The disastrous Whitlam years

The Australian 17thJuly2021

From China to Vietnam, the truth is Gough was a disaster


GREG SHERIDAN


FORMER PM BOB HAWKE
‘The (Whitlam) government became an international laughing stock’

Fifty years after Whitlam’s first visit to Beijing, it’s time to bust Labor’s myth.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese, in a landmark interview with The Australian, has pledged bipartisanship on China, human rights and national security, endorsed Washington’s view of strategic competition with Beijing, and observed that whoever is in government in Canberra will have enormous difficulty re-establishing constructive dialogue with the People’s Republic of China.

This is striking. It also represents repudiation by modern Labor of Gough Whitlam’s approach to China.

Albanese could never say that. No one in the modern Labor Party can publicly question the false god of the Whitlam China legacy.

But in foreign policy, Whitlam was an unmitigated disaster, who nearly broke the US alliance. Almost all his judgments were wrong and he earned the long-lasting enmity of our closest Asian allies.

Australians didn’t like him much either. In 1975, they subjected Whitlam to the biggest electoral landslide loss in Australian history. Bizarrely, Whitlam hung on as leader. In 1977, Australians again voted against Whitlam by essentially the same margin.

Whitlam was wrong on China in important ways. His only positive contribution was to show the Hawke governments how not to govern. Hawke’s success came from being the opposite of Whitlam.

This month is the 50th anniversary of Whitlam’s visit to China as opposition leader and the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.

Whitlam’s visit has been lionised, exaggerated and blown out of all proportion in historical myth making which is epic in its inaccuracy and breathtaking in its avoidance of facts.

Whitlam was an impressive individual of great charm and wit. He was also a disastrous prime minister, perhaps the worst we ever had.

He lost control of the budget, he increased federal expenditure at grotesque rates, he summoned up inflation and he made the country so unsuccessful that for the first time since World War II, more Australians left the country than foreign immigrants came in.

He also injected ideological poison into social and cultural debates. He started off as a rightwinger but nearly lost a leadership challenge to the wildly left Jim Cairns, and after that moved ever further to the left.

Whitlam did do some good things in social policy, such as introducing universal health cover. But many of his social reforms – such as free university education taxed working class people to give benefits to middle class people and were reversed by later Labor governments.

In foreign policy, Whitlam was supremely damaging.

The Labor Party of the 1950s and 60s was heavily infiltrated by the Communist Party. ASIO concluded a number of Whitlam’s ministers were background dual members of the Communist Party. Bob Carr has written eloquently about how this infiltration made Labor unfit for government for much of the 1950s and 60s.

When he came to office, Whitlam did not behave responsibly in national security. He refused to allow Labor staffers to be subjected to the normal national security checks. His attorney-general, Lionel Murphy, refused to allow ASIO to bug Russian diplomats’ phones.

In March 1973, just a few months after Whitlam’s election, Murphy organised an extraordinary raid by the Commonwealth Police on ASIO headquarters. All confidential files were impounded, ASIO staff were kept away from their desks and assembled in the building’s auditorium.

Murphy was looking for nonexistent ASIO files on himself and on imaginary Croatian terrorism. During the 1974 election campaign, Whitlam said this raid was his greatest mistake.

Harvey Barnett, who went on to serve as ASIO director-general under Bob Hawke, and in whom Hawke had great confidence, later reflected that the raid “sent shockwaves around Australia and the Western world … Many thought the Westminster system was at risk … Usually the first action radical political regimes take in any sort of coup d’etat situation is to make a grab for the records of the security service … Australia’s overseas allies were aghast and concerned”.

Right from the start, the Whitlam government was beset by appalling indiscipline among cabinet ministers. Labor had opposed Australian participation in the Vietnam War. It is another bit of fictitious legend-making to claim Whitlam withdrew Australian troops from Vietnam. Almost all Aussie Diggers had left Vietnam by the time Whitlam came to power; only a tiny training team and a unit to guard the embassy were left. Whitlam withdrew the training team. That’s all.

The incendiary rhetoric of numerous Whitlam ministers was not merely to oppose Australian participation but to agitate in effect for a communist victory. This in a conflict where 500 Australian soldiers had died. Communist victory in Vietnam meant mass i m p r i s o n -ments in ree d u c a t i o n
camps, widespread persecution of religious and ethnic minorities, and more than 1.5 million refugees. Communist victory in Cambodia meant genocide.

Clyde Cameron, Whitlam’s minister for labour, called the US bombing of North Vietnam the most monstrous act in human history and the policy of maniacs. Another minister, Tom Uren, condemned the Americans’ “mentality of thuggery”, while Cairns called it “the most brutal, undiscriminating slaughter of defenceless men, women and children in living memory”. Whitlam had no control of his own government and this was the beginning of earning deep, and nearly disastrous, hostility in Washington.

Oddly, I became quite friendly with Whitlam for a few years when defending him against the charge that he encouraged the Indonesians to invade East Timor. I asked him once why he never discussed national security matters in cabinet, to which he replied: “Comrade, how could I discuss sensitive national security matters given the people I had in my cabinet?”

Whitlam named a couple of individuals specifically. I won’t repeat their names, but history is clear enough. Whitlam did not trust his own cabinet on national security.

Peter Edwards, in Australia and the Vietnam War, writes: “The Australian-American relationship was closer to a rupture than at any time since the signing of the ANZUS Treaty.” Subsequent historians have added striking detail. Whitlam went within an ace of destroying the US-Australia alliance, yet he is lionised in the Labor myth-making machine. It is as though Americans decided to make Herbert Hoover – a privately impressive individual, known for a time as “the great engineer” but who was a disastrous president completely overwhelmed by the Depression – as their ideal of presidential government.

The Americans waged the Vietnam War incompetently until the late 1960s but as they gave control of the combat effort to the South Vietnamese, these brave non-communists fought heroically and had every chance of national survival until the vagaries of W a t e r g a t e meant that

the Americans withdrew their promised air support. As a result, South Vietnam fell to the communists, not to a communist insurgency but to invasion by regular armoured divisions of the North Vietnamese army supplied by the Chinese.
Whitlam hated the South Vietnamese anti-communists and behaved with spectacular, almost monstrous, cruelty towards them. Thousands of Vietnamese had worked with Australian soldiers and diplomats. The Department of Foreign Affairs had no sympathy for them but even it drew up a list of 2000 who should be brought to Australia as Saigon fell. Whitlam refused, and barely 200 came.

Australian planes took off half empty as our allies and friends were left to a pitiable fate under the communists.

Whitlam said on the ABC that Australia did not want “another reactionary right-wing minority”. Foreign minister Don Willesee pleaded with him to take more. Whitlam replied: “I’m not having those f..king Vietnamese Balts coming into this country with their religious and political prejudices against us.”

Whitlam opposed the entry of Vietnamese refugees, saying they stirred no sympathy in him. He added: “There will be some resentment about the people coming to Australia at a time of unemployment, and also people from a very different way of life.”

In other words, Whitlam consciously stirred up ethnic and racial prejudice against Vietnamese because he thought they might be politically hostile to Labor.

Denis Warner, the greatest Australian journalist ever to work in Southeast Asia, wrote: “The shame of Australia’s performance in the final days of the Vietnam War, and immediately thereafter, will endure for a long, long time.”

I think there was another reason Whitlam so despised the South Vietnamese. He sometimes championed the underdog in Australia, but internationally he always favoured the strong over the weak, the mighty over the meek, the many over the few, the metropolitan over the distant. Thus he favoured China over Hong Kong, Taiwan or individual human rights. He favoured the Soviet Union over the Baltic States. He even extended de jure recognition of Soviet sovereignty over the Baltic States, breaking the hearts of Australians of Baltic extraction and showing characteristically poor historic judgment, as the Baltic States are all now independent of Moscow.

He favoured Indonesia over East Timor. He favoured the many Arabs over the few Israelis.

Whitlam flattered the powerful; the less powerful found him disagreeable. Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew in his memoirs records an arrogant and pretentious Whitlam, often ignorant of the way the region worked. Lee describes Whitlam as “a sham white Afro-Asian” and says it was a relief for Singapore when Whitlam left the prime ministership.

Some of Whitlam’s behaviour was truly grotesque. He personally commissioned Bill Hartley, a radical and disreputable figure who for years took payment from Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya, to seek electoral funds for Labor from the Iraqi Ba’ath party of Saddam Hussein. Whitlam got no money and tried to keep the operation secret. When it came out, he was condemned by the ALP national executive. Two of his former ministers, John Wheeldon and Kim Beazley snr, vowed never to serve on a frontbench led by Whitlam.

Equally bizarre was the loans affair, in which the Whitlam government authorised Tirath Khemlani as its agent. Hawke in his memoirs wrote that Whitlam was “conned by this unimpressive little shyster” who claimed he could raise billions of dollars for national infrastructure. Even after resources minister Rex Connor’s authority to use Khemlani was withdrawn, he kept on, with Whitlam’s tacit approval.

