Quadrant online is at it again. A few weeks after publishing a fantasy of panelists and audience members of Q&A being torn apart by a nail bomb, another writer can’t help but slaver over the possibility of the violent death of leftists:
“Leftists are boring because they relate everything to themselves. The old Left of fairness and compassion for the underdog has gone. The new Left is about posing as compassionate at no cost to oneself, preferably towards some’victim’ safely at arm’s length — an Aboriginal township-dweller or an ‘asylum seeker’ over on Manus Island. And if an asylum seeker who’s been let in throws bombs in a crowded street the Leftist can live with that too, and make excuses for it, as long as it’s not in some sacred Leftist space like the Wheeler Centre.”
The writer of this masturbatory death fantasy is Christopher Akehurst. It’s part of a 1000+ word tirade on leftists, which ends with the proposition that 1) Hitler was a boring and dull man; 2) nevertheless he dun the Holocaust; and 3) leftists are boring and dull and thus they might do a Holocaust too. This bit of Godwinning is ironic because the writer Akehurst brings to mind here is Hitler, in one of the endless tirades in Mein Kampf and Table Talk about “Jewish Bolsheviks”.
Interesting, because Akehurst was once a sometimes-funny writer, a quarter of a century ago, in a column for (Robert Manne’s) Quadrant called “Argus”. In the usual fashion, his humorous talents have decayed into bitter despite. Sadly, even in his prime, no mainstream publication of large circulation saw sufficient worth in Akehurst’s humorous broadsides to give him a column, or any sort of regular publication. Instead, he made a living off running Coast and Country magazine, a piece of glossy, B&B-weekender porn, whose readers were exactly the sort of cashed-up inner-city leftists he despises so much.
Tough gig, and Coast and Country appears to have gone out of publication. Hard to know which aspect of that he’s bitter about. And who really cares? In the meantime however, is it possible that the one or two sane members of the Quadrant board who remain could gently remind their writers not to fantasise about the violent deaths of leftists, at actual places, where actual people work, when writing diatribes about how incivil leftists are?
I suppose I can be labeled as leftist but I never fantasise about the demise of other Australians. If I wanted all those right of centre to die (and bombs appear to be the MO of choice), it would include some of my nearest and dearest. Do these Quadrant people live under a rock?