I would like to thank the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilization, and especially its Director Simon Haines, for providing this opportunity to reflect further on what I said in my article published in the Weekend Australian on 11 July.

I greatly admire the work of your Centre as it pursues its vital educational initiatives, and your tenacity in the face of sustained opposition. When I was minister for higher education years ago I would have found it hard to envisage a day when academics, who griped constantly about real and imagined cuts, would demand their institutions knock back generous offers of funding. Strange times!

In the article I argued that we in the West inhabit a civilization that is starting to loathe itself. One in which the entire educational system at all levels, increasingly reinforced by media, political and corporate elites, is largely in thrall to an ideology intent on portraying Western civilization as an unbroken litany of oppression, racism, slavery, colonialism, pretty much without redeeming features, the source of just about all the world’s ills.

We see the bizarre spectacle of crowds of ‘white people’, middle class, educated white people, mainly young, engaging in ritual, prayer like, denunciations of ‘whiteness’ and ‘white people’. We hear academics and comperes on ABC likening ‘being white’ to original sin, for which only partial redemption is available by ‘acknowledging privilege’ and becoming a loyal ‘ally’ of the oppressed.

I claimed that what we are experiencing has distinct echoes of the Chinese cultural revolution: the forced apologies for ideological heresies, the destruction and deprecation of statues and other symbols of an irredeemably tainted past, the rigid enforcement of speech codes that police the boundaries of what can be said and thought when it rubs up against the latest iteration of the ever-changing identity politics ideology.

Identity politics is the ideological core of the worldview that rationalizes and underpins these developments. It is invariably accompanied by the system of thought control that we nowadays label political correctness, which functions as the compliance and enforcement arm of the identity politics ideology. 

Political correctness mandates that any dissent from identarian orthodoxies not be debated seriously, but requires denunciation not just of the heretical idea but the speaker, who is ipso facto a ‘bad person’, a bigot, a racist, a fascist – even a Nazi. It also demands punishment in forms ranging in severity from social media mobbing and social obloquy to career destruction for alleged malefactors, with little or no opportunity to mount a defence.

In some cases, dissenting speech is deemed by the ideologues to constitute ‘violence’ against oppressed people, warranting actual, kinetic, counter-violence in response. So we see masked, black-shirted thugs who style themselves as anti-fascists, or Antifa, violently attacking gatherings of their opponents. No sense of historical irony, these people.

The situation we now find ourselves in is the culmination of an extraordinarily successful project captured succinctly in a phrase that appeared in correspondence in the mid 1960s between Herbert Marcuse, a major figure in the later development of ‘critical theory’ first hatched by the Frankfurt School of Marxist theorists in the aftermath of World War I, and the German radical activist Rudi Dutschke.

The phrase was ‘the long march through the institutions of power’. As the Vietnam War radicalization of young boomers and the fantasies of imminent revolution faded, attention turned to the long view and a strategy and a strategy to capture the institutions of society, starting with higher education.

It was an explicitly totalitarian project. In a notorious essay titled Repressive Tolerance published in 1965 Marcuse gives a broad outline of what he had in mind, conceding that at that time it seemed hopelessly utopian.

He envisaged a future in which tolerance of speech would be governed by a distinction between what he called ‘repressive tolerance’, by which he meant tolerance of ‘right-wing’ speech that reinforces and perpetuates the current oppressive power structures; and ‘liberating tolerance’ that promotes challenges to the existing order. ‘Repressive tolerance’ was to be, well, repressed; ‘liberating tolerance’ was to be fostered.

Marcuse stressed the crucial role of academia in bringing about these developments, but contended that this required a major re-engineering of what is taught in the universities. With academia as a foothold, the influence of this thinking would spread out, with each successive generation of graduates, to the wider society.

I doubt that even Marcuse could have envisaged the extent of the success of this project, which seemed to flow organically from the initial from the Vietnam War radicalization of the baby boomer generation.

