The Age of Stupidity, Bewilderment and Enthusiastic Folly

A draft essay potentially for John Menadue's blog

I need to begin with some sweeping observations, because I believe that if Australia is to be able prosper and be an harmonious society some sweeping changes are necessary. 

Australia has a damaged tertiary education sector, first because of the flight of students to the money in accounting and commerce; second because the Morrison Government set fees deliberately to discourage teaching and study of subjects that would enable the development of free-thinking minds with an awareness of history and of other societies; third because in the wake of 9/11 universities rushed to build departments of security studies that train minds to think in adversarial terms. I have not seen these security organisations presenting views on one of the major threats to our whole framework of  security and identity: the drift of the United States into oligopoly and fascism.

Economics as a body of knowledge in the west focuses on Darwinian notions of survival in competition … when evolutionary science has for the most part moved on to see that evolutionary progress occurs mainly because of collaboration. Narrow Darwinian perspectives of conflict and survival of the fittest are driving forces for chewing up the planet. We have to rethink many things, escape narrow Darwinian perspectives, to find ourselves on safer ground. We also need to be aware that China, committed to globalism, has been victim of trade war assaults and is actively pursuing other ways of making products and using money, away from sanctions and the US dollar. So my point is not academic: we need to be aware of the ideological basis of market economics.

We are an adversarial society. Going to war more often than most, almost uniquely sending our heroes to distant battles where our interests are obscure; where our involvement may be illegal or supporting the illegal but we don’t care — because it’s a blind and perverse element of belief in a ‘rules based international order’. The broader population remains isolated from war, oblivious of the violence, violation, killing, destruction, hunger, despair, and total upheaval that are the essence of warfare. 

We are addicted to loyalty to sporting teams and gambling, filled with need for winning and defeat; admiring of Australian cricketers who mired the sport in sledging. In the New Guinea highlands the introduction of Rugby League reduced enthusiasm for constant war; less so in Australia. Many of us are addicted to computer games, most of them involving killing. Big careers are made in law, fighting for issues or money or property; our politics, heavily infested with lawyers, is contestatorial. Loving the look of men and women in uniform; enjoying entitlement to strut in uniform. In politics no uniforms, but factional feuding–fighting–that diminishes focus on national interest. Our parliaments are unrelentingly conflictual. At the last national election we saw a drift of voters away from the self-stuck, self-struck major parties. Whether this is clearly understood by the major parties is not clear. The marginal Labor majority in the House of Representative may mean a stubbornness in Labor at a time when collaboration essential. 

We face as a planet dual threats of climate change and of nuclear war, more serious than at any time in history. 

The Executive Editor of the South China Morning Post, of Hong Kong, wrote in an email on 17 July about the death of Shinzo Abe that “[h]istory is often a summary of accidents”. This sounds a simple notion but look closely and compare with what great leaders believe they do; history is what happens when you dream of something else, often enough. We could look upon history also as the detritus left by great men who in their determination cause great harms. Robert MacNamara former head of the Ford motor company, former US Defense Secretary during the Vietnam War, subsequently chief of the World Bank,  thirty years ago wrote a book about ‘blundering into disaster’, expressing disappointment that people were not like him, doing things with orderly discipline. But in counterpoint, at Reykjavik around the same time, the chiefs of the US and Soviet tribes, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev sent their advisors out of the room so they could discuss the dismantling of nuclear weapons… such a foolish and blundersome notion, quickly diminished by the orderly men behind them. We will all be killed by sound consistent thinking. There was agreement achieved on a treaty to eliminate intermediate range nuclear missiles from Europe. This eventually ran down into the ground. (We should bear in mind that in NATO planning of defence against the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War there was heavy reliance on the NATO side on theatre nuclear weapons to meet the preponderant conventional capacity of the Warsaw Pact countries.)

Other writers in this blog in recent days have produced a body of good sense on strategic policy, relations with China, connection to NATO, etc… leaving me needing first to recommend that everyone read their work. They need to be published as collection of important essays. John Menadue did a great service to the new Labor Government assembling recommendations in many essays during the campaign. But now that the tadpoles of Opposition have become hopping frogs with ministerial power there is greater need to put sensible ideas before government and its advisors. There are two very large ideas of first importance. 