Hawke’s judgment? “The Australian (Whitlam) government became an international laughing stock.”

Whitlam’s 1971 visit to Beijing was good for him in domestic Australian politics. By pure luck he was there a week before Henry Kissinger was there as Richard Nixon’s envoy. Kissinger’s visit had nothing to do with Whitlam but it contributed to the utterly provincial legend of the Whitlam visit as a historic breakthrough.

Whitlam was a great talker, and a few days sounding off in Beijing in front of awe-struck Australian journalists was perfect for him. The former Harvard academic, Ross Terrill, who was with Whitlam at the time, suggests Whitlam at times didn’t know what the Chinese were talking about, thinking they meant Japan when they were referring to the Soviet Union. Terrill makes the more serious charge that because Whitlam was desperate to get the victory of reciprocal diplomatic relations, he negotiated an extremely bad outcome for Australia’s ability to pursue its legitimate interests with Taiwan, a poorer outcome, Terrill says, than more hard-headed countries got.

Extending diplomatic recognition to Beijing was rendered more complex by the CCP’s active support for communist insurgencies throughout Southeast Asia. It was partly solidarity with Southeast Asia which made Canberra hesitant.

Once the Americans decided to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing, it was absolutely inevitable that we would do the same. We were neither pioneers, nor laggards. We got absolutely no extra benefit out of Whitlam’s visit. The real pioneer in the China relationship was Bob Hawke, who saw its economic potential.

Whitlam’s visit instilled in the Labor Party a lot of bad ideas about China diplomacy – that it requires grand gestures, and historic vision; that China is an opaque enigma of mystery and riches to be magically unlocked by the right combination of incantation, gesture and obeisance.

In fact, China is just another very difficult country, best worked at steadily and quietly, and in this John Howard was the gold standard. Whitlam was a majestically talented and well motivated Australian. He was an utter disaster as prime minister.

Western Civilisation in crisis

Quadrant Magazine

Western Civilisation and its Irrational Critics

14th May 2021

Eugene Alexander Donnini

The Enlightenment philosopher John Locke’s notions of government with the consent of the governed and the idea of natural rights had a profound influence on the Enlightenment and the growth of Western civilisation. Locke believed all human beings were equal before the law, regardless of their religious, cultural, racial or political affiliations, and were entitled to equal opportunities and justice. He believed each human being had basic natural rights to life, liberty and property, and that these rights are rights that one is born with and nobody can take away, for political, religious or other reasons. The right to live means you have the right to be born and live your life in peace. The right of liberty basically means nobody can enslave you or control your thoughts or actions. The right to property means that anybody can buy or own property.

In his most famous work, The Treatise on Civil Government, Locke argues that sovereignty (supreme authority) resides in the people, and explains the nature of legitimate government in terms of natural rights and the social contract (the voluntary agreement among individuals): “Men being by nature all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent.” Locke recognised the primacy of human freedom and that a legitimate government needs to be established on that basis.

This essay appears in the current Quadrant.
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In Locke’s time nationalism—if it meant anything—meant being subordinate to your local landlord (aristocrat), the monarchy and organised religion, which were not based on any notions of equality of opportunity, freedom of expression, voting, or any other rights, but on keeping the population without rights and property and mostly poor. The civic nationalism Locke and others were in the process of developing was very different, based on the Enlightenment values of the sovereignty of the individual, bipartisan secularism and universal rights, and most importantly, the rule of law, that today underpin most Western constitutions and presuppose all human beings are born free and created equal.



Civic nationalism vs racism

Civic nationalism, through trial and error, has proven historically the most successful, equitable form of government ever devised. What guarantees its success is the equal value of every person based on a voluntary agreement to put Enlightenment values above all other values and laws that relate to religion, culture or anything else. Locke believed these were basic requirements for people who wish to live in peace and harmony. But in Western nations today Enlightenment-derived law and values are being attacked and eroded by governments that treat the sovereignty of their people with contempt, by legislating beyond the mandates they were elected to implement.

Attacks against civic nationalists by the Left and Right are two-pronged. The minuscule ethnocentric Right (ethnonationalists) considers Enlightenment values a threat to the European race, while the Left sees Enlightenment values as a mechanism of the capitalist class to control the workers and exploit their labour. Both these views are false and derived from eighteenth-century mechanistic philosophy (which likens the universe to a large machine) and antiquated tribal nonsense, not historical fact. There has, however, since the 1960s, been a primary shift by the Left away from the capitalist-versus-proletariat classical Marxist theory—which is still used to incite hatred in new recruits but has been almost totally abandoned in terms of ideology and function.

The ethnonationalist far-Right fringe’s use of identity politics as a fundamental marker for human categorisation is as dangerous as it is on the Left—but not as all-pervading and influential as the Left’s command over identity politics and its cancel culture of “wokism” that today has reached saturation level in social media, universities and the corporate world, where skin colour is of primary importance, more so than one’s capacity to do the job. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary describes identity politics as: “politics in which groups of people having a particular racial, religious, ethnic, social, or cultural identity tend to promote their own specific interests or concerns without regard to the interests or concerns of any larger political group”. Identity politics is a form of ethnocentrism, in other words, the racism of the kind Hitler imposed on the Jews. James Kirchick published an article in Tablet Magazine in August 2019 on the recent tidal wave of left-wing racism in America which exposes this cancer at a systemic level:

The way the left talks incessantly about “white men”, or openly puts membership in victim groups above individual rights and virtues, is the essence of what most people mean by racism. Not “reverse racism”—but real, actual, racism.

The identity politics almost the entirety of the Left and the far-Right fringe are propagating does nothing but generate hatred and divide and destroy whole communities for political ends.

There is nothing stopping any cultural community living in a civic Western nation from practising the traditions of their culture and religion, as long as such practices do not interfere with the rights, freedom and safety of fellow citizens which is guaranteed under the law—fundamentally derived from Enlightenment values. This is one of the primary reasons the West has been so successful and prosperous; why people from all cultures and races migrate to the West and seldom away from it. In other words, the freedom they enjoy also comes with a responsibility to recognise the freedom and rights of others in their community, regardless of religion, culture or skin colour.



Left establishment, alliances and fake news

There is an anti-Enlightenment alliance today that wants to destroy Western civilisation and replace it with a collectivist Marxist dictatorship, an alliance between the intelligentsia, the media, universities, politics and big business, whose ships, ideologically, are all sailing in the same direction (away from Enlightenment values) and whose policies are fundamentally left-wing (E. Harris. Exposure of the Vast Left-Wing Establishment. Huffpost. 26/2/2016). Mainstream media are, to this end, mostly “fake news” (liars), globalist agitators and propagandists. By fake news, I mean a type of yellow journalism or propaganda that consists of deliberate misinformation or hoaxes spread via traditional print and broadcast news media or online social media. Consider the mainstream media coverage and support for the lies circulated by the Bush White House administration, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and that Libya was slaughtering its own people, which was the excuse used by the leftist Obama administration and its allies to destroy and plunder that nation and its resources, costing the lives of 60,000 Libyan civilians.

CNN is historically one of the most unabashed and obvious disseminators of fake news along with most of the mainstream left-leaning media, like MSNBC, the ABC, and most blatantly the BBC. One of the most informative books (now a documentary) about fake news is called Hoaxed: Everything They Told You is a Lie, by Mike Cernovich.

Political scientists and foreign policy experts have used the term “Deep State” to describe individuals and institutions who exercise power in collusion with or independent of national political leaders. Today such individuals and institutions proliferate as non-elected policy-makers in positions of leadership both inside and outside Western nations. It is they who set the basic agenda, who insidiously guide policies and promote mandates that do not have the support of the people. Organisations like the UN, WHO, and EU (all controlled by Marxists) are primarily Deep State enablers whose anti-democratic agendas are enforced or imposed by deception, propaganda and stealth. (See The Deep State. Mike Lofgren, 2016). Also, The Deep State of Europe “Welcome to Hell”, (April 18, 2017) by Basil Coronakis. The Deep State agenda is further imposed by trans-national committees such as the Marxist-inspired “human rights commission”: a department, body or committee constituted by a state or its local government. This may seem harmless, but it’s not, because the commission derives its authority from the United Nations and can usurp the authority of civic nations. Protection for human rights is by definition built into Enlightenment values and law and doesn’t require an outside, non-elected commission to implement, particularly one that is discriminatory, that has a globalist Marxist agenda and whose definition of human rights is defined by that agenda and not applied without discrimination. Where, for example, was the human rights commission that should have stood up to defend the human rights of those tens of thousands of European women and children raped and abused by Muslim grooming gangs, abuses that are still occurring today? Where is the human rights commission that will raise its hand against the current dispossession and mass murder of white South African people? Or the practice of human slavery in Muslim countries? Or the deaths of over 250,000 Christian Middle Eastern Arabs living in Islamic countries? These are but a few of many examples.



