QUEER-BASHING and CLIMATE DENIAL : related ?

Gay-friendly Tassie !

Australian politics perhaps shows best how closely related are the strident opposition to both Gay marriage and the reality of Global warming .


In that Antipodes nation, the right wing of the socialist party joins with the capitalist parties in opposing both : and that adds up to about 70% of the voters on Election Day, though polling on these issues alone shows a much more even split among the  population.

Electoral systems that favour the two biggest parties give the "paranoid" voter the final say on every thing.

Clearly the parties are well behind current public opinion. This is because both main parties need to get as many of the "paranoid" voters as possible, to form government in a distorted electoral system that wildly favours the two biggest parties - by design.

(The left wing of the socialists joins with the Greens in favouring gay marriage and the reality of climate change.)

At the federal level, the governing Labor (socialist) party is trying to straddle the fence, knowing it appeals to both queer-bashing Labor activists and gay-supporting Labor activists..

But in Tasmania, the governing Labor party will use a small loophole in the Australian constitution to allow gay marriage in the tiny island state - heartedly supported by most Greens but opposed by some Labor activists.

(By contrast, the Libertarian party and its rural and far right fellow travellers are undivided in roundly opposing gay marriage.)

Much the same for global warming ; the right denies it 100%, the Greens support it 100% and the centre-right socialists tries to have it both ways.

Switching to America , a life-long active Republican worker and professional denier for Big Tobacco and a host of other big rich unpopular industries, Frank Schubert , is leading the richly financed anti-gay marriage movement in the United States , further cementing the arguments that all denier movements are intimately connected......

1789 French Revolution, 1917 Russian Revolution, 1972 Tasmanian Revolution (!!)

the Greens' revolution

In yesterday's post, I noted the neat 100 year interval between the French revolution of 1789, the Second Socialist International of 1889 and the rapid rise of the Greens' issues following the fall of Communism in 1989.

Today let us look at the geographic spread of these three revolutions.

Europe held the first radical (and Radical) revolution, which then rapidly spread  ----- to Latin America in particular.

(The American Revolution certainly did not contain the radicalism of the French Revolution - I am not denying its great importance and global impact - but even Americans can admit it was above all a revolution in favour of Moderation.)

Asia was the site for the next big revolution - first  in the USSR and its satellites and then in China and its satellites. We tend to call it (rightly)  East versus West as well as Left versus Right.

The new - Green - revolution arose on its own, starting in tiny, far off Tasmania in the geographic region of the world we call Oceania.

But it arose to prominence (despite an attempt by "desperate Old  Right guys" to hype Moslems as a serious Russian-level threat to western hegemony) because (and only because) the New Right was anxious to find a new enemy to vent over.

With solid enemies like the New Right, the new Green Revolution hardly needed solid friends.

(Just as beavers will die if they don't constantly gnaw, right wingers would die happy and content, if they didn't have paranoid fears to occupy themselves with.)

The Greens were truly lucky to have the New Right take them seriously as a global threat right from the start, because no one else did.

But why Tasmania ?

It was in the spring of 1972 that the world's first Green party arose in the tiny Australian state (and island)  of Tasmania.

The last two national Australian Green leaders have come from this state with but 2% of the total Australian electorate - a strong sign it still remains an Green powerhouse, punching well above its demographic weight.

So our third world shaking revolution has not come from the centre of the 18th century intellectual world or from the territorial and demographic powerhouses of the 20th century.

Instead we must admit that Oceania - and Tasmania in particular - are small in population, isolated geographically from the main body of humanity and not usually thought of as intellectually, militarily or economically strong.

In the two previous urban, industrializing, imperialistically-minded revolutions, this would have been fatal.

But for a revolution that saunters forth under the banner that the small is beautiful, the personal is political and we should think globally but act locally, tiny rural Tasmania is the natural (as well as Natural) home of the Green Revolution.

But 40 years on, the Greens still fail to be taken seriously by mainstream world opinion : instead they suffer the worst fate a revolution can experience : everyone likes them, in the same manner as one likes small children.

And just as with small children, we do not fear them or ask them for advice.

Seeking advice from them still seems a long way off, but with the New Right deniers fearing them, a significant start has been made.

Ironic Congrats to the deniers

This year will mark the 40th Anniversary of the Green Revolution and so , sincere congratulations to Green leaders from Tasmania like Bob Brown, Christine Milne and Nick McKim.

But it is also fitting to also mark 40 years of Green-baiting and Green-denial from the only people smart enough to recognize that they represented a new revolution (besides the Greens themselves).

 So ironic congrats too then, to their long time opponents from among the New Right deniers, who unwittingly have helped the rest of the world to learn to take the Green revolution seriously .....