The Minefield

In a remarkable column from 1944, George Orwell bemoaned the sheer range of social and political phenomena to which the label “Fascist” was being applied — to the point that he believed the word itself had become “almost entirely meaningless”. And while it conveyed little more than a term like “bully” would, “Fascist” nonetheless carried an emotional charge, a degree of opprobrium, that such an everyday word did not.For this reason, Orwell concluded, the label should be used both precisely and sparingly: “All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.”During the first Trump administration, a debate broke out among historians and political philosophers as to whether what the United States was witnessing amounted to “fascism”. For some, the term was an accurate description of a political disposition and form of political expression which at once had deep roots in American history — reaching back even before the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the “America First” phenomenon in the 1930s — and enjoyed certain family resemblances with the European movements with which we ordinarily associate the word. For others, calling the Trump administration “fascist” was either premature, a form of rhetorical overreach or a misdiagnosis.In many respects, that debate now seems quaint. For after the 6 January 2021 assault on the US Capitol and the various forms of executive action taken by Donald Trump in his second administration — including the extortion of universities, law firms and media companies, the use of masked ICE agents to detain and “disappear” people without due process, the deployment of the National Guard on the streets of American cities, and the targeted prosecution of political adversaries — that which was merely feared has now come to pass.But does this mean the description “fascist” should now be used freely as a way of characterising the Trump administration — the way “populism” was after 2016? Not only are there serious questions about the rhetorical efficacy of the term’s use (even if it is historically or politically accurate) or its ability to mobilise an electorate against a common democratic threat. There is also the prospect that the use of the term itself could provide a degree of licence, in the minds of some, to take matters into their own hands and engage in outright political violence.This points to a kind of two-fold paradox involving “fascism”. On the one hand, fascism is itself a paradoxical political phenomenon in the way it holds together seemingly incommensurable impulses. As José Ortega y Gasset famously remarked in 1927:“It asserts authoritarianism and organises rebellion … It seems to pose itself as the forge of a strong State, and uses means most conducive to its dissolution, as if it were a destructive faction or a secret society. Whichever way we approach fascism we find that it is simultaneously one thing and its contrary, it is A and not A …”On the other hand, while the term “fascism” could accurately convey the gravity of the situation facing an advanced democracy, the very use of the term could deepen the democratic dysfunction and thereby exacerbate the political conflict. Would we be well-advised, then, to follow Orwell’s advice and use the term only ever circumspectly and not as a rhetorical weapon against our opponents?Guest: Jason Stanley is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he is also the Bissell-Heyd-Associates Chair in American Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. He is the author of How Propaganda Works, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them and, most recently, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.

This week is the first ever “Minefield Mailbag”, where Waleed and Scott try to respond to what’s been on our listeners’ minds.The questions they take on cover such diverse topics as society’s obligations to self-professed “sovereign citizens”, whether NATO is to blame for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, why “virtue signalling” may not be such a bad thing after all, and the discrete relationship between philosophy and gardening.If you’d like to submit a question for a future mailbag, or propose a topic for a future episode, you can send an email to theminefield@abc.net.au.