Propaganda and lies

The Left establishment (which today in Western nations includes most of the establishment Right) often accuse civic nationalists of being racists, neo-Nazis and fascists, but this is a deliberate and blatant lie. What these collectivists omit to say and which history demonstrates beyond any shadow of a doubt is the exact opposite: the combined civic-nationalist nations of Europe and beyond defeated the Nazis and the Fascists during the Second World War, and also encouraged and assisted the Eastern Bloc nations to liberate themselves from the equally oppressive and barbaric Soviet Marxist regime.

They also omit to inform people that Nazism and Fascism were, like the Soviets, brutal collectivist regimes (closed political systems) that described themselves as socialists, who had nothing but contempt for the values of the Enlightenment—values close to the hearts and minds of those men and women who fought and died so their nations and others would, in future, be free from the collectivist folie à deux tyranny and oppression of left and right-wing collectivism. As Edward Hudgins wrote in D-Day and Enlightenment Values (June 6, 2014):

Fundamentally, fascism and communism both arose because of an eclipse of the Enlightenment principles. Fascism and communism held the group—the “race” and the “proletariat” respectively—as superior to the individual. They rejected reason as a guide to life in favour of mindless, emotional obedience to authority.

Today, mainstream opinion (propaganda) pieces that tell us to stop obsessing over socialism’s past failures, and start to get excited about its future potential, have almost become a genre in their own right. For example, a New York Times article (June 26, 2017) claimed that the next attempt to build a socialist society will be completely different, a claim made by every Marxist buffoon who has ever existed, and with the same disastrous consequences:

This time, people get to vote. Well, debate and deliberate and then vote—and have faith that people can organize together to chart new destinations for humanity … Stripped down to its essence, and returned to its roots, socialism is an ideology of radical democracy.

What utter poppycock! History offers no proof for these statements and demonstrates that those who make them are naive and irresponsible, or conniving ideologues, or just plain ignorant. These neophytes bring nothing new to the debate. In fact, they stifle debate and new ideas at every opportunity. The collectivism they aspire to has not changed ideologically, economically or otherwise. Nevertheless, what they are implying is that all those bloody Marxist regimes that failed in the past were not real Marxism; and when they and their comrades are in charge things will turn out differently. In other words, they’d like us to believe, they are uncontaminated by any proclivity to darkness or sin and thus would bring on the virtuous utopia. When one witnesses the deep hatred, anger and intolerance that permeates much of left-wing politics today, the first impulse anyone should have when confronted by these paragons of virtue is to turn and run.



Collectivism and mass murder

Their remarks about debating and deliberating also need to be clarified. For example, would debating and deliberating come before or after the Marxists are in power and freedom has been abolished? And will those who are critical of collectivism or opposed to it have a voice in a socialist government, in other words, an equal say? Of course not! The very idea of voting is done within a limited context. In other words, all change has to be made within the confines of a socialist government: one of the major hallmarks of a closed political system, which effectively removes one of the fundamental principles of the Enlightenment: the people’s right to vote a government out of office.

Once this right is removed (which fascist/Nazi/Marxist regimes have done and always aim to do) the possibility of rampant nepotism and corruption escalate because the people have no legal redress against them from “outside” the government in terms of a neutral universal law or constitution. In the past, this arrangement has led to the imprisonment, torture and massacre of millions of people—those, for example, who opposed the Nazis (the National Socialist German Workers’ Party), the Fascists, and the Marxists. There have been many books written about right-wing collectivism and a good place to start is Richard Bessel’s Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: Comparisons and Contrasts (1996). Right-wing collectivism was responsible for the mass murder of millions of people. It is not however widely known (and today is suppressed knowledge) that left-wing collectivism, in Russia alone, murdered over ten times as many people in an equally brutal fashion as the Nazis, for which there are ample primary source documentation and eyewitness accounts.

The Soviet gulags were filled with people who were critical of or opposed the collectivists. Gustaw Herling-Grudzski wrote A World Apart (1951), in which he describes life in the gulag in a harrowing personal account and provides an in-depth, original analysis of the nature of the Soviet Marxist system. Lenin’s Gulag by Richard Pipes (June 2014), also gives an in-depth account that draws on primary source documentation. The most famous account was Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
The primary source evidence in relation to the similarities of other Marxist dictatorships is overwhelming. For example, look at the Documentation Center of Cambodia, Mapping the Killing Fields. Through interviews and physical exploration, DC-Cam identified 19,733 mass burial pits, 196 prisons that operated during the “Democratic” Kampuchea (DK) period, and eighty-one memorials constructed by survivors of the DK regime. If you look at the history of the USSR and its occupied states in the Eastern Bloc (see Nikolai Dekker, Genocide in the USSR, 1958), you will see a familiar pattern of mass murder and oppression emerging. Many of these regimes called themselves “democratic” socialist republics.

A pattern of socioeconomic failure extends to every single Marxist state that has existed, the latest variant is Venezuela, where starvation is rampant and people are eating pets and zoo animals to survive, as Forbes reported in April 2017.



Collectivists are not anti-capitalist, they are anti-freedom

It is a myth and a smokescreen selectively disseminated by the Left that somehow the majority of corporations are anti-Left, in other words, opposed to globalisation and aligned to the interests of nation-states. This preposterous idea is used as propaganda when it suits, but is a long way from the reality of corporate-global-banking-political inter-connectedness. In Jihad vs McWorld (July 30, 1996), Benjamin Barber correctly states:

By many measures, corporations are more central players in global affairs than nations. We call them multinational but they are more accurately understood as post-national, transnational or even anti-national. For they abjure the very idea of nations or any other parochialism that limits them in time or space.

Corporations play a major role in leftist globalisation processes, which involve the integration and control of not only a nation’s resources but also its communication systems, ideas, culture and economy into a one-world corporate network. In terms of communication and media, look at the role played by staggeringly wealthy giant corporations like CNN, ABC, MSNBC, SBS, BBC, FOX, Al Jazeera, Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, PayPal, Patreon and others. These are massive global corporate business concerns that have a hegemony over human communication and the spread of ideas worldwide. Most of them are left-wing progressives (collectivists) with a pro-globalist bias, who are now active in the process of de-platforming (censoring) any ideas critical of or opposed to their global agenda, as Samuel Westrop points out in Silicon Valley Censorship (July 26, 2007):

The same level of discrimination and censorship is incorporated into anti-Enlightenment, undemocratic toxic laws, that are being imposed by Western governments, attacking free speech, freedom of the press, the spread of new ideas and laws that compel citizens to use certain words and phrases and forbid them from using others under the threat of prosecution and/or imprisonment.

And as Jordan Peterson noted in The Hill (10/18/16), in relation to Canada’s new CA legislation:

There is, however, a crucial difference between laws that stop people from saying arguably dangerous words and laws that mandate the use of politically-approved words and phrases. We have never had laws of the latter sort before, not in our countries.



The West is the best

The basis of rational, reasonable, empirical, scientific Western thought grew out of the Enlightenment and was all founded on a lack of belief in authority: the authority of the church, the aristocracy, and the state. Instead of “faith”, Enlightenment philosophers demanded investigation and evidence to seek the truth. They had confidence in humanity’s intellectual powers, both to achieve systematic knowledge of nature and to serve as an guide in practical life. This confidence is generally paired with scepticism towards forms or carriers of arbitrary authority (such as superstition, prejudice, myth, ideological possession, propaganda and miracles), insofar as these are seen to compete with the authority of one’s own reason, evidence and experience. The message of the Enlightenment is that the process of becoming self-directed in thought and action through the awakening of one’s intellectual powers leads ultimately to a better, more fulfilled existence, and for this we have overwhelming proof.

The arts and sciences of the West within the context of civic nations have flourished, resulting in the greatest scientific advancements and inventions in human history. The abolition of diseases, poverty and slavery, the creation of the internet, putting human beings on the moon, sound infrastructure construction, and technology, air travel, the wonders of nanotechnology and quantum physics … the list goes on. Why do you think people migrate to the West, mostly from anti-democratic (Marxist) and other (Islamic) closed societies? It is because the West, with all its imperfections, is free, creative and prosperous. The bulk of modern inventions are products of the West, not of closed societies who already believe they have the truth from an authority, who cower before their tribal gods and the dictates of tyrannical clerics, intelligentsia and governments infested with nepotism who rob the people of their rights and freedom, expecting blind obedience, giving nothing in return but utopian fairy-tales, torture, socioeconomic failure and death.

Climate Hysteria

Is climate hysteria the storm before the calm?


