Andrew Roberts - The Legacy of the English-Speaking Peoples

ladies and gentlemen it is a great honor to be invited to address you this morning and thank you very much indeed Chris for those kind words it's quite true that my book got to number two on the bestseller list beaten only by Michael Jackson if you want in a single Colonel the collapse of Western civilization maybe in speaking to you about the legacy of the english-speaking peoples there is obviously just in the title of that a rather doleful lapidary side to it the overtones aren't good you don't care about people's legacies until their dying are we dying this is one of the questions that I'm going to be trying to answer hi to like Greg go back to the 1688 revolution for the explanation of British greatness once also of course it was picked up and glorified and made so much of by the revolutionaries in America in 1776 so they consciously looking back to the Whig revolutionaries of 1688 created their revolution as well which together once the two revolutions were were completed and successful explains why the english-speaking peoples became so so powerful but does it still exist does this this power of the english-speaking people still exist of course it was that dreadful old fraud Mahatma Gandhi who claimed who when asked what he thought of Western civilization answered in the conditional it would be a good idea it was taken up that that that joke by all the self-hating Westerners and the structuralist s-- and the post modernists and it has infused into our zeitgeist the idea that and the moral of equivalents of course that there's something that we have to be profoundly apologetic about that we should feel original sin and guilty cents towards our civilization and this from from Mahatma Gandhi who who betrayed the untouchables and was a disaster when it came to his own movement in India managing to hold it back about 20 years who told the Jews that they ought to be able to trust in the best ending of Adolf Hitler and and he told his wife that he couldn't have sex with her because he wanted to sleep with a German bodybuilder this is the person who instead is created as the as the exemplar of the of the morality of the of the opponents of Western civilization so looking at the questions that Greg brought up and taking them one step further when he writes about the importance of representative institutions yes we have been tremendously fortunate that due to 1688 and 1776 we have got had a situation where people don't take over countries Western released english-speaking peoples but by which I'd like to make the definition of those countries where they're the majority of their people speak English as their first language so Australia Canada America New Zealand Great Britain of course Ireland and the West Indies in those countries people do not come to power because of armed soldiers at their back yes we've had soldiers of course we've had Winston Churchill and JFK and anti Roosevelt Willington but none of these people have come to power as a result of military cooze or because of their because of their military strength yes in continental Europe in the 20th century there has hardly been a single country where that hasn't happened let alone Africa or Asia and you constantly see men who hold power because of naked force in a sense this is obviously just down to geography Britain has not been invaded successfully tip since since 1688 really and and before that long before then and those 22 miles of saltwater have prevented to be the 14th Napoleon the Kaiser Adolf Hitler from capturing London in a way that if they hadn't been there would undoubtedly have been the case so since 1789 when Britain has had this this long story of constitutional monarchy unbroken constitutional monarchy France has had two empires three monarchies and five Republic's the assemblée nationale their their power Parliament has been opened and closed more times than a dodgy street venders suitcase you then move on as Greg mentioned to the rule of law the vital importance of the rule of law the evolving common law by precedent from from Magna Carta onwards if anything we are perhaps getting too much controlled by the rule of law and therefore lawyers no less than 6% of the American economy is bound up with its with its legal system it's an litigiousness has gone completely crazy to a degree that people threw vote through fear of negligence suits I prefer actually on occasions not to undertake the task so that they are supposed to and so we also see it of course with this excessive legalism in international affairs the idea that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were illegal because they weren't even though they have been passed by the parliaments of every country and and written signed by the by their heads of state no you had to have the United Nations also also providing its stamp on this otherwise it's illegal we're getting to the point where when the gala tea is is making us weaker and stronger as society's religious toleration which which Greg mentioned so rightly has been a tremendous help to the english-speaking people's there haven't been pogroms in the apart from one small attack on Jews in in Ireland Limerick in Ireland in 1900 there hasn't been a persecution religious persecution amongst the english-speaking