Return to Main Menu"As part of this process the elites, while they may mouth concern for the country, have given up thinking in terms of the national interest to pursue an internationalist agenda. This agenda is eroding the foundations of our nation and marginalising the majority, which has less and less say in its destiny.
"The bulk of the media, charges with a watchdog role in the public interest, have become active agents in this process. Academics, artists and others who are supposed to be independent-minded have become propagandists and intellectually corrupt hirelings."
Graeme Campbell and Mark Uhlmann
"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gate is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves among those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very hall of government itself. for the traitor appears not traitor - he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation - he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city - he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be found."
Cicero 42 BC
The idea that there exists a new class, ruling elite that controls, not only by armed force and money, but also by ideas, is viewed, unsurprisingly enough by many of its members as a right wing conspiratorial idea. It is no such thing. The ideas, not only by armed force and money, but also by ideas, is viewed, unsurprisingly enough by many of its members as a right wing conspiratorial idea. It is no such thing. The idea of a ‘new class’, a new ruling class, has, has been discussed by a number of mainstream writers. Christopher Lasch’s The revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy argues that democracy is threatened not by the masses, as Jose Ortega y Gasset though in The Revolt of the Masses (1932), but by the best and the brightest, who have become arrogant internationalists, forming a community of elite professional and managerial contemporaries stretching across the globe, with little sense of civic and moral virtues.
This idea has been expressed by scores of writers since the early 19th century, so this process has been going on for some time (usually in debates over free trade vs protectionism, but in the 20th century over immigration). For example C Wright Mills in the Power Elite and Alvin Gouldner in the Future of the Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, develop this thesis, the latter theorist being used by Katharine Betts in her critique of Australia’s immigration policy.
The new class elites are coercive utopians, a term first used by the social theorist Peter Metzger. They believe that humans are perfectible, human nature is essentially good and that the evils that exist are the products of a corrupt social system. An ideal social order realised. But this ideal has to be imposed - it is not freely and democratically accepted. In particular, coercive utopians see their own culture and society as deeply flawed. This technocratic manipulation of the ordinary people is discussed by John Ralston Saul in his book Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, David Ehrenfeld’s The Arrogance of Humanism, B E Brown, Intellectuals and other traitors and Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals.
Earlier in this chapter we quoted Ian Viner QC claiming that Mainstream values had led to the Holocaust. John Carey in his book The Intellectuals and the Masses has shown that the founders of modern culture viewed the masses as ripe for examination. The masses were viewed as corrupt by such intellectual heroes as George Bernard Shaw, Ezre Pound, D H Lawrence, E M Forster, Virginia Woolf, H G Wells, Aldous Huxley, W B Yeats and others. W B Yeats recommended the proto-Nazi philosopher Nietzsche as a counteractive to the spread of democratic vulgarity.
George Bernard Shaw believed that Neitzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra was the first modern book that can be set above the Psalms of David. And Nietzsche’s view of the masses: ‘Many too many are born, and they hang on their branches much too long. I wish a storm would come and shake all this rottenness and wormeatenness from the tree. Great writers such as Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesses and Andre Gide are all in debt to the novelist Knut Hamsun, but Hamsun was a supporter of Adolf Hitler and said in a obituary of Hitler that he was a warrior for man kind, and a prophet of the gospel of justice for all nations. His fate was to arise in a time of unparalleled barbarism which finally felled him. All of that from one of the so-called great writers of the 20th century!
Yet the view of the masses as unliving is made by T S Eliot in the Wateland and is an idea accepted by George Orwell (who should have known better) and D H Lawrence. Lawrence’s correspondence is full of holocaust-style remarks. (‘Three cheers for the inventors of poison gas.) He looked forward to the extermination of the human race. Nietzche, a hero of the postmodern movement which dominates the arts faculties in Western universities, said in The Will to Power: the great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men.
He looked forward to the same annihilation of millions of failures. In that same book, Nietzsche proposes the establishment of international racial unions to rear a tremendous aristocracy so that the will of philosophical men of power and artistic tyrants will be made to endure for millennia. Carey sees Hitler’s Mein Kampf as firmly rooted in the intellectual traditions of the time. Ian Viner QC could not be more mistaken.
New class elites or cognitive elites are creatures primarily created by university system. In the American context George Roche in his book The Fall of the Ivory Tower argues that the entire system of American higher education is academically, morally, and quite literally going bankrupt. He identifies two villains: (1) the radicals of the 1960s who have now become the liberal-left establishment and given the US multiculturalism and political correctness and (2) a federal government motivated by economic rationalist concerns. The same is truth of Australia.
Further, if Roche is right that much of the research being done and published is worth little or nothing is true of the US, then it is certainly true of Australian academic work in the arts, social sciences and humanities which remain essentially a neo-colonial US product. In both societies the intelligentsia have viciously attacked the societies that have supported them and fed them.
In the Australian context, John Carroll has written of the treason of the upper middle class’ a remissive class fuelled by paranoia and hatred. The rebellion of the 1960s expressed itself in direct attacks on the institutions of traditional Australia. They are the generation who regard John Lennon as a profound philosopher. According to Professor R Gaita (Australian Catholic University) there is an untruthfulness that pervades nearly all the institutions which we now call universities. M C Conner correctly observes that our universities are horrible lefty, authoritarian places brimful of nonsense subjects and crazy PC rules.
