Back in the USSR

We in the Enlightened West can no longer scoff at the destructive delusions of authoritarian societies. In some ways, we are now worse.

We who live in liberal democracies are generally grateful that we’ve been spared the excruciating dullness and dysfunction that less fortunate people in authoritarian societies are forced to endure.

There are many examples from the past century of how awful life is under despotic regimes – every Islamic shithole in the Middle East springs to mind, as do North Korea and most of post-colonial Africa.

But the most entertaining example is still the Soviet Union, partly because its leaders were so convinced that their controlled society was superior to our less-controlled one that not only did they deliberately eliminate anything even remotely related to free-thinking Western culture and technology from the USSR, but they boasted about it to useful idiots like New York Times reporter Walter Durante and Columbia University sociology academic Bernhard Stern, whose gullible reports now prove, if such proof were necessary, that the delusions the Soviet leaders had about life in their worker’s paradise were a thin veneer over industrial-strength misery for hundreds of millions of people.

The process of thoroughly separating Soviet culture from the West began at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, at which the doctrine of “socialist realism” was declared. It dictated that all artistic endeavours must henceforth be unambiguously optimistic about socialism, and anyone found indulging instead in abstract or critical ideas like those popular in the bourgeois West would be arrested and sent to a gulag.

It didn’t stop there. Socialist realism soon spread to science, where research opportunities and academic tenure became reliant upon adherence to party principles. The most startling case was the official replacement of the Western concept of genetics with Lysenkoism, which argued that the characteristics passed down from one generation of a species to another were not genetic but acquired from the environment. It sounds mildly eccentric at first, but in reality, when it was applied to agriculture across the Soviet Union, led to widespread famine and even more misery.

We in the dynamic, innovative, free West could once scoff at all this mandatory culture and science. But we can’t any more. Our governments are busily devising cultural and scientific dogmas that are just as deluded and destructive; the only difference is that we haven’t felt the consequences of them yet, partly because they are being implemented at the lethargic pace of overpaid 21st century public servants rather than with the urgency of early Soviet revolutionaries.

But don’t worry, the consequences will arrive soon enough.

The Australian government is currently halfway through reviewing its National Cultural Policy, a five-year plan that started in January 2023, which will determine how it spends more than $300 million in grants a year through its culture agency, Creative Australia, among others.

I became aware of this when I received several reminders on social media that as an Australian citizen I could submit my own suggestions to this process on my own behalf or as the representative of an arts organisation.

It took only a few clicks to learn that this was not as democratic as it seemed, and that all submissions must include suggestions about how to respect the “cultural rights” of First Nations people and other diversity diktats. Still, snooping around this enormous branch of the federal Arts Department’s website did uncover some unintentionally hilarious material.

To ensure that stupid people are not excluded from this important cultural process, the guide for submissions is also published in something called “Easy Read”, which “uses simple words and pictures to explain ideas”, such as why culture matters:

Once you scroll past that, things become less easy to read than the authors of the document intended. For example:

What are those two “dancers” doing? Is this a new form of inclusive ballet, or does this image depict the moment when a disabled man at a strip joint blows his NDIS grant on a lap dance? We may never know. The hilarity subsides, however, when you remind yourself that your taxes paid for a federal public servant to type “black woman dancing with white guy in a wheelchair” into a primitive AI image generator, then cut and paste that image along with dozens of other stupid images into a document about culture for semi-literate morons. It’s then that feelings of depression and dread become difficult to overcome.

The document that launched this program in 2023 contains platitudes from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese that vaguely recall the rhetoric of the Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934:

“They (arts) bring us together, adding to life’s great highs and helping us get through the lows. Our artists help us celebrate what makes us different, and rejoice in what we share. Whether it’s our stories being told, our music being played, or our world being interpreted through paint, dance, textile, stone or clay, the arts are central to our being. It is through our many and varied forms of artistic expression that we build our identity as a nation and a people.”

Albanese carefully avoided dogmatically explaining the sort of art that the state will support with its taxpayer-funded largesse, but he didn’t need to. Everyone in the arts “industry” knows that, to qualify for a grant, you simply need to tick as many victimhood boxes as possible.

There was a vivid example of how this works on 8 May, when a bloke called Richard Lewer won the Archibald Prize for his portrait of Iluwanti Ken, a “respected Pitjantjatjara Elder” and “a senior artist and ngangkaṟi (traditional healer).”

The only interesting thing about this portrait is counting how many diversity boxes it ticked in order to win the $100,000 prize. I counted three, including Lewer’s unfortunate artistic disability, but there could be more. Needless to say, however, this is now the minimum requirement for all future Archibald Prize winners.

There seems to be an inverse relationship between official attempts to dictate culture and the actual culture of ordinary people. The more the government tries to enforce an approved culture, the worse the actual culture becomes. This was true in the Soviet Union, and it’s true in Australia today.

The “culture” in Aboriginal communities around Alice Springs, for example, revolves around alcohol, violence, victimhood, porn, sexual assault and occasionally pedophilia. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese attended the funeral of Kumanjayi Little Baby, the five-year-old child who was abducted, raped and murdered in one of these hellish Aboriginal townships this month, and posted photos of himself sharing the family’s grief. His post suggests that he was just a compassionate passer-by, that his government could not have prevented the child’s death by closing down the camps and forcing the adult residents to get a job and care for their children like the rest of us do. Instead, what they really need is more state-funded artists who acknowledge First Nations’ “cultural rights”.

Neither can we scoff at the Soviets for supporting hare-brained ideas like crops having inherent characteristics that are determined by the environment, not their genes. The transgender ideology that has now thoroughly captured politics, academia and the judiciary across the formerly liberal West is virtually identical to the Soviets’ Lysenkoism, except instead of applying to insentient crops it applies to troubled humans, and often results in the ghoulish practice of teenage genital mutilation. In many ways, our primitive art and barbaric pseudo-science make the Soviets look cautiously restrained by comparison.

It takes a bolder man than me to scoff at other cultures these days. In my lifetime, the West has lost most of its claims to superiority over other cultures, even if it does nominally remain the repository of 2000 years of glorious Western Civilisation.

As I said, the biggest difference between us and most other dysfunctional societies is that we haven’t felt the consequences of our lunacy yet.

I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect that day is coming faster than most people realise.

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I’ve recently published an updated edition of Die Laughing: The Wild Life of Bill Leak. It is now more relevant than ever. Bill was widely mocked for warning that Islam, identity politics, censorship and environmentalism would destroy Australia’s awesome culture. Well, who’s laughing now?

You can buy the new edition here.

Or watch my documentary, The Heart of Sharkness, about the human cost of protecting sharks, here. The callous incompetence of our politicians and various marine experts will shock you.