By Olivia Pierson
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Last week a friend and I trailed along to a public lecture at Auckland’s Massey University given by Professor Rouben Azizian, who is Massey’s illustrious Director for Defence and Security Studies.  He was co-speaking with his Canadian colleague, Dr. Marc Lanteigne, a senior lecturer and specialist on China and East Asia. The topic up for examination was New Zealand’s role in the Asia Pacific region in an ‘increasingly unstable world’ (that’s code for a world with Trump as U.S President).

I had the small hope that we would not be subjected to a whole lot of Trump Derangement Syndrome, but alas, of course we were.  All university professors these days are ‘rattled globalists’ whose agenda has been.. well, rattled by two major 2016 events: the election of President Donald J Trump and the Brexit referendum in the U.K. They often reference these events, as Professor Azizian and Dr Lanteigne did on at least four occasions in the short space of 1.5 hours.

Professor Azizian is a Russian Armenian who has had a long diplomatic and academic career which started in Moscow. He has written and/or edited a mix of around 30 articles, chapters and books on geopolitical diplomacy and security.  He is widely respected as being extremely knowledgeable on diplomatic/security issues in the Asia Pacific region from Russia to Nepal, from Fiji to North Korea and from Indonesia to China - and all else betwixt.

His two main areas of concern were the increasing closeness of the relationship between Russia and China - two massive nations who are both currently on expansion missions: Russia into Ukraine, China into the South China Sea. Also of concern is the looming crisis of North Korea going nuclear and the conflict between the Kim regime and the Trump administration.  Professor Azizian’s theme for the evening was that New Zealand could step up to be more vocal about these geopolitical problems instead of waiting until we were officially asked to contribute - given that we and Australia are central to these issues because we are located in the heart of the South Pacific.

Dr. Marc Lanteigne spoke about the mysterious China Belt & Road Initiative and the heavy investments in trade route infrastructure by air, sea and railroad now set up through China, Russia and the Pacific, an initiative that New Zealand, unlike Australia, is now officially a participant as the route has expanded into the South Pacific region, due in part to our free trade agreement with China. Australia has refrained from signing off on this initiative, preferring instead to be more closely allied to the United States rather than Asia (and Kiwis like to imagine that Ozzies are dumber than us).

Dr. Lanteigne informed us that the Belt and Road Initiative will be the main item on the agenda at the end of October 2017, when the highly secretive Party Congress (ruling communist party) gathers in lockdown in Beijing - a congress held every five years to discuss military, economic and defence issues facing China.  It would be safe to conclude that the other main item on the agenda will be North Korea (that the United States has strong armed China into finally dealing with).

One can only imagine the impact on China of the spanner now thrown into the works by President Trump’s upping the ante on North Korea with talk about a military solution!

Professor Azizian pointed out, as if it were a bad thing, that in his recent and very statesmanlike address to the United Nations, “President Trump used the term sovereignty 21 times”.  Ye gods!  Aside from who the little brain was doing the counting, since when can nations in some sort of union talk to each other with any sincerity without the concept of sovereignty being important?  By way of analogy, that would be like individual humans talking about their problems with a relationship counsellor without being able to reference the concept of “self”.

Hence my previous comment about university lecturers being “rattled globalists”.

When it came to the lecture’s Q & A allocation, I found the questions from the audience to be of sound quality, but the answers were weak and evasive.  They were, however, telling of where Dr. Lanteigne and Professor Azizian actually stood on some of these matters (they were futile in their attempts to not let it show).

After our lecturers made a pathetically flimsy case for peaceful negotiations with North Korea being “the only way forward despite Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric” (meaning the world just has to accept a nuclear armed North Korea), one elderly gentleman asked if a reunification of Korea might be on the agenda - he didn’t say clearly whose agenda, but both Dr. Lanteigne and Professor Azizian denied that this was even a possibility and certainly not in Kim Jong-un’s mind.  This answer absolutely flies in the face of many experts who write extensively about North Korea and South East Asia, like author and commentator Gordon Chang, who wrote in September of this year:

  “The overarching goal of the Kim family—and the core of its legitimacy—is the reunification of the Korean nation under its rule, something the United States would have to resist. Therefore, the North Koreans could start a chain of events that leads to conflict and perhaps the world’s first nuclear exchange. “  [Gordon Chang, 8th September 2017]

To read more of Gordon Chang’s outstanding commentary on China and North Korea, go here to the World Affairs Journal. 

If North Korea becomes a fully fledged nuclear power, the Korean peninsula may well be reunified but only on the terms of the brutal Northern regime.  Remember the reunification of Vietnam with its death toll of millions and its 2.5 million refugees?  Does anyone want a repeat of that, only this time with nukes in play?  This possibility is what Trump is trying to avoid, as well as trying to avoid having a North Korean intercontinental nuclear missile having the capability to hit the United States homeland.

