Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You: Australia Has it Coming
赖瑞青 Larrikin gets his mitts on some tankie twaddle
15 August 2022
For this week’s Pervy Titillations column we have an outstandingly dire piece of tankie drivel by a journalist we will call Merv Fumble, who writes for a prominent left-leaning journal. The anonymous individual who leaked this draft article to us described Merv as “an embittered old Marxist prick”. We leave it for you to judge the accuracy of that call. Our editorial comments are footnoted.1
Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You 勿谓言之不预: Australia has it Coming
By Merv Fumble
Let me tell you about a democracy of over 20 million people, with a vibrant civil society, long-established environmental and feminist movements and an active LGBT scene, which is not worth anyone losing a drop of blood to save if it gets into a stoush with China. No, I’m not talking about Taiwan anymore. I’m talking about Australia.
Now hear me out, because there’s an unpleasant truth we all need to confront. The truth is, Australia is 100% an outpost of white imperialism. The settlement of Australia started with a collection of squalid penal colonies, followed by tokenistic self-governing colonies.2 When national self-government arrived it was a farce confected by white pastoralists and industrialists eager to make their new “nation” a deputy for global British capital and expansionism. After World War Two we swapped one imperial benefactor for another, and now here we are, serving an American master that’ll drag us to destruction once it attacks China, but not one step closer to true nationhood.
And let’s be honest about China. Yes, it remains at a totalitarian-statist stage of development, throwing Muslims into concentration camps, ruthlessly suppressing dissent, and crushing trade unions as it aligns itself with international capital. But you can’t deny it has feelings, that it has been hurt. It spent a hundred years getting shafted by white western imperialism, and like the nerdy kid everyone used to beat up on who’s now a roided-up tough with a new Porsche, it’s hooning around its neighbourhood settling old scores. And if we don’t show it some respect, it’ll come for us.
But hear me out - there’s not a skerrick of evidence that China has imperial ambitions in Asia. First, recall Lenin’s analysis of imperialism: all of the “imperialist powers” subjecting the world to the “exploitation of finance capital” were white in the early 20th century3. Today, imperialism is just as white. Now if you think you can channel Lenin and claim Taiwan is a potential victim of Great Chinese Chauvinism that deserves the right of national self-determination, he would’ve had an answer to that. Yes, he once said that regions like the Ukraine had a right to form a state, independent from Russia. But unlike the Russia Lenin described in 1916, China is not a white “oppressor state”, and Taiwan is an ethnically inherent part of China.
What China does seek is what left-realists like me call a “gross-realm”4, a sphere of influence safe from predatory American power, in which it can securely make its final transition to a post-capitalist stage of development, generating co-prosperity with the rest of Asia. Renounce the US alliance and we can take our place in this new sphere. But suppose we barrack for the Yanks in any coming struggle with China. In that scenario, we’re going to be toast, and we don’t deserve a shred of sympathy or support once they abandon us, their white imperial outpost, to defeat and oblivion in a new Asian order.
This is what a left-realist lens reveals. Forget the center-left, the sellout Labor hacks who think they can uphold social liberal values even as they keep their devil’s bargain with global white capital. Forget the feminists, who – going by my experience – will settle for imperialism and hot young tradies every bloody time. And forget the Australian working class which forsook socialism for Sinophobia, neoliberalism, and wage rates that left pundits like me can only dream of earning. They can all get stuffed. Australia needs to heed voices like mine, for if it makes the wrong choice and defies China, it will be defenseless and friendless in the shitshow that follows.
Yes, with due regard to Poe’s Law, this is a parody.
Pre-1788 indigenous history is evidently not Merv’s strong suit.
Yeah nah. Lenin included Japan among the imperialist states.
This looks a lot like C. Schmitt and A. Hitler’s notions of Großraum, tbh