One rules based order to go?

Australian political pundits are scrambling to make sense, political mileage, and career points, out of the plainly destructive nonsense being collaboratively produced by Australia's government elect, and the US, in relation to China. Gareth Evans is unimaginative, but at least notices that it's all just so very wrong. Hugh White has some insight, but it is limited to the obvious fact that what the government is doing is a multifariously bad idea, on multiple levels in economic, diplomatic, and - especially - military terms. His calls for revision are lacking. All told this response amounts to little more than the kind of ineffectual churn and noise seen before both the Korean and Vietnamese-American wars. Not to mention Desert Storm, with its infamous, imaginary weapons of mass destruction.

The geopolitical elephant in the room is deeply ideological, as well as significantly religious. Nothing willl change until that embarassing problem is tackled head on. It's part of the reason why Australia's vulnerability to US coercion is not just about economics and geostrategic concerns.

It is the US that is Australia's primary geopolitical and geostrategic problem for many reasons, but for two reasons in particular. The first, John Pilger has long since identified. The military industrial complex (MIC) is a geostrategic-cum-economic mainstay of the United States. The US military industrial economy has immense momentum, and part of that momentum depends on the actual kinetic momentum, and the geographical distribution and location, of the out-sourcing US military.

The second large problem - which is causally interdependent with the first - is the West's deeply visceral socio-cultural aversion to two things. One is atheist-socialist power. The other is the erosion of US ideological and economic supremacy. First I'll attend to the godless-red-scare narrative, and a little later in the article the linked problem of a tottering US.

Ideological Rules Based Disorder

It is foolhardy to ignore, or to diminish, the salience of Australia's ideological aversion to godless socialism, let alone to atheist communism. To do so will simply perpetuate exactly the kind of stubborn political - and dangerous militarist - lock-jaw that we have been witnessing at least since Malcolm Turnbull's 2017 introduction of the limitations on foreign influence. That action was not only executed with unecessary and unwise political tone-deafness, but was also clearly more about both ideological bigotry and economic competition (and Australia's inability to compete on even free-market terms) than it was about anything to do with national security or counter-espionage.

If Australian troops go to war with the PLA in the South China Sea, it will have little to nothing to do with democracy, freedom, pluralism, or human rights. It will be about the check books of a lazy, incompetent, and wilfully umbrageous economic 'elite', and about the stubborn ideological McCarthyism that comes as a free bonus when you elect a Prime Minister and cabinet with an omniscient imaginary friend. It doesn't help when one's PM and foreign minister are neither smart enough, nor strong enough, to resist the imperatives of the US-dominated military industrial complex in their own nation (and nor does it seem to fit well with Turnbull's foreign influence legislation).

Implementing legislated limitations on foreign influence doesn't seem to have stopped the US MIC from having its way with Australia both economically, ideologically, and geostrategically. Moreover - there are other forces apart from US military business that threaten our regional influence far more than Chinese scholars and business investors ever did. One of these is the inordinate influence that delusional megacults like Hillsong (also of US megacult derivation) have on our most senior politicians.

Much has been said recently about careless Western and Australian diplomatic and political rhetoric and tone when referring to China. However, word use and phraseology is all but irrelevant compared to Australia's McCarthyist, ideological idiocy and tone-deafness. Those problems are certainly linked with the religionism and ideological weirdness that has persistent, significant influence right across our political system.

Our nation boasts first-world scientific and political sophistication, and a commensurate understanding of how psycho-socially complex, and causally fraught, geopolitics and foreign affairs are. As such we cannot sensibly deny the critical importance of the bizarre epistemic irrationality of a Prime Minister who is mentored and influenced by people who believe they are actively guided by, and take instruction from, some omnipotent supernatural being. Not to mention the fact that the PM himself thinks that he has a direct line of communication with said almighty influence.

How can that possibly not matter when the Prime Minister's primary, and most pressing, foreign relations task is dealing with the largest atheist government in history? (That's the whole of world history.) How can it not matter in general for foreign and domestic policy making? Such unicorn-laden epistemologies are neither a valid basis for, nor a healthy bedfellow of, sound, adult, 21st century statecraft.

Rest assured, and have no illusions: if ADF-employed kids die fighting the PLA - democracy will not be what they really died for. They'll have died for the profits and pride of a conservative, econocratic 'elite', and for the bizarre, bigoted, religiously-grounded, ideological commitments of effective delusionals who serve that 'elite' first and foremost. In a war with China over Taiwan, democracy and freedom will just be recruiting billboard slogans, and they won't mean what the average person thinks they mean anyway. Not even close. Nor will any crusade to defend pluralist democracy (whatever that really is) in Taiwan.

How can most Australians be fooled by Hillsong and by the media-think-tank axis of Sky News and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute most of the time? Surely we're smarter than that. Unfortunately, big media and missile-business bankrolls are enough to make the otherwise ham-fisted clunkery of the media's memetic-propaganda machine look well-oiled, suave, and coherent. They can even make it seem normal and healthy that Australia's PM is brainwashed by the bizarre Hillsong megacult, which fact probably should instead hint at how vulnerable we are, as a nation and a people, to ridiculous misinformation.

He Who Has the Gold...

As I briefly mentioned already, the second thing to which the denizens of Parliament House, and their various religious and ideological mentor-masters, are deeply averse to, is the idea of the Anglo-Commonwealth-American axis no longer being globally and regionally geopolitically supreme. That is - supreme in a very much god-ordained sense that's intended to be sort-of-but-not-really metaphorical.

