A stranded platoon, surrounded and outnumbered by enemy forces, needs to exaggerate its size. So each man runs back and forth, firing from behind every tree. From a distance, the enemy will sense each shot as a sign of a unique beating heart. But, if they are brave enough to get close, the enemy would discover a tiny band of resisters, winded, low on ammunition and ready to surrender. Applying the same principle, the radical left of Australia fires as many shots as it can: attending every political event, pasting posters on every wall, publishing newspapers and setting up webs of front organizations as complex as corporate tax shelters. By making sure to fire a shot from behind every available tree, even the tiniest sect can seem like part of the national political conversation. Yet in reality, by the mid-1990s, the radical left of Australia—bundling all the Trotskyites, Maoists, anarchists and Leninists together—numbered no more than 2000 lost souls.
The fall of the Berlin Wall had thinned the herd. Though, out of at least a dozen parties on the hard-left, only one, the flagship Communist Party of Australia, collapsed entirely. Affronted and perplexed by the complete failure of soviet communism, the CPA packed up its toys and went home, voluntarily disbanding in 1991. Everyone else soldiered on. Most had a ready excuse to hand. The Soviet Union abandoned ‘true socialism’ decades ago, they would say. Some were secretly relieved. Finally, they would no longer hear the refrain: Why don’t you move to Russia?
