(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
[sydney, australia] One can say a lot about a government by looking at who they like. One can say even more about it by discovering who they dislike.
Australian Steve Irwin, entertainer and self-proclaimed environmentalist, filmed one of his famous nature documentaries in September. He swam over a skate out on the Great Barrier Reef, in shallow water. As the cameras were filming, the spiked tail of Steve's chest cut into Steve's chest, causing a wound "to the heart," which he died of shortly after.
Irwin had become known by dealing with dangerous animals in front of the camera, mostly crocodiles. He did not hunt for them to kill them, but to bring them to his zoo. Irwin had a broad Australian accent, a clown's exaggerated body language and a boyish audacity near dangerous animals.
Irwin's attractiveness lay precisely in this fantasy: We would like to give a man superhuman powers: To be able to fly through the air, shoot nets from the wrists, put his head between the jaws of a beast. But animals, of course, do not follow the script.
The other part of his appeal was like the Coliseum for the masses: People like to see someone fooling death.
The national grief response at his passing was strangely violent. And interestingly, it was shared: Irwin was easily represented as a hero for the "ordinary" Australian.
The government defines the "ordinary" Australian against the well-educated, urban, cultural "elite" (that word is pronounced here in Australia with the same contempt that right-wing Americans reserve for "liberals").
The politicians fortified themselves to ally with the future saint. They came in hordes of the celebration of Irwin's life, held on his "Crocosorium". In front of stands full of weeping families, Prime Minister Steve's virtues boast of a true Australian: "He loved his family and he loved his country," said John Howard.
This is how it was clearly implied – and politicians specialize in implicating clearly – that people who criticize their country (and the Prime Minister's policy) are "un-Australian". They are not patriots.
Why are there always right-wing parties that call themselves "nationalists" of some kind: Le Front National, the National Socialist, New Zealand First, and so on? To me, it seems that the people who really love their country are the ones trying to save it from a bad governance.
It takes real courage to resist a bad government. If the board is really bad, it can be an action that challenges death. Or one can lose. In my lifetime, the most unusual example of this is Anna Politkovskaya, the world-famous Russian journalist who was shot and killed in Moscow on October 7.
The task she undertook was to tell her fellow Russians the truth about Vladimir Putin's regime's destruction of democratic institutions. And about his war in Chechnya. To honor the dead; to hold the government accountable; to make Russians less vulnerable to Putin's propaganda; to carry on the hope of a life of democratic freedom for their countrymen.
Politkovskaya felt ostracized in her own country: she lived with the certainty that she would be killed. Putin's reaction was slow and subdued.
His politicians stay away from Anna Politkovskaya, which only confirms – if we did not know – how great a need there was for this extraordinary woman, and how right she was.
OK, we greet you, brave Anna.
Anna Funder is an Australian lawyer and writer, living in Melbourne. She is the author of the book Stasiland and writes regularly and exclusively for this column in Ny Tid, like Irshad Manji, Noreena Hertz and Shah M. Rais. Earlier, the late Anna Politkovskaya also wrote her columns under this vignette.
Translated by Sara ES Orning
