Allied Credulity Paved Way to conflict
For the past 117 years Germany has known how to extract motor spirit fuel from the air. This on top of the fact that Germany had invented in the first place the combustion engine motor vehicle carried a definite implication: Germany would introduce for the mass market the alternative to fossil fuels.
The opposite happened. Germany instead became dependent on fossil fuel energy derived from Russia.
The original belief that Germany would introduce alternative fuels stemmed from Germany’s domination of chemical synthesis giving it 70 percent of the world market and giving the world such names as BASF, Hoechst, Bayer and the I.G Farben combine.
After World War 2 the Allies were determined to install in the Axis powers a system of government which would eliminate dictatorships. Proportional representation was the solution.
It eliminated autocrats. But ushered in an element that would reveal its peril only much later on.
In the meantime Germany started to construct nuclear power stations, a construction that would become greatly accelerated after the Middle East oil shocks.
The growing die Grünen now started conflating the existing German peace movement with anti nuclear environmentalism.
As die Grünen grew so did its determination to shut down nuclear power, a campaign that was only thwarted in its total success when the last remaining reactors were saved from closure by the February 24 Ukraine invasion.
Even during the height of the Soviet era in the partitioned Germany the allies consistently underrated the German Ostpolitik doctrine which actively sought a rapprochement with the Soviets.
Then came the fall of the Berlin Wall and with it the acceleration of die Grünen. Germany became increasingly dependent on imported energy. It was cost-effective and successive coalition governments dare not challenge die Grünen because it increasingly held the balance of power.
The reunified Germany far from releasing the power of its chemical and engineering sectors to implement alternative fuels had simply decided to use Russia’s.
Global academia and think tanks always failed to factor in Germany’s thirst for Russian hydrocarbons. Its defeat in World War 2 was a result of operation Barbarossa designed to capture Russia’s carboniferous resources.
Neither did the West’s academia and think tanks care to look too closely into the way Germany’s commercial weltanschauung far from engaging in a united effort to synthesize fuel now simply dealt with China in development of the automotive and engineering sectors.
Indeed, many would be surprised if they knew how many high-branded premium face value German products are in fact machined in China.
Neither did these same think tanks and research “units” care to wonder too deeply why after its 2014 seizure of the Crimea and resulting sanctions Russia went ahead and tried to appropriate the remaining area of Ukraine it hadn’t already captured,
The reason was that president Putin knew by then that even into the longer term Russia was sanction-proof, thanks to an unparalleled era of credulity in Europe and the United States.
The February 24 invasion blew apart the set of deliberately cultivated Western politico media illusions about Germany.
One of these was the belief rigidly held by this same class that Germany’s environmental movement in its political guise was entirely a force for good.
February 24 severely dented also the media class extreme reluctance to challenge China on anything at all. Even now a shunned topic is the linkage between the Beijing Olympics at one end and the United States midterm elections this year as the likely window of opportunity for staging the invasion.
Ukraine tore away the myth fostered in the United States that China by virtue of trade would become a benign force. After February 24 there emerged a new trade bloc, the Russia-Soviet one.
Nowhere is this credulity more evident than about president Putin himself.
Russia’s post Stalinist rulers governed under a first-among-equals arrangement. The Nikita Kruschev (pictured) troika was an example . After some initial window dressing for the benefit of the West Putin like Stalin ensured that he ruled alone.
Bismarck coined the term Realpolitik. In the last 30 years Germany became the focus of what now is so cruelly revealed as the diametric opposite in the form of Unrealpolitik, wishful thinking detached from evolving realities.
This illusory politik was though masked by a piety that effectively deflected any criticism or commentary as to the eventual destination which was ultimately revealed on February 24.
Articles of faith cross Tasman Sea and embed in General Election run up
In 2017 Scott Morrison brandished a lump of coal in Australia’s Federal Parliament.
Nowadays the prime minister might prefer instead to wave a cup of baby’s blood in front of the assembled legislators.
