Abbott's use of Nazi propaganda techniques

The Blowfly has been hanging around the Prime Minister this week seeking to understand how our No 1 redhead is thinking.

It has all been rather frantic trying to sell the carbon tax and matching Toxic Tony.

She wont listen to The Blowfly. I have been sending out telepathic signals to her to not even attempt to match him. He simply cant be matched! He is in another dimension.

A dimension where it is okay to tell lies and mistruths and treat human beings just like Joseph Goebbels did for Hitler.

And on that note The Blowfly was happy to see the PM reading the rather illuminating article by Ian Robinson in last Saturday's Fairfax papers. Ian is the president emeritus of the Rationalist society of Australia.

"Taxing the truth:why we must not let Abbott's dogmas lie" is a wonderful little tome on the methods that the Coalition in general, and Abbott in particular, is using to distort the reality of the political debate in Australia.

Although the PM says she is not that interested in the polls, because she has her eyes firmly on the end game, she is neither deaf nor blind.

She can hear the commentators opine that Abbott has the Government with its back to the wall and that he is a certainty to be our next PM.

This has surprised her a little----to say the least!

She thought that the three word slogans were used by Tony simply because that was all he could remember.

She thought that the way he misrepresents her apparent commitment to 'no carbon tax' before the last election was just sour grapes because his offer to build a $1 billion hospital for Andrew Wilkie was not taken up.

But according to the article these tactics are all propaganda strategies enunciated by Hitler in 'Mein Kampf' and used by his trusted assistant Goebbels to manipulate the thinking of the unsuspecting German people.

The PM was so intrigued by this article that she got out her trusty iPad and looked up 'Nazi propaganda' on Wikipedia. This is what she found.

Julia highlighted some of the points she thought were relevant .

"Mein Kampf contains the blueprint of later Nazi propaganda efforts. Assessing his audience, Hitler writes in chapter VI:

"Propaganda must always address itself to the broad masses of the people. (...) All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed. (...) The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses. The broad masses of the people are not made up of diplomats or professors of public jurisprudence nor simply of persons who are able to form reasoned judgment in given cases, but a vacillating crowd of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another. (...) The great majority of a nation is so feminine in its character and outlook that its thought and conduct are ruled by sentiment rather than by sober reasoning. This sentiment, however, is not complex, but simple and consistent. It is not highly differentiated, but has only the negative and positive notions of love and hatred, right and wrong, truth and falsehood."^[5]

As to the methods to be employed, he explains:

"Propaganda must not investigate the truth objectively and, in so far as it is favourable to the other side, present it according to the theoretical rules of justice; yet it must present only that aspect of the truth which is favourable to its own side. (...) The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward. (...) Every change that is made in the subject of a propagandist message must always emphasize the same conclusion. The leading slogan must of course be illustrated in many ways and from several angles, but in the end one must always return to the assertion of the same formula."

 The entry on Nazi propaganda in Wikipedia is worthy of review by anyone curious about the propaganda methods used by the Nazis. The Blowfly commends it to anyone who is interested in the truth and the foundations for manipulating the thinking of voters.

But back to the PM!

As she absorbed the material on Nazi propaganda methods a serenity seemed to come over her as she realised what Abbott was up to.

At least when you fully understand what your opponents are up to you have a chance of winning.

And so instead of resorting to Goebbels she pondered the words of George Bernard Shaw: "My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world."

And then she put her head back, clasping her iPad to her breast, and pondered the future.

A future where Tony Abbott has to explain to people why the carbon tax did not cause the sky to fall in.

A future where voters realise that the Minerals Resources and Rent tax is one of the few ways that Gina, Twiggy and Clive get to genuinely share their wealth with the people who own the minerals.

A future where the NBN allows Australia to be competitive in a global economy.

A future where Question time is used constructively to ask questions rather than be bastardised with censure motions.

A future where there is a genuine civility in the Parliament.

A future where refugees are welcomed as a building block of our nation.

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ! Poor dear! She dozed off while thinking about what this country could be.

Dirt files lead you to the political hypocrites

The Blowfly has been particularly bemused by the excitement about ‘dirt files’ this week.

Blowflies love dirt files.

The surprise would be that there was a politician who was not deserving of a dirt file.

For some strange reason the notion that politicians are unlikely to have dirt files is part of the illusion of politics.

Let’s take the PM for starters.

She is an unmarried woman living in sin. Besides her present partner Tim she has been in a previous relationship with Craig Emerson, one of her Cabinet colleagues.

In addition during her lawyer days it appears that she may have had other relationships.

You don’t get to be PM by joining ballet classes and enrolling in home economics----especially if you are acting for the Union movement.

