NSW Premier's Armenian Lesson
Հայոց ցեղասպանություն
Gladys Berejiklian knows what happens when you disarm a people, intrude on their property, issue decrees affecting life and home, restrain them in camps, brutalize them in the street and, in the worst case, condemn them to death. It happened to her own great-grandparents.
Why is she playing with those same measures, in a wholly disproportionate response to a low-fatality coronavirus?
Sep 15, 2021
Հայոց ցեղասպանություն may look a little odd to you but, down on Australia’s southern tip, the premier of New South Wales Gladys Berejiklian can tell you in painful detail what it means.
She grew up speaking exclusively Armenian for the first five of her 50 years — her parents felt the need to preserve the heritage ‘given the atrocities committed against our family and the Armenian people’.
According to her biography all eight great-grandparents were lost in what Turkey calls the ‘Events of 1915’ but which actually lasted for two years or more.
It could have been yesterday for many descendants who keep the memory alive and although it happened 105-odd years ago that’s a blink of history’s eye.
The Young Turks, a group of military officers, had imposed a constitutional government curbing the absolute rule of the Ottoman sultan. But these young technocrats and modernizers were also expansionists and Turkish chauvinists, contrasting with the declining Ottoman Caliphs. The military was pro-German, anti-Russian and suspicious that smaller territories could switch sides.
They accused the entire Armenian community of being an agent of Russia, rather as if Robert Mueller and the FBI/CIA had accused President Donald Trump’s family of being merely the spearhead of a broader Russian-Jewish conspiracy. [1]
On Apr 24, 1915 the government seized the guns of Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman army and arrested several hundred intellectuals and leaders. Over the next three years, as WW1 raged, civilians became casualties not just in Russian Armenia but all the way east to Baku on the Caspian sea.
Some estimates say 1.5 million Armenians were deported and their property confiscated. Many of them died on the road or struggling to survive in the camps.
Turkey continues to dispute the Events of 1915 but in Apr 2021 the United States became the latest of more than 30 countries to label it a genocide. Australia did not and in Aug 2021, Berejiklian repeated her call for the federal government to join them.
The long aftermath of the Armenian exodus has led to two wars over Ngorno-Karabakh/Artsakh, in the 1990s and the 44-day war of autumn 2020 which continues to flare, most recently in Jul 2021. [2]
Notoriously private
It was only in 2018 that Berejiklian revealed her own family history. ABC describes her as a notoriously private person, at odds with the life of a politician. [3]
The news channel wrote that she had been urged repeatedly to open up to the public about childhood and family, and it says colleagues saw her reluctance as a weakness.
Finally, in the run up to the 2019 election, Berejiklian gave a speech in which she said:
My family were victims of the Armenian genocide of 1915… All four of my grandparents were orphaned and witnessed untold atrocities... More than 40 of my relatives were among the 1.5 million Armenians killed.
She told the audience that her m.o. in public life ‘has been to not stray from core business’ but surely a personal story that burns so painfully would inform her political outlook.
Humane politics
Politicians are not technocrats. If they were just administrators we could find better ones to do the job. Politicians exist so that their life experience can inform their decisions and in order to channel their constituents, so that humanity may tame the ambitions of bureaucrats.
They are supposed to bring a moral perspective to the scientific and technical, to take decisions that say: thus far and no further. To paraphrase Stalin’s famous quote, they must recognize the difference between a human and a statistic.
This is especially important in times of rapid scientific advance. ‘Technology has to be in service of something... it does not provide its own logic,’ according to Dr Stephen Blackwood, founding President of Ralston College, a new university in Savannah, Georgia.
The National Socialists was very largely a technological regime, nuclear war is the creation of technology, gene modification and bio warfare are almost at the point where they can wreak unimaginable suffering on our planet because of technology.
That is not to say technology is bad. It is to say it must take its place according to a higher-order series of conversations. And those conversations are not mere intuitions, speculations or consulting the entrails of a goose.
Blackwood captures precisely what is lacking in Berejiklian.
What gives
Such a disconnect between a politician’s personal history and her willingness to inflict harsh measures on the country that welcomed her family must have a cause.
Berejiklian boasts that her restrictions are the strictest Australia has seen. The NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller has admitted heavy-handed enforcement is not directed by any public health order, but rather an agenda to achieve greater compliance. [4]
NSW has banned access for the unvaccinated to pubs, restaurants and hotels or to ticketed events. Other orders include:
Avoid beaches, patrolled by police on horseback
Don’t leave home without reasonable excuse
Stay within 5km of your home
Don’t share your car
Only one person to go shopping
No window shopping or idling
Meet up to 5 people outdoors if vaccinated
Carry proof of vaccination and address
Work at home, fine $10,000 for firms and $2,000, individuals
Random interrogations by police
It is also the tone — hectoring, bullying, inconsistent, even arbitrary — that creates an unflattering public perception. Mayor Steve Christou of Cumberland Council, in west Sydney, greeted the recent lockdown with the words, ‘Welcome to Nazi Germany’.
