Vales & Culture

Since World War 2, global capitalism has served humanity well. The records speak for themselves, in terms of welfare improvement for huge numbers of people around the globe. Human rights have been recognised and enforced in more places. The rationale of international trade is unassailable. Free markets are the best means to allocate scarce resources. Capitalist democracies work at fixing marginal market failures while generally trying to avoid distorting true price signals, enabling more people to gain from market efficiency. Free movement of factors of production is encouraged, based on the principle of free and rational agents taking resources where they are needed (and paid) the most until the marginal return from movement equals the marginal cost of it. This allocative efficiency satisfies consumer demand and public welfare and not government political goals where the latter diverge from the former. These are the common sets of values. All citizens, from all different nation states, play by the same rule of mutual economic wellbeing improvement.

The communist world chose a different route, relying on central government planning instead of the free market, and failed. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, we thought the triumph of free market capitalism framed in democratic political practices would see the end of Hegelian dialectical materialism.

Then entered the Islamic caliphate and communist revisionism, the latter led by Moscow’s revanchism and Beijing’s mercantilist winner-takes-all approach. These political doctrines, which are not new but have only become visible threats to open societies in recent decades, do not play by the rules of democratic capitalism. They operate not on win-win exchanges but on absolute hegemony. In these doctrines there is no room for arbitration to resolve friction, no room for mutually accepted legal argument and ruling over disputed positions. There is only one winner that takes all by hook or by crook.

These doctrines are treacherous in that they have taken advantage of the free and open society structure and culture to imbue themselves with knowledge and material gain, only to turn around and deliberately harm those same societies once they are in a position of power. This is no ordinary competition between businesses and economies in a free trade world governed by common rules as witnessed in the post-World War 2 rise of Germany and Japan. The rise of the new but un-reinterpreted caliphates in Arabia thanks to the oil trade, and of neo-

communist China thanks to an ebullient West, has taken the form of being an orchestrated and insidious effort to vanquish free market open societies from within. These doctrines are worse than fascism. At least fascists don’t feign common citizenship with democracies that host or house them. But like the fascists that led the world to war in 1914 and 1939 because of their belief in a non-negotiable position of superiority, caliphates and revisionist communists are edging the world towards kinetic war one step at a time. Neither is willing to accept the common values of equity and freedom and arms-length rule of common law that have enabled the world, including them, to flourish and prosper in modern times.

It will take all the West’s resolve to again save the world from monolithism. It is the same as the unconstrained vision that has mushroomed within Western societies to aim for an absolutist end. These elements, born from a different end, have learnt the monolithic game and come to like it. They call themselves better names of course, like NGOs, XYZ foundations, the World This and That Forum. The West cannot wait to confront these totalitarian ideologies at a later stage and risk the suffering and loss of millions of lives in an all-out world war or civil war. The rise of populist movements of various shades that populate the so-called “centre-right” segments of the population in the West – in reality, the responsible constrained vision majority – is a necessary antidote that will blunt the monolithic ideologies and lead to their curtailment or expulsion from free society. Just like with the economic sanctions over Iran and Russia, the financial risks of economic warfare with China and radical Islamism, carried out early, will pale into insignificance compared to the existential risk that would flow from the potential missteps by the CCP in wanting to take over Taiwan and, by extension, the world economy. The same preventative approach should apply to all the nooks and crannies of Western societies to ensure monolithist forces cannot ensconce themselves comfortably anywhere in the West.

Recalibrating laws and by-laws and regulations, that form the basis of day-to-day life in the West, should be prioritised. It’s the base stones that we need to reinforce, block by block, to strengthen the West from within and from the ground up. Domestic policy countering the spread of monolithist ideology should be pursued vigorously in all public institutions in conjunction with industry groups. Community level practices that breach communal peace or secularism, such as public loudspeakers calling for prayer, should be shunned. That such calls can be made outside the statutory public works time of 7:00am to 7:00pm weekdays and less for weekends, shows that there should be national and state legislation preventing local government from approving such activities since the third tier of government is too easily shoved into malpractice by organised activist groups.

Encouragement and incentive to not wear the niqab or burqa (face cover, not the hijab, which is the head scarf) in public space for social cohesion, women’s identity and human rights,

and security reasons, as much of Europe has done, should be considered. There is the view that an outright ban may be a breach of personal freedom of expression so should be a last resort only. But given the mandatory nature of burqa or niqab wearing in theocratic Islamic states, how would anyone know if Muslim women living in the West would want to adhere to such restrictions? Banning face covers would set them free. It’s the same notion that if government sets a rule that the public want but finds it hard to express without fear of personal consequences, then the rule should be set.

CCP China and Islamist radicalism are more dangerous than Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan or the Soviet Union in potentially creating profound upheaval in the West. At least, Russia doesn’t call or see itself as communist or theocratic anymore – although Putin’s monolithism still rings given his KGB past. If sanctions were thought at times to be appropriate for Russia, to diminish its capacity to wage war, they should be mandatory for China to deter it striking a Pearl Harbor on the West. It would be much less costly for the West to give concrete signals to Beijing now than to have to engage in a full-blown war in the Indo-Pacific later. There may be concerns that aggressive moves by the West might trigger Imperial Japan Syndrome in Beijing, in the sense that Japan’s strike on Pearl Harbor was in response to U.S. moves to blockade Japan’s oil imports in 1941. But this is not the case. Oil to Japan was existential; there are no Western sanctions today that can make China feel existentially threatened. Preventing China from having free access to the West’s market to pillage and plunder is not causing an existential threat to China. It’s more to avert a long-term existential threat to the West. It’s in the same way as closing the border to prevent caliphatists from flooding the West. Sanctions on certain Chinese activities are simply to reduce the CCP’s capacity to wage war.