Australian War Powers, Foreign Influence, and China Bashing

This recent Twitter response by the Australian War Powers Reform movement to a recent episode of Australian politics and news talk show Q&A is a good representation of the sad state of our nation.

I have numerously pointed out in the past that the current activities of various government and non government (and para-government?) institutions and organisations is a fairly clear and unequivocal breach of Australia's 2017 foreign interference and security laws. This assertion is not nearly as silly as many will, and do, claim.

In fact the government and certain missile marketing shops (ASPI) operating in Australia should really be quite nervous. One does not have to be a constitutional lawyer to see that they have a sticky problem. However, admittedly the law is not always predictable in such situations, and there is often a lot of leeway for practicality and ‘fluid’ judicial interpretation.

Still - a judge would need to decide, and that is a problem for our Prime Muppet and ASPI (American Strategic Puppet Institute?) To be frank – if the judge can read and is not hopelessly biased, it is a very real problem for ASPI and our warmongering parliamentary AUKUS-onauts.

In addition to just general interpretability, judicial license, and unpredictability: where the law meets governmental and constitutional issues things can presumably get somewhat murky. I can only imagine what arcane and archaic legal precedents and texts might be called upon in a nation where in 1975 the Governor General fired the ‘democratically’ elected Prime Minister (Sometimes I wonder if the scriptwriter of ‘Yes Prime Minister’ was actively involved in that episode of Australian history).

However, I suggest that the laws in this situation are not that murky and unpredictable, and that being an agent of foreign influence for the UK or the USA is a problem for Australian based brink tanks and even for our government. A legal and ethical problem.

While I am not a lawyer, a doctorate in analytic philosophy and experience teaching normative ethics at Australian universities provides some surprising advantages in dealing with such issues. The reader will perhaps have to extend the principle of charity to me (trust that I have some clue about the matter) when I say that, for one thing, such training accentuates one's ability to spot when someone is 'trying it on', as the euphemism goes.

Our current government, and marketeering brink tanks like ASPI (there aren't that many like ASPI, really) are trying it on. They're doing bluster and 'balls out' brashness. They're feeding Australia 'big lie' pie with a side of chips and sly. They’re going to bluff and puff, and bluff and puff, until they blow your nous down (That’s prounounced ‘nouse’ like ‘house’ in Australian. Okay so in point of fact it is usually pronounced like 'noose' if one is not using 'Stralian. I have an MPhil in English specialising in informational science fiction literature and the Suvinian novum, so I like to play with words. It’s annoying – but I am unlikely to stop doing it. Just FYI.)

Not everyone is fooled by ASPI and Mad Morrison's imaginary friend, however. I also think that a properly objective federal judge reviewing the requisite parliamentary legislation and the 2017 updates to the anti-foreign-influence laws in the criminal code would not be easily fooled.

US and local megacultists (religious delusionals) cannot cross their fingers and hope general public malaise induced by their Muppet Show keeps their delusional church pals safe forever. They’ve already crossed a line. Someone could make it burn them. It would only take will and commitment, and some expertise. Recently, writers for John Menadue's Pearl's and Irritations, and AWPR, have been producing some very nice political commentary and critical analyses. They're doing lovely, elegant, and effective analogies and comparisons. They're pointing out with acuity, aplomb, and insight when the claims of brink tank foreign influencers ASPI and their megacultist marketeer shills (like the - err – Prime Minister) are nonsense (To be fair - that's easy since it's most of the time). Some of AWPR's writers might possibly be megacultists. I guess even megacultists have good days. I’m ignoring the possibility to avoid group narcissism.

(Yes - that's marketeers. It is like a conceptual mash-up of ‘Mouseketeers’ and ‘marketers’, for obvious reasons. Think of Mickey Mouse as our PM (current status quo), and you have a pretty good artistic impression of the current state of our nation. Mickey Mouse, most readers will remember, is an American children’s fantasy character with significantly comedic features.)

In a legal argument – the logical and critical facets of the salient security issues will matter. To be honest – the government and its local brink tank pals clearly don't even have the kind of safety one gets from the promise of open argument with open questions. Read the 2017 updates to the criminal code regarding foreign influence and security laws. Read them carefully. If you do that and get the impression that ASPI and the PM and his imaginary friend might potentially be in trouble, then you’re not deceiving yourself. They have built themselves something of a house of cards.

(There is an American television series called House of Cards. I loved it. The scriptwriters use the malevolent protagonist Frank Underwood to introduce the concept of political ‘flipism’, which might be one of the most ingenious euphemistic characterisations of Western fake-democratic process ever imagined. The flipism going on in our Parliament now is monumental. In fact – imaginary friends are probably not even as scientifically sound as flipism, or flipping a coin on decisions to ‘chance’ it.)