peoples which is a tremendous strength of them and when one thinks of the incredible there's been prejudice of course but not persecution nothing like we haven't had the equivalent of the German cult or Kampf or the equivalent of the Dreyfus case thank God and the result has been that when it comes to that massive brain drain that took place between after Adolf Hitler's rise to power from January 1933 we were able we in the Western world were able to take some of the most brilliant German scientists of their day the people who in the end of course created the weapon that ended the Second World War I once asked General Sir Ian Jacob who was Winston Churchill's assistant military secretary why it was that we won the war and he said you know I think but I often think about this yeah I think it really comes down to the fact that our German scientists were cleverer than their German scientists and if you look at it the numbers are astonishing between 1901 and Hitler coming to power in 1933 the Americans only won five Nobel prizes to Germany's 25 in the second half of the 20th century however once this break blame brain drain had happened once this great flight of the Jewish intellect to the english-speaking peoples many of it of course to Los Alamos in New Mexico had taken place in those next 50 years between 1950 and to the year 2000 Germany won only 16 Nobel prizes to America's sixty-seven that was the extent of the brain drain and it came as a result of our religious toleration and indeed Germany's religious in toleration you see also in free speech the whole concept of free speech in the way in which after the American First Amendment and our also after the growing laws helping freedom of the press that has proved a tremendously important aspect in fighting in fighting corruption in the American continent of course when you look for the two places which have worst political corruption Louisiana and Quebec neither of them were colonized by the English the free market - is a is something as Greg also pointed out something that stemmed from the from the 1688 revolutions and was picked up very much by the by the Americans especially after 1776 although the english-speaking peoples only make up 5 sorry 7.5 percent of the world's population they produce no less than 35 percent of the world's GDP this the the sense that universities are unshackled unbridled intellectually that they believe in a in an open interplay of ideas these things have meant that the english-speaking peoples have since 1900 been in the absolute forefront the absolute cutting edge of all of the great revolutions the automotive aeronautics computer technology finance biotech IT internet you name it the english-speaking peoples have up until now at least always been in the forefront now we didn't invent these laws these these great things yes we had our revolution was it our revolution it was a Dutch revolution events in in a sense as a Dutch invasion but welcomed over of course by the Whig our stock rats and merchants we didn't invent law that was the Romans we didn't invent democracy that was the Greeks we didn't invent Protestantism it was the Germans we didn't invent the Enlightenment that was the French and the Scots we didn't invent capitalism that again was the Dutch but we did adapt them to the values of the 1688 and 1776 revolutions and so when in my view we look at the continuity between the British Empire and the American Republic and it is a case of a battle being passed when we look at the Roman M and the roman republic only historians and pedants and the two aren't mutually exclusive I actually you will argue that there is a huge difference between the two really the difference is rather like the difference between the the British Empire and the British and the American Imperium that has come and of course one of the great things that has has helped us has the english-speaking peoples and and continues to and will in the future I believe is the fact that in although England itself only covers 1.3 percent of the world's land surface its language is understood by spoken by nearly 25 percent of the world's population and is on the verge now of becoming the world language one doesn't like to use the phrase lingua franca that's her but you know there in in in France you have the Lua Toba which was probably passed in 1994 which attempted to make illegal the public uses of the words in signs and and also sometimes on radio and television of words like a sex symbol low weekend and so on and of course it it collapsed in in ignominy and ridicule our language our tongue which is so supremely adaptable which has been turned into a pigeon tongue tongue all over the world is now being taught to more Chinese people than there are English speakers today an astonishing and and in some ways rather worrying statistic of which more later now all of this civilization this language law freedom and and so on is utterly worthless unless we are prepared to fight to defend it and on four great occasions since nineteen hundred attacks have been made on the english-speaking peoples and their primacy their global hegemony usually coming out of the blue the first of course was the was that made by willkommen Prussia Germany as as it had been for only thirty or forty years in 1914 then after that you had the Nazi aggression