Just because Joe McCarthy was paranoid doesn’t mean that he was wrong about the deep and troubling reach of communist agents burrowing into America’s government and entertainment industries. Mostly, McCarthy’s only real mistake was being late to the party, at least as far as the State Department was concerned: from 1938 to 1946, a “monstrous conspiracy”, according to a recent history, ran through the State Department, the military and even the White House “to advance the Soviet cause within the U.S. government”.
While much of it had been cleaned up by the time McCarthy launched his crusade, as we now know, there were still many communist moles lurking in the US government. As recently as 2010, two high-ranking veteran State Department officials were convicted of spying for Cuba for nearly thirty years.
When it came to Hollywood, McCarthy was even more on the money, even though he did admittedly falsely accuse many, he was not always wrong. As Pat Buchanan has said, the great leftist martyr Dalton Trumbo, “had it coming… Trumbo was a Stalinist, a hard-core Communist when the Communist Party USA was run from Moscow by the Comintern, agents of the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century.”
If only McCarthy were alive to take the whip to the useful idiots and Quislings currently riddling Australia’s public service, academia and even big business, and doing communist China’s dirty work.
Australia’s top spy Mike Burgess was directly pressured by public servants, academics and business identities to “ease up” on ASIO’s foreign interference and espionage operations, despite judicial figures, journalists, veterans and diaspora communities being targeted in record numbers by foreign spies and agents.
In his fourth annual threat assessment speech on Tuesday night, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation director-general revealed that, at a time of unprecedented espionage and foreign interference activity in Australia, there were “senior people in this country who believe (it) is no big deal”.
Mr Burgess, who outlined a number of operations including the expulsion of a “hive” of highly trained spies placed in Australia years earlier to recruit agents and steal sensitive information, said some powerful figures were using “flimsy” excuses to undermine efforts to protect the nation.
“Individuals in business, academia and the bureaucracy have told me ASIO should ease up its operational responses to avoid upsetting foreign regimes,” Mr Burgess said.
Because it’s in their interest to shill for a hostile, communist foreign power. Even if academics especially weren’t fellow travellers, the lure of Chinese grant money is an even more powerful incentive. Too many big businessmen have only a single moral compass: grab as much as they can, no matter how dirty the hands throwing cash at them are.
At a time when China was subjecting the Australian government to unprecedented bullying, for the temerity of questioning the origins of the Covid pandemic, who did Australia’s richest man side with? You guessed it: Twiggy Forrest sneaked in a Chinese official to ambush a live press conference by then Health Minister Greg Hunt. Forrest, who owes his entire fortune to China, stood by smirking, while the communist official launched a tirade against the Australian government.
Even the military, supposedly the first line of Australia’s defence, is being subverted by Chinese spies waving cash.
As the AUKUS partnership with the US and Britain advances, Mr Burgess said there had been a “distinct uptick in the online targeting of people working in Australia’s defence industry”.
“As we progress AUKUS, it’s critical our allies know we can keep our secrets, and keep their secrets,” he added.
Former Defence personnel were also being targeted as “lackeys”, recruited to sell their military training and expertise to foreign governments.
Mr Burgess said while the overwhelming majority” of veterans were “Australian patriots in every sense, a small but concerning number are willing to put cash before country”.
Unsurprisingly, the lackwit leftists of the legacy media are being targeted, too.
Mr Burgess also raised concerns over a “discernible and concerning uptick in the targeting of the media industry, online and in person”.
ASIO recently uncovered a plot to “exploit and potentially recruit senior Australian journalists”, which was thwarted before its execution.
One wonders how many of them were headquartered in Ultimo.
This is no spook-storm-in-a-teacup, either. As I’ve written before, the next five years will be the most dangerous as regards China. The new Cold War is getting even hotter than the first one.
Mr Burgess warned that ASIO was locked in “hand-to-hand combat” with more spies and hostile foreign intelligence services than “at any time in Australia’s history”. He said the security agency’s workload exceeded that experienced during the Cold War, post-9/11 and at the height of Islamic State.
The Australian
Chinese sympathising snitches are also endangering the lives of diaspora dissidents — at least one of whom was recently subject to an attempted kidnapping — and their families still in China.
Any businessman, media figure, academic, or politician who does China’s dirty work must be held accountable.