Let’s take Tony Abbott.

He was a swash-buckling , young, aspiring Liberal at Sydney University who was learning how to be a Liberal. You don’t become a Liberal by going to bible classes and mixing with computer geeks.

And even take Kevin Rudd. He is now doing a good act of trying to be a ‘goody two shoes’ and going to church each Sunday but, as a public figure, his warts in due course got into the public arena thanks to a wonderful essay by the journalist , David Marr.

And even a goody two shoes such as Andrew Wilkie was found to be vulnerable simply because of something that was done at Duntroon yonks ago. He was involved somehow in bastardisation.

But hell, its Duntroon!

These guys and gals are going to be in the front lines looking at bullets coming at them and having their throats slit. You don’t need wimps in the armed forces.

Politicians, unlike blowflies, are human beings!

They do things that other human beings do.

The only question is whether they do things that voters might take offence at.

And as we voters allow our moral boundaries to move it becomes a little harder to offend us.

However if another politician can stumble upon something that voters might take offence at then it might allow a political advantage.

And we voters are so damned gullible!

More than half of us are inclined to believe the lies that Tony Abbott utters and be receptive to the 3 word slogans that emanate from his lips.

If somehow, just somehow, our politicians were perfect we might have politicians like the Rev. Fred Nile.

And that would be just as offensive to our parliamentary processes as the current crew. They would be bombarding everyone about how we should live our lives, what we should and should not read and whether we should believe in god etc.

That would be hell! On earth!

Dirt files are simply a necessary part of the balance between the political forces.

The major purpose of dirt files is to allow the hypocrites to be revealed.

Now that is what the really fun part of watching politics is all about.

So when Tony Abbott creams the Government for creating dirt files we should fall out of chairs laughing.

This guy is the most shameless hypocrite that The Blowfly can recall.http://archiearchive.wordpress.com/2012/05/12/the-cracking-of-the-abbott-monolith/

His lies, his misrepresentations and his misleading comments know no bounds.

But he is just doing his job!

He is preparing his Party-–and the Coalition—for government.

Tony is the ball-runner. The one who takes the ball up to the other teams line of defence and, just when has almost penetrated it, he slips a pass to a flashy, side-stepping inside-centre who dances his way over the try-line.

And there is another use for dirt files.

The dirt files are of valuable use inside your own party.

When you most need to nobble an aspiring colleague you pull out the dirt file and show it to him. As they splutter indignant words of repudiation you tell him or her, that ,unless they pull their heads in you will either leak it yourself or lend it to your opponents.

That’s why Malcolm Turnbull is sitting pat.

He knows that the work is being done for him----mostly by his colleagues----who simply could not bear to have Abbott lead them in forty directions at once --with his weather-vane capacities to be populist at all costs.

What Australia needs now is a strong, focused principled leader----not a Howard or an Abbott!

And the Liberals know that!

And so do the Nats!

Ain’t it delicious?

Tony Abbott: Driven by nostalgia!

The Blowfly is always looking for clues as to what drives Tony Abbott.

Shaun Carney, writing in the Age at the weekend, suggested he was driven by nostalgia.

Nostalgia for the good old days of John Howard!

Abbott abhors Labor rule and simply seeks to destroy an ALP government that he thinks is ruining our country.

Carney contrasts this with the Fraser Government who spent most of it’s time and energy trying to get Gough Whitlam away from the levers of power.

They finally succeeded but were hampered by their lack of vision. They had spent all their energies on getting Gough out and had spent little time on policy development of their own.

The Blowfly has some sympathy for Carney’s comparisons.

Tony Abbott has now moved 49 unsuccessful censure motions against the Gillard Government.

He and Christopher Pyne have also subjected Australia’s first female prime minister to the most terrible verbal battering. This leaves many Australians quite disconnected from how our mothers’ told us that we should treat a woman----and for that matter another human being!

Malcolm Fraser has gone on to be a humanitarian of some note who made peace with Gough and has become the conscience of the Liberal Party. He voted with his feet and resigned. Abbott’s asylum seeker approach was just too repugnant to him.

Could we hope that if Tony Abbott, driven by his nostalgia for the years of Little Johnny, could shape the latter years of his life in a similar fashion to Malcolm Fraser?

Could we hope that Abbott would be able to develop a unique vision for Australia after all his negativity and pugnacious behaviour?

Could we hope that somehow the ‘Mad Monk’, Rhodes Scholar and wearer of ‘budgie smugglers’ would see that most Australians, while valuing some of the cultural values of the past, do not want to return there?

It’s unlikely!

As my mother once told me “A leopard does not change its spots!”