under Adolf Hitler and Japanese aggression in the Pacific then after that the cold war almost immediately afterwards the threat posed by another set of totalitarians the Soviet communists and after that obviously a post 9/11 the fourth great assault on the english-speaking people's by the again totalitarian Islamic fundamentalists entirely unappeasable people we know they're unappeasable because if they're appeasable the French would have appeased them by it seems to me that the witness of history is testament that it's almost never wealth of which we have a lot in the english-speaking people's of course but willpower that decides these these great struggles the Romans were richer than the Huns the Ottomans were richer than the Turks and the Mongols the Bolsheviks were were far poorer than the Romanovs the Nazis had virtually no money in 1923 to 1933 and yet it was the one it was the group that had the aggression and the revolutionary capacity and the willpower and the ability to take to take on these much more wealthy powerful groups that eventually prevailed and in a sense of course they're attacked because greatness naturally leads to attacks the Roman Empire was constantly being attacked the British Empire hardly had a had a year of complete peace the somewhere or another they were going to be attacks and now of course America and the rest of the english-speaking peoples are under attack in the Churchill say it might be the Baron of all vices but it's also one of the most common and to heat the top dog is a natural part of the human condition there's a great quotation from Lord Curzon who when Viceroy of India wrote to Lord Salisbury's nephew the sorry son-in-law the First Lord of the Admiralty Lord sell burn and he said I never spend five minutes either sorry I never spend five minutes in inquiring if we are unpopular the answer is written in red ink on the map of the globe no I would count everywhere on the individual hostility of all the great powers but would endeavor to arrange things that they were not united against me and the first condition of success in such a policy is in my opinion to be as strong in small things as in big constantly to seek popularity it seems to me is unmanly and ultimately self-defeating policy in a great power too much introspection is unhealthy even degenerate the attacks on the english-speaking people's very often come from out of a clear blue sky and they've often started with early defeats we see all that at black week in the opening round of the borough war the success of the initial success of the Schlieffen Plan which was only stopped several months in in 1914 then of course the blitzkrieg against Poland in 1939 the attack on Pearl Harbor the both the Berlin Airlift and the building of the Berlin Wall in 1948 and 1961 respectively came out of clear blue skies the Korean North North Korean invasion of the South the Suez Crisis nobody was expecting the sudden nationalization of the Suez Canal on the 26th of July 1956 the Falklands one that one we woke up one Saturday morning to find that Argentina had attacked Falklands the first Gulf War again was was not flagged up to anyone any more than was 9/11 there's Paul Wolfowitz said the most surprising thing about surprise attacks is that we're still surprised by them occasionally the english-speaking peoples have when they have seen obvious attacks about to be made upon them have they have attacked first in 1801 we sank Nelson sank the Danish fleet in Copenhagen without any declaration of war in 1914 Churchill bombed the outer forts of the Dardanelles again without a declaration of war and of course in 1940 the French were actually our allies when they sent when we sank their fleet at Iran so it can be done it's also often that the great power status of of huge empires that are lost not because of some great cataclysmic struggle against another great power but but rather and because there was a small power that is that is testing a great power to the point that it becomes obvious to the world that that great power has in fact lost its status and this is something that we need to to consider when we are when we are trying to be as strong in small things as in big austro-hungarian and austria-hungary and the Serbs the French in Indochina the British Empire at the time of Suez and of course the Russians in Afghanistan it strikes me that if the english-speaking peoples have been more United after the First World War if the United States had absurd isolationism joined the League of Nations and taken part or even taken the lead in vigorous collective action against Nazi Germany from 1933 onwards perhaps that second great conflagration of that century might also have been avoided as it was much of Europe fell prey to fascism as you heard from Greg then those parts that escaped it fell prey to appeasement and pacifism it was German it was Winston Churchill in 1938 who said it is the english-speaking peoples who almost alone keep alike the torch of these things are a powerful incentive to collaboration with the nation's as with individuals if you care deeply for the same things and these things are threatened it is natural to work together to preserve them when the english-speaking peoples are united we tend to win when not sue is being a classic example Vietnam again things have tended