Keith Kacmar’s Post

My interpretation of this is that the 1975 coup against Australia's democracy was payback against Gough Whitlam for establishing a relationship with China in 1972. And the UK/US far right extremists who attacked freedom in Australia, including our competitive markets, are ... well, they are attacking freedom in Australia. And Vladmir Putin and a group of oligarchs in the UK, USA and Australia have teamed up and are using a lie about the collapse of the Soviet Union to justify their support for their attack on US, UK, Australian and Canadian democracy. And the ball is still in play and we don't yet know who is going to win. So, that's why the truth about the attacks on Australian family-owned farms, dairy farmers and me in particular can't be disclosed in the media ... because my ancestors created the foundations for formal diplomatic ties between the USA and China in 1972. The flip side of the argument is that food security helped build modern China and without that, maybe China would have been broken up and thus easier for the USA to handle (the woulda, coulda shoulda argument). And everything that's happened since is so politically explosive, there's greater value in using the threat of its disclosure to drive change, rather than allow the release of the information. I'm hoping that a successful result for the Democrats in this upcoming election will mean that disclosure takes place in a relatively benign environment so that my freedom can be restored and so the USA can rediscover middle ground. It will be interesting to see what happens in the relationship between the USA and China. I'm optimistic.

I am "gifting" this Bloomberg opinion piece. Copy-free link. No subscription is needed to read. Have none of America’s hyper-partisan demagogues heard of that other Republican senator, Arthur Vandenburg, who during the early Cold War proclaimed that “politics stops at the water’s edge”? Has it not occurred to them that a world leader, an international hegemon, needs a functioning diplomatic corps, a well-staffed and well-funded army, indeed a government that can run without worrying about bouncing its checks, not to mention the rule of law? As the world witnesses this American freak show, the worries grow. Maybe America just doesn’t want to be a hegemon anymore. Or maybe Americans just care much less about the world than about their domestic feuds. Patriotism is out, vitriol is in, democracy and global order are down. The world has a stake in this story. How can America lead a global struggle between freedom and tyranny if it can’t even preserve its own democracy? This weakness is now the bull’s-eye for all enemies of the international order and democracy. China and Russia are doing everything they can, with disinformation and propaganda, to stoke America’s polarization. And they revel in their KGB-style cynicism.