The caller on Raf Epstein’s ABC drivetime show had a theory on Scott Morrison’s ministergate scandal that Epstein didn’t have much time for. “I’m just wondering, you know,” John said, “if this concentration of power is the preparation for a coup.” Epstein was having none of that: “I don’t think anyone’s talking about a coup, John. I don’t think that’s realistic. But you could say a measure of how bad this was, is it makes talk of a coup sound normal!”
That was last week, and listening to it, one marvelled at the contortions of the liberal mind. Of course it can’t be a coup, we live in a liberal democracy, but the fact that it looks like the preparations for one is the scandal’s greatest sin, because it’s more characteristic of a banana dictatorship than a liberal democracy. Which is what we are, even though we don’t look like it due to ministergate. Which is what makes it so bad. Which…
John’s voice I’d recognised as that of a veteran radical, a signed-up Trot during the Dismissal of 1975. He sounded a bit startled but not surprised to get the liberal shutdown. Within a few days the rest of the public sphere had caught up to his vanguard. The prime minister had had himself commissioned, without public ceremony, to five key ministries at the start and part-way through a pandemic. He’d kept it near-totally secret. So had the governor-general, it turned out, by not recording it in the vice-regal diary. David Hurley was appointed by Morrison, restoring a patriarchal military figure to the centre of life, rejecting any women and First Nations nonsense.
So we have an ex-head of the armed forces appointed by a prime minister who is a believer in signs, myths and an interventionist God, who turns himself into a potential government-of-one, a move which the governor-general makes no record of.
This is the point where one breaks out what I have previously called the “Hollywood effect”, which is that the more likely you are to find a conspiracy plausible in a film or TV series, the less likely you are to believe it in real life, even when the actual stages of the event are identical. Some movie in which a journalist with incriminating floppy discs gets run off the road, a half-empty Scotch bottle planted in his car? “Ah, well,” you say, swigging kombucha, “the syndicate would have to do that because he was about to expose Plan 7.” Insurrections, power grabs, conspiracy, closer to home? Conspiracy theory….
So what — apart from paranoid hypervigilance and NSW Liberal Party factional warfare raised to the nth level — would explain such a grab? Well, let’s turn to the Book of Revelation.
Last week we noted that ScoMo’s repeated references to sailing the ship through the tempest of COVID came from the gospels. But what if he had seen greater portents in the news — signs of disaster that only a military Christian and a Christian prime minister could deal with? To that we look to Revelation, the final book of the Bible, author unknown — now simply designated “John of Patmos” — and possibly composed on drugs, or at least ergot, grain-mould that prompts hallucinations. Addressed to the “seven churches of Asia’, Revelation tells a terrifying story of a war in heaven and earth between good and evil leading to Judgment Day.
Quick summary: after a bit of rigmarole, God unseals seven books, which bring forth the four horses and riders of the apocalypse: a white horse for power, red horse for war, a black horse of (market-based) famine, and the pale horse of plague. Then an earthquake, then seven angels appear and celestial war consumes a third of the earth. In chapters 12 and 13:
And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. (12.3)
And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority. (13.2)
After which it’s more apocalypse until heaven is revealed and all the fornicators are in the pit.
Sooooo pretty obviously, the pale horse is COVID, the black horse is the coming global financial crisis, the red horse is war, and the white horse is the UN, taking global control (“don’t trust … the United Nations”).
The red dragon, well, duh, China. The beast? The leopard is traditionally Persia/Iran, the bear is Russia, the lion is India. The Ukraine war and China and others’ refusal to condemn Russia, essentially backing it, is what plunges us into global war. Did Morrison see COVID as the fourth horse, the prelude to humanity’s great test? Would this be sufficient to persuade that emergency arrangements should be in place?
How would it go? Well, the dragon attacks Taiwan, the Coalition government actually wavers as ScoMo, powered by prophecy, takes us into a war going nuclear. He advises the governor-general to sack the five ministers he doubles, and the defence and foreign affairs ministers. He then advises the G-G to prorogue Parliament (if it’s sitting), and call elections for seven weeks hence. The prime minister, controlling key domestic ministries, and the G-G is commander-in-chief in this two-person executive council. Ambassadors work to them. It’s all legal and constitutional. After that, who knows?
Possibly, once again I am burying a serious point in flights of fancy, though I suspect by now most Australians would have absolutely no doubt that Morrison might well have been steering government by a lunatic book of deranged prophecy. But if you wrote this stuff like most of the press corps, you’d die of boredom. But the brevity of our constitution, the ambiguity of its directions, combined with the ambiguous powers of the governor-general, and a political right that has made its anti-democratic intent plain, all show us how a legal coup is possible. We arguably had one in 1975, and based on the same principle: the governor-general can ignore the Parliament. Whatever ScoMo’s motives, ministergate served as an awfully good rehearsal.
But really, plagues and red dragons? So 1200BC. What was the more obscure moment that might have started it all off for ScoMo? Could it have been this, early in Revelation, before all the malarky starts?
And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white raiment; and they had on their heads crowns of gold. (4:4)
These are surely the 24 members of the First Nations Voice to Parliament, as recommended in the Langton-Calma report, in discussion from early 2020. As it was suggested they be chosen by community, they are clearly elders, and their mooting is portentous.
And this …
So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.