• First the need to understand cultural and language differences in relations with China, eloquently articulated by Jocelyn Chey and Wanning Sun. 
• Second the need to stop thinking in conflictual terms and build a strategic environment on the basis of cooperation. 

Teow Loon Ti binds this together with the business of relations with China, as does Geoff Raby. 

Mike Scrafton and Brian Toohey make important comments on the problems of the defence and security areas of government and their power over the prime minister and defence minister who have arrived on the one hand with background education and work in economics and the union movement and law and industrial law on the other. 

The tale is wagging the dog, defence force strategic views still are strangely taken as appropriate for national strategy, a folly, as I pointed out here, several years ago. This dog is, of course, tethered by a leash to the grand (and now foolish and dangerous) strategic designs of the United States. The lack of vision and sense of national interest is disturbing. 

There are four globally important matters that lead me to the view that US strategic policy is now foolish and dangerous. I write having had responsibilities in relation to the relations with the United States in the Washington embassy and the Department of Defence in Canberra, and China both in Canberra and Beijing. The four areas are: 

• Ukraine and the long war coming between the US and Russia in Ukraine; 
• North Asia and the Pacific and the folly of hunger for war with China; 
• the Middle East and hunger for war with Iran; and 
• the cavalier approach to the global threats of climate change and nuclear war. 

There is also combination with the coming likely decline and disintegration of Europe; a  Europe riding to war with Russia as Napoleon did, to destroy his empire and kill half the horses of Europe; as also Hitler did, convinced of strategic necessity, creating in Ukraine a boiling pot of anguish, corruption, hatred and capacity to bring down the chandeliers again. 

This is my 1000 word limit here. I will write about the grand follies and dangers separately.

Climate gets real

I found this report of the climate scientist who reached the point of emotional realisation that it related to his own life very reassuring.

We have reached a point with the fifth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) where it's just dumb to pretend it's not real, to pretend major damage to the planet is not happening... and dumb just to keep nagging the academic truth. So good to see a scientist shift from earnest constant assertion to act like the doctor prepared to take the pills herhimself.

Of course it's not just the air, the weather. It's the sea, the soil and water generally. And things like bees. Bees? Yes, no bees, no pollination, no food. Pretty much, slow almost full stop.

Until fairly recently we had the prospect of sanity developing via price mechanism, with peak oil. But coal seam gas has pushed that off, while at the same time complicating the imperative of practical as well as moral realisation that if we burn all we have to burn, it will include our own species, pretty much. How to shift from mad consumption, with so much of 'advanced' civilisation employed marketing crap and self-indulgence.

I have to begin to resolve things myself. Though at 70 I am not going to see the 'catastrophe' 30 years from now.

Japan, China, Indonesia all now have carbon reduction goals far better than Australia's. The new Australian government disassembles climate policy; many Australians say we can't shift first.

But we can look at our leading responsibility given huge coal resources.

In 2012, the International Energy Agency (IEA) acknowledged that, in the absence of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, more than two thirds of coal, oil and gas reserves cannot be burnt before 2050 if we are to have a 50% chance of limiting global warming to 2°C. These are not great odds
of landing the plane safely.

[source: http://www.climateinstitute.org.au/verve/_resources/Unburnable_Carbon_Australias_Carbon_Bubble_finalreport.pdf]

for there to be an 80 per cent chance of achieving internationally agreed targets of limiting global warming to 2°C, only 20-40 per cent of existing coal, gas and oil reserves can be burnt. - See more at: http://www.climateinstitute.org.au/articles/media-releases/www.climateinstitute.org.au/unburnable-carbon.html#sthash.re3LZuJh.dpuf

 And the same document noted this - it's also a business sense issue, if people at board tables and heading programs in resource industries can think beyond the next promotion or bonus:

Reviewing all the measures in the key export markets for Australian coal indicated that all are taking action to reduce emissions. These countries in fact rank fairly high up the scale of effort. Notably, China has recently announced its plan for energy consumption to peak at 4 billion tonnes coal equivalent within the current five year plan. The IEA projects China’s coal consumption will peak within the next 10 years (assuming all policies currently announced are actually implemented). Beyond this, there is a global trend of a tightening regulatory framework for the coal sector, whether it be driven by concerns around cost, air quality, water availability, or climate change. This has resulted in heightened competition as coal producers are displaced from their traditional markets (eg the US). Technological advances and policy support measures are also seeing alternatives such as wind power become cheaper than coal generation, including in Australia itself now.