To maintain clarity in the foreign influence situation, we can simply ask: Is fomenting unnecessary military strife with China over a matter that has nothing to do with our national interest, and destroying our tertiary education export sector and other China-based trade deleterious to Australia’s national security and national interests?

The answer is clearly - yes.

Don’t just take my word for it. I might piss in the wind. Even into it occasionally. Yet I am not a lone voice in the wilderness. Recently, AWPR and Pearls and Irritations writers are doing themselves proud as folk philosophers. Nay – as actual political philosophical logicians and critical thinkers. They’re checking facts, challenging daft premises, spotting aporia and contradictions, and generally arguing the hell out of it:

The political status of Taiwan as a democratic province of the People’s Republic of China is essentially irrelevant to consideration of the strategic factors that are at play. No one in Australia would for a moment contemplate going to the military aid of the Catalan people of Barcelona in their quest for political independence from the Castilian people of Madrid. In fact, like the EU, we remain completely disengaged from what we judge to be an internal issue for Spain. Yet, because of its role as a tripwire in the US-China relationship, we accord Taiwan overwhelming strategic significance. (Allan Behm, Pearls and Irritations.)

I mean - that's good stuff. (I think that at various times in the past I have suggested – tongue in cheek - that China could sail its navy to Hawaii, or surround and contain Texas in order to help them to secede from The US.)

Additionally, AWPR have access to legal expertise that I don’t have. I wouldn’t feel terribly safe – legally speaking - if I were Australia’s Prime Muppet, and especially not if I were working for ASPI (American Sock Puppetry Institute?) I am making jokes to keep you entertained, dear reader. However, those agents of foreign influence mentioned in the previous sentences are in fact in prospectively quite deep dung.

Actually – I wouldn’t feel particularly safe in Morrison’s shoes with the US MIC doing all that warmongering, and that’s apart from the anti-influence laws. Those loonies are dangerous. However, I don’t have the ‘benefit’ of being rendered numb or impervious to rational thought – and facticity - by having delusions of the protection of an omniscient imaginary friend.

One has to be monumentally ignorant and not a bit silly – or else just plain delusional - not to see that warmongering anti-China rhetoric, and allowing our Navy to be seconded to the US mission of harassing our historically friendly superpower trading partner, is potentially very damaging to our national security. Being that China has hypersonic weapons, for example.

Here is one basic example to demonstrate the facts of the matter. If China is not our enemy because of the influence and interference in our domestic politics by The United States, then we can safely build nuclear power stations (provided we don’t let muppets with imaginary friends run them – probably).

You see how it works?

No US foreign influence:

Australian nuclear power stations = safe.

US muppetry that breaks the 2017 updated foreign influence laws:

Australian nuclear power stations = not safe.

The unnecessary US ‘surround and control’ geostrategic psyop (with a side of dominionist geopolitics-to-go) clearly puts Australia in harm’s way, and unnecessarily. This is not good for our national security. Moreover the outcome is clearly secured on behalf of the US and its ‘elites’ by Australians doing foreign influence.

Handwaving appeals to patriotic misconceptions of the salience of ANZUS and other treaties do not ameliorate this situation at all. Treaties are not some kind of immutable natural law like gravity. They’re a constructed formalisation of a relationship which is subject to constant monitoring and critical appraisal, and reappraisal. More importantly, however, the signatories to a treaty must behave appropriately and in accordance with various commitments, duties of care, and responsibilities to each other.

The USA has not been doing so. Getting us unnecessarily involved in a potential serious conflict with China for no good reason (no real believable reason at all), whilst variously ‘cutting our lunch’ on China trade and acting variously duplicitously in the geopolitical sphere, is not what a treaty partner should be doing.

Moreover, the ANZUS treaty does not make us beholden to half of the nonsense that the government likes to infer – and sometimes overtly claim - it does. They rely upon the Australian public not being able to distinguish between actual actionable commitments and general patriotic and cultural affinities.

That’s what AUKUS (or as I like to call it more accurately and with the letters matching the pecking order: USUKA) is all about. ANZUS was looking a bit shaky for the purpose for which they wanted to deploy it. Mostly because New Zealand was not getting sucked in adequately. AUKUS is more of the same propagandist fake-authority done by might-is-right megacultist delusionals, but without vulnerability to that annoyingly sensible Ardern person.

Put otherwise – ASPI and USUKA-nauts really do think some kind of god being is on their side. That kind of insanity is as sophisticated as they get. Their situation is therefore quite fragile – like their psyches.

