The weakened West

 West is weak, divided and lacking in self-worth TONY ABBOTT 

The Western democracies are now feeble and divided, having militarily, industrially, and even culturally disarmed in the years since their seeming triumph in the Cold War against the old Soviet Union. Facing unprecedented challenges – including a militarist dictatorship in Moscow, an Islamist dictatorship in Tehran, and a communist dictatorship in Beijing – this is clearly a “civilisational moment” because others clearly don’t believe in us, as they were supposed to after the “end of history”; and we no longer quite believe in ourselves, despite all the objective evidence about the merits of the Western achievement. One of the reasons Russia is now slowly grinding down gallant Ukraine is because Ukraine’s friends in the West have helped it enough to avoid defeat, but not enough actually to win. Partly from fear of what a humiliated nuclear-armed tyrant might do. Partly through internal division over the extent to which other people’s wellbeing is our business too. And partly through resistance to the industrial mobilisation needed to match an economically declining but geopolitically driven dictatorship. After initially being the largest non-NATO contributor to  Ukraine’s defence, primarily through the delivery of some 100 Bushmaster armoured vehicles and by helping to train in Britain the Ukrainian infantry, Australian support has now almost dried up, with even a recent request for coal refused, presumably because that might add to the temperature in Kyiv. 

Likewise, one of the reasons Israel is bogged down in Gaza, hesitant to destroy the Hamas leadership, is because its friends can’t quite grasp the moral distinction between a liberal democracy prosecuting a just war against a terrorist statelet pledged to its destruction, and an apocalyptic death cult that uses civilians as human shields. Somehow, civilian deaths in Gaza are not the fault of the terrorists who put command centres and military stores underneath schools and hospitals but of the Israeli Defence Forces, even though the Israelis have been far more fastidious about avoiding civilian deaths than Bomber Command ever was. In a further perversity, global institutions, invoking bogus morality, have bid to arrest both Israel’s and Hamas’ leaders for war crimes; and to restrain the actions of Israel but not Hamas. This is the moral confusion arising from the left’s long march through the institutions, with a generation of students conditioned to see issues in terms of oppressors and oppressed, with Israel damned as a settler state with “white privilege”. And thanks to a generation of permissive immigration, there are now Islamist subcultures within Western countries for whom sectarian solidarity is what matters most. It’s this growing conviction of the democracies’ decadence that’s emboldening Beijing in its intimidation of practically independent Taiwan. They doubt our will to resist. 

 Partly because of the economic cost of decoupling from China. Partly because US commanders now question their ability to win an air-sea battle in the Taiwan Straits. And partly because societies that have had it so good for so long are simply unprepared for a potentially existential struggle, even on behalf of a country like Taiwan that testifies to the universal appeal of the Western way of life. It’s telling that for the first time since the ANZUS treaty in 1951, Australia has just refused a US request for military help, declining to send a freedom-of-navigation frigate to the Red Sea. Our government is using its commitment to AUKUS submarines a decade hence to mask cuts to our fighting capacity now. Rather than admit to an instinctive pacifism, it would prefer to tell our allies that we’d like to help, but lack the means to do so. This general decline of the West is the dispiriting background to our strategic disarray. People have never had more access to information, yet rarely been so ignorant; never been more materially rich, yet rarely more culturally and spiritually bereft. And whatever might distinguish today’s leaders – in business, the academe, the law, the military, and the church, no less than in politics – it’s rarely character, conviction and courage. Historically, at least in the Anglosphere, our most iconic institutions have worked for the protection of society against the state, and for the freedom of the individual against oppression. 

From centuries of trial and error, the king was under the parliament, the parliament was under the people, the people were under the law, and the law was under God – or at least some concept of the common good. At its zenith, there was an expectation of humility. Even for exalted people and institutions, our pride was supposed to vest in the things beyond ourselves; an attitude most wonderfully conveyed in the statement of our late queen on her 21st birthday that: “My whole life, be it long or short, shall be devoted to your service and that of the great imperial family to which we all belong.” Our strategic confusion is just another example of the myriad problems that arise when people are ignorant of their own story, fail to understand how their culture has evolved, and haven’t grasped how society is a trust between the  dead, the living, and the yet-to-beborn. It’s actually an abundance of respect for all cultures other than our own that’s now the mark of most Western countries. It’s very hard to mount a defence unless there’s something worth defending. Yet all the main Anglosphere countries are now angsting over their self-worth: America over slavery, Britain over the empire, and Australia over settlement and dispossession. 

What else can explain our present government’s insistence that no important announcement be made except in the presence of three flags: the national one, plus the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ones. These days entities that wouldn’t dream of toasting the king at a formal dinner, or beginning any official proceedings with a prayer, now routinely begin their activities with an acknowledgment of the traditional Indigenous owners, as if that’s the only cultural inheritance that matters; and even though Christianity, or “the coming of the light”, is almost certainly more important to more Indigenous people than ancestor worship. Until we have elected leaders brave enough to drop the pieties that imply that our country belongs to some of us more than to all of us; and to stop flying the flags of some of us co-equally with the flag of all of us, there’s really no hope of reversing the cultural decay that’s behind our strategic confusion. Are we collectively capable of recovering the historical memories and cultural self-confidence required to face this civilisational challenge? Sterner times could soon force us to rediscover our better selves. 

This is adapted from a speech this week to the Danube Institute in Budapest.