ADAM CREIGHTON

Global panic over climate action is not based on facts, says Barack Obama’s chief scientist



Demands to act on climate change reached fever pitch at President Joe Biden’s climate summit last month, where 40 world leaders gathered on Zoom to outdo each other in their ambitions to slash carbon dioxide emissions to achieve “net zero” by 2050.

For well over half the population, to question the urgency of “action on climate change” is to question science itself, to wish a dystopian climate carnage on mankind. “It’s the existential crisis of our times,” the President said. “The signs are unmistakeable. The science is undeniable. But the cost of inaction keeps mounting.”

Yet for New York University scientist Steven Koonin, Barack Obama’s former chief scientist, it’s anything but. The gap between rhetoric and facts has never been greater. His new book, Unsettled, released digitally this week, hasn’t lobbed a grenade so much as fired a bazooka at the climate “consensus”.

“Leaders talk about existential threat, climate emergency, disaster, crisis, but in fact when you actually read the literature, there is no support for that kind of hysteria at all,” he says. “The science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change in coming decades, much less what effect humans will have on it.”

Koonin, “increasingly dismayed” by climate alarmism, will be hard to “cancel”. He’s still alive, a self-declared Democrat, with impeccable academic and career credentials: a Caltech-trained physicist who became chief scientist at BP in 2005 and then Barack Obama’s undersecretary for science in 2009.

Yes, the planet has warmed, he concedes, and the burning of fossil fuels is partly to blame, but the impact is tiny, complex and uncertain, and occurs against a backdrop of natural climate change over thousands of years that dwarfs the recent increase in temperature.

At least half the warming since 1950 — about 0.7 degrees — is due to human influence, but it could just as easily be a quarter, climate science says.

“We are trying to understand a chaotic, multiscale system with incomplete observations, so it’s no surprise the science isn’t settled,” Koonin says. Humans affect only around 1 per cent of the world’s natural energy flows.

“We have this big system and we’re tickling it a bit,” he adds.

Since 1880, as far back as modern measurements go, global average temperature has risen haphazardly by about one degree centigrade. But it rose as rapidly between 1910 and 1940 — when emissions and the Earth’s population were tiny fractions of today’s levels — as the average temperature did over the past 30 years.

“Variations in the temperature are not at all unusual; what’s of interest is to what extent the changes are driven by humans or part of natural variation,” Koonin says, pointing out that the world’s temperature has been much higher, and much lower, in the distant past

The 1600s saw a little ice age, while the dinosaurs put up with much warmer weather.

In short, zoom in, and it looks scary; zoom out, and it’s hard to see what all the fuss is about.

Conveying the findings of climate science to the public has been akin to Chinese whispers, where the final message has been misinterpreted, exaggerated, and cherrypicked by bureaucrats, politicians and journalists, to the point it’s barely recognisable.

For instance, the latest climate science finds heatwaves are no more common than they were a century ago; the warmest temperatures in the US haven’t increased in the past 50 years.

Global wildfires have declined more than 25 per cent since 2003, and humans have had no detectable impact on the hurricanes. You’d never read that in any mainstream press.

As for the sea level, it’s been rising for 20,000 years, including by 25cm since the late 19th century — a drop in the ocean given it was 6m higher 125,000 years ago.

Even current trends indicate the sea level is rising 3mm a year, or enough to rise one metre in 333 years. Bondi is still a good long-term investment.

Climate scientists say temperatures could rise between 1.5 and 4 degrees over the next century.

What about if it rises three degrees by 2100, or twice the 2015 Paris climate change conference target?

“The net economic impact … if this happened would be minimal,” Koonin says, taking the analysis straight out of the latest UN climate change assessment.

“Even for five degrees of warming, GDP in around 2100 would be 6 or 7 per cent lower than it would otherwise be,” he explains. And even then, we would still be far richer than we are today.

Prophets of climate doom exclusively use the most unrealistic of the IPCC’s assumptions about the future, known as “RCP8.5”.

It assumes the world’s population grows to 12 billion from less than 8 billion today by 2100, and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere triples. Never mind emissions are already falling in most advanced countries, which have promised to halve them by 2030.

Why has climate science been so twisted and obfuscated? As with COVID-19, fear sells, so news media have little interest in context or facts that might make the disaster narrative less compelling.

Secondly, “action” on climate change demands significant government intervention. Supporters of drastic climate change policies tend to also support extreme Keynesian economics and an activist welfare state.

In other words, even if apocalyptic climate forecasts turn out to be very wrong, policies to cut emission would have, conveniently for them, seen a significant growth of government.

“Do you believe in climate change?” It’s apt phraseology. No one ever asks if you understand climate change. For most people, this “belief” is little different from religious faith, taken on word from the high priests of climate change.

What’s worrying is that the advocates for drastic action to stop climate change, in the media and bureaucracy tend to be the same people who have made significant errors about COVID-19, a phenomenon that should have been much easier to forecast than the climate 100 years from now.

For all our sakes, let’s hope they aren’t so wrong about the outlook for global temperatures, given the increasing marginal cost of reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

In 1982, the head of the United Nations Environment Program forecast “an ecological catastrophe as devastating as a nuclear war”.

Nothing remotely like that has come true.

If Koonin’s less alarmist take on climate science prove mores in keeping with reality, a lot of people will be very embarrassed in coming decades. For everyone else, much poorer than they might have been, the amusement will be small consolation.


‘Leaders talk about existential threat … when you actually read the literature, there is no support for that kind of hysteria at all’
STEVEN KOONIN
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

The Reality of Trans

 We were very moved, as we know many others were, by the testimony of Leanne Mills which was published in the Daily Mail on December 13th last year. Leanne, who was born a boy, Lee Anthony, began to feel gender dysphoric at age four and had sex reassignment surgery at age 34. Leanne is concerned that young trans people are not being given the full facts about transitioning.

Leanne wrote to us with a link to a subsequent article in the Nottingham Post and to explain the rationale behind the decision to go to the press: to warn and to help others, particularly young people who may be considering transition. We asked Leanne to write an open letter to those young people and give the other side of a story which is usually portrayed to children as only positive and affirming. We publish the letter below and we are very grateful to Leanne for writing it and allowing us to use it.

In Leanne’s own words:

“I do hope it goes down well, though I know many trans people will feel extremely hurt by what I say. This grieves me but I feel the truth of transitioning must be told for the sake of the young.”

Our thanks to Leanne for having the courage to take this risk and for speaking out publicly to help others.

…………………

A Letter to Young Trans People

Like you I was once a trans teenager. Decades ago I participated in a TV documentary in which I attempted to show how difficult life was for a young transsexual, for example in trying to find work. I saw the programme again recently and the first thing that struck me was how naive I seemed as I touchingly described my hopes for the future. I can be forgiven for that, I was only 19 after all.

Since then I’ve been through the transition (the most challenging period of my life) and nearly a quarter-of-a-century later still have gained much enlightenment in my ‘female’ role.

I use quotes here, for the most profound lesson I’ve learned is that I can NEVER be a ‘real’ woman. This is not born of opinion, but of cold, indifferent medical and scientific evidence. I realise that statement is crushing to all trans women (or transmen if going the other way), regardless of how breath-takingly convincing your transformation might be. But simple logic dictates that I can never escape the male body which Nature imposed on me at birth. Though I’ve permitted drastic and intrusive surgical modifications it shall forever be male. I’m reminded by the evidence on a daily basis. For example I still find it necessary to shave off facial hair despite having had laser treatment. I must continue to take female hormones for the rest of my days or my bones will start to decay and fracture. And that’s not all – the risk of Deep Vein Thrombosis, heart attacks or strokes is ever present.

I can’t bear children for I possess no uterus. Don’t even bother to ask me where the menopause is supposed to come in. I am unable to experience love as a woman because my vagina is artificial, a mere tube of penile skin that lacks feeling. When I came out of hospital in 1995 I was handed a collection of glass dilators which were required to keep it from shrinking; This happens because Nature resents Mankind’s meddling and fights back, attempting to close a space between my thighs that really shouldn’t be there. As a consequence also I am beset by messy post-op complications, causing a painful burning sensation which sometimes is excruciating. Some individuals even suffer prolapse, finding themselves on and off the operating table. Vaginal reconstruction is in itself a risky affair, any wrong move on the surgeon’s part can lead to lasting damage to the bladder or rectum. Others find they cannot pass water, requiring an emergency visit to the hospital. Tragically none of this will be found referenced on the Mermaids website.

My male past shall forever haunt me, no biological female ever began as a man after all. When out in public I feel I must always be on my guard lest someone ‘read’ me, that is to say see through the illusion of femininity that I project. For example characteristics like jaw-line, large hands, tallness, especially the adam’s apple can be tell-tale signs that one is not what one appears to be. Indeed in the final analysis all I can ever hope to be is a facsimile of a woman. I was born trapped in a man’s body. The only way I will ever leave it is when I take my last breath. All I can truly claim to be innately feminine is my demeanour, my emotional responses, my self-expression, my interaction with others…

So does it mean then that all the pain, abject misery and hell I’ve clawed my way through for many years now amount to nothing? Not necessarily. Though sex reassignment surgery is a pragmatic solution, it does not alone resolve the hell of gender dysphoria. I believe the key to survival is calm, logical acceptance of clinical reality together with the limitations that fact places on the transsexual person.

