There have not been many who have dared make the comparison between CCP China and Nazi Germany. Both are fascist states governed economically by central planning. Both rely upon ethnic eugenics for political legitimacy. Both are incrementally expansionist to attack competing liberal democracies. Both use powerful economies to buy off and silence opponents. Both are propaganda-based fraud states. Both use the cult of personality. That they come from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum is irrelevant when the circuit of left and right join at the extremes of dictatorship.
Crispin Hull did a great job on the weekend of summing it all up:
- The CCP has annexed Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong in moves comparable to the Nazi moves on Austria, Rhineland, Sudetenland and South China Sea atolls.
- In such a comparison, Taiwan becomes comparable to Poland.
- Occupation justified by racial purity is comparable to the settlement of Han Chinese in all of these states.
- Nominally democractic leaders declared themselves dictators for life and use mass propaganda to cover their crimes against humanity.
- As such, the 2022 Bejing Winter Olympics look like Berlin 1936, offering succour and legitimacy to the tyrants.
- Western democracies should boycott the Olympics as the first move in a strategy to isolate the CCP that must ramp up as it threatens Taiwan.
- War is out of the question owing to the risk of nuclear disaster.
This is well-argued and goes to an uncomfortable truth for Australians. How many of us have felt outraged at the individual, commercial and state collaborators with Nazi Germany when the story of the Holocaust is retold?
How do we justify that moral high ground when our iron ore is repurposed as this, via Peter Hartcher:
[Uighur leader] Rebiya Kadeer…told me then that at least 1 million Uighurs had been detained in the centres she calls “concentration camps”, including 37 of her relatives. This was her entire extended family in China.
“I believe the Chinese Communist Party is achieving its goal,” she told me through an interpreter. “Their final goal is the total extermination of the Uighur people. Children aged two to 12 are taken from their families into state custody, girls are given forced sterilisation so they can’t give birth to any more Uighur children. Some Uighur women are forced into marriage with Chinese men. A further method is forced transfer of Uighur workers into factories in other parts of China where the Chinese workers are allowed to leave the factories but the Uighurs workers are not.
“The total number of people who are in the concentration camps or who have been through the process is about five million.” Half the total population. Some die in the process, but most do not. This is the evil genius of the system of genocide with Chinese characteristics. By allowing the Uighurs to live, Xi expected to avoid the accusation of genocide, Nazi-style. But total extermination of a people through mass murder is not the only definition of genocide. The UN Genocide Convention defines genocide as “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part” a people.
Obviously, Australia is not the only one caught in this CCP moral-pincer. Much of the world is, which rationalises the pragmatism that characterises everybody’s engagement with the CCP.
But, pragmatism cuts both ways. Any realistic assessment of the long-term implications of CCP power and expansionism is much more dramatic for Australia than for other Western democracies. The UK, US or Europe will never be occupied by the CCP (though the class inequalities arising from Chinese entrance to the global economy are toxic for freedom if not managed better).
In Australia’s case, we can’t say the same. A triumphant CCP in Asia, with all states cowed, could lead to a very dark place for our freedoms. Don’t be fooled into thinking that it requires something so dramatic as an invasion. The CCP is much more practiced at repression than that.
Simply extrapolate a few current trends. Imagine a giant Chinese naval base in PNG with a permanent gun held to Canberra’s head. Add ethnic Chinese immigration controlling as few as six federal electorates (there are already two) with Beijing pulling the levers of bullying and bribery to control that community.
Badabing, badaboom, that’s the end of Australian freedom.
And what then would the CCP demand of us? Look to Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong for the answer:
- Collaborators working hand-in-glove with Beijing to silence all conscientious objection.
- Han Chinese mass migration.
- Reeducation camps in the Pilbara.
- Coast-to-coast propaganda flows driving “Xi Jinping thought”.
What Western historians of the 22nd century might call the “second Australian genocide”.
So, the next time you dismiss the travails of the Tibetans, Honkies or Taiwanese, and worry that boycotting the Olympics or ramping up sanctions to include iron ore might damage your house price, please also consider the long-term price that your children are going to pay if we do not.
