I have noted the pivot at Crikey to Wokey over the past few years. Gone are hard-hitting critiques based upon a push for political and national interest transparency.
In their place now is a conga line of whingers seeking to cancel anybody who upsets a snowflake.
This is its choice, and reducing its coverage to hurt feelings over the pitfalls of democracy is fair enough if that’s your cup of tea.
But it is not fair enough when it comes to seeking to destroy the central pillar of Australian democracy and freedom.
Wokey regularly publishes card-carrying China groveller Wanning Sun and, increasingly, its stable of commentators has contracted a severe case of anti-Americanism to boot.
Wokey has done its level best to destroy AUKUS and is now competing with Nine to be the lowest snake in the room on behalf of China.
AUKUS is neither here nor there, to me. Anything that better integrates US forces with our own is a plus as CCP hegemonic ambitions surge out of China.
Even if it doesn’t make much sense to build a fleet of nuclear submarines to blockade your own ports.
But that is an expression of strategic stupidity more than the subs themselves, going one way with your economy and the other way with your defence.
Anyway, the answer is not less AUKUS or less America; it is less China.
Which brings me to Wokey’s Bernard Keane, who is welcoming his new Chinese overlords furiously.
…it is our pro-American defence establishment that dictates what constitutes bien pensant thinking around Australia’s strategic policies in the media. Unfortunately for them, Trump is busy wrecking the entire image of the United States carefully crafted over generations by its advocates here: that of a benign force for democracy, stability, free markets and shared values.
Instead, Trump seems hell-bent on confirming every left-wing stereotype of the United States since the start of the Cold War — that America is a malignant, imperialistic power that happily tramples over the rights of other countries abroad and its own people at home and represents a force for instability, not security.
The deep fear the Mad King has thus engendered in our American apologists is that, in unmasking what America is really like, and how little it differs from a long-demonised country like China, Trump will push the Australian electorate to reject the relentless integration of Australia into the US military and intelligence machine that has been bipartisan policy since the Gillard years, in favour of a more independent foreign policy.
In that context, they’re torn over China’s rise to economic dominance: they understand how important the Chinese economy is to Australian prosperity, but ache for ways to constrain it and protect American economic and technological primacy.
From their perspective, and that of the editors and journalists they ceaselessly brief and for whom they contribute op-eds, China is a bigger threat than ever because the United States is now so unappealing, and a functional relationship with Beijing is all the greater a threat given Trump has made relationships with Washington contingent on bowing to his agenda in a way far less subtle than anything that has emanated from China.
It’s muddled thinking from a section of the governing class that, for 80 years, hasn’t had to do much thinking at all, because the answer to every problem was to defer to the United States. They have let the means — an alliance with the United States — replace the ends — Australia’s security, prosperity and sovereignty.
That is the most naive claptrap I have read in the Aussie media in thirteen years of doing this job.
It is everything that is wrong with our country captured in one puke.
- culture war over national interest framework
- whataboutism over reasoning
- thin-sliced economics over deep intellect
- entitled bogan whinging over realpolitik
Why is paying a little more for our defense—which underpins our freedom and prosperity much more than China ever has or will—so unreasonable that we should pivot to an advancing autocratic hegemon run by the most evil organisation on earth?
Chinese sovereign gangsterism is so much worse than American that they don’t occupy the same ballpark.
What is at stake in this fight is liberalism itself. It is broad enough to encompass a populist like Trump without collapsing.
Yet we have run from it, and the underpinnings of our own freedom, faster than a speeding bullet.
Do the Wokey dills really think that its cancellation rainbow will be strengthened under a CCP hegemon that crushes perceived threats in every twitch from an exceedingly narrow norm that starts and stops with membership of The Party?
Whether you are gay, trans, black, white, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, fat, female, disabled, or a furry, your life under the CCP will end as you know it.
You will identify with The Party, or you will be in a Pilbara labour camp, having your organs harvested.
It’s almost what Wokey deserves.