 I have written some more relevant to this at my sustainable home food forest blog, link in sidebar.

for there to be an 80 per cent chance of achieving internationally agreed targets of limiting global warming to 2°C, only 20-40 per cent of existing coal, gas and oil reserves can be burnt. - See more at: http://www.climateinstitute.org.au/articles/media-releases/www.climateinstitute.org.au/unburnable-carbon.html#sthash.re3LZuJh.dpuf

for there to be an 80 per cent chance of achieving internationally agreed targets of limiting global warming to 2°C, only 20-40 per cent of existing coal, gas and oil reserves can be burnt. - See more at: http://www.climateinstitute.org.au/articles/media-releases/www.climateinstitute.org.au/unburnable-carbon.html#sthash.re3LZuJh.dpuf

for there to be an 80 per cent chance of achieving internationally agreed targets of limiting global warming to 2°C, only 20-40 per cent of existing coal, gas and oil reserves can be burnt. - See more at: http://www.climateinstitute.org.au/articles/media-releases/www.climateinstitute.org.au/unburnable-carbon.html#sthash.re3LZuJh.dpuf

metaphor: the downhill dribble of mind and politics

Today The Guardian carries a column from John Naughton of The Observer, on metaphor in intelligence systems combing everyday discussion searching for metaphorical mindsets, contriving to link it using a metaphor to the Chinese Government's approach to managing the media with a measure of subtlety, as one might manage engineered water systems. Article entitled:

The great firewall of China gets metaphorical: The Chinese government's increasingly sophisticated approach to censorship demands a new interpretation

 I offered a comment, then a followup comment, you will see I manage to return to my despond about Australian politics too:

The notion of metaphor can move the brain either to opening or to clickclacky simplification and dogma; The latter more evident in this discussion than the former.

I am very conscious in broader historical context (and it's quite useful to consider this metaphorically in terms of water if we keep the natural river and ocean and atmosphere water movement in view, not just human engineering) that for Chinese leaders and most [Chinese] citizens there is not much example to follow as sociopolitical model. Where to flow, where to break banks and sea walls; where and how to limit and control.

Metaphorically we might constructively describe much of the preoccupation of the developed world's polity as bottom pimple comparison and ridicule. Along with tsunamis of absurdism in avoidance of blindingly obvious critical problems.

Can we get enough empathy to see how difficult it is to run and ameliorate a country with 1.3 billion people .... without the help of R Murdoch, S Berlusconi, etc.

Pursuing the aqueous progress metaphor and its evidence of downhillism of the cerebral potential of Homo urbis, the evidence is there not just in the comments sections but also in those cute sections or footers which draw us, like the flush of toilet bowls to what is most popular.

Were I to have command of a large and complicated country just for any moment I trust I would try a bit to keep the citizen brain away from self-destructive addition to useless water flows by dribbling behind the levee banks of wankerie.

I am carried forward towards a national election in Australia by media which by and large, vaguely insightful that we will get a leader choice between hubris and mucus, fail to see in the mirror that that is about what most of them offer themselves.

My second comment more elevated perhaps:

DennisA

15 July 2013 1:50am

It is rewarding to go back to John Naughton's earlier article to which he links and to which this is also a link.
This article by Ray Peat is insightful on metaphor:
Academic authoritarians, language, metaphor, animals, & science

When something new is noticed, it excites the brain, and causes attention to be focused, in the “orienting reflex.” The various senses participate in examining the thing, in a physiological way of asking a question. Perception of new patterns and the formation of generalizations expands the ways in which questions are asked. When words are available, questions may be verbalized. The way in which questions are answered verbally may be useful, but it often diverts the questioning process, and provides rules and arbitrary generalizations that may take the place of the normal analogical processes of intelligence. The vocabulary of patterns no longer expands spontaneously, but tends to come to rest in a system of accepted opinions.

