Extreme heat, destroyed Parks, military as the people’s Savior. A writer draws a Parallel between Australia and the end of the Soviet Union.
Red Skies Over Paradise: the sky over the town of Mallacoota, from the tourists photo: reuters
CANBERRA taz | The weather on the Southeast coast of Australia to be evacuated recalled on Saturday to the atmosphere in a hot air oven: temperature up to 46 degrees, hot winds from all directions. In combination with dry Vegetation, some of the worst and most dangerous conditions for the fight against forest fires, the firefighters” as a spokesman for the rural fire Department be it “.
Alone in the state of New South Wales raged in the afternoon local time, about 160 fires – 12 out of control. Thousands of square kilometers of Land are subject to more of an emergency Ordinance. In many places, the forces are overburdened, if not overwhelmed by the intensity and speed of the fires.
Not only in the States of New South Wales and Victoria were raging large fire, the part of whole towns are at risk. The European tourists popular Kangaroo Island in South Australia has been extensively searched in the flames home. Two people burned to death in their car, when they were surprised by an “unstoppable fire,” as the authorities explained.
The world famous Flinders Chase national Park burned almost completely. The natural Paradise is known for Koalas, echidnas (Echidnas) and kangaroos. The five-star Hotel, Southern Ocean Lodge has been completely destroyed.
After a long Hesitation, the government ordered a significant expansion of the aid by the army. Three ships of war, evacuated stranded tourists from coastal towns. The 3,000 reservists were called up to duty use – for the first Time in the history of Australia, the competent Minister Linda Reynolds. Military installations are used as a temporary shelter for those who have lost everything except the clothes in which you are the flame to escape.
The government’s been under fire, because you didn’t take the warnings of prominent experts seriously. So a group of former fire brigade had a commander months ago on the likelihood of escalation referred to, and the government warned, you need more extinguisher ready aircraft.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison refused to meet them, because the group standing in connection with the well-known environmental scientist Tim Flannery. This criticism of the climate sceptical Position of Canberra and the lack of will of the conservative coalition government for in-depth climate protection.
Even leading Conservative fear, in the meantime, the science want to see the enemy, and coal-friendly attitude of the government Cabinet, the nothing but a minimal connection between the fires and global warming, is a long-term politically unsustainable.
so Far, the government has the support of the conservative media the American Rupert Murdoch. The dominant newspaper and a TV station to publish for years, information that disparage climate science and climate change as a myth of the present.
Richard Flanagan, one of the leading thinkers in Australia and multi-award-winning writer, recalls the Situation ” eerily to the Soviet Union in the 1980s, as the ruling Apparatchiks were all-powerful, but the basic moral legitimacy to Rule had been lost.”
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In a comment in the “New York Times” writes Flanagan, “the Australians want to be with a large and growing majority against climate change, and now the question of the growing gap between the ideological fantasies of the government, Morrison and the reality of a dried-up, fast heating, burning of Australia”. In today’s Australia, the political Establishment, which is left desolate by his own fantasies and crazy to become a monstrous reality to see “who has neither the ability nor the will, to turn himself in.”
Flanagan is reminiscent of the remark made by the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, according to which the had started to break-up of the Soviet Union with the nuclear disaster of Chernobyl in 1986. After this disaster, “the System as we know it, is unsustainable,” said Gorbachev in 2006. “Could it be that the immense, could be still at the end of the tragedy of Australian fires unfolding as the Chernobyl of the climate crisis?”, Flanagan asks rhetorically.