It would be hard to overstate the significance of Charlie Kirk within the conservative movement and in the Trump administration. By some reckoning, his influence and social media prominence were second only to Donald Trump himself.As the founder and face of Turning Point USA, Kirk was pivotal in driving Trump’s appeal among younger voters — particularly young men. And, indeed, his singular appeal was to have made a muscular, self-assured brand of conservative Christian nationalism appealing in a hyper-online age. Hence his podcast would come to enjoy the kind of online saturation reserved for few other “content creators”. The social media algorithm was Charlie Kirk’s vernacular.It would not be right, however, to call Kirk an “online influencer”. Instead, he was a MAGA evangelist, a charismatic figure in the full sense of the word. And like all charismatic figures, while he tried to instil belief in young people, he also came to be the object of their belief — they could derive confidence from his confidence, from his self-assertiveness, from his ability to answer his detractors. Which is why his willingness to engage with his opponents in front of large crowds at colleges and on university campuses was integral to his persona.It is certainly to Kirk’s credit that he engaged in frank debate with those who were offended by his strident political convictions. But the performative logic of these “debates” was not to convince so much as it was to “own”. The true audience were not those physically present. Which is to say, point of the debates was to be turned into “content”.This begins to approach the significance of Charlie Kirk for those who have been left devastated by his assassination. Quite apart from the inherent indecency and immorality of taking the life of a young husband and father, killing Kirk has been received as an attack on a belief system — with its intertwined religious, racial and political elements — that sees itself as already threatened by “enemies within”.Assisted by how increasingly prominent his own Christianity became in recent years, Kirk represents what “America” will look like when it is made “great again”. It is no wonder, then, that he is quickly becoming canonised as a MAGA martyr.Finding smug satisfaction in the death of Charlie Kirk is to allow oneself to fall outside the bounds of fundamental decency. Wishing to “right the record” of his immoderate, frequently bigoted rhetoric, after his death, in such a way that it makes it sound as though Kirk “had it coming”, is also utterly indecent. And while there is no virtue in performing grief that one does not feel, being contemptuous of those who are grief-stricken over Kirk’s murder is itself democratically corrosive.Indeed, one of the predicates of political violence is the inability to recognise the humanity in one’s fellow citizens, and to see them only ever as bearers of a particular ideology — as “abstractions”. And that’s what is worrying about this particular political moment. Once citizens are turned into ideological abstractions — whether they’re called “fascists” or members of the “radical left” — they can be sacrificed in the service of a greater cause. In this way, contempt or the abandonment of basic decency are the conditions of possibility of “categorical” violence.If contempt and indecency are the kindling, then an event like the assassination of Charlie Kirk could provide the spark that turns the United States’ current “cold” civil war into a theatre of political violence.

In August, Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh from The Bookshelf on Radio National, teamed up with the indomitable Sophie Gee — Professor of English at Princeton University, Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Sydney, and co-host of the podcast The Secret Life of Books — and Scott Stephens from The Minefield, to mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen (1775–1817).In front of a live audience at the State Library of New South Wales, the quartet discussed Austen’s innovative approach to fiction, why her novels are of such abiding interest to moral philosophy, the importance of “a room of her own” when writing, and her subtle critique of patriarchy, gender norms, slavery and religion.Finally, they reflect on three exemplary moments in Austen’s last three novels — Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816) and Persuasion (1818).This episode was originally broadcast on The Bookshelf on Thursday, 11 September 2025.

Whether it is in geopolitics or in social and personal relationships, the overweening desire to “save face” can have manifestly unjust and outright damaging consequences.Those who continue to languish under Iran’s oppressive regime take little comfort in Ayatollah Ali Khamenei being afforded the opportunity to shore up his public standing following the US missile strikes on its nuclear facilities. And Hannah Arendt correctly observed at the heart of the ‘Pentagon Papers’ a willingness on the part of the US government to lie to the American people about the status of the war in Vietnam, and thus to prolong an unwinnable and inhumane war, in order to protect “the reputation of the United States and its President”.When saving face is paramount to all other considerations, others invariably pay the price in order for the untrammeled supremacy of the ego to persist.But “ego” does not quite grasp the social complexity bound up with the concept of “face” — which suggests something closer to “honour” or a kind of thick social reputation, standing or prestige that is conferred by others, the loss of which is no mere bruised ego but a threat to one’s social existence.While this concept of “face” has partly been appropriated from Chinese culture, it nonetheless has roots in the ancient of honour/shame cultures of the Mediterranean and Asia Minor, and, as Kwame Anthony Appiah points out, finds expression fully as much in Western Europe and West Africa as it does in East Asia.Thus Immanuel Kant will warn about the moral dangers of “defamation” and of the intentional dissemination of scandalous information which, even if true, “detracts from another’s honour” and “diminishes respect for humanity as such … making misanthropy or contempt the prevalent cast of mind”. He concludes:“It is, therefore, a duty of virtue not to take malicious pleasure in exposing the faults of others so that one will be thought of as good as, or at least not worse than, others, but rather throw the veil of philanthropy [Menchenliebe] over their faults, not merely by softening our judgements but also by keeping our judgements to ourselves; for examples of respect that we give other can arouse their striving to deserve it.”Kant recognises that frequently the desire to humiliate another is not about their reproof, but about our own relative aggrandisement.Does this suggest that giving someone the ability to “save face”, even when they are found to be in the wrong, can function as both a rejection of the zero-sum logic that often prevails in honour/shame cultures (in which there is only so much social prestige to go around) and a constructive way of keeping them within a moral community?