not to go so well fortunately in both Iraq and Afghanistan Prime Minister Blair and George Bush and they the Cameron and Gordon Brown before him stood shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the english-speaking peoples in America it cost Tony Blair the Premiership John Howard who in my view is as great I think he's your greatest statesman since Robert Menzies also stood shoulder to shoulder and as he as does Stephen Harper in Canada so today when one looks at the vanguard of the struggle between civilization and barbarism which is on the frontline in Afghanistan where you have 1,500 soldiers one still sees the english-speaking peoples providing the bulk of the foreign troops one hopes that they will prove equal to the challenge of the future that would only be possible if they continue to cleave to the values that made them great yet an even worse existential threat threat than Islamic totalitarian fundamentalism faces them in the future I think Clive Bell's definition of civilization is as good as any taken from his book civilization which was published in 1928 in which he defined it as quote a taste for truth and beauty tolerance intellectual honesty fastidiousness a sense of humor good manners curiosity a dislike of vulgarity brutality and overemphasis freedom from superstition and prudery a fearless acceptance of the good things in life a desire for complete self-expression and a liberal education a contempt for utilitarianism and Philistine ism I believe the fifth great challenge of the future not just to the english-speaking peoples but to Western civilization itself is well underway and it doesn't come from the coming nuclear ization of Iran or the terrorism of al-qaeda viciously destabilizing as both of those undoubtedly are form judged by bells definition and for all its undoubted high civilization in the days of Ming porcelain and the invention of printing today's China is a very far from civilized country and looks set to move yet further away from the kind of civilization as defined by bail in the foreseeable future for should China ever achieve hegemony over our planet something that is certainly not inconceivable on present trends and might well happen in our children's lifetimes if not our own then the prospect for the survival of the legacy of the english-speaking peoples of those liberal values of which Greg and I have been speaking would be terrifyingly bleak all that would stretch forward in the life of this planet would be a new Dark Age in which the global whip hand belonged to one of the most unpleasant totalitarian regimes on today's planet when whose leaders are activated by instinct diametrically opposed to the generous open enlightened ones that I've been describing for the revolutionary peak that the nomenclature that controls China does not believe in any of those values that made the english-speaking people's great except one which is precisely the thing that is presently making them great they despise representative institutions they waive the rule of law they persecute religious faiths and they crush freedom of speech only the free market only to the free market capitalism do they adhere for as long as it serves their purposes and and because it is also nonviolent they can learn from history they do learn from history they are learning from history and they are not making the errors of the past and challenging the english-speaking peoples militarily at least yet instead as the as in oriental martial arts they are using their opponents very strengths in the case our free market beliefs in this case against us and beating us at our own game the english-speaking peoples became powerful since the Industrial Revolution because we produce the goods and services the rest of the world wanted at prices it could afford the Islamic fundamentalist arrest threat the fourth threat that I mentioned but is now I believe containable and will play itself out if we continue to show strength abroad and vigilance at home no it is the fifth threat to the english-speaking peoples from China that might well be the existential one but there's absolutely nothing about human affairs that suggests that democracy must inevitably triumph over dictatorship civilization over barbarism or good over evil as John Stuart Mill warmed in his book on Liberty code it is a piece of idle sentimentality the truth Milly as truth has any inherent power denied to error of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake modern China is the country of the dungeon with its vast hidden gulag complex of political prisoners and of the stake with its world record in the number of people it executes as Amnesty International stated in a recent report extensively arbitrarily and frequently as a result of political interference great civilizations of the past one thinks of the Romans crushed by the by a tiller or the Aztecs and Incas falling before the conquistadores the Spanish Moors expelled by Ferdinand and Isabella they have succumbed to the energy and might of their enemies for multifarious reasons adumbrated by historians such as Gibbon and William Prescott so there's nothing inevitable in the future triumph either of democracy all the english-speaking peoples indeed as Earth's proud empires pass away so they're Emeril tells us it's perhaps more likely that