Ironically NSW was once home to the closest thing Australia has had to a fascist movement, the New Guard of the 1930s, rooted in Sydney’s business and military establishment. As we shall see Berejiklian is far closer to communists.
A pedestrian explanation may be that she is trying to save her career. She was under pressure at the start of Event Covid, with party insiders discussing her replacement.
Tender secret
The following is not news to Australians but may raise questions about Chinese influence.
Berejiklian was, she admits, the secret partner for over five years of Liberal NSW politician Daryl Maguire who is linked to the Communist Party of China.
Maguire helped run the Australia Council for the Promotion of the Peaceful Reunification of China, which is a CPC organization that seeks the absorption of Tawian solely on the terms of the People's Republic of China. [5]
Maquire’s activities on behalf of the CPC go deeper. In 2013 he held a press conference on Tibet on behalf of United Front Work Department, an organ of the CPC that focuses on overseas Chinese. [6]
Maquire received thousands of dollars in cash at his parliament office as part of a scheme for Chinese nationals to acquire visas fraudulently. A business in NSW would pretend they employed the nationals. He shared the profits with his business associate, Maggie Wang. He also brokered property deals for a major Chinese developer. [7]
In Oct 2020 NSW upper house called for Berejiklian’s investigation for corruption. One Nation MP Mark Latham said Maguire had used Berejiklian as ‘a spy’ within her own office. Berejiklian rose to premier of NSW during the 2013-2018 relationship. [8]
Clive Hamilton, professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University, says the country faces a crisis of Chinese influence, if not a tipping point. His book, Silent Invasion: How China Is Turning Australia into a Puppet State, details how it has penetrated public life from universities and business organizations to community groups. [9]
It is partly due to a wave of Chinese emigration — which, as we saw, Daryl Maguire facilitated — but also due to billionaire money, conflicted media owners, gullible students and business associations that are effectively Chinese promotion agencies.
He alleges 40 former and sitting Australian politicians do China’s bidding, often lured by money from billionaires like property developer Huang Xiangmo — the same man tied to Maguire. Xiangmo called the allegations of hidden Chinese influence, racism.
Small world
Berejiklian’s image is not helped by the staff.
She inherited NSW Chief Health Adviser, Kerry Chant (appointed 2008) who seems to struggle under stress, laughing and offering to lock down Australians forever, while inserting the phrase, ‘new world order.’
When asked on Sep 9, 2021, what must happen to return people’s freedoms, Chant answered:
We have to learn to live with Covid. We’re going to be vaccinated, [then] vaccinated again, we’re going to be potentially challenged by different variants… um, we’ll get to a… a level of comfort, a bit like we have with flu… We will be looking at what contact tracing looks like in the new world order.
In Aug 2021 Berejiklian appointed former Communist Party of Britain member Jim Betts to the most powerful civilian post in NSW, heading the public service and her own premier’s department.
It is remarkable that in a country of 25 million of whom 8 million live in New South Wales, the conservative-leaning Liberal Party should appoint or tolerate communists or communitarian champions of one-world government.
There is a history of Britain and Australia swapping civil servants trained by leadership ‘charities’ like Common Purpose and in behavioural and psychological management techniques. I do not know in the case of Betts but at his level it is likely. See my article The Never Normal is Forever — UK Gov aims to Embed Control through 'New Identities' about the senior British government psychological adviser Prof Susan Michie.
It is also extraordinary that so many politicians in other states should seem to act like clones and doppelgängers.
One party
Medical dictatorship is no flippant slogan. Diktat is the order to comply with a rule that has no prior legal basis, may even be unlawful or unconstitutional, but is nonetheless issued as a rule by a compliant bureaucracy and imposed by force.
Many of the regulations issued in the name of public health under lockdown meet that definition and their arbitrary, even unscientific, nature is justified by an appeal to medical emergency.
The spread of medical dictatorship has been especially rapid in constitutional monarchies that lack a written constitution and/or an enforceable bill of rights. This broadly includes the commonwealth: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and several smaller territories and islands.