So, generally, even the new must fit the old moulds. How should we proceed to awareness of the moulds by which our brains are strangled daily.
To imagine that reporting in some idealised western circumstance is somehow pure suggests we should at least metaphorically revisit the tabloid sub-editor's table around which I trembling crept as a copy boy, fifty years ago, and to which journalists approached with varied degrees of courage, their stories written one sentence per single A5-ish piece of butchers' paper, loosely pinned together, for subeditors to throw in the bin, re-order, part-remove, rewrite, calling in the miscreate at some point to explain comparative wisdom, authority and marketing insight.
What Ray describes is the inevitability of spin, conscious, subconscious, unconscious; denied or contrived . Who says who should have charge of that? That's the question.

 I wonder why I write comments... I suppose I have some notion that anything that goes to the internet trickles down eventually somewhere and may kick a neurone usefully, maybe not. But we outside the spheres of notoriety can expect no more, failing public indecency, a heavy price for notoriety.

When I had a tractor I would pass the time while driving hither and thither composing letters to government ministers and auditors general; seldom later sent. Like those composed in the restless night, they were often less meaningful if one attempted later transcription. I suppose that in terms of management of my frontal lobes, like other people theirs, offering comments is thus valuable, especially now I am 70, uncommitted to any employer, needing to do something definitely different from Sudoku.

It is important, I think, when writing, to say something new. Including neological contribution to the language.

As to providing supplementary comment, there is that thing that happens when you press 'send' or equivalent: The "oh-I-should-have-said" phenomenon.

When I trained for the foreign service, an eminent (within those walls) senior diplomatic figure gave us some golden rules. I relate three, to give the third of them proper context:

[1] "If yew mest merry, merry menny." (I offer accent to show superciliousness, say it aloud with curled lip, a tad pizzicato with a little timbre of inharmonicity and nasalisation.)

[2] "When you are planning the dinner party, ensure you have the right mix of tall poppies and short poppies. Remember tall poppies are never comfortable unless they have some short poppies with whom to compare themselves."

and thirdly, he said

[3] "Beware of esprit d'escalier. Write what happened in the foreign ministry, not what you thought of going out the door." Note that when spoken, this has great impact given the pizzicatoliness of [1] and extension of that through pronunciation of repeated poppies in [2]... this flows into a contrapunted slithery sound of scathing cadence in [3]. +++

Nowadays I don't have to worry about [3] because most of the people I've been talking to are in my head.***

As regards that esprit d',  Sir Harold Nicolson once said, as I once read but can't find citation, he had never seen a record of any conversation in any foreign ministry archive in the world in which the author of the record did not win the argument.

For fun, see the high dudgeon of Herbert Highstone regarding Nicolson here and the diversity of his commentary here. And see, see, he learned to think about a thousand rageable things while working on the farm, I'm sure.And Herbert always wins, same glorious fate of most others who write comments. I have, to put Nicolson around another way, seldom had a discussion with anyone who was wrong.
...................

I think that the plaster on the wall will be dry enough for me to go and paint now... :-)

=====

+++ how you say things is almost everything, as the actress may have said to the bishop.

***The novelist's privilege. Great chance of avoiding the straight jacket or psychopharmacologist:

 "No no, you don't understand, the voices are OK, I'm a novelist!"

getting mind back

I've moved back from this gurglacious setup to a 17in laptop at a standing desk. Sitting down is part of the problem.

I have been conscious of the way in which in the last several years the pressures of the smart phone's proddings and the presence of the bigger screen/s at which I type this have been interfering with my capacity to think. We seem all to become more and more dependent on sucking the tits of digital means.

One of the things delivered unto us on these digital devices is called news. But what is this 'news'? With a few exceptions it too seems to have succumbed to undying lemming behaviour, 'journalists' chasing each other over cliffs of nonsense they themselves have erected, cliffs which blind the incessant reader to anything that happened more than a news cycle ago. No one wants reality now, we all want the games.