There is something undeniably disorienting about the way AI features in public and political discussions.On some days, it is portrayed in utopian, almost messianic terms — as the essential technological innovation that will at once turbo-charge productivity and discover the cure to cancer, that will solve climate change and place the vast stores of human knowledge at the fingertips of every human being. Such are the future benefits that every dollar spent, every resource used, will have been worth it. From this vantage, artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the end, the ‘telos’, the ultimate goal, of humanity’s millennia-long relationship with technology. We will have invented our own saviour.On other days, AI is described as representing a different kind of “end” — an existential threat to human life, a technological creation that, like Frankenstein’s monster, will inevitably lay waste to its creator. The fear is straightforward enough: should humanity invent an entity whose capabilities surpass our own and whose modes of “reasoning” are unconstrained by moral norms or sentiments — call it “superintelligence” — what assurances would we have that that entity would continue to subordinate its own goals to humankind’s benefit? After all, do we know what it will “what”, or whether the existence of human beings would finally pose an impediment to its pursuits?Ever since powerful generative AI tools were made available to the public not even three years ago, chatbots have displayed troubling and hard-to-predict tendencies. They have deceived and manipulated human users, hallucinated information, spread disinformation and engaged in a range of decidedly misanthropic “behaviours”. Given the unpredictability of these more modest algorithms — which do not even approximate the much-vaunted capabilities of AGI — who’s to say how a superintelligence might behave?It’s hardly surprising, then, that the chorus of doomsayers has grown increasingly insistent over the last six months. In April, a group of AI researchers released a hypothetical scenario (called “AI 2027”) which anticipates a geopolitical “arms race” in pursuit of AGI and the emergence of a powerful AI agent that operates largely outside of human control by the end of 2027. In the same vein, later this month two pioneering researchers in the field of AI — Eliezer Yudkowsy and Nate Soares — are releasing their book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: The Case Against Superintelligent AI.For all this, there is a disconcerting irony that shouldn’t be overlooked. Warnings about the existential risk posed by AI have accompanied every stage of its development — and those warnings have been articulated by the leaders in the field of AI research themselves.This suggests that warnings of an extinction event due to the advent of AGI are, perversely, being used both to spruik the godlike potential of these companies’ product and to justify the need for gargantuan amounts of money and resources to ensure “we” get there before “our enemies” do. Which is to say, existential risk is serving to underwrite a cult of AI inevitabalism, thus legitimating the heedless pursuit of AGI itself.Could we say, perhaps, that the very prospect of some extinction event, of some future where humanity is subservient to superintelligent overlords, is acting as a kind of decoy, a distraction from the very real ways that human beings, communities and the natural world are being exploited in the service of the goal of being the first to create artificial general intelligence?Guest: Karen Hao is the author of Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination.

In the middle of August, the Bendigo Writers Festival found itself at the centre of a firestorm after over fifty participants decided to withdraw — some claiming they were required to engage in a form of “self-censorship”, and others withdrawing in solidarity.Reports have it that, two days before the festival was due to open, a “code of conduct” was sent to those taking part in the one of the four La Trobe Presents panels, “urging compliance with the principles espoused in [the university]’s Anti-Racism Plan, including the definitions of antisemitism and Islamophobia in the Plan”. The code also asked participants to practice “respectful engagement” and “[a]void language or topics that could be considered inflammatory, divisive, or disrespectful”.For many of those due to take part in the writers’ festival, this code of conduct amounted to a demand for self-censorship over what they hold to be a “genocide” taking place in Gaza, and would prevent them from criticising the actions of the State of Israel, “Zionism” as an ideology and, by extension, “Zionists”.This is just the latest of a series of controversies surrounding Australian writers’ festivals — some of which pre-date the massacre of Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023 and the onset of Israel’s devastating military incursion into Gaza, but which have now intensified and been rendered even more intractable by those events.The conflict in Gaza has placed severe strain not only on the relationships between Australian citizens and communities, but also on our civic spaces and modes of communication: from protests on streets and demonstrations on university campuses, to social media posts and opinion pieces. Given that writers’ festivals intersect with each of these social spheres, it is unsurprising that they should prove so susceptible to the fault lines that run through multicultural democracies.Leaving the wisdom or effectiveness of “codes of conduct” aside, it is worth considering whether there are constraints inherent to public debate in a democracy — which is to say, forms of self-limitation and fundamental commitments that ensure the cacophony of conflicting opinions does not descend into a zero-sum contest.

