Last night I received an email that I hope to read out on the podcast entitled Letter from An Honest Foreigner. The letter has many interesting things to say but one sentence highlighted for me a thought I have spoken about but not written down.
“In listening to the Melbourne Traditionalists’ podcast episodes about the White Australia policy, it therefore jumped out at me that, from the beginning, many of the people involved in the plan to destroy the specifically English, and more broadly British, character of Australia were themselves not purely of English stock.”
This instantly puts my mind to thinking about Arthur Calwell, he was Australia’s first Minister of Immigration in 1947. It was he who brought into Australia the first large non-British immigration. Yet in 1966 as leader of the Australian Labor Party he campaigned to keep the White Australia policy. These two positions are irreconcilable, either you keep an exclusive immigration policy or you do not.
Like nearly all Western politicians he was a Liberal, he believed in and supported Liberalism.
Liberalism is a logic and that logic works like an express train. It speeds past station after station but that’s no problem as you never wanted to get off there anyway. But there tends to come a point were you think to yourself, this has all gone to far, I think I want to get off this train….but you can’t, this is an express train. It’s not stopping at any station, no it is going all the way to the end of the line.
At the end of the line will be the Autonomous Individual, who will have no race or ethnicity, no sex or gender, no family or marriage, a person completely free of the restrictions of the past. Most Liberals will be shocked that this is the end of the line, but it is. They will argue that they never meant for it to go so far. That this is far beyond anything that they wanted or imagined. But that’s the thing with express trains, they don’t stop all stations, they don’t even stop when you realise that you have gone too far.
To escape Liberalism is to escape from that express train, but it’s not easy. At first you think that voting for someone new will change things. But every “conductor” that you vote for keeps going in the same general direction. You see that the train has changed tracks but it always heads in the same direction. Changing the conductor can change the speed of the express train, vote “Right” and it slows down, vote “Left” and it speeds up. Even that cannot be trusted. A person can escape from the train, all they have to do is jump. Rarely does the jump hurt, but the fear is great, it feels so unnatural to be jumping from a moving train, one that nearly everyone you know likes or at least puts up with.
Once you have jumped you find that you are not alone. Others jumped before you, you even find people who never got on. Now you shout at the passengers on the train and they can’t understand what your saying to them. They wonder to themselves, why would anyone want to jump off the express train, however they also see that people do jump off. They wonder if there is something wrong with the train. Most notice that something is wrong but most will never jump. If it stops they will get off, but they won’t jump. Which means that the only way that the logic of Liberalism can end is by stopping the train.
The express train seems to be getting faster, those running the train think that the end of the line is near. As they move faster the risk also rises. Liberalism has always been patient, it has lasted multiple lifetimes, many don’t even notice that they are on the express train. Once it was the journey that was important, now it appears that it is running out of patience. Everything must be achieved rapidly. So everything moves faster. So fast that the express train is in danger of derailing!
Originally published at Upon Hope. You can find Mark’s Subscribestar here.