As the historical example of the Nazis shows, totalitarianism is characteristically deflective. Collective tantrums over the wheels falling off the bandwagon of endless upward mobility reject any concept of social responsibility as a matter or course, preferencing hiding behind freedom like cowards over standing in front of it and defending it equally for everyone. To these ends, totalitarian paranoia and conspiracism deflect attention away from the sadistic violence totalitarians value in practise. Dictators allege the defense of lofty universalisms from disloyal evildoers while serving their own ambition, and that of cronies who demonstrate the necessary obsequiousness and obedience. Deflection masks the pursuit of unspoken purposes and the servicing of ulterior motives—the establishment and maintenance of a ruling oligarchy. The deny-attack-reverse-victim-and-offender strategy of coercive control, codified into ideology, deflects responsibility for the consequences of sadistic violence away from the totalitarians who perpetrate it, reconstructing harm as beneficial to the victim. Deflection is as crucial to totalitarian social control as it is to domestic abuse, and this is telling. Not least, the illiberal authoritarianism of hegemonic ‘neoliberal’ ideology in Australia, alongside a national epidemic of domestic violence, suggests that mainstream political and cultural norms offer fertile soil for deflection and contempt for anything that looks like norms of consent.
The ghoulish history of anti-semitism demonstrates the critical necessity of deflection to totalitarian social control as well as any. Hitler’s conspiracist hallucination of a grand Jewish plot for world domination was singularly useful in deflecting responsibility for the economic woes of 1930’s Germany away from structural and historical causes, onto a stereotyped scapegoat. The raging paradox of anti-Semitic stereotypes was that the hooked-nose Jew was an evil capitalist and an evil communist at the same time. Jews were not only good for blood libel and divine right mythology, they were positively Schrödingerian ninjas as well. It was a testament to how completely affective conformity to group ideology shut down critical thinking, that this raging paradox passed under the radar of many who soon wound up freezing to death on the Eastern Front. Deflecting from structural causes of economic and social crisis enabled the Nazis to revive their economy by preparing for imperialist warfare via Military Keynesianism instead, flouting the much-hated Treaty of Versailles for brownie points.
So too with Stalin. His own protracted reign of terror foretold the restoration of class hierarchies, and the return of the commodity form, in any challenge to his personal autocracy, even as the deformed proletarian state inherited the proletarian commodity-form from the Leninist New Economic Policy. Stalinist conspiracism reframed the resistance of peasants to his policy of forced, vertical collectivisation and theft of their food supplies as a conspiracy of what Stalin alleged was a peasant ‘middle class’ (ie. peasants who still had food) against their own traditional collective farming practises, known as the mir. Stalin’s documented attitudes and policies towards Soviet Jews only demonstrates the value of the core deflective fairy tale of disloyal elements plotting to subvert and wreck the great totalitarian social engineering project.
Stalin weaponised the same fairy tale against Trotskyist dissidents, labelling them ‘petit-bourgeous, counter-revolutionary terrorists,’ just as Trotsky had done against anarchist ‘wreckers’ and syndicalist ‘deviationists.’ The introduction of counterterrorist conspiracism into counter-revolutionary conspiracism by a dictator playing fast and loose with antisemitic conspiracism, exemplified by the Doctors’ Plot. In the foul, sterile and wretched milieu of Stalinist totalitarianism, multiple forms of deflection married with ease to explain its consequences as root causes—excusing the perpetrator, reversing the burden of proof onto the opponent of power, and so reversing roles of victim and perpetrator. For Stalin, as for Hitler, being criticised and being attacked were the same thing, as were being opposed and being abused.
For both archetypal despots, deflection was instinctive—problematising the consequences of totalitarian misrule and maladaptivity as a cause rather than an effect at a political level. It was instinctive because it arose from the same abusive subjectivity we know operates in an identical manner in the macrocosm, in the domestic sphere, as the psychology of coercive control. The sociology of moral panics tells us that, socially, the coercive control propagandist deflects accountability from power by ‘producing a deviant’—by essentialising and reframing consequences as causes, in other words, demonising the now-scapegoated victim in the process. Victims must believe the harm they experience is their own fault, and that they are hurting their abuses by reminding them of it, or trying to hold them to account.
An indentically abusive mentality and blame-shifting, morally-disengaged logic operates in the domestic sphere, as the abuser deflects from unwanted accountability by producing a deviant—by essentialising and reframing consequences as causes, and producing a deviant whose scapegoating is also purposed to reconstuct harms as beneficial to the victim, neutralise resistance, and enforce docility, compliance and obedience. As noted above, this is a characteristic and defining feature of the current and ongoing epidemic of domestic abuse throughout Australia—mirrored geopolitically in the ongoing and systematic destruction of the Palestianian people at the hands of a totalitarian, ethnofascist Zionist imperialism operating on the deflecting logic of, ‘if you challenge or oppose our crimes against humanity, you hate Jews.’ Operating on the deflecting subjectivity of the domestic abuser, the genocidal totalitarian essentialises and attempts to reconstruct opposition to crimes against humanity as their perpetration.
