Many moons ago, I pondered what would happen if a conservative political candidate or politician was photographed in front of a swastika flag while wearing a Hitler t-shirt. I was referring to Labor candidate John Falzon, who celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Russian revolution by posing for a selfie in front of a Soviet flag, wearing a Lenin t-shirt and communist red star lapel pin.
Falzon’s communist japery was laughed off and ignored by the media. But we know, of course, exactly what would happen to a conservative candidate.
When former National leader Todd Muller was spotted owning a MAGA hat among his political souvenirs, the New Zealand media went into a meltdown of pearl-clutching. When Tony Abbott was photographed in proximity to a protest banner calling then-PM Julia Gillard a “witch”, it sparked a frenzy of self-righteous outrage in the Australian media.
But when another Labor candidate sports a hammer and sickle? Crickets.
Last week, ABC Online ran a soft piece by Markus Mannheim on Maddy Northam, Labor candidate for the seat of Kurrajong in the forthcoming ACT election. It so happened that Northam has placed a drawing of a hammer and sickle on the wall of her campaign office[…]
In time, the hammer and sickle was implanted on the top left corner of the flag of the Soviet Union that flew over communist totalitarian dictators such as Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev[…]
Trade union officials and aspiring Labor Party politicians should know better. They should be aware that the hammer and sickle was the symbol of choice for some of the most vicious and murderous regimes the world has known.
The hammer and sickle was the emblem of mass-murder, torture and suffering on a scale that dwarfs even that of the Nazis. Anyone proudly sporting a hammer and sickle should be regarded with exactly the same opprobrium as someone parading a swastika.
Now imagine what your average reporter would have said if an ACT Liberal candidate had adorned their office with a bundle of sticks featuring an axe, or fasces, the symbol of Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime that ruled over Italy from 1922 to 1943.
All (political) hell would have broken loose. And for good reason.
Mussolini was not a mass murderer on a scale to match Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler or the Soviet Union’s Stalin. But no self-respecting politician in Australia today would identify with the symbol of Italian fascism or attempt to pass off criticism of any such identification with an assertion that it was all smear.
As always, the left-media refuse to hold their fellow-travellers to account, no matter how egregious their sins.
And, as always, the left persist in denying the heinous crimes of communism.
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