With the Australian Defence Force being officially stationed in my local government area, the proto-fascist police state has emerged, quite literally overnight, to the thunderous applause of the Quiet Australians. Nary a peep of decrying a Rising (code for Eastern) Authoritarianism, nary a whimper from a milion citizens already in lockdown.

This spectacle, this farce, is interesting in nature as it reveals great detail of where the current administration’s priorities lie during crisis. At every stage of this unfolding “national emergency”, no real effort has been made to respond to the true nature of the Delta outbreak, only the facade of response. As breakdown continues, there is little reason to expect these core priorities to change, even with a change of party administrators.

Oh, and please stop kidding yourself, Australia is a one party state in every way but name: we are ruled by The Party of Capital. Anyway.

It should be apparant to all observers that the government’s health response has been utterly pathetic. After delaying the initial lockdown for far too long, it was too lax in enforcing public health measures in high socio-economic status areas, and responded to increasing cases by heavily increasing police patrols in western suburbs, where the multicultural population lives. Income support has only just begun at the time of writing, four long weeks into lockdown, but even that pittance is made as onerous as possible to receive.

Anti-lockdown protests, the first of which sadly looks to be many being last weekend, present in its purest form a primal reaction to what is perceived to be sudden reduction in liberty. Not letting a super-spreader event go to waste, the state police appealed for citizens to report on eachother, and over ten thousand reports were made.

That such a call was not only heeded, but indulged in happily, should send chills down the spine of anyone who dissents in this dying world. The mass electronic surveillance systems seem to not be production-ready yet, but the supplement of human-supplied intelligence by an easily manipulated public is even harder to manage.

Over the last two days, restrictions have been further tightened and the state police force formally requested assistance from the national defence force. They arrived yesterday.

Given the rather inconvenient (for the proto-fascists currently in charge) legal impediment to the defence force operating, each officer must be escorted by a police officer, their only apparent use in aiding public health being purely aesthetic. But that aesthetic of projected authority has a very real function in the fascism being constructed before our very eyes.

Whether or not an an authoritative action actually affects anything is irrelevant, so long as negative externalities are not experienced by the only demographic that matter: white property owners must not be inconvenienced, and their prejudices indulged, at every cost. This is a very clear indication of how the state is planning to handle subsequent collapses.

If you apply this analytical lense to any problem in contemporary Australian society, you may or may not be surprised that every act of government may align very well. There’s a saying about class society and democracy: bourgeois democracy is but dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

Personally, I am completey shocked at how broad a slice of the population will so willingly lick the boots of bourgeois state enforcers. But take a glimpse at any social media platform and you can hardly deny such a torrent of servile reaction. Even the darlings of the liberal media elite could be seen kowtowing in public.

The response to a dying world differs amongst people. Some seek safety, some seek change. And so it is with politics, the trend being clear towards a further diminished opposition to the dominant values.

What are those values, you may ask?

So-called Australia was founded as the white supremacist wedding of labour and capital, and is now ruled by a corrupt cabal of elites who offer unscrupulous settlers and the weak minded the chance to sponsor and thus indulge in government corruption. That’s it, nothing more. Property interests pretending to be a country.

However weak a justification such a grotesquerie claims, it does so claim. And so the exact nature of Australian fascism will draw from a vast well of ugliness, savagery and unjust privilege extracted over a century or more. There is much to be understood, but we must understand the exact nature of that national consciousness. Especially that nature that may be present in all of us, as one borne of the colony.

Lest we be as clueless as a liberal journalist in the bourgeois media, as stupid a pawn as an anti-lockdown protester, or as malicious as a left-reactionary.

The old world is dying. A new world struggles to be born. This is the time of monsters. We must recognise that fascism is simply the pure expression of capitalism in decay.