In 2019 as children and adults at an Oceania conference wallowed up to their waists in pools of water Mr Morrison was on the receiving end of an admonition from New Zealand premier Jacinda Ardern to “explain himself” in regard to climate warming.
A few years before such a thinly veiled scolding would have had panjandrums in Wellington and in Canberra scurrying back and forth uttering sentences beginning with “What she really meant to say was……..”
This time there was no such fluttering. The comment was allowed to stand where it was, as it was, with no backsliding.
So what happened in the brief time when as Federal treasurer Scott Morrison waved his chunk of anthracite and that moment two years later when as prime minister he the senior trans Tasman partner received from his junior partner in the arrangement a condescending ticking-off?
In the intervening two years which saw Mr Morrison achieve his “miraculous” and “impossible” general election victory there occurred a societal shift, a tipping point traversed.
In this now recognisable turn of the ethical tide there emerged now a knowledge worker urban service sector craving to occupy the international ideological high mountain tops, the ones on which to display a passion for the betterment of the world as a whole.
In Australia the first to grasp the new puritanism was Malcolm Turnbull who as prime minister was responsible in 2016 for Australia’s retro-fitted French nuclear submarines.
As zany as the decision seemed at the time, and even more so later, Mr Turnbull saw that the nuclear-as-evil electoral talisman had crossed the Tasman and become firmly wedged in Australia’s own progressive psyche, the one dedicated to republicanism and other such stagey modernisms.
Scott Morrison similarly saw this mutation to what had hitherto been known as the environmental movement. But he realised that in its climate format and that however fashionable it was becoming the Australia middle class was still worried by the cost of it.
So filling the gap left by a captivated Labour Party he put price tags on the progressive zeal and won the impossible election.
The ideological waves from New Zealand breaking on Australia’s shores have now eroded this pocket-book approach.
In economic terms these progressive waves have become inelastic. Price does not matter. The elites want the product which New Zealand has taught them is globalist prestige and recognition. Progressivism had entered the economic zone of premium pricing. The greater the cost. The greater the appeal and perceived benefit.
This is why Mr Morrison now talks of his Labour opposition’s Big Government threat. He cannot be seen to denigrate and demean anything on the climate-social justice axis. The urban activist electorate will turn on him avenging the desecration of their recently acquired belief systems.
Back now to Tuvalu.
It’s symbolism as a political hinge was missed at the time because along with everyone else in Australia Mr Morrison failed to see that the New Zealand prime ministerial remarks were aimed at prestige-conferring globalist institutions as much as the locals.
In the event this unseen yet pivotal episode in Australian electoral progressivism was itself drowned out in an ensuing media-political comedy. Broadcaster Alan Jones said Mr Morrison should "shove a sock down her throat”, following Ms Ardern's critique.
Mr Morrison never adept with abstract altruistic issues now instead chided Mr Jones.
The straight-taking broadcaster was described by Mr Morrison as being "very disappointing" and "way out of line".
Also missed at the time was the way in which Mr Morrison had allowed himself also to be slickly backed into the social justice corner, as well as the climate “crisis” one.
He was told that he had failed to do his “bit” for the population of these said to be submerging islands.
Mr Morrison by way of further explanation reminded everyone on the atoll that he had two daughters and in this paternal capacity was necessarily involved in sea levels in the Pacific.
In the event Mr Jones personified the turning point in Australia’s ideological balance
It was a changing of the guard utterly unobserved at the time.
In came an imploring, dewy-eyed era of global sensitivity and collective loftily visible self-sacrifice.
Out went the winner-take-all era of bluntly stated sports metaphor performance targets along with the ruggedly expressed emphasis on method and order and individuality.
Malcolm Turnbull, the first to discern the way in which New Zealand’s ideology centrepieces such as no-nuclear had penetrated Australian electoral politics, now also put his boot into Mr Jones describing the broadcaster as an "appalling misogynist."