It is perhaps one of the greatest memetic social-engineering and propagandist feats of our time that, even with the availability of The Web and social media, Anglo-American media and governments have managed to convince many that our fleets are in the South China Sea chiefly to preserve and protect Taiwanese democracy and pluralist freedom. These misinformational agents have been able to do this even while repeatedly (loudly) chanting Robert McNamara's military-economic, siege-warfare 'surround and contain China' mantra. That mantra alone should be a strong hint to even the densest of Australian political pundits and voters that something is not quite 'fair-dinkum' about the whole SCS geostrategic affair.

Apparently for the most part, and apart from academics like Chengxin Pan, James Laurenceson, and Jane Golley: it isn't.

Fortunately, the Biden administration has recently recognised that McNamara's mantra has well and truly passed its use-by date. However, the McNamaran edict has now been replaced with incessent talk of (harping about?) an 'international rules based order'. The problem with this so called rules based order is that China - the most populous nation on the planet - seems largely excluded (rhetorically and otherwise) as a valid participant in setting the rules. The rules - it seems - are unilaterally to be decided by the US and its other (economically inferior) trading partners.

Apparently, either you're with 'US', or you're against 'US' (read it as U-S and as 'us'). And by 'US', they mean their international rules based order (Can we get fries with that order?).

Do the econocratic duopolies self-appointed to setting the rules - like the US, UK, and Australia - really have true democracy and ideological and political pluralism anyway? Noam Chomsky's charge that they instead commonly have a one-party system comprised of a "business party" is hardly unfair, and not inaccurate. It is noteworthy, at least, that neither Joe Biden's recent appeal to free COVID vaccines from commercial IP restrictions, nor Donald Trump's earlier refusal to kowtow to the US military industrial complex, were warmly received by US corporate culture and investors.

The 'rules based' discourse is very much a purpose-built rhetorical tool used to further demonise China as a global actor. Yet, China itself is arguably not worried about tone and rhetoric nearly so much as Gareth Evans suggests. That concern is something of an effective distraction from what the Australian military is doing - very much materially - at the behest of our US and UK masters.

The aversion to bruising, or 'improper', political rhetoric is arguably much more a British and Western establishment hangup. Actions speak far louder than words to Chinese powerbrokers. China's well known tradition of diplomatic and commercial long negotiation lead-times, and trust based relationship building, are all in the service of securing very much material outcomes.

What China most certainly have noticed is Australian warships following those of the UK and US into openly threatening China with hot war right on China's doorstep. China just might have noticed the proliferation of US bases all along their patch of the Pacific rim. They've certainly noticed that the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies are not only inordinately interested in the affairs of Hong Kong and Taiwan, but have also infiltrated mainland China almost continuously since the 1950s (until CPC specialists destroyed CIA operations on the Chinese mainland in 2010-12 with a highly versatile and extremely sophisticated counter-espionage program).

New Domestic Political Rules Required ASAP

Of course not all economists and political commentators support the infantile, mouth-foaming, China-bashing that is currently rife everywhere except for New Zealand. Sober voices have been calling for revision and change at least since Kevin Rudd last year suggested a rough road map for changes to the rules for diplomacy and commerce with China. Evans, White, Jane Golley, and James Laurenceson have variously (if sometimes waveringly) opposed the Hillsong-ordained, sinophobic, econocracy.

However, with the exception of intelligent, and bold, calls to get behind Xi's Belt and Road Initiative (a sterling idea), far more radical action than is envisaged by all of these commentators is arguably needed at this point to stop an unmitigated - and increasingly imminent - disaster. Repealing of the McCarthyist 2017 foreign-interference fakery would be a solid gesture to China. At least applying it evenly and systematically to the US military industrial complex would be a start. Specifically - ordering a parliamentary investigation into the actions, funding, and degree of foreign influence of the notorious arms business 'brink-tank' ASPI would be a judicious move, and would be a healthy sign of impartiality for the benefit of Beijing.

A broad-based apology to Chinese and CPC students and their families would be one meaningful diplomatic move involving official language. It would also solve a swathe of our domestic fiscal and budgetary challenges.

However, the changes required in Canberra's Parliament House are far beyond what is being called for by Evans, or by White, or by Melissa Conley Tyler. Immediate withdrawal of our military from the SCS, and serious consideration given to deposing - or simply firing - our current Prime Minister, are probably minimum required actions just to start with. Sweeping reforms to our parliamentary and electoral processes that ensure anti-duopolistic election outcomes are all but essential.

Introducing legislation to stop domestic megacults like Hillsong effectively interfering in foreign affairs is another non-negotiable. Apart from being dangerous, such undue interference by epistemically irrational, dominionist megacults sends a signal to China (and, frankly - to most of Europe). That signal is 'we're stupid, unreliable, and nutty'. (It's not really different to Falun Gong being in control of China. No one wants Falun Gong practitioners to have their organs harvested, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be an astronomically terrible idea to make China a Falun Gong state.)

Surely true pluralism can withstand these much needed, and urgently needed, changes?

Certainly some will resile from the idea of deposing Scott Morrison and introducing legislation to ensure that delusional megacults cannot unduly influence foreign policy. However, if that, and withdrawing our navy from SCS operations stops a pointless hot war killing our young people - and our hopes of future prosperity - for the benefit and umbrage of a wealth few religiocrats, then time is of the essence.

---