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Two former prime ministers met in Sydney last week, with Tony Abbott attempting to help Liz Truss’ book 10 Years to Save the West inch above the Ultimate Air Fryer Cookbook on the bestseller list by “launching” the tome a mere six months after its release.
So just what is threatening the West according to these colossal figures in the world of second-hand embarrassment? According to their agreed-upon thesis, the threats can be traced back to “the various mind viruses”, as Abbott put it. “Whether it’s the woke mind virus, the net zero mind virus, whether it’s the appeasement of our external enemies mind virus, all of which are doing so much damage.” This is a Rhodes scholar, talking like a punctuation-free YouTube comment, if that gives you any indication of the state of modern conservatism.
Given the sheer volume of threats Abbott and friends have told us Western civilisation is facing, we thought it might be useful to give a ranking, so that next time you’re warned of an imminent danger to everything we hold dear, you’ll know just how worried to be.
Low threat
The following might seem like they pose a serious menace to anyone interested in preserving a healthy, informed and pluralist culture. But don’t worry, the Defenders of Western Civilisation (DWC) don’t seem all that bothered.
The immolation of our cultural patrimony. In mid-2021 it was revealed that, owing to years of neglect, large amounts of material in the Australian National Archives were approaching a “digital cliff”, with old tapes and film chronicling Australia’s post-colonial history in danger of being lost forever. The then Morrison government, which had shown such an interest in protecting that history from black armbands and naysayers… didn’t seem concerned. Junior minister Amanda Stoker was sent out to shrug that the government had “nothing to be embarrassed about … time marches on and all sources degrade over time”.
Nazi sloganeering. This really surprised us considering 34,000 Australians gave their lives fighting Nazism, a fight which we can surely agree was the most real threat to “Western civilisation” there has ever been. So, given the stated DWC reverence for our armed forces, it was strange that after then senator Fraser Anning gave his maiden speech, in which he invoked the Nazi slogan “the final solution”, the following members of the Coalition government lined up to shake his hand: Mathias Cormann, Bridget McKenzie, Nigel Scullion, Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, Matt Canavan, James McGrath, Anne Ruston, Amanda Stoker, Jonathon Duniam, James Paterson, Dean Smith, David Bushby, Wacka Williams, Barry O’Sullivan and Steve Martin. They were joined by crossbenchers Cory Bernardi, Derryn Hinch, David Leyonhjelm, Peter Georgiou, Stirling Griff and Rex Patrick.
Abbott certainly didn’t hold back on Anning, later calling his presence at a far-right rally “pretty poor judgment”. He went even further, saying, “We’re all against soft-touch policing, we’re all against kid-glove policing, but that doesn’t mean that we should be supporting extremists, of the left or the right.”
White supremacy slogans. Once the relatively chill response to Nazi sloganeering in the centre of Australian democracy sinks in, the response a few months later to a motion endorsing a white supremacist slogan doesn’t seem that weird. The then government would soon insist that it was an “administrative error” that led to Coalition senators voting to endorse One Nation leader Pauline Hanson’s motion that “it’s okay to be white”.
But it didn’t register as such for whoever could be heard saying “we’re standing up for Western civilisation” in response to barracking from the Labor side of the chamber. Nor, as it happens, for senior figures like Christian Porter and Mathias Cormann, both of whom initially tweeted support for the vote. Abbott again kept his counsel.
Mild threat
Marriage Equality. “If you change marriage, you change society; because marriage is the basis of family; and family is the foundation of community,” argued Abbott in 2017. In the florid debate we were all forced to endure back in 2017, we were told the passage of marriage equality laws would be an assault on religious freedom and freedom of conscience, deprive parents of the right to control what their children learn and, most serious at all, prevent penguins from enjoying a happy marriage. And heterosexual marriage, as argued by Abbott and others, is obviously the building block of Western civilisation.
We only put marriage equality in the mild category because, well, it happened. And believe it or not, Western civilisation endured.
Existential threat
Most threats to Western civilisation fall into this category, almost by definition.
Islam. This has been the perennial threat stared down by Western civilisation since, oh, at least 1683. Luckily the DWCs have always been there to make sure we’re aware of it.
A few months after being turfed from the top job, Abbott demanded a “reformation” in Islam to temper what he portrayed as an inherent tendency to violence in the religion: “All cultures are not equal and, frankly, a culture that believes in decency and tolerance is much to be preferred to one which thinks that you can kill in the name of God, and we’ve got to be prepared to say that”. Further, he argued: “It’s not culturally insensitive to demand loyalty to Australia and respect for Western civilisation.”
Earlier that year, then Liberal senator Cory Bernardi (supported by One Nation as well as the Q Society and other anti-Islam groups) pushed for and got a Senate inquiry into Halal-certified meat, attempting to establish connections to Islamist terrorism (it failed to find any). The Q Society, which argued “Islam and sharia are anathema to everything a Western democracy stands for”, welcomed Liberal Party figures to its events in 2017.
Pauline Hanson would later oppose the decision to allow a group of Australian women married to Islamic State fighters back into Australia: “These people fought and supported their husbands in their fight against Western civilisations. They hate us with vengeance,“ she told Sky News in 2022.
Woke. As Abbott pointed out to Truss, the “woke mind virus” is a huge threat. Which is particularly worrying, because everything is woke. Woke in itself is an existential threat to the West. More recently, woke led criticism of Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Criticism of Israel is now the biggest threat to Western civilisation.
All of which leads us to the biggest threat to Western civilisation:
Western civilisation itself. Free inquiry, academic freedom, freedom of speech and the robust exchange of viewpoints and ideas are all central tenets of the questing minds that have made up the proudest achievements of Western civilisation, from Socrates through Shakespeare to Mill. And, according to those charged with that civilisation’s defence, nothing could pose a greater threat to it.
In 2021, then education minister Alan Tudge argued dissent over the meaning of Anzac Day would compromise national security :
We should expect our young people leaving school to have an understanding of our liberal democracy and how it is that we are one of the wealthiest, most free, most tolerant and most egalitarian countries in all of human history, which millions have immigrated to. If they don’t learn this, they won’t defend it as previous generations did.
He went on to oppose any “activism” in the curriculum by working very hard to ensure it only contained certain views.
Remember the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, which Abbott said was explicitly aimed at precluding different interpretations of the canon?
The key to understanding the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation is that it’s not merely about Western civilisation, but in favour of it. The fact that it is ‘for’ the cultural inheritance of countries such as ours, rather than just interested in it, makes it distinctive.
When this explicit preclusion of debate was attached to Ramsay Centre funding, the Australian National University pulled out of the course. This prompted then Liberal Craig “microwaved Tony Abbott” Kelly to complain that “leftie academics” (you guessed it) harboured “a hatred of Western civilisation”.
Honestly, the only effective protection for Western civilisation is to abandon everything that gave it heft. You know who engaged most deeply with Western canon thinkers? Twentieth-century anti-colonial movements. Marx loved Shakespeare, while we’re on the subject.
Have we forgotten any looming calamities to the Western order? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.