I wonder if Marcuse would have been struck by the irony that his project has even extended to the most powerful corporations in the world, the social media giants, that he would presumably have seen as his strongest adversaries. Little did he know that, as things would develop, woke leftist ideology would provide these corporations with a way to signal their virtue, to exhibit their commitment to ‘social justice’, without endangering their wealth and power – how perfect!

How important is this, in the long term scheme of things? Some are inclined to minimize the problem by saying we are going through a period of essentially well-motivated, exuberant excess, maybe even a bout of temporary insanity, and that things will calm down in due course, just like they did in the early 1970s after the upheavals of the late 1960s.

This is far too complacent, for two reasons. Firstly, there is little precedent for the degree of political polarization, and the widespread recourse to violence, that we see today. This is particularly so in the United States since the George Floyd killing, where parts of cities have been torched and in some, like Portland, rioting has gone on for a considerable time, aided and abetted by a media that insists on describing these events as ‘essentially peaceful’

This is compounded by the withdrawal, or at least the stepping-back, of police efforts to maintain law and order, to the point that police simply fail to intervene as businesses are looted, and private homes invaded. The role and very existence of police is increasingly questioned, despite clear evidence that their absence leads to dystopian hell-holes of perpetual violence, looting and destruction.

Recently there has been a further disturbing development in America: gangs of rioters, originally largely confined to inner-urban areas, invading suburbs, and in some cases being confronted by armed citizenry, as happened when a mob went to the home of Seattle police chief Carmen Best.

Best, a black woman, has been a rare voice of courage and sanity, who opposed from the outset the surrendering of part of inner-Seattle to the mob. Having received next to no support from the city council and other local political leaders, she has just thrown in the towel and resigned her position, making the following observations in her resignation statement:

We're in the middle of a social reckoning, you know, racial reckoning in the country ... and we have to acknowledge that policing has a history that has in many ways been conducive to the racism that we're experiencing … But we also have to acknowledge that policing is working really hard to change that narrative. And we need to work with the public to figure out how we're going to do that.

In a recent analysis, the Australian counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen has suggested that the situation developing in the US can be characterized as a state of ‘incipient insurgency’ that could spiral into widespread violence. That the leading nation of the free world should have reached this point should concern us all.

The second point is that this is happening at a time when the global liberal order, and the free societies they embody, face very serious challenges from regimes and ideologies that posit very different societal models. Recall Francis Fukuyama’s famous claim in the 1990s that the fall of the Soviet bloc marked the ‘end of history’, by which he meant that human social evolution had basically ended with the triumph of liberal democracy and market economics.

Of greatest salience, especially to Australia, is the emergence of the CCP regime in China as a contender for global industrial, technological and military dominance. This regime is well along developing systems of totalitarian surveillance and control beyond even the nightmares of George Orwell. It is leveraging technologies like AI to solve the most significant obstacle in the way of Orwell’s projected 1984 dystopia. Even with Orwell’s ‘telescreens’ in every house, someone has to do the monitoring.

AI offers a solution to the monitoring problem, with software agents tirelessly looking for patterns and associations suggestive of incipient dissent, right down to facial expressions. A recent leak of Chinese data indicates this surveillance is now2 being extended into the home.

This would be bad enough if confined within China’s borders, but as we are learning every day the regime is intent on exerting regional and ultimately global dominance. We see Australia’s universities becoming increasingly dependant on the fee income from Chinese students, the crack-cocaine of Australian higher education funding.

This income, in some cases amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, can be turned off overnight by the CCP regime, a threat they have not hesitated to use recently as Australia disputes regime claims about the virus and the CCP’s territorial ambitions.

And don’t the universities know it. They have become terrified of tolerating, let alone doing, anything that might offend their masters. What are we to make of the University of Queensland mobilizing all of its considerable legal resources against the philosophy student, Drew Pavlou, who organized a demonstration in support of the people of Hong Kong, which was viciously attacked by a gang of several hundred pro-Beijing ‘students’.

Worse, some Vice Chancellors have gone even further, in effect becoming apologists and enablers of the regime, with one prominent figure going way beyond his expertise, talking about the need for governments and politicians to avoid ‘sinophobic blatherings’ and dismissing intelligence agency concerns about CCP activities in Australia.