And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication (17:4)
… is clearly Katy Perry’s 2015 Superbowl concert. Look at the eyes of the beast, people! Scarlet! On the airwaves, in the air, signs and wonders…
The learned author jests, but he won shall not be named also wanted to move the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem. The nutter was inviting the quickening. Scom’s religious beliefs should have been examined long ago. We dodged a bullet. We must ensure it never happens again. Have a look at what Pentecostals actually believe. They BELIEVE this stuff.
Is it any wonder that the DSM V has such that concerning religion and delusion, because it is so widely held religion is exempted from the diagnosis of delusion.
However in the important respect of being an incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained and one that defies credibility, religion is a delusion.
My thoughts as the truth gradually came out that this was indeed a dry run for a Christian constitutional coup.
Christian PM gets his Christian G-G to put him into five senior ministries, none of which is subject to Cabinet for decisions, and both keep the whole thing secret. It was a structure for a one-man executive.
Look up the Seven Mountains Mandate – there is a duty on happy clappy Christians to infiltrate and ultimately control the structures of state. Look at the US Supreme Court…
Yes, two thirds of that is fairly standard on evangelical web sites. The First Nations Elders is a great addition. However conventional wisdom I think is that Pauline is the Scarlet Woman, in the local incarnation anyway.
It’s all fun and games until climate chaos really kicks in and they start wars based on this stuff. Like Margaret Atwood says of The Handmaids Tale, it’s a work of fiction but everything in it has happened somewhere.
The electorate saved Australian democracy, whereas in the US the theocratic project nears completion.
That is due to the US having a tyranny of the minority…mainly thanks to a Senate that was put in place by such a minority, the Founding Fathers …To ensure that the real control of the country did not pass too easily to the masses was the real concern of many of the attendees at those Constitutional Conventions.
The Electoral College which was constituted to give citizens in less populated and economically unproductive rural states with as many as four times the votes as those as those in more populous and economically productive urban ones, thereby violating the fundamental democratic principle of “one person, one vote;” It can also be alleged that the college was originally instituted and continues to be maintained for explicitly racist and anti-democratic purposes.
The loser of the popular vote has won the electoral college only five times before 2000. The last time such happened was in the mid 1800’s, long before universal franchise. Now it’s happened twice in 16 years and has enabled, inarguably, the two worst presidents in modern American history, both Republican. Dubya, The Faux Texan and as the Scots have it The Radge Orange Bampot!
Ian Millhiser, writing in Vox, calculates that if you add up the population of states and assign half to each of their two senators, “the Democratic half of the Senate represents 41,549,808 more people than the Republican half.”
41.5 million, more than 10 % of the population in fact c 12.5%, close to 1/8th!
You might think that in a country that claims to be some sort of a democracy, the party that held that much of an advantage might end up with a solid majority in the Senate, rather than have just barely eked out a 50-50 tie in a body that, taken together, represents the whole country.
Republicans have not won the majority of the votes cast in all Senate races in any election cycle for a long time. Nonetheless, Republicans held majority control of the Senate after the elections of 2014, 2016 and 2018 and still, after the 2020 races, held 50 of the 100 seats.
The problem in the USA is that though it says United, the States of America are not, so concerning much needed legislation, many people, mostly GOP oriented , but some from the Democratic Party, will clutch at their pearls and scream “State’s Rights!”
There are two things needed to occur to bring the USA out of the 18thC into at least the 20thC.
The Electoral College needs be reformed or the US moves to The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact
Also new legislation to replace the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, a combined census and apportionment bill passed by the United States Congress 18 June 1929, that established a permanent method for apportioning a constant 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives according to each census.
In 1929 the population of the USA was c. 122 million with 48 states it is now c.331 million now with 50 states to which must be added the Federal District of Columbia and the Territories of American Samoa, Guam, Northern Marianas, Puerto Rico and US Virgin Island.
Almost a century on the USA has over twice the the population but with still only 435 seats in the House of Representatives.
Strange how a chapter so Old testament pops up in the new one.
There is very much an Us and Them aspect to many religions if you want there to be, and footy teams,.. And the Pentecostals are no exception.
The sense of inclusion is mesmerising.
We need to take into account the power and influence the Catholic and protestant church had in Australia and how it influenced politics and congregations, this Pentecostal version has been punked up by US influence, the most charismatic are posted over there for training and ideas.
I’m surprised that the Neoliberal connection isn’t talked about openly, the prosperity gospel.
I presume that you mean it seems O/T for all the fire & brimstone, blood & destruction which is certainly true.
However, it is very much ‘modern’ being a first century AD attempt to make sense of the startling effect of an upstart Roman imperium crushing all the ruling order of ancient certainties, upending locality as a binding force and imposing a New World Order on what seemed eternal verities.
FWIW, Herbert W Armstrong ranted & railed over the world wide airwaves in the 50/60s about the Woman as Britain and the Beast with multiple heads & horns being the (then) EEC allying with Gog Magog and the Dragon of the USSR etc etc to threaten Godzone country, the USofA which the fair-skinned, if not actually blonde blue eyed Aryan JC would save.
As exegesis he really had it off pat, as far as it went, ie not very.
For does it all comes down to what some say is exegesis but others eisegesis?
For modern evangelical scholars accuse liberal Protestants of eisegesis, while other more orthodox scholars accuse the fundamentalist Christians of eisegesis.
Catholics say all Protestants engage in eisegesis, because the Bible can only be correctly understood through the Holy Tradition of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church
But Judaism has the best counter. All Christians practice eisegesis when they read Tnk, the OT as a book about Jesus!