For many transitioning today who fail to comprehend the reality I describe, I fear you will only meet with disaster.

How many of you, for instance, are even doing so for the right reasons? There will be those (influenced by social media) who see it as cool, merely swept along with the many trends and fads that mark our modern age. Others are inspired by the glamour, competing with their peers for those coveted ‘likes’. The trans celebs must take responsibility here, placing too much focus on beauty rather than pragmatism, after all excuse me if I suggest that none of them ever seem to look like ‘the back end of a bus’. And their encouragement of young followers to purchase hormone pills over secret sites on the web is dangerous in the extreme. More will be transitioning in the belief that ‘the grass is greener on the other side’, an answer to inner feelings of self-doubt and inadequacy, or simply searching for love which you feel lacking in your lives.

And that doesn’t even begin to include the countless numbers who are just confused, possibly being gay, cross-dresser, asexual or even autistic as opposed to transsexual. Mermaids are dangerously muddying the waters still further, overly-promoting gender identity theories based on nothing more sound than faith and philosophy. They need to understand that no matter how hard trans people are encouraged to believe or feel themselves to be a member of the opposite sex, it will not make it so – and neither will limitless surgery.

Looking ahead, you will be infertile (especially crossing over so young) so you can forget ever having children yourselves. That also means no grand-children. What you also don’t realize is you have youth on your side only for now. Old age comes to us all. The looks that we all seek will no longer be as much in evidence 30-40 years from now, many of your friends will have moved on and family members passed away (as for all people). But the most important thing you should know is that there are very few men and women in society who will commit themselves to a life with a transsexual person. I know this from experience. And then there is societal prejudice – you simply can’t force people to love you no matter what legal rights you may be given, that’s basic human nature. The most unfortunate will find themselves chronically lonely, isolated and maybe even suicidal.

Of course I’m not suggesting that everyone will end floundering on the rocks, you do get happy endings. But the ones that don’t make it are indeed out there in significant numbers, unseen and unheard. I am merely one who has chosen to come out of obscurity and present an alternative reality in the hope of slowing the runaway train of the ‘trendy to be trans’ culture.

Transition if you truly feel that is the right path for you (not because someone else suggests you do) but be a realist and acknowledge that the end result may fall rather short of your original dream. I don’t wish to be flippant but only Dr. Who could manage the most flawless and genuine sex change ever witnessed.

Leanne Mills

Climate reality

Physicist who became a climate truth teller


HOLMAN W. JENKINS JR


Barack Obama is one of many who have declared an “epistemological crisis”, in which our society is losing its handle on something called truth. Thus an interesting experiment will be his and other Democrats’ response to a book by Steven Koonin, who was chief scientist of the Obama Energy Department.

Koonin argues not against climate science but that what the media and politicians and activists say about climate science has drifted so far out of touch with the actual science as to be absurdly, demonstrably false.

This is not an altogether innocent drifting, he points out. In 2019 a report by the presidents of the US National Academies of Sciences claimed the “magnitude and frequency of certain extreme events are increasing”. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is deemed to compile the best science, says all such claims should be treated with “low confidence”.

In 2017 the US government’s Climate Science Special Report claimed, in the lower 48 states, the “number of high temperature records set in the past two decades far exceeds the number of low temperature records”. On closer inspection, that’s because there has been no increase in the rate of new record highs since 1900, only a decline in the number of new lows.

Then there was 2018’s US Fourth National Climate Assessment, issued in Donald Trump’s second year, which relied on such overegged worst-case emissions and temperature projections that even climate activists were abashed (a revolt continues to this day). “The report was written more to persuade than to inform,” Koonin says. “It masquerades as objective science but was written as — all right, I’ll use the word — propaganda.”

Koonin is a Brooklyn-born math whiz and theoretical physicist. He taught at the California Institute of Technology for nearly three decades, serving as provost in charge of setting the scientific agenda for one of the country’s premier scientific institutions. In 2004 he joined BP as chief scientist. Using $US500m of BP’s money, Koonin created the Energy Biosciences Institute at Berkeley, which is still going strong. He found his interest in climate science growing, “first of all because it’s wonderful science. It’s the most multidisciplinary thing I know. It goes from the isotopic composition of microfossils in the sea floor all the way through to the regulation of power plants.”

From deeply examining the world’s energy system, he also became convinced the real climate crisis was a crisis of political and scientific candour. He went to his boss and said, “John, the world isn’t going to be able to reduce emissions enough to make much difference.”

His thoughts seem to be governed by an all-embracing realism. Hence his book coming out next month, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.

Any reader would benefit from its deft, lucid tour of climate science. His rigorous parsing of the evidence will have you questioning the political class’s compulsion to manufacture certainty where certainty doesn’t exist. You will come to doubt the usefulness of century-long forecasts claiming to know how 1 per cent shifts in variables will affect a global climate that we don’t understand with anything resembling 1 per cent precision.

His book lands at a crucial moment. In its first new assessment of climate science in eight years, the UN climate panel will rule anew next year on a conundrum that has not advanced in 40 years: how much warming should we expect from a slightly enhanced greenhouse effect?

The panel is expected to consult 40-plus climate computer simulations — testament to its inability to pick out a single trusted one. Worse, the models have been diverging, not coming together as you might hope. Without tweaking, they don’t even agree on current simulated global average surface temperature — varying by 3C, three times the observed change during the past century. (If you wonder why the IPCC expresses itself in terms of a temperature “anomaly” above a baseline, it’s because the models produce different baselines.)

Says Koonin: “There are situations where models do a wonderful job. Nuclear weapons, when we model them because we don’t test them any more. And when Boeing builds an aeroplane, they will model the heck out of it before they bend any metal.

“But these are much more controlled, engineered situations,” he adds, “whereas the climate is a natural phenomenon. It’s going to do whatever it’s going to do. And it’s hard to observe.

“You need long, precise observations to understand its natural variability and how it responds to external influences.”

Yet these models supply most of our insight into how the weather might change when emissions raise the atmosphere’s CO2 component from 0.028 per cent in preindustrial times to 0.056 per cent later in this century.

“I’ve been building models and watching others build models for 45 years,” Koonin says. Climate models “are not to the standard you would trust your life to or even your trillions of dollars to”.

Younger scientists in particular lose sight of the difference between reality and simulation: “They have grown up with the models. They don’t have the kind of mathematical or physical intuition you get when you have to do things by pencil and paper.”

All this you can hear from climate modellers themselves, and from scientists nearer the “consensus” than Koonin is. Yet the caveats seem to fall away when plans to spend trillions of dollars are bruited. For the record, he agrees that the world has warmed by 1C since 1900 and will warm by another 1C this century, placing him near the middle of the consensus.

Neither he nor most economic studies have seen anything in the offing that would justify the rapid and wholesale abandoning of fossil fuels, even if China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and others could be dissuaded from pursuing prosperity. He’s a fan of advanced nuclear power eventually to provide carbon-free baseload power.

He sees a bright future for electric passenger vehicles. “The main reason isn’t emissions. They’re just shifted to the power grid, and transportation anyway is only about 15 per cent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. There are other advantages: local pollution is much less and noise pollution is less. You’re sitting in a traffic jam and all of these six or four-cylinder engines are throbbing up and down burning fuel and just doing no good at all.”

But these are changes it makes no economic sense to force. Let technology and markets work at their own pace. The climate might continue to change, at a pace that’s hard to perceive, but societies will adapt. “As a species, we’re very good at adapting.”

The public now believes CO2 is something that can be turned up and down, but about 40 per cent of the CO2 emitted a century ago remains in the atmosphere. Any warming it causes emerges slowly, so any benefit of reducing emissions would be small and distant. Everything Koonin and others see in the science suggests a slow, modest effect, not a runaway warming. If they’re wrong, we don’t have tools to apply yet anyway. Decades from now, we might have carbon capture — removing CO2 directly from the atmosphere at a manageable cost.

Koonin wants voters, politicians and business leaders to have an accurate account of the science. He doesn’t care where the debate lands. Yet his expectations are ruled by a keen sense of realities.

Even John Kerry, Joe Biden’s climate tsar, recently admitted that Biden’s net-zero climate plan will have zero effect on the climate if developing countries don’t go along (and they have little incentive to do so). Koonin hopes “a graceful out for everybody” will be to see the impulse for global climate regulation “morph into much more impactful local environmental action: smog, plastic, green jobs. Forget the global aspect of this.”

