In a sick world, centrism makes monsters of us 

Please, if you would, sit down, pop the kettle on, and allow me to explain in totally non-genocidal terms why baby formula is banned from entering Gaza. 

Without spittle frothing, without kicking a puppy in the face, I promise this makes as much sense as liberating the women of Iran by bombing them, and “stabilising” Syria, again, with bombs. 

As an AI rendition of John Lennon on an algorithmically boosted YouTube channel designed to turn kids into misogynistic Nazi chuds would probably say: Give mostly peaceful bombing a chance. 

If the tone shift is jarring today, after 21 months of genocide, a functioning moral compass isn’t making me rich, so I’m brushing up the CV for an editor role at the ABC. Or at the very least a beastkeeper position feeding kitten embryos to Peta Credlin inside Murdoch’s Fiery Flesh Pits. I feel like I’m nailing it. 

Ya see, what we’re not taught on Commie websites like The Shot – because of cultural marxism, and antisemitism, woke, DEI, the male loneliness crisis, and indeed the new Superman movie – is that infant sustenance is Hamas. There’s almost certainly a series of terror tunnels linking the Nestle baby formula factory with the 36 hospitals Israel has bombed in Gaza. Hospitals that were also Hamas.

Wait! 

Holy mother of Christ, is that a Greens senator holding a sign about starving children?! Ruining parliamentary decorum like that on opening day!? Shammmmmmme. As a freshly minted political realist fishing for a big establishment media pay day, I can’t help but feel Mehreen Faruqi deserves harsher parliamentary sanctions for her “utterly disrespectful” cardboard than Israel does for its apparently respectful holocaust. 

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Reality has been abused. Today, the Western establishment routinely deploys the psychological manipulator’s toolbox of DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim and offender). It’s discombobulating by design. This fosters a soiled, siloed consciousness in which detached normies are able to sleepwalk their way through a descent into genocidal, authoritarian fascism. A world in which the mechanised slaughter of more than 1000 Palestinians lured to their deaths with the prospect of food at aid sites is considered ok, normal, but a man wearing a kefiyah, or a headband, or a ski mask – basically anything that would keep you warm on a weekend away at the snow – is considered fucking terrifying.  

The Australian Labor Party, a savvy collective of careerists “gravely concerned” enough to at least lie about selling F-35 parts to bomb Palestine, today represents Australia’s gelatinous gooey political centre. (And most of the right, for that matter, the Liberal Party being diminished into little more than a necromancy project for NewsCorp.) The ALP holds an overwhelming 51 seat parliamentary majority. 

Our centrist diplomatic position today is essentially: Thanks for all the cash, here’s some F-35 parts. Please don’t use them, #peaceinthemiddleeast, #gravelyconcerned, yadda yadda. Also, if you run out, for reasons we don’t wanna hear about, don’t forget to come back for more weapons! 

To the great mass of ALP split-the-difference aficionados, all of this horror is acceptable. In a sick society, centrists become monsters. This appears inherent; an immutable law of nature. It is the phenomenon Martin Luther King referred to when he identified white liberal moderates as the bigger impediment to justice than the Klu Klux Klan.

Far-right supremacist psychopaths always seem to want blood and domination, as does American/Israeli/Australian big business, but they usually only get it when the political centre decides to embrace the bipartisan rort as well. The political centre plays the normalising functioning in any culture, collectively christening acceptable opinions, polite manners, and our perceptions of “normal”. In late-stage capitalism’s shift into overt fascism, the Western centre has deemed an endless loop of emaciated children murdered with impunity over your morning coffee totally a-ok. Worth fighting to maintain, in fact.

Centrism is today a focus-group-driven doctrine of fence-sitting derpy dickheads riding a morally vacuous path of electoral least resistance. It is not sensible pragmatism like it pretends to be, nor is it neutrality. It is denial. PR for creeping fascism. A more presentable, nicer scented foot inside the exact same boot. Whether the bombs falling are dropped by a far-right white supremacist like Trump, or a centrist with a rainbow pin lapel like Biden, Albanese, Obama, Blair or Starmer, they still do the exact same fucking thing on the ground. 

And when you stand against this, Trump or Biden, Starmer or Albanese, all of them want you off the streets and quiet about it. 

This video shows Kent police threatening to arrest a protester under the Terrorism Act – leaving them facing up to 14 years in jail – simply for waving a Palestinian flag and calling Israel's actions in Gaza a genocide.

The direction of travel under Starmer is now clear. pic.twitter.com/qKz23CCtPq

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) July 16, 2025

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Western democracies have become perfect metaphors for capitalism itself: we get to enthusiastically choose between different brands owned by the same handful of companies. We have political theatre, not politics. WWE for the writers’ festival crowd. I’m not a nihilist: it certainly does matter, our very limited political choices do make some difference in people’s lives. But, ya know, so does professional wrestling! 

