So, our young people are increasingly in favour of a republic? Help them pack for the Democratic Republic of Korea, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or any other number of republics where the people there wish they lived here.
It’s time we stopped this nonsense before we undo years of advancement that enabled people in the West to live longer, happier, healthier lives.
It’s time we stopped kowtowing to useful idiots.
An article in The Australian recently entitled Support for republic on the rise was probably click-bait (I wouldn’t be surprised) but I was livid. My comment on the article about our young people’s support for a republic was:
‘I hope I die before that happens. Then the useful idiots can do whatever they want with our once great nation.’
To which someone replied:
‘Amen, amen, amen.’
Which made me realise that ‘the dead lay hold of the living’ and I should not give up this privilege so readily.
Karl Marx would have had us believe that we should break free of the chains that bind us to religion, commodity fetishism (where, effectively, we have been trained to ignore the value of labour in production), and our forebears’ ideas about the good society.
And then I realised that Marx didn’t want us to live in accordance with what our forebears arrived at through their own struggle. Marx wanted us to follow the useful idiots.
No, Marx, I refuse to follow your program. I refuse to kowtow to your utopian ideas that have only resulted in human misery.
I immediately thought of those academics who are now effectively antisemitic, pro-Palestinian, socialist, and hell-bent on using public monies to reverse the situation that Marx decried, where conservatives would:
‘…from a hundred professorial chairs, disseminate this dead thing as a living thing, direct it against the living thing, for the purpose of stifling it.’
The truth is that humans have perpetuated their difficult existence by learning from those who came before them. But the Wokerati are trying to use Marx’s ideas to turn us against ourselves.
Which leads me to those ‘useful idiots’ who are helping our enemies to infiltrate our societies and to stifle our free-thinking behaviours by wielding our liberties as a double-edged sword.
Those who advocate for a republic deny the foundational historical processes that enabled their freedom of thought in the first place. Let alone that they have arrived at ways to re-enslave themselves through the very freedoms they inherited from their forebears.
Without the Western tradition, these people would never have been free enough to arrive at such a treasonous position. They would have been burned at the stake or purged during the pogrom.
Nowadays, such people have become the ‘useful idiots’ who support our enemies.
But try calling the useful idiots ‘treasonous’ and the label will not stick.
The interesting thing is that those who support proscribed terrorist organisations (or refuse to proscribe organisations that are clearly terrorists) are the perpetrators of a double standard that works in their useful idiot favour.
Swimming coaches that make unfortunate comments in favour of other teams are ‘treasonous’, but those who hate our country, our rule of law, our Judeo-Christian heritage, and anything else about the country we built, are somehow not treasonous?
Hizb ut-Tahrir, a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK, is somehow just fine and dandy in Australia?
The Albanese government has turned our world topsy-turvy.
In the meantime, those of us whose families toiled our golden soil (and may even share a heritage with those who lived here before Europeans) and only ever wanted to be free citizens in a fair and just country, are somehow the perpetrators of all that is bad in nations elsewhere. It is ridiculous.
Yet we are expected to kowtow to this nonsense.
The act of kowtowing is a Chinese custom of submission. Lord Curzon, in his book Travels with a Superior Person, wrote that the kowtow was a:
‘…form of obeisance that had figured so largely in the diplomatic struggle between Europe and China for two centuries, and the final abandonment of which signified the latter’s defeat. The performer of the kowtow kneels thrice on the ground, and on each occasion knocks his forehead three times on the floor, in sign of subjection to the Sovereign. From one point of view, it may be said to mark the extremity of deference, from another the maximum of humiliation.’
Our British heritage ended the humiliating practice of the kowtow. Yet here we are beset by Woke rituals that, in the space of less than a generation, require us to endure similar humiliations as part of our employment or anything to do with the formal public sphere.
We may not be knocking our heads on the floor, but being forced to participate in Woke rituals is no less toxic.
Key to learning how to be an effective leader, a topic I have taught for over twenty years, is to comprehend that getting people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t do requires a voluntary response to our attempt at influencing them. Anything less is unethical.
Yet the Wokerati have adopted a socialist approach to consensus that brainwashes our youth and forces adults who disagree to kowtow under threat of cancellation or dismissal.
Such a system never works for long.
As soon as those behind the Berlin Wall had even a whiff of freedom, within hours the East German authorities could not hold back the tide. As a result, the 74-year-old Soviet Union became undone in the space of only two years.
That’s because socialism doesn’t work. That’s because you can’t teach people to live as socialists. That’s because socialism isn’t fair or equitable and it stifles innovation which is central to improving living standards. People don’t want to be socialists. Just like Australians don’t want to be republicans. They want to be free.
Up until now, we have been free, and our constitutional monarchy has served us well. Only the socialists want a republic. And if we keep allowing those useful idiots who would abuse our freedoms to reinstate the kowtowing our forebears rejected, then we only have ourselves to blame.
Dr Michael de Percy@FlaneurPolitiqis a political scientist and political commentator. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Chartered Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (CILTA), and a Member of the Royal Society of NSW. He is National Vice President of the Telecommunications Association, Chairman of the ACT and Southern NSW Chapter of CILTA, and a member of the Australian Nuclear Association. Michael is a graduate of the Royal Military College, Duntroon and was appointed to the College of Experts at the Australian Research Council in 2022.
