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> Enough people think Gough was bonkers There is much discussion about how in the cold war, a swath of countries from East Germany to China ran as states led b
by VictorPath 4y ago
> Enough people think Gough was bonkers
There is much discussion about how in the cold war, a swath of countries from East Germany to China ran as states led by one party. Not much discussed is how many western aligned countries did as well. As the Cold War heated up, from 1949 to 1972, the Liberal coalition ran Australia. In 1972 another party is elected into power, and an extraordinary amount of energy from within Australia and without (UK and US) went into undermining anything but the old one party led coalition. Whitlam was undermined every day for his less than three years in power, then ousted by the retainer of a foreign queen, so that the one party led rule would continue to 1983. Of course the undermined <3 year interruption to one party led rule was "bonkers" to those supporting decades of one party led rule.
One party led rule from 1949 to 1983, with the one elected other party with less than 3 years ousted by a representative of a queen. These people then had the gall to criticize the one party led coalitions running China and East Germany as being one party states that blocked political pluralism.
The same thing happened in the other western aligned countries in the Pacific during the Cold War - Japan, South Korea. The same case in South Africa, Italy, France etc.
- flerchin 4y agoFor crying out loud, a long term majority is not One Party Rule. The primary difference being that dissenting parties are not outlawed.
- School-Cotton 4y agoMaybe true for Australia but this definitely depends on the country. Mexico had one-party rule throughout most of the 20th century by any reasonable definition, but opposition parties weren’t formally banned. They were just never allowed to win anything.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y agono but South America had a lot of cia backed coups when the wrong party won.
- VictorPath 4y agoIn France the largest political party until 1956 was the communist party. In 1948 the communist/socialist alliance was almost elected to power in Italy, and the communist party was getting over one third of the vote to 1976 (the Italian socialist party with hammer and sickle logo got about 10% of the vote, and Maoist parties got hundreds of thousands of votes). Too much widespread support at the time to ban. Not in West Germany which reinstated the Nazi ban on the communist party. Not the USA which banned the communist party, criminalized the party and jailed its leaders ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_1954 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_195... ). South Korea, South Africa, Indonesia wtc. all followed the same path. Dissenting parties were outlawed in western and western aligned countries all over the world, and many of them like Japan, South Korea, France, Italy, Australia etc. became one party led states. Australia did not outlaw the Labour party, but we can see what happened when the Liberal party interrupted the 1949 to 1983 Cold War rule led by the Liberal party - pressures national and international undermined any ability to rule until a foreign monarch had her footman toss him out.
- aragilar 4y agoSorry, what? If you look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Australia#Prime_ministers'_parties_by_time_in_office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Australia#Prime_mi..., you can see that's not the case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Labor_Party_split_of_1955 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Labor_Party_split_o... was a major cause in federal Labor not winning enough seats, and with the demise of the DLP and the rise of explicit faction control, it was possible for Labor to win majorities in the lower house (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Labor_Party#Federal_election_results https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Labor_Party#Federal... links to all the relevant elections).