This is a view widely shared and little expressed. First, the mainstream climate community will try to ignore his book, even as his publicists work the TV bookers in hopes of making a splash. Then Koonin knows will come the avalanche of name-calling that befalls anybody trying to inject some practical nuance into political discussions of climate.

He adds with a laugh: “My married daughter is happy that she’s got a different last name.”

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL


‘(Climate models) are not to the standard you would trust your life to’
STEVEN KOONIN
THEORETICAL PHYSICIST

The slippery slope of public welfare

The Australian


To be righteous is one thing, to be right another altogether


HENRY ERGAS


The Liberal staffers who videoed themselves masturbating in Parliament House are morons, not monsters. And if we gasp at Andrew Laming’s conduct, it is less because it was manifestly unethical than because it shows, all too clearly, that while you are only young once, you can be immature forever.

That such things occur is hardly surprising. As Carlo Cipolla, a great historian, concluded in his marvellous book on The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, there is in every human subpopulation — be they philosophers or pole dancers, members of parliament or members of criminal gangs — a constant proportion who are idiots. And precisely because they are and act like idiots, the sole aspect of their behaviour that is utterly predictable is that it will astonish those who are not.

But those obvious facts didn’t stop the leaks from provoking howls of outrage, as if they proved that the Morrison government had plunged from the thunderbolts of Sinai to the insensate debauchery of the Cities of the Plain. In an already overheated atmosphere, the opposition was able to raise the temperature to boiling point, further eroding the government’s standing.

To some extent, the pressures, which have intensified steadily since Brittany Higgins’s allegations emerged, reflect factors that were apparent in the response to the bushfires of 18 months ago.

Convinced a new age was about to dawn, large sections of the left, and its allies in the media, never accepted their election defeat, accumulating reserves of rancour that the COVID crisis suppressed but hardly diminished. As that crisis ebbed, the claims of pervasive misogyny allowed the rancour to explode in righteous anger.

But to be righteous is one thing, to be right another. In reality, far from deteriorating, the core indicators of gender equality have improved, in many cases spectacularly, under the Coalition.

For example, the gender pay gap soared during the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years from 15 to nearly 19 per cent, as Labor’s splurge on pink batts and school halls compounded the mining boom’s boost to earnings in male-dominated occupations; but since the Coalition took office, the earnings differential between men and women has shrunk to an unprecedented low of 13.4 per cent.

And just as women’s relative earnings have risen towards those of their male counterparts, female labour force participation has reached record highs, aided by policy changes that make working more worthwhile.

None of that implies that the problems have disappeared. But the contrast between the progress and the protests underscores Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation of nearly two centuries ago that revolutions are triggered not by dashed hopes but by mounting expectations.

Noting that the devastating famines of 1693-94 and 1709-10 had caused barely a murmur, Tocqueville argued that the measures the French monarchy adopted in 1730 to ensure relief was widely available meant that it came to be viewed as being responsible for food supplies, setting the scene for the uprisings that occurred in the wake of the much milder shortages of 1788-89.

In other words, the government’s expanding role, instead of assuaging expectations, boosted them, creating a vicious spiral in which outcomes could never keep up with what public opinion believed it had been promised.

Compounding the tensions, the economic and social progress that followed the monarchy’s successive reforms had instilled an entirely new sense of limitless possibility. The eternal “tomorrow” of utopian political visions suddenly seemed to move closer, fuelling the belief that — come the revolution — injustice, superstition and poverty could all be eradicated in the next glorious hour.

The Revolution was therefore the progeny of the ancien regime’s achievements rather than the symptom of its failings. But while the revolutionaries stormed to power under the banner of freedom, they delivered the exact opposite. That, said Tocqueville, was no accident.

Inevitably, those who want to drastically reshape social arrangements find themselves strengthening the apparatus of repression, as if “liberty, like a child, had to go through a stage of tears and weeping in order to reach maturity”.

And equally inevitably, so as to justify the greater coercion, they adopt a “grotesquely distorted account of reality” in which they portray themselves as “wholly good”, while attributing “demonic power to the adversary”.

Ignoring “the ineluctable imperfections of human existence”, they come to hold others to moral standards they could never live up to themselves, thereby preparing the ground for those excesses of rage and frenzy that, in Edmund Burke’s words, “pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation and foresight can build up in a hundred years”.

To say that is not to suggest that the guillotine beckons, although there is a distinct whiff of burning in the air. It would, however, be a mistake to think the mechanisms Tocqueville identified have lost any of their relevance. On the contrary, today’s upheavals have all the hallmarks of those that preceded them: the reluctance to acknowledge how much has already been achieved; the relentless demonisation of real or imagined adversaries; the thirst for what Yeats grimly called “the blood-dimmed tide”.

And even if they are not as deadly, they are no less vitriolic, insisting, as did the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks and the Maoists, that any alleged perpetrators (or their presumed accomplices in the government) must be in bad faith, with the only way of proving good faith being for the “enemies of the people” to concede what their assailants seek — that is, abdication or self-annihilation.

The changes that have occurred in our culture only aggravate those dynamics. As the traditional Australian virtues of stoicism, and a laconic, somewhat disabused, realism, have given way to the glorification of uninhibited emotions, the nation’s capacity to distinguish tantrums from traumas seems to have completely disappeared.

And with it has vanished the capacity to distinguish sanctimonious grandstanding from serious consideration of the difficult questions — including those related to sexual assault and to our political culture — that do need to be addressed.

Unfortunately, simply understanding the processes at work doesn’t make them much more tractable: merely to cry, as Dostoevsky famously did in The Possessed, that “the fire is in the minds of men and not in the roofs of houses” does not quell the flames, any more than psychosis can be relieved purely by being diagnosed. And with no shortage of stupidity left to surface, the hysteria isn’t about to abate.

But the worst response would be to cave in. Rather, we remember our Kipling: keep your head when all others about you are losing theirs. And as the crowds swirl and the howls mount, make sure you hold it tight.

A Little Chinese History

Quadrant Magazine


All Under Heaven: China Reconstructs its History

30th March 2021


Daryl McCann

Frequent contributor



In October 2018, I wrote an article for the Australian titled “Kowtowing to China Will Only Lead Us to Hong Kong”. Since then, of course, not only has the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong been extinguished, along with the safeguards of an independent judiciary system, but Beijing has made its move on Australia. This has taken many forms, although the so-called shadow trade war which followed the Morrison government’s call for an independent inquiry into the origins of COVID-19 looms largest in our minds. None of this has prevented Kevin Rudd criticising Scott Morrison for being “hairy chested” in his attitude to Xi Jinping. If only the Coalition government got “the balance right”—or spoke to Beijing with “respect” as New Zealand’s Trade Minister Damien O’Connor advises—Australia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) could return to an era of strategic partnership. Bill Hayton’s The Invention of China (2020) is a very good place to start in any serious response to the likes of Rudd and O’Connor.

While the organising principle of the Chines Communist Party (CCP) in the post-Mao era has remained Leninist, the ideology of the Party has undergone a dramatic transformation. The dogma that brutally bound the PRC together during the era of Mao (1949 to 1976) was egalitarian collectivism. One of the many cruel features of Maoism was the officially sanctioned outbreaks of millennialist psychosis, including the 1949 to 1953 Land Reform Movement (estimated between 2 and 3 million killed), the 1958 to 1962 Great Leap Forward (estimated 40 to 45 million) and the 1966 to 1976 Cultural Revolution (estimated 20 million). Maoism, though obviously harrowingly homicidal, nevertheless possessed a centripetal force that required the people of the PRC to direct themselves inwards towards the centre of all things—the Great Helmsman. Afterwards, paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s capitalist-Leninism might have been a welcome respite from Maoist madness, and yet the new market reforms could not be counted upon to bind the population together as one standardised body in fealty to the CCP. What, then, would be the ideological glue to hold the PRC together if not Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought?

The most valuable aspect of Hayton’s The Invention of China is that it provides us with insight into how the Party has, over the past forty years, progressively stitched together a new totalitarian ideology. We could call it imperialist-Leninism. This despotic worldview binds the people of the PRC together in a racialist form of nationalism that, once again, directs them towards the centre of all things—in this case, General Secretary Xi Jinping, elevated to the status of “Helmsman” by the CCP’s Central Committee as recently as last October.

