Proper Gander

I watched the news on SBS this evening. It was a profoundly depressing experience, not so much because of what was being covered, but because of the way that it was being covered:

• Covid: a lengthy part of the news. About 15% news, and 85% propaganda.
• Cop26: about 10% news, and 90% climate change propaganda.
• Fuel shortages in the UK: about 50% news, and 50% anti-Brexit propaganda.
• Chinese military intimidation of Taiwan: this was much better, being mostly news. But a very worrying story, of course.
• Demonstrations in Chile: about 60% news, and 40% a cri de coeur on behalf of the illegal migrants.
• Sport: I don’t know. I turned it off. On the basis of past experience, it would have been heavily loaded in favour of women playing football or cricket or rugby, if there were any women’s games to report on.

SBS used to be the best news channel in Australia, and pretty much the only channel which reports on what’s going on in the world, as opposed to more parochial content.  Now, propaganda is its game.

I have a nasty feeling that with this level of wall to wall messaging, the world is headed to a bad place. The overreaction to Covid has dramatically accelerated totalitarian control, and the erosions of freedom of movement and freedom of speech.  The climate change nonsense is even worse.  They have softened up people to the idea of pointless state-imposed economic carnage and loss of freedom with their overreaction to Covid, and I think they are going to capitalise on that with a full-bore drive to world poverty with climate change. Except that it won’t be quite the whole world; China and Russia are having none of this nonsense, although China is diplomatic enough to mouth a few empty platitudes.

Talking to some friends from Zimbabwe this afternoon, it was interesting to hear their view about how intelligent Robert Mugabe was in his destruction of the middle class in Zimbabwe, in order to ensure that there could be no challenge to his domination. Slow, relentless, and always in control of the security forces and the media.  The very rich in the Western world are scarcely better in this respect, although their methods are very different.

When the middle classes in the Western world are reduced to impotence and poverty, the mega-rich will rule over us all like demi-gods.