In their complicity with ongoing crimes against humanity in occupied Palestine, the pro-Zionists of the Albanese Federal ALP government follow suit, borrowing from their ongoing support for counterterrorist, anticommunist and racial conspiracisms. The fact that Bob Hawke has, in recent years, been revealed as a CIA informant, and that his ascent was closely tied to the fortunes of Catholic Francoist Bob Santamaria and the anticommunist National Civic Council, against demonstrates the core deflective subjectivity appearing in multiple guises—along with the unspoken purposes and ulterior motives of their empire-building, fossil fuel-thirsty extractivist perpetrators. The anticommunism of Santamaria’s DLP, reflected in Hawke’s active disruption of communist-led union militancy, rewrote opposition to the coercive abuse of an ascendent corporate oligarchy—a hostile takeover of liberal democracy in which Hawke was a key player—as the disloyalty to democratic norms they were themselves perpetrating.
This process is known to psychologists as ‘projection’—naming a shameful feature of ourselves we also find inadmissable, and entitling ourselves to the opportunity to unburden ourselves by associating our own shame with someone else. This is why we need the deviance production, moral panicking and dramatising, the mechanics of moral disengagement to shift blame and reconstruct harms as beneficial to the victim, and the conspiracist tall-as-living-fuck stories to explain, not only why we are the victims and not the perpetrators, but also why we embody everything we claim to oppose in defending values we don’t live. In the case of corruption, the Australian Labor Party, lead by the leader of its left faction, who knows very well what the issues in Palestine are, projects the inadmissiable shame of complicity in genocide onto a faction it essentialists as wreckers and disloyal to values the Hawke-led ALP has been central in abandoning and selling out to corporate capture. A complicit class of neoliberal courtiers enables the proverbial rolling of corporate turds in socialism and egalitarianism glitter and virtue-hoarding that perpetrates class warfare and green technocratic ecofascism in the name of loyalty to the cause of the individual against coercive autocracy. A dysfunctional left parrots this virtue-hoarding in embodying all the abuses against the individual that call it into existence in the first place.
Heinously deviationist syndicalists have long recognised that electoralism is a dead end for the labor movement. The deflective witchhunting of the CFEMU, led by a political leader who, in opposition, explained the reasons for opposing him in power, demonstrates this crucially decisively insofar as the ALP embodies all the reasons for needing a labor movement in the first place: to defend rights and advance interests, in light of the fact that the liberal critique of autocratic hierarchies and monarchical abolutism equally apply to the autocratic hierarchies inherent to capitalist social relations of production. The need for coercive control at a structural level appears in the objectification and extractive predation on all life, which may not in fact grant consent; it might even object or resist. All life, however, must regrettably be saved from itself in the service of the greater good; all life must be forced to be free, under conditions where social and class hierarchies are held positively sacred, but personal boundaries not so much. The sacred is that which serves the deflective purposes of coercive control. Recalcitrant deviationists amongst the reconstructed, antiauthoritarian left have long pointed out that the state is a machine to these ends, and only to these ends. As such, syndicalists have long held, the state is a lesser machine that controls those who wield it, via the oligarchy it truly serves, not the other way around. The Great Albanese Backflip is practically archetypal in this respect, with the Great Leninist Backflip as a historical precedent—marrying the oligarchy with the state.
As statists, both the Australian Labor Party and Australian iterations of the Leninist cult of personality reproduce the core mythology of the market hierarchies they allege to oppose: that altruistic outcomes can derive from selfish means. Both wag the dog; laborites use their political control to discipline and control workers and our unions in the interests of capital, exploiting social hierarchies of gender and race to play the vassals off against one other, to rule through divide-and-conquer. Leninists use their political control to incorporate union councils (or ‘soviets’) into corporate structures recognisable as insurgent totalitarianism when state capitalist oligarchs and technocrats on the far-right do it.
As we know from history, however, states exist only ever to defend ‘the minority of the opulent from the majority.’ Social and class heirarchies are fait accomplis of European colonial conquest, a fact that creates unique conundrums for liberal capitalists seeking an alchemy of colonial conquest and consent, of imperialism and loyalty to the cause of the individual against encroachment and enclosure. In seeking to capture the state, both laborites and leninists must deflect from the racialised character of the Australian settler colonial state. One wonders what indigneous people might make of ALP claims to moral authority to arbitrate corruption; we can be well sure, however, that they will never be asked in any form that isn’t a technocratic, tokenistic, corporatist, neoliberal whitewash. No one will ask the many victims of ongoing domestic violence in this country. Coercive control birthed the Australian state, via the same Civilising Mission narratives of saving savages and brutes that Benjamin Netanyahu is using to explain how Zionism is indigenous to Mesopotamia. It’s also handy that in excess of USD$400 billion in natural gas reserves sit off the coast of Gaza, but troublesome in that they belong to other people . . . currently being systematically exterminated.
As with the witchhunt against CFEMU officials steeped in the Laborite tradition, the counterterrorist conspiracism Netanyahu was a key player in developing, the elephant in the room are the ongoing crimes against humanity in Palestine, the growing aggression of the expansionist Zionist state in the region, and the lawlessness of those who crow the loudest about normative rules-based world orders in defiance of ICJ rulings they don’t like. The rebottling of the ancient vintage of conspiracist deflection means that the sadism, violence and bloodshed of all of history continues unabated; amidst Voltaire’s marriage of absurdity and atrocity, the people of Palestine continue to suffer and die amidst the waking nightmare of positively ghoulish crimes against humanity.
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