Hamas and Truth

 NONE SO BLIND TO HAMAS AS THOSE WHO WILL NOT SEE

 GEMMA TOGNINI 

One of the most famous lines in recent cinematic history belongs to a (then) youthful Tom Cruise in the blockbuster flick A Few Good Men. Cruise plays a hot-shot young navy lawyer with thinly veiled daddy issues, and in the film’s most famous scene he has a perfectly wicked Jack Nicholson on the stand in a tense courtroom showdown. Nicholson plays a decorated US marine colonel who secretly has gone rogue, and Cruise is trying to goad him into confessing to murder. Nicholson is, of course, brilliant, channelling hints of Randle McMurphy from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as he stares down Cruise’s impassioned demands for the truth. You can’t handle the truth, he bellows in return. And thus a legend was born. This was a work of fiction but we are living it today, this aversion to the truth. Australia collectively is incapable of facing up to so many of the things challenging who we are and the values we’ve built across generations, the values hewn from the blood, sweat and tears of Australians from all backgrounds, creeds and faiths. We may not be able to handle it, but believe me when I say Australia needs a headfirst encounter with the truth. 

There is no greater example than the war against Hamas, which I might point out is a war against terrorism that the global community is happy for Israel to fight alone. As this awful, necessary conflict continues, as the Israel Defence Forces edge closer to the goal of wiping out Hamas, there have been repeated calls for a ceasefire because of the start of Ramadan, which began this week. As the Muslim holy month began, Australians, both notable and beautifully including the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, wished our Muslim community Ramadan Mubarak. This represents the Australia we want to be part of, truly tolerant in the face of significant differences. However, the calls for a ceasefire because of Ramadan ignore important truths. Let me lay them out for you. Hamas broke the ceasefire and started this war on the Sabbath, the Jewish holy day. Not only was it the Sabbath but the violent orgy of murder, rape and mutilation was carried out on 

 Torah, a time of Jewish celebration to mark the completion, and the restart, of the annual cycle of reading the Torah. Another truth, courtesy of 1973: the Yom Kippur war was started on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. Day in, day out, every month of every year since, rockets have been fired at Israel and its citizens on any and every single day, especially on the Sabbath. Israel’s enemies know many soldiers will be in synagogue. What I’ve just shared isn’t my opinion. It is the truth that Hamas started the war last year on Simchat Torah and the Sabbath. It is the truth that the Yom Kippur war was started on Israel’s holiest day. It is truth any ceasefire without surrender is simply an opportunity for Hamas to regroup and do what it says it will – repeat October 7, not only in Israel but in all Western countries. It has promised it; we best believe Hamas means it. This is the awful truth, and millions of Gazans are suffering because Hamas continues to knock back every ceasefire deal put on the table. This is the truth. So many Australians, especially in the progressive left, simply can’t handle it. They continue to deny the cancerous culture of anti-Semitism that has been laid bare in this country since October 7. They deny. They deflect. They gaslight anyone who dares call it out. They follow any conversation around the brutality of Hamas’s use of sexual violence with the word “but”. Ah, the truth is hard, the truth hurts. There’s a reason that’s a cliche and that’s because it’s true. 

Psychologists have studied a phenomenon called the backfire effect, a term to describe what happens when someone presented with irrefutable truths on a matter that should shift their thinking instead doubles down. Gregg Ten Elshof is a professor of philosophy at Biola University in the US. In 2009 he wrote a book called I Told Me So, in which he unpicks humanity’s seemingly unmatched capacity for self-deception. Ten Elshoff unravels, with excruciating accuracy, what happens when finding the truth becomes the secondary motivation for asking questions. It turns out humans are masters in the art of embracing denial when it suits us. So, in the Australian context, what is the primary goal? Is it electoral? Is it fear of being wrong, is it the pain of having to look at your ideology and accept it’s flawed? Beyond the war in Gaza, there are many examples of what I’m talking about, few as striking as the treatment of gender dysphoria in children. This past week in Britain, the National Health Service announced that puberty blockers would no longer be prescribed to anyone under 18. This follows the damning scandal and subsequent closure of that country’s Tavistock gender identity clinic and a growing bank of evidence on the danger of these treatments more broadly, which includes links between transgender hormone therapy and cancer. This is truth. Australia? Still stuck on the fence. Clinging to the idea that gender-affirming care is the only valid approach. The British decision is based on truth, based on science. Finally, the truth in this space is being accepted but here in Australia so many still hold that children who the law recognises are too young, too emotionally (and in all other ways) vulnerable to consent to sexual relationships, can decide to take life-altering medication from which there is no return. 

So many other issues. Our energy mix and reckless refusal to consider anything other than renewables. The plight of Indigenous Australians who live in places that are out of sight, hence out of mind. What will it take? This question runs laps around my mind and my heart daily and this is where I have landed. We need an encounter with the truth. Australia and Australians need a headfirst, deep-hearted, full-frontal collision with the truth. Not “my” truth, or his or her truth, the facile indulgence that allows people to construct and reconstruct various matters to suit their own narrative. But the truth. Most of us in this country do not understand existential threat. We have the luxury of not knowing what it’s like to have to defend our borders or go catch the bus wondering if you’ll be knifed or shot by a terrorist. So many times I’ve said to people, in relation to the Hamas war, what if it were your daughter who had been raped and desecrated? What if it were your son who had his eyes gouged out in front of his children while being forced to listen to the sexual brutalisation of his own wife? Would that be an encounter with truth enough? We don’t need any more facts. We have scant need for more information. But boy, do we need a collective come to Jesus moment on more than one front, and I pray this happens without a need for first-hand experience.