On all of humanity’s existential crises, never in my lifetime has the will of the people been so overtly severed from the actions of governments across the capitalist world. The “free world”, it is sometimes unironically referred to by people Gen-X and older, people that believe in the benevolence of wearing a suit and talking about values while perpetually bombing somewhere – Overthereistan – for freedom (and oil and the like, what of it?). 

I believe in democracy as an ideal, as a goal, as the antithesis of tyranny and a necessary weapon in the eternal fight against ever-creeping authoritarian evil. But I do not presently believe it exists in many places, certainly not in the US, and increasingly not in the UK, or here at home. America is a reality consuming empire, and Australia a vassal state.

Moments of atrocity reveal the true contours of global power. It is around Gaza, the climate crisis, and ever-growing wealth inequality where the mirage of democracy most obviously vanishes. In Alexandria Ocazio Cortez’s support for continued military funding to Israel this week – despite her weasel words professing otherwise – we see that this alleged saviour of the left is as capable of being an imperial stooge as anyone. Her role from an Imperial standpoint is to convince us that the system is redeemable, to safely and politely conform against the machine. It is not. Systems that champion greed, narcissism and psychopathy, systems built on the bones of conquest and genocide – these do not need reform, they need to die. 

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More than mere revulsion at the moral cowardice of centrism, it cannot be overstated just how profoundly stupid a doctrine it is. Existential problems do not simply go away because incrementalist, captured governments commit to ignoring them. Clearly, much of the time, the problems get worse. 

Take carbon. CO2 doesn’t operate on peek-a-boo-with-an-infant rules, it obeys the laws of physics. So if you build, say, the North West Shelf fossil fuel nightmare – which will emit 87.9m tonnes of carbon dioxide each year for many decades of largely tax-free climate destruction – no amount of photos cuddling koalas can balance that ledger. Under centrist capitalism, the solution to this crisis has been to rely on capitalism to fix the problem (while pretending it didn’t also cause the problem). Strangely enough, that’s not working very well! 

Similarly, whether we pretend everyone wanting fewer murdered children is anti-semtic or not, barbaric impunity in the face of livestreamed war crimes will inevitably create social disharmony, rage, grief, and misery. The government’s recent calls to end the “war” in Gaza would be so much more convincing if we weren’t also profiting directly from these crimes against humanity. You wouldn’t need a Minister for social cohesion if you were actually trying to help solve these very real problems and weren’t expending all your political capital protecting the feelings of a detached, hyper-wealthy colonial deathcult, the pro-genocide lobby that is Zionism. 

Likewise, the oligarchical rort that is the wealth inequality crisis doesn’t just vanish if the fairwork ombudsman keeps lifting the minimum wage beneath inflation; it doesn’t just go away if the ALP refuses to tax the hyper-wealthy hard enough to fix anything; it doesn’t just disappear if the PM keeps fantastising about “fighting Tories” inside the pages of Tory newspapers. Corruption isn’t quashed by secretive tribunals run by mates, either, shock horror.

This is the cognitively dissonant line we’re asked to constantly swallow in the West, without choking, all while declaring our benevolence and projecting concern about international law and human rights almost everywhere fucking else. There is so much galling, murderous, almost certainly pedophilic hypocrisy recorded for posterity now that moving past any of this feels like an absurdist project. To exist without everpresent heartbreak in this world, you either need to know nothing about it, detach completely, or embrace the evil asshole dormant inside each of us. Albanese’s ALP has opted for the last two while publicly feigning the first. 

Fascism is creeping on our sedated, amnesiac island, and we’re sleepwalking our way into it in classic Australian fashion. Partially, this is because Aussies aren’t amazing at noticing things at the best of times. Our own genocide was so barbarically successful many of us have convinced ourselves it never happened. But we’re also missing much of this because it is Labor, both state and federal, instituting most of these horrific authoritarian establishment overreaches. Hannah Thomas’ state-assaulted eye can see it, but for whatever reason there’s an inertia around our political consciousness surrounding this party. 

It was Keating and Hawke that embraced the championing of greed at the expense of the social contract, the hyper-wealthy enrichment scam that is neoliberal capitalism. It was Gillard and Rudd who tortured refugees with the depravity Australians only expect of Peter Dutton. And it is Albanese that approved the North West Shelf, appointed a Special Envoy for Shut the Fuck Up About The Genocide, pressured universities to adopt the Zionist weaponised IHRA definition of antisemitism, clamped down on protest rights at home, sold F-35 parts to Israel during a livestreamed holocaust. 

This is the middle road, the political centre, apparently, littered with bones, concentration camps, murderous weather, broken economies, stifled protest, genocidal allies and the erasure of Palestine. Before too long you’ll find it looks identical to the paths leading to the right.