Blog Archives
FUTURE OF THE PASTORAL IDYLL
In 1995 Theodore Kaczynski wrote Industrial Society and Its Future in which he proposed overthrowing the economic and technological basis of the present society. His reasoning was that individuals had become over-socialised, pursued false goals and lacked autonomy. Scientists and technologists were culpable of pursuing surrogate goals and marched on blindly regardless of the welfare of the human race. His evidence of the failure of the industrial system is leftism, which he regards as a symptom of the disruption of the power process. His solution after revolution is to disperse technologies and organisations, with most people accepting hardships to live idyllically close to nature, feeding themselves as peasants, herdsmen, fishermen or hunters. His paper is available on the Internet.
My novel The Grass Is Always Browner (2011) tells a different epic fictional political thriller of several generations of a people, beginning in the year 2237, based on current technological trends, including climate change. Independently of the Kaczynski analysis, industrial society collapses after famine and coastal flooding, with the population dispersing from urban centres to grow their own food and self-sustain on acreages. Political organisation is led by a dynasty of Aboriginal people, who arbitrate in religious conflict between the descendants of European settlers and immigrants from Asian countries.
Both works forecast attempts by ordinary people to regain the idyllic state of nature idealised by the Romantic poets and later by hippies. To reach it, dystopian transition conditions could be necessary. However, lives could be improved by it and this story enables us to consider modifying the direction of technological development or even rejecting it.
The Grass Is Always Browner is on Amazon. Further information: https://martinknox.com
FUTURE OF THE PASTORAL IDYLL
In 1995 Theodore Kaczynski wrote Industrial Society and Its Future in which he proposed overthrowing the economic and technological basis of the present society. His reasoning was that individuals had become over-socialised, pursued false goals and lacked autonomy. Scientists and technologists were culpable of pursuing surrogate goals and marched on blindly regardless of the welfare of the human race. His evidence of the failure of the industrial system is leftism, which he regards as a symptom of the disruption of the power process. His solution after revolution is to disperse technologies and organisations, with most people accepting hardships to live idyllically close to nature, feeding themselves as peasants, herdsmen, fishermen or hunters. His paper is available on the Internet.
My novel The Grass Is Always Browner (2011) tells a different epic fictional political thriller of several generations of a people, beginning in the year 2237, based on current technological trends, including climate change. Independently of the Kaczynski analysis, industrial society collapses after famine and coastal flooding, with the population dispersing from urban centres to grow their own food and self-sustain on acreages. Political organisation is led by a dynasty of Aboriginal people, who arbitrate in religious conflict between the descendants of European settlers and immigrants from Asian countries.
Both works forecast attempts by ordinary people to regain the idyllic state of nature idealised by the Romantic poets and later by hippies. To reach it, dystopian transition conditions could be necessary. However, lives could be improved by it and this story enables us to consider modifying the direction of technological development or even rejecting it.
The Grass Is Always Browner is on Amazon. Further information: https://martinknox.com
Does Australia’s Constitution have racism?
Australia’s Constitution adopted on 1 January 1901 had 3 clauses explicitly concerned with race (see below).In 1901 it was commented that “It enables the Parliament to deal with the people of any alien race after they have entered the Commonwealth; to localise them within defined areas, to restrict their migration, to confine them to certain occupations, or to give them special protection and secure their return after a certain period to the country whence they came.”
DELETED ENTIRELY BY REFERENDUM IN 1967
‘In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted’.
STRUCK OUT BY REFERENDUM 1967
Section 51(xxvi) still provides that the Commonwealth Parliament can legislate with respect to ‘the people of any race, other than the aboriginal race in any State, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws’. This is the so-called, ‘races power’.
CURRENT PROVISION
Section 25 recognised that the States could disqualify people from voting in the elections on account of their race.
I am puzzled that Section 25 continues and wonder under what scenario Australian authorities would need this clause, over and above legislation that would apply to non-Indigenous people? Do the concerns above still apply and need the remaining provisions? Or do new concerns warrant their retention? Is it feared that the non-Indigenous population (3%) could passively resist, as did Hindus in India (80%) against the British occupiers in 1919-1930? Or that they could oppose the government, as did Black Africans (75%) in South Africa before 1986? Or perhaps some immigrant race’s misbehaviour could not be controlled by the laws that control the rest of Australians?
My fiction novel The Grass Is Always Browner tells a story of Australia’s ethnic development 250 years in the future. http://www.martinknox.wordpress.com