Dr Lanteigne and Professor Azizian gave the distinct impression that North Korea has never been a problem until Trump came along and made it one. Not once did either of these learned men ever mention the epic failure of President Obama, President Bush, President Clinton or President Bush Senior to address in any meaningful sense the aggressive actions, threats and intentions of the North Korean regime.  But Azizian did take the time to address Trump’s latest tweet about Secretary of State Rex Tillerson “wasting his time talking with North Korea” as if the tweet were so terrible.

Of course neither lecturer ever once mentioned the disgusting, cruel and unnecessary torture and death of Otto Warmbier, the young American boy arrested in North Korea for the alleged crime of taking a poster off the wall in a hotel - kidnapped and arrested on President Obama’s feeble watch, then tortured into chronic brain damage and delivered back to his parents to die in Ohio on President Trump’s watch.

How the hell was this naked North Korean aggression toward an American citizen a result of “Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric” when it happened during Barack Obama’s presidency?

If these lectures are a way to try to lure the public to come to Massey University to enrol in this course, nothing could be more off-putting. If I want to hear globalist anti-Trump sentiment 24 hours a day all I have to do is tune in to CNN, Al Jazeera, the BBC or NZ TV1 and TV3, not go and fork out thousands of dollars a year to be lectured at university level with this unintelligent, irrelevant bias.

Massey University should perhaps try to lure professors and specialists who are well versed in American history and American exceptionalism if they want to stay relevant and educate people to be effective in a changing world.

It is worth making the point that New Zealand would do well to form stronger ties with the country who saved our bacon during the Second World War - when the rubber hit the road, it was an Asian Empire who sought to make us subjects and the American Republic which fought for our survival at great loss to themselves until they won the war. To opt for closer ties to communist China and oligarchic Russia at the expense of our ties with the liberty oriented United States - our real ally - does not say very much for the kind of democracy we as New Zealanders like to think we are.  Ideology actually does matter when it comes to close alliances in my view.




If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer" ​

 
​ By Olivia Pierson

The profound ignorance of philosophical and historical matters in modern politics today depresses me beyond words.  Politics is the fifth branch of a disciplined philosophy which covers the important human question: “In what way are men to be governed?”  A monarchy?  A republic?  An oligarchy?  A meritocracy? A timocracy? A direct democracy? A totalitarian state?  Anarchy?  History is literally littered with real life examples of all of these governing systems, yet the average voter now would be hard pressed to describe what any of them actually represent.

Someone recently asked me why I care so much about American politics and not so much about the politics of my own country.   In our New Zealand election two weeks ago, I nearly didn’t vote at all.  Nearly.

The reason for my interest in American politics is simple: small Western democracies such as New Zealand (and the rest) owe not only a philosophical debt to America that they are never honest enough to admit was ever transacted, but also a military debt. Because so many people today have such little interest in history, they remain militantly ignorant to the point that most Kiwis under 50 today are not even aware that only 70 odd years ago we were protected by America from the Japanese when Winston Churchill could not spare resources from Mother England to make sure we were not attacked by the Empire of the Sun, as Darwin was in Northern Australia.  We were literally a sitting duck, an indefensible island jewel of natural resources in the South Pacific, until America sent around 45,000 troops here to protect New Zealand civilian life in exchange for having an allied base from which to launch American attacks on the Japanese.

But I digress from my main topic.

Aside from this important detail of World War II, the philosophical debt Western democracies like NZ owe America has its roots originally in ancient Rome, planted firmly by Marcus Tullius Cicero, who died in 43 BC. 

It was Cicero who acquainted the ancient Roman people with the Greek philosophies of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.  It was Cicero who during his time on Earth wrote and spoke of the wisdom of the Greek philosophers and the knowledge they could impart to a Roman Republic, at a time when Romans had strong anti-Greek sentiments and had forgotten that they had learned everything worth knowing about republics from the ancient Greeks - just as the modern world today has strong anti-American sentiments and has forgotten that we learned everything worth knowing about democracy from the United States.

The 18th Century framers of the American Constitution: Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Hamilton, et al, drew heavily on the 17th Century Enlightenment thinkers: John Locke, James Harrington, Baron de Montesquieu and Algernon Sidney.  Those thinkers had drawn heavily on the 13th Century philosopher Thomas Aquinas, who drew from the writings of the ancient Greeks, especially Aristotle, and from Cicero - the man who delivered the Greek philosophers into readable Latin for the Romans (when Mary the mother of Jesus was not even an immaculate glint in her grandfather’s eye).

