In Australia,the roots of tyranny are strong and deep.
Cunningham was sick and tired of English rule in Ireland. And along with 50,000 of his fellow Irishmen, Cunningham picked up a weapon and started in uprising against Great Britain.
Their rebellion was a complete disaster; the rebels hoped that the British army was too weak to resist after their defeat in the American Revolution.
But within a few short months the British had regained tight control of Ireland.
Naturally their first order of business was to round up all the remaining rebels— and Cunningham was among them.
His punishment was being shipped off to a British penal colony in the south Pacific, in a place that was generally known at the time as “New Holland”.
Today we call it Australia.
Cunningham wasn’t one to accept his fate easily. Even while en route to Australia, he and other prisoners briefly managed to take over the ship…though British marines eventually regained control and gave Cunningham 100 lashes.
But Cunningham still wasn’t finished. A few years later in March of 1804, he led about 300 Australian prisoners in yet another rebellion against their British jailers.
That rebellion was so severe that the British governor was forced to declare martial law— the first, but certainly not the last time in Australia’s history this would happen.
It’s ironic that, each year, ‘Australia Day’ is celebrated on January 26, which commemorates the day that the British Navy first sailed into Sydney Cove, hoisted their flag, and declared the land their penal colony.
So Australia Day does not celebrate the birth of a nation so much as the ribbon-cutting of a giant prison.
All my life I’d thought of Oz as one of the freest nations on Earth, a true oasis of Liberty whose fiercely-independent population would under no circumstances tolerate any hint of despotism stealthily creeping up behind them. Clearly, I was in error. The infamous 1996 gun ban—rushed into law in a frenzied panic two weeks after a lunatic had murdered 35 people at Port Arthur—came as something of a shock to me, that shock amplified when Aussies foolishly embraced the government’s rescission of their natural rights (not legally codified, mind; Australia has never had a 2A) with open arms. Australians, it seemed were blindly eager to trade essential liberty for temporary security, a deal with the Devil they walked into with eyes wide shut.
SO. How’d that work out for ya, cobber?
Thousands of Australian construction workers, for example, protested because they refuse to be coerced into vaccination against their will.
They actually were peaceful protestors. For real. They literally sang the national anthem.
Yet police pepper sprayed them and fired rubber bullets into the crowd of thousands (which included children).
Perhaps even more diabolical is that the government restricted the media from showing footage of the event as it was happening, and restricted airspace to prevent media helicopters from filming.
What’s really crazy is that this authoritarianism goes beyond COVID hysteria.
Australia’s parliament has passed a new bill eradicating Australians’ right to digital privacy.
It’s called “Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill 2021.”
It gives the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) sweeping new powers to not just surveil Australian citizens online, but also take over and run their online accounts, lock the actual user out of the account, and add or delete data.
The police never have to notify a person that their account has been hacked by the government.
What they are calling “warrants” actually do not always require an actual court or judge to sign off.
An “emergency authorisation,” allows police to bypass the courts entirely. And why should anyone be concerned about that? It’s not like the Australian government has ever abused its emergency powers before…
The right to travel, the right to protest, the right to privacy, the right to due process, the right to leave your home and earn a living— these are basic human rights that are now gone in Australia.
Ahh, worked out exactly as it always does, then. Good to know, I reckon.
It should be obvious by now to every citizen of any Western nation that never-ending “emergency powers” can easily snowball into a full-blown dictatorship.
Hardly unexpected, seeing as how that was the plan all along. It’s the “easily” part that I find most dismaying.
There is no reason it couldn’t happen to other formerly free nations as well.
And that means, more than ever before, it’s time to think about a Plan B.
It is at that. Considering the fact that the aforementioned snowballing is already happening in THIS formerly free nation—is quite well along, actually, with not much more resistance here than Aussies showed when their guns were taken from them, embarrassingly enough—I hereby propose that “Plan B” consist entirely and exclusively of three simple, easy to remember words: Kill. Them. All.
Learn it. Live it. Love it.
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