the power of the english-speaking peoples is on the way now two and a half centuries after the Industrial Revolution meanwhile China has entered the 21st century with a burgeoning economy a totalitarian political system of vast army and a regime which boasts the doleful combination of a resentful historical memory and a quiet but implacable determination to succeed if you think I'm merely playing the role of the fat boy in the pic quit pay who wants to make your flesh creep consider these seemingly random facts that I've clerk plucks almost at random from recent news stories which taken singly might not individually amount to much but which I believe that taken together provides us with a scenario for the future that should indeed worry us about how much longer the english-speaking peoples can enjoy their place in the Sun the latest IMF reports that China could be the world's largest economy by 2016 so he's five years away although the accounting for this requires adjustments for the purchasing power of the two countries currencies the date is not that much even when taking that into account The Economist predicts that it'll happen in 2019 for example although the average American is of course 10 times richer than the average Chinese China has 3 trillion of dollars in foreign reserves at the risk of sounding like another HW Seeger who predicted the end of China's long sleep as far back as 1907 in March 2011 China has become the world's leading leading manufacturer by output returning the cont the country to the position it occupied in the early 19th century and ending the United States 110 year run at the top of that of that ranking the next month in April we learned that China's first quarter GDP grew at a higher than expected nine point seven percent we can only dream of numbers like that your outgoing ambassador the Australian outgoing ambassador for Beijing dr. Jeff ray beam has stated in his farewell address that China the Chinese economy will double in the next ten years in the last thirty years China has doubled its GDP three times the only historical precedent for this was Britain in the industrial revolution in America in the last 50 years of the 19th century which doubled their GDP but only once in half a century not thrice in three decades Cardinal Joseph then the former Bishop of Hong Kong and advisor to Pope Benedict on matters Chinese has been speaking up about the way artists lawyers and bloggers have disappeared in China since the Middle Eastern democracy movement took down the Tunisian and Egyptian regimes in February they want a Catholic Church completely obedient to the government he warns and they are succeeding meanwhile the methods used against the non-political nonviolent sect falen gong including mass imprisonment public book burnings beatings cigarette and burnings hot on branding and scores of others other well-documented acts of torture have led to the deaths of over a thousand people torture and ill-treatment remain widespread reports amnesty while in the u.s. the Congressional Women's Caucus has drawn attention to China's quote appalling human rights record and its practice of female infanticide forced abortion and the abortion of female fetuses China also has an appalling environmental record as pollution often goes in hand-in-hand with corruption the Three Gorges Dam project on the Yangtze forced no fewer than 700,000 people to leave their homes yet water quality on one scratch of the river it was discovered was unfit for human consumption and there is now the prospect of the 140 mile stretch of the river along the Three Gorges turning into a giant cesspool consider to China's automatic responses to issues like SARS and avian flu which is to lie and cover up as much as possible a Chinese artist who has only recently been released a couple of last couple of days after three months in jail simply for want for actually naming the children who were killed in a recent Chinese earthquake got three months mad China has the world's largest program of Internet censorship all too often aided by software produced by Western countries in his recent speech to the Shanghai International Film Festival Rupert Murdoch pointed out how China only allows a quota of 20 foreign films to be imported a year and it's never a good sign when you can't collect your Nobel Prize as as new Jarboe was prevented from doing last year because you're banged up in jail for demanding basic human rights with no external military threat to guard against whatsoever China nonetheless maintains People's Liberation Army of over three million men its development of drones building of aircraft carriers and huge increases in defense expenditure is already tipping the balance of power in the South China Seas and creating of course huge volatility in the Spratly the Spratly Islands as well meanwhile China's vastly expanding space program has a very clear military application try to imagine a war in which one power was able to use GPS and its antagonists could not in 2009 the there were a series of attacks cyber attacks against Google and various other American information technology companies and US government corporations and organizations and this was followed by what was called the night dragon cyber attacks on oil and gas companies Australian defense contractors and the