My Take | Old Australian politicians speak truth about sleepwalking into war
- The manufactured ‘China threat’ is really about Taiwan’s hidden drive for independence and America’s need to preserve regional dominance
Magic and politics, if you think about it, are very similar. Both involve making ostentatious moves to distract their audiences from seeing what really happens on stage to produce the desired trick. That’s why “sleight of hand” is such a useful political metaphor.
Those who break the magician’s code of silence are frowned upon. It’s the same with retired politicians who have no filter and speak their mind. Opprobrium and criticism inevitably rain down on them because, to the dismay of the paid media hacks and political apparatchiks, they dare state the obvious and commonsensical.
I have grown increasingly fond of those old pols from down under who, in retirement, find it too alarming not to speak up against their country sleepwalking into a hot war with China on the say-so of Washington, with the full connivance of the Australian political establishment.
First there was Paul Keating, the former Labor prime minister, who made mincemeat of the self-important hacks playing at national security against China at the National Press Club of Australia.
“If the worst thing that faces the people of Taiwan would be what prevails in Hong Kong today, then we haven’t got a cause for war,” he said. “I’d like to see the national security law no longer apply in Hong Kong, but Hong Kong still has substantially its own system and if that were the outcome that applied in Taiwan, then I can live with that.”