During an interview years ago, a journalist curiously asked: ‘Do you believe in the Devil?’ Having long thought about this, I replied: ‘With more than 100 million brutally murdered by Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao Tse-tung and over a billion turned into serfs under a reign of terror, could any of us possibly doubt the presence of an enormous evil influence in this world?’

That evil influence continues today. Worse unlike the trahison des clercs, the treason of the intellectuals of an earlier age, what we are seeing today is the even more significant treason of the elites to Beijing where today Xi Jinping and a gang of criminal multi-billionaire thugs imprison, torture and kill those who present the slightest challenge to their regime and thus to ‘Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’, a curious melange of lies and truths, of ambitions and admissions from which any reaction can justify the death sentence or constitute a cause for canonisation.

Underground religion and any Falun Gong practitioners are particularly targetted. The latter’s core principles – truthfulness, compassion, forbearance – are antithetical to ‘Xi Jinping Thought’. While the movement never posed the slightest threat to the regime, its growing popularity produced more practitioners than party members of the CCP. Finding this intolerable, Beijing decided on a particularly cruel method of suppression.

The 2019 decision of the independent China Tribunal, chaired by leading barrister Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, confirmed this, finding that the Falun Gong were now  ‘probably the principal (but not only) source of organs for forced organ harvesting’. This was  among the estimated as many as 90,000 annual transplants with ‘very many people’ dying ‘indescribably hideous deaths for no reason’.

Meanwhile, as elites determine that Western countries must reduce carbon dioxide emissions to net zero, the equipment for renewable energy (wind and solar) is mainly produced in China by slave labour and dirty coal. Xi’s promises on complying with net zero emissions are suspected to be as empty as his promises to President Obama not to militarise the crucially strategic South China Sea in breach of international law.

So why does the West tolerate these outrages? Why does Australia tolerate the dramatic breach of international trade law in imposing tariffs on our goods as high as 80.5 per cent while blocking the export of our coal and copper, clearly as punishment for daring to suggest an investigation into the origins of the Covid-19 virus?

Why do we tolerate farms, mines, water, real estate, even the Port of Darwin, falling under the control of Chinese communist-controlled entities portrayed untruthfully as mere market corporations?

And how is China so advanced in intellectual property and especially that relating to military matters?

And when the Covid-19 virus manufactured in a military-controlled laboratory in Wuhan was allowed to spread across the world without any proper warning, instead of encouraging  a useless World Health Organisation inquiry, did we not set up with the Trump administration an international tribunal with a view to seeking compensation for the enormous amount of harm? Had compensation been awarded, we could have recovered our damages from the properties held in Australia by entities under the control of the communists.

And why did we and so many others allow manufacturing to be moved to China in the full knowledge that there is inadequate protection there to protect Chinese workers but worse, where much of the manufacturing is undertaken by slave labour?

Why did President Biden abandon the latest weapons in Afghanistan knowing that they would be provided to the Chinese for copying? Why did he abandon the critical Bagram airport?

Why were the US mainstream and social media, supported by much of the mainstream in other Western countries including Australia, so opposed and so determined to bring down Donald Trump, the only president in recent years who has significantly stood up to the Chinese communists?

Since President Nixon, Western leaders have been gullible and excessively generous in their dealings with Beijing. When President Clinton allowed them to join the World Trade Organisation the view was that admitting communist China to the Western institutions and markets would result in increasing liberalisation in China.

Supposedly sophisticated Western leaders demonstrated appalling and excessive naivety, not even insisting that the retention of the great gift of entry to our markets be dependent on both observing the rules and evidence-based progress in liberalisation.

And apart from such naivety, much of this subservience to the communists can also be explained by the important adage ‘Follow the money’. In an observation attributed to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: ‘The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.’

Beijing has succeeded beyond Lenin’s wildest dreams. An extraordinarily significant number of Western elites have made Beijing wealthy, the world centre of manufacturing, one endowed with the latest IP.

Neville Chamberlain is excoriated today for his appeasement of Hitler, relying, on one occasion only, on Adolf Hitler’s word. But neither he nor the establishment sold out to the Nazis.

Today, a vast corps of elites – in business, politics, media, sports, Hollywood  and universities – is engaged in selling  the rope with which Xi wishes if not to  hang us, at least to turn us into denizens of a tributary state. That capture of the elites permeates the establishment.

For some years Peter Schweitzer, President of the Government Accountability Institute has been writing about this elite capture. Of his latest book, Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China, he says: ‘The Biden family, while he was vice president and continuing when he became president, received some $31 million from Chinese individuals who we’re linked to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence’. The book discusses the role of other leading Democrats and Republicans.

As this column predicted on 24 October 2020, ‘A Biden presidency would be a disaster for Australia and for the rest of the world’. It has been a greater disaster than we could have imagined, one aided by this unprecedented trahison des élites.