The people have only one dangerous enemy … the government. -- Georges Danton, guillotined in 1794 for seditious opposition to Robespierre's Terror

Like the French Revolution's Maximilien Robespierre, Philip Ruddock began his political career with integrity and a sense of justice. Few who knew Ruddock as the principled politician who often crossed the floor of Parliament as a dissenting member of the Liberal Party can believe how distasteful he has become.

Like Robespierre before him, Ruddock has turned into a repressive authoritarian.

The French Reign of Terror was originally conceived by Georges Danton, nobody's idea of an angel. Faced with external enemies, he believed France should secure law and order within its boundaries. But once the threat of war was over, he wanted an end to The Terror. Robespierre, however, continued to implement it with a vengeance against any and all dissenters, eventually joining his fanatical colleagues on the typically named Committee of Public Safety to have Danton and others arrested for their seditious views.

Robespierre liked to think of himself as incorruptible and was so-called by his admirers. But others called him the "sanctimonious butcher." Like Robespierre, Philip Ruddock -- whose historical epithet remains as yet uncoined -- is cold, remote and, above all, inflexible. Emotionless as an undead cadaver, he has no concept of the mind-unhinging reality asylum seekers have faced in his concentration camps, or the Gulag-inspired reality the rest of us will face under his repressive anti-dissent pro-terror legislation.

Worse than Robespierre, who was a small man who had to stand on the tips of his toes at the podium, Ruddock's smallness is like that of a black hole, sucking all of humanity's goodness into its fathomless hatred.

Robespierre rationalised The Terror thus: "When the republic is threatened, we are omnipotent." During the trial of Danton and Camille Desmoulins, editor of Le Vieux Cordelier, which dared to protest against The Terror -- a trial, it should be noted, where journalists and court reporters were banned -- Robespierre admonished presiding judge Fougier for appearing to be soft on dissent: "We deliver the enemies of the Republic to you. Your job is to eliminate them not to judge them." The judge followed his orders. Danton, Desmoulins, and several others were guillotined within a few days.

Ruddock's sense of justice has become equally perverted. It blindly follows the twisted ideology of John Howard, the hate-whispering hobgoblin who squats on the shoulders of two-thirds of Australia's larval population. The guillotine is gone, but endless prison sentences await the Danton's of today.

Everyone hated Robespierre's secret police. Everyone always hates the secret police. The definition of a government with secret police is a government that employs state terrorism. The same will be true of Ruddock's ASIO branch of thugs in the service of Ruddock's Terror.

So went Robespierre, so goes Ruddock. Who said there was no such thing as reincarnation?

Thanks to Andrzej Wajda's film Danton, Barry Jones' Dictionary of World Biography, and Wikipedia for the background to this dilettantish piece. - TGW