The backwash continues to break on Australian shores. In the last few months News Corp in a carefully planned about-face suddenly converted and became a climate change believer and advocate. Swept away too was Alan Jones.
Target Marketeers take advantage of Atonement Cult
In today’s age of the apology proliferating atonements are encouraging another fast-growth fashion in which commercial interests seek opportunities to publicly demonstrate cohesion with diversity and equality.
Advertisers are now on the look-out for mainstream media transgressions that allow them to mass signal their own virtue by withdrawing their patronage from selective broadcast programmes and even from print titles.
Their target demographic is composed of a university-catchment in its later teens and on the verge of entering middle age, the advertising agency prime target sector.
In order to reach this cherished segment the Wellington daily the Dominion Post for example devoted an issue to apologising for itself
It ardently excoriated itself for its value judgements throughout its history that transgressed contemporary diversity/equality criteria.
This contrived atonement edition was ridiculed at the time by the demographic that it was not in fact aimed at.
But it struck a spectacular chord with its intended target market, the graduate one, the cultural elite, the segment with disposable income, money to spare.
In media terms an apology until a few years ago was a quasi-legal device used to stave off a legal action or to mitigate, soften one.
The old please-forgive-us apologies were handled gingerly because they were deemed to call into question the reliability, integrity, of the media operation as a whole.
Now, and in their promotional manifestation the apology is embraced with the same enthusiasm with which in its legal context it had once been shunned.
The now-routine institutional apology trend technique blinds editorialists to the danger that it poses for them.
This is because advertisers now use it to reach the impressionable much-desired younger graduate segment of the purchasing population.
Advertisers actively seek programmes where someone is likely to put their foot in it, just so they are seen to withdraw from backing this same programme and in doing so acquire the resulting plaudits from this same high-minded premium purchasing segment.
In the official and governmental realm meanwhile the apology proclamation has become the standard public relations marketing tool allowing politicians and their departments to quit something from the past and thus unencumbered to market the new replacement policy and approach.
Brisk and perfunctory it nonetheless has the effect of conveying the required level of hand-wringing to those who hitherto had troublesomely and noisily believed themselves to have been wronged.
The mainstream media collectively and uncritically supports the officially approved diversity and equality doctrines
The demonstrable enthusiasm of this community of interest fuels the fervour which now marketing agencies take advantage of.
Now and in its politico-media usage the apology means to “cave-in” on something, the opposite of its original Latin meaning in which it meant quite the opposite, to “defend” this or that.
Thus the slogan Apologia Pro Vita Sua once meant defending ones past actions, and certainly not regretting them, the current interpretation.
Target marketeers grasped the ecclesiastical implications of the word as a technique of signalling to the high-earning and younger impressionable buying classes the corresponding righteous intentions of their clients, and thus of their products.
The journalistic community is only now waking up to the distant rumbling of the apology avalanche which threatens practitioners who go off-piste, off the beaten path of conformity either accidentally or deliberately.
Leading food and solutions company Alliance Group today announced an operating result of $8 million for the year ending 30 September 2018 on the back of a substantial lift in payments to farmer shareholders.
An innovative software company that shows the world how to understand what lies beneath the land and the oceans has won the Supreme Award at the 2018 New Zealand International Business Awards.
Emirates is gearing up to launch the world’s first “biometric path” which will offer its customers a smooth and truly seamless airport journey at the airline’s hub in Dubai International airport.
Blockchain is helping to fight the fakes
17 Oct: 11:14 | New Zealand Steel has paid a 17 percent premium for a blocking stake in distributor Steel & Tube Holdings, the latest move in an ongoing tussle for the Lower Hutt-based steel products supplier . Read More . . >
World-first verification framework takes premium Māori products to the Chinese market.
New Zealand kiwifruit grower Marcus Wilkins is looking offshore in an attempt to see the variety, which bears his name, finally start the journey to reach its full potential in the global market.