Harry Heidelberg is a Webdiary columnist.

 

“Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.” 1984 George Orwell

We feel numb because the unimaginable horror story has become reality. When you don’t know whether to laugh, cry or throw a brick through the window, you become numb. Eventually the emotion will out. It was always objectionable but somehow understandable when other parts of the world succumbed to the netherland of the big lie. We’d read about Fascism and Communism but we’d never experienced it directly and we knew we never would. It was there all along: our moral superiority. Bad things don’t happen in our sunny English speaking world.

The Americans have always been overt in expressing their moral superiority. They were an exceptional society founded under God. The British had centuries of tradition, continuity and relative stability. The Australians knew it so deeply in their hearts, that there wasn’t even a need to crow about it. Why crow about givens? We know we’re a decent people and we invented the “fair go”. We’d never engage in grand conspiracies. We had no need to and it was never really our style anyway.

The D-Day commemorations in Normandy this weekend will be a reminder of our shared history. The bonds of the member countries of the English speaking world are incomparable and apparently unshakable. When does it become unhealthy though? When do the bonds become shackles? All the signs are there for anyone who cares to glance for longer than a nanosecond. One sign could be that two of our “sisters”; Canada and New Zealand are at odds with us. There wasn’t a lot of ambiguity about D-Day though.

Now we seem mired in ambiguity and the worst part of all is that our leaders are burying us in the stuff. So what is our mire made of? Bullshit. In the ultimate nightmare scenario, 1984 and Animal Farm have merged to become the compendium we call 2004.

Some might say that there’s a cloud over D-Day. A commemoration is about remembering. There’s no cloud over that day. It was the beginning of the end of terror in Europe. This continent stands today as the European Union. The world has never seen nations come together like this. A bold enterprise affecting the daily lives of 450 million people.

Creating a new Europe has been a long and difficult road and we’re only part way along it. The pathfinders of the new united Europe were dismissed last year by the Americans as being “Old Europe”.

At the conclusion of World War II, the POW conventions in Geneva were drafted. The UN was formed and these days it is all treated as frankly blah. There was a reason for it though. Countries like ours were at the forefront of these endeavours. We had a clear vision founded on core beliefs that had served us well.

One of our own, Doc Evatt, was elected Secretary General of the United Nations in 1948. Imagine how he would have felt to be the leader of the UN when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was passed? This was Australia walking tall. Not in a brash or ungainly way but in a stubborn attempt to find the right way ahead.

We’ve lost our way and it’s possible to find inspiration in our past in order to set ourselves right again. We do have a duty to set ourselves right again because our leaders will not do it for us. When our leaders start to sound like “Squealer” in Orwell’s Animal Farm, the time has come to take our country back.

Squealer said, “Do not imagine, comrades, that leadership is a pleasure. On the contrary, it is a deep and heavy responsibility. No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”

The words we hear from our leaders are a daily diet of lies, spin and hypocrisy. You know it is unravelling when they start contradicting themselves on the same day.

We’re not dumb farmyard animals and we’re not going to be taken for a ride, we’re not going to be patronised.

We are living in dangerous times and its becoming harder to breathe. Many of us don’t like the media but right now we need them more than ever. Truth is our only source of oxygen. We still need the media to help us find it. No one else will help us.

Societies based on lies and led by individuals with no moral compass will inevitably collapse. History tells us this and there is no better weekend than this one to remember that.

Lest we forget.