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| Lightning Ridge |
Fires were burning in the oil fields. Rats were scrabbling in the walls. Trust no one had been a cross to hang around his neck. He approached infinity and they cried out loud. It made a difference to, "we almost died laughing". There were hysterical tomes, shrieks of indignation, God botherers who sought redemption, to transcend the discomfort of their own routines, but he could see inside their false beliefs, their doubts. When the spirits retreated back from whence they came, when God didn't infest their every waking moment, when the ordinary really did become the ordinary, then those who sought to pursue him could only scuttle for cover.
Their seaweed dreams floated through the suburb like short circuiting electric currents, going nowhere. A woman had stopped fantasising about her wedding, and thoughts she would wish no one else to know, what it would be like on the wedding night. She had gone, he presumed, to set up her own home. A devotee of Alcoholics Anonymous stopped trying to convert everyone he met, and had ruthfully come to admit his own disillusionment. People were people wherever they went. A labourer tossed and turned over his frustration with shifts. Everyone was becoming poorer. No one dreamed of empire. Even in these marooned places, remote from the currents of history, psychological disturbance was becoming common place. He heard them marching to war, although no war had been declared. He heard the analysts continue to fret over the best course of action; marooned, too, in their own inaction.
They had entered frightening times.
The government's response had been to crack down even further, to quell all dissent. To turn the society into a desert, in the name of fairness. Diversity became the mantra. Uniformity became the solution. Day by day the disconnect became greater.
He waited for the next attack; the attack that would change Australia forever.
The government had taken full advantage of the climate of fear it had done so much to create.
A terrorist attack anywhere in the world was an excuse for the Australian government to abrogate yet more freedoms, introduce yet more surveillance, fund the unsupervised if not out of control national security agencies yet more hundreds of millions of dollars. To taunt their critics ever further. To crush anyone who disagreed with the national narrative.
Bollards had been erected through the centres of Sydney and Melbourne.
The government had ramped up its rhetoric to ever greater heights; and proudly announced it had introduced more than 60 pieces of counter terror legislation. More, in fact, than any other Western country. This remote island nation where the on-field deaths were negligible.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
Did no one teach them that?
Did no one dare speak the truth to these people?
The Australian Prime Minister of Australia Malcolm Turnbull had now been the man responsible for dropping more than 1300 bombs on Iraq.
It was a fair guesstimate to say that each of those bombs probably killed 10 Muslims.
Australia had followed America into the Vietnam War, based on false evidence concocted by the CIA. It had followed America into Iraq, based on false evidence concocted by the CIA. It had been party to secret imbroglios around the globe, cooked up by unsupervised agencies who lied to their political leaders, to the public, even to their own staff.
It had been a deadly concert.
And now, the internal brew was even more toxic. A bureaucratic and judicial apparatus which had implemented Cultural Marxism with billions of dollars of funds ripped off an unsuspecting, uneducated public. The National Broadband Network was just the most high profile heists of recent times, $61 billion ripped off the public in order to force, by legislation, millions of Australians onto an inferior broadband network. Deny them the internet. Deny them the most educative and potentially liberating technology in human history. Deny them the capacity to run their own lives. And whatever you do, don't tell them the truth about what you're doing.
Why the infestation of regulation. Why the phony wars, when there was no threat to the homeland. Why the flooding of the country with immigrants. Why the phony propaganda campaign, backed by billions in public funding, on refugees. Why the government's propaganda arm, the Australian Broadcasting Commission, trumpeted every minutiae of the climate change debate while ignoring the very real stories of the people's welfare. Why identity politics, playing on a dizzying range of victims, from transgender activists to Muslim refugees, predominated any stories on the multiple issues afflicting ordinary working people. Why someone who got up and went off to a job each day was denigrated. Why someone who tried to establish a business found themselves facing one government erected barrier after another.
Why their voices had been excised from the public debate.
Old Alex gazed out across a whipping wind and a falling sky, the ghosts of Aboriginal warriors long lost playing still in the shadows of that sacred lake; and a frigid cold settled across what had once been a remote, working class suburb.
One of the latest emblems of authority, a highly decorated startlingly new Audi police car, bristling with antennas, radars and scanners, drove by.
He turned to try and grasp something, as those he was with reminisced in celebratory, affectionate detail the sins of their youth.
EXTRACT:
One of the remarkable aspects of ASIO's files is how little we know about ASIO's proactive operations. While the purpose of personal files and subject files is to gather useful information about security targets, the actual operations conducted from time to time that involved these targets remain a mystery. Its unraveling awaits a historian with tenacity and a great deal of time. We know these files are highly sensitive because of the extent of deletions.
From Dirty Secrets: Our ASIO Files.
THE BIGGER STORY:
As what remains of Islamic State crumbles, the would-be victors have started circling. In Mosul, Iraqi forces have begun preparing for peace in the city where the now-encircled marauders took root three years ago. Across the border in Raqqa, with five of its neighbourhoods under their control, Kurdish forces are contemplating what comes next for them and their cause.
Analysis Ever-closer ties between US and Kurds stoke Turkish border tensions
Following Turkish airstrikes last week, US armoured vehicles have been deployed as a buffer between Kurdish and Turkish forces
Day-after scenarios are rapidly being plotted by every group that has played a role in Iraq and Syria over many years of war and loss. Russia, the US and Iran are jostling for advantage across the swath of both countries held by the capitulating group. The prize is far more than who gets to claim the inevitable military victory over Isis. At stake, for all sides, is the future make-up of the region and a chance to shape it in their likeness.
The wish list of outcomes is broad and divergent. For Russia, there is the chance to establish a presence in the centre of the region, with political muscle and enhanced gas and oil interests. For Iran, a consolidated and potentially decisive role in both countries. And for the US – in the absence of a broader strategy – the chance to spoil its rivals’ plans.
Amid the great power struggles, others too have sensed opportunity in chaos. The Kurds of Iraq and Syria have made little attempt to hide the fact that the post-Isis vacuum marks a rare, potentially historic, moment.
In Iraq, the president of the largely autonomous Kurdish north, Massoud Barzani, has called a referendum on independence to be held on 25 September. In Syria, Kurdish forces raised by the US, and sent to oust Isis from one of its last two citadels, believe that their role can be parlayed into broader autonomy.
Across a dizzying battlefield that has devolved into a series of concurrent conflicts within the one war, Kurdish forces backed by the US are making steady gains in Raqqa. In Iraq, in the early phases of the fight for Mosul, the peshmerga played an important part in securing the city’s northern and eastern approaches.
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