Greg Marston, a Professor at the University of Queensland, shares his insights on Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a potential remedy for job displacement due to AI. He discusses how AI can boost productivity while threatening employment, calling for a shift in how society values work. The conversation touches on the historical context of economic policies, the importance of care labor, and the need for systemic reforms. Marston highlights the need for a visionary approach to ensure economic security in a rapidly changing job landscape.

In March, an ABC Four Corners investigation detailed widespread instances of abuse, injury and neglect in childcare centres across the country. Just a few months later, in a climate of already heightened public awareness and media scrutiny, a series of deeply disturbing allegations came to light of child sex abuse in childcare centres in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland.The nature and extent of these instances of neglect and abuse, as well as the fact they involved the most vulnerable among us, suggested a systemic problem in Australia’s $20 billion childcare sector — something that tougher regulation or a national register of childcare workers or improved child safety training or even CCTV cameras will not fully address.Put simply: the concern isn’t simply that a few ‘bad actors’ managed to slip through the regulatory cracks, but that something more thoroughgoing or pervasive is undermining the quality of the care and education being provided to young children. Interestingly, both the Education Minister, Jason Clare, and the Minister for Early Childhood Education, Jess Walsh, have implicated the profit motive itself as compromising the care of some providers. Walsh singled out “some repeat offenders who continue to put profit ahead of child safety”, and Clare has acknowledged that “overwhelmingly higher levels” of quality are found among the not-for-profit providers.The federal government has announced a series of measures that, it hopes, will restore the trust of parents and the public in Australia’s childcare system — two-thirds of which is comprised of for-profit companies that have benefitted greatly from the subsidies provided to parents by the government. One of these measures is the ability to strip unsafe early education and care providers of their eligibility for subsidised care.But it is government subsidies themselves that have fuelled demand in the first place, precipitating a rapid influx of stock-market listed companies hoping to reap their own share of the windfall. It’s a familiar story that has played out since the late-1970s: rather than running vital utilities or social services themselves, government delegates the provision of vital goods and services to “the market” into which it intervenes through funding or regulation. Michael Maron has termed this the advent of the “regulatory state”.But are there some social goods — which is to say, goods that are integral to the possibility of human flourishing — that should not be exposed to the perverse incentives afforded the market? As Andrew Hudson, CEO of the Centre for Policy Development, has pointed out: “For too long, early childhood education has operated as a private market — leaving governments with limited tools to manage quality, access, or safety across the system. That’s what needs to change.”Unless there is an overriding commitment to the wellbeing and flourishing of the children on the part of the organisation — as the animating principle or ‘telos’ of the organisation itself — what reason is there not to cut corners, to limit staff pay, to reduce overhead, to maximise efficiency, to do the bare minimum in order to approach compliance?When the wellbeing of children is made subordinate to the goal of profit, it is the children themselves who are worse off.You can read Luara Ferracioli and Stephanie Collins reflect on whether early childhood care and education are compatible with the profit motive on ABC Religion & Ethics.

Garrett Cullity, a Professor of Philosophy and Director at the Centre for Moral, Social and Political Theory, sheds light on the complexities surrounding climate commitments. He discusses the recent International Court of Justice opinion that underlines nations' obligations to combat climate change. The conversation dives into Australia's political tension over net zero ambitions, examining the clash between climate policy and economic interests. Cullity emphasizes the need for genuine action rather than mere 'virtue signaling' in facing environmental challenges.