Like Hitler, One Nation employs conspiracy theories to create divisions and fuel the rise of fascism in Australia, says John Passant.
BACK IN 1998, I wrote an article for the Canberra Times arguing that One Nation was an organisation that had the potential to become fascist.
I argued that because its base was small business and workers in less unionised regional and rural areas, One Nation had the potential to become a classic fascist movement supported by an economically distressed middle class and organised gangs from the “lower” classes.
We see those developments again in Australia with Reclaim (white) Australia, at least, supportive of One Nation and its ideas, while at the same time, Hanson’s Parliamentary representatives mostly appearing to be small business people rocked by years of market pressures.
With Hitler, the “othering” of Jews was an important glue to bind together his forces and supporters before and after he came to power. Yet the main target of his first concentration camps was the Left. It was communists, social democrats and unionists he locked up. In the case of the communists, this was in the first week of coming to power. The Nazis began locking up the social democrats a little later.
Read the full article by John Passant at Independent Australia.