Peter Jennings, in an “The Australian” newspaper article headed “Six policies the PM should implement, starting today”, argues for a number of responses to the Bondi shootings — including “commonwealth and state governments should use their existing legal powers to temporarily ban all pro-Palestinian protests in our cities. The same rule should apply to the odious Nazi groups”.

A number of issues quickly come to mind. For example, how long is “temporary”? Would a single individual with a placard criticising Israeli actions in Gaza be considered “pro-Palestinian”, or would it take 2 or 3 or more people? Unlike Jennings, I have lived and worked in countries — Russia and China — where such protests are banned and have read and written more about such things than he ever will, and it is clear to me that Jennings is the sort of person who would thrive in an authoritarian (even very dictatorial) country.

Many Australia politicians and commentators have a mindset that would be at home in Putin’s Russia. And, with nothing but an ancestor who may have been killed in the Holocaust, many Australian Jews claim to be experts on authoritarianism, racism and offensive speech – and push the state of New South Wales in Australia to propose that people who chant Nazi slogans (like “blood and honor”) or invoke Nazi “characteristics” face up to two years in prison.

I was living in Russia (Moscow and Irkutsk) when Putin invaded Ukraine in early 2022 and was shocked at the speed at which people adopted – even in private conversation – the mandated term “special military operation” instead of the word “invasion” (which I used) because they were afraid of being reported to the authorities. This was in stark contrast to the free-wheeling conversations that I had when I first lived in Russia in the early 1990s.

This evolution in censorship was very different to my time living in China when I knew that there were certain things that I should not say. I knew that my book “Dictatorial CEOs and their Lieutenants: “Inside the Executive Suites of Mao, Napoleon, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Ataturk” was being confiscated at the border.

The move to censorship and dictatorship in Russia began soon after Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, but my first direct personal experience of it was when I wrote a university research paper in 2017 about Russia’s political position in “Eurasia” and referred to 2014 “invasion” of Crimea. The university refused to publish it. Prior to this, my main direct experience of censorship was seeing young Russians violently pulled off Pushkin’s statue in central Moscow for displaying anti-Putin placards.

Total censorship and dictatorship did not appear overnight in 1930s Germany, but it did progress much faster than in Putin’s Russia – and the ultimate consequences were much more devastating.

We now live in a digital world where the possibilities for both free expression and censorship – and attendant social control — are much greater than ever before. As usual, it is the ignorant idealists – the Pol Pot types — looking to create a better society who become the zealots leading groupthink in favor of repression. The are now coming to the fore in Sydney!

Kindle versions of my original book on “Dictatorial CEOs” — and an updated version to include Putin — are available on Amazon by clicking “Purchase Jeff’s Book” on my main internet site: https://lnkd.in/gNnkSXZm