u.s. electricity grid who have been attacked now there's no commercial advantage to be gained from attacking the US grid if you wanted commercial advantages if this was being done for money you would do it to to banks and insurance companies and so on but that's not what's happening here in fact this is a case of China flexing its its cyber muscles whether you like it or not history is on our side are threatening Nikita Khrushchev warned a group of Western diplomats in Moscow in 1956 we will bury you recent events should warn us that although the Soviet Union never succeeded in burying the West China might for this has already begun and this time it's being fought by means of trade surpluses low wages and exported unemployment dr. Railly is immensely complacent about all this and thinks overall it's a good thing quote a country that is heavily invested in another country is going is certainly going to feel more secure about that relationship as a result of that investment he says and the Australian Financial Review tells us that dr. Robey will remain in China to pursue business opportunities it sounds fine in theory until one calls that the country that will to mine Germany has as its number one trading partner in 1914 was Great Britain when nie Bevan was asked how he persuaded the doctors leaders to join the National Health Service in 1948 he answered I stuffed their mouths with gold instead of giving us palliatives dr. ray we ought to have reminded us that the study of history is witness to the fact that no nation that doubles its power in ten years there's no nation which has done that without delat aureus knock-on effects to its neighbors sovereignty the world will be a very different and far more uncomfortable place for as the english-speaking people's sorry for the english-speaking people's when China becomes the global top dog power displacing the United States that she's now set to do economically and I believe in the other vital criteria too one can debate exactly when sometime between Pearl Harbor and d-day the British Commonwealth handed the Imperial baton over to the United States or and it taken from but whether whenever it happened at least the success of power spoke our language shared our laws traditions and values and were twice our war tested allies if China does eclipse the United Nations United States in our lifetimes we may come to regard Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger as opening up of China in 1973 not as we do today as a brilliant way of outmaneuvering the USSR in the Cold War and bringing a stable force into the world economy for the first time since the early 1930s but instead the opening of a Pandora's box full of terrible new threats to face mankind apologists for Chinese totalitarianism argue that a country of 1.3 billion cannot be ruled democratically yet neighboring India with 1.15 billion has managed it well enough as the Taiwanese showed when they peacefully brown abroad Kuomintang rule to end on their Island it's nonsense to argue the Chinese people are somehow incapable of working representative institutions the 20th century was called the American Century with some reason but with China's ceaseless saber rattling again Democratic Taiwan her boot on the neck of Tibet threats against Vietnam and the Philippines in the South China Seas and her enabling relationship with North Korea over its nuclear weapons program China's international behavior hardly all goes well for a peaceful chinese century China is now the only Empire left in the world in the sense of a multicultural entity held together by force and soon the most powerful nation in the world will not be a liberal democracy but instead an authoritarian totalitarian nominally communist dictatorship this will invert neva tably call into question where the western-style Liberty really is the best form of government historically rich middle classes have demanded a say in their own government but in the case of China what if they're so happy at this astounding economic growth that they don't want to jeopardize it by importing democracy perhaps the sign of files affirm we must expect many more in our society culture and media because opportunities opportunists always gravitate towards the strong and the powerful all right when they claim that China has no interest in translating its economic power into hard or even soft power that the days of the great khans are over and China its Chinese are too sophisticated and zen-like to lust for backward Western concepts like Imperium and to Germany all I can say is that the witness of history bears testament to this that the when the nation's leaders of a nation find that they can exercise soft or indeed hard power without significant drawbacks they tend to do so China's behavior towards each of its neighbors except of course the psychologically disturbed North Korea suggests that while soft power corrupts hard power will corrupt absolutely you in Australia are on the front line of these terrifying developments in twenty years time there will be 15 cities in China as big as the total Australian population immigration will become a vital estroux indeed a weapon and if all your business is done with China the moment you have the majority of it is especially in your in your growing areas of resources if your mouths are stuffed