And now in a blizzard, we lose some of the best members of the Australian parliament, all in a rush. Fear and bigotry vultures remain, with a few good men. The renewed Prime Minister, a charismatic, demagogic, hypocritical, lying, conniving, eroding, manipulative genius (a doctor friend today said "psychopathic narcissist?"), has all but destroyed his party to get the prize. He says he has learned, he says he is a better man, but he really just seems to be doing the same only more. He has a not to be rebutted way of speaking in public, cutely said today he might give consideration to some views some others may offer; others he would vehemently reject. His return has been loud. He is most likely to lead the Labor Party to a defeat in coming elections less dreadful than it would have been under Gillard, Gillard facing an internal and external opponent every day. As to whether this renewed Prime Minister will resign from the leadership after such defeat... well, it would not be on character if he did.

But I digress.... Go here for a good commentary.

I suppose it's not just digression, it's also fury at the way our minds are led astray because of the way we now get news and the way news and attitudes are shaped.

----

We face corrosion of the brain personally, not just in the body politic.

This article in The Guardian expresses the problem very well:

...Such are the annoying ironies of work and play in the 21st century: more and more of us are "knowledge workers", doing jobs that require deep concentration, yet we do so on machines that seem deliberately designed to interrupt us all the time and to keep us on edge. Then, in the evenings, we try to relax using similar machines, which all too often whip us up into a state that isn't relaxing at all.
The dirty secret of the internet is that all this distraction and interruption is immensely profitable. ...

 This hit the spot for me, directly.

So...

I have disconnected my phone from receiving mail and news updates. I am unsubscribing from a lot of new news. I am going to try to get the focus onto longer writing projects of my own initiative. More art.
... less blogging???  :-)

 I have refrained from Twittery and Face-painting, declining invitations from whomever. LinkedIn, about which I've giggled a bit here before, lost its shreds of worth, in my view, by pointing at me and presumably the world a hose pipe of opinion of General Stanley McCrystall this week. Enough bullshit, enough demagoguery from celebrities.

Oh and Huffington Post, a formerly great initiative, going down the drain: possibly interesting serious material now interspersed with celebrity cleavage and thigh revelations. Remove from phone. I can get enough of that in many doctors' waiting rooms!

The 'App' is the poison, the means to more quickly vanish into mindlessness, or to avoid prospect of elevating oneself from mindlessness, to ensure succinctification of the bullshit. Up from the merde let me struggle now. Before the depth turns all the lights out.

I will still look to The Guardian for reassurance that there are some sane people, so reflective thinkers, some independent minded editors out there.

Australia-China

With the announcement of agreement with China on annual leaders meetings, I was asked by Radio National Breakfast to contribute to analysis. The program is accessible here. The comment selected from my interview was about the need for intelligent national leadership to get Australians away from fear and misinformation about China. Here's hoping...

Earlier entries in this blog (click on China among the labels in right hand column) showed my concern that we needed to get some shape back into the relationship. 

I scribbled some quick briefing notes for the Breakfast team yesterday morning. These covered more than the core subject for interview. We have in Australia, as generally in the world, a great ignorance of what has happened in China in the past 35 years, the greatest revolution in world history. Where is that being thought or taught? French Revolution, let alone Eureka Stockade, just piddling by comparison. These were my notes, also prepared to freshen up my brain for interview:

What has just been done in Beijing restores and reaffirms a course we should have been on, which we were on until the overall relationship became lost in talking about the money.
We have enjoyed a strong relationship with China because we are seen by China as a country that acts in its own interests and has been prepared to work with Chinese leaders in helping them build a strong economy AND a civil society. This is still a broad and important task; government has had a major role in the China relationship not only because China has a communist country but also because the Chinese government has been engaged in extraordinary reforms.
I hope the Federal Opposition will recognise all this.
I hope both Government and Opposition will also work to change a lot of silly attitudes in Australia, that China is 'taking us over'.
Noting that China's investment in Australia stands around 20 billion compared with US 550bn (the ABS main page on this doesn't even count China!)

