protests ideology afghanistan
(Image: Gorkie/Private Media)

As some critics have pointed out, while anti-lockdown protesters and their media and political enablers were lamenting the death of freedom in Australia, Afghans were trying to flee a far more real and permanent threat to freedom in the form of the medieval Taliban.

Those illegally gathering in the name of freedom here were fascinating for their lack of clear characterisation. Their ranks include Nazis trying to recruit people with “qui” placards, people with the mindset of Craig Kelly and George Christensen et al, that freedom is for white people, sovereign-citizen-types who reflexively and erroneously cite Magna Carta if they’re ever told to do anything they don’t want to, religious fundamentalists who only need prayer to stay safe from COVID, adherents of various conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers, left-wing chancers looking for a cause to grab onto, and actual ordinary people left without jobs because of lockdowns. Soixante-huitards they ain’t.

Those of us who marched — in vast numbers — against Australia’s participation in the Bush administration’s Middle East ventures nearly two decades ago, including against the fabrications of John Howard and Alexander Downer to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq, might compare and contrast how far protests have fallen, in light of the final vindication this month of those who opposed the Afghanistan and Iraq follies.

The connection is more than coincidental given events in Afghanistan. The lies about Iraq and the lack of accountability for the Afghan and Iraq debacles — including, now, for war crimes perpetrated by Australian forces — are an important reason why democratic governments are mistrusted, along with the financial crisis and the subsequent bailouts, and the years of stagnation that followed.

The connection goes further. The sheer diversity of the anti-lockdown protests, the lack of any defining ideology, the choose-your-own adventure nature of the motivations on display — all suggest protests as pastiche. So many of the ideas adorning placards at these protests are derived not from the lived experience of the protesters but from their curation of internet-derived concepts and memes. The use of “qui” on placards by Nazis was a meme created in France after an interview with a far-right ex-military figure earlier this year. QAnon is of course a US product — reflecting its soft power dominance in the Anglophone world, the US is a potent cultural engine of conspiracy theories, anti-vax lies, extremist content, and far-right memes parroted by right-wingers the world over.

The infectious nature of protest is hardly a new, or right-wing, phenomenon. The 1965 Freedom Ride in western NSW led by Charles Perkins was inspired by the 1961 civil rights Freedom Rides in the United States. Black Lives Matters protests in Australia last year — focused on Black deaths in custody here — were prompted by BLM protests in the US. But the derivative nature of the pastiche propelling anti-lockdown protesters onto the streets and into print is something different, as if there’s no longer any coherent ideology strong enough to unite people angry at government actions.

It’s as if the relentless individualist ethos of neoliberalism is combining with the consumer sovereignty logic of the internet to dissolve the possibility of political coherence. Having been told for a generation that our only identity and value is as a producer and consumer who must choose how to maximise our individual economic value, why would we not select the most appealing misinformation, conspiracy theory, religious creed, or extremism on which to hang our alienation?

Neoliberal politicians have had to grapple with this before. Having banished communitarian economic thinking and insisted the individual was the supreme social and economic structuring, right-wing politicians such as John Howard eventually realised that that left a gaping hole in the range of identities and tropes they could exploit for political advantage. Having initially envisaged a kind of shareholder democracy in which each Australian would enjoy private medical treatment, private education, work as independent contractors, and sit relaxed and comfortable in their McMansions as they watched their Telstra shares grow, the Howard government got mugged by reality — share prices could fall as well as rise, private health insurers gleefully ripped off members, employers kept exploiting workers, and housing became ever more unaffordable.

September 11 gave right-wingers a less economically-based political vision to exploit: we would become a semi-militarised society, ostentatiously proud of our brave men and women in uniform as they confronted the ultimate Other of large-scale Islamist terrorism. Anzac Day would become a national celebration of white imperial aggression, with thousands of young Australians enjoying Farnsey and Barnesy on the beaches of Gallipoli on Anzac Eve, even as Australian troops once again fought in the Middle East in the service of our imperial masters. We were in a civilizational conflict with medieval barbarians who hated us for our freedom.

Eventually that proved even more problematic than the myth of the shareholder democracy, although it took much longer. The lies were exposed, the sheer absurdity of the missions became apparent, the reluctance for continuing sacrifices in the name of endless war emerged, the unwillingness of the government to address the mental health toll on veterans ever harder to stomach. Instead of the Gallipoli myths we ended up with revelations of atrocities; Simpson and his donkey were replaced with skolling from prosthetic legs; instead of Anzacs we had decorated war criminals. As late as 2014 Tony Abbott was contemplating solo military interventions in the Middle East and his ministers were speaking of the “existential threat” of Islamic State, but it did nothing to save a flailing Abbott, no matter how many dozens of flags adorned his media conferences.

Seven years on, neoconservatives and right-wing politicians are again warning of the terrorist threat to western countries, in the hope that some kind of unifying principle can be exploited in response to a return of Islamist murder, but security agencies are already struggling to deal with very different threats — white supremacists, QAnon adherents, incels, sovereign citizens. And as Donald Trump himself pointed out, who had benefited from the neoconservatives’ endless wars except defence contractors?

Rather like television evolved from black and white to colour to digital to moving onto the internet in a multiplicity of sources, ideology and protest has been pulled apart from the comforting Cold War days of the west versus communism to the era of counter-terrorist forever wars, narco-conflicts, and a proliferating world of ever more bizarre conspiracy theories and extremists memes on the screen in your hand. And the consumer, as always, is king.