Erasing our memory to bring the past up to date

If the ABC was your only source of news you would know nothing about the decision in DPP v Patterson & Anor in the Country Court of Victoria last month.

You might remember a recent news story about what happened in Melbourne in June 2020 during the Covid lockdowns.

In response to the murder of George Floyd in the United States a week earlier, some 10,000 people marched through the city in support of 'Black Lives Matter'. The protest was illegal because outdoor gatherings were prohibited under the lockdown orders imposed by Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews.  

As police began making arrests at the march, scuffles broke out. A body camera worn by a police officer captured one particular incident. In the court case that followed, what happened was described by a judge of the Victorian County Court as follows: 

Officers A and B [two police officers] took up a position in front of Mr R [a protester] saying something like, 'All right, mate' [as far as I could make out] and one of them immediately pushed him [Mr R] backwards.  Mr R in my view looked startled and took a further step back.  

The two officers then stepped forward and Officer B then tried to put an arm around Mr R's neck in what seemed to be a move to place him in a headlock.  Mr R pushed him back and then Officer A punched him twice to the face, while Officer B continued to grab him and he was brought to the ground with police on top of him.

This scenario as I have described it took about 10 seconds.  A short time later Mr R was seen standing in handcuffs facing a wall and bearing a contusion around his eye…

At no stage in any of the footage of this incident could I discern police speaking to Mr R beyond the several words I have described before launching into physical action which I would describe as immediate and violent…

I am satisfied that Officers A and B were the aggressors in the situation and that they employed violence on Mr R in effecting the arrest.  They did not wait for a line to be formed across the footpath which could have been observed by Mr R.  They did not speak to him and inform him he was under arrest and then inform him why.  They simply confronted, pushed, and attacked him before bringing him to the ground.  In my view, they used unlawful violence in arresting Mr R.

The ABC gave this shocking story massive coverage across the country. It featured as one of the top items in the ABC's television and radio news three days in a row, and Mr R was interviewed in a special report for the 7.30 program. The Victorian premier, minister for police, and chief commissioner all apologised to Mr R , and negotiations about the payment of compensation are continuing.

If you have no memory of seeing this story on the ABC, don't worry. It didn’t happen.   There was an illegal BLM march in Melbourne in June during the Covid lockdowns, but the Victoria police allowed the protest to occur, did nothing to stop it, and there were no arrests.

What's described as happening at the protest did occur. But a year later on Friday 29 May 2021. And it wasn’t an illegal BLM protest. Instead, it was at an illegal protest against Victoria's lockdown laws. ‘Mr R’ is Jason Reeves. The judge's remarks are taken word-for-word from the decision of Victorian County Court Judge Liz Gaynor in the case of Director of Public Prosecutions v Patterson & Anor [2024] VCC 487 delivered last month on 16 April. You can read the decision here. The case didn't involve Reeves himself. Two other protesters, Nicholas Patterson and Adam Roob, had been charged with various criminal offences arising from the protest, and the case was about whether, at their trial, police could use evidence from police body cameras and officers' statements. The judge ruled the police could not because that evidence came into existence because of the police's own wrongful actions against Reeves.  

On Saturday morning the decision was front page news in Melbourne's Herald Sun newspaper. The ABC has made no mention of the decision. Nor has The Age. If you rely on what you hear or watch on the ABC or read in The Age to form your recollection of the past you would not know about the events of 29 March 2021. It would be as if they didn't happen. Just as a protester at an illegal BLM march getting punched by a police officer didn't happen either.

It's not just the ABC and The Age who want you to believe 29 May 2021 didn't happen. According to the Herald Sun, both the Victoria Police and the Office of Public Prosecutions 'refused to comment'. The ABC and The Age enthusiastically supported Daniel Andrews and his Covid lockdowns. If you support the end, you support the means. The ABC and The Age were silent in the face of the authoritarianism required to enforce the lockdowns. For the ABC and The Age to report on Director of Public Prosecutions v Paterson & Anor would be to raise too many questions. It's easier not to ask questions. Just as the ABC and The Age haven't asked any questions about what's happened to all the other lockdown court cases before the Victorian courts.

