While COVID-19 distracts the world, it’s Groundhog Day for totalitarianism
Western nations are consumed with trying to defeat the coronavirus, but are all but ignoring the real infection now working its way around the planet — the menace posed by the Chinese Communist Party, writes Piers Akerman.
Opinion
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The Wuhan virus is but a sideshow to the real disease attacking the world.
Blithely, the Western nations are all but ignoring the infection now working its way around the planet.
It’s got nothing to do with global warming or transsexualism or gender identity or any other of the preoccupations of the woke class.
It’s got nothing to do with poverty or the current pandemic, either.
But it is real and it is existential and it is the menace posed by the Chinese Communist Party to the international order and respect for the rule of law.
In this it mirrors the rise of the Nazi Party through the 1930s and, recklessly and irredeemably, the West is as blind to the current threat as it was nine decades ago.
For those who studied history before history was adulterated and rewritten by generations of Leftist teachers, the pattern is all too familiar.
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Hitler marched his troops into neighbouring states under the guise of uniting German speakers in his Reich and the West, and the League of Nations (the failed forerunner of the United Nations) felt it was better to appease this monster than make a stand.
True, the horrors of WWI — with its poison gas and the introduction of barbed wire, tanks and aircraft — were all too fresh in the minds of world leaders and they looked aside as the blitzkrieg swept across Europe — initially in an evil alliance with Stalin’s USSR — just as the world ignored the Japanese attack on China a decade earlier.
Today we see the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under President Xi Jinping pressing expansion of China’s territorial claims through the South Pacific region, following the same playbook as bygone dictators.
Xi’s inspiration is Mao Zedong, and it should not be forgotten that the young Mao was a staunch believer in survival of the fittest and opposed to traditional Chinese Confucianism with its respect for harmony, order and hierarchy. He believed that violence was the necessary transformative power. Around the time he was among those organising the formation of the CCP in July, 1921, Mao wrote that China needed a leader who would “charge on horseback amid the clash of arms … to shake the mountains with one’s cries”.
Xi rallies his party with the same bellicose aspirations as he scorns the UN and refuses to obey international tribunals — even though China has now stacked the UN organisation with lackeys and toadies prepared to vote in its favour. Remember, too, that next year will mark the centenary of the CCP, and Xi believes he has to deliver something worthy of celebration to match the auspicious anniversary.
Last week the Communist government set a course to disrupt the Australian wine industry as it had earlier done with our beef and barley exports. Nothing, however, has stopped the Chinese from buying even more of our high-grade and easily accessible iron ore.
The number of Chinese who drink our premium wines is minuscule — as are Chinese consumers of our beef and barley, in the scheme of things — but shifting the nation’s imports of iron ore to supplies from Africa or South America would disrupt China’s economy and, for now, iron ore is inviolate.
The expansion in the South China Sea continues apace. The seduction of African and Pacific Island leaders is a priority. Australia is disparaged as chewing gum stuck to China’s shoes, a minor but unpleasant irritant, but our universities kowtow and offer to subsidise students from this nation — and place their enrolments ahead of the national quarantine and ahead of Australian scholars.
We are witnessing events that seem like a rerun of 1938, though with different players. This is Groundhog Day for totalitarianism.
It’s not overstating to call this a clash of civilisations. The most basic world views are at odds here.
China poses the most potent threat and makes Russian Czar Vladimir Putin look like no more than a murderous thug but, again, the world has done nothing as he has had those who crossed him assassinated, wherever they may have sought sanctuary.
In the last two world wars, the US proved to be the saviour of Western civilisation.
As we stand again on the brink, neither President Trump nor his rival Joe Biden provide confidence to the civilised world.