When I was standing in line at the bank on Monday to deposit some cheques, Sky News Australia was on the telly and Rowan Dean who is the Editor in Chief of The Spectator magazine in Australia, was having something of a preaching session about why the universities in Australia which are currently the site of considerable protest against the war in Gaza, should not only be defunded as public institutions but that there should be some new institution for teaching conservative values to students. He appeared to be calling for a specifically conservative business school, in the same way that something like Australian Catholic University might teach Catholic values to its students.
I can understand why Mr Dean should object to students having any kind of voice at all. As the Editor in Chief of The Spectator magazine in Australia, he is effectively the Australian agent for the very British tory establishment. When you consider that previous Editors in Chief of The Spectator magazine in Britain have included Nigel Lawson and Boris Johnson, who were then installed in the very heart of government at Westminster at Number 11 and Number 10, then any kind of voice against what The Spectator must be silenced. "Conservative values" has displayed by The Spectator magazine included open praise for the angry mustachioed German man from 1935-1938 until things went a even bit to unpleasant for The Spectator magazine.
Universities in particular have often been a thorn in the side of people in power. Not only do universities represent a kind of third place, but the age of the students is such that they still have the vigour and anger to be able to make coordinated protests. Also, as university is a period in one's life before someone enters full-time work in a lot of cases, university students are doubly blessed with not just vigour and anger but that most precious of commodities, time. Coincidentally, the other period in people's lives when they have a lot of time is in retirement; which is what talk-back radio and Sky News Australia have built their preaching model on.
Recently, one of the dog-whistle clarion cries which appears to be a coordinated effort across the Anglosphere by the Murdoch press, is the yelling that there is too much immigration. Of course rabid racist xenophobia is nothing new, but this latest effort is nothing more than a cover to convince middle and lower class people that the reason why rents are going up is because of the immigrants and not because of a deliberate degradation of public housing and a concerted chronic lack of investment in public housing. They will of course mention nothing of the fact that the propertied rentier class is making money hand over fist but when this is pointed out, blame is then put back on 'the market' instead of the housing policy in the first place.
At the same time, we have Universities selling education at massively inflated costs to foreign students; also because of a degradation of education and a concerted chronic lack of investment in the labour stock of the nation. This is of course deliberate. The people who own and/or control capital, want to keep their little cabals of ownership and control to themselves; so any kind of ladder upwards, such as a decent wage, home ownership, tertiary education, must be removed or destroyed.
If the twenty-first century has told us anything, it is that everything that the Lost, Greatest and Silent Generations fought for, and paid for with the lives of more than 100 million souls, can very easily be stolen away and has been done so by the Baby Boomers and the top half of Generation X, who inherited everything, were given the highest real wages in the history of the world, and are now parasitically stealing the work of Generations X, Y, and Z, in the continued maintenance of the lifestyle they didn't have to work for.
All of this means to say that the horrors of the twentieth century, which produced a very brief period of economic paradise for a wider range of people, also known as Les Trente Gloriueses from 1945-1975, were an anomaly. It was only because so much physical capital was destroyed that that happened. What the late period of the twentieth century and the opening three decades of the twenty-first century should remind us of, is that the people who own and/or control capital, want to keep their little cabals of ownership and control to themselves, and that what is going on is nothing more than a reassertion of that condition. This was, is, and always will be, the central project of Empire.
The project of Empire, which has always been the same project but rebranded occasionally, is the exercise of raw naked power for the purpose of the exercise of raw naked power. It matters not whether it was the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Greeks, the Romans, the Mayans, the Aztecs, the Olmecs, the Mongols, the British, the French, the Germans, or the Americans, the goal of every empire has always been identical.
There are in fact two massive problems with the project of Empire. The first is the fact that on the way to exercising of raw naked power, factions within the Empire will compete to eventually become the top of the stack. Sometimes this resolves itself via factions, or parties, or families, or corporations. Capitalism is not anything particularly interesting, other than a slightly different collective ownership program; which is designed to maintain raw naked power in those few select hands. There were some interesting experiments by means of communist revolutions but they actually end up in mostly the same place; which is factions competing to eventually become the top of the stack.
So when I hear Rowan Dean on Sky News Australia, banging on about how there needs to be new institutions for teaching the leaders of tomorrow, which aren't infected by wokism or leftism, I believe that his intentions are genuine. It isn't very often that you get a peek behind the curtain and see raw naked power actually parading around in no clothes, but here we are.
This might sound ridiculous now but once upon a time, universities were centres for learning. It was at universities that people learnt how to think, learnt history, learnt about the arts, and learnt the useful sciences. Somewhere between about 1870 and 1914, when it was decided that the way that you controlled empire, and this included both the British Empire and emerging American Empire, that the corporation and not the estate would be the basis of rebuilding the world into the next phase of the project of Empire. Probably the last war to be played out, with the training from the playing fields of Harrow and Eton, was the First World War. By the Second World War, economics had built itself into the excuse generation factory for capitalists and mercantilists and after the war, the great chasm of capitalism and communism was a useful narrative; when in actual fact the mechanism for owning and/or control capital looked practically identical on either side of the Iron Curtain.
I think that it is reasonable to believe that the factions who want to exercise raw naked power purely for its own sake, would want to eject universities from public funding and from the pipeline of producing people who might be capable of leading nations. As it is, as far as the people who own and/or control capital are concerned, the reason that universities currently exist is as a certificate giving and almost semi-vetting process to make sure that the right people get into positions of power and excluding the people that don't. The idea of the university as learning centre is utterly pointless to the people who own and/or control capital because the Arts are only of use if they can sell tickets, the Humanities serve no purpose whatsoever, and the useful Sciences are only useful as far as they are able to produce technicians who can operate the machines of production.
The war in Gaza is a problem for media outlets like Sky News Australia and The Spectator magazine because just like in times past, although they can paint the two sides as goodies and baddies to appease their funding donors, we have long reached the point where the moral dimension and the amount of blood spilled is horrendous. In calling for a new institution for teaching conservative values to students, what Mr Dean actually wants is for the students who currently exist to shut up and put up and get out of the way of business' ongoing project of Empire. The way that you can silence an opposing voice is to dismantle it; which is what Mr Dean is calling for.
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