Given this, what are the prospects for honest, objective scholarship about contemporary China, its political system, the nature of its relations with other countries, including Australia? As a number of commentators have stressed, the main effect is likely to be what is not investigated, the contentious issues that are not explored and debated, the research that is not conducted, in order to avoid offending Chinese sensibilities.

In a talk titled  Engineers of the Soul: Ideology in Xi Jinping’s China, delivered to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the former China correspondent and principle international adviser to the department John Garnaut described how the CCP regime under Xi is pushing an ideological revival, that he describes this way:

Mr Xi did not invent this ideological project but he has hugely reinvigorated it. For the first time since Mao we have a leader who talks and acts like he really means it. And he is pushing communist ideology at a time when the idea of ‘communism’ is as unattractive as it has been at any time in the past 100 years. All that remains is an ideology of power, dressed up as patriotism, but that doesn’t mean it cannot work.

… and he adds this crucial point:

The challenge for us is that Xi’s project of total ideological control does not stop at China’s borders. It is packaged to travel with Chinese students, tourists, migrants and especially money. It flows through the channels of the Chinese language internet, pushes into all the world’s major media and cultural spaces and generally keeps pace with and even anticipates China’s increasingly global interests.

Pretty disturbing stuff. I recently hosted an online discussion with Clive Hamilton, the Australian academic who founded the left-leaning think tank The Australia Institute, who has written two books that lay out in exhaustive detail the scope of CCP influence operations around the world. 

Given all this, you may be wondering: Where are all the champions of academic freedom and institutional autonomy that so vociferously opposed every attempt to establish any course sponsored by the Ramsay Centre?

Surely, every staff association, every student group, especially those that imagine themselves ‘progressive’, should be shouting from the rooftops, about all this? Throwing their full weight behind persecuted students, and staffers forced to apologize for any territorial map, or observation, that offends CCP sensitivities? They must be seething with rage, surely? And as for those Confucius Institutes, that senior regime figures have frankly stated are part of the CCP’s global propaganda apparatus – well they must be breathing fire about them!

Well, maybe I missed it, but I have yet to see a single expression of concern from any of these fearless fighters for social justice about these matters. According to Drew Pavlou, he has received precisely zero support from Queensland University staff associations and student groups. This in spite of him being, except for this issue, a hard-line leftist himself. Not much solidarity there. Actually it is worse that that – the UQ chapter of Socialist Alternative actually conflated protests against the CCP regime and the local Confucius Institute with racism.

And how about the students Sydney University Student Representative Council education officer Lily Campbell, another Socialist Alternative activist, who berated Michael Spence for even negotiating with the Ramsay Centre during an episode of Q & A? When asked for comment by Australian Financial Review journalist Robert Bolton she ‘declined to comment on the Confucius Institute’!

How to account for this?

Actually, it all makes a certain sense. If Western Civilization, this wretched product of those wretched ‘white people’, is so abominable, then why should we be concerned about a foreign totalitarian regime intruding into all aspects of our societies including – and especially – the education system. After all, CCP totalitarianism could not be any worse than what we have already, could it? So why worry – taking up these matters would just distract us from the important work of opposing those sinister Ramsey courses that might confuse our narratives.

This might actually seem logical to young – and not so young – people who are devoid of any worthwhile historical knowledge, but thoroughly indoctrinated in the verities of identity politics.

The French writer Pascal Bruckner wrote presciently about the self-loathing mindset of ‘progressive’ academia a decade ago in his book The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism. Here is his summation:

First of all, the duty to repent forbids the Western bloc, which is eternally guilty, to judge or combat other systems, other states, other religions. Our past crimes command us to keep our mouths closed. Our only right is to remain silent.

Here is his devastating conclusion:

Indulgence toward foreign dictatorships, intransigence toward our democracies. An eternal movement: critical thought, at first subversive, turns against itself and becomes a new conformism, but one that is sanctified by the memory of its former rebellion.

So what can be done? I take this up in part 2 of this talk.