just a little bit of history repeating
Jul. 5th, 2009 11:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crazyjaneWatching Newsfront tonight ... for them as don't know, it's a movie looking at a particularly turbulent period in Australian social politics through the eyes of a newsreel crew. In the 1950s, the Red Scare hit here with only slightly less hysteria than in the USA. We didn't have a committee, or outlaw communism (although we tried - the legislation was thrown out for being unconstitutional, then the constitutional referendum failed), but we had the Catholic Church exhorting us from the pulpit to ban the Stalinist menace.
The Australian Labor Party suffered pretty badly during this time. Catholics, dismayed by what they saw as creeping socialism in 'their' party, split to form the Democratic Labor Party - a socially conservative lot who dissolved after 1978, and re-invented themselves with a little more distance from the Church. In the early days, though, people were put under incredible pressure to support the DLP - their salvation was said to depend on it.
All of which led me to look up the man who is often said to have been the 'most socialist' of any Labor Prime Minister, Ben Chifley. Along the way, I found this quote from him. Given the current situation of the world's financial sector, it seems both ironic and prophetic :
'In my electorate, I witnessed the freedom that was enjoyed by 2,000 men outside a factory in an attempt to secure the one job that was offering . . . the freedom to starve and to live on the dole of 8s. 9d. a week—a single man on 5s. 6d. . . . [This is] the freedom of the economic individualists whose only God was Mammon and profit . . . I would prefer regimentation to economic individualism'.
The Australian Labor Party suffered pretty badly during this time. Catholics, dismayed by what they saw as creeping socialism in 'their' party, split to form the Democratic Labor Party - a socially conservative lot who dissolved after 1978, and re-invented themselves with a little more distance from the Church. In the early days, though, people were put under incredible pressure to support the DLP - their salvation was said to depend on it.
All of which led me to look up the man who is often said to have been the 'most socialist' of any Labor Prime Minister, Ben Chifley. Along the way, I found this quote from him. Given the current situation of the world's financial sector, it seems both ironic and prophetic :
'In my electorate, I witnessed the freedom that was enjoyed by 2,000 men outside a factory in an attempt to secure the one job that was offering . . . the freedom to starve and to live on the dole of 8s. 9d. a week—a single man on 5s. 6d. . . . [This is] the freedom of the economic individualists whose only God was Mammon and profit . . . I would prefer regimentation to economic individualism'.