with gold and you find you will find it hard to use China's demands to export its population and that the old cry of racist will be used against you when you try foreign direct investment in Australia from China has grown 12 times between mid 2007 and mid 2009 your Foreign Investment Review Board has accepted 230 proposals worth sixty billion dollars but only imposed any conditions on six of them I'm not going to go into the details of Josh Frydenberg warning over foreign purchases of great tracts of Australia or what WikiLeaks told us about bhp in my view being very patriotic in lobbying against China ko but at least they show that there are some people in Australia who are cognizant of what is happening the Chinese are beating us at our own game capitalism and as yet we have no plan B of course there are grounds for hope that the Chinese threat might include before my dystopian vision becomes a reality only last week there were riots in three provinces with cars being set on fire although they were met with murderous force from a regime that has no intention of apologizing for killing five thousand of its own citizens in the capital's central square on one day as Gideon Rachman recently pointed out in the Financial Times the US has a global reach and a technological sophistication the church China is nowhere near matching the u.s. is also ahead on soft power China as yet has no equivalents to Hollywood Silicon Valley or the American Dream as yet moreover there are 118 boys Boyett born in China for every hundred girls in 2010 which is an increase on the two thousand in balance so in about 20 to 25 years time there will be not enough brides for one fifth of today's baby boys with potentially hugely destabilizing social consequences as well as demographic problems China faces formidable political regional environmental and ethnic ones of course and presumably its present astonishing 8 to 10 percent annual growth rates must tear off at some point China's seemingly inexorable rise to me is no reason that we should make her path to greatness easier or quicker indeed it should be a reason for the West to the day when China overtakes us yet President Obama pursues a foreign policy that denies the existence of rivals acknowledging only partners it's the 1968 Woodstock approach to international relations in which strangers are merely friends you haven't met yet to treat China like that is impossibly naive far from trying to put off that dismal day we Avari only overtaking the english-speaking peoples are doing everything in their power to stoke up their own funeral pyre by not demanding a true conversion rate to the Chinese economy currency by not expelling scores of espionage agents in Chinese embassies around the world in a manner they never bought to doing to KGB agents during the Cold War by refusing to acknowledge where these cyberattacks already coming from by exporting our coal centers and production facilities by training hundreds of thousands of Chinese scientists in sensitive research areas at MIT Harvard Yale Oxford Cambridge Melbourne and dozens of other Great Western seeds of learning by turning a blind eye to the huge swathe of Africa and Asia being bought up by the Chinese for their raw materials the West is as Lenin said the capitalists would one day do selling us the rope with which we shall hang them by adopting free market capitalism in their coastal provinces at least for as long as it suits them the Beijing regime has even dfangs the West's ideologically while not altering its revolutionary nomenclature one iota one can admire their genius while denouncing their ruthlessness and cynicism the writer and philosopher Umberto Eco has spotted this process clearly writing in la república about how quote it has become clear that the next great confrontation foreseen by the US will be with China there is no reason to suppose that this will take the form of a war but it will certainly be an economic and demographic conflict you only have to visit an American University to see how Asian students are taking more and more of the scholarships and research positions here in Australia you have your most important economic relationship with China but your most important millet three relationship with the US as does Japan and South Korea sooner or later these must diverge and so you will find yourself in the vanguard of the next great struggle of the english-speaking peoples and we made all the more difficult and confusing and morally challenging because it will not be a military struggle of the kind that simplified the anti totalitarian struggles for earlier generations in Australians civilization is as evening wore reminded us when writing of Rudyard Kipling the work of centuries which is laborious ly achieved but only precariously defended when the Chinese are in the global driving seat I believe that we will look back in loving nostalgia to the boyish tyranny and the once lustrous but by then utterly moribund legacy of the english-speaking peoples thank you very much indeed

Channel: Institute of Public Affairs

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Keywords: Andrew Roberts (Author), IPA, Institute of Public Affairs, Western Civilisation

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Length: 43min 39sec (2619 seconds)

Published: Tue May 08 2012