Much has been written recently about the renewed appeal of extreme political doctrines in Western liberal democracies, including Australia. It may be that we are now a sufficient distance from the end of the Second World War (1945) and the Cold War (1991) for a kind of amnesia to take effect.
As a high school student in the 1970's, I was only too well aware of the lessons learnt from the last great conflagration, particularly the defeat of fascism. There was also the horror of the Holocaust, which proceeded almost clinically from Nazi ideology.
The Cold War highlighted that other extreme - this time on the left - communism, or at least, it's application. While some folks in democracies flirted with Soviet or Maoist Communism, the majority of people did not think kindly of a system which enslaved its people (in all manner of ways), was authoritarian and frankly, incompetent.
My advice to young people who may, for very good reasons, be disillusioned with liberal democracy, is to go back to very recent history and read the accounts of good people trapped in these bad systems, the stories about imprisonment, the massacres, forced starvations, threadbare existences, hopelessness and so forth.
Fascism and communism are pernicious ideologies propounded by fanatical ideologues, none of whom should be running a country. Human life comes second to whatever the 'plan' is. Better to focus on reforming the system we have, not return to a very dark past.