As far as I can tell from a Google search, other than the story of the case in the Herald Sun, there's only been one other mention of the case anywhere - in the Daily Mail Online, which repeated what was in the Herald Sun. That was it. Maybe Google censored the search results, but I doubt it. Had a County Court judge concluded a BLM protester had been punched in the face by a police officer, I suspect many hundreds of media mentions would have appeared. If a BLM protester was assaulted, the media would have wanted the public to know about it - and remember it. Julie Inman Grant, the eSafety Commissioner, wants the public to remember the murder of George Floyd, which is why she's taken no action to remove from the internet the six-minute video of his death. But to ensure the Australian public has no memory of a Christian bishop stabbed in his church in an alleged Islamist terrorist attack, she's ordered social media companies to remove the video of the incident from the internet.

This is how elites try to erase our memory. As it happens, this is nearly exactly the title of the speech Brendan O'Neill delivered to a sold-out event for the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne a few weeks ago - 'Erased Memory - Why the elites want you to forget about lockdowns and Islamic terror'. The video of Brendan's speech and my conversation with him afterwards has now been watched 185,000 times and generated more than 2,000 comments. It clearly struck a nerve. We knew at the time of Julie Inman Grant's censorship efforts, and we talked about that, but we didn't know anything of the forthcoming decision in Director of Public Prosecutions v Patterson & Anor or how nearly all of the media would ignore it. You can watch Brendan's speech here.

This is some of what he said about 'lockdown amnesia':

Last year, the Financial Times ran an essay with a headline, 'Why are some of us suffering from lockdown amnesia?'  And it reported on the studies showing that the lockdowns appear to be fading rapidly from our consciousness.  Many of us, it continued, have only hazy memories of this period and very little sense of the important events that happened.

Numerous explanations have been put forward for lockdown amnesia.  Some psychologists say, 'Well, we were closed off from the outside world.  We weren't talking to friends and family so much, and therefore, there were fewer ways for us to mark the passing of time and to create memories in the way that we normally create memories.  

I'm sure there's some truth in that, but I think there's something else to it as well.  We are ashamed of what we became.  We are ashamed of what became of the societies we live in and the role that we played in allowing it to happen.

I think we are voluntarily forgetting because we can't believe what became of our nations that we thought were civilised.  We can't believe the monstrosities that we were complicit in.  For example, yellow tape on park benches, snitching hotlines so you could dob people in to the police, lakes dyed black.  I think fundamentally, the culture of forgetting is our way of coping with the fact that the line between civilisation and barbarism is thinner than we thought. 

That's what Brendan said about what we do to ourselves. And this is what he said governments do:

I think one of the most interesting and worrying phenomena of our times is the manipulation of memory, and the way in which we are almost instructed in a very subtle way to remember certain things and to forget other things, to obsess over certain issues and just to completely block other issues out from our minds to such an extent that even something like lockdowns become this big black hole in our brains.

Another issue, for example, is terrorism.  I strongly believe we live under something like a terror amnesia industry.  We are encouraged to forget.  We are encouraged not to talk about it.  I am convinced that one of the reasons the Australian government is so determined to wipe that stabbing video from the internet is to hide away the truth of the problem of radical Islam, to shove it down the memory hole.  To borrow a term from Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith's job in Nineteen Eighty-Four, of course, was to shove inconvenient facts down the memory hole so that the masses would forget about them.

I think one of the reasons the government is at war with Elon Musk, is not only because it wants to throw its weight around in relation to a billionaire that it thinks everyone hates when they don't; but because it wants to memory hole this inconvenient attack, and memory hole all the issues it raises about the ideology of multiculturalism, the failure of integration, the fact that there are young people in this society and other societies who hate their society so much that they are willing to attack the people in it.

Everything Brendan says is absolutely right - except for one thing. There's nothing subtle about what the government is doing. The government isn't encouraging us to forget; it's doing something far worse. By censoring what we can see and what we can say about it, the government is stopping us from even forming memories in the first place. One day the government might succeed in convincing us there's nothing not to remember. At the moment, the government is just focused on correcting 'misinformation'.  

How the government controls our speech and our memory are key themes in Nineteen Eighty-Four.  One of the most chilling passages in the whole book is when one of Winston Smith's work colleagues, Syme who is part of a team compiling the eleventh edition of the Newspeak Dictionary says to Smith,

'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?  In the end, we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it.'

Smith's job in the Records Department at the Ministry of Truth is to rewrite history. After he made the necessary alterations, he sent them to his superiors via a pneumatic tube beside his desk.

What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms.  As soon as the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of the Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead  This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs - to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date.  

In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any items of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record.

Thank you for your support.

kind regards John