The latter-day CCP ideologues have discarded some of their old Marxist standbys and borrowed heavily from the canards of reformers and revolutionaries living in the final decades of the Qing Great-State. These intellectual rebels devised racialist and Social Darwinist myths about a long, uninterrupted history of “Chinese culture” that has no connection to reality. The great conceptual innovation of the Party in the post-Mao era, according to Hayton, has been to build on these century-old fabrications to create a racialist nationalism that conveniently intertwines notions of “China”, “the people”, “the government”, “the nation-state” and “the Party”. Or as Xi Jinping put it in the closing speech of the 2018 National People’s Congress: “The Communist Party will always be the backbone of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation.” This worldview has become so persuasive and pervasive in the PRC that slating the Party is now tantamount to betraying the Chinese people. Joseph Goebbels, if he were still amongst us, would be impressed. In the most pointed passage in The Invention of China, Hayton has this to say:

What should we call this new political ideology, one that features a single “core” leader, insistent demands for natural homogeneity, intolerance of difference, rule by party not by law, corporativist economic policies, a focus on discipline and an ideology based on tactical exceptionalism—all backed up by a massive surveillance state? China’s Communist Party has long talked of building “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. Xi Jinping now seems more interested in building “national-socialism with Chinese characteristics”.

Hayton does not claim to have written a book of original scholarship, but The Invention of China is nevertheless a powerful work of synthesis, brilliantly drawing on the latest historiography of “New Qing History” and “Critical Han Studies”. Both these schools of thought, Hayton points out, are not “addressed with candour inside the People’s Republic itself” but are pursued, if they are pursued at all, at universities in North America, Australia, Europe and Japan. The Chinese State Council (China’s ostensible government) does not sanction these relatively new and contrarian ways of viewing the history of their country. That is hardly surprising given that the findings of New Qing History and Critical Han Studies undermine the CCP’s mantra that its claims to exceptionalism are underwritten by an unassailable patriotic spirit built on the superiority of 5000 years of unbroken Chinese civilisation.

So much we think we know about China, including its very name, was fabricated by reformers and revolutionaries during the latter stages of the Qing Dynasty (1644 to 1912) or, as Hayton refers to it, the Qing Great-State. He calls it the Qing Great-State because the subjects of Qing emperors, like the subjects of the Ming emperors and every other dynastic ruler before them, had no concept of loyalty beyond “allegiance to the ruler”. It is a challenging idea to grasp for someone raised on the notion of a nation-state, but no less difficult to grasp than the idea of a nation-state for those identifying themselves in terms of loyalty to a dynastic ruler. Zhang Deyi, an emissary for the Qing Great-State in Europe and North America, wrote this in his diary in 1871:

After decades of East-West diplomatic and commercial interactions, [they] know very well that my country is called Da Qing Gua [Qing Great-State] or the Zhong Hua [Central Efflorescence] but insist on calling it “China”, Zhaina, Qina, Shiyin, Zhina, Qita, etc … Zhong Guo has not been called by such a name over four thousand years of history … I do not know on what basis Westerners call it by these names!

The reason why Westerners wanted to call it by those names, maintains Hayton, is because they understood a specified country in terms of “a piece of land” whereas Zhang Deyi made sense of his own country only when he “invoked its ruling dynasty”.

In other words, the Qing Great-State, like the Ming Great-State before it (1368 to 1644), was not a nation-state in the European sense. There was a fuzziness about territorial boundaries on the part of the Qing Great-State when it came to negotiating with rival empires. This was not a matter of being flexible or benevolent—quite the opposite, in fact. The rulers of the Qing Great-State believed they governed “all under heaven” (tianxia) and all who dwelled beyond their realm were more-or-less uncivilised. Thus, there was a reluctance to demarcate boundaries with the emissaries of the encroaching Russian empire for two reasons. First, the very act of state-to-state negotiations (as in the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk) implicitly conferred on Russia a status inappropriate for “barbarians”. Second, being overly specific about boundaries had never been necessary because all of the Qing Great-State’s neighbours paid an annual tribute in order to secure important trading privileges and, of course, to avoid invasion by the armed forces of the regional behemoth. The number of tributary states, thirteen in 1796 and still extensive even in the latter stages of the Qing Great-State, is testament to its imperial ambitions in Central Asia. They were no less than Russia’s from the north and Britain’s from the south (that is, India). In summary, the Qing rulers, like the Russians and the British, also played the Great Game.

Hayton exposes the fraudulence of the CCP’s Hundred Years of Humiliation formulation in a number of other ways, the following anecdote included. Back in March 2014, when Chancellor Merkel was hosting President Xi in Berlin, the Germans decided that a Prussian reproduction of a copy of a French map presented to Qing Dynasty Kangxi Emperor in 1718 might be the ideal gift for the General Secretary of the CCP who had everything. They were not to know that the PRC delegation would be horrified by their map. Why? It omitted the states and territories that later added to the Ming-era empire, encompassing Tibet, Mongolia, Manchuria, Xinjiang and Taiwan. Beijing’s state-run media rescued the situation in their own totalitarian way by reporting Merkel’s gift-giving gesture while surreptitiously replacing the 1718 French drawing with an 1844 British version which incorporated Xinjiang and Tibet within the Qing empire’s frontiers. The Qing rulers might have been on the defensive over the last half-century of their rule, but at their height they were as avaricious as any other imperialist power of the time. The salient point here is that the imperialist-Leninists in Beijing continue to rule over what were previously five separate realms.

The Hundred Years of Humiliation concept began as a call to patriotism for a people or peoples who had never been patriotic. A person’s loyalty was for the existing dynastic ruler, not for a place on the map. Nevertheless, some will argue—as Xi Jinping’s regime does—that what differentiates China from the rest of the world and makes it superior is a 5000-year-old civilisation that originates with the mythical Yellow Emperor. Only this is a fantasy, counters Bill Hayton, in the chapter titled “The Invention of Chinese History”. Take the Yuan Dynasty (1279 to 1368) for instance. The accepted or polite view, especially when speaking with a CCP apologist, is that China’s superior 5000-year-old civilisation survived Pax Mongolica intact because the Mongol rulers were themselves utterly transformed by China’s superior (and uninterrupted) civilisation. Hayton disagrees: “The Mongols named their Chinese administration the ‘Yuan Dynasty’ in order to make it more culturally acceptable, but it was not a ‘Chinese’ state so much as an Inner Asian great-state.” The Mongols left their stamp on this East Asian region in a multitude of ways, including uniting the territory for the first time in four centuries. To put it bluntly, as Hayton does, “China”—as we broadly conceive it—is in no small measure a legacy of the Mongols.

Moreover, “China”—again as we broadly conceive it—is also a legacy of the Qing Great-State, one of the more rapacious empires in history. One of the reasons that Xinjiang, Tibet and Taiwan, to name but three territories, are claimed by today’s imperialist-Leninists in Beijing is only because at an earlier time grasping Qing rulers pinched them. All three territories regained various degrees of independence only after the clout of the Qing Great-State waned. No rationalisation of European or Japanese imperialism is required to make the point that the territorial expansiveness of the PRC profits from the imperial ambitions of the Qing Great-State. Rather than allowing ourselves to be lectured by the likes of President Xi Jinping about the Hundred Years of Humiliation, justice would be better served if we spoke up about the Seventy Years of Humiliation for Tibetans, Mongolians, Manchurians and Uyghurs, along with the Seventy Years of Threats against Taiwan. The PRC is an imperialist state built upon the vestiges of an earlier imperialist state. Thus, when Mao Zedong ordered military forces into Tibet and Xinjiang in 1950 to enforce martial law it was less an act of liberation than occupation. All the brutality that has followed from that time, the ongoing oppression of the Tibetan people and the re-education camps in Xinjiang, has the tint of genocide.

The term “China”, Hayton contends, has no likely etymological connection to the Qin Dynasty (221 to 206 BC) and Qin Shi Huang (of the Terra Cotta Warriors). The country might as well have been dubbed Cathay or some other arbitrary name because, as Zhang Deyi explained, that was not how the people of the Qing Great-State or the Ming Great-State or the Song Great-State (960 to 1279) referred to themselves. Hayton suggests that the words zhong guo, as in Zhongguo, the term used by both Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong for China, refers to the particular culture of a given dynasty and not, as nationalistic historians in China would argue, “a continuous state across three, or even five, millennia”. Hayton maintains that a better translation of Zhongguo would be centre-of-the-world rather than middle kingdom “since it is really a description of a political hierarchy between ‘us’ on the inside and ‘them’ on the outside”. Here is the etymological origin of Xi Jinping’s imperialist-Leninist vision of a “shared future for mankind”.

This brings us to the subject of Great Han Chauvinism. Sino-nationalism, according to Hayton, began with a small group of influential reformers and revolutionaries in the latter stages of the Qing Great-State. Nationalism was posited as the answer to the indignities meted out to the Qing Great-State by European powers and Imperial Japan, from the Opium Wars (1839 to 1842 and 1856 to 1860) to the Boxer Rebellion (1899 to 1901) and beyond. Unfortunately, the would-be reformers and revolutionaries found their political inspiration in the racialism and ethnic tribalism popular in various European nations and Japan in the late nineteenth century, many of them informed by the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer. While it was true that a Manchu elite, the rulers of the Qing Great-State, went to great lengths to distinguish itself (as the qi) from the rest of the population (min), it was not as if the rest of the population were racially, or even linguistically, one people: “But by maintaining their separate and privileged status as qi, the Manchu elite created the conditions for a race-based revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century.” China’s turn-of-the-century revolutionaries took the survival-of-the-fittest racialism of Spencer, with its discriminatory generalities about the white race, the yellow race and so on, and re-purposed it for their own chauvinistic awakening.

