(Image: Private Media)

His words were stern, they were magisterial, they were no-nonsense, they were of great significance.

I speak of course of Paul Keating’s op-ed in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald this morning (I will die in a ditch before I call them Nine papers) — Joe Biden also gave a speech at the UN or something — which marks the first clear and declarative statement against our return to being a junior member of the white imperial Anglosphere in the Asian century.

Aside from Keating, there has been pretty much crickets, apart from somewhat less powerful voices, such as myself, Vanguard — the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) paper — and Green Left. Strange times, strange times…

In a tone you only get to take when you’re an ex-PM, Keating excoriated not only the Morrison government but the supine Sinophobes in the Age/SMH, such as the haha “froth-mouthed” (Keating’s words) Peter Hartcher and the “lizard king” (my words) Chris Uhlmann. Keating makes the points that constitute the obvious opposition to the deal: that we are lacing ourselves into an old imperial alliance, working off a systemic misconstruction in which China — a land-based, internal power — is presented as if it were the next sea-based global imperium, as the UK and then the US had been in the past two centuries.

There was more to it than that, but what has been notable is the lack of concerted, institutional opposition to our new, willed dependency in a white man’s Burton. Labor fell into line dutifully, the ACTU said not a word, the left unions did not break away and speak away, the Greens emphasised the nuclear danger angle, there was no word from the churches against a willed drift to war.

This was a new development in our history. For more than a century, stretching back to the 1890s, we have had a left with some institutional bases, which saw the global question as intertwined with local questions. True, there was plenty of, um, falling short within these movements, like, um, systemic white-power racism, but there was also vast resistance, from the 1916 anti-conscription movement onwards.

Through the 1950s and ’60s we had a vigorous peace movement — which, being run largely by the Communist Party, had its biases — and then we had one of the world’s largest anti-war and anti-nuclear movements from the ’70s through to the 2000s. The active support of unions and churches was essential to such a movement, as was the presence of a more vocal and independent Labor left — and a Labor leadership that retained aspects of Labor’s dissidence. That this coalition is now absent is a disaster for the country.

I don’t believe for a second that it is indicative of a wider absence in society; I think many Australians have a deep disquiet about the direction being taken, the giddy, gung-ho commitment to a race-grounded imperial alliance. But the shifts in Australian society have been so great that there has been a split between elite power group leaderships, and an atomised population which is often to the left of the people leading them.

Labor’s inability to speak on these matters from some sort of independent point of view has been a long time in the making (and one PJ Keating must shoulder part of the blame). So too a union movement that’s capacity to resist capital and power has been so compromised by being bound up with the vast superannuation fund, and the petty games of Labor factionalism, that it cannot articulate the simple humanist message that should arise from the character of unionism itself: no to being marched to war, yes to global dialogue and co-operation. Kim Carr, usually the goodest of good soldiers, made some protest by calling for a Senate inquiry into the deal, and linking this new explicit dependency with the killing of our heavy industrial sector. That was about as much as he could say within the self-accepted discipline of the Labor frame.

The new “industrial left” group of unions hasn’t shown any will to do any actual politics — not a leaflet, not a publication — so there was no hope that its residual left, not to say Maoist, traditions might kick in.

The Greens led with opposition to nuclear activity on our shores, a reasonable choice but with an obvious electoral pitch to South Australian seats like Boothby and Mayo. In terms of social leadership, they should have started with opposition to the push to war — to the obvious imperial whiteness and racism at the core of it — and the attack on global multilateralism. They should come out big on this, leading with a resistance to the push to war, and making the nuclear aspect part of that. We need the Greens to step into that leadership space that has been vacated by others. This is demonstrated all the more by the failure of progressive outlets to identify the side they should be on, in stark terms, and with full urgency.

Guardian Australia was pathetic on this, and its failure to rise to the occasion shows how both centrist and out-of-its-depth its editorial centre is. Having nothing to say immediately, it then went to — or was this a contact-high hallucination from reading too many wellness articles? — John Blaxland for commentary. I’m all for pluralism in progressive media but I don’t think the authorised historian of ASIO should be its go-to. It got better/worse when it ran Neil James, head of that old Santamaria front the Australian Defence Association. Graeme Wise is really getting value for money over at the Guardian shop. Both were, you’ll be amazed to hear, uncritical.

Elsewhere the progressives “of colour” were largely silent. People who can spend two weeks debating whether a white author can write in an Asian character have little to say on a development that will necessarily redefine Australia as an Anglo/European society once more. Is it not now clear why the federal government was happy, and is still trying, to kill off the east Asian-oriented overseas student industry? Nothing better demonstrates the degree to which identity politics is an elite politics, happy to leave the big material stuff to the powers that be.

This gap, between the widespread disquiet about this move and a lack of leading political agency to express it, is a very disheartening development, albeit one which has been a long time coming. The hollowing out of the union movement (a self-carving wooden ashtray, that one); the destruction of industry that was a guarantor of independence, giving Murdoch the keys to the kingdom; the… well, you know what I’m getting at. And who.

To keep saying that one PJ Keating needs to account for how we got here makes you sound like a broken Mahler 78. Nevertheless, if we’re going to begin a decades-long reorientation from this situation, we are going to need some honest accounting about the decades of mistakes made that got us here. Some true confessions from the perpetrators would be an excellent start.

But it is going to take more than a few hacks to start a real resistance to this. The Greens, the churches, any left union with a skerrick of politics remaining — any or all are going to need to turn their diesel-powered guns to this. We have a evangelical-Christian-headed government, and our three big media orgs are headed by pro-militarist Christian types.

Whatever the US’s intent in this alliance is, we are being marched to civilisational conflict with a religious and apocalyptic overlay. This can be exposed and defeated, but it’s going to take a realisation by progressives that this is not a side issue to negative gearing or sombrero-wearing. Biden can tell the UN he doesn’t want a new Cold War; it’s the hot one our leaders want that I’m worried about. This is going to be, quite literally, the fight of our lives.