The British Bill of Rights, that originated in the Magna Carta and was updated in the Seventeenth Century, is incorporated into these countries’ laws but there have been several failed attempts to assert them. Instead legislators have trodden the Napoleonic path, painstakingly amending statutes for particular groups, such as hate laws that are extended to each new class of peoples deemed worthy of special censorship or protection like adding letters to LGBTQ.
Meanwhile the abasement of the peoples of the Crown dominions grows ever more obvious, their guns long ago removed after chance mass shootings.
Is there a connection between the local politicians and the communist Chinese? How could there not be, given the structure of the global economy. Chinese manufacturers, multinational corporations and western consumers are interdependent and integrated. So are the supply chains. So is the finance. So is the politics.
But we are not allowed to say that in public. We have to pretend there is a Chinese wall that blocks the flow of information between business and politics. Cute but misleading.
The second point of contact for Australia is its mines and raw materials. British ships sailed to Macau in 1620. The Investors have been active in China for at least as long as Australia and increasingly those interests overlap: China will build the equipment to run the smart cities using minerals dug in Australia and newly-vacated Afghanistan.
It’s no longer a linear production line, it’s a constellation. Instead of owners at each stage of a process there is a fluid, dynamic set of partners with shared interests in cooperation and control. We talk nowadays not of shareholders but ‘stakeholders’.
The Chinese are already deeply integrated into the digital-financial complex alongside the Pentagon, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the companies it spawned with the CIA (In-Q-Tel). Asset management companies like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street and Fidelity operate partly as vehicles of the families of Rockefeller, Rothschild & Regina and their front companies and licence holders. Politicians are a fig leaf. They are not the power and they’re certainly not the owners.
Politicians don’t reveal who they answer to unless it serves a purpose. With officials dangling the phrase ‘new world order’ as a badge of honour that day may come sooner rather than later.
Will Gladys Berejiklian appear on the palace balcony with armed guards as she waves a rainbow flag or happy globe or the latest UN design for the techno (cratic) party? And where will the people be?
Update Sep 17, 2021
Berejiklian Blackmailed by Pfizer, AstraZeneca Lobbyist — says Clive Palmer MP
Berserkian faces a corruption inquiry by the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) in connection with a loan given to Daryl Maguire. With this hanging over her head, she is being blackmailed by lobbyists who businessman and United Australia Party founder Clive Palmer says control the Liberal Party in Sydney.
This lobbyist has told her the only way she gets out of that inquiry is if she pushes the double jab. His clients are AstraZeneca. His clients are Pfizer… What the premier is telling them [the people] is not true and they shouldn’t be locked down. Businesses should be open and the government is using this as an excuse to destroy them and they know that… She is being directed by a lobbyist in Sydney who is being paid by AstraZeneca and by Pfizer tens of millions of dollars to get these policies through, to make sure the vaccine gets pushed. That’s why — you asked the question, I gave you the answer and that’s my personal knowledge and I am happy to make a statement here, or to police, or to anyone. [11]
Notes:
After a burst of unavoidable revelation in Oct 2020 the Australian media has resumed its silence towards the Liberal Party’s shenanigans in NSW. It’s reached the point where many viewers turn to the comedian FriendlyJordies. He is being sued for defamation by NSW Deputy Premier John Barilaro. [10]
Searching Google you won’t find much reference to Berejiklian’s Chinese ties nor any comparison between her Armenian family experience and the current trajectory of Australia. Maybe that is because Google has its own ties to China. You won’t have any luck using the search term ‘fascist’ because Google has redefined it, while former CEO Eric Schmidt works from his Pentagon desk to build the state-corporatist fintech, surveillance capitalist dream. Try Duck Duck, Mojeek or even Bing.
[2] Euronews and AFP, Jul 2021 — Armenia says 3 soldiers killed in border clashes with Azerbaijan
[3] ABC, 2018 — Gladys Berejiklian shares her personal story of family tragedy and great ambition
[4] Crazzfiles, Sep 2021 — NSW Police Commissioner admits increased enforcement is not based on health orders
Parliament transcript (PDF), Sep 1, 2021, page 12
[5] Sky News, Oct 2020 — Daryl Maguire was ‘surrounded by Chinese Money’
[6] SMH, 2018 — Disgraced MP held Parliament press conference to promote Chinese propaganda on Tibet
[7] Reuters, Oct 2020 — Australian politician tells inquiry Chinese visa scheme was a scam
[8] The Guardian, Oct 2020 — Gladys Berejiklian accused of breaching code of conduct after admitting she hoped to marry MP
[9] ABC, 2018 — Chinese agents are undermining Australia's sovereignty, Clive Hamilton's controversial new book claims
[10] Macrobusiness — Meet FriendlyJordies