There was at least some attempt by the 1912 revolutionaries to acknowledge that the subjects of the Qing Great-State had not been one indivisible race. Though maintaining the myth about the homogeneity of the Han, at least the republic’s new flag, consisting of five stripes, red for the Han, yellow for Manchu, blue for the Mongols, white for the Hui Muslims and, lastly, black for Tibetans, recognised five ethnic groups/nations (minzu) in the mix. Sun Yat-sen, influenced by both turn-of-the-century European notions of race-based nationalism and America’s “melting pot”, opposed the five-striped flag but lacked the authority to disallow it. He envisaged the new republic melding the ethnicities of what had been the Qing Great-State into one people (Zhonghua Minzu). He died in 1925 but his one-state/one-people dream endured. Once Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang (literally Nation Party) achieved a semblance of countrywide power after capturing Beijing in 1928, the five-striped flag was replaced by Sun Yat-sen’s mythological Blue Sky, White Sun and Wholly Red Earth. The PRC, founded in 1949, accepted many of Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek’s conceptual and etymological innovations, including the one about “China” being Zhonghua (People’s Republic of China = Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo).

Mao’s CCP opportunely accepted these fables of the late Qing Great-State reformers and revolutionaries: Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Tibet were, and had always been, integral parts of Greater China. That said, the strictures of Marxist-Leninism meant that Mao’s regime designated “their” Mongolia as Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Tibet as Tibet Autonomous Region and Xinjiang as Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, the quintessential hybrid Maoist/post-Maoist, accepted that Hong Kong be ascribed as the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, as long as it was recognised as a part of the People’s Republic of China. Hayton notes that Xi Jinping’s father, Xi Zhongxun, an acolyte of Zhou Enlai and the kind of CCP kingpin one can almost respect if not endorse, believed that the peoples of the “autonomous” regions of the PRC would be better served if Beijing left them, as much as a one-party state can permit, to their own devices. The radical departure of Xi Jinping’s ultra-nationalist belief-system from his own father’s views is telling.

Much of Xi Jinping’s imperialist-Leninist ideology is based on a lie, starting with the legend of the Yellow Emperor. The PRC’s global “United Front” organisations are forever celebrating the Yellow Emperor. Western politicians, including our own, politely (and naively) participate in these ceremonies without understanding that the Yellow Emperor fantasy is a ruse by Beijing to justify its darkest inclinations. Thus, the CCP regime, as the vanguard of a superior and continuous civilisation that has its genesis in 2698 BC, reserves for itself a special exceptionalism on the global stage. The regime, as the standard-bearer of the indissoluble Chinese motherland, also affords itself the right to visit civilisational annihilation upon Tibetans, Mongolians, Uyghurs, Manchurians and, if given the chance, the Taiwanese. But it goes even further than that. Not only the non-Han minorities suffer at the hands of Beijing’s cultural absolutism. Dissimilar elements of the so-called “Han Race”, as much an invention of late-Qing Great-State revolutionary intellectuals as “China” and the “Chinese language”, are also homogenised or regularised.

The absence of a “Chinese language”—and the consequent need to manufacture one—demon­strates as well as anything that there has never been a unitary “China”. Mandarin, or Putonghua, is nothing more than the Beijing-ese dialect spiffed up to be the official language of the PRC. According to the Chinese linguist Lü Shuxiang, there are 2000 forms of “Chinese” spoken throughout the PRC, some 400 of them mutually unintelligible. The Qing Great-State had no need for a national language, asserts Hayton, because “there was no Qing nation”. The subjects of a Qing ruler, as we have noted, were not loyal to a piece of land but a ruling dynasty, with the latter speaking Manchu and everyone else communicating in the local vernacular. It was the turn-of-the-twentieth-century intellectuals who determined that a northern dialect—rather than Esperanto or some other tongue—should serve as the unifying language of a newly minted nation.

Hayton’s chapter “The Invention of the Chinese Language” tells the darkly humorous story of Beijing trying to stymie the Shanghainese’s native tongue: while teaching children to speak the local language is permissible, “teaching them to read it as a written language remains forbidden”. All of this is part of a tyrannical quest to mould the fictitious “Han Race” into one nation and one people with one core leader, reinforced by an unbroken lineage going all the way back to the mythical Yellow Emperor.

The worldview of the CCP, in both its Maoist and post-Mao incarnations, appears to have adopted the worst features of European notions of sovereignty and the most problematic qualities of the Qing Great-State. The PRC’s “sovereignty fundamentalism”, as Hayton calls it, invariably results in Beijing denouncing any outside attempt to penetrate the opaqueness of its actions. We have witnessed this in the Politburo’s lingering fury at the Morrison government’s call, in April 2020, for an international inquiry into the genesis of COVID-19. It was more than a year after the outbreak before Beijing reluctantly allowed a small number of scientists associated with the World Health Organisation to visit Wuhan. It is unlikely that the investigative team will be able, at this late stage, to make a genuine assessment of the role of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in spawning the pandemic. Beijing has no wish to be open and transparent about what it did or did not do. The CCP regime is putting up the same screen of impenetrability that it did during the Great Leap Forward of 1958 to 1962. Back then the outside world was given no opportunity to witness the death of 40 to 45 million people, all victims of Mao Zedong’s millennial madness, in one of the greatest cover-ups of the twentieth century. The PRC is a sovereign state. Foreigners have no business “meddling” in its internal affairs. It is the same story today with the “education camps” in Xinjiang or oppression in Tibet or the origins of COVID-19.

On the other hand, when it comes to dealing with the rest of the world and especially its neighbours, Beijing readily takes a maximalist position. In 1979, for instance, Deng Xiaoping ordered the People’s Liberation Army into Vietnam to “teach it a lesson”. As it happened, 25,000 Chinese soldiers soon died and, after Deng hastily declared victory, the remaining PLA forces fled back over the border. One of the reasons for the invasion, we assume, is that Beijing was annoyed with Hanoi for overthrowing the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. It was perfectly reasonable, of course, for Beijing to intervene in Cambodia by aiding and abetting Pol Pot, but quite another for Vietnam, which had once made tributary payments to the Qing Great-State, to do the same. The PRC, to put it another way, has retained the fuzzy boundaries of the Qing Great-State when dealing with others, and yet the CCP adopts a policy of sovereignty fundamentalism to conceal its darkest deeds from the prying eyes of outsiders. It might have a cyber army of 100,000 spying on the world, not to mention agents interfering in the domestic politics of Australia (and everywhere else).

We can see this combustive mix of Qing Great-State imperialism, European-inspired racialist nationalism and sovereignty fundamentalism at work in Hayton’s chapter “The Invention of a Maritime Claim”. The Qing Great-State never made any actual territorial claim to the South China Sea, but to whatever extent the Qing rulers had any conception of the South China Sea, it was “theirs”; just as Nepal, Tibet, Korea or any other territory under heaven was “theirs”. During the time of the Republic of China (1912 to 1949), a few Chinese cartographers began making claims to atolls and suchlike that did not exist, or did not exist where they claimed they existed, and now President Xi, backed by the People’s Liberation Army Navy, is claiming the entirety of the South China Sea as a sacred and integral part of a continuous and superior civilisation that has its origins in the time of the Yellow Emperor. Add Beijing’s sovereignty fundamentalism to these absurdly ambit claims and we end up with a new law that commands the navy to “take all necessary measures, including the use of weapons, when national sovereignty, sovereign rights and jurisdiction” are “illegally infringed upon by foreign organisations and individuals” in the South China Sea.

By the end of The Invention of China, Bill Hayton’s description of Xi Jinping’s ideology as “national-socialism with Chinese characteristics” has become disturbingly credible. Andrew Hastie’s warning of two years ago seems more prescient than ever: “The new next decade will test our democratic values, our economy, our alliances and our security like no other time in Australian history.” The Chinese embassy, at the time, deplored Hastie’s depiction of the PRC as an echo of Hitler’s Germany: “History has proven and will continue to prove that China’s peaceful development is an opportunity, not a threat to the world.” Last year’s Sino-Indian skirmish in the Himalayas, the crackdown in Hong Kong, the internment camps in Xinjiang, Beijing’s shadow trade war against Australia and now the threat to open fire on Filipino fishing boats in the South China Sea surely suggests otherwise. Hayton’s book brings us closer to understanding the volatile dynamism of the imperialist-Leninist ideology underpinning Xi Jinping’s “Chinese Dream”.

Daryl McCann contributed the article “Australia’s Refusal to Kowtow to China” in the January-February issue