I am not interested in what Mr Morrison’s imperial imaginary friend thinks. He should resign and get psychiatric help.

Now.

It is the opening paragraph of Behm's penultimate paragraph that nails the AUKUS scam most thoroughly: “Australia has no direct strategic interest in Taiwan..”

This short phrase highlights nicely the overarching point at hand. The US and its local muppeteers – ASPI and our delusional PM and pals – have purportedly managed to hoodwink the Australian public, government, and media into the delusion that we should all be all-in with Uncle Sam to defend Taiwan from the evil Xi Jinping the Merciless.

Gosh but it was easy.

(See what I did there with the intertextual and subtextual reference to Ming the Merciless and the racist subtexts of the popular American sci fi in which that fictional villain appears? If not never mind – it will come to you. Probably). Actually, I am not sure that the Australian public is, on the whole, very convinced by USA-ASPI-Sky muppetry (muppeteering?) Perhaps it is just the commercial media that is living in a bubble of delusion and an echo chamber of cringey idiocy? Maybe we’re all spectating the behaviour of ASPY (sorry - ASPI) and (Pie in the) Sky News like we would watch a circus? Or The Muppet Show? (I am not saying that Sky News is comprehensively defective, because that’s hard to achieve. But they seem to be giving it a red hot go.)

With the kind of muppet show we’re all witnessing you could forgive most Australians for being so complacent as not to bother even responding. ASPI (The American Spy Puppet Infiltrators) already have a bunch of our public money with which to sell us American bombers and submarines and such. Seems like a lost cause, I guess.

One cannot fault ASPI and the Liberal Party muppeteers on their opportunistic grasp of the insanity of our political environment. Foreign influencer marketeers like ASPI have done a sterling job of using Australian's own tax-funded public purse in helping the US (That's the foreign influence part according to the 2017 foreign influence updates to the criminal code, folks.)

My training in psychology, cognitive science, and the philosophy of psychology also allows me to get a handle on the situation. This is another way that I know that ASPI (The American Sock Puppetry Institute? I know I will get it right at some point) and the government are doing a fairly unsophisticated kind of conceptual engineering and memetic propaganda. It’s what I have already called maketeering. It is like doing propaganda with a pair of mouse ears on, or in a muppet suit. It is a little American style show for the Australian public – whom they evidently believe are eminently dupable, child-minded morons.

That can’t be right – though. Can it?

Well they haven’t fooled AWPR, so that’s one thing at least. They also haven’t fooled most of the denizens of the UTS Australia-China Relations Institute as far as I can see.

I profess that ASPI and the government are so abjectly self-assured (that must be the imaginary friend thing working?) that I am not even quite sure sometimes if they have fooled yours truly. I do love The Muppet Show.

As I said near the beginning of this post: I am not a lawyer. The assertion that ASPI and even the PM are breaking foreign influence laws will be called silly by many lawyers. However, those lawyers who are likely themselves to be part of our PM’s Muppet Show, pals with ASPI, or themselves megacultists with imaginary friends (or else just supporters in principle of the idea of delusional mental patients inhabiting parliament).

Nonetheless, unless they’re totally delusional like the PM (which status is obviously not uncommon) those same lawyers should also be quietly aware that the government and its local brink tank pals should really be quite nervous. If anyone with adequate legal expertise does call their bluff (any ambulance-chasing no-win-no-fee solicitor?) I suggest they will have a big problem.

There have been claims that the US and UK are normatively, or otherwise, subject to exemption clauses or exclusions in relation to foreign influence, based on prevailing legal, constitutional, geostrategic, or political conditions. This is not just dubious. We all have good reason to suspect that even given concessions to constitutional law, it is just false.

The legal arguments would have to be decided based upon determining the existence of foreign influence. As I have made clear - it would be embarrassingly difficult to conclude such influence is not happening. Here: try it. Say "ASPI is not aiding and abetting foreign influence on our domestic politics on behalf of US arms manufacturers and the US government and its intelligence agencies." It's almost what philosophers might call an evidential reductio ad absurdum. That is - the statement clearly contradicts the material facts.

Then it would be a simple matter of identifying linked threats to national security. The prevailing geostrategic conditions involving Taiwan have been either patently fabricated, or else provably precipitated with foresight, and malice of forethought, in the first place by the same actors doing the foreign influence! That’s got to matter to a judge who’s had their lunch, and enough sleep.

I suggest that the kind of foreign influence done by ASPI and even our PM is not even hiding in plain sight, and that the judge would have to be either a complete nincompoop or else a complete corrupt not to find that the effects of said influence were deleterious to our national security and interests. I have certainly met Australian judges who are nincompoops, but I have reasonable confidence that many are not.

---