There is also the notion that Chinese are so numerous among us. But only 3% or so of the population was born in China. Recent conversations with China-born Australians have begun with the wish that more Australians could learn and get facts right. The Beijing announcement will please them, but it's only a start, the big problem is in Australia... and alas it has some narrow racist elements.
There is also the perspective that China is the cause of greenhouse problems. But we do have to look at climate change in social science perspective too - to allow room for developing countries to catch up. in 1985, China consumed around 50kg per capita of steel, we consumed ten times that. We have matured, in a post industrial phase, and Australian consumption has dropped to around 300kg - while China has risen to over 400kg per capita - and it is not clear when their consumption pattern will mature. We supported growth of their steel production as core to development. I expect China, with increasing focus on pollution, to do more efficiently.
China was the first country with a renewable energy law, China is a huge producer of solar power capacity, including exported panels and other gear.
China is going through an industrialisation process in several decades that took us a century. We need to show respect for the extraordinary complexity of political and economic issues in China, not just focus on relatively tabloid issues. Yes, there are human rights issues, but what has happened since 1978 is the largest revolution in human history and hundreds of millions have benefited.
What happened in 1978? Before that a person related to a 'work unit' and the work unit controlled whether you remained a fetus and got born, whether you had a roof over your head, whether you had whatever education, whether you got work, got married, whether you had a child. Everything a farmer or worker produced belonged to the state. In 1978 farmers were told to produce a quota and keep the rest. This kind of reform moved into industry. A need for company law, tax law, provision for profit and loss, bankruptcy, unemployment, new business establishement, social security and health systems... in a country with sixty times our population, minorities numbering ten times our population; per capita income has risen from under $300 to around 5000.
A lot of people in private cars now in China (zero in 1978) but consider that China has 5000km of high speed rail and plans to build to 25,000 by 2020.

Having noted that last number in my notes yesterday, it was interesting that the China discussion on the radio this morning was preceded by a news report that Australia may have 1700km of very fast train track by 2053. I suppose the awfully precise and remote number 2053 derived from discussion in 2013 in which someone said "we couldn't finish something like that for forty years!"

2053 is by my calculation seven years after 2046. I expect any very fast train in 2053 will be even more of the future than Wong Karwai's 2046 train.*** 

click on pictures for sources

So bizarre for a government (sadly bound for the butchers in a few months) to call for discussion about a train in 2053. We can't remember what has happened in China in 35 years... Here's a lovely glimpse of a fancy train, 50 years ago, when it too was about to be sent to the butcher.


*** if you haven't seen 2046, please first see Wong Karwai's staggeringly beautiful In the Mood for Love to which 2046 is a sequel. For more words on these films see this blog. I tend to find Australian film boring; perhaps I watch too many films like these two. They confront also with the extraordinary intellectual force of China, which we are generally not bright enough to imagine.

critical juncture in world affairs

I have just put an update at this web page I established many years ago, when the Iraq war was upon us and figures in the then Australian government, committed to war, told opponents to shut up.

My update brings in information on the cost of war in money and human horrors also in Afghanistan. We are trapped in fantasies in public policies, seemingly unaware that we leave behind wreckage from war that will poison lives there and here for generations.

I maintain this view as expressed to the Australian foreign minister in 2003 (no reply):

I have become increasingly of the view... that it is in the nature of modern war that it tends, more than anything else - certainly it does not tend to ‘victory’ - to import into the righteous invading countries the problems you seek to eliminate by invading... Your assertion of effectiveness of violence in international policy drifts down to validate the use of violence by non-states in international affairs, and increasingly by individuals in national and sub-national affairs, and indeed, I suggest, in domestic life. We are dealing not just with a narrow national security issue but a large ethical dimension.

In my update on that page set up to speak about Iraq and Afghanistan, I have limited my comments to those subject, with the US 'fiscal cliff' thrown in. That's the purpose of that page.

But the diseases of head in sand, staying the course, being great again, etc (aka pride?), also are poisoning capacity to deal with the increasingly profound issues related to climate change, the decline of Europe into depression, the approach of "Arab winters" in the wake of the "Arab Spring" and so on.  Insert the word Israel here, Israeli conduct contributing heavily to mayhem in the Moslem world.

