Culture

Tony Abbott Talks Up ISIS As Worse Than The Nazis, REALLY Needs To Stop Comparing Things To Nazis

The Prime Minister of Australia is an internet comments section given human form.

by Alex McKinnon  3 September 2015

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Between the newly-created Australian Border Force, selecting former SAS commando Andrew Hastie for the upcoming Canning byelection, calling media criticism of government policy “a bit of a jihad” and jonesing for a full-on Western intervention in the ongoing Syrian civil war, the government have really, really been cranking up the militaristic language lately.

Given the government’s leaked intent to stage one national security “announceable” a week until the next election, it isn’t hard to see why. National security is the only thing the government feels comfortable talking about anymore (ignoring that they manage to fuck even that up sometimes, like they did with Operation Fortitude), and by creating new national security issues there’s a chance people will be scared enough to put aside their distaste for the government on all things domestic and vote for them in 2016.

Last week it even came out that Abbott has been pressuring Washington to publicly ask Australia to provide more military assistance in Syria, presumably because getting another three years usage out of the big government offices rather than the slightly smaller Opposition ones is worth sending Australian troops into a vicious, multi-sided clusterfuck that has left hundreds of thousands of people dead.

Nor has this recent trigger-happiness from the government been matched by an acknowledgement that carpet-bombing Syria will only increase the already-gargantuan flow of displaced people from the region, presumably because we already have a plan to lock up any Syrian kids who survive the sea journey in detention camps where they’ll be exposed to rampant physical and sexual abuse that it’s now illegal to report. Who knew Being Tough On Immigrants could get so complicated?

BUT ANYWAY. On 2GB with Alan Jones this morning, Abbott again talked up the apparent need for Australia to increase its military involvement in Syria, reiterating comments he made last year that ISIS are worse than Nazi Germany because they don’t hide what they do.

“It’s nonsense, turn on your televisions, look at what is happening. The latest atrocity apparently was four young men being strung up and burned alive,” Abbott said.

“The Nazis did terrible evil but they had a sufficient sense of shame to try to hide it. These people boast about their evil, this is the extraordinary thing. They act in the way that medieval barbarians acted, only they broadcast it to the world with an effrontery which is hard to credit.”

Confirming the suspicion that the Prime Minister of Australia is an internet comments section given human form, Abbott’s weird tendency to attack everyone from Bill Shorten to job losses in the Defence industry by evoking the fucking Nazis is well known by now.

Even in this case, where you could conceivably get why someone might flail around to describe the horrible things ISIS does and land on the Nazis, claiming that a bunch of evil fuckwits wreaking havoc in the Syrian desert with their stolen Toyota Hiluxes are worse than one of the largest and most systemic state genocides in human history is a bridge too far, especially given the highly political nature of what Abbott’s trying to accomplish when he says things like that.

Predictably, Abbott’s latest headkick moment has been met with a swift and broad backlash from people who know better. Robert Goot, the president of the Executive Council of Australia Jewry, told the Sydney Morning Herald that “whilst there is no question that Islamic State is a profoundly evil organisation, the Prime Minister’s comments suggesting that it is in some respects worse than the Nazis were injudicious and unfortunate.”

“The crimes of Islamic State are indeed horrific, but cannot be compared to the systematic round-up of millions of people and their despatch to purpose built death camps for mass murder,” Goot said. “There is a fundamental difference between organised acts of terrorism and a genocide systematically implemented by a State as essential policy.

“Acts of terrorism are necessarily done in the full glare of publicity for their propaganda effect. In contrast, those responsible for ordering and implementing systematic State-sponsored genocide are high government officials who often operate in secret not out of any sense of shame, but to avoid being held criminally responsible for their actions.”

People on Twitter were somewhat less diplomatic.