By Andrew L. Urban.
A bottle of Coopers Light Ale hangs from a tree by a rope around its neck. Strange fruit, indeed, the fruit of Australia’s collective political cowardice. The lynch mob that put it there is moving on to fresh victims. Hanging from trees around about are the effigies of Bill Leak and QUT students, and there is plenty of rope for more. The lynch mob has many targets, from imagined racists to the ones they call ‘climate deniers’, a phrase as meaningless as their hatred is irrational.
Rage encouraged by their fellows in the mob, they strike fear into the hearts of law abiding citizens, just as the lynch mobs of the old American South did to blacks. This is our new KKK, bigots blinded to truth by their dunce hats and blindfolds proclaiming moral supremacy. Beneath their gowns of outrage they garsp bludgeons and bats of vitriol with which to smash their victims. Their intolerance is rigid, their faces as masks set in the grimace of fanaticism.
First published in Letters to the Editor, The Australian, Thursday, March 23, 2017