Letter
Cultivated China phobia
Colin Mackerras is very civilised in his refusal to comprehensively criticise the cultural failings of Australia with respect to China. His criticisms are restrained but very clear in their noting of the all-embracing nature of those failures.
He could have further noted that, despite the decades since the abolition of the White Australia policy, the virulent racism that underlay that policy remains just below the surface of daily life.
Our overweening beliefs in the superiority of white cultures over all others has been a clear driver of the willingness of even much of the Left to willingly swallow the racist gibberish that emanates constantly from that turgid sinkhole of racialism that is the US.
Our utter infantile inability to untie the apron strings that have tied us to the rapidly declining US empire suggests a failure of us ever reaching maturity.
Asia is the centre of world development in the 21st century and if we don’t get on board soon, we will remain a lick-spittle remnant of a past Western empire that is an object of curiosity and pity to the dynamic new world!
— Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041