We often talk about the agony of modern TV – the hopeless collapse of entertainment into the seething, blind, mindless nest of streaming service offspring governed by a diversity box-ticking exercise.

Polished by CGI and edited with ChatGPT, it is designed to flicker in the background while the audience doomscrolls on their phone.

At least we still wield power over the remote control.

In North Korea, their Supreme Leader of the necrocracy (as the late Christopher Hitchens dubbed the regime) has been executing school children for watching Netflix’s Squid Game.

This slaughter has been justified under the Anti-Reactionary Thought and Culture Act which calls for either death or forced labour for those who consume or distribute South Korean entertainment.

South Korea’s TV, art, fiction, and music is considered a ‘rotten ideology that paralyses the people’s revolutionary sense’. Or more correctly, it makes liars out of the North Korean regime by showing citizens a world outside the walls of propaganda.

North Koreans who fled south over the border told stories of being in their teens when they were taken to see these executions.

The rich could buy their way out of punishment – the poor could not. ‘They execute people to brainwash and educate us,’ one said. ‘People without money sell their houses to gather $5,000 or $10,000 to pay to get out of the re-education camps.’

Civil terror is not limited to a system of control – it’s a profit machine that imposes fines as if they were an obedience tax.

Australia did the same thing during Covid by raising revenue out of civil dissent. $200 for failing to wear a mask. $3,000 for breaking curfew. $5,000 for gathering. $5,000 for failing to carry proof of vaccination. $10,000 – $99,000 for business non-compliance. $20,000 for repeated unlawful gatherings (up to $55,000 for businesses). $11,000 + jail for breaking isolation. Roughly 130,000 fines were handed out (with many of them subject to retractions or challenges, but don’t let that distract you from the fact that they tried…)

Murdering children makes North Korea an extreme (by no means unique) example – but in their communist purity we can see the defining evils of collectivism.

Without the sheep’s wrapping of kindness, tolerance, and diversity, the end goal is revealed as state-sanctioned mind control where a nation kept quiet by fear and poverty.

Even our government, and its Western allies, are starting to show the twitching paranoia of the Big State while appreciating its potential.

Remember former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s little admission about communist China?

‘There’s a level of admiration I actually have for China. Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime.’

He was condemned for this ignorant, insensitive, and foolish comment, but do other Western leaders raise an eyebrow at the power Xi Jinping commands?

Xi Jinping doesn’t have to draft ‘child safety’ legislation for social media to enforce control over the speech of adult voters. There are no theatre performances in the weeks before an election, or costly bribes made out to specific identity groups who are kept at each other’s throat by policies designed to subvert democracy into a ‘pick me!’ frenzy.

Cancel Culture is our civilised version of North Korea’s child murder. High-profile targets are picked for ruin and paraded through the press to ensure others remain quiet.

(That is not to say scoundrels should not be cancelled or shamed, only that modern culture has turned a healthy practice into an act of intimidation just as the guillotine transitioned from criminals to nuns.)

These are not original observations. I have lost track of how many articles have been put to print in this publication referencing, with varying levels of concern, George Orwell’s 1984.

And yet there remains a lack of sincerity in their reception.

People are concerned about the way our political system has started to mimic the world’s dictatorships … the audience member humming a song off-key at a concert. Yet it remains an abstraction. A disbelief. Future problems for unborn children.

This could be thanks to the endless cycle of imminent and absent apocalypses fashioned by politicians seeking money and power.

We have heard the cry of wolf, and no longer stir.

All this ambivalence persists while Labor, the Coalition, Teals and the Greens lean into laws that narrow our freedoms.

In their own way, they each seek to control the future political narrative by weaponising ‘Misinformation and Disinformation’ laws and social media bans. Disagreement has become harmful. Criticising policy has been reframed as hate. The comment sections on social media embarrass their egos.

Controlling the flow of political information has long focused on our children, although it has become more sophisticated than traumatising school kids into wailing in the street and gluing themselves to the road.

Keeping children trapped within the state education system from kindergarten through to their university qualification, with much of it spent locked out of social media, ensures a bubble is placed around them. They are taught to prejudice information rather than critically investigate. They are told that anything ‘of the right’ is extreme, false, and dangerous. Their minds emerge as devout converts of ‘the Left’ who lack a proper grasp of history, free thought, and the ability to challenge experts. Their liberty is pickpocketed one dollar at a time. It might not be murder, but it is slavery perpetrated for political outcomes.

And even if the children rebel, their capture is a useful lever against unwilling parents. We have seen this already. What else was the HECS discount than emotional manipulation of concerned parents and grandparents who, too poor to help, cast a vote instead…

The ‘modern’ Liberal Party finds itself under the new leadership of Angus Taylor and Jane Human, two politicians whose track record on freedom leaves much to be desired.

Being ‘modern’, we may warn them, is not about bending to petty identity politics or shining the shoes of UN apparatchiks.

It means living in the modern world where the threat of old political empires are present and real.

It means ditching the dusty suits, swish parties, and corporate circles for a seat on the bus and a walk through the city where Australians are fighting against the human tide to ensure they still have a culture…

Modernity means recognising new conservatism is growing online. The Liberal Party’s average age is between 60-80. They are missing three generations of talent and support by insisting on old forms of media while resisting, aggressively, the rise of Maga, Farage, and One Nation. All of these right-wing movements have young audiences cultivated on the platforms they use.

A modern Liberal Party takes the fight to communism, and recognises it beneath its disguise, just as Menzies did.

Said Menzies:

‘The real disease of communism id deeper and more deadly, and unless we attack it by all possible means, it will infect the whole of our community life … those who persist, as does the Leader of the Opposition, in regarding communism as just some variant of democratic political philosophy entirely overlook the fact that communism id debased, treasonable, utterly undemocratic; in form a subversive conspiracy; in practice opposed to high standards of living and real prosperity; destructive, if it succeeds, of all human freedom. We are pledged to fight it, and to defeat it.’

The Coalition have fed the beast of communism for decades. Now they must slay the creature they fattened.

Flat White is written by Alexandra Marshall. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.