In 66 BC, the Roman Republic was already over 400 years old when Cicero, a consul of Rome, was considered one of its greatest statesmen as well as being an eloquent and prolific writer. He came from an ordinary equestrian family. Through the vehicle of practising law, he distinguished himself as an orator and rhetorician and became the most powerful defender of the Roman Republic version of governance in a time when the Republic was dramatically disintegrating into tyrannical rule via what would go on to become the cult of the Caesars; the end of the Republic and the beginning of an empire.

Cicero was not invited to partake in the brutal murder of his friend Julius Caesar on the senate floor because his colleagues thought he would disapprove.  He did not.  He quietly celebrated Caesar’s death because he equated Caesar’s rule with dictatorship.  He believed in the constitutional rule of natural law, laws that were in accordance with the nature of man:

   “True law is correct reason congruent with nature, spread among all persons, constant, everlasting. It calls to duty by ordering; it deters from mischief by forbidding. Nevertheless it does not order or forbid upright persons in vain, nor does it move the wicked by ordering or forbidding. It is not holy to circumvent this law, nor is it permitted to modify any part of it, nor can it be entirely repealed. In fact we cannot be released from this law by either the senate or the people. No Sextus Aelius should be sought as expositor or interpreter. There will not be one law at Rome, another at Athens, one now, another later, but one law both everlasting and unchangeable will encompass all nations and for all time.” [Cicero - On the Republic]
[Emphasis mine]

Some 1800 years later, Thomas Jefferson expressed the same idea when he wrote two years before the American Revolution:

     “A free people claim their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.”  [Thomas Jefferson - Rights of British America, 1774]

After Jefferson had twice served as President, he wrote in a letter to Henry Lee:

    “With respect to our rights, and the acts of the British government contravening those rights, there was but one opinion on this side of the water. All American whigs thought alike on these subjects.
     When forced, therefore, to resort to arms for redress, an appeal to the tribunal of the world was deemed proper for our justification. This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take. Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.  [Emphasis mine]
     All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc..“ [Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Henry Lee, 1825]

John Adams, who had a particular fondness for Cicero, wrote:

    “As all the ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher united than Cicero, his authority should have great weight.” [John Adams]

Thus Cicero’s love for his dying republic was transmitted through the ages to the American Founding Fathers as they busied themselves creating a new one - a better one - not only for American citizens to flourish within, but also as an example to the whole world of what living under self-governance and true liberty would look like.  Their success was staggering evidenced by the fact that their  example is now the common, daily experience of all Western democracies today. 

​But can it be preserved?

Without understanding our history of how we came about this radical idea of self-rule, whether one lives in NZ, Australia, England or America, I do not believe we can preserve it, for the condition of freedom requires knowledge and a tenacious spirit of vigilance - protecting that which is valuable, right and ideal is befitting of a free people.  But how can a free people protect what is valuable, right and ideal when they by volition prefer to remain ignorant of how we even came to have the immeasurable gift of hours, days, weeks, months, years and decades of liberty?

I refer back to Cicero to have the last word on this, since not only was he put to death under the new Emperor Octavian/Augustus (at the will of Marc Antony) - the Roman Republic was lost from that point on,  never to be revived again over the next 500 years of its existence as an empire, where it died on the doorstep of the new dark age of  Catholic theocracy.

    “Ancestral morality provided outstanding men, and great men preserved the morality of old and the institutions of our ancestors.  But our own time, having inherited the commonwealth like a wonderful picture that had faded over time, not only has failed to renew its original colours but has not even taken the trouble to preserve at least its shape and outlines.  What remains of the morals of antiquity, upon which the Roman poet said that the Roman state stood?  We see that they are so outworn in oblivion that they are not only not cherished but are now unknown.  What am I to say about the men?  The morals themselves have passed away through a shortage of men; and we must not only render an account of such an evil, but in a sense we must defend ourselves like people being tried for a capital crime.  It is because of our vices, not because of some bad luck, that we preserve the commonwealth in name alone but have long ago lost its substance.” [Cicero - On the Commonwealth]

That’s Cicero’s eloquent way of saying “where have all the real men gone?”

OK, I’ll let myself have the last word after all…

I recently stood in Rome and gazed in wonder over the ancient ruins of the Roman Forum where the glorious senate once gleamed in white marble, where Cicero himself frequently orated, where Julius Caesar was stabbed to death.  This haunting, melancholic question was with me all the while I looked: “how did all this come so irretrievably undone?”

I believe Cicero has answered this for me.  The commonwealth lost its substance through failing to bring forth outstanding men to preserve the morality (wisdom) of its founders.  To preserve the morality of a civilisation’s founders requires an acute knowledge of history. 

​The people in my country today are not even knowledgeable about who helped to preserve us right here on our own soil only 70 years ago, but they are frightfully knowledgable about the correct pronoun - which is not even in the English language -  to use when addressing some confused weirdo who is taking powerful drugs to make the transition from one sex to another.


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If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer" ​


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