HOTEL HELL FOR REFUGEES
Headline on front page of Preston Leader on Tuesday 10 March 2020 (This is a Murdoch paper!!! )
Whatever happened to our so-called democracies?
Starting with South Africa, the world waited with bated breath for dramatic changes when Nelson Mandela became the first black president of a united South Africa and possibly the end of apartheid - and the police state.
Mandela retired after his first and only 5-year term as president - he was, of course, quite elderly by then and after the criminally hard life he had had in South Africa's infamously dreadful prison on Robben Island, he rightly thought a younger generation should govern for South Africa.
He wrongly favoured Thabo Mbeki who was disastrous during his periods as president because he was an AIDS denier to the extent that even today, a few presidents later, HIV/AIDS still presents a major health challenge for the South African people.
A little later Jacob Zuma became president and corruption set in, with disastrous results for the economy and all other facets of South African life.
One of the disasters of this period was the Marikana massacre of many miners who had gone on strike because of the murderous mismanagement of the company owning certain mines.
The person who is now the president, Cyril Ramaphosa, was apparently the person who ordered the police and the army to open fire on the miners. In an earlier incarnation he had been the president of the organisation Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). Then he became a business man and also very rich.
Disaster all the way, and the rich got richer and the poor poorer - if possble - and South Africa still remains a mess - in 2020.
I arrived in Australia from South Africa in 1978, hoping apartheid and police state would not be as bad as in South Africa.
Idle hope! After all, apartheid started in Australia on 26 January 1788 and the nature of the British colonisation of Australia was that it was already a police state. Instead of improving over the years, the police state has intensified to the extent that asylum seekers managing to get to Australia - escaping mostly from brutal regimes around the world and arriving here to ask for asylum, hoping to have peace in their lives, are locked up in concentration camps from which escape is virtually impossible.
Some slightly more humanitarian politicians - and they are few and far between in Australia - managed to pass legislation to bring refugees to Australia from the concentration camps on Manus and Nauru for medical treatment. This legislation was overturned by the government as soon as it was possible, and 55 asylum seekers have been locked up in a Mantra Hotel in Preston in Melbourne for the last 8 months with no chance of any relief in sight and no hope of change from a government and opposition determined to follow a police state mentality of locking people in concentration camps and throwing away the keys.
What is mostly ignored by most white Australians and many migrants in the last 200 years or so is that the indigenous inhabitants of this ancient country are still treated like savages in their own land and they are imprisoned at alarming rates where they are also suffering deaths in custody by a brutal police regime determinedly maintained by the police state governments of the country.
Some of those of us who have experienced the "joys" of living in a police state despair of any changes in Australia because so many people behave like sheep and also can - or won't be bothered with making any sorts of protests and leaving the rest of us with that hopeless feeling that there is never going to be any changes - ever!
At the age of 93 I thought I had seen and experienced most of the worst aspects of human nature but the longer I live the worse it gets - and I haven't spoken about Israel yet.
Israel is not only a police state, but one with fascist tendencies. Israelis resent being compared to the Nazis but most of what they are doing to keep the Palestinians under control is to keep them incarcerated in their concentration camps in Gaza and the West Bank on land stolen from them by the zionist settlers. Even those Palestinians who were and are in Israel as citizens of their own land are treated like second or third class citizens without full citizens' rights because the zionist project is to occupy the rest of Palestine which has some old Jewish names - Judea and Samaria - for them called after some of the old tribal groups of a few thousand years ago.
Israel wants a Jewish state and if that is what they want, Israel under no circumstances can be called a democracy - it hasn't been that for most of its existence - but a theocracy similar to Iran and other similar religious states.
.........and Israel is the propagator of much of the anti-semitism in the world in the 21st century.
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