are those two “dancers” doing? Is this a new form of inclusive ballet, or does this image depict the moment when a disabled man at a strip joint blows his NDIS grant on a lap dance? We may never know.
The hilarity subsides, however, when you remind yourself that your taxes paid for a federal public servant to type “black woman dancing with white guy in a wheelchair” into a primitive AI image generator, then cut and paste that image along with dozens of other stupid images into a document about culture for semi-literate morons.
It’s then that feelings of depression and dread become difficult to overcome.
The document that launched this program in 2023 contains platitudes from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese that vaguely recall the rhetoric of the Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934:
“The arts bring us together, adding to life’s great highs and helping us get through the lows. It’s through our many and varied forms of artistic expression that we build our identity as a nation and a people.”
Albanese carefully avoided dogmatically explaining the sort of art that the State will support with its taxpayer-funded largesse, but he didn’t need to.
Everyone in the arts “industry” knows that, to qualify for a grant, you simply need to tick as many victimhood boxes as possible.
There was a vivid example of how this works earlier this month , when a bloke called Richard Lewer won the Archibald Prize for his portrait of Iluwanti Ken, a “respected Pitjantjatjara Elder” and “a senior artist and ngangkaṟi (traditional healer)”.
The only interesting thing about this portrait is counting how many diversity boxes it ticked in order to win the $100,000 prize.
DISABILITY
I counted three – including Lewer’s unfortunate artistic disability – but there could be more.
Needless to say, however, this is now the minimum requirement for all future Archibald Prize winners.
There seems to be an inverse relationship between official attempts to dictate culture and the actual culture of ordinary people.
The more the government tries to enforce an approved culture, the worse the actual culture becomes.
This was true in the Soviet Union, and it’s true in Australia today.
The “culture” in Aboriginal communities around Alice Springs, for example, revolves around alcohol, violence, victimhood, porn, sexual assault and occasionally paedophilia.
Albanese attended the funeral of Kumanjayi Little Baby, the five-year-old child who was abducted, raped and murdered in one of these hellish Aboriginal townships this month, and posted photos of himself sharing the family’s grief.
His post suggests that he was just a compassionate passer-by, that his government could not have prevented the child’s death by closing down the camps and forcing the adult residents to get a job and care for their children like the rest of us do.
Instead, what they really need is more State-funded artists who acknowledge First Nations’ “cultural rights”.
Neither can we scoff at the Soviets for supporting hare-brained ideas like crops having inherent characteristics that are determined by the environment, not their genes.
The transgender ideology that has now thoroughly captured politics, academia and the judiciary across the formerly liberal West is virtually identical to the Soviets’ Lysenkoism, except instead of applying to insentient crops it applies to troubled humans, and often results in the ghoulish practice of teenage genital mutilation.
In many ways, our primitive art and barbaric pseudo-science make the Soviets look cautiously restrained by comparison.
It takes a bolder man than me to scoff at other cultures these days. In my lifetime, the West has lost most of its claims to superiority over other cultures, even if it does nominally remain the repository of 2000 years of glorious Western Civilisation.
As I said, the biggest difference between us and most other dysfunctional societies is that we haven’t felt the consequences of our lunacy yet.
I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect that day is coming faster than most people realise.PC
– Fred Pawle
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Further explanation and note that UN IPCC agreements, in this example the Paris Agreement signed 2016 (contrary to media claims of “signed up to” the Glasgow 2021 net zero emissions agreement by Prime Minister Morrison he did not do that, instead stated Australia would adopt an aspirational goal based on developing new technologies – eg nuclear emissions zero power stations – and without damaging the economy) is …….
The short answer is that there is no hard enforcement in the Paris Agreement. But all the members regularly meet, share progress, and renew their pledges of climate action, encouraging every country to step up its commitments.
Updated August 8, 2025
The Paris Agreement is a diplomatic agreement that brings the world together in a common effort to combat climate change. The most important piece of this agreement is that all members must make pledges of action every five years to lower their greenhouse gas emissions. Those pledges are called their “Nationally Determined Contributions” (NDCs). For example, the European Union’s most recent NDC pledges to cut emissions to at least 55% below 1990 levels by 2030.
But while countries are required to submit these pledges, the content is up to them: Members get to decide for themselves what to promise in their NDCs. So what would make a country make a strong pledge and then stick to it?
The short answer is that there’s not much formal accountability. Instead, says Michael Mehling, Deputy Director of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, the focus is on accurate reporting. “Every country has to send periodic reports on what they’re doing,” says Mehling, “in the form of national emissions inventories and progress towards achieving their NDCs.” The main formal consequence for a member failing to meet its targets is a meeting with a global committee of neutral researchers. The committee will work with struggling members to create new plans.
Woke culture includes climate change politics and impositions for emissions reduction, transition to renewable energy and away from fossil fuels, etc. And now the woke socialist Albanese Labor Government has agreed to sign a Trade Agreement with the EU Government that the Liberal National Coalition started negotiations for 2018/19 but did not proceed to sign because of terms and conditions the EU Government wanted to impose for Australia.
“The Labor Party want to sign a deal with the EU which means that future Australian governments won’t be able to drop the Paris Agreement without being bludgeoned in trade by the EU. If we revise our Net Zero goals downwards or delay them the EU can cut access for our farmers to their markets. And the EU will be able to say they are not bullying us, or interfering with our sovereign rights, they are just enforcing a trade agreement we signed up for.
In the Labor Governments own words:
For the first time in a free trade agreement, Australia (and the EU) has made a binding commitment to implement obligations under the Paris Agreement on climate change.
— Australian Government, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
Effectively Australian farmers or exporters to the EU will be held hostage by the EU to make sure we meet our Paris targets, even if we vote against Net Zero commitments. The deal has meaningless words like “Australia maintains the right to regulate in pursuit of its own public policy objectives” but if we actually do that, there will be a price.
Once farmers have adapted to the new EU market, and supply lines are established to advertise, package, transport and distribute there, there will be real pain if those markets are abruptly cut off because Australia didn’t meet it’s absurd impossible Net Zero targets.
This suits the Labor Party, they can sell out the regions without worrying about a voter backlash from country folk who don’t vote Labor much anyway. The Labor inner-city voters will be happy because they can buy their French cheese and European electric cars slightly cheaper, along with their discounted Dutch ham. But the farmers and the Coalition will be caught in a no win situation where they will pay if they try to get rid of the Paris agreement.”