As my nation of Australia hurtles toward oppressive censorship of the people by a government with an unbridled grip on power, I feel a sense of increasing trepidation for us all. Our time of modern convenience and living loosely with the truth has come to an end, as it was always going to.

As a writer, I wonder what contribution I can possibly make to calming the chaos surrounding us. Globalisation has changed the way we see ourselves in our own nations. Many of us prefer the moniker of being a ‘global citizen’, described as a “reconfiguration of citizenship and power.” Anything contrary is simply not acceptable, amounting to apostasy to think otherwise.

Then I remind myself of what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote of the writer’s obligation:

Once we have taken up the word, it is thereafter impossible to turn away: a writer is no detached judge of his countrymen and contemporaries; he is an accomplice to all the evil committed in his country or by his people.

He is right – it is impossible to turn away. It should be that way for everyone. But we know from the last four and half years that that is not the case. It remains that only a minority are prepared to speak out, stand up, or write of the brutality committed against our nation in the name of the omnipotent god called “Safety.”

Speak against this monstrous entity and you will be punished. Australians are about to feel the wrath of the Leviathan as it implements the most draconian censorship laws which will bear down upon us like Armageddon.

I wrote recently about how the social contract between we as citizens and our government has been severed through decades of authoritarian edicts, which have now culminated in the final death throes of our freedom to think and speak. It is imperative that we understand how politics governs our lives if we wish to defend what most of us have enjoyed for the past half century as a free society, and if we want our children and grandchildren to know that life, too.

The ancient Greek historian, Polybius, asked the question:

What then are the origins of a political society, and how does it first come into being?

His explanation, written more than 2000 years ago, should illuminate our current plight:

From time to time, as a result of floods, plagues, failures of crops or other similar causes, there occurs a catastrophic destruction of the human race, in which all knowledge of the arts and social institutions is lost. Such disasters, tradition tells us, have often befallen mankind, and must reasonably be expected to recur. Then in the course of time the population renews itself from the survivors as if from seeds, men increase once more in numbers and, like other animals, proceed to form herds. Because of their natural weakness it is only to be expected that they should herd with their own kind, and in this situation, it is inevitable that the man who excels in physical strength and courage should lead and rule over the rest.

So, what can we learn from this?

We learn that our time here is fleeting; our currency, by way of how we live, is unpredictable and subject to being hijacked by the strongest adversary; and that we function best as societies when we live with shared experiences.

We are witnessing right now a subjugation of western civilisation and everything that made us unique in the world’s story. But we have forgotten it, either by choice or through ignorance.

This world has no tolerance for either.

For when the powerful take over, their only aim is to control.

When the monarchy ended in ancient Rome, with the kings banished and the elites installed to oversee the beginning of the Republic, things did not instantly transpire into harmony. The historian, Sallust, tells us:

The patricians treated the common people as their slaves, and dealt with their lives and bodies after the fashion of the kings, driving them from their fields, and lording it over those who were destitute of land. The common people, oppressed by these cruelties, and especially by high rates of interest, and at the same time bearing the burden of taxation and military service in the ceaseless wars, withdrew under arms to the Sacred Hill and the Aventine, and so presently secured for themselves the Tribunes of the People and other rights.

You know that saying, ‘History Repeats?’

However, it is the question which St Augustine asks in his City of God, that is telling:

But if this was the time when the Roman commonwealth is said to have been at its fairest and best, what are we to say or think now, when we come to the succeeding time: to the time when the city, in the words of the same historian, ‘altering little by little from the fairest and best, became the worst and most shameful?’

Here, Sallust was referring to the destruction of Rome’s greatest enemy, the Carthaginians, and the proceeding time which resulted in the Fall of Rome from grace:

From that time forth, the morals of our forefathers were swept away, not by slow degrees, as formerly, but as if by a torrent.”

I provide these exemplars as testimony to how we should judge our own times.

To conclude, I come back to where I began with Solzhenitsyn when he warns that, without constant vigilance upon freedom, anyone anywhere can suffer the same fate as his own time, and as I warn, as in ancient Roman times:

If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people’s bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: ‘It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.’

Nothing is impossible, as Australians are about to find out.

And this is why I write.