The qualification that we would add to this is that the left/right distinction is no longer of mush significance since the so-called fall of communism. We have instead a new religion of internationalism - of anti-white racism, multiculturalism, feminism and Asianisation - that can be approached either from the dreadlock direction (Hanson’s rent-a-crowd arts graduate dole bludgers) or from above, (the elite economic rationalist men-in-slimy-grey-suits). There is little philosophical difference between them. In both cases they hate old Anglo-Australia and wish to see it destroyed.
Les Murry, Australia’s most reveres living poet has recognised this in his award-winning Subhuman Redneck Poems, In the poem The Suspension of Knock he speaks of the very uniqueness of a racism. Unfortunately Murry interprets Pauline Hanson as betraying us by turning the debate in to racism, indicating that Murry himself is duped by the new class.
It is not possible or necessary to conduct a detailed study of the operation of the Australian new class but we shall give three brief examples to illustrate our these. From the left, consider that case of Manning Clark. At the time of writing, a debate rages about whether Clark was a soviet agent of influence, being recipient of the Soviet Union’s highest honour, the Order of Lenin. These revelations were published by Brisbane’s The Courier-Mail on August 24, 1996. Following Colebatch we believe that it is probable that Clark was a Soviet agent of influence but not a Soviet spy.
Clark’s History promoted the view that Australia was a nation of bastards a kingdom of emptiness and that its traditions and values are worthless. This new class view of history survives today in Paul Keatings anti-Anglo, anti-English view of Australian history. Colebatch notes that in the hypothesis that Manning Clark deliberately attempted to explain a lot: the nonsense about The Man from Snowy River being participation in a blood sacrifice, the recurring image of the sinister people in black, the sneer at Jewish money lenders. Indeed Clark’s anti-Semitic comments should be an embarrassment to the left but their hypocrisy and deceit is so great that they choose to ignore it.
Clark’s real damage was to Australian history. Beyond this Clark had a particularly strong hatred for science and technology. He was in bed with the radical feminists (God help him) who believe that white male science is an organ of oppression and domination and that technology rapes nature. In his Boyer Lectures of 1976, he sees the coming of the white man to Australia as a curse for the land. Clark contributed to the situation where Australian history has become Australian anti-history, a historical revisionism of feminism, Asianism, multiculturalism and Aboriginalism.
Consider for another example of the new class in action Professor Allan Patience’s recent contribution to Quadrant. Professor Patience has the Chair in Political Science and Asian Studies at the Victoria University of Technology, Melbourne.
He has been held (according to his article) academic appointments in the UK, Japan, Singapore, China and Burma. His article is an attempt to come to grips with a failed love affair with a Japanese male ‘Y’. Patience claims that his story is taken by Patience to be significant in the way it challenges Australian multiculturalism as we seek to be part of, or remain apart from, Asia. The details of the failed relationship need not concern us.
Patience takes some of the blame but puts the rest upon the yoke of Australia’s hard culture, characterised by secularism, populism, racism and masculinism. Well, is any of this true? Australia has one of the highest male youth suicide rates in the world - even Germaine Greer is coming to believe Australian males may be in trouble. Second, as Sydney is one of the homosexual capitals of the world, it hardly seems reasonable to say that Australia is not tolerant in this respect. Third, Asian culture has a much harder, almost cruel, view of women’s destiny and social place.
Things have not changed much in modern times. According to a report by the UN’s Children’s Fund, Progress of Nations (1996), SE Asia has the world’s most malnourished children. The Asia Syndrome is not due to poverty - sub - Saharan Africa is poorer. The report places the blame on the poor care given to women in Asian societies. In our opinion it is an instructive failure of Patience’s essay that he does not consider whether Asian cultures are hard, instructive because in the new cargo cult religion of Asianisation, all that is Asian is sacred and all that belongs to Anglo-Australia is evil.
For a final example of the new class in action, consider the recent writings of Robert Manne, editor of Quadrant, and the voice of ethnically assimilated Australian neo-conservatism. He claims in his November 4 article in The Australian that Hanson is our first anti-politician representing hostility to parliamentary politics. Hanson has negative charisma, she is painfully inarticulate and ignorant. Manne and his ilk are of course the opposite. In fact he seems to support a form of Platonic authoritarianism where an enlightened elite rule over the benighted mass of serfs (Opinion, The Australian, December 16, 1996).
As a consequence of the Hanson debate not only Australians of Asian birth but all Australians are likely to be harmed. But there is no problem of Hanson developing a populist right party because if she tries the danger to us of her limitations will eventually become transparent. Manne is sympathetic to the Hawke position of explaining to Anglo-Australia why they have reached their use by date. Well aware of the gulf of opinion between the liberal-left-ethnic ruling elite and the ordinary people, Manne’s support comes down firmly in favour of his class, as would be expected.
Having outlined the position of Hanson’s critics and having conducted an imminent or internal critique of their views, showing their international inconsistency and irrationality, we turn now to the task of giving positive support for Hanson’s position. In the next chapter we address the separate issue of the Aboriginal Question and Mabo.
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