The weakening of the developed world has huge impacts on developing countries left, as many are, poorly equipped with self-confidence, too often poorly governed, wanting cago-cult like deliverance of and by the material and modern.. these countries also dealing with China as the new global power (another large subject***, but on the resources scramble, do read Geoff Hiscock  — I do not profit in any way from this Amazon link).

***

I've had an email swiftly after writing that last bit asking questions about Chinese investment. I should make clear that I do not regard China's hunt for resource access as more predatory than is western multinational activity. And is tiny in Australia compared with other more traditional foreign investment. I think it would help people seeking to understand China's approach to issues (including for example opposition to military interventions in Syria (another very big subject) to read about the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence which do really hang about at the core of Chinese policy (along with lots of self interest). Also to read some of the policy documents from the recent party congress. OK, hard? Try reading Hansard ... or the local government act for my state. Or the Australian federal opposition's foreign policy. The Chinese stuff is pretty elegant!

Australia-China relations: oral histories

The National Library of Australia is placing online audio and transcript of a project by the Library, Australia-China Council and Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, called "Beyond the Cables" to record perspectives of forty years of Australian ambassadors to China for the 40th anniversary of diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China established December 1972.

I approached listening to my own recording with some trepidation. I am always apprehensive about re-reading things I've written... this recording went from unprepared to on-the-record in three hours sitting in a fancy studio with the lovely Michael Wilson as my interrogator. I had not expected Michael to begin at the beginning as we seemed to do. You are spared my prenatal life but not much more.

I guess it's in the nature of oral history that it may ramble. I speak not in prose but in utterances, as we are supposed to do. I fear there are anecdotes incomplete as we changed subject here and there.

It is mercifully easier to browse with the text and audio parallel. The transcript not perfect but a huge labour. I hope no one will sue me for things said  :-)

As I write this, my own transcript is the only one accessible online so far. I will have to find time to listen to others as they become available, I suppose... life is a string of distractions from what you think you should be doing (I refer not to the vacuum cleaner but the novel).

I hope this collection amounts to something valuable long-term. I hear from GS who interviewed a number of the others that he has been having a good time, that there are some good stories. More seriously, perhaps it will give international relations and history academics more insight into how we go about making international relations. Too much writing in the history of Australia-China relations, in my observation, has drawn upon news clippings and the surmise of authors as to how to pin them together... dignities and dogmas become entangled with notions unsoundly based on fragmentary evidence.

on the national political front; sport and beginning the 'silly season'

'The silly season' is a term in Australian public life for that summer period when top people have gone on leave and other people become spokespersons - and when junior journalists get a run at showing their understanding or otherwise of truth and what sells newspapers. This seems upon us in Australia already this summer, except that the principals remain in place as the silliness grows.

There is a tendency for some people (an increasing number just turn off in despair) to retreat with a sigh to sport and away from politics when the politics gets divisive, which is odd, when one considers that division and contest are at the core of competitive sports.

An observation made when I was an anthropology student long ago was that in the highlands of Papua New Guinea the arrival of football with the colonials provided a generally non-lethal alternative to warfare which was an integral part of daily life for men, who painted up and went on guard or rampage. I note in passing that, comparable with our modern politics in Australia, attacks on working women was deemed easier, safer, more likely profitable than frontal engagements between blokes.

It's summer, the end of the parliamentary session for the year is disappearing under dirt, someone (in a Murdoch online rag) had to say that cricket is no less than "The Last Great Unifier in a Deeply Divided Nation."

I was pleased to see some commentators disagreeing. I have added my comment thus:

The team competitive chauvinistic bind-us-together drive comes from the r-complex, the ancient and primitive part of the brain we share with dinosaurs and fighting ant colonies.  

It is not noble, it does not solve local or global problems but feeds divisiveness. 

One might hope that with Lynton Crosby gone to drive the next British Conservative Party election campaign that we might experience a turn for the better in Australian public life, but he has left a lasting legacy from his years managing willing marionette Howard that  division, sledging and hatred pay dividends if fanned well and in particulars. 

In drafting that I sought the right word to describe the Crosby-Howard relationship and was delighted when I found Wikipedia had this description for 'marionette':

A marionette is a puppet controlled from above using wires or strings depending on regional variations. A marionette's puppeteer is called a manipulator.^[1] Marionettes are operated with the puppeteer hidden or revealed to an audience by using a vertical or horizontal control bar in different forms of theatres or entertainment venues. They have also been used in films and on television.The attachment of the strings varies according to its character or purpose.

Observing the development of Crosby's career in the UK has led me to the thought that we do need to review the public image of former Prime Minister Howard. Even those who hold negative views on his impact on the nation see him in awesome power. But he was, under the garb of postures, a small figure. What did The Great Oz say to Dorothy? "Pay no attention to the little man behind the screen" or words to that effect.

Noting also that the role of the marionette, the manipulated, is of course to manipulate the audience, generally with extravagant emotions. In which context, we can carry the metaphor further, to Punch and Judy, the archetypal marionettes, amusing because of all the violence displayed. And oh gosh, The Punch being the name of the rag in which the cricket story was published. Game over.

pivotal strategic moment

I said in an entry in this blog on 10 August that we are now in what seems the most important pivotal moment in Australia–China relations. It seems also the case with Australia's relations with the United States, though we don't seem to know it and, still largely asleep, may slide into an absurdity in our alliance with the US.

I was astonished today to see that a report of views of Edward Luttwak, commending our support of an American policy of containment of China, filled half of the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald, notionally a very sensible old Australian newspaper.

I wrote to the Herald thus:

Your Luttwak front page
I am astonished that you would give the front page to reporting Edward Luttwak's views on the containment of China. To have him enter the debate regarding Australia's relations with China and the United States should cause reflection on where we are going in supporting foolish American strategic policy.  

Since the 1970s he has spouted a dangerous nonsense far to the right of Henry Kissinger. He sees international relations as bizarrely abstract, a duel between great enemies, with all the countries in the middle proxies or pawns. He certainly has no real notion of Australia or Australian policy as other than a manipulable. He does not know, does not really have regard for Australian interests.  

He speaks not of China but himself when he writes, as you quote: "The Chinese are autistic in dealing with foreigners, they have no sense of the 'other','' he said. ''They think they are incredibly brilliant strategists as if they had been conquering other nations, when in fact it's been the other way around for 1500 years.''

The notion of containment of China is a huge strategic error. It could not work and as a frame of mind can only aggravate issues in the region, establishing hostile mindsets, reversing trends towards the construction of diplomatic and political infrastructures for development and the resolution of disputes.

====

There is another disconcerting development today, with reports that a State Department spokesman has said that the the US-Japan treaty covers the Senkakus, islands called such by Japan, also claimed by Beijing and Taipei, known in Chinese as the Diaoyu Islands. Wikipedia provides some account of the territorial dispute, Japan regarding the islands as having been terra nullius at Japanese occupation at the time of the China-Japan war of 1895, Chinese governments claiming otherwise. There has been a considerable escalation of tension in relation to these islands and claims to them recently. The importance of the disputes arises from contest for seabed resources. ASEAN countries, Korea and Russia as well as China and Japan are in the mix of this. The best current resource on this subject is Geoff Hiscock's new book, Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources available on paper or Kindle or from iTunes. 

Bringing the US-Japan Security Treaty in and in this way is serious. The Americans, in pre-election mode, seem to be racing ahead on this issue. Also as if they were still repaying for the Acheson 'doctrine' of 1950, thought contributory to the Korean war... or imagining that global security still works as imagined to work then.

The texts of US-Japan and ANZUS treaties are here

http://australianpolitics.com/topics/foreign-policy/anzus-treaty-text

http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/n-america/us/q&a/ref/1.html

Everybody rushes to Articles IV and V of ANZUS, Art V of US-Japan, the bits referring to military support, but really ought to spend a little more time on Art I, this the first sentence of Art I of the US-Japan Security Treaty: 

The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international disputes in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.

We should be saying to the Americans that we would not consider ANZUS to apply in the case of US at war with China over Diaoyo/Senkaku islands. If the Americans want to say 'we are just upping